When I interviewed applicants for Fulbright Scholarships to study in the United States, I was surprised at the number of Russians who said they wanted to travel to America in order to look at the papers of
sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who taught at Harvard. A new book helps explain the importance of this dissident sociologist, one of the first wave of intellectual Russian refugees expelled on the orders of Lenin.
Bill Grimes' fascinating review of Lesley Chamberlain's
Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia
in the New York Times yesterday puts Sorokin's story in context--and explains why Russians are interested in his fate. An excerpt:
It certainly deserves to be better known, if only for the light it sheds on the often fumbling efforts of Lenin’s regime to impose its harsh ideology. Lenin and his enemies sprang from the same soil of opposition to czarism, believed in a special destiny for Russia and in many ways thought the same thoughts. Although branded as enemies of the state, the purged intellectuals were exiled, not shot, because, Ms. Chamberlain speculates, “Lenin was prepared to treat them with a minimum of civic dignity, as his equals on the defeated side.”
In the early 1920s, ideological divisions had not yet hardened to the point of eliminating all human feeling. In a telling instance, the secret police officers monitoring the launch of the Philosophy Steamer raised their hats in salute as it left the harbor, shouting: “We are all Russians. Why is this happening?”
At the same time, the manufacturing of evidence, the manipulation and rewriting of the legal code and the government’s brazen lying to its own people and the West amounted to a rough draft for the future. In an interview with an American journalist, Trotsky carefully explained that the expulsions were an act of mercy, because in the event of renewed civil war, the exiled intellectuals would probably go over to the enemy, and then they would have to be shot.
The legal grounds for expulsion and transcripts of interrogations make particularly chilling reading. Some intellectuals were marked down by the secret police for such offenses as “knows a foreign language” or “is ironic and fools about in his lectures.” Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, the head of the White underground movement, sized up his interrogators perfectly. When asked his attitude toward Soviet power, he replied, “I am watching its development with interest.”
That was true of his fellow victims too. Their fatal weakness was to be cultivated humanists with no political program other than a belief in personal liberty and the importance of moral values rooted in religion. The language of totalitarianism was unintelligible to them, and not only to them.
“The idea that a single and total view of the world could be universally imposed by a brutal police regime was a new political fate in the modern world,” Ms. Chamberlain writes. Lenin’s exiles had the misfortune to be the advance guard in a persecuted army whose numbers would soon be legion.
You can read a sample chapter
by clicking this link.