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
The first, and perhaps the most important, of the Russian religious philosophers was V. Solovev, who asserted that in modern times the divine spirit lay rather with unbelievers than with believers. Solovev, of course, was never a supporter of the Russian autocracy and his ideas can properly be called the Christian justification of the political opponents of the official Orthodox state. Solovev’s attitude to the socialists was very contradictory, but he considered it impossible either to denounce them (they were right to attack modern capitalism) or to unite with them (they put forward a positive programme which was unacceptable to him).76 From this one can easily conclude that whether or not the political ideas of the Lefts were correct, Solovev’s philosophy justified destructive activity directed against the old order. According to his logic the Narodovoltsy, the Marxists and all those atheistic socialists were bearers of the divine spirit. Consequently, even the terrorist acts of the Social-Revolutionaries could be justified morally. True, Solovev did not draw that conclusion, but Merezhkovsky did it for him. A present-day Soviet thinker of the ‘new right’, M. Agursky (who is probably the most profound theoretician of that tendency) was quite justified, in his own way, when he remarked maliciously that ‘Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Hippius rejected Bolshevism, without recognizing that it was their own godchild.’77
In Merezhkovsky’s opinion, the revolution had to come down from the sociopolitical plane ‘into the religious depths, which, however, include that plane as well, just as the third dimension includes the second.’78 Political emancipation must be combined with spiritual, religious renewal — that was Merezhkovsky’s basic idea, which determined his political sympathies and antipathies and explains his disagreement with the subsequent Bolshevik revolution, which was absolutely alien to the Christian renaissance. However, was not the Bolshevik ideology itself a peculiar sort of atheist or, rather, anti-God religiosity? ‘Up to now,’ wrote Merezhkovsky, ‘revolution has been the religion of the Russian intelligentsia. It is not a long step from this to religion becoming revolution.’79 Something like that did happen, perhaps, but the only revolutionary religiosity proved, in practice, to be the atheistic variety.80 Was Merezhkovsky mistaken, though, in his prophecies? Perhaps in this case, too, he ‘failed to recognize his own godchild’?
We can appreciate the difficulties of official Soviet historians of social thought when they try to depict such pronouncements as ‘reactionary’. In the end, for example, V.A. Kuvakin,81 in his book on Russian religious philosophy published by the Mysl' publishing house, is obliged to write: ‘In the period when it came into being, the “new religious consciousness” represented a conservative camp only in the person of V. Rozanov.’82 The specific nature of Kuvakin’s language, of course, enables him to speak of a whole ‘camp’ consisting of one man. But it becomes clear that in this case, too, one cannot get by without a reservation, since Rozanov ‘was close to Merezhkovsky in some points of his modernistic religious programme’.83 Actually, Rozanov’s religious utopianism was to a large extent simply outside the realm of politics. He could be called conservative, or even reactionary, only if he had not been so remote from life. Rozanov’s dream was to ‘extinguish the political bonfire’ completely,84 not to bring about the triumph of any particular political ideas. His immediate interests lay in another direction altogether — the field of religious reform. Furthermore, his criticism of the official Church (and even of Christianity itself) was radical enough to create a fairly large audience for him among the Russian intelligentsia.