Soviet-Era Translations of Philosophical Texts in Latvia: The Challenge of Desovietization.
International Research Conference “Culture Crossroads XX”
5 November 2026, Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga.
At the international conference Cultural Crossroads, Andris Hiršs presented a paper entitled “Philosophical Texts Translated in Soviet-Era Latvia: The Question of Desovietization.”In recent years, desovietization has increasingly become a subject of scholarly debate in fields such as collective memory, education, and historiography. More recently, the question had also begun to attract attention within philosophy. Yet what would it mean to desovietize philosophical thought? What might such a process involve, and to what extent could the concept of desovietization be meaningfully applied to Latvia’s intellectual history?
The paper explored these questions by examining the translation of philosophical texts in Soviet Latvia. In the 1970s, the publishing house “Avots” launched a series entitled “Works of Past Thinkers”, which introduced Latvian readers to translations of major works by classical Western philosophers. Several volumes from the series had been republished since the restoration of Latvia’s independence and continued to be used in university teaching and cited in academic scholarship. Yet the possible influence of Marxist-Leninist ideology on the translators’ work and on the content of these translations had received little, if any, critical attention.
Taking the 1977 Latvian translation of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as its case study, the paper examined the methodological challenges involved in identifying ideological intervention in philosophical translation, particularly where censorship and ideological constraints may have shaped the translated text in ways that were neither explicit nor immediately apparent.
Programme and conference details: International Research Conference “Culture Crossroads” - Latvian Academy of Culture
Researchers’ Night, 25 September 2026
58a Miera Street, Riga
Historical experiment: A Lesson in Self-Criticism: Ideology, Language and the Individual in Soviet Latvia
Andris Hiršs
Programme and event details Researchers’ Night - Latvian Academy of Culture
Thinking under Ideology: A Case Study of Philosophical Practice in Latvia under Soviet Rule
Andris Hiršs
Society for European Philosophy Annual Conference 2026
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK, 2–4 September 2026.
Presentation examining philosophical practice in Latvia under Soviet rule, focusing on the ways philosophers negotiated ideological constraints through conformity, camouflage and reinterpretation.
Soviet ideology did not simply suppress philosophical thought; it shaped the conditions under which philosophy was practiced. Rather than approaching Soviet philosophy through the opposition between conformity and dissent, the analysis examines how ideological institutions participated in the formation of philosophical agency itself. Philosophical work under Soviet socialism developed through forms of constrained self-transformation, in which intellectual actors adapted to ideological demands while simultaneously seeking limited spaces of intellectual autonomy. During the Stalinist period, philosophical practice required public demonstrations of ideological loyalty through self-criticism, denunciation campaigns, and participation in struggles against “bourgeois” thought. Philosophy functioned not merely as doctrine but as a disciplinary mechanism regulating intellectual legitimacy, professional survival, and access to institutional authority. In the late Soviet period, however, this configuration shifted. Drawing on Alexei Yurchak’s concept of the “performative shift,” the analysis argues that Latvian philosophers developed strategies of epistemic duality: formally reproducing the language of Soviet orthodoxy while cultivating limited spaces for engagement with phenomenology, existentialism, and other non-Marxist traditions. Through analysis of informal intellectual networks, the circulation of philosophical texts, and strategic uses of official discourse, it shows how ideological conformity became a medium for reconfiguring thought rather than simply suppressing it. Tthe study uses the Latvian case to illuminate broader questions concerning ideology, intellectual formation, and agency under conditions of institutional constraint. This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project “Conversions and ruptures: epistemic strategies in Latvian philosophy during the Soviet period (1944-1991)” (lzp-2024/1- 0650)
SEP Annual Conference 2026 – Society for European Philosophy
Constructing the Soviet Philosopher in Latvian Self-Criticism during the Postwar Stalinist Period
Andris Hiršs
Cultural Crossroads, Riga, Latvian Academy of Culture, 7 November 2025
Leibniz und Personalismus
Andris Hiršs
Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Philosophie in Osteuropa, Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, 12 September 2025