Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 brill.

nl/ruhi

Philosophical Idealism and Utopian Capitalism:

The Vekhi Authors and the Riabushinskii Circle

James West
Middlebury College

Abstract
The publication of the Vekhi (“Signposts”) symposium in Moscow in 1909 was the literary event
of the decade in Pre-Revolutionary Russia. Its critique of the radical collectivist traditions of the
Russian intelligentsia in the name of “the primacy of spiritual life” was greeted with howls of
condemnation from nearly every ideological camp. Contemporaries interpreted this appeal as
turn away from the political struggle with autocracy toward mysticism and obscurantism.
Historians have more charitably seen Vekhi as a way station in the ideological pilgrimage of its
principal participants, Peter Struve, Nicholas Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Semion Frank, from
Marxism through Liberalism toward more contemplative and ethereal realms of Idealist philoso-
phy, Orthodox theology and imperialist nationalism. Both of these interpretative streams per-
petuate the impression that Vekhi represented a drift from the practical to the spiritual, and that
its message went, either deservedly or tragically, unheard and unheeded.
It is argued here that Vekhi’s philosophical discourse contained within it some very concrete
social and economic prescriptions, and that its message in fact fell on at least some receptive
ears. Vehki found an attentive audience among a small group of liberal industialists in Moscow,
led by Pavel Riabushinskii. It served as a catalyst for the creation of an entrepreneurial group
known as the Riabushinskii Circle, and opened the way for a remarkable collaboration between
intellectuals and entrepreneurs that lasted until the Bolshevik Revolution, and culminated in
Riabushinskii’s “Utopian Capitalist” vision for Russia.

Keywords
Vekhi (Signposts); Neo-Kantianism; Old Belief; Progressivism; Utopian Capitalism

Introduction: Vekhi and Riabushinskii Circle

The Vekhi symposium was the succès de scandal of Russian intellectual

life in 1909. Its assertive critique of the radical traditions of the Russian

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI 10.1163/187633111X594551

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
494 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

intelligentsia1 provoked a cascade of denunciations and repudiations from

a wide variety of public figures from across the ideological and political spec-
trum. To many contemporaries, Vekhi’s assertion of “the primacy of spiritual
life over external forms of community” represented a capitulation to the forces
of reaction, a turning away from the political struggle with autocracy toward
obscurantist mysticism. Historians, armed with hindsight, have been more
charitable. Vekhi is generally seen as a way station in the ideological pilgrimage
of its principal participants, Peter Struve, Nicholas Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov
and Semion Frank, from political Marxism and Liberalism toward more con-
templative and ethereal realms of Idealist philosophy, Orthodox theology and
imperialist nationalism.
Vekhi was arguably all of these things. The views of contemporary critics
and subsequent scholars taken together highlight Vekhi’s role in framing the
political and moral impasse Russia found itself in after the revolution of 1905.
Yet both of these interpretative streams perpetuate the impression that Vekhi
represented a drift from the practical to the spiritual, and that its message
went, either deservedly or tragically, unheard and unheeded. It will be argued
here that Vekhi’s spiritual discourse contained within it some very concrete
social and economic prescriptions, and that its message in fact fell on at least
some receptive ears. Vehki found an attentive audience among a small group
of liberal industialists in Moscow, led by Pavel. Riabushinskii. For them, Vekhi
was not just a philosophical curiosity. It served instead as a catalyst for the
creation of an entrepreneurial activist group known as the Riabushinskii
Circle, and as a gateway for a remarkable collaboration between intellectuals
and entrepreneurs that lasted from 1909 until the Bolshevik Revolution. Seen
from the perspective of the industrialists, Vekhi’s critique of the intelligentsia
contained a blueprint for a future path of national development in which they
would play a central role.

1)
Vekhi’s criticism was directed against the many patterns of radical utopian thought which
had dominated the Russian thinking elites since the days of Herzen and Belinskii in the 1830s.
By the time of Vekhi, these revolutionary and collectivist visions, which included Nihilism,
Populism and Marxism, had become so sacrosanct to many educated Russians that no criticism
of these pioneers and martyrs of Russian secular thought could be tolerated. This ideological
sensibility explains the extremely negative reaction from virtually all factions of the Liberal and
Revolutionary movements that greeted Vekhi’s appearance.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 495

Old Believer Industrialists and Idealist Philosophers

The group of textile industrialists around Riabushinskii, including his brother,

Vladimir, Alexander Konovalov, Sergei Chetverikov, Sergei Tret’iakov and
Nicholas Morozov, first came together in the early turbulent days of 1905.
They adopted an aggressively oppositional stance toward the autocracy, which
put them at odds with the cautious majority of the Moscow’s merchant
establishment.
A curious thing about the Riabushinskii group was that its leadership
was dominated by descendents of Old-Believer peasant entrepreneurs of the
Moscow textile industry. Both Riabushinskii and Morozov were practicing
members of the Belokrinitsa sect of Priested Old Believers. The Konovalov
family was also originally of Old Believer persuasion as well, though its mem-
bers had converted to Orthodoxy by the mid-nineteenth century.
From its origins in the Great Church Schism of the seventeenth century,
Old Belief had been the most traditionalist stream of Russian Orthodoxy.
That people from this background emerged as liberal activists and modernist
visionaries in the early twentieth century seems on its face paradoxical, as if
descendents of Quakers or Mennonites suddenly morphed into Carnegies or
Rockefellers of a very modern persuasion. Yet a pattern of Old-Believer inno-
vation had been set long before, as evidenced by the prominent role of dissent-
ers in the founding of the modern textile industry in the early nineteenth
century. When new technologies such as steam power became available, the
inventive Old Believers were ready and able to employ them first. Thus by
virtue of their work ethic and risk-taking behavior, a handful of Old Believer
families ensconced themselves within the entrepreneurial elite of Moscow.
It was from these families that the liberal leadership of the Russian entrepre-
neurs later emerged.
Pavel Riabushinskii was replicating the forward-looking behavior of his
schismatic ancestors when he became an outspoken opponent of the auto-
cratic regime in 1905.2 Having himself suffered persecution under the
inquisitional power of the tsarist police, Riabushinskii advocated religious
toleration, the rule of law, the sanctity of the individual, civil rights and con-
stitutional checks on power in Russia. Along with the group’s denunciation of

2)
On the history of the Riabushinskii family, see: Yuri Petrov, Dinastiia Riabushinskikh (Moscow:
Russkaia kniga, 1997).

