(From the word: sovety – councils). An ambiguous concept. ‘One may concisely define it as the study of communism as such’ (J. M. Bocheński). Although Communism, in the various countries where it was installed, possessed a whole range of common traits, of which the chief ones were uncontrolled by liberal and democratic practices, the despotic-terrorist governments of the communist party, the nationalization of economic, social and cultural processes imposed by it, along with the state monopoly on information transfer (communist totalitarianism), it was the Communism in the various countries that differed in details dependent on the historical-cultural distinctness of each of them as well as on the time and method of Communism’s installation. That said it became widely accepted as the name used for the whole of research (chiefly conducted in the West) connected with the former Soviet Union. Depending on the range of the problem area undertaken, the conceptual apparatus used, as well as – which was certainly not without significance – the viewpoint preferences of the researcher, one may differentiate at least a twofold understanding of the term. Hence, we call studies research concerning the history of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet state, the mechanisms of its economy, along with the utilization of criminal social experiments (collectivization, the system of forced labour camps), analyses of attempts at economic and political modernization, pathological phenomena in Soviet socio-economic life (e.g. corruption, nepotism) (general) political Soviet studies. Here is to be found all research into the internal, ethnic, foreign, social and ecological policy of the Soviet state, research concerning the history and conduct of the Soviet armed forces and apparatus of repression, analysis of the relations between the central power and the union republics, between the state-steersman (the USSR) and satellite states (the so-called Warsaw Pact), between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, or between the USSR and the USA during the ‘Cold War’. Often research into the Soviet power elite, and therefore the so-called inner party, or the nomenclature, is called ‘Kremlinology’ which served to establish the actual power structures.

The most well-known political Sovietologists in the world, connected most often with renowned academic centres, include: Z. Brzeziński, R. Pipes, G. F.Kennan, A. Ulam, L. Shapiro, R. Conquest, R. Tucker, B. Wolfe, L. Łabędź, M. Lewin, A. Besançon, M. Malia, M. Heller, A. Awtorchanow, S. Cohen, and many more. One may mention the periodicals involved in the problem area of sovietology: ‘Problems of Communism’, ‘Encounter’, ‘Soviet Studies’, ‘Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique’, ‘Studies in Comparative Communism’, ‘American Slavic and East European Review’ and others. The question of Soviet studies appeared in virtually all serious Western periodicals that were devoted to political matters.

Soviet studies in the narrower context (philosophical sovietology) are called thus in relation to the Soviet state’s fundamental ideological core that was Marxism-Leninism, and the resulting ideology of communism. The author of this differentiation between Soviet studies in general and philosophical Soviet studies was J. M. Bocheński – the founder (1957) of the Eastern European Institute at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) – and the publisher, in association with a vast array of colleagues and students (G. Wetter, G. L. Kline, H. Dahm, G. Küng, Th. J. Blakeley, N. Lobkowicz, E.V.D. Zweerde, D. Comey, S. Müller-Markus, Z. Jordan, K. G. Ballestrem, F. Rapp, R. T. De George, J. O’Rourke, T. Rockmore, J. Scanlan, E. M. Swiderski) the series Sovietica (57 volumes 1959–1997) as well as the quarterly Studies in Soviet Thought (1960). Experts in this field include L. Kołakowski and A. Walicki.

One may include in works of a Soviet studies nature, though not necessarily academic, publications of writers and academics in opposition to the USSR (e.g. A. Sakharov, A. Solzhenitsyn, Zh. Medvedev, V. Shalamov, A. Amalrik, A. Zinov'ev, N. Mandelshtam, L. Chukovska, V. Bukovski, N. Gorbanevska, V. Maksimov, V. Voinovich, G. Vladimov, A. Niekrich, E. Ginzburg and many, many others), who used a more personalized form of narration (memoirs, the essay, short story, the novel) as if they were describing Soviet reality from ‘the inside.’ A similar role was played by the memoirs of foreigners (e.g. A. Weissberg-Cybulski, A. Koestler, J. Czapski, G. Herling-Grudziński, S. Swianiewicz, A. Wat). It is impossible not to mention also the first historical attempts to analyze Russian communism written under the impressions of the Bolshevik coup d’etat e.g. K. Kautsky, R. Luksemburg, J. Martow, the authors of De profundis, J. Kucharzewski, E. H. Carr, B. Russell, J. Reed, and Russian émigré philosophers.

The Soviet state, like nothing else in the 20th century, concentrated the world’s attention, arousing through its uniqueness extremely contradictory evaluations: from enthusiasm through wishful, though critical interest, to total negative appraisals. Interest in the USSR grew in proportion with its consolidation, propaganda broadcast, based on the lies and alterations of the economic and social achievements of the 1930s, viewed along side the simultaneously occurring economic and social crisis of the Western world, rising despair in market economic mechanisms and the liberal-democratic political system in the face of the ideological stereotypes of Western intellectuals and the breaking of the belief in the West’s system of values, and in the face of fascism’s eventual appearance and its most evil of manifestations – German Nazism. All of this along with the USSR fencing itself in with an information barrier, and the subordination of the communist movement, enhanced the propaganda, tendentious, or false image of the country. ‘In these selfsame years, when millions were dying of the government instigated ‘‘artificial’’ famine in the Ukraine, dying from torture, the cold, exhaustion, bullets in Stalin’s prisons, camps and stages of repatriation, the Soviet state, in the eyes of a significant, and certainly influential faction of the Western intelligentsia, grew into a bastion of peace, the flame of revolutionary humanism, the presage of the new world, where people are free from the uncertainties of tomorrow, equal and confident in the future. With communism identified themselves, or expressed sympathy people of the calibre of A. Malraux, W. Benjamin, Th. Plivier, J. R. Bloch, Th. Dreiser, J. Dos Passos, U. Sinclair; the macabre farce of the Moscow Show Trials was welcomed as an act of justice by L. Feuchtwanger and R. Rolland’ (L. Kołakowski). Considered to be the crowning of progressive processes and humanism the state was treated by intellectuals of a leftist orientation as the embodiment of lofty, all-human Enlightenment ideals. The excesses of communism were either not registered or attributed to historical necessity – the unavoidable price to be paid by a backward state for accelerated modernization. The role of the USSR grew immeasurable as a result of the Second World War, which led to the formation of two global military-economic blocks in opposition to each other, and the initiation of the conflict known as the Cold War. This in turn led to a development in what possible research upon the nature and internal mechanisms of the USSR there could be.

