Lenin As Philosopher:
History of a
T
exf
BERTRAM D. WOLFE
THE
FAILURE
of the 1905 Revolution in Russia brought on a
general retreat from political activity. The greater certitudes of Rus–
sian Marxism, its denser body of doctrine and higher degree of extro–
version, did not immunize it against the epidemic of self-examina–
tion. And because of the international socialist controversy over "re–
visionism" versus "Marxist orthodoxy," the argument then largely
turned on the question: Is it permissible,
is
it orthodoxy or revision–
ism, for a Marxist to take any significant ideas from the prevailing
fashion of the "neo-Kantian" revival?
This debate had started before the 1905 defeat. In 1900 and
1901, Bulgakov and Berdyaev, two leading Russian neo-Kantians,
had broken completely with Marxism and gone over to religion.
Whereas the German and Austrian neo-Kantian socialists had fought
to retain their places inside the movement and had won recognition
as a legitimate tendency, the Russian revisionists soon flung them–
selves passionately into the path of schism. Bulgakov became a lead–
ing theologian of the Orthodox Church, spending the last twenty
years of his life ( 1924-44) as the Director of its Theological Seminary
in Paris. Berdyaev developed into one of the outstanding religious
writers of our time, preaching a synthesis of socialism, personalism,
and corporate Christianity.
2
In this, as in all things, the superheated
atmosphere and intensity of Russian thought made for extremism.
German revisionism was a reformist dilution or an apologetic "mod–
ernization" of Marxism; Russian revisionism was a heterodoxy, a
fanatic schisrp, a
raskol.
And the impulse of Russian "orthodoxy"
was to resort to excommunication.
The year 1904 had marked the hundredth anniversary of the
death of Kant. For several years thereafter there was an intense
1. This is an excerpt from
Three Who Made a Revolution,
to be published
by the Dial Press.
2. Recently (1946) he has added a dash of Stalinism.
