God Before Food: Philosophy, Russian Style

By CARLIN ROMANO

In 1922, a year of living dictatorishly, Lenin devoted astonishing time to handpicking intellectuals to be exiled from Russia. In missives to underlings, including a go-getter named Joseph Stalin, he railed against these "bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they're the brains of the nation. In fact, they're not the brains, they're the ****." He told Stalin in a note, "We are going to cleanse Russia once and for all." An earlier Bolshevik poster already showed Lenin sweeping enemies from the globe over the caption, "Comrade Lenin cleanses the filth from the land."

Lenin altered the law to permit external exile of the regime's purported reactionary foes. That outdid the czars, since the state previously had transported enemies only to Siberia and the like. Lenin also mandated that police shoot exiles on sight if they returned to Russia. But he didn't want to shoot them right away — Western opinion still mattered then.

Like so much else horrific in Russian history, the foul strategy came to pass, abetted by Trotsky and others. Eighty-five years ago this month, on August 16 and 17, the regime arrested scores of intellectuals. On two other dates, September 28 and November 16, the GPU (secret police) ushered more than 60 Russian intellectuals and their families onto German cruise ships in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd). The September ship was the Oberbürgermeister Haken, the November ship, the Preussen. Involuntary passengers included the great Christian existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev, the philosophers Semyon Frank and Nikolai Lossky, and the literary critic Yuly Aikhenvald, who had translated Schopenhauer into Russian.

Each deportee could take two suitcases of clothes. No books, jewelry, or icons. Several thinkers used the weeks before shipping out to mourn their libraries. One picked mushrooms in the forest, a traditional Russian form of meditation, before turning himself in. The ships sailed off into the Gulf of Finland and took their intelligenty into exile, mainly to Berlin, Prague, and Paris, where they joined other refugees in the Russian diaspora that came to be known as "Russia Abroad."

Some deportees on the "philosophy steamers" believed — or hoped desperately — that they'd soon be back in Russia. But Semyon Frank's wife spotted her husband on deck, crying, "I'll never see my homeland again." A few, like Berdyaev, became internationally famous. Most died without returning, and many barely survived financially. One Berlin émigré compared himself to a moth: "First I eat my trousers, then I eat my jacket."

Consider them all lucky. Within a few years, Stalin replaced Lenin, and bullets and labor camps replaced ship tickets.

In Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (St. Martin's Press), British cultural critic Lesley Chamberlain brings us a much-needed account, the only one in English, of this shameful moment in Russian history. She caustically calls the exiles on the steamers "the first dissidents from Soviet totalitarianism," though the Soviet Union didn't come into existence until months later. With them, she says, departed a fair share of "cultural decency and intellectual independence."

Most of the intellectuals could not fairly be classified as reactionaries. Many shared Lenin's anti-czarist spirit. They'd openly confronted the czar at home and in some cases served prison time while Lenin safely plotted from abroad. Nor were they just philosophers. Lenin targeted lawyers, engineers, historians, theologians, and more, even ordering a detailed investigation into "anti-Soviet professors of the Archaeological Institute." For the most part, his victims talked like Silver Age liberals and Christian socialists, not hostile White Russian anti-Bolsheviks.

To understand this event properly, we fortunately have Chamberlain and the U.S. release this summer of not just Lenin's Private War, published in Britain last year, but also her Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia (Overlook/Rookery), which came out in Britain in 2004. If Chamberlain didn't exist, students of Russian intellectual life couldn't invent her. She's too outside-the-box in her career, prose, and nervy insights (such as that Russia's Silver Age "threw up interesting prefigurations of Western postmodernism"). Together the books provide an overview of a philosophical tradition most Western professors in the discipline hardly know. Motherland unpacks the conceptual tensions that led to 1922, making intelligible her later book's bitter tale of a rationalist, Communist government turning on its best and brightest idealists.

More at: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=rm311xxxr19y3kblwldz6nc67t4b51dx

Lenin really did seem downright humanitarian when compared with Stalin, Pot and Mao. Couple this thread with your democide thread and it's a couple of good reasons why communism should just be given one more try to get it right.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

When people ( read liberal dems) criticize the current administration with comparisons to some of the great despots in recent history, it shows how little they know of history.
There is much in the current administration that can be justly criticised. It is not the criticism, itself that i find annoying; rather the tone of it.
Why anyone would think that an all-powerful STATE is a good thing, a thing to be advanced is beyond me. Hostory shows quite clearly that mankind will abuse unlimited power. We need limits on governemnt power to prevent this sort of abuse.

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags

Communism works, on paper.....

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"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

Yeah, what's that saying? "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely," or words to that effect.

It's ironic that the Twentieth Century's most notorious dictators sowed the seeds of their own downfall by exhiling and murdering the very people who could have enabled their success. Instead, many esccaped to other countries and became part of the effort to defeat these guys.

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" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

You know, I love the way these threads start off talking about fascism or Bolshevik atrocities and then seamlessly merge into slams about "liberal dems."

Comrade! You are onto us. We went underground in the early 1990's, and are now just lying in wait to TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY!

Woohoo!

I wonder if this is what Castro was thinking of when he unloaded the Marielitos? He forgot to add the intellectuals and musicians and the cigar makers.

__________________
"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

You some kind of liberal democrat, Bokonon?

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

Nope. I'm a cheerful fascist with communist tendencies. But I disdain bourgeois labeling.

Guilty!

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags

Hell,ol' Stalin,the man'O steel showed you how.

Just pull a Mercader on'em.

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Here ya go.

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Pretty much the same thing on the political wheel, eh?

And isn't "cheerful fascist" an oxymoron?

Oh never mind, that's just intelligentsia labeling.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Dammit Jim,I said Mercader not Mercator!!!

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Oh. Sorry.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2191309040821598002&q=top+gear+mercedes&total=411&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1