Atlantic Books The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia By Lesley Chamberlain Atlantic Books 416 pages. 25 pounds

The persecution of free-spirited intellectuals and artists in the Soviet era has become, in many respects, a familiar tale. Numberless novels and memoirs have described, in nightmarish detail, the varied forms of coercion and punishment it adopted -- whether in Josef Stalin's prison camps or Leonid Brezhnev's psychiatric hospitals, through public shaming or private harassment. Yet there is an episode in this chronicle which is less widely known, even though it occurred at the very beginning. With her new book, "The Philosophy Steamer," Lesley Chamberlain makes an irrefutable case for its significance in the intellectual history of 20th-century Europe.

In the autumn of 1922, the Haken and the Preussen, two modestly sized ships equipped with every amenity, cast off from Petrograd for Germany bearing an improbable cargo of some 60 philosophers, historians, theologians and economists, together with their wives and families. These expulsions marked the climax of a campaign, carried through by Vladimir Lenin himself with obsessive determination (even in the face of his own infirmity), to cleanse Soviet Russia of leading members of the old intelligentsia who had long been voicing their criticisms of Marxism and Bolshevism in the press. The deportees were largely university professors, men of limited political clout in the new social order. But to Lenin, they were anathema: They were, he thought, bourgeois, and they tended to believe in God. He execrated them in a letter to Maxim Gorky as "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." By the logic of Bolshevism, with its cult of atheist rationalism, these spiritually inclined thinkers were the new society's madmen; the boats on which they sailed were its ships of fools. In the minds of the passengers, however, it was Lenin himself who was beyond understanding. "What have they expelled us for?" asked Boris Odintsov, an agronomist and former aristocrat. "What is it? Stupidity or fright?" Chamberlain's account suggests that the answer must be sought, above all, in Lenin's limitless suspicion toward his own class (the intelligentsia), a paranoia which set a fateful pattern in Soviet leadership.

Nevertheless, the expulsions were, as Chamberlain notes, "a relatively mild act in vicious times." The professors might have been executed (as the poet Nikolai Gumilyov had been in 1921, along with 60 others charged with anti-Bolshevik conspiracy). Lenin, she posits, was cautious of a Western backlash, and may also have wished to show some restraint to his own class. This relative clemency is perhaps one reason why the expulsions are not better known. Yet, as Chamberlain discusses with subtlety and depth, the events expressed a less tangible catastrophe -- the tragedy of a culture unable to reconcile its conflicting urges toward reason and faith, toward secular justice and spiritual truth; and of a culture quite prepared to sacrifice the values it most needed, of humanity and ethical awareness, to ensure the victory of dogma. Of course, many brilliant intellectuals remained in Soviet Russia, and briefly flourished in the 1920s before Stalinism hit its stride. But the history of the deportations reveals, with particular clarity, the internal conflicts that plagued Russia's past and that would recur, with more brutal consequences, in the future.

Itar-Tass Chamberlain's book suggests that Lenin's distrust of his own class, the intelligentsia, lay behind his decision to expel dozens of scholars and religious thinkers in late 1922.

As for the deportees themselves, they got by, more or less, in the great centers of the Russian emigration -- Berlin, Prague and Paris. They were helped by their hosts (notably, the Czech president Tomas Masaryk) and they helped one another. The anguish of permanent exile was compensated to some degree by the opportunity to exploit the wealth of learning and culture which they brought with them and shared with fellow emigres. A few, notably the free-thinking religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, attained major international reputations that might otherwise have eluded them. Others continued to work quietly in their chosen disciplines and reduced circumstances. Chamberlain's wandering eye alights, at irregular intervals, on their understated and largely uncelebrated achievements, such as Boris Vysheslavtsev's perceptive reflections on the Russian mind and the flaws of Marxism, or the "principled impressionism" of the literary critic Yuly Aikhenvald, who was much admired by Vladimir Nabokov. The deportees were a disparate group (some even retained pro-Soviet sympathies), but the majority shared roots in Christian interpretations of the value of freedom and of the individual. They cultivated, according to Chamberlain, "what would become after the 1939-45 war the politics of human rights, but they did so in a religious rather than a legal framework." The most important among them, she argues, "should be appreciated and criticized alongside Weil, Buber and Levinas -- religious thinkers who worked on the margins of philosophy."

Chamberlain is not the only writer in recent years to have addressed the 1922 expulsions; indeed, her title alludes to an important source, Mikhail Glavatsky's recent history in Russian on the same topic. Her approach, however, is thoroughly individual, both in method and scope (the second half of the book is entirely devoted to life in emigration). Throughout, Chamberlain steers a highly unpredictable course between history, biography and philosophy. In her previous book, "Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia," a similarly fluid and fragmentary approach proved ill-suited, in some important respects, to the scale of the subject. In "The Philosophy Steamer," it works superbly, being tied to a well-structured central narrative that has been comprehensively and imaginatively researched. Chamberlain makes particularly good use of a wide array of memoirs, allowing us to feel, at very close quarters, the mixture of astonishment, irony and, finally, dignified resignation with which the deportees faced their interrogators and their punishment. In the second half of the book, by contrast, the narrative evokes a sense of distance from individual lives, as if mirroring the alienation experienced by the deportees themselves.

A further unpredictable element is the presence of the author herself, now retreating behind the mask of historian or novelist, now engaging openly in polemics and evaluations. A few years ago the novelist Viktor Yerofeyev wrote, with a characteristic show of philistinism, that his first reaction to reading any work by a foreigner on Russian culture was to ask: What does he or she want from us? Chamberlain's personal approach in "The Philosophy Steamer" makes such questions productive, prompting the reader to explore the paradox of why Russian religious philosophy should hold such fascination for its English chronicler, a self-avowed secularist steeped in Nietzsche and Freud. Chamberlain gives no final answers, but neither does she hide her ambivalence toward her subjects, admiring their moral integrity on the one hand and sharing Lenin's skepticism toward their "mysticism" on the other. She cannot accept their faith, yet she is also critical of their philosophical adversaries, be they Marxist-Leninist materialism or the mainstream of 20th-century Western thought, with its "atheist, rational and anti-inward course in pursuit of the good society." "There is a need for guidance," she concedes, somewhat surprisingly, "from a source outside ourselves"; yet "all secular guidance ... is open to manipulation." The unresolved tensions inherent in Chamberlain's own outlook add one further subplot to an already fascinating book.

Oliver Ready is completing his doctoral thesis at Oxford on aspects of Russian prose since the 1960s.