Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellectual Background PDF
Preview Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellectual Background
RELIGION, REVOLUTION AND THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA, 1900-1912 Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia 1900-1912 The Vekhi Debate and its Intellectual Background Christopher Read Lecturer in History University rif Warwick © Christopher Read 1979 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1St edition 1979 978-0-333-24005-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1979 ~Y THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Read, Christopher Religion, revolution and the Russian intelligentsia 1900-1912 I. Revolutionists-Russia 2. Intellectuals- Russia 3. Russia-History-Nicholas II, 1894-1917 4. Intellectuals - Russia - Religious life I. Title 322-4'2'0947 DK253 ISBN 978-1-349-03896-1 ISBN 978-1-349-03894-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03894-7 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER Contents Acknowledgements IX Introduction I. PART I THE INTELLIGENTSIA AND RELIGION I I I. Religious belief among the intelligentsia 13 Philosophical liberalism 15 The new religious consciousness 24 2. Philosophy and the revolutionaries 40 3· Religious revolutionaries 57 Christian anarchism and Christian socialism 59 Social democracy as a religion 77 PART II THE INTELLIGENTSIA AND REVOLUTION 96 4. Critics of the revolutionary intelligentsia 97 The conservatives 98 Vekhi (Landmarks) 106 The creative intelligentsia and revolution: artistic critics of the intelligentsia tradition 121 5. Defenders of the revolutionary tradition 141 6. A continuing debate 162 Conclusion 1 74 Appendix Chronological table of main sources 181 vii Vlll Religion and Revolution in Russia, 1900-1912 Bibliography 199 A. Works in Russian 199 B. Works in other languages 214 Index 217 Acknowledgements I would like to record my thanks to some of the many people who gave me advice, encouragement, support and assistance at vital stages in my work. I am indebted to Professor D. Nicholl and Professor E. Lampert who diverted my initial enthusiasm for Russian studies into realistic channels; to Professor A. Nove, Mr J. D. White and Mr M. Dewhirst for invaluable assistance in the early stages; to Professor L. Schapiro and Dr N. Andreev for generous help, encouragement and criticism as my work took on a fuller shape, and to the personnel of the exchanges branch of the British Council, without whose assistance the accumulation of material for this book would have been impossible. I would also like to thank Ms Annabel Yarrow for turning my hieroglyphics into a high-quality typescript, and Mrs Y. Slater who typed the final version. Even such excellent help will not have been enough to eliminate all the mistakes arising from my own fallibility, and, of course, I assume full responsibility for all errors of fact and of judgement in the pages which follow. Christopher Read Warwick December 1978 ix Introduction Of the major European powers only Russia had an 'intelligentsia question'. Elsewhere, wrote the literary critic and historian of the intelligentsia D. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky in 1908 there was dis cussion of science, politics, philosophy and art; in Russia there was only discussion of the nature of the intelligentsia.l The purpose of this study is to examine the parameters of this discussion in one of its last and most intense phases, that which occurred at the time of the attempted revolution of 1905. In view of the unfamiliarity of, first, the concept of an 'intelligentsia' as it was understood in Russia and, second, the context of this last outburst of the debate, it is necessary to make a few preliminary remarks, though this in itselfis difficult in that the answers to the preliminary questions about the in telligentsia are the stuff of the debate itself and to give a full answer would pre-empt all that follows. The complex questions of pinpointing the origin and defining the essential characteristics of the intelligentsia have never been answered to everyone's satisfaction. There are almost as many solutions as there are discussants of the question. However, certain elements are fundamental to any definition. The first of these is that all intelligenry possessed a deep concern for the social question and some degree of identification with the poor and oppressed of Russia. Since it would be wrong to assume that only liberals and radicals felt this way - Tsar Nicholas II, for example, often expressed in his letters a sympathy for and a naive beliefin the innate benevolence of the peasantry - this criterion has to be modified by a second. The intelligent invariably had a critical and, to some extent, hostile attitude towards the government and in particular to its handling of the social question. The degree of hostility could vary from mild to violent and the opposition could be partial or total, but a feeling that the political and social structure as it then existed was fundamentally unjust and indefensible was shared by all intelligenry. In order to differentiate intelligentsia opposition from other more spontaneous outbursts which were occurring regularly in villages 2 Religion and Revolution in Russia, 19oo-l912 and cities, it is necessary to add a third criterion: self-consciousness or articulation of the feeling of hostility. In most cases this quality pre-supposed an advanced formal education but this in itself was not essential. Many commentators emphasised that an unlettered peasant could be an intelligent ifhe possessed a reflective turn of mind and was able to express himself verbally. The best known examples of this type are various peasants whom Tolstoy knew and com municated with who became models for his philosopher-peasant Platon Karataev in War and Peace. Thus one cannot assume that all intelligenry were university graduates or former students any more than one can use the opposite definition, that all graduates were intelligenry. This last sociological definition has been taken up in the Soviet Union but was not in the minds of any intelligent in the late nineteenth century. It is essentially a western European Marxist definition of the class of mental labourers and was imported into Russia in the early twentieth century. Since the revolution this definition has become the only one used in Soviet discussions and the earlier sense of the word has been officially obliterated. In essence, these criteria give a picture which the Russian intelligentsia liked to have of itself as the voice of the inchoate, oppressed masses. It will be noted that even the most rigorous critics of the intelligentsia from within its own ranks did not question this role, but argued that the intelligentsia as it was then constituted was incapable of fulfilling it. Thus, to all intelligenry, this self-ascribed role was the decisive element, though it could be fulfilled in very different ways. One can find, to a greater or lesser degree, signs of the role in the works of individuals as diverse as Radishchev, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Lenin, not all of whom would have felt comfortable being called intelligenry. For this reason, even a definition that an intelligent was someone who considered himself to be an intelligent has its limitations. For instance, Lenin is by all objective criteria a good example of one particular strand of the intelligentsia, but no one was more contemptuous than he of the intelligentsia as a whole. No simple formula has proved acceptable as a general definition ofthe Russian intelligentsia. Lavrov's 'critically thinking people' is loose enough to include, without too much strain, some of the relatively enlightened government ministers such as Witte and even the arch-reactionary Pobedonostsev was nothing if not a critically thinking person, even though the object of his criticism was democracy. The later populist definition of the intelligentsia as the
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