NIKOLAY BERDYAEV
The Origins and Meaning of Russian Communism.
Translated by Vladimir Vasilyevich Khlynin ( Angelblazer), Buyan Island, the Kingdom of the Glorious Tsar Saltan, October 19, 2025.
INTRODUCTION
THE RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS IDEA
AND THE RUSSIAN STATE
1.
Russian communism is difficult to understand because of its dual character. On the one hand, it is a worldwide and international phenomenon; on the other hand, it is a Russian and national phenomenon. It is especially important for Western people to understand the national roots of Russian communism, its determinacy by Russian history. A knowledge of Marxism will not help here.
The Russian people, in their spiritual structure, are an Eastern people. Russia is the Christian East, which for two centuries was subjected to a strong Western influence and, in its upper cultural stratum, assimilated all Western ideas. The historical fate of the Russian people has been unhappy and full of suffering, and it developed at a catastrophic pace, through discontinuity and a change in the type of civilization. In Russian history, contrary to the opinion of the Slavophiles, one cannot find organic unity. The Russian people had to master spaces that were too vast, the dangers from the East were too great, from the Tatar invasions, from which it also protected the West, and the dangers from the West itself were also great. In history, we see five different Russias: Kievan Russia, Russia of the Tatar period, Muscovite Russia, Petrine Russia, Imperial Russia, and finally, the new Soviet Russia. It would be incorrect to say that Russia is a country of young culture, until recently semi-barbaric. In a certain sense, Russia is a country of old culture. In Kievan Russia, a culture was born that was higher than in the West at that time: already in the 14th century, Russia had classically perfect icon painting and remarkable architecture. Muscovite Russia had a very high plastic culture with an organically integral style, very elaborated forms of life. This was an Eastern culture, the culture of a Christianized Tatar kingdom. Muscovite culture was developed in constant resistance to the Latin West and foreign customs. But in the Muscovite Tsardom, the culture of thought was very weak and unexpressed. The Muscovite Tsardom was almost thoughtless and wordless, but it achieved a significant formation of the elemental forces, had a distinct plastic style, which Petrine Russia, the Russia of awakened thought and word, was deprived of. Thinking Russia, which created a great literature and sought social truth, was torn and styleless, lacking organic unity.
The contradictoriness of the Russian soul was determined by the complexity of the Russian historical fate, the collision and struggle within it of the Eastern and Western elements. The soul of the Russian people was formed by the Orthodox Church; it received a purely religious formation. And this religious formation has been preserved up to our time, up to the Russian nihilists and communists. But a strong natural element remained in the soul of the Russian people, connected with the vastness of the Russian land, with the boundlessness of the Russian plain.* In Russians, "nature," the elemental force, is stronger than in Western people, especially the people of the most formed Latin culture. The natural-pagan element entered Russian Christianity as well. In the type of the Russian person, two elements always collide—primitive, natural paganism, the spontaneity of the endless Russian land, and the Orthodox asceticism received from Byzantium, the striving for the other world. The Russian people are equally characterized by natural Dionysism and Christian asceticism. An infinitely difficult task stood before the Russian person—the task of forming and organizing his immense land. The immensity of the Russian land, the absence of borders and limits, were expressed in the structure of the Russian soul. The landscape of the Russian soul corresponds to the landscape of the Russian land—the same boundlessness, formlessness, striving toward infinity, breadth. In the West, it is cramped, everything is limited, everything is formed and distributed into categories, everything favors the formation and development of civilization—both the structure of the land and the structure of the soul. One could say that the Russian people fell victim to the immensity of their land, their natural spontaneity. Forming did not come easily to them; the gift for form among Russian people is not great. Russian historians explain the despotic character of the Russian state by this necessity of forming the huge, immense Russian plain. The most remarkable of Russian historians, Klyuchevsky, said: "The state grew stout, while the people grew lean." In a certain sense, this continues to be true for the Soviet communist state as well, where the interests of the people are sacrificed to the power and organization of the Soviet state.
The religious formation of the Russian soul developed certain stable properties: dogmatism, asceticism, the ability to bear suffering and sacrifices in the name of one's faith, whatever it may be, a striving toward the transcendent, which refers either to eternity, to the other world, or to the future, to this world. The religious energy of the Russian soul has the ability to switch and be directed toward goals that are no longer religious, for example, toward social goals. Due to the religious-dogmatic makeup of their soul, Russians are always orthodox or heretics, schismatics; they are apocalypticists or nihilists. Russians were orthodox and apocalypticists both when they were Old Believer schismatics in the 17th century and when they became revolutionaries, nihilists, communists in the 19th century. The structure of the soul remains the same; the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia inherited it from the schismatics of the 17th century. And the main thing always remains the confession of some orthodox faith; belonging to the Russian people is always determined by this.
After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Second Rome, the largest Orthodox kingdom in the world, the consciousness awoke in the Russian people that the Russian, Muscovite kingdom remained the only Orthodox kingdom in the world and that the Russian people were the sole bearer of the Orthodox faith. The monk Philotheus was the exponent of the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome. He wrote to Tsar Ivan III: "The Third, new Rome—thy sovereign kingdom—the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church—shines throughout the entire universe more brightly than the sun. And let thy power know, O pious Tsar, that all kingdoms of the Orthodox Christian faith have converged into thy kingdom: thou alone in all the universe art a Christian Tsar. Take care, hearken, O pious Tsar, that all Christian kingdoms have converged into thy single one, that two Romes have fallen, a third stands, and a fourth there shall not be; thy Christian kingdom shall not pass to others." The doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome became the ideological basis for the formation of the Muscovite kingdom. The kingdom was gathered and formed under the symbolism of a messianic idea. The search for a kingdom, a true kingdom, is characteristic of the Russian people throughout their history. Belonging to the Russian kingdom was determined by the confession of the true, Orthodox faith. In exactly the same way, belonging to Soviet Russia, to the Russian communist kingdom, will be determined by the confession of the orthodox-communist faith. Under the symbolism of the messianic idea of Moscow—the Third Rome—a sharp nationalization of the church occurred. The religious and the national in the Muscovite kingdom grew together just as in the consciousness of the ancient Jewish people. And just as Judaism was characterized by a messianic consciousness, so was Russian Orthodoxy.
But the religious idea of the kingdom poured into the form of the formation of a powerful state, in which the church began to play a servile role. The Muscovite Orthodox kingdom was a totalitarian state. Ivan the Terrible, who was a remarkable theorist of the autocratic monarchy, taught that the tsar must not only govern the state but also save souls. It is interesting to note that in the Muscovite period, the Russian church had the smallest number of saints. The best period in the history of the Russian church was the period of the Tatar yoke; then it was most spiritually independent and had a strong social element.* The universal consciousness was weakened in the Russian church to such an extent that the Greek church, from which the Russian people received their Orthodoxy, ceased to be regarded as a truly Orthodox church; they began to see in it a corruption of the true faith. Greek influences were perceived by the popular religious consciousness as a corruption penetrating into the only Orthodox kingdom in the world. The Orthodox faith is the Russian faith; a non-Russian faith is not the Orthodox faith.
When, under Patriarch Nikon, corrections of errors in the liturgical books according to Greek models and insignificant changes in the rite began, this caused a stormy protest from popular religiosity. In the 17th century, one of the most important events in Russian history occurred—the religious schism of the Old Believers. It is erroneous to think that the religious schism was caused exclusively by the ritualism of the Russian people, that the struggle in it was solely over the two-fingered versus three-fingered sign of the cross and minor details of the liturgical rite. In the schism, there was also a deeper historiosophical theme. The question was whether the Russian kingdom was a truly Orthodox kingdom, i.e., whether the Russian people were fulfilling their messianic calling. Of course, darkness, ignorance, and superstition, the low cultural level of the clergy, etc., played a large role here. But such a major event in its consequences as the schism is not explained by this alone. A suspicion awoke among the people that the Orthodox kingdom, the Third Rome, had become corrupted, that a betrayal of the true faith had occurred. The state power and the higher church hierarchy were seized by the Antichrist. Popular Orthodoxy breaks with the church hierarchy and with the state power. The true Orthodox kingdom goes underground. This is connected with the legend of the City of Kitezh, hidden beneath a lake. The people seek the City of Kitezh. An acute apocalyptic consciousness arises in the left wing of the schism, in the so-called non-priest movement. The schism becomes a phenomenon characteristic of Russian life. So too, the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia of the 19th century would be schismatic and would think that the power was possessed by an evil force. Both in the Russian people and in the Russian intelligentsia, there would be a search for a kingdom founded on truth. In the visible kingdom, falsehood reigns. In the Muscovite kingdom, which recognized itself as the Third Rome, there was a confusion of Christ's kingdom, the kingdom of truth, with the idea of a powerful state governing through falsehood. The schism was a revelation of this contradiction, was a consequence of the confusion. But the popular consciousness was dark, often superstitious; in it, Christianity was mixed with paganism. The schism dealt the first blow to the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome. It signified the malaise of the Russian messianic consciousness. The second blow was dealt by the reform of Peter the Great.
*See the interesting book by Fedor Stepun — "Das Antlitz Russlands und das Gesicht der Revolution."
*See G. Fedotov: "Svyatiye Drevney Rusi" (The Saints of Ancient Rus), Paris 1931.
II.
Peter's reform was a fact so decisive for all subsequent Russian history that the main trends of the 19th century were divided in their assessment of it. Today, both the Slavophile and the Westernizer points of view on Peter's work must be considered equally incorrect and outdated. The Slavophiles saw in Peter's work a betrayal of the primordial national Russian foundations, an act of violence, and a rupture in organic development. The Westernizers saw no originality in Russian history, considered Russia merely a country backward in enlightenment and civilization, while the Western European type of civilization was for them the only and universal one. Peter opened the paths of Western enlightenment and civilization for Russia.
The Slavophiles were wrong because Peter's reform was completely inevitable: Russia could no longer exist as a closed-off kingdom, given its military, naval, and economic backwardness, and the absence of enlightenment and the techniques of civilization. Moreover, the Russian people not only could not fulfill their great mission, but their very independent existence was in danger. The Slavophiles were also wrong because it was precisely in the Petrine period of history that Russian culture flourished, that Pushkin and great Russian literature appeared, thought awakened, and the Slavophiles themselves became possible. Russia had to overcome its isolation and join the cycle of world life. Only on this path was the world service of the Russian people possible.
The Westernizers were wrong because they denied the originality of the Russian people and Russian history, held simplified views on the progress of enlightenment and civilization, and saw no mission for Russia other than the need to catch up with the West. They did not see what the Slavophiles did see—the violence inflicted upon the people's soul by Peter. Peter's reform was inevitable, but he carried it out through terrible violence against the people's soul and their beliefs. And the people responded to this violence by creating the legend of Peter as the Antichrist.
Peter's methods were utterly Bolshevik. He wanted to destroy old Muscovite Russia, to uproot the feelings that lay at the basis of its life. And for this purpose, he did not stop short of executing his own son, a adherent of the old ways. Peter's methods regarding the church and the old religiosity are very reminiscent of Bolshevik methods. He disliked old Muscovite piety and was especially cruel towards the Old Believers and old ritualists. Peter mocked the religious feelings of the old times, organized the "All-Jesting and All-Drunken Council" with a jester patriarch. This is very reminiscent of the anti-religious manifestations of the 'godless' in Soviet Russia. Peter created the synodal system, largely copied from the German Protestant model, and finally subordinated the church to the state. However, it must be said that Peter was not the one to blame for the humiliation of the Russian church in the Petrine period of Russian history. Already in the Muscovite period, the church was in a slavish dependence on the state. The authority of the hierarchy among the people had fallen even before Peter. The religious schism dealt a terrible blow to this authority. The level of enlightenment and culture of the church hierarchy was very low. Therefore, Peter's church reform was also necessitated. But it was carried out violently, without sparing the religious feeling of the people. One could draw a comparison between Peter and Lenin, between the Petrine coup and the Bolshevik coup. The same rudeness, violence, imposition of certain principles from above upon the people, the same rupture of organic development, denial of traditions, the same statism, hypertrophy of the state, the same creation of a privileged bureaucratic stratum, the same centralism, the same desire to sharply and radically change the type of civilization.
But the Bolshevik revolution, through terrible violence, liberated the people's forces, called them to historical activity; this is its significance. Peter's coup, while strengthening the Russian state and pushing Russia onto the path of Western and world enlightenment, intensified the schism between the people and the upper cultural and ruling stratum. Peter secularized the Orthodox kingdom, directed Russia onto the path of enlightenment. This process occurred in the upper strata of Russian society, among the nobility and officialdom, while the people continued to live by old religious beliefs and feelings. The autocratic power of the tsar, which had фактически taken the form of Western enlightened absolutism, retained in the people its old religious sanction as a theocratic power. The weakening of the spiritual influence of the official church was an inevitable result of Peter's reform and the invasion of Western enlightenment. Rationalism penetrated even the church hierarchy itself. The famous metropolitan of Peter's era, Feofan Prokopovich, was essentially a Protestant of a rationalistic type. But in the Petrine era, this had its compensation in a series of saints, unknown to the Muscovite era, in the institution of elders [startsy], in the underground spiritual life.
The Western enlightenment of the 18th century in the upper strata of Russian society was alien to the Russian people. The Russian gentry of the 18th century superficially indulged in Voltairianism in one part, and mystical Masonry in another. The people, however, continued to live by old religious beliefs and looked upon the gentleman as an alien race. The enlightened and Voltairian Catherine the Second, who corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, finalized those forms of serfdom which provoked the protest of the stricken conscience of the Russian intelligentsia in the 19th century. The influence of the West initially struck at the people and strengthened the privileged gentry. People like Radishchev were an exception. Only in the 19th century did Western influences on the formed Russian intelligentsia give rise to a love for the people [narodolyubiye] and liberationist strivings. But even then, the educated and cultured strata turned out to be alien to the people. Nowhere, it seems, was there such an abyss between the upper and lower layers as in Petrine, Imperial Russia. And no country lived simultaneously in such different centuries, from the 14th to the 19th and even to the coming century, to the 21st century. Russia of the 18th and 19th centuries lived a completely inorganic life. A struggle between East and West was taking place in the soul of the Russian people, and this struggle continues in the Russian revolution. Russian communism is an Eastern communism. The influence of the West over two centuries did not master the Russian people. We will see that the Russian intelligentsia was not at all Western in its type, no matter how much it swore by Western theories. The empire created by Peter grew externally, became the greatest in the world, it had an external, coercive unity, but there was no internal unity, there was an internal rupture. The power and the people were torn apart, the people and the intelligentsia were torn apart, the nationalities united in the Russian empire were torn apart. The empire, with its Western-type state absolutism, least of all realized the idea of the Third Rome. The very title of emperor, which replaced the title of tsar, was, according to Slavophile consciousness, already a betrayal of the Russian idea. The despotic Nicholas I was the type of a Prussian officer. At the court and in the highest bureaucratic strata, German influences were very strong. The fundamental clash was between the idea of the empire, a powerful state of a military-police type, and the religious-messianic idea of the kingdom [tsarstvo], which went into the underground layer, the popular layer, and later, in a transformed way, into the intelligentsia layer. The clash between the consciousness of the empire, whose bearer was the power, and the consciousness of the intelligentsia would be fundamental for the 19th century. The power would increasingly alienate itself from the intelligent, cultured strata of society, in which revolutionary moods would grow. The nobility, which was the advanced and most cultured stratum at the beginning and even in the middle of the 19th century, would decline in cultural level in the second half of the century, become reactionary, and would have to yield its place to the raznochinets intelligentsia, which would bring with it a completely different, new type of culture. The absence of unity and integrity of culture would be expressed in the fact that the intellectual and spiritual trends of the 19th century would be divided by decades, and each decade would bring with it new ideas and strivings, a new mental structure. And yet, the Russian 19th century would create one of the greatest literatures in the world and an intense, original, very free thought.
The majority of the Russian people—the peasantry—lived in the grip of serfdom. Inwardly, the people lived by the Orthodox faith, and it gave them the ability to endure the sufferings of life. The people always considered serfdom a falsehood and an injustice, but they considered the guilty party in this injustice not the tsar, but the ruling classes, the nobility. The religious sanction of the tsarist power among the people was so strong that the people lived in hope that the tsar would protect them and stop the injustice when he learned the whole truth. In their concepts of property, Russian peasants always considered it a falsehood that the nobles owned huge lands. Western concepts of property were alien to the Russian people; these concepts were weak even among the nobility. The land is God's, and all those who labor, who work the land, can use it. A naive agrarian socialism was always inherent in the Russian peasants. For the cultured classes, for the intelligentsia, the people remained a kind of mystery that needed to be solved. They believed that in the silent, still wordless people, a great truth about life was hidden, and the day would come when the people would speak their word. The intelligentsia, detached from the people, lived under the charm of the telluric mystique of the people, of what the populist [narodnik] writers of the 1870s called "the power of the earth."
By the 19th century, Russia had formed into a huge, immense peasant [muzhik] kingdom, enserfed, illiterate, but possessing its own popular culture based on faith, with a dominant noble class, lazy and of low culture, often having lost religious faith and national image, with a tsar at the top, towards whom religious faith was preserved, with a strong bureaucracy and a very thin and fragile cultural layer. Classes in Russia were always weak, subordinate to the state; they were even formed by the state power. The only strong elements were the monarchy, which had taken the form of Western absolutism, and the people. The cultural layer felt itself crushed by these two forces. The intelligentsia of the 19th century stood over an abyss that could always open up and swallow it. The best, most cultured part of the Russian nobility felt the abnormality and unjustifiability of its position, its guilt before the people. By the 19th century, the empire was very unhealthy both spiritually and socially. It is characteristic of Russians to combine and conjoin antinomic, polar opposite principles. Russia and the Russian people can only be characterized by contradictions. The Russian people can with equal justification be characterized as a state-despotic and anarchically freedom-loving people, as a people inclined to nationalism and national self-conceit, and a people of universal spirit, more than all others capable of all-humanity [vsechelovechnost'], cruel and unusually humane, inclined to inflict suffering and painfully compassionate. This contradictoriness was created by all of Russian history and the eternal conflict between the instinct of state power and the instinct of the people's love of freedom and love of truth [pravdolyubiye]. Contrary to the opinion of the Slavophiles, the Russian people were a state people—this remains true for the Soviet state as well—and at the same time, this is a people from which constantly emerged free bands [vol'nitsa], the free Cossacks, the rebellions of Stenka Razin and Pugachev, the revolutionary intelligentsia, anarchist ideology, a people seeking the otherworldly kingdom of truth. In the huge state-empire created through terrible sacrifices, this truth was absent. This was felt by both the popular layer and the best part of the cultured nobility, and the newly formed Russian intelligentsia. The Russian kingdom of the 19th century was contradictory and unhealthy, there was oppression and injustice in it, but psychologically and morally it was not a bourgeois kingdom, and it opposed itself to the bourgeois kingdoms of the West. In this peculiar kingdom, political despotism combined with great freedom and breadth of life, freedom of daily life [byt], morals, with an absence of partitions and oppressive normativity, legalism. This was determined by the basic striving of the Russian nature towards infinity and boundlessness. Limitation, separateness, smallness were not characteristic of the Russian kingdom, the Russian nature, and the Russian character. We will see that Russia did not experience a Renaissance and humanism in the European sense of the word. But at the heights of its thought and creativity, it experienced the crisis of humanism more acutely than in the West. Russian humanism was Christian, it was based on love for humanity [chelovekolyubiye], mercy, pity, even in those who consciously retreated from Christianity. Throughout the Petrine, imperial period, a conflict existed between Holy Rus [Svyataya Rus'] and the empire. Slavophilism was the ideological expression of this conflict. In the 19th century, the conflict took new forms—the Rus seeking social truth, the kingdom of truth, clashed with the empire seeking power.
CHAPTER I
THE FORMATION OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA
AND ITS CHARACTER.
SLAVOPHILISM AND WESTERNISM
1.
To understand the sources of Russian communism and to grasp the character of the Russian revolution, one must know what that peculiar phenomenon which in Russia is called the "intelligentsia" represents. Western people would be mistaken if they identified the Russian intelligentsia with what in the West is called intellectuels. Intellectuels are people of intellectual labor and creativity, primarily scholars, writers, artists, professors, teachers, etc. The Russian intelligentsia is a completely different formation, to which could belong people not engaged in intellectual labor and not particularly intellectual in general. And many Russian scholars and writers could not at all be counted among the intelligentsia in the precise sense of the word. The intelligentsia rather resembled a monastic order or a religious sect with its own special, very intolerant morality, with its obligatory worldview, with its own special manners and customs, and even with a peculiar physical appearance by which one could always recognize an intellectual and distinguish him from other social groups. The intelligentsia in our country was an ideological, not a professional or economic grouping, formed from various social classes, initially predominantly from the more cultured part of the nobility, later from the sons of priests and deacons, from minor officials, from townspeople [meshhane], and, after the emancipation, from peasants. This is the so-called raznochinets intelligentsia, united exclusively by ideas, and moreover, ideas of a social character. In the second half of the 19th century, the stratum which is simply called "cultured" transitions into a new type, receiving the name "intelligentsia." This type has its characteristic features, inherent in all its true representatives. The intelligentsia had typical Russian traits, and the opinion which saw in the intelligentsia a denationalization and a loss of all connection with Russian soil is completely erroneous. Dostoevsky understood perfectly well the Russian character of the revolutionary intellectual and called him "the great wanderer of the Russian land," although he did not love revolutionary ideas.
The intelligentsia is characterized by rootlessness, a break with all class-based ways of life [byt] and traditions, but this rootlessness was characteristically Russian. The intelligentsia was always carried away by certain ideas, predominantly social ones, and devoted itself to them selflessly. It possessed the ability to live exclusively by ideas. Due to the conditions of the Russian political system, the intelligentsia found itself cut off from real social work, and this greatly contributed to the development of social dreaminess within it. In autocratic and serf-owning Russia, the most radical socialist and anarchist ideas were developed. The impossibility of political activity led to politics being transferred into thought and literature. Literary critics were the rulers of social and political thought. The intelligentsia assumed a schismatic character, which is so inherent in Russians. It lived in schism with the surrounding reality, which it considered evil, and within it, a fanatical schismatic morality was developed. The extreme ideological intolerance of the Russian intelligentsia was self-defense; only in this way could it preserve itself in a hostile world, only thanks to its ideological fanaticism could it withstand persecution and retain its features. For the Russian intelligentsia, in which social motives and revolutionary moods predominated, which produced the type of person whose only specialty was revolution, an extreme dogmatism was characteristic, to which Russians have been inclined since time immemorial. Russians possess an exceptional ability to assimilate Western ideas and teachings and to process them in a peculiar way. But the assimilation of Western ideas and teachings by the Russian intelligentsia was in most cases dogmatic. What in the West was a scientific theory, subject to criticism, a hypothesis, or in any case a relative, partial truth, not claiming universality, turned among Russian intellectuals into dogma, into something like a religious revelation. Russians are all inclined to perceive things in a totalitarian manner; they are alien to the skeptical criticism of Western people. This is a shortcoming, leading to confusions and substitutions, but it is also a virtue and points to the religious wholeness of the Russian soul. The radical Russian intelligentsia developed an idolatrous attitude towards science itself. When a Russian intellectual became a Darwinist, Darwinism was for him not a biological theory subject to dispute, but a dogma, and towards anyone who did not accept this dogma, for example, a supporter of Lamarckism, a morally suspicious attitude arose. The most significant Russian philosopher of the 19th century, Vl. Solovyov, said that the Russian nihilists professed a faith based on a strange syllogism: man descended from the ape, therefore, we must love one another. Saint-Simonism, Fourierism, Hegelianism, materialism, Marxism—Marxism especially—were perceived and experienced by the Russian intelligentsia in a totalitarian and dogmatic way. Russians in general poorly understand the significance of the relative, the gradualness of the historical process, the differentiation of different spheres of culture. Connected with this is Russian maximalism. The Russian soul strives for wholeness, it cannot reconcile itself to the division of everything into categories, it strives for the Absolute and wants to subordinate everything to the Absolute, and this is a religious trait in it. But it easily commits a confusion, takes the relative for the absolute, the partial for the universal, and then it falls into idolatry. It is precisely the Russian soul that is prone to the switching of religious energy onto non-religious objects, onto the relative and partial sphere of science or social life. This explains a great deal.
