In 1909 a book of essays appeared in Russia under the title Landmarks. The contributors included the religious philosophers Nikolai Berdyayev, Sergei Bulgakov and Semyon Frank, the legal theorist, B. A. Kistyakovsky, the literary critic M. Gershenzon and the eminent economist, publicist, and liberal politician Peter Struve.
All of these men, well-known at the time, had grown up under the populist and Marxist-dominated trends then fashionable among the Russian intelligentsia — and all had turned against this tide. Berdyayev and Bulgakov were ex-Marxists. Struve had written the founding manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1898.
In Landmarks, however, all the authors rejected the Marxism of the intelligentsia and called for a regeneration of Christian oriented culture.
Their arguments in favor of such a renewal created shock, anger, and outrage in liberal and Marxist circles. As we today know so well, these are circles that will not endure dissent. At the time, Lenin called Landmarks “an encyclopedia of liberal apostasy.” When the Bolsheviks seized power from the Social Democrats in 1917, Landmarks was immediately placed on the forbidden list.
The horror that is Communism did not envelop all Russia immediately, however. In 1918, the authors of the Landmarks articles, now joined by some others, published a second book in Moscow under the title De Profundis (From the Depths).
In this second volume, the authors of Landmarks, joined by some others, spoke of the October Revolution as “the inevitable consequences of the intelligentsia’s thirst for revolution.” As Berdyayev put it in his contribution, Russia had now been seized by evil spirits like those in Gogol’s nightmarish tales, or by the “possessed” of Dostoyevski’s prophetic imagination. “It was not simply a change of regime, but a spiritual disaster, a self-willed descent into the abyss.” (from Under the Rubble, p. VII).
De Profundis was confiscated and banned at once. Only two copies survived in the West, unknown and unobtainable until 1967. One came to the attention of Solzhenitsyn, who — after his exile — subsidized the publication of a new series of articles by Soviet dissidents, under the title of From Under the Rubble, — a phonetic echo of the Russian for De Profundis (Little, Brown, 1974).
As befits a nation where Svetlana Stalin’s picture, adorned with a mustache, appeared on the cover of Esquire magazine, and a nation where Solzhenitsyn’s warnings have created great resentment among liberals, From Under the Rubble received only token attention. We have not yet reached the stage where works with a spiritual purpose are banned, but we have long since passed the stage where such works are treated with respect.
What is remarkable about Landmarks, is not only the prescience of its authors, and the accuracy of their forecasts, but the fact that literally thousands of scholars poring over the pre-revolutionary literature of Russia managed to overlook its accuracy, and to ignore its remarkable foresight. No notice is taken of it in the celebrated writings of Isaiah Berlin, by Isaac Deutcher, or by countless others.
Instead, these individuals admire the historical vision of Lenin, who only a few weeks before the February 1917 rising, wrote to some workers in Zurich that “such a revolution could not succeed in Russia, the most bourgeois-minded country in Europe” (From Under the Rubble, p. 281).
Of course, selectivity in writing history has now grown into the rule rather than the exception. It would be naïve to expect admirers of catastrophe to point out its defects.
But it is truly remarkable that religious groups, both Jewish and Christian, should so signally overlook the spiritual catastrophe of old Russia and the relatively new USSR — and its history.
Over 300,000 Orthodox clerics were murdered by the Bolsheviks, and those who today recall these statistics and martyrs are largely restricted to White Russian circles of aging émigrés. The National Council of Churches, which bleeds so ostentatiously for the “liberation forces” and terrorists of Africa and Central America, have yet to organize even a memorial service for their coreligionists in the “Worker’s Paradise.”
Religious scholars have not, so far as I know, devoted much effort to acquainting congregations and church hierarchies with the specifics of Communist and Socialist antireligious activities. From Under the Rubble, which updates the situation, is not now extolled from pulpits, so far as I know, nor is it included among stacks of worthy reading for mainstream congregations in the West.
Yet From Under the Rubble warns, it points out, it compares, it points a finger toward the path upon which we are unwittingly embarked — and it makes its case by calling attention to not only Landmarks, but to what has happened since, which proves — beyond question — the arguments made by Landmarks.
From here