The Philosophy of the Ones Who Left: An Experiment in Intellectual Autism

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[Photo Credit: “A Party” by Vladimir Makovsky]

From the Editor — In the following essay, which first appeared in Russkaya Istina (Jan. 8, 2024), Russian philosopher Yuri Pushchaev takes issue with a group of émigré Russian writers who have written a book sharply condemning their home country for the war in Ukraine.  According to Pushchaev, these émigré authors have shut their eyes to history. They write as if the war in Ukraine began quite out of the blue on Feb. 24, 2022, and that its outbreak was due solely to Russian malevolence. He accuses his opponents, in short, of being intellectually dishonest. 

Now, what may be more important than whether or not the reader is fully convinced, or indeed convinced at all, by Pushchaev’s counterarguments, is this: Pushchaev himself clearly is a person capable of, and open to, reasoned argument. For just this reason he is the kind of person with whom productive dialogue is possible.  It has long been our conviction that there are in Russia today a great many such people. 

One further point. In the argument between Pushchaev and his opponents, both sides appeal to Landmarks – by which we mean, of course, not the publications page of the Simone Weil Center, but the original 1909 collection of philosophical essays on the Russian intelligentsia called Landmarks -- as a prime source of authority.  As for which of the two sides is more justified in doing so we leave it to the reader to decide. 

The Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine has marked the onset of a new historical era and as such it is not surprising that it has also given rise to philosophical reflection.  Two collections of philosophical essays on the topic of the SMO have already appeared in the Russian language, though in their positions toward the SMO, the one is the exact inverse of the other.  

The first of these volumes, The Great Russian Correction of Names, brings together philosophers and authors of a pro-Russian orientation. (A review and summary of the volume can be found here.)¹

However, it is a collection that takes the opposite point of view about the SMO that will be the focus of our present review. It is called In the Face of Catastrophe and was published in Berlin in 2022.² The contributors to the volume are Russian philosophers of a markedly liberal perspective, most of whom either left the country in protest after Feb. 24, 2022, or who, at that point, had already been living abroad for a long time. Those who fall into the latter category make clear that they no longer particularly identify either with Russia or with the Russian philosophical community. Mikhail Mayatsky, who lives in Switzerland, eloquently illustrates the stance of those authors who have long lived abroad and who no longer identify with Russia:  

As for my share in the collective guilt, I do not rule out that my more than thirty years of living outside of Russia have dulled my feelings of identification with this country and its people. Maybe that’s why I feel guilty not as a Russian, but rather as a philosopher; I did not take sufficiently seriously the imperial or xenophobic excesses of a part of the philosophical guild; I passed them off as understandable personal whims, or even flattered myself for my tolerance toward such views as evidence of my own breadth and tolerance. Even so, this can be classified as “guilt” only in some very broad meaning of the word (2, p. 52).

In the Face of Catastrophe brings together a varied group of authors. Among them are some philosophers and historians who are quite well-known in academic circles, for example, A.L. Dobrokhotov and A.V. Akhutin are among the most senior, so to speak, heavy weights in their fields. N.S. Plotnikov, A.N. Dmitriev and A.T. Bikbov, though from the younger generation, are also well known. There are also some lesser-known authors. It is clear that each of them has their own style, makes their own arguments, strives to say something original. Nevertheless, as we know from the history of Russian social thought, philosophical collections published in Russia have always taken the form of a manifesto, a statement unified by one or another position that is held in common, and some shared set of desiderata. Whatever variability there may be in terms both of the presentation and what concretely is said, there will also be something in common shared by all authors. The same holds true for this collection. 

 As already noted, the general subject matter is clear – the Special Military Operation, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. It’s a white-hot topic. From this follows the nervous tone of the collection, its fervor, even loudness, all dictated by this being a response to a story that is unfolding before our very eyes and provoking an ongoing emotional response. To a certain extent it is an understandable response, and yet not everything can be allowed to be dictated by circumstances. To spite them, I will ask the authors quietly and calmly, to begin with, in order to lower the temperature: where does the categorical certainty so often found on the pages of this collection come from, as well as its uncompromising division of everything into light and darkness? Is this truly what one expects from a philosophical or a scholarly historical study, as distinct from a work of propaganda on behalf of an ideology or political party?  In all fairness, not all the articles are like this; there are some in which the volume and weight of the critical-analytical component is more or less noticeable — for example, in the chapter by Alexander Bikbov.  And yet even these articles are manifestly biased, full of prejudices in the sense of taking various things on faith, as indisputable foundational truths, though prior to all reasoning. For example: Russia is an aggressive and backward country (by the way it has always been like that), one which, after the events of February 24, has forever erased itself from the so-called civilized world. This is not even discussed by the different authors in the collection. Russia is emotionally and rhetorically condemned in a tone that does not admit of the slightest doubt.

