Source:
my translation of www.vehi.net/vehi/intro.html
The
revolution of 1905-06 and the ensuing events were a kind of national
test of those values which our social thinkers had viewed with the
utmost devotion for more than half a
century. There were some thinkers,
though, who, using apriori
reasoning long
before the revolution, had clearly seen the errors of these
spiritual principles. On the other hand, the lack of success of
the social movment in and of itself is, of
course,
not evidence of the inherent falseness of the ideas which gave rise
to it. Thus, essentially the defeat of the intelligentsia did not
really reveal anything that we did not already know. But it did
have a huge impact in
another sense. First, the entire intelligentsia was deeply shaken
and
provoked to consciously re-examine the very bases of its
traditional world view which, up to then, it had accepted blindly on
faith. Second, the details of the events, i.e., the concrete form
that
the revolution and its suppression took, allowed those
who did recognize the error of this world view to now see more clearly
the sins of the past and to explain their views with more substantial
evidence. And that is how this book came about. The
contributors just could no
longer keep silent about what had become for them matters of tangible
truth. They were also sincerely convinced that their
critique of the spiritual bases of the intelligentsia would
lead to a more generally recognized need to re-examine them. The men who have gathered for this task differ both on questions of "faith" and in their practical desires, but there is no disagreement about our task. The common idea is the recognition of the theoretical and practical superiority of the spirital life over the external forms of society in the sense that the individual's inner life is the sole creative force of humanity. It alone, not the principles of the political order, is the sole firm base of any kind of society. The point-of- view of the Russian intelligentsia, which supports the entirely different principle of the unconditional primacy of social forms, is compltely mistaken in the view of the contributors to this book as it contradicts the nature of the human spirit and will be practically fruitless. It is incapable of leading to the goal that the intelligentsia has set, the freeing of the people. Generally speaking, the authors do no disagree about the end goal. They investigate the world view of the intelligentsia from different angles, and, in a few cases, as, for example, on the question of the religiousity of the people, they seem to contradict themselves. But this results from the fact that the different contributors approach the question from different angles and is not evidence of a difference of opinion on the basic ideas. We do not judge the past because its historical inevitability [what has happened] is clear to us, but we will point out that the path that society has taken so far has led it to a dead end. Our warnings are not new; they have been constantly repeated by our most profound thinkers from Chaadaev to Tolstoi and Solov'ev. But they have not been heard; the intelligentsia rushed on by them. Perhaps, now, awakened by a great shock, [the intelligentsia] will listen to [our] even weaker voices.
Of
course, a lot of Russians disagreed with Vekhi's assertion of failure
(both of the 1905 Revolution and of the intelligentsia), and that
accounts for the bitter polemics of the debate that followed. |
All materials on this
site
are copyright © 2005, B. Blois & C.T. Evans
For information contact cevans@nvcc.edu