Already in the 18th century, the type of the Russian intelligentsia began to emerge. The first Russian intellectual was Radishchev, the author of "A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow." Radishchev's words: "my soul was wounded by the sufferings of mankind" constructed the type of the Russian intelligentsia. Radishchev was educated on 18th-century French philosophy, on Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. But he was not of an anti-religious bent, like many "Voltairians" of that time. French ideas were refracted in the Russian soul first and foremost as compassion and love for humanity [chelovekolyubiye]. Radishchev could not bear serfdom, the humiliations and sufferings of the people. By the time Radishchev's book appeared, Catherine II was already seized by reactionary moods. Radishchev was arrested, sentenced to death for his book, which was commuted to penal servitude. Also arrested and confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress was the prominent figure of Russian enlightenment in the 18th century, Novikov, a mystic-Mason, a Christian, and a man of very moderate political views. Thus was the formation of the Russian intelligentsia met by the Russian power. The first steps of the Russian intelligentsia on the paths of enlightening consciousness, and not revolution, were accompanied by sacrifices and sufferings, prison and hard labor. Radishchev had, for his time, rather bold and radical views and was one of the predecessors of the revolutionary intelligentsia and Russian socialism. But in the 18th century, Russian thought was not yet original. Only the 19th century would be the century of original thought, the century of self-consciousness. But it would also be the century of an internal revolution. Consciousness itself was, for us, a rebellion against the surrounding reality, against imperial Russia. Enlightenment destroyed the old faith in the Orthodox kingdom, and the search for the kingdom took a different direction, the Russian mission was understood differently.
The loneliness of Russian cultured and freedom-loving people in the first half of the 19th century was extraordinary.* There were cultured people, but there was no cultural environment. People of that time complain that they are surrounded by darkness, that no one understands them and no one sympathizes with them. The mass of the Russian nobility and officialdom was very uncultured, ignorant, devoid of any higher interests. This was the "rabble" [chern'] that Pushkin spoke of. The image of Chatsky in "Woe from Wit" depicts this loneliness of the best, most intelligent and cultured people of that time. At the beginning of the 19th century, in the era of Alexander I, Russia experienced a cultural renaissance. That was the golden age of Russian poetry, the era of mystical currents and the Decembrist movement. Alexander I himself was an intellectual tsar, who sought truth all his life, in his youth an enemy of autocracy and serfdom, but a divided and not strong man.
The renaissance of that era occurred in a very small and thin layer of the nobility. Cultured and truth-seeking people had to live in small groups and fellowships. Masonry, mystically colored, was very widespread in the Alexandrian era and played a great educational role. Masonry was the first form of self-organization of society. The most intense spiritual life of that time poured into this form. The beginning of the 19th century was an era of the loosening of the Russian soul. It became receptive to all kinds of ideas, to spiritual and social movements. It was an era of universalism, an era of inter-confessional Christian unions. And then began the formation of the Russian all-humanity [vsechelovechnost'] characteristic of the 19th century. Through the Napoleonic wars, Russia came into direct interaction with the West. The Russian officer corps had been in Europe and returned with a broadened horizon. Alexander I himself was a Russian "all-human" [vsechelovek]. He met with Robert Owen and spoke with him about a new social order, he prayed together with Quakers. But this did not prevent the end of his reign from being marked by a gloomy reaction. The Russian soul was preparing for the 19th century. But there was no integrity and unity in Russian life. There was an abyss between the upper cultural layer of the Russian nobility, who then served in the guard, and the average mass of the nobility. In this upper layer there were spiritual and literary movements, within it the Decembrist movement was being prepared, aimed at liberation from autocracy and serfdom. But everything happened in such a small and socially isolated layer that it could not substantially change Russian life. The Decembrist uprising, which testifies to the unselfishness of the best part of the Russian nobility, was doomed to failure and was cruelly crushed. The main actors of the Decembrist movement were executed or exiled to Siberia by Nicholas I. The majority of the Decembrists held moderate and even monarchical views. But Pestel, representing the extreme left wing of the Decembrists, the author of "Russian Truth," can be called the first Russian socialist, a socialist before the socialists, as Herzen expressed it. In him was already revealed that will to power and to violence which in the 20th century was revealed in the communists. But Pestel's socialism was, of course, given the conditions of the time, agrarian. Pestel was a republican, a supporter of popular rule [narodovlastiye] and at the same time a centralist. He was not a liberal and was inclined to despotism. But at the same time, while the Decembrist movement was taking place, the enormous mass of the Russian nobility was dark, lazy, and led a meaningless life. The average Russian nobleman first served in the guard, soon retired, and settled in the village, where he did nothing and manifested himself in all sorts of despotic whims and petty despotism. This was the greatest failure of the Petrine era. That era created the type of "superfluous people," created either Rudins or Oblomovs. And the best were those "superfluous people" who painfully recognized their superfluousness, like some of Turgenev's heroes. Only in Pushkin, the sole Renaissance Russian man, did the possibility of a different relation to life flash. Pushkin, as it were, united in himself the consciousness of the intelligentsia and the consciousness of the empire. He wrote revolutionary poems and he was also the poet of Russian great-powerhood [velikoderzhavnost']. After the suppression of the Decembrist uprising, after the accession of Nicholas I, everything proceeded along the path of growing schism and revolution. The Russian intelligentsia finally took shape in the schismatic type. It would always speak of itself as "we," and of the state, the power, as "they." The Russian cultural layer found itself over an abyss, crushed by two basic forces—the autocratic monarchy from above and the dark mass of the peasantry from below.
Russian thought, rootless and rebellious, was in the 19th century internally free and daring, not bound by a heavy past with tradition, but externally constrained and often persecuted. The impossibility, due to political conditions, of direct social work led to all activity transferring into literature and thought, where all questions were posed and resolved very radically. A boundless social dreaminess, unconnected with real reality, was developed. Russians were Saint-Simonists, Fourierists, Proudhonists, when in Russia there was still serfdom and an autocratic monarchy. They were the most extreme, totalitarian Hegelians and Schellingians, when in Russia there was as yet no philosophical culture and philosophical thought was under suspicion. Russian cultured people loved endless conversations and arguments about world questions, lasting whole nights, in small circles, in the salons of the 1830s and 40s. The first awakening of independent thought and self-consciousness in the 19th century occurred in Chaadaev, an exceptionally gifted man, but one who wrote almost nothing. He was lazy, like all Russian gentlemen [bare]. His unusually sharp and powerful thoughts were expressed in one "Philosophical Letter." It is a whole philosophy of history. The historiosophical theme is the primary one in Russian thought of the 19th century. Independent Russian thought first of all pondered what Russia's task and the peculiarity of its path were, whether it was the East or the West. The first Russian historiosopher, Chaadaev, was a retired officer of the Life-Guards Hussar Regiment, just as the first independent and most remarkable Russian theologian, Khomyakov, was an officer of the Life-Guards Cavalry Regiment. Chaadaev's philosophy of history was a rebellion against Russian history, against the Russian past and the Russian present. Peter's work awakened Russian thought and Russian creativity. Herzen said that to Peter's reform the Russian people responded with the appearance of Pushkin. To this one must add that it responded with the appearance of Westernizing and Slavophile thought. All Russian thought of the 19th century, occupied with general questions of worldview, was either Westernizing or Slavophile, i.e., it solved the problem of whether Russia should be the West or the East, whether it was necessary to follow Peter's path or return to pre-Petrine, Muscovite Rus.
Chaadaev came forward as a decisive Westernizer, and his Westernism was a cry of patriotic pain. He was a typical Russian man of the 19th century from the upper cultural layer. His denial of Russia, of Russian history, is a typical Russian denial. His Westernism was religious, unlike subsequent forms of Westernism; he sympathized greatly with Catholicism, saw in it an active, organizing, and unifying force of world history, and in it he saw salvation for Russia as well. Russian history appeared to him as devoid of meaning and connection, belonging neither to the East nor to the West—a reflection of that loss of cultural style and unity which is characteristic of the Petrine era.
*See M. Gershenzon's book "Young Russia."
Chaadaev considered Russia a lesson and a warning for other peoples. The authorities saw Chaadaev as a revolutionary. But in reality, his ideas were close to those of de Maistre, Bonald, and Schelling, with whom he corresponded and who held him in high esteem. Culturally refined, Chaadaev could not reconcile himself to being doomed to live in an uncultured society, in a despotic state that held the dark people in its grip without enlightening them. Chaadaev expressed a thought that must be considered fundamental for Russian self-consciousness: he speaks of the potentiality, the unmanifested nature of the Russian people. This thought could seem like a condemnation of the Russian people insofar as it was directed at the past—the Russian people had created nothing great in history, had fulfilled no high mission. But it could also turn into a great hope, into a faith in the future of the Russian people when directed towards the future—the Russian people are called to realize a great mission. Precisely on this potentiality and backwardness of the Russian people, the entire 19th century would base the hope that the Russian people are called to resolve questions which are difficult for the West to resolve due to its burdened past—for example, the social question. So it was with Chaadaev as well. The Russian government responded to the first creative awakening of Russian thought by declaring Chaadaev insane; he was subjected to a medical examination. Chaadaev was crushed by this and fell silent. Later he writes an "Apology of a Madman" and in it expresses thoughts characteristic of Russian consciousness about Russian messianism. One thing is the judgment of the past, another is the hope for the future. Precisely because of its potentiality, the preservation within it of enormous, untapped forces, the Russian people are called to say their original word to the world, to fulfill a great mission. Chaadaev already contained many fundamental Russian thoughts. In their schism with the contemporary world, in their protest against the falsehoods of Russian life, Russian cultured people tried to turn to Catholicism and seek salvation in it. In this regard, the figure of Pecherin is characteristic; he emigrated and became a Catholic monk. He combined Catholicism with utopian socialism. In this period, attempts were made to provide a Christian foundation for socialism; they were carried away by Lamennais; the intelligentsia was still religiously inclined. Pecherin wrote in one of his poems:
"How sweet it is to hate one's fatherland / And eagerly await its destruction."
Typically Russian words, words of despair, behind which a love for Russia is hidden. In the West, being a Catholic monk, Pecherin yearned for Russia and believed that Russia carried with it a new cycle of world history.
2.
The primary Western influence, through which Russian thought and Russian culture of the 19th century were largely defined, was the influence of Schelling and Hegel, who became almost Russian thinkers. This influence did not mean slavish imitation, like the influence of Voltairianism in the 18th century. German thought was perceived actively and processed into a Russian type of thought. This especially needs to be said about the Slavophiles, for whom the influence of Schelling and Hegel also fertilized theological thought, just as the influence of Plato and Neoplatonism once fertilized the theological thought of the Eastern Church Fathers. Khomyakov created an original Orthodox theology, into which processed motifs of German idealism entered. Like the German Romantics, Russian thought strives for wholeness and does this more consistently and radically than the Romantics, who themselves had lost wholeness. The wholeness of the Christian East is contrasted with the rationalistic fragmentation and dissection of the West. This was first formulated by I. Kireyevsky and became a fundamental Russian motif, rooted in the depths of the Russian character. Russian communist atheists assert wholeness, totality, no less than the Orthodox Slavophiles. Psychologically, Russian orthodoxy is precisely wholeness, totality. The Russian Westernizers, to whom the religious type of the Slavophiles was alien, became carried away by Hegelianism, which for them was just as totalitarian a system of thought and life, encompassing absolutely everything. When Belinsky or Bakunin were Hegelians, they were precisely such Hegelians. A Russian young man belonging to the generation of idealists of the 1830s and 40s professed a totalitarian Schellingianism or a totalitarian Hegelianism in relation to all of life, not only the life of thought and social life, but also personal life, in relation to love or the feeling for nature. Belinsky, a revolutionary by nature and temperament, who laid the foundations for the Russian revolutionary-socialist worldview, at one time became a conservative due to his passion for Hegel's philosophy. He considered himself obliged to accept the rationality of reality—this is how he understood Hegel's thought that all that is real is rational.
Creative originality of religious and philosophical thought was revealed in the Slavophiles. They substantiated a mission for Russia different from the mission of the peoples of the West. The originality of the Slavophiles was connected to the fact that they attempted to comprehend the distinctiveness of the Eastern, Orthodox type of Christianity, which lay at the foundation of Russian history. Although the Slavophiles sought organic foundations and paths, they were also schismatics, living in a break with the surrounding reality. They denied imperial, Petrine Russia; they did not feel at home in the reality of Nicholas I, and the authorities treated them suspiciously and hostilely, despite their Orthodoxy and monarchism. There was nothing in common between the system of official nationality [narodnost'] or official nationalism, developed in the era of Nicholas I and becoming the ideology of power, and the Slavophile understanding of nationality. The system of official nationality was based on three principles—Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality—and the Slavophile system recognized these same three principles. But the spirit was opposite. It was perfectly clear that for the system of official nationality, primacy belonged to the principle of autocracy, while Orthodoxy and nationality were subordinate to it. It was also clear that the nationality was dubious and had been influenced by the worst aspects of Western state absolutism. Nicholas I was the type of a Prussian officer. Orthodoxy, meanwhile, was not spiritual but externally state-oriented and turned into a means. These principles had a completely different meaning for the Slavophiles. First of all, they recognized the absolute primacy of the religious principle and sought a purified Orthodoxy, not distorted or perverted by historical influences. They also strove to reveal the genuine nationality, the soul of the people. They saw the image of the Russian people as freed from distortions which they attributed to Western rationalism and state absolutism. Their attitude towards the state was completely different from that in the system of official nationality. The Slavophiles were anti-statists; they even had a strong anarchic element; they considered the state an evil and considered power a sin. They defended monarchy on the grounds that it was better for one person to be soiled by power, which is always sinful and dirty, than for the entire people to be so.* The tsar has no right to power, just as no one does. But he is obliged to bear the burden of power which the people have placed upon him. The Slavophiles considered the Russian people non-state-oriented. The Russian people have a religious, spiritual calling and want to be free from state-building [gosudarstvovaniye] to realize this calling. This theory contradicts, of course, the fact that the Russian people created the greatest state in the world and signified a break with the traditions not only of Peter but also of the Grand Princes of Moscow. But the Slavophiles expressed here one of the poles of Russian consciousness, a characteristic trait of the 19th-century intelligentsia and all of Russian literature. The Slavophiles were the founders of that populism [narodnichestvo] which is so characteristic of Russian thought in the 19th century and later assumed religious forms. The Slavophiles believed in the people, in the people's truth, and the people for them were primarily the peasants [muzhiki], who had preserved the Orthodox faith and the national way of life. The Slavophiles were ardent defenders of the commune [obshchina], which they, like all populists, considered an organic and originally Russian structure of the economic life of the peasantry. They were decisive opponents of the concepts of Roman law regarding property. They did not consider property sacred and absolute, and considered the owner merely a manager. They denied Western bourgeois, capitalist civilization. And if they thought the West was rotting, it was because it had embarked on the path of this bourgeois civilization, because the wholeness of life had split within it. The Slavophiles already anticipated that distinction between culture and civilization which became popular in the West since Spengler's time. Despite the conservative element of their worldview, the Slavophiles were ardent defenders of the freedom of the person, freedom of conscience, thought, speech, and were peculiar democrats, recognizing the principle of the supremacy of the people. Khomyakov, in his poems, denounced the historical sins of Russia, not only Petrine but also pre-Petrine Russia, and was even more sharp than the Westernizers.
The Slavophiles and Westernizers were enemy-friends. Herzen said: "We are like a two-faced Janus; we have one love for Russia, but not the same." For some, Russia was, above all, a mother; for others, a child. The Slavophiles and Westernizers of the 1830s and 40s belonged to the same circle, argued in the same salons which witnessed the battles between Herzen and Khomyakov. Only later did they finally part ways. The intolerant Belinsky no longer wanted to meet with his friend K. Aksakov. The best, most cultured and thinking Russian people of the 19th century did not live in the present, which was repulsive to them; they lived in the future or the past. Some, the Slavophiles, dreamed of an ideal pre-Petrine Rus; others, the Westernizers, dreamed of an ideal West. But even the conservative turning of the Slavophiles to the distant past was merely a utopia of a perfect order, a perfect life, just as the turning of the Westernizers to the West, which they knew poorly, was a utopia. The Westernizers were often enlighteners, civilizers, and this is the least interesting type. More interesting is the type of Westernizer who subjected Western, predominantly French, social teachings to Russian processing. If Hegelianism and Schellingianism were perceived in Russia in a totalitarian, holistic, and maximalist manner, then Saint-Simonism and Fourierism were perceived just as totalitarily, holistically, and maximally. In the camp of the radical wing of the Westernizers, the influences of French socialism and French literature, especially George Sand, were strong. George Sand had a colossal influence on the development of emotional life in the Russian cultural stratum, on the development of the Russian attitude towards freedom and sincerity of feeling, the Russian protest against violence, convention, and insincerity in feelings. The plan for realizing social truth was developed according to Saint-Simon and Fourier. And, of course, the French themselves did not know such enthusiasm for these ideas.
At the end of the 1840s, a circle gathered at the home of the Russian landowner Petrashevsky, which discussed social questions, the plan for a new and better structure for humanity. The majority of the circle were Fourierists or Saint-Simonists. The ideas were the most radical in terms of the reorganization of humanity, but the character of the conversations was most peaceful and harmless.* The Petrashevtsy did not engage in any revolutionary activity—in those times there was no and could be no revolutionary activity in Russia—everything happened in the sphere of thought. Most of all, of course, they wanted the emancipation of the peasants. The utopian socialism of the circle's members was idyllic. Three stages are established in the development of socialist ideas in Russia: the stage of utopian socialism, populist socialism, and scientific or Marxist socialism. Petrashevsky was very typical of a Russian landowner inflamed with utopian socialist ideas. He said: "Finding nothing worthy of my attachment—neither among women nor among men—I have devoted myself to the service of humanity." This expresses a mood very characteristic of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia—love for the "distant" rather than love for the "near." Petrashevsky was directed towards the distant, towards the happiness of humanity. He believes in the happiness of humanity. The naive utopianism of Petrashevsky was expressed in the fact that he arranged a phalanstery according to Fourier for the peasants on his estate. But the peasants set fire to this phalanstery. This is a symbolic fact. Similarly, in the 1870s, the peasants would not accept the socialist intelligentsia who went to the people for selfless service to them. Petrashevsky even asserted during his interrogation that phalansteries were entirely possible in serf-owning and autocratic Russia. An opinion characteristic of the utopian stage of socialism.
From the Petrashevsky circle, the extreme, revolutionary direction was represented by N. Speshnev, who apparently served Dostoevsky as a pretext for creating the image of Stavrogin in "Demons." Speshnev was an atheist, a communist, and was even close to Marxism. Dostoevsky took part in the Petrashevsky circle, although he was the most skeptical regarding the possibility of realizing Fourier's social utopia. The peaceful gatherings of the Petrashevsky circle ended just as sadly as everything ended sadly in Russia at that time. All members of the circle were arrested, and 21 people were sentenced to death, commuted to hard labor. Among them was Dostoevsky, who had to experience the minutes of being condemned to execution.
The affair of the Petrashevtsy could not but strengthen the revolutionary moods of the Russian intelligentsia. Russian socialism would no longer be so idyllic. The figures of Nechayev and Tkachev would appear. It is very interesting to note that the first Marxists in the world were Russians. Russian Marxism, as a movement, arose only in the second half of the 1880s. But individual Russian Marxists already existed in the late 1840s in Paris. Thus, the steppe landowner N. I. Sazonov was in Paris in the late 1840s as the first Russian Marxist and perhaps one of the first disciples of Marx in general.* Marx, who generally did not like Russia and Russians, writes from Paris with surprise that he has acquired followers among Russian steppe landowners. He had some distrust of these too-early Marxists. Marx later had to experience great unpleasantness with Bakunin and endure a struggle with him for the First International, although, apparently, Bakunin initially influenced Marx's concept of the mission of the proletariat.** In any case, the Russian capacity for selfless enthusiasm for social ideas is very characteristic for our theme. Throughout the 19th century, Russians had an irresistible inclination towards socialism. And everything prepared in our country the enthusiasm for communism. The fate of Herzen presents enormous interest in the history of Russian self-consciousness, the Russian national idea, and the Russian social idea.
The anarchic element was particularly strong in K. Aksakov.
*See P. Sakulin: "Russian Literature and Socialism." 1922.
*See the same book by Sakulin.
** This parenthetical note remains in Russian in the original text.
3.
Herzen was a Westernizer who debated the Slavophiles in the salons of the 1840s. Although he also went through a Hegelian phase, he soon moved on to Feuerbach. The primary influence on him was not German but that of French socialist literature. Herzen's socialist worldview was developed under the influence of the French socialists. The German socialism emerging at that time, i.e., Marxism, was alien to him. Herzen was one of those Russian Westernizers who passionately dreamed of and idealized the West. Herzen emigrated, becoming one of the first Russian ;migr;s. He arrived in the West during the atmosphere of the 1848 revolution; he was initially captivated by this revolution and placed great hopes upon it. But Herzen was destined to experience bitter disillusionment with the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, with the West, and with Western people in general. Herzen's infatuation with the West was typically Russian, and his disillusionment with the West was also typically Russian. After him, many Russians experienced a similar disillusionment. Herzen was struck and wounded by the philistinism [meshchanstvo] of the West. He saw this philistine, petty-bourgeois spirit even in the socialists. He was one of the first to see the possibility of a socialist bourgeoisness. The image of the knight was replaced by the image of the philistine shopkeeper. The denunciation of the bourgeois nature of the West is a traditionally Russian motif. The Slavophiles expressed this in different terms. The reactionary K. Leontiev would rebel against the philistinism of the West just as the revolutionary Herzen did.
