"The Russian Revolution, since it happened, could only happen in Russia"

“The Russian revolution is the last active and nationwide manifestation of nihilism. A passionate spiritual search is embedded in Russian nihilism - the search for the absolute, although the absolute here is equal to zero.
S.L. Franc

S.L. Frank owns a number of works on the Russian revolution, written in exile: "From reflections on the Russian revolution", "The religious and historical meaning of the Russian revolution", "The collapse of idols" (ch. 1). Frank considers revolutionary phenomena in a cultural and historical context. In the article "From Reflections on the Russian Revolution" he writes:

“The Russian revolution, in its basic, underground social essence, is an uprising of the peasantry, the victorious and fully realized All-Russian Pugachevshchina of the beginning of the 20th century. To understand the very possibility of such a phenomenon, you need to remember a lot. Russian public estate system The system of the nobility and landlords, which took shape in the 18th century, never had deep, organic roots in the minds of the masses. Whether it is legitimate or not - which is completely indifferent here - the Russian popular masses never understood the objective grounds for the domination of the "master" over them, they hated him and felt destitute. This was not only "class" hatred, due to economic motives: a characteristic feature of Russian relations was that this class strife was reinforced by an even much deeper sense of cultural and everyday alienation. For the Russian peasant, the master was not only an "exploiter", but - which, perhaps, is much more important - the "master", with all his culture and life skills, right down to dress and appearance, was an alien, incomprehensible and therefore internally unjustified creature, and subordination to this being was felt as a burden that I even had to “endure”, but not as a meaningful order of life ...

This estrangement between the tops and the bottoms of Russian society was so great that what is surprising, in fact, is not the precariousness of 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 ununited and unbalanced foundation? To explain this—and thus to explain why it eventually collapsed—it must be remembered that the real foundation of Russian statehood was not the social estate system and not the prevailing everyday culture, but its political form, the monarchy. A remarkable, in essence, well-known, but in all its significance not appreciated feature of the Russian social and state system was that in the people's consciousness and people's faith only the sovereignty- the power of the king; everything else is class relations, local government courts, administration, large-scale industry, banks, all the refined culture of the educated classes, literature and art, universities, conservatories, academies, all this in one way or another was held only indirectly, by the power of tsarist 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 its assessment later - it would be a profound mistake, focusing on the outward appearance of the revolutionary process, to identify the Russian revolution with the socialist movement. The Russian revolution was brought about by a peasant who never, even at the height of his madness, in the years 17-18, was a socialist...

The process of spontaneous democratization of Russia can be characterized as an invasion of the internal barbarian. But, like the invasion of external barbarians on ancient world, it has a double meaning and a double tendency. It brings with it the partial destruction of a culture that is incomprehensible and alien to the barbarian, and has as its automatic consequence a lowering of the level of culture precisely by virtue of its adaptation to spiritual level barbarian. On the other hand, this invasion is driven not only by hostility to culture and a thirst for its destruction; its main tendency is to become its master, to master it, to feed on its blessings. The invasion of culture by the barbarians is therefore at the same time the spread of culture into the world of the barbarians; The victory of the barbarians over culture is, in the final analysis, the victory of the remnants of this culture that have survived from the catastrophe over the barbarians. Here, in the strict sense of the word, there is no winner and vanquished, but there is, in the midst of the chaos of destruction, the mutual penetration and merging of two elements into a new living whole ...

But how did it happen that the revolution, which was peasant in its social substratum, internally guided by the peasant's desire for independence and self-rule, that is, in essence, by the possessive instinct, 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 soil in the primordial peasant feeling of hostility towards the "bars"; the struggle against "capitalism" was perceived and enthusiastically carried out by the masses of the people as the destruction of the hated "masters". The revolution, anti-noble in its inner aspiration, became anti-bourgeois in its realization; the merchant, the shopkeeper, any prosperous "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 presented himself as his ally. The turbulent waves of the peasant flood flooded and destroyed not only the old, really obsolete strata, but also those abundant young sprouts that were manifestations of the very process of Russia's democratization in the stage of its slow peaceful infiltration. The revolutionary wave, huge and destructive, swept away everything that had grown on the soil, already watered by the tide, of which it itself forms a part. The absolute nonsense - from a rational point of view - of this fact is now recognized in Russia by everyone, including even, in the depths of their souls, the Communists themselves; to do this, it is enough just to take a look at the picture of NEP.

The articles in the collection "From the Depths" were written by the best Russian intellectuals not only of that revolutionary time, but of any time in general. Each of the authors owns the word just fine.

This collection is both an eyewitness account and an understanding of the collapse of Russian life that happened as a result of the revolution.

It was extraordinarily bold to write this in 1918, during the day-to-day growing Bolshevik terror. For such thoughts, many authors were then simply loaded onto a steamer and thrown out of Russia.

Today, "From the Depths" is not only wonderful and useful reading This is a top notch book.

This is a deep, and most importantly, spiritual look at the tragedy, which will help readers of our time understand what 1917, Bolshevism, and the real, and not mythologized, Russian revolution are.

The authors

The authors of the collection are eleven famous Russian philosophers, scientists and publicists of the early twentieth century - Sergei Askoldov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Aron Izgoev, Sergei Kotlyarevsky, Valerian Muraviev, Pavel Novgorodtsev, Joseph Pokrovsky, Peter Struve and Semyon Frank.

Time of writing

1918

Publication history

The collection “From the Depths” was conceived by the philosopher Pyotr Struve in 1918, and in August of the same year it was published as a continuation of the literary and political journal “Russian Thought”, which had been closed by that time. However, the distribution of the collection was prevented by the atmosphere of the Bolshevik Red Terror. The circulation lay in the warehouse until 1921 and was withdrawn, and all copies were destroyed. Many of the authors of the collection were expelled from Russia on the “philosophical ship”. However, one of the authors, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, managed to save and take abroad a copy of the collection, which was republished in Paris in 1967. Thus, it became available first to a foreign reader. In the Soviet Union, the book was banned almost until the collapse of the USSR and was illegally distributed in samizdat. Officially, the collection was published only in 1991.

