The Russian Revolution, like any major historical event, is an extremely complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Since we can generally talk about the causes or factors of historical phenomena, it has many heterogeneous causes. It is more correct, however, not to use this concept of cause in the knowledge of historical processes, which in it, unlike natural science, is vague and ambiguous, not adequate to the spontaneous, internal nature of history; it is better to talk about the driving forces and determining trends of the historical process.
In this sense, we can say that the Russian Revolution, like any historical phenomenon or like any manifestation of spiritual and vital forces and aspirations, has many different sides, like different dimensions or layers; and accordingly, it can be viewed from different points of view. Common strange - because it is most consistent with political passions - is to consider it in terms of current politics, to study the immediate political events and facts that gave a direct impetus to the revolutionary movement, or individual and party opinions, aspirations and actions, from the intersection of which the specific course of events of the revolution emerged. There are people who are convinced that this is, in fact, the only correct and completely concrete way of explaining the revolution; At the same time, it is popular because it makes it possible to place responsibility for the revolution on individuals or separate groups and this gives moral satisfaction and impulse to activity, which then comes down to the fight against by individuals and their groups.
But although it is absolutely indisputable that the revolution itself was composed of the crossing of many individual and random facts - in the end, from the entire totality of aspirations and actions individuals who participated in it, starting from party leaders and ending with the last selfish robber and outrageous hooligan - however, such an explanation is by no means complete and therefore not specific; it is rather just an abstraction in which, using some, always more or less arbitrarily chosen, individual facts, we try to depict in a simplified diagram the external process of discovering revolutionary forces. A true historical explanation must take into account, along with this superficial layer of the intersection of individual events and aspirations, a deeper layer of historical existence: the general historical conditions who created this or that stratification of the people into classes, estates, political parties, as well as the internal nature of those general spiritual and social forces that were expressed in the revolution. But you can go further, or rather, deeper: the historical fate of the people, as well as the fate of the individual personality, whatever the influence of the environment, upbringing, living conditions, and also chance encounters and collisions with isolated externaltheir elements - in the final analysis, in some sense, predetermined by the basic character and vocation of a people or individual, the main tendency of its spontaneous internal development. And since such spontaneous internal development of the individual and collective personality is an expression of certain primary spiritual forces, the general uniqueness of her religious-metaphysical view of life and attitude towards life, the action in her soul of the deepest, that is, religious assessments, then the greatest concrete depth reaches an explanation that, in a historical phenomenon,- in our case, in the Russian revolution - sees the discovery of some primary spiritual forces and religious orientation.
Further, the Russian revolution - again, like any major historical event - has a side, due to which it is a purely national phenomenon, determined by the uniqueness of national history and national character and worldview, and at the same time it also has another side, due to which it is a phenomenon of the world and universal order, an event that occupies specific place and having significance in a single world history for humanity.
In the following lines we would like to express what, in our understanding, is the meaning of the Russian Revolution, as a fact or event in the world history of the human spirit.
The national originality of the Russian revolution, due to the originality of the entire Russian history, which followed completely different paths than the history of the Western world, and the exceptional originality of the Russian national character, mentality and set of beliefs, which makes the Russian person and Russia something mysterious, incomprehensible and mysterious not only for a Western European, but also for a Russian, brought up on Western concepts, this originality is, of course, an indisputable fact. The Russian Revolution, the way it happened, could only have happened in Russia; Russian socialism is not Western socialism, but rather, as one of the leaders of German Social Democracy defined it, Asian socialism; Russian revolutionary riot and outrage, as it is depicted, for example, in Blok’s poem “The Twelve,” has its own specific spiritual nature, incomprehensible and alien to a European; “democracy” in Russia is something completely different from Western democracy; management methods created by the revolution were also of a specifically Russian nature.
And behind all this, the Russian revolution, in a strange way, easily and naturally fits into the universal historical evolution, has a precise, defined place in it, and is, in a certain sense, its logical conclusion. All of her ideological material, which, however, she processes in her own way, is borrowed from the West; socialism and republicanism, atheism and nihilism - all these motives, which, according to thinkers who previously affirmed the uniqueness of Russia, seemed absolutely alien to the Russian people, were borrowed from the West. The Russian peasant and worker, following the example of his English and French predecessors, inhumanly executed his monarch, who so recently, under the name of “Tsar-Father,” was a unique and seemingly unshakable national-religious basis for his entire state consciousness; Monuments to Marx and Lassalle are being erected in Moscow, and the Spasskaya Tower of the ancient Kremlin, which withstood the invasion of Napoleon, now plays “Internationale” instead of “Kol Slaven”. The Russian people mock their church, shave their beards, put on a foreign “french jacket” and engage in all sorts of “electrification” and “organizations”. Of course, it is easy to say - as many short-sighted people say and think - that all this is not done by the Russian people, but by a bunch of their rapists, not Russian, mostly of Jewish origin.
This explanation is not only incorrect in fact - for in all these acts the native Russian also takes a direct and free part - but, first of all, it simplifies the issue by its superficiality. For the very power and influence of foreigners on Russian fate is a mystery that requires explanation; and whoever knows how to see impartially must admit that this power is fundamentally a kind of spiritual charm, a kind of temptation to which the Russian soul easily succumbs, according to its own impulse; here a strange and, from the point of view of ordinary national feeling, offensive affinity of the primordial Russian spirit with the non-Russian spirit is revealed. Thus, it is necessary to testify simply as a fact that the most characteristic revolutionary rebellion of the Jewish mind found some strange but deep echo in the rebellion of the Russian spirit, so alien to it in other respects, and only because of this it took possession of it. Marx's theory of class struggle and the uprising of the proletariat, his call for the overthrow of the old European state and bourgeois society, responded to some long-overdue, hidden dream of an illiterate Russian peasant.
And strange as it may be to say, but through the “Asian socialism” that has reigned in Russia, on the one hand, some kind of internal spontaneous process of Europeanization of Russia is taking place, its introduction, if not to European orders of life, then to the external European appearance, and, on the other On the other hand, Russia reveals a great attractive power for Western Europe, some kind of providential role in the fate of Europe. The Russian Revolution, in all its unique national originality, expressed or realized something, no matter whether positive or negative, that has some cardinal significance in the fate of all-European humanity and - in national refraction - revealed the current state of its spirit, in a certain sense explained it to it. path. The Russian Troubles are a pan-European turmoil, and we Russians, having lived through and comprehended it, to a certain extent We now feel like experts and recognized diagnosticians of the disease in Europe. The deep spiritual crisis now experienced by the Russian people is the completion and at the same time the turning point of the path along which all humanity is moving. Take the chain of great spiritual processes and historical events, starting with the birth of the so-called. “new century”: in the 15th century - the spiritual rebellion of the Renaissance, in the 16th - the religious storm of the Reformation, in the 17th - the English Revolution, in the 18th - the pride of the Enlightenment, culminating in the great French Revolution, the 19th - the establishment of democracy and at the same time the birth of revolutionary socialism. Isn't the Russian socialist revolution of the beginning of the 20th century the immanent, logical conclusion of this entire process? The spiritual historical process, flowing in a continuous stream, has, as it were, its own surge of huge waves, which at one moment or another rise and capsize with destructive force. different countries, but all together determined by the strength and direction of the entire flow.
