By Corinna Lotz, co-founder
Myself and comrades in the Socialist Future Group were captivated by Ilyenkov’s accessible and human explanation of key philosophical concepts. We had first encountered Dialectical Logic in the 1980s when we were activists in the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Much later, we travelled to Helsinki in 2012 to take part in Spinoza in Soviet Thought, a conference organised by Vesa Oittinen of the Aleksanteri Institute, a pioneering Ilyenkov scholar. There, we met fellow Ilyenkovians from Russia, Heli Katraakoski from Finland, Monica Lemos from Brazil and researchers from Taiwan. We agreed to continue beyond the conference, and thus the IFI was born in CRADLE, Helsinki’s centre for activity theory.
Our first symposium Evald Ilyenkov – Prospects and Retrospects in Philosophy and Psychology, took place in Helsinki in 2014. Four years later we organised Deconstructing Neoliberal Hegemony in Copenhagen along with Signe Juhl-Norgaard: it drew participants from 27 countries, supported by Copenhagen University’s psychology institute and the Danish Red-Green Alliance.
The IFI soon became an inspiring social organism, crossing the stale East-West divide. Andrey Maidansky, the leading Russian Ilyenkov authority, encouraged our efforts. In 2019, Kyrill Potapov, a Vygotsky scholar at London’s Institute of Education, became co-convenor.
Finding Evald Ilyenkov: How a Soviet Philosopher who stood up for dialectics continues to inspire, the first monograph about him in English, appeared in 2019. It’s since been translated into Spanish and Chinese.
In 2022, we organised the Futures and Ideals symposium at University College London’s Institute of Education, with David Bakhurst and Ezequiel De Paolo as keynote speakers. During Ilyenkov’s centenary year three of us edited 100 years of Evald Ilyenkov, a 570-page special issue of Studies in East European Thought and we took part in the Berlin conference organised by Isa Jacobs, Martin Küpper and others.
IFI members presented at Historical Materialism conferences, in Athens (2023) and at the Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2026). Our panel at Cluj included Boris Groisman, Andrzej W Novak, Ivan Uemelianin and myself, which led to the November 2026 Cambridge symposium, The Dialectics of Social Intelligence: Evald Ilyenkov and the struggle over human agency.
As of November 2026, IFI has 857 followers on Facebook and 783 on its YouTube video platform, featuring 62 videos. It continues to hold monthly online readings, presentations and discussions.
With nine volumes now published in Russia (ongoing), from original archival sources and edited by Andrey Maidansky and Ilyenkov’s daughter Elena Illesh, Ilyenkov’s contribution is opening new doors. Only now can we read his original texts and understand the agonies he suffered. This precious work opens new challenges for the IFI. Ilyenkov, indeed, is not only a classical figure but our contemporary, to quote his student, Vladislav Lektorsky.