Herzen, unlike other representatives of the left camp, did not profess an optimistic theory of progress; on the contrary, he defended a pessimistic philosophy of history, he did not believe in the rationality and benevolence of the historical process moving towards the realization of the supreme good. This is original and interesting in Herzen. He recognized the supreme value as the human personality, which is crushed by historical progress. He laid the foundation for a distinctive Russian individualistic socialism, which in the 1870s would be represented by N. Mikhailovsky. Socialist individualism is opposed to bourgeois individualism. Herzen sees no forces in Western Europe capable of resisting the reign of philistinism. The Western European worker is himself a philistine and cannot save anyone from philistinism. Herzen, an ;migr; deprived until his death of the possibility of physically returning to his homeland, returned spiritually to his homeland. However terrible the autocratic regime of Nicholas I, serfdom, and ignorance were, it was precisely in Russia, in the Russian people, that the potential for a new, better, non-philistine, non-bourgeois life was hidden. Herzen saw these potentials in the Russian peasant [muzhik], in the grey peasant sheepskin coat [tulup], in the peasant commune [obshchina]. Within the Russian peasant world lay the possibility of a harmonious combination of the principle of personality and the principle of communality, sociality. Herzen was a humanist-skeptic; religious beliefs were alien to him. Faith in the Russian people, in the truth contained within the peasant, was for him the last anchor of salvation. Herzen became one of the founders of Russian populism [narodnichestvo], a distinctive Russian phenomenon. In the person of Herzen, Russian Westernism drew closer to certain features of Slavophilism. A schism occurred in the Westernizer camp between the populist-socialists and the liberals. Herzen and the populist-socialists believed in Russia's special path, in its calling to realize social truth better and sooner than the West, believed in the possibility for Russia to avoid the horrors of capitalism. The liberal Westernizers thought that Russia must follow the same path as Western Europe. The Populists had a negative attitude towards politics; they thought that politics would push Russia along the banal Western path of development; they recognized the primacy of the social over the political. This is a characteristically Russian motif. Herzen, Bakunin, even such sinister revolutionaries as Nechaev and Tkachev, are in a certain sense closer to the Russian idea than the Westernizers, the enlighteners, and the liberals. The militant atheism of the Russian revolutionary socialist and anarchist movements was Russian religiosity, Russian apocalypticism, turned inside out. It is very important to note that liberal ideas were always weak in Russia and we never had liberal ideologies that gained moral authority and were inspiring. The actors of the liberal reforms of the 1860s were, of course, significant, but their liberalism was exclusively practical and businesslike, often bureaucratic; they did not represent any ideology, which the Russian intelligentsia always needed.
CHAPTER II
RUSSIAN SOCIALISM AND NIHILISM
1.
Although Belinsky was a man of the 1840s, belonging to the generation of Slavophiles and Westernizers, he can be considered the first to express the type of the revolutionary intelligentsia, and towards the end of his life, he formulated the basic principles of its worldview, which were later developed in the 1860s and 70s. First and foremost, Belinsky was not a Russian gentleman [barin], like all the Slavophiles and Westernizers, like Herzen and Bakunin; he belonged to a different social stratum, he was a raznochinets. In his mental structure, he had typically intellectual traits: he was an intolerant fanatic, prone to sectarianism, selflessly carried away by ideas, constantly developing a worldview for himself not out of a need for pure knowledge, but to justify his strivings for a better, more just social order. Belinsky was a man of exceptional talents and exceptional receptivity to ideas, but his level of education was not high; he hardly knew any foreign languages and became acquainted with the ideas he was passionate about second-hand. He learned about Hegel mainly through Bakunin's accounts. Belinsky went through all the stages of ideological enthusiasms of the cultured Russian stratum of that time. In turn, he was a Fichtean, a Schellingian, a Hegelian, then moved on to Feuerbachianism, denying the influence of French literature and French socialist thought. He was, first and foremost, a remarkable literary critic, the first to appreciate Pushkin and Gogol and the beginning of the work of our great novelists. He himself possessed artistic sensitivity and was capable of aesthetic judgments, but he became the originator of that type of publicistic, social criticism which was destined to play a huge role in the history of the intelligentsia's consciousness. Belinsky had a characteristically Russian search for an integral worldview that provides an answer to all questions of life, combines theoretical and practical reason, and philosophically grounds a social ideal. Integral truth [tselostnaya pravda], as N. Mikhailovsky, who also emerged from Belinsky, would later express it, is both truth-as-fact [pravda-istina] and truth-as-justice [pravda-spravedlivost']. The same idea of wholeness, totality, would later be found in N. Fyodorov on a religious basis and in Marxism-Leninism. Russian publicist critics would always preach an integral worldview, would always unite truth and justice, would always be teachers of life. Belinsky was the first, most gifted representative of this type. He already asserts the social role of the literary critic. Russian social thought was concealed under the form of literary criticism because, due to censorship conditions, it could not express itself otherwise.
In the ideological evolution and revolution that Belinsky experienced, the crisis of Hegelianism is the most interesting and important.* Russian thought experienced two crises of Hegelianism: a religious crisis in Khomyakov, and a social crisis in Belinsky. The main question that interested the Russian people of the 1840s, who were enthusiastic about Hegel, was the question of their relation to "actuality" [deistvitel'nost']. Hegel's thought about the rationality of actuality, which in Hegel himself had a panlogistic meaning and signified recognizing as truly actual only the rational, was experienced in Russia very intensely and painfully, but was misinterpreted. It is known that Hegel can be understood conservatively and revolutionarily—he gave rise to right and left currents; he was the philosopher of the Prussian state, in which he saw the embodiment of the absolute spirit, and yet, through dialectics, he introduced a revolutionary dynamism into thinking, giving rise to Marx.
The Russian Hegelians of the 1840s initially understood Hegel conservatively and interpreted the thought of the "rationality of actuality" in the sense that one must reconcile oneself with the surrounding actuality, the actuality of the Nikolayan era, and see reason in it. Such a moment of conservative Hegelianism was experienced by Belinsky and Bakunin, men of revolutionary temperament who later came to a revolutionary worldview. The Russian romantic-idealists of the 1840s fled from social reality into the world of thought, fantasy, literature, into the reflected world of ideas. They suffered from the ugliness and falsehood of reality but were powerless to remake it. The schism with actuality made Russian people inactive and produced the type of the "superfluous man." They could not accept actuality—not for reconciliation with it, but for struggle against it. But Hegelianism contained the possibility of a turn towards actuality, which could have a double meaning. The identity of being and thought is not only a transfer of being into thought but also a transfer of thought into being. In Belinsky, at the end of the 1840s, in his final period, a stormy and passionate turn towards social actuality occurred, but not for reconciliation, but for struggle. Struggle presupposes a turn towards actuality, towards reality. A dreamy relation to life makes struggle impossible. But in Belinsky, this takes the form of a crisis of Hegelianism, with which all left, revolutionary Russian thought breaks until the emergence of Russian Marxism, which turned to Hegel again but understood his dialectic revolutionarily. In his final period, Belinsky arrives at revolutionary socialism and militant atheism. This found expression in his remarkable letters to Bakunin, which in old Russia could not be printed. The rebellion against Hegel is a rebellion in the name of the living, human personality, and the struggle for the living human personality turned into a struggle for the socialist organization of society. Thus was formulated the characteristic Russian idea of individualistic socialism.
Belinsky, first of all, with his usual passion, rebels against abstract idealism, distant from concrete life, which sacrifices the individual, the living human personality, to the world spirit, to the general. "The fate of the subject, the individual, the personality," writes Belinsky, "is more important than the fate of the whole world and the health of the Chinese emperor (i.e., Hegel's Allgemeinheit)." "I bow to your philosophical cap," Belinsky addresses Hegel, "but with all the respect due to your philosophical philistinism, I have the honor to report to you that if I managed to climb to the highest rung of the ladder of development—I would even there ask for an account of all the victims of the conditions of life and history, of all the victims of chance, superstition, the Inquisition of Philip II, etc., etc.: otherwise I will throw myself headfirst from the top rung. I do not want happiness even as a gift, if I am not assured about each of my brothers by blood—bones of my bones and flesh of my flesh. They say that disharmony is a condition of harmony: perhaps this is very profitable and delightful for melomaniacs, but certainly not for those who are destined to express the idea of disharmony with their fate."
These are very important words for subsequent Russian problematics. Here the problem of theodicy is posed, the problem of justifying suffering, which is the fundamental Russian problem and the source of Russian atheism, the problem of the price of progress, which will play a big role in the social thought of the 1880s. Belinsky anticipates Dostoevsky; the problem of Ivan Karamazov about the tear of a child had already been experienced by him; the dialectic of Dostoevsky in "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" was nascent in him. Sometimes it seems that in the thoughts of Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky had in mind Belinsky, whom he knew well personally and with whom he argued a great deal. Belinsky experiences despair and bitterness after disillusionment with idealism. He becomes a revolutionary, an atheist, and a socialist. It is very important that in Belinsky, Russian revolutionary socialism is emotionally combined with atheism. The source of this atheism was compassion for people, the impossibility of reconciling with the idea of God in view of the excessive evil and sufferings of life. This is atheism born of moral pathos, out of love for goodness and justice. Dostoevsky would explore this peculiar religious psychology and ideological dialectic. Out of compassion for man, out of rebellion against the "general" (idea, reason, spirit, God), which crushed the living man, Belinsky becomes a socialist. He is remarkable testimony to the moral-psychological sources of Russian socialism. The rebellion against the general in the name of the personality transitions in him into a struggle for a new general, for humanity, for its social organization. Belinsky does not notice that, having rejected all the "general" that previously crushed people, he quickly subordinates the personality to a new "general." And it seems to him that this new "general," which he worships—since a Russian person cannot not worship something—he affirms in the name of the personality. The same thing will happen in the 1860s. "Sociality, sociality—or death!" exclaims Belinsky. "What is it to me that the general lives when the personality suffers." "Negation is my god."
In Russia at the end of the 1840s, the same dialectical process of thought was already occurring that took place in Germany in left Hegelianism, in Feuerbach and Marx. A break with abstract idealism and a transition to concrete actuality occurs. Belinsky becomes imbued, in his own words, with a "Marat-like love" for humanity. "I am a terrible man," writes Belinsky, "when some mystical nonsense gets into my head." Such is the Russian person in general; some "mystical nonsense" often "gets into his head." These words of Belinsky are very remarkable. Out of compassion for people, Belinsky is ready to preach tyranny and cruelty. Blood is necessary. To make the majority of humanity happy, one can cut off the heads of even hundreds of thousands. Belinsky is a predecessor of Bolshevik morality. He says that people are so stupid that they must be led to happiness by force. Belinsky admits that if he were tsar, he would be a tyrant in the name of justice. He is inclined towards dictatorship. He believes that a time will come when there will be no rich and no poor.
Belinsky begins to assert that the Russian people are an atheistic people, but they still retain a love for the Christ of the poor and unfortunate. Belinsky writes his letter full of indignation to Gogol regarding his book "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends." This letter, of course, could not be printed and was passed from hand to hand. Belinsky branded Gogol a traitor, a preacher of slavery. He was religiously wrong, but socially right. Belinsky is a central figure in the history of Russian thought and self-consciousness in the 19th century. And he, more than others, must be placed in the ideological genealogy of Russian communism, as one of its predecessors, much more so than Herzen and other people of the 1840s and even the 1860s. He is close to communism not only in his moral consciousness but also in his social views; he is not typical for populism; he recognizes the positive significance of industrial development and is even ready to recognize the significance of the bourgeoisie, whom he detests, just as the Russian Marxists would later do.
Through Belinsky, one can study the internal motives that gave rise to the worldview of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, which would dominate for a long time and ultimately give rise to Russian communism, though in a different historical setting. These motives must be seen first and foremost in a passionate, indignant protest against the evil, misfortunes, and sufferings of life, in compassion for the unfortunate, the destitute, the oppressed. But Russians, out of pity, compassion, out of the impossibility of enduring suffering, became atheists. They become atheists because they cannot accept a Creator who created an evil, imperfect world full of suffering. They themselves want to create a better world in which there will be no such injustices and sufferings. In Russian atheism, there were motives akin to those of Marcion. But Marcion thought that the Creator of the world was an evil god, whereas the Russian atheists, in a different intellectual age, thought that God did not exist at all, and if He did, He would be an evil God. This motive was present in Belinsky. Bakunin gives the impression of a God-fighter with a motivation akin to Marcionism. In Lenin, this finds its completion. At the very origins of Russian atheism lay an heightened, exalted sense of humanity. But in the final results of Russian atheism, in the militant godlessness that came to power, humanity was transformed into a new inhumanity. This was foreseen by Dostoevsky.
Two intentions of consciousness can be seen in Belinsky. He first of all directs his attention to the living human personality, to the sufferings it experiences, first of all wants to affirm its dignity and right to a full life. He rebels against the "general," against the world spirit, against idealism in the name of this living human personality. But the direction of his attention changes very quickly, and the personality is swallowed up by the social whole, by society. Society, a new society, which can be created only through revolution, can deliver the human personality from intolerable sufferings and humiliations. The majority of society, constituting the "people," endure these unjust sufferings and humiliations. But an exclusive focus of consciousness on society and on the necessity of its radical change leads to the forgetting of the human personality itself, the fullness of its life, its right to the spiritual content of life. The problem of society finally substitutes for the problem of man. The revolution overthrows the "general" that crushed the human personality, but it suppresses it with a new "general," society, which demands the complete submission of the person. This is the fatal dialectic in the development of revolutionary-socialist and atheistic thought. Russian atheism, which turned out to be connected with socialism, is a religious phenomenon. At its base lay a love for truth. Belinsky was already imbued with the sectarian spirit so characteristic of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia.
Belinsky cannot be called a populist [narodnik] in the strict sense of the word. He did not have the faith in the "people" characteristic of the populists. But he had already formulated two principles that formed the basis of populist socialism—the principle of the supremacy of the human personality and the principle of the communal, socialist organization of human society. The personality and the people—these are the two fundamental ideas of Russian populist socialism. Much more characteristic of populist socialism is Herzen. Herzen is better known in the West than Belinsky; he was an ;migr;, published the journal "The Bell" [Kolokol] in London, was connected with the Western socialist movement, and his books were translated into foreign languages. He was much more of an individualist and a humanist than Belinsky. But, as already mentioned, he became disillusioned with the West and sought salvation in the Russian peasant [muzhik], whom Belinsky did not idealize at all. In Belinsky, there was already a potential Marxist. Most astonishing is that in the Russian peasantry, living under the conditions of serfdom, deprived of elementary education, Herzen saw a greater expression of the principle of personality, a greater wholeness of individuality, than in the European man who had become a philistine. In the Russian people, the principle of personality is combined with the principle of communality. From abroad, Herzen becomes the founder of populist socialism, which reaches its greatest development in the 1870s. Herzen believed that socialism would be realized more easily and better in Russia than in the West, and that it would not be philistine. Like many populists, he was against a political revolution, which could push Russia onto the Western, bourgeois path of development. To be a socialist at that time meant to demand economic reforms, to despise liberalism, to see the main evil in the development of capitalist industry, which destroyed the seeds of a higher type of society in the peasant way of life. Often it meant sympathizing with dictatorship, even monarchy. Populist socialists were sometimes ready to support the monarchy in Russia if it would defend the people against the nobility and the growing bourgeoisie. Herzen, from emigration, on the pages of "The Bell," welcomed Alexander II for the act of emancipating the peasants. But Herzen, despite his revolutionary-socialist ideas, despite his ;migr; status, turned out to be alien to the generation of the 1860s. He was a man of the 1840s, a Russian cultured gentleman [barin], a humanist and a skeptic, but not a nihilist. He is not typical for the revolutionary intelligentsia, much less typical than Belinsky. Chernyshevsky, who developed ideas of populist socialism related to Herzen, would speak of Herzen with contempt, saying that he was a gentleman of the 1840s who still thought he was arguing in salons with Khomyakov. In the 1860s, new social strata entered the intelligentsia, primarily seminarians; nobles ceased to dominate, and a tougher, more ascetic mental type appeared, more realistic and active. The epigones of the idealists of the 1840s, the "superfluous people," seemed like people of a bygone era. Nihilists appear.
*See "The Socialism of Belinsky." Articles and Letters. Edited and with commentary by P. Sakulin. 1925. This book contains remarkable letters from Belinsky to Botkin.
2.
Nihilism is a characteristically Russian phenomenon, unknown in Western Europe in this form. In a narrow sense, nihilism refers to the emancipatory intellectual movement of the 1860s, and its chief ideologist is considered to be Pisarev. The type of the Russian nihilist was depicted by Turgenev in the character of Bazarov. But in reality, nihilism is a much broader phenomenon than Pisarevshchina (Pisarev-ism); it can be found in the substratum of Russian social movements, although nihilism itself was not a social movement. Nihilistic foundations are present in Lenin, although he lived in a different era. "We are all nihilists," says Dostoevsky. Russian nihilism denied God, spirit, soul, norms, and higher values. And yet, nihilism must be recognized as a religious phenomenon. It arose on the spiritual soil of Orthodoxy; it could only arise in a soul that had received an Orthodox formation. It is an Orthodox asceticism turned inside out, a grace-less asceticism. At the base of Russian nihilism, taken in its purity and depth, lies an Orthodox rejection of the world, a sense of the world as lying in evil, a recognition of the sinfulness of all wealth and luxury of life, all creative abundance in art, in thought. Like Orthodox asceticism, nihilism was an individualistic movement, but it was also directed against the creative fullness and richness of human individuality. Nihilism considers not only art, metaphysics, and spiritual values to be a sinful luxury, but also religion. All forces must be devoted to the emancipation of earthly man, the emancipation of the laboring people from excessive suffering, to creating conditions for a happy life, to the destruction of superstitions and prejudices, conventional norms and lofty ideas that enslave man and hinder his happiness. This is the one thing needful; all else is from the evil one.
In the intellectual sphere, one must ascetically content oneself with the natural sciences, which destroy old beliefs, overthrow prejudices, and with political economy, which teaches the organization of a more just social order. Nihilism is the negative of Russian apocalypticism. It is a revolt against the falsehood of history, against the lie of civilization, a demand that history end and a completely new, extra-historical or supra-historical life begin. Nihilism is a demand for stripping bare, for casting off all cultural coverings, for reducing all historical traditions to nothing, for the emancipation of natural man, upon whom no fetters will be imposed any longer. The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found its expression in materialism; a more refined philosophy was declared a sin. The Russian nihilists of the 1860s—I have in mind not only Pisarev but also Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, and others—were Russian enlighteners; they declared war on all historical traditions; they opposed "reason," whose existence as materialists they could not recognize, to all the beliefs and prejudices of the past. But Russian enlightenment, due to the maximalist character of the Russian people, always turned into nihilism. Voltaire and Diderot were not nihilists. In Russia, materialism took on a completely different character than in the West. Materialism turned into a peculiar dogma and theology. This is striking in the materialism of the communists. But already in the 1860s, materialism acquired this theological coloring; it became a morally obligatory dogma, and behind it was concealed a peculiar nihilistic asceticism. A materialist catechism was created, which was fanatically assimilated by broad layers of the left Russian intelligentsia. Not to be a materialist was considered morally suspect. If you are not a materialist, then it means you are for the enslavement of man and the people. The attitude of the Russian nihilists towards science was idolatrous. Science—by which were meant mainly the natural sciences, at that time colored in a materialist hue—became an object of faith, it was turned into an idol. In Russia at that time, there were also remarkable scholars who represented a special phenomenon. But the nihilist-enlighteners were not men of science. They were believing people, and dogmatically believing. They were least of all characterized by skepticism. The methodical doubt of Descartes is ill-suited to the nihilists, and indeed to the Russian nature in general. The typical Russian person cannot doubt for long; he is inclined rather quickly to form a dogma for himself and to give himself over to this dogma wholly, totally. The Russian skeptic is a Western type in Russia. In Russian materialism, there was nothing skeptical; it was believing.
In nihilism, another trait of the Russian Orthodox religious type was reflected in a deformed way—the unresolved problem of culture on Orthodox soil. Ascetic Orthodoxy doubted the justification of culture, was inclined to see sinfulness in cultural creativity. This was reflected in the tormenting doubts of the great Russian writers about the justification of their literary creativity. Religious, moral, and social doubt about the justification of culture is a characteristically Russian motif. Among us, there was constant doubt about the justification of philosophical and artistic creativity. Hence the struggle against metaphysics and aesthetics. The question of the price at which culture is bought would dominate the social thought of the 1870s. Russian nihilism was a withdrawal from the world lying in evil, a break with the family and with any established way of life. Russians found it easier to make this break than Western people. The state, law, and traditional morality were considered sinful because they justified the enslavement of man and the people. Most remarkable of all is that Russian people who received a nihilistic formation easily went to sacrifices, went to hard labor and the gallows. They were directed towards the future, but for themselves personally they had no hopes—neither in this earthly life nor in the eternal life which they denied. They did not understand the mystery of the Cross, but they were supremely capable of sacrifices and renunciation. In this, they were favorably distinguished from the Christians of their time, who showed very little capacity for sacrifice and were a scandal, repelling people from Christianity. Chernyshevsky, who was a true ascetic in life, said that he preached freedom, but for himself he would never use any freedoms, lest people think he was defending freedoms for selfish purposes.* The amazing capacity for sacrifice of people of the nihilistic worldview testifies to the fact that nihilism was a peculiar religious phenomenon.
It is not by chance that seminarians, the children of priests who had gone through the Orthodox school, played a large role in Russian nihilism. Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky were the sons of archpriests and studied in the seminary. The ranks of the raznochinets "left" intelligentsia were strongly replenished by people from the clerical estate. The meaning of this fact is twofold. Through the Orthodox school, the seminarians received a formation of the soul in which the motif of ascetic world-denial played a large role. At the same time, in the seminarian youth of the second half of the 1850s and the beginning of the 1860s, a stormy protest was brewing against the decadent Orthodoxy of the 19th century, against the ugliness of the clerical way of life, against the obscurantist atmosphere of the theological school. The seminarians began to be imbued with the emancipatory ideas of the Enlightenment, but they were imbued in the Russian way, i.e., extremistically, nihilistically. No small role was played here by the ressentiment of the seminarians towards the noble culture. At the same time, a thirst for social truth awoke in the youth, which was in them a product of Christianity that had taken a new form. The seminarians and raznochintsy brought with them a new mental structure, more severe, moralistic, demanding, and exclusive, developed by a heavier and more painful school of life than the school of life in which people of noble culture grew up. This new young generation changed the type of Russian culture. The type of culture of the men of the sixties, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, the nihilists, the growing revolutionary intelligentsia, was a lowered one compared to the type of noble culture of the 1830s and 40s, the culture of Chaadaev, I. Kireyevsky, Khomyakov, Granovsky, Herzen. Culture is always formed and achieves more perfect forms through aristocratic selection. Democratizing, spreading in breadth to new strata, it lowers its level, and only later, through the reworking of human material, can culture rise again. On a small scale, in the intelligentsia stratum of the 1860s in Russia, the same process occurred that happened on a broad, nationwide scale in the Russian revolution. The change in the type of culture was expressed first of all in a change in the direction of consciousness and the themes of culture. This was predetermined already by Belinsky in the last period of his development. The "idealists" of the 1840s were interested mainly in the humanities, philosophy, art, and literature. The nihilists of the 1860s were interested mainly in the natural sciences and political economy, which already determined the interests of the communist generation of the Russian revolution.
