Because of traditional scientistic optimism, which reached its culmination in the mid-twentieth century, scientific discussion of the problems of the ultimate fate of the world and of mankind has been rare. The scientistic-technocratic utopianism, which developed in the last two centuries and had numerous representatives in Russia—from N. F. Fedorov and N. G. Chernyshevskii to K. E. Tsiolkovskii—hindered the examination of the eschatological problem. In religious philosophy, the belief in an earthly paradise was characteristic of V. S. Solov'ev. Eschatological motifs (...) are prominent also in Marxism. (shrink)