Before the beginning of the twentieth century idealist philosophy was not very popular in intellectual circles. In Vekhi Berdyaev admitted that ‘the Russian intelligentsia did not read or know Solovev: it failed to recognize him as its own.’85 It was Rozanov and Merezhkovsky together who in 1901 made the first attempt to reconcile religion and the intelligentsia, by organizing meetings to discuss religion and philosophy. The aim of such a reconciliation, however, was to bring about a modernization of the Orthodox Church itself, which in its current form could offer no attraction to the intelligentsia. The official Church’s attitude to this initiative was extremely unfriendly, for ‘Orthodox conformism’ came under sharp criticism in these meetings. The intelligenty put questions to the church dignitaries which the latter could not and did not want to answer. ‘These religious and philosophical gatherings were interesting principally for the questions that were asked rather than for the answers that were given,’ Berdyaev recalled.86
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 individuaclass="underline" ‘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
The periodical Voprosy zhizni [Problems of Life], which was published by the idealists in 1905, ‘belonged to the left, the radical school of thought, but it was the first in the history of Russian periodicals to combine that sort of social and political ideas with religious inquiry, with a metaphysical outlook and a new tendency in literature.’92 However, this periodical survived for one year only — amid the turmoil of the first Russian Revolution — and then ceased to appear. ‘In the heat of battle,’ its writers, as Berdyaev himself admitted, ‘often attached insufficient value to that social truth and right which was to be found in the left intelligentsia and which retained its power.’93 This impelled them further and further away from the democratic and socialist line that they had originally proclaimed. In itself the appearance of the Russian idealists was, as I have already said, a logical reaction to positivism and the positivistically treated vulgar Marxism of European Social Democracy. The trouble was that, lacking support from the mass of the intelligentsia, the idealists moved more and more to the right: ‘these cultural and idealist tendencies began to lose their connection with the social revolutionary movement; more and more they lost the broad social standpoint.’94 Later, Berdyaev was to say that this departure from the revolution was ‘fatal’. And it was just this shift to the right, intensified by disappointment with the failure of the 1905 movement, that gave rise to the Vekhi symposium, with its openly reactionary programme. Berdyaev subsequently complained that Vekhi had been misunderstood — that it was not, on the whole, a political act but a ‘struggle for the spirit’ and only through misunderstanding, ‘in accordance with the ancient tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, the struggle for the spirit was taken as reactionary, almost like a betrayal of the struggle for freedom.’95
Nevertheless this interpretation of Vekhi, after the event (in a period when Berdyaev had again become a left-winger, a personalist96 and a Christian socialist) raises doubts. Above all, the tone adopted by all the contributors to Vekhi was extremely aggressive and uncompromising. There were no sins with which they did not charge the intelligentsia. While condemning them, they simultaneously tried to preach to them. ‘There is no word more unpopular in the intelligentsia milieu than the word “humility”,’ complained S. Bulgakov.97 ‘A swarm of sick men isolated in their native land — this is the Russian intelligentsia,’ declared M. Gershenzon.98 ‘The intelligentsia’s consciousness demands radical reform,’ concluded Berdyaev.99 The same idea is developed by Struve, too, when he affirms that ‘it is mandatory that the intelligentsia reexamine its entire world-view, and this includes subjecting its chief buttress to radical re-examination — the socialist repudiation of personal responsibility.. ’100
Not surprisingly, such attacks produced an outburst of indignation within the Russian intelligentsia. Until then such voices had been heard only from the governmental camp and the appearance of Vekhi was regarded as an act of betrayal, as ‘a stab in the back by persons who had always stood in their [the intelligentsia’s] own ranks’.101 The bulk of the intelligentsia repudiated the ‘revisionism’ of Vekhi ‘Opposition to the views of Vekhi’, wrote Leonard Schapiro, ‘was strong not only among the avowed radicals such as the Social-Revolutionaries, the heirs of the nineteenth-century Populists, but even more so among the Kadets, a party with an avowedly liberal programme.’102 The collection of essays by Struve and his friends was reprinted several times, and everyone read it, but only as a ‘scandalous’ book.103