This dramatic event in our history is reminded today of a modest granite obelisk erected near the Blagoveshchensky bridge in St. Petersburg. On it there is a laconic inscription: "Outstanding figures of Russian philosophy, culture and science went to forced emigration from this embankment in the fall of 1922".
In this very place there was a steamer "Ober-Burgomaster Hagen", which would later be called "philosophical."
More precisely, there were two such ships: "Ober-Burgomaster Hagen" left Petrograd at the end of September 1922, the second - "Prussia" - in November of the same year. They brought more than 160 people to Germany - professors, teachers, writers, doctors, engineers. Among them were such brilliant minds and talents as Berdyaev, Ilyin, Trubetskoy, Vysheslavtsev, Zvorykin, Frank, Lossky, Karsavin and many others, the flower of the nation. They were also sent by trains, steamers from Odessa and Sevastopol. "Let's cleanse Russia for a long time!" Ilyich rubbed his hands contentedly, on whose personal order this unprecedented action was undertaken.
The expulsion was of a rude, demonstratively humiliating character: it was allowed to take with you only two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, a jacket, trousers, a coat, a hat and two pairs of shoes per person; all the money and other property, and most importantly the books and archives of the deported were confiscated. The artist Yuri Annenkov recalled: “There were about ten people seeing off, no more … We were not allowed on the ship. We were standing on the embankment. When the steamer departed, those leaving were already invisibly sitting in their cabins. It was not possible to say goodbye …"
On the ship - it was German - the exiles were given the "Golden Book", which was kept on it, - for memorable records of eminent passengers. It was decorated with a drawing by Fyodor Chaliapin, who left Russia a little earlier: the great singer portrayed himself naked, from the back, crossing the sea ford. The inscription said that the whole world was his home.
The participants of the first voyage recalled that a bird had been sitting on the mast all the time. The captain pointed at her to the exiles and said: “I don’t remember that. This is an extraordinary sign!"
The expulsion operation was entrusted to the GPU, which compiled lists of exiles.
Trotsky, with his characteristic cynicism, explained it this way: "We expelled these people because there was no reason to shoot them, and it was impossible to endure." The main goal of the Bolsheviks was to intimidate the intelligentsia, to silence it. But we must admit that those who left were still lucky. Later, all dissenters, including the most famous people in Russia, were ruthlessly shot or sent to camps.
The majority of the Russian intelligentsia did not accept the revolution, as they realized that a violent coup would turn into a tragedy for the country. That is why it constituted a threat to the Bolsheviks who seized power by violence. For this reason, Lenin decided to liquidate the intelligentsia by first deportations and then merciless repression and purges. M. Gorky - "the petrel of the revolution" was severely disappointed. He wrote in Novaya Zhizn: “From now on, even for the most naive simpleton it becomes clear that not only some courage and revolutionary dignity, but even the most elementary honesty in relation to the policy of the People's Commissars is out of the question. Before us is a company of adventurers who, for the sake of their own interests, for the sake of delaying a few more weeks, the agony of their dying autocracy, are ready for the most shameful betrayal of the interests of the motherland and the revolution, the interests of the Russian proletariat, in whose name they are rampaging on the vacant throne of the Romanovs."
In the 1920s, intellectuals who did not accept the Bolshevik regime fell under the heavy pressure of censorship, and all opposition newspapers were closed. Philosophical articles written from non-Marxist or religious positions were not subject to publication. The main blow fell on fiction, according to the orders of the authorities, books were not only not published, but were withdrawn from libraries. Bunin, Leskov, Lev Tolstoy, Dostoevsky disappeared from the shelves …
The intelligentsia of Russia had already become very small in number by 1923, it accounted for about 5% of the urban population, so the intellectual capabilities and potential of the state weakened. Children of the intelligentsia were not admitted to universities, workers' schools were created for the workers. Russia has lost a huge number of thinking and educated people. ON Mikhailov wrote: "The revolution tore away from Russia, from the Russian soil, tore from the heart of Russia the most prominent writers, bled blood, impoverished the Russian intelligentsia" …
Russian Atlantis
Igor Sikorsky, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, built the world's first helicopter in the United States, Russian engineers Mikhail Strukov, Alexander Kartveli, Alexander Prokofiev-Seversky actually created American military aviation, engineer Vladimir Zvorykin invented television in the United States, chemist Vladimir Ipatiev created high-octane gasoline, thanks to why during the war American and German planes flew faster than Russians, Alexander Ponyatov invented the world's first video recorder, Vladimir Yurkevich designed the world's largest passenger liner Normandy in France, Professor Pitirim Sorokin became the creator of American sociology overseas, Mikhail Chekhov, a genius actor of the Moscow Art Theater - the founder of the American psychological theater, Vladimir Nabokov - a famous writer, and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky in the United States is considered the American genius of music. The names of all the geniuses and talents lost by Russia are simply impossible to enumerate.
Due to the catastrophe of 1917 and the dramatic events of the following years, a total of about 10 million Russian people turned out to be abroad.
Some were expelled, others fled, fleeing prisons and executions. The color of the nation, the pride of Russia, the whole lost Atlantis. The names of these Russian geniuses and talents, our involuntary "gift" to other countries and continents, were hidden from us for many years in the USSR, they were called "renegades", and few people in our country still know about some of them.
To this terrible tragedy of the loss of the best minds and talents was added another one, the consequences of which we still feel. In our country, there was a rout, a "genocide of minds", the deliberate destruction of the Russian intelligentsia, its place in universities, scientific institutes, in design bureaus, in art was taken by other people. The destruction of the continuity of traditions of honor, nobility, high ideals of faithful service to the Fatherland and the people, which has always been a hallmark of the Russian creative intelligentsia, which has developed in Russia for centuries, has occurred.
But in reality he does not like Russia, openly despises our history and people, and at the first opportunity seeks to leave for the West.