For understanding the genesis of Russian nihilism in the broad sense of the word and the Russian revolutionary spirit of the 1860s, the figure of Dobrolyubov is very interesting. In him, one can see in what kind of soul nihilistic and revolutionary ideas were born. It was a structure of soul from which saints emerge. This can be said equally of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky. Dobrolyubov left behind a "Diary" in which he describes his childhood and youth. Dobrolyubov received a purely Orthodox religious upbringing. In childhood and still in early youth, he was very religious. His disposition was ascetic. He had a strong sense of sin and a tendency to constant repentance.* The most insignificant sins tormented him greatly. He could not forgive himself if he ate too much jam, slept too long, etc. He was very pious. He tenderly loved his parents, especially his mother, and he could not reconcile himself to their death. Dobrolyubov was a pure, severe, serious man, devoid of any playfulness which was present in people of noble culture and constituted their charm. And so this pious, ascetic to the point of severity, serious soul loses its faith. He loses faith, struck by the evil, injustice, and sufferings of life. He could not reconcile himself to the fact that such an evil world, full of injustices and sufferings, has an all-good and all-powerful Creator. Here a peculiar Marcionite motif is at work. Dobrolyubov is shaken by the death of his beloved mother. He also cannot reconcile himself to the baseness of the way of life of the Russian clergy, its low spirituality, its obscurantism, the absence of any realization of Christianity in life. Dobrolyubov feels himself surrounded by a "dark kingdom." His main article, written about Ostrovsky, is called "A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom." Man himself must bring light into the dark kingdom. Enlightenment is needed, a revolutionary change of the entire structure of life is needed. Dobrolyubov was a critic; he wrote about literature. He did not go to such extremes as Pisarev in denying aesthetics, but for him, too, aesthetics was a luxury; he ascetically denied the excessive luxury of aesthetics. Dobrolyubov wants earthly happiness for man and, after the loss of faith, knows no other goal. But he himself knew no happiness; his life was joyless, and he died almost as a youth from consumption. Russian nihilism can only be imagined as a movement of youth; nihilism in old age has a repulsive character.
N. Chernyshevsky was the ruler of the thoughts not only of the radical intelligentsia of the 1860s but also of subsequent generations. His popularity was greatly aided by the halo that surrounded his name due to his exile to hard labor. Chernyshevsky was accused of composing proclamations to the peasants, with the accusation based on the falsification of handwriting and false testimony. He was sentenced to seven years of hard labor and after that spent another twelve years in Eastern Siberia under exceptionally difficult conditions. He endured Siberia and hard labor as a true ascetic. Chernyshevsky was a very meek man; he had a Christian soul, and in his character, there were traits of holiness.* The tormenting of Chernyshevsky was one of the most shameful acts of the Russian government of the old regime. Chernyshevsky, like Dobrolyubov, was the son of an archpriest. His initial education was theological; he was educated in a seminary. He was a very learned man, a true encyclopedist; he knew both theology and philosophy up to the philosophy of Hegel, knew history and the natural sciences, but above all, he was an economist. Marx highly valued him as an economist. He had the makings of becoming a specialist scholar, and if he did not become one, it was exclusively because he was carried away by the social struggle. But he was still a bookish man and did not give the impression of a passionate person. He wrote moralizing novels but did not possess any special literary talent. Despite his extensive learning, Chernyshevsky was not a man of high culture. The type of culture was lowered compared to the culture of the people of the 1840s. In him, there was a lack of taste, brought by the seminarians and raznochintsy. Chernyshevsky was a materialist, a follower of Feuerbach, and at the same time an idealist of the earth, like Dobrolyubov, like all the best representatives of the revolutionary and nihilistic intelligentsia. In him, too, the ascetic trait was strong. He affirmed an extreme materialism, philosophically naive and pitiful, out of asceticism. He affirmed the utilitarian morality of rational egoism out of moralism, out of a love for the good. The moral motive was always very strong in the nihilists, who theoretically denied all morality. Idealism, spiritualistic metaphysics, and religion were associated with life's materialism and social injustice. For this, Christianity provided sufficient grounds. Idealists and spiritualists too often covered the basest interests with lofty ideas. And therefore, in the name of life's idealism, in the name of realizing social truth, they began to affirm crude materialism and utilitarianism, to deny all lofty ideas, all lofty rhetoric.
Chernyshevsky wrote the utopian novel "What Is to Be Done?", which became a kind of catechism of Russian nihilism, a handbook of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. In artistic terms, this novel is rather weak and tasteless, but it is very interesting for the history of the Russian intelligentsia. The moral attacks from the right camp on this novel were monstrously unjust and slanderously false. The remarkable Russian theologian Bukharev was right, who saw in it a Christian character. "What Is to Be Done?" is an ascetic book, something like an instruction for the pious life of Russian nihilists. The hero of the novel, Rakhmetov, sleeps on nails to harden his character and accustom himself to endure sufferings and torments. The preaching of freedom in love meant not a preaching of licentiousness, which was strong precisely among the conservative ruling classes, among the guards officers, etc., and not among the nihilists, people of ideas. This preaching meant a demand for sincerity in feelings, liberation from all conventions, lies, and oppression. Chernyshevsky's morality was, of course, far higher than the slavish morality of the "Domostroy." "Vera Pavlovna's Dream" in the novel presents a socialist utopia in which cooperative workshops are organized. Chernyshevsky's socialism still bore a partly populist, partly utopian character, but he is, more than others, one of the predecessors of communism in the 1860s. This is acknowledged by Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, in his book on Chernyshevsky.* It is not for nothing that Marx studied Russian to read Chernyshevsky.
Chernyshevsky is most original as an economist. He was not an opponent of industrial development, like many other populists, but he poses the traditional question for Russian 19th-century thought of whether Russia can avoid the capitalist period of development and resolves it in the sense that Russia can reduce the term of the capitalist period to zero and pass directly from lower forms of economy to a socialist economy. The communists, despite their Marxism, are attempting to do precisely this. Chernyshevsky makes the opposition, characteristic of populist socialism, between national wealth and the people's well-being. In capitalist countries, national wealth increases, while the people's well-being decreases. Chernyshevsky defends the peasant commune. He affirms that the third, higher socialist period of development will resemble the initial, lower period. Chernyshevsky, like Herzen and later Mikhailovsky, identifies the interests of the people with the interests of the human personality in general. Of all those who wrote in the legal literature, Chernyshevsky was the most clearly expressed socialist, and this determined his significance for the Russian intelligentsia, which, in its moral consciousness in the second half of the 19th century, was almost entirely socialist. Nihilism of the Pisarev type was a weakening of social motives, but this was a temporary phenomenon.
Chernyshevsky's philosophical position was the weakest. Although he started from such a remarkable thinker as Feuerbach, his materialism was vulgar and colored in the hue of popular natural science booklets of the time, much more vulgar than the dialectical materialism of the Marxists. Chernyshevsky also wrote on questions of aesthetics and was a typical representative of Russian publicist criticism. He defended the thesis that reality is higher than art and wanted to construct a realist aesthetics. In Chernyshevsky's anti-aestheticism, there was a strong ascetic motif. He already wanted that type of culture which triumphed in communism, although often in a caricatured form—the dominance of the natural and economic sciences, the denial of religion and metaphysics, the social command in literature and art, the morality of social utilitarianism, the subordination of the inner life of the personality to the interests and directives of society. The asceticism of Chernyshevsky and the Christian virtues of this "materialist" are a huge contribution to the capital on which the communists also live, though they themselves no longer possess these virtues.
In contrast to Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, the main exponent of Russian nihilism in the proper sense, Pisarev, was a nobleman's child. He was an elegant, refined young man, with soft, by no means nihilistic manners. This "destroyer of aesthetics" had the tastes of an aesthete. He was a more talented writer than Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. His fate was typically Russian. He was arrested on a trivial pretext and spent four years in prison in solitary confinement, where he wrote the majority of his articles. After his release, Pisarev soon died, still very young, from an accident—he drowned. Of the generation of enlighteners of the 1860s, he was the most individualistic; the social motive in him is weaker than in Chernyshevsky. Pisarev was interested mainly in the emancipation of the personality, liberation from superstitions and prejudices, from family ties, from traditional morals and conventions of life. Intellectual emancipation was of central importance for Pisarev. And he hoped to achieve it through the popularization of the natural sciences. He preaches materialism, which, by his naive conviction, emancipates the personality, while it denies the personality. If the personality is entirely produced by the environment, then it can have no freedom or independence. Pisarev wanted to develop a new human type; this interested him more than the organization of society. He called this new human type the "thinking realist." Here the realist generation of "sons" sharply opposes itself to the idealist generation of "fathers." In his type of the "thinking realist," Pisarev anticipates much in the type developed by Russian communism. Some traits of the type of the "thinking realist" were depicted by Turgenev in the character of Bazarov ("Fathers and Sons"), but not very successfully.
* See the very interesting book on Chernyshevsky, "The Love of the People of the Sixties." Academia. 1929.
* See G. Plekhanov: "N. G. Chernyshevsky."
In the Russian intelligentsia stratum before the appearance of the nihilists of the 1860s, the predominant human type was the one we called the "idealists of the 1840s." This was a continuation of the type from the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, associated with mystical Masonry. It was the result of the Russian soul's processing of the influences of German Romanticism and Idealism. It grew on the soil of cultured Russian gentry. This human type, very noble, was characterized by high aspirations, a love for the "sublime and beautiful," as Dostoevsky later liked to ironize; it had much dreaminess and a weak capacity for action, for realization; it had no small amount of Russian laziness, born of the gentry lifestyle. From this type came the "superfluous people."
The type of the "thinking realist," preached by Pisarev, carried completely different traits, often developed in reaction against the type of the "idealist." The "thinking realist" is alien to all dreaminess and romanticism; he is an enemy of all lofty ideas that have no relation to reality and are unrealizable; he is inclined to cynicism when it comes to exposing religious, metaphysical, and aesthetic illusions; he has a cult of deed and labor; he recognizes only the natural sciences and despises the humanities; he preaches the morality of rational egoism not because he was more egoistic than the "idealistic" type—on the contrary, the "idealistic" type was more egoistic—but because he wanted a merciless exposure of the deceptive lofty ideas used for the basest interests.
But the level of philosophical culture of the "thinking realists" was low, much lower than that of the "idealists of the 1840s." B;chner and Moleschott, i.e., the most vulgar materialism based on the popularization of the natural sciences of that time, turned into remarkable philosophers and became teachers. This was a terrible fall compared to Feuerbach, a real philosopher. The "thinking realist" began to seek the solution to the mystery of life and the mystery of being in dissecting frogs. It was precisely from the "thinking realists" of the 1860s that the absurd argument, which became so popular in the radical intelligentsia, originated: that the dissection of corpses did not reveal the existence of a soul in man. They failed to notice the reverse meaning of this argument: if they had discovered a soul during the dissection of a corpse, it would have been proof in favor of materialism.
There was a discrepancy between the seriousness and significance of the human crisis occurring in the "thinking realists" and the pitifulness of their philosophy, their crude and vulgar materialism and utilitarianism. The "thinking realist" was, of course, an enemy of aesthetics; he denied the independent significance of art. In this regard, he demanded severe asceticism. Pisarev carried out a real pogrom of aesthetics, completely denied Pushkin, and suggested that Russian novelists write popular treatises on natural science. In this respect, the cultural program of the communists is more moderate—it recommends studying Pushkin and attributes importance to art. Dialectical materialism is less vulgar than B;chner-Moleschott materialism. But among the communists, technology plays the same role that natural science, predominantly the biological sciences, played in the 1860s. Pisarev's nihilism declared that "boots are higher than Shakespeare." The idea of the "social command" in art and literature was asserted in Pisarevshchina in an even more extreme form than in communism. If the program of Russian nihilism had been fully realized in Russian communism, the results for the quality of culture would have been more destructive than what we see in Soviet culture.
The appearance of the "thinking realist" signified the appearance of a harsher type than the "idealist of the 1840s," and at the same time a more active one. The type of culture turned out to be lowered. But in Pisarev's nihilism, there was also a healthy reaction against barren romantic dreaminess, inaction, laziness, and egoistic self-enclosure; there was a healthy call to labor and knowledge, albeit one-sided. In nihilism, there was an elementary and real emancipation. The movement had enormous and positive significance for the emancipation of women. An analogous process was repeated in our country during the transition from the type of people who created the cultural renaissance of the early 20th century (the "idealistic" movement of that time) to the type of the Russian communist.
The ideologists of communism did not notice the radical contradiction lying at the foundation of all their strivings. They wanted the liberation of the personality; they declared a rebellion against all beliefs, all norms, all abstract ideas in the name of this emancipation. In the name of liberating the personality, they overthrew religion, philosophy, art, and morality; they denied the spirit and spiritual life. But by doing this, they suppressed the personality, deprived it of qualitative content, emptied its inner life, and denied the right of the personality to creativity and spiritual enrichment. The principle of utilitarianism is extremely unfavorable for the principle of personality; it subordinates the personality to utility, which tyrannically dominates over the personality. Nihilism manifested a violent, externally imposed asceticism in thinking and creativity. Materialism was precisely such an imposed asceticism, a poverty in thinking. The principle of personality could in no way be grounded and strengthened on the soil of materialism. The empirical personality turned out to be deprived of the right to a creative fullness of life. If the talented Pisarev had lived to a more mature age, he might have noticed this fundamental contradiction and understood that one cannot fight for the personality on the basis of a belief in the "frog."
The currents of the 1870s smoothed out the extremes of the nihilism of the 1860s. The thinking of the radical intelligentsia of the 1870s was influenced not by B;chner and Moleschott, but by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. A transition occurred from materialism to positivism. A reaction against the dominance of the natural sciences became apparent. The rights of aesthetics were partially restored, and art was not completely denied. But the idea of the "social command" continued to dominate the intelligentsia's consciousness.
CHAPTER III
RUSSIAN POPULISM AND ANARCHISM
1.
Populism [Narodnichestvo] is just as characteristically a Russian phenomenon as nihilism and anarchism. We had left-wing and right-wing populism, Slavophile and Westernizer populism, religious and atheistic populism. The Slavophiles and Herzen, Dostoevsky and Bakunin, L. Tolstoy and the revolutionaries of the 1870s—are all equally populists, though in different ways. Populism is, first and foremost, a belief in the Russian people, whereby the "people" must be understood as the laboring common people, primarily the peasantry. The people are not the nation. Russian populists of all shades believed that the secret of true life is preserved within the people, hidden from the dominant cultured classes. At the base of populism lay a feeling of the intelligentsia's alienation from the people. The intelligentsia-populists did not feel themselves an organic part of the people; the people existed outside of them. The intelligentsia is not a function of the people's life; it is alienated from the people's life and feels its guilt before the people. The feeling of guilt before the people played an enormous role in the psychology of populism. The intelligentsia is always in debt to the people, and it must pay its debt. All culture received by the intelligentsia is created at the expense of the people, at the expense of the people's labor, and this imposes a heavy responsibility on those who partake of this culture. Religious populism (the Slavophiles, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) believed that religious truth is hidden within the people, while non-religious and often anti-religious populism (Herzen, Bakunin, the populist-socialists of the 1870s) believed that social truth is hidden within them. But all Russian populists were conscious of the falsehood of their own lives. The real person, the person not oppressed by a sense of guilt, by the sin of exploiting his brothers, is the laboring person, the person from the people. Culture itself is not a justification for life; it is bought at too high a price—the enslavement of the people. Populism was often hostile to culture and, in any case, rebelled against the worship of culture. Populism of the Slavophile, religious type saw the main guilt of the cultured, upper classes in their break from the religious beliefs of the people and from the people's way of life. Much more significant was populism of the socialist type, which saw the guilt of the cultured classes in the fact that their entire life and their culture were based on the exploitation of the people's labor.
The intellectual, cultural stratum in Russia was weakly conscious of its dignity and its cultural vocation. At the heights of its creative path, the Russian genius acutely felt its loneliness, its alienation from the soil, its guilt, and threw itself downward, wanting to cling to the earth and to the people. Such are Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. What a difference in this regard between Tolstoy and Nietzsche! The populist worldview has a telluric character; it depends on the earth. "The people live under the power of the earth," says the remarkable populist writer Gleb Uspensky. The populist intellectual, on the contrary, is alienated from the earth and wants to return to it. The populist ideology was possible only in a peasant, agricultural country. The populist worldview is a collectivistic, not an individualistic, worldview. The people are a collective into which the intelligentsia wants to integrate itself, to enter.
Russian populism is a product of the schism of the Petrine era. It is a product of the consciousness of the intelligent strata of the unjustifiability of their life, the absurdity of their life, a product of the inorganic character of the entire structure of Russian life. No Western people experienced the motifs of repentance as strongly as the Russian people in its privileged strata. A peculiar type of the "repentant nobleman" was created. The "repentant nobleman" was conscious of his social, not personal, sin—the sin of his social position—and repented of it. The sociologist-populist of the 1870s, N. Mikhailovsky, makes a distinction between the work of conscience and the work of honor. The work of conscience occurs in the privileged classes, in the nobility, while the work of honor, the demand for recognition of human dignity, occurs among the people, in the lower, oppressed classes. Populist-nobles were moved predominantly by motives of conscience; populist-raznochintsy—by motives of honor. Russian populism was always characterized by an aversion to bourgeoisness and a fear of the development of capitalism in Russia. The populists believed in the special paths of Russia's development, in the possibility of bypassing Western capitalism, in the destiny of the Russian people to resolve the social question better and sooner than in the West. In this, the revolutionary populists concur with the Slavophiles. This comes from Herzen. One of the main supports of populist socialism was the fact that the Roman concepts of property were always alien to the Russian people. The absolute character of private property was always denied. For the Russian consciousness, the important thing is not the relation to the principle of property, but the relation to the living human being. And this, of course, was a more Christian consciousness. It is also important to note that the Russian intelligentsia differed from Western intellectuels not only spiritually but also in its social position. The Western intelligentsia is, in a social sense, bourgeois; it usually belongs to the privileged, propertied classes. This is determined by the conditions of higher education in the West. The Russian intelligentsia was usually proletarian, not bourgeois in the social sense of the word. After the 1860s, even when the intelligentsia remained noble, these were mostly ruined, proletarianized nobles. The raznochintsy intelligentsia had no means and earned a pittance from lessons or literature, were in need, and lived in poverty. University education in Russia was much less a privilege of the wealthy classes than in the West. This partly explains socially the perennial sympathies of the Russian intelligentsia for socialism, the non-bourgeois character of its ideology. But the socialism of the 19th-century intelligentsia had a dreamy character. Nowhere in the West did the problem of "the intelligentsia and the people," to which all Russian thought of the second half of the 19th century was dedicated, exist in such a peculiar form, for in the West there was essentially neither an "intelligentsia" nor a "people" in the Russian sense of the word. All populists idealized the structure of peasant life; the peasant commune [obshchina] appeared to them as an original product of Russian history, an ideal type or, in the expression of N. Mikhailovsky, a high type at a low stage of development. But one should not attach too much importance to the populist doctrine of the commune; it was merely a reflection of Russian life conditions. Of greater significance is the moral and spiritual type of populism. Russian communism has a doctrine opposite to populism, but strong elements of Russian religious populism have entered into it.
The beginning of the 1860s was an era of liberal reforms: the emancipation of the serfs, judicial reform, the establishment of the zemstvo (local self-government). For several years, there was greater harmony, a relative reconciliation of the left intelligentsia with the authorities, and a desire to participate in the implementation of reforms coming from above. Herzen and even Chernyshevsky write laudatory articles about the peasant reform of Alexander II and are ready to support the government in this matter. The intelligentsia's dream of emancipating the peasants is being realized. But these springtime moods did not last long. Reactionary moods from above and revolutionary moods from below began to grow, and the atmosphere became increasingly unhealthy. Very soon, at the court and among the nobility, which was hit by the emancipation of the peasants, reactionary moods hostile to the reforms became apparent. Regarding the intelligentsia, the usual regressive tendency prevailed. The affect of fear became predominant in the ruling stratum, and indeed it was always predominant in the Russian power due to the schism in Russian life and the inorganic character of the Russian state. A revolutionary movement began, which expressed itself in terrorist acts against Alexander II. The reactionary moods of the commanding classes were caused by their interests and passions. These moods were realized in repressions, which in turn caused revolutionary moods and acts. A vicious circle ensued. Revolutionary acts could not change the system, since the enormous mass of the people still believed in the sacredness of the autocratic monarchy. The intelligentsia insufficiently understood that the Russian monarchy could not be maintained by bare violence alone, that it relied on the religious beliefs of the people. The peasants were emancipated with land. The opinion of those who demanded the emancipation of the peasants without land and thus their proletarianization was defeated. But the peasants, despite owning a large part of the land, remained unsettled and dissatisfied. The level of agricultural culture was low, primitive, and the peasants lacked sufficient land for sustenance. The estate system remained, and the human dignity of the peasantry remained humiliated. In terms of daily life [byt], Russia continued to be a country of the nobility, and feudalism was not fully overcome until the revolution of 1917; there remained magnates who owned huge lands. The customs were feudal. Despite the enormous significance of the reform, everyone was dissatisfied. After the emancipation of the peasants, revolutionary populism, agrarian socialism, received new motives. In Russia, the development of capitalist industry began, albeit to a weak degree, and the bourgeoisie grew. Village kulaks turned into the bourgeoisie. The question of whether Russia could bypass the capitalist stage became more acute.
For the extreme, maximalist revolutionary currents of the late 1860s, the sinister, eerie figure of Nechaev is of the greatest interest—a characteristically Russian figure. He was the founder of the revolutionary society "The Axe or People's Reprisal" [Topor ili narodnaya rasprava]. Nechaev composed the "Catechism of a Revolutionary," an extraordinarily interesting document, unique of its kind. In this document, the principles of godless revolutionary asceticism found their ultimate expression. These are the rules by which a true revolutionary must be guided, like an instruction for his spiritual life. Nechaev's "Catechism of a Revolutionary" is eerily reminiscent of an Orthodox asceticism turned inside out, mixed with Jesuitism; it is something like an Isaac the Syrian and at the same time an Ignatius Loyola of revolutionary socialism, the ultimate form of revolutionary ascetic world-rejection, complete revolutionary detachment from the world. Nechaev was, of course, a completely sincere, believing fanatic, who reached the point of zealotry. He had the psychology of a schismatic. He is ready to burn another but agrees to be burned himself at any moment. Nechaev frightened everyone. Revolutionaries and socialists of all shades disowned him and found that he compromised the cause of revolution and socialism. Even Bakunin rejected Nechaev. Nechaev and the Nechaev affair served as the pretext for Dostoevsky's writing of "Demons" [Besy]. The case of the murder of the student Ivanov by the Nechaevites, suspected of being an informer, struck Dostoevsky's imagination and is depicted by him in the murder of Shatov. Pyotr Verkhovensky, of course, bears little resemblance to Nechaev and gives the impression of a pasquinade, but psychologically Dostoevsky revealed much that is true. There is something mystical in Nechaev's "Catechism." For us, it is especially interesting that Nechaev in many ways anticipates the type of Bolshevik party organization, extremely centralized and despotic, in which everything comes from above. Nechaev wanted to cover all of Russia with such small revolutionary cells with iron discipline, for which everything, everything is permitted for the achievement of the revolutionary goal. Nechaev despises the popular masses and wants to lead them to revolution from above; he denies democracy. How does Nechaev depict the type of revolutionary? "The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, affairs, feelings, attachments, property, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by one exclusive interest, one thought, one passion: revolution."*
The revolutionary has broken with the civil order and the civilized world, with the morality of this world. He lives in this world to destroy it. He must not love even the science of this world. He knows only one science—destruction. For the revolutionary, everything is moral that serves the revolution. Words that Lenin would later repeat. The revolutionary destroys all who hinder him from achieving his goal. He is not a revolutionary who still values anything in this world. The revolutionary must penetrate even the secret police, have his agents everywhere. It is necessary to increase suffering and violence to provoke the uprising of the masses. It is necessary to unite with bandits, who are the true revolutionaries. It is necessary to concentrate this world into one all-destructive and invincible force. The psychology of the revolutionary, according to Nechaev, requires renunciation of the world and personal life, exceptional capacity for work, exceptional concentration on the one thing needful, consent to suffering and torture, for which one must prepare. This psychology is mysterious because, in this case, there is no faith in the help of God's grace and in eternal life, as in Christianity. Yet many Christian virtues of renunciation are required of the revolutionary, albeit for a different goal. The great difference from Christianity is that the Christian catechism does not require lies for the achievement of a higher goal and does not permit the use of all means, even the most criminal.
