Russian Intelligentsia toward the Legal Nihilism. Reading the “Landmarks” (1909) and “Out of the Depth” (1918) after February 24, 2022

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to re-read the criticism of the Russian intelligentsia, which was made by authors of Landmarks (“Vekhy”, 1909) and Out of the Depth (“Iz glubiny”, 1918), in the context of the support given to the Russian invasion on the Ukraine in 2022 by the large part of Russian intellectuals. Instead of perceiving the current “rapprochement” of the Russian intelligentsia to the Putin government as a kind of “aberration” and a departure from its “moral mission”, the author would like to show the arguments concerning long duration of the tradition of their acceptance of the anti-liberal and authoritarian course of the Russian government. This tradition was unveiled by such outstanding Russian liberals and religious thinkers as, among others: Nikolai Berdyaev, Petr Struve, Bogdan Kistyakovski, Iosif Pokrovsky and Sergei Kotlyarevsky. They believed that the susceptibility of the intelligentsia to revolutionary slogans was caused not only by hostility to the Old Regime, but by their instrumental attitude to the state and law. They claimed that the Russian intelligentsia had much more in common with the representatives of Tsarist autocracy than would result from the hostility felt towards it. A common feature of both was “legalnihilism” – a point of view that assumed a distrustful attitude towards rational law. The only way to overcome this distrust was therefore instilling Kant’s personalism and raising the authority of natural law among the broad strata of the Russian intelligentsia.