The bourgeois intelligentsia denies the existence of the working class. Prove that the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and employees are participants in capitalist relations

Peasants represented the largest estate (85% of the population). They were joined by a significant stratum of those who led a “semi-peasant” way of life. In Russia, unlike in the West, there was no long-term "de-peasantization", the drive of peasants from the land and their transformation into an urban proletariat. On the contrary, by the beginning of the 20th century, the peasant community had almost “digested” the landowner and began to “digest” the few owners like the capitalist farmer. The dynamics of the ϶ᴛᴏth process is shown in fig. (Fig. 2. Landlord (noble) (1) and peasant (2) land ownership in European Russia in 1862-1911)

A meticulous study of statistical data on land ownership in Russia in all regions was carried out on the basis of the results of three censuses - 1878, 1887 and 1905. These data are summarized, for example, in D.A. Tarasyuk’s book “Land Ownership of Post-Reform Russia” (M., Nauka, 1981). Here is the most accurate picture. In 1877, 23.8% of the land was privately owned (80% of the owners were nobles), allotment communal land was 33.6%, state, specific, church, etc. land - 42.6%. The land that was in private property a small number of wealthy peasants, amounted to only 3.8% of allotment communal land. By 1905, the situation had not changed significantly: privately owned 26.1%, allotment communal land was 33.8%, state - 40.1%. The only difference is that among the private owners, the nobles now had only 52.3% - since 1877 they have sold 30% of their land.

An attempt to quickly create a class society in the countryside in the form of farmers and agricultural workers through a "revolution from above" (Stolypin's reform) failed. When issuing the first Decree (November 9, 1906), Stolypin himself said that the purpose of the Decree was "to drive a wedge into the community." Moreover, from the very beginning it was clear that such a profound change in the entire life order of the village would not be supported by the peasants. Stolypin warned that one should not "make it dependent on good will peasants the moment of the expected reform”.

A lot of literature has been written about the attitude of the community to land use and to the reform, incl. abroad. Usually the community did not object if, during the next redistribution, someone wanted to stand out on a farm on the edge of the communal land. But during the reform, such allocation began to be imposed by force, and the authorities supported the “separatists”, so that they demanded better plots for themselves. This community has already resisted. But the main conflict arose when the land surveyors, in order not to mess around, switched to wholesale privatization, immediately breaking up the land of the entire village into plots.

In the memoirs of a zemstvo chief from the Vologda province. V. It is worth saying that such a case is described by Polivanova. Land surveyors came to the village during the harvest, convened a meeting and announced that it was ordered to divide into farms. The gathering consulted and refused. The chief promised a loan, then threatened to arrest the "rebels", then threatened to send soldiers to stay. The peasants kept repeating: "As the old people lived, so we will live, but we do not agree to the farm." Then the chief went to drink tea, and ordered the peasants to sit on the ground and wait. Went out late at night. “Well, do you agree?” The meeting replied: “Everyone agrees. To the farms, so to the farms, to the aspen, so to the aspen, only ɥᴛᴏ if everyone, therefore, together. It is worth saying that Polivanov writes that he managed to reach the governor and postpone the reform of the village of Lopatikha. Historian P. Zyryanov, who narrates the ϶ᴛᴏt story, notes that ϶ᴛᴏ is a typical case with an atypical epilogue.

The overwhelming majority of the population of Russia approached the revolution, united in a huge estate of peasants who retained a special culture and communal worldview - in the words of M. Weber, “archaic agrarian communism” (it would be wrong to talk about class consciousness, because in the exact sense of ϶ᴛᴏgo the words peasants of Russia did not constitute a class) This communism did not follow from religious or ideological doctrines, but from the conditions of life historically given to the Russian peasantry.

At a large international seminar in 1995 devoted to the problem of hunger, the historian V.V. Kondrashin said: “Fear of hunger was one of the reasons for the consolidation of the Russian peasantry within the framework of the traditional land community. For centuries, under the conditions of the tax oppression of the state, the bondage of landowners, the community ensured the minimum application of the forces of labor ϲʙᴏ their members, kept the mass of peasant farms from ruin. In the community, there was traditionally mutual support of the peasants in case of famine. Public opinion consecrated assistance in saving the weakest peasant families from starvation ... I must say that the chronic malnutrition of the peasants [in the post-reform period] created in Russia a social basis for Bolshevism and the spread of equalizing communist ideas.

The main values ​​of bourgeois society - individualism and competition - did not find a response among the peasants, which means that the institutions of the bourgeois state and the norms of bourgeois law were not attractive to the vast majority of the people. Even at the very end of the 19th century, the Russian village (not to mention the national outskirts) lived according to the norms of traditional law with a very strong influence of communal law.

The English peasant researcher T. Shanin tells the following story: “At that time, I worked on the communal law of Russia. In the 1860s, communal law became the law applied in the volost courts. They were judged according to tradition, since communal law is traditional law. And when appeals went to the Senate, it turned out that they did not know what to do with these appeals, since they did not quite understand what the laws of communal law were. Hundreds of young jurists were sent to the field to collect these traditional norms and then codify them. A lot of materials were collected, and one interesting document comes to mind. This is a protocol that was kept by one of these young jurists in the volost court, which heard the case of land litigation between the two parties. After consulting, the court declared: ϶ᴛᴏt is right, ϶ᴛᴏt is wrong; ϶ᴛᴏmu - two thirds of the disputed plot of land, ϶ᴛᴏmu - one third. The jurist, of course, threw himself up: what is ϶ᴛᴏ - if ϶ᴛᴏt is right, then he should receive all the land, and the other has no right to it at all. To which the volost judges replied: “The land is only land, and they will have to live in one village all their lives.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, in a significant part of the enlightened layer, the opinion about the backwardness of the Russian peasantry (savagery, Asianism, etc.) dominated. This was quite combined with “love for the people” and reverence for those spiritual authorities, for example, Leo Tolstoy, who are all ϲʙᴏ them proved that such an idea of ​​the peasantry is false. Here, I think, an important defect of European education in non-Western cultures has affected. Behind the clumsy, "Asian" appearance of any social phenomenon educated person hard to make out the point. We fully inherited and multiplied this defect in Soviet times, and it played a fatal role during perestroika. The remarkable chemist and agronomist A.N. Engelgardt, who worked in the village and left a detailed fundamental research (“Letters from the Village”), thought about ϶ᴛᴏm already in the first years of her life in the village (village of Batishchevo, Smolensk province) It is worth noting what he narrated in the fifth Letter:

“What a difference in ϶ᴛᴏm between the stories of Turgenev and Uspensky, depicting a Russian peasant! Compare Turgenev's "Singers" with Uspensky's "Convoy". Ouspensky's outer side is more true than Turgenev's, and when you find yourself among the peasants, at first you will think that Ouspensky's picture is reality, "bare truth", and Turgenev's picture is a tinted, dressed-up fiction. But wait, and after a while you will be convinced that there are Turgenev's singers, but there are no Uspensky's cabs. In the village you will hear these "Singers" in the song of the mowers returning from mowing, and in the ugly trepak of a couple who have been on a spree returning from the fair, and in the choir of crippled passers-by singing about the "prodigal son", but you will not see "Oboz" and you will not will hear".

And here is his observation, which is important for understanding the role of the peasants in the revolution: “And what struck me when I heard peasant reasoning at gatherings - ϶ᴛᴏ ϲʙᴏboda, with whom the peasants speak. We talk and look around, can ϶ᴛᴏ be said? and suddenly they will be attracted and asked. The man is not afraid of anything. Publicly, publicly, on the street, in the middle of the village, the peasant discusses all sorts of political and social issues and always speaks openly in front of ϶ᴛᴏ everything that he thinks. A peasant, when he is not to blame for either the king or the pan, that is, he paid everything that is due, is calm. Well, on the other hand, we don’t pay anything ”(A.N. Engelhardt,“ Sixth Letter ”)

Let me give you a personal impression. It seems to me that people who have grown up under the pressure of a good formal education often imperceptibly begin to believe that only such a formal education is the bearer of a high culture and a strong way of thinking. There is a grain of truth in such views, but not so big. In childhood, in last years war, I lived most of the time alone with my grandfather in the village. We talked a lot. Since then I have gained knowledge, but have not grown wiser, I think about the same as then, and I remember those conversations well. My grandfather was a poor Cossack. But he was one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life. It is the smartest, capable of important and ϲʙᴏ reasoning, covering wide historical periods, and large spaces. Under ϶ᴛᴏ he was a man of high and subtle culture, with a “multilayered” delicacy (I don’t know if the word “dialectical” is appropriate). Everything ϶ᴛᴏ was a product of his upbringing in a peasant culture. It is worth saying that for many of the current intellectuals, my grandfather would have seemed "clumsy", and he looked like a Kyrgyz. And they probably wouldn't find it interesting to talk to him.

Let us return to the conditions of life of the Russian peasants. A.N. Engelhardt draws attention to a very important fact: the intelligentsia in general had no idea about the most important aspects of the life of the peasants, and above all about their food. It is worth noting that he writes in the “Ninth Letter”: “Even in the October book “Father. Notes ”for the past year, an article was published, the author of which, on the basis of statistical data, proved that we sell bread not from excess, that we sell our daily bread abroad, which is necessary for our own subsistence ... Many were struck by the conclusion, many they didn’t want to believe, they suspected the fidelity of the figures, the fidelity of the information about the harvests collected by the volost and zemstvo administrations ... Anyone who knows the village, who knows the situation and life of the peasants, does not need statistical data and calculations to know that we sell bread abroad, not from excess... In a person from an intelligent class, such doubts are understandable, because one simply cannot believe how people live like this without eating. And meanwhile ϶ᴛᴏ indeed so. It’s not that ɥᴛᴏ would not have eaten at all, but are malnourished, live from hand to mouth, eat all sorts of rubbish. Wheat, good pure rye, we send abroad, to the Germans, who will not eat any rubbish ... But not only does the peasant eat the worst bread, he is still malnourished.

He repeatedly returns to the topic of peasant nutrition, as Leo Tolstoy later did in his articles. Note that for those who want to understand the origins of the Russian revolution, all ϶ᴛᴏ must be read. A.N. Engelhardt writes in the same letter: “The American sells the surplus, and we sell the necessary daily bread. The American farmer himself eats excellent wheat bread, fatty ham and mutton, drinks tea, eats his dinner with sweet apple pie or molasses papushnik. Our peasant farmer eats the worst rye bread with fire, calico, furs, slurps empty gray cabbage soup, considers buckwheat porridge with hemp oil a luxury, has no idea about apple pies, and he will even laugh that there are such countries where sissies -The men eat apple pies, and they feed the farm laborers the same. Our peasant farmer does not have enough wheat bread for a child's nipple, the woman will chew the rye crust that she eats herself, put it in a rag - suck it.

And they talk about ways of communication, about the conveniences of delivering bread to the ports, they write editorials! After all, if we live like Americans, then it would not be like carrying bread abroad, but producing it twice as much as it is now, and then it would just be just the right time. They talk about ways of communication, but they do not see the essence.

It should be noted that reliable information about real life peasants reached society from the military. It is worth noting that they were the first to sound the alarm due to the fact that the onset of capitalism led to a sharp deterioration in nutrition, and then the health of peasant recruits into the army. The future commander-in-chief, General V. Gurko, cited data from 1871 to 1901 and said that 40% of peasant boys tasted meat for the first time in their lives in the army. General A.D. Nechvolodov in the famous book “From Ruin to Prosperity” (1906) cites data from an article by Academician Tarkhanov “The Needs of National Nutrition” in the “Literary Medical Journal” (March 1906), according to which Russian peasants consumed food on average per capita for 20.44 rubles. per year, and English - by 101.25 rubles. It is worth saying that it would be useful to read S. Govorukhin, who paints "fat Ostend oysters" in the capital's stores "Russia, which we have lost."

Earlier it was said that already by 1906 the peasantry in its mass demanded the nationalization of the land, and during the Stolypin reform stubbornly resisted the transformation of land into private property (land privatization, in principle, will be the main means of “depeasantization”) A.N. Engelhardt narrated : "The peasant would find use in land, the landowner would find use in capital." This means that the peasant and the farmer operate in two completely different cultural and economic systems (according to Aristotle's definition, in economy and chrematistics). It is quite reasonable that the current neoliberal ideologist of “wild” (or rather, utopian) capitalism A.N. Yakovlev complained bitterly: “There has never been normal, free private property in Rus'... Private property is the matter and spirit of civilization.”

However, his complaint is only partially reasonable, since private property is the matter and spirit of precisely Western and only Western civilization. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in "Discourses on the origin of inequality" (1755) narrated about the emergence of civil society: "The first one who cleared a piece of land and said: "϶ᴛᴏ mine" became the true founder of civil society." It is worth noting that he added further that at the basis of civil society is continuous war, "the predation of the rich, the robbery of the poor." It is clear that such an ideal was incompatible with the communal worldview of the Russian peasants.

Moreover, in relation to the peasantry, it has long been known for sure that private property and capitalism mean its rapid and direct destruction, moreover, with mass suffering and inevitable cruelties. The peasant historian V.P. Danilov recalled the experience of capitalism during the privatization of land in England: with an ax, where they cut off the heads of those who do not agree with the fencing.”

After the reform of 1861, the position of the peasants improved, their economy, in general, went uphill, productivity increased, everything had an effect, for example, on food. But then more and more peasants began to feel the onset of capitalism. The railroads began to “suck out” agricultural products. The peasantry was the main source of resources for capitalist industrialization, and the marketability of their economy was artificially increased by monetary taxes and taxes. Periodic mass famine arose in Russia, which the peasants did not know before (as, however, they did not know the famine before capitalism either in Europe, or in India, or in the Aztec empire)

Here is what the historian V.V. Kondrashin said at an international seminar in 1995: “By the end of the 19th century, the scale of crop failures and famines in Russia increased ... the peasants meekly endured the horrors of famine, did not support the revolutionary parties. At the beginning of the 20th century, the situation changed dramatically. The impoverishment of the peasantry in the post-reform period as a result of exorbitant state payments, a sharp increase in land rental prices in the late 90s ... - all ϶ᴛᴏ put the mass of peasants in front of a real threat of pauperization, de-peasantization ... The state policy towards the countryside in the post-reform period ... had the most direct impact on the financial situation of the peasantry and the onset of starvation disasters.

Until 1917, the entire surplus product was mercilessly withdrawn from the village (“we are not enough to eat, but we will take it out”) All more or less developed countries that produced less than 500 kg of grain per capita imported grain. Russia in the record year 1913 had 471 kg of grain per capita - and exported a lot of grain - due to domestic consumption, and it was precisely the peasants. Even in 1911, in the year of an exceptionally severe famine, 53.4% ​​of all grain was exported - more relatively, and even more absolutely, than in the years of the previous five-year period.

