Mathematics,religion, and Marxism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s

Mathematicians and traditional pure mathematics in the U.S.S.R. came under attack in the 1930s from the platforms of religion and nationalism in attempts to establish dialectical materialist mathematics. These platforms came to light at the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party in 1930. A leader of the attacks was the mathematically inclined Marxist/Stalinist ideolog Ernst Kolman (1892–1979), in whose writings randomness and probability (more amenable to philosophical discourse than other areas of mathematics) are recurring issues. The recently rediscovered booklet Mathematics and Religion, written in 1933 under the influence of Kolman by the mathematician and political activist Mikhail Kh. Orlov (1900–1936), encompasses the Bolshevik position on mathematics and religion. A nucleus of vilification in Orlov's book for his religiously inclined pre-revolutionary writings is the mathematician Pavel Alekseevich Nekrasov (1853–1924), and by extension, the Moscow Mathematical Society, a focus of attack by Kolman and others. The attacks, and especially the probabilistic aspects are studied below under a sequence of headings: Mathematics and the 16th Party Congress; Moscow Mathematical Society; Nekrasov's Probability and Social Physics; Politically Correct Probability; Politically Correct Statistics?; Orlov, Religion, and Mathematics; Orlov and Kolman on Religion and Mathematics. There are biographical appendices on Kolman and Orlov. The outstanding mathematician/probabilists of the time, Andrei N. Kolmogorov (1903–1987) and Sergei N. Bernstein (1880–1968), were prominent among the obstacles to the “reforms” of Kolman (in Moscow) and Orlov (in Ukraine), respectively, and feature in this study.