Table Of ContentRELIGION, 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
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First published 1979 ~Y
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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
