HOOVER ARCHIVES:
The “Russian Idea” of Nikolai Berdyaev

By David Satter

The Hoover Archives contain a large collection of writings by the Russian émigré intellectual Nikolai Berdyaev, many of which were published in obscure Parisian émigré journals. Berdyaev’s writings illustrate the profound paradoxes of Russian messianism, which continue to confound many Russians today. By David Satter.

On December 3, 1944, a strange event took place in newly liberated Paris. Nikolai Berdyaev, a religious philosopher and the best-known Russian émigré intellectual of his time, made a speech before an audience of elderly Russian émigrés in support of the Soviet Union. A contemporary account of the speech in the Manchester Guardian is among the materials on Berdyaev in the Hoover Archives.

This photograph of Nikolai Berdyaev appeared in his Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951).

Berdyaev said the messianism of two European nations—Russia and Germany—had an impact on their neighbors. The two, however, were not similar. German messianism was pagan in character, marked by a glorification of race, nature, and the fighting spirit, completely contradicting the spiritual message of Judaism and Christianity. Russian messianism, by contrast, was deeply rooted in Jewish and Christian thought. “The Russian messianic conception,” Berdyaev said, “always exalted Russia as a country that would help to solve the problems of humanity and would accept a place in the service of humanity.”

Berdyaev concluded that “recent changes in Russia, the changed attitude to religion and to the country’s traditions, make it not only possible but right for Christian Russians to rally to the Soviet government.”

Russia’s “Special Mission”

Because I am writing a book about Russian attitudes toward the communist past and the psychological roots of the communist regime, I became interested in Berdyaev’s political views.

The paradox of those views is striking. Unlike many in both Russia and the West, Berdyaev regarded communism as the total negation of morality, not as an economic system. In a letter to “Miss X” (apparently a convinced Communist with whom Berdyaev corresponded between 1930 and 1939), Berdyaev wrote: “The people of the West are obliged to study a great deal in this experience. The reality has shown that the question of socialism is not an economic or political question but a question about God and immortality.” Despite his belief in the evil of socialism, however, even though it had triumphed in Russia, Berdyaev continued to believe that Russia had a special “mission” in the world. This belief eventually led him to approve and support the Soviet Union.

Berdyaev wrote that bolshevism “was not violence against the Russian people on the part of a small group of people obsessed with a false idea but was a creation of the Russian people, its own fate.”

Berdyaev’s writings illustrate the problem of Russian messianism, which is central to Russian political culture. The contradictions that ensnared Berdyaev confound many Russians today who, despite all that has happened, still find it hard it renounce communism completely owing to their belief in Russia’s “special role.”

Viewing the materials in the Hoover Archives, we are confronted with the contradiction between Berdyaev’s analysis in his books of the nature of communism and his political writing in Russian émigré journals. Berdyaev’s logic in the latter emerges as follows: (1) the Russian people have a great universal mission; (2) the Soviet regime was the product of the Russian people; so (3) at a fundamental level, then, the Soviet regime cannot be evil.

In his article, “It Is Necessary to Endure the Russian Fate,” which was published in 1946 in the Paris émigré newspaper Russkiye Novosti, Berdyaev wrote that many émigrés did not want to recognize that “‘bolshevism’ was not violence against the Russian people on the part of a small group of people obsessed with a false idea but was a creation of the Russian people, its own fate.” The issue was not one of approving all the actions of the Soviet regime “but the question of one’s relation to the Russian people, to the Russian earth and to the Russian revolution as an important moment in the fate of the Russian people.”

Despite the evidence of Stalin’s creation of a system based exclusively on lies, Berdyaev maintained that free speech was possible in the Soviet Union.

