Ernst Kolman

Ernst Kolman , Russian Арношт Яромирович Кольман , transcription Arnoscht Jaromirowitsch Kolman, (born December 6, 1892 in Prague , † January 22, 1979 in Stockholm ) was a Soviet Marxist philosopher who was notorious for his role in the communist coordination of the sciences in the Soviet Union.

Life

Kolman came from a Jewish family in Prague and studied from 1910 at the Polytechnic in Prague, where he also attended mathematical lectures at the Charles University in Prague (he probably also heard from Albert Einstein , who taught at the German University in 1911/12, he was later called an Einstein student). During the First World War he fought in the Austro-Hungarian army and was captured by the Russians. In the Russian Revolution he joined the Bolsheviks and was a Communist Party functionary in the Red Army and the Communist International. From 1923 he was a Communist Party functionary in Moscow, where he supervised the science sector. In 1926 he became head of the Moscow Workers Publishing House . In 1931 he came to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow as head of the Marx department. The director Riazanov had previously been arrested for allegedly suppressing Marx's manuscripts (he was not convinced of their quality, especially in the mathematical field).

When Dmitri Fjodorowitsch Jegorow , one of the leading Soviet mathematicians and founder of the Moscow School of Real Analysis, was arrested in 1930 for ideological deviation, Kolman temporarily took over the management of the Moscow Mathematical Society from him from 1930 to 1932 . In 1936 he was also a leader in the Lusin affair, the disempowerment of the second head of the Moscow school of analysis, Nikolai Lusin , which was driven by anonymous attacks in Pravda, probably by Kolman. In 1932 he became director of a college for party cadres, in 1933 a member of the presidium of the party college and in 1934 philosophy professor at Lomonosov University. In 1939 he also received a full professorship in mathematics at Lomonosov University and became an employee of the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences and head of the Department of Dialectical Materialism. After the Second World War, Kolman was posted to Czechoslovakia as head of the Communist Party’s propaganda department. When in 1948, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the CP in Czechoslovakia, he criticized its line because the development towards communism was not progressing quickly enough, he was ordered back to the USSR and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He remained in custody until Stalin's death in 1953 and was then at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He later lived in Czechoslovakia for a few years (1959 to 1963, he was director of the Institute for Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences). After criticizing his speech at a Czechoslovak writers' meeting (which some ideologues in Czechoslovakia considered too revisionist) in 1963, he lost his offices and returned to Moscow and worked again at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology. He later turned away from communism and sought asylum in Sweden in 1976 and was therefore removed from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences that same year. He wrote a critical book on communism in the form of an autobiography ( The lost generation. We shouldn't have lived like this , Fischer Taschenbuch 1979, 2nd edition 1982) and an open letter to Brezhnev regarding his departure from communism, which received him limited attention in the west.

Among other things, he wrote about Marx and Hegel's relationship to mathematics and also some works on the history of mathematics (including on Bernard Bolzano ) and published on mathematical logic. In the Soviet Union he tried to put mathematics on a Marxist basis, but there is little substantial information on mathematics and mathematical philosophy in his works; he preferred philosophical discussions on the terms probability and randomness. In the Soviet Union he turned against religious and idealistic currents in the 1930s , which he identified in some leading mathematicians (especially from Moscow, Pavel Alexejewitsch Nekrasov , Jegorow, Lusin , who died in 1924 ). Under his influence, the mathematician and Communist Party activist Mikhail Orlov (1900-1936), who was mainly active in Ukraine, published the book Mathematics and Religion in 1933 .

According to information in his autobiography, around 560 publications come from his pen.

He gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1932 (On Marx's foundation of differential calculus, functions of quaternional variables).

literature

• Pavel Kovaly: Arnoŝt Kolman: Portrait of a Marxist-Leninist philosopher, Studies in East European Thought, Volume 12, 1972, pp. 337-366.
• Eugene Seneta: Mathematics, religion, and Marxism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Historia Mathematica, Volume 31, 2004, 337-367
• GG Lorentz: Mathematics and Politics in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1953, Journal of Approximation Theory, 16, 2002, 169-223
• Ernest Gellner: Selected philosophical themes, Routledge 1974, Chapter 10 (Ernst Kolman: or, knowledge and communism)

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Kolman in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ He was a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and fell victim to the Stalinist terror in 1936