* See the collection of materials in which Nechaev's "Catechism of a Revolutionary" is printed, in the book: "Michael Bakunins sozialpolitischer Briefwechsel mit Alexander Herzen und Ogarjow". 1895.
Something of Nechaev's ascetic revolutionary type passed to Dzerzhinsky, the creator and leader of the Cheka. Dzerzhinsky was, of course, a believing fanatic who permitted all means in the name of realizing the kingdom of socialism. He inflicted terrible suffering, he was steeped in blood, but he was himself willing to accept sacrifice and suffering. He spent 15 years in hard labor. A believing Catholic in his youth and early years, preparing for the priesthood, he redirected his religious energy. And this happened with many revolutionaries. The communists, after all, softened the Nechaevist catechism, but much of this catechism entered Russian communism, especially in its initial period. Nowadays, the communists represent the state, are engaged in construction, not destruction, and therefore are changing greatly, ceasing to be revolutionaries in their type. But for them, too, there is no "near one," only the "distant one." And for them, too, the world is divided into two camps, and everything is permitted regarding the hostile camp. Nechaev himself spent 10 years in the hard labor prison, the Alexeyevsky Ravelin, under horrifying conditions. There he propagandized and converted the entire prison guard into his agents and through them communicated with the People's Will party, to which he gave advice. He was a man of exceptional strength. But the triumph of such a man could not portend anything good.
2.
Anarchism is just as characteristic a product of the Russian spirit as nihilism and populism. It is one of the poles in the mental structure of the Russian people. The Russian people are a state-oriented people; they submissively agree to be the material for the creation of a great world state, and yet they are inclined to rebellion, to free bands [vol'nitsa], to anarchy. The Russian Dionysian element is anarchic. Stenka Razin and Pugachev are characteristically Russian figures, and the memory of them is preserved among the people.
The anarchic element is very strong also in Russian 19th-century thought. The entire Russian intelligentsia disliked the state and did not consider it their own. The state was "them," strangers; "we" lived in a different plane, alien to any state. If Russians were prone to the idea of the sacred anointing of power, they were also prone to the idea that all power is evil and sin. We have seen that the Slavophile justification of the autocratic monarchy contained a strong anarchic element. Konstantin Aksakov was a true anarchist; he has passages reminiscent of Bakunin. A strong anarchic element is also present in Dostoevsky. The Russian populists did not understand the significance of the state and did not think about how to seize power within the state. Yaroslavsky reproaches them for this in his "History of the Communist Party."* The ideal future was always imagined as stateless. The state is the loathsome present.
Most astonishing is that the ideology of anarchism is predominantly the creation of the highest stratum of the Russian gentry, and this Russian anarchism acquired pan-European significance. The gentlemen Bakunin, Prince Kropotkin, Count Tolstoy—are the creators of Russian and world anarchism. The central figure is Bakunin. Bakunin is a fantastic product of the Russian gentry. This enormous child, always inflamed by the most extreme and revolutionary ideas, a Russian dreamer, incapable of methodical thinking and discipline, something like a Stenka Razin of the Russian gentry. He was still a man of the 1840s, a friend of Belinsky, Herzen, the Slavophiles, at that time an idealist and Hegelian. But he acquired his significance, and indeed European significance, in the 1860s and especially the 1870s. As an ;migr;, he participated in all European revolutions. He fought with Marx over the First International, into which he wanted to introduce anarchist principles, decentralization, and federalism. At first, Bakunin was on good personal terms with Marx, and he even influenced Marx in the doctrine of the messianic calling of the proletariat.** But later he becomes Marx's mortal enemy. For him, Marx is a statist and a pan-Germanist. Bakunin did not like Germans, preferred Latin peoples, and his main book is called "The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution." Bakunin had a very strong Slavophile element. His revolutionary messianism is a Russian-Slavic messianism. He believed that the world conflagration would be ignited by the Russian people and Slavdom. And in this Russian revolutionary messianism, he is a predecessor of the communists. Bakunin is credited with the words: "The passion for destruction is a creative passion." Bakunin's anarchism is rebellion. He wants to raise a world rebellion, ignite a world conflagration, destroy the old world; he believes that on the ruins of the old world, on the ashes, a new world will arise by itself. Bakunin wants to incite the popular, proletarian masses of the whole world to rebellion. He wants to appeal to the rabble [chern'], to the lower depths, and believes that the rebelling rabble, casting off all the fetters of history and civilization, will create a better, free life. He wants to unleash the rabble. Bakunin is a populist in the sense that he believes in the truth hidden in the laboring people, in the dark mass, and especially in the Russian people, whom he considered the people-rebel par excellence. All evil for him is in the state, created by the ruling classes and being an instrument of oppression. Marx was intellectual; he attached enormous importance to theory, philosophy, science; he did not believe in politics based on emotions; he attached enormous importance to the development of consciousness and organization. Bakunin is exclusively emotional, hostile to all intellectual theories. He had a negative attitude towards the sciences and scholars. Most hateful to him is the power of scholars. Scientific socialism for him is the power of scholars. The management of life by science cannot be permitted. No one should be given power. He idealizes the bandit-like, Razin-esque, Pugachev-esque element in the Russian people. In the first moment of the revolution, the Bolsheviks made great use of this element, contrary to all Marxist theories. Lavrov, one of the scholarly ideologists of the revolutionary socialist movement of the 1870s, wanted to teach the people and expected revolution from this teaching. Bakunin wanted to incite the people to rebellion without teaching them. He believed in the truth and power of unorganized spontaneity. For Bakunin, the light of barbarism from the East will illuminate the darkness of the West, the darkness of the bourgeois world. The Russian communists would also come to this consciousness, despite their Western Marxism. For Bakunin, man became man through rebellion. There are three principles of human development: 1) man as animal, 2) thought, 3) rebellion. Bakunin opposes rebellion to organization. Marx was for him a Jacobin, and he could not stand Robespierre and the Jacobins. Bakunin was a communist, but his communism was anti-state, anarchic. He believed in a union of productive associations. Bakunin was convinced that the Slavs by themselves would not have created a state, and on this was based his faith in the mission of Slavdom. For Bakunin, statehood is primarily a German influence. And Bakunin predicts that if Marxism is realized in any country, it will be a terrible tyranny. Some of Bakunin's predictions sound prophetic today.
But Bakunin's atheism was even more militant, crude, and violent than Marx's atheism. This was determined by his passionate, maximalist Russian temperament. Marx was a man of thought, and for him the struggle against religion was primarily a question of changing consciousness. Bakunin is an emotional man, and his atheism gives the impression not of denying the idea of God as false and harmful, but of fighting against God, of God-fighting [bogoborchestvo]. In his atheism, there are Marcionite motifs. One of his main works is called "God and the State." The state was for Bakunin the source of all the evils of world history, the enslavement and captivity of man and the people. But faith in God was the main support of the state. All power is from God. For Bakunin, this means that all power is from the devil. God for him is the devil, the source of the power of man over man, of enslavement and violence. "If God exists, then man is a slave." The idea of God is the renunciation of human reason, of justice and freedom. God is vengeful. All religions are cruel. Precisely materialism is idealistic in practice. In religion, the divine is elevated to heaven, while the crude animal remains on earth. This is Feuerbach's thought, later repeated by Marx. Bakunin, unlike Belinsky, spoke very crudely about Christ. Christ should have been put in prison as a loafer and vagabond. Man, endowed with an immortal soul and freedom, is an anti-social being.* For the immortal spirit does not need society. Society gives birth to the individual; society is the source of morality. In contrast to Max Stirner, Bakunin's anarchism is decisively anti-individualistic, collectivistic, communist. Bakunin denies the personality, its independent value and autonomy. In this, he differs from Proudhon. He preaches anarcho-communism. But in contrast to the anarcho-communism of Kropotkin, which is colored by ideological optimism, Bakunin's is colored in the sinister hue of destruction and rebellion against everything, first and foremost against God. Bakunin associates churches with taverns. He exclaims: "Only a social revolution will possess the power to close, at one and the same time, all the taverns and all the churches."** The militant communism of Bakunin goes further than the militant atheism of the Russian communists, who, after all, did not close all the churches and upon whom the intellectualist influence of Marxism is felt.
But in his militant atheism, Bakunin is a predecessor of communism. Communism utilized Bakunin's anarchism and rebelliousness for the work of destruction. But in creation, in construction, in organization, the communists differ radically from Bakunin, who could never have organized power and did not want to. Bakunin, like Nechaev, had a negative attitude towards science and the intelligentsia. This motif also entered the Russian revolution.
Compared to the extremism of Nechaev and Bakunin, other currents of Russian revolutionary-socialist, populist thought were softened and moderate. In philosophy, it was positivism, the influence of Auguste Comte, Mill, Spencer, and even the emerging Neo-Kantianism, and not militant materialism. Crude utilitarianism in morality is overcome, as are the extremes of nihilism in general. In social doctrine, many approached Proudhon and borrowed something from Marx, whom they were beginning to know. The rulers of the thoughts of the intelligentsia of the 1870s were P. Lavrov and N. Mikhailovsky, defenders of so-called subjective sociology, i.e., the viewpoint which recognizes the necessity for sociology to produce a moral evaluation of social phenomena. Lavrov and Mikhailovsky, in their own way, defend the human personality, though not distinguishing it from the individual, and their socialism, like Herzen's, had an individualistic character. The socialist organization of society is needed for the sake of the fullness of life of every individual. Mikhailovsky declares the "struggle for individuality" and constructs theories of conflict and struggle between the personality and society, built on an organic type. Lavrov and Mikhailovsky are typical ideologists, domestic philosophers of the radical intelligentsia. The weakness of their philosophical position, their superficial positivism, hindered them from philosophically grounding the principle of personality, which was the positive side of their socialist theory. For them, the personality still remained a creation of society, of the social environment, and it is unclear where they could find the strength to struggle against a society that wants to turn the personality into its organ and function. Lavrov gained fame with his "Historical Letters," which became the moral catechism of the populist intelligentsia. Lavrov expressed the motif of repentance, the guilt of the cultured classes before the people, and the necessity to pay their debt to the people. He poses the traditional Russian question of the price of progress and culture. But the populism of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky belonged to that type which considered the interests of the people obligatory for itself, but not the opinions of the people. They thought that the correct, enlightened opinions were with the intelligentsia, not with the people. The intelligentsia should give the people knowledge, enlighten their consciousness, serve the interests of the people and the cause of their liberation, but preserve independence in opinions, in ideas. Mikhailovsky expressed this in the following phrase: "If the revolutionary people were to burst into my room and wish to smash the bust of Belinsky and destroy my library, I would fight them to the last drop of blood."
Here he seems to foresee the situation in which the radical intelligentsia, which strove for revolution, would be placed. Mikhailovsky, of course, can least be recognized as a predecessor of communism, much less so than Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Bakunin, and in this, he resembles Herzen. This is another strand of Russian socialist thought. The revolutionary people would want to smash the bust of Belinsky precisely because they become imbued with some of the very ideas of this same Belinsky. This is the paradox of revolutionary thought.
In the 1870s, there was a strong populist movement in Russia, which expressed itself in "going to the people" [khozhdenie v narod]. This movement initially did not have a revolutionary-political character. The intelligentsia-populists wanted to merge with the people, wanted to enlighten the people, to serve the peasants in their vital needs and interests. They wanted land and freedom [zemlya i volya] for the people, and with this was connected the underground organization "Land and Liberty" [Zemlya i Volya]. The failure of this "going to the people," in which so much self-sacrifice and capacity for sacrifice, so much faith and hope, so much nobility were displayed, was connected, of course, with the fact that it encountered government repressions and persecutions, but not only with that. The drama of the populist movement was primarily that the people did not accept the intelligentsia, and the people themselves handed over the intelligentsia-populists, who sacrificially and selflessly wished to serve the people, to the authorities. The people, understood primarily as the peasantry, were alien to the "worldview" of the intelligentsia; the people still remained religious, Orthodox, and the irreligiosity of the intelligentsia repelled them. The people saw a gentleman's whim in the populist "going to the people." All this squarely confronted the consciousness of the populist intelligentsia with the political problem and led to the development of new methods of struggle.
*See E. Yaroslavsky: "Aus der Geschichte der kommunistischen Partei der Sowjetunion", I Teil.
** See the cited book by Comu.
See M. Bakunin: "The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution", 1922.
** See the same book.
3.
The most remarkable theorist of revolution in the 1870s was P. N. Tkachev.* And he, more than anyone else, must be recognized as a predecessor of Lenin. Tkachev published the revolutionary organ "Nabat" (The Tocsin) abroad, which was the expression of the most extreme current. Tkachev, incidentally, was the first in the 1870s to speak about Marx in our country. In 1875, he writes an "Open Letter to Engels," in which he speaks of Russia's special paths and the special character of the coming Russian revolution, to which the principles of Marxism cannot be simply applied. At the same time, one cannot say that Tkachev opposes the transplantation of Marxism onto Russian soil with the principles of populism. Tkachev was not a traditional and typical populist; he essentially did not believe in the people. He was the first to oppose, to that Russian application of Marxism which considered the development of capitalism, a bourgeois revolution, a constitution, etc., necessary in Russia, a viewpoint very close to Russian Bolshevism. Here the type of disagreement between Lenin and Plekhanov is already foreshadowed. Tkachev does not want to allow the transformation of the Russian state into a constitutional and bourgeois one. Tkachev considered the absence of a developed bourgeoisie Russia's greatest advantage, facilitating the possibility of a social revolution. The Russian people are socialist by instinct. Tkachev was not a democrat. He affirmed the power of a minority over the majority. Tkachev was called a Jacobin, which is not entirely accurate. Jacobinism is a form of democracy, but Tkachev was first and foremost a socialist, and his socialism was not of the democratic type, in which he resembles Lenin and the communists. Tkachev was an opponent of the populist movements "Land and Liberty" [Zemlya i Volya] and "Black Repartition" [Chyorny Peredel], which denied purely political struggle. His attitude towards these currents very much resembles Lenin's attitude towards the so-called "Economists," who set purely economic tasks before the working class, while leaving the political struggle largely to liberal currents. In the history of revolutionary movements in Russia, Tkachev is a predecessor of "The People's Will" [Narodnaya Volya], which, unlike the populist movement of the 1870s, set itself the political task of overthrowing the autocratic monarchy through terror. "The People's Will" is Tkachev's victory over both Lavrov and Bakunin. Tkachev, like Lenin, was a theorist of revolution. His basic idea is the seizure of power, the seizure of power by a revolutionary minority. For this, it is necessary to disorganize the existing power through terror. According to Tkachev, the people are always ready for revolution because they are merely material used by the revolutionary minority. Revolutions are made, not prepared. Tkachev recognizes no evolution. No propaganda or teaching of the masses should precede the revolution. But Tkachev is decisively against Bakunin's anarchism. He considers the destruction of the state absurd. He speaks of replacing conservative institutions with revolutionary ones almost exactly as Lenin would later speak. The anarchic Dionysianism of Bakunin is completely alien to Tkachev. Bakunin was against all organization, while Tkachev was a supporter of the organization of the revolutionary minority, which must conquer power. He is one of the few Russian revolutionaries of the past, almost the only one, who thought about power, about its conquest and its organization. He wanted the revolutionary socialist party to become the government. And in this, he very much resembles Lenin. He imagined the revolutionary socialist government as rather despotic. The destruction of the entire past under Tkachev's triumph would have been even more merciless than under Lenin. But the time for this had not yet come, and Tkachev's ideas did not have particular popularity in the Russian revolutionary milieu. The will to power preached by Tkachev was very contrary to the moods of the Russian socialist-populists.
Very decisively and sharply, already in the 1870s, the founder of Russian Marxism and Social Democracy, G. V. Plekhanov, polemicized against Tkachev. This is one of the main motifs of his book "Our Differences" [Nashi raznoglasia]. Plekhanov's polemic with Tkachev is of great interest because it sounds exactly as if Plekhanov were polemicizing with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, at a time when they did not yet exist. Plekhanov rebels, mainly, against the idea of the seizure of power by a revolutionary socialist party. He considers such a seizure of power the greatest misfortune, fraught with future reaction. Plekhanov is also against Bakuninism and rebelliousness. He is a Westernizer, a rationalist, an enlightener, and an evolutionist. The Russian irrational motifs are alien to him. He defends science and philosophy against the revolutionary obscurantism of Bakunin and Tkachev. Plekhanov, like all the Marxist-Mensheviks later, did not want to recognize Russia's special paths and the possibility of an original revolution in Russia. And in this, he was, of course, mistaken. Tkachev was more right. Tkachev, like Lenin, constructed a theory of socialist revolution for Russia. The Russian revolution was forced to follow not Western models. Connected with this was a particular problem in the history of Russian socialist thought—could Russia bypass capitalist development, the domination of the bourgeoisie; could the revolution be socialist; could Marxist theory be applied to Russia without taking into account the peculiarities of the Russian path. Tkachev was right in his criticism of Engels. And his rightness was not the rightness of populism against Marxism, but the historical rightness of the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks, of Lenin against Plekhanov. In Russia, it was not the communist revolution that turned out to be a utopia, but the liberal, bourgeois revolution that turned out to be a utopia. Marx did not like Russians very much; he could not stand Bakunin, did not like Herzen. In his attitude towards Russia, a genuine imperialistic pan-Germanism was sometimes felt. But he attached enormous importance to Russia and the possibility of revolution in Russia. He even studied Russian and followed the Russian disputes about revolution and socialism. He wrote a famous letter to N. Mikhailovsky.* As I have already said, he highly valued Chernyshevsky. But both Marx and Engels spoke of the bourgeois character of the coming Russian revolution, were for the People's Will members [narodovol'tsy], who concentrated exclusively on overthrowing the autocratic monarchy, and in this respect were much less predecessors of Lenin than Tkachev. Marx and Engels did not understand the originality of the Russian path and were "Mensheviks," no matter how much the "Bolsheviks" tried to obscure this. But Tkachev was a "Bolshevik," as Nechaev was, and even Bakunin partly, but to a lesser degree, since he denied power and organization. In the 1870s, those disputes were already foreshadowed which the Russian Marxists and populists conducted in the 1890s, and at the beginning of the 20th century, the Marxist-Bolsheviks and Marxist-Mensheviks.
The assassination of Alexander II by decision of the "People's Will" party was the end and collapse of Russian revolutionary movements until the emergence of Marxism. This was the tragedy of a single combat between Russian power and the Russian intelligentsia. At the head of the terrorist organization "People's Will," which prepared the attempt of March 1, 1881, stood the heroic personality of A. Zhelyabov. Zhelyabov himself came from the people, from peasants; he was initially a populist and denied the significance of political struggle. The hopelessness of the intelligentsia's movement "to the people" led Zhelyabov to the consciousness of the inevitability of the struggle with autocracy as the first task. Zhelyabov was not at all a fanatic and zealot like Nechaev. He was rather the type of man destined to experience the fullness and harmony of life. He was also least of all a materialist, and among Russian revolutionaries, he was the closest to Christianity. At the trial concerning the March 1st affair, to the question of whether he was Orthodox, he answered: "I was baptized in Orthodoxy, but I deny Orthodoxy, although I recognize the essence of the teaching of Jesus Christ. This essence of the teaching occupies an honorable place among my moral motives. I believe in the truth and justice of this teaching and solemnly recognize that faith without works is dead and that every true Christian must fight for truth, for the right of the oppressed and weak, and if necessary, suffer for them: such is my faith."* Before his execution, he kissed the cross. This very much confuses the communist biographer of Zhelyabov, A. Voronsky. He explains Zhelyabov's Christian sympathies by the fact that he was a populist of the 1870s, not a man of the sixties. I think that the fact that Zhelyabov was a man from the people played a large role here. And such a man, from private motives, from a love of truth, had to give his life to organize an assassination. This is the terrible tragedy of Russian life. In his worldview, Zhelyabov was not a predecessor of Russian communism, but in terms of organizational methods and actions, he was. The history of Russian revolutionaries is a martyrology. And the communists used this martyrology as moral capital. The Russian historical power morally killed itself by creating martyrs.
* See G. Plekhanov: "Our Differences" and "Historical-Revolutionary Chrestomathy" vol. I, 1923.
* See K. ...: "The Development of Socialist Ideas in Russia", volume I, 1924.
Source of Zhelyabov's quote not fully provided in the original text.
CHAPTER IV
RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE 19TH CENTURY AND ITS PROPHECIES
1.
Now we transition to a different world, a different spiritual atmosphere—the atmosphere of the great Russian literature of the 19th century. This literature is the greatest monument of the Russian spirit and has acquired world significance. But for our theme of the sources of Russian communism, one of its traits is important, constituting its remarkable peculiarity. Russian literature is the most prophetic in the world; it is full of presentiments and predictions; it is characterized by anxiety about an impending catastrophe. Many Russian writers of the 19th century felt that Russia was placed before an abyss and was flying into the abyss. Russian literature of the 19th century testifies to an ongoing internal revolution, to an impending revolution. The entire Russian 19th century, the greatest century of Russian history in terms of creative upsurge, was a century of increasing revolution. The schism, the duality of this century, brought Russian creativity to the greatest tension. Russian literature of this century was not Renaissance in its spirit. Only in Pushkin were there glimpses of a Renaissance. That was the golden age of Russian poetry. This Russian Renaissance occurred in a very narrow circle of the Russian cultured nobility. It quickly broke off, and literature went along other paths. Starting with Gogol, Russian literature becomes didactic; it seeks truth and teaches the realization of truth. Russian literature was born not from a joyful creative abundance but from the agony and suffering fate of man and the people, from the search for universal salvation. But this means that the basic motifs of Russian literature were religious. Russian literature is characterized by compassion and humanity, which have astonished the whole world.