The fact that such a separate wave is growing in this moment precisely among a certain people, and the fact that it takes this specific form is due to a number of particular reasons and, above all, the national-historical and spiritual conditions of a given people. The English Puritan revolution could only take place in England and would be unthinkable in France; the French Jacobin Revolution is, as we know from Tocqueville and Taine, a reflection of the national-historical conditions of French life; and in the same way the Russian socialist revolution is unthinkable anywhere except in Russia. And, despite this, all these revolutions are consistent and, despite all their differences, basically related explosions of the same destructive forces born in the spiritual development of European humanity. And even the uniqueness of each of them fits into a certain general order, when combined together gives a certain unified rhythm historical development. We see in them a certain weakening of the internal intensity of spiritual tension and ideological richness and, at the same time, a consistent strengthening of extensive strength, radicalism and breadth of scope. To be convinced of this, one has only to compare, on the one hand, Cromwell with Lenin, or Milton at least with Blok, and on the other hand, the religious-political bourgeois English revolution with the radicalism of the Jacobin French and, finally, with the positively comprehensive Russian socialist revolution. With each new wave, its deep ideological power weakens and fades, while its destructive power and external volume increase. And maybe it won't wrong assumption that with the Russian Revolution the cycle of great destructive waves of this flow was exhausted.
If we now look closely at the spiritual or ideological essence of the Russian revolution, then we must, first of all, admit that - contrary to appearances - this essence is not exhausted and is not adequately expressed by socialism. This is obvious even to external political observation, for the Russian revolution was carried out, ultimately, by the peasants; a peasant nowhere, including in Russia, is not a socialist. By this we do not at all want to repeat the superficial opinion widespread among emigration that the Russian revolution only covered up the nakedness of idealess cynical rioting and selfish robbery with a false appearance of ideas and ideals. The revolution is always carried out by faith in its ideals of the active minority of the people who form the core of its participants, and always unbridles the dark whirlwind of vice, outrage and self-interest. This was the case in Russia as well. No matter how much senseless destruction and purely selfish selfish actions came into the revolution, its true strength was a certain selfless faith, an impulse towards some objective truth, and its success was determined by the steadfastness and selfless selflessness of the fanatical servants of this faith. Only by virtue of its ideological nature, the reality of which we consider both sociologically indisputable and factually verified by impartial observation, does the Russian Revolution become a generally historical phenomenon and, thereby, a phenomenon of a spiritual order.
But what exactly was the content of this faith? It is very difficult to determine this, because its positive content is extremely vague and formless and therefore almost elusive; its essence is almost exhausted in negation, and only from this side can one try to define it. The Russian revolution, in the sense of negation, is the most radical of all that have hitherto: it denied not only a certain political form of government or the dominance of classes or estates, it denied property, religion, the state, even nationality; its beginning was a fact unheard of in history - the denial of national self-defense, national suicide during the war, a kind of rebellion against the elementary instinct of national self-preservation. In its further course, it showed not only actual trampling (which happens in all revolutions), but also a fundamental rejection of all moral and legal principles that are indisputable in European society. In the name of what? This positive ideal can only be defined this way: in the name of the boundless autonomy of the rational structure of life.
The thirst for self-indulgence and the belief in the limitless power of the organizing, arbitrary will is characteristic Russian revolutionary psychology. Perhaps it will be objected that this is an attraction to freedom, which in its extreme form forms the essence of anarchism, but the Russian revolution developed the most cruel, unheard of despotism, took state intervention in human life to its extreme limits and did not reveal any the slightest love to freedom. But such objections are based on a misunderstanding. First of all, this outcome is the typical fatal fate of any unbridled will: through anarchy it always leads to despotism. But then, and this is much more important, the desire for the ideal of freedom presupposes faith in the individual, his absolute dignity and his inalienable rights; but there was no such faith at all in the Russian revolution. On the contrary, the ideal of self-government was combined in it with the denial of the beginning of the self-sufficient value of the individual.
It resulted, therefore, in the form of faith in the arbitrary will of the people, a faith that gave justification and ideological strength to communist despotism. And if faith in any positive principle was involved in this, then it was faith in reason, in the purely rationalistic sense of the word; The Russian revolution lived with the conviction that, having thrown off all constraints, destroyed all traditional social foundations and freed itself from all legal restrictions, people's will will be able to rationally, that is, truly expediently, organize the life of the people and establish social truth. Hence, so characteristic of the Russian revolution - not only in the person of its intellectual leaders, but in the person of its purely popular representatives - the naive belief in the omnipotence of science, in the possibility, with the help of science, to technically organize life, so that its highest, final perfection will be achieved (moreover, responsibility for failures in this regard has hitherto been placed on the deliberate opposition of specialists and scientists who stand on the side of the enemies of the people).
It is remarkable that the Russian revolution, having revealed unheard-of hostility towards any spiritual culture - towards religion, towards law, even towards non-utilitarian scientific knowledge (flirtating with art has no serious significance and does not count, and behind it it is not difficult to discern crude nihilism in this region) - showed a naive and passionate faith in technical civilization and the truly idolatrous cult of any rational - technical and social - organization. The Russian Revolution, of course, is completely alien to the “cult of reason” in the sense of the enlightenment of the French revolution - “Reason” with capital letters, as the highest absolute principle, as an object, albeit vague and miserable, but still religious, faith. On the contrary, the Russian revolutionary faith in reason is complete nihilism to the last limit, the denial of all higher, superhuman principles, the recognition of human spontaneous reason as an instance of human self-organization affirmed only in itself and not knowing any higher norms.
If possible in short formula shine on the Russian revolutionary faith, then it can be expressed as listic rationalism,- a combination of disbelief and denial of all objective principles connecting human will, with faith in human autonomy, which, guided by an innate attraction to happiness and well-being, can easily achieve it only through the technical and rational organization of human activity. Socialism is only an expression of this nihilistic rationalism in the socio-economic field: something that the Western European masses and their leaders only timidly dreamed of and that in their own consciousness encountered insurmountable spiritual barriers in the form of the entire rooted system of rights and culture - an attempt to subjugate all life, including its deepest, so to speak, physiological basis in the person of economic blood circulation and rational social regulation - this was tried without the slightest doubt in Russia, because here there was sufficient disbelief for this in the super-rational foundations of culture, including in the individual, even as economic entity, and sufficient faith in simple human reason, which, with the help of a fist and a whip for the unreasonable and vicious, will easily and simply arrange human life.
