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Vitaly Aronovich Rubin (September 14, 1923, Moscow – October 18, 1981, Beersheba) was a Soviet and Israeli Chinese philosopher.

The son of philosopher A. I. Rubin. In 1940 he entered Moscow State University. In 1941-1942 he served as a volunteer in the Red Army, a short time was in German captivity. Because of this, he was arrested, in 1943-1944 he was in a special camp for military personnel near Tula, where he contracted tuberculosis of the spine and was demobilized due to disability. After treatment he studied at Moscow State University (1948-1951), in 1952-1953 he worked at the Novocherkassk Agricultural Institute with Chinese interns. In 1953-1968, the referent-translator FBON, in 1959 defended his thesis for the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences. In 1969-1972, senior researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. After Rubin submitted an application to go to Israel (1972), he was forced to resign from his job, was persecuted by law enforcement agencies and the KGB. He is an active participant in the human rights movement. Rubin’s international authority, which was published in Western scientific journals, contributed to a broad movement of Orientalists, who repeatedly appealed to the Soviet leadership to release the scientist to the West. In 1974, he was granted Israeli citizenship in absentia and was elected associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rubin was one of the first members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, three weeks after its creation he received permission to leave the USSR (June 1976). While living in Israel, he continued his active scientific activity, taught the history of Chinese political thought and philosophy of ancient China at the University of Jerusalem, visited Taiwan and Japan. He died in a car accident at the age of 58.

Educated as a historian, Rubin until the mid-1960s dealt with the problems of the existence of slavery and popular assembly in the states of the Chunqiu era, and then moved to the study of the political ideology of ancient China, especially Confucianism. In 1970 he published his only monograph “Ideology and Culture of Ancient China”, which in 1976 was published in English translation and received great resonance in the professional environment. According to A. I. Kobzev, in the last decade of his life Rubin was the most famous in the world “Soviet, or rather anti-Soviet, sinologist”.

Biography

Formation (1923-1953)
Born in Moscow on September 14, 1923 in the family of philosopher Aron Ilyich Rubin and housewife Sophia Saulovna Bakhmutskaya. At the same time, a twin sister, Maria Rubina, was born. They were nephews of actress Maria Sinelnikova, economist Isaac Rubin and novelist Andrei Sobol; cousins and sisters of poet Mark Sobol. According to Vitaly, his father was a “hot Jew”, although the language of his work was always Russian. In the 1920s, A. I. Rubin worked at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism on the translations of K. Marx; further tried to present the canon to the RANION