RUSSIAN WORLD The ship of Russian philosophers

Exactly one hundred years ago, more than 300 illustrious representatives of the scientific, literary and artistic intellectual elite who saved Russian culture from being annihilated were expelled from Soviet Russia. Today too, due to the “Ukrainian revolution”, thousands of teachers, artists and scholars from various fields have fled the country. Will they be able to do the same?

Exactly one hundred years ago, in September-October 1922, more than 300 illustrious representatives of the scientific, literary and artistic intellectual elite were expelled from Soviet Russia to Germany, at the personal disposition of Lenin. It was supposedly a gesture of liberality by the regime, which sought to obtain international recognition of the new state after the civil war. A recently deceased thinker, Sergej Khoruzhij, who dedicated his life to the reconstruction of Russia’s cultural memory, called that event “the ship of the philosophers”, because effectively most of those expelled were forced to embark with a single suitcase loaded with nostalgia and sadness.

The exiled Russians were able in the last century to save Russian culture from complete Soviet annihilation, and made it even more known to a West thirsty to explore the various dimensions of the soul, from East to West. The exiled philosophers created centers for research and dissemination of history and theology, such as the Saint-Serge Institute in Paris, where the main exponents of existentialism, sociology and neo-patristicism taught, such as Nikolaj Berdjaev, Sergej Bulgakov, Georgij Florovskij and many others .

In 2022, due to the “Ukrainian revolution” that once again severed neo-imperial Russia’s ties with Europe and the rest of the West, tens of thousands of representatives of the creative intellectual elite left the country on the new “ships of the philosophers” . At least until the borders are completely closed to escape Putin’s grim isolation. Teachers, painters, musicians, philosophers and scholars from various fields of science flee along the most accessible routes through Istanbul, Yerevan, Georgia, Estonia or Latvia. Will they be able to save Russian culture again and entrust it to the international community so that it does not wither and be lost? Will they be able to create new realities and associations in exile, involving the very many people who consider Russia an indispensable part of the universal soul and not just the accursed kingdom of “Russianism”?

Two eminent representatives of the new Russian diaspora, jurist Elena Lukjanova and sociologist Sergej Erofeev, who have already been working for a long time in academic centers abroad, such as the “Free University” opened in the United States, spoke on this topic on Radio Svoboda. They rightly pointed out that conditions are very different from a century ago, when the “philosophers” were completely cut off from the mother country, while today there are universal forms of communication, however much attempts are made to limit and suffocate them. That is why “one cannot speak of emigration or exile in the full sense, but rather of “relocation”, as Lukjanova points out. In addition, “science has ceased to be exclusively national for a long time, it could not even exist in that way and it would only be a simulacrum of propaganda”, as indeed occurs in many current proclamations about the “diversity” of the Russian soul.

Putin’s rhetoric insists on “sovereignty” even to define culture, and has imposed on the Russian variant of Wikipedia a specific treatment of culture that protects itself from all foreign influence, expurgating it from any recent citation and based solely on texts published between the sixties and nineties. It is the “cultural war” that accompanies the Ukrainian bombings, to justify the facts by distorting reality and its interpretations. In recent months, Erofeev has proposed some lessons on the “Russian catastrophe” in which he shows that the “regime”, which sociologists call the “system”, has been consolidating itself over the course of these thirty post-Soviet years precisely with the progressive manipulation of culture. .

The emigrants of a hundred years ago said “we are not in exile, we are on a mission”, to share with the whole world the treasures of Russian art and tradition. As Erofeev says, “Lenin is to be thanked for sending Pitirim Sorokin and Fedor Stepun abroad, not to mention everyone else; even Putin’s favorite philosopher, Ivan Il’in, was in that boat.” The new diaspora actually started not in 2022 but in 2014, “the first wave of relocation” according to Lukjanova, after the patriotic euphoria of annexation of Crimea, which already announced the entire review of Russian history and culture. Many did not accept the shame of that turning point that unleashed a repressive spiral that is now almost absolute. The approval of the new Constitution in 2020 caused the ” second wave”.

Russian intellectuals, or at least what remains of the glorious tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, cannot bear the feeling of guilt for what is happening in Russia today and this prevents them from conceiving themselves as “missionaries” of Russia in the world. Soviet ideology could easily be branded as foreign to tradition, but today precisely tradition is claimed in the “revised” version by power, confirming the semantic continuity of the terms tradition/translation/betrayal, which commits anyone who wants to express a common dimension of the spirit. The waves of “philosopher ships” have actually been going on since the early 2000s, following Putin’s rise to power and the reconstitution of Orthodoxy as a State Church. Journalists, human rights activists, university professors are leaving, according to the various persecutory measures that take place from year to year.

The most prestigious Russian universities, starting with the “Lomonosov Mgu” and the “Vyška School of Economics”, with thousands of students ready to start a new academic year after the summer holidays, today are deserts entrusted to a few propagandists, because most of the real scholars and scholars have either left or resigned. Even the “Saints Cyril and Methodius” Specialization School of the Orthodox Church has been left without a real leadership after Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev), who had instituted and sustained it for more than a decade, was expelled, putting in his place the gloomy conservative Maksim Kozlov. Putin himself has decreed that there is no such thing as “political science”, because “it has no method”, and criticism of political systems is already a thing of the past, a brief parenthesis in the history of Russian science , in which the method is imposed from above and does not admit deviations.

Erofeev explains that “in all the post-Soviet years, in the humanitarian and social sphere not only amateurism has flourished but a true obscurantism, which today reigns unchallenged.” After the long Soviet winter, the revival of Russian culture was in any case a very approximate phenomenon, and the appropriation by the regime has been very easy, grossly exalting what had been eliminated by Soviet ideology. The most striking aspect of this simplifying propaganda is precisely the religious culture, which has emphatically taken up the sacred images of saints and Orthodox tsars to the point of even recruiting icons in the media war, as happened in the last days with Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity”.

The true rediscovery of culture, history and religion in Russia is a task for the future, when the neo-imperialist instrumentalization has been somewhat exhausted. In a sense, the war in Ukraine has accelerated this process of overcoming, demonstrating the inconsistency of the new ideology: Ukraine, which should have been canceled in the name of the sacred origins of Russian Christianity, today has finally become aware of its national, cultural and even religious. This proposes a completely opposite interpretation to the imperial one of Putin and Kirill: Ukraine represents a Russia capable of dialogue and integration with Europe and the West, which has always existed east of the Dnieper, and which turns Russia into a melting pot of images and synthesis always new and original, of universal value for men of all continents.

Erofeev is convinced that “Putin has shortened the course of history and will not be able to last much longer, just like Stalin and Brezhnev.” The task of the new “philosophers”, Russian and of any other nationality, is to grasp the meaning of time, without leaving culture and the treasures of the spirit in the hands of populists and dreamers of new empires, who destroy cities and human lives but they have no strength to destroy the soul. This is the mission that the present time imposes on each one of us.

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