Petr Nikolaevich Fedoseev (Russian: Пётр Николаевич Федосеев) Soviet philosopher and public figure. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1960; corresponding member, 1946). Hero of Socialist Labor (1978). Member of the CPSU since 1939.
Fedoseev graduated in 1930 from the pedagogical institute in Gorky, and in 1936 he completed graduate work at the Moscow Institute of History and Philosophy. From 1936 to 1941 he was a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Between 1941 and 1955, Fedoseev worked for the CPSU’s Central Committee (CC CPSU), was editor in chief of the journals Bolshevik and Partiinaia zhizn’ (Party Life), and headed the department of dialectical materialism in the Academy of Social Sciences attached to the CC CPSU. From 1955 to 1962 he was director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciencs of the USSR. He served as vice-president of the academy from 1962 to 1967 and was again named to that office in 1971. From 1967 to 1973 he was director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU. Fedoseev’s chief works deal with historical materialism, scientific communism, and scientific atheism, and they include a critique of bourgeois philosophy and sociology.