The Russian Revolution is the last effective and popular manifestation of nihilism - this primordially Russian mentality, at the same time closely connected with the universal development of modern times. If we now, taught by the experience of the Russian revolution, look back at our spiritual past of the 19th century, then we see the slow, gradual accumulation of a thunderous atmosphere that broke out in this monstrous storm. And the prophetically predicted “demons” of Dostoevsky, and Turgenev’s Bazarov, who denies all “principles”, hates the lordly aesthetic, non-utilitarian culture and at the same time is confident that in the anatomy of frogs all the knowledge a person needs for life can be achieved (“cutting frogs and swearing”) "), and the real Bakunin, with a light heart exposing Raphael's Madonna to soldier's bullets in Dresden, believing in destruction as the only creativity, but also traditional Russian administrators, despising all humanity and liberalism and firmly believing in the fist and the whip as sufficient means of reprisal and the simple truth of life, and Leo Tolstoy, who renounced art, culture, the state, historical religion and insisted that “it is enough for a person to come to his senses, understand and rationally arrange his life” in order to achieve perfection - all these are heterogeneous manifestations of the same element of nihilistic rationalism , that typical Russian rebellion that led to the catastrophe of the Russian revolution.
But where do the historical roots of this nihilism lie? And here again we must note the interweaving of the national with the supranational. It is remarkable that Turgenev, who introduced this term to characterize the new Russian mental type that emerged in the 50s of the 19th century, borrowed it from German literature: this term was put into use to criticize rationalism by the German philosophy of feeling of the early 19th century (if we are not mistaken - Jacobi). The historical origins of Russian nihilism go back to the free-thinking circle of nobles of Catherine II, that is, to the French Enlightenment of the 18th century. After all, it was precisely this free-thinking “Voltairianism” of the nobility that sowed the first seeds of nihilism in Russia, and the roots from them gradually penetrated into ever deeper layers of Russian soil, capturing in the second half of the 19th century the layer of “raznochintsy” - the only intermediate layer in Russia between the nobility and the people, - giving rise to the nihilism of the 60s and the revolutionary nihilism of the 70s and by the beginning of the 20th century reaching the last depths of the masses. But in in a certain sense this nihilism has an even more distant predecessor in Russia. The age of Catherine was impossible without the spirit of Peter the Great and his reforms. The brilliant state reformer of Russia, in a sense, was undoubtedly the first Russian nihilist: it was not for nothing that the Bolsheviks, even during the last robbery of churches, referred with satisfaction to his example.
The combination of reckless prowess, the audacity of sacrilege and blasphemy, incomprehensible to a European, bold radicalism in breaking traditional foundations with a deep and naive faith in civilization and in the rational state structure of life, undoubtedly brings us together, despite all the differences - obvious enough to be worth mentioning. - Peter the Great with modern Russian Bolshevism. But Peter the Great is the Russian reflection of Western rationalism of the 17th century, the age of Descartes and Hugo Grotius, the revolt of the Netherlands and the English Puritan revolution. And again we feel: in the current Russian revolution some sum of the pan-European spiritual development of recent centuries has been summed up.
It seems to me that if we think deeply enough and take a broad look at the pan-European (including Russian) historical past, we will see that the Russian revolution is the last completion and final result of that grandiose uprising of mankind, which began in the Renaissance and fills the entire the so-called “new history”. In the most diverse forms, through a series of steps or eras, each of which denies the previous one, stands in relation to it in dialectical opposition, and at the same time complements and completes it, one develops historical theme: This theme is freedom based on the autonomy of the human spirit. The religious and social idea of the Middle Ages was the idea of theocracy: the ideal of establishing the kingdom of God, establishing truth on earth, through the subordination of man to power, the authority of which is of unearthly, divine origin and is guided by the highest religious truth.
This idea has its source in the Christian consciousness of the subordination of the earthly to the heavenly, the dependence of all earthly truth on the aspiration to the Kingdom of Heaven, the religious hierarchy of world existence. But this system was also based on forgetting one cardinal truth of Christian consciousness - the truth about personal freedom, as the main condition for a religiously meaningful life. This was brilliantly comprehended and expressed by Dostoevsky in “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”: “You desired,” says the Grand Inquisitor to Christ, clarifying the contrast between theocracy and the primary plan of Christianity, “the free love of man, so that man would follow You, captivated and seduced by You.” The great principle of man's sonship with God found its expression in the authority of the Father's power and the hierarchy emanating from him, but not in the free love of the son. The truth was revealed and revealed, and all that remained was, it seemed, from above, from the height of the church authority that possessed it, to implement it and subordinate human life to it. It was forgotten that in Christianity the truth coincides with the “path and life”, that it lives in the deepest depths of life and is realized only in the path that a person, obeying its call, freely chooses. It was forgotten that truth is love, and love is freedom.
From this imperfection, from this internal contradiction of the theocracy, in which the covenant of love was carried out by force of coercion, and humanity was directed to free sonship of God through slavish submission to the shrine of power, the main theme of the new history was born. This theme is freedom, the free creativity of man, the supreme rights of the creative human spirit, the acquisition of truth and the construction of life from the immanent, internal source of the human personality. This new spirit finds its first and highest expression in the Renaissance, in the ecstasy of artistic creativity, in the demand for space for human creative powers, in the discovery natural foundations man, harmony between nature and man, in the thirst for mastery of nature and merging with it, in an immense desire for distance and breadth, in a word - in the Faustian spirit. This is the first and open rebellion against Christianity, and at the same time an attempt to realize the Christian idea of the individual and its freedom - for antiquity did not have this idea - by means of a pagan worldview. The destructive nature of this rebellion did not make itself felt for a long time and, on the contrary, the liberation of creativity associated with it brought such a wealth of new spiritual fruits - only because in medieval Christian education humanity accumulated a huge reserve of potential creative forces. From this source a new free, rational science was born: from Leonardo da Vinci and Giordano Bruno there is a direct path to Descartes and Galileo, to the era of rationalistic natural science of the 17th century.
The Reformation is an uprising in the field of Christian religiosity itself. Its theme is the restoration and affirmation of the inner religiosity immanent in the human spirit. This necessary, objectively justified task of establishing inner religiosity, worshiping God in spirit and truth, is carried out by her, however, also in the rebellious form of religious individualism, rejection of the historical tradition of the church, rebellion of a free religious personality against the super-personal spirit of the cathedral shrine of humanity. Freedom is affirmed in separation, and not in the loving merging of souls; a person, intoxicated by his own free communication with God, does not reveal himself through this communication, but on the contrary, ceases to feel his super-personal ontological roots, to feed on the living juices of religious life, circulating only in the universal spirit of Christian humanity, and is therefore doomed to drying out and religious withering.
This fatal process also did not immediately make itself felt, because the first, creative period Reformation lived entirely at the expense of the immense religious energy of the spirit accumulated in the Middle Ages. But not only the drying out and impoverishment of religious life in later Protestantism, right up to the liberal Protestantism of our time, which no longer believes in anything, but, mainly, the socio-political fruits of Protestantism testify that in its one-sided individualism, religious freedom was bought at too high a cost of loss the very source of religious nutrition. For from the very beginning, already from the 16th century and especially in the 17th century, the religious rebellion of Protestantism led to a political rebellion, the stern religious-passionate Puritan spirit culminated in the irreligious pathos of “human and civil rights” and led to the complete secularization of state-public life.
