Petr Nikolaevich Fedoseev

Born Aug. 9 (22), 1908, in the village of Starinskoe, now in Pil’na Raion, Gorky Oblast. Soviet philosopher and public figure. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1960; corresponding member, 1946). Hero of Socialist Labor (1978). Member of the CPSU since 1939.

Fedoseev graduated in 1930 from the pedagogical institute in Gorky, and in 1936 he completed graduate work at the Moscow Institute of History and Philosophy. From 1936 to 1941 he was a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Between 1941 and 1955, Fedoseev worked for the CPSU’s Central Committee (CC CPSU), was editor in chief of the journals Bolshevik and Partiinaia zhizn’ (Party Life), and headed the department of dialectical materialism in the Academy of Social Sciences attached to the CC CPSU. From 1955 to 1962 he was director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciencs of the USSR. He served as vice-president of the academy from 1962 to 1967 and was again named to that office in 1971. From 1967 to 1973 he was director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU. Fedoseev’s chief works deal with historical materialism, scientific communism, and scientific atheism, and they include a critique of bourgeois philosophy and sociology.

Fedoseev was elected a member of the CC CPSU at the Twenty-second, Twenty-fourth, and Twenty-fifth Congresses of the CPSU. He was a deputy to the sixth through tenth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and he served as chairman of the Commission on Public Education, Science, and Culture at the eighth, ninth, and tenth convocations of the Soviet of Nationalities. In 1958 he was named chairman of the board of the Soviet-Hungarian Friendship Society.

Fedoseev is an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the Hungarian People’s Republic and a foreign member of the Academy of Science of Bulgaria, of Czechoslovakia, and of the German Democratic Republic. He has been awarded three Orders of Lenin, four other orders, and various medals.