Even in the “normal” years, the situation was difficult. The very low level of the officially established “physiological minimum” - 12 pounds of bread with potatoes a year speaks about ϶ᴛᴏm. In a normal year 1906, ϶ᴛᴏt consumption levels were recorded in 235 counties with a population of 44.4 million. The indignation of the peasants was no longer caused by the fact that they had to eat bread with quinoa and fur bread (with chaff, from unweathered grain), but that “there was no white bread for the nipple” - a baby. More precisely, the entire surplus and a significant part of the necessary product was withdrawn from the village.

Here it is necessary to say about a special social type among the peasants - the kulak (world-eater). A whole myth was created around the ϶ᴛᴏth concept during the years of perestroika, it was equated with the concept of “right owner” and presented as a model of Russian labor data. In fact, the kulaks were mainly peasants who had left the land and were engaged in usury and trade. A.V. Chayanov gave a socio-economic description of the kulaks, and A.N. Engelgardt cites ϲʙᴏ and everyday observations: land, ϶ᴛᴏ is not yet a real fist, he does not think to seize everything for himself, does not think how good it would be if everyone were poor, in need, does not act in the ϶ᴛᴏ direction. Of course, he will take advantage of the need of another, make him work for himself, but he does not build his well-being on the need of others, but builds it on his work. From such a land peasant you will hear: “I love the land, I love work, if I go to bed and do not feel pain in my arms and legs from work, then I am ashamed, it seems as if I didn’t do something, I spent the day in vain.” It is worth noting that he is expanding his economy not only for the purpose of profit, he works to the point of fatigue, lacks sleep, and is malnourished. Such a landed peasant never has a large belly like a real fist.

Of all the “Happy Corner” [as A.N. Engelhardt called the area near his estate] only in the village of B. there is a real fist. This one loves neither land, nor economy, nor labor, he loves only money. This one will not say that he is ashamed when, going to bed, he does not feel pain in his arms and legs, ϶ᴛᴏt, on the contrary, says: “work loves fools” ... This one boasts of his fat belly, boasts that he himself works little : "My debtors will mow everything, burn it and put it in a barn." This kulak deals with the land so-so, by the way... In ϶ᴛᴏ everything is based not on the land, not on the economy, not on labor, but on capital, on which he trades, which lends out at interest. His idol is money, and he only thinks about increasing it... It is worth noting that he lets capital grow, and ϶ᴛᴏ is called "turning with brains." It is clear that for the development of his activities it is important that the peasants were poor, in need, had to turn to him for loans.

The peasantry (including “in gray overcoats” - soldiers) came up in 1917 with a vivid historical memory of the revolution of 1905-1907, which was not only a “rehearsal” (as Lenin called it), but also a “university ". It was the first of a whole world chain peasant wars The twentieth century, in which the community opposed the onset of capitalism, which meant “peasantization”. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that having overthrown tsarism in February in alliance with the bourgeoisie and having gained the opportunity to influence the course of political events, the peasants (and soldiers) exerted pressure that pushed Russia away from bourgeois statehood and capitalist living order.

The working class By the time of the 1917 revolution total strength the working class in Russia was estimated at 15 million people - about 10% of the total population. But who belongs to the working class? In 1913, V.I. Lenin narrated: “we probably have about 20 million proletarians,” but then the rural proletariat (about 5 million people) and the urban poor were also included in the ϶ᴛᴏ category. At the VIII Congress of the RCP (b), Lenin said that the layer of workers, "who made up our strength, - this layer in Russia is incredibly thin." Many researchers after ϶ᴛᴏ tried to clarify the number of workers, highlighting its various components. As a result, it is believed that there were 7.2 million people in the factory industry workers with families, of which 1.8 million were adult men.

But the main thing is not even in quantity. The working class of Russia, without going through the crucible of the Protestant Reformation and prolonged depeasation, did not acquire the attitude of the proletariat - a class of individuals who have lost their roots and trade in their labor power on the market. The vast majority of Russian workers were workers in the first generation and, according to their type of thinking, remained peasants. Quite shortly before 1917 (in 1905), half of the male workers owned land, and these workers returned to the countryside for the harvest. A very large part of the workers lived a bachelor's life in the barracks, while their families remained in the countryside. In the city, they felt like they were working.

On the other hand, many young peasants came to the city for seasonal work and during economic booms when the city was short of labor. Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that constant and bilateral contact was maintained between the workers and peasants in Russia. The city worker of the beginning of the century spoke and dressed in much the same way as the peasant, in general, was close to him in terms of lifestyle and type of culture. Even according to their class status, most of the workers were recorded as peasants. Peasants and workers constituted that “people” that was separated from and, at critical moments, opposed to the “upper” estates of tsarist Russia.

The persistence of communal data and life skills among the workers manifested itself in the form of a powerful worker solidarity and a capacity for self-organization that does not arise from class consciousness alone. This determined the behavior of the working class, unusual for the West, in the revolutionary struggle and in its self-organization after the revolution, in the creation of a new statehood. Many observers even noted a phenomenon, strange at first glance: the workers in Russia at the beginning of the century “conserved” peasant thinking and, in their way of thinking, were more peasants than those who remained in the countryside.

It is necessary to emphasize a very important fact, which in our simplified history was excluded from consideration, because it contradicted the vulgarized Marxist theory: by 1914, the main bearers of the revolutionary spirit among the workers were not old cadre workers (they supported the Mensheviks in the mass), but young workers, recently coming from the village.

It was they who supported the Bolsheviks and helped them to take leading positions in the trade unions. These were yesterday's peasants, who survived the revolution of 1905-1907. precisely at the moment of his formation as a person - at the age of 18-25. Ten years later, they brought to the city the spirit of a revolutionary community that realized its strength. At the sharpest turns of the revolutionary process, this grassroots mass of Bolsheviks created such a situation, which can be called after B. Brecht: "the followers lead the leaders."

I must say about the cultural type, which was a young literate Russian worker of the early twentieth century. It was a special cultural and historical phenomenon, and it played a big role in the revolution. This was a worker who, on the one hand, had a great thirst for knowledge and reading, which was always characteristic of workers who came from the village. The difference is that our worker simultaneously received three types of literature at the peak of their maturity - the Russian literature of the Golden Age, the optimistic educational literature of the industrial era, and the equally optimistic social science of Marxism. This combination is unique in time. A. Bogdanov in 1912 narrated, referring to a conversation with an English trade union leader, that in those years in the factory workers' libraries, in addition to fiction, there were books like Darwin's Origin of Species or Flammarion's Astronomy - and they were read to holes . In the factory libraries of the English trade unions there were only football calendars and chronicles of the royal court.

The class consciousness of the workers of Russia was highly developed, although other signs of "class" were far behind. Antonio Gramsci told in 1917 (other thinkers expressed a similar idea in a different way) that the Russian workers, as it were, collected and absorbed the class consciousness accumulated by the workers of the whole world over three hundred years. It is worth noting that they became a prophet, carrying in themselves "coal blazing with fire", the thought and language of the working people of all times and peoples.

The bourgeoisie in Russia, fettered by class boundaries, did not have time and could no longer develop that class consciousness of the “young” bourgeoisie, which in the West made it a revolutionary class “for itself”. Unlike Western capitalism, where representatives of the big bourgeoisie began as entrepreneurs, Russian capitalism from the very beginning was formed mainly as a joint-stock capitalism. Large capitalists of the modern sense did not come from entrepreneurs, but from among managers - directors of joint-stock companies and banks, officials, who at first did not have large personal capital. The big Moscow (“Old Russian”) capitalists like the Ryabushinskys, Morozovs, or Mamontovs often started out as stewards of the money of the Old Believer communities. According to their type of thinking, both of them did not look like Western bourgeois individualists.

The size of the big bourgeoisie in Russia was very small. In 1905, the income was over 20 thousand rubles. (10 thousand dollars) a year from commercial and industrial enterprises, urban real estate, money capital and "personal labor" received in Russia, according to the Ministry of Finance, 5739 people and 1595 joint-stock companies and trading houses (their shareholders make up the first number )
It is worth noting that the rest of the rich people, not counting the landowners, received income from the service.

We see that the "mass" of the bourgeoisie was very small. In Moscow, according to the 1902 census, there were 1394 owners of factory establishments, including small ones. 82% of entrepreneurs were part of the old craft and merchant estates, were included in the hierarchy of feudal society, had ϲʙᴏ and estate organizations and did not experience an urgent need to reorganize society in a liberal-bourgeois way.

The fear that the bourgeoisie, suppressed by the “imported forces of big capital” (M. Weber), experienced during the revolution of 1905-1907, forced it to seek protection from the tsarist bureaucratic state. It is important to know that after the terrible lesson of 1905 the majority of the bourgeoisie abandoned politics altogether, became conservative and could not take an active role in the revolution. Numerous attempts to found political parties of the bourgeoisie (“proprietors”) were unsuccessful. It is important to note that one of the paradoxes of Russia was that parties that were not purely bourgeois either in terms of their social composition or ideology fought to expand the possibilities of bourgeois development.

It was customary for orthodox Marxists and liberals to consider that the Russian revolution happened “too early” - the prerequisites for it were not yet ripe, the bourgeoisie was weak, the soil was not ripe for democracy. This view is mechanistic, it does not take into account the phase of the “life cycle” of the entire capitalist formation and, above all, the West, which both liberals and Marxists tried to follow.

Studying the events in Russia since 1904, M. Weber comes to a much more complex and fundamental conclusion: “it is too late!”. A successful bourgeois revolution in Russia is no longer possible. And the point was, in his opinion, not only that the mass of the peasantry was dominated by the ideology of “archaic agrarian communism,” incompatible with bourgeois-liberal social structure. The main thing was that the Russian bourgeoisie took shape as a class at a time when the West was already completing its bourgeois-democratic modernization and had exhausted its liberating potential. The bourgeois revolution can only be carried out by the "young" bourgeoisie, but this youth is unique. Russia at the beginning of the 20th century could no longer be isolated from “mature” Western capitalism, which had lost its optimistic revolutionary charge.

As a result, capitalism is imported into Russia, which, on the one hand, awakens radical socialist movements, but at the same time raises a mature bureaucratic organization against them, absolutely hostile to the body. Under the influence of imported capitalism, the Russian bourgeoisie aged prematurely and, having entered into an alliance with the bureaucracy, found itself incapable of doing what the young bourgeoisie had done in the West. "Too late!".

The émigré historian A. Kustarev, who studied the “Russian studies” of M. Weber, writes: “The most interesting thing in Weber's analysis, it seems, is that he discovered a dramatic paradox in Russia's recent history. Russian society at the beginning of the 20th century found itself in a position where it was forced to simultaneously “catch up” with capitalism and “run away” from it. It seems that the Russian Marxists (especially Lenin) fully understood this circumstance and took it into account in their political calculations, as well as in their rudimentary theory of a socialist society. Their analysis of the situation is in many ways reminiscent of Weber's analysis. This is a correct remark, and one should only be surprised that Weber and Lenin came to similar conclusions based on completely different philosophical premises. It should be added that Marx also came to the same conclusion about Russia at the end of his life, but Lenin did not know about it.

That small part of large capitalists, which was able to enter into symbiosis with “imported” mature Western capitalism, after 1905 took such a radical social Darwinist anti-democratic position that it came into conflict with the cultural norms prevailing in Russia and could not join the revolutionary movement. Thus, a group of Moscow millionaires, speaking in 1906 in support of the Stolypin reform, declared: “We are not at all afraid of differentiation ... Out of 100 half-starved, there will be 20 good owners, and 80 farm laborers. We don't suffer from sentimentality. Our ideals are Anglo-Saxon. Need help first strong people. And we don’t know how to feel sorry for the weak and the whiners.” As a public position, such a view could not take root - the society did not follow the Anglo-Saxon ideals, it "suffered from sentimentality."

The Russian bourgeoisie came to the beginning of the 20th century as an economically strong, but “culturally sick” class, with internally contradictory self-awareness. The imminent revolution, seemingly objectively designed to clear the way for bourgeois-democratic transformations, initially carried a strong anti-bourgeois charge. In 1905, Weber expressed the opinion that the coming Russian revolution would not be bourgeois-democratic, but would be a revolution of a new type, and the first in a new generation of liberation revolutions.

The bourgeoisie in Russia did not receive even that religiously consecrated position, which was given to the Western bourgeoisie by Protestantism and the Enlightenment, which is closely connected with it. In Russia, the ideals of the Enlightenment spread, having already lost their role as the bearer of bourgeois ideology (rather, on the contrary, here they were colored by anti-bourgeois criticism). Russian bourgeois liberals were romantics, doomed to self-destruction. Paradoxically, they were forced to actually oppose capitalism - mature and bureaucratic. The subject ideologue of the big bourgeoisie, Bryusov, then said:

And those who destroy me

I greet you with a welcoming anthem.

M. Weber, explaining the fundamental difference between the Russian revolution and the bourgeois revolutions in Western Europe, gives a fundamental argument: by the time of the first revolution in Russia, the concept of “property” had lost its sacred halo even for representatives of the bourgeoisie in the liberal movement. This concept does not even appear among the main programmatic requirements of the ϶ᴛᴏth movement. As one of the researchers of Weber's works writes, "Thus, the value that was the engine of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Western Europe is associated in Russia with conservatism, and in the given political circumstances, even simply with the forces of reaction." In general, the bourgeoisie in Russia did not become the leading force of the bourgeois revolution, as it was in the West. More importantly, it was not perceived as such a force by other parts of society.

It is worth saying that the political preferences of the active part of the bourgeoisie were distributed in a wide range - from the right and nationalists to socialists. The leading bourgeois party (People's Party, "Constitutional Democrats" - Cadets) was reformist and sought to prevent a revolution. But this party, too, was at first “anti-bourgeois” and, as the Cadets themselves said in 1905, “had no opponents on the left” (and the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks were to its left). True, frightened by December 1905, the Cadets dissociated themselves from the revolutionary approach and limited themselves to "constitutionalism".

Part of the bourgeoisie, experiencing a spiritual crisis, supported the socialist opposition, flirted with the Freemasons, sometimes gravitated towards the Social Democrats (sometimes even financing their fighting squads, as in 1905 the large Moscow factory owner N.P. Schmit, whose name is the lane on Krasnaya Presnya ; later he gave all the money to the Bolsheviks, and they published the newspaper Pravda and kept professional revolutionaries abroad) But even this small part of the bourgeoisie did not claim to be a leader in the revolution, it exclusively followed the voice of a sick conscience.

