Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov

Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov, probably in the 1890s

Lev Alexandrowitsch Tichomirow ( Russian Лев Александрович Тихомиров ; born January 19, 1852 in Gelendzhik , † October 10, 1923 in Sergiev Posad ) was a Russian revolutionary of the Narodnik terrorist wing and was a member of the executive committee. After breaking away from the ideas of violent revolution, he became one of the leading conservative thinkers in Russia . He wrote several books on the Russian monarchy, Orthodox belief, and political philosophy in Russia.

Education and political activity

Tikhomirov as a young man

As the son of a military doctor and a graduate of the Institute for the Education of Major Daughters , he attended high school in Kerch . From 1872 he studied at the Medical Faculty of Moscow University . Although he was brought up conservatively, he was influenced by the revolutionary ideas of the Narodniki. As he engaged in political agitation among the workers, he was imprisoned in connection with the 193 trial in 1873 and sentenced to four years in prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg . In 1878 he became a member of the Narodniki Land and Freedom Organization , where he held a leading position on the Executive Committee. He was also involved in the publication of the organization's magazine. In 1879 he joined the conspiratorial and radical association Narodnaja Wolja (German: Volkswille).

In 1883, after the Narodnaja Volja was banned, he emigrated to Switzerland and then traveled to France. There he described his thoughts on the situation in Russia in 1886:

From now on our only hope is Russia and the Russian people. We have nothing to expect from the revolutionaries […] With this in mind, I began to rearrange my life. I must justify it for my service to Russia, under the conditions of my conscience, regardless of any party programs.

In Paris in 1888 he distanced himself from his earlier revolutionary convictions and published the book in 1888, Tikhomirov publicly repented of his revolutionary activities, publishing his book Why I gave up being a revolutionary (Russian: Pochemu ja perestal but revoljutsionerom). Then he addressed to the Tsar Alexander III. a petition to return to Russia, which he was granted in 1889.

Looking back at his previous life, he wrote in his memoir:

I hated my youth. It is filled with passionate desires of a corrupt heart, full of impurity, a stupid arrogance, an arrogance of a person who recognizes his possibilities, who was ripe to think analytically or independently. I began to love my life from the moment (in my final years in Paris) when I became mature and liberated […] to understand the meaning of life and when I began to search for God

Conservative monarchist

After returning from exile, he became one of the leading conservative monarchists in Russia. He published numerous articles in the journals Moskowskije Vedomosti , Novoje wremja and Russkoje Obosrenije . In 1917 he moved to Sagorsk and withdrew from politics.

Publications

In his writings he criticized liberal democracy , for example in the publication Liberals und Terroristen (1890) and in the publication Liberals und Sozial Demokratie (1896). He attacked democratic institutions that were ruled by party intrigue and excessive individualism . He advocated a Russian alternative to the democratic idea:

We must look for other ways by understanding the decisive truth that is now being revealed through the negative experiences of the New Age : that organization of a society is only possible by maintaining spiritual equilibrium in every person. And this spiritual balance is only possible by living a life in religious thoughts.

In 1905 he published his largest work, the four-volume edition of On Monarchist State , which soon became the ideological basis of the monarchist movement in Russia. In it he explained the existence of authority as the fundamental regulating power in society. The nature of authority - democratic, aristocratic or monarchistic - is the root of the moral and psychological state of society. He wrote:

If a powerful moral ideal exists in a society - an ideal that requires voluntary obedience and service to one another, then it leads to monarchy because the existence of that ideal does not require physical power (democracy) or the rule of an elite ( aristocracy ) . All of this necessarily emerges as an ongoing expression of this moral ideal. The greatest mediator of this expression is a personality in a position of complete independence from all external political forces

In 1909 he became editor of the state-owned monarchist newspaper Moskovskije Vedomosti . After the interior minister stopped paying for the newspaper in 1913, he resigned as editor. He then wrote his second largest work entitled On the Religious and Philosophical Foundations of History .

In it he argues that history is determined by two competing points of view in the world: the dual and the monistic . The dualistic recognizes the existence of God and that the world was created by God. The monistic asserts that the world has always existed by itself. In his writing he showed the traces in the whole story of the struggle between these two views, which will end in an apocalypse .

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he worked as a school secretary in Sergiev Posad, where he died in 1923.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heinrich E. Schulz et al., Who Was Who in the USSR ?, Metuchen 1972, p. 540
2. ^ LA Tichomirow Memoirs , Moscow 1927 (Russian)
3. ↑ LA Tichomirow, Journals
4. ↑ Heinrich E. Schulz et al., Ibid
5. ^ LA Tichomirow, "Liberal and Social Democracy", Moscow, 1896
6. ^ LA Tichomirow, About the monarchist state