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The Origin of
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A4 7

t
r
THE ORIGIN OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM

s
r
 By the same author
TRUTH AND REVELATION

THE BEGINNING AND THE END

DREAM AND REALITY

THE DIVINE AND THE HUMAN

TOWARDS A NEW EPOCH

THE RUSSIAN IDEA

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

SPIRIT AND REALITY

SOLITUDE AND SOCIETY

THE DESTINY OF MAN

THE MEANING OF HISTORY

FREEDOM AND THE SPIRIT

 NICOLAS BERDYAEV

THE ORIGIN OF
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM

GEOFFREY BLES
LONDON
 Printed in Great Britain by
Lowe & Brydonc (Printers) Ltd.
for the publishers Geoffrey Bles Ltd
52 Doughty Street London WCi
First Published 1937

New Edition 1948

Reprinted 1955

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY

R. M. FRENCH
 CONTENTS

Introduction.—The Russian Idea of Religion

and the Russian State 7

I. The Formation of the Russian Intelligentsia and

its Character. Slavophilism and Westerniza¬
tion 19

II. Russian Socialism and Nihilism 37

III. Russian Narodtiichestvo and Anarchism 58

IV. Russian Nineteenth Century Literature and its

Predictions 76

V. Classical Marxism and Russian Marxism 94

VI. Russian Communism and the Revolution 114

VII. Communism and Christianity 158

Author’s Notes 189

 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/originofrussianc0000unse_z0f6
 INTRODUCTION
THE RUSSIAN IDEA OF RELIGION AND
THE RUSSIAN STATE
I

R ussian Communism is difficult to understand on account of

k. its twofold nature. On the one hand it is international and a
world phenomenon; on the other hand it is national and Russian.
It is particularly important for Western minds to understand the
national roots of Russian Communism and the fact that it was
Russian history which determined its limits and shaped its charac¬
ter. A knowledge of Marxism will not help in this. The Russian
people in their spiritual make-up are an Eastern people. Russia is
the Christian East, which was for two centuries subject to the
powerful influences of the West, and whose cultured classes
assimilated every Western idea. The fate of the Russian people in
history has been an unhappy one and full of suffering. It has
developed at a catastrophic tempo through interruption and
change in its type of civilization.
In spite of the opinion of the Slavophils it is impossible to find
an organic unity in Russian history. The Russians held sway over
too vast an expanse of territory—the danger from the East, from
the Tartar invasions (from which it protected the West as well),
was too great. And the danger from the West itself was also great.
We distinguish five different Russias in history: the Russia
dominated by Kiev, the Russia of the Tartar period, the Russia of
the Moscow period, the imperial Russia of Peter and finally the
new Soviet Russia. It would not be true to say that Russia is a land
of new culture, that not long ago she was still half barbarous; in a
definite sense Russia is a land of ancient culture. The Russia of the
Kiev period gave birth to a higher culture than that of the con¬
temporary West. Already in the fourteenth century there existed
[7]
in Russia a classically perfect ikonography and a remarkable archi¬
tecture. Russia of the Moscow period developed a very high cul¬
ture in the plastic arts with an organic integrated style and highly
finished forms of life. This was an Eastern culture—the culture of
the Christianized Tartar Empire.
The culture of Moscow was developed in constant opposition
to the Latin West and to foreign customs. But in the Muscovite
Empire intellectual culture was very weak and lacked expression.
The Muscovite Empire was almost without thought and speech,
but during this period, in addition to the development of the
plastic arts, the elemental basis of the life of the time was given
significant form; and this was lacking in the Russia of Peter,
though the latter awoke to the expression of ideas in words.
Thinking Russia, which produced a great literature and sought
after social justice, was dismembered and styleless and had no
organic unity.
The inconsistency of the Russian spirit is due to the complexity
of Russian history, to the conflict of the Eastern and Western
elements in her. The soul of the Russian people was moulded by
the Orthodox Church—it was shaped in a purely religious mould.
And that religious mould was preserved even to our own day, to
the time of the Russian nihilists and communists. But in the
Russian soul there remained a strong natural element, linked with
the immensity of Russia itself, with the boundless Russian
plain, (i)1
Among Russians ‘Nature’ is an elemental power, stronger than
among Western peoples, especially those of the most elaborated,
i.e. Latin, culture. The nature-pagan element entered even into
Russian Christianity. In the typical Russian two elements are
always in opposition—the primitive natural paganism of bound¬
less Russia, and an Orthodox asceticism received from Byzantium,
a reaching out towards the other world.
A natural dionysism and a Christian asceticism are equally charac¬
teristic of the Russian people. A difficult problem presents itself
ceaselessly to the Russian—the problem of organizing his vast
Tor Author’s Notes see p. 189 ff.
[8]
 territory. The immensity of Russia, the absence of boundaries,
was expressed in the structure of the Russian soul. The landscape
of the Russian soul corresponds with the landscape of Russia, the
same boundlessness, formlessness, reaching out into infinity,
breadth.
In the West is conciseness; everything is bounded, formulated,
arranged in categories, everything (both the structure of the land
and the structure of the spirit) is favourable to the organization and
development of civilization. It might be said that the Russian
people fell a victim to the immensity of its territory. Form does
not come to it easily, the gift of form is not great among the
Russians. Russian historians explain the despotic character of
Russian government by this necessary organization of the bound¬
less Russian plain. Kluchevsky, the most distinguished of Russian
historians, said, ‘The state expands, the people grow sickly.’ In a
certain sense this remains true also of the Soviet-Communist
government, under which the interests of the people are sacrificed
to the power and organization of the Soviet state.
The rehgious formation of the Russian spirit developed several
stable attributes: dogmatism, asceticism, the ability to endure
suffering and to make sacrifices for the sake of its faith whatever
that may be, a reaching out to the transcendental, in relation now
to eternity, to the other world, now to the future, to this world.
The rehgious energy of the Russian spirit possesses the faculty
of switching over and directing itself to purposes which are not
' merely rehgious, for example, to social objects. In virtue of their
religious-dogmatic quality of spirit, Russians—whether orthodox,
heretics or schismatics—are always apocalyptic or nihilist. Russians
were true to type, both in the seventeenth century as Dissenters
and Old-ritualists, and in the nineteenth century as revolutionaries,
nihilists and communists. The structure of spirit remained the
same. The Russian revolutionary intelligentsia inherited it from
the Dissenters of the seventeenth century. And there always
remains as the chief thing the profession of some orthodox faith;
this is always the criterion by which membership of the Russian
people is judged.
[9]
 < '

After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Second Rome, the
greatest Orthodox state in the world, there awoke in the Russian
people the consciousness that the Russian Muscovite state was left
as the only Orthodox state in the world and that the Russian
people was the only nation who professed the Orthodox Faith. It
was the Monk Filofei who expounded the doctrine of Moscow as
the Third Rome. He wrote to the Tsar Ivan III: ‘Of the third new
Rome’... ‘Of all kingdoms in the world, it is in thy royal domain
that the holy Apostolic Church shines more brightly than the sun.
And let thy Majesty take note, O religious and gracious Tsar, that
all kingdoms of the Orthodox Christian Faith are merged into thy
kingdom. Thou alone, in all that is under heaven, art a Christian
Tsar. And take note, O religious and gracious Tsar, that all Chris¬
tian kingdoms are merged into thine alone, that two Romes have
fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth. Thy
Christian kingdom shall not fall to the lot of another.’
The doctrine of Moscow the Third Rome became the basic idea
on which the Muscovite state was formed. The kingdom was con¬
solidated and shaped under the symbol of a messianic idea. The
search for true, ideal kingship was characteristic of the Russian
people throughout its whole history. Profession of the true, the
Orthodox Faith, was the test of belonging to the Russian kingdom.
In exactly the same way profession of the true communist faith
was to be the test of belonging to Soviet Russia, to the Russian
communist state. Under the symbolic messianic idea of Moscow as
the Third Rome there took place an acute nationalizing of the
Church. Religion and nationality in the Muscovite kingdom grew
up together, as they did also in the consciousness of the ancient
Hebrew people. And in the same way as messianic consciousness
was an attribute of Judaism it was an attribute of Russian Ortho¬
doxy also. But the religious idea of the kingdom took shape in the
formation of a powerful state in which the Church was to play a
subservient part. The Moscow Orthodox kingdom was a totali¬
tarian state. Joseph Volotsky was the founder of state Orthodoxy.
Ivan the Terrible, who was a remarkable theoretician of absolute
monarchy, taught that a Tsar must not only govern the state, but
[10]
 also save souls. It is interesting to note that the Muscovite period
was the period of Russian history in which the smallest number of
saints was produced.
The best period in the history of the Russian Church was the
period of the Tartar yoke, when spiritually it was most indepen¬
dent and displayed a strong social sense. (2) (Ecumenical conscious¬
ness was weakened in the Russian Church to such an extent that
Russians ceased to regard the Greek Church, from which the
Russian people received their Orthodoxy, as a true Orthodox
Church; they began to regard it as a crippled expression of the true
faith. Greek influences were taken by popular religious thought as
corruptions penetrating into the only Orthodox kingdom in the
world. The Orthodox faith was the Russian faith; what was not
Russian faith was not Orthodox faith. When, under the Patriarch
Nikon, the correction of mistakes in the service books according
to Greek models and some insignificant changes in ceremonial
were undertaken, they called forth a violent protest from popular
religion. In the seventeenth century there took place one of the
most important events in Russian religious history, the Old-
ritualist schism.
It is a mistake to think that this religious schism was the outcome
simply of the Russian people’s beliefs about ceremonial and that
the struggle was waged merely over the question of making the
sign of the cross with two or with three fingers, and over other
details in the ordering of divine worship. There was something
'deeper than that in the schism. The question was this: is the
Russian kingdom a true Orthodox kingdom, i.e. is the Russian
people fulfilling its messianic vocation? Of course, unenlighten¬
ment, illiteracy and superstition and the low cultural level of the
clergy played a large part in it. But an event so vast in its effects as
the schism cannot be explained by those things alone. A suspicion
awoke in the people that the Orthodox kingdom, the Third
Rome, was being impaired, that a betrayal of the true faith was
taking place. Antichrist had seized on the hierarchy of Church and
State alike. Popular Orthodoxy broke with both. True Orthodoxy
retired underground. From this arose the legend of the City of
[11]
Kitezh which was hidden beneath a lake. The people were seeking
the City of Kitezh. A keen apocalyptic consciousness came into
being in the left wing of the schism, the section known as ‘the
Priestless’. Schism became a characteristic phenomenon of Russian
life. In the same way the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia of
the nineteenth century was to become sectarian and to think that
the forces of evil had seized power.
Both among the Russian masses and among the Russian intelli¬
gentsia will be found the search for a kingdom founded on justice.
In the visible kingdom injustice reigns. In the Muscovite kingdom,
aware of itself as the Third Rome, was mingled the Kingdom of
Christ, a kingdom of justice, with ideas of a mighty state ruling by
injustice. The schism was the exposure of the inconsistency, the
result of the mingling. But the popular mind was unenlightened,
often superstitious; in it Christianity was mingled with paganism.
The schism gave the first blow to the idea of Moscow as the Third
Rome. It showed that all was not well with the Russian messianic
consciousness. The second blow was given by the reform of Peter.

