On September 29, 1922, the German steamboat Oberbürgermeister Haken departed from the Nikolaev Embankment in St. Petersburg. It carried off outstanding figures in Russian culture and science, who were exiled from their homeland. One of the passengers was the religious and political philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948). He had been kicked out of the country, forever.
At that time he was already a famous scholar, the author of the controversial monographs The Meaning of the Creative Act and The Meaning of History. They made him famous, offended the tsar and enraged Soviet authorities. The conflict of his worldview with tyranny began in 1900. In short, the thinker envisioned the free development of Russia with constitutional limitations of the power of the emperor, the development of parliamentarianism and grassroots democracy along with increasing literacy among the worker and, most importantly, peasants, who remained a “dark force of forced bondage.” His advocacy of these views led Berdyaev to internal exile in the Vologda region as well as prison in Irkutsk. Nonetheless, following his release he continued to profess his views.
The Bolsheviks turned out to be harsher. Following the Revolution of 1917, Berdyaev established the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture (1918-1922). Its significance was that it was one of the few places where free thinking emerged and scenarios were drafted for Russia’s post-revolutionary development. For this the scholar was twice jailed by Soviet authorities.
The first time Berdyaev was arrested in 1920 in relation to the investigation of the Tactical Center, which developed scenarios for a multi-party system and the creation of a multi-faceted Russian society. Then Berdyaev was personally interrogated by Iron Felix (the head of the Cheka Dzerzhinsky) and his assistant Wiaczeslaw Mienzynski. However, the philosopher had no direct link to the Tactical Center, even criticizing some of its utopian aspects, and was soon released. Berdyaev was arrested the second time in 1922. “I was in jail for about a week,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I was then invited to see the investigator, who declared that I was being exiled from the Soviet Union. They made me sign a document stating that in the case of my appearance within the borders of the USSR I would be executed.” Berdyaev first went to Berlin and then established his residence in Paris. It was there, in the suburb of Clamart that Berdyaev lived until his death.
His most significant works include The End of Our Time (1924, aka The New Middle Ages), The Destiny of Man (1931), Slavery and Freedom (1939) and The Russian Idea (1946). Several books were published posthumously, including Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography and The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar.
These works have gone down in history as a period of Russian religious and philosophical renaissance. Berdyaev’s philosophical thinking was directed towards human achievement, the meaning and purpose of history, the problem of history’s possible end and also the history of the Russian people, Russia’s prospects and Russian mentality.
At the same time, Berdyaev had a rebellious streak, having being imprisoned four times, shifting from Marxism (he considered Marx to be a genius) toward a personal philosophy and freedom of spirit and further to religious existentialism and personalism.
In his work The Beginning and the End (Eschatological Metaphysics) he proclaims the philosophy of the spirit: “The spirit for me is freedom… A assert the primacy of freedom over being. Beig is secondary…” This is clearly a revolt against Marxism. For Berdyaev, the key role belongs to freedom and creativity, and the only source of creativity is freedom.
During the period when Russia became Bolshevik and Europe became Fascist, Berdyaev came forward with the values which the world holds true today. “Freedom is not created, because it is not nature; freedom existed before the world began, it is rooted in immemorial nothingness. God is almighty over being, but not over nothingness, or over freedom. And this is why evil exists…”
A bright philosophical figure in his homeland and having attained some fame in the West, Berdyaev died like most Russians cast out of their homeland – an obscure émigré. He did not receive immediate recognition and in his homeland, in the USSR, this came only with perestroika. His works, which had already long been considered classics of philosophy came to the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s via samizdat but the first legal publications emerged only in 1990. Incidentally, Berdyaev, who according to Time magazine is the most widely read Russian philosopher, is only now beginning to be broadly published and studied in universities.
“Eras so full of events and changes are usually considered interesting and significant,” he wrote in Dream and Reality. “But these eras are unfortunate and anguishing for many individuals, for entire generations. History does not spare individuals, it does not even notice them. I lived through three wars, two of which can be called the world wars, two revolutions in Russia, small and large... I experienced the spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century, then Russian communism, the crisis of world culture, the ascension of Fascist in Germany, the collapse of France and its occupation by the victors... I survived the exile. I painfully endured a terrible war against Russia. Even for the philosopher this was too much…”
Now we know that nearly every one of these world events aimed to limit or destroy freedom, although often projected under the guise of freedom while imitating its essence. Berdyaev, a man living in exile, obscurity and poverty, formulated the modern concept of freedom as a vector of development which will never again drive humankind toward the dead end of communism, totalitarianism or extremism.
It is an appropriate time to read Berdyaev, at least to help avoid the repetition of mistakes.
Vladimir Emelyanenko
