The Russian revolution of 1917 was made by educated people. Lenin was a lawyer. Trotsky a literary critic. Bukharin a theorist. They read Marx, Hegel, Rousseau. They wrote articles, argued in circles, published newspapers. And they built a system that destroyed most of them. This route is about how the intelligentsia created a revolution that devoured it — and what those who watched it happen thought about that.
Belinsky — "furious Vissarion" — was the first Russian critic to turn literature into politics. His 1847 letter to Gogol: Russia needs not prayers but rights, laws, enlightenment. He died in 1848 of tuberculosis — and saw not one of his demands met. But he created a type: the man of the intelligentsia for whom the idea matters more than a life.
Dostoevsky passed through the Petrashevsky circle — he was sentenced to be shot, pardoned at the last moment, sent to hard labor in Siberia. He came back a different man. His "Demons" of 1872: he showed what happens when a man of the intelligentsia takes an idea and goes with it all the way. Nechaev — a real person — murdered a student for the sake of "the discipline of the movement." Dostoevsky showed: the logic is flawless, the premises are not.
Tolstoy was no revolutionary — he was an aristocrat who came to hate the aristocracy. His answer to injustice: non-resistance to evil by force, the simple life, manual labor. Tolstoyism was a mass movement. His followers founded communes and refused military service. Lenin hated Tolstoy — because Tolstoy was offering another road.
In 1909 the collection "Vekhi" (Landmarks) appeared, in which Berdyaev, Bulgakov and others delivered their diagnosis of the Russian intelligentsia: it had created a religion without God. The people as an absolute, revolution as the Last Judgment, the party as the Church. This is not criticism — this is pathology. They were not heard. In 1922 Berdyaev and two hundred others were expelled from Russia on the "philosophers' ship."
If the most educated and the most sincere people built the Gulag — what does that say about education and sincerity as guarantees?