What is this book about?

The collection "From the Depths" is devoted to the problems of the Russian revolution and, in general, the entire Russian history for almost ten centuries. The authors of the collection united in order to express their thoughts about the events of February - October 1917, the result of which was the coming of the Bolsheviks to power. All the creators of "From the Depths" have a common conviction that all the positive beginnings of social life are rooted in the depths of religious consciousness and that the rupture of such a fundamental connection, which occurred in the revolutionary and pre-revolutionary years, laid the foundation for the trials that befell Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. .

The revolutionary events of 1917 are criticized: " terrible disaster”, an “anti-national” phenomenon that turned the country into a “lifeless corpse,” writes Nikolai Berdyaev, the event is “talentless”, “ugly”, where everything is “stolen, banal, vulgar”, notes Sergey Bulgakov, “days and months, full of excruciating anxiety”, “unprecedented defeat of the state,” continues Aron Izgoev. According to Sergei Kotlyarevsky, revolution is " the greatest shock all the moral foundations of the Russian people”, “an unheard-of disorder of life”, which “threatens the most terrible, most disastrous consequences” (Pavel Novgorodtsev), “national bankruptcy and world shame” (Peter Struve), “a terrible catastrophe of our national existence” - such a diagnosis Semyon Frank announced the year 1917.

The authors of "From the Depths" believed that the insults, humiliation and ridicule that religion was subjected to led to an incredible decline in morality and the planting of class hatred and struggle. It was faith in God, the inner support, according to the authors of the collection, that was decisive in the life of the state, so thinkers were looking for the basis of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 in the spiritual sphere.

“Every nation makes a revolution with the spiritual baggage that it has accumulated in its past,” Nikolai Berdyaev argued. A healthy or unhealthy state of society depends precisely on the attitude of people to religious issues, since religion is " supreme foundation and the shrine of life" (Novgorodtsev). “Religion has always been a force that binds the state from the side of its organic unity, in whatever political form it may be expressed,” Askoldov pointed out. And that's why everything revolutionary movement usually has before it, as a preparatory phase, one or another process of the decline of religion, sometimes a kind of"Age of Enlightenment" ”, “revolutions are prepared and usually come on the basis of a weakening of religious consciousness.” This is what happened in Russia under the influence of Western Europe ideas of positivism, materialism and socialism.

Title: "From the Deep" taken from the opening words of Psalm 129 of David: Out of the depths I called to Thee, O Lord!

The final article of the collection, written by Semyon Frank, is called De profundis- the Latin version of the phrase "From the depths" (De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine!) It was Frank who came up with the final title of the collection. Initially, it was called "Collection of "Russian Thought".

"From the Deep" is the final part of a trilogy of collections of articles in which ideological continuity can be traced. The preceding parts are the collections Problems of Idealism (1902) and Milestones (1909). This connection was directly pointed out by the publisher himself (Pyotr Struve) and by some authors of the collection From the Depths. "Milestones" (Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia) was an "appeal and warning" addressed to the educated part of society, a diagnosis of the vices of the country and a premonition of "moral and political disaster, which menacingly emerged as early as 1905–1907. and broke out in 1917.

The collection was compiled in a very short time , for four months - from April to July 1918.

Four authors of the collection “From the Depths” (Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semyon Frank and Aron Izgoev) were expelled from Russia in the autumn of 1922, along with many other prominent scientists, doctors, artists and cultural figures, whom the Communist Party considered opponents of Soviet power.

At the time of the ban on the collection, several of his articles were published separately. So, in 1921, Peter Struve in Sofia published a pamphlet "Reflections on the Russian Revolution", based on the text of his article from the collection. Spirits of the Russian Revolution by Nikolai Berdyaev was published in 1959 and 1965. Sergei Bulgakov's dialogues "At the Feast of the Gods" were published as a separate pamphlet in Kyiv in 1918 and in Sofia in 1920. The original version of Vyacheslav Ivanov's article "Our Language" was published in the second issue of the "Frontiers" magazine in 1976.

The deceptive sanctity of revolution

P. K. Sternberg leads the shelling of the Kremlin. V. K. Dmitrievsky, N. Ya. Evstigneev

An excerpt from an article by N. A. Berdyaev “The Spirits of the Russian Revolution” (“From the Depths.” Collection of Articles on the Russian Revolution)

Russian revolutionary morality is a completely unique phenomenon. It was formed and crystallized in the leftist Russian intelligentsia over a number of decades and managed to acquire prestige and charm in wide circles of Russian society. The average intelligent Russian person is accustomed to bow before the moral image of the revolutionaries and before their revolutionary morality. He was ready to admit that he was unworthy of this moral high ground of the revolutionary type. In Russia, a special cult of revolutionary holiness was formed. This cult has its saints, its sacred tradition, its dogmas. And for a long time, any doubt about this sacred tradition, any criticism of these dogmas, any irreverent attitude towards these saints led to excommunication not only on the part of revolutionary public opinion, but also on the part of radical and liberal public opinion.

Dostoevsky fell victim to this excommunication, for he was the first to reveal lies and substitution in revolutionary holiness. He realized that revolutionary moralism has revolutionary amoralism as its reverse side, and that the resemblance of revolutionary holiness to Christian holiness is the deceptive resemblance of Antichrist to Christ.<…>The outward persecution that the old regime instigated against the revolutionaries, the outward suffering they had to endure, contributed greatly to this deceptive semblance of holiness. But never did a true transformation take place in revolutionary holiness. human nature, second spiritual birth, victory over inner evil and sin; it has never set itself the task of transforming human nature. Human nature remained decrepit, it was in bondage to sin and bad passions and wanted to achieve a new, higher life by purely external, material means.

