The Thinking Reed

The movement for church reform smacked very definitely of oppositional politics and we are surprised to find that Lenin, contrary to his custom, reacted quite favourably to this liberal ‘new Orthodoxy’ as he called it, a follower of which he saw in the ‘sincere Christian socialist’ G. Gapon.87 In his opinion the

discontent among the clergy, the striving among them after new forms of life… the appearance of Christian Socialists and Christian Democrats… this all serves the purpose of the revolution and creates exceedingly favourable conditions for agitation for the complete separation of the Church from the State. The allies of the revolution, voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious, are growing and multiplying hour by hour.88

Experience showed — and this, evidently evoked Lenin’s enthusiasm — that the call for church reform had a much greater effect among the intellectual or radical circles of the clergy than among members of the intelligentsia themselves. On the whole, the first attempt to reconcile the intelligentsia and religion was not a success. The second attempt — in the same direction, formally, but in essence quite unlike the first — was made by a group of former ‘legal Marxists’ — Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Struve, Izgoev and others — in the symposium Vekhi after the failure of the 1905-07 Revolution, when the intelligentsia’s disappointment had created favourable soil for radical self-criticism.

It was by no means accidental that the authors of Vekhi were former Marxists. The entire evolution of the ideas of Berdyaev and, to a lesser extent, of his co-authors testifies to this. At first they launched a critique against the Social Democrats which cannot be dismissed as lacking foundation. They attacked the Russian Socialists for their vulgar materialism, for their scorning of spiritual values, for their insufficient interest in the individual: ‘Neither soul nor body should be affirmed,’ wrote Berdyaev in 1905, ‘but the individual as a whole and the distinctiveness of his being.’89 Without suspecting this himself, he was here almost repeating the basic idea of the young Marx. He could not have known that, because the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 had not then been published either in Russian or in German.90 Nevertheless, it must be admitted that twentieth-century Russian (and not only Russian) idealism owed much to Marxism. It was no accident that the greatest representatives of idealist dialectics in our century, Croce and Berdyaev, were men who had been trained as Marxists. It was through Marx that they came to know Hegel’s dialectic which, had it not survived in the setting of Marxism, would have been completely ousted from the scientific method of the positivists. Berdyaev never denied his link with Marx: ‘However strange it may be at first sight, yet it is actually Marxism — at first critical rather than orthodox Marxism — which has supplied us with an idealist, and later on a religious current of thought.’91