When Russia expelled its intellectuals, freethinkers

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LENIN'S PRIVATE WAR: THE VOYAGE OF THE PHILOSOPHY STEAMER AND THE EXILE OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA

By Lesley Chamberlain

St. Martin's Press, $27.95, 414 pages

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

The 20th century had more than its share of ruthless despots, but it's a pretty good bet that Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, better known by his soubriquet Lenin, will always have a place near the top of any list of them. When the writer Maxim Gorky, himself a supporter of the Bolsheviks, went to plead with Lenin for the life of one of the Romanov Grand Dukes, who were then being shot en masse on the grounds that he was a fine historian, Russia's new ruler told him that the revolution had no need of historians.

Apparently, Lenin's twisted worldview also had no use for free-thinking intellectuals in general, and "Lenin's Private War," the latest book by Lesley Chamberlain, that most insightful of historians now studying the newly revived history and culture of Russia, tells the extraordinary story of the mass expulsion from their motherland of its finest economists, philosophers, scientists and thinkers. In short, the intelligentsia, that word so associated with Russia, was no longer wanted there after the Bolshevik Revolution.

In fact, there were so many of these people and their families that there was not just one "philosophy steamer": Two German ships had to be chartered to take them across the Baltic at the end of September 1922 to the German port of Stettin. In a sense, these early refugees from totalitarian tyranny were lucky.

Not for them the agony of the S.S. St. Louis, unable to deliver its human cargo to its intended place of salvation: They were well received not only in Germany but in the various places some of them traveled on to from there, particularly France and Czechoslovakia. And of course, they well knew that they were fortunate, all things being relative, to escape a harsher judgment at home. As Leon Trotsky put it in his inimitable way to Louise Bryant, the widow of John Reed:

"You ask me what the explanation is of the decree to expel abroad elements hostile to the Soviet regime . . . they are potential weapons in the hands of our possible enemies. In the event of new military complications . . . all these unreconciled and incorrigible elements will turn into military-political agents of the enemy. And we will be forced to shoot them according to the regulations of war. This is why we prefer in a peaceful period to send them away in good time. And I hope that you won't refuse to accept our far-sighted humanity."

To Russia's new masters, any dissent was treason, and by their reckoning it was important to sweep independent thinkers out of the country. The timing of this is significant: The expulsion occurred three months before the proclamation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Dec. 30, 1922. Clearly the new Communist state was not going to be a paradise for freethinkers.