But a person fanatized by a false idea is able to endure external hardships, need and suffering, he can be an ascetic not because by the power of his spirit he overcomes his sinful and slavish nature, but because the obsession with one idea and one goal displaces for him all wealth and the diversity of being is what makes it naturally poor. This is graceless asceticism and graceless poverty, nihilistic asceticism and nihilistic poverty. Traditional revolutionary holiness is godless holiness. This is a godless claim to achieve holiness by one human being and in the name of one human being. On this path, the image of man is crippled and falls, for the image of man is the image and likeness of God. Revolutionary morality, revolutionary holiness are profoundly opposed to Christianity. This morality and this holiness claim to replace and replace Christianity with its belief in the divine sonship of man and in the gifts of grace acquired by man through Christ the Redeemer.

Icon of the Mother of God "Kazanskaya" on the Trinity Gates of the Kremlin, shot through with bullets. 1917

Revolutionary morality is just as hostile to Christianity as Tolstoy's morality - the same lie and substitution poisons and weakens them. The deceptive appearance of revolutionary holiness was sent to the Russian people as a temptation and a test of their spiritual strength. And the Russian people did not stand the test of this. Those who are sincerely carried away by the revolutionary spirit do not see realities, they do not recognize spirits. Deceptive, deceitful and double images captivate and seduce. The temptations of Antichrist, the morality of Antichrist, the holiness of Antichrist captivate and attract the Russian people.<…>

In the Russian revolution, Russian sins and Russian temptations are eliminated, something that was revealed to the great Russian writers. But great sins and great temptations can only be with a people great in its capabilities. The negative is a caricature of the positive.<…>The idea of ​​the people, God's plan for them remains even after the people have fallen, changed their goals and subjected their national and state dignity to the greatest humiliation. A minority can remain faithful to the positive and creative idea of ​​the people, and from it a revival can begin. But the path to rebirth lies through repentance, through the consciousness of one's sins, through the cleansing of the spirit of the people from demonic spirits. And first of all, it is necessary to begin to distinguish between spirits.

Old Russia, in which there was much evil and ugliness, but also much goodness and beauty, is dying. The new Russia, born in death throes, is still mysterious. It will not be the way the activists and ideologists of the revolution imagine it to be. It will not be whole in its spiritual appearance. In it, the Christian and anti-Christian principles will be more sharply divided and opposed. The anti-Christian spirits of the revolution will give birth to their own dark kingdom. But the Christian spirit of Russia must also show its strength. The power of this spirit can act in a minority if the majority falls away from it.

DE PROFUNDIS

S.L. Frank

The air is cut away before

And closed from behind.

Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!

Or we shall belated.

If someone had predicted a few years ago that abyss of falling into which we have now fallen and in which we are helplessly floundering, not a single person would have believed him. The most gloomy pessimists in their predictions never went so far, did not reach in their imagination to that last verge of hopelessness to which fate has led us. Looking for the last glimmers of hope, one involuntarily seeks to find historical analogies in order to draw consolation and faith from them, and you almost do not find them. Even in the Time of Troubles, the decomposition of the country was not, it seems, so general, the loss of the national-state salt was so hopeless as it is today; and ^ tsa.mind come as the only suitable examples of the formidable, biblical horror-filled world events of the sudden destruction of the great ancient kingdoms. And the horror of this spectacle is aggravated by the fact that this is not a murder, but the suicide of a great people, that the corrupting spirit of decay, with which the whole country has been plagued, was voluntarily, in a wild, blind rapture of self-destruction, inoculated and absorbed by the people's organism. If we, the cells of this once mighty, now agonizing state body, still live physically and morally, then this is to a large extent that life by inertia that continues to smolder in the dying and which, as it were, is possible for a while even in dead body. I recall the gloomy, perverted fantasy of the greatest Russian prophet, Dostoevsky. The dead in their graves, before falling silent forever, still live, as if half asleep, in fragments and echoes of former feelings, passions and vices; the already completely decomposed dead man occasionally mutters a meaningless "bobok" - the only remnant of the former speech and thought. All the current petty, often nightmarishly absurd events in our lives, all this senseless fuss of all sorts of “sovdeps” and “executive committees”, now fruitless verbal, now breeding only blood and destruction, all these chaotic fragments of speeches, thoughts and actions that have survived from the once mighty Russian statehood and culture after the frantic dance of the revolutionary ghosts, like the last dying flames after the diabolical coven - isn't all this the same "bobok"? And if, suffocating and dying in the midst of this darkness of the grave, in our anxieties and hopes, by the inertia of thought, we continue to mutter about the “precepts of the revolution”, about the “Bolsheviks” and “Mensheviks” and about “ constituent assembly”, if we convulsively cling to the pitiful remnants of old ideas, concepts and ideals that fade in our minds and take this fruitless and inactive fluttering of feelings, desires and words in the darkness of death for political life, then this is all the same “bean” decaying dead.

