It was Stalin who pointed out that while a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic. He knew what he was talking about: Like Hitler and Mao, he imposed himself on the world’s consciousness by murdering so many people that the moral sense was stupefied. Rather than face the impossible task of sympathizing with all communism’s victims, one at a time, many intellectuals took refuge in Hegelian fatalism. The millions of Russians who died because of the Russian Revolution — in the Civil War, famines, forced collectivization, Cheka prisons, Gulags — were written off by fellow-travelers as a sacrifice demanded by history, so that a better future might be born. One of the major efforts of post-World War II writers, in every genre, has been to reverse Stalin’s equation, to force us to reckon life by life, rather than in deadening plurals.

“Lenin’s Private War” (St. Martin’s, 414 pages, $27.95) by Lesley Chamberlain, is a significant new contribution to this reparative effort. Out of the many millions of Communism’s victims, she focuses on a group of 67 intellectuals, arrested on Lenin’s direct orders on the night of August 16, 1922, and deported to Germany that autumn. They were not all philosophers — they included historians, economists, literary critics, journalists, and mathematicians — and they were not all deported on a single ship; it took two tourist steamers, sailing six weeks apart, to deposit them and their families at the Baltic port of Stettin. But the episode has entered history as “the Philosophy Steamer,” a shorthand for this act of aggression against the Russian intelligentsia.

Why focus on the deportation of a few dozen intellectuals, when the years before and after the voyage of the Philosophy Steamer witnessed so many deaths? Indeed, the men whom Lenin selected for expulsion — the expulsanty, as they were called — could even be considered lucky. If they had stayed in the Soviet Union, they would certainly have died in Stalin’s purges 15 years later. Even in 1922, Lenin’s decision to banish these potential threats to the state, rather than torture, imprison, or kill them, was unusually mild.

The reason Ms. Chamberlain tells their story, then, is not that the Philosophy Steamer stands out as an episode of exceptional cruelty. It is, rather, that she sees in these individual fates an emblem of the fate of Russia under communism. What these thinkers and writers represented, she argues, was a vital tradition of spiritual idealism, inherited from the 19th century, which could have sustained a moral opposition to communism. “Though they could never have identified themselves that way, the 1922 expellees were the first dissidents from Soviet totalitarianism,” Ms. Chamberlain writes. By eliminating them, Lenin cannily eliminated an intellectual threat to the Bolshevik regime; by reclaiming them, Ms. Chamberlain hopes to restore their legacy as well as their memory. Most of the men on the Philosophy Steamer are completely unknown in the West. Perhaps the only name on the list of expulsanty that might be recognized today is Nikolai Berdyaev, the Christian mystical thinker who wrote “The Fate of Man in the Modern World.” He was joined by the Jewish-born Orthodox philosopher Semyon Frank, the humanist literary critic Yuri Aikhenvald, the historian Alexander Kizevetter, and other Russian luminaries.

What they had in common was that, although they dissented from the Bolshevik party line, they were not totally unsympathetic towards the Revolution, at least at first. The very fact that they were in Russia in 1922 meant that they had not fled during the Civil War, along with the White aristocrats and conservatives. Many of them had been vocal opponents of Tsarism. As Ms. Chamberlain writes, “there was hardly a man on Lenin’s expulsion list not marked by the strong Russian Populist tradition of public service which committed him to work for his country as an organizer and teacher.” When the economist Aleksei Peshekhonov was arrested, he asked to be released on the grounds that “I spent time often enough in prisons under the old regime.”

What made the men of the Philosophy Steamer objects of suspicion to Lenin, Ms. Chamberlain argues, was that they represented a “third way” for Russia, between the obstinate old regime and the ruthless new one. She believes that religious idealists such as Berdyaev and Frank were the closest thing Russia could find to genuine liberals. The peculiarities of Russian history meant that the language of secular, rights-based liberalism could never find purchase there. The legacy of the Enlightenment was hijacked, instead, by revolutionary Marxists, whose atheism and materialism carried certain Western tendencies to a nihilistic extreme. This helps to explain why Lenin could appear, to Western sympathizers, like the heir to Voltaire and Madison: He, too, was out to emancipate his people from an obscurantist, priest-ridden, feudal regime.

But Ms. Chamberlain — whose previous book, “Motherland,” was a history of Russian philosophy — insists that it is a mistake to view Russian religion through Western categories. Men like Berdyaev, she argues, were not religious reactionaries, but liberal idealists, who used the language of Orthodox Christianity to defend freedom of conscience. “They were closet liberals,” she writes, “who shared a quest for social justice with Marxism,” but who feared Marxism’s totalitarian potential: “The importance of transcendent moral values made them Christian rather than secular socialists.” Ms Chamberlain acknowledges that this sort of religious idealism was powerless against Marxist materialism, when it came to organizing society and claiming political power. The men on the Philosophy Steamer were “martyr[s] to the great truth about Russian history, that political effectiveness was not to be gained by moral means.” But she clearly sympathizes with their view that political freedom cannot survive unless it is hedged round with moral absolutes.

This intellectual argument is the most lively and provocative strand in “Lenin’s Private War.” At the same time, Ms. Chamberlain combs the archives to show exactly how the Soviet bureaucracy seized on its victims, and what happened to them after they disembarked from the Philosophy Steamer. The year 1922 marked an illusory thaw in Soviet Russia, as the austerity of the Civil War period gave way to the economic liberalization of the New Economic Policy, or NEP. But the other face of what Ms. Chamberlain calls the “Janus year” was a new crackdown on political dissent. In typical Soviet style, the change of line was signaled in a letter Lenin wrote to a Party journal, in which he denounced moderate intellectuals as “advocates of serfdom, reactionaries and graduate flunkeys of the popery.” Even after Lenin suffered the first of his strokes, he continued to pester Stalin with detailed instructions for the Philosophy Steamer: “All of them must be chucked out of Russia. It should be done all at once … and with no explanation of motives — leave, gentlemen!” As Ms. Chamberlain shows, this kind of brutal, hectoring sarcasm was typical of the way the Soviet “new man” approached civilized humanism.

After the expulsanty arrive in Germany, in the fall of 1922, Ms. Chamberlain broadens her focus to the whole of “Russia Abroad,” that ghost nation whose capitals were Berlin, Paris, and Prague. This allows her to write about exiles such as Roman Jakobson, the pioneering literary theorist, and Vladimir Nabokov, who were not actually part of the Philosophy Steamer group, but who are better known in the West. Drawing on fictional and autobiographical accounts, she shows how the émigrés tried to sustain the best traditions of Russian culture, even as they succumbed to infighting and ossification. Only a few of them managed to break out of “Russia Abroad” and take part in the life of their new countries.

Each of the strands in “Lenin’s Private War” is fascinating, and together they make for an important book. Ms. Chamberlain shows that the losers of history — the powerless intellectuals whom Lenin swept aside with the stroke of a pen — can have more to teach us than the winners. She reminds us that the cost of communism is measured not just in lives lost, but in ideas forgotten and possibilities foreclosed. The reader is left with only one wish: that Ms. Chamberlain were a better writer, less given to solecisms, unintentional ambiguities, unclear references, and narrative disorganization. Unfortunately, the person best qualified to tell a story isn’t always the best storyteller.

akirsch@nysun.com