Soviet philosophy began around 1930 with the reduction of Marxism to orthodox Marxism-Leninism. In historiography of philosophy, too, the Soviet period was marked by a fundamental subordination of philosophy to its ideological function, a subordination which has continued to exert its pressure on both practice and theory of the history of philosophy. Both practice and theory had to be developed: as Bolotnikov noted in 1933, "there are in our country hardly any specialists in history of philosophy."² History of philosophy was one of the fields in which Soviet philosophy was not burdened with an elaborated Marxist(-Leninist) theory, and thus was relatively virgin soil.³