During the Cold War period the quantity of Soviet studies publications, both in the field of political Soviet studies, as equally in philosophical Soviet studies, grew notably, which was due as much to the significance the Soviet Union enjoyed on the world stage, as to the wide-spread belief, not always grounded in truth, in the USSR’s susceptibility to Western research procedures. Therefore, equally in political sovietology there are represented the most diverse of interpretations, often-differing opinions, and research approaches. Here are represented examples of the problem area existing in Soviet studies finding its reflection as equally in the researchers’ convictions as in the resolutions of the individual questions: is communism a phenomenon that represents a continuation of the Russian political tradition or is it simple imported, foreign, which only took over Russia by chance? Whether Leninism (Bolshevism – although these concepts only partially cover each other) is a consequential ‘extension’, or simply a demoralization of Marx’s doctrine?; Whether Lenin’s activities are opportunism or activism? Lenin-Stalin continuation or negation?; Whether the USSR’s socio-economic system is pulsative development, or a progressive duplicating model: War Communism – NEP; USSR: totalitarian or authoritarian?; the size of gross domestic product earmarked for armaments; strategies for counteracting Soviet expansionism; the policies of détente and convergence, or military-economic confrontation? The Warsaw Pact: unity or conflicts? The scale of national separatism, or the dissident movements within the Soviet Union. At the same time research into the ideological aspects of communism was carried out. The representatives of philosophical sovietology documented and studied Marxist-Leninism, publishing works devoted to it, and also carried out research into Marxism in other communist countries. According to Bocheński, Marxism was one of the three types of philosophy that dominated in the 20th century alongside analytical (Anglo-Saxon) philosophy and traditional – continental. In turn, within the sphere of Marxism the academic differentiated Soviet Marxism-Leninism, neo-Marxism (L. Kołakowski, K. Kosik, the ‘Praxis’ group) and Western Marxism. Research into Marxism, and particularly Soviet philosophy has been carried out in the Fribourg school, although not only there, according to the certain type of standards in force in Western philosophical culture, which may be termed analytical. Its basic components are: empiricism, logically subordinated structure, scientific fragmentation of research, hence the resignation from those all-embracing, philosophical assertions unfavourable for scientific confirmation or falsification, research into the sensibleness of linguistic expressions and phrases, rationalist objectivism, the search for similarities and differences between existing philosophical systems (Aristotlianism, Hegelianism, scholasticism, Russian religious philosophy, contemporary philosophy: neotomizm, pragmatism, phenomenology), or scientific (relativistic physics, cybernetics, psychology, sociology), showing the existing anachronisms in Marxism-Leninism, as equally those in Marxism tout court, the antiquated conceptual apparatus, superstitions, absence of differentiation between description and ideological valuation, between science and faith which manifested itself in the structural similarity to a religious world outlook. In the opinion of W. Gavin and Th. Blakeley the leading themes of Marxist-Leninist philosophy comprise: its anti-Cartesianism; the conception of human existence as the active creator of reality; scientism of 19th century descent registered in contextualism, and hence class orientated knowledge of the world serving the liberation of humanity under the leadership of the proletarian party; interactiveness of theory and practice; the interactiveness of time and history leading to the complete absolute; finally the design for the development of authentic community. Analysis of such type served the dissemination of knowledge on Soviet philosophy in the West and its confrontation with other currents in thought.
One may list several research areas of philosophical Soviet studie: the philosophical sources of Marx’s doctrine rooted – as Kołakowski shows – in one of the chief currents of European philosophical tradition; Marx’s historical materialism and its constituent parts have – as A. Walicki has emphasized – a key significance for the shaping of the anti-liberal countenances of the doctrine; Engel-Plekhanov-Lenin’s dialectical materialism and its truth in the light of formal logic; the Russian sources of Leninism (Populism, controversies in the sphere of Russian Marxism); Marxist-Leninist historiosophy; the philosophical elements of Leninism; the principle of the party-mindedness of philosophy, the concept of matter, the theory of cognition (reflection); the periodization of Soviet philosophy, its chief features, representatives; research into the anti-liberal and eschatological-millenaristic contents of Marxism. Philosophical Soviet studies include also research into Marxist sociology (methodology) of knowledge (contextualism) and the theory of values (Marxist ethics and aesthetics). It is obvious that in the light of the quoted methodological criteria Marxism-Leninism in not fulfilling the requirements presented philosophy, was the sole ideological expression legitimizing communism. With time this belief evaporated until the doctrine itself served as a completely dead justification for the despotic governments of the communist party. It was then an instrument of indoctrination, whose destructive results were dependent on the specifics of the given country, and did not leave behind any significant intellectual components. Marxism itself, which justifiably rests in Western philosophical culture, mushroomed into an uncountable quantity of interpretations, and there still exist philosophers claiming inspiration from this source.