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Philadelphia Inquirer
November 6, 2002
Marking 80th year since the Soviet purge
In 1922 Lenin exiled more than 200 prominent critics, creating a rich,
international diaspora of Russian intellectuals.
By Carlin Romano
Inquirer Staff Writer
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - Imagine President Bush getting sick of America's leading opposition intellectuals - Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag and the like - criticizing his war on terror and other policies.
So he rounds them up, lets them take a few belongings, forces them to sign sworn statements that they know they'll be shot if they return to the United States, and puts them on a couple of 747s to Europe.
Not much of an option in 21st-century "We have a Constitution" America. But 80 years ago this fall, that's more or less what Vladimir Lenin did to the top non-Communist philosophers, literary critics, economists and other academics of post-revolutionary Russia.
Beginning in August 1922, he arrested hundreds of them: figures such as Nikolai Berdayev, N.O. Lossky, and Fyodor Stepun - three of Russia's greatest philosophers - and the brilliant sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who helped found Harvard's sociology department. Then he put them on two German liners - the Oberbürgermeister Hacken and the Preussen - which sailed Sept. 28 and Nov. 16 from St. Petersburg to Stettin, Germany. The vessels came to be known as the "Philosophers' Ships."
What Russians call the "1922 Exile of the Intellectuals" signaled to the world that the nascent Soviet Union would be a harsh totalitarian place that did not tolerate dissent or "class enemies." That proved to be an understatement: The Stalinist purges of the 1930s brought the murder and imprisonment of many writers, artists and academics. Banishment of dissenters remained a Soviet practice through the generation of such still-living giants as novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was deported in 1974. At the same time, the 1922 exile scattered seeds that produced a rich international diaspora of Russian intellectuals and artists, most notably in Paris and New York, that included artists such as Vladimir Nabokov.
This autumn, as Russians and their media mark the grim anniversary, more than a decade's worth of released archival material since the Soviet Union's collapse is allowing them to do so with greater precision than ever before. The October issue of Voprosy Filosofii, Russia's leading philosophy journal, is entirely devoted to the deportation. In the United States, Yale University Press has just published A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev's architect of perestroika. In his sweeping distillation of the archives of Soviet repression, Yakovlev writes of the 1922 actions: "The pygmies were expelling the giants."
For decades, historians pieced together the story of the expulsion from emigre memoirs. Berdyaev, world famous and widely translated in the mid-20th century as Russia's great Christian existentialist, wrote about it in his autobiography, Self-Awareness (1949). He described his August arrest for "anti-Soviet activity" and interrogation by Felix Dzerzhinsky himself, head of the Bolshevik secret police.
Berdyaev recalled launching into a 45-minute lecture explaining his "opposition to Communism." Fortunately for his sake, Dzerzhinsky, a brutal enforcer who remains so hated a symbol of oppression that Russians continue to fight over whether statues of him should be allowed to stand, mainly listened.
"When we crossed the Soviet border at sea," Berdyaev wrote later in the book, "there was the feeling that we were out of danger; until then no one was sure they would not make us turn around. But together with this feeling of entering a zone of great freedom, I had a feeling of sorrow at parting with my native land...."
In 1972, one expert on the exile estimated that "160 leading representatives of the Russian intelligentsia were expelled during the autumn of 1922." It now appears that 228 writers, academics and students were involved. The Soviets continued to expel intellectuals into the next year, putting some on a train to Riga, Latvia, others on a steamship to Constantinople.
Of one thing, historical material now available leaves no doubt. Lenin, who considered himself an important philosopher, did not share President Bush's scant interest in the egghead class. For the Bolshevik leader, cleansing his new state of non-Communist intellectuals was a front-burner concern.
Lenin's war on his intellectual foes, whom he had described in letters as "lackeys of capital," gained force on June 1, 1922, when he signed a new penal code into law. It effectively gave the government the right to kill anyone who threatened to destabilize the new power won by Soviet workers and peasants, i.e., the one-party state.
The government also tightened prepublication censorship. Lenin ordered all members of the Politburo to spend two or three hours each week reading books and magazines to identify enemies. He wrote to Joseph Stalin that officials "must draw up lists, and several hundred such gentlemen ought to be exiled abroad without mercy. We'll clean up Russia for a long time to come.... All of them - throw them out of Russia. This must be done at once."
The lists arrived in Lenin's hands by mid-August - he drew up the list of philosophers himself - and arrests began. An Aug. 31, 1922, article in the government newspaper Pravda informed readers that several groups in the intelligentsia endangered the Soviet regime, and they were "headquartered" in high schools, universities, and such faculties as philosophy and literature.
The arrested intellectuals had to sign statements promising never to return to the Russian Socialist Federal Socialist Republic (the U.S.S.R.'s precursor). If they did, they acknowledged, Article 71 of the Criminal Code provided for them to be executed immediately. According to the documents, each deportee was allowed to take "one winter coat and one summer coat, one suit and change of clothes, two shirts, two nightshirts, two pairs of socks, two sets of underwear, and 20 dollars in foreign currency."
Lenin ended his tirade to Stalin - filled with what French scholar Nicholas Werth calls "maniacal detail" - with a blunt statement: "This is all of supreme importance." For many Russians 80 years later, who still remember exile as a totalitarian tool, it still is.
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