On a forgotten thinker and Putin’s useful idiots (originally published in March 2024)

In the fall of 1922, a steamer left Bolshevik Russia for Germany. One of several so-called “Philosophers’ Ships,” it carried some of the greatest Russian minds of their time, men who had been deemed politically unreliable by Soviet authorities and kicked out of the country. They may not have seen it that way just then, but they were lucky — their fate would have been unenviable had they remained in the Soviet Union. But this did not blunt the trauma, and perhaps most of them would never get over the loss of their homeland. One of the intellectual luminaries deported that autumn was the thinker and philosopher Fyodor Stepun, though according to his own memoir, he left not on a steamer but a train. Under the circumstances, the exact method of conveyance was likely a matter of indifference. But the destination was not. German on his father’s side, Stepun had studied at the university in Heidelberg and spoke the language flawlessly. Germany was hardly “chuzhbina,” a Russian word that encompasses the uncompromising foreignness of any place that is not one’s place of birth, and held few terrors for him. This probably explains why, unlike many other émigrés, he never bothered leaving his adopted country, not even when the Nazis had come to power and Stepun, now a university professor in Dresden, was once again deemed politically unreliable. Here, too, he lucked out. He could have easily ended up in Buchenwald, like so many opponents of the Nazi regime. Instead, he was left to his own devices. During the Allied bombings of Dresden, his home was destroyed, but — yet another stroke of luck — he and his wife happened to be out of town. He resumed his academic activities after the war and died in Munich in 1965 at age eighty-one, having lived through tumultuous times but never deserted by the gods.

That his name is mostly forgotten today is no objection against Stepun. A marvelous writer, he wrote prolifically about philosophy, literature, and politics. He also left behind a rich memoir whose title can be translated, somewhat clumsily, as What Once Was and What Has Not Been Fulfilled (Byvshee i nesbyvsheesya). Stepun belonged to that breed of European Russians who, however much they identified with Russia (and they very much did), were steeped in European culture and always looked to the most glorious chapters of Europe’s history for inspiration and spiritual nourishment. He was a Westernizer (“zapadnik”), not in the sense that Stepun believed Russia ought to slavishly emulate the West or that he denied Russia the uniqueness of its own destiny, but because he was a committed liberal, a position that has almost always implied a Western orientation in Russia. But his liberalism needs to be qualified. It had nothing to do with the live-and-let-live mentality that tends to characterize modern liberalism. He was a typical Russian thinker in that religion underwrote his philosophical outlook, and that also applied to his liberalism. Freedom for Stepun was indissoluble from Christianity (“the truth will set you free”) and was unthinkable without it. He rejected relativism and believed in the absolute truth of religion, arguing that in the absence of a Christian point of reference, Western society turned into a market of opinions. Sooner or later, such a society began to reflect private interests, causing democracies to degenerate. Of Stepun’s Christian liberalism, only inchoate shadows remain. Still intact, for those modern liberals whose profession of faith is sincere, is Stepun’s opposition to all forms of totalitarianism. In the realm of ideologies, Stepun had an impeccable sense of hygiene and never permitted himself flirtations with malodorous agents of history. His own inner philosopher’s ship steered clear of estuaries where ideological Loreleis ensnared minds that were either less resolute or more flexible. Stepun was more than just a deep thinker; he was a thinker you can read without holding your nose.

Stepun’s “Letters from Germany,” a series of articles published between 1930 and 1932, analyzed the prevailing political situation in that country. By then, Stepun had again found himself in the whirlpool of history. Having escaped one form of totalitarianism, Stepun now watched his new home drift towards another. With his habitual curiosity, he sought out Germans from different socioeconomic strata to better understand German society, even attending a Nazi rally to hear Hitler speak (contrary to what we usually read about Hitler’s famously hypnotic oratory, Stepun’s brief account of the experience portrays an abjectly underwhelming politician who had become so popular he’d lost his sense of political purpose). To his surprise, he found that many Germans were quite fascinated by the Soviet experiment. A relentless foe of the Bolsheviks, whom he accused of having hijacked the original February Revolution, Stepun was not a little perturbed to discover that Soviet Bolshevism had a solid fan base in what was still a democracy, however besieged. He attempted to make sense of this phenomenon in “The Forms of German Sovietphilia” (“Formy nemetskogo sovetofil’stva,” 1930), one of the German letters. You wouldn’t know it from its unpromisingly prosy title, but the article, in one important aspect, is as much about our own political landscape as it is about Stepun’s.

