History: Inside every revolutionary, wrote Flaubert, there is a policeman. One certainly didn't have to look very far inside in the case of the 20th century's most influential revolutionary, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Having grabbed power in October 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, as a small political minority in Russia, faced the immediate problem of retaining it and defending their concept of the revolution in the face of their many enemies, both internal and external.
This they did primarily by military means in the four-year civil war that ended in 1922, but also by the creation of a powerful new secret police force, the Cheka, headed by the Polish aristocrat, Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Having defeated his military enemies and neutralised his political ones Lenin then switched to the ideological front. In autumn 1922, more than 60 distinguished writers, philosophers, economists, agronomists and university teachers were deported, together with their families, on two German ships, the Oberbürgermeister Haken and the Preussen, sailing from Petrograd (St Petersburg). Though they would later be represented as thoroughgoing reactionaries, the deportees were in fact a mixed bunch politically, comprising conservatives and liberals as well as left-leaning intellectuals and sympathisers of the peasant Socialist Revolutionaries. Few of them had been sympathetic to Tsarist autocracy. They were, however, mostly Christians, informed by the Russian tradition of semi-mystical philosophical idealism, and as such particularly abhorrent to the ruthlessly materialist Lenin, who was, as usual, blunt in his contempt, speaking of "the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they're the brains of the nation. In fact they're not the brains, they're the shit".
Banished from Russia, the intellectual émigrés settled in various central and western European capitals, chiefly in Berlin, Prague and Paris, where they sought to maintain their national identity and keep alive the memory of Russian culture through newspapers and periodicals, printing presses, educational institutes and charitable foundations. The material pressures on many were acute, necessitating humiliating requests for charity or visits to the pawnshop.
"I am living like the moth," one down-at-heel exile confessed. "Today I eat my trousers, tomorrow my jacket."
Russian idealist philosophy derived from religious thought and centred on the notion of the "person" (a slightly different concept from western liberalism's "individual"). The idea of the person, Lesley Chamberlain writes, was designed to safeguard the dignity and integrity of individual souls; a person's moral and spiritual autonomy should not be encroached upon by the state, but a person should also confront, through engaging with his conscience, his duties to others.
The individual or personal conscience was thus the only proper site for the workings of morality. Those who instrumentalised morality from a position of power were simply hypocrites.
"Marxism," wrote Boris Vysheslavtsev, "moralizes in its exposure of 'exploitation', while simultaneously being immoral in its social and political practice. Moral protest makes its appearance in order to provide a basis for and justify hatred, only to vanish again so as not to interfere with the workings of that hatred."
Vysheslavtsev would undoubtedly have agreed with Dostoevesky's maxim that without God everything is permissible. Russian idealists found it impossible to conceive of a morality without the support of Christian belief. As Chamberlain points out, this can be difficult to grasp for those coming from the western tradition, where there is a long and respectable line of atheistic or agnostic moral speculation. Some westerners might also point out that even with God much has been permissible that should not have been: wars and genocides have been prosecuted by Christian and Muslim generals and murderous imperialist exploits praised by Christian statesmen and blessed by bishops.
Not all of the cruelties of the 20th century were perpetrated by atheistic communists and national socialists.
Few of the exiled philosophers celebrated by Chamberlain have ever been well-known outside Russia, although Nikolai Berdyaev is a partial exception.
Many of the figures on the fringe of the emigration are, however, more familiar, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the novelists Nina Berberova and Vladimir Nabokov, the literary theorist and precursor of structuralism Roman Jakobson, who said he spoke 12 languages, "all of them in Russian". Russian idealism, and the notion of Russian exceptionalism from the ways of the "materialist" West, have been undergoing something of a revival in the home market since the collapse of communism, and as Chamberlain admits, this is a development that is "not undangerous".
Those who want to read more about the Russian philosophical tradition should turn to Chamberlain's 2004 study, Motherland. The present volume is an historical and biographical account of some of the main figures in the 20th-century tradition and is aimed, apart perhaps from a slightly demanding final chapter, at a more general reader. These warm, large-souled and generous philosophers were the voices Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev were determined to consign to "the dustbin of history". Chamberlain's engaging, wise and balanced study does an excellent job of retrieving them, sprucing them up and preserving them for posterity.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist
The Philosophy Steamer By Lesley Chamberlain Atlantic, 414pp. £25