And, however, the indestructible, organic thirst for true life, the thirst for air and light makes us convulsively escape from the suffocating darkness of the grave, attracts us to wake up from the grave stupor and this wild, sleepy-dead mumbling. If Russia is destined to be reborn yet—a miracle in which, in spite of everything, we want to believe, moreover, in which we are obliged to believe while we are alive—then this rebirth can now only be a toll resurrection, an uprising from the dead. new soul to a completely different, new life. And the first condition for this rebirth must be a complete, final awareness of both the entire depth of our fall, and its final, truly real spiritual causes, and not just that ghostly, fantastic setting and kaleidoscopically meaningless chain of fragmentary, events of this fall that surround us from the moment when we have already lost the ground under our feet. Like a drowning man who is still trying to emerge, we must renounce the dizzying, stupefying underwater fog and force ourselves to understand where and how and why we fell into this abyss. And even if we are really destined to die, then even then the spirit of life leads us to die not in the sleepy fading of thought and will, but with clear mind, passing on to the ages and peoples a clear, warning voice of the perishing and pure, deeply conscious repentance. By the power of free thought and conscience - which no external disasters, no oppression and arbitrariness can take away from us - we must rise above the current moment; to understand and appreciate the nightmarish present in connection with all our past, in the light not of the blinking, wandering lights of swamp vapors, but of the imperishable, supertemporal insights of human and national Life.

It would seem that the devilish obsession that has found us is already ending, and the rooster, dispersing the coven of witches on Bald Mountain, has already crowed for a long time. But we still have not come to our senses, we stand as if spellbound and do not understand Where this delusion came from. We already well understand that the whirlwind that has swirled us since March of last year was not an upsurge of creative political forces, but brought only death, blinded our eyes with the dust and dust that rose from the lowlands of life, and ended with a devastating pandemonium of all the spirits of death, evil and decay. But we still cannot understand how this happened, and it still seems that somehow, regardless of our will and against it, a terrible substitution of good for evil took place. For the first time, the homeland became truly free for the embodiment of the cherished; their ideals, the best Russian people became in power, even better, more energetic and ardent. urged them to achieve their desired goals, and suddenly all this failed somewhere, and we woke up with nothing, worse than that, without any trough and even without the old, rickety, but still native hut. And despite all the menacing signs and punishments of God, the thought of the majority still clings to petty, external and completely imaginary explanations, tries to put the responsibility on some unforeseen and independent of us forces and authorities, on someone else or on something else and does not see the connection that has taken place with the very essence of Russian public consciousness.

The prevailing simple explanation of what happened, which the average "repentant" Russian intellectual has now reached, consists in a reference to the "unpreparedness of the people." According to this explanation, the “people”, due to their ignorance and state bad manners, for which the same “old regime” is ultimately to blame, was unable to assimilate and implement the excellent reforms conceived by the revolutionary intelligentsia and ruined the “country” with its rude, inept behavior. and revolution." Thought out to the end, this explanation contains, of course, the most severe, withering criticism of the entire political practice of our revolutionary and radical parties. What kind of politicians are these who, in their programs and in their mode of action, take into account some fictitious ideal people, and not with the people really existing! Nevertheless, this explanation, even with all the logical consequences that follow from it, remains superficial, extremely one-sided, and therefore theoretically incorrect, and as an attempt at self-justification, morally false. Of course, the people, glorified for their righteousness, have shown their real moral character to such an extent that this will for a long time discourage the populist deification of the lower classes. And yet, apart from any false sentimentalism in relation to the "people", it can be said that the people in the sense of the lower classes or in general the strata of the population can never be the direct culprit of political failures and the disastrous outcome of a political movement for the simple reason that under no social okay, under no circumstances social conditions people in this sense is not the initiator and creator political life. There is always a people, even in the most democratic state, an executor, a tool in the hands of some guiding and inspiring minority. This is a simple, unshakable and universal sociological truth: it is not an amorphous mass that can be effective, but only an organization, and any organization is based on the subordination of the majority to the leading minority. Of course, it depends on the cultural, mental and moral state of the broad masses of the people which political organization, which political ideas and methods of action will prove to be the most influential and powerful. But the general political result which follows from this is always, therefore, determined by the interaction between the content and level of the social consciousness of the masses and the direction of the ideas of the leading minority. Applying this abstract sociological axiom to current Russian reality, we must say that in populace due to historical reasons, of course, a significant stock of anarchic, anti-state and socially destructive passions and instincts has accumulated, but that at the beginning of the revolution, as always, large forces of patriotic, conservative, spiritually healthy, national- unifying direction. The whole course of the so-called revolution consisted in the gradual withering away, dispersion, withdrawal into some politically inactive depth of the people's soul of the forces of this last order. The process of this gradual displacement of good by evil, of light by darkness in the people's soul was carried out under the systematic and stubborn influence of the leading revolutionary intelligentsia. With all the excess of explosive material accumulated among the people, it took half a year of persistent, to the point of frenzy energetic work of unbridling anarchist instincts, so that the people finally lost their conscience and common state sense and completely surrendered to the power of pure-blooded, no longer embarrassed demagogues. Displaced by these demagogues, the weak-nerved and weak-minded socialist intellectuals must, before blaming the people for their failure, remember all their activities aimed at destroying the state and civil discipline of the people, at trampling into the mud the very patriotic idea, unbridled, under the name of the workers' and agrarian movement. , greedy instincts and class hatred among the masses - we must remember in general the whole bedlam of irresponsible phrases and slogans that preceded the post-October bedlam of actions and found its consistently straightforward embodiment in it. And if these former inspirers of the revolution now accuse the people of failing to appreciate their noble "defencism" and giving preference to base "defeatism" or mixing the pure ideal of socialism as a distant bright dream of human justice with the idea of ​​​​immediate personal robbery, then an impartial observer, and here, who is by no means inclined to consider the people sinless, he admits that the fault of the people is not so great and, according to humanity, is quite understandable. The people's passion in its straightforwardness, in its intuition for the active-volitional basis of ideas, only removed from the intelligentsia's slogans a thin layer of illusory reasoning and morally groundless tactical distinctions. When “defencism” is based not on a living patriotic feeling, not on the organic idea of ​​the motherland, but is only a cunning tactic of anti-patriotic internationalism, when the ideal of socialism, to which the masses are called to unselfish service, is based on the corrupting idea of ​​class hatred and envy, is it possible reproach the people for their inability to assimilate these internally contradictory, fundamentally vicious clots of morally and intellectually confused intellectual "ideology"?

