Idealism as "criminal content" (concerning A.F. Losev's "restoration" of the world of eternal ideas)

In our country, the attitude of the power structures to science as an institution of culture remains very important. The degree of state interference in the internal affairs of the academic community is growing, and the petty tutelage of scientific institutions and control over their intellectual activity are increasing. Study of the Soviet state under Stalin shows what damage such interference in scientific institutions, especially those of a humanitarian profile, can cause. This article describes the start of repressions against one of the most significant philosophers and philologists of the USSR, Alexei Fedorovich Losev. In this case the target of persecution was the humanities, which, in the opinion of the ruling elite, opposed the ideology of emerging Stalinism. Scientists were accused of adherence to idealism, and, consequently, to bourgeois values. By the end of the 1940’s - early 1950’s, the internal logic of repressive mechanisms in the Soviet Union led to the destruction of genetics, then cybernetics and sociology. This caused the country’s lag in these branches of science that has still not been fully overcome.