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
496 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

the domination of the tsarist state over the economy, these positions taken
together placed the so-called “young”3 industrialists around Riabushinskii in
the liberal avant-garde of the Moscow merchantry during the turbulent days
of 1905.4
What these people possessed in abundance were their own entrepreneurial
skills, a religiously-grounded sense of injustice, and personal energy. But what
they lacked was practical political experience, intellectual sophistication, and
an appropriate language with which to express their forward-looking aspira-
tions. The publication of Vekhi would open a door of opportunity to the
industrialists on all these counts.
Under Russian conditions, it was unlikely that industrialists would ever
have much to do with intellectuals such as the vekhotsy. The old soslovie (estate)
mentality, with its social taboos and segregations, still persisted even as new
professional groupings emerged from under the archaic estate system.
Moreover, Russian merchants were traditionally held in low esteem by all
other social strata, from the peasantry through the nobility. The kupets, with
his legendary avarice, his dubious business practices and his self-regarding
behavior, was universally spurned in a culture which placed emphasis on
agrarian values and communal identities. This deep-seated anti-bourgeois
prejudice was not dispelled by the appearance of modern entrepreneurs who
bore little resemblance to the bearded merchants of the past. It was especially
strong among the intelligentsia, whose denunciations of “bourgeois” attitudes
and behaviors were legion, from Herzen and Chernyshevskii through the
Populists, Marxists and Liberals.5
The entrepreneurs around Riabushinskii had encountered this prejudice
in emphatic ways during and after the crisis of 1905. No sooner had they
made their political debut in the spring of that year than they met resistance
from the liberal intellectuals with whom they had hoped to collaborate. The
leadership of the Kadet Party made it clear from the outset that it would toler-
ate no “class” (read: “bourgeois”) interests within its ranks. Rebuffed by the

3)
The moniker “young” was a contemporary reference not only to the generational identity of
the new industrialists, but also their political radicalism, comparable to that of the “Young
Turks” in the Ottoman Empire at the same time.
4)
On the political activities of the Riabushinskii Circle, see: James L. West, “The Rjabushinskij
Circle: Industrialists in Search of a Bourgeoisie,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Ost Europas, Heft 3
(1984): 358-377.
5)
For the history of the kupechestvo and its relations with other social groups, see: Alfred Rieber,
Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1982).

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 497

mainstream liberals, the “young” group drifted in and out of a series of mar-
ginal and largely unsuccessful political parties, such as the Moderate-
Progressive Party and the Party of Peaceful Reconstruction. When the majority
of merchants, frightened by the militancy and violence of their workers, either
dropped out of politics altogether or made their peace with authority and
joined the pro-government Octobrist Union, the “young” industrialists
remained aloof, seeing Octobrism as collaboration with the ancien regime they
detested. Their early attempts at liberal journalism, such as the newspapers
Utro, Narodnaia Gazeta and the first Utro Rossii, all soon succumbed to the
pressures of resurgent censorship. In the years after 1905, then, the “young”
industrialists found themselves adrift, with neither a political voice nor a con-
ceptual vehicle for their liberal-capitalist aspirations.
In the very different world of the intelligentsia, the future Vekhi authors
underwent a similar collapse of illusions in 1905, and in the years follow-
ing experienced an analogous isolation from the liberal movement that
they themselves had pioneered. As intellectuals, however, they were signifi-
cantly more perceptive and articulate in expressing their discontent than
the untutored industrialists. Like the Riabushinskii group, they too were in
transition, but with a much clearer sense of where they were going. Having
begun their intellectual careers as Marxists, Peter Struve, Nicholas Berdiaev,
Sergei Bulgakov and Simeon Frank had migrated toward liberal politics in
the Liberation Movement, and had been active in organizing the Kadet
Party in 1905. But the radicalism of the intellectuals, the violence of the
workers and peasants, and the resurgence of reaction in the wake of the revolu-
tion drove them to despair. Yet as serious thinkers, they were able to craft a
philosophically-grounded explanation of what had happened and what
needed to be done about it. From Marx, they moved to Kant. As Berdiaev
observed: “the Neo-Kantian… spirit became a weapon of liberation from
Marxism and positivism… and served as a bridge to higher forms of philo-
sophical awareness.”6 In Vekhi, this Neo-Kantian resonance was still very
strong.7

6)
Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsia (2nd edition, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo V.M. Savlin,
1909) 14. Reprinted by Izdatel’stvo “Posev,” Frankfurt, 1967.
7)
Idealism remained a powerful stream of thought among the non-Marxist intelligentsia. It was
still the predominant outlook among the scholars and intellectuals whom Lenin ordered
deported on the infamous “philosophers steamships” in 1922. See: Lesley Chamberlain, Lenin’s
Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 2006).

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
498 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

Vekhi as a Neo-Kantian8 Manifesto: Kant and Capitalism

Vekhi drew its philosophical inspiration from Kantian Idealism. Whereas

Marx had posited a materialist understanding of the world, Kant, the father of
German Idealism, had proposed a dualistic ontology based on a division
between two realms of “reality,” the phenomenonal and the noumenal.
Phenomena could be sensed and experienced, they existed in the measurable
world of human perception. Beyond the borders of the tangible world, how-
ever, there existed the inaccessible realm of ideal “things-in-themselves,” nou-
mena, which shaped the nature and essence of phenomena, but were
inaccessible and unknowable to the human mind. Humanity could detect
only emanations of the noumenal essences, in the form of ideals such as
Beauty, Morality, Justice, Freedom, etc. But the ding-an-sich which stood
behind these values was eternally veiled.
As an epistemology, a way of seeing reality, the Neo-Kantian vision of con-
stant, essential and unchanging ideal forms no doubt recommended itself to
the vekhovtsy as an antidote to what they saw as the relentless materialist
excesses of the radical intelligentsia. They had first announced their Idealist
turn away from Marxist positivism in 1902, in the precursor to Vekhi, Problemy
Idealizma.9 The Kantian notion of fixed and eternal values suspended above
the flux of the phenomenal world must have been even more appealing to the
group after the political and social chaos of 1905. Thus running throughout
the various articles contained in Vekhi was a Neo-Kantian assertion: there exist
absolute, ultimate values – truth, beauty, freedom and individuality – which
must be valued and protected as ends in themselves.
Kant’s originary idealism was more contemplative than activist. It posited
no “becoming,” no teleological sweep toward the noumenal realm. Later
German philosophers, such as Fichte, Herder, Schelling and especially Hegel,
added a dynamic element, and ascribed agency to men in the realization of
Kantian noumenal essences in the phenomenal world through the building of
Culture (Kultur). Russian Neo-Kantians appropriated this activist orientation,
placing high value on the human construction of kul’tura (Culture) as an
accumulation of fixed and unchanging values through time. Thus for the