But enough about these claims of certain groups and factions of the socialist intelligentsia to explain the amazing catastrophe of a great state by the fact that the country did not believe them and began to be treated not according to the recipes of their political concoction, but according to some strange and worse recipes. This inter-factional squabbling and family scores between all sorts of "Bolsheviks" and "Mensheviks", "Left Socialist-Revolutionaries" and "Right Socialist-Revolutionaries", no matter how important they may now seem to the delusional consciousness of a perishing people and no matter how much misfortune and bloodshed they cost the tormented homeland, belong precisely to that sepulchral mumbling and floundering from which we must first of all wake up.

We will pass over in silence as superficial and not reaching the essence of the matter and those numerous explanations that place all the blame for the death of the motherland on individuals, on the incompetence, short-sightedness or dishonesty of the rulers and influential leaders of political life in the ill-fated "days of freedom". Of course, there have been many fatal mistakes and crimes, avoiding which could have changed the outcome of the entire political movement, and many, too many of the favorites and chosen ones of the Russian public turned out to be far from up to par, did not show the necessary combination of state foresight with moral determination and a sense of moral responsibility. But already the abundance of these errors and crimes in actions and omissions testifies that they were not an inexplicable accumulation of accidents. Quos vult perdere, demenltat. All that long chain of individual disastrous actions, of which the gradual, rapidly growing collapse of Russian statehood, the failure of the majority of rulers, the steadfastness of the order in which the best people were supplanted by worse ones, and the fatal blindness of public opinion, which all the time supported the worst against the best, are all only external symptoms of a more general, more deeply rooted disease of the national organism. This consciousness does not absolve individuals of responsibility who, by virtue of their position and influence or the greatest force they poured disease-causing, corrupting principles into state life, or showed insufficient seriousness and energy in the fight against them. But it also places responsibility on all the others, direct and indirect, participants, inspirers and preparers of this collapse and tries to identify the source of evil in its more general and therefore deeper form.

A deeper definition of the source of the evil that ruined Russia must be noted in the face of the growing awareness of the fatality of the socialist idea that has captured broad circles Russian intelligentsia and leaked mighty jets into the masses. Indeed, Russia carried out such a grandiose and terrible in its consequences experiment of the general spread and direct practical application of socialism to life, which, not only for us, but probably for the whole of Europe, revealed all the evil, all the internal moral depravity of this movement. Using the example of our fate, we are beginning to understand that in the West, socialism did not exert a destructive influence only for this reason, and even, on the contrary, to a certain extent contributed to the improvement of forms of life, the strengthening of its moral foundations that this socialism was not only held back from the outside by mighty conservative cultural forces, but was also thoroughly saturated with them from the inside; in short, because it was impure socialism in its own essence, but entirely bourgeois, state, non-socialist socialism. In our country, in the absence of any external and internal barriers and foreign admixtures, with our tendency to logically simplify ideas and straightforwardly reveal their effective essence, socialism in its pure form has grown into a magnificent, double flower and has brought forth its poisonous fruits in abundance. Contrary to all widespread attempts to obscure the ideological acuteness of the present conflict, it must be openly recognized that it is precisely the most extreme of our socialist parties that most clearly and consistently express the essence of socialism - that revolutionary-rebellious socialism that revealed its living face in the 1940s. For with the later penetration of socialism into the broad masses of the people and its transformation into a long-term party movement within the framework of European bourgeois statehood, the clarity and sharp expressiveness of this living image gradually faded and softened. Already so-called "scientific socialism" contained an unreconciled duality between a destructive, rebellious denial of the cultural-social ties of European society and a broadly tolerant, essentially conservative, scientific-evolutionary attitude towards these ties. The later dissolution of socialism into a peaceful economic and political movement to improve the fate of the working class left the anti-national, anti-state, and purely destructive essence of socialism almost nothing but empty phraseology, devoid of any effective meaning. Outwardly victorious, socialism in the West was neutralized and internally defeated by the assimilating and educational force of the old state, moral and scientific culture. In our country, where socialism has really conquered all opposition and has become the dominant political frame of mind of the intelligentsia and masses of the people, its triumph inevitably led to the collapse of the state and to the destruction of social ties and cultural forces on which statehood is based.

Against this understanding of the causes of our catastrophe, one cannot object in the spirit of the current explanation we have considered above, pointing out that, in essence, the Russian masses are not at all prepared for the perception of socialism and are not socialist in spirit. Of course, our workers did not strive for socialism, but simply for a free life, for an immeasurable increase in their incomes and a possible reduction in labor; our soldiers refused to fight not out of the idea of ​​internationalism, but simply as tired people, alien to the idea of ​​state duty and thinking not about their homeland and state, but only about their village, which is far away and to which “the German will not reach”; and in particular, the peasants who were so unexpectedly converted to "Socialist-Revolutionaries" divided the land not out of faith in the truth of socialism, but obsessed with the furious self-interest of the owners. All this is virtually indisputable, but the strength of this indication is extinguished by a deeper understanding of the very moral and psychological essence of socialism. For this inner lie, this discrepancy between the grandeur of ideas and the crudeness of the real motives they cover up, which has been revealed so drastically, with caricature sharpness in our conditions, necessarily follows from the very essence of socialism. Revolutionary socialism, which affirms the possibility of establishing truth and happiness on earth by the mechanical means of a political upheaval and a violent "dictatorship," is socialism based on the doctrine of the supremacy of economic interests and class struggle, which sees in the greed of the upper classes the only source of all evil, and in the same in essence, the greed of the lower classes - a sacred force that creates good and truth - this socialism bears in itself the immanent necessity of universal social hypocrisy, the consecration of lowly selfish motives with the moral pathos of nobility and unselfishness. And therefore here too one should not belittle the significance of a purely ideological and supra-individual principle: it was not just the low, earthly, egoistic passions of the masses that killed us, for these passions are inherent in most people under all conditions and are still restrained by the opposition of the forces of the religious, moral, cultural and social order. ; it was the unbridling of these passions through the inoculation of the ideological poison of socialism, their artificial heating to the point of fanatical frenzy and obsession, and the artificial moral and legal atmosphere that gave them freedom and impunity that ruined us. The undisguised, naked evil of gross desires can never become a powerful historical force; it becomes such a force only when it begins to seduce people with the false guise of goodness and a disinterested idea.

