Morson: Suicide of the Liberals

Gary Saul Morson writes beautifully on the intelligentsia of the Russian revolution.

The parallels that they have with the modern liberals are astounding.

The full lenghth article (link at the bottom), but I have taken out excerpts that I think you will find relevant here:

Between 1900 and 1917, waves of unprecedented terror struck Russia. Several parties professing incompatible ideologies competed (and cooperated) in causing havoc. Between 1905 and 1907, nearly 4,500 government officials and about as many private individuals were killed or injured. Between 1908 and 1910, authorities recorded 19,957 terrorist acts and revolutionary robberies, doubtless omitting many from remote areas. As the foremost historian of Russian terrorism, Anna Geifman, observes, “Robbery, extortion, and murder became more common than traffic accidents.”

Anyone wearing a uniform was a candidate for a bullet to the head or sulfuric acid to the face. Country estates were burnt down (“rural illuminations&rdquo😉 and businesses were extorted or blown up. Bombs were tossed at random into railroad carriages, restaurants, and theaters. Far from regretting the death and maiming of innocent bystanders, terrorists boasted of killing as many as possible, either because the victims were likely bourgeois or because any murder helped bring down the old order. A group of anarcho-­communists threw bombs laced with nails into a café bustling with two hundred customers in order “to see how the foul bourgeois will squirm in death agony.”

Instead of the pendulum’s swinging back—a metaphor of inevitability that excuses people from taking a stand—the killing grew and grew, both in numbers and in cruelty. Sadism replaced simple killing. As Geifman explains, “The need to inflict pain was transformed from an abnormal irrational compulsion experienced only by unbalanced personalities into a formally verbalized obligation for all committed revolutionaries.” One group threw “traitors” into vats of boiling water. Others were still more inventive. Women torturers were especially admired.


How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in ­terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin—“When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope”—would have been more accurately rendered as: “They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, “liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?


That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies. Lenin, after all, was by no means the only bloodthirsty Russian radical. In 1907, Ivan Pavlov—not the Nobel prize–winning scientist, but one of the brightest theoreticians of the especially violent ­Maximalists—published The Purification of Mankind, which divided humanity into ethical races. In this analysis, exploiters, vaguely and broadly identified, constituted a race, “morally inferior to our animal predecessors,” which must be exterminated, children and all, by the morally superior race, whose best members were the terrorists themselves. Remarkably enough, this program evoked no indignation, among other Maximalists or even among other socialists, however moderate. Another prominent Maximalist, M. A. Engel’gardt, argued for a red terror that would kill at least twelve million people. As if anticipating the Khmer Rouge, one anarchist group sought to establish equality by killing all educated people.

And yet the liberals refused to use their position in the Duma to make constitutionalism work. They would not participate in determining the government budget but confined their activities to denouncing the government and defending terrorists. Even when Pyotr Stolypin, the most capable chief minister ­Nicholas II ever had, offered to enact the entire Kadet program, the Kadets refused to cooperate. Evidently their professed beliefs were less important than their emotional identification with radicalism, of whatever sort.

In one memorable scene, the hero of ­Solzhenitsyn’s novel November 1916, Colonel Vorotyntsev, finds himself at a social gathering principally of Kadet adherents, where everyone repeats the same progressive pieties. He soon grasps that “each of them knew in advance what the others would say, but that it was imperative for them to meet and hear all over again what they collectively knew. They were all overwhelmingly certain that they were right, yet they needed these exchanges to reinforce their certainty.” To his surprise, Vorotyntsev, as if under a spell, finds himself joining in. It requires an effort to remind himself that what these progressives say about “the people,” whom they do not know at all, contradicts everything he has learned from his acquaintance with thousands of common soldiers. When Vorotyntsev ventures the slightest discordant observation, “just . . . one little thing . . . they were all on their guard. They fell silent, as they had been speaking, in unison, and their silence was aimed at the colonel.” He retreats and, as if hypnotized, repeats progressive pieties with the rest.

What is this strange political hypnosis? Vorotyntsev gives ground and holds his peace, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary,” a word Solzhenitsyn italicizes to suggest that, in other cultures and periods, a different term of opprobrium will play the same role. Soldiers who are brave under fire cower before progressive opinion. For a long time, Vorotyntsev cannot bring himself to voice counterarguments, “and he despised himself for it. . . . It was a contagious disease—there was no resisting it if you came too close.”

At last, Vorotyntsev finds it in himself to resist. Soon after, he discusses the encounter with Professor Andozerskaya, who explains that she, like professors at many universities today, “must choose every word so carefully.”