It was among Russian writers that the problem of justifying human creativity and culture was posed with particular sharpness, and the justification of culture was subjected to doubt, as it was in the currents of Russian social thought. And this was connected with the structure of the soul, developed by Orthodoxy—a soul in which a very strong ascetic element and a search for salvation, an expectation of another, higher life, remained. Psychologically, Gogol, L. Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky in many ways converge with Belinsky, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and the populists of the 1870s, although they are anti-materialists and their creativity is colored religiously. Western people almost never doubt the justification of civilization; this is a purely Russian doubt, and it arose not among those Russians who had not yet been introduced to culture, but among those who were often at the heights of culture. The most significant Russian writers did not believe in the stability of civilization, in the stability of the foundations upon which the world, the so-called bourgeois world of their time, rested. They are full of eerie presentiments of an impending catastrophe. European literature, corresponding to a more established and crystallized, more formed, more self-satisfied and calm, more differentiated and distributed into categories civilization, does not know such religious and social agitation. Russians, on the other hand, were more characterized by wholeness, totality, both in thought and in creativity and life. Russian thinkers, Russian creators, when they had spiritual significance, always sought not so much perfect culture, perfect products of creativity, as a perfect life, perfect truth of life. Connected with this is the realism of 19th-century Russian literature, which is often misunderstood. Great Russian literature stands beyond European classicism and romanticism. It was characterized by realism, but not at all realism in the school sense of the word; this is realism almost in a religious sense, and at its heights in a purely religious sense. It is realism in the sense of revealing the truth and depth of life. At the same time, Gogol's techniques were more romantic, Tolstoy's more classical. Russian writers experienced with unusual sharpness the tragedy of creativity before the inevitability of the transformation of life itself, the realization of truth in life. Gogol and Tolstoy were ready to sacrifice the creativity of perfect literary works for the sake of the creativity of a perfect life. Russian writers are not shackled by the conventional norms of civilization and therefore touch the mystery of life and death. They go beyond the limits of art. Such are Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Only Pushkin posed the problem of the freedom of creativity, the independence of the poet's creativity from the "rabble" [chern'], by which he understood, of course, not the people, but the surrounding noble, official, court society.
Gogol already posed the problem of the social mission of art, of the writer's calling to social service. He wanted what, in a vulgarized form, Russian communism calls the "social command." The great Russian writers were lonely in their time, were against the society surrounding them, but they were not at all individualists in principle; they sought, in different ways, a national, collective, conciliar [sobornoye] art. By denouncing the falsehood of the existing society, by seeking truth, literature fulfilled a social mission, which, according to the Russian spiritual makeup of many, was a religious-social mission.
Russian poetry was full of presentiments of the coming revolution, and sometimes even called for it. Pushkin was considered the singer of imperial Russia. And indeed, many grounds can be cited to consider Pushkin a statist in his worldview and less of a schismatic than other Russian writers. He had a cult of Peter the Great. He was inspired by the greatness of Russia. But after the publication of all of Pushkin's poems, it became clear how many revolutionary poems he had. The first and second halves of his literary activity are very different. This is already evident from the different evaluation of Radishchev. Pushkin belonged to the generation of the Decembrists; they were his friends. But the crushing of the Decembrists seemed to convince him of the might of the Russian monarchy. Pushkin is dual; he has, as it were, two faces. He had a love for the greatness and power of Russia, but he also had a passionate love for freedom. He had a very special love for freedom, different from the love for it of the Russian intelligentsia. He is a true singer of freedom.
"We wait, with languor of hope,
The minute of holy liberty,
As a young lover waits
For the minute of sweet rendezvous."
In Pushkin, it was as if, for one moment, that which was always disunited among us was united—the ideology of the empire and the ideology of the intelligentsia. He wrote about himself:
"And long shall I be dear to the people,
That I awakened kind feelings with my lyre,
That in my cruel age I glorified freedom
And called for mercy for the fallen."
In the poem "The Village" [Derevnya], Pushkin describes the charm and poetry of the Russian village. But suddenly he remembers the falsehood, slavery, and darkness with which the charm of village life, which existed only for a privileged minority, is connected. The poem ends with the words:
"Shall I see, my friends, an unoppressed people
And slavery fallen by the tsar's command,
And over the fatherland of enlightened freedom
Will the beautiful dawn at last arise?"
But most interesting for Pushkin's revolutionary moods is the poem "Liberty" [Vol'nost'].
"I want to sing freedom to the world,
To strike vice on the thrones."
In this poem, there are eerie words about tsars:
"Despotic villain,
You, your race I hate,
Your destruction, the death of your children
I see with cruel joy."
Pushkin felt the rebellious element in the Russian people and foresaw the possibility of a "Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless." And in the most harmonious Pushkin, one cannot find complete harmony, and he felt the unhealthiness, the rupture, and the falsehood of imperial Russia.
But the most staggering impression is produced by Lermontov's poem "The Prediction" [Predskazanie], which sounds entirely prophetic.
"A year will come—Russia's black year—
When the crown of the tsars will fall,
The rabble will forget its former love for them,
And the food of many will be death and blood;
When children, when innocent wives
Will not be protected by the overthrown law;
When plague from the stinking, dead bodies
Will begin to wander among the sad villages,
To call from huts with a handkerchief;
And famine will torment this poor land,
And the glow will color the waves of the rivers: —
On that day a powerful man will appear,
And you will recognize him—and understand,
Why in his hand is a damask knife.
And woe to you! Your weeping, your moan
Will then seem ridiculous to him;
And everything in him will be terrible, gloomy,
As his cloak with his lofty brow."
This poem, romantic in form, written in 1830, foresees the horrors of the revolution almost a century in advance.
The third great Russian poet, Tyutchev, had a conservative rather than a revolutionary worldview. But he constantly felt that a terrible revolution was approaching the world. In a strange contrast with his conservative-Slavophile worldview, Tyutchev acutely felt in the world a chaotic, irrational, dark, nocturnal element. The veil of harmony and order thrown over the world, in Apollonian forms, seemed to him unstable and thin.
...Man, like a homeless orphan,
Stands now, both powerless and naked,
Face to face before this dark abyss...
And all that is bright, alive,
Seems to him now a long-past dream,
And in the alien, unsolved, nocturnal
He recognizes his fatal heritage.
Not only in nature but also in history there is this chaotic, turbulent element. And Tyutchev foresees historical catastrophes, the triumph of chaotic forces, which will overturn the cosmos. Tyutchev is a conservative who does not believe in the stability of conservative principles and foundations. He constructs a reactionary utopia to save the world from chaotic revolution. He imagined that Christianity could be used as a conservative force. His purely political poems are weak; only his cosmic poems are remarkable.
The head of the Slavophile school, A. Khomyakov, was not a prophetic nature. A strong thinker, he was a very mediocre poet. But he has a whole series of sharply denunciatory poems, from which it is clear that, despite the Slavophile idealization of the historical past, he was tormented by the great historical sins of Russia. He believed that Russia was called to proclaim to the world the "mystery of freedom," to bestow the "gift of holy freedom." Russia is "unworthy of the election," but is "chosen."
"And upon you, alas! how many
Terrible sins have weighed down!
In the courts black with black falsehood
And branded with the yoke of slavery;
Full of godless flattery, pernicious lies,
And dead and shameful sloth,
And every abomination!"
And Khomyakov calls for repentance.
"For all, for every suffering,
For every trampled law,
For the dark deeds of the fathers,
For the dark sin of their times,
For all the troubles of the native land, —
Before the God of goodness and power,
Pray, weeping and sobbing,
That He may forgive, that He may forgive!"
He denounced the Russian state for its exclusive obsession with material force, i.e., the basest temptation. He welcomed Russia's defeat in the Crimean campaign as a just punishment. He did not want to see Russia's vocation in state power; he demanded the realization of truth. And in this, he stood in line with the intelligentsia.
Gogol was tormented that Russia was possessed by spirits of evil and falsehood, that it was full of snouts and mugs and it was difficult to find a human being in it. It is a mistake to see Gogol as a satirist. He saw the metaphysical depth of evil, not just its social manifestation. The old Russia of Gogol's time, with its evil and unjust social forms, no longer exists—there is no autocratic monarchy, no serfdom, no old inequalities. But in a deeper sense, Gogol's Russia has remained, even in Soviet Russia, and Soviet, communist Russia is full of snouts and mugs, and the human image is distorted within it. And in Soviet, communist Russia, there are Khlestakovs, Nozdrevs, Chichikovs, and dead souls are traded in it, and a false inspector general strikes fear into everyone. Above all, Gogol penetrated the spirits of falsehood that torment Russia. Gogol experienced a religious drama. He was crushed by the weight of the evil he perceived; he saw good nowhere, he saw no image of man. He sought a way out in the Christian life and set forth his search in the book "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends." It provoked a stormy protest from Belinsky, who saw in it a betrayal of humane, progressive, freedom-loving ideals. But in "Selected Passages," Gogol understood the Christianization of life in a very petty and narrow way, essentially anti-social, and he could be interpreted as a defender of the existing order, up to and including serfdom. In "Selected Passages," there was much that was ugly and did not correspond to the depth of Gogol's religious drama; it was a reflection of the contradictions and deformities of Russian life. Gogol had a strong ascetic element in his nature, characteristic of Russians, and this led him to condemn his own literary creativity.
A most prophetic character distinguishes the poetry of the early 20th century. This was a poetry of sunset, of the end of an entire era, with a strong element of decadence. But the poets also saw the dawns. The Symbolist poets felt that Russia was flying into an abyss. This horrified them at times, and at other times delighted them, as a possibility for a new, better life. Symbolism was an expression of alienation from social reality, a withdrawal into another world. But at the same time, the Russian Symbolists V. Ivanov, A. Bely, A. Blok, suffering from loneliness, wanted a national art, tried to overcome decadent aestheticism, and sought a social command, using Soviet terminology. Most prophetic were the poems about Russia by A. Blok, the greatest poet of the beginning of the century.
"I listen to the roar of the battle
And the trumpet cries of the Tatars,
I see over Rus, far away,
A broad and quiet fire."
In another poem from the cycle "On the Field of Kulikovo," he writes:
"The versts, the steep banks flash by...
Stop!
The frightened clouds go, they go,
The sunset is in blood!"
But the feeling for Russia and the premonitions about Russia were most expressed in the amazing poem "Russia."
"Russia, impoverished Russia,
Your grey huts to me,
Your wind-blown songs to me,
Like the first tears of love!
I do not know how to pity you,
And I carefully bear my cross...
To whatever sorcerer you wish
Give your bandit beauty!
Let him lure and deceive you,—
You will not perish, you will not vanish,
And only care will cloud
Your beautiful features...
Well, what then? One more care —
One more tear, the river is noisier,
And you are still the same — forest and field,
Yes, the patterned kerchief to the brows..."
Here is the presentiment that Russia will give its "bandit beauty" to a sorcerer, "who can lure and deceive her," and at the same time the faith that Russia will not perish.
And another Symbolist poet, Andrei Bely, exclaims in one poem: "Scatter in space, scatter, Russia, my Russia." The poets of that pre-revolutionary time were mystics, apocalypticists; they believed in Sophia, in new revelations, but they did not believe in Christ. Their souls were unarmored, defenseless, but perhaps precisely for this reason they were open to the stirrings of the future, receptive to the internal revolution that others did not notice.
Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries felt themselves over an abyss; they did not live in a stable society, in a solid, established civilization. A catastrophic sense of the world became characteristic of the most remarkable and creative Russian people. A solid, stable, classical culture with its partitions, differentiation of different areas, with its norms and its spirit of finitude, its fear of infinity, is very unfavorable for presentiments and foresight. This kind of culture creates armor for the soul and closes it to the blows coming from the unknown future. In Russia, an eschatological soul structure developed, oriented towards the end, open to the future, foreseeing catastrophes; a special mystical sensitivity was developed. The Western soul was too fortified and enclosed in civilization. Among us, however, a pre-revolutionary atmosphere was increasingly formed. Russia of the 19th and 20th centuries is radically different from Muscovite Rus. Muscovite Rus had its own style of culture; it was shackled in certain forms. The soul had not yet awakened. It had not awakened to thought, to criticism; it had not yet experienced division. From the touch of the West, a real upheaval occurred in the Russian soul, an upheaval in a completely different direction than the path of Western civilization. The influence of the West on Russia was completely paradoxical; it did not instill Western norms in the Russian soul. On the contrary, this influence revealed turbulent, Dionysian, dynamic, and sometimes demonic forces in the Russian soul. The soul became unshackled, and a dynamism unknown to the pre-Petrine era was revealed. The infinity of the strivings of Western Faustian man, the man of modern history, manifested itself in Russia in a completely special way, in its own manner, and this found its genius expression in the work of Dostoevsky. There collided the everyday Russia, inherited from the past—noble, merchant, petty-bourgeois—which the empire supported, and the Russia of the intelligentsia, spiritually revolutionary and socially revolutionary, striving towards infinity, seeking the City to Come. This collision unleashed dynamic forces and led to explosions. While in the West, enlightenment and culture created a certain order, subordinate to norms—though, of course, a relative order—in Russia, enlightenment and culture overthrew norms, destroyed partitions, and revealed revolutionary dynamism. This was reflected at the heights of Russian creativity, in all Russian writers.
2.
The internal revolution taking place in Russia was reflected most of all in the work of Dostoevsky. It was reflected differently in Tolstoy. Tolstoy's art was not prophetic, but he himself was a revolution. It is interesting to compare these two greatest Russian geniuses. The relationship between the artistic element and consciousness in them is opposite. Dostoevsky is a dynamic artist, probably the most dynamic in the world.* Everything in him is immersed in a molten, fiery atmosphere, everything is in turbulent motion, there is nothing established, definitively formed. Dostoevsky is a Dionysian artist. He expresses the revolution of the spirit, reveals the dialectic of revolution. In him, the prophetic element is very strong; he is oriented towards the future and foresees much in it. He foresees the Russian revolution and reveals its ideas. But Dostoevsky's conscious ideas, expressed in "A Writer's Diary," give the impression of being conservative, although this is a special conservatism, mixed with revolutionaryness.
Tolstoy is an artist of a stable and formed way of life. Dostoevsky's novels are tragedies; Tolstoy's novels are epics. As an artist, Tolstoy is not characterized by prophetism; he is not oriented towards the future. The dynamism and prophetism of Dostoevsky are connected with the fact that he is entirely absorbed in the problem of man; he is an anthropologist. In Tolstoy's art—his novel is the most perfect in world literature—human life is immersed in cosmic life, in the cycle of cosmic life. Dostoevsky is in history; Tolstoy is in the cosmos. But dynamism and prophetism are characteristic precisely of history, not cosmic life. In consciousness, however, it was Tolstoy who was a revolutionary, a denouncer of the falsehood of world life; he is an anarchist and a nihilist; he rebels against world history and against civilization with unprecedented radicalism. Man must not obey the law of the world; he must obey the law of the Master of life, God. Positively, Tolstoy is opposed to communism; he does not recognize violence, he is an enemy of every state, denies technology and the rational organization of life, believes in the divine basis of nature and life, preaches love, not hatred. But negatively, he is a predecessor of communism; he denies the past, the traditions of history, old culture, church and state, denies all economic and social inequality, attacks the privileged, ruling classes, does not like the cultural elite. In the Russian populism of the 1870s, "repentant nobles" played no small role. But in the genius creativity and life of L. Tolstoy, the repentance of the ruling classes reached its greatest tension. Tolstoy is entirely permeated by the thought that the life of civilized societies is based on lies and falsehood. He wants to radically break with this society. In this, he is a revolutionary, although he denies revolutionary violence.
Dostoevsky was also a revolutionary, despite the conservative appearance of many of his ideas. He disliked and denounced the revolutionary intelligentsia primarily because he foresaw the denial of spiritual freedom as the ultimate result of the ideological dialectic of a revolution based on atheism. Atheism, according to Dostoevsky, inevitably leads to the denial of spiritual freedom. This is revealed in the genius dialectic of "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" and in Ivan Karamazov. This is the whole originality of Dostoevsky's denunciations against the revolutionary intelligentsia. These denunciations defend the freedom of the spirit, which in Dostoevsky himself is completely revolutionary and overthrows the Grand Inquisitor in every church and state. In "Demons," he is a prophet of the Russian revolution; he foresaw much, but was often unjust. Dostoevsky is a revolutionary of the spirit. He wants a revolution with God and Christ. Dostoevsky is an enemy of atheistic socialism, as the temptation of the Grand Inquisitor, as the betrayal of spiritual freedom for the sake of bread and happiness. But he is least of all a defender of the old bourgeois world. He too is a socialist on an Orthodox basis, a socialist with Christ. He constructed a theocratic utopia, which is a denial of the old world, a denial of the state and the bourgeois economy. In this, he is very Russian. Towards the end of his life, Dostoevsky became embittered and allied himself with reactionary elements who could not understand him. But both, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, rebel against the falsehood of the law, express the Russian spirit of anti-legalism, both are enemies of the bourgeois world and its norms. Both, though in different ways, seek true Christianity against the distortions of historical Christianity. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were possible only in a society that was moving towards revolution, in which explosive materials had accumulated. Dostoevsky preached a spiritual communism, the responsibility of all for all. This is how he understood the Russian idea of sobornost. His Russian Christ could not be adapted to the norms of bourgeois civilization. Tolstoy did not know Christ; he only knew the teaching of Christ. But he preached the virtues of Christian communism, denied property, denied all economic inequality. The thoughts of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are on the verge of eschatology, like all revolutionary thinking. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky preach all-humanity [vsechelovechnost'], and this is a Russian idea. Internationalism is merely a distortion of the Russian idea of all-humanity, of Christian universality. The Russian people, according to Dostoevsky, are a God-bearing people precisely because they are the bearers of the all-human idea, the idea of all-human brotherhood. Dostoevsky was contradictory in his attitude towards the West, which he both loved and hated. There was also a contradiction between the universal, all-human idea, whose bearer he considered the Russian people, and his sharp national antipathies. He believed that the light would come from the East. But he was not characterized by particularism and nationalism, which were always alien to original Russian thought. Nationalism was always a German borrowing on Russian soil. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are heralds of a universal revolution of the spirit. The Russian communist revolution would have horrified them with its denial of the spirit, but they were also its predecessors.
The figure of Konstantin Leontiev is very interesting and indicative for the theme of the presentiments and prophecies of Russian literature.* K. Leontiev was an artist, publicist, and sociologist. He is a completely individual thinker and does not belong to any school or direction. From the usual point of view, he is a reactionary, but his reactionism is romantic. He wants to stop the liberal-egalitarian progress because it leads to the kingdom of philistinism [meshchanstvo], to the destruction of complex and flourishing culture. For him, socialism is also the kingdom of bourgeoisness, a grey earthly paradise, leveling and depersonalization. Like the revolutionary Herzen, the reactionary Leontiev sharply poses the problem of philistinism, a characteristically Russian problem. Hatred of the bourgeois spirit is the defining affect in Leontiev's life. He could not bear that "the apostles preached, the martyrs suffered, the poets sang, the painters painted, and the knights shone in tournaments only so that the French or German or Russian bourgeois in his ugly, comic clothing would prosper 'individually' and 'collectively' on the ruins of all this former grandeur." Leontiev is a man of the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century. But he became a monk, he took secret vows and lived in the Optina Pustyn, guided by the elder Ambrose. Leontiev was characterized by a sharp aestheticism. The aesthetic evaluation for him is fundamental. In him, an indefinite duality remained until the end of his life: he is a monk in his orientation towards the other world, towards heaven, and an aesthete in his orientation towards this world, towards the earth. He does not want the realization of Christianity in life, the implementation of social truth, because this seems to him the death of beauty, ugliness. Leontiev's Christianity is pessimistic and exclusively otherworldly. Leontiev is in many ways a predecessor of Nietzsche. The will to power, aristocratism, a tragic sense of life, sharp aestheticism, amoralism, concentration of attention on the conditions for the flowering and decadence of cultures—all this relates Leontiev to Nietzsche. For our theme, Leontiev's prophecies about the Russian revolution are of the greatest interest. For a time, he believed that a flourishing of an original, non-bourgeois culture was still possible in Russia. But later he became disillusioned with the Russian people and the Russian mission. He goes so far as to begin to see the only mission of the Russian people in giving birth to the Antichrist from its depths. Already in the 1880s, he feels that Russia is fatally moving towards revolution and predicts what this revolution will be like. He foresaw the communist revolution more accurately and in more detail than Dostoevsky. He predicts that the revolution will be tyrannical and bloody, that it will not be liberal but communist, that rights and freedoms will not be proclaimed in it, and that the liberal-radical intelligentsia will be overthrown. The revolution will not be humane, and it will need the ancient instincts of domination and submission. Russian communism will carry away the peoples of the East and go to exterminate the bourgeois world of the West. The extermination of the bourgeois world did not sadden Leontiev in the least. But he wanted to save the remnants of a noble, aristocratic culture. For this, Leontiev grasps at the last means; he proposes that the Russian tsar introduce communism from above. Leontiev, according to Russian tradition, hates capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Leontiev's presentiments and predictions are accompanied by a feeling of the approach of the end of the world.
In Russia at the end of the 19th century, apocalyptic moods increase, and moreover in a pessimistic coloring. Behind this feeling of the approach of the end of the world and the kingdom of the Antichrist, one can see the feeling of the approach of the end of an entire historical epoch, the destruction of the old world. And this feeling is dual, sad and joyful. The most interesting and sensitive Russian writers did not want to reconcile themselves to the idea that Russia would follow the banal Western path, bourgeois, rationalistic, liberal, humanistic. Apocalyptic moods take a peculiar form in Vl. Solovyov, the most significant Russian philosopher. The philosophy of Vl. Solovyov, like all original Russian philosophy, was Christian. At first, he constructed a Christian theocratic utopia, preached a free theocracy, believed in the possibility of Christian politics. In contrast to Leontiev, he wanted to realize Christian truth in the fullness of life. He is a representative of Russian all-humanity, an enemy of all national particularism. He is a Christian universalist, thirsts for the union of churches, and at one time leaned towards Catholicism. In the first period of his activity, Vl. Solovyov interpreted Christianity optimistically, wanted to combine it with progress and humanism, believed in the possibility of the development of Godmanhood on earth. But Vl. Solovyov experienced a series of disappointments, suffered blow after blow. He is forced to admit that history is going in a completely different direction from the one in which he saw the triumph of Christian truth. An acute sense of evil arises in him, which was weak before. Towards the end of his life, he finally becomes disillusioned with the possibility of a universal free theocracy, no longer believes in the paths of history. He begins to think that history is ending, that it has no future, that everything is exhausted. He writes his "Story of the Antichrist." In it, he prophesies about the imminent appearance of the Antichrist. The world social organization of humanity will no longer be the work of Christianity, not a Christian theocracy, but the work of the Antichrist. Vl. Solovyov foresees the role of Pan-Mongolism and the danger threatening Russia and Europe from the yellow race. And in Vl. Solovyov, as in Leontiev, apocalyptic moods, the feeling of the approach of the end, mean not the onset of the end of the world, but the end of a historical epoch, the presentiment of historical catastrophes. This is an apocalypse within history. Everyone feels that Russia is placed before an abyss.