Thus, there is no doubt that revolutionary socialism, in its pure, unmitigated and unneutralized essence, turned out to be a poison for us, which, being absorbed by the people's organism, incapable of isolating appropriate antidotes from itself, led to a fatal disease, to gangrenous disintegration of the brain and heart of the Russian state. Full awareness of this fact is an essential, necessary moment of that repentant self-knowledge, outside of which there is no salvation for us. The destructiveness of socialism, in the last analysis, is due to its materialism - the denial in it of the only truly constructive and unifying forces of society - namely, the organic, internally spiritual forces of social existence. Internationalism is the denial and ridicule of the organizing spiritual force of nationality and national statehood, the denial of the very idea of ​​law as the beginning of supra-class and supra-individual justice and objectivity in public relations, misunderstanding of the dependence of material and moral progress on the internal spiritual fitness of a person, on his cultural upbringing in personal and social life, a mechanical and atomistic view of society as an arena of a purely external collision of separating, egoistic forces - these are the main negative and corrupting motives of this materialism . Since one can contemplate the spectacle of the death of one's own homeland from the point of view of purely scientific curiosity, one can see in it a grandiose experiment of reducing materialistic understanding to the absurdity historical life. For here it is shown with one's own eyes that practical materialism, in the absence of self-sufficing forces of a spiritual order, is not a factor in the existence and development of society, but only in its collapse and decay.

But in one respect this diagnosis of the source of our deadly disease is still insufficient, does not penetrate deep enough; he does not explain why socialism in Russia has become such an all-conquering temptation and why the people's organism has not shown the proper power of self-preservation to neutralize this poison or vomit it out of itself. This brings us to the more deeply gripping question of the general weakness in Russia of spiritual principles that protect and strengthen the social culture and state unity of the nation.

This question is raised primarily on a purely political plane. Why did all the non-socialist, so-called "bourgeois" parties in Russia turn out to be so weak, that is, all the political forces charged with strengthening and preserving state unity, public order, and moral and legal discipline? Leaving aside all the variety of purely temporary, from a deeper historical point of view, random and insignificant political party groupings, we can say that two large parties have long existed in Russia: the liberal-progressive party and the conservative party. Both, as you know, at the most alarming moment of the collapse of Russian statehood, turned out to be completely powerless.

The impotence of the liberal party, which undoubtedly unites the majority of the most cultured, enlightened and talented Russian people, is now often explained by its state inexperience. Without entering into a detailed discussion of this explanation, we must recognize it as clearly insufficient: history knows at times of sharp political turns quite a few cases of successful state activity by elements who had not previously had state experience. Cromwell and his associates were hardly more experienced in the field of public life before the revolution than our liberals.

The main and final reason for the weakness of our liberal party lies in a purely spiritual moment: in its lack of an independent and positive social outlook and in its inability, because of this, to kindle that political pathos which forms the attractive force of every major political party. Our liberals and progressives, in their overwhelming majority, are in part cultural and state-enlightened socialists, i.e., in Russia, a country almost devoid of corresponding elements in the popular masses, they perform the function of moderate Western European socialists, in part they are semi-socialists, i.e. That is, people who see the ideal in half of the negative program of socialism.

Thinkers of the Russian Diaspora

about the Russian revolution.

Literature:

1) Frank S. From Reflections on the Russian Revolution.\\ Russian Idea.- M.: Art, 1994-T.2.S.8-46.

2) Milyukov P. Why was the Russian revolution inevitable?\\ Russian idea.T.2.S.119-128.

3) Ilyin I. The Russian Revolution was a disaster.\\Russian idea.T.2.S.286-297.

The problem of "mob revolt" or revolution, as the events that took place in Russia and the beginning of the twentieth century are more often called, is of interest, has been and will be of interest to every Russian person who has at least a drop of interest in his own Motherland. And in particular this applies to representatives of the humanities - philosophers, historians, politicians.

Each of them, in his own way, relates both to the revolution itself and to the results that have become a consequence of it. Most of them try to present it as a chaotic manifestation of the Russian mentality, not supported by any historical background. Only the reasons for this .. victorious and until the end carried out all-Russian Pugachevism of the early twentieth century. "are of interest to researchers. Implying the system in all revolutions, be it Russia or France, they single out specific features in Russian that made it possible for the victory of the mob in Russia.

“What is the Russian revolution? How to comprehend and understand this terrible catastrophe, which to us contemporaries and victims of it, easily seems like something unprecedented, hitherto unprecedented in its devastation, which even a dispassionate objective historian will have to recognize as one of the greatest historical catastrophes experienced by mankind! "- S. Frank wrote in 1923, and Ilyin, agreeing that "... the Russian revolution is the greatest catastrophe not only in the history of Russia, but also in the history of all mankind, answers him in 1954 that it was the result of madness all the inhabitants of the great state, whether it be the peasantry, which by 1924 (according to Ilyin) should have become completely equal with the rest of the population due to the fact that "... The land was given to him in private ownership (P.A. Stolypin's reform, 1906 ) ... "or the proletariat, which would have received the right to trade unions if the revolution had not taken place, there was also madness on the part of the industrial and commercial class, exterminated after the victory of bo Lsheviks, "... but the revolution was the greatest madness for the Russian intelligentsia, who believed in the suitability and even salvation of Western European state forms for Russia and failed to put forward and implement the necessary new Russian form of participation of the Russian people in the exercise of state power ...".