It is important to know that the majority of the Russian bourgeoisie, which emerged from the merchant class and was suppressed by the “imported forces of big capital” (M. Weber), after the terrible lesson of 1905, completely abandoned politics and placed all their hopes on the tsar and the bureaucratic apparatus. It is worth noting that it became conservative and could not take an active role in the revolution.

Intelligentsia. Modernization in Russia also gave rise to a special cultural layer unknown in the West during the period of bourgeois revolutions - the raznochintsy intelligentsia. Judging by the materials of the 1897 census, the professional intelligentsia at that time included about 200 thousand people. Since the beginning of the 20th century, its numbers have been growing rapidly, and by 1917 it was estimated at 1.5 million people (including officials and officers). The largest group on the eve of the 1917 revolution were teachers (195 thousand) and students (127 thousand .) There were 33 thousand doctors, engineers, lawyers, agronomists - 20-30 thousand each. About a third of the intelligentsia was concentrated in the capitals.

Having adopted Western liberal and democratic ideas, this intelligentsia at the same time did not become bourgeois. The spontaneous social philosophy of the Russian intelligentsia (not leaning towards any specific ideology) was a contradictory combination of the ideals of the body of civil society with the messianic, based on the religious ideal of truth and justice, characteristic of traditional society and precisely in Russian history. N.A. Berdyaev narrated that the intelligentsia “were an ideological, and not a professional and economic group, formed from different social classes.”

Having enthusiastically accepted the idea of ​​a free person, the Russian intelligentsia could not agree with the anthropology of Western civil society, which represented a person as a competing individual, forced to continuously harm his neighbor in the struggle for existence. It should be noted that those who were brought up on Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it was impossible to accept in general the rationalism of the philosopher of civil society John Locke, according to whom the separation of people is justified, since “no one can get rich without causing a loss to another”.

If for a Western intellectual imbued with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the ideal was the search for “truth as truth”, then for the Russian intellectual the ideal was inextricably combined with the search for “truth as justice”. As N.A. Berdyaev narrated, “Dostoevsky has amazing words that if there was truth on one side, and Christ on the other, then it would be better to reject the truth and follow Christ, i.e. to sacrifice the dead truth of the passive intellect in the name of the living truth of the integral spirit.”

As a result, the Russian intelligentsia, having done a great job of destroying the legitimacy Russian autocracy, could not become that spiritual authority that would take upon itself the legitimization of the bourgeois state. On the contrary, a significant and in this respect a very authoritative part of the intelligentsia has taken a definitely anti-capitalist position. This was especially evident in the movement of the populists, who saw the core of the future free society in the peasant community, and then in the social democracy, which adopted the postulate of Marxism about the liberating mission of the working class.

It is necessary to pay special attention to this fact. It should not be forgotten that an important ideological (and, more broadly, spiritual) condition that influenced the development of the revolution and the subsequent Soviet period was strong influence on the cultural layer of Russia Marxism. This is a huge social, philosophical and economic doctrine, born of the social thought of the West during the completion of the first phase of the industrial revolution. Competing with liberalism, Marxism was distinguished by its universalism - all-humanity.

Having provided a methodology unsurpassed in terms of its cognitive possibilities for the analysis of the capitalist economy, Marxism had a very great influence on all economists. At the beginning of the twentieth century, S.N. Bulgakov narrated in his “Philosophy of Economics”: “Practically all economists are Marxists, even if they even hated Marxism.” Let us note that at that time, the time of the rapid economic development of Russia, the impact of economists on the consciousness of the intelligentsia and the entire reading public was very significant.

Being more closely associated with science than liberalism, Marxism had a wider explanatory power. Proceeding from the messianic idea of ​​overcoming that alienation between people and between man and nature, which private property gave rise to, Marxism carried a huge charge of optimism - in contrast to the pessimism of bourgeois ideology, expressed in social Darwinism (Malthusianism and its other variants)

It was these qualities, consonant with the traditional ideals of Russian culture, that explained the craving for Marxism in Russia. The influence of Marxism was experienced not only by the Social Democrats, but also by the populists and even anarchists who disagreed with many of its postulates. In fact, the entire cultural stratum of Russia and a significant part of the workers were under his influence. G. Florovsky, explaining why Marxism was perceived in Russia at the end of the 19th century as a worldview, narrated that “not the dogma of Marxism, but its problems” was important. It was the first ideological system in which the main problems of being, ϲʙᴏ and necessity were posed at the present level. No matter how ϶ᴛᴏ may seem unusual to our Orthodox patriots, we must remember the important thought of G. Florovsky - it was Marxism that awakened in Russia at the beginning of the century a craving for religious philosophy. For in Marxism, as G. Florovsky writes, there were also “crypto-religious motives… It was Marxism that influenced the turn of our religious quests towards Orthodoxy. Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Frank, Struve emerged from Marxism… All ϶ᴛᴏ were symptoms of some kind of shift in the depths.” I will add that in those times not only religious seekers were Marxists, but even such right-wing leaders of the Cadets as P. Struve and A. Izgoev.

Today ϶ᴛᴏ will seem strange, but the liberal intellectuals, who went into the field of religious and philosophical searches, even from Marxists, accused socialism (represented primarily by the Social Democrats) precisely in “bourgeoisness”. The position of S.N. Bulgakov is very indicative. It is worth noting that he, whom Plekhanov earlier called “the hope of Russian Marxism”, by 1907 incorporated into his philosophy the main and seemingly mutually exclusive parts of the thinking of the Russian intelligentsia - liberalism, conservatism and progressivism. In 1917, in his well-known work “Christianity and Socialism”, S.N. Bulgakov devoted a whole section precisely to criticizing the “bourgeoisness” of socialism (“he himself is saturated from head to toe with the poison of that very capitalism, with which he fights spiritually, he is capitalism upside down”) However, he further writes about socialism: “If he sins, then, of course, not because he denies capitalism, but because he denies it not radically enough, while he himself is spiritually still in capitalism.”

The intelligentsia was separated from bourgeois values ​​not only by an ideological abyss, but also by social conditions of life. Contrary to popular belief during perestroika, the bulk of the intelligentsia in Russia on the eve of the revolution of 1917, in terms of material well-being, belonged to the poor majority of the people. S. Govorukhin, who struck the imagination of the inhabitants of the USSR with oysters and sturgeon, which were in vain lying on the windows of “Russia, which we have lost”, prudently did not say that 40% of the intellectuals of Russia in April 1917 had an income of up to 1.5 thousand rubles. per year, which were defined as a living wage, and another 40% - an income of about 1.5 thousand rubles. (the average salary of a metal worker was 1,262 rubles.)

Teachers in rural schools earned less than unskilled workers - an average of 552 rubles. per year (϶ᴛᴏ on average, but 66% of them had a salary in the range of 408-504 rubles per year), and this salary was not paid for several months. When examining schools in the Smolensk province, in one of the questionnaires one could read: “Life is hard labor. The financial situation of a rural teacher is below any criticism. You have to starve in the full sense of the word, be without shoes and clothes, and leave their children without education.” So the very way of life of the majority of the intelligentsia did not at all induce them to be on the side of capital in social conflicts. The intellectual was a working man. In his report to the tsar in 1904, P.A. Stolypin even called the zemstvo intelligentsia (“the third element”) the main source of radicalism in the countryside, concluding: “The only brake on the path of the “third element” is the administration.”

The intelligentsia sympathized with the revolution, meaning its liberating, and not bourgeois, beginning, and the younger generation - students - actively participated in the actions of workers and peasants. Their demonstrations usually preceded and served as a catalyst for workers' demonstrations. During the peasant unrest of the beginning of the century, students even earned such respect for their selfless help that the very word “student” began to be understood as something like “defender of the people”. There is a known case when peasants in 1902 went to smash the police station, demanding “to free their student” - a semi-literate local peasant, the instigator of their speeches.

When, after the defeat of the revolution of 1905-1907 and the loss of faith in the success of the Stolypin reform, the only bourgeois-liberal party in Russia (the Cadets) began to rely on the bourgeoisie (“Russian Krupps” and “strong philistinism”), it undertook a large propaganda campaign aimed at overcoming the hostile attitude of the intelligentsia towards the bourgeoisie. It was led by former Marxists (the authors of the book "Milestones" Struve, Berdyaev Izgoev) Under ϶ᴛᴏm they inevitably had to reject the very ideal of equality. Struve narrated that the basis progressive society“will always human personality marked over a high degree suitability” [highlighted by me - S.K-M]. This was a shift to the “market” and social Darwinist idea of ​​man, and therefore to a complete break with the anthropology on which the communal worldview of the peasants stood (“archaic agrarian communism”) Struve even tried to appeal to the patriotic feelings of the intelligentsia, calling for support the development of capitalism as a “national ideal and national service”, but ϶ᴛᴏt market patriotism did not receive a response (and in general ϶ᴛᴏ the “field” was firmly occupied by the right)

This turn of Struve was very radical, and Berdyaev immediately came out in support of him: “They will say that Struve wants to bourgeoisize Russia, to instill bourgeois virtues in the Russian intelligentsia. And it is extremely important to “bourgeoisize” Russia, if by data we understand the call for social creativity, the transition to higher forms of economy and the rejection of the harassment of equality.” But the fact of the matter was that the intelligentsia did not see in bourgeoisness the impulse to "social creativity", but the "negation of equality" was too conspicuous. And, in general, the campaign to link the intelligentsia with the bourgeoisie did not have any noticeable success. Izgoev was even forced to reproach the intelligentsia with the fact that "the Western European bourgeoisie in its knowledge, energy, honesty, ability to work is many, many times superior to the Russian, even the socialist intelligentsia." The intelligentsia swallowed the reproach, but in the mass they did not begin to master the main values ​​of the energetic Western bourgeoisie.

The intelligentsia formed a significant part of that social formation that historians call the "urban middle strata." This is the urban petty bourgeoisie, employees and people of freelance professions. Both socially and ideologically, ϶ᴛᴏ education was very different from what the West calls the "middle class". If in the West the “middle class” followed in line with the ideology set by the bourgeoisie, then in Russia, with the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the diverse urban intelligentsia, on the contrary, supplied cadres of ideological workers to all parties and felt themselves to be a “laboring” class, as if a superclass force . The stabilizing, conservative role played by the "middle class" in the West was not played by the urban middle strata in Russia. On the contrary, they quickly radicalized at the moment of the revolution and dispersed on opposite sides of the barricades without forming any centrist nucleus.

A particularly important role was played by the diverse urban strata at the time of the February Revolution. First of all, their representatives, who were in the army, had a very large proportion in terms of numbers - about 1.5 million people, or 15% of all military personnel. Under ϶ᴛᴏm, a very large part of them - as officers. Secondly, it was they who took an active part in the revolutionary process, disproportionately large even in comparison with their numbers. This can be seen from the composition of the army committees, which began to be created from the first days of the revolution. There is data on the composition of the delegates to the congress of the Southwestern Front in May 1917. This is very representative data, since almost 40% of the entire active army was on the ϶ᴛᴏ front. 57% of delegates can be attributed to the middle strata - 28% of employees, 24% of people in freelance professions and 5% of artisans. Of the rest, there were 27% of farmers, 10% of workers and 3% of the "ruling classes" (landlords, manufacturers and merchants). By autumn, however, the weight of the "middle strata" in the army committees began to decrease, and the number of workers to grow, but still the political activity of the "raznochintsy" remained high.

Nobility. This estate was small in number, the nobles made up about 1% of the population, but most of them were declassed, joining the ranks of the raznochintsy intelligentsia. About half of the nobles were landowners (about 0.5% of the population). At the same time, the ϶ᴛᴏ estate had a very large economic and political influence, owning about a third of the land in the country. In 1905, the value of land of nobles in 50 provinces of Russia was 60% higher than total weight equity capital in the country.

The local nobility as an estate experienced strong pressure. A third of the large estates, which had over 500 acres of land, (and almost a third of their land) was already bourgeois (they were owned by merchants and people from peasants). Of the estates from 100 to 500 acres, only 46% were noble. 26% of estates from 20 to 100 dess. could no longer compete with the kulak farms.

Let us note the important role of the nobility, which is often lost sight of. This estate "bound" Russian society, since the nobles were characterized by high geographical mobility and extensive social ties. As a rule, landlords lived in the village and at the same time in the county or provincial town, often visited the capitals and traveled abroad. Their relatives joined the ranks of officials and officers, their children studied at universities. Through them, the city was closely connected with the countryside (the other channel of communication was the peasants who went to the city to work)

Historians note the peculiarity of the Russian nobility, which played an important role in its relationship with other classes. Unlike the nobility of Western Europe, the Russian nobility was not a closed corporation. Through a number of procedures, a lot of non-noble elements were accepted into it. This, in particular, delayed the development of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. In our country, she was inclined to compromise and even symbiosis with the nobility, and in Europe she was forced to go to a radical revolution in order to establish her status in spite of the nobility. The aristocracy during revolutions, especially in France, became almost the main enemy of the bourgeoisie. In Russia, among the liberal-bourgeois politicians, there were many nobles and even aristocrats.

In their mentality and deeds, the nobility made a sharp turn in connection with the revolution of 1905-1907. It is worth noting that he largely predetermined the fate of capitalism in Russia. The nobility, which had landed property as their main source of income, hardly endured the abolition of serfdom and the agricultural crisis that followed. At the beginning of the century, most of the estates were in decline, 4/5 of the nobility were not able to support ϲʙᴏ and families only on income from the land. This determined a noticeable increase in the opposition of the nobility, which was expressed in active participation in the zemstvo movement and liberal sentiments (support for constitutionalism)

This liberalism was, however, self-contradictory, as the nobility viewed industrialization programs with distaste as "squeezing resources out of agriculture." In other words, the nobility did not see for itself the opportunity to take advantage of the development of capitalism, it associated its well-being with land ownership and public service.

Unrest of the peasants in 1902-1903, and then the revolution of 1905-1907. the families of 30,000-40,000 landowners were the hardest hit. About 15% of the estates were burned, a significant part of the land in the areas covered by unrest had to be sold. The attempts of the leaders of the nobility to restore the long illusory patriarchal relations with the peasants completely failed.

The peasants clearly defined their attitude towards the landowners as a class enemy. Under the data were historical roots, which gave lush shoots after the reform of 1861. A.N. so arrogant that they do not allow greyhounds to trample the fields. In a footnote, he gives an explanation: “Before, it also sometimes happened that peasants, especially state-owned ones, attacked hunters trampling their fields. You may not know that the hunters had a signal "to fight." The hunter, captured by the peasants, blew a signal on the horn, and then all the other hunters hurried to his aid and, of course, usually beat the peasants. It should be noted that now hardly anyone will trumpet “for a fight”.

