“Accepted the October Revolution through Plato…”: Plato as a Forerunner of Socialism in Russian Thought in the 1900s-1920s

Abstract

   The article discusses the place of Plato in the ideology and political practice of the Bolsheviks in the first five years after the seizure of power. The conception of Plato as a forerunner of socialism dates back to Germany in the 1890^s (in the works of von Pöhlmann, Kautsky and Adler etc.) and was quickly picked up in Russia. This is supported both by numerous Russian translations of these works and the development of the thesis about Plato’s “socialism” by Novgorodtsev, Bulgakov, Trubetskoy, and others. The October Revolution enhanced interest in Plato’s ideal state, as evidenced by the increased number of publications on this topic. Despite the fact that the theoreticians of Bolshevism themselves treated Plato either indifferently or negatively, for a certain part of the Russian intelligentsia, Platonic “socialism” became a kind of explanatory model for the processes occurring in Russia. In the works of authors like Pertsev, Novitsky, and Vyshinsky, Plato’s political utopia was considered as a paradigm to the leveling and state-compulsory communism of the Bolsheviks. Since the mid- 1920^s, recourse to Plato for an explanation of the Bolshevik socialist project has become less common. The policy of war communism, which prompted the closest analogies with Platonic egalitarianism, had concluded; the canonization of Lenin’s works, in which the assessment of Plato was generally negative, made a “Platonic” interpretation of Bolshevism ideologically unacceptable.