Russian Studies in Philosophy

About Russian Studies in Philosophy

Russian Studies in Philosophy — Journal Profile

Russian Studies in Philosophy is an English-language translation journal: for three decades it carried contemporary Russian philosophy into English in unabridged translations, drawing its contents chiefly from the leading Russian philosophical periodicals — Voprosy filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), Filosofskie nauki (Philosophical Sciences), the philosophy series of the Moscow University Herald and the philosophy series of the Leningrad (later St Petersburg) University Herald. Its print ISSN is 1061-1967 and its online ISSN is 1558-0431, the pair carried on this JournalsWorld record and confirmed by OpenAlex and by the preservation records of its former publisher. It was founded in the orbit of the New York publisher M. E. Sharpe, whose Russian-studies translation journals were a fixture of Cold War and post-Cold War area studies, and it later passed with the Sharpe list to Routledge, part of Taylor & Francis, whose journal platform carries its archive under the code MRSP. OpenAlex counted 879 works for the journal, published between 1992 and 2022, and recorded no works after 2022 at checking time — so this profile describes a journal whose historical run is complete or paused in the sources that could be verified, and says so plainly rather than presenting it as a currently active title.

Identity and history

The journal belongs to a distinctively twentieth-century publishing form: the cover-to-cover and curated translation journal. After the Second World War, and with gathering pace during the Cold War, American and British publishers built lists of English-language journals whose entire content consisted of translations from Russian periodicals, because the community of Western scholars who could read Russian fluently was far smaller than the community that needed to follow Soviet and Russian debates. M. E. Sharpe of Armonk, New York, became the best known of these publishers in the social sciences and humanities, with a stable of "Russian Studies in …" and "Problems of …" titles across economics, politics, history, literature, psychology and philosophy. Russian Studies in Philosophy was the philosophy member of that family. The bibliographic record dates its run from 1992 — with the fragmented early coverage (1992–1995, then 2002 onward) shown in the source data behind this record reflecting database coverage rather than the journal's own continuity — and its volumes appeared bimonthly, typically carrying a themed group of translated articles in each issue.

Its stated method, in the description carried in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index journal directory, was precise: the journal "contains unabridged translations of articles chiefly from the following publications: Voprosy filosofii; Filosofskie nauki; Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriia filosofii; Vestnik Leningradskogo universiteta, seriia ekonomiki, filosofii i prava", and the materials were chosen "to reflect developments in Russian philosophy and to be of interest to those professionally concerned with this field". Unabridged is the operative word. Where newsstand and digest translation services summarised, this journal translated whole arguments, with their scholarly apparatus, so that a philosopher in Ohio or Oxford could follow a Moscow debate about Kant, Marxism, phenomenology or the philosophy of science in something close to its original form. In the 2010s the M. E. Sharpe journal list passed to Routledge, and the journal's later volumes and archive are carried on the Taylor & Francis platform; OpenAlex names Routledge as the host organisation of the source. The Portico preservation registry records the journal, under both of its ISSNs, among the M. E. Sharpe titles whose content is preserved — a useful guarantee for a backfile of this kind.

Scope and subjects

The journal's scope was Russian philosophy itself, in the full breadth the Russian journals published it. OpenAlex's topic assignment for the source, at checking time, gives the map: Philosophy and Historical Thought (280 works), Marxism and Critical Theory (181), Soviet and Russian History (152), Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies (148), Philosophy, History and Historiography (114), and Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (108). In lived terms, its issues carried the post-Soviet reckoning with the Marxist inheritance; the recovery of the suppressed pre-revolutionary religious-philosophical tradition — Solovyov, Frank, Berdyaev, Shestov, Florensky and the Slavophile inheritance behind them; Russian engagements with Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger; Bakhtin and the philosophy of language; philosophy and methodology of science in the Russian tradition; and essays on Russian culture, mentality and economic transformation written by the leading Russian philosophers of the day, Vyacheslav Stepin's essay on the Russian mentality and market reform being a representative example carried in its pages in 2015. Because its source journals were the organs of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Philosophy and of the great university philosophy faculties, the journal functioned as a sampling of the Russian philosophical establishment's own agenda, translated whole.