In 1905, at the congresses of the All-Russian Peasant Union, forces hostile to the peasants were identified, and in ϶ᴛᴏm a convincing agreement was reached. The “enemies” were designated in this order: officials (“harmful to the people”), landlords, kulaks, and local Black Hundreds. And most importantly, complete antagonism with the landowners was expressed in the general peasant demand for the nationalization of the land and the continuously repeated assertion that "the Earth is God's." The elections to the I and II Dumas dispelled all doubts - the peasants did not want to have the landowners as their representatives.

The nobility fully realized the threat that the revolution poses to them. In October 1905, the government's fear reached such a degree that it was ready to sacrifice the nobility. The chief manager of land management and agriculture, N.N. Kutler, was preparing a project for the compulsory alienation of landowners' lands and their transfer to the peasants! In 1906, the liberal mood among the nobility was over, the Cadets for their agrarian program were “exposed” as traitors to the interests of the nobility and purged from the zemstvos (as they say, there was an “urbanization of Russian constitutionalism” - he was expelled from the countryside to the cities) The nobility moved to the right and became a conservative force, exerting strong pressure on the government.

Having correctly assessed the attitude of the peasants towards themselves, the nobility could no longer defend democratic principles, especially universal suffrage - it would mean the complete elimination of the nobility from the political arena. Having dispersed the I and II Dumas, tsarist government changed the electoral law in such a way that 30,000 landowners received twice as many seats in the Third Duma as 20 million peasant households. During the discussion of ϶ᴛᴏt, the draft electoral law was called "shameless." Nicholas II himself said, laughing: "I am for the shameless."

The revolution of 1905 forced the landlords to finally gain class consciousness and create a political organization - the Council of the United Nobility. Within its framework, the concepts of adaptation of the nobility to the new situation were developed. Its essence was in the partial perception of Western ideas and the idea of ​​the dissolution of the peasant community, which showed its revolutionary potential. The Westernism of the nobility was very selective - the principles of a liberal economy were accepted (primarily, the privatization of the land of peasant communities, despite the fact that landlord property was declared “inalienable”), but the principles of parliamentary democracy were rejected. It was a kind of prototype of "liberalism according to Pinochet."

When Stolypin, who deeply understood the lessons of the revolution of 1905-1907, proposed and began to implement a holistic program for the modernization of the economy and the state of Russia on capitalist principles, the conservative nobility accepted only its agrarian part from it (the destruction of the community and the privatization of land), but began to show growing resistance other sections of the reform, without which the agrarian part was doomed to collapse. Of course, the failure of the reform was already predetermined by the stubborn resistance of the communal peasantry, but the influential opposition on the right left Stolypin no chance.

In March 1907, the Council of the United Nobility sent Stolypin a memorandum expressing dissatisfaction with the very idea of ​​the reform. It said: “Having directed all its efforts to the rise of the peasant economy, the government abandoned all concern for the cultural economy and even contributes to its abolition, encouraging any undertaking in the field of the transition of the entire land area to primitive agriculture.”

At the beginning of 1907, the Congress of the United Nobility announced its rejection of the reform of local governments, since, they say, it would give local power into the hands of “people of a predatory-industrial type”, who would unite with the “third element” (intelligentsia) Based on all of the above Having said that, we come to the conclusion that even such a modernization program was rejected, in which the development of capitalism (with the most necessary minimum of democratization) would occur while maintaining all the privileges of the nobility. The nobility put up a barrier to bourgeois statehood "from the right." Opposing the reform project primary education(parts of the general plan of the Stolypin reform), the leader of the right in the Duma, N.E. won't protect you."

At the end of 1907, the Right Cadet A. S. Izgoev narrated: “Among our two ruling classes, the bureaucracy and the local nobility, we would look in vain for constitutional forces. The interests of these classes cannot be protected under the rule of law in the country. These classes are incapable of implementing constitutions, even in its formal sense. Thus, the nobility, a very influential estate in Russia, became after 1905 anti-bourgeois, even if it was from the “right”. His rejection of the liberal-capitalist order became fundamental. The newspaper Morning of Russia, which again began to be published from November 1909 with the money of big capital (Ryabushinsky, S.N. Tretyakov, etc.), narrated on May 19, 1910: people: one of them has to leave.”

The break between the nobility and the bourgeoisie meant the collapse of the Octobrists, the party to the right of the Cadets. This gap was quite clearly recognized by both sides. The newspaper "Morning of Russia" narrated, in particular: "The union of agrarians with the commercial and industrial class would be unnatural." Or, more colorfully: “Life will step over the corpse of the estate that hindered it with the same indifference with which spring water pours over a dam, eroding it and laying a new channel.”

As ϶ᴛᴏ happens at the stage of decomposition of a class society, the privileged class degrades morally and becomes driving force regression. This is how the nobility became after the revolution of 1905. Participating in the elections to the Second State Duma in 1907 and observing the policy of the nobility, S.N. Bulgakov narrated: “Ah, ϶ᴛᴏ class! It was in those times the center of Russian culture, not understanding the ϶ᴛᴏth meaning of the Russian nobility would mean committing an act of historical ingratitude, but now ϶ᴛᴏ is a political corpse, poisoning the atmosphere with its decomposition, and meanwhile it is intensely galvanized, and ϶ᴛᴏt class is at the very source of power and influence. And when you see with your own eyes ϶ᴛᴏ degeneration, combined with arrogance, pretensions and, at the same time, cynicism, which does not disdain dubious services, one becomes afraid for power, which stubbornly wants to be based on the ϶ᴛᴏ element, which inclines attention to his parquet whispers.

The position of the clergy was special. At the beginning of the century, the Church became, in fact, part of the state machine of the Russian Empire, which, in the context of the impending revolution, was one of the reasons for the fall of its authority among the masses of the population (which, by the way, is not directly related to the problem of religiosity)

Therefore, by the way, it is useful to remember that the crisis of the Church at the beginning of the century was not at all the result of the actions of the atheist Bolsheviks. It is worth noting that it happened earlier and is connected precisely with the position of the Church at the time of the destructive intrusion of capitalism into Russian life. According to the reports of military confessors, when in 1917 the Provisional Government exempted Orthodox soldiers from the obligatory observance of church sacraments, the percentage of those receiving communion immediately fell from 100 to 10 or less.

In the mass of her, the clergy behaved like an estate bound by the discipline of church organization. S.N. Bulgakov, already a prominent religious philosopher at that time, continuing the idea of ​​the state of the nobility, writes in 1907: bloc and all the time was under the supervision and under the influence of the bishop... And let the responsibility for the sin, which was committed at the ballot boxes by the hand of the clergy, fall on the inspirers of ϶ᴛᴏth low design, ϶ᴛᴏth blatant violence... The consequences of ϶ᴛᴏth satanic design - to make the clergy an instrument for the election of government candidates - will be innumerable, because the clergy will still have to report to their flock for the fact that the “governor” and other proteges of the vaguely right-wingers went through their backs to the State Duma ... This is political absurdity and arrogant cynicism, which is purposely not the enemies of the church will also come up with ideas... Until now I have had to attack intellectual nihilism a lot, but I must admit that in this case it is far from administrative nihilism!

public classes- “large groups of people, differing in their place in a historically defined system of social production, in their relation ( for the most part fixed and formalized in laws) to the means of production, according to their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, according to the methods of obtaining and the size of the share of social wealth that they dispose of. Classes are such groups of people, of which one can appropriate the labor of another, due to the difference in their place in a certain way of social economy ”(V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 39, p. 15).

The main sign of difference between classes is the attitude towards the means of production. The emergence of classes and class antagonisms is associated with the development of the social division of labor and the emergence of private ownership of the means of production, which split society into haves and have-nots, exploiters and exploited. Each antagonistic socio-economic formation is characterized by its own class structure, a swap of the main classes generated by the dominant mode of production: slaves and slave owners, serfs and landowners, workers (proletarians) and the bourgeoisie. Along with them, there are non-basic classes and social strata that are either inherited from past formations (under capitalism - peasants, artisans, small traders, landlords), or are the spokesmen for the emerging classes of a new formation (the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - in the bowels of feudalism).

With all the differences in the class structure of antagonistic societies, they have common feature: exploitation of one class by another. The irreconcilably hostile interests of the antagonistic classes lead to a class struggle that results in change. social order and, consequently, the class structure of society. The main classes of modern capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and the working class. The modern bourgeoisie is divided according to the amount of capital into a monopoly, big non-monopoly front bourgeoisie. The entirety of economic and political domination is concentrated in the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie. Its class interests came into irreconcilable conflict with the interests of the entire nation, of the entire people.

The working class, deprived of the means of production and forced to live by selling its labor power to the capitalists, is an oppressed and exploited class. Along with the growth in the number of the proletariat, its organization and political activity grow. It represents the main force in social development and expresses the interests of all the working masses, all social strata of society in the struggle against the dominance of monopolies. In addition to the main classes in the capitalist countries, there are peasants and landlords. The peasantry, ruined by the monopolies, is decreasing in numbers; by virtue of their position, the poorest peasants are a firm ally and reliable support working class in the countryside.

As capitalism develops, the landowners become bourgeois, they become more and more merged with the bourgeois class. Along with the classes in the developed capitalist countries there are social strata: the urban petty bourgeoisie (artisans, handicraftsmen, small merchants, etc.), the intelligentsia, and employees. Together with the peasantry, they constitute the so-called middle strata, occupying an intermediate position between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Employees and the intelligentsia, in terms of living and working conditions, adjoin the working class, since they are representatives of the army of hired labor. Together with the peasantry they become allies of the working class. Marxism scientifically revealed not only the reasons for the division of society into classes, but also the ways of destroying classes and building a classless society.

The decisive condition for the abolition of classes is the elimination of private ownership of the means of production, the exploitation of man by man, and the establishment of public ownership of the means of production. This world-historical task can only be carried out by the working class, as the most revolutionary, class-conscious and organized class in history, associated with the most advanced form of economy - large-scale industrial production led by their political party. The experience of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries has confirmed that a radical transformation of classes and class relations is possible only through a socialist revolution and the conquest by the working class of its political power - the dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class needs political power not only to abolish public ownership of the means of production, but also for a radical socialist transformation of the economy, creating the necessary socio-political, cultural and spiritual prerequisites for achieving social homogeneity of society.

In the process of building socialism, a fundamental change in the social structure of society takes place: the class of exploiters is liquidated, two friendly classes remain - the working class and the cooperative peasantry and the working intelligentsia that emerged from these classes. The mutual relations of classes, as well as other social groups and strata, are conditioned here by social ownership of the means of production, the unity of fundamental interests, the commonality of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and a single goal - the building of communism. Under developed socialism, the role of the working class as the leading force in the life of society is growing. Directly connected with the main form of socialist property, it is the main productive force, creates the largest share of the gross social product, stands in the forefront of technical, economic and socio-political progress.

In the USSR, the working class is the largest part of the population - 61.8%. Under the influence of the scientific and technological revolution, professional and cultural and technical changes are taking place in the working class: the level of education and culture of workers is growing, the proportion of workers with high qualifications is increasing, and physical labor is increasingly saturated with intellectual content. The working class plays an active role in the political life of the country, in managing the national economy, and in the work of party, trade union and Komsomol organizations. The social nature of the peasantry also changed radically. It has become a new, socialist class and, under the leadership of the working class, is actively participating in the construction of a communist society. Socialism delivered the working peasantry from exploitation and poverty.

Scientific and technological progress has significantly changed the content of peasant labor: it is gradually turning into a variety of industrial labor. Collective-farm democracy is being strengthened and developed, and the social and political activity of agricultural workers is growing. Important role in the life of a developed socialist society, the intelligentsia plays a role - a social group of working people engaged primarily in mental labor (engineers, technicians, teachers, doctors, scientists). The number of intelligentsia is growing rapidly, which is associated with the acceleration of scientific and technological progress, with the growing role of science in all spheres of society.

The alliance of the working class, the collective-farm peasantry and the people's intelligentsia, with the leading role of the working class, has become a solid, indestructible foundation for the new historical community that has taken shape in our country - the Soviet people. The construction of the material and technical base of communism creates economic opportunities for overcoming social differences between the working class and the peasantry, between town and country, between people of mental and physical labor. In the USSR and other socialist countries, society is advancing along the road to ever more complete social homogeneity, to overcoming all vestiges of class division.

ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE NEW SCREAMS WITH THE OLD

Since the 17th century up to the Revolution in the Russian Empire obvious church schisms did not happen, but immediately after There was not one revolution, but several at once. Of these, the most massive were: 1) splits autocephalists on the national outskirts (in Georgia, Ukraine, Finland); 2) renovationist and 3) catacomb in Russia; 4) karlovatian and 5) Eulogian in exile. A false conclusion suggests itself: since these splits have occurred AFTER Revolutions, which means that the Revolution was their REASON and if there were no Revolution, it would not be violated and church unity. This conclusion is false because the causes and effects are reversed. The divisions did not happen because the Revolution happened, but the Revolution, anti-Christian in nature and aims, could happen only because these divisions already existed.

When studying new splits, the greatest difficulties arise due to the fact that before there is still no clear ecclesiastical point of view all these splits. Moreover, besides renovationist , none of them is directly called a split, and it is not known who to consider foreigners, evlogians, catacombs, josephites and "non-rememberers". That is, who should be considered people who, at their illegal cathedrals and cathedrals, more than once anathematized Russian Orthodox Church and accused her of various heresies? And such anathemas and accusations were uttered by the leaders of both foreigners and catacombs. It is quite obvious that they themselves do not recognize their unity with the Church, and at the same time, each community proclaims only itself as the "true Church", the legal successor of the pre-revolutionary one. At the Liturgy, they do not commemorate the name of His Holiness Patriarch Alexy, and in their sermons and journalism they do not get tired of repeating previously pronounced anathemas. Can Orthodox people take blessings from foreign and catacomb clergy, go to their churches and receive communion there? Finally, is it useful to read the books published by YMCA-PRESS by “Parisian theologians” that have filled the shelves of church bookstores since the early 1990s?