As the collection’s compiler and editor Nikolai Plotnikov formulates it in his preface, the work’s authors were united by “the awareness of the need to carry out that critical analysis of basic concepts, without which it is impossible to accurately express the meaning of what is happening, to outline the contours of the catastrophe that has taken place and to find new ways of speaking about ourselves, about our language and thought, about our culture and history."  He describes the collection of essays as  “the solidary expression of their public position voiced by critical intellectuals.”  He then goes on to compare, in somewhat exalted terms, this “uncensored collection of articles” to “a whole tradition of such intellectual manifestos written by Russian idealists and Marxists, Russian liberals and socialists, emigrants and dissidents, including the following works:  Problems of Idealism; А Free Conscience; Landmarks: A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia;  The Intelligentsia in Russia; De Profundis; The Kingdom of the Antichrist; From Under the Rubble;  Self-Awareness [Samosoznanie]; and other collections” [2, p. 6].³ 

And yet, here is what literally leaps out at you when reading the articles in the collection In the Face of Catastrophe, if you compare them with, in particular, Landmarks. Whatever one’s assessment might be of that earlier collection, it nonetheless set a certain tone and standard of critical and self-critical analysis in our history of social thought. In the Berlin collection, such critical introspection and self-reflection are completely absent. On the other hand, there is a surfeit of phony self-reflection.

What am I referring to here? In 1909, the Landmarks authors directed their critical judgement also against themselves. They tried to understand what vices within the consciousness of the Intelligentsia, to which category they considered themselves a constituent part, had led to the catastrophe of the [1905 - 1907] revolution. But what we come across in this new volume is something completely different. When I wrote, above, that the collection’s ‘nervous tone’ and ‘fervor’ are only partly dictated by the red-hot presence of the historical situation, I also had something else in mind.  Even earlier, the authors had already demonstrated their inherent hostility towards the actual, not fictional, Russia; had already demonstrated their sectarian manner of thinking – their self-identification as the select righteous ones radiating the light of Enlightenment and civilization into the surrounding dark and backward space; but all this has found its culminating expression in the volume presently under consideration.  And to the extent that there is any self-reflection here concerning one’s own guilt, it is only along the lines of: ‘What was missing in our follow-through?’ ‘What screws did we fail to sufficiently tighten?’  ‘What did we fail to push hard enough such that this became possible?’  Exaggerating a little, their stance might be compared to how the direct ideological heirs of the Bolsheviks might today be  trying to figure out where they went wrong, how did they fail to make a successful counter-revolution impossible? ‘If only we had strangled the church and the intelligentsia more, then they wouldn’t have been able to undermine the consciousness of the Soviet people.’

Associated with this is a huge sense of ressentiment which runs through many articles. When they return, as they give the reader to understand, they will not allow a repeat. ‘We will take steps,’ the authors all but declare, ‘to ensure it doesn’t happen again.’  Can you imagine, respected reader, what they will be capable should they come back to power here? It will simply be a pogrom, one where the professional banning of their opponents will, very likely, be far from the worst scenario.

The absence of even a shadow of doubt about one’s rightness is organically connected, in this collection of articles, with a blatant ahistoricism and even anti-historicism. To which can be added enormous intellectual pride shrouded by exaggerated moralizing and moral histrionics. All of which suggests that this collection is not about comprehension, not about an honest, unbiased effort at analyzing the situation so as to discover how everything resulted in a tragedy on such an enormous scale. The collection, to the contrary, is exclusively about a total and a priori condemnation of Russia.  Unsurprisingly, given the authors’ stance, they pass over in complete silence the actions of Ukrainian authorities and radicals. It is as if no overthrow of the legitimate Ukrainian government in 2014 ever took place, or that, over the eight following years, no military operations had been launched on Donbass – there is literally not a word about any of this in the volume’s entire 180 pages. This is all the more surprising given that some of the authors of the collection are professional historians. One gets the impression that for the great majority of the authors of the collection (with the possible exception of A. Bikbov and A. Dmitriev), Russian-Ukrainian history in effect began starting from February 24, 2022.

