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

Lesley Chamberlain

3.57 · Rating details · 49 ratings · 10 reviews

In 1922, Lenin personally drew up a list of some 160 'undesirable' intellectuals - mostly philosophers, academics, scientists and journalists - to be deported from the new Soviet State. 'We're going to cleanse Russia once and for all' he wrote to Stalin, whose job it was to oversee the deportation. Two ships sailed from Petrograd that autumn, taking Old Russia's eminent me ...more

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Hardcover, 414 pages

Published August 7th 2007 by St. Martin's Press (first published January 1st 2006)

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Jun 01, 2009 Eric rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: etudes-slaves

Wow, what a book. It’s a necessary and helpful English digest of the vast Russo-German scholarship that has bloomed from the post-Cold War opening of the Soviet archives, AND a heroic effort to position the intellectual agony of exiled Russian thinkers as one of the representative, even mythic stories of European intellectual history. The first wave of émigré studies had to remind people that the emigration existed in far richer human terms than the Soviet caricature of bitter former landowners Wow, what a book. It’s a necessary and helpful English digest of the vast Russo-German scholarship that has bloomed from the post-Cold War opening of the Soviet archives, AND a heroic effort to position the intellectual agony of exiled Russian thinkers as one of the representative, even mythic stories of European intellectual history. The first wave of émigré studies had to remind people that the emigration existed in far richer human terms than the Soviet caricature of bitter former landowners and militaristic reactionaries would suggest; the mission now—-admirably taken up by Chamberlain, along with the other scholars whose work she elucidates in her at times absorbing endnotes—-is to show just how relevant the debates that consumed “Russia Abroad” are to our understanding the political and intellectual revolutions of the 20th century.

In 1922 Lenin expelled two boatloads of philosophers, academics and journalists who opposed, to varying degrees, the Bolshevik consolidation of totalitarian power but who were too patriotic, too identified with the intelligentsia’s sacred duty as conscience of Russia to ever emigrate voluntarily. Chamberlain is right to point to Solzhenitsyn as a later example of the tradition from which the 1922 expellees like Berdyaev came: they were committed to freedom without being recognizable Western liberals. A political liberalism was less developed in Russia and autocracy was traditionally opposed by notions of free will and the dignity of individual that flowed from religious and literary traditions, not secular or rationalist ones. The religious philosophers who journeyed out of Russia on the “Philosophy Steamer” loathed the Soviet Russia then emerging, but they also had little love for the secular materialistic West—-and in fact they tended to view Leninism as a alien growth of European rationalism on Russian soil. Chamberlain, I think, is wrong to take this equation of Lenin and the European Enlightenment at face value. In her epilogue she goes to great lengths to treat Lenin as a viable positivist philosopher in dialogue with the metaphysical thinkers he expelled. The problem is that Lenin represents positivism in such a bizarre, perverse, indeed murderous and terroristic a form, and his earlier-quoted memos regarding the expelled thinkers are so scatological and insane, that to suggest his intellectual parity with the likes of Berdyaev or Aikhenvald, or to suggest that he cared about the humanity of the Russian people as much they did, is to be irresponsible. And Chamberlain’s comparison of him to Wittgenstein is nothing short of grotesque.

The book is fascinating for the light it puts on the early years of the Soviet Union, the initial consolidations and innovations of the first modern totalitarian state, and its stratagems for securing formal recognition from the rest of the world. Lenin expelled rather than simply killed these thinkers because he was conscious of being watched by the rest of Europe; also, as the presumed bringer of Enlightenment rationalism to Russia, he could easily stereotype the expellees as fundamentalist reactionaries, relics of the old regime rather than the exponents of a native democratic tradition and, almost to a man, past opponents of Czarism. The expellees were thus left to exile. Compounding the basic human pain of exile, they also had to suffer the sense of responsibility that came with the intelligentsia’s duty to make Russia freer and more humane. Chamberlain has some heartbreaking scenes from the 1920s—-when many in the emigration still thought that the Bolsheviks would soon fall and the émigrés return—-of these thinkers in their various conclaves and transplanted institutes, endlessly discussing and lecturing the meaning of the revolution and laying plans for the Russia to which they would someday return. Some convinced themselves that a Bolshevik interregnum was necessary to the new birth of freedom that they would help usher in and husband. Over the last chapters there is a melancholy air of purposelessness and wasted potential. Hope of return would slowly, agonizingly perish and most would be dispersed or destroyed in the maelstrom of WWII. Reading this I felt very vividly Nabokov’s bitter laments that exile had “made [him:] a fool,” and that his father, an anti-Czarist liberal statesman and jurist, was never able to serve Russia to the full capacity of his gifts and devotion.

