ABSTRACT
In spite of the great difference between the two parties of intelligentsia radicalism—the old populists and the new Marxists—they had in common certain immovable tenets, among which were agnosticism and the subordination of all human values to the ends of social progress and political revolution. Among the conservative and Slavophil sections of the educated classes, the supremacy of political and social over all other values was also the rule, and Christian orthodoxy was valued as a justification of political theories rather than for its own sake. Between atheism and progress, on the one hand, and religion and political reaction, on the other, the alliance was complete. To dissolve these alliances, and to undermine the supremacy of political over cultural and individual values, was the task of the generation of intellectuals who came of age in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The first of these two developments culminated in the theories of the Christian liberals who edited the Landmarks (1909) and in the various forms of mystical revolutionism of Merezhkóvsky to the socialist messianism of Ivánov-Razúmnik. All these movements, however, retain the other salient feature of the old intelligentsia-ism: they tend to identify (perhaps a little less crudely than their predecessors) moral good with public utility, with a marked predominance of the latter over the former.