8)
“Neo-Kantian” is the term generally applied to the revival of Kantian thought in the late
nineteenth century. The “back to Kant” movement emerged in Germany, and later in Russia, as
a reaction to the predominance of materialist and positivist currents that came to dominate
philosophical and political discourse in Europe after 1848.
9)
See: Problems of Idealism, Randall A. Poole, ed. and trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003).

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 499

Russian Neo-Kantians, Culture represented the ultimate expression of the

Ideal in the human realm. As Frank defined it, Culture consisted in “the
accumulation of absolute values created by mankind and comprising its
spiritual-social way of life.”10 Berdiaev echoed him in asserting the primacy
of “the accumulation of timeless values in history.”11 In this way, Russian
Neo-Kantianism opened the possibility of applying Kant’s esoteric philosophy
to the real world by creating islands of stability in the chaotic flux of Russia’s
disordered modernization.
The Revolution of 1905 had revealed to the Vekhi authors that Russia was
in danger of dissolving into chaos, and that efforts to control this anarchic
violence would lead either to a dictatorship of reaction, or potentially worse
from their point of view, a dictatorship of the radical intelligentsia. In either
case, Culture as the vekhovtsy conceived it, would be irredeemably destroyed,
either by police repression or revolutionary nihilism. In this sense, the intelli-
gentsia critics of Vekhi were correct: the symposium did, indeed, represent a
renunciation of political struggle in defense of unseen things, of ideal values
that perhaps only a philosopher or a mystic could fully understand and/or
appreciate.
But woven into the philosophical and theological arguments of Vekhi were
persistent hints of a more concrete, real-world agenda. The Populist, Marxist,
and even Liberal intelligentsia, Struve asserted, had done the revolution
“badly” (plokho).12 Wedded to its ideational baggage of collectivism, material-
ism, and nihilism, it had interpreted the crisis of the autocracy as an invita-
tion to incite the narod to violence against all authority in the name of
collectivist utopias. Long devoid of any appreciation of philosophical or spir-
itual values, Russian intellectual elites of all stripes had failed to understand
that the only successful transformation that could move the nation beyond its
impasse had to begin not with social classes or political regimes, but with the
individual. Of all the noumena Kantian philosophy had posited, the most
essential to the vekhovtsy was that of “personhood” (lichnost’), the sanctity of
the individual person. If Kant had written, “now I say that man… exists and
an end himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will,”13

10)
Semion Frank, “Ocherki filosofii kultury,” pt.I, Poliarnaia Zvezda, Dec. 22, 1905, 110.
11)
Nicholas Berdiaev, “Socialism as Religion,” in: Bernice Rosenthal, A Revolution of the Spirit,
(Newtonville Mass: Oriental Research Partners, 1982), 120.
12)
Peter Struve, “Intelligentsia i revolutsiia,” in: Vekhi., Ibid., 170.
13)
Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Berdiaev used this quotation as an
epigram for his article in Problemy idealizma. See: Nicholas Berdiaev, “The Ethical Problem in
Light of Philosophical Idealism,” in: Problems of Idealism, 161.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
500 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

M. O. Gerschenzon echoed him in the introduction to Vekhi: “the individual’s

inner life is the sole creative force of human existence.”14 The theme was reiter-
ated by Struve, who asserted that “nothing is more dear and important than a
person’s individual self-perfection.”15 Thus for the Vekhi authors, personhood
was a noumenal value, for it represented the only vehicle in the world of phe-
nomena suitable for, as Frank phrased it, “the embodiment of ideal values in
life,”16 values worthy of veneration and cultivation for their own sake.
This assertion of the sanctity of the individual person could easily fore-
shadow a retreat by some of the Vekhi authors toward spirituality, an invoca-
tion of the scanctity of the “soul” in the face of growing atheism and secularism.
Indeed, Berdiaev for example had echoed Dostoevskii in asserting that “the
image” of the individual personality “abides eternally in the creative idea of
Divinity.”17 Yet the message of Vekhi could also be understood in a different
way: as a philosophically grounded liberal orientation with real-world impli-
cations. If “individual self-perfection” was the highest creative goal, then what
force could create the conditions in Russia for the emergence of autonomous
individuality? At its heart, this was not only a spiritual problem, but a material
one as well. Ironically, the quest for ideals ultimately led some of the vekhovtsy
back around to concrete economic and social considerations. The “self-perfec-
tion of the individual” might come about not only through ascetic retreat or
inward-looking contemplation, some of the Vekhi authors hinted, but also
through active engagement with a dynamic real world.
The lesson that many had drawn from the anarchy of 1905-7 was that the
Russian people’s violent despair was fueled at least in part by the grinding
poverty in which they lived. But the intelligentsia, it was asserted by Frank, in
fetishizing the narod, also made a fetish of its poverty by exalting collective
constructs such as “the peasant” or “the worker:” “In its soul, love for the poor
becomes love for poverty.”18 The Vekhi authors asserted that the elimination of
poverty, and of the collectivist totems which the intelligentsia had constructed
out of it, was the key precondition for the flourishing of the individual in
Russia, both spiritually and materially. The task, then, was the creation of suf-
ficient national wealth to raise the people out of its penury. But, as Berdiaev