II
Peter’s reform was a fact so decisive for all subsequent Russian
history that our currents of thought in the nineteenth century
were distinguished by the value they assigned to it. One must now
regard as equally untrue and out of date both the Slavophil and the
Western points of view about Peter’s work. The Slavophil saw in
it the betrayal of the original national basis of Russian life, a
violation and interruption of its organic development. The Wes¬
ternized saw nothing original and distinctive whatever in Russian
history; they considered Russia as only a backwater in enlighten¬
ment and civilization. The Western European type of civilization
was for them the only type, and must be universal. Peter showed
Russia the ways of Western enlightenment and civilization.
The Slavophils were wrong, because Peter’s reform was abso¬
lutely inevitable. Russia could no longer exist as a closed country,
in a backward condition both military and naval, and economic,
without education and technical civilization. In such circumstances
[ 12 ]
the Russian people not only could not fulfil its great mission, but
its very independence was exposed to danger. The Slavophils were
wrong for this reason too, that it was precisely in the Petrine period
of its history that Russian culture bloomed, Pushkin and the great
period of Russian literature appeared, thought awoke and the
Slavophils themselves became possible. Russia was obliged to
break out of its isolation and join in the swirling life of the world.
Only in such ways could the Russians make their contribution to
the life of the world.
The Westemizers were wrong, because they denied any original
distinctive character to the Russian people and Russian history,
they clung to naively simple views of the progress of enlighten¬
ment and civilization, and saw no mission of any sort for Russia,
except the necessity of catching up with the West. They did not
see, what for that matter even the Slavophils saw, the violation of
the soul of the people, which Peter perpetrated. Peter’s reform was
unavoidable, but he achieved it in a way which did terrible vio¬
lence to the soul of the people and to their beliefs. And the people
answered this violence by founding a legend of Peter as Antichrist.
Peter was a revolutionary from above; and not without reason
is he considered a bolshevik in type. Peter’s methods were abso¬
lutely bolshevik. He wanted to destroy the old Muscovite Russia,
to tear up by the roots those feelings which lay in the very founda¬
tion of its life. With that object in view he did not stop at the
execution of his son, who held to the old-fashioned ways. The
'methods adopted by Peter in dealing with the Church and the old
religion are very reminiscent of the methods of the bolsheviks. He
did not like the old Muscovite piety and was especially severe on
the adherents of the old rites and on the Old Believers. Peter ridi¬
culed the religious feelings of the old days; he organized a mock
Council with a mock Patriarch. This very much recalls the anti-
religious activities of the godless in Soviet Russia. Peter founded a
synodal regime to a large extent copied from the German Protes¬
tant form, and he brought about the final subjection of the Church
to the State.
It ought to be said, however, that it was not Peter who was to
[ H ]
blame for the degrading of the Russian Church during the Petrine
period of Russian history. Already in the Muscovite period the
Church was in slavish dependence on the State. The moral
authority of the hierarchy among the people had fallen before
Peter’s time. The religious schism dealt a terrible blow to that
authority. The level of education and culture among the ecclesias¬
tical hierarchy was very low. On that ground, too, Peter’s reform
of the Church was a necessity. But it was carried out by violence
and with no mercy on the religious feelings of the people.
A comparison might be made between Peter and Lenin,
between the Petrine and the bolshevik revolutions. They display the
same barbarity, violence, forcible application of certain principles
from above downwards, the same rupture of organic develop¬
ment, and repudiation of tradition, the same etatism, hypertrophy
of government, the same formation of a privileged bureaucratic
class, the same centralization, the same desire sharply and radically
to change the type of civilization. But the bolshevik revolution, by
terrible violence, liberated forces that were latent in the masses and
summoned them to take their share in making history; therein lies
its significance. While Peter’s revolution, having strengthened the
Russian State and urged Russia along the way of Western and
World enlightenment, widened the gulf between the people and
the upper classes, the cultured and ruling class. Peter secularized
the Orthodox kingdom and guided Russia into the way of en¬
lightenment. This process took place in the upper levels of Russian
society, among the nobility and civil servants, while at the same
time the people went on living by the old religious beliefs and
feelings. The autocratic power of the Tsar, in fact, assuming the
form of a Western enlightened absolutism, kept in the people’s
eyes its old religious sanction as a theocratic authority.
The weakening of the spiritual influence of the official Church
was an inevitable result of Peter’s reform and the triumph of
Western enlightenment. Rationalism appeared even in the Church
hierarchy itself. The well-known Metropolitan of Peter’s time,
Theophan Prok opovitch, was in reality a Protestant of the rationa¬
listic type. But in the Petrine period this had its compensation in a
[ n ]
 series of saints such as the Muscovite epoch had not known, in
starchestvo,1 in hidden spiritual life.
The Western education among the upper ranks of Russian
society in the eighteenth century was alien to the Russian masses.
The Russian ruling class of the eighteenth century was superficially
influenced by the teachings of Voltaire on the one part and by
mystical Freemasonry on the other. But the people went on living
by the old religious beliefs and regarded the gentry as an alien race.
That enlightened disciple of Voltaire, Katharine II, who corres¬
ponded both with him and with Diderot, finally established those
forms of serfdom which called forth the protests of the pained
conscience of the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia.
The influence of the West struck primarily at the masses and
strengthened the privileged classes. People like Radishchev were
exceptions. Only in the nineteenth century did the influence of the
West on the Russian educated intelligentsia give birth to love of
the people and to liberationist movements. But even then the
educated and cultured classes seemed alien to the people. Nowhere,
apparently, was there such a gulf between the upper and lower
classes as in Petrine, imperial Russia, and not another single country
lived at the same time in such different centuries, from the four¬
teenth to the nineteenth and even to the coming twenty-first
century.
Russia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived a com¬
pletely inorganic life. In the soul of the Russian people a struggle
'between East and West was waged, and that struggle is continuing
in the Russian revolution. Russian communism is a communism
of the East. The influence of the West during the two centuries of
its action failed to subdue the Russian people. We shall see that the
Russian intelligentsia was absolutely non-Western in type, how¬
ever much it swore by Western theories.
The Empire founded by Peter grew outwardly; it became the
largest in the world. It had an outward enforced unity, but there
was no inward unity; inwardly it was broken into fragments.
Government and people were rent apart, people and intelligentsia,
*See footnote on p. 134.

1*5]
and the nationalities which were gathered together in the Russian
Empire were sundered from each other. The Empire with its
Western type of imperial absolutism less than anything realized
the idea of the Third Rome. The very title ‘Emperor’ substituted
for ‘Tsar’ was, in Slavophil opinion, a betrayal of the Russian idea.
The despotic Nicholas I was of the Prussian officer type. At court
and in the upper ranks of the bureaucracy German influences were
very strong.
The fundamental opposition was between the idea of an Empire,
a mighty State of the military-police type, and the religious,
messianic idea of a Tsardom which descended to become the
possession of the masses, and then, under a transformed aspect,
reached the intelligentsia. The conflict between the idea of Empire
as expressed by the Government and the outlook of the intelli¬
gentsia was to be fundamental for the nineteenth century. The
Government was to make itself more and more alien from the
intelligentsia among the cultured classes of society, in which a
revolutionary temper was to begin to grow. The nobility, which
was the leading and specially cultured class at the beginning and
even in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the second half of
the century was to sink in cultural level, become reactionary, and
be forced to give way to an intelligentsia drawn from many classes
who would bring with them another and new type of culture.
The absence of unity and of an integral culture is shown in this—
that the intelligentsia and spiritual currents of the nineteenth cen¬
tury are divided into decades and each decade brings with it new
ideas and tendencies, a new spiritual tenor of life. And for all that,
the Russian nineteenth century produced one of the greatest
literatures in the world, and an intense, original, very free thought.
The bulk of the Russian people—the peasantry—lived in the
grip of serfdom. Inwardly they lived by the Orthodox Faith and
that gave them power to bear the sufferings of hfe. The people
always considered serfdom as a wrong and an injustice, but they
assigned the blame for this injustice not to the Tsar, but to the
ruling class, the nobility. The religious conception of the Tsar’s
authority was so strong among the people that they lived in the
f 16 ]
Hope that the Tsar would protect them and put an end to the
injustice when he learned the whole truth.
In accordance with their own ideas of property, the Russian
peasantry always thought it wrong that the nobles should possess
vast tracts of land. Western ideas of property were alien to the
Russian people; they were but feebly understood even by the
nobility. The soil was God’s, and all who toiled and laboured at it
might enjoy the use of it. A naive agrarian socialism was always an
accepted principle among the Russian peasants.
To the cultured classes—to the intelligentsia—the mass of the
people remained a sort of mystery of which the secret was yet to
be discovered. They believed that in the still silent inarticulate
people lay concealed a great truth about life, and that the day
would come when the people would say their say. The intelli¬
gentsia, divorced from the masses, lived under the fascination of
a people, mystic, because wedded to the soil, of that which the
narodnik1 writers for seventy years called ‘the authority of the soil’.
By the nineteenth century Russia had assumed the form of an
immense, unbounded peasant country, enslaved, illiterate, but
with its own popular culture based on a faith, with a ruling noble
class, idle and with little culture, which had lost its religious faith
and its sense of nationality; with a Tsar at the top, in relation to
whom a religious belief was retained; with a strong bureaucracy
and a very thin and fragile layer of culture.
Social classes in Russia have always been weak, subjected to
-the State; they were even formed by State authority. The only
vigorous elements were the monarchy, which had taken the form
ofWestem absolutism, and the masses. The cultured layer felt itself
crushed by these two forces. The intelligentsia of the nineteenth
century stood over an abyss which at any moment might open
and swallow it. The best, the most cultivated part of the Russian
nobility was aware of the abnormality, the wrongness of its posi¬
tion, the blame attaching to it in the face of the masses.
By the nineteenth century, the Empire was very sick, both
1This word, and the abstract noun ‘narodnichestvo’ derived from it, are ex¬
plained by the author at the beginning of Chap. Ill, p. 58.
B B. R.C.
[ 17]
 spiritually and economically. The bringing together of principles
which are antinomies and polar opposites is characteristically
Russian. Russia and the Russian people can be characterized only
by contradictions. On the same grounds the Russian people may
be characterized as imperial-despotic and anarchic freedom-loving,
as a people inclined to nationalism and national conceit, and a
people of a universal spirit, more than others capable of oecumenic
views; cruel and unusually humane; inclined to inflict suffering
and illimitably sympathetic. This contradiction is established by
all Russian history and by the eternal conflict of the instinct of
imperial might with the instinct of the people’s love of freedom
and j ustice.
In spite of the opinion of the Slavophil, the Russian people were
endowed with political sense. This remains true even for the
Soviet State, and at the same time it is a people from whom issued
constantly the Cossack freebooters, the risings of Stenka Razin
and Pugachev, a revolutionary intelligentsia, anarchic, a people
who sought for a kingdom of righteousness not of this world.
That righteousness was not to be found in the vast Empire State
founded through terrible sacrifices. This was felt by the masses
and by the best part of the nobility and by the newly-educated
intelligentsia.
Russia of the nineteenth century was self-contradictory and
unhealthy; in it there was oppression and injustice, but psycho¬
logically and morally it was not a bourgeois country and it set
itself against the bourgeois countries of the West. In this unique
country political despotism was united with great freedom and
breadth of life, with freedom in manner of life, with absence of
barriers, imposed conventions and legalism.
 CHAPTER I