Stepun identifies several groups of German Sovietphiles. There were the usual suspects — communists and socialists, whose political views made them Moscow’s natural fellow travelers. The religious Sovietphiles, oxymoronic as it sounds, formed another group: a consequence of what Stepun sees as a denuded, meatless German Protestantism, these Soviet sympathizers were attracted by a radical ideology that suited their nationalist reflexes and filled the vacuum created by the compartmentalization of their faith. Finally, there were what Stepun calls, perhaps not very aptly, the snobbish Sovietphiles. Stepun finds them especially objectionable, and they get the most amount of space in the article. In Stepun’s analysis, these Sovietphiles were bastard children of Nietzschean thought, philosophical libertines with unconventional, topsy-turvy notions of morality. What went on in the Bolshevik state was “interesting” to them, even the terror. They prided themselves on surveying events from above, not just from a bird’s eye view but from God’s eye view, a vantage point that absolved the observer from standard moral criteria. It was a position Stepun rightly condemns as morally repugnant — one does not contemplate human suffering from a philosophical aerie with smug moral detachment. But, Stepun admits, philosophical preferences alone could not account for the gravitational pull that the Soviet Union exerted on these Sovietphiles. Something else was at work, and Stepun has a diagnosis at the ready. A gradual erosion of patriotism coupled with a pervasive feeling of spiritual fatigue had led to a disenchantment with modern Europe, kindling a yearning for mental (and, in some cases, actual) voyages to other shores. These Sovietphiles saw modern Europe as a lost cause, a materialistic and torpid relic inspiring little more than ennui. The Soviet Union increasingly looked like an effective riposte to Europe’s spiritual stagnation.

This group was impervious to any arguments that life under the Bolsheviks was far from paradise. If you (Stepun, that is) spoke to them about the Soviet famine, they would tell you Europe was on the verge of famine as well, and anyway, whatever famine existed in the Soviet Union, anti-Bolshevik Europe was to blame. If you left the economy alone and tried to explain that the Bolsheviks had enslaved the Russian people, they countered by saying enslavement in the name of ideas was preferable to a freedom that denied all ideas — the West, after all, was dying precisely because it lacked any vital political ideas of its own. Et cetera, ad nauseam — you might have as well been arguing with a wall. Suspicious of White émigrés, they made ideological pilgrimages to the Soviet Union and returned to regale their compatriots with stories of how great life was in the Bolshevik state. Mostly these Sovietphiles were on the left, though Stepun hastens to add it was not so much a political as a cultural Left. A spiritually bankrupt tribe, they thought they knew and understood everything, believed nothing and no one, and were always ready to justify any radical position. They could be quite cultured and sophisticated, but in the end, they were little more than useful idiots.

When Stepun penned the article, the young German democracy was in crisis; Russia was a full-blown totalitarian state. The present configuration offers remarkable parallels between then and now. Don’t go looking for an exact carbon copy — the great historian Benzion Netanyahu wrote that though the patterns of history may repeat themselves endlessly, they don’t do so fully. Those who do not learn from these patterns are not necessarily doomed to repeat history, but there is a good chance they will trip on it. With their low voter turnout numbers, staggering levels of polarization, and growing support for what mainstream media like to call “populists,” modern Western democracies are certainly in poor health. As for modern Russia, the shadow of a long winter’s night has once again fallen over it. Over the last two decades, its ruler has managed to turn Russia into a classic fascist state. The country has all the hallmarks of fascism: a cult of personality; a one-man, one-party regime; a growing militarization of society; a jingoistic foreign policy; appeals to national myths; suppression of freedoms where their expression poses a threat to the official narrative, and so on. Fascism is basically state worship, and in modern Russia one’s life is subservient to the needs of the state and ultimately has no value. For a country that lost more people than any other in its war against fascism, this is a bitter irony, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Germany was compelled to denazify itself after the war, and even if it still has active reservoirs of, if not revanchism, then revisionism, there is a general understanding that its Nazi experience was a dark part of its history, an understanding that has been codified at the institutional level. There was no Russian equivalent of Germany’s denazification following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and in the absence of an ideological laxative, the past is bound to be a revenant.

