The Thinking Reed

Perhaps the years 1904 and 1905 were the golden age of the Russian intelligentsia, the time when it seemed that all its hopes were being fulfilled and everything it had been fighting for over several generations was being realized. However, the intelligentsia found that it could not act independently in the revolution. ‘There arose even then as a confused idea’, Pokrovsky recalls, ‘the notion of a political strike of the intelligentsia — in the end, the only effective weapon was the one used by the proletariat. But that was not put to use till the working class gave the example of how to use it.’70

The results of the 1905 revolution, which failed to smash the monarchy or even to force it to accept any sort of reasonable constitution (for even the Manifesto of 17 October 1905, which ‘granted’ some political rights to the people, was not put into effect) caused dismay and a real ‘spiritual crisis’ among many Russian intelligenty,71 who asked themselves whether the path they had been following was the right one. This produced a crisis among the left-wing Radicals: to use the expression of an American historian, ‘a crisis of identity’.72

The symposium Vekhi [Waymarks] was first and foremost an expression of this crisis. It was issued by a group of former left-wing Cadets among whom were also men who had done much to propagandize Marxism in Russia — P. Struve, N. Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov and others. The publication of Vekhi was a most important episode in the history of the Russian intelligentsia and of Russian social thought. Essentially, this was the only serious attempt to ‘revise’ the consciousness of the intelligentsia and turn it rightward, breaking it away from the revolution. The unexpectedness and exceptional nature of this attempt focused society’s attention upon Vekhi and made it the centre of a serious political debate. A great deal has been written about Vekhi both then and since, and the problem of Vekhi remains topical to this day for many people of Solzhenitsyn’s type. To understand it, however, one needs to analyse, as Berdyaev did later, the events of those years and to look at the history of Russian idealism.

The question of Russia’s Christian intelligentsia was badly muddled by Lenin, who was quite unwilling to investigate the concrete problems of Russian religious thought, which seemed to him utterly reactionary. He saw ‘traitors’, ‘reactionaries’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’, ‘poltroons’, ‘gasbags’ and ‘layers-out of corpses’ who ‘did not even destroy the monarchy’ in all intellectuals who took up moderate positions in politics.73 The subsequent Soviet-Stalinist interpreters of Lenin aggravated his mistake by declaring all the Christian intellectuals of the early years of this century to be if not direct then indirect supporters of the autocracy (it is interesting that Solzhenitsyn’s admirers usually hold the same view). In reality, however, matters were very much more complicated. The Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century was to a very large extent opposed to the Orthodox Church (and has remained so down to the most recent times); this, however, did not prevent some circles of the Slavophil intelligentsia from taking up arms on behalf of ‘true’ Orthodoxy against the bureaucratic, ‘Petersburg’ Orthodoxy of official Russia. These attempts met with no success.

The religious revival in Russia at the turn of the century was part of a reaction against positivism throughout Europe, which led to the appearance of various forms of philosophical idealism. Moreover, ‘dead positivism’ was regarded, as D. Merezhkoysky put it, as one of the weapons of ‘autocratic conformism’.74 In this situation the religious ideas of the Russian philosophers were not only not ‘reactionary’ but were in the highest degree productive, and their attacks on positivist schemes were in many respects similar to the anti-positivist pronouncements of the latest Western Marxists. Of course, the positivist treatment of Marxism which was widespread in the parties of the Second International could not but become a target of criticism, and it must be admitted that it often failed to stand up to this criticism. At the same time the political views of many ‘mystics and God-seekers’ were, at first, not at all as ‘right-wing’ and ‘reactionary’ as Lenin described them. Recalling the cultural and religious revival of those years, Berdyaev wrote later: ‘There was nothing reactionary in the cultural renaissance of the beginning of this century: many of its active spirits even sympathized very definitely with revolution and socialism.’75