THE FORMATION OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLI¬

GENTSIA AND ITS CHARACTER. SLAVOPHIL¬
ISM AND WESTERNIZATION

T o understand the sources of Russian communism and make

clear to oneself the character of the Russian revolution, one
must understand that singular phenomenon which in Russia is
called ‘intelligentsia’. Western people would make a mistake if
they identified the Russian intelligentsia with those who in the
West are known as ‘intellectuals’.
‘Intellectuals’ are people of intellectual work and creativeness,
mainly learned people, writers, artists, professors, teachers and so
on. The Russian intelligentsia is an entirely different group; and to
it may belong people occupied in no intellectual work, and gener¬
ally speaking not particularly intellectual. Many Russian scholars
and writers certainly could not be reckoned as belonging to the
intelligentsia in the strict sense of the word. The intelligentsia
reminds one more of a monastic order or sect, with its own very
intolerant ethics, its own obligatory outlook on life, with its own
- manners and customs and even its own particular physical appear¬
ance, by which it is always possible to recognize a member of the
intelligentsia and to distinguish him from other social groups.
Our intelligentsia were a group formed out of various social
classes and held together by ideas, not by sharing a common pro¬
fession or economic status. They were derived to begin with
mainly from the more cultured section of the nobility, later from
the sons of the clergy, small government officials, the lower
middle class, and, after the liberation, from the peasants. That then
is the intelligentsia; its members were of different social classes,
and held together solely by ideas, and, moreover, by ideas about
[ 19 ]
 sociology. In the second half of the nineteenth century the stratum
of society which is simply called cultured is developed into a new
type and is given the name ‘intelligentsia’. This type has its charac¬
teristic traits which belong to all its present representatives.
There were typical Russian features in the intelligentsia and it is
a wholly mistaken opinion which regarded it as denationalized
and severed from the Russian soil. Dostoyevsky, although he did
not like revolutionary ideas, admirably understood the true Rus¬
sian character of the revolutionary member of the intelligentsia
and called him ‘the great wanderer of the Russian land’. Lack of
roots in the soil, a break with all class life and traditions, are charac¬
teristic of the intelligentsia, but even these qualities in them took a
characteristically Russian form.
The intelligentsia was always carried away by some idea or
other, for the most part by social ideas, and devoted itself to them
supremely. It acquired the power of living by ideas alone. Owing
to Russian political conditions, the intelligentsia found itself
divorced from practical social work, and that easily led to social
day dreaming. In the Russia of autocracy and serfdom, the most
radical socialist and anarchist ideas were developed. The impossi¬
bility of political action led to this, that politics were transferred to
thought and literature. It was the literary critics who were the
leaders of social and political thought and character. The intelli¬
gentsia assumed that sectarian character which is so natural to all
Russians. It lived in schism from its actual environment, which it
considered evil, and within it a fanatical sectarian ethic was elabo¬
rated.
The thoroughly true-to-type intolerance of the Russian intelli¬
gentsia was self-protective; only so could it preserve itself in a
hostile world, only thanks to its fanaticism could it weather per¬
secution and retain its characteristic features. Extreme dogmatism,
a thing to which Russians are fundamentally disposed, was
characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia, dominated as it was by
social motives and a revolutionary frame of mind which fostered
the type of man whose sole speciality was revolution. Russians
possess a particular faculty for assimilating Western ideas and
l 20 ]
 doctrines and giving them an original form. But the assimilation
of Western ideas and doctrines by the Russian intelligentsia was
for the most part made a matter of dogma. What was scientific
theory in the West, a hypothesis, or in any case a relative truth,
partial, making no claim to be universal, became among the
Russian intelligentsia a dogma, a sort of religious revelation.
Russians are always inclined to take things in a totalitarian
sense; the sceptical criticism of Western peoples is alien to them.
This is a weakness which leads to confusion of thought and the
substitution of one thing for another, but it is also a merit and
indicates the religious integration of the Russian soul. Among the
Russian radical intelligentsia there existed an idolatrous attitude to
science itself. When a member of the Russian intelligentsia be¬
came a Darwinist, to him Darwinism was not a biological theory
subject to dispute, but a dogma, and anyone who did not accept
that dogma (e.g. a disciple of Lamarck) awoke in him an attitude
of moral suspicion. The greatest Russian philosopher of the nine¬
teenth century, Solovev, said that the Russian intelligentsia pro¬
fessed a faith based upon the strange syllogism: man is descended
from a monkey, therefore we ought to love one another. In this
totalitarian and dogmatic way the Russian intelligentsia accepted
and lived through Saint Simonism, Fourierism, Hegelianism,
materialism, Marxism—and Marxism in particular,
f Generally speaking, Russians but poorly understood the mean¬
ing of the relative, the fact that historical progress advances by
stages, the differentiation of various spheres of culture. Russian
maximalism is due to this. The Russian spirit craves for wholeness.
It cannot reconcile itself to the classification of everything accord¬
ing to categories. It yearns for the Absolute and desires to sub¬
ordinate everything to the Absolute, and this is a religious trait in
it. But it easily leads to confusion, takes the relative for the Abso¬
lute, the partial for the universal, and then it falls into idolatry. It
is a property of the Russian spirit especially to switch over the
current of religious energy to non-religious objects, to the relative
and partial sphere of science or social life. This explains a great
deal.
 As early as the eighteenth century the type of Russian intelli¬
gentsia began to emerge. Radishchev, the author of A Journey
from Petersburg to Moscow, was the first. His words ‘My soul was
wounded by the suffering of humanity’ establish the type of
Russian intelligentsia. Radishchev was brought up on French
eighteenth century philosophy, on Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau.
But he had no anti-religious tendency, as had many Voltairians of
that time. French ideas entered into the Russian spirit and became
sympathy and philanthropy. Radishchev could not tolerate serf¬
dom and the degradation and suffering of the masses. At the time
that Radishchev’s book appeared, Katharine II was already in the
grip of a reactionary mood. Radishchev was arrested and con¬
demned to death on account of his book, but the sentence was
commuted to imprisonment. In the same way, Novikov, a notable
worker for Russian enlightenment in the eighteenth century, a
man of the mystical type, a Christian of very moderate political
views was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress.
In this fashion the formation of the Russian intelligentsia was
greeted by Russian authority. The first steps of the Russian
intelligentsia along the paths of enlightenment—not revolution—
brought with them sacrifice and suffering, imprisonment and hard
labour.
Radishchev held views which for his time were rather daring
and radical and he was one of the forerunners of the revolutionary
intelligentsia and of Russian socialism. But in the eighteenth cen¬
tury Russian thought was not yet original. The nineteenth century
was to be the century of original thought and self-consciousness.
It was also to be the century of inward revolution. To us self-
consciousness meant revolt against the actual facts around us,
against imperial Russia. Enlightenment destroyed the old belief
in the Orthodox kingdom and the search for the kingdom took
another direction; the Russian mission was conceived in another
way. The loneliness of Russian cultured and freedom-loving
people in the first half of the nineteenth century was extraordinary.
(3) There were cultured people, but no cultured environment.
The people of that time complain that they are surrounded by
unenlightenment, that no one understands them and no one sym¬
pathizes with them. The bulk of the Russian nobility and official
class were very uncultivated, illiterate and devoid of any of the
higher interests of life. It was that ‘mob’ of which Pushkin speaks.
The picture of Chatsky in The Misfortune of Being Too Wise
depicts that loneliness of the best people, especially of the learned
and cultured at that period.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the time of Alex¬
ander I, Russia lived through a cultural renaissance. That was the
Golden Age of Russian poetry, the time of mystical tendencies
and of the Decembrist movement. Alexander I himself was a
‘Tsar-intelligent’, a seeker after truth all his life, in his youth an
enemy of autocracy and serfdom, but a man of divided mind and
no great strength. The renaissance of those days affected but a
meagre part of the nobility. Cultured people and seekers after
truth had to live as small groups and societies. Masonry tinged
with mysticism was very widespread in the time of Alexander and
was an important educative influence. Masonry was the first form
that the self-organization of society assumed. Into that mould
flowed the particularly tense spiritual life of that time.
The beginning of the nineteenth century was a period in which
the surface of the Russian spirit was broken into, so that it became
susceptible to ideas of all sorts, to spiritual and social movements.
It was a time of universalism, of inter-confessional Christian
associations. Then also Russian fsyechelovechnost1 began to take
-shape and became characteristic of the nineteenth century.
Through the Napoleonic war Russia was brought into immediate
touch with the West; Russian officers visited Europe and came
back with a broadened mental outlook. Alexander I was himself
a Russian fsyechelovek. He met Owen and talked to him about a
new structure of society; he worshipped with Quakers. But this
did not prevent the end of his reign from being marked by a grim
reaction. The Russian soul was getting itself ready for the nine¬
teenth century. But there was no wholeness and unity in Russian
life. There was a gulf between the upper cultural level of the
xSee the note at the end of the chapter.

[ 23 ]
nobility, who then served in die Guards, and the average bulk of
that class, hi that upper level there were spiritual and literary
movements; from it arose the Decembrist movement which aimed
at liberation from autocracy and serfdom. But it all went on in
such a small and secluded section that it could not really change
Russian life. The Decembrist rising, which witnesses to the dis¬
interestedness of the elite of the nobility, was doomed to failure
and was sternly crushed. The chief actors in the movement were
executed or exiled to Siberia by Nicholas I.
A large number of the Decembrists held moderate and even
monarchist views. But Pestel, who represented the extreme left
wing and was the author of Russian Justice, may be called the first
Russian socialist before the socialists, as Hertzen put it. In him
there was already seen that will to power and violence which in
the twentieth century appeared in the communists. But Pestel’s
socialism was, of course, agrarian. He was a republican, a partisan
of the sovereignty of the people, and at the same time a centralist.
He was not a liberal, and was inclined to despotism. But at the
very time of the Decembrist movement the vast mass of the
Russian nobility was unenlightened, idle, and led an unreflecting
life. Belonging to the middle Russian nobility he began by serving
in the Guards. He soon retired and settled in the country, where
he had no occupation and made himself conspicuous by all sorts of
oddities and petty despotism.
This was the greatest failure of the Petrine period. That age pro¬
duced the type of ‘superfluous people’—either Rudins or Oblo¬
movs. And the best of the ‘superfluous people’ were those who
sadly recognized their superfluity, like several of Turgeniev’s
heroes. In Pushkin alone, a unique Russian of the renaissance,
there gleams the possibility of another attitude to life. Pushkin
combined in himself, as it were, the consciousness of the intelli¬
gentsia and the consciousness of empire. He wrote revolutionary
verse, and at the same time he was the poet of Russian imperialism.
After the suppression of the Decembrist rising, after the accession
of Nicholas I, everything tended towards the growth of schism
and revolution. The Russian intelligentsia was definitely shaped
[m]
into a schismatic type. It will always speak of itself as ‘we’; and of
the State, of authority, as ‘they’.
The Russian cultured class was suspended over an abyss, crushed
by two fundamental forces, autocratic monarchy above and an
unenlightened mass of peasantry beneath. Russian thought, with¬
out basis and rebellious, in the nineteenth century was inwardly
free and audacious; it was not chained to a grim past and to tradi¬
tion, but outwardly it was cramped and even persecuted.
The impossibility in the political circumstances of direct social
work led to this, that all activity passed into literature and thought,
where every question was posed and decided very radically.
Limitless social day dreaming, with no connection with actual
reality, wa; the result. Russians were disciples of Saint Simon,
Fourier, Proudhon, at a time when serfdom and autocracy still
existed in Russia. They were most extreme and totalitarian dis¬
ciples of Hegel and Schelling when there was no philosophical
culture whatever in Russia, and philosophical thought lay under
suspicion. Cultured Russians loved endless discussions lasting
through v hole nights, and arguments about world questions,
among smad groups, in the salons of the ’thirties and ’forties.
The first awakening of independent thought and self-conscious¬
ness—in the nineteenth century—came with Chaadaev, a man of
exceptional gifts, but who wrote almost nothing. He was idle, as
were most Russian gentlemen. His unusually keen and powerful
thought was set forth in a single Philosophical Letter. This was a
^whole philosophy of history. The theme was fundamental to
Russian nineteenth century thought. The first question over which
independent Russian thought pondered was one in which lies the
problem of Russia and the peculiarity of its line of progress: Is she
East or West?
This first Russian historical philosopher, Chaadaev, was an
officer of the Hussar life-guards, in retirement, just as the first and
most distinguished Russian theologian, Khomyakov, was an
officer of the horse-guards. Chaadaev’s philosophy of history was a
revolt agamst Russian history, against the Russian past and the
Russian present. Peter’s work awoke Russian thought and Russian
l 25 ]
creativeness. Hertzen said that the Russian people’s answer to
Peter’s reforms was the appearance of Pushkin. To this we must
add that they also replied with the appearance of Westernizing
and Slavophil thought. All Russian nineteenth century thought
which was occupied with general questions of world outlook was
either Westernizing or Slavophil, that is, it answered the question:
Ought Russia to be West or East? Must she follow Peter’s path,
or turn back to the time before him, to Muscovite Russia? Chaa-
daev came out decidedly as a Westernizer, and his Westernism
was a cry of patriotic anguish. He was the typical nineteenth
century Russian of the cultured upper class. His rejection of
Russia—of Russian history—was a typically Russian rejection;
his Westernism was religious, in distinction from subsequent
forms of Westernism; he was very sympathetic with Roman
Catholicism and saw in it the active, unifying, organizing strength
of history, and in it he saw salvation for Russia.
Russian history presented itself to him as devoid of meaning,
and with no connecting links, belonging neither to the East nor to
the West. It was the reflection of that loss of cultural style which
was so characteristic of Peter’s age. Chaadaev considered Russia a
lesson and a warning to other peoples. The Government saw in
Chaadaev a revolutionary. But in actual fact he was near in his
ideas to de Maistre, Bonalde and Schelling, with the last of whom
he corresponded and who held him in high esteem. The highly
cultured Chaadaev could not reconcile himself to the fact that he
was condemned to live in an uncultured society, in a despotic state,
which gripped an unenlightened people as in a vice and did
nothing to enlighten them. Chaadaev expressed thought which
one must regard as fundamental to Russian self-consciousness. He
spoke of the latent powers of the Russian people, powers which
had not yet revealed themselves. This might appear to condemn
the Russian people in so far as it applied to the past. They had
created nothing great in history, had fulfilled no great mission.
But it might also, when applied to the future, become a great hope
and faith in the future of the Russian people as being called to
realize a great mission.
[26]
 Precisely on that latent power and backwardness of the Russian
people the whole nineteenth century will base the hope that the
Russians are called to solve problems which are difficult for the
West to solve as a result of the burden of its own past; for example,
the social question. That was what it meant for Chaadaev. The
Russian Government replied to the first awakening of Russian
thought by announcing that Chaadaev was a madman. He was
subjected to medical examination. In this way Chaadaev was
crushed and silenced. But later on he wrote A Madman s Apology,
and in it he expressed thoughts about Russian messianism which
were typically Russian. Judgment upon the past was one thing,
hope for the future was another. Precisely in the strength of the
latent power lying in its immense untapped forces, the Russian
people was called to say its own original word to the world,
to fulfil its great mission. In Chaadaev may already be found
much fundamental Russian thought.
In their cleavage from contemporary life, in their protest against
the injustice of Russian life, cultured Russians attempted an
appeal to Roman Catholicism and to find salvation in that. A
characteristic figure in this connection is Pecherin, who went
abroad and became a Roman Catholic monk. He combined
Roman Catholicism with Utopian socialism. At that period
attempts were being made to give socialism a Christian basis; they
were influenced by Lammenais; the intelligentsia still had a
religious framework. In one of his poems Pecherin wrote: ‘How
..sweet to hate one’s own native land and eagerly to await its annihila¬
tion’—typical Russian words—words of despair behind which is
hidden a love of Russia. In the West, Pecherin, already a Roman
Catholic monk, was yearning for Russia and believed that Russia
was to inaugurate a new cycle of world history.

