The idea of Russian intellectuals opposing radical ideology in the name of religious tradition was still quite novel in 1902, and it is no surprise that these apostates from radicalism made slow headway against the prevailing trends. The Vologda discussions of 1902-1903 manifested the broader confluence of Marxism and modernism in Russian intellectual culture. The politics of the new religious consciousness resembled the "political romanticism" defined by Carl Schmitt, dwelling on antitheses in the phenomenal realm only as "occasions" for the manifestation of some third, absolute power, in which "the concrete antithesis and heterogeneity disappear". The revolutionary convergence between idealists and realists was the difference that quickly emerged between St. Petersburg and Moscow beginning in 1905. Across the ideological spectrum one encounters faith in the untapped potential of human imagination. As a result, intellectual culture in Russia overlapped with the development of a modern image culture.