Secular nation state, which originated in the 17th century, is a product of both the Renaissance and the Reformation. Coming from the spirit of the Renaissance, the thirst for power and mastery of the world is concentrated in the power of national monarchies and the world colonization emanating from them, while the Reformation contributes to the strengthening of secular state power with its religious individualism, the transfer of all the power of religious life into the isolated individual, and the weakening of the creative power of the church idea.
But no sooner had the secular nation-state been formed—or rather, had it not yet been formed—than the same mystical forces that had created it began to destroy it. The idea of the self-imposed freedom of the human person, which in its religious-Puritan garb produced the revolutionary upheavals of the 17th century, soon merges with rationalism, this spiritual fruit of the Renaissance. From Descartes and Hugo Grotius the direct path leads to Locke, to the skeptical unbelief of Hume, to the superficial and frivolous French Enlightenment of the 17th century, from which in turn was born political freedom and democracy of the 19th century. Liberalism and democracy are the product of a spirit of arbitrariness, already completely detached from religious nourishment, cut off from ontological roots and internally empty.
And the Protestant faith in the religious dignity of the human spirit, and the spontaneous Renaissance sense of the creative power of man, and even the faith of rationalism - still fundamentally religious - in the “inner light of truth” revealed in the human mind, is replaced by an empty humanistic faith devoid of specific spiritual content in man in general and his moral goodness, faith in “humanity” and its progressive development. But already the catastrophe of the great French Revolution, generated by the humanistic enlightenment of the 18th century, and through a series of historical vacillations which brought humanity to the era of democracy, should have significantly undermined this flat faith. At the beginning of the 19th century, in the era of reaction and romance, we have some brief moment of deep reflection by European man about the correctness of the path along which he was walking - it is enough to mention here Joseph de Maistre and his like-minded people, German romanticism and German idealistic philosophy, in features of Hegel. Social and political history, however, went further along the old path. The 19th century is the century of democracy. But just as the birth of secular statehood occurs with the maturation of a democratic revolt against it, so simultaneously with the establishment of democracy, a revolt against it begins in the form of socialism.
Socialism is at once both the completion and the overthrow of liberal democracy. He is driven by the same basic motive as she, common motive of all modern times: to make man and humanity the true master of his life, to provide him with the opportunity to independently arrange his destiny. But he sees emptiness, meaninglessness and internal contradiction that formal freedom that liberal democracy gives: a person, formally free, left to himself, cannot do anything and dies a victim of social accidents, turns out to be a plaything of economic conditions, a slave of the economically powerful strata. To make it truly free, it is necessary to sacrifice its formal freedom of the individual, unite it into a collective whole and leave it to humanity, concentrating in its hands all earthly means, to independently and rationally build life at the cost of even the slavery of the individual.
Spiritual devastation, as a result of the entire historical rebellion of modern times, the separation of the human personality from its supra-personal ontological roots, is revealed here in all its terrible force: a person in socialism is no longer an original spiritual principle, but is simply a natural being, and the only goal of his arbitrary structure is material power and material well-being. The only surviving “sacred principle” is the principle of human daring itself, the rebellion of a natural being against the difficult conditions in which both nature and the elements of its own social life place it. And this principle of daring, the dream of building the Tower of Babel “with one’s own hand,” as it is sung in the anthem of the “international,” is realized by denying all the spiritual roots and foundations of human existence. Socialism is the final result of the great uprising of mankind and at the same time the result of its complete exhaustion - the complete spiritual impoverishment of the prodigal son over many centuries of wandering away from his father’s home and its wealth.
But Russia? What does it have to do with this whole path, and why exactly did it have to realize socialism, to express the ultimate state to which this path leads European humanity?
Russia has never seen either a Renaissance or a Reformation, or even rationalism and enlightenment in the deep and spontaneous sense that these movements had in the West; in Russia there was no dominance of liberal-bourgeois democracy, the culmination of which and at the same time the protest against which is socialism. But Russia did not remain alien to the spiritual process that forms the content of new history; only in her until the last moment he acted weaker, affecting only the more superficial layers of her being, and left in her an unspent reserve of fresh spiritual strength. But precisely because the enzyme of the same fermentation process was nevertheless thrown into Russia, that at the same time the Russian spiritual organism did not acquire the immunity that the West had developed over many centuries of its painful experience - last crisis, to which it leads, was supposed to break out with terrible force and with exceptional demonstrativeness precisely in Russia.
Russia also did not know theocracy, in the Western European sense of the word. There is one fundamental difference in the religious development of the West and the East, the source of which lies in the final depths of the originality of the religious-creative spirit of the West and the East. While in the West, religious creativity from the very beginning was invested in the work of external life construction and the perception of Christianity meant for Western peoples entry into the harsh theocratic school of moral, state and civil education - in Russia there is great spiritual energy drawn from the immense treasury of the Orthodox faith, went almost entirely into the depths of the religious development of the spirit, almost without defining the empirical periphery of life; in any case, it did not define the social and legal structure of Russian life, nor did it instill faith in any principles of civil and state relations sanctified by it. Therefore, on the one hand, in spiritual depth, hidden from variability and fluctuations historical waves, the purity of the church faith could have been preserved longer, and there was no such vital needs in the fight against her, in breaking her bonds, which he experienced Western world; on the other hand, those spheres of law and morality, intermediate between the religious spirit and vital empiricism, which in the West are so firmly instilled by theocratic education, remained undeveloped and unstrengthened. This uniqueness determined the religious and historical fate of Russia.
Of all the achievements of Western European culture, Russia has long acquired only one thing: strong state power, which initially grew in it not from the process of secularization and not in the fight against theocracy, but from the very depths of the Orthodox faith: “Tsar-Father,” the Anointed of God was in the popular consciousness the only bearer and supreme authority of the empirical-social implementation of religious truth, the only link connecting religious faith with historical construction. This gave the monarchy enormous, limitless power, with which no other power, not even the power of the Orthodox Church, competed in the state-historical sphere. Therefore, when the hour struck for Russia to embark on the path of Western European modern history, when the spirit of secularization and independent construction of life penetrated into it, this spirit began to do its work in completely different ways than in the West. In the West, this process had to begin with a powerful movement - with the Renaissance and Reformation; he had to act from within, first to shake the church consciousness and the life-philosophical worldview.
Secularized culture and national statehood are the mature and gradually growing fruit of this spiritual development. We didn't need this. For us, things began immediately, as it were, from the periphery - with the secularization of the state and the external, civil, legal forms culture. When these tendencies, coming from the periphery of culture and originating only at the threshold of the 18th century, began to penetrate the depths of the personal spirit, in the West the first creative period of this process was already over, and symptoms of degeneration and destruction were already clearly appearing as its last results. And when in Russia, only in the second half of the 19th century, the same movement of emancipation and secularization began to penetrate from cultural circles to the lower strata of the people, and when it, at the beginning of the 20th century, embraced the masses, the West had already outlived all the potential of the “liberation” spirit and reached the idea that expressed the agony and self-destruction of this spirit - socialism.
That's why spiritual process, which for us was, as it were, a belated surrogate of the Renaissance and Reformation, we no longer had to feed on the rich, juicy first fruits of the Western spirit, but only on the last stale crumbs and decaying scraps from its banquet table.
