Since joining the Institute shortly after its founding in 1996, Professor Oittinen has helped shape its research agenda while pursuing influential work on Russian modernization, German idealism, and Soviet philosophy. In this interview, he reflects on the institute's early years in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, discusses his forthcoming German-language book Hegels Dialektik der Moderne (Hegel's Dialectic of Modernity), and explains why Soviet philosophy—particularly the work of thinkers such as Lev Vygotsky and Evald Ilyenkov—deserves renewed scholarly attention. The interview provides a fascinating glimpse into Professor Oittinen’s pioneering role at Aleksanteri and the enduring relevance of studying Russian and Soviet intellectual history.
The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Initially, I had difficulties in finding academic job in Finland, where only the representants of the analytic tradition were regarded as “real” philosophers, and was already considering moving to Sweden (I had just received a position at the Umeå university in northern Sweden) when I got the news that the Academy of Finland had granted me a five years’ financing. The Aleksanteri Institute was recently established, and Markku Kivinen invited me to work there. I agreed, and since then I have belonged to the staff of the Institute, nowadays already as an emeritus. The support of the Aleksanteri Institute enabled me to have a series of interesting, and, so I hope, fruitful symposia on different aspects of Soviet philosophy – first on Ilyenkov, then later on Aleksandr Bogdanov, Spinoza in Soviet philosophy, on Max Weber’s and Marx’s views on Russia.
I feel I am very lucky to have been able to become a member of the institute’s collective. Especially the years 2012–2017, when the Institute had the status of a Centre of Excellence of the Academy of Finland, was a fruitful period. The institute produced an extensive study on Russian modernization. My contribution to the theme was not huge, but my other research has followed the general traits of the institute, that is, the problems of modernization and how it has been visible in Russian thought and intellectual culture. In particular, I have been interested in the problem of rationality and how it has been realized in Russia.
As is well known, the collapse of Soviet Union led to a free-market euphoria, which blotted out the deeper historical processes. There was, for example, in the West talk of a “transition economy” (so, the Bank of Finland founded a “Research Institute for Transition Economies”), which built on the tacit assumption that a neo-liberal free market society is the norm towards which all the other economic models more or less “transit”. The subsequent development of Russia towards a more authoritarian rule, and in the last instance, towards the “Putinism” we today see, soon proved these views as illusory. To my mind, the Aleksanteri Institute has managed to avoid the worst traps of this over-optimistic view on Russia’s development trends.
The book, entitled Hegels Dialektik der Moderne (Hegel’s Dialectic of Modernity), will appear soon from the Karl Alber publishing house in Germany. As the title indicates, the central idea of the book is to track Hegel’s views on modernity. Already some fifteen years ago, I planned a book on the subject, but the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies refused the financing. In the following years, however, I published several articles on the theme which now are collected in a single volume. Of course, the present publication is more heterogeneous and fragmentary than the originally planned book. Over the years, I have also grown more critical of Hegel: today it seems to me rather obvious that Hegel has not succeeded in overcoming Kant, for example, although this had been one of his motives in building up his own philosophy.
Hegel, of course, remains an important philosopher and an intellectual giant. For a long time, he was not appreciated duly by the Anglo-American academic establishment, not even in Nordic countries where analytic philosophy had risen to a hegemonic position after the Second World War. For Finland the situation was especially paradoxical, as the one of the most important theoreticians of Finnish nationality, Johan Vilhelm Snellman, was a strict Hegelian. Indeed, as a philosopher he was more Hegelian than Hegel himself. The situation changed from the 1970s on, as several American historians of philosophy, often with a background in Pragmatism, became interested in Hegel once again. Now it was broadly understood that Hegel was an important theoretician of modern society and especially the modern state. A further relevant aspect of Hegel’s thought is his dialectics, which has not ceased to puzzle the minds of later generations of philosophers.