II
The basic Western influence, by which Russian nineteenth
century thought and culture were moulded to a remarkable
degree, was the influence of German romanticism and idealism at
the beginning of the century, especially the influence of Schelling
[27 ]
and Hegel who became almost Russian thinkers. This influence did
not mean a slavish imitation such as the influence of Voltaire had
meant in the eighteenth century. German thought was taken
actively and worked over into a Russian type of thought. It is
particularly necessary to say this of the Slavophils, among whom
the influence of Schelhng and Hegel fertilized theological thought,
just as the influence of Plato and the Neoplatonists formerly ferti¬
lized the theological thought of the Eastern doctors of the Church.
Khomyakov founded an original Orthodox theology into which
worked-over themes of German idealism enter.
Like the German romantics, Russian thought strove after whole¬
ness and did so more consistently and radically than the romantics,
who themselves lost wholeness. The wholeness of the Christian
East is set in opposition to the rationalist fragmentariness of the
West. This was first pointed out by I. Kireevsky and it became a
fundamental Russian theme rooted in the depths of Russian
character. Russian communist atheists assert wholeness, totali¬
tarianism, no less than the Orthodox Slavophils. Psychologically,
Russian orthodoxy is wholeness, totalitarianism; the Russian
Westernizers to whom the religious type of Slavophil was alien,
were influenced by Hegelianism, which to them was simply a
totalitarian system of thought and life embracing absolutely
everything. When Belinsky and Bakunin were Hegelians they
were precisely that sort of Hegelian. A young Russian, belonging
to the idealist generation of the ’thirties and ’forties, professed a
totalitarian Schellingism or totalitarian Hegelianism in relation
to the whole of life, not only the life of thought and social life,
but also personal life, in relation to love or natural feeling.
Belinsky, a revolutionary by nature and temperament, who gave
a basis to the Russian revolutionary and socialist outlook, at one
time became a conservative under the influence of Hegel’s
philosophy. He felt himself bound to accept the reasonableness
of reality; he grasped Hegel’s thought that everything real is
rational.
Creative originality in religious and philosophical thought was
shown by the Slavophils. They established the mission of Russia
[28]
 as distinct from that of Western peoples. The originality of the
Slavophils lay in this: they endeavoured to comprehend the dis¬
tinctiveness of the Eastern Orthodox type of Christianity which
lay at the basis of Russian history. Although the Slavophils sought
for organic foundations of history and paths of development, yet
they also were sectarian and lived in schism from their actual
environment. They rejected the Imperial Russia of Peter; they
did not feel at home among the actual circumstances of the time
of Nicholas I, and authority regarded them with suspicion and
hostility, notwithstanding their Orthodoxy and monarchist
principles.
There was nothing in common between the official theory of
the Russian national spirit, worked out in the time of Nicholas I
as the accepted point of view of the Government, and the Slavo¬
phil understanding of nationality. The official system was based
on three principles: Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality, and
the Slavophil system recognized the same three principles. But
the spirit was not the same. It was absolutely clear that for the
official system the principle of autocracy was primary; Orthodoxy
and nationality were subservient to that. It was also clear that
nationality in the official sense was of a dubious character and under
the influence of the worst sides of Western political absolutism.
Nicholas I was of the Prussian officer type. The Orthodoxy, too,
was not spiritual and inward; it was political and became a means
to an end.
These principles had an entirely different meaning for the Slavo¬
phils. They acknowledged first of all the absolute primacy of the
religious principle, and they sought an Orthodoxy which was
purified, not distorted and perverted by historical influences. They
also strove for the realization of a genuinely national spirit. They
saw a vision of the Russian people freed from the distortion which
they attributed to Western rationalism and political absolutism.
Their attitude to the State was entirely different from anything
to be found in the system of official nationalism. The Slavophils
were opposed to the State. There was even a strong element of
anarchism in them. They considered the State an evil and govern-
[ 29 ]
ment a sin. They defended monarchy on die ground diat it is
better for one man to be defiled by possessing authority, which is
always sinful and vile, than the whole people. (4) The Tsar has no
right to authority, and no more has anyone else. But he is con¬
strained to bear the burden of authority which the people have
laid upon him.
The Slavophils considered that the Russian people had no gift
for politics. It has a religious and spiritual vocation and wishes to
be free from political affairs in order to realize that vocation. Of
course, this theory contradicts the fact that the Russian people
have founded the biggest State in the world, and indicated a break
with the traditions not only of Peter but also of the Grand Princes
of Moscow. But the Slavophils were therein expressing one of the
poles of Russian consciousness, a characteristic trait of the intelli¬
gentsia of the nineteenth century and of all Russian literature.
The Slavophils were the founders of that nationalism which was
so characteristic of Russian nineteenth century thought and after¬
wards took reactionary forms. The Slavophils believed in the
people, in justice that belonged to the people, and for them the
people was first and foremost the muzhik, who kept the Orthodox
Faith and the national tenor of life. The Slavophils were warm
defenders of the Commune, which they regarded as organic and
as the original Russian structure of economic life among the
peasantry, as all the narodniks thought. They were decided oppo¬
nents of the ideas of Roman Law on property. They did not re¬
gard property as sacred and absolute; owners of property they
regarded as stewards only. They repudiated Western, bourgeois,
capitalist civilization. And if they thought that the West was
decaying, it was because it had entered upon the path of that
bourgeois civilization, because in it the unity of life had been
split asunder. The Slavophils already anticipated the distinction
between culture and civilization which has become popular in
the West from the writings of Spengler.
In spite of the conservative element in their outlook, the Slavo¬
phils were warm defenders of freedom of the person, of conscience,
of thought and of speech; and they were democrats in an original
[ 30 ]
sort of way, recognizing the principle of the sovereignty of the
people. Khomyakov, hi his poetry, exposed the historical sins of
Russia, not only of the Russia of Peter, but of the Russia of the
time before him, and was even more trenchant than the Western-
izers. The Slavophils and the Westernizers were both friends and
foes. Hertzen said: ‘We are like the two-faced Janus; we have one
love of Russia, but it is not the same love. For some Russia is first
and foremost a mother, for others—a child.’ The Slavophils and
Westernizers of the ’thirties and ’forties belonged to one circle;
they argued in the same drawing-rooms which witnessed the con¬
tests of Hertzen and Khomyakov. It was only later that they
definitely parted. The intolerant Belinsky was already refusing to
meet his friend K. Aksakov.
The best, the most thoughtful and cultured people of the nine¬
teenth century did not live in the present, which was abhorrent to
them; they lived in the future, or in the past. Some, the Slavophils,
dreamed of an ideal Russia before Peter’s time; others, the
Westernizers, dreamed of an ideal West. But even the Slavophils’
conservative handling of the distant past was but a Utopia of a
perfect regime, the perfect life, just as was the Westernizers’
presentation of the West, which they knew none too well. The
Westernizers were frequently agents of enlightenment and civili¬
zation; and that is the least interesting type. The more interesting
type of Westernizer was that which made a Russian re-hash of
Western ideas, in particular of French social teaching. In Russia,
if Hegel and Schelhng were taken up in a totalitarian, entire
and maximalist fashion, so also were Saint Simon and Fourier. In
the camp of the radical wing of the Westernizers, the influence of
French socialism and French literature was strong, especially that
of Georges Sand, who had an immense influence in shaping
emotional life in Russian cultured circles, in fashioning the
Russian attitude to freedom and sincerity of feeling, the Russian
protest against violence, conventionality and insincerity of feeling.
The plan for realizing social righteousness was worked out
according to Saint Simon and Fourier. And, of course, the French
themselves had no such passion for these ideas.
[ 3i ]
 At the end of the ’forties a group used to meet at the house of a
Russian landowner called Petrashevsky. It passed judgment on
social problems and planned a new and better organization of
humanity. Most of the members of the group followed Fourier
and Saint Simon. Their ideas for the reorganization of humanity
were very radical, but the character of their conversations was
most peaceful and harmless. (5) They concerned themselves with no
revolutionary activity of any sort. At that time no revolutionary
activity existed in Russia, nor could it. Everything happened
in the realm of thought. Most of all, of course, they desired the
liberation of the peasants. The utopian socialism of the group was
idyllic. They postulated three stages in the development of socialist
ideas in Russia: the stage of utopian socialism, narodnik sociahsm
and scientific or Marxian sociahsm.
Petrashevsky was a very typical Russian landowner, afire with
the ideas of utopian socialism. He said: ‘Unable to find anything
either in women or in men worthy of my adherence, I have turned
to devote myself to the service of humanity.’ In that was expressed
a most characteristic frame of mind of the Russian revolutionary
intelligentsia—the love of the man far off, not the love of.one’s
neighbour. It is to this man far off that Petrashevsky reached out,
to the happiness of humanity. He believed in the happiness of
humanity. Petrashevsky’s naive utopianism was expressed in the
fact that on his estate he set up a phalanstery1 for the peasants on
the Fourier model. But the peasants burnt that phalanstery. The
fact is symbolic. In the same way, in the ’seventies, the peasants
refused to accept the socialist intelligentsia who went to them with
offers of self-denying service. When questioned, Petrashevsky
even maintained that the phalanstery was wholly possible in the
Russia of serfdom and autocracy. The opinion was characteristic
of the utopian age of socialism.
The most extreme revolutionary tendency in Petrashevsky’s
group was represented by N. Speshnev who apparently served
Dostoyevsky as a model when he drew the picture of Stavrogin in
The Possessed. Speshnev was an atheist and a communist and came
*A communal house.
I 32 ]
very near to Marxism. Dostoyevsky took part in Petrashevsky’s
group, although he was sceptical of the possibility of realizing
Fourier s utopian socialism. The peaceful gatherings of Petra¬
shevsky’s group ended sadly, as everything ended sadly in Russia
at that time. All its members were arrested and twenty-one were
condemned to death, commuted to penal servitude. Among them
was Dostoyevsky, who had to live through the moment of con¬
demnation to be shot. The Petrashevsky case could not but
strengthen the revolutionary temper of the Russian intelligentsia.
Russian socialism will no longer be merely idyllic. The figures of
Nechaev and Tkachev are to appear. It is very interesting to note
that the first Marxists in the world were Russians. Russian Marx¬
ism, as a movement, arose only in the second half of the ’eighties,
but individual Russian Marxists existed already at the end of the
’forties in Paris. Thus the Steppe landowner, N. I. Sazonov, was
the first Russian Marxist in Paris, and perhaps one of the first
disciples of Marx in general. (6)
Marx, who generally speaking did not like Russia and the
Russians, writes with amazement from Paris, that followers of his
had made their appearance who were Russian Steppe landowners.
He felt some mistrust of these too early Marxists. Marx was to go
through much unpleasantness later on with Bakunin and carry on
a controversy with him about the First International, although it
would seem that from the beginning Bakunin influenced the
Marxist conception of the mission of the proletariat. (7) In any
Case, the Russian capacity for a supreme enthusiasm for social
ideas is very germane to our subject. Right through the nineteenth
century the Russians had an irresistible inclination to socialism,
and everything prepared a passion for communism among them.
Hertzen’s fate is a subject of immense interest in the history of
Russian self-consciousness, of the Russian national idea, and of the
Russian social idea.

