The Red Czar

This chapter explores Leontiev's remarkably prescient thoughts of the events of 1941–1945 in Russia. Leontiev's hope for the twentieth century was that it should abandon the prevailing doctrine of rational utilitarianism and find salvation in a new mysticism. Moreover, his sense of the precariousness and instability of nineteenth-century industrial civilization led naturally to the prediction that it would perish in the conflagration of a general war fought with the weapons of modern science. His Letters of an Anchorite set out a chillingly detailed and prescient scenario for the outbreak of such a conflict, presenting a vision that closely anticipated the actual events of 1914. Indeed, Konstantin Nikolaevic Leontiev had predicted as early as 1880 that the “feudalism of the future” would be predicated on “constant refined dread, constant unrelieved pressure of conscience, discipline and the will of the superiors.”