De-Stalinization of the Concept of the Nation in Soviet Marxism in the Second Half of the 20th Century
De-Stalinization of the Concept of the Nation in Soviet Marxism in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Summary/Abstract: The Marxist theory of the nation has become an object of numerous researches since the second half of the 20th century. The new stage of the Marxist theory of nation developing has begun since 1990th and brought new different approaches into its interpretation, especially on the background, key ideas, theoretical and methodological foundations. The authors revealed typical problems of the existing and newly created concepts of the nation within the framework of Soviet Marxism of the 1960s-1980s. The paper showed how the permanent revision process (“de-stalinization”) of theoretical ideas on the national community interrelated with the ideological functions of social sciences and humanities. The detailed substantiation of the ineffectiveness of long-term and numerous attempts of the Soviet specialists in the field of studying national issues was investigated on the Russian and Ukrainian academic communities’ material. The results show that all the corrections and semantic additions to the concept of nation, proposed by Marxists since the end of the 1960s, turned out to be unpromising. The recognition of the Marxist conception of nationalism and national community, not as a self-sufficient theory, but as an element of political doctrine, became a real tendency in the development of the theoretical knowledge of nations and nationalism in the post-Soviet period in Ukraine and Russia.

• Details
• Contents