Nevertheless, Vekhi gave rise to a serious polemic. The Social-Revolutionaries and the Cadets even published two symposia in reply.104 Lenin wrote a special article ‘Concerning Vekhi’. It must be said that he used the appearance of Vekhi to compromise the Cadet Party, to which its authors belonged. Consequently, he did not so much argue against the ideas expressed in the symposium as denounce the Cadet Party, calling it ‘the party of Vekhi’ with a criminal connection with the authors of that book, which the Cadets themselves disowned in every possible way.105 Lenin had a poor understanding of the essence of the dispute and did not even discuss it, declaring that ‘it is not the intelligentsia that Vekhi is attacking. This is only an artificial and misleading manner of expression.’106 In his own way he was even glad about the publication of Vekhi, for Berdyaev, Bulgakov and Struve unknowingly helped him considerably in his fight against Russian liberalism by discrediting their own party: ‘working-class democrats should welcome Vekhi.’107
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
The Vekhi writers were wrong, but the optimism of the Left was also premature. After 1905 they hoped that one more shove would suffice to bring down the old regime, and nobody doubted that what would follow then would be the triumph of freedom. Besides, could it have been known beforehand that ‘near the end of the play’ the Tsar’s government would get involved in a world war and bring Russia to such a monstrous catastrophe that what would be at stake would be not a transition to democracy but the salvation of the people and the state, the mere survival of society?… In 1910 nobody suspected that, not the Vekhi writers not the Liberals nor the Socialists.
The Vekhi writers suffered not only political defeat (in the sense that the intelligentsia did not follow their lead) but also philosophical defeat. In the last analysis Merezhkovsky was quite right, in his polemic against Vekhi, when he said that the spiritual revolution cannot be separated from the social revolution. In a country where there is no political liberty, spiritual rebirth can come only through a struggle for democracy. And that, in turn, implies that social consciousness must be renewed in forms quite different from those proposed by the ‘God-seekers’ — including Merezhkovsky himself. However, history was to outwit not only the Vekhi writers, the ‘God-seekers’ and the ‘God-builders’, but, as we shall see later, the Bolsheviks as well…