If Berdyaev was correct that Bolshevism was an expression of the Rus-sian tradition, one could argue that there is something wrong with that tradition, but Berdyaev took a different view. In an article written in 1948 (but published in 1952, after his death) in the Paris periodical Novyi zhurnal, Berdyaev insisted on the “special mission” of the Russian people. “The fate of Russia is unique,” he wrote, “and the Russian people are unique. . . . The Russian idea entered communism, but it was deformed . . . and connected with a false spirit . . . forced collectivism.” Despite this, Berdyaev believed it important to remember that “the Russian people were the first to make a social experiment, extraordinary in its bravery, and raise a new theme for the whole world. Let it [the Russian people] once in a while make a mistake but that is better than doing nothing and remaining self satisfied.”

Repression and Freedom

Berdyaev was not blind to the mass repression in the Soviet Union, but, given his faith in Russia’s “special way,” he came, in the postwar years, to see it as almost secondary to Russia’s saving mission. He thus implicitly justified Marxism, which he had condemned in his theoretical works for its readiness to exchange truth for bread.

In a 1946 article in Russkiye Novosti, Berdyaev responded to the campaign then going on in the Soviet Union against the poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoschenko, who were criticized for their “anti-soviet spirit.” “The basic mistake,” he wrote, “is to assume that it is possible to fabricate souls by means of mandatory organization, that it is possible to have a factory production of people. . . . The Soviets want to create a society in which there will not be the exploitation of man by man and they have done a great deal in this direction. The goal is humane. . . . But it is impossible to create a new social system without free criticism.”

Despite the evidence of Stalin’s creation of a system based exclusively on lies, Berdyaev maintained that free speech was possible in the Soviet Union. He argued that Russia would probably not adopt Western-style democracy but instead head toward “real freedom” and that the Russian people should remain true to “Russian universalism.”  

Berdyaev’s faith in Russia’s special mission led him to reject the “bourgeois democracy” in the West, which offered only formal freedom. “The enormous working masses,” he wrote in Novyi zhurnal, “are deprived of the opportunity to realize their freedom.” In the process, however, Berdyaev denied the very meaning of political freedom: “The complexity and contradictoriness of the understanding of freedom is that in movement some see the violation of freedom and in the absence of movement or change, they see freedom. . . . As a result, the great slogan of freedom, can become in the capitalist world, a cover for capitalist interests.”

Berdyaev owed his life to being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922 on the so-called philosophers’ boat. Before his expulsion, he was personally interrogated by Felix Dzerzhinski, the head of the Cheka.

Berdyaev said that the discussion should not be about “formal, stingy and, in essence, conservative” freedom but about “genuine, deep, permanent freedom” connected with human dignity. “Freedom is understood
. . . as the opening of collective social activism and the defining of a direction that changes the face of the world.”

In his writing, Berdyaev did not defend the “freedom” that existed in the Soviet Union. He wrote that “freedom is not only the creative activity of the social person in society, freedom is also independence of spirit and all forms of spiritual life and spiritual creativity from the so-called objective world, from society imposing its will on a person from outside.” His faith in the “Russian idea,” however, led him to justify the Soviet Union’s social pretensions, despite his own insistence that the issue of Marxism was moral not economic.

Berdyaev was not blind to the mass repression in the Soviet Union, but, given his faith in Russia’s “special way,” he came to see the repression as subordinate to Russia’s saving mission.

Berdyaev’s writing gave rise to controversy and disappointment in the Russian émigré community. Berdyaev almost certainly owed his life to being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922 on the so-called philosophers’ boat. Before his expulsion, Berdyaev was interrogated by Felix Dzerzhinski, the head of the Cheka, and he used the opportunity to denounce communism to one of its most sanguinary practitioners.

Berdyaev’s faith in the “Russian idea,” however, seems to have been the result of an emotional commitment not subject to rational analysis. Moreover, his views were not alien to the Russian political tradition. Communism expressed, in a radical materialist form, a faith in Russia’s special message that Berdyaev would have preferred to see expressed in the form of “religious socialism.” Such a messianic role, however, can only be based on a denial of universal ethics, a fact well demonstrated in Berdyaev’s philosophy and an enduring problem for Russia today.