ABSTRACT
Plato, that prime enemy of a classless society, turned out to be a little more than a parasite proposing that the privileged classes alone benefit from the labours of the artisans and of those who toiled the soil. The image of Plato as a social thinker that predominated between 1923 and 1927 was far from being unique to Soviet scholarship. He was cast in a similar light as National Socialist propaganda in Germany began to hold sway. Plato's 'reactionary' philosophy was interpreted as the direct outcome of the socio-political and ideological battle between aristocratic and democratic parties in fifth-century Athens. Mikhail Dynnik's portrait of Plato appeared in the newly revised first volume of the History of Philosophy. The chapter suggests that Russian conservative thinkers fostered an image of Plato in order to inculcate a sense of Russia's spiritual and traditional differences with the rest of Europe.