14)
Mikhail Gershenzon, “Preface to the First Edition,” in: Landmarks: A Collection of Essays
on the Russian Intelligentsia, Boris Shragin & Albert Todd, eds (New York: Karz Howard,
1977), 1.
15)
Peter Struve, “Intelligentsia i revolutsiia,” Vekhi, 162.
16)
Simeon Frank, “Etika nigilizma,” Vekhi, 186.
17)
Berdiaev, “Socialism as Religion,” Vekhi, 136.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 501

noted, “in the consciousness and emotions of the Russian intelligentsia, the
interests of distribution and equalization have always prevailed over those of
production and creation.”19 Frank echoed him, asserting that the intelligent-
sia, with its socialistic obsessions, “does not love wealth,” and it also despised
those who possessed wealth, believing “that all rich people are evil, all poor
people are nice and good.”20 Thus the intellectual elites incited the narod to
seize the possessions of the wealthy, as had happened in 1905, with predictable
anarchistical results which threatened to destroy all wealth, and all Culture
along with it.
In its denunciation of wealth, the intelligentsia also undervalued the
labor necessary to create it. In Bulgakov’s view, possessed as it was by its
“anti-bourgeois feeling,” the intelligentsia evinced “an aura of otherworld-
liness,” a strange form of secular, atheistic “religiosity,” “a propensity for
daydreaming, a sometimes starry-eyed idealism, utopianism and an underde-
veloped sense of reality in general.” These attitudes left the intellectual elites
bereft of “the habit of sustained, disciplined labor and a measured way of
life.”21
The solution to this impasse lay not in politics or political struggle, but also
not necessarily in any retreat into spirituality. It lay in what Berdiaev called
“concrete idealism, linked with a realistic attitude toward existence,”22 which
might facilitate the application of Kantian-inspired insights to practical prob-
lems. While Berdiaev, perhaps the most other-worldly of the vekhovtsy, spun
his idealism in spiritual directions, others of his collaborators believed that
individuality could only be achieved by the acquisition of habits and values
learned in the process of cultural and material wealth-creation. Struve enu-
merated these values throughout his work: “persistent self-discipline,” “sus-
tained, disciplined labor,” “personal responsibility” were recurrent themes in
his writings.23 Only if these habits and values could be inculcated – and the
field of action for this could only be the individual – could the cycle of destitu-
tion, oppression and violence be broken, for as Frank declared: “apart from
national wealth, popular welfare is inconceivable.” He concluded that, “it is

18)
Frank, “Etika nigilizma,” Vekhi, 201.
19)
Berdiaev, “Filosofskaia istina i intelligentskaia pravda,” Vekhi, 3.
20)
Frank, “Etika nigilizma,” Vekhi, 203.
21)
Bulgakov, “Geroizm i podvizhnichectvo,” Vekhi, 28-30.
22)
Berdiaev, “Filosofskaia istina,” Vekhi, 18.
23)
See, for example: Vekhi, 171.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
502 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

time to move beyond distribution and the struggle for it to cultural creation,
the production of wealth.”24
The Vekhi authors all agreed that the intelligentsia, still wedded to its uto-
pian extremism, was incapable of making this transition. Like Russia itself, it
was caught between two worlds, with old forms breaking down but new ones
not yet clearly in sight. While on the one hand, Frank observed, “we are wit-
nessing the disintegration of the traditional intelligentsia spirit,” on the other
hand, “new ideas and ideals are taking shape too weakly and obscurely.”25 The
intelligentsia was the problem, and Frank warned that the solution would
require that “the intelligentsia would cease to be an ‘intelligentsia’ in the old
Russian sense of the word.”26 Struve, too, strongly implied that the intelligent-
sia itself was an anachronistic by-product of a transitional stage of social devel-
opment, suspended between a traditional soslovie order and new class system.
What was needed, he provocatively asserted, was the “embourgeoisement”
(oburzhuazitsia) of the intelligentsia. The emergence of modern professional
groupings in Russia was an early harbinger of the evolution of a modern class
structure, into which the old intelligenty would be absorbed: “[the intelligent-
sia will] spontaneously enter into the existing social structure, dispersing itself
among the various classes of society,”27 each of which would produce its own
thinking elites now anchored to the real world by their modern professional
and technical expertise.
Who, then, would supplant the old intelligentsia to lead Russia in its trans-
formation? Vekhi’s explicit call was for new elites of a new mentality. Bulgakov
declared: “Russia needs new agents in all fields of life,”28 people dedicated to
the creation of spiritual and material wealth, “an educated class with a Russian
soul”29 that could rescue the nation from its material and spiritual poverty.
Everything depended on this. If this dynamic new element failed to emerge,
then Bulgakov warned, “the intelligentsia, in connection with the Tartar bar-
barism which is still so prevalent in our state and social systems, will ruin
Russia.”30

24)
Frank, “Etika nigilizma,” Vekhi, 200.
25)
Ibid., 208.
26)
Ibid., 210.
27)
Struve, “Intelligentsia i revolutsiia,” Vekhi, 173.
28)
Bulgakov, “Filosofskaia istina,” Vekhi, 59.
29)
Ibid., 26.
30)
Ibid.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 503

Industrialists and Idealists: The Riabushinskii Circle Reactivated

It cannot be established with certainty how the “young” industrialists read

Vekhi, or even if they read it at all.31 But it is clear that almost immediately
after its publication, and in the midst of the journalistic firestorm it provoked,
Riabushinskii and his associates reanimated their political activity after several
years of ideological drift. The symposium was published in its first edition in
March of 1909. Within weeks, Riabushinskii took an unprecedented step of
opening a dialogue with the authors of the symposium: he invited Struve and
Bulgakov to a series of banquets at his home to meet with the industrialists
and discuss the issues they had raised. This was the origin of the famous
Ekonmicheskie Besedy.32 From 1909 until 1912, once a month, often scheduled
to suit Struve’s and Bulgakov’s availability, “men of science” dined with “men
of practical experience” to discuss such technical topics as trade policy, indus-
trial organization, labor legislation, all directed toward the creation of a coher-
ent plan of national economic development. During these years, the Economic
Discussions served as kind of advanced policy seminar for the industrialists,
and as a philosophical finishing school under the mentorship of the vekhovtsy
who attended regularly.
Encouraged by this support, the Riabushinskii group renewed its attempts
at political mobilization of the “Russian bourgeoisie.” Like Russia itself, the
entrepreneurs were caught in an in-between state in their social evolution
from merchant soslovie to modern industrial class. The majority of merchants
and industrialists were still fearful of the workers and deferential toward the
tsarist government, assuming the old kupechestvo posture of “lower than water,
quieter than grass.” The Riabushinskii Circle became the epicenter of an effort
to create in Russia and authentic entrepreneurial burzhuaziia, conscious of its
power, but also imbued with a “mission” to uplift the nation.
In the fall of 1909, Utro Rossii renewed publication, and it soon took its
place as the most audacious voice of the Moscow liberal press in its criticism
of the authorities and the intelligentsia. Struve, Bulgakov and Berdiaev were
all prominent contributors to the revived newspaper. Struve, in particular,

