‘You’ve been reading too much Kropotkin, Kolya.’
‘Even Kropotkin calls on “history” as a model. History will destroy every one of us, Dimka. Soon there will be no more history at all! Analysis, that might have saved us. The basis of all modern science, eh? Analysis, Dimka, not projections. You’re prone to project, as you know, when you get excited - ‘
‘What! I’m a pure scientist.’ I realised he was probably joking.
‘Marx, Kropotkin, Engels, Proudhon, Tolstoi - all use precedent and so they are completely unscientific. Kropotkin might be the most scientific. He has the proper training. But the radical young already treat him as some sort of Old Testament prophet, quoting his words rather than applying his methods. Is that all we are to have? Substitutes for past orthodoxies? Is the language of science to replace the language of religion and become a meaningless litany in support of authority?’
‘There are already such narrow-minded scientists,’ I agreed. ‘But there are others, as there will always be, who oppose them, who are constantly, as am I, generating new theories, new analyses.’
‘And they are accepted?’
‘Eventually. I’m staking my life on it.’
‘Eventually? When their words have been incorporated into the litany.’
‘Science is less subject to decadence. It thrives upon change. But is it a better world in which nothing is considered worthwhile if it’s more than a day or two old?’
‘It could not be more boring.’
But I was to live to see such a world during the days of the swinging sixties in Portobello Road, when the very ideas of Science became mere fads discussed for a few days in rubbishy papers and then dropped. At least in Russia people still respect the past. Science itself cannot cure the world’s ills. Did Aristotle manage to stop Alexander the Great laying waste to Persia? Did Voltaire restrain Catherine the Great’s reign of terror? I have done many positive things in my life, but many of my actions have been perverted or misused or at best misinterpreted. This was to be the complaint of another great Russian thinker. Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. He was a celebrity when I met him in Petrograd in the company of his ‘clan’. He was a life-long opponent of Bolshevism. He spent all his years, all his fortune, in an effort to stem the tide of ‘democracy’, ‘republicanism’ and ‘socialism’ sweeping across the world. He argued that Rasputin, for all his faults, gave better advice than many of the Tsar’s ministers. Rasputin at least understood there were higher worlds than the world which was then bent on destroying so much of value. I visited a house in Triotskaya Street, near the Nevski, one evening. Kolya wanted me to meet Gurdjieff’s most devoted follower, the journalist Ouspenski, who was at that time in the army. Gurdjieff, of course, was more concerned with the world of the soul than the world of material reality, but for a while, with a number of other intellectuals, I was impressed by him. Eventually I returned to the Orthodox Faith, which offers much the same as he offered and, if I may say so, asks a rather lower cash price. The price for a series of lectures from Gurdjieff, even then, was about a thousand roubles.
In the years between the wars Gurdjieff’s philosophy would attract many brilliant people who rightly saw it as a substitute for the current political creeds and fads. For a time a number of important politicians, too, were attracted to it. The world might have been a very different place today if Gurdjieff’s teachings had taken deeper root in the minds, say, of Hitler and Goering. Gurdjieff should have stayed on in Petrograd instead of returning to Tiflis in 1917. He might have changed the whole course of Russian history. He was a noble opponent of anarchism and socialism. He recognised them as a poor substitute for true mystical experience. Yet I saw him argue fluently with committed Bolsheviks and seem to be agreeing with them. But this was his way of turning their own logic against them to win them round.
In those months before the Tsar’s abdication, the streets became even worse. The broad pavements were dirtier and more depressing. Peter was a city of death and desolation. The war reports suggested tremendous advances until in early December, just before I was due to undergo my examinations, came the news of the taking of Bucharest. Rumania had capitulated. We had lost an ally overnight. Even more wounded filled the city. France and England were rumoured to be preparing to ally themselves with Germany against Russia. Even I, obsessed with my dissertation, could not ignore the fact that we were in great danger.