For Russian apocalyptic moods, N. Fyodorov is of enormous importance. He lived at the end of the 19th century, but acquired significance and fame in the 20th century. In N. Fyodorov, the character of apocalyptic moods changes. From the religious current of thought, he is the most oriented towards the future and understands the apocalypse actively, not passively. N. Fyodorov was completely unknown and unappreciated for a long time, despite the fact that the greatest Russian people—L. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Vl. Solovyov—valued him extraordinarily highly. In character, N. Fyodorov was a Russian eccentric, an original. He was not at all a professional writer and philosopher. He belonged to those Russian people who seek salvation from evil and suffering, seek the Kingdom of God, and have their own plan of salvation. N. Fyodorov believed that one should not sell books, that they should be given away for free. This greatly hindered the spread of his ideas. But now, after the revolution, of all the Russian religious thinkers of the 19th century, N. Fyodorov is the only one popular, and in Soviet Russia, there is a whole Fyodorovian current. This is understandable. N. Fyodorov considered himself an Orthodox Christian, but he has many similar traits with communism; he is a predecessor of modern activism. Russian apocalyptic moods were dual; there was a revolutionary and a reactionary moment in them. But undoubtedly, a passive understanding of the apocalypse predominated. The Russian person felt himself permeated by the mystical stirrings of the approaching end, foresaw the inevitable domination of the Antichrist, he was in a state of expectation, the future evoked horror in him. What the apocalypse prophesies will happen to man, to the people, but man is not an active agent in the realization of the prophecies. The apocalypse is understood as a divine fatality; human freedom plays no role. In N. Fyodorov, the understanding of the apocalypse changes sharply. The apocalyptic prophecies about the kingdom of the Antichrist, the end of the world, the Last Judgment, N. Fyodorov understands conditionally, as a threat. There is nothing fatal here. If people unite for the "common task" [obshcheye delo] of resurrection, for the real realization of Christian truth in life, if in a brotherly union they fight against the elemental, irrational, death-dealing forces of nature, then there will be no kingdom of the Antichrist, no end of the world and Last Judgment; then humanity will directly pass into eternal life. Everything depends on the activity of people. And N. Fyodorov preaches an unprecedented activity of man, which must conquer nature, organize cosmic life, conquer death, and resurrect the dead. This "common task" presupposes, as its necessary condition, brotherly relations between people, the cessation of human discord, the realization of kinship between people, but it is also accomplished with the help of science and technology. N. Fyodorov believed that technology, if mastered by a brotherly united humanity, can perform miracles, even resurrect the dead. He understood philosophy projectively. There should be no estate of scholars and academicians representing pure knowledge, abstracted from practical life. The separation of theoretical and practical reason is an evil. Like Marx and Engels, N. Fyodorov thinks that philosophy should not only know the world but also change it; it must create a project for saving the world from evil and suffering, first of all from death, as the source of all evil. The posing of the problem of death radically distinguishes, of course, N. Fyodorov from Marxism and communism. World life is in the power of irrational, elemental natural forces. These forces must be regulated, subordinated to reason and knowledge; man must master them.
N. Fyodorov calls for people to stop fighting each other and unite together to fight the elemental forces of nature. In this, there is an undeniable similarity with communism, albeit on a different spiritual basis. N. Fyodorov hates capitalism even more than the Marxists, considering it the creation of prodigal sons who have forgotten their dead fathers. He is also a collectivist, an enemy of individualism. What distinguishes N. Fyodorov from communism is his Christian faith and consciousness of duty towards deceased fathers. But he is brought closer to communism by his extreme activism, faith in the omnipotence of technology, preaching of collective, common work, hostility to capitalism, projectivism, totality in relation to life, a tendency towards regulation and plans on a world scale, denial of theoretical thought, speculation detached from practical work, recognition of labor as the basis of life. N. Fyodorov was a peculiar communist on a religious basis, with elements of indefinite Slavophilism. In his teaching, realistic elements are mixed with utopian elements. He was a typical Russian thinker. In the modern disciples of Fyodorov, the Christian elements are weakened, and the technical elements, akin to communism, are strengthened.
Russian literature and Russian thought testify that in imperial Russia there was no single, integral culture, that there was a rupture between the cultural stratum and the people, that the old regime had no moral support. There were no conservative cultural ideas and forces in Russia. Everyone dreamed of overcoming the schism and rupture in one form or another of collectivism. Everything was moving towards revolution.
* See my book "Dostoevsky's Worldview," Berlin, 1923. YMCA-Press.
* See my book "Konstantin Leontiev. (An Essay from the History of Russian Religious Thought)." Paris. 1926.
CHAPTER V
CLASSICAL MARXISM AND RUSSIAN MARXISM
1.
By the 1880s, populist socialism had been exhausted, and the revolutionary movement could no longer develop under its banner. The very emergence of the "People's Will" party, which set itself primarily the purely political goal of overthrowing the autocratic monarchy through terror, was a crisis of populism. The revolutionary intelligentsia lost faith in the peasantry and decided to rely solely on its own heroism. The assassination of Alexander II by the People's Will members not only did not lead to the triumph of the revolutionary intelligentsia but also provoked a strong reactionary movement in the era of Alexander III, not only in the government but also in society. The revolutionary movement found no real social base. At this time, abroad among the ;migr;s, the group "Emancipation of Labor" [Osvobozhdenie truda] arose. It was headed by G. Plekhanov, P. Axelrod, V. Zasulich, and Deutsch. This was the emergence of Russian Marxism and the Social Democratic movement. After Marx and Engels, Plekhanov was one of the main recognized theorists of Marxism. In the past, Plekhanov had participated in the populist revolutionary organizations "Land and Liberty" and "Black Repartition." During his years living in Western Europe, Plekhanov became a completely Western man, of a very rationalistic disposition, quite cultured, though not of a high type of culture, a revolutionary more bookish than practical. He could be a leader of the Marxist school of thought, but he could not be a leader of a revolution, as became clear in the era of revolution. But several generations of Russian Marxists, including Lenin and the leaders of Russian communism, were educated on Plekhanov's booklets. Initially, Marxism on Russian soil was an extreme form of Russian Westernism. The first generations of Russian Marxists first of all fought against the old currents of the revolutionary intelligentsia, against populism, and dealt it irreparable blows. Russian Marxism awaited liberation from Russia's industrial development, which populism precisely wanted to avoid. Capitalist industry was supposed to lead to the formation and development of the working class, which is the liberating class. Therefore, the Marxists were for the proletarianization of the peasantry, which the populists wanted to prevent. The Marxists thought that they had finally found a real social base for the revolutionary liberation struggle. The only real social force on which one could rely was the forming proletariat. It was necessary to develop the class revolutionary consciousness of this proletariat. One must go not to the peasantry, which had rejected the revolutionary intelligentsia, but to the workers, to the factory. The Marxists considered themselves realists because the development of capitalism in Russia at that time was indeed occurring. The first Marxists wanted to rely not so much on the revolutionary intelligentsia, on the role of the individual in history, as on the objective socio-economic process. The Marxists looked down with contempt on the utopian socialism of the populists. If the type of the Russian revolutionary-populist was predominantly emotional, the type of the Russian revolutionary-Marxist was predominantly intellectual. In accordance with the conditions in which Russian Marxism arose, the Marxists initially especially emphasized the deterministic and evolutionary elements in Marx's teaching. They fought against utopianism, against dreaminess, and prided themselves on having finally found the truth of scientific socialism, which promised them certain victory by virtue of a lawful, objective social process. Socialism would be the result of economic necessity, of necessary development. The first Russian Marxists were very fond of speaking about the development of material productive forces as the main hope and support. At the same time, they were interested not so much in Russia's economic development itself as a positive goal and good, but in the formation of an instrument of revolutionary struggle. Such was the revolutionary psychology. The goals of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia remained seemingly the same, but they acquired a new instrument of struggle; they felt firmer ground under their feet. Marxism was a more complex intellectual theory than the theories on which the revolutionary intelligentsia had relied until then, and it required greater efforts of thought. But it was viewed as a revolutionary instrument, and first and foremost as an instrument of struggle against the old currents that had proven powerless. At first, the Marxists even gave the impression of being less extreme and ferocious revolutionaries than the old socialist-populists or socialist-revolutionaries, as they came to be called; they were against terror. But this was a deceptive appearance that misled even the gendarmes. The emergence of Russian Marxism was a serious crisis for the Russian intelligentsia, a shaking of the foundations of their worldview. Different new currents arose from Marxism. And it is necessary to understand the essence of Marxism and its duality in order to orient oneself in the subsequent Russian currents.
Marxism is a more complex phenomenon than is usually thought. One must not forget that Marx emerged from the depths of German idealism of the early 19th century; he was imbued with the ideas of Fichte and Hegel. Similarly, Feuerbach, the main representative of left Hegelianism, even when he called himself a materialist, was entirely saturated with idealist philosophy and even remained a peculiar theologian. Especially in the young Marx, one feels his origin from idealism, which left its mark on the entire conception of materialism.* Marxism, of course, provides very great grounds for interpreting the Marxist doctrine as a consistent system of sociological determinism. Economics determines all of human life; not only the entire structure of society but also all ideology, all spiritual culture, religion, philosophy, morality, and art depend on it. Economics is the base; ideology is the superstructure. There exists an inexorable objective socio-economic process that determines everything. The form of production and exchange is, as it were, primordial life, and everything else depends on it. In man, it is not he himself who thinks and creates, but the social class to which he belongs; he thinks and creates as a nobleman, a big bourgeois, a petty bourgeois, or a proletarian. Man cannot free himself from the economics that determine him; he merely reflects it. Such is one side of Marxism. The power of economics in human life was not invented by Marx, nor is he responsible for the fact that economics so influences ideology. Marx saw this in the capitalist society of Europe that surrounded him. But he generalized this and gave it a universal character. What he discovered in the capitalist society of his time, he recognized as the basis of every society. He discovered much in capitalist society and said much that was true about it, but his error lay in the universalization of the particular. Marx's economic determinism has a very special character. It is the unmasking of the illusions of consciousness. Feuerbach had already done this for religious consciousness. Marx's method of unmasking the illusions of consciousness very much resembles what Freud does. Ideology, which is merely a superstructure, religious beliefs, philosophical theories, moral evaluations, creativity in art—all illusorily reflect in consciousness the reality, which is primarily economic reality, i.e., the collective struggle of man with nature to sustain life, just as in Freud there is primarily sexual reality. Being determines consciousness, but being is primarily material, economic being. Spirit is an epiphenomenon of this economic being. Marxism does not directly derive every ideology and every spiritual culture from economics, but through the medium of class psychology, i.e., in the sociological determinism of Marxism, there is a psychological link. Although the existence of class psychology and the class distortion of all ideas and beliefs is an undoubted truth, psychology itself is the weakest side of Marxism; this psychology was rationalistic and completely outdated.
To understand the meaning of the sociological determinism of Marxism and its unmasking of the illusions of consciousness, one must pay attention to the existence in Marxism of a completely different side, apparently contradicting economic materialism. Marxism is not only a doctrine of historical or economic materialism about the complete dependence of man on economics; Marxism is also a doctrine of deliverance, of the messianic calling of the proletariat, of the future perfect society in which man will no longer depend on economics, of the power and victory of man over the irrational forces of nature and society. The soul of Marxism is here, not in economic determinism. Man is wholly determined by economics in capitalist society; this relates to the past. The determinability of man by economics can be interpreted as the sin of the past. But in the future, it can be different; man can be liberated from slavery. And the active subject that will liberate man from slavery and create a better life is the proletariat. Messianic properties are attributed to it; the properties of God's chosen people are transferred to it; it is the new Israel. This is the secularization of ancient Hebrew messianic consciousness. The lever with which the world can be overturned has been found. And here Marx's materialism turns into extreme idealism. Marx discovers in capitalism a process of dehumanization, of reification (Verdinglichung) of man. Connected with this is Marx's genius doctrine of the fetishism of commodities. Everything in history, in social life, is the product of human activity, human labor, human struggle.* But man falls victim to an illusory, deceptive consciousness, by virtue of which the results of his own activity and labor appear to him as a thing-like, objective world on which he depends. There is no thing-like, objective, economic reality; this is an illusion; there exists only human activity and the active relation of man to man. Capital is not an objective, thing-like reality existing outside man; capital is merely the social relations of people in production. Behind economic reality, there are always living people and social groupings of people. And man, through his activity, can melt down this phantom world of capitalist economics. The proletariat is called to this; it falls victim to this illusion, this fetishization and reification of the products of human labor. The proletariat must fight against the reification of man, against the dehumanization of the economy, must reveal the omnipotence of human activity. This is a completely different side of Marxism, and it was strong in the early Marx.** The faith in the activity of man, the subject, he received from German idealism. This is a faith in the spirit, and it is incompatible with materialism. In Marxism, there are elements of a genuine existential philosophy, revealing the illusion and deception of objectification, overcoming the world of objectified things through human activity. Only this side of Marxism could inspire enthusiasm and evoke revolutionary energy. Economic determinism debases man; only faith in human activity, which can accomplish the miraculous transformation of society, elevates him.
Connected with this is the revolutionary, dynamic understanding of dialectics. It must be said that dialectical materialism is an absurd combination of words. There can be no dialectic of matter; dialectic presupposes the logos, meaning; only the dialectic of thought and spirit is possible. But Marx transferred the properties of thought and spirit into the depths of matter. The material process turns out to possess thought, reason, freedom, creative activity, and therefore the material process can lead to the triumph of meaning, to the mastery of social reason over all of life. Dialectic turns into an exaltation of human will, of human activity. Everything is determined not by the objective development of material productive forces, not by economics, but by the revolutionary struggle of classes, i.e., by human activity. Man can conquer the power of economics over his life. According to Marx and Engels, a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom is imminent. History will be sharply divided into two parts: the past, determined by economics, when man was a slave, and the future, which will begin with the victory of the proletariat and will be entirely determined by the activity of man, social man, when there will be the kingdom of freedom. The transition from necessity to freedom is understood in the spirit of Hegel. But the revolutionary dialectic of Marxism is not the logical necessity of the self-disclosure and self-development of the idea, but the activity of revolutionary man, for whom the past is not binding.
* Marx says in his Theses on Feuerbach: "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism... is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively." Marx: "Thesen uber Feuerbach". This passage is completely opposite to materialism and approaches existential philosophy.
** This side of Marxism is emphasized and developed by Lukаcs, the most intelligent of the communist writers, in the book: Lukаcs — "Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien uber marxistische Dialektik".
"Freedom is recognized necessity," but this recognition of necessity can work miracles, completely regenerate life, and create something new, unprecedented. The transition to the kingdom of freedom is a victory over the original sin, which Marx saw in the exploitation of man by man. The entire moral pathos of Marx is connected with this revelation of exploitation as the basis of human society, the exploitation of labor. Marx clearly confused economic and ethical categories. The theory of surplus value, which reveals the exploitation of workers by capitalists, Marx considered a scientific economic theory. But in reality, it is primarily an ethical doctrine. Exploitation is not an economic phenomenon but first and foremost a phenomenon of a moral order, a morally bad relation of man to man. There exists a striking contradiction between the scientific amoralism of Marx, who could not stand the ethical justification of socialism, and the extreme moralism of Marxists in their evaluations of social life. The entire doctrine of the class struggle has an axiological character. The difference between the "bourgeois" and the "proletarian" is the difference between evil and good, injustice and justice, between the blameworthy and the praiseworthy. In the Marxist system, there is a logically contradictory combination of materialistic, scientific-deterministic, amoralistic elements with idealistic, moralistic, religious-myth-making elements. Marx created a genuine myth about the proletariat. The mission of the proletariat is a matter of faith. Marxism is not only science and politics; it is also faith, religion. And its strength is based on this.
2
The Russians initially perceived Marxism primarily from its objective-scientific side. Most striking was Marx's teaching that socialism would be the necessary result of objective economic development, that it was determined by the very development of material productive forces. This was received as a hope. Russian socialists ceased to feel rootless, hanging over an abyss. They felt themselves to be "scientific," not utopian, not dreamy socialists. "Scientific socialism" became an object of faith. But the firm hope that scientific socialism gives for the realization of the desired goal is connected with industrial development, with the formation of a class of factory workers. A country that remains exclusively agricultural and peasant does not offer such hopes. Therefore, the first Russian Marxists first of all had to overthrow the populist worldview, to prove that capitalism was developing and must develop in Russia. The struggle for the thesis that capitalist industry was developing in Russia and consequently the number of workers was increasing appeared as a revolutionary struggle. Socialist-populists, in the eyes of the Marxists, turned almost into reactionaries.
But Marxism was perceived differently. For some, the development of capitalist industry in Russia meant hope for the triumph of socialism. A working class was emerging. It was necessary to devote all one's strength to developing the consciousness of this class. Plekhanov said: "The entire dynamics of our social life is for capitalism." Saying this, he was thinking not of industry itself but of the workers. For others, primarily the legal Marxists, the development of capitalist industry acquired self-sufficient significance, and the revolutionary-class side of Marxism receded into the background. Such was, first of all, P. Struve, a representative of bourgeois Marxism. Those Russian Social Democratic Marxists who later received the name "Mensheviks" highly valued the thesis that a socialist revolution was possible only in a country with a developed capitalist industry. Therefore, a socialist revolution would be possible in Russia when it ceased to be a predominantly peasant and agricultural country. This type of Marxist always valued the objective-scientific, deterministic side of Marxism but also retained the subjective, revolutionary-class side of Marxism. The constant talk of the first Marxists about the necessity of capitalist development in Russia and the readiness to welcome this development led to the old People's Will member L. Tikhomirov, who later switched to the reactionary camp, accusing the Marxists of having to turn into knights of primitive accumulation.
The Marxists considered the populists to be reactionaries, supporters of backward forms of economy, while the populists considered the Marxists to be supporters of capitalism, called to serve the development of capitalism. And indeed, Russian Marxism, arising in a country not yet industrialized, without a developed proletariat, was bound to be torn by a moral contradiction that weighed on the conscience of many Russian socialists. How can one desire the development of capitalism, welcome this development, and at the same time consider capitalism an evil and injustice, with which every socialist is called to fight? This complex dialectical question created a moral conflict. The development of capitalist industry in Russia presupposed the proletarianization of the peasantry, the deprivation of their means of production, i.e., the plunging of a significant part of the people into a distressed condition. Capitalism meant the exploitation of workers, and thus one had to welcome the emergence of these forms of exploitation. In classical Marxism itself, there was a duality in the evaluation of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Marx, insofar as he stood from an evolutionary point of view and recognized the existence of different stages in history, for which evaluation changes, highly evaluated the mission of the bourgeoisie in the past and the role of capitalism in the development of the material power of humanity. The entire conception of Marxism is very dependent on the development of capitalism and ties the messianic idea of the proletariat to capitalist industry, an idea that has nothing in common with science. Marxism believes that the factory, and only the factory, will create the new man. The same question is posed to Marxism in another form: is Marxist ideology the same reflection of economic reality as all other ideologies, or does it claim to discover absolute truth, independent of historical forms of economics and economic interests? For Marxist philosophy, the question is very important: is this philosophy pragmatism or absolute realism? This question, as we will see, will be debated in Soviet philosophy. But the first Russian Marxists faced a moral question and a cognitive question, and it created a moral and logical conflict. We will see that this moral conflict will be resolved only by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It was the Marxist Lenin who would assert that socialism could be realized in Russia apart from the development of capitalism and before the formation of a numerous working class. Plekhanov, on the other hand, spoke out against combining the revolution overthrowing the autocratic monarchy and the social revolution; he was against the revolutionary-socialist seizure of power, i.e., he was in advance against the communist revolution in the form in which it occurred. One must wait for the social revolution. The liberation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves, not of a revolutionary circle. This requires an increase in the number of workers, the development of their consciousness, and presupposes a more developed industry. Plekhanov was initially an enemy of Bakuninism, in which he saw a mixture of Fourier with Stenka Razin. He was against rebelliousness and conspiratorialism, against Jacobinism and faith in committees. A dictatorship can do nothing if the working class is not prepared for revolution. The reactionary character of the peasant commune, hindering economic development, is emphasized. One must rely on the objective social process. Plekhanov did not accept the Bolshevik revolution because he was always against the seizure of power for which neither the strength nor the consciousness was yet prepared. What is needed first of all is the revolutionizing of consciousness, not a spontaneous movement, and the revolutionizing of the consciousness of the working class itself, not of a party-organized minority.
But with such an application of Marxist principles to Russia, one would have to live too long before the social revolution. The possibility of immediate socialist activity in Russia was called into question. The revolutionary will could be finally crushed by an intellectual theory. And the most revolutionarily minded Russian Marxists had to interpret Marxism differently and construct other theories of the Russian revolution, develop different tactics. In this wing of Russian Marxism, the revolutionary will predominated over intellectual theories, over the bookish, cabinet interpretation of Marxism. An imperceptible union occurred between the traditions of revolutionary Marxism and the traditions of the old Russian revolutionary spirit, which did not want to allow a capitalist stage in Russia's development, with Chernyshevsky, Bakunin, Nechaev, and Tkachev. This time, it was not Fourier but Marx who was united with Stenka Razin. The Marxist-Bolsheviks turned out to be much more in the Russian tradition than the Marxist-Mensheviks. On the basis of an evolutionary, deterministic interpretation of Marxism, it was impossible to justify a proletarian, socialist revolution in an industrially backward, peasant country with a weakly developed working class. With such an understanding of Marxism, one had to count first on a bourgeois revolution, on the development of capitalism, and only then carry out a socialist revolution. This was not very favorable for the exaltation of the revolutionary will.
On the basis of the transplantation of Marxist ideas into Russia, among Russian Social Democrats, there arose, incidentally, the trend of "Economism," which assigned the political revolution to the liberal and radical bourgeoisie and considered it necessary to organize a purely economic, professional movement among the workers. This was the right wing of Social Democracy, which provoked a reaction from its more revolutionary wing. An increasing division occurred within Russian Marxism between the orthodox, more revolutionary wing and the critical, more reformist wing. The distinction between "orthodox" and "critical" Marxism was very conditional-relative because "critical" Marxism was in some respects more faithful to the scientific, deterministic side of Marxism than "orthodox" Marxism, which drew from Marxism completely original conclusions in relation to Russia, conclusions that Marx and Engels would hardly have accepted. Lukаcs, a Hungarian writing in German, the most intelligent of the communist writers, who displayed great subtlety of thought, gives a peculiar and, in my opinion, correct definition of revolutionaryness.* Revolutionaryness is determined not at all by the radicalism of goals and not even by the character of the means applied in the struggle. Revolutionaryness is totality, wholeness in relation to every act of life. A revolutionary is one who, in every act he performs, relates it to the whole, to the entire society, subordinates it to a central and integral idea. For a revolutionary, there are no separate spheres; he does not allow fragmentation, does not allow the autonomy of thought in relation to action or the autonomy of action in relation to thought. A revolutionary has an integral worldview in which theory and practice are organically fused. Totality in everything is the basic sign of a revolutionary relation to life. Critical Marxism could have the same ultimate ideals as revolutionary Marxism, which considers itself orthodox, but it recognized separate, autonomous spheres; it did not affirm totality. One could, for example, be a Marxist in the social sphere and not be a materialist, even be an idealist. One could criticize certain aspects of the Marxist worldview. Marxism ceased to be a holistic, totalitarian doctrine; it turned into a method in social cognition and social struggle. This is contrary to the totality of the revolutionary type. Russian revolutionaries in the past were always total. Revolution was for them a religion and a philosophy, not just a struggle connected with the social and political side of life. And a Russian Marxism had to be developed that corresponded to this revolutionary type and this revolutionary totalitarian instinct. This is Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Bolshevism defined itself as the only orthodox, i.e., totalitarian, integral Marxism, not allowing the fragmentation of the Marxist worldview and the acceptance of only its separate parts.