In the absence of Council decisions regarding these formations, the only canonically legal definitions for a church person should be those made by His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon and the members of the Holy Synod. Among them was St. Hilarion (Troitsky), whose words became the guiding thread for the subsequent presentation:

“One should always proceed from the idea of ​​the Church when solving questions of church life, and these questions often in their essence represent REPETITION or MODIFYING THE OLD. The gates of hell, ganging up on the Church among other things, an uprising of heresies and delusions, and now create many anti-church phenomena. The fight against these phenomena is the task of the available church leaders, but the fight must take place on ANCIENT CHURCH basis and in connection with the treasury of the theological knowledge of the universal Church. You involuntarily notice how questions arise and are discussed today, long ago and quite sufficiently resolved by ancient church writers. Who does not know that the question of the Church is the most important PRINCIPAL question in contemporary controversy different kind sectarianism? And of course, in the matter of this controversy, one must always keep in mind those dogmatic results to which ancient ecclesiastical theological thought came.

It follows from this that to get out of that vicious circle, which you get into when faced with the problem of the newest splits, there is only one way: regardless of subconscious sympathies to apply to this or that variety of schismatics the canons long ago worked out by church experience. The history of schisms and heresies set forth systematically, and not in the form of “pictures” scattered in time and space, allows us to say that new splits arise not only influenced by the old but most often they are organized. The post-revolutionary splits did not arise from scratch, but were initiated by activists those anti-church movements, in the depths of which the reformation of the Orthodox Church was being prepared for decades. The preparations were carried out under the slogans of the need for "renewal" / "correction" of church life allegedly "corrupted" during the Synodal rule.

However, despite the undeniable connection between the new schisms and the old ones, there is one essential difference between them. The old schisms (of those who lived in the 15th century and the Old Believers in the 17th century) were “ Presbyterian”, that is, their initiators belonged to the lower clergy (archpriests, deacons, psalmists and simple monks). New schisms for the first time in the history of the Russian Church were " hierarchical", that is, their initiators and chiefs were BISHOPS.

What were causes, to such an unparalleled phenomenon that many authoritative and respected church hierarchs pre-revolutionary standing in conditions of terrible persecution against their Church did not in the least contribute to Her UNITY, but on the contrary, they began to tear apart the robes of Christ? It seems that the reason for this should be sought in the cultural revolution that took place in the country in the 18th century, and, strange as it may seem, in that spiritual education system which was imposed on the Church by the secular state.

During the XVIII century. Russia passed accelerated courses of "enlightenment" under the European program for the creation of an anti-Christian civilization. She experienced a cultural renaissance, an ecclesiastical reformation, and set about preparing a political revolution. All these processes have led to secularization(secularization) in the broadest sense of the word and to a religious division between the common people and the Europeanized ruling and cultural part of society. In fact, even then there was a church schism, into which the cultural stratum went. From their underground, the new dissidents spread godless ideas and promoted revolutionary ideas. In the same environment, strongly freemasonized, the first secret political societies began to form, associated with international revolutionary organizations.

International terrorism, about which there is so much talk at the present time, originated in the Russian Empire already in 1797, when the first pre-Decembrist secret society, who set the goal of regicide as a means to "change power" (from a monarchical system to a constitutional one). The society arose at the army headquarters in Tulchin under A.V. Suvorov, who did not want to swear allegiance to Paul I. Suvorov was exiled to his estate, and the officers to Smolensk, which is why this society is called the "circle of Smolensk officers." It was not they who killed Paul, but their cause continued to live and cover ever wider circles of the "advanced intelligentsia."

Therefore, I believe that the year 1797 can be considered, if not the date of the birth of the Revolution of 1917, then, in any case, the date of its conception. After conception, it developed for a long time in the "womb": it went through "universities" in various unions = Bunds and circles, successively replacing each other "Decembrists" (1812-1825), "Petrashevites" (1848), "Nechaevites", "Chaikovites" and "People's Volunteers".

At the beginning of the 20th century, with the help of "reborn" Freemasonry, the "constitutionalists" got down to business. They created the apparatus necessary for the political struggle in the form of political parties. And in 1905, this apparatus received a platform for open propaganda of its ideas in State Duma. The process of secularization, begun under the slogans of liberation from the authority of the Church and the building of a secular culture independent of divine commandments, has ended politicization of all strata of society, including the church.

This fact does not make sense to bashfully hush up. The Church is not an isolated community, and therefore is not protected from external influences. Before the Revolution, politicization embraced everyone - both the laity and the clergy, right down to the episcopate. On the wave of revolutionary excitement, parties of "Christian socialists" began to emerge, some bishops sympathized with the Social Revolutionaries, others had the closest ties with the "monarchist" Black Hundreds. But there is no doubt that the “pathogens” in the Church Body were representatives of the “liberal professions”, who formed the core of all political parties and some of which were taken over by cultural mission to "renew" the state Church, in their opinion, outdated and inconsistent with European standards. This part of the intelligentsia lobbied for the passage of laws on “freedom of conscience and religion” and launched a campaign in the press controlled by it to discredit the Church using the usual slander in this case.

When studying the materials of the Local Council of 1917-1918, especially the work of the commissions, where representatives of the intelligentsia (professors, lawyers and publicists) predominated, one gets the impression that they wanted to carry out at this Council the unsuccessful Reformation in their time and only by the Providence of God the Church was saved. True, at the cost of external persecution and internal splits. And in this case, the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 20th century can be summed up in two words: the Church survived, DESPITE the Revolution, and the new splits have grown stronger and preserved THANKS TO her conquests. This alone can serve as an indication of the anti-Christian essence of the Revolution, hidden under political slogans about human rights, freedom and equality.

"REVOLUTION IS FIRST OF ALL THE ENEMY OF CHRISTIANITY!"

With the first appearance in Russia of the secret political societies of the “constitutionalists”, it became obvious to many that Russia was overtaken by the “first wave” of the revolutionary storm that broke out in Europe and destroyed the Christian monarchies there. Comparing the dates of the actions of the revolutionary forces in Russia with the chronology of the revolutions in Europe, it is easy to make sure that all subsequent "waves" rolled from there. In the 1860s, the main revolutionary forces - communists, anarchists and Zionists - took shape in international organizations, and in each of them there were representatives from Russia. For contemporaries, this organizational connection was obvious, and this can be judged from the then journalism. But there were people who saw something more important in the Revolution - its deep anti-Christian essence.

So, F.I. Tyutchev after the revolution of 1848 in Europe in a note intended for the Emperor under the title "Russia and the Revolution" wrote: " The revolution is first of all the enemy of Christianity! The anti-Christian mood is the soul of the revolution; this is her special, distinctive character. Those modifications to which she was successively subjected, those slogans which she alternately assimilated, everything, even her violence and crimes, were secondary and random; but one thing in her is not like that, it is precisely the anti-Christian mood that inspires her, and it is this (one cannot but admit it) that gave her this formidable dominion over the universe. He who does not understand this is nothing more than a blind man who is present at the sight that the world presents to him.

Tyutchev also wrote that if the Revolution wins, then Orthodox Russia will perish: “For a long time already in Europe there have been only two real forces - the Revolution and Russia ... the existence of one of them is tantamount to the death of the other!… One should not hide from oneself that it is unlikely that all these shocks, earthquakes resounding in the West, would stop at the threshold of the countries of the East, and thus it could happen that in this fatal war, in that THE MILITIES OF GODDESS undertaken against Russia by a revolution that has already engulfed three-quarters of Western Europe, the Slavic-Orthodox East ... would not have found themselves drawn into this struggle after them.

Unfortunately, Tyutchev, speaking of anti-Christian essence Revolution, is limited to too vague formulations and, moreover, with a clear flavor of Schellingian mysticism. The revolution is personified, it lives and acts on its own: its “soul” experiences “anti-Christian sentiments” inspired by someone, and now this monster “undertakes” a “militia of atheism” against Russia. Although it is impossible to demand from a poet anything other than allegories, however, Tyutchev was not only a poet, but an experienced politician and diplomat. He had lived in Europe for 22 years and was well acquainted with those who "inspired" and "undertook". He did not want to see the first “strike” in the Decembrists’ conspiracy and did not know that his colleagues in the “poet workshop” were already preparing the second “strike”, gathering on Saturdays at Petrashevsky’s apartment. Interestingly, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto begins with words that seem to have been copied from fashionable ghost novels: "A ghost haunts Europe, the ghost of communism!"

Naturally, such explanations of the essence and causes of the Revolution cause a feeling of dissatisfaction. I would like to clarify what is hidden behind the words about “ghosts” and “moods” and who exactly leads the cohorts of the “militia of atheism”. If you call a spade a spade, then “anti-Christian sentiments” are rooted in civilized countries occultist ideology having powerful and well-organized structures. From the beginning of the 18th century, their branches took root in Russia, and when a bloody revolution took place in France, God-fearing people called the “militia of atheism” nothing more than “farmazons” and “Martinists”. In the 16th century, when they emerged from the underground, the priests of "secret knowledge" still pretended to be pious Christians, wishing to lure the simple-hearted and inquisitive "profane" Christians into their nets. But in the 19th century they were no longer in danger, and therefore at their gatherings they no longer concealed their goals, and "public opinion", brought up in the spirit of "anti-Christian sentiments", perceived what was said with delight. Here are some quotes.

GOALS OF FREEMASONRY. At the congress of students in Liege in 1863, the Freemason Lafargue defined the goal of Freemasonry " as the triumph of man over God". Here are their slogans: War to God, hatred to God! All progress in this! Gotta pierce the sky like a paper vault". At the Bolfort Congress of 1911, the Freemasons openly said: “Let us not forget, WHAT WE ARE ANTI-CHURCH, let us make every effort in our lodges to destroy religious influence IN ALL FORMS in which it manifests itself. The Convention of the Grand Lodge of France, which was first obeyed by Russian Freemasons, who achieved the abdication of the Tsar, and in exile they “worked” in it, declared in 1922: “We will energetically support freedom of conscience in everyone, but we will not hesitate to declare war TO ALL RELIGIONS for they are the true enemies of mankind. Will be working, we will weave with our quick and nimble fingers a shroud that will one day cover all religions; so we'll reach all over the world DESTRUCTION OF THE CLERGY and the prejudices they inspire.

Denying Christianity and the so-called "positive religions" (Judaism, Islam and Buddhism), where, although in a distorted form, but still preserved worship, occultists-Masons have a special hatred for Christianity. In 1903, at the Convention of the same Lodge, it was said: “Let us recall that Christianity and Freemasonry are absolutely irreconcilable, - so much so that to join one means to break with the other. The triumph of the Galilean lasted 20 centuries. The illusion lasted too long. He joins in the dust of ages with other deities of India, Egypt, Greece and Rome." Or else: "Down with the Crucified: Your kingdom is over." And all in the same spirit. After the seizure of power, all points of the Masonic program regarding murder Christian Church performed strictly:

1) separate the Church from the State, bring it down to the level of a legal entity, one of the religious and public organizations;

2) separate the school from the church and to take into their own hands the matter of forming citizens of a state of a new type;

3) physically destroy the clergy during the years of terror, with which any Revolution begins.

STRUCTURES. Masonic structures were formed before the Reformation or simultaneously with it, as evidenced by the so-called "Cologne Charter" of Masonic Congress of 1531 English researchers (see F.A. Yeats "Rosicretzerian Enlightenment", M., 1999) date the formation of the first Masonic lodges no later than 1646. After almost two centuries of being underground, the Freemasons revealed themselves to the world openly in England in 1718, and since the networks of Masonic lodges were already scattered throughout Europe, Freemasonry arose, as if by pike, in all countries at once, including in Russia. However, from the very beginning, Freemasonry was not unified, since its varieties came from different occult "schools". Different "rituals" or systems of Freemasonry divided Europe into spheres of influence in the same way as the kahal does. Therefore, on political map Europe of the 18th century, it would be advisable to mark not the borders of the state, but the boundaries of the division of its territory between the Masonic orders. Such a map could reflect the true state of affairs in the alignment of the warring occult clans and thereby help historians to put together a whole picture of the seemingly disordered and unmotivated mosaic of wars and palace coups.

On this map, the capital of the tiny duchy of Brunswick would look like the largest political center, because Dukes of Brunswick were Grand Masters of the Order Scottish system(Andreev Freemasonry, it is also “red”) and from here came instructions to the “brothers” in other countries. competing with them Holstein and Brandenburg(Prussia) first belonged to swedish system, The grand master of the lodges in which was the Swedish king. He initiated the Masons. book. Pavel Petrovich (the future Emperor) during his visit to St. Petersburg. Grand Orient of France extended his tentacles to the neighboring principalities: Alsace, Baden, Oldenburg, and with the initiation of the young Friedrich, who became king, into freemasons, he got the opportunity to influence the politics of Prussia. English Freemasons("John's" or "blue" Freemasonry), as the founders of all systems, had branches in all countries.

In addition to Masonic lodges, lodges of "enlightened" occultists were scattered throughout the Old World, uniting in the so-called " initiatory Orders". Among them, the most famous Templars And Rosicrucians, - they have survived from the time when chemists were still called alchemists, and magicians and witches were periodically burned at the stake by inquisitors. To these ancient Orders in the XVIII century. added Martinists(founders: a baptized Jew / Maron / Martinius and his student the Count of Saint-Martin) and Illuminati(founder - Professor of the University in Bavaria Adam Weishaupt).

QUESTION: WHAT IS THE CLERGY? Was this estate affected by Freemasonization and, if so, to what extent? To get answers to these questions, another search had to be made, the results of which were so extensive, and the conclusions were so unexpected that a separate book would have to be written to present them. Here I will briefly say: part of the clergy (numerically small, but the most influential and active) was covered by Freemasonization through the education system already in the 18th century, while lovers of “mysticism” from the clergy preferred the lodges of the Order of the Knights of the Golden Cross (Rosicrucians). As a result, at the beginning of the XIX century. the son of the priest M.M. Speransky led the reforms (including the spiritual department), at least two Rosicrucians (S. Glagolevsky and M. Desnitsky) became metropolitans and headed the Bible Society, and the third is the most active figure in this society, Archimandrite Filaret Drozdov - from 1821 became the Metropolitan of Moscow and until 1866 he remained one of the most influential figures, both in the church and in the state field. Under his protection, the Moscow Rosicrucians successfully survived the period of the prohibition of Freemasonry in Russia from 1822 to the 1890s, when it “woke up” and blossomed in a new capacity for new achievements under the leadership of the “brothers” from Paris.

freemasonry can be compared with joint-stock companies open type (JSC), which is why, perhaps, the epithet "open" is often found in the names of modern publishing houses, funds and clubs. Initiatory Orders are joint-stock companies closed type(COMPANY). They carefully developed the system of subordinating the lower cells to the higher ones and the principle of the inevitability of death in case of betrayal. The Orders oversee the activities of Freemasonry and related secret terrorist societies and parties. The Charter of the Illuminati turned out to be the most effective, so it was published under the guise of exposing Masonic machinations and was taken as the basis for the creation of parties such as Narodnaya Volya, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. The Chinese "triads" are arranged according to the same principle. Such a network model makes it possible to ensure conspiracy and exclude the possibility of the failure of the Center in any conditions. A vivid confirmation of this can be the fact that the Rosicrucians and Templars have survived even in such a state as Soviet Union, with its seemingly all-pervading Organs. But much of the security of the deep-seated secret organizations of the occultists owes to the fact that in leadership positions in the all countries in secret offices, the Gendarme Corps, the Cheka-OGPU, the Gestapo, the CIA and the FBI - there are adherents of these Orders And create special units there on the use of magic to manipulate the minds of both individuals and the crowd, and the population as a whole.