Where does all this take us? As already noted, it takes us to the demonization of Russia and, more generally, the demonization of all those whom they view as their opponents.  For example, they manage to say, without blushing, the following: “We are forced, however, to admit a simple fact: the overwhelming majority of the Russian population is not able to see things this way [i.e., in the way that they have been describing –trans.], free from ideological crutches. It’s not just a matter of their having been bad students in school. The crucial point is that for decades – no, sadly, even for centuries – Russian culture and Russian civilization has ignored the very problem of the existence of evil... The key problem of post-Soviet consciousness, the problem which has ultimately led to disaster, can be found precisely in this inability to recognize evil in oneself and in the world around us. This failure to examine the problem of evil, this failure to recognize evil in oneself, has led to the failure to recognize evil in the actions of one’s own state and government.” (2, pp. 20–22).

Well, there you have it! No more, and no less. The Russia which was nurtured by the Eastern Orthodox Church, and by the authors Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin and Anton Chekhov; Russia with its “Russian boys”⁴  and Russian monks⁵ as described in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov – this is the Russia that has for hundreds of years been simply ignoring the problem of evil. 

Such statements cannot be taken seriously. They recall the passage from Griboyedov’s play, “Woe from Wit”:

Khlyostova:

Such strange things happen in our world today,

That at his age a man should go insane!

He must have drunk more than he should for his years … 

Countess:

It is true! 

Granddaughter of the Countess  

No doubt. Upon my word!

Khlyostova: 

Drank champagne he did -- by the glassful.

Natalya Dmitriyevna 

By the bottle!

Zagoretsky (with passion)

No! By the forty-gallon barrel!⁶

Spurred on by their liberalism, our very own Zagoretskys are simply uninterested in what the other side actually says or does. Putin, along with many leading Russian political thinkers, experts and analysts, constantly repeat that we and the Ukrainians form a single people — that this is therefore a civil war, and that precisely this is what underlines its tragic character. But no, the authors insist on  stating, contrary to the evidence: “In an ethical sense, isolationism invents its own morality – it is a morality of resentment, characterized by a complete absence of viewing oneself as a moral actor or subject. Any consciousness of one's own guilt and responsibility is blocked, whereas all evil is exteriorized onto the image of an external enemy, who is demonized and who takes on the role of the main subject of action. The ‘evil’ enemy is presented as an antipode to the mirror image of the ‘good’ self, deprived of any capacity for ethical self-reflection.” (2, p. 7).

They are talking about us, of course. If you will pardon me for making this point, it was, after all, the main Ukrainian propagandist Oleksiy Arestovich who recently noted that, in Ukrainian propaganda, Russians are referred to as orcs and pigs, whereas Putin states that the Russians and the Ukrainians form a single people. ‘Whose position do you think is more moral,’ asks Arestovich. Arestovich! 

But our authors, due to their extreme indoctrination, are incapable of grasping Arestovich’s argument; indeed, at no point in the text do they say a single word about Ukraine as an active subject with its own measure of guilt and responsibility. No, Ukraine is only a pure victim clothed in white. This allows them not to notice the torture of Russian prisoners, even though direct recordings of it can be found all over the Internet. They talk endlessly about Bucha, even though not a single name of any of the victims has been made public in two years! Nor have the authors provided a single piece of factual evidence indicating that Bucha was anything other than a production staged by the Ukrainian regime with the purpose of disrupting the truce achieved [in Istanbul – trans.] in March 2022.⁷

In general, when reading the articles in the collection, one gets the feeling that it was not written for the domestic reader: those who live in Russia will find it very hard to accept this one-sided accusatory bombast. More likely, the collection is addressed specifically to the West, to those on whom the philosophers’ wellbeing now depends. Those Western readers will welcome the philosophers' admission of their own national guilt and their willingness to turn a blind eye to the responsibility of all other parties. And so, this case of intellectual autism which at first seemed so surprising turns out in the end to have a completely understandable and rational justification.

About the author:  Yuri Pushchaev, Ph.D., is research scholar in the faculty of philosophy of Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU).