To follow the volume’s argument, one needs to grasp how the contributors used the words “intelligentsia” and “intelligent” (member of the intelligentsia). “Intelligentsia” is a word that originated in Russia, where it was coined about 1860. Used in its strict, proper, or classical sense, it means something entirely different from its English equivalent. To be an intelligent it was by no means sufficient (or even necessary) to be well-educated. And if by “­intellectual” one means a curious person thinking for himself or herself, then intelligent was close to its opposite.

The Landmarks contributors mention a second characteristic of intelligents: their devotion to a special set of manners, including dress, hygiene (deliberately poor), hair style (the famous “short-haired lady nihilists&rdquo😉, prescribed and taboo expressions, and a set of sexual practices that the Landmarks contributors describe as puritanical dissoluteness (debauchery practiced as a rite) fueled by “nihilistic moralism.”

Most important, and of greatest concern, was how intelligents thought. An intelligent signed on to a set of beliefs regarded as totally certain, scientifically proven, and absolutely obligatory for any moral person. A strict intelligent had to subscribe to some ideology—whether populist, Marxist, or anarchist—that was committed to the total destruction of the existing order and its replacement by a utopia that would, at a stroke, eliminate every human ill. This aspiration was often described as chiliastic (or apocalyptic), and, as has been observed, it is no accident that many of the most influential intelligents, from Chernyshevsky to Stalin, came from clerical families or had studied in seminaries. For Struve, the mentality of the intelligentsia constituted a cruel parody of religion, preserving “the external features of religiosity without its content.”

If there was one “philosopheme” (Struve’s term) shared by intelligents it was the assumption that all questions must be judged politically. Thus, one could discredit a scientific theory not by logic or evidence but by calling its implications “reactionary” (“and what don’t we call reactionary!&rdquo😉. The Soviets banned, at one time or another, genetics, relativity, and quantum theory—not on criteria from their respective disciplines, but on the basis of their supposed incompatibility with “dialectical ­materialism.”

(The actual full article address did not link)
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals

(Quotes continued)

Intelligentsia ethics appalled the Landmarks essayists. If everything is political, then the cruelest means are not only permitted but obligatory. What is more, the very tactics the revolutionaries condemned became acceptable when the revolutionaries themselves used them. The argument that comes naturally to liberal-minded people—what if the shoe were on the other foot?—was rejected in principle. For an intelligent, there is no other foot.

In Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, when young Veronika criticizes revolutionaries for doing just what they condemn, her intelligentsia aunts are shocked. Why,



the unfeeling girl was equating the oppressors of the people with its liberators, speaking as though they had the same moral rights! . . . Let him [the intelligent] kill. . . . The Party takes all the blame upon itself, so that terror is no longer murder, expropriation is no longer robbery.

Such thinking is a “major convenience,” Gershenzon observed, because “it remove[s] all moral responsibility from the individual.” Writing about a decade after Landmarks, the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called such an excuse a spurious “alibi” and insisted: “There is no alibi.”

The intelligentsia constituted one Russian intellectual tradition, the great writers another. “It is remarkable,” Struve commented, “how our national literature remains a preserve the intelligentsia cannot capture.” Gershenzon famously remarked that “in Russia an almost infallible gauge of the strength of an artist’s genius is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia.” Russia’s greatest contribution to world culture—the literary tradition of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov—could not have existed had these writers written to political formula. On the contrary, the Russian novel of ideas critically examined everything the intelligentsia stood for—the simplicity of human psychology, the easy division of people into good and evil, the supposition that life’s meaning is already known, and the reduction of ethics to politics—and showed how mistaken and dangerous such ideologies are.

Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like intelligentsia wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. Socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas—they contrived ways to justify radical intolerance and violence as forced, understandable, and noble. They had to, since the fundamental emotional premise of liberalism—hostility to those ignorant, bigoted, morally depraved people on the right—almost always proved more compelling than professed intellectual ­commitments.

Casting “unworthy, furtive glances at who liked what,” Berdyaev observed, these liberals illustrated how “moral cowardice develops, while love of truth and intellectual daring are extinguished.” Captivated by public opinion, they signed petitions they did not agree with and excused heinous acts, always observing the rule: Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone an inch to one’s right. Educated society knew that one could not just abolish the police, as the anarchists demanded, and that socialism would not instantly cure all ills, but they assured themselves that progressive opinion must be right:


progressive minds? . . . Only people with an exceptionally strong spirit could resist the hypnosis of a common faith. . . . Tolstoy resisted, and so did Dostoevsky, but the average person, even if he did not believe, dared not admit it.

