Russian Philosophers in China in the First Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

Russian philosophers, who ended up in China after the Civil War in Russia, in the 1920s, still practically do not attract scholarly attention, while a lot has been written about Russian emigrant philosophers in Europe and the USA. Meanwhile, among the hundreds of thousands of Russian refugees who settled mainly in China after the end of the Civil War, there were many original thinkers with professional philosophical education. This article offers a brief overview of the life and work of several Russian thinkers who lived in China in the 1920s – 1940s. Among them were jurist and historian of philosophy Matvey N. Ershov, politician and lawyer Nikolay V. Ustryalov, writer and philosopher of culture Vsevolod N. Ivanov, as well as Dmitry V. Boldyrev, philosopher and public fig­ure, who died in 1920 on his way to Manchuria. The article examines in detail the life and teachings of an almost forgotten philosopher, Ilya B. Kodjak, who created his own socio-philosophical system, the so-called “Sociosophy”, in Harbin in the 1930s. Critically examining religious, philosophical, political, and social doctrines, he substantiates the need for a “scientific resolution of the idea of the transcendent” and the creation of a “new rational-national religion”, which is to be based on a carefully thought-out system of not ethnic, but philosophical nationalism. According to Kodjak, “Sociosophy is a science in which the internal system of a person is evaluated through the prism and awareness of the social or­ganism that has developed in people, as the atoms of the social body, the idea of quality and the absoluteness of morality.” By discussing the work of several original Russian philosophers of the first half of the 20th century, the article demonstrates how diverse and rich Russian philosophical thought was on Chi­nese soil.