The Thinking Reed

The fact is that it was rather difficult to see Vekhi as a manifesto of the Cadet party, and Lenin himself acknowledged that on the whole the programme of Vekhi was similar to that of the conservative ‘October 17th’ Party. But precisely the fact that Struve and the other contributors to Vekhi belonged to the Cadets showed, according to Lenin, that there was no great difference between the liberals and the conservatives. This view can be more or less justified where the right-wing Cadet politicians were concerned but not in relation to the Left-Cadet intelligentsia, upon whom Lenin fell no less vigorously than did the Vekhi contributors themselves (with this difference only: that the Left-Cadet intelligenty were for Struve almost Bolsheviks, whereas for Lenin they were almost conservatives). ‘The Cadet polemic with Vekhi’, he wrote, ‘and the Cadet renunciation of Vekhi are nothing but hypocrisy, sheer idle talk.’108

In fact, however, the Left Cadets were arguing with Vekhi about essential matters. They wrote that the 1905 Revolution, despite its failure, had helped the country to progress and one could not talk of the bankruptcy of the Russian intelligentsia who had prepared the revolution, for in 1905 the gap between the intelligentsia and the people had been closed for the first time. The people had supported the ideas of the intelligentsia. ‘The autocracy’, wrote N.A. Gredeskul, ‘is now consciously “rejected” in Russia not by the intelligentsia alone (as had been the case before 1904–1905) but also by the people as a whole. The brunt of the fight against the absolutism is borne no longer by the intelligentsia but by the people.’109

The tragic gap between the ideologues and the masses had been overcome; the prophecy had been fulfilled: ‘The nation has been spiritually reborn, or, more correctly, only now has it come to spiritual birth.’110 This crisis of the movement was a crisis of growth. Vekhi anticipated in grotesque fashion the present official propaganda which accuses the oppositionist intelligentsia of ‘renegacy’ from the state and the generally accepted ideology, and also of ‘cosmopolitanism’.111

From the standpoint of the Lefts there was nothing reprehensible in being, in those days, ‘isolated from the people’, from the ‘soil’ which was not yet ready for their work of liberation: ‘In Russia the clash between the thinking of the intelligentsia and popular tradition had a special character not because our evolution was irregular or immoral but because the heresy of the intelligentsia found the masses at too low a level of development.’112 Milyukov observed that by condemning ‘nihilism’ the Vekhi contributors had themselves acted towards the tradition of the intelligentsia as ‘real “nihilists”’.113

The Cadets’ onslaught on Vekhi was no less furious than Lenin’s. They refused even to have discussions with the contributors themselves:

Where is there any battle of ideas here, when they proclaim that we are moral lepers? Is it appropriate to talk of a battle of ideas when they preach to us humility, repentance and renunciation of our errors? This is more in the nature of a sermon, but would it not be better to leave that sort of thing to the Church?114

By their action the contributors to Vekhi had put themselves outside the ranks of the Russian intelligentsia. Essentially, their task was doomed from the start because the ideology of the intelligentsia was already fully formed and could not be remade by a series of articles. Theoretical questions, wrote Tompkins, had already ‘given way to practical ones, so that the effort of Struve to turn the clock back and reexamine the ideology was quite useless.’115 Ideas for which generations of Russian revolutionaries had gone to penal servitude and to the gallows could not be simply disaffirmed. ‘Neither the “God-seekers” nor the “God-builders”,’ wrote K.K. Arsen'ev, ‘were able to rouse any broad, deep movement. None of them spoke “a word to set men’s hearts on fire”.’116 Berdyaev, too, acknowledged this failure when he said that the preaching of Vekhi had ‘no influence on the wide circles of Russian society’.117