All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences Session and the Soviet Philology (Secret Memorandum to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks by a Group of Leningrad Linguists)

The memorandum sent in 1948 to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks by a group of linguists who defined themselves as followers of “the only true” Soviet materialistic theory of language created by academician Nikolay Marr, aimed at defeating their rivals described by the authors of the memo as representatives of idealistic bourgeois theory closely connected with the traditions of foreign linguistics. The main opponents of the Leningrad group of linguists were professors of Moscow State University A. Reformatsky, M.N. Peterson and academician V.V. Vinogradov, whose influence, academic and administrative standing were regarded as a serious threat by the signers of the memo. If they had become winners in the political struggle, the fate of the Soviet / Russian philology could have been much gloomier; it was Vinogradov, however, who won the battle — he was the one who stood behind the “historical” work by Stalin Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950) that shattered Marr’s theory.