Gustav Naan

Who was Gustav Naan?

Gustav Naan was an Estonian physicist and philosopher.

Gustav Naan was born in Russian SFSR in a village near Vladivostok to a family of Estonian settlers. He graduated from the Leningrad State University in 1941. He took part in World War II and joined the CPSU in 1943. Having settled to Estonia after the USSR annexed Estonia, Gustav Naan, a loyal communist and graduate of the Higher Party School of the AUCP. published a number of Stalinist-oriented polemic pieces. In 1948, Naan published an article in Voprosy filosofii on the philosophical implications of the theory of relativity, criticizing 'physical idealists' of the US and Britain; in 1951, however, he published an article that decried vulgar materialist critics of the relativity theory whilst being ″tolerant on philosophic questions to a striking degree in Stalinist Russia, considering its place and time of publication″. Authors who followed Naan's article into discussion were almost universally critical of Naan's position. In 1952, which was the most intense year of the debate, three different authors published against Naan in the 1952 first issue of Voprosy filosofii alone.