Christian Political Philosophy in Exile – Between Sobornost’ and Theocracy

Abstract

Is Russian political philosophy done by Russians, in Russian, and in Russia? Philosophers and other intellectuals who had ended up in Western Europe after their involuntary emigration from Soviet Russia in 1922, managed to set up institutions, to found journals, and, in cases like Nikolai Berdiaev or Semën Frank, to become part of West European philosophical culture. Many of them, however, retained their focus either on a Russia that they hoped would one day be liberated from Soviet oppression or, like m. Maria (Skobtsova), now St Mary of Paris, tried to work in and for the diaspora. This chapter highlights those thinkers who, in different ways, can be identified as part of so-called Russian religious philosophy. For them, opposition to the atheist Bolshevik regime which many of them identified as the Antichrist was self-evident. Some developed a social and political philosophy that included elements of a socialist agenda. The political-philosophical potential of their notion of sobornost’ [communality] has not been exhausted yet. Others, like Ivan Il’in, moved close to fascism in their attempt to restore a tsarist monarchy.