Review of Lesley Chamberlain's "Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer..."

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

After the fall of the Romanovs, and not too long before he became the first Premier of the Soviet Union, Lenin planned a forced emigration for some of the more ideologically problematic Russian intellectuals. While the Lenin’s efforts were nothing like the later mass purges of Stalin, he did much to ensure that the transition from the monarchy to the USSR and its state capitalism, including making sure that the influence of intellectuals who weren’t wholly sympathetic to Lenin’s new economic ideas would never have the ability to peddle that influence. 

In September of 1922, well over one hundred intellectuals and their families were forcibly deported from their homes on board two ships, one of which was known as the “Philosophy Steamer.” Chamberlain tells the stories of these people, their lives, their ideas, and what it was like when they ended up in their new homes in Europe. Chamberlain weaves together that is actually quite a bit more than simply the “voyage of the Philosophy Steamer” that the subtitle describes. It’s really a story of exile, displacement of every kind, and ultimately re-shaping one’s life in a foreign land.

Most of the intellectuals aren’t terribly well-known, at least in the United States, but a few might be somewhat familiar, depending on your reading or academic interests. The lives that I was especially interested in, because I previously knew of them, were: the Russian mystic and theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, writer Maxim Gorky, and sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, and structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson. A few very recognizable figures pop up from time to time, including Shostakovich and Nabokov. The fascinating thing about many of the people on the ship (and its sister ship) is that they didn’t want to leave the land of their birth. Ironically, many of them were socialists. 

Their fatal flaw, however, seemed to be their collusion with theism, and particularly the Orthodox Church. (Because of the hearty interrelationships between Orthodoxy and socialism in nineteenth-century Russian thought, many of the exiles were both Christians and socialists – a phenomenon we would hardly recognize in our peculiar historical moment, but one that was very familiar to Russians at the time.) Lenin’s materialism simply didn’t have a place for God in his philosophy, and therefore these people couldn’t stick around. In fact, Gorky even considered himself to be an ally of Lenin, and was frankly shocked when he found a member of Lenin’s Cheka knocking on his door one night to take him away.

Much of Chamberlin’s book details what happens when the exiles land at their new homes which, for most of the people she’s writing about, are Prague, Berlin, and Paris. (Sorokin was the exception, who ended up in the United States, and founded the Harvard Sociology Department.) The politics and the opinions of these thinkers were much too diverse to be outlined here, but many of them thought that Lenin’s little experiment would be history in no more than a decade or so, and then they would be able to return home to their former lives. 

This book could have easily been just about Lenin or an account of the time spent on the ship, or some other narrowly focused aspect of this story, but Chamberlain strikes a fine balance in integrating all of these. She does, from time to time, take excessive novelistic license in imagining details of certain lines, which can get tedious, but this is an overall enjoyable, well-told narrative of tumultuous time in history, and the seemingly universal precariousness of the intellectual in the twentieth century.