Mood of the Intelligentsia

Wellred

Core Argument

The chapter analyses the psychological and ideological fallout of the reactionary period following the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution, focusing on the demoralisation of the intelligentsia. It argues that the trauma of defeat did not merely produce physical repression but an epidemic of pessimism and despair, transmitted into the working class via the petty bourgeoisie, which acts as a conveyor belt for ruling-class ideas. The intelligentsia, disappointed in the revolution, retreated into subjectivism, hedonism, mysticism, and metaphysics. This found expression in the Symbolist school of poetry, in philosophy’s turn from dialectics toward Kantianism, and in the cult of “Art for Art’s Sake”—all pretexts for an inward-looking escape from political struggle. The chapter draws historical parallels: the “gilded youth” after Robespierre’s fall, hedonism after the English Restoration, and the mysticism of Baudelaire after 1848. In Russia, this mood was crystallised by the Cadet-aligned journal Vekhi (Landmarks), whose contributor M.O. Gershenzon openly declared that the intelligentsia should fear the people more than the Tsar’s executions and prisons. A more insidious assault came from former “Legal Marxists” such as Struve, Berdyaev, and Merezhkovsky, who abandoned Marxism and became apologists for reaction. The chapter singles out dialectics as the specific target of these intellectual critics, arguing that rejection of dialectical materialism is a rejection of Marxism’s revolutionary essence. These alien ideas penetrated the workers’ party itself, smuggled in via the subjective idealism of Ernst Mach and taken up by Bolshevik ultra-lefts including Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Bazarov. Under the banner of novelty, they revived pre-Marxist ideas—anarchism, Proudhonism, Kantianism—and even attempted to fuse Marxism with religion, producing the “God-Builders” and “God-Seekers.” Lunacharsky’s Religion and Socialism argued for a “godless religion of labour.” The chapter details Lenin’s initial reluctance to split the Bolshevik leadership over philosophy, his patience with Bogdanov, and his eventual break when Bogdanov published a defence of Machism in Kautsky’s Die Neue Zeit, internationalising the dispute. Lenin’s response was Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a work that cut through the fog of mysticism. The chapter concludes with Lenin’s insistence, in letters to his sister, that no concessions be made and that the language against Bogdanov and Lunacharsky not be toned down, using the untranslatable term popovshchina (“priestliness”) to characterise their outlook. The polemic is directed against both the open reactionaries of Vekhi and the pseudo-Marxist renegades who, under the guise of philosophical innovation, undermined the theoretical foundations of the revolutionary movement.