TRACES OF RENNESANCE AND REFORMATION

It has already been said more than once about the three main stages of this process, known by the names: Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution and who were by their occult nature anti-Christian upheavals in culture, religion and politics. The end result was the creation NEW CULTURE("secular") NEW RELIGION("Protestantism") and NEW ORDER("democracy"). In other words, in Christian Europe there was a total secularization in all spheres of public life.

In Orthodox Rus', the same anti-Christian upheavals. Their manifestations are usually interpreted as the result of external influence, as borrowing from Europe. However, with all the certainty of the constant "import" of cultural, sectarian and political ideas from Europe, we must not forget the existence of our own "double believers" - pagans, Bogomil Manicheans and whips, which were discussed in detail in the second part of this book.

Neither Kievan nor Muscovite Rus', and even more so its outskirts, have never been some kind of reserve of Orthodoxy, inaccessible to various outside influences. The Eastern Slavs built their state on a vast plain, from time immemorial open to all "winds and fads" and crossed by trade routes laid along a dense network of its rivers. In Kyiv, Novgorod and Pskov, in Vladimir, Tver and Moscow Always there were trade and craft quarters not only Armenian, Greek and Jewish, but also German, Polish, Fryazhsky (Italian). This was the country trading, which means that not only by borrowing, but also with the active participation of urban residents, it inevitably had to be involved in pan-European the process of de-Christianization that began in Europe in the 13th century

The first traces of the Strigolnikov heresy were noted in Rus' in the 13th century, and they chronologically coincide with the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe, the heyday of occultism and the appearance of the first humanists, preachers of man-godism. "Late" Renaissance responded to Rus' at the end of the 15th century. split of the "Judaizers". At the same time, with led. Prince Ivan IV, for the first time the question of secularization church estates, and in connection with it a powerful movement of "non-possessors" arises. Taking away from the Church and their monasteries land holdings was one of the main points of the European Reformation, and in Europe it was carried out fairly quickly. But in Russia, the case dragged on for three centuries and ended only in the reign of the German Empress Catherine II.

So the ideas Reformations and related heresies penetrated into Rus' immediately, but they already had ground for rooting here. Already in the first half XVIV., from this soil the first tares begin to grow secular culture. The political and religious concepts of sectarians begin to spread not only through the apocrypha, but also through new literature. New genres appeared: religious-political pamphlets and translated fiction (the so-called "first Russian stories"). Then, under Ivan the Terrible, expand trade relations with England, the influx of foreigners is increasing, and they bring the first printing presses from Europe. The German Sloboda (the old one, near Solyanka) appears in Moscow. The era of "great geographical discoveries" in the Russian version was expressed in the development new lands in Siberia and the conquest of new commercial and industrial markets there.

So, we can say that the anti-Christian upheavals in the region cultural construction(Renaissance) and religious Protestantism(Reformation) Russian occultists, sectarians and the first intellectuals - "non-possessors" started at the same time with their European "brothers" and with their most active support. As for the third stage, the Revolution, here we were clearly late, probably because the previous stages were too slow due to the stubborn unwillingness of Russian Orthodox people to renounce their faith and adopt ideas alien to this faith. By the middle of the 17th century, when the Protestants in Europe had already begun the third stage and organized the first Great Revolution in England, a long-awaited split broke out in Russia, in which all the previous anti-church movements, inspired by the interests of the new class, the bourgeoisie, merged.

Basics cultural revolution laid down by Peter I, brought up in the German Quarter, under the guidance of his foreign mentors. Under their guidance, further development the Reformation failed under his father, and church administration took on forms borrowed from the West. cultural construction was the core of all the "transformations" of Peter I and his successors. He began with the introduction of a "civil" calendar and a "civil" script, and thus laid the foundation stone for a new one, " secular”, states on the European model. The secular state retained the status of the state church for the Orthodox Church, but at the same time removed it from real levers of influence on public life.

Without a "secular culture" Russia was not allowed into a "civilized society", and therefore priority directions of the domestic policy of the ruling elites throughout the XVIII century. were: 1) secularization in the broadest sense of the word, that is, the seizure of church property by a secular state and 2) the creation in Russia of an exact copy of an occult culture in its roots, revived in Europe during the Renaissance under the slogans of a struggle against the authority of the Church.

Palace of Culture It was built with the help of the same “freemasons” invited from Europe. It is not surprising that the first figures of "Russian culture", as a rule, became Freemasons. And if we take into account that at first they were representatives of the upper, ruling class, then one can imagine how fast this palace was being built. Both processes - both secularization and culturalization - went on simultaneously with the "general masonization" of the whole country.

Under Peter I, the culture tregers achieved the “separation of the Church from the State”, which in reality always turns into the subordination of the Church to the State. Under the empresses Anna Ioannovna and Elizabeth, they “separated the school from the Church” by creating their own “secular” educational institutions, first closed (for the education of children of the nobility), and then opened to involve children from the “third estate” and the clergy. And with all the successors of Peter the Great, they continued the persecution of the clergy and monasticism that had begun under him, right up to physical destruction. Persecution of the Church inXVIIIV. in scale comparable to those that began under the rule of the first, most Judaized, "iron cohort" of the Bolsheviks (Kabbalists). Dozens and hundreds of capable and influential bishops, archimandrites and priests were killed, tortured and died in exile, among whom the most famous was the recently canonized Metropolitan of Rostov Arseniy (Matseevich). They destroyed him because he wanted to restore the patriarchate, because he wrote a book against schismatics, because he resisted the diabolical plans to strangle the Church and monasticism through economic sanctions.

Thus, the above program of Freemasonry was drafted 100 years before the Revolution of 1917 And only this can explain why they managed to destroy the Russian Empire with such ease. It collapsed like a bough, undermined by the madmen sitting on it.

By the beginning of the XIX century. in Russia were presented ALL the above types of dedications Orders and Freemasonry. For a century of "work" in the lodges, the indefatigable Freemasons have already brought up three generations of "new Russians" and a "fourth estate" called the intelligentsia has appeared in Russia. The European powers spread their influence through the channels of the Masonic network, and their henchmen dutifully carried out the will of their foreign "brothers". When necessary, troops were sent to Europe at the first request to participate in foreign wars and radical reforms were carried out so that colonizers lived habitually in "this country". Gradually, they brought the usual entertainments (theatre, museums, games, horse races) from Europe to Russia, established educational and scientific institutions, taught the native aristocracy to speak their languages ​​and translate works of "secular literature" from them. The building of secular culture founded in 1672 by pastor Gregory was brought under the roof by cultural figures of the middle of the 18th century, and their grandchildren erected the roof.

The first lodges in Russia were organized in the 18th century. foreign mercenaries, and their first members were representatives of the titled nobility. In the 1770s there was a “princely lodge” of Osiris, whose members were the descendants of the Rurikovichs, and, interestingly, we find the same names in the lists of lodges before the Revolution. This is explained by the fact that Freemasonry, like sectarianism, is characterized by heredity. Each Mason educates his sons in his own spirit and prepares them for initiation, and for his daughter he seeks to find a husband also from the Masonic environment. It is useful to take this circumstance into account when studying the biographies of famous figures in culture, science and politics.

It is authentically known that high-ranking members of the Masonic lodges, occupying high positions in government, the army and the education system, were at the same time organizers palace coups and regicides. For lack of in Russia political parties, already formed in Europe, at first the Masonic lodges performed their functions. The first secret political societies of the 18th century. arose under the direct supervision of the Masonic Chapters and Directories. From there they received their statutes, rules of initiation ("initiation") with oaths and death threats in case of issuing secrets; adopted the experience of creating a network of cells for 3-5 people, ensuring the safety of the system as a whole in the event of a failure of one cell. At the beginning of the XIX century. the first political organizations arose, known as Decembrists, Petrashevists, Bakuninists, Nechaevites and Chaikovists, but in fact were nothing more than political Masonic lodges. With the advent of a diverse intelligentsia, Masonic lodges gradually began to take on the form of political parties, which were in all "civilized", that is, European countries. But until 1905 they were in their infancy and continued to "work" in the Masonic lodges.

Compared to Russian Freemasonry early XIX century, when it was mostly "noble", " revived» Freemasonry of the early twentieth century. strongly “bourgeoisized”, and the nobility in it was represented by people from a new social group, or stratum, called the “intelligentsia”. At the same time, in 1905, parties of the "people's communist" type were legalized, which previously existed in the form of secret, often terrorist organizations, built on the model of the same Masonic lodges. Thus, both wings (left and right) of the party spectrum at the beginning of the century were almost the same in terms of the social composition of party members (the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia), were related in origin (from Freemasonry), and also differed little from each other in programs.

The main goal of both was to destroy the monarchical system and separate the Church from the state, that is, to abolish the state religion. Some wanted this because they were Gentiles, heterodox and schismatics, others because they declared themselves atheists.

Freemasonization and the cultural revolution

Freemasonization- this is the creation of "shadow control", which allows in the "networks of education" to prepare native cadres("advanced intelligentsia") for future political parties and with their help to introduce the "new thinking" (the old occultism) into society. Freemasons themselves do not like to talk about this, and information has to be drawn from books written by their opponents. This process occurs in the same way as its related and probably subordinate process criminalization, that is, the creation of a "shadow economy" by criminals. Bulk politicization consciousness is achieved by introducing into all strata of society the idea of ​​the inevitability and desirability of breaking the state organism, and at the same time to the rejection of state religion. Universal politicization facilitates the task of seizing power and leads to political collapse, as happened at one time in Europe with all Christian monarchies, and in 1917 with the Russian Empire.

The system of Masonic lodges was organized first in England, then quickly spread throughout the continent and, thanks to Peter I, even got to Russia without the usual delay. This system allows members of secret occult orders to take root in government, but under conditions hereditary monarchy make it difficult. Therefore, at first all efforts are aimed at recruiting persons from ruling class up to the members of the ruling family, and then, after a series of palace coups, conspiracies and regicides, the Revolution takes place. For the sake of brevity, information about the main results of the "work" of the Masons on political field presented in the table.

This system made it possible to control any public organization, both archaic (religious sects), and organized by the Masons themselves in the form of literary and scientific societies, noble clubs, student circles. Mason at the same time can be a participant in Khlyst's zeal, chamberlain, minister of confessions and public education, chairman of the Bible Society (such, for example, was Prince A.N. Golitsyn); or a colonel of the guards, a member of a literary circle and a member of a secret political society, like many Decembrists. In the box, he could be a master, and his sovereign, the king (or king) - an apprentice, and in this capacity, the king (or king) was obliged to obey his chamberlain. And if he did not obey, then he was killed right in the palace (emperors Peter III, Pavel I). These emperors were themselves Freemasons, as for the others, there is no reliable information about them. Although it is more than likely that Alexander I was a Freemason, and in any case, they were the murderers of his father, and all his confidants (M. Speransky, A. Golitsyn). Before the Revolution of 1917, several (at least 5) Grand Dukes were Freemasons, including Kirill Vladimirovich, whom the scrupulous Karlovtsy declared "emperor in exile"). Thus, the very concept of power disappeared, because in reality the country was not ruled by the one who was revered as the ruler. The consciousness of the layman was split in two, in fact, the population of any country was doomed to live in a lunatic asylum, where patients, with the consent of doctors and orderlies, changed into their clothes, and then it turned out that they were not only schizophrenics, but also criminals.

CULTURE. Secularization consisted not only in carrying out the so-called "church reforms", in the abolition of the patriarchate, in the persecution of the clergy, in the closure of monasteries and the selection of church lands. It was carried out through the establishment independent of the Church and hostile to it « secular» schools, « secular literature" and new " literary language". All this was completely borrowed from Protestant Europe and allowed the Masonic cultural traders to educate “new Russians” by the second half of the “age of enlightenment”, capable of serving as conductors of European ideas and interests. It was they who became members of the first Masonic lodges, organizers of palace coups and the first "free societies", salons, circles - that is, that cultural environment, in which they began to educate personnel for subsequent political conspiracies, rebellions and revolutions. I'll talk about specific facts.

Russian theater was first founded by the German pastor Gregory, a resident German settlement, in 1672, that is, even under Alexei Mikhailovich.

Russian Academy sciences were headed by the stepfather of the pastor Gregory, medical doctor Blumentrost and a certain Schumacher. School of Engineering founded by the Scot Jacob Boyus, a famous occultist and publisher of the astrological calendar, banned by the Church. He also founded the School of Engineering, and our first historian V.N. Tatishchev was his student.

Land Cadet Corps, from which all closed military institutions originated, was founded on the model of the Prussian Field Marshal Minich. Its first graduates (Sumarokov, Melissino, Melgunov, Elagin and Kheraskov) preferred literature instead of serving in the army. While still in the corps, the young cadets organized "Society of Lovers of Literature"(probably French, since there was no Russian yet). After completing the "amateurs" course, she worked tirelessly to create it. Sumarokov composed dramas and became the second founder of the Russian theater, Melissino founded a lodge named after himself, P. Elagin is considered the founder of "Elagin" Freemasonry, and Kheraskov was a trustee Moscow University founded by Freemason Shuvalov. Other trustees were his "brothers" in the lodge of Moscow Rosicrucians and Martinists, P. Tatishchev and I. Turgenev.

The Moscow Martinists dragged the famous "enlightener" Novikov and his teacher, the Illuminati, Schwartz into their Order. Soon these Freemasons of the "Russian spill" organized "Friendly Society" in which they were brought up: two metropolitans, the historian Karamzin and the poet Zhukovsky, a distant relative of that Elagin, who founded his own, “Elagin” system.

Zhukovsky, along with other "brothers" according to the lodge "Arzamas" worked a lot on the processing of "raw stone", young poet A.S. Pushkin and his friends at the Lyceum.

The first directors of the Lyceum, Engelhardt and Malinovsky along with "enlightened" Kunitsyn, Baron Fergusson and Marat's brother, brought up such “freethinkers” from the lyceum students that the first graduation almost in full force joined the secret, this time already purely political, societies of the future Decembrists. These societies were founded by freemasons and literati, and since then it has become a tradition.