But what is most important: they were the ones that most suited our taste, they answered some unique need of our Russian “liberation” spirit. This is not difficult to understand. All the intermediate creations of the new Western spirit express that stage of its development when it threw off church guardianship, but in the depths of its seemingly freely creative spirit retained deep, indelibly imprinted traces of the theocratic school it had passed through. The secularized culture of new Western history, based on personal freedom, created a number of non-religious and at the same time “ sacred principles”, on which it firmly rests and which are themselves rooted in immediate faith in them.
Nationality, property, family, state power, “human and civil rights,” “personal dignity” - all these are secular traces and reflections of a long-standing theocratic education. The decomposition of the spiritual-ontological, essentially religious foundations of existence has occurred in the West throughout modern history gradually, through their transformation, giving them a secularized form, through which their original essence still shines through. Therefore, the process could not be truly destructive in nature, or the latter began to affect itself only very late. Therefore, more than once during this time, brought to the edge of the abyss, falling into the horror of anarchy, Europe saved itself from it with its conservatism, its faith in sacred principles.
It's completely different with us. Between pure, deep and complete faith, between the integral immersion of the spirit in the depths of church-religious existence and its complete detachment and emptiness, we have nothing in between. Therefore, in our country, intermediate tendencies on which Western European life has long been based are religiously and psychologically impossible - neither reformation, nor liberalism, nor humanitarianism, nor irreligious nationalism, nor democracy. A Russian person either has in his soul the true “fear of God”, genuine religious enlightenment, and then displays traits of goodness and greatness that amaze the world, or he is a pure nihilist, who not only theoretically, but practically does not believe in anything and who everything is allowed. Nihilism - disbelief in spiritual principles and forces, in the spiritual fundamental principle of public and private life - is, next to and simultaneously with deep, untouched, integral religious faith, a fundamental, primordial property of Russian man.
Therefore, it was Russia that was, as it were, initially destined to say the last word in this spiritual movement of self-denial of culture, which inevitably grew out of the plan to give its self-authorized, self-sufficient, detached affirmation. Purely concretely historically, the fury and destructiveness of the Russian revolution was born out of a deep, not only economic class, but also spiritual and cultural alienation between the Russian popular masses and the educated strata of Russian society, who tried to implant European culture in Russia and were themselves partly already saturated with it. From the moment the monarchy collapsed, this only support in the popular consciousness of the entire state-legal and cultural way of life - and it collapsed due to the collapse in the popular consciousness of the religious faith in the “Tsar-Father” - all the principles of state and social life, because they did not have independent foundations in it, were not themselves rooted in spiritual soil.
The Russian people have lost the original integrity of their religious faith, they have broken away from the old and felt, like Ilya Muromets, who lay on the stove for thirty-three years, the need to straighten out their strength, to live independently, to become the master of their own life; but he did not and could not acquire any new positive faith and therefore was doomed to fall into pure nihilism - to renounce his homeland, religion, the beginning of property and labor. Russian nihilistic communism - this "Asian" socialism - is the expression of this renunciation and universal negation; all its positive content and hope is limited to the Russian “maybe” - the naive belief that “ working people", having destroyed everything, he will somehow restore everything on his own and, with the help of a strong fist, force everyone to participate in an unknown new harmony on the devastated land.
Of course, as happens in all revolutions that arise from a blind shock to power, its official slogans and conscious principles of action are far from adequate to the elemental spiritual essence of the forces that gave birth to it. We can say that, for all its madness, it is overly rational and in this sense Europeanized in comparison with the spirit that gave birth to it; and this is partly the result of the essential participation of a foreign element in it. But still, in its basic essence, the Russian revolution is an adequate expression of the nihilistic rationalism of that ultimate, devoid of any spiritual content and spiritual root, arbitrariness in arranging one’s life human mind, which is last result the development of a new Western spirit, but which in the West, due to its entire past, could not hitherto effectively and fully realize itself, but found its exponent in the Russian people at the moment when this Western idea sunk into their whole, naive and inexperienced soul.
What, in the end, is the religious and historical meaning of the Russian revolution?
As indicated, by the will of historical destinies, the main direction of which we tried to outline schematically above, the Russian Revolution summed up more than four centuries of spiritual and historical movement of Western man. This result, of course, was summed up not only in the Russian revolution: it is quite clear in the Western Europe. The centuries-long development of humanistic culture and citizenship, which led to the world war - this suicide of Europe - complete general disappointment in democracy, in the “rights of man and citizen”, a socialist dream, partly fruitless and powerless, drowned and dissolved in the swamp of democratic philistinism, partly with the despair of the latter hope, in the fluctuations of disbelief and faith, looking, as an unattainable example for itself, at Russian communism, the deep disappointment of all the best minds of Europe in everything that has been the driving force of its development over the past centuries in the Enlightenment, in democracy and liberalism, in all kinds of rationalism , in “Europeanism” itself - a passionate, although hitherto unrealized dream of a new religious revival, a characteristic search for new spiritual principles in the East - these are some characteristic articles of this result.
In Russia, however, the same result was summed up catastrophically, demonstrated firsthand with stunning force; and therefore from Russia, apparently, this result is destined to effectively influence further development humanity.
This result, which most immediately means experimental verification and, as a result, the self-abolition of socialism, in fact has a much deeper meaning and universal content. Socialism itself is only the last stage of the entire spiritual development of modern times; its destructive - in relation to the existing cultural and social structure - tendency is, at the same time, completion, bringing to the last end all the cherished aspirations of the new time. True, a whole spiritual abyss seems to separate materialistic and nihilistic socialism - this is the most extreme expression of the spiritual impoverishment of humanity - from the luxurious, promising, sparkling with spiritual wealth and excess of strength, the first forms of this movement.
And yet there is the deepest inner affinity between them - the same affinity that exists between an idealizing, spiritualized portrait and a crude but apt caricature of the same person. The “heroic rage” of the rebellious pantheism of Giordano Bruno lives in the vulgar rage of the socialist revolution, the inspired dream of Leonardo da Vinci about mastering the secrets of nature, about the power of the human mind over it, sounds in an senile degenerate form in stupid speeches about “electrification” as the source of salvation for humanity ; the youthful utopia of the frantic Campanella about a “solar state”, about a universal kingdom ruled by a single power that rationally builds its economic and social life - this utopia continues to live in the dream of an international. The last echo of the luxurious, intoxicated with worldly beauty, riot of the people of the Renaissance still sounds in the ugly and chaotic riot of the Russian peasant, who overturned all the barriers of the old world; and the gloomy fire of the gloomy religious fanaticism of Calvin and the English Puritans flared up into the hellish flames of revolutionary fanaticism, creating orgies of human sacrifice in the basements of the Russian “chrezvychaykas”.
The Russian Revolution is historical reductio ad absurdum, an experimental exposure of the untruth of the ideal of an unauthorized arrangement of life that has guided humanity over all recent centuries. In her person the collapse of the Tower of Babel, which was built by mankind over four centuries, takes place. The path that humanity has embarked on since the era of the Renaissance and Reformation has been passed to its final end; “new history” is ending before our eyes. And some truly “modern history” begins, some completely different era.
