Those on ‘Philosopher Jets’ Today Very Different than Those on ‘Philosopher Ships’ a Century Ago, Mitrofanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 4 – Those on Lenin’s “philosopher ships” believed in Russia and its future, stayed within a Russian-language milieu to have influence, and hoped to return once their goals were realized; but those on “philosopher jets” today don’t have similar commitments and don’t expect Russia to become a country they’d like to return to, Georgy Mitrofanov says.

            The church historian who teaches at St. Petersburg’s Spiritual Academy says those leading scholars on the philosopher ships faced a choice: they could integrate in the West or they could remain committed to influencing Russia. Most of them chose the latter course (severreal.org/a/chem-filosofskie-parohody-otlichayutsya-ot-filosofskih-samoletov-/32151030.html).

            They refused to separate themselves from Russia because “having left Russia only because they were forced to, “lived with the hope that this bloody Bolshevik nightmare would end quite quickly and then they or at least their children would have the chance to return to Russia and live in a free country."

            “But their hopes were not realized,” Mitrofanov says. Even more, “one must admit that their inheritance which became widely available in Russia only at the end of the 1980s has mostly not been in demand.” There are exceptions to both these observations: some scholars like Pitirim Sorokin became Western scholars, and some ideologies like Eurasianism did come back.

            What is especially interesting, he continues, is that some members of the first emigration anticipated this, writers like Ivan Ilin and Fyodor Stepun. They believed that with the fall of communism, Russia would seek to build a normal capitalist economy but would fail because it would not have the people it would need to do so.

            “The new Russian capitalists” likely to emerge would “not resemble the European bourgeoisie which created European democracy, a legal state which defended human rights or recall Russian merchants with the moral qualities” that group often displayed before the revolution.

            The differences between that wave of emigration and the current one reflects the intervening degradation of Russian life, the decline in the centrality of humanistic education, and what Russians have learned about their country given the negative selection is leaders have made of those who aspire to come to the top.

            For these reasons, Mitrofanov says, those who have left on “philosopher jets” now are “ready to return if conditions improve, but for the majority of them, what matters most is putting down roots in Western life.” They are deeply disappointed about Russia and have few hopes for its future. As a result, they have separated themselves from it psychologically.

            The negative selection of elites during the soviet period and more recently, he argues, is manifested in the conformism of such people and their acceptance of the camp principle of taking care of themselves instead of being willing to sacrifice for anyone else. “You die today,” they believe; and “I will tomorrow.”