God Before Food: Philosophy, Russian Style
By CARLIN ROMANO
In 1922, a year of living dictatorishly, Lenin devoted astonishing time to handpicking intellectuals to be exiled from Russia. In missives to underlings, including a go-getter named Joseph Stalin, he railed against these “bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they’re the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not the brains, they’re the shit.” He told Stalin in a note, “We are going to cleanse Russia once and for all.” An earlier Bolshevik poster already showed Lenin sweeping enemies from the globe over the caption, “Comrade Lenin cleanses the filth from the land.”
Lenin altered the law to permit external exile of the regime’s purported reactionary foes. That outdid the czars, since the state previously had transported enemies only to Siberia and the like. Lenin also mandated that police shoot exiles on sight if they returned to Russia. But he didn’t want to shoot them right away Western opinion still mattered then.
Like so much else horrific in Russian history, the foul strategy came to pass, abetted by Trotsky and others. Eighty-five years ago this month, on August 16 and 17, the regime arrested scores of intellectuals. On two other dates, September 28 and November 16, the GPU (secret police) ushered more than 60 Russian intellectuals and their families onto German cruise ships in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd). The September ship was the Oberbürgermeister Haken, the November ship, the Preussen. Involuntary passengers included the great Christian existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev, the philosophers Semyon Frank and Nikolai Lossky, and the literary critic Yuly Aikhenvald, who had translated Schopenhauer into Russian.
Each deportee could take two suitcases of clothes. No books, jewelry, or icons. Several thinkers used the weeks before shipping out to mourn their libraries. One picked mushrooms in the forest, a traditional Russian form of meditation, before turning himself in. The ships sailed off into the Gulf of Finland and took their intelligenty into exile, mainly to Berlin, Prague, and Paris, where they joined other refugees in the Russian diaspora that came to be known as “Russia Abroad.”
Some deportees on the “philosophy steamers” believed or hoped desperately that they’d soon be back in Russia. But Semyon Frank’s wife spotted her husband on deck, crying, “I’ll never see my homeland again.” A few, like Berdyaev, became internationally famous. Most died without returning, and many barely survived financially. One Berlin émigré compared himself to a moth: “First I eat my trousers, then I eat my jacket.”
Consider them all lucky. Within a few years, Stalin replaced Lenin, and bullets and labor camps replaced ship tickets.
In Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (St. Martin’s Press), British cultural critic Lesley Chamberlain brings us a much-needed account, the only one in English, of this shameful moment in Russian history. She caustically calls the exiles on the steamers “the first dissidents from Soviet totalitarianism,” though the Soviet Union didn’t come into existence until months later. With them, she says, departed a fair share of “cultural decency and intellectual independence.”
Most of the intellectuals could not fairly be classified as reactionaries. Many shared Lenin’s anti-czarist spirit. They’d openly confronted the czar at home and in some cases served prison time while Lenin safely plotted from abroad. Nor were they just philosophers. Lenin targeted lawers, engineers, historians, theologians, and more, even ordering a detailed investigation into “anti-Soviet professors of the Archaeological Institute.” For the most part, his victims talked like Silver Age liberals and Christian socialists, not hostile White Russian anti-Bolsheviks.
To understand this event properly, we fortunately have Chamberlain and the U.S. release this summer of not just Lenin’s Private War, published in Britain last year, but also her Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia (Overlook/Rookery), which came out in Britain in 2004. If Chamberlain didn’t exist, students of Russian intellectual life couldn’t invent her. She’s too outside-the-box in her career, prose, and nervy insights (such as that Russia’s Silver Age “threw up interesting prefigurations of Western postmodernism”). Together the books provide an overview of a philosophical tradition most Western professors in the discipline hardly know. Motherland unpacks the conceptual tensions that led to 1922, making intelligible her later book’s bitter tale of a rationalist, Communist government turning on its best and brightest idealists.
Isaiah Berlin declared that Russia possessed “thinkers, but not eminent philosophers.” Chamberlain rightly blames his singular prestige for the notion that all such thinkers amounted to mere “magi of the steppes.” To be sure, she notes, Russian philosophy largely eschews systematic approaches. And Pyotr Chaadaev (1794-1856) famously deemed Russians “rather careless about what was true and what was false.” But Russian philosophy also displays distinctive assets along its anti-Cartesian, pro-Pascalian path.
