Already before the revolutions of 1917, but especially after the 1922 Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, many Russian philosophers left their native land. Some of them found large audiences in the West; others are still in the process of being uncovered. All of them, however, were determined by their Russian background and by their opposition to the Soviet regime as it actually existed. In this sense, they can all be regarded as their determinate negation [bestimmte Negation], different in character but partly shaped by what they reject. This chapter focuses on four thinkers who, detached from their place of origin, reattached to it in various ways: first, Dunayevskaya, by developing a humanist Marxism that disqualified the official Soviet variant; second, Berlin, by coupling political philosophy to an investigation of the thinkers that inspired his fatherland, and Rand, by ranting persistently against any kind of ‘socialism’; and finally, Kojeve, by considering Soviet communism and Western capitalism as alternative ways towards a single future.

After 1922, the Soviet Union was a fact of life, and alternative perspectives on its reality and on the towering figure of Stalin had decisive and divisive effects on political philosophy. Up until World War II, the USSR established itself as one of two systems that were opposed to each other, as well as to the liberal-democratic system. For communists, fascism was the other side of the same bourgeois capitalist coin. For fascists, liberalism and communism were two variants of cosmopolitanism. For liberals, finally, communism and fascism were two variants of totalitarianism. After World War II, this triangle changed into a binary that resulted in the Cold War, in which each of the two sides had to deal with the other.