Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 16 - From Marx to Mao

124V. I. LENINmocracy and the whole Russian liberation movement.Vekhi is a most significant landmark on the road of RussianCadetism and Russian liberalism in general towardsa complete break with the Russian liberation movement,with all its main aims and fundamental traditions.IThis encyclopaedia of liberal renegacy embraces three mainsubjects: 1) the struggle against the ideological principlesof the whole world outlook of Russian (and international)democracy; 2) repudiation and vilification of the liberationmovement of recent years; 3) an open proclamation of its“flunkey” sentiments (and a corresponding “flunkey” policy)in relation to the Octobrist bourgeoisie, the old regime andthe entire old Russia in general.The authors of Vekhi start from the philosophical basesof the “intellectualist” world outlook. The book is permeatedthrough and through with bitter opposition to materialism,which is qualified as nothing but dogmatism, metaphysics,“the most elementary and lowest form of philosophising”(p. 4—references are to the first edition of Vekhi). Positivismis condemned because “for us” (i.e., the Russian “intelligentsia”that Vekhi annihilates) it was “identified with materialistmetaphysics” or was interpreted “exclusively in the spiritof materialism” (15), while “no mystic, no believer, candeny scientific positivism in science” (11). Don’t laugh!“Hostility to idealist and religious mystical tendencies”(6)—such is the charge with which Vekhi attacks the “intelligentsia”.“Yurkevich, at any rate, was a real philosopherin comparison with Chernyshevsky” (4).Holding this point of view, Vekhi very naturally thundersincessantly against the atheism of the “intelligentsia” andstrives with might and main to re-establish the religiousworld outlook in its entirety. Having demolished Chernyshevskyas a philosopher it is quite natural that Vekhi demolishesBelinsky as a publicist. Belinsky, Dobrolyubov andChernyshevsky were the leaders of the “intellectuals” (134,56, 32, 17 and elsewhere). Chaadayev, Vladimir Solovyov,Dostoyevsky were “not intellectuals at all”. The former were