Vekhi: A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia

A celebrated collection of articles, published in 1909, raised questions that mattered not only for the self-awareness of the intelligentsia, but for Russia’s fate as a whole.

"Vekhi" became emblematic: the authors warned of the danger of social upheavals—often ideologically prepared specifically by representatives of the radical intelligentsia—condemned their nihilism, disbelief, inability for constructive creative work, indifference toward their country, and fascination with social utopias. The looming events (the October Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War in Russia) confirmed the authors of "Vekhi" were right, and since then the book has been seen as prophetic. It was with "Vekhi" that the so-called "religious revival" in Russian philosophy began, and also the "liberal conservatism" in Russian political theory.

This edition is released to mark the 100th anniversary of the first publication of "Vekhi". For a broad circle of readers for whom Russia’s past, present, and future are not indifferent.

Compiled by M.O. Gershenzon, N.A. Berdyaev, S.N. Bulgakov, M.O. Gershenzon, A.S. Izgoev, B.A. Kistyakovsky, P.B. Struve, S.L. Frank. Without illustrations. Offset paper.

Not to judge the Russian intelligentsia in a doctrinaire way from the height of known truth; not with arrogant contempt for its past, but with pain for that past and burning anxiety for the future of the native country. The Revolution of 1905–06 and the events that followed it were, as it were, a nationwide test of the values that for more than half a century had been guarded as our highest shrine by public thought. Individual minds had already, long before the revolution, clearly seen the mistaken nature of these spiritual foundations, relying on a priori reasoning; on the other hand, the external failure of a social movement, by itself, of course, is still not evidence of the inner falsity of the ideas that caused it. Thus, in essence, the intelligentsia’s defeat revealed nothing fundamentally new. But it had immense significance in another sense: first, it deeply shook the entire mass of the intelligentsia and created in it the need to consciously re-examine the very foundations of its traditional worldview, which until then had been accepted blindly on faith; second, the details of the event—namely, the concrete forms in which the revolution and its suppression took place—gave those who in general already recognized the error of that worldview a clearer understanding of the sin of the past and a more convincing expression of their point.

That is how the proposed book came about: its participants could not remain silent about what had become, for them, palpable truth; at the same time they were guided by the confidence that their critique of the intelligentsia’s spiritual foundations was, in fact, moving toward a need for such a test that had become widely shared…