What is the reason for such an unprecedented madness, which led to many millions of losses in the number of Russians, and indeed of all the peoples inhabiting Russia? Can it be called madness that "... the main Russian feature that runs like a red thread through all aspects of the historical process - political, social, intellectual and national - ... the well-known weakness of cohesion and cementing of the components of the social aggregate ...", as Milyukov writes ? In his work, he tries in historical material to find an explanation for the anarchist nature of the Russian peasantry, which, according to most historians, is the cause of all manifestations of rebellion in Russia. The political discrepancy, in his opinion, is in the paradox of the development of the state economy, constantly falling short of the general level of state development, which constantly "... created objective necessity to resort to force." The lack of cohesion among social elements is due to the absence of "... groupings of the population dense enough to limit government power." There was no "... intellectual cohesion between the top and bottom of Russian society" in Russia either. does not deny the unity of the national way of thinking and feeling - the unity that passes through all social strata .., but here, too, history for a long time separated the tops and the bottoms into different sides and prevented their continuous interaction ... ". The fourth manifestation of the lack of cohesion was the centrifugal aspirations of the nationalities that inhabited the Russian empire.

But where did the revolution come from? What forces gave birth to it? Frank claims that "... Ideologically, it comes at least from the Decembrists and is already quite clearly from Belinsky and Bakunin. The two currents intertwined with each other and in their unity formed a mighty revolutionary force that fell upon the old Russian statehood and culture and destroyed them .freethinking

a small handful of madmen fell like an avalanche on the "immature" minds of representatives of the Russian intelligentsia. The desire to help the Motherland, the people and oneself won a convincing victory over prudence. Moreover, the example of the Narodnaya Volya perfectly shows that the revolutionaries are ready to use any means to achieve their own goals. At the same time, the people, as in the case of the Decembrists, were removed from revolutionary activity. Subsequently, this "lordly complex" led to the gradual removal of non-peasant and non-proletarian parties and individual politicians from the helm of power in mid-1917, followed by their destruction. But that was already in the twentieth century, and the revolution itself matured at the end of the nineteenth. Without any doubt, at that time "... the true foundation of Russian statehood was not the social-estate system and not the dominant everyday culture, but its political form - the monarchy." The ideal of the "tsar-father" at the same time was slowly but irresistibly fading away in the people's soul; and it was replaced by a vague but acute yearning for democracy, self-determination, and public autonomy. This conflict had already come to light after the unsuccessful Japanese war and led to the revolution of 1905. The immeasurable ordeal of the world war finally shook the unstable balance of the country.

All this led to a blow to the very weak spot in the Russian social structure - to the confrontation between the Russian peasant and the master "... The Russian revolution in its basic, underground social essence is an uprising of the peasantry ..." And this peasantry was a product that enlightened Russian men who sincerely cared about education did not expect to receive his subjects. The ideas of enlightenment that fell on fertile Russian soil led to rather strange consequences: humanism, proclaimed by the main doctrine, was distorted beyond recognition, turning, of course, unwittingly, into the most terrible muzhik crime. A simple Russian man turned out to be a hostage of a no less simple Russian master, who, using his own lack of understanding of human nature, brought the peasant to the madness of the revolution. And there is not a single opportunity to justify a member of any political group that represented Russian people in 1917. The Cadets and Octobrists, the Black Hundreds and the Trudoviks, and not only the Social Democrats, are to blame for the millions of victims of "progressive" madness. Of course, it must be remembered that ... the perception of the main culprit of the revolution in the intelligentsia and its ideas is methodologically on the same level with the assertion that the revolution was created by foreigners, Jews, or with the assertion that Russia was ruined by the weakness and lack of will of the interim government, the frivolity and irresponsibility of Kerensky etc. All of these statements are both true and false at the same time. Of course, we must not forget that "... at the heart of the revolutionary mood and the intelligentsia lay the same basic feeling of social, everyday and cultural" resentment ", the same hatred of the educated, dominant ... power, in a word, the same ressentiment that lived among the masses of the people in a more hidden and for the time being inactive form. According to its social, domestic and educational level it stood much closer to the lower strata than to the ruling class. And therefore she was the first to raise the banner of rebellion and was the vanguard of that invasion of internal barbarians, which Russia has experienced and is experiencing.

Considering the positions of the authors of the Russian diaspora, it is worth paying attention to the term "progressive". Frank uses this word to distinguish between two similar phenomena; Here is what he writes: "...by revolution they mean a shock caused by "progressive forces" and leading to "progress", to an improvement in social life, by turmoil - a shock in which the forces that carry out social "progress" do not participate. But at the same time, two pages earlier, the same author says something quite the opposite: "The revolution is never and nowhere is an expedient, meaningful way to satisfy them (the needs of society). It is always only "disturbance", that is, only a disease that breaks out as a result of the inconsistency of the old order and reveals its inconsistency, but in itself does not lead to satisfaction. organic needs something better... a revolution is always pure destruction, not creativity. True, on the ruins of the destroyed, after the end of the destruction, or even simultaneously with it, the restoring creative forces of the organism begin to act, but these are the essence of the forces not of the revolution itself, but hidden, living forces preserved from destruction ... "

These are the main points, deeply rooted in the history of centuries, which could not but come out at the first serious shake-up and not have a corresponding influence on the definition of the physiognomy of the Russian revolution. Special Features, which distinguish this revolution, its national face, are thus reduced 1) to the original anarchism of the masses, held by the regime of violence in a state of passive submission, 2) to the decline of the influence of the ruling class, condemned to death and clinging to the same falling strength - autocracy, 3) to the theoretical maximalism of the revolutionary intelligentsia, prone to utopian solutions and devoid of political experience, and 4) to the separatist aspirations of the intellectual leaders of national minorities. The combined result of the action of these factors was Russian Bolshevism - a specific Russian product that grew up on national soil and is impossible in this form anywhere except Russia.

