The last fight of the sixtier

The article tells about the last public report of Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov, an outstanding philosopher-Marxist of the 20th century, the recognized spiritual leader of the Soviet "Sixtiers". The Sixtiers movement originated in the atmosphere of the Khrushchev Thaw and aimed to revive and purify authentic Marxism from the distortions of the so-called "personality cult" era. Ilyenkov made his report on February 12, 1979 at the meeting of the Davydov seminar at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR and contained a polemic with Anatoly Arsenyev's point of view on the problem of "historicism in psychology". The article is based on the memoirs of the authors, who personally participated in that historic meeting. It presents their point of view on the moral and theoretical drama, the culmination of which was the discussion of E. Ilyenkov with his former student and follower. The fact that the Sixtiers' ideas had not only ceased to be popular by the end of the seventies, but began to be aggressively rejected in the circles of the Soviet intelligentsia, gave sharp controversy to polemics. Marxism of the sixties was replaced by an interest in positivism and religion. The article contains an attempt to give an objective analysis of the problem discussed, and above all the spiritual atmosphere of that time. © 2018 Izdatel'stvo Nauka. All rights reserved.