The exile, destruction or co-opting of Russian intelligentsia augments my sense of Russia as the martyr nation of modernity, uniquely beset by the 20th century’s toxic ideologies. Russia suffered the moral and intellectual depredations of a domestic totalitarianism, suffered them the longest, as well as absorbing an apocalyptic unleashing of violence and hate by Germany’s variety. Lenin and Stalin did their best to enslave and “spiritually castrate” the Russian people (Brodsky’s words) and Hitler attempted to exterminate them with his race war. Communism and Fascism both took their 20 million.
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Nov 24, 2009 Geoff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sep 28, 2012 John David rated it really liked it

Shelves: modern-history

After the fall of the Romanovs, and not too long before he became the first Premier of the Soviet Union, Lenin planned a forced emigration for some of the more ideologically problematic Russian intellectuals. While the Lenin’s efforts were nothing like the later mass purges of Stalin, he did much to ensure that the transition from the monarchy to the USSR and its state capitalism, including making sure that the influence of intellectuals who weren’t wholly sympathetic to Lenin’s new economic ide After the fall of the Romanovs, and not too long before he became the first Premier of the Soviet Union, Lenin planned a forced emigration for some of the more ideologically problematic Russian intellectuals. While the Lenin’s efforts were nothing like the later mass purges of Stalin, he did much to ensure that the transition from the monarchy to the USSR and its state capitalism, including making sure that the influence of intellectuals who weren’t wholly sympathetic to Lenin’s new economic ideas would never have the ability to peddle that influence.

In September of 1922, well over one hundred intellectuals and their families were forcibly deported from their homes on board two ships, one of which was known as the “Philosophy Steamer.” Chamberlain tells the stories of these people, their lives, their ideas, and what it was like when they ended up in their new homes in Europe. Chamberlain weaves together that is actually quite a bit more than simply the “voyage of the Philosophy Steamer” that the subtitle describes. It’s really a story of exile, displacement of every kind, and ultimately re-shaping one’s life in a foreign land.

Most of the intellectuals aren’t terribly well-known, at least in the United States, but a few might be somewhat familiar, depending on your reading or academic interests. The lives that I was especially interested in, because I previously knew of them, were: the Russian mystic and theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, writer Maxim Gorky, and sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, and structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson. A few very recognizable figures pop up from time to time, including Shostakovich and Nabokov. The fascinating thing about many of the people on the ship (and its sister ship) is that they didn’t want to leave the land of their birth. Ironically, many of them were socialists.

Their fatal flaw, however, seemed to be their collusion with theism, and particularly the Orthodox Church. (Because of the hearty interrelationships between Orthodoxy and socialism in nineteenth-century Russian thought, many of the exiles were both Christians and socialists – a phenomenon we would hardly recognize in our peculiar historical moment, but one that was very familiar to Russians at the time.) Lenin’s materialism simply didn’t have a place for God in his philosophy, and therefore these people couldn’t stick around. In fact, Gorky even considered himself to be an ally of Lenin, and was frankly shocked when he found a member of Lenin’s Cheka knocking on his door one night to take him away.

Much of Chamberlin’s book details what happens when the exiles land at their new homes which, for most of the people she’s writing about, are Prague, Berlin, and Paris. (Sorokin was the exception, who ended up in the United States, and founded the Harvard Sociology Department.) The politics and the opinions of these thinkers were much too diverse to be outlined here, but many of them thought that Lenin’s little experiment would be history in no more than a decade or so, and then they would be able to return home to their former lives.

This book could have easily been just about Lenin or an account of the time spent on the ship, or some other narrowly focused aspect of this story, but Chamberlain strikes a fine balance in integrating all of these. She does, from time to time, take excessive novelistic license in imagining details of certain lines, which can get tedious, but this is an overall enjoyable, well-told narrative of tumultuous time in history, and the seemingly universal precariousness of the intellectual in the twentieth century. ...more

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Feb 03, 2013 Sam Schulman rated it it was ok

