Degradation of Soviet Marxism through the example of philosophy and methodology of history of the second half of the 20th century

In the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet humanities faced crisis of their philosophical foundations - the materialist understanding of history. In epistemological terms, it was caused by the discovered heuristic limits of the abstract-universal materialist theory, which describes the general in the development of reality but eliminates all the diversity of the particular in it. Over time, there emerged two interrelated trends within this crisis - the gradual formulation of the concrete-universal theory, which describes both the general and (in a generalized form) the whole diversity of the particular in development, and the degradation of the abstract-universal theory. The disintegration of the abstract-universal theory has become the dominant trend. It manifested itself in the fact that, recognizing that the general provisions of materialism were true in principle, most Soviet authors began to depart from them when analyzing specific historical phenomena. It was concluded that in a particular situation, social being does not always determine social consciousness, the basis does not always determine the superstructure, material production does not always determine political life and culture. At the same time, there was a rejection of dialectics, an integral part of Marxism. The opinion was often expressed about the equivalence of opposites in their unity and relativity of those parties that were recognized as absolute in traditional Marxism. Such theoretical conclusions resulted in the rejection of historical materialism and transition of the overwhelming majority of the national humanities representatives to the positions of pre-marxist and non-classical philosophy.