Putin’s Russia Squeezed Out the Mind – DW – 01.10.2022
100 years ago, Soviet Russia pushed itself out of the best scientists, philosophers, publishers, publicists. The German steamer “Oberburgomaster Haken” arrived from Petrograd to Germany with the appointment of a philosophical cargo – among the passengers were Nikolai Berdyaev, who needs no introduction even today, Sergei Bulgakov, passionate anti-Soviet Ivan Ilyin, so passionate about Putin for his nationalism, close to fascism, Sergei Frank .
During the years of perestroika, this criminal act of the Bolsheviks was fitted under the concept of the “philosophical ship”. In fact, in the autumn of 1922, Russian thought was deported on various trains and steamships from the Baltic and Montenegrin seas. Thus, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who became a scientific star in America and John F. Kennedy’s university teacher, was sent by train to the Baltic countries.
Destroyed not only Russian thought. At the same time, Ukrainian exporters of independent Ukraine were taken out for transportation along the Black Sea. They were warmly welcomed in Prague – the Bolsheviks went berserk, and the rest of the Ukrainian separatists had already left for Siberia. In any case, Russia has become impoverished in intelligence, and has never reached the mental diversity of the pre-revolutionary era.
However, the Bolsheviks presented the expulsion as an act of humanism not characteristic of the proletarian dictatorship. Trotsky wrote: “We sent people because there was no reason to shoot them, and it was impossible to endure.” In fact, Lenin was not averse to sending scientists to remote areas of the country or even shooting them, but he decided to send them into exile anyway. In a letter to Mr. Stalin in the summer of 1922, Lenin shared his thoughts: “… we should send several hundred templates for dispatch ruthlessly. We will clean up Russia for a long time.”
But Russia, nevertheless, in recent years has again been loaded with the minds of defenders, dissidents, protest writers like Solzhenitsyn, and great scientists like Sakharov.
The time has come to cleanse Russia of its mind again.
This time it also coincided with the war. At the end of February 2022, Putin’s Russia, without thinking about the consequences, squeezed out a lot of people with a dangerous attitude to life, work, and creativity. She, in essence, castrates herself. It’s irrevocable. But that was only the beginning. In September, after the announcement of a chaotic mobilization, they rushed from Russia to where – most importantly, out – the most intelligent young and not very young people, a trial by conscription. It was not difficult for them to figure out that, once in Ukraine, they could return with a load of 200.
Russia’s state power of exploration in its intention to extirpate the mind from Russia is a form of its madness, it is the reason for its chronic lagging behind European civilization. It’s really her historical key word: to destroy the mind by submitting to your own idiocy. But there is a limit to the destruction of the country. In the 21st, the drain of a free mind threatens to disintegrate the country. Berdyaev became famous in exile for his book The New Middle Ages, where he described the “miracles” of Soviet power. Today we are sent to the “New Middle Ages”, but this will be an accident for our country. After the “philosophical ship”, the Gulag, Brezhnev’s stagnation, the present time brings us to the finishing density. Either the country will fall apart, or it will turn to a free mind, return the promotion, admit its guilt. Nothing else is given.
Victor Erofeev, writer, literary critic, TV presenter, author of the books “Russian Beauty”, “Good Stalin”, “Akimuds” of many and others, holder of the French Order of the Legion of Honor.
This comment is related to the personal opinion of the author. It may not coincide with the opinion of the Russian editors and Deutsche Welle in general.
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