“The conscience of Stalin”, of Rambert Nicolas: a French admirer of Russian “messianism”

It looks like this book translated from Russian. Not that of Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), whose author is a specialist, this exalted, inspired language, religious philosophers of the finishing Russian Empire. Russian today. That of intellectuals who, under Putin, contribute, not without exaltation in turn, to rehabilitate the “Great achievements” of the USSR, in the name of an ideal that, precisely, Rambert Nicolas intends to describe in Stalin's awareness.

Rambert Nicolas is a young philosophy teacher. He notably taught at the French university college in Moscow. His little book, which appears in the prestigious “Library of Ideas” by Gallimard, is the commentary of a text that he has just translated into the same collection: an unpublished French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968), Sophia I. Philosophy and phenomenology (544 pages, 28 euros, digital 20 euros).

He owes her title to him: “The consciousness of Stalin”it is Kojève himself, as he defined himself. We know the author ofIntroduction to Hegel reading (Gallimard, 1947) as a thinker of the “End of history”which would find its fulfillment in a global society where “Nothing changes anymore”. Sophiafirst step in a larger project, ultimately interrupted, makes it possible to take the concrete measure of this theory: he makes her coincide with Stalin's policy.

Kojève began to write it in 1940. It was the year when, according to several surveys, he became “Value agent” For the KGB. Two years earlier, the great terror organized by Stalin had killed 750,000. A year earlier, the USSR had signed a pact with Nazi Germany that made it the ally. Kojève, obviously, assumed everything, in “Stalinian strict observance” for whom the philosopher was “Builded actively in work (…) which aims to achieve communist society ”he writes in Sophia. “Ultimately”summarizes his commentator, humanity had to build universal solidarity, “But it had to be achieved by steel”to understand : “The killing of previous conservative generations”.

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