1. O. K. Shevchenko, The SMO and Russian Philosophers (project outline: “The Great Russian Correction of Names) [О.К. Шевченко. СВО и русские философы (конспект проекта: «Великое Русское исправление имен»]. URL: https://dzen.ru/a/ZW7pfsIF-xcrHD2P?share_to=telegram

2.  Translator’s note:  The text referenced is Nikolai Plotnikov, ed., Перед Лицом Катастрофы [Pered Litsom Katastrofy], (LIT Verlag: Berlin, 2023).  For purchase or download from the publisher, go to: https://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/978-3-643-15317-3

3. Translator’s note: Of the collections listed, several are relatively well known in the West. In this latter category can be included: Landmarks (published in 1909); Problems of Idealism (1902); De Profundis: A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia (1918); and From Under the Rubble (1976).   The contributors to Problems of Idealism overlap to a great extent with those of Landmarks and De Profundis, and include S. Bulgakov, P. Struve, N. Berdyaev and S. Frank (among others).   These authors, over the nearly 20-year arc of these publications, move from an initial, Kant-inspired rejection of dogmatic Marxism (Problems of Idealism) to an increasingly openly Christian philosophical grounding.  Freedom of Conscience, published in 1906, was an appeal to liberate Russian religious thought in the sense of allowing for its integration with secular science --  a stance which, as the authors saw it, was in keeping with the example set by Vladimir Solovyov.  The today little-known volume, The Intelligentsia in Russia, published in 1910, a year after Landmarks, included among its contributors such prominent names as Pavel Miliukov. The collection is dedicated to a rebuttal of Landmarks, and a spirited defense of the Russian revolutionary tradition stretching from Belinsky and Herzen to Chernyshevsky.  Three of the remaining volumes are, in effect, lamentations decrying what is seen by the contributors as the unmitigated disaster of the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath:  The Kingdom of the Anti-Christ (1921, D. Merezhkovsky, ed.); From Under the Rubble (1974, A. Solzhenitsyn, I. Shafarevich, et al) and Self-Awareness [Samosoznanie] (1976, E. Barabanov, P. Litvinov, M. Meerson, B. Shragin).  Boris Shragin, one of the contributors to Self-Awareness, also edited and wrote the introduction to the 1977 edition of Landmarks in English translation (New York: Karz Howard).

4. Translator’s note:  In Chapter 3, Book 5 of The Brothers Karamazov, the phrase ‘Russian boys’ occurs in the context of a conversation between Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov.  Ivan tells his brother Alyosha:

“Of course, I am just such a little boy as you are, only not a novice. And what have Russian boys been doing up till now, some of them, I mean? In this stinking tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit down in a corner. They’ve never met in their lives before and, when they go out of the tavern, they won’t meet again for forty years. And what do they talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern? Of the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality. And those who do not believe in God talk of socialism or anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same, they’re the same questions turned inside out. And masses, masses of the most original Russian boys do nothing but talk of the eternal questions! Isn’t it so?” 

“Yes, for real Russians the questions of God’s existence and of immortality, or, as you say, the same questions turned inside out, come first and foremost, of course, and so they should,” said Alyosha, still watching his brother with the same gentle and inquiring smile.  (Constance Garnett translation, Project Gutenberg)

5. Translator’s note: Russian monk in this context is a reference to Book VI, chapter  3 of The Brothers Karamazov, titled “Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zossima: On the Russian Monk and His Possible Significance.”  (See Constance Garnett translation in Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/28054/pg28054-images.html#chap41 )

6. Translator’s note: The Griboedov play in verse “Woe from Wit” is known to every school child in Russia and is frequently quoted by Russians.  The irony of the quoted passage is understood by the reader, because the protagonist being accused of ‘insanity’ and drunkenness, Chatsky, is neither insane nor a drinker.  He is simply an observant critic who doesn’t go along with the crowd.  Griboedov (1795 – 1829) was a brilliant Russian polymath who, at the end of his brief career, served as a Russian diplomat in Persia. There he negotiated the peace treaty of 1828 that ended the Russo-Persian War. The following year he was murdered, it is said, by ‘religious fanatics,’ though some Russian historians believe that his murder was arranged by the British crown. 

7. Note from Landmarks: There exist widely differing accounts of the incident at Bucha.   The following account provided by The New York Times assigns blame entirely to the Russian side: The New York Times, “Caught on Camera, Traced by Phone: The Russian Military Unit That Killed Dozens in Bucha, Dec. 22, 2022 [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/video/russia-ukraine-bucha-massacre-takeaways.html An example of a very different reading of the event can be found in Gordon Hahn, “Bucha and the Scuttling of the Russo-Ukrainian Istanbul Process,” December 17, 2023  [https://gordonhahn.com/2023/12/17/bucha-and-the-scuttling-of-the-russo-ukrainian-istanbul-process/