Ill
Hertzen was a Westemizer, who argued with the Slavophils in
the drawing-rooms of the ’forties. Although he also passed
B.R.C.
c [33 ]
through Hegelianism, he soon went over to Feuerbach. The funda¬
mental influence upon him was not German, but the influence of
French socialist literature. Hertzen’s socialist outlook was elabo¬
rated under the influence of the French socialists. The German
socialism, then coming to the fore, i.e. Marxism, was alien to him.
Hertzen belonged to those Russian Westernizers who dreamed
passionately of the West and idealized it. Hertzen lived abroad; he
was one of the first Russian emigrants. He came upon the West
in the atmosphere of the Revolution of 1848, and at first he was
attracted by it and founded great hopes on it. But it was his fate to
live through the bitter disillusionments which followed the
Revolution of 1848, in the West and among Western people
generally. His passion for the West was typically Russian, as was
his disillusionment in the West. Many Russians after him lived
through similar disillusionments. Hertzen was amazed and hurt by
the pettiness of the West; he noted this petty bourgeois spirit even
among socialists. He was among the first to see the possibility of a
bourgeois socialism. The ideal of the Knight was altered into the
ideal of the small shopkeeper. The arraignment of the bourgeois
spirit of the West is a typically Russian theme. The Slavophils
gave expression to it, in other terms. K. Leontev, the reactionary,
will rebel against the pettiness of the West just as Hertzen, the
revolutionary, did.
Hertzen, as distinct from other representatives of the left wing,
did not profess an optimistic theory of progress. On the contrary,
he defended a pessimistic philosophy of history. He did not believe
in the rationality and goodness of a historical process which moved
towards the realization of higher good. This is the original and
interesting thing about Hertzen. He recognized the higher value
of human personality, although it is crushed by the progress of
history. He laid the foundation of the original Russian individual¬
istic socialism which was to be represented in the ’seventies by N.
Mikhailovsky. Socialist individualism is opposed to bourgeois
individualism. Hertzen could not see what forces there were in
Western Europe to be opposed to the empire of pettiness. The
Western European workman had this pettiness of mind and,
[34]
 therefore, he could not save the West from it. Hertzen, the emi¬
grant, deprived till his death of any possibility of a bodily return
to his native land, returned thither in spirit. However horrible the
autocratic regime of Nicholas I, its serfdom, and its illiteracy, yet
it was precisely in Russia, in the Russian people, that there lay
hidden the latent power to fashion a new and a better life, not
petty and not bourgeois. Hertzen sees these potentialities in the
Russian muzhik, in the muzhik’s grey sheepskin coat, in the
peasant Commune. In the Russian peasant-world was hidden the
possibility of bringing together the principle of personality and
the principle of community and social life. Hertzen was a humanist
sceptic; religious beliefs were alien to him. Belief in the Russian
people, in truth latent in the muzhik, is for him the final anchor of
salvation. Hertzen became one of the originators of Russian narod-
nichestvo, a peculiarly Russian phenomenon. In the person of
Hertzen Russian Westernism approached Slavophilism in certain
respects.
In the Westernizing camp there occurred a split into the narodnik
socialists and the liberals. Hertzen and the narodnik socialists be¬
lieved in a special path of progress for Russia, in its vocation to
realize social justice better and earlier than the West. They be¬
lieved it was possible for Russia to escape the horrors of capitalism.
The Westernizing hberals thought that Russia must pass along the
same road as Western Europe, The narodniks repudiated politics;
they thought that politics would push Russia along the trite
Western road of development; they recognized the primacy of
the social over the political. This also is a characteristically Russian
theme. Hertzen, Bakunin, even such shocking revolutionaries as
Nechaev and Tkachev were, in a certain sense, nearer the Russian
idea than the enlightened Westernizers and hberals. All the sub¬
sequent atheism of the Russian revolutionary socialist and anar¬
chist tendencies was Russian religiousness turned inside out,
Russian apocalyptic. It is most important to note that the liberal
tradition has always been weak in Russia and that we have never
had a liberalism with moral authority or which gave any inspira¬
tion. The authors of the liberal reforms of the ’sixties had, of
[35 ]
course, some significance, but their liberalism was exclusively
practical and businesslike; they produced no theory whatever, a
thing which the Russian intelligentsia always needs.
Note.—Fsyechelovechnost means ability to share the point of view of all
nations or types or individual persons (see Dostoyevsky’s speech at the unveiling
of the Pushkin Monument). Fsyechelovek (p. 23) is the person with this ability.

[36]
 CHAPTER II

RUSSIAN SOCIALISM AND NIHILISM

A lthough Belinsky was a man of the ’forties and belonged to

LJL the generation of the Slavophils and Westernizers, yet he
was perhaps the first who gave expression to the type of revolu¬
tionary intelligentsia, and at the end of his life he formulated the
fundamental principles of its general outlook which were de¬
veloped later on in the ’sixties and ’seventies. In the first place,
Belinsky was not a Russian gentleman like all the Slavophils and
Westernizers, like Hertzen and Bakunin. He belonged to a differ¬
ent social class, he was a raznochinets.1 There were traits in his
spiritual make-up which were typical of the intelligentsia; he was
intolerant, fanatical, inclined to sectarianism, passionately devoted
to ideas; he was constantly elaborating a view, not such as pure
knowledge required, but as a basis for his aspirations towards a
better and more righteous social order. Belinsky was a man of
remarkable gifts and a notable susceptibility to ideas, but the level
of his education was not high. He was almost entirely without
knowledge of foreign languages and became acquainted with the
ideas to which he was devoted at second hand. He came to know
Hertzen principally through what Bakunin told him.
Belinsky passed through all the stages in enthusiasm for ideas
usual in Russian cultured circles of that time. He was in turn a
disciple of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and later went over to
Feuerbach; he felt the influence of French literature and French
socialist thought. He was above all an admirable literary critic; he
was the first to value Pushkin, Gogol, and the early creative work
of our great novelists. He himself possessed artistic susceptibility
1 ‘Person belonging neither to any guild, nor to the merchant class nor to the
nobility.’
[37]
and was capable of aesthetic judgment, and he became the ancestor
of that type of literary critic who was destined to play an immense
part in the history of the thought of the intelligentsia. In Belinsky
there was the characteristically Russian search for an integral
outlook which will give an answer to all the questions of life,
unite the theoretical and practical reason, and give a philosophical
basis to the social ideal. Integrated truth, as later expressed by N.
Mikhailovsky, who was also in the line of descent from Belinsky,
is both truth in the abstract and that truth which finds expression in
justice. The same idea of wholeness will be found in N. Federov in
a religious setting, and in Marxist Leninism. The Russian critical
publicists will always preach an integrated outlook, will always
connect truth and righteousness, will always be teachers of life.
Belinsky was the first specially gifted representative of this type.
He already affirms the social side of the work of the literary critic.
Russian social thought was concealed under the form of literary
criticism, because under the conditions of censorship it could not
otherwise fmd expression. In the evolution and revolution of ideas
through which Belinsky lived, the crisis which Hegelianism
reached in his mind is of particular interest and importance. (8)
Russian thought passed through two such crises in regard to
Hegelianism: one in Khomyakov which was religious, the other
in Belinsky which was social. (9)
The fundamental problem which interested Russians in the
forties who were attracted by Hegel was the problem of their re¬
lation to ‘actuality’. Hegel’s doctrine of the rationality of actual
fact, which in Hegel himself was entirely a matter of logic and
meant the recognition of the fact that only the rational was
authentically real, was in Russia a matter of most tense and painful
experience and was falsely interpreted. It is well known that Hegel
can be understood in a conservative sense or in a revolutionary
sense; he originated a right and a left current of thought. He was
the philosopher of the Prussian State, in which he saw the em¬
bodiment of absolute spirit, and at the same time through his
dialectic he brought a revolutionary dynamic into thought and
gave birth to Marx. The Russian Hegelians of the ’forties at first
[38]
understood Hegel in the conservative way, and interpreted his
thought of the rationality of ‘actuality’ to mean that one must
reconcile oneself to one’s actual environment—the period of
Nicholas—and recognize reason in it. Belinsky and Bakunin, men
of revolutionary outlook on life, passed through such a period of
conservative Hegelianism. Russian romantic idealists of the ’forties
escaped from actual social conditions into the world of thought,
imagination, literature, into the reflected world of ideas. They
suffered from the ugliness and injustice of their environment, but
were powerless to alter it. Discord with their actual environment
made Russians inactive, and produced the type of ‘superfluous
people’. Hegelianism included a possibility of relation to actual
fact which might have a double meaning. The identity of life and
thought consists not only in the carrying over of life in to thought
but also in the carrying over of thought into life.
At the end of the ’forties, in Belinsky’s last period, a stormy and
passionate relation to actual social conditions did occur, but leading
not to reconciliation but to conflict. Conflict presupposes a rela¬
tion to actual fact, to reality. A dream relation to life makes con¬
flict impossible. But in Belinsky this took the form of a crisis in his
Hegelianism. All the left revolutionary Russian thought broke
away from Hegelianism until the coming of Marxism, which
turned towards Hegel anew, but now interpreted his dialectic in a
revolutionary sense. In his latest period Belinsky went over to
revolutionary socialism and militant atheism. This found ex¬
pression in the remarkable letters to Botkin, which could not be
printed in the old Russia. The revolt against Hegel is a revolt on
behalf of living human personality, and the conflict for living
human personality resolved itself into a conflict for a socialist
structure of society. Thus was formulated the characteristically
Russian type of individualistic socialism.
Above all, Belinsky, with his usual impetuosity, rebels against
an abstract idealism remote from concrete life, which sacrifices
the individual to the general, the living human person to the world
soul. ‘The fate of the subject, the individual, the person,’ he writes, ‘is
more important than the fate of the whole world or the well-
[39]
being of the Chinese Emperor.’ ‘I reverence your philosopher’s
gown,’ he observes to Hegel, ‘but with all due respect to your
philosophical philistinism, I have the honour to inform you that if
it were given me to climb to the highest rung in the ladder of
development, even there I would ask to be rendered an account for
all the victims of the circumstances of life and history, for all the
victims of chance, of superstition, of the Inquisition, of Philip II
and so on and so on. Otherwise I would fling myself down head¬
long from that highest rung. I do not want happiness even as a gift
unless I have peace of mind about my brothers by blood, bone of
my bone, and flesh of my flesh. They say that disharmony is a con¬
dition of harmony. Maybe that is very pleasant and consoling for
lovers of music, but it is certainly not so for those to whom fate
allots the part of expressing disharmony in their experience.’ These
words are very important to the subsequent Russian problem. In
them is posed the problem of evil, the problem of the justification
of suffering, which is the fundamental Russian problem and the
source of Russian atheism; it is the problem of the cost of progress,
which will play a large part in the social thought of die ’seventies.
Belinsky anticipated Dostoyevsky; he had already lived through
Ivan Karamazov’s problem of the tears of a child; in him was
conceived Dostoyevsky’s argument in the Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor. It seems sometimes as though in the thoughts off Kara¬
mazov Dostoyevsky had in mind Belinsky, whom he knew very
well personally and with whom he disputed a good deal. Belinsky
lived through despair and bitterness after his disillusion in idealism.
He became a revolutionary, an atheist and a socialist. It is an im¬
portant fact that in Belinsky Russian revolutionary socialism was
combined emotionally with atheism. The source of this atheism
was sympathy with mankind, the impossibility of reconciling
oneself with the idea of God in view of the excessive evil and
suffering of life. Such atheism arises from moral feeling, from love
of what is good and righteous. Dostoyevsky will reveal this
peculiar religious psychology. From sympathy with mankind,
from revolt against the general (idea, reason, spirit, God) which
has oppressed the living individual man, Belinsky became a
[ 40 ]
socialist. He is an excellent witness to the moral-psychological
sources of Russian socialism. Rebellion against the general for the
sake of the individual, in him, passes over into a fight for the
general in a new sense, for humanity, for its social organization.
Belinsky fails to notice that having repudiated all that ‘general’
which had previously oppressed mankind, he was rapidly subject¬
ing the individual to a new ‘general’. And it seemed to him that
this new ‘general’ to which he paid reverence, since a Russian can¬
not but pay reverence to something or other, he affirmed for the
sake of individual personality. The same thing is to happen in the
’nineties. ‘A social spirit!—or death!’ cried Belinsky. ‘What is it to
me that the “general” lives, when the individual suffers! Repudia¬
tion is my God!’
In Russia at the end of the ’forties, there already existed that
same process of thought which was formed in Germany in the left
wing of Hegelianism, in Feuerbach and in Marx. There is a break
with abstract idealism and a transference to actual concrete fact.
Belinsky is permeated, in his own words, with a Marat’s love of
humanity. ‘I become terrible’, he writes, ‘when I get some mystical
absurdity or other into my head.’ The Russian in general is like
that; he often gets some ‘mystical absurdity’ into his head. These
words of Belinsky’s are very remarkable. From his sympathy with
mankind, Belinsky was ready to preach tyranny and brutality.
Bloodshed was unavoidable. In order to bring happiness to the
greater part of mankind you may cut oft the heads of hundreds of
.thousands. Belinsky was the forerunner of bolshevik morals. He
says that people are so stupid that you must drag them to happiness
by force. He admits that if he were Tsar he would be a tyrant on
behalf of justice. He is disposed to dictatorship. He says the time
will come when there will be no rich and no poor. Belinsky
started the assertion that the Russians are an atheist people. But he
still preserves a love for the Christ of the poor and unhappy. Be¬
linsky writes Gogol a letter full of indigantion a propos of his book
Correspondence with Friends. This letter, of course, could not be
printed and was passed round from hand to hand. He branded
Gogol as a traitor and a preacher of slavery. From a religious point
[41]
of view he was wrong, but from a social point of view he was
right.
Belinsky is the central figure in the history of Russian thought
and self-consciousness in the nineteenth century. And he, more
than any other, must be regarded as an intellectual ancestor of
Russian communism and as one of its predecessors; certainly more
than Hertzen and others of the ’forties and even of the ’sixties. He
comes near to communism not only in his ethical thought but
also in his social views. He is not a typical narodnik; he recognizes
a positive importance in industrial development, he is even ready
to admit the importance of the bourgeoisie, whom he cannot bear,
exactly like the Russian Marxists later on.
In Belinsky may be studied the inward motives giving birth to
the general outlook on life of the Russian revolutionary intelli¬
gentsia, which remained dominant for a long while and finally
produced Russian communism, though in a different historical
setting. These motives must be seen above all in a passionate in¬
dignant protest against the evil, violence and suffering of life, in
sympathy with the unhappy, the destitute and the downtrodden.
But as a result of pity, sympathy and the impossibility of bearing
suffering, Russians became atheists. They became atheists because
they could not accept a Creator Who made an evil, incomplete
world full of suffering. They themselves desired to make a better
world in which there should be no such wickedness and suffering.
In Russian atheism there were thoughts akin to Marcion. But
Marcion thought that the Creator of the world was an evil God,
while the Russians, in a different intellectual age, thought that there
was no God at all, or if He did exist that He would be an evil God.
This is in Belinsky. Bakunin gives the impression of a fighter
against God from motives akin to Marcionism. hi Lenin this
reaches its culmination. In the earliest origins of Russian atheism
there lay a lofty human feeling which reaches exaltation. But in
the final result, in militant godlessness when it came into power,
Russian communism replaced the human feeling by its opposite.
This was foreseen by Dostoyevsky.
Two lines of thought may be recognized in Belinsky. In the first
[42 ]
place he turns his attention to the living human individual, to the
suffering he is undergoing, and desires above all to assert that he is
worthy of and has a right to life in its fulness. He rebels against the
‘general’, against the world spirit against idealism, on behalf of
this living human person. But the direction of his attention very
quickly changes, and the person is swallowed up in the social
whole. It is society, the new society which can be established only
by way of revolution, that can rescue the human individual person
from the intolerable suffering and subjection. The larger part of
society, constituting ‘the people’, endures this unjust suffering and
subjection. But the focussing of the attention upon society and the
necessity of changing it leads him to forget that very same human
individual person, the fulness of his life, and his right to the spiri¬
tual content of life. The problem of society finally replaces the
problem of man. Revolution overthrows the ‘general’ which had
oppressed the human individual person, but makes him subject to
a new ‘general’, to a society which demands for itself the complete
submission of man. Such is the fateful development of religious-
socialist and atheistic thought. Russian atheism, which was linked
with socialism, is a religious phenomenon. In its foundations there
lay a love of justice. Belinsky was already permeated with the
sectarian spirit which is so characteristic of the Russian revolu¬
tionary intelligentsia.
One cannot call Belinsky a narodnik in the strict sense of the
word. He did not share the characteristic narodnik belief in ‘the
.people’. But in him were already formulated two principles which
lay at the base of narodnik socialism—the principle of the supremacy
of human personality and the principle of the communal socialist
organization of human society. Personality and people—these
were two fundamental ideas of Russian narodnik socialism. Hert-
zen was much more characteristic of narodnik socialism. He was
better known in the West than Belinsky; he lived abroad; he
edited The Bell in London; he was connected with the Western
socialist movement and his books were translated into foreign
languages. He was much more individualistic and humanist than
Belinsky, But, as was said above, he was disillusioned in the West,
[43]
and looked for salvation in the Russian muzhik, whom Belinsky
certainly did not idealize. In Belinsky the potential Marxist already
existed. The amazing thing is that in the Russian peasantry, living
as they were in conditions of serfdom and devoid of the most
elementary enlightenment, Hertzen saw a greater expression of
the principle of personality than in the European who had become
a bourgeois. In the Russian people the principle of personality
was combined with the principle of community. Living in a
foreign country Hertzen became the founder of narodnik socialism,
which reached its highest development in the ’seventies. Hertzen
believed that socialism could be brought into being more easily
and better in Russia than in the West, and that it would not be
bourgeois. Like many narodniks he was opposed to a political revo¬
lution which might drive Russia into the bourgeois path of
development.
To be a socialist in those days meant to demand economic re¬
forms, to despise liberalism, and to regard the development of
capitalist industry as the chief evil, because it destroyed the con¬
ception of the peasant order of life as the highest type of society.
Frequently this meant a sympathy with dictatorship, even with
monarchy. The narodnik socialists were ready to support the mon¬
archy in Russia if it would stand for the defence of the people
against the nobility and the growing bourgeoisie. During his life
abroad Hertzen, in the pages of The Bell, congratulated Alexander
II on his action in liberating the peasants. But Hertzen, in spite of
all his revolutionary socialist ideas, in spite of his situation as an
emigrant, seemed alien to the generation of the ’sixties. He was a
man of the ’forties, a cultured Russian barin, a humanist and a
sceptic, but not a nihilist. He was not typical of the revolutionary
intelligentsia, much less typical than Belinsky. Chernishevsky,
who developed ideas of narodnik socialism akin to Hertzen, speaks
of him with contempt, as a barin of the ’forties, who always goes
on thinking that he is arguing with Khomyakov in the drawing¬
rooms of Moscow. In the ’sixties new social groups, and especially
seminarists, came to the fore among the intelligentsia; the nobility
ceased to dominate, and a sterner, more ascetic, spiritual type made
[44]
its appearance, more realist and active. Those idealists who really
belonged to the ’forties, but appeared in the ’sixties as the ‘super¬
fluous people’, now seemed men of a bygone age. The nihilists
came on the scene.

