Boris Alexandrovich Tschagin

Boris Alexandrowitsch Tschagin ( Russian Борис Александрович Чагин , scientific transliteration Boris Aleksandrovič Čagin ; * March 11th ^July / March 23rd  1899 ^greg. In Moscow ; † December 10th 1987 in Leningrad ) was a Russian philosopher and historian.

Life and work

At the age of seventeen, the son of a working-class family, he began working as an employee. From 1919 to 1922 he fought in the Russian Civil War . In 1920 he joined the Communist Party of Russia . In 1922 he attended the military college in history. He then taught social sciences at military educational institutions.

Since 1930 he was a teacher at a military academy. At the same time, he lectured at Leningrad universities and was head of the philosophy department at the Polytechnic Institute, the Telecommunications Institute, Leningrad University and others. a. He was one of the founders of the Philosophical Faculty at Leningrad University and was dean there until World War II .

In 1933 he finished the institute of the Red Professorship in the field of history of philosophy and defended his candidacy on the subject of "Philosophical and sociological views of Franz Mehring". During the so-called Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union , he fought against the German invasion. After the war he resumed his scientific work and headed the chair of philosophy at the SM Kirov Military Medical Academy and then at the MI Kalinin Military College and at the Leningrad University.

Since 1948 he has held a professorship in the philosophy department at the Leningrad Department of the Academy of Sciences (AdW) of the USSR . In 1946 he defended his doctoral thesis "The Ideology of German Social Democracy from 1895 to 1914". Since 1960 he was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. For many years he worked in the editorial board of the magazines "Questions of Philosophy" (Woprossy filosofii) and "Philosophical Sciences" (Filosofskije nauki) and other magazines. He was co-author of the six-volume “History of Philosophy” and the “History of the CPSU”.

The focus of his work was the history of philosophy, especially the Marxist-Leninist ; Analysis of the ideology and philosophy of German social democracy; Problems of historical materialism (especially the subjective factor, structure and forms of social consciousness). He examined in detail the theoretical views of Franz Mehring , his political and ideological role in German social democracy and the views of the left social democrats and their struggle against revisionism.

Chagin dealt with the philosophical-literary legacy of Plekhanov and his contribution to the development of the social theory of Marxism, and in particular Plekhanov's thoughts on the ideological superstructure and social psychology, and also looked after Plekhanov's editions. He played a major role in researching Lenin's stage in the development of philosophy in Russia. He dealt above all with the historical development of Lenin's philosophical views, with his struggle against the Narodniki , the “legal” Marxists and the economists . He emphasized the dialectic of objective conditions and the socio-historical process.

He also dealt with the social, gnoseological and logical aspects of Marxist-Leninist partisanship. Particularly noteworthy are his investigations into the structure and legal statements of the subjective factor in Soviet society and the history of social theories and historical materialism in the Soviet Union.

Works

• The subjective factor. Structure and regularities (= Small Library 44 Politics, Science, Future ). Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1974, ISBN 3-7609-0122-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Boris Alexandrowitsch Tschagin in the catalog of the German National Library