31)
An educated Russian in 1909 would have to have been in Siberian exile not to know of Vekhi,
so it is a reasonable assumption that the industrialists in fact read it. Vekhi and its controversy
was referred to often in the pages of Riabushinskii’s revived Utro Rossii. See for example: Utro
Rossii, Oct. 13, 1911, 1.
32)
On the Economic Discussions, see: West, “The Rjabushinskji Circle”.; Petrov, Dinastiia
Riabushinskikh., 83 ff.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
504 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

associated himself closely with the Riabushinskiis, most notably by his partici-
pation in Vladimir Riabushinskii’s nationalist symposium Velikaia Rossiia in
1910. It was in these publications that the Young Group’s Vekhi-inspired ide-
ology of industrial liberalism took shape and was elaborated.

Vekhi and the Problem of Modernization

The attraction of Vekhi’s message for the “men of practical experience”

undoubtedly lay in the fact that for all their philosophizing and spiritual
searching, some of the Vekhi authors, perhaps as a vestige of their earlier
Marxist attachments, were clearly still concerned with concrete social and eco-
nomic issues. While their Neo-Kantian emphasis in Vekhi was on the creation
of the conditions conducive to the “self-education and self-perfection of the
individual,” they recognized that this transformation of the Russian personal-
ity could not be achieved without a transformation of the material world in
which personality was formed. And if the intelligentsia was misguided in its
obsession with distribution of wealth, the question of the creation of wealth
was clearly placed on the agenda.
At its heart, it was the problem of modernization that haunted Vekhi:
how to push beyond old and discredited institutions, identities and habits
of thought toward the individual freedom, national prosperity and social
reconciliation that beckoned. There were four possible orientations toward
the problem on modernization: 1) a Populist rejection of industrialization
and retention of the agrarian base of the economy; 2) a Marxian begruging
toleration of capitalism in the expectation of an imminent proletarian revolu-
tion; 3) a passive acceptance of “state capitalism,” the continuation of the
domination of the state in economic development; or 4) an embrace of entre-
preneurial capitalism, with its concomitant competitive and free-market
forms. The Vekhi authors were very far from being Populists, and thus they
rejected the first path out of hand, for it would mean stagnation and perpetu-
ation of the traditional attitudes they decried. They had once embraced, but
now rejected, the Marxist road, both because of its inherent violence and its
relentless materialism. Autocratic domination of the economy might hold
Russia together by fear and violence, but at the cost of suppressing and delay-
ing the maturation of a new energetic and creative Russian persona. Thus a
more open and free entrepreneurial capitalist pattern recommended itself as
the most effective engine of wealth-creation and the best incubator of new
cultural values.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 505

Yet the vekhovtsy, like the intelligentsia they criticized, were deeply ambiva-
lent about the onset of industrial capitalism. It was clear to all of them that in
its early phases, industrialization had been a costly experiment for Russia.
As 1905 had demonstrated, industrial development had rent the fabric of
Russian society and culture, had at least in its early years actually increased the
poverty and misery of the people. What’s more, it had thrust the autocracy
into a revolutionary crisis, threatening the destruction of all authority by peas-
ant anarchy and worker violence. But while the Vekhi authors were not in
complete agreement about the future course Russia should follow, they were
not at heart obscurantists or anti-modernists. They all embraced the modern
liberal values of personal freedom, the rule of law, and sanctity of the indi-
vidual, and concurred in the view that Russia must move forward, not back-
ward or sideways. And while they held divergent views on the ideal form of
social organization – Berdiaev eventually advocated a form of Christian
Anarchism, Bulgakov embraced the idea of a Christian Socialism, and Struve
placed his hopes in a renewed great-power nationalism – it was clear at least to
Bulgakov, that for the foreseeable future “[there is] much to learn about the
technology of life and labor from Western man.”33
But capitalism in Russia, they all insisted, could not be a mere transposition
into the East of the competitive and materialist patterns of the West. It would
have to conform itself to indigenous values and mores. Its “new agents” would
have to possess Russian values. And true to their Neo-Kantian convictions, the
Vekhi authors insisted that capitalism subordinate itself to higher noumenal
ends.

The Resonance of Vekhi in Riabushinskii’s “Bourgeois Idea”

The industrialists responded to Vekhi’s challenge. Riabushinskii’s publishing

house began to issue forth a range of journalistic organs formulating a liberal-
capitalist position, which drew heavily on the fund of ideas imparted by his
newfound intellectual mentors. His Utro Rossii was directed toward the mer-
chants and industrialists, and tried to propagate “The Bourgeois Idea”; Tserkov’,
his Old Believer organ, attempted to formulate a “Neo-Old Believer” position
and cultivate an “Old Believer intelligentsia”; and the Velikaia Rossiia (1910,
1911) symposium (to which Struve contributed a major article), sought to