The Landmarks contributors aimed to change Russia so that, like England, it would have educated people but not an intelligentsia. They warned, as Dostoevsky had in The Possessed, that to the extent that a society’s educated class comes to resemble an intelligentsia in the Russian sense, it is headed for what we now call totalitarianism—unless others muster the strength to resist it.

One sometimes hears that “the pendulum is bound to swing back.” But how does one know there is a pendulum at all, rather than—let us say—a snowball accelerating downhill? It is unwise to comfort oneself with metaphors. When a party is willing to push its power as far as it can go, it will keep going until it meets sufficient opposition. In the French Revolution, terror was eventually stopped by “Thermidor,” and then by Napoleon. But in Russia, Stalin proclaimed “the intensification of the class struggle” after the Revolution, entailing an unending series of arrests, executions, and sentences to the Gulag. What meets no resistance does not stop. 

@philokalia said
Russian revolution.
The parallels that they have with the modern liberals are astounding.

@wolfgang59 said
1. You are easily astounded.

2. The word "liberal" is totally dependent on context. There are liberals in the
Catholic church, there are liberals in Islam, there would have been liberals in Nazi
Germany and Stalin's Russia. You think they shared much in the way of ideology?

In a nutshell: Russian Mushiks should have been slaves in the way they had been ordained?

So the american colonies were wrong in revolting and killing off the King's faithful servants.

@ponderable said
In a nutshell: Russian Mushiks should have been slaves in the way they had been ordained?

So the american colonies were wrong in revolting and killing off the King's faithful servants.

Even when Pyotr Stolypin, the most capable chief minister ­Nicholas II ever had, offered to enact the entire Kadet program, the Kadets refused to cooperate. Evidently their professed beliefs were less important than their emotional identification with radicalism, of whatever sort.

@philokalia said
This is not quite the message here.

Much of what was being written talks about how the liberals were apologists for the radicals and terrorists, and essentially believed in the revolution to such an extent that they would not be willing to stomach anything less than full revolution.

Check out this quote from the article

Even when Pyotr Stolypin, th ...[text shortened]... s were less important than their emotional identification with radicalism, of whatever sort.

@philokalia said
This is not quite the message here.

Much of what was being written talks about how the liberals were apologists for the radicals and terrorists, and essentially believed in the revolution to such an extent that they would not be willing to stomach anything less than full revolution.

Check out this quote from the article

Even when Pyotr Stolypin, th ...[text shortened]... s were less important than their emotional identification with radicalism, of whatever sort.

TLDNR

@philokalia said
(The actual full article address did not link)
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals

(Quotes continued)

Intelligentsia ethics appalled the Landmarks essayists. If everything is political, then the cruelest means are not only permitted but obligatory. What is more, the very tactics the revolutionaries condemned became acceptable w ...[text shortened]... of arrests, executions, and sentences to the Gulag. What meets no resistance does not stop. 

@ponderable said
The term in your quote is "radicalism" which is not to be confused with liberalism.

@suzianne said
I am really, really, really, really getting tired of people like you describing liberals as the most vile humans on the planet.

I understand that there's been like 40 years of liberal-bashing going on in the media (starting with Reagan and continuing on AM radio with Rush Limbaugh, and ending up with people like Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson), and that now, under T ...[text shortened]... e my neighbor, as Jesus commanded, or do I spit on him and do everything I can do to keep him down?"

@kevcvs57 said
Have you factored in the disgusting blood drenched regime that they were revolting against or is that irrelevant. Even in hindsight I’d support the Bolshevik revolution against the centuries old murderous autocratic czarist regime.
But how many modern day liberals do you think are yearning for that kind of revolution. You should be warning the conservatives about the threat ...[text shortened]... ary factions that have insinuated themselves into their ranks and taken over their Republican Party.

@suzianne said
I am really, really, really, really getting tired of people like you describing liberals as the most vile humans on the planet.

I understand that there's been like 40 years of liberal-bashing going on in the media (starting with Reagan and continuing on AM radio with Rush Limbaugh, and ending up with people like Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson), and that now, under T ...[text shortened]... e my neighbor, as Jesus commanded, or do I spit on him and do everything I can do to keep him down?"

@suzianne said
I am really, really, really, really getting tired of people like you describing liberals as the most vile humans on the planet.

I understand that there's been like 40 years of liberal-bashing going on in the media (starting with Reagan and continuing on AM radio with Rush Limbaugh, and ending up with people like Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson), and that now, under T ...[text shortened]... e my neighbor, as Jesus commanded, or do I spit on him and do everything I can do to keep him down?"