II
Nihilism is a characteristically Russian phenomenon; in its
Russian form it is unknown in Western Europe. In the narrower
sense of the word, nihilism is the intellectual liberation movement
of the ’sixties, and Pisarev is recognized as its chief exponent. The
Russian nihilist was sketched by Turgeniev in Bazarov. But in
actual fact nihilism is a much wider thing than that for which
Pisarev stands. It is to be found in the subsoil of Russian social
movements, although nihilism in itself is not a social movement.
There is a nihilist basis in Lenin, although he lives in another epoch.
‘We are all nihilists,’ says Dostoyevsky. Russian nihilism denied
God, the soul, the spirit, ideas, standards and the highest values.
And none the less nihilism must be recognized as a religious
phenomenon. It grew up on the spiritual soil of Orthodoxy; it
could appear only in a soul which was cast in an Orthodox mould.
It is Orthodox asceticism turned inside out, and asceticism with¬
out Grace. At the base of Russian nihilism, when grasped in its
purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world, its
sense of the truth that ‘the whole world lieth in wickedness’,1 the
acknowledgement of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all
creative profusion in art and in thought. Like Orthodox asceticism,
nihilism was an individualist movement, but it was also directed
against the fulness and richness of life. Nihilism considers as sinful
luxury not only art, metaphysics and spiritual values, but religion
also. All its strength must be devoted to the emancipation of
earthly man, the emancipation of the labouring people from their
excessive suffering, to establishing conditions of happy life, to the
destruction of superstition and prejudice, conventional standards
and lofty ideas, which enslave man and hinder Inis happiness. That
is the one thing needful, all else is of the Devil. In the intellectual
St.John, 5.19.
145]
sphere, one must find an ascetic satisfaction in the natural sciences,
which destroy the old beliefs, and overthrow prejudices, and in
political economy which inculcates the organization of a more
righteous social order.
Nihilism is the negative of Russian apocalyptic. It is a revolt
against the injustices of history, against false civilization; it is a
demand that history shall come to an end, and a new life, outside
or above history, begin. Nihilism is a demand for nakedness, for
the stripping from oneself of all the trappings of culture, for
the annihilation of all historical traditions, for the setting free of
the natural man, upon whom there will no longer be fetters of
any sort. The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found expression
in materialism; anymore subtle philosophy was proclaimed a sin.
The Russian nihilists of the ’sixties—and I have in mind not only
Pisarev but also Chernishevsky, Dobrolyubov and others—were
Russian prophets of enlightenment. They declared war against all
historical traditions; they opposed ‘reason’, the existence of which
as materialists they could not recognize, to all the beliefs and pre¬
judices of the past. But the Russian prophets of enlightenment, in
accord with the maximalist character of the Russian people,
always became nihilists. Voltaire and Diderot were not nihilists. In
Russia, materialism assumed an entirely different character from
its Western form. Materialism was turned into a peculiar sort of
dogmatic theology. This is a striking fact about the materialism
of the communists. But already in the ’sixties materialism had
assumed this theological tinge; it became a dogma of moral obliga¬
tion and behind it was concealed a distinctive nihilist asceticism. A
materialist catechism was framed, and Was adopted by the fanatical
circles of the left Russian intelhgentsia. Not to be a materialist was
to be taken as a moral suspect. If you were not a materialist, then
you were in favour of the enslavement of man both intellectually
and politically. The attitude of the Russian nihilists to science was
idolatrous. Science, by which was to be understood principally
the natural sciences, which at that time were presented in material¬
ist colours, became an object of faith; it was turned into an idol.
There were admirable scholars in Russia at that date who in them-
[46]
selves constituted a special phenomenon. But the nihilist prophets
of enlightenment were not men of science. They were men of
belief—and dogmatic belief. The mediodical doubt of Descartes
suits the nihilists, and indeed the Russian nature in general, but
little. The typical Russian cannot go on doubting for very long;
his inclination is to make a dogma for himself fairly quickly, and
to surrender himself to that dogma whole-heartedly and entirely.
A Russian sceptic is a Western type in Russia. There was nothing
sceptical in Russian materialism; it was a faith.
In nihilism still another trait of the Russian Orthodox type was
reflected in a distorted view, the lack of a solution of the problem
of culture due to the Orthodox background of Russian mentahty.
Ascetic Orthodoxy was doubtful about the justifiability of culture;
it was inclined to see sinfulness in cultural creativeness. This found
expression in the painful doubt felt by the great Russian writers
about the justifiability of their own literary work. Rehgious,
moral and social doubt of the justification of culture is a most
characteristically Russian theme. Doubt has been constantly ex¬
pressed among us as to whether philosophical and artistic creative¬
ness is justifiable. The problem of the cost at which culture is pur¬
chased will be dominant in the social thought of the ’seventies.
Russian nihilism was a withdrawal from a world which ‘lieth in
wickedness’, a break with the family and with all settled and
established life. Russians accepted this break more easily than
Western peoples. They considered the State, law and traditional
morals sinful, for these things had been used to justify the enslave¬
ment of man.
More remarkable than anything is the fact that Russians, when
nihilism had shaped them, readily sacrificed themselves and went
to penal servitude and the gallows. They were striving after a
future, but for themselves they had no hope whatever, either in
this earthly life or in the life everlasting which they denied. They
did not understand the Mystery of the Cross, but they were in the
highest degree capable of sacrifice and renunciation. In this respect
they compared favourably with the Christians of their day, who
displayed very little capacity for sacrifice, and so repelled men
[47]
from Christianity. Chernishevsky, who was a genuine ascetic in
life, said that he preached liberty, but for himself he would never
avail himself of any sort of liberty whatever, lest it should be
thought that he defended liberty with a selfish purpose, (io) The
wonderful capacity for sacrifice in men of a materialist view of
life is evidence of the fact that nihilism was a distinctively religious
phenomenon.
It was not by chance that seminarists, children of priests and those
who passed through the Orthodox school played a great part in
Russian nihilism. Dobrolyubov and Chernishevsky were sons of
arch-priests and had studied in a seminary. The ranks of the ‘left’
intelligentsia among us were filled to a large extent by members of
the clerical class. The significance of this fact is twofold. In the
theological school the seminarist acquired a certain configuration
of spirit in which ascetic denial of the world played a large part.
At the same time, among the seminarists of the second half of the
’fifties and the beginning of the ’sixties, a violent protest against
the decadent Orthodoxy of the nineteenth century was coming to
a head, against the unseemliness of the lives of the clergy, and
against the obscurantist atmosphere of the clerical schools. Semin¬
arists were beginning to be permeated by the emancipating ideas
of education, but permeated after the Russian fashion, that is to
say, in an extremist, nihilist manner. No small part in this was
played by the ressentiment of the seminarists to the culture of the
nobility. At the same time a thirst for social justice was awakening
in the young, and for them it meant the birth of Christianity in a
new form. The seminarists and raznochinsti1 brought with them a
new build of character, sterner, ethical, exacting and exclusive,
formed by a severer and more painful school of life than that in
which the cultured members of the nobility had grown up. This
new young generation changed the type of Russian culture. The
type of culture in the men of the ’sixties, Dobrolyubov, Cherni¬
shevsky, the nihilists, the growing revolutionary intelligentsia, was
somewhat low in comparison with that of the cultured nobility
of the ’thirties and ’forties, the culture of Chaadaev, Iv. Kireevsky,
2See footnote on p. 37.