Two years ago, the Russian president made the decision to invade Ukraine. While many in Russia supported the war (“special military operation,” in the Kremlin’s newspeak), it also turned out the Russian president had a good number of apologists in the West, just like the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Only today’s useful idiots are mostly on the right. This makes for a curious spectacle: some of the same people who (rightly, in my opinion) inveighed against the rollback of freedoms during the pandemic are now making excuses for a political leader who is a paragon of illiberalism and unfreedom. These people will tell you any number of things. They will insist that the situation is far more complex than Western propaganda would have us believe. They will explain that the war the Russian president started in February 2022 is a “proxy war” and that it was actually caused by the West, forgetting that the war actually began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, when none of the casus belli used by the Russian president in 2022 obtained. If you point to the lack of freedom of expression and to oppression of dissident voices in Russia, they will start relativizing things; they might say the situation is no better in the woke West and that the US election of 2020 was stolen. If you mention Nemtsov or Navalny, they will remind you of Julian Assange or (this one is truly beyond me) Jeffrey Epstein. They might tell you about some corruption schemes involving Biden and Ukraine, as if this had anything to do with anything. They might say the Russian president has cleaned the Augean stables by getting rid of kleptocratic oligarchs, omitting that he has created an oligarchic and no less kleptocratic class of his own. Some of the explanations are downright cockamamie — an otherwise intelligent and educated acquaintance of mine told me he’d read on Twitter that the Ukrainian president was a cocaine addict. Among some there is also an element of the “detached philosophy” Stepun so justly condemns — such philosophers positively gloat over the return of history, as did one right-wing American pundit who recently argued that warfare was historically a natural state of affairs and the invasion of Ukraine was just history making its comeback. Naturally, the argument was made from the safety of his home in the US Midwest. Like Stepun’s Sovietphiles, those who are in a position to travel to Russia do so and then come back starry-eyed. I think here of one high-profile American journalist who recently went to Russia, interviewed its president, and then posted online what struck many as propagandistic videos about Moscow’s metro and shopping carts — a variation of “the trains run on time” theme. So they do; the risk of living in illiberal regimes is that those who run afoul of them might have to experience the efficiency of those trains first-hand, and not in a good way.

All of this is not difficult to explain. Shorn of transcendental values and powerful political ideas, Western societies have turned stagnant and are floundering, much like Stepun’s Germany in the early 1930s. As a result of the domination of “progressive” politics, many in Western societies have lost faith not only in their governments and elected officials, but also in their systems. Frustrated by the inability to change anything at the electoral level, they no longer believe they live in liberal democracies. The response to the pandemic only reinforced these perceptions. In the “progressive” culture of virtue signaling, enabled and exacerbated by social networks, every cause is consequently doubted and turned into an anti-cause; the enemy of the enemy becomes a friend. The world is then viewed in binary terms: if Biden (or Trudeau, or Macron) says the Russian president is bad, the opposite must be true. Unable to counter the onslaught of “progressive” politics, people turn a sympathetic eye to political figures who seem to challenge it, however odious. And if said figures are antithetical to freedom, enslavement in the name of ideas might just be a tad more attractive than a freedom that denies all ideas, though I doubt those who are excited by the Russian president appreciate the enslavement part. They see the man as the antidote to wokeism, a champion of traditional values, a knight errant fighting the decadent and corrupt West. Some of the more hardline apologists, in fact, will only be too happy to see the demise of the West in its present form, and if the Russian autocrat is the man to speed up the process, then so be it. Those are the useful idiots who are quite happy to be useful.

