The Thinking Reed

While the Christian world marched on majestically along the road marked out for it by its divine Creator, carrying along generations, we, although called Christians, stuck to our place. The entire world was being rebuilt, while we built nothing: as before, we hibernated in our hovels built of logs and straw.33

Berdyaev wrote that ‘Chaadaev came out decidedly as a Westernizer, and his Westernism was a cry of patriotic anguish.’34 The author of the ‘philosophical letters’ already felt keenly that he was standing at the frontier of two worlds, unable either to accept Russia completely or to reject her. ‘His rejection of Russia, of Russia’s history,’ Berdyaev comments, ‘was a typically Russian rejection.’35

With Chaadaev begins the development of ‘Westernist’ thought in Russia, and at the same time the spiritual history of the Russian intelligent. He it was who first asked the questions to which Belinsky and Gogol, Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky, Martov and Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin, Lakshin and Solzhenitsyn were to give their different answers, questions which are to this day debated fiercely: What was, is and will be Russia’s role in Europe? What is the road to the Europeanization of Russia? The Westernists were not merely men who had had a European education. Their interest in the West led them to master quickly all the innovations of European thought, so that the Russian intelligentsia was undoubtedly the bearer of the most up-to-date and advanced Western ideas in a very backward semi-Asiatic country. This only intensified its tragic isolation.

Different thinkers evaluated differently their isolation from the people. On the one hand, as V. Polonsky noted, ‘its isolation in battle positions’ gave the intelligentsia grounds for

feeling that it was the sole bearer of advanced, progressive missions for the nation, the defender of the interests of the oppressed people, and their leader. The very deep conviction of the Russian intelligentsia that its destiny was to be the teacher and guide of the masses was given brilliant expression in Russian literature.36

We can find this idea in many thinkers, starting with Herzen, but it was expressed with special clarity by the young Lenin when he wrote in his book What Is To Be Done? that the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat can be elaborated only by the intelligentsia and then ‘brought to them from without’.37 At that time Lenin said that ‘the intelligentsia are so called just because they most consciously, most resolutely and most accurately reflect and express the development of class interests and political groupings in society as a whole.’38 Plekhanov even blamed Lenin for such statements, saying that for him ‘the masses are merely inanimate raw material, upon which the intelligentsia, signed with the seal of the sacrament of the Holy Ghost, carries out its operations.’39