This paper deals with the Soviet reception of the works of the historian and sociologist of science Boris Hessen. His major work, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia, was presented at the Second International Congress on the History of Science in London (1931). Hessen was not a pioneer of the Marxist interpretation of the roots of scientific knowledge - in Russia Alexander Bogdanov, Ivan Borichevsky or Valentin Asmus wrote about it until the early 1930s Paradoxical remains the absence in the late USSR already after Stalin's death and the rehabilitation of Hessen of wide interest in his writings, that were well-known in the West.