Whoever you take from Russian poets and writers, with rare exceptions, you will definitely find his involvement in revolutionary circles. So, for example, 15 years after the Decembrists, a circle of "fourierism lovers" was organized, gathering on Saturdays at Petrashevsky. Most of its members were poets and writers: A. Pleshcheev, the Maykov brothers (pupils of the writer I. Goncharov), Saltykov-Shchedrin, F.M. Dostoevsky and other lesser known "workers of the pen".

SLAVOPHILS AND WESTERNERS

In this unbroken chain successively connected stages of cultural construction, we missed a very important stage, which is directly related to new church schisms. This refers to the division of the literary revolutionary intelligentsia into " Westerners" And " Slavophiles". Judging by their names, the former were Westerners, and therefore liberals; the second loved the Slavs and antiquity, that is, they were conservatives. But in essence, they differed little from each other, because both wings of the intelligentsia grew up on the same "soil" - on German soil, which is famous for its great philosophers.

The most famous Westernizers were the freemason and philosopher Chaadaev with his " philosophical writing”, critic Belinsky, professor T. Granovsky, emigrant and writer A.I. Herzen and his friend, poet Ogarev. With their "Bell" they inspired thousands of young Russian people to revolutionary terror. Then the Westerners organized them into circles of "Nechaevites", "Karakozovites", "Chaikovites" and "People's Volunteers" with the charter of the Freemason-Illuminati Weishaupt.

There are also many famous Slavophiles. These are the “wise men”: the poet D. Venevitinov, Rodion Koshelev, the Kireevsky-Elagin brothers, A. Khomyakov, and “religious philosophers” trace their genealogy from them. These are the “late” Slavophiles: I.S. Aksakov, the Samarin brothers, the historian Ilovaisky, and the “pochvenniki” headed by the former Fourierist F.M. Dostoevsky. Finally, these are the pan-Slavists, whose ideas, ironically, were already embodied in the 20th century. in the form of the Warsaw bloc - and none of them remained, even the ideas of pan-Slavism disappeared. The Western rationalists preferred the inventions of Hegel, while the impressionable Slavophile mystics were imbued with Schelling's ideas to the depths of their souls. So it is more appropriate to call these two wings of the Russian intelligentsia Hegelians and Schellingians, but we will refrain from introducing new terms and will use the usual names. Since we are all a little familiar with Hegel in the courses of historical materialism, we will give information only about Schelling and his philosophy.

SHELLING (1775-1854) At the age of 19 he became a follower of Fichte and soon became acquainted with Goethe. He entered into close contact with a circle of romantics (the Schlegel brothers, Gerdender). The wife of one of the Schlegels, Caroline, was the soul of the circle, and soon, fulfilling the "requirements of a free feeling", she left her husband and became the wife of the young philosopher Schelling. Inspired by this incendiary woman, Schelling "is looking for a dark beginning in the nature of the Deity", develops the theory of the world falling away from God and returning to God (Deity) when through Christianity, writes about the duality and polarity of the World Soul. He also outlined the historical-critical method in biblical studies, which was continued by the New Tübingen school in the person of Strauss(see his Life of Jesus).

The theory of three potencies in God, developed by Schelling and accepted by his admirers, boils down to the following provisions:

1) Three Potencies of God three Persons correspond - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. In the life of mankind, these potentialities correspond to: 1) pre-existence; 2) incarnation and 3) reconciliation, all together and constituting religion.

2) The mythology of paganism is a natural religion, a preparatory stage in preparing a person for communion with God, and therefore fully deserves recognition;

3) Christianity is a Revelation Religion, but she, it turns out, according to Schelling, experienced three epochs of development and gave rise to three of its varieties:

A) " Petrine Christianity ”, or the era of the Apostle Peter, expressed in the external and violent unity of the Church. It corresponds to the first potency of the Deity - God the Father and Catholicism.

b) " Pauline Christianity ”, or the era of the Apostle Paul, when the “spirit of freedom” triumphed in Christianity. It corresponds to the second potency, God the Son, and Protestantism.

V) " Johannine Christianity ”, or the era of the Apostle John the Theologian, the era of the near future. It corresponds to the third potency of the Divine, the Holy Spirit, with the help of which the lost unity will be restored, but this time on the basis of freedom.

This is a "harmonious system" Schellingism , and, according to the author of the ESBE article, it represents MIXTURE from: 1) subjective idealism; 2) objective naturalism and 3) religious mysticism. The mixture, it should be noted, is monstrous and can be considered one of the most " subtle poisons”, compiled by occult alchemists. The ingredients are chosen in such a way as to seduce people of various views and characters, who are dissatisfied with faith in God the Creator and Christ the Savior and who are engaged in looking for a compromise between his passion for Culture and attraction to God. On the basis of such systems, thoughts arise about the possibility of creating your own “ religious philosophy which is based on the idea of alchemical marriage» Culture and Church. Russians Schellingians 1830s became "religious philosophers", created historiosophy Slavophilism, and the writers embodied these ideas in the corresponding "literary images". Skillfully combining naturalism in descriptions with elements mystics And criminality in action "social psychological novels" they, under the guise of preaching "John's Christianity", implanted in the minds of readers unbelief in Christ, the Son of God, and "demands of free feeling."

It so happened that in the 1830s, the Minister of Public Education, Count S. Uvarov, formulated a state idea, wanting to oppose it to the propaganda of the French Revolution slogan "freedom, equality, fraternity" coming from the West. Another triad appeared in Russian everyday life: “ Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality”, but everyone understood these three words in their own way. The Slavophiles, for example, understood by Autocracy something that corresponded to their ideas about " enlightened monarch»; under Orthodoxy - desired by them " Johannine Christianity", and under the People - a fusion of ideas about" folk soul"and the messianic destiny of the Slavs under the leadership of the Russian God-bearing people. This obviously Judaized theory about the “all-human” nature of “Russian culture” and the “God-chosen” (this time Russian) people found ardent support in sectarian and Old Believer circles. The Slavophils were closely connected with them on the basis of a common desire for both of them to realize the predictions of Elder Philotheus about "Moscow-the Third Rome."

Rational friends of the Slavophils in the university (and at the same time in Masonic circles), in the same years, on the contrary, were carried away by Hegel's idea of ​​"Absolute Reason". spirit" became "Slavophiles". From whom these spirits came, it is not difficult to guess

So because of Hegel and Schelling in the ranks of the "advanced intelligentsia" there was the largest split in its entire history. Liberals Westerners "dreamed and continue to dream of integration into the World Community (in the 19th century it was Western Europe). And the conservatives Slavophiles , although they did not find anything resembling a world-historical idea in the Great Russians, they nevertheless argued that of all the Slavs, this people has the most superior qualities. God gave some of the "wise men" to join Orthodoxy, and soon they declared that "a Russian without Orthodoxy is just rubbish." They understood Orthodoxy in their own way: they did not like the hierarchy and the monks, they dreamed of returning to the way of life in pre-Petrine Rus' in the form of religious communities. They also interpreted autocracy in their own way - for that they were "wise-minded", that is, almost the first "religious philosophers" in Holy Rus'. " Almost”- because they still had a predecessor, a wandering freemason Skovoroda, whose cousin great-grandson, the philosopher Vl. Solovyov, has already been mentioned with an unkind word more than once.

Westerners began to ideologically serve the “left”, or rather, the liberal part of the emerging political spectrum, and the ideas Slavophilism were intended for his "right" flank. Probably in the new sect in this way the Masonic leaders tried to lay the foundations two-party system like all civilized people. The intellectuals have not united since then. Although, it would seem, the Westerners, they are also people's democrats and revolutionary terrorists, were clearly dangerous, and the Slavophiles with their ideas about pan-Slavism and originality were completely harmless, but the tsarist censorship in those days did not doze off and managed to discern something heretical behind the outwardly loyal slogans .

And what is interesting, although the modern intelligentsia does not read Schelling and Hegel, the division continues: some become "Westernizers", while others become "Slavophiles". Some are easily distinguished from others by cultural symbols. Among the Westerners, they were Granovsky and Belinsky, Herzen and Ogarev, the historian S.M. Soloviev, but the most important symbol is the philosopher Vl. Solovyov. The poet A. Khomyakov, the historian Dm. Ilovaisky, writer F. Dostoevsky and the head of the Karlovtsy schism, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky).

So on the winding paths of the rebellious intelligentsia, we unexpectedly met with the founder of a new type of church - “ churches abroad". When in 1906 “conservative” parties were organized on the basis of Slavophilism (they were called “Black Hundreds” in Russia, and in emigration “monarchists”), Metropolitan Anthony became a kind of spiritual leader in these circles. So if we talk about religious roots Karlovac schism, then through his Leader he goes back to the national Slavism of the late Slavophiles, and even further - to Schellingism . If Schellingism, Slavophilism, and the monarchical idea of ​​the impossibility of “preserving the Church” without the Tsar are considered signs of the Orthodox faith, then Metropolitan Anthony and all his admirers, of course, are “Orthodox in everything.” However, we do not undertake to judge his faith, but a little lower (in Chapter 25) we will show how the ideas of Slavophilism in emigration degenerated into worship before Hitler.

Finishing the theme of the prehistory of the Revolution, I would like to sum up.

Why precisely by 1917 "the means of production could not endure contradictions with production relations" is unknown, but, according to Marx, it was precisely for this reason that in July 1918 he was killed last king from the Romanov dynasty. Before that, they were also killed (in 1762, 1801, presumably in 1825 and 1854, definitely in 1881), but "means" and "relationships" did not enter into a fight. Then, most likely, the occultists were still busy with the problem of “how to equip Europe”, because, we must pay tribute to the Europeans, they had to “work” on them much longer than on Russia. After all, the work of grinders there began no later than the 13th century. and dragged on for 600 years. France did not surrender throughout the 19th century. - it was literally raped by constant revolutions, and Germany is still afraid, although in 1945 only ruins were left from it. And Russia entered the battle later than the others and must now, relying on God, take the blow alone, and not moan that “we were deprived” of this or that. We have deprived ourselves of everything, because we became accomplices of the theomachists, and not in 1917 or 1927, but much earlier.

.What happened between 1667 and 1917? Two essentially new estates appeared - BOURGEOISIE And INTELLIGENCE, - of which the second for some reason was called a layer . Perhaps because the first paid for the services of the second. These new estates were formed from “different ranks”, that is, from all the former estates (nobility, merchants, clergy and peasantry), as well as from representatives of different peoples, of which the Protestant Germans, and later Jews, had the greatest weight in both estates. Jews. What was the greatest difference between these new estates and the old ones? Because the big bourgeoisie mainly consisted of Old Believers, sectarians and infidels, and intelligentsia- from atheists, nihilists, Jews and Protestants and also non-believers, then for the most part these estates were NOT ORTHODOX, moreover, for various reasons, the Orthodox Church was hated, and many of these population groups were outspoken GOTHless and even occultists, consisting of members of the Theosophical, Anthroposophical and Solovyov societies and Rosicrucian lodges. It is impossible to understand the reasons for the new, post-revolutionary schisms without taking into account what happened in the extremely mixed world of the Old Believers, secret sectarianism and God-seeking, and therefore a special chapter is devoted to this topic.

wrote

I tried not to miss anything, starting from October 1917.

“We are being bombarded with accusations that we act with terror and violence, but we take these attacks calmly. We say: we are not anarchists, we are supporters of the state. Yes, but the capitalist state must be destroyed, the capitalist power must be destroyed. Our task is to build a new state, a socialist state ... The bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia bourgeois circles of the population are sabotaging people's power in every possible way ”(Speech at the First All-Russian Congress of the Navy on November 22 (December 5), 1917. Lenin. PSS vol. 35 p. 113

“We want to start an audit of the safes, but we are told on behalf of scientific specialists that they contain nothing but documents and securities. So what's the harm if the representatives of the people control them? If so, why are these very critical scientists hiding? With all the decisions of the Council, they tell us that they agree with us, but only in principle. This is the system of the bourgeois intelligentsia, of all compromisers, who, by their constant agreement in principle, in practice, ruin everything. If you are wise and experienced in all matters, why don’t you help us, why on our difficult path we don’t meet anything from you but sabotage? ..

But there were people among the bank employees who are close to the interests of the people, and they said: "They are deceiving you, hurry to stop their criminal activities aimed directly at harming you." We wanted to follow the path of agreement with the banks, we gave them loans to finance enterprises, but they started sabotage on an unprecedented scale, and practice led us to carry out control by other means. The Left Socialist-Revolutionary comrade said that in principle they would vote for the immediate nationalization of the banks, in order then, in the shortest possible time, to work out practical measures. But this is a mistake, because our draft contains nothing but principles. (Speech on the nationalization of banks at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Lenin. PSS. December 16, 1917. Vol. 35, pp. 171-173)

“The Bolsheviks have only been in power for two months,” we note, “and a huge step forward towards socialism has already been made. Those who do not want to see or do not know how to evaluate historical events in their connection do not see this. They do not want to see that NON-DEMOCRATIC institutions in the army, in the countryside, in the factory have been destroyed almost to the ground in a few weeks. And there is no other way to socialism, except through such destruction, and there cannot be. They do not want to see that in a few weeks the imperialist lies in foreign policy, which dragged out the war and covered up robbery and seizure by secret treaties, were replaced by a truly revolutionary-democratic policy of a truly democratic world ... In essence, all these intellectualist cries about suppressing the resistance of the capitalists represent himself is nothing more than a burp of the old "agreement," to use the word "politely." And if we speak with proletarian frankness, then we have to say: the continued servility to the moneybags, that is the essence of the cries against modern, working-class violence, used (unfortunately still too weakly and not energetically) against the bourgeoisie, against saboteurs, against counter-revolutionaries ... These intelligentsia hangers-on of the bourgeoisie are "ready" to wash the skin, according to a well-known German proverb, only so that the skin remains dry all the time. When the bourgeoisie and the officials, employees, doctors, engineers, etc., accustomed to serving it, resort to the most extreme measures of resistance, this horrifies the intellectuals. They tremble with fear and scream even more shrillly about the need to return to "agreement". But we, like all sincere friends of the oppressed class, can only rejoice at the extreme measures of resistance of the exploiters, for we expect the proletariat to mature, to mature into power, not from persuasion and persuasion, not from the school of sweet sermons or instructive recitations, but from the school of life, from the school struggle. (Frightened by the collapse of the old and fighting for the new. December 24-27, 1917. Lenin. PSS. T. 35 pp. 192-194)