33)
Ibid., 28.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
506 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

propagate a “Neo-Slavophile” brand of liberal nationalism among the public

at large. Taken together, these ideological initiatives fashioned a new persona
for the emergent industrialists, that of an energetic and combative entrepre-
neurial elite imbued with Russian national values and an indigenous Russian,
specifically Old Believer, ethos. Such was Riabushinskii’s response to Vekhi’s
call for “new agents” with a “Russian soul.”
Riabushinskii’s organs took up Vekhi’s critique of the intelligentsia, with
periodic sallies purporting that the typical intelligent “has a poor idea of work,”
and that “the ideology of the intelligentsia is not sympathetic to cultural pro-
gress, respects not labor, but rest.” Echoing Struve’s notion of the hoped-for
“embourgeoisement” of the intelligentsia, Utro Rossii predicted that in capitalist
Russia, the intelligentsia would “divide by class” and disappear as an isolated
and alienated revolutionary elite. Within the bourgeoisie, the industrial pro-
cess would create its own “third element,” and subsume the old radical intel-
ligentsia into its new technical cadres. Likewise, groups like the Old Believers
would generate their own intelligentsias.34
The entrepreneurial bourgeoisie would come to replace the aristocracy and
the intelligentsia as the classe dirigeante of Russia. And it would be animated
by a new vision of itself, which Riabushinskii termed “The Bourgeois Idea.”
The language used to describe this new entrepreneurial identity echoed Vehki’s’’
Neo-Kantian discourse. The new bourgeoisie was not composed of mere
profit-seeking businessmen, but of “Creators of Material Value.” They were
“energetic and labor-loving,” and knew “what the bureaucracy [and by impli-
cation the aristocracy and intelligentsia] did not know: the value of individual
free creativity and personal responsibility.”35 Riabushinskii’s “Bourgeois Idea”
had at its base “the idea of Cultural Freedom”: “the striving toward individual
material perfection, toward material construction by each of us of our own
personal lives.” This creative impulse would become “the ideology of the spir-
itually and materially powerful class of the bourgeoisie” in the new capitalist
Russia.36
Riabushinskii’s new entrepreneurs would internalize a native Russian ethos
that would both attenuate and russify the acquisitive and competitive dynam-
ics of their capitalist project. Unlike the foreign businessmen who had long
dominated the Russian economy in collaboration with the tsarist state, the
new entrepreneurs, Utro Rossii explained, were imbued with “purely Russian

34)
Utro Rossii, April 4, 1910, 1.
35)
Utro Rossii, May 18, 1912, 1.
36)
Utro Rossii, Jan. 1, 1912, 1.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 507

national traits” for they rose from “the bubbling sea of the people” “by means
of personal energy and personal efforts” to create new wealth and new national
values.37 Drawing on his own Old-Believer roots and those of many of his
workers in the textile industry, he posited a vision of a renewed national faith
charged with the values of a long-vanished ancient Rus’. The people of the
schism cultivated the traits of “love of work, sobriety and personal integrity,”
and had evolved their subculture within local communes practicing ancient
democratic values an of Old Rus’ before the tsars.38 If the still-living Old
Believer culture became the model for a future indigenous capitalism,
Riabushinskii argued, Russia would have no need to learn the skills of self-rule
and wealth-creation from foreigners. It had only to rediscover its own primor-
dial identity.
Finally, Riabushinskii’s argued that an indigenous spirit of capitalism would
enrich and empower a resurgent Russian State. It was on this point that Struve,
the most important Vekhi figure for the industrialists, contributed yet another
justification for entrepreneurial capitalism as the creative engine of state
power. In Vekhi and elsewhere, Struve posited the State as a noumenal entity
that existed for itself, above the petty arena of party politics, and above the
government itself. The State, he argued, was a “mystical organism” whose vis-
ible phenomenal manifestation was its “military power.” It demanded of its
people “recognition of the ideal of state power on the basis of disciplined
labor.”39 With the material and spiritual renaissance of the Russian people,
they would come to understand the mystical nature of the State above them.
Russia would transcend the old tsarist regime to build a new, free, capitalist
Russia which he called, borrowing from Stolypin, Velikaia Rossiia. (Great
Russia)40
The industrialists took up this nationalist theme with alacrity. In 1910
Vladimir Riabushinskii published a two-volume symposium in 1910 by the
same title, which featured a leading article by Struve, entitled “The Economic
Problem of Velikaia Rossiia.” Here Struve lauded entrepreneurial capitalism as
the only economic system which could assure the survival of the Russian State
in the face of German militarism. Here he made a connection which would
seem self-evident, but which in Russia, dominated as it was by agrarian biases,

37)
Utro Rossii, May 5, 1911, 1; Jan. 1, 1910, 1; Jan. 16, 1909, 1.
38)
Tserkov, Oct. 19, 1914, 1.
39)
Struve, “Otryvki o gosudarstve,” in: Patriotica: sbornik statei za piat’ let (St. Petersburg:
Izdanie D. E. Zhukovskovo, 1911), 98.
40)
Struve, “Velikaia Rossiia,” Russkaia Mysl’, No. 1, 1908.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
508 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

had yet to be convincingly argued: “the greater the economic development of

a country, the greater its military preparedness.”41 If only Russia could be
transformed on the basis of entrepreneurial capitalism instead of the state
capitalism, “then its military power would be many times greater” than it was.
In the future entrepreneurial and democratic “Velikaia Rossiia,” he argued,
“the raising of the productive forces of the country should be understood as a
national idea and a national service.”42 Utro Rossii chimed in that it was “the
exalted historical mission” of the ascendant bourgeoisie to impart by its exam-
ple the values of self-discipline in “the citizens of the future Velikaia Rossiia,”
and that this alone would be “the pledge of our future victories, victories of a
new, strong Great Russia over the Russia of broken dreams, fruitless strivings
and bitter failures.”43

Idealist Economics Beyond Vekhi

While the industrialists organized themselves, their Vekhi allies continued to

express their concern about the path of national development. In their writ-
ings afterVekhi, they continued to elaborate their views on Russia’s economic
future. Berdiaev seemed relatively uninterested in economic issues, and of all
the vekhovtsy, he was probably the most hostile to “bourgeois” values. Yet as
early as 1906 he had clearly realized that Russia’s poverty was a key obstacle to
the spiritual development of the nation. Whereas the intelligentsia’s “cult of
poverty” made a virtue of penury, in reality “poverty and material oppression
do not ennoble, but rather embitter and brutalize.”44 At the same time, he also
railed against “bourgeois satiety,” the “deification of material prosperity,”45 and
“the danger of embourgeoisement46 to the spiritual health of the people. As anti-
bourgeois as any of the radical intelligenty, he denounced, he saw the material
aspirations of capitalism and of socialism as one in the same destructive
impulse. His solution to the problem of poverty, thus, was not capitalist devel-
opment, but the reorganization of society according to the principles of a