[48]
Khomyakov, Granovsky and Hertzen. Culture always develops
and reaches more finished forms in aristocratic circles. When
it becomes democratic and is diffused among other classes of
society, its standard is lowered, and only later, as the human
material is worked over, can culture rise higher again. That same
process went on in Russia on a small scale among the intelligentsia
of the ’sixties, and on a wide, national scale it took place at the
Russian revolution. The change in the type of culture was ex¬
pressed primarily in the different objects towards which it was
directed. This had already been anticipated by Belinsky in the
latest period of his development. The ‘idealists’ of the ’forties were
interested mainly in the humane sciences, philosophy, art, litera¬
ture. The nihilists of the ’sixties were chiefly interested in the
natural sciences and political economy, and thus these became the
interests also of the communist generation of the Russian revo¬
lution.
In the understanding of the genesis of Russian nihilism m the
wide sense of the word and the Russian revolutionary spirit of the
’sixties, the figure of Dobrolyubov is of great interest. In him is
seen the sort of soul in which revolutionary and nihilist ideas were
born. It was the kind of soul from which saints are made. That may
be said of Dobrolyubov and of Chemishevsky alike. Dobrolyubov
left behind him a Diary in which he describes his childhood and
youth. He had a purely Orthodox religious upbringing. In his
childhood and even in early youth he was very religious. The cast
of his soul was ascetic. He had a strong sense of sin and was dis¬
posed to frequent confession. The most insignificant sins caused
him pain. He could not forgive himself if he ate too much jam,
slept too long and so on. He was very devout. He loved his parents
tenderly, especially his mother, and he could not become recon¬
ciled to her death. Dobrolyubov was a pure, stem, serious man,
without any of that lightness of touch which gave such a charm to
the cultured nobility. And then this devout, ascetic soul, serious to
the degree of harshness, lost his faith, appalled by the evil, the in¬
justice, and the suffering of life. He could not reconcile himself to
the fact that with so evil a world, full of injustice and suffering,
B.R.C.
d [49 ]
there exists an all-good and all-powerful Creator. Here is the
destructive Marcion theme at work. Dobrolyubov is stunned by
the fact that his beloved mother dies.
Nor can he reconcile himself to the low level of life among the
Russian clergy, its lack of spirituality, its obscurantism, its absence
of any application of Christianity to life. He feels himself sur¬
rounded by ‘the kingdom of darkness’. His principal essay, written
a propos of Ostrovsky, is entitled A Ray of Light in the Kingdom of
Darkness. Man must himself bring light into the kingdom of dark¬
ness. What is needed is enlightenment, a revolutionary change in
the whole order of life. Dobrolyubov was a critic; he wrote about
literature. He did not go to such extremes as Pisarev in the re¬
pudiation of aesthetics, but even for him aesthetics were a luxury,
and on ascetic grounds he rejected the superfluous luxury of aesthe¬
tics. He desired earthly happiness for man, and after he lost his
faith he knew no other purpose in life. But he himself knew no
happiness, his life was joyless, and he died of consumption almost
in his youth. One can imagine Russian nihilism only as a youth
movement; nihilism in the elderly has a repulsive character.
N. Chernishevsky dominated the thought not only of the
radical intelligentsia of the ’sixties, but also of succeeding genera¬
tions. The halo which surrounded his name in penal servitude
contributed very greatly to his popularity. Chernishevsky was
charged with drawing up proclamations to the peasantry, the
charge against him being supported by forgery and false evidence.
He was condemned to seven years’ penal servitude, and after that
spent twelve years in Eastern Siberia under extremely severe con¬
ditions. He bore Siberia and penal servitude as a genuine ascetic.
Chernishevsky was a very gentle person; he had a Christian soul
and there were marks of saintliness in his character, (n) This
harrying of Chernishevsky was one of the most shameful actions
of the Russian government ol the old regime. Chernishevsky, like
Dobrolyubov, was the son of an arch-priest. His earliest education
was theological, and he was brought up in a seminary. He was a
very learned person, a veritable encyclopaedist; he knew both
theology and philosophy down to the philosophy of Hegel; he
[50]
knew history and the natural sciences; but he was chiefly an
economist. As an economist Marx ranked him very high. He had
gifts which might have made him a specialist, and if they did not
actually do so, it was simply because he was attracted by the con¬
flict in the field of social ideas. But all the same he was a bookish
man, and gave no impression of having a passionate nature. He
wrote novels with a moral purpose, but he possessed no special
talent for literature. Notwithstanding the breadth of his learning,
Chernishevsky was not a man of high culture. His standard of
culture was rather low compared with that of the people of the
’forties. There was a lack of taste in it, due to the influence of the
seminarists and raznochintsi.
Chernishevsky was a rationalist, a disciple of Feuerbach and at
the same time one who idealized the soil, like Dobrolyubov and
like all the best representatives of the revolutionary and nihilist
intelligentsia. He had a strong ascetic side to him also. It was a re¬
sult of his asceticism that he professed his extreme materialism,
which was, philosophically speaking, naive and pitiful; and it was
due to his moral sense and love of the good that he affirmed a
utilitarian ethic of rational egoism. The ethical motive was always
very strong among the nihilists, though theoretically they re¬
pudiated all morals. Idealism, spiritual metaphysics, and religion
were connected in their minds with practical materialism and
social injustice. Christianity provided sufficient grounds for this.
Those who professed to have an idealistic and spiritual outlook too
pften concealed the basest self-interest behind the expression of
lofty ideas. And, therefore, on behalf of a vital idealism, for the
sake of the realization of social justice, they began to assert a crude
materialism and utilitarianism, and to reject all lofty ideas and
rhetoric.
Chernishevsky wrote a utopian novel called What is to be done?
which became a sort of catechism of Russian nihilism, a text-book
of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. From an artistic point
of view the novel was sufficiently weak and tasteless, but it is very
interesting from the point of view of the history of the Russian
intelligentsia. The attacks upon it on moral grounds from the right
[5i]
wing were monstrously unjust and libellously false. The notable
Russian theologian, Bukharev, who recognized its Christian
character, was right. What is to be done? is an ascetic book, a sort of
manual of the devout life for Russian nihilists. Rakhmetov, the
hero, sleeps on nails in order to harden his character and train him¬
self to endure pain and suffering. The preaching of free love did
not mean the preaching of dissoluteness, a thing which flourished
precisely among the conservative governing classes, the guards
officers and so on, but not among the nihilists, who were men of
ideas. It meant a demand for sincerity in emotion, a liberation
from all conventions, lies and oppression. Chernishevsky’s ethics,
of course, stood a great deal higher than the slave morality of
‘Domostroi’. Vera Pavlovna’s dream in the novel pictures a
socialist Utopia in which co-operative workshops are organized.
Chemishevsky’s socialism, more than any other, still bore a partly
narodnik and partly utopian character, but was already one of the
predecessors of the Communism of the ’sixties. Plekhanov, the
founder of Russian Marxism, recognizes this in his book on Cher-
nishevsky.(i2) Not without reason did Marx study Russian in
order to read Chernishevsky.
It was as an economist that the latter was most independent.
He was not, like many other narodniks, an opponent of industrial
development. But he poses the traditional problem for Russian
nineteenth century thought: Can Russia escape capitalist develop¬
ment? and answers it by saying that Russia can shorten the capital¬
ist period to nothing, and go straight on from the lower forms of
economy to socialist economy. The communists, in spite of their
Marxism, are trying to do just this very thing. Chernishevsky sets
national wealth and popular well-being in opposition to each
other, which was characteristic of narodnik socialism. In capitalist
countries, national wealth increases and the people’s welfare dimin¬
ishes. Chernishevsky is a defender of the peasant Commune. He
asserts that the third and highest socialist period of development
will resemble the first and lowest. Chernishevsky, like Hertzen
and later Mikhailovsky, identifies the interests of the people with
the interests of human personality in general. Of all those who
[52]
wrote books that the law allowed to be published, Chernishevsky
was the most clearly expressed socialist, and this marks his signifi¬
cance for the Russian intelligentsia, which in its moral conscious¬
ness was most wholly socialist in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Nihilism of the Pisarev type was a weakening of the
socialist theme, but this was a temporary phenomenon. Chemi-
shevsky’s philosophical position was specially weak. Although he
derived it from so admirable a thinker as Feuerbach, yet his
materialism was vulgar, and coloured by the popular natural
science books of that day, much more vulgar than the dialectic
materialism ol the Marxists.
Chernishevsky wrote on aesthetic questions too, and was a
typical representative of Russian journalistic criticism. He de¬
fended the thesis that reality is higher than art and desired to con¬
struct a realist aesthetic. There was a strong ascetic motive in
Chernishevsky’s anti-aestheticism. He was already seeking that
type of culture which triumphed in communism—frequently in
caricature—the dominance of the natural and economic sciences,
the rejection of religion and metaphysics, the subservience of
literature and art to social aims, an ethic of social utilitarianism,
the subjection of the internal life of the individual to the interests
and requirements of society. Chernishevsky’s asceticism and the
practical Christian virtues of this ‘materialist’ provided an im¬
mense endowment of moral capital on which the communists are
living, although they themselves do not possess those virtues.
In contrast with Chernishevsky and Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, the
principal exponent of Russian nihilism in the proper sense, was a
scion of the nobility. He was an elegant and smart young man
with gentle, by no means nihilist, manners. This 'destroyer of
aesthetics’ had aesthetic taste. As a writer he was more gifted than
Chernishevsky and Dobrolyubov. His fate was typically Russian.
He was arrested on some trivial ground and spent four years in
prison in solitary confinement, where he wrote most of his essays.
Pisarev died soon after he was set free, and when he was quite a
young man, being drowned as a result of an unfortunate accident.
Coming from a generation of prophets of enlightenment in the
[53]
’sixties, he was very much of an individualist, and the social theme
was weaker in him than in Chernishevsky. Pisarev was mainly
interested in the emancipation of the individual person, in its
liberation from superstition and prejudice, from the ties of family,
from traditional morals, and the conventions of life. Intellectual
freedom held a central position for him, and he hoped to attain it
by popularizing natural science. He preached materialism, which
he was naively convinced sets personality free, although at the
same time materialism denies personality. If personality is entirely
produced by environment, then it cannot possess freedom and
independence of any sort.
Pisarev wanted to produce a new type of human being; this
interested him more than the organization of society. This new
human type he called ‘the thinking realist’. The realist generation
of ‘sons’ is sharply opposed to the idealist generation of ‘fathers’.
In his type of‘thinking realist’ Pisarev anticipated to a large extent
the type produced by Russian communism. A number of the
traits of this ‘thinking realist’ were sketched by Turgeniev in
Bozarov (Fathers and Sons), though not with any particular success.
Among the Russian intelligentsia, before the appearance of
nihilism, the human type predominated which was known as
the ‘idealist of the ’forties’. It was the continuation of the type
which belonged to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the
nineteenth centuries, and was connected with mystical masonry.
It was the outcome of the working over by Russian thought of
German romanticism and idealism. It grew up on the soil pro¬
vided by cultured Russian gentry. This type of man, a very
honourable type, was prone to the highest aspirations, to apprecia¬
tion of taste and beauty. As later on Dostoyevsky loved to observe
with irony, it was given to much day dreaming and had but a
feeble capacity for action and putting into practice; there was no
little of the Russian laziness to which the gentry were liable. From
this type the ‘superfluous people’ came. The type of ‘thinking
realist’ preached by Pisarev produces completely different traits,
which are often engendered in reaction against the idealist type.
The ‘thinking realist’ was alien from all day dreaming and roman-
[54]
ticism; he was the foe of all lofty ideas which had no relation what¬
ever to action and were not put into practice. He was inclined to
be cynical when it came to unmasking illusions, whether religious,
metaphysical or aesthetic. His cult was a cult of work and labour.
He recognized only the natural sciences, and despised the humani¬
ties. He preached the ethic of reasoned egoism, not because he was
more egoistic than the idealist type (on the contrary, the reverse
was the case), but because he desired the merciless exposure of
fraudulent lofty ideas which were made to subserve the basest
interests.
But the level of philosophical culture of the ‘thinking
realists’ was low, much lower than that of the ‘idealists of the
’forties’. Buchner and Moleshott—exponents of the most vulgar
materialism based on the popularization of the natural science of
the day—were taken to be notable philosophers and became
teachers. This was a terrible fall from Feuerbach, not to speak of
Hegel. The ‘thinking realists’ set out to find the solution of the
mystery of life and of existence in the dissection of a frog. It was
precisely from the ‘thinking realists’ of the ’sixties that there came
that absurd argument, which became so popular among the
radical Russian intelligentsia, that the dissection of a corpse did not
reveal the existence of a soul in man. The reverse bearing of this
argument escaped their notice; if they had brought the soul to light
by the dissecting of a corpse, this would have been evidence on the
side of materialism. There was a great contrast between the
seriousness and significance of the human crisis which took place
in the ‘thinking realists’, and the pitifulness of their philosophy,
their crude and vulgar materialism and utilitarianism.
The ‘thinking realist’ was, of course, a foe of aesthetics, and
denied the independent significance of art. In that respect he de¬
manded a stern asceticism. Pisarev perpetrated a positive pogrom
of aesthetics; he rejected the perfect achievement of Pushkin, and
proposed that the Russian novelists should write popular tracts
on natural science. In this respect the cultural programme of the
communists is more reasonable; it proposes the study of Pushkin,
and assigns some meaning to art. Dialectic materialism is less vulgar
[55]
 than the materialism of Buchner and Moleshott. But among the
communists technical knowledge plays the same part as natural
science, and especially the biological sciences, played in the ’sixties.
Pisarev’s nihilism announced that ‘boots are above Shakespeare’.
The idea of the subservience of art and literature to social aims was
asserted in Pisarev’s system in an even more extreme form than in
communism. If the programme of Russian nihilism were actually
realised to the full in Russian communism, the results for culture
would have been more destructive than those we actually see in
Soviet culture. The appearance of the ‘thinking realist’ meant the
appearance of a harsher type than the ‘idealist of the ’forties’, and
at the same time a more active type. But in the nihilism of Pisarev
there was a healthy reaction against fruitless, romantic day dream¬
ing, idleness and egoistic self-absorption; it was a wholesome sum¬
mons to labour and knowledge, although a one-sided knowledge.
There was a simple and active liberating force in nihilism. The
movement had an immense and a positive significance for the
emancipation of women. An analogous process recurred among
us Russians in the change from the type of person who created the
cultural renaissance of the beginning of the twentieth century—
the ‘idealist’ movement of that day—to the Russian communist.
The exponents of nihilism did not observe the radical contra¬
diction which lay at the roots of their aspirations. They sought the
liberation of personality; they proclaimed a revolt against all be¬
liefs, all abstract ideas, for the sake of that liberation. On behalf of
the liberation of personality, they emptied it of its qualitative con¬
tent, devastated its inner life, and denied it its right to creativeness
and spiritual enrichment. The principle of utilitarianism is in the
highest degree unfavourable to the principle of personality; it sub¬
jects personality to utility, which holds sway tyrannically over
personality. In its thought and creative activity nihilism displayed
a violent asceticism intruded from without. Materialism was such
an intruded asceticism and poverty of thought. The principle of
personality can in no way stand and develop on the soil of
materialism. Personality, as they conceived it, is found to be de¬
prived of the right to creative fulness of life. If the talented Pisarev
[ 56 ]
had lived to more mature years, he would perhaps have observed
tliis fundamental contradiction; perhaps he would have under¬
stood that one cannot fight for personality on the ground of one’s
belief‘in the frog’. The tendencies of the ’seventies rubbed off the
corners of the nihilism of the ’sixties. The chief influence on the
thought of the radical intelligentsia of the ’seventies was not that
of Buchner and Moleshott, but of Comte and Herbert Spencer. A
change-over took place from materialism to positivism, a reaction
against the predominance of natural science. To some extent the
rights of aesthetics were upheld, and art was not repudiated. But
the idea i f the subservience of art to social aims continued to
dominate he minds of the intelligentsia.