“The workers and peasants are not at all infected with the sentimental illusions of the gentlemen of the intelligentsia, with all this New Life and other slush, who “shouted” against the capitalists to the point of hoarseness, “gesticulated” against them, “thrashed” them, in order to burst into tears and behave like a beaten puppy when it came to the point, to the implementation of threats, to the practical implementation of the displacement of the capitalists ... The organizational task is intertwined into one inseparable whole with the task of mercilessly military suppression of yesterday's slave owners (capitalists) and a pack of their lackeys - gentlemen of the bourgeois intellectuals. We have always been organizers and bosses, we have commanded - this is what yesterday's slave owners and their clerks from the intelligentsia say and think - we want to remain so, we will not obey the "common people", workers and peasants, we will not obey them, we will turn knowledge into a weapon of defense the privileges of the money bag and the domination of capital over the people. This is how the bourgeois and the bourgeois intellectuals speak, think and act. From a selfish point of view, their behavior is understandable: it was also “difficult” to part with serfdom for the hangers-on and hangers-on of the feudal landowners, priests, clerks, officials from the Gogol types, “intellectuals” who hated Belinsky. But the cause of the exploiters and their intellectual servants is a hopeless cause ... "We can't do without us," the intellectuals, accustomed to serving the capitalists and the capitalist state, console themselves. Their impudent calculation will not be justified: educated people already now they stand out, going over to the side of the people, to the side of the working people, helping to break the resistance of the servants of capital ... A war for life and death for the rich and their hangers-on, bourgeois intellectuals, a war against crooks, parasites and hooligans. Both, the first and the last, are siblings, children of capitalism, sons of aristocratic and bourgeois society, a society in which a handful robbed the people and mocked the people ... It is impossible to do without advice, without guidance from educated people, intellectuals, specialists. Every intelligent worker and peasant understands this perfectly well, and the intellectuals of our midst cannot complain about the lack of attention and comradely respect on the part of the workers and peasants. But one thing is advice and guidance, another thing is the organization of practical accounting and control. Intellectuals all too often give the most excellent advice and guidance, but they turn out to be ridiculously, absurdly, shamefully "armless", incapable of putting these advice and instructions into practice, of carrying out practical control over the fact that the word is turned into deed. (How to organize a competition? December 24-27, 1917. Lenin. PSS. T. 35 pp. 197-198)

“... after the victories that were won in the civil war by the Soviet government, starting from October and ending in February, passive forms of resistance, namely: sabotage by the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia, were essentially broken. It is no coincidence that at the present time we are witnessing an extremely wide, one might say, massive change in mood and political behavior in the camp of former saboteurs, i.e. capitalists and bourgeois intelligentsia. We now have before us, in all spheres of economic and political life, an offer of services from an enormous number of bourgeois intelligentsia and leaders of the capitalist economy, an offer of services by them to the Soviet government. And the task of the Soviet government now is to be able to use these services, which are absolutely necessary for the transition to socialism, especially in such a peasant country as Russia, and which must be taken with full respect for the supremacy, leadership and control of the Soviet government over its new - who acted very often against their will and with a secret hope of protesting this Soviet power - assistants and accomplices. In order to show how necessary it is for the Soviet government to use the services of the bourgeois intelligentsia precisely for the transition to socialism, we will allow ourselves to use an expression that at first glance will seem like a paradox: one must learn socialism to a large extent from the leaders of trusts, one must learn socialism from the greatest organizers of capitalism. That this is not a paradox can easily be seen by anyone who thinks about the fact that it is precisely the large factories, namely the large-scale machine industry, which has developed the exploitation of the working people to an unheard of proportions, that it is precisely the large factories that are the centers of concentration of that class which alone was able to destroy the domination of capital and begin the transition to socialism. It is not surprising, therefore, that in order to solve the practical problems of socialism, when its organizational side is put in the queue, we must necessarily enlist the assistance of the Soviet government big number representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia, especially from among those who were engaged in the practical work of organizing the largest production within the capitalist framework, and that means, first of all, organizing syndicates, cartels and trusts ... The former leaders of industry, the former bosses and exploiters, must take the place of technical experts, managers, consultants, advisers. The difficult and new, but extremely rewarding task of combining all the experience and knowledge that these representatives of the exploiting classes have accumulated with the initiative, energy, and work of broad sections of the working masses must be solved. For only this combination of production is able to create a bridge leading from the old, capitalist, to the new, socialist society. (The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power. March 23-28, 1918. Lenin. PSS. T. 36. P. 136-140)

“Lenin welcomes the congress on behalf of the Council of People's Commissars and says that the teachers, who used to be slowly moving to work with the Soviet government, are now more and more convinced that this joint work is necessary. Similar transformations from opponents to supporters of Soviet power are very numerous in other strata of society as well. The teacher's army must set itself gigantic educational tasks and, above all, must become the main army of socialist enlightenment. (Speech at the 1st All-Russian Congress of Internationalist Teachers on June 5, 1918. Lenin. PSS, vol. 36. P. 420)

“The intelligentsia puts its experience and knowledge - the highest human dignity - into the service of the exploiters and uses everything to make it difficult for us to defeat the exploiters; it will ensure that hundreds of thousands of people will die of starvation, but it will not break the resistance of the working people. (IV conference of trade unions and factory committees of Moscow. June 27, 1918. Lenin. PSS. T. 36. P. 452)

“The working class and the peasantry should not rely too much on the intelligentsia, since many of the intelligentsia coming to us are always waiting for our fall.” (Speech at a meeting in the Simonovsky sub-district on June 28, 1918. Lenin. PSS. T. 36. P. 470)

“We did not have to use all the stock of experience, knowledge, technical culture that the bourgeois intelligentsia had. The bourgeoisie taunted the Bolsheviks, saying that Soviet authority barely last two weeks, and therefore not only shied away from further work, but wherever she could, and in every way that was available to her, she resisted the new movement, new construction, which broke the old way. (Speech at the solemn meeting of the All-Russian Central and Moscow Councils of Trade Unions on November 6, 1918. Lenin PSS. T.37 p. 133)

“... they took over from capitalism a ruined, deliberately sabotaging industry and took it up not with the help of all those intellectual forces who set themselves from the very beginning the task of using knowledge and higher education - this result of the acquisition of a reserve of sciences by mankind - they used all this in order to frustrate the cause of socialism, use science not to help the masses in organizing a social, national economy without exploiters. These people set themselves the task of using science to throw stones under the wheels, to interfere with the workers, the least prepared for this business, who took up the business of management, and we can say that the main obstacle has been broken. It was extremely difficult. The sabotage of all elements gravitating towards the bourgeoisie has been broken.” (VI All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets. Speech on the anniversary of the revolution on November 6, 1918. Lenin. PSS. T. 37. P. 140)

“To be able to reach an agreement with the middle peasant—not for a moment renouncing the struggle against the kulak and firmly relying only on the poor peasants—this is the task of the moment, for it is precisely now that a turn in our direction among the middle peasantry is inevitable due to the above reasons. The same applies to the handicraftsman, and to the artisan, and to the worker, placed in the most petty-bourgeois conditions or retaining the most petty-bourgeois views, and to many employees, and to officers, and - in particular - to the intelligentsia in general. There is no doubt that in our party one often notices an inability to take advantage of the turn among them, and that this inability can and must be overcome, turned into skill ... their intelligentsia, which yesterday was still consciously hostile to us and which today is only neutral, this is one of the most important tasks of the present moment ... ". (Valuable confessions of Pitirim Sorokin. Lenin. PSS. T. 37. P. 195-196)

“When the first victories of the Czechoslovaks began, this petty-bourgeois intelligentsia tried to spread rumors that a Czechoslovak victory was inevitable. They printed telegrams from Moscow that Moscow was on the eve of the fall, that it was surrounded. And we know perfectly well that in the event of even the most insignificant victories of the Anglo-French, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia will first of all lose their heads, fall into a panic and begin to spread rumors about the successes of our opponents. But the revolution showed the inevitability of an uprising against imperialism. And now our "allies" have turned out to be the main enemies of Russian freedom and Russian independence... Take all the intelligentsia. She lived a bourgeois life, she was accustomed to certain comforts. Since it vacillated in the direction of the Czechoslovaks, our slogan was a merciless struggle - terror. In view of the fact that this turn in the mood of the petty-bourgeois masses has now come, our slogan must be an agreement, the establishment of good-neighborly relations ... if we are talking about the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. It hesitates, but we also need it for our socialist revolution. We know that socialism can only be built from elements of large-scale capitalist culture, and the intelligentsia is such an element. If we had to fight it mercilessly, it was not communism that obligated us to this, but the course of events that pushed all “democrats” and all those in love with bourgeois democracy away from us. Now it is possible to use this intelligentsia, which is not socialist, which will never be communist, but which the objective course of events and relations is now setting towards us neutrally, in a neighborly way ... If you really agree to live in good neighborly relations with us, then take the trouble to fulfill certain tasks, gentlemen, cooperators and intellectuals. And if you do not fulfill it, you will be lawbreakers, our enemies, and we will fight you. And if you stand on the basis of good-neighborly relations and fulfill these tasks, this is more than enough for us ... We must give the intelligentsia a completely different task; it is unable to continue sabotage and is set up in such a way that now it takes a position in relation to us the most good-neighborly, and we must take this intelligentsia, set certain tasks for it, monitor and verify their implementation ... We cannot build power if such a legacy of capitalist culture, like the intelligentsia, will not be used. (Meeting of party workers in Moscow on November 27, 1918, PSS. T. 37. P. 217-223)

“Now we can get such workers among the bourgeoisie, among specialists and intellectuals. And we will ask every comrade working in the economic council: what have you, gentlemen, done to attract experienced people to work, what have you done to attract specialists, to attract clerks, efficient bourgeois co-operators who should not work for us worse than they worked for some Kolupaevs and Razuvaevs? It is time for us to abandon the old prejudice and call on all the specialists we need to our work. (Speech at the II All-Russian Congress of Soviets of the National Economy. November 26, 1918. Lenin. PSS. T. 37. P. 400)

“... there are specialists in science and technology, who are all thoroughly imbued with the bourgeois worldview, there are military specialists who were brought up in bourgeois conditions - and it’s good if they were in bourgeois, but then in landowners’, in sticks, in serfdom. As for the national economy, all agronomists, engineers, teachers - they were all taken from the propertied class; They didn't fall out of thin air! The poor proletarian from the machine tool and the peasant from the plow could not pass the university either under Tsar Nicholas or under the Republican President Wilson. Science and technology - for the rich, for the haves; capitalism gives culture only to a minority. And we must build socialism out of this culture. We don't have any other material. We want to build socialism immediately from the material that capitalism has left us from yesterday to today, now, and not from those people who will be cooked in greenhouses ... We have bourgeois specialists, and there is no one else. We have no other bricks, we have nothing to build from. Socialism must win, and we, socialists and communists, must prove in practice that we are capable of building socialism from these bricks, from this material ... ”(Successes and difficulties of Soviet power. April 17, 1919. Lenin. PSS. T. 38 p. 54)

“The question of bourgeois specialists is in the army, in industry, in cooperatives, it is everywhere. This is a very important issue in the transitional period from capitalism to communism. We can build communism only when we make it more accessible to the masses by means of bourgeois science and technology. It is impossible to build a communist society otherwise. And in order to build it in this way, it is necessary to take the apparatus from the bourgeoisie, it is necessary to involve all these specialists in the work ... We must immediately, without waiting for support from other countries, immediately and immediately raise the productive forces. This cannot be done without bourgeois specialists. This must be said once and for all. Of course, most of these specialists are thoroughly imbued with a bourgeois worldview. They must be surrounded by an atmosphere of comradely cooperation, by workers' commissars, by communist cells, they must be placed in such a way that they cannot break out, but they must be given the opportunity to work in better conditions than under capitalism, because this layer, educated by the bourgeoisie, will not work otherwise. It is impossible to force a whole layer to work under pressure - we have experienced this very well. (VIII Congress of the RCP (b.). March 19, 1919. Lenin. PSS. T. 38 pp. 165-167)

“If we were “inciting” against the “intelligentsia”, we should have been hanged for this. But we not only did not set the people against it, but preached on behalf of the party and on behalf of the authorities the need to provide the intelligentsia better conditions work. I have been doing this since April 1918, if not earlier... The author demands a comradely attitude towards the intellectuals. This is right. We also demand this. In the program of our Party, just such a demand is put forward clearly, directly, precisely. (Reply to an open letter from a specialist. March 27, 1919. Lenin. PSS. T. 38 pp. 220-222)

“Twice as many officials are working in our country now as six months ago. This is a gain that we have received officials who work better than the Black Hundreds.” (Extraordinary meeting of the plenum of the Moscow Soviet. April 4, 1919. Lenin. PSS. T. 38 p. 254)

“The first drawback is the abundance of people from the bourgeois intelligentsia, who, quite often, considered the educational institutions of the peasants and workers, created in a new way, as the most convenient field for their personal inventions in the field of philosophy or in the field of culture, when all too often the most absurd antics was presented as something new, and under the guise of purely proletarian art and proletarian culture, something supernatural and absurd was presented. But at first it was natural and can be forgiven and cannot be blamed on a broad movement, and I hope that we will eventually get out of this and get out. (I All-Russian Congress on Out-of-School Education. May 6, 1919. Lenin. PSS. T. 38 p. 330)

“All those descriptions that were given about the restorations against Kolchakism, they are not at all exaggerated. And not only workers and peasants, but also the patriotic intelligentsia, who completely sabotaged at one time, the very intelligentsia that was in alliance with the Entente, and Kolchak pushed her away. (On the current situation and immediate tasks. July 5, 1919. Lenin. PSS. T. 39. P. 39)

“We know the “nutrient medium” that gives rise to counter-revolutionary enterprises, outbreaks, conspiracies, and so on, we know very well. This is the environment of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois intelligentsia, in the villages of the kulaks, everywhere - the "non-party" public, then the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. It is necessary to triple and tenfold the supervision of this environment. (Everyone to fight against Denikin! July 9, 1919. Lenin. PSS. T. 39 p. 59)

“... it must also be said about the attitude towards that middle stratum, towards that intelligentsia, which complains most of all about the rudeness of the Soviet government, complains that the Soviet government puts it in a worse position than before. What we can do with our meager means towards the intelligentsia, we do for its benefit. We know, of course, how little the paper ruble means, but we also know what private speculation is, which gives a certain help to those who cannot feed themselves with the help of our food organs. We give the bourgeois intelligentsia advantages in this respect. (VIII All-Russian Conference of the RCP(b). December 2, 1919. Lenin. PSS. T. 39. P. 355)

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