41)
Struve, “Ekonomichekaia problema ‘Velikoi Rossii’” in: Vladimir Riabushinskii (ed.),
Velikaia Rossiia: Sbornik statei po voennym i obshchestvennym voprosam (Moscow: 1910), 144.
42)
Ibid., 152.
43)
Utro Rossii, Jan 1, 1912, 1.
44)
Berdiaev, “Socialism as Religion,” Ibid., 126.
45)
Ibid, 129.
46)
Ibid.,126.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 509

“free theocracy,” “the social organization of economic life in free federative

unions and self-governing zemstvo units,” animated by “a collective spirit
based on love.”47 Yet his rejection of capitalism on ethical grounds did not
prevent him from collaborating with the Riabushinskii group, once their
slavophillic leanings and Old Believer mythology became evident. He contrib-
uted often to Riabushinskii’s newspaper Utro Rossii as the industrialists’ “Neo-
Slavophile” orientation took shape on its pages.48
Frank did not personally embrace the entrepreneurs, yet he nonetheless
continued to expand his views on their calling in his writings. In 1910, for
example, he conceded that capitalism had the power “to liberate man from
narrow, confining empirical dependencies,” and that without such liberation
“general spiritual development” of the individual was “impossible.”49 But he
made a “religious-philosophical” demand on capitalism: that it justify itself
not merely on economic grounds, but on philosophical grounds as well: it
must, he insisted, subordinate itself to the Idealist task of “creating Culture, as
the totality of historically-realized objective and absolute values.”50
Riabushinskii whole-heartedly agreed.
Bulgakov continued the Vekhi polemic against the intelligentsia, but now in
more pointed economic way. He attacked the intelligenty, and the educated
elites in general, for their unreasoned hostility to constructive and creative
economic activity. Russians, he argued, instinctively tended to equate entre-
preneurship with oppression and exploitation. This ingrained prejudice must
give way to the realization that the development of productive forces is a
national priority, “the task for the entire nation.”51 Material culture, he main-
tained, is the only basis for spiritual renewal, for capitalism has the power “to
liberate man from narrow, confining empirical dependencies, without which
no spiritual development is possible at all.”52 In the end, however, capitalism
could not justify itself by its material fruits alone, but only by creating endur-
ing institutions and values, in other words, by conditioning its leaders and
workers alike to become self-reliant and disciplined builders of Culture. If
these truths were not recognized and embraced by educated society, Bulgakov

47)
Ibid, 133-34.
48)
See: Utro Rossii, Jan. 5, 1910, 1; and Jan. 23, 1910, 1.
49)
Frank, “Kapitalizm i kul’tura,” Moskovskii Ezhenedel’nik, April 17, 1910, 42.
50)
Ibid.
51)
Bulgakov, “Narodnoe khoziastvo religioznaia lichnost’,” Moskovskii ezhnedel’nik, June 20,
1909., 32.
52)
Ibid., 30.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
510 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

lamented, then not only would Culture decline in Russia, it would stand in
danger of being extinguished altogether through “the economic conquest of
Russia by foreigners.”53 In the wake of Vekhi, he expended considerable efforts
trying to work out the elements of an “Orthodox work ethic,” one that might
encompass the entrepreneurial culture of the Old Believers, whose history he
had begun to study.54 Thus Frank was undertaking a scholarly study of the
central historical experience of religious persecution and perseverance that
undergirded Riabushinskii’s imagined new entrepreneurial identity.
It was Struve, the trained economist, however, who most closely associated
himself with the industrialists, and who put forward the clearest arguments in
defense of industrial capitalism. While he disagreed with his Vekhi collabora-
tors over their injection of faith and spirituality into politics and economics,
he nonetheless shared their Idealist outlook, and like them, he couched his
support for capitalist entrepreneurship in terms of its contribution to Culture.
The socialistic worldviews of the intelligentsia, he argued, by exalting collec-
tivist solutions and “irresponsible equality,” devalued individuality, and thus
nurtured an attitude of “personal irresponsibility.”55 Thus the intelligenty could
never understand or appreciate “the meaning and significance of industrial
capitalism,” which fosters an entirely different set of human traits: “personal
efficiency,” “self-control,” “conscientiousness,” in a word, the “idea of the free
and unique personality.”56 They could not see in its advent “the triumph of a
more productive system,” whose entrepreneurial impulses did not constitute
“theft,” but rather “the creation of the foundations of Culture.”57 Russia’s edu-
cated elites, he argued, must come to understand that entrepreneurship was
not in its essence self-regarding and acquisitive, but rather constituted “a form
of national service,” the only possible way to assure the welfare of the narod.
Similarly, Russian entrepreneurs, the “creators of material wealth,” would also
have to come to see their efforts not as “representatives of group or class inter-
ests,” but as “service” to the people, having “creative significance for the entire
society.”58 If this transformation could be achieved, then capitalism in Russia

53)
Ibid., 32.
54)
See: Bernice Rosenthal, “The Search for an Orthodox Work Ethic,” in: Between Tsar and
People, Samuel Kassow, Edith Clowes & James L. West, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 56-74.
55)
Struve, “Intelligentsiia i narodnoe khoziastvo,” Russkoe mysl’, Dec. 1908, 363.
56)
Ibid.
57)
Ibid., 364.
58)
Ibid., 367.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 511

would become a great multiplier of the people’s wealth, and the guarantor
of the survival of the Russian State and Russian Culture in the Age of
Imperialism.
Taken together, the Vekhi authors, despite their misgivings, generally
accepted the advent of capitalism and its entrepreneurs as agents of both mate-
rial and spiritual progress. For the first time in Russian history, representatives
of the thinking elite embraced the values of entrepreneurship and private ini-
tiative. But with this approval came a challenge as well: that the entrepreneurs
would subordinate their profit-seeking and acquisitive tendencies to a higher
ideal, that of service to the people and the nation. Russian capitalism, if it were
to be legitimate, would have to justify itself in terms of indigenous ethical and
spiritual criteria.

