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Aleksandr Zinovyev

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Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinovyev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Зино́вьев)IPA: [əlʲɪˈksandr əlʲɪˈksandrəvʲɪʨ zʲɪˈnovʲjɪf] <ref>alternative transliterations: Alexandre, Alexander, Zinoviev, Zinov'yev</ref> (September 29, 1922 – May 10, 2006) was a well-known Russian logician, sociologist and writer. Apart from his professional work in the field of logic, Zinovyev was renowned for his novel The Yawning Heights and systematic critique of the Soviet society. He has been a dissident critic of the Communist power, but became an apologist for Communism at the time of Perestroika. He had also become a moderately known writer on both Western and Russian societies.

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[edit] Youth

Image:1938.jpg

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinovyev was born in the village of Pakhtino, Chukhlomsky District, Kostroma Oblast as a sixth child to Aleksandr Yakovlevich Zinovyev and Appolinariya Vasilyevna Zinovyeva. A few years after Aleksandr's birth they moved to Moscow, seeking a better quality of life.

Zinovyev excelled at school, and in 1939 entered the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. He was soon expelled for a critical attitude to forced collectivisation, and even was forbidden to enter any other institute. He recalls that he has been arrested but managed to escape, and later involved in a plot to assassinate Stalin during a school parade. He joined the Red Army in 1940 and took part in the Great Patriotic War as tankist and pilot, receiving many medals for a distinguished flight record.

[edit] Scientific work in Moscow

Zinovyev entered Moscow State University; he later told that his ban from universities was overlooked for a bribe—a box of sweets. He graduated in 1951 summa cum laude with a thesis on the logical structure of Marx' Das Kapital; the thesis was only published in Russia in 2002. During the next decades he became one of the most important logicians of the USSR.

Alexander Zinovyev wrote many articles and books on logic and methodology of science and was often invited to international conferences, but the authorities never let him attend. As the chairman of Moscow State University Logic Department, Zinovyev earned himself the reputation of a pro-dissident lecturer since he refused to expel dissident professors. As a protest against Brezhnev's spreading cult of personality he resigned from editorial board of Voprosy Filosofii ('Philosophical Questions'), the leading philosophy journal of the time. By the year 1974 he was in almost complete isolation.

[edit] In exile

Various fictional, often satirical, stories he wrote about the Soviet society agglomerated into his first major work of fiction, The Yawning Heights. After the release of the book in Switzerland in 1976, Zinovyev was dismissed from his lecturer's job, evicted from the Academy of Sciences, stripped of all awards including his war medals, and finally expelled from Soviet Union after his next novel, Bright future, criticising Leonid Brezhnev, was published in the West in 1978. He settled in Munich where he lived until 1999.

The Yawning Heights was the first in a series of Zinovyev's fictional works that have been widely recognised to belong in the original genre that he has called the sociological novel. The Yawning Heights was extremely successful, being soon translated into most major European languages and read aloud in Russian via Western radio broadcasts. Such novels describe fictional situations, focusing on their sociologically significant aspects. Characters, who vary in their personal qualities and social positions, discuss their life in the society, being "allowed" by the author to voice different opinions on various issues. Zinovyev admits that much misunderstanding of his ideas arises from undue confusion of his point of view with those of his characters.

Among his non-fiction works from that time are Without Illusions (1979), We and the West (1981), Communism as a Reality (1981), Gorbachevism (1987). The latter was first published in French, 1987 (Lausanne: L'Âge d'homme). Without Illusions is a collection of essays, lectures, and broadcasts by Zinovyev. He explained thereby his way of interpretation of the Communist society, suggesting he was using scientific approach. Zinovyev stated, that the Western democracies had actually underestimated the threat of Communism, especially the peaceful infiltration of Communist characteristics into the Western society. He claimed that Communism did not destroy and principally could not have destroyed the social differences among the people, but had only changed the forms of inequality. Contrary to some critics of the Soviet system, Zinovyev emphasised that it was by no means irrational in essence or a result of some incidental circumstances: according to Zinovyev, this system was a product of laws of sociology and as such, rational in nature. However, he also stressed that in no way did he support Communism.<ref>Without Illusions - (Без иллюзий), 1979. The text in Russian: http://antisoviet.imwerden.de/zinoviev_a_bez_illuz.html.zip</ref>

[edit] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union

Until the era of Perestroika, he was one of the most outspoken critics of the Soviet regime. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, who sought a kind of revival of pre-1917 Russia, Zinovyev also denounced religion and Russian nationalism.

Zinovyev ceased to criticise Communism at the very dawn of Perestroika, before the upsurge of crime and socio-economic problems that Russia faced in the 1990s. He became sympathetic to certain aspects of Soviet regime, and most radically condemned the reforms initiated by Boris Yeltsin [1]. He argues that the West was the key influence in the Union's downfall and even claimed that the West made use of Gorbachev and Yeltsin as its agents for crushing Russia.[citation needed]. In 1996, he appealed to the public to support Gennady Zyuganov, a Communist candidate who eventually lost the presedential election to Yeltsin. According to Solzhenitsyn, Zinovyev was one of those who later viewed forced collectivisation as a long-awaited gift offered to the peasants. <ref>Александр Солженицын, Россия в обвале, 1998 (гл. 25. Болезни русского национализма) http://antisoviet.imwerden.de/Solzh/v_obvale_toc.html</ref>

[edit] Return to Russia

After 21 years of exile, Aleksandr Zinovyev returned to Russia in 1999. Having turned anti-West, he stated that "under the leadership of the United States (a global suprasociety located in the USA), the West has deliberately put into practice a program for destroying Russia."<ref>http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/4659.html##4</ref> He used to be an ardent supporter of Yugoslavia's anti-Western leader Slobodan Milošević and visited him, praising him for resistance against the West. Regarding Joseph Stalin, whom Zinovyev and his comrades had once planned to assassinate, Zinovyev declared: "I consider him one of the greatest persons in the history of mankind. In the history of Russia he was, in my opinion, even greater than Lenin. Until Stalin's death I was anti-Stalinist, but I always regarded him as an outstanding personality."<ref>Независимая Газета http://www.peoples.ru/art/literature/prose/roman/alexander_zinoviev/</ref>

In his online interview, Zinovyev maintained that all the accusations brought against Milošević were mere slander; he also declared that he admired Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladić, whom he regards as significant and brave persons of the 20th century.[2][3] Zinovyev was a co-chairman of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic [4]. After the death of Milošević in March 2006, the future of this association remains unclear.

Zinovyev was opposed to globalisation, which he likened to a "Third World War". He was also fervently critical of the United States' role in the world, regarding them as more dangerous to Russia than Nazi Germany. [5]

On May 10, 2006, Aleksandr Zinovyev died of brain cancer.

[edit] Awards

  • member of Bavarian Academy of Arts
  • member of Italian Academy of Science
  • Prix Europeén de l'essai, 1977
  • Best European Novel, 1978
  • Prix Médicis Étranger, 1978
  • Prix Tocqueville, 1982
  • honorary citizen of Ravenna, Avignon and Orange

[edit] See also

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Scientific works

  • The Philosophical Problems of the Polyvalential Logic (Философские проблемы многозначной логики, 1960)
  • Логика высказываний и теория вывода (1962)
  • The Principles of the Scientific Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Основы научной теории научных знаний, 1967)
  • Complex Logics (Комплексная логика), 1970)
  • The Logics of Science (Логика науки), 1972
  • Logical Physics (Логическая физика), 1972

[edit] Fiction and sociological works

[edit] Reference

<references/>

[edit] External links

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