This "orthodox" Marxism, which in reality was a Russian-transformed Marxism, perceived first of all not the deterministic, evolutionary, scientific side of Marxism, but its messianic, myth-making religious side, allowing the exaltation of the revolutionary will, bringing to the fore the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, led by an organized minority inspired by a conscious proletarian idea. This orthodox, totalitarian Marxism always demanded the confession of the materialist faith, but it also had strong idealistic elements. It showed how great the power of an idea over human life is if it is total and corresponds to the instincts of the masses. In Marxist-Bolshevism, the proletariat ceased to be an empirical reality, for as an empirical reality the proletariat was insignificant; it was first and foremost the idea of the proletariat, and the bearer of this idea could be a small minority. If this small minority is wholly possessed by the titanic idea of the proletariat, if its revolutionary will is exalted, if it is well organized and disciplined, then it can work miracles, can overcome the determinism of social regularity. And Lenin proved in practice that this is possible. He made a revolution in the name of Marx, but not according to Marx. The communist revolution in Russia was carried out in the name of totalitarian Marxism, Marxism as the religion of the proletariat, but contrary to everything Marx said about the development of human societies. It was not revolutionary populism but precisely orthodox, totalitarian Marxism that managed to carry out a revolution in which Russia skipped over the stage of capitalist development, which seemed so inevitable to the first Russian Marxists. And this turned out to be in agreement with Russian traditions and the instincts of the people. By this time, the illusions of revolutionary populism had been exhausted; the myth of the people-peasantry had fallen. The people did not accept the revolutionary intelligentsia. A new revolutionary myth was needed. And the myth of the people was replaced by the myth of the proletariat. Marxism decomposed the concept of the people as a holistic organism, decomposed it into classes with opposing interests. But in the myth of the proletariat, the myth of the Russian people was restored in a new way. A kind of identification of the Russian people with the proletariat occurred, of Russian messianism with proletarian messianism. A worker-peasant, Soviet Russia arose. In it, the people-peasantry united with the people-proletariat, contrary to everything Marx said, who considered the peasantry a petty-bourgeois, reactionary class. Orthodox, totalitarian Marxism forbade speaking of the opposition of interests between the proletariat and the peasantry. On this, Trotsky failed, who wanted to be faithful to classical Marxism. The peasantry was declared a revolutionary class, although the Soviet government constantly had to struggle with it, sometimes very cruelly. Lenin returned in a new way to the old tradition of Russian revolutionary thought. He proclaimed that Russia's industrial backwardness, the rudimentary character of capitalism, was a great advantage for the social revolution. One would not have to deal with a strong, organized bourgeoisie. Here Lenin was forced to repeat what Tkachev had said, and by no means what Engels had said. Bolshevism is much more traditional than is commonly thought; it is in agreement with the originality of the Russian historical process. A Russification and orientalization of Marxism occurred.
*See the book by Lukаcs cited above.
3.
Marxism was a collapse for the Russian intelligentsia, a consciousness of its weakness. This was not only a change in worldview but also a change in mental structure. Russian socialism became less emotional and sentimental, more intellectually grounded and harsher. The first Russian Marxists were more European, more Western people than the populists. A will to power, to the acquisition of strength, awakened, and an ideology of strength appeared. The motif of compassion weakened, no longer defining the type of revolutionary struggle. The attitude towards the people-proletariat was determined not so much by compassion for its oppressed, unfortunate position as by faith that it must triumph, that it is the coming force and the liberator of humanity. But despite all the mental changes in the intelligentsia, the basic substratum remained the same—the search for the kingdom of social truth and justice, the capacity for sacrifice, the ascetic attitude towards culture, the holistic, totalitarian attitude towards life, determined by the main goal—the realization of socialism.
Initially, Russian Marxism was a complex phenomenon; it contained different elements. And this became evident later. If one part of the Russian Marxists valued above all the holistic, totalitarian character of their revolutionary worldview, guarded their orthodoxy, and was distinguished by extreme intolerance—if Marxism and socialism were a religion for them—then in another part, a differentiation of different cultural spheres occurred, the revolutionary wholeness was violated, and the liberation of the suppressed life of the spirit and spiritual creativity took place. The rights of religion, philosophy, art, independent of social utilitarianism in moral life, i.e., the rights of the spirit, which were denied by Russian nihilism, revolutionary populism and anarchism, and revolutionary Marxism, were recognized. Since Marxism and socialism ceased to be seen as a religion, a holistic worldview answering all questions of life, space was freed for religious quests, for spiritual creativity. Strange as it may seem at first glance, it was precisely from the depths of Marxism—though rather critical than orthodox—that an idealistic, and later religious, current emerged in our country. S. Bulgakov, now a priest and professor of dogmatic theology, as well as the author of these lines,* belonged to it.
A crisis occurred in the worldview exclusively oriented towards this world, towards earthly life, and another, otherworldly, spiritual world was revealed. The end of the exclusive domination of materialism and positivism in the Russian intelligentsia arrived. A fierce struggle was waged for the possibility of such a metaphysical and religious turn. The idealistic current was received with terrible hostility, both in the Marxist camp and in the old populist and radical camp. This turn was viewed as a betrayal of the liberation struggle. In the Marxist camp, this initially took the form of a struggle between the orthodox, i.e., totalitarian, direction and the critical direction, which allowed the combination of Marxism with a different, non-materialist philosophy and a critical revision of certain aspects of Marxism. Subsequently, the movement broke away from connection with different forms of Marxism and turned into a struggle for the autonomy of spiritual values in cognition, art, and moral and religious life. Attempts were made to provide an ideological, ethical foundation for socialism. This was an overcoming of the traditions of Russian nihilism, utopianism, materialism, and positivism. In the end, this led to the fact that wholeness, totality, began to be sought not in revolution but in religion. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a genuine cultural renaissance in Russia—religious, philosophical, artistic. And here a return occurred to the traditions of great Russian literature and Russian religious-philosophical thought. From Chernyshevsky and Plekhanov, they turned to Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, and Vl. Solovyov. But these cultural idealistic currents began to lose connection with the social revolutionary movement; they increasingly lost a broad social base. A cultural elite was formed, which had no influence on the broad circles of the Russian people and society. This was a new schism, of which the history of the Russian intelligentsia is so rich. This was the weakness of the idealistic movement. And this had fatal consequences for the ideology of the Russian revolution, for its struggle against the spirit.
In the Russian upper cultural stratum of the beginning of the century, there was a genuine renaissance of spiritual culture; a Russian philosophical school with an original religious philosophy appeared; there was a flowering of Russian poetry; after decades of decline in aesthetic taste, an acute aesthetic consciousness awakened; an interest in questions of a spiritual order, which we had at the beginning of the 19th century, awakened. For the first time, perhaps, people of refined culture, bordering on decadence, appeared in Russia. This was the time of symbolism, metaphysics, and mysticism. People of the Russian cultural stratum stood fully at the height of European culture. Nietzsche was of enormous importance at this time, whose influence met with the influence of Dostoevsky. From German philosophy, thinkers like Schelling and Fr. Baader again aroused the greatest interest. They passed through Ibsen, through the French symbolists. But Russian symbolism did not remain in the sphere of the aesthetic-artistic; it quickly passed into the religious-mystical sphere. Russian thinkers who were half-forgotten or still little known and unappreciated—Khomyakov, Vl. Solovyov, K. Leontiev, N. Fyodorov, V. Rozanov—were rediscovered and gained significance. But all interest in the Enlightenment, nihilistic, populist strand of Russian thought was lost. This was a time when, at Vyacheslav Ivanov's "Tower"—the name of the apartment on the sixth floor opposite the Tauride Palace of the most refined of Russian symbolist poets—the most refined conversations on aesthetic-mystical themes took place every Wednesday. At this time, downstairs, the first revolution of 1905 was raging. Between the upper and lower floors of Russian culture, there was almost nothing in common; there was a complete schism. They lived as if on different planets. In general, the movement can be characterized as a peculiar Russian romanticism, but in its religiously directed wing, it was a transition to religious realism. There was nothing socially reactionary in the cultural renaissance of the beginning of the century; many of its figures even definitely sympathized with the revolution and socialism. But interest in social questions weakened, and the figures of spiritual culture had no influence on the ongoing social-revolutionary fermentation; they lived in social isolation, constituting a closed elite.
At the same time, fierce disputes between Bolshevism and Menshevism were occurring, and the Bolshevik party organization was growing. Plekhanov, the head of the Menshevik faction of Social Democracy, was a bookish theorist of Marxism, not a revolutionary leader. The true revolutionary leader was Lenin, the creator of the Russian and world communist movement. The split of Russian Social Democracy into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks began at the congress of the Social Democratic Party held in London in 1903. At this congress, the Bolsheviks received a numerical "majority," while the Mensheviks received a "minority." The very fate of the word "Bolshevism" is very interesting. Initially, this word was completely colorless and meant the supporters of the majority. But later it acquired a symbolic meaning. The word "Bolshevism" became associated with the concept of strength, while the word "Menshevism" with the concept of comparative weakness. In the element of the 1917 revolution, the rebelling popular masses were captivated by "Bolshevism" as a force that gives more, while "Menshevism" seemed weak; it gives less. The modest and insignificant word "Bolshevism" in its origin acquired the significance of a banner, a slogan; the word itself sounded strong and expressive. But it is very characteristic of the schism in Russian culture that both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and all the figures of the revolutionary social movement were inspired by ideas completely different from those that dominated the upper layer of Russian culture; Russian philosophy was alien to them; questions of the spirit did not interest them; they remained materialists or positivists. The cultural level not only of the average revolutionaries but also of the leaders of the revolution was not high; their thought was simplified. They remained alien to that stirring of the spirit that swept over Europe and Russia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The themes of Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Vl. Solovyov, Nietzsche, the theme of German idealism, symbolism, and generally the themes of Christianity remained alien to them. A higher intellectual culture was possessed by the elements grouped around the "Union of Liberation," an organization formed in 1903-04 and representing a broad liberal-radical bloc for the struggle for political freedom against autocracy. In this bloc, broad circles of the left intelligentsia attempted to unite with liberal figures of zemstvo and city self-government; more moderate Social Democrats also participated. But this "Union of Liberation," in which significant intellectual forces participated, could not take control of the revolutionary movement because in Russia, only a movement under the symbolism of socialism, not liberalism, could be successful, and it had to be inspired by a totalitarian worldview. The elementary and crude ideas of the 1905 revolution, in which the heritage of Russian nihilism was felt, repelled the figures of the cultural renaissance and provoked a spiritual reaction. At this time, a revaluation of the values of the Russian intelligentsia's worldview occurred. This found expression in the then-famous collection "Vekhi" (Landmarks), in which the materialism, positivism, and utilitarianism of the revolutionary intelligentsia, its indifference to the higher values of spiritual life, were subjected to sharp criticism. A struggle for the spirit was taking place, but this struggle had no broad social influence. According to the old tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, the struggle for the spirit was perceived as a reaction, almost as a betrayal of liberationist aspirations. Such was the pre-revolutionary cultural atmosphere. Within the revolutionary movement, the weakness and unpreparedness of the Social Democratic Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who continued the populist traditions, became evident. This was the time of the State Duma, the beginnings of the Russian parliament, still quite powerless, and the formation for the first time of a large liberal party, the so-called Cadets, under the leadership of P. Milyukov. On the surface of Russian life, liberalism seemed to begin to play a rather large role, and the government had to reckon with it. But the greatest paradox in the fate of Russia and the Russian revolution is that liberal ideas, ideas of law, as well as ideas of social reformism, turned out to be utopian in Russia. Bolshevism, on the other hand, turned out to be the least utopian and the most realistic, the most corresponding to the entire situation as it had developed in Russia in 1917, and the most faithful to some primordial Russian traditions, and to Russian quests for universal social truth, understood in a maximalist way, and to Russian methods of governance and rule by violence.* This was determined by the entire course of Russian history, but also by the weakness of our creative spiritual forces. Communism turned out to be the inevitable fate of Russia, an internal moment in the fate of the Russian people.
* My first book, published in 1900, "Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy," represented an attempt to synthesize Marxism with the idealist philosophy of Kant and Fichte.
**In an article written in 1907 and included in my book "The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia," St. Petersburg, 1910, I definitely predicted that if there was a real, major revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks would inevitably triumph in it. (Publisher's note: This refers to the article "From the Psychology of the Russian Intelligentsia").
CHAPTER VI
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM AND THE REVOLUTION
1.
The Russian revolution is universalistic in its principles, like every great revolution; it was carried out under the symbolism of the International, yet it is also profoundly national and is becoming increasingly nationalized in its results. The difficulty in judging communism is determined precisely by its dual character, both Russian and international. Only in Russia could a communist revolution have occurred. Russian communism must appear to people of the West as an Asian communism. And it is unlikely that a communist revolution of this kind is possible in the countries of Western Europe; there, of course, everything will be different. The very internationalism of the Russian communist revolution is purely Russian, national. I am inclined to think that even the active participation of Jews in Russian communism is very characteristic of Russia and the Russian people. Russian messianism is akin to Jewish messianism.
Lenin was a typically Russian person. In his characteristic, expressive face, there was something Russian-Mongolian. In Lenin's character, there were typically Russian traits, and not specifically of the intelligentsia, but of the Russian people: simplicity, wholeness, a certain coarseness, a dislike for embellishment and rhetoric, practicality of thought, a tendency towards nihilistic cynicism on a moral basis. In some respects, he resembles the same Russian type that found genius expression in L. Tolstoy, although he did not possess Tolstoy's complexity of inner life.
Lenin is made from a single piece; he is monolithic. The role of Lenin is a remarkable demonstration of the role of the personality in historical events. Lenin could become the leader of the revolution and realize his long-developed plan because he was not a typical Russian intellectual. In him, the traits of the Russian intellectual-sectarian were combined with the traits of the Russian people who gathered and built the Russian state. He combined in himself the traits of Chernyshevsky, Nechaev, Tkachev, Zhelyabov with the traits of the Grand Princes of Moscow, Peter the Great, and Russian statesmen of the despotic type. This is the originality of his physiognomy. Lenin was a maximalist revolutionary and a statesman. He combined in himself the ultimate maximalism of the revolutionary idea, a totalitarian revolutionary worldview, with flexibility and opportunism in the means of struggle, in practical politics. Only such people succeed and triumph. He combined in himself simplicity, directness, and nihilistic asceticism with cunning, almost with craftiness. In Lenin, there was nothing of the revolutionary bohemia, which he could not stand. In this, he is the opposite of people like Trotsky or Martov, the leader of the left wing of the Mensheviks.
In his personal life, Lenin loved order and discipline, was a good family man, loved to sit at home and work, did not like the endless disputes in cafes to which the Russian radical intelligentsia was so inclined. There was nothing anarchic in him, and he could not stand anarchism, whose reactionary character he always exposed. He could not stand revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary phrase-mongering. Being the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, the leader of Soviet Russia, he constantly exposed these traits in the communist milieu. He denounced communist conceit and communist lying. He rebelled against the "infantile disorder of leftism" in the communist party. In 1918, when Russia was threatened by chaos and anarchy, in his speeches Lenin made superhuman efforts to discipline the Russian people and the communists themselves. He called for elementary things: for labor, for discipline, for responsibility, for knowledge and learning, for positive construction, and not just destruction; he denounced revolutionary phrase-mongering, exposed anarchic tendencies; he performed genuine incantations over the abyss. And he stopped the chaotic disintegration of Russia, stopped it by a despotic, tyrannical path. In this, there is a trait of similarity with Peter.
Lenin preached a cruel policy, but personally he was not a cruel man. He did not like it when people complained to him about the cruelties of the Cheka, said that it was not his business, that it was inevitable in a revolution. But he himself probably could not have run the Cheka. In his personal life, he had much good nature. He loved animals, loved to joke and laugh, touchingly cared for his wife's mother, to whom he often gave gifts. This trait gave Malaparte a reason to characterize him as a petty bourgeois, which is not entirely accurate.* In his youth, Lenin revered Plekhanov, treated him almost with reverence, and awaited his first meeting with Plekhanov with passionate excitement.** The disappointment in Plekhanov, in whom he saw petty traits of self-love, ambition, a prideful and contemptuous attitude towards comrades, was for Lenin a disappointment in people in general. But the first impulse that determined Lenin's revolutionary attitude towards the world and life was the execution of his brother, implicated in a terrorist affair. Lenin's father was a provincial official who rose to the rank of general and nobility. When his brother was executed for a political case, the surrounding society turned away from Lenin's family. This was also a disappointment in people for the young Lenin. He developed a cynically indifferent attitude towards people. He did not believe in man, but wanted to organize life so that it would be easier for people to live, so that there would be no oppression of man by man. In philosophy, in art, in spiritual culture, Lenin was a very backward and elementary man; he had the tastes and sympathies of people from the 1860s and 70s of the last century. He combined social revolutionaryness with spiritual reactionism.
Lenin insisted on the original, nationally distinctive character of the Russian revolution. He always said that the Russian revolution would not be as the doctrinaires of Marxism imagined it. By this, he always introduced a corrective to Marxism. And he constructed the theory and tactics of the Russian revolution and realized it. He accused the Mensheviks of a pedantic adherence to Marxism and an abstract transfer of its principles onto Russian soil. Lenin is not a theorist of Marxism, like Plekhanov, but a theorist of revolution. Everything he wrote was merely the development of the theory and practice of revolution. He never developed a program; he was interested in only one topic, which least of all interested Russian revolutionaries—the topic of seizing power, of acquiring the strength for it. That is why he triumphed. Lenin's entire worldview was adapted to the technique of revolutionary struggle. He alone, in advance, long before the revolution, thought about what would happen when power was conquered, how to organize power. Lenin is an imperialist, not an anarchist. All his thinking was imperialistic, despotic. This is connected with the straightforwardness, the narrowness of his worldview, the concentration on one thing, the poverty and asceticism of his thought, the elementary nature of the slogans addressed to the will. The type of Lenin's culture was not high; much was inaccessible and unknown to him. Any refinement of thought and spiritual life repelled him. He read a lot, studied a lot, but he did not have extensive knowledge, he did not have a great intellectual culture. He acquired knowledge for a specific purpose, for struggle and action. He had no capacity for contemplation. He knew Marxism well and had some knowledge of economics. In philosophy, he read exclusively for struggle, for settling scores with heresies and deviations in Marxism. To expose Mach and Avenarius, with whom the Bolshevik Marxists Bogdanov and Lunacharsky were infatuated, Lenin read a whole philosophical literature. But he had no philosophical culture, less than Plekhanov. All his life he fought for a holistic, totalitarian worldview, which was necessary for the struggle, which was supposed to concentrate revolutionary energy. From this totalitarian system, he did not allow a single brick to be removed; he demanded the acceptance of the whole thing entirely. And from his point of view, he was right. He was right that the infatuation with Avenarius and Mach or Nietzsche violated the integrity of the Bolshevik worldview and weakened it in the struggle. He fought for integrity and consistency in the struggle; it is impossible without a holistic, dogmatic creed, without orthodoxy. He demanded consciousness and organization in the struggle against all spontaneity. This is his main motive. And he allowed all means for the struggle, for achieving the goals of the revolution. For him, good was everything that served the revolution, evil was everything that hindered it. Lenin's revolutionary spirit had a moral source; he could not bear injustice, oppression, exploitation. But having become obsessed with a maximalist revolutionary idea, he ultimately lost the immediate distinction between good and evil, lost the immediate relation to living people, allowing deception, lies, violence, and cruelty. Lenin was not a bad man; there was also much good in him. He was a disinterested man, absolutely devoted to the idea; he was not even a particularly ambitious or power-hungry man; he thought little of himself. But the exclusive obsession with one idea led to a terrible narrowing of consciousness and to a moral transformation, to the admission of completely immoral means in the struggle. Lenin was a man of fate, a fatal man; in this lies his strength.
Lenin was a revolutionary to the core precisely because all his life he professed and defended a holistic, totalitarian worldview and did not allow any violations of this integrity. Hence also the passion and ferocity, incomprehensible at first glance, with which he fought against the slightest deviations from what he saw as Marxist orthodoxy. He demands orthodox views, consistent with the totality of the worldview—that is, revolutionary views on cognition, on matter, on dialectics, etc.—from anyone who considers himself a Marxist, who wants to serve the cause of social revolution. If you are not a dialectical materialist, if in purely philosophical, epistemological questions you prefer the views of Mach, then you are betraying totalitarian, holistic revolutionary spirit and must be excluded. When Lunacharsky tried to speak of god-seeking and god-building, although it was of a completely atheistic character, Lenin furiously attacked Lunacharsky, who belonged to the Bolshevik faction. Lunacharsky introduced complication into the holistic Marxist worldview; he was not a dialectical materialist; that was enough for his excommunication. Let the Mensheviks have the same ultimate ideal as Lenin, let them also be devoted to the working class, but they lack wholeness, they are not totalitarian in their attitude towards the revolution. They complicated the matter with talk that in Russia a bourgeois revolution was needed first, that socialism was realizable only after a period of capitalist development, that one must wait for the development of the working class's consciousness, that the peasantry is a reactionary class, etc. The Mensheviks also did not attach particular importance to a holistic worldview, to the obligatory profession of dialectical materialism; some of them were ordinary positivists and even, which was completely terrible, Neo-Kantians, i.e., they clung to "bourgeois" philosophy. All this weakened the revolutionary will. For Lenin, Marxism is first and foremost a doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Mensheviks, however, considered the dictatorship of the proletariat impossible in an agricultural, peasant country. The Mensheviks wanted to be democrats, wanted to rely on the majority. Lenin is not a democrat; he asserts not the principle of the majority, but the principle of a selected minority. Therefore, he was often accused of Blanquism. He built a plan for the revolution and the revolutionary seizure of power, not relying at all on the development of the consciousness of the vast masses of workers and on the objective economic process. The dictatorship flowed from Lenin's entire worldview; he even built his worldview in application to the dictatorship. He asserted dictatorship even in philosophy, demanding the dictatorship of dialectical materialism over thought.
*See the talented book by J. Malaparte: "Le bonhomme Lеnine".
** See the "Jubilee Collection on Lenin".
Бердяев английский перевод Истоки и смысл русского
© Copyright: Владимир Васильевич Хлынинъ, 2025
Свидетельство о публикации №225102000217
Свидетельство о публикации №225102000217
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