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

CONCERNING VEKHI125the leaders of a trend against which Vekhi is fighting to thedeath. The latter “tirelessly maintained” the very same thingsthat Vekhi stands for today, but “they were unheeded, theintelligentsia passed them by”, declares the preface to Vekhi.The reader can already see from this that it is not the“intelligentsia” that Vekhi is attacking. This is only an artificialand misleading manner of expression. The attackis being pursued all along the line against democracy, againstthe democratic world outlook. And since it is inconvenientfor the ideological leaders of a party that advertises itself as“constitutional” and “democratic” to call things by theirtrue names, they have borrowed their terminology from theMoskovskiye Vedomosti. 67 They are not renouncing democracy(what a scandalous libel!) but only “intellectualism”.Belinsky’s letter to Gogol, declares Vekhi, is a “lurid andclassical expression of intellectualist sentiment” (56). “Thehistory of our publicist literature, after Belinsky, in thesense of an understanding of life, is a sheer nightmare” (82).Well, well. The serf peasants’ hostility to serfdom is obviouslyan “intellectualist” sentiment. The history of theprotest and struggle of the broadest masses of the populationfrom 1861 to 1905 against the survivals of feudalism throughoutthe whole system of Russian life is evidently a “sheernightmare”. Or, perhaps, in the opinion of our wise and educatedauthors, Belinsky’s sentiments in the letter to Gogoldid not depend on the feelings of the serf peasants? The historyof our publicist literature did not depend on the indignationof the popular masses against the survivals of feudaloppression?Moskovskiye Vedomosti has always tried to prove thatRussian democracy, beginning with Belinsky at least, in noway expresses the interests of the broadest masses of thepopulation in the struggle for the elementary rights of thepeople, violated by feudal institutions, but expresses only“intellectualist sentiments”.Vekhi has the same programme as Moskovskiye Vedomostiboth in philosophy and in publicist matters. In philosophy,however, the liberal renegades decided to tell the wholetruth, to reveal all their programme (war on materialismand the materialist interpretation of positivism, restorationof mysticism and the mystical world outlook), whereas on