"Marxism and Problems of Linguistics" () is an article written by

Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...

, most of which was first published on 20 June 1950, in the newspaper ''

Pravda ''Pravda'' ( rus, Правда, p=ˈpravdə, a=Ru-правда.ogg, 'Truth') is a Russian broadsheet newspaper, and was the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most in ...

'' (the "answers" attached at the end came later, in July and August), and was in the same year published as a pamphlet in large numbers. The article appeared in the context of the last wave of publications by followers of

Nikolai Marr Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (, ''Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr''; , ''Nikoloz Iak'obis dze Mari''; — 20 December 1934) was a Georgian-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking o ...

who supported the Japhetic theory, attacking the "old" linguistics, that had started in ''Pravda'' on 9 May 1950. Yet, instead of supporting Marr's linguistic theories, Stalin brought the campaign into a full turn, decisively ending the acceptability of Marr's theories in Soviet science. The "discussion" in the paper lingered a little while longer but did not bring much new, due to the impossibility of arguing with Stalin, and the field of Soviet linguistics was effectively shifted. The next year, the Academy of Sciences published a hardbound volume of commentaries named "Session of the Department of Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR devoted to the anniversary of the publication of 'Marxism and Problems of Linguistics'", running a print of 10,000. After the publication of this article, Marr's theories were largely abandoned by Soviet linguists, and an emphasis on Russian language research was promoted instead.

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* * Reproduced from Works by Joseph Stalin 1950 documents Works originally published in Pravda 1950 in the Soviet Union {{USSR-stub