It’s always engagé, fiercely concerned with the communal welfare of Russia, even as it favors the individual’s personal dignity and autonomy. Russian philosophy’s chief problem is “how to reconcile individuality with selflessness.” It is notoriously nonacademic, doable by novelists, journalists, or priests. It ponders the “good” or “rounded” person, how he or she ought to live, and resembles a kind of moral calling or “springboard to immediate practical action” on the part of justice-seekers who believe in “adapting truth to hope.” (Chamberlain argues that this bent continued till the end of the Soviet Union.) No wonder Czar Nicholas I ordered all philosophy departments shut down in 1826.
At its core, as in Dostoyevsky’s novels, Russian philosophy skews counter-Enlightenment and idealist, looking like “a branch of German philosophy” in its infatuation with Kant and Hegel. It’s highly skeptical of an instrumentalist, technocrat approach to life that scants emotion and spontaneity. (Berdyaev ordained rationalism “the original sin of almost all European philosophy.”) In a peculiarly Russian way, it anticipates the ever-present possibility of chaos in human life. Moreover, it’s congenitally unable to separate itself from Orthodox Christian mysticism, except when it swings the opposite way to Western, utopian, scientific reason (which played out in both the liberal humanism of Alexander Herzen and Lenin’s ruthless police state). It is always impassioned about ideas, as in Belinsky’s famous rebuke of Turgenev, reproduced in Tom Stoppard’s play The Coast of Utopia: “We haven’t yet solved the problem of God, and you want to eat!”
Lenin’s activist attention to philosophers pleases as it chills, since it confirms the immense importance of the enterprise in Russia. Although the Marxist messiah informed Gorky that “I am not a philosopher,” he still assaulted his ideological enemies with the 1908 publication of Materialism and Empirio-criticism, a treatise Chamberlain eviscerates. He took his materialist, atheist ideas seriously and would brook no opposition to them after winning the Russian civil war. He aimed to crush the metaphysical, idealist, intropective philosophers he perceived as his enemies, labeling them all “reactionaries.” Chamberlain recovers the varied colors of the 1922 deportees: “libertarians, patriots, nationalists, Christian socialists, cooperatists, European-style Social Democrats. … “
Despite her lack of a chair in Russian studies, Chamberlain refuses to just report. A former Reuters correspondent in Moscow who is well versed in German philosophy and literature, she insists, in Motherland and Lenin’s Private War, on making critical sense of her amorphous subject. She emphasizes that the “philosophy steamer” episode must weigh against the once-common notion that Stalin, not Lenin, created Communist totalitarianism. In fact, Lenin launched the non-czarist suppression of dissent, the attempt “to destroy individual conscience and human inwardness,” which we see reviving in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Though secular herself, she rejects the “quiet support for Lenin’s rationalism” that led some Western historians to pull punches on his autocratic policies, while suggesting that an unsuppressed Christian Orthodox idealism might have softened his tactics.
Whatever one’s cavils about Chamberlain’s take on Russian philosophy, such as the limited importance she gives to the concept of dusha, or “soul,” her twin studies form a gateway to a wrongly marginalized “Otherland” of European thought. Chamberlain pokes, provokes, and evokes a holy trinity of merits in intellectual history and criticism.
For the 2003 World Congress of Philosophy, the Russian Philosophical Society rented a ship to take its participants to Istanbul, the site of that year’s event. While docked there, the ship served as both a nightclub for partying and a wry thumb in the eye of Soviet history.
“It’s our way of mocking and reviling the past,” one Russian philosopher confided. And yet, on that ship, one could still spot several commissars of the Soviet philosophy establishment who’d retained their power slots and do so today having carefully sidled from late Brezhnev, through perestroika, glasnost, and oligarch-capitalism, to the oppressive “vertical power” of today’s Kremlin.
Which raises the most chilling aspect of Lenin’s Private War: how the years 1920-22 resemble 2003-7. Slow but steady elimination of all opposition media. Obstruction of fair elections. Murders of prominent critics of the regime. Creation of a propaganda-fed youth group. Imposition of slanted educational texts. Criminalization of dissent. Concentration of power in the hands of one tough guy at the top.
Memo to Russian philosophers: Hang on to your life jackets.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.