MITIN, MARK BORISOVICH

MITIN, MARK BORISOVICH (1901–1987), Russian ideologist. Born in Zhitomir, he joined the Communist Party in 1919. Educated in Moscow, he held executive positions at the Krupskaya Communist Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, a training school for party theoreticians. At the same time he worked in the Institute of Philosophy of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. In 1939, he became director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute, and five years later he assumed the position of chief of the philosophy department of the Central Committee's higher party school. For his services to the party, Mitin was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor, and the Stalin Prize in 1949. Between 1939 and 1961, he served as a member of the Party Central Committee, one of the few Jews permitted to occupy such a high party post. Never deviating from Stalinism, and taking an active part in the anti-Jewish campaign during the "Doctor's Plot\>\> ," etc., Mitin's philosophical and historical books included Dialekticheskiy i istoricheskiy materializm (1934); Istoricheskayarol G.V. Plekhanova v russkom i mezhdunarodnom rabochem dvizhenii (1957); Filosofiya i sovremennost (1960). He was coeditor of the massive five-volume Istoriya filosofii (1957–61), and was editor of the journal Voprosy filosofii. (William Korey)