Stepun wrote that without the one absolute truth, democracies became unmoored, eventually morphing into soulless political systems defined by a “struggle between [various] interests and ideologues who represent their class and party interests.” Were he alive today, Stepun would find the modern context familiar enough. But I imagine even he would be fazed by the idea that a former KGB agent at the helm of a thuggish kleptocratic state could be seen as a crusader for traditional Christian values. Stepun would have agreed with the claim that Ukraine was the cradle of Russian culture, but he would have never agreed that, if lost, it ought to be restored through force. In an almost prophetic article prompted by an encounter with a Russian soldier who had fought under Vlasov (essentially a collaborator), Stepun argued that the concept of “motherland” was spiritual and never legalistic. He wrote that even if Russia became a federation and Ukraine were to leave it, Russians would still have every right to consider Ukraine as their spiritual motherland. But it did not follow that a Ukrainian would consider Moscow as his motherland. One’s motherland comes from one’s soul; it is not an objective externality that can be imposed.

The Russian president believes otherwise and is happy to impose his concept of motherland using tanks and rockets. The man is said to have an avid interest in history, and he must imagine history would redeem him the way it redeemed the great statesmen of the past. Bismarck, for instance, provoked two wars (one of them, with Austria, was known as “Bruderkrieg,” i.e., fraternal war, much like the one now) as he worked to unify Germany. Hundreds of thousands died during the wars, but their names are forgotten. Everyone remembers the Iron Chancellor, though. If Bismarck got a pass, why not the Russian president? But the year is not 1865, and the Russian president is no Bismarck. Apropos of his decision to invade Ukraine, one is tempted to say what Talleyrand or Fouché is supposed to have said after Napoleon had had the duke d’Enghien abducted and executed: it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. A crime against the people of Ukraine, the Russian invasion is also a colossal blunder that will cost Russia dearly in the long run, materially and spiritually.

When Stepun wrote his article about the German Sovietphiles, he saw Bolshevism as the greatest threat the West faced. His fear of the Red Menace would persist even in the years following the Second World War. This might have made him insensitive to other risks. In one of the German letters, he wrote that Hitler had no political future — he would be undone by the impossibility of being everything to everyone and by a Goebbels-led internal opposition. This was written in 1932; a year later, Hitler became chancellor, and Germany was consumed not by Bolshevism but by Nazism. The lesson here is that even the brightest minds can underestimate the real source of danger. The main threat to Western liberalism right now is posed not by the Right but by the Left — or that strand of the Left that has captured the hearts and minds of Western societies, monopolizing public discourse in the name of a tolerance that only its ideologues are qualified to define. Paradoxically, the Left’s relentless paeans to diversity only concern superficialities; the more proclamations it makes in the name of diversity, the less room there is for spiritual and intellectual freedom and the more of a luxury these things become. We seem to be left with a Left that is doing away with liberalism in the name of liberalism, and with a Right that increasingly thinks the liberalism of the Left is all that liberalism has to offer and so the baby can be thrown out along with the bathwater.

To be sure, plenty of people (most?) on the right in the West reject the Russian president and his regime. As for those who are not, there is a key difference between them and Stepun’s Sovietphiles. The German Sovietphiles were willing to act on their ideas. Stepun writes about a young wealthy German woman who went to the Soviet Union and returned a committed communist, giving up her wealth and going to work at a factory as a proud member of the proletariat. Even the young wealthy man advised to renounce his earthly possessions by Jesus didn’t go that far. I doubt many Westerners today would embrace the ideology of the Russian president and upend their lives in its name. This is not only because few in the West would be willing to give up their creature comforts, but because the current Russian president, for all his claims, has no ideology to offer. One of the very few positive things I will ever say about the Soviet experiment is that it galvanized millions and inspired countries around the world. No country would care to emulate the modern Russian state, because it has nothing worth emulating. Many in the Soviet Union wept when Stalin died; I doubt few would sincerely mourn the passing of the Russian president even in Russia. Tens of millions of Russians oppose him and his war. Their situation is doubly insufferable: they are hostages of their regime, which treats them like a fifth column, and they are on the receiving end of the general animus that many outside of Russia currently feel towards all things Russian. But they are Russia’s best hope and need all the support they can get. Sympathy for a president they never got to choose — from countries where some semblance of choice still exists, where human life has value, and where one’s fate is not subject to the caprices of a bellicose mafioso — is a major disservice to them.