That sampling function is also the journal's limitation, and an honest profile should name it. A translation journal reflects its sources' choices twice over: the Russian editors chose what Russian philosophy published, and the American editors chose what, from that, would interest English-speaking professionals. Independent Russian voices outside the academy journals, and Russian philosophical work published in newer or regional venues, are under-represented by design. What the journal offers instead is depth and fidelity within its channel — the mainstream of Russian academic philosophy, in full text, in English.

Editorial information and publishing practice

As a translation journal, Russian Studies in Philosophy did not operate like an ordinary submissions journal, and this profile does not invent an author pipeline for it. Its contents were drawn from the named Russian periodicals under the publisher's translation arrangements; Western scholars encountered it as readers and citers, not as a place to send manuscripts, and Russian scholars reached its pages by publishing in the source journals. No article processing charge applied to such a model, and none is claimed here; correspondingly, the usual author-facing apparatus of calls for papers and submission guidelines is not part of this title's story, and the guidance pages preserved in older directories under its name are the publisher's generic contributor text rather than a genuine route into the journal. Its production values were those of the Sharpe translation programme: bimonthly issues, articles translated in full with original citations, and distribution to the university libraries that formed the core market for area-studies translation journals. Under Routledge the journal's volumes continued on the same model into the early 2020s.

On the journal's present status, this profile records exactly what could be verified and no more. OpenAlex's record for the source ends with works dated 2022 — its year counts run at a steady 40 to 45 works a year from 2018 through 2022 and then stop — and the publisher's platform page could not be fetched for this profile (the publisher's site declined the request), so a current active status could not be verified. Readers should treat the journal, on present evidence, as a completed or paused translation programme whose archive remains its contribution, and should check the Taylor & Francis platform directly for any announcement of resumption before assuming either activity or cessation as a settled fact.

Metrics and indexing

OpenAlex (source S79788425, resolved through its ISSN endpoint at checking time) counted 879 works and 776 citations for the journal, an h-index of 10, an i10-index of 10 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.0 for the most recent window it computes — figures that describe a journal whose individual articles were, in the main, cited rarely in the citing literature OpenAlex tracks. That pattern is typical of translation journals, whose influence runs through reading, teaching and the quiet absorption of arguments as much as through formal citation, and whose articles are often cited, when they are cited, in their Russian originals rather than in translation. The source data behind this JournalsWorld record reported an h-index of 5 on its own basis and a best category position in the second quartile for philosophy; SCImago-derived listings from the mid-2010s placed the journal in the third quartile of philosophy with a low SJR. None of these figures describes a high-impact title, and this profile does not dress them up: the journal's value was never citation mass but access — it was, for thirty years, one of the few reliable windows through which English-speaking philosophy could watch Russian philosophy happen.

Its indexing, as stated in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index directory description, comprised ABSEES Online (the American bibliography of Slavic and East European studies), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index itself, Current Contents / Arts & Humanities, and the International Bibliography of Periodical Literature on the Humanities and Social Sciences (IBZ). That is the indexing footprint of a serious area-studies title of its period: present in the humanities citation indexes and in the Slavic-studies bibliography where its natural readers looked. Its PhilPapers presence — the philosophy bibliography carries a category browse for the journal and indexes many of its translated articles individually — gives its contents a continuing discovery route among philosophers today.

Who should use this journal now

The journal's present-day users are readers and researchers rather than submitting authors. For a historian of philosophy working on the post-Soviet transformation of Russian thought, on the Russian reception of phenomenology or Kant, on Bakhtin studies, or on the afterlife of Marxist philosophy, its thirty-year run is a curated archive: three hundred or so issues' worth of the Russian philosophical establishment in English, chosen as it appeared. For teachers, its translated articles remain assignable texts — full arguments, in reliable English, on topics (Russian religious philosophy, the philosophy of the Russian emigration, Soviet philosophy of science) where English-language primary material is otherwise scarce. And for bibliographers, its identity is unusually well pinned: two ISSNs, a single title across two publishers, a Portico preservation record, and a clean OpenAlex source — though citers should note that articles here are translations, and scholarly citation should where possible also name the Russian original in Voprosy filosofii or its sister journals, as the journal's own pages make possible.