A negative definition of the meaning of this new era is not at all difficult: it will be based precisely on the denial of the ideal of the new time, on disappointment in the idea of self-imposed rebellious human self-organization. It is much more difficult to see its positive content.
Those who have not yet fully understood the great historical meaning of the catastrophic time we are living through see in such thoughts a painful and too extreme reaction, a senseless, unrealizable and harmful dream of restoring the Middle Ages, an absurd attempt to erase the entire great page new history with all its spiritual achievements. But this is based on a misunderstanding. Any renunciation of the past, any sweeping denial of it is evil and delusion. History never turns back, does not restore the past - it always moves forward; and even if the past could be revived, it would no longer be the old past, precisely because it would be the past revived, and between it and the true past would lie the unforgettable, ineradicable and instructive experience of the era that overthrew this past. But history does not go in a straight line, it is not a continuous and continuous “progressive movement” one at a time. straight path; it moves in zigzags or, perhaps, in a spiral: having gone through the circle of development in one direction, it is forced, from a new starting point and at a new level, to walk again for some time almost parallel to the path that it has already traversed once. History moves dialectically, simultaneously overcoming each of its previous eras and thereby drawing closer again to the one that preceded it, but also enriching itself with what has already been passed. As in biological development, the new generation, carrying within itself the blood of its fathers, revives the effectively formative entelechy of its grandfathers to a new life.
If we fill this methodological scheme of historical development with concrete spiritual content and apply it to the crisis we are discussing, then, I think, we will have to express the teleologically necessary - although by no means predetermined - outcome from it in the following way: There can be no talk of a simple return to the overcome past of the Middle Ages, of a complete and radical denial of the deepest driving spiritual force of modern times. Humanity stands again at the crossroads, and it will choose the correct and historically necessary path if new will go the way to the same goal. After all, the dream of medieval theocracy is just as completely exposed as the dream of arbitrary human self-organization. And in relation to this falsity of the theocratic ideal, the very plan of new history was legitimate and historically justified. This was the idea of realizing spiritual freedom, planting truth on earth not from the outside and from above, but from the depths, from the very foundations of the creative human spirit; this plan contained a correction of the one-sidedness of the theocratic principle, an attempt to truly implement the Christian principle of God-manhood, the fundamental participation of the free human spirit in God's creativity. The main misconception of modern times was only that freedom was identified with rebellion; they tried to affirm the creative depths of the human spirit by detaching them from the divine soil in which they are rooted and through which only they can be nourished. Humanity thought to reach the sky by breaking away from its roots and floating freely in the air; it seemed to want to take possession of the sky and subjugate it to itself.
In fact, one can grow to heaven only by being rooted in it from the very beginning, through the depths of the spiritual and historical soil. The rebellious human-divinity of the new time must give way to an organic, truly creative divine-humanity, creative power which lies precisely in his religious humility. The era of true maturity of the human spirit is coming or should come, equally alien to the harsh transcendental spiritual discipline of his childhood in the face of the Middle Ages, and the rebellious wandering of his youthful period. In adulthood, the ideals and beliefs of childhood are again resurrected in our soul, but we no longer naively submit in their face to the external spiritual force that educates us, but truly freely perceive them with a personal free spirit, which, based on our own last depths, is rooted through them in the highest superindividual and superhuman beginning. The era, all of whose creativity was based on the denial of the higher spiritual forces that nourish the human spirit, must be replaced by an era, the free creativity of which is entirely strengthened by the rooting of the human spirit in the highest spiritual principle.
Through the chaos, desolation and darkness of today, an era is envisioned of humanity's conscious striving not for the freedom of the prodigal son, but for free sonship with God.
Whether it will come, and when and how it will come - this, on the one hand, depends on the strength of the religious will, the will to feat of each of us and, on the other hand, on the inscrutable will of Providence, leading humanity along historical paths known only to Him alone. .
S. L. Frank actively participated in the process of new sociocultural self-determination of Russia, but was not a figure of the first magnitude in it. His name is traditionally the last to be added to the names of Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Pyotr Struve. At the same time, Frank is interesting for his calm, balanced approach, which constitutes both the essence of his philosophy and the main feature of his socio-political thought.
In the period from 1917 to 1922, trying to understand the Great Russian Revolution, he wrote a series of religious, philosophical and political articles.
Frank was attracted by the idea of transforming Russia into a society based on the principles of law and democratic elections. In April 1917, he wrote: “For any educated, thoughtful and conscientious socialist - no matter how radical his views he may hold - it is absolutely obvious that in conditions of free political thought, with complete, absolute security of freedom of speech, assembly, professional and political unions, with democratic suffrage, all the interests of the working class can be protected and implemented in a peaceful, legal way."
At the same time, Frank watched with great concern the development revolutionary events. He expressed his concern in the article “Democracy at a Crossroads,” published in the first issue of the magazine “Russian Freedom,” which P. Struve began publishing in March-April 1917.
Frank argues that a remarkable revolution took place, uniting such a movement into one movement. different groups, like nationalists and Socialist Revolutionaries. However, now Russia is faced with a choice between two moral paths, two completely different types of democracy: “Democracy... as an unselfish, selfless, responsible service to the highest truth, which all power should be... and.... democracy is only a means to make the people the owner of the country’s material wealth and thereby allow them to fully enjoy life. Power here is for the people only their right and power, and not their duty and service. This is the path of hatred and arbitrariness, the path of unbridling dark, base instincts...”
The essence of Frank’s “two democracies” becomes clearer in his next article, “The Moral Divide in the Russian Revolution,” which appeared in the second issue of Russian Freedom on April 26. Already in this article, Frank considered Lenin and his followers as the main representatives of a lawless form of democracy: “No matter how much they shout at us about the struggle between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat,” no matter how they try to hypnotize us with old, cliched words, not a single sane person may not realize that - despite the undeniable presence of differences in class interests - this division does not have significant political significance... Kerensky and Plekhanov almost only speak in different words than Milyukov and Guchkov, but they do the same thing; and on the other hand, the socialists Kerensky and Plekhanov in their real aspirations have nothing in common with the “Bolshevik” socialists and Lenin, and the struggle between these two trends in socialism is in currently, perhaps the most important and deeply exciting political struggle» .
April 25 Frank graduated new article for “Russian Freedom” - “On nobility and baseness in politics” - in which he expressed deep concern about the “hurricane of class hatred” and the “moral poison of violence” that “has entered the body of the people.” After the arrival of Lenin, Frank declared, who brought with him an atmosphere of extreme sectarianism (“Khlyst zeal”), the country plunged into the abyss of eternal suspicion, seeing counter-revolutionaries everywhere. In the article, he noted: “It’s scary to think, but it seems that we are uncontrollably sliding into the abyss.”
S. Frank compared the events of October 1917 “with the terrible world events full of biblical horror of the sudden destruction of the great ancient kingdoms.” The philosopher conveys this feeling in one of his most important articles “De profundis”, included in the collection of journalism “From the Depths”, which, in fact, was a continuation of the famous “Milestones” and was created on the initiative of P.B. Struve as an expression of opposition to Bolshevism.