The Progressists and the Political Struggle in the Fourth Duma

The trajectories of the vekhovtsy and their industrialist protegés crossed after
1909, but they were ultimately headed in different directions. Whereas Struve
and his associates grew increasingly disillusioned with Duma politics, the as
yet unchastened Riabushinskii group were spoiling for a political fight.
Emboldened by their acquisition of a coherent outlook and program,
Riabushinskii and his associates entered the political fray in the Duma elec-
tions of 1912. They formed the core group of a new political coalition called
the Progressist Party. Having experiencing moderate success in the Duma elec-
tions of 1912, the Progressists emerged as the most aggressive force among the
liberal parties in the Fourth Duma, chastising the collaborationist Octobrists
for their timidity, and often outflanking the liberal Kadets on the left in con-
frontations with tsarist officials. As the Octobrists disintegrated in the wake of
Prime Minister Stolypin’s assassination in 1911, and schism between right and
left wings threatened the Kadets, rumors spread that Struve would finally
abandon his Kadet affiliations and ally with Riabushinskii’s people to form a
new National-Liberal association, though this happened in the pre-war period.
Within the Duma, the Progressists challenged the government on every
front. As tsarist ministers increasingly ignored the Duma, and clogged it with
“legislative vermicelli” of meaningless motions, the Progressists showed their
radical pedrigree. By 1914, as the struggle with the regime ground on in the
Duma, Riabushinskii and Konovalov began talking privately of a “super-
organic solution” to the political impasse, and were making secret overtures to
the Mensheviks, the SRs, and even the Bolsheviks to bring the mass pressure

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
512 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513

of the workers against the regime to foment “the next 1905” for which the
“bourgeoisie” would be ready as it had not been in the “first” 1905.59
These conspiratorial machinations came to naught, however, as the out-
break of war supervened. The Progressists and their Vekhi allies bore a share of
the blame for bringing about the crisis that ultimately destroyed the Old
Regime along with its liberal opponents. Throughout its history, Utro Rossii
assumed an aggressively nationalist stance, berating the government repeat-
edly for not standing up to the Germans. Struve’s imperialist vision, which
demanded Russian control of the Bosporus, and Berdiaev’s visceral aversion to
“the Teutons,” defined an aggressive position that urged the government
toward confrontation with Germany and Austria at every turn. When war
finally came, Utro Rossii was naively exultant.
The military inepitude of the tsarist regime, about which Utro Rossii had
long complained, soon provided a broader field of maneuver for the Progressists
than had the restrictive politics of peacetime. As the situation at the front
worsened in 1915, the coalition-building impulses of the Riabushinskii Circle
at last found realization in the organization of the War Industries Committees.60
Finally, in the same year, the Progressists’ long-sought goal of a broad liberal-
oppositional coalition was finally realized. Konovalov and the Progressists
became the key players in the Progressive Bloc, a broad alliance of the liberal
and left Duma parties which secretly organized a shadow government ready to
take power from the tsarist regime discredited by its military incompetence.
Even here, at this late date, the Progressists continued to be the most radical
of the liberal Duma parties, repeatedly urging confrontation with the belea-
guered and increasingly incompetent tsarist regime.61
Once again, however, these initiatives were cut short by momentous events
as the tsarist regime collapsed in February 1917. After the fall of “the hated
Old Regime,” Progressivisim faded as a coherent movement. Konovalov and
Riabushinskii both served in various individual capacities in the Provisional
Government and its institutions, but the increasingly desperate efforts at
coalition-building passed to others further to the left of the industrialists.

59)
On the so-called “Information Committee” conspiracy, see: Istoricheskii Arkhiv, No. 6,
(1958), and No. 2, (1959).
60)
On the War Industries Committees, see: Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial
Mobilization in Russia, 1914-1917: A Study of the War Industries Committees (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1983).
61)
On the Progressive Bloc, see: Michael F. Hamm, “Liberal Politics in Wartime Russia:
An Analysis of the Progressive Bloc, Slavic Review 33 No. 3 (Sept. 1974): 453-468.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
 J. West / Russian History 38 (2011) 493–513 513

As Vekhi had darkly warned, however, the forces of disintegration accelerated

out of control, and ultimately all that was left was to surrender the Winter
Palace to the Bolsheviks, as it fell to Konovalov to do as Acting Prime Minister
after Kerenskii’s flight in October 1917. Riabushinskii, Konovalov, Struve,
Bediaev, and the other aspiring leaders of the stillborn Velikii Rossiia spent the
rest of their lives in exile, assessing how and why they had, in Konovalov’s
words, “hopelessly failed the Exam of State.”

Conclusion

If the industrialists’ agenda had been aggressively political and social, the main
thrust of Vekhi had been toward philosophical and spiritual concerns. Yet the
two ideational streams were not incompatible, and in the last years of the tsa-
rist regime, they blended in the discourse of the Riabushinskii Circle.
In the end, of course, little of this mattered. While this singular instance of
collaboration between intellectuals and entrepreneurs may have been a har-
binger of potential cohesion within Russia’s “unrealized middle class,” it
remained an isolated case within an otherwise fractured and fragmented civil
society struggling to emerge. Thus the hopes shared by Riabushinskii and
some of the vekhovtsy for an open and capitalist Velikaia Rossiia free of both
the tsarist regime and the revolutionary intelligentsia never came to pass.
Riabushinskii’s visionary evocation of the “Russian bourgeoisie” untimately
found little resonance among the frightened and intimidated merchants and
manufacturers. For this reason, Riabushinskii “Bourgeois Idea” might well be
called “Utopian Capitalism,” for in the Russia of his day there was literally “no
place” where it could be realized. Thus the self-styled “men of practical experi-
ence” had no more influence over the future course of Russian history than
did the philosophers and theologians of Vekhi.
Yet amid all the mutually annihilating binaries of Russian culture, Vekhi
and the industrialists did manage to meet for a moment in a unique discursive
space, where an alternative path of national development could at least be
imagined. There, Idealist philosophy, liberal nationalism, modern entrepre-
neurship and ancient spirituality combined to shape a fleeting eleventh-hour
vision of an indigenously modern and democratic Russia.

Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM

via IIT Guwahati
Downloaded from Brill.com08/25/2023 11:38:28AM
via IIT Guwahati