Shelves: jewish-history, russian-history, communism

This is an impressionistic, warm, emotional, and complex book about the intellectuals Lenin focussed on after the end of the Civil War as his enemies, how he drove them out of Russia, and their experience as emigres in Berlin and Prague. But there are some things about the book that make me uncomfortable, some of which are forgiveable, others, perplexing. To have given herself to this project, Lesley Chamberlain must be an enthusiast, but from the beginning of the book, I was puzzled by the sign This is an impressionistic, warm, emotional, and complex book about the intellectuals Lenin focussed on after the end of the Civil War as his enemies, how he drove them out of Russia, and their experience as emigres in Berlin and Prague. But there are some things about the book that make me uncomfortable, some of which are forgiveable, others, perplexing. To have given herself to this project, Lesley Chamberlain must be an enthusiast, but from the beginning of the book, I was puzzled by the significance she gives to this incident, and the horror she shows. Of course it was fascinating - that Lenin particularly marked out some 22 professors, mainly, and their families, for expulsion. On the other hand, after hundreds of thousands of murders before, and millions more to come afterwards, Chamberlain's attitude is a little odd. The expulsion of these men and their families is arguably the most - perhaps the only - decent thing Lenin ever did in his life.
Again, that she must find these people unusually charming and fascinating and even important is natural, but she tends to speak of each and every one of them as the biggest man in his field - some were, clearly, but her advocacy of others does not give one confidence in her judgment.
Her horror at the fate of these men and their families is never tempered by the thought that they were surely the luckiest non-Bolshevik intellectuals in the history of the USSR. Not only were they not murdered before, or starved into submission, or murdered afterwards, but they didn't have to struggle into exile in rags. They were put on a boat, with their luggage, etc., they were given British currency on which to live, and told never to come back. That they were shocked, upset, not cognizant of their luck, homesick, attached to Russia, etc., is understandable and interesting - that Ms. Chamberlain is so shocked not so much.
Finally, and really something that I do wonder about, is her treatment of Berdyaev, the philosopher, who was arguably Russia's greatest living philosopher at the time. LC quotes him endlessly, goes into his political disagreements with other White Russian exiles, his conversations on board ship, his writings in exile, etc. - but one would never know from reading a book which gives so much attention to Berdyaev that he had a great reputation for blaming the Revolution on what he saw was an essentially Jewish characteristic, a messianic longing for perfection on earth. He expounded this at length in a book of 1919, and wrote about it afterwards, often to his credit condemning antisemitism itself. But to someone who knows a bit about the Russian Revolution, that is Berdyaev's major intervention on the subject, which is representative of a lot of the thinking among those who opposed the Bolsheviks. Some even blame the Whites' antisemitism for their loss of international support and the failure of their military enterprise, with some reason. So when, in a book so focussed on Berdayeav, and also so attentive to the plight of Russia's Jews and the Jews among the expelled, never to hear one word about Berdyaev's controversy on this subject is odd, and disconcerting (Just as it is disconcerting in so literary a book to encounter so many errors of grammar and usage. But theses are funny, whereas suppressing Berdyaev's major concern is not.) ...more

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Jan 13, 2017 Gruia rated it it was ok · review of another edition

A cultural study with fake political baggage. Scholars of philosophy and art history would love exploring this book, which digs into early 20th century cultural trends with gusto (following the narrow Russian vein). But for those interested in history (like me) this book has very little meat, as the title event is historically inconsequential.

Chamberlain forces the idea that the philosophical standing of the deportees was in direct opposition with Lenin's and a danger to his new state order. Thi ...more

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Jun 27, 2008 Jonathan rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Interesting but dull. If I had a really in-depth knowledge of Russian philosophers before starting to read it, it might have been more interesting, but as just someone curious about history... yeah, a bit dull.

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Apr 19, 2019 Andrei rated it really liked it

Very informative.

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Jan 26, 2009 James Henderson rated it really liked it

Shelves: biography, history-of-ideas, history

In September 1922 a steamer with Russian citizens aboard left Petrograd for the West with a group of the "intelligentsia" of Russia, literary critics philosophers and others . This ship and others would eventually carry more than two hundred into exile in what has been chronicled by Lesley Chamberlain in her book, Lenin's Private War. Subtitled 'The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia", the book, a sort of intellectual history and cultural biography, tells the st In September 1922 a steamer with Russian citizens aboard left Petrograd for the West with a group of the "intelligentsia" of Russia, literary critics philosophers and others . This ship and others would eventually carry more than two hundred into exile in what has been chronicled by Lesley Chamberlain in her book, Lenin's Private War. Subtitled 'The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia", the book, a sort of intellectual history and cultural biography, tells the story of this group of Russian thinkers, most of whom would never return to their homeland. This episode can be seen as the beginning of the closing of Russia to the West and one of the critical steps in the Bolsheviks exertion of complete totalitarian control over the arts and philosophy in the Soviet Union. Among the exiles were well-known thinkers including philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Nikolai Lossky; historians Myakotin and Kizevetter; and, many other writers, economists, journalists and social scientists. Their crime simply was they had overstayed their welcome. They did not fit into the plans of Lenin. Fortunately, while they were arrested, their end was one of exile rather than immediate execution.

Lesley Chamberlain vividly delineates the character of key members of this group, highlighting the singular importance of Berdyaev and his Christian idealism that was the antithesis of Lenin's Marxist materialism. The book is fleshed out with details from letters, memoirs and other documents that provide a solid foundation for the story she tells. We learn of their arrest and interrogation and the background leading to their ultimate exile. The irony of this exile is explored in the second half of the book which discusses the difficult world they faced in a Europe that came to be dominated by Hitler in the 1930s. Some of these thinkers faced even worse fates in that world than they had in the Russia from which they had been exiled. Ultimately many fled to the United States or merely went into hiding for the duration of the war. Their exile is magnificently told in this book. Chamberlain has provided us with a fascinating story of separation and hope.
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