The authors of the collection summed up the results of the proletarian revolution and predicted the catastrophe of the civil war. In general, the articles were of a different nature, but religious and national themes ran through the entire book, as well as grief over the fate that befell Russia. It was a reaction to what Frank called "the suicide of a great people."
The main idea of Frank's political article was that Russia had fallen into a spiritual abyss and was in need of resurrection. Intellectual concept: revolution is a consequence of the secularization of European society. However, Frank believed that Russia, unlike the West, does not have deep spiritual traditions that serve as the roots of Western reforms and give them stability.
Frank believed that the political world is not main strength in history; political parties, government and peoples are not the goal of life. Rather, they are the product of a life based on true principles. According to Frank, liberals and conservatives had the same spiritual foundation, despite the fact that their parties expressed different views.
Politics, Frank wrote, depends on two things: an inspired minority taking leadership, and the moral, intellectual, cultural state of the masses: “The general political outcome is always, therefore, determined by the interaction between the content and level of social consciousness of the masses and the direction of the ideas of the leading minority.” .
With this understanding of nature political power imbued with his article “From Reflections on the Russian Revolution,” which S. Frank wrote already in Germany. It mainly talks about the need to appeal to the spiritual foundations of the people: “Only he can defeat the revolution and overthrow the power established by it, who can seize it internal forces and direct them to a rational path. Only those who can - like the Bolsheviks in their time - find a starting point for their own aspirations... only those who can victoriously establish their own political ideals.”
In this sense, Frank saw the strength of the Bolsheviks in their great ability to master the social consciousness of the country and use it. The essence of the revolution, he wrote, is “the overcoming of one faith by another,” and, having achieved this, the Bolsheviks were able to capture the minds of the population and seize power. Many years later, Frank said that the opposition movement, in order to save Russia from Bolshevism, would need to be able to exploit popular grievances in the same way: “The only possibility of saving Russia in the first years of Bolshevism would have lay in some kind of anti-Bolshevik peasant movement under the slogan “land and freedom.” , a movement led by some brilliant politician - demagogue."
Literature
2. Frank S.L. On nobility and baseness in politics // Russian Freedom. 1917. No. 2. P. 26-31.
3. Frank S.L. Moral watershed in the Russian Revolution // Russian Freedom. 1917. No. 2. P. 34-39.
4. Frank S.L. From reflections on the Russian Revolution //Russian Thought. 1923. No. 6-8. pp. 238-270.
6. Frank S.L. De Profundis // From the depths. Collection of articles about the Russian revolution. M.: “News”, 1991. pp. 299-322.
7. Frank S.L. Biography of P.B. Struve. New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1956. - 238 p.
“The Russian Revolution, as it happened, could only happen in Russia”
“The Russian Revolution is the last effective and popular manifestation of nihilism. Russian nihilism contains a passionate spiritual search - a search for the absolute, although the absolute here is zero.”
S.L. Franc
S.L. Frank owns a number of works on the Russian revolution, written in emigration: “From reflections on the Russian revolution”, “The religious and historical meaning of the Russian revolution”, “The collapse of idols” (chapter 1). Frank examines revolutionary phenomena in a cultural and historical context. In the article “From Reflections on the Russian Revolution” he writes:
“The Russian Revolution, in its fundamental, underground social being there is an uprising of the peasantry, the victorious and fully realized all-Russian Pugachevism of the beginning of the 20th century. To understand the very possibility of such a phenomenon, you need to remember a lot. The Russian social class system that emerged in the 18th century—the system of the nobility and landowners—never had deep, organic roots in the consciousness of the masses. Whether it is legal or not - which is completely indifferent here - the Russian masses never understood the objective grounds for the “master’s” domination over them, hated him and felt destitute. This was not just “class” hatred driven by economic motives: characteristic feature Russian relations was that this class discord was reinforced even more deep feeling cultural and everyday alienation. For the Russian peasant, the master was not only an “exploiter,” but—which is perhaps much more important—the “master,” with all his culture and life skills, right down to his dress and appearance, was an alien, incomprehensible and therefore internally unjustified creature, and subordination to this creature was felt as a burden that I had to even “endure”, but not as a meaningful order of life...
This alienation between the top and bottom of Russian society was so great that what is surprising, in fact, is not the instability of the statehood based on such a society, but, on the contrary, its stability. How could the grandiose edifice of the old Russian statehood rest on such an unified and unbalanced foundation? To explain this - and thereby to explain why it ultimately collapsed - we must remember that the true foundation of Russian statehood was not the social class system and not the dominant everyday culture, but its political form - the monarchy. A remarkable, essentially well-known, but in all its significance unappreciated feature of the Russian social and state system was that in the people's consciousness and people's faith only the supreme power itself was directly strengthened - the power of the tsar; everything else is class relations, local government, court, administration, large-scale industry, banks, the entire refined culture of the educated classes, literature and art, universities, conservatories, academies, all this in one way or another was maintained only indirectly, by force royal power, and had no direct roots in the popular consciousness...
No matter how significant the effective role of socialism in the Russian revolution was - we will return to assessing it later - it would be a deep mistake, focusing on the appearance of the revolutionary process, to identify the Russian revolution with socialist movement. The Russian revolution was carried out by a man who was never, even at the height of his madness, in 17-18, a socialist...
The process of spontaneous democratization of Russia can be characterized as an invasion of an internal barbarian. But, like the invasion of external barbarians on the ancient world, it has a double meaning and a double tendency. It brings with it the partial destruction of a culture incomprehensible and alien to the barbarian and has as its automatic consequence a decrease in the level of culture precisely due to its adaptation to spiritual level barbarian. On the other hand, this invasion is driven not only by hostility towards culture and the thirst for its destruction; his main tendency is to become its master, to master it, to be imbued with its benefits. The invasion of barbarians on culture is therefore at the same time the spread of culture on the world of barbarians; the victory of barbarians over culture is, in the final analysis, still a victory of the remnants of this culture that survived the catastrophe over the barbarians. There is no winner and vanquished here in the strict sense of the word, but there is, amidst the chaos of destruction, mutual penetration and merging of two elements into a new living whole...
But how did it happen that the revolution, peasant in its social substratum, internally guided by the peasant’s desire for independence and self-rule, that is, in essence, the instinct of ownership, became socialist in its content? Socialism captivated the masses not with its positive ideal, but with its force of repulsion from the old order, not with what it aspired to, but with what it rebelled against. The doctrine of class struggle, as already indicated, found its basis in the primordial peasant feeling of hostility towards the “bars”; the struggle against “capitalism” was perceived and enthusiastically carried out by the masses as the destruction of the hated “masters.” The revolution, anti-noble in its inner aspiration, became anti-bourgeois in its implementation; the merchant, shopkeeper, every wealthy “owner” suffered from it no less than the nobleman, partly because in the eyes of the people he had already taken on the appearance of a “master,” partly because he, having grown up on the soil of the old order, naturally seemed to be its ally. The stormy waves of the peasant stream flooded and destroyed not only the old, truly obsolete layers, but also those abundant young shoots that were manifestations of the very process of democratization of Russia in the stage of its slow peaceful seepage. The revolutionary wave, huge and destructive, swept away everything that had grown on the soil that had previously been watered by the tide, of which it itself was a part. The absolute nonsense - from a rational point of view - of this fact is now recognized by everyone in Russia, including even, in the depths of their souls, the communists themselves; To do this, it’s enough just to look at the picture of the NEP.”
