Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia Book

Our weak intelligentsia souls are simply incapable of conceiving abominations and horrors on such a Biblical scale and can only fall into a numbed and unconscious state. And there is no way out, because there is no longer a motherland. The West does not need us, nor does Russia, because she no longer exists. You have to retreat into the loneliness of a stoic cosmopolitanism, i.e., start to live and breathe in a vacuum.- Semyon Frank

If history is indeed a nightmare from which we are trying to wake, then it would do us good to keep a ledger on the bedside table, so that when we rouse ourselves we can take down a few lessons while they are still fresh in our morning minds. The Philosophy Steamer is just such a document. Mostly culled from archival sources that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union, the book tells of an event almost successfully blotted out of history's collective consciousness, Lenin's deportation in September 1922 of a large group of philosophers, journalists, writers, and academics. Their alleged crime was anti-Bolshevism, and were it not for the fact that the Bolshevik experiment was then in its early stages, and still under the world's watchful eye (the first international recognition of the Soviet Union as a state did not come until 1922, by Germany, and that was mainly motivated by dire economic pressures), then most of the thought-criminals shipped off on the Philosophy Steamer may have been facing a wall and a firing squad rather than exile abroad. Some were not so fortunate (the retelling of Gumilyov's shooting in a forest outside of St. Petersburg, a poet, and an innocent, murdered by association with the Tangantsev affair, is notably and movingly tragic). In the first half of the book Chamberlain focuses on the situation in Russia at the end of World War I, mainly 1917 through Lenin's "Janus year", 1922, and how the fractured, starving country found itself vulnerable to the perverted positivism of an atheistic totalitarianism. The Russian people and land were battered and backward, reeling from a late emergence from Tsarism, and adrift ideologically in regard to their place in the new world. 19th century Russia was steering itself on a course toward an egalitarian and open society, but a monarchist autocracy was not abandoned completely until 1917. This left the Russian people as a whole far behind the Western world ideologically, politically, and in areas such as agriculture and industry. When Lenin re-emerged the country was desperately primed to find a new way forward, a way that distinguished it from what was perceived as fetishistic materialism on the part of the West, but was also not imitative of the East, which was considered in many ways more backward than Russia itself. What Marxism-Leninism represented was a complete annihilation of the past, a tabula rasa on which could be sketched the new Russian person, freed from the oppressive forces of Tsarism, Western materialism, and the Church- a rational, utilitarian, classless human being. What it delivered was something else entirely.

To break completely with the past, there could be no dissenters, and no ideas vying for their own place among the new "rational" way. At its base, Marxism-Leninism is a utilitarian, positivist materialism, that is, the view that the world exists only as what can be observed and wrought from the physical space around us, and that any kind of metaphysics, or indeed any creative acts outside of what benefits the whole, are unnecessary, stupid, or dangerous. Thus came the legal cases against "parasitism" that ended in such acts as the torture and exile of Joseph Brodsky under Stalin. What use is poetry, or creative literature, to the new man, unless it exalts socialism? What use spending time ruminating on the existence of deities? What use exploring the workings of the soul, or why even admit to the existence of a soul, which does nothing to further the "greater good"? Any inward reflection or metaphysical speculation, "spirituality", was not essentially functional to the State, and therefore had no right to exist. They even wanted to turn Tolstoy's estate into a communal farm. The men who were deported on the Philosophy Steamer were generally comprised of people representational of this "old" way of thinking (though in some cases something as slight as being related to a Soviet dissenter abroad was enough to have one expelled). Most prominent among these men were Nikolai Berdyaev, the "mystic philosopher"; Yuly Aihkenvald, the literary critic; Semyon Frank, a religious thinker and writer; the philosopher Nikolai Lossky; journalist and writer Mikhail Osorgin; and economist Aleksei Peshekhonov. These are but a few names among the many relevant to this story, those not only expelled on the steamer in 1922, but also among those who left voluntarily prior to or after that significant year, people such as Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, Ivan Bunin, and eventually even Lenin's associate Maxim Gorky (one of Chamberlain's aims in this book is to reform the image of Gorky, who, although working with the Soviets and thus garnering much post-Soviet ire, actually did a great deal to assist the artists and writers at home and abroad, setting up funds and putting together writer's guilds to enable the stricken class to continue to work and teach amid an oppressive and destructive political atmosphere; Chamberlain makes the claim that by working as a conduit between Lenin and the intelligentsia Gorky in fact saved countless lives). What the men on Lenin's list of expellees shared was an individualistic philosophy or viewpoint on a certain subject or matter that did not coincide with Lenin's own views, be they artistic, economic or political. The new Russian man was not to be self-reflective, spiritual, religious, or creative outside the needs of the State; the men who were sent away or imprisoned committed the now unforgivable crime of developing unique personalities and outlooks.

Chamberlain then explores the centers of culture for "Russia Abroad", mainly Prague, Berlin, and Paris. Prague was to become the academic center for the émigré community, mostly because the founder of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Masaryk, invited many of the expelled academics to teach at universities, and also set up grants and funds to keep the intellectuals clothed and fed when there was no work to be had. His generosity should not be underestimated, but it may have been rooted somewhat in ulterior motives- at the time the thinking in the West was that the Bolshevik experiment could hardly last out the year, and when the State collapsed and the exiled intelligentsia returned to take the helm of the country, Masaryk wanted to ensure his burgeoning country would have friendly relations on the inside. This was not unique; among the émigré population and those in the West keeping watch, it seemed that the primitive thuggery of the Bolsheviks was destined for quick collapse. Hardly any of them foresaw a seventy year rule. One of the sadder aspects of the psychology of the émigrés was their persistent belief that by the next summer, or the next year, or perhaps the year after, they would be breathing the air of their homeland again; Chamberlain cites a moving passage from Nabokov's The Gift, where Godunov-Cherdyntsev opines "Some day, interrupting my writing, I will look through the window and see a Russian autumn". Nabokov, along with Aikhenvald, Bunin, Nina Berberova, and others were at the center of the creative life of Russia Abroad in the early twenties, Berlin. Berlin, at first, was an affordable and accommodating refuge. A vibrant and varied community of upwards of 360,000 immigrants thrived until the late 1920's, when they were dispersed by inflation and then the Depression. The immigrants were, in the main, living day to day as it was. Paris became the last stronghold of Russia Abroad, and sustained a good number of them until Hitler and economic disaster came knocking, and sent them on the run yet again from another tyrant.

The historic event of the Philosophy Steamer is inextricably woven with the problems of modernism, and the last section of Chamberlain's book attempts to position the deportations among other philosophic and cultural forces that were culminating at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The clash that came between Lenin and the thinkers and thoughts he wished to erase from history and his experimental society is commented upon toward the end of the book by way of a quote from Grigory Skovoroda, an eighteenth century Russian writer: "We've measured the depth and height of the seas, the earth and heavens, we've discovered a countless multitude of worlds; we construct "incomprehensible machines". But something is missing. You can't fill up a vacuum in the soul with the limited and the transitory." In other words, when a man is stripped of all inwardness, when he is rendered purely functional, when everything particular and unique is wiped away, even if it be irrational and capricious, what is left but animated flesh and bone? Lenin envisioned a world of Utopian automatons; I raise my flag on the side of Nabokov, Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, Tsvetaeva, and Gumilyov: Utopia is the enduring creative imagination.