Axelrod Lyubov Isaakovna

Genus. in 1868 in the town of Dunilovichi, Vileika district, Vilna province, in the family of a rabbi; Narodnaya Volka, since 1883 participant in the revolutionary movement (Poltava, Kharkov, Melitopol, etc.); after the Narodnaya Volya assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander III, she broke with populism, switched to the position of Marxism, joined the “Emancipation of Labor” group and for many years remained Plekhanov’s most devoted comrade-in-arms despite all the internal splits and discords among Russian Marxists, especially aggravated after the formation of the Bolshevik in 1903 wing led by Lenin. She graduated from the University of Bern with a Doctor of Philosophy degree (her dissertation on the worldview of Leo Tolstoy in 1902 was published in German in Stuttgart) and soon became one of the main authors of articles on philosophical topics in the social democratic publications Iskra and Zarya. , joining the Menshevik faction. In 1906, after an amnesty was declared for members of opposition parties, she returned to Russia as a prominent figure in the Menshevik Party and the most authoritative expert on Marxist philosophy after Plekhanov. She won a reputation among Russian social democracy, including the Bolsheviks, as an unshakable defender of the “purity” of Marxist philosophy (hence the pseudonym “Orthodox”). During the First World War she took a defencist position, at the beginning of the 1917 revolution she was a member of the Menshevik Central Committee, then a member of the Central Committee of Plekhanov’s Unity group. In the early 1920s, she taught at the Institute of Red Professorships, then worked at the Institute of Scientific Philosophy of the Russian Association of Scientific Research Institutes (RANION) of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the State Academy of Artistic Sciences. In 1921–1925, professor of the department of philosophy of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Moscow State University, full member of the Research Institute of Scientific Philosophy at the faculty (1922–1925), from 1925 professor of the departments of historical materialism of the faculties of Soviet law and the faculty of ethnology. In the early 1930s, she was ranked among the so-called “mechanists” who were accused of revising Marxist philosophy, after which her name was consigned to oblivion. Died in Moscow 02/05/1946; buried in the new Donskoy cemetery.