William Van Den Bercken

William van den Bercken CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIALISM IN RUSSIA ��â THE FIRST ENCOUNTER Unlike in the West, the Soviet Union has never seen a dialogue between marxism and christianity. The communist party has always rejected such an encounter and the churches have never feit the need. Despite the political- patriotic support it has given the state, the Russian Orthodox Church has always guarded against any marxist ideological influence on Christian theology. Nor have there been any intellectual dialogues between a party ideologist and a believer. Not merely because such an exchange could not be published, but also because of the Soviet Union's dearth of original marxist thinkers. Moreover, marxism is ignored by Christian writers, even in samlzdatl publica- tions. One explanation for the lack of intellectual contact between marxism and christianity could be that church and party know quite well that the two Weltanschauungen are incompatible. Cooperation is possible on the practical, political level, especially because marxism in Russia is primarily a statist ideology. But as long as state and party formally harbour the scientific illusion of marxism, christians can have no illusions about the two world views sharing a common philosophical basis. It can be no coincidence that in the country where marxism had the monopoly of Weltanschauung Christian thought and ideas are being rediscovered and taken up with a degree of receptiveness no longer met with in the secularised West. The spiritual divide came early in Russia, well before the 1917 revolution. In 1909, a book of collected articles was püblished under the title Vekhi, meaning 'Signposts' or 'Landmarks'.2 In it, the seven contributing authors distance themselves from Russian socialism. At this time marxism is one of the two political streams in Russian socialism; the other being populism, an ideology 1 For an explanation of the word saeizdat see next article, p.39. Vekhi, sbornik statey o Russkoy intelligentsia, Moskva 1909 (2-e izd.). Reprint: Posev, Frankfurt a.M., 1967. An English translation appeared in 1977 in New York: Landearks, a collection of essays on the Russian intelligentsia, transl. by M. Schwarz, ed. by B. Shragin and A. Todd. Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 02:43:15PM via free access born in the sixties and seventies of the previous century. In terms of political ideologies, populism was a native Russian form of socialism (Herzen, Cher- nyshevski, Lavrov, Mikhailovski); but philosophically it was strongly influenced by western materialist thinkers like Feuerbach, Compte, Darwin and Mill. Plekhanov and Lenin, the founding fathers of Russian marxism were also philosophically steeped in the materialist tradition of the 19th century. Despite the political differences between populism and marxism, both revolutionary movements in Russia shared the same materialist Weltanschauungwith all the implications for the image of man, ethics and the concept of truth. In fact the entire progressive Russian intelligentsia of the time adhered to the materialist Weltanschauung, and traditionally they kept far away from christianity and religion. This outlook took as lead a natural link between progress, socialism and atheism. And it was this intellectual position to which the Vekhi writers, themselves former adherents of marxism, were opposed. Vekhi's philosophical-ethical critique of Russian socialism anticipates today's ethical discussion in the Soviet Union. One cannot help being struck by the continued freshness of the matters raised by four of the Vekhi writers, Berdyayev, Kistyakovski, Bulgakov and Frank. Kistyakovski's plea for an authentic sense of justice equals the contemporary calls for the rule of law in the Soviet Union. Vekhi's anti-revolutionary position may have been seen as betraying the cause of progress in 1909, but today one is obliged to grant the Vekhi writers a large degree of foresight and forward thinking. They warned against the intellectual and moral consequences of what was then Soviet ideology statu nascendi. In the Soviet period the Vekhi writers have suffered under the general odium of "Philosophie idealism", in common with all non-Leninist forms of thought, but to a larger degree in that Lenin had condemned them personally ("reac- tionary", "counter-revolutionary", "bourgeois", "renegades" etc.). Therefore the book has never been published in the Soviet Union. Now a clear revaluation of Russian "idealistic" 19th and early 20th century thinkers is underway; and the publication of Berdyayev has already been announced. Other anti-socialist thinkers like Dostoyevski and Solovyov are quoted in the media with a relish and frequency which would make Marx jealous. The Vekhi writers share in this general rehabilitation. True, it is not so much because of their un-marxist attitude as for their Russian-ness; but the two are very close: the latter being a frequent alibi for the first. Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 02:43:15PM via free access 1. The birth of Vekhi Nikolai Berdyayev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semyon Frank and Bogdan Kistyakovski, were not the only Vekhi writers. The school also included Pyotr Struve, Aleksandr Izgoyev and Mikhail Gershenzon. With the exception of the last named, all belonged to the so-called legal marxists during the 1890's, young academics who expressed marxism in their lectures and writings. Their "legality" lay in the fact that, unlike revolutionary marxists of Lenin's ilk, they were tolerated by the tsarist authorities. Berdyayev and Frank taught philosophy, Bulgakov economy. Struve was the only political activist, being among the authors of the first programme of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (later the Communist Party). After 1900 these intellectuals broke with marxism as philosophy. Their critique of marxism was formulated by Berdyayev, Bulgakov, Kistyakovski, Struve and Frank together with Pavel Novgorodtsev in Problemy Idealizma ("Problems of Idealism", 1903). In this volume of collected articles they defended a neo- kantian ethic against Marx's economic determinism and extrapolated a moral duty for social struggle. "Problems of Idealism" readership stayed confined to academic circles, it lacked the political pregnancy of later Vekhi. In 1905 came Russia's first revolution. Initially, expectations among radical intelligentsia soared, but soon after it became clear that the government would not honour its commitments to political reform, and revolutionary elan deflated accordingly into disillusion. Berdyayev and his fellows, seeking an explanation for the bankruptcy of revolutionary thought, publish the volume of Vekhi articles. They make a clean break with the intellectual and political attitudes of the radical intelligentsia whose maximalism they blame for the malaise. The authors point to the need for an individual, intellectual and moral about face as prerequisite for society's renewal. In Vekhi the authors go a step beyond their 1903 book. Ethics are now seen primarily as the individual's duty to personal self-perfection. The individual conscience and feeling of responsibility are given priority over and above structural changes in society. The writers extend this idea in an analysis of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and cultural concepts of the Russian intelligentsia. So, in a sense, the articles are related to concrete historical circumstances. But the case studies deal with values and goals with a scope wider than the historical context. That makes most of the articles (not all, but more on this below) classics of Russian intellectual history. In so far philosophical positivism, ethical nihilism, cultural utilitarianism and ideological dogmatism are not exclusively typical progressive Russian thought anno 1909, Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 02:43:15PM via free access Vekhi's criticism of these concepts has a universal significance. Vekhi's onslaught against wat was held holy by the revolutionary intelligentsia provoked bitter reactions from Russian society. Not only the parties of the left but also the rightist Constitutional Democrats (of which Struve had become a member himself) counter-attacked Vekhi. Within twelve months hundreds of articles appeared in the press and six volumes of collected essays were published - all directed against Vekhi. And the Vekhi volume itself went through five editions. Even so, the repercussions faded as fast as they had been bitter. The Vekhi concepts fell on the stony ground of Russian society, only taking root in certain ultra-rightist circles, where they were usurped. Only on one further occasion did the Vekhi authors - or at least five of their number - make themselves heard; that was in 1918, a year after the Bolshevik revolution. Together with six like-minded writers they produced a new volume of articles, Iz Glubiny ("From the Depths"), so called after the contribution by Semyon Frank with the latin title De Profundis. However, the Russian situation had changed to such a degree that it was impossible to distribute the printed book. Only in 1921 did a few illegal copies appear in Moscow, the rest being confiscated by the authorities. It is not the purpose to deal with the contents of Iz Glubiny here; suffice it to say that the Vekhi authors saw their worst fears for a Russian revolution manifested; and their third book re-emphasised the necessity of a religious-ethical reversal. Only Struve propagated a political alternative in the form of an anti-Bolshevist nationalism, building further on his previous neo-slavophile ideas. As irony would have it, a nationalist answer to communism had already been formulated, albeit diametrically opposed to that envisaged by Struve. It was a Russian nationalism integrated with communism, the so-called national bolshevism. This ideology came from a number of ex- Vekhi sympathisers and was set out in a new collected volume, Smena Vekh ("Changing of Signposts", 1921). There were indeed a number of party members who were not un- favourably disposed to such adjustment of communism, but the leadership would have none of it. A protest at this betrayal of Vekhi principles also came from Pyotr Struve, now living in Prague where he continued to publish his newspaper Russkaya Mys ("The Russian Thought").

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