The October Upheaval of 1917 and the Collapse of N.A. Berdyaev’s “Russian Idea”
Vladimir Boyko
N.A. Berdyaev develops and elaborates the principles for comprehending the national idea, previously formulated by V.S. Solovyov. The founder of the philosophy of All-Unity linked the meaning of a nation’s existence with the destiny of the Christian world, the Universal Church. According to Solovyov, the national idea has universal character, it consists in what God thinks of the nation in eternity. In his works Berdyaev examines the Russian idea in the context of the establishment of God-manhood formation, emphasizes the priority of a universal, objective Divine will, calls for the renewal of Christianity and all aspects of social life. The personalist philosopher connects the impending religious revival with the development of the personal principle. He perceives Christianity as a revelation about the person, and the Western European idea of knighthood as the threshold of Christian anthropology. The most important component of the realization of the Russian people-nation is the knightly ideal – the basis for forming a new religious consciousness, an alternative to ‘worldly philistinism’ and total self-sufficing statehood.
Initially, Berdyaev’s attention to the “Russian Idea” was connected with his reflections on the causes and consequences of the First Russian revolution of 1905-1907. He came to the conclusion that Russia was destined for a great mission – to become a bridge between the Christian East and West, to unite humanity in its progressive historical improvement. To fulfill this mission, the Russian people must overcome their inherent shortcomings and create favorable conditions for perfecting the personal principle within its bounds. In the Russian person, who has absorbed knightly virtues, Berdyaev believes, the individualism of the West is superseded, and a synthesis of the two vectors of historical development, East and West, is realized.
The theme of Russia’s world-historic world mission becomes urgent in Berdyaev’s work in connection with the country’s entry into the First World War, and especially after the overthrow of the autocracy in February 1917. He views the victory of democracy in Russia as an external condition for the emergence of spiritual knighthood, whose thoughts are directed beyond the empirical world. The Russian philosopher hopes that the revolution will liberate spiritual forces of the people and will be accompanied by the formation of national aristocracy of the spirit. But in the summer of July 1917, Berdyaev observes that Russia is being sacrificed to the revolutionary element. He considers the Russian person’s inclination towards social utopias a consequence of centuries of slave-like existence of the people, the absence in the Russian national character of a sense of duty and responsibility. The Bolsheviks’ victory in the struggle for power in the autumn of 1917 confirmed Berdyaev’s worst fears. He states that in Russia, the forces of negation and degeneration, the force of chaos and disintegration have prevailed. There is no genuine revolutionary movement, no creative development. Class consciousness destroys respect for the human person. The triumph in Russia of the bourgeois ideal of prosperous existence in the material world, of equality and justice, over the hierarchical principle of the universe’s order, was symptom of the degradation of the Russian people and meant the collapse of N.A. Berdyaev’s “Russian Idea”.