In fact, I was interested in German philosophy before I was interested in Soviet philosophy. My PhD thesis (1994) dealt with Althusser’s and Deleuze’s interpretations of Spinoza (it has been, by the way, republished last year (2025) with the title Spinoza in Frankreich). I began to familiarize myself with Soviet philosophy only some time later. There were several occasions which inspired me to this direction. One was purely economical: as a student, I was constantly short of money, and managed to get translation jobs for the leftist publishing house Kansankulttuuri, because as a student of philosophy I knew the terminology of this kind of literature better than many other translators. I translated some popular biographies of philosophers – Descartes, Platon, Feuerbach, Diderot – which were initially published in the Soviet book series Mysliteli proshlogo. A further Soviet book I remember translating was Nikolai Lapin’s The Young Marx, a work I think is still worth reading today. Of course, I soon found that most of the Soviet philosophical literature was dull and uninteresting – we should not forget that it was the heyday of the Brezhnev era then. So, I was positively struck when one day I found (I believe it was Kansankulttuuri’s book shop) a new work, Dialekticheskaia logika, by a certain Evald Ilyenkov. I was impressed by it and wrote a review of it in the journal Sosiologia. It is very probable that I would not have thought it worthwhile to delve much into Soviet philosophy had I not encountered Ilyenkov. But the final impulse came only in the last year of the 20th century with my involvement with the Aleksanteri Institute.
The Soviet reception of Spinoza’s philosophy is, in the main, not as as interesting one might expect. Mostly it consists of considerations on whether and how Spinoza’s concept of substance is to be equated with the concept of matter in Marxism-Leninism, and the like. But two genuinely original “Spinozists” in the Soviet Union can be singled out: Vygotsky and Ilyenkov. Both, however, read Spinoza rather selectively. For Vygotsky, Spinoza was important above all as a philosopher of monism. Vygotsky tried to find in Spinoza arguments against the methodological dualism he encountered in the psychology of his time – the erklärende and verstehende approaches, to use Dilthey’s terminology. Ilyenkov, for his part, read Spinoza as a precursor of his own “activity approach”.
Ilyenkov and Vygotsky are both original thinkers which stand out in the heritage of Soviet intellectual culture. Both have been acknowledged worldwide as thinkers who have put forth pioneering ideas (e.g. the concept of activity which has inspired both psychologists and philosophers). The first international symposium I organized was the one on Ilyenkov in 1999. I was somewhat afraid that a symposium on a Soviet Marxist philosopher would not arouse any interest – we lived then in the Yeltsin era and all things Soviet, especially Soviet Marxism, was regarded as passé. But contrary to my expectations, the Ilyenkov symposium proved a major success. My Russian colleagues have later told me that Ilyenkov’s path to worldwide fame began with this symposium. Of course this must be taken cum grano salis, since Ilyenkov would in any case become known later or sooner in the West, too.
As I have already mentioned, the history of Soviet philosophy contains many surprises and it is certainly possible to make discoveries which can help in solving the problems of present-day philosophy. The received picture of Soviet philosophy as a dogmatic form of Marxism is definitely besides the point – but, I agree that one has to delve in a little and not be satisfied with the official handbooks and introductions. The so-called activity theory – or rather, approach – for example, is one of the important achievements of Soviet thought. My colleague Andrei Maidansky and I have published a collective work on this phenomenon.
I should not talk much about plans which have yet to be realised! But it is true, I have planned a book on Soviet philosophy for a long time. As an intellectual phenomenon, Soviet philosophy is much more interesting than generally assumed, and it is possible to make real discoveries there. To my mind, the philosophy of the Soviet era is considerably more important than the so-called “Russian” philosophy of the Silver Age in the early 1900’s which is extolled by many both in the present-day Russia and in the West. This does not, of course, mean that the Soviet philosophy does not have its faults and weak points. One of the most important to my mind is the rather weak thematization of human subjectivity. Initially, I planned to write the book in Finnish and in the form of a popular manual, but now I have come to other thoughts. It is difficult to find a publisher in Finland for such a book, hence I must change the language and drop the popular aspect… well, let's see what will come out of this.