The history of mankind knows many social revolutions. Addressing this topic, Berdyaev notes that the long historical path leads to revolutions, and in them national characteristics are revealed even when they deal a heavy blow to national power and national dignity. Every nation has its own style, revolutionary and conservative. Each people makes a revolution with the spiritual baggage that it has accumulated in its past; it brings into the revolution its sins and vices, but also its ability for sacrifice and enthusiasm. The Russian revolution is anti-national in nature; it turned Russia into a lifeless corpse.
“Revolutions that take place on the surface of life,” writes the philosopher, “never reveal anything essential; they only reveal illnesses hidden inside the people’s body...
A catastrophe happened to Russia. She fell into a dark abyss. And it begins to seem to many that a united and great Russia was just a ghost, that there was no true reality in it. The connection between our present and our past is not easy to grasp. The expression on the faces of the Russian people has changed too much; in a few months it has become unrecognizable."
80 Berdyaev N.A. Spirits of the Russian Revolution // Uriyna in the USSR. 1991. No. 1. P. 41
In his work “The New Middle Ages” (1924), combining three studies on the destinies of Russia and Europe, Berdyaev reflects on the Russian revolution, its nature and consequences: “It is possible to discover an innumerable number of reasons for the Russian revolution, - terrible -
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a war that the Russian people could not withstand spiritually and materially, the weak sense of justice of the Russian people and the lack of real culture in them, the land instability of the Russian peasantry, the infection of the Russian intelligentsia with false ideas - all these, undoubtedly, are the reasons for the Russian revolution."
However, the thinker associates the main meaning and causes of the Russian revolution with religious and cultural characteristics Russian people. According to Berdyaev, Russian culture was predominantly aristocratic. The Russian people could never not only socially, but also religiously accept the Russian cultural layer and the Russian nobility. In Russia there has always been a split between the upper and lower strata of society. The people did not accept the war, nor did they accept the democratic rule that followed it. And the revolution was primarily predetermined by this spiritual rejection of the people. The monarchical principle of government was supported by the religious beliefs of the people. However, this reign was cursed and contributed to decay within a century. “When religious beliefs decay, the authority of the authorities fluctuates and falls,” writes Berdyaev. “This is what happened in Russia. Religious Beliefs people have changed. Semi-enlightenment began to penetrate the people, which in Russia always takes the form of nihilism... When the spiritual foundations of war collapse, it turns into bloody anarchy, into a war of all against all. And then only a brutal and bloody dictatorship turns out to be possible. All the principles that protected the cultural layer in Russia collapsed. This cultural layer, this subtle culture, was possible only thanks to the monarchy, which did not allow the rampant spread of popular darkness."
81 Berdyaev N.A. New Middle Ages. Berlin, 1924. P. 84.
82 Ibid. P. 73.
With the fall of tsarist power, the philosopher believes, the entire social structure of Russian society was destroyed, a thin cultural layer that did not have strong social roots was destroyed. In these conditions, the strong monarchical power had to be replaced by an equally strong power, which is what the Soviet power appeared to be. A terrible coarsening of life has occurred, everything
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of life, the soldier-folk style reigned. The Bolsheviks not so much created this rough life, harsh rule, but rather reflected and expressed the brutalization that was taking place folk life. A government that wanted to be more cultural could not exist and would not correspond to the state of the people.
Assessing the tragic situation in Russian society, Berdyaev admits that, like any real revolution, the revolution in Russia, with all its features and prerequisites, is an inevitable fact, moreover, an accomplished fact. On the one hand, the Russian Revolution as a social event is quite logically intertwined with the general course of the aggravation of the European socio-cultural crisis, on the other hand, it is a national event. The revolution took place in Russia when liberal democracy had already outlived its usefulness, when the humanism of the new European history. The Russian Revolution, Berdyaev believes, demonstrated the triumph of extremely anti-humanistic socialism. “The Russian people,” the philosopher believes, “according to the characteristics of their spirit, sacrificed themselves to an unprecedented historical experiment. He showed the ultimate results of known ideas. The Russian people, as an apocalyptic people, cannot realize a middle humanistic kingdom; they can realize either brotherhood in Christ or fellowship in Antichrist. If there is no brotherhood in Christ, then let there be fellowship in Antichrist. The Russian people presented this dilemma with extraordinary severity to the whole world."
83 Ibid. pp. 141 - 142.
Berdyaev believes that the Russian revolution must be experienced spiritually and deeply. There must be catharsis, internal cleansing. The spiritual and in-depth experience of the revolution clarifies the seriousness of the social crisis, Russian and world. You can't continue to pretend that nothing special happened. There is nothing more pathetic than the self-consolation of people who have been knocked out of the forefront of life, expressed in the denial of the very fact of revolution, in the desire to call it unrest and rebellion. “I think,” writes Berdyaev, “that not only has a revolution occurred in Russia, but a world revolution is also taking place.
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a global crisis is emerging, similar to the fall of the ancient world. And to desire a return to the state of the world that was before the catastrophe of the World War means to be completely unaware of what is happening, to have no historical perspective. The foundations of an entire historical era have been eradicated. All the foundations of life were shaken, the lies and rottenness of the foundations on which the civilizational society of the 19th and 20th centuries rested were revealed. And these foundations, which in their decay gave rise to terrible wars and revolutions, want to be restored... Both in Russia and in Europe there is no return to pre-war and pre-revolutionary life and there should not be."
So, the revolution does not create a new, better life, it only finally completes the destruction of what is already practically destroyed and perishes. The spiritually lived experience of war and revolution should lead to a new life. And every person needs to find within themselves the possibilities of spiritually experiencing this situation and finding a new, better life, since, according to Berdyaev, a better life is, first of all, a spiritual life. And the revolution brings a person to this experience and understanding of revaluation, rethinking of life.
Berdyaev sees that in Russia the cultural tradition is being interrupted, the level of culture and the quality of culture are declining. The class of civilized peasantry comes to the fore. The new Russian bourgeoisie will not need higher culture, and above all will present a demand for technical civilization. Russia faces inevitable “barbarization.” Berdyaev considers this process to be common for Europe as a whole. The revolution accelerated the end of the existence of such a social phenomenon as the Russian intelligentsia. “The intelligentsia dreamed of a revolution for a century and prepared for it,” writes Berdyaev, “but the revolution became its death, its own end. One part of the intelligentsia became power, the other part was thrown overboard of life... A new intelligentsia should be born, but it will be greatly reduced in its cultural level, it will not be characterized by the highest demands of the spirit."
84 Berdyaev N.A. New Middle Ages. pp. 90-91.
85 Ibid. P. 96.