These very basic moments, which the philanthropist Milyukov would hardly dare to call madness, are in fact such, and "... when a people falls into madness, then something absolutely senseless occurs from a rational point of view: chaos of self-destruction sets in - confusion sets in," - as S. Frank accurately noted. "But on the other hand, any turmoil is a revolution. This means: the madness of self-destruction always has its own organic, internal cause, always due to overstrain and painful irritation of the underground creative forces that find no way out in a normal, healthy Not being in the slightest degree a satisfactory and meaningful form of development and not carrying out any positive development, confusion is nevertheless always an indicator and symptom of accumulation historical forces development, which, thanks to some unfavorable conditions, have turned into destructive, explosive forces,” he writes, and continues, “Trouble is undoubtedly a disease, a pathological phenomenon. But in the life of peoples there are no purely contagious superimposed diseases; every historical disease comes from within, is determined by organic processes and forces. "Of course, there is also protection against any disease, even historical. Each manifestation of chaos is opposed by a certain depreciation fund that accumulates healthy

cells ready to fight the disease. These living forces were not generated by the revolution and were not even liberated by it: like all living things, they have organic roots in the past, they already acted under the "old order", and no matter how difficult their action was then, it is, in any case, no less weakened by the destruction and emptiness caused by the revolution.

Thus, summing up the work, we can talk about an ambiguous position in relation to the Russian revolution in the emigrant environment. On the one hand, it is easy to see the complete denial of revolutionary ideas by the authors and it would hardly be possible to imagine another option, but on the other hand, there is a special interest in this problem at a strictly scientific level. An attempt is made to understand the problem by discarding feelings and emotions. But only Frank and Milyukov succeeded in this, although Ilyin's work was written somewhat later. Ilyin has a stronger religious moment, and therefore the work is written in a more expressive manner.

S. L. Frank actively participated in the process of Russia's new socio-cultural self-determination, but was not a figure of the first magnitude in it. His name is traditionally added last to the names of Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Pyotr Struve. At the same time, Frank is interesting for his calmly balanced approach, which is 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, thinking and conscientious socialist, no matter how radical his views, it is quite obvious that in conditions of free political thought, with full, absolute security of freedom of speech, assembly, professional and political unions, under democratic suffrage, all the interests of the working class can be protected and carried out 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 the Crossroads", published in the first issue of the journal "Russian Freedom", which began to be published by P. Struve in March-April 1917.

Frank argues that a remarkable revolution has taken place, uniting in one movement so many 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 a disinterested, selfless, responsible service to the highest truth, which should be any power ... and .... democracy is only a means to make the people the master wealth country and thus give him the full enjoyment of life. Power is here for the people only its right and power, and not 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 Russkaya Svoboda on April 26. Already in this article, Frank viewed Lenin and his followers as the main representatives of a lawless form of democracy: “No matter how much they shout about the struggle between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat”, no matter how much they try to hypnotize us with old, stereotyped words, not a single sane person may not be aware that—despite the undeniable existence of differences in class interests—this division has no essential 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 socialists "Bolsheviks" and Lenin, and the struggle between these two trends in socialism exists in this moment, perhaps the most important and deeply gripping political struggle» .

On April 25, Frank finished a new article for Russkaya Svoboda, “On Nobility and Baseness in Politics,” in which he expressed his deep concern about the “hurricane of class hatred” and the “moral poison of violence” that “entered the inside of the people’s organism.” After the arrival of Lenin, Frank declared, who brought with him an atmosphere of extreme sectarianism (“Khlist zeal”), the country plunged into an abyss of eternal suspicion, seeing counter-revolutionaries everywhere. In the article, he noted: “It is terrible to think, but it seems that we are irresistibly rolling into the abyss.”

The events of October 1917 were compared by S. Frank "with the formidable 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”, which was 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 what happened proletarian revolution and predicted disaster civil war. In general, the articles were of a different nature, but religious and national themes, as well as sorrow for the fate that befell Russia, ran like a red thread through the entire book. 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 needed to be resurrected. 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 force in history; political parties, government and peoples are not the goal of life. Rather, they are the product of a life based on true beginnings. 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 the lead, and the moral, intellectual, cultural state of the masses: “The overall 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” .

This understanding of nature political power his article “From Reflections on the Russian Revolution”, which S. Frank wrote already in Germany, is permeated. It mainly speaks of 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 master its internal forces and direct them to rational way. Only he who can - like the Bolsheviks in their time - find the starting point for their own aspirations ... only he can victoriously assert his own political ideals.

In this sense, Frank saw the strength of the Bolsheviks in their great ability to master public consciousness countries and use it. The essence of the revolution, he wrote, is “overcoming one faith by another,” and, having achieved this, the Bolsheviks managed to take over 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 have had to be able to exploit popular claims in the same way: “The only possibility of saving Russia in the early years of Bolshevism would lie 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 meanness in politics // Russian Freedom. 1917. No. 2. S. 26-31.

3. Frank S.L. Moral watershed in the Russian Revolution // Russian Freedom. 1917. No. 2. S. 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. S. 299-322.

7. Frank S.L. Biography P.B. Struve. New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1956. - 238 p.