Similar journals in this directory

Readers of this journal may also consult Avtobiografija (ISSN 2281-6992), the journal of life writing and the self in Russian culture published from the University of Padua; Дискурс Пи — Diskurs Pi (ISSN 1817-9568), the Russian journal of philosophy and discourse studies; Logos et Littera (ISSN 2336-9884), the Montenegro journal of linguistics and literature; and Forum Wschodnie (ISSN 2353-5784), the Polish interdisciplinary yearbook on the post-Soviet East. Each has its own full profile in this directory.

Frequently asked questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1061-1967 and online ISSN 1558-0431.

Who published Russian Studies in Philosophy? It was a M. E. Sharpe translation journal from the United States; the Sharpe list later passed to Routledge (Taylor & Francis), which OpenAlex records as the host of the source.

Did it publish original English articles? Its model was unabridged English translations of articles from named Russian philosophy journals, principally Voprosy filosofii and Filosofskie nauki and the Moscow and Leningrad university heralds' philosophy series.

Is the journal still active? A current active status could not be verified for this profile: OpenAlex records works from 1992 to 2022 and none after 2022 at checking time. Check the Taylor & Francis platform for the latest position.

How was it indexed? Per its citation-index directory description: ABSEES Online, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents / Arts & Humanities, and IBZ; its content is also preserved in Portico.

Can I submit a manuscript? It was not a conventional submissions journal — its contents were drawn from its Russian source journals — so there is no ordinary author pipeline to describe; this profile records no submission route rather than inventing one.

What an issue looks like, and the programme it belonged to

A typical issue of the journal in its mature years carried a compact set of long translated articles — OpenAlex's counts of around forty works a year across bimonthly issues imply roughly six or seven substantial pieces per issue — often grouped so that a reader could follow a single Russian debate across several voices. An issue might place a programmatic essay on the state of Russian philosophy beside a historical study of a Silver Age thinker, a Russian reading of a Western philosopher, and a philosophy-of-science paper from the Moscow methodological tradition. The translations kept the Russian scholarly conventions — the dense footnoting, the engagement with German and French sources in the original languages, the habit of arguing through the history of philosophy — which is precisely what made the journal valuable to specialists and demanding for general readers. It was not a digest and did not aspire to be one.

The journal also belonged to a family, and the family resemblance is part of its explanation. Alongside it, the same publisher issued Russian Studies in History, Russian Studies in Literature, Russian Politics and Law, Russian Education and Society, Problems of Post-Communism and a shelf of sibling translation titles — the Portico registry's M. E. Sharpe list shows the whole stable preserved under the same arrangement. Together those journals constituted the English-language monitoring system for Russian humanities and social sciences in the decades when that monitoring mattered most: the collapse of the Soviet state, the chaotic 1990s, and the re-consolidation of Russian academic life in the 2000s and 2010s. Philosophy's member of the family had a particular charge within it, because philosophy in Russia carried ideological weight that literature or education did not: the discipline had been the official doctrine's home under the old order, and its post-1991 reinvention — the return of the religious thinkers, the re-reading of Marx, the reopening of questions Soviet philosophy had closed — was one of the most consequential intellectual stories in the country. The journal's run, 1992 to 2022 on the record verified here, spans almost exactly that story, from the first post-Soviet stocktaking to the eve of the rupture in Russian–Western academic exchange in 2022. Whether that coincidence of dates is cause, effect or chance is something this profile cannot establish from the sources fetched, and it does not pretend to; but it is the right frame for understanding what the archive contains and why scholars will keep using it.

A note on names and records

Bibliographers should note two traps in this journal's records. The first is its publisher history: catalogue records under M. E. Sharpe and records under Routledge describe the same journal and the same continuing volumes, not two titles, and the ISSN pair is constant across the change. The second is the similarity of its title to its siblings — Russian Studies in History and Russian Studies in Literature are different journals with different ISSNs, and citations shortened carelessly to "Russian Studies" have mixed the family up before. Anchor every reference on the full title, Russian Studies in Philosophy, together with ISSN 1061-1967.

One more use deserves mention: language learners and translators themselves have long treated journals of this kind as training material, since a competent philosophical translation, set against a findable Russian original, is a masterclass in how two philosophical vocabularies map onto each other — where English must paraphrase, where it can borrow, and where a Russian term of art simply has to be carried across and explained.