[ 57 ]
 CHAPTER III

RUSSIAN NARODNICHESTVO AND

ANARCHISM

N arodnichestvo is a phenomenon just as characteristically Rus¬

sian as nihilism or anarchism. The Slavophils and Hertzen,
Dostoyevsky and Bakunin, L. Tolstoi and the revolutionaries of
the ’seventies were all alike narodniks, though in different ways.
Narodnichestvo is above all belief in the Russian people, and by the
people must be understood the simple labouring people, and
especially the peasantry. The people are not the nation. Russian
narodniks of all shades believed that among the people was pre¬
served the secret of the true life, a secret concealed from the
governing cultured classes. Consciousness of the gulf between the
intelligentsia and the people was fundamental to narodnichestvo.
The narodniks of the intelligentsia did not feel themselves an
organic part of the people; the people was to be found outside
them. Intelligentsia was not a function of the life of the people, it
was broken off from that life, and felt guilty in relation to the
people.
This sense of guilt played an immense part in the psychology of
narodnichestvo. The intelligentsia was always in debt to the people,
and had to pay its debt. All the culture which the intelligentsia
accepted was built up at the people’s expense, at the expense of the
people’s labour, and this laid a heavy responsibility upon those who
shared in that culture. The religious narodniks (the Slavophils,
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi) believed that in the people religious truth
was hidden; those who were not religious and often anti-religious
(Hertzen, Bakunin, the narodnik socialists of the ’seventies) be¬
lieved that in the people was hidden social truth. The true man,
the man who is not crushed by the sense of guilt, by the sin of ex-
[58]
 ploiting his brothers, is the labouring man, the man of the people.
Culture for its own sake is not a justification of life, but is bought
at the too heavy price of the enslavement of the people. Narodni-
chestvo was not infrequently hostile to culture, and in any case
rebelled against too great a respect for it. The narodnichestvo of
the Slavophil religious type saw the chief guilt of the cultured
upper classes in their divorce from the religious beliefs of the
people, and from the people’s life. Narodnichestvo of the socialist
type had a much greater significance, for it saw the guilt of the
cultured classes in this, that the whole of their life and culture was
founded upon exploitation of the people’s labour.
The intellectual, cultured class in Russia had but a feeble sense
of their own worth and their own cultural vocation. On the
heights of its creative path, the Russian genius was keenly aware
of its loneliness, its separation from the soil, its guilt, and cast itself
down in order to stoop into contact with the soil and the people.
Such were Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky. What a difference there is in
this respect between Tolstoi and Nietzsche! The general outlook
on life of narodnichestvo has a flavour of the soil—it depends on the
land. The people live under the power of the land, says that
remarkable narodnik writer Gleb Uspensky. The narodnik of the
intelligentsia, on the other hand, has broken away from the land,
and desires to return to it. The narodnik view of things held good
only in a peasant, agricultural country. The general outlook of the
people is collective, not individual. The people are a collective
whole and with it the intelligentsia desires to unite, entering into
its life.
Russian narodnichestvo is the offspring of the cleavage of the
Petrine epoch. It is a product of the consciousness of the intelli¬
gentsia that their own life could not be justified, that it was absurd, a
product of the inorganic character of the ordering of Russian life
as a whole. Not a single people of the West has gone through such
a sense of repentance as the Russians, as represented by their privi¬
leged classes. The singular type of the ‘contrite noble’ came into
being. He was conscious of his social, but not of his individual sin,
the sin of his social position, and he repented of it. N. Mikhailovsky,
[59]
the narodnik sociologist of the seventies, distinguished between
the work of conscience and the work of honour. The work of
conscience goes on among the privileged classes, the nobility,
while the work of honour, the demand for the recognition of
human worth, goes on among the people, the lower, the op¬
pressed classes. The upper class narodniks were moved especially
by motives of conscience, the lower class narodniks by motives of
honour. An aversion for the bourgeoisie and a dread of the de¬
velopment of capitalism have always been distinctive of the Rus¬
sian people. The narodniks believed in a path of development for
Russia, in the possibility of escaping Western capitalism; they be¬
lieved that the Russian people are predestined to solve the social
problem better and more quickly than the West. The revolution¬
ary narodniks agreed with the Slavophils in this. The behef derives
from Hertzen. One of the chief supports of narodnik socialism was
the fact that the Roman conception of property was always alien
to the Russian people. The absolute nature of private property
was always denied. To the Russian mind what was important was
not one’s attitude to the principle of property, but one’s attitude
to the living man. And that, of course, was the Christian position.
It is important too to note that the Russian intelligentsia was
distinguished from the Western ‘intellectuals’ not only spiritually
but also in its social position. Western intellectuals are, socially
speaking, bourgeois; objectively they belong to the privileged
well-to-do class. This is due to the conditions of higher education
in the West. The Russian intelligentsia was commonly prole¬
tarian, not bourgeois in the social sense of the word. After the
’sixties, even when the intelligentsia remained upper class, it was
in the majority of cases an impoverished proletarianized upper
class. The intelligentsia of the lower class had no means of sub¬
sistence and earned their living by giving cheap lessons, or by
writing, and they were obliged to live from hand to mouth.
University education in Russia was to a much less extent a privi¬
lege of the rich than in the West. This partly explains the sympathy
of the Russian intelligentsia for socialism, the non-bourgeois
character of its ideology. But the socialism of the intelligentsia of
[ 60 ]
the nineteenth century was of a visionary character. Nowhere in
the West did there exist so singular a form of the problem ‘in¬
telligentsia and people’, to which all Russian thought of the second
half of the nineteenth century was devoted, for in the West there
existed neither intelligentsia nor people in the Russian sense. All
the narodniks idealized the peasant way of living; the peasant Com¬
mune seemed to them an original product of Russian history, the
ideal type, or, as N. Mikhailovsky expressed it, the highest type
on a low rung of development. But one must not attach too great
importance to the narodnik doctrine of the Commune; it was only
the reflexion of Russian conditions of life. Great significance be¬
longs to the moral and spiritual aspect of narodnichestvo. Russian
communism holds a doctrine which contradicts narodnichestvo,
but into it powerful elements of Russian revolutionary narod¬
nichestvo have entered.
The beginning of the ’sixties was the period of liberal reforms,
of the liberation of the peasants, the foundation of the Zemstvo.
Several years of great harmony ensued because the left intelli¬
gentsia became reconciled with authority and willing to take part
in the realization of reforms which originated from above. Hert-
zen and even Chemishevsky write laudatory essays on the peasant
reforms of Alexander II and are ready to support the government
in this matter. The dream of the intelligentsia of the freedom of
the peasants was coming true. But this spring-like temper lasted
but a short while. A reactionary mood from above and a revolu¬
tionary temper from below began to grow, and the atmosphere
became more and more tense. At court, and among the nobility
who suffered from the liberation of the peasants, a reactionary
temper hostile to reforms soon made its appearance. The usual re¬
pressive tendency in relation to the intelligentsia won the victory.
A feeling of terror began to predominate in the governing classes,
as indeed it always has predominated among Russian authorities
in consequence of the cleavage in Russian life and the inorganic
character of the Russian State. A revolutionary movement began
which found expression in terrorist acts against Alexander II. The
reactionary temper of the governing classes was stimulated both
[6i]
by their interests and by their passions, and it found vent in acts of
repression which, in their turn, aroused revolutionary temper and
activity? A vicious circle was set up.
Revolutionary acts could not change the order of society, for
the immense bulk of the people still believed in the sacrosanct
character of the autocracy. The intelligentsia had not sufficient
grasp of the fact that it was impossible for the Russian monarchy
to maintain its position by mere violence, and that it rested upon
the religious convictions of the people. The peasants were
liberated and given land. Those who demanded the liberation of
the peasants without providing them with land, that is to say, the
turning of them into a proletariat, had clearly been defeated. But
the peasants, in spite of the fact that they possessed the larger part
of the land, remained unorganized and discontented. The level of
agricultural skill was low and at a primitive stage, and the peasants
had not sufficient land for their subsistence. A class regime still
remained, and the peasant, as a man, continued to be humiliate.d.
Russia was still an aristocratic country, and feudalism was not
entirely superseded until the actual revolution of 1917. The great
magnates who possessed immense estates still remained. Manners
and morals were feudal. Notwithstanding the immense signifi¬
cance of the reform, everybody was discontented. After the
liberation of the peasants, revolutionary narodnichestvo, i.e.
agrarian socialism, was directed to new ends. The development of
capitalist industry on a small scale began in Russia. The bourgeoisie
began to grow. The prosperous peasantry in the villages was
changed into the bourgeoisie. The question whether Russia could
escape the capitalist stage became more acute.
In connection with the extreme maximalist tendencies of the
end of the ’sixties the sinister, grim, and characteristically Russian
figure of Nechaev is of particular interest. He was the founder of
the revolutionary society called ‘The Axe or the People’s Justice’.
Nechaev composed the ‘Revolutionary Catechism’, a document
of unusual interest, unique of its kind. In this document is to be
found the extreme expression of the principles of atheistic revolu¬
tionary asceticism. They are the rules by which the genuine revo-
[ 62 ]
lutionary should be guided, his manual, as it were, of the spiritual
life. Nechaev’s catechism is reminiscent to a grim degree of Ortho¬
dox asceticism turned inside out and mixed with Jesuitism. He was
a sort of Isaac the Syrian and Ignatius Loyola of revolutionary
socialism, the extremist form of the revolutionary ascetic denial
of the world. Nechaev was, of course, absolutely sincere, and his
fanaticism was of the extremest kind. His was the psychology of
the sectarian. He was prepared to burn his neighbour, but he was
ready at any moment to be burned himself. Nechaev alarmed
everybody. Revolutionaries and socialists of all shades rejected
him and found that he was compromising the work of revolution
and socialism. Even Bakunin repudiated Nechaev.
Nechaev and his work inspired Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed.
The affair of the murder of the student Ivanov by followers of
Nechaev on the suspicion that he was an agent provocateur struck
the imagination of Dostoyevsky and he described it in the murder
of Shatov. Peter Verkhovensky, of course, bears little resemblance
to Nechaev and gives one the impression of a caricature, but
psychologically Dostoyevsky revealed a great deal of truth. There
is something mystical in Nechaev’s catechism. It is of special in¬
terest to us that Nechaev to a large extent anticipated the bolshevik
type of party organization, in which everything comes from
above, the extreme of centralized and despotic organization.
Nechaev desired to cover the whole of Russia with those small
revolutionary cells, with an iron discipline for which everything
would be permissible for the sake of achieving the revolutionary
purpose. Nechaev despised the masses and wanted to drag them
forcibly to revolution. He rejected democracy. How does Nechaev
characterize the revolutionary? ‘The revolutionary is the doomed
man. He has no personal interests, business, feelings, connections,
property, or even name. Everything in him is in the grip of the
one exclusive interest, one thought, one passion, revolution.’ (13)
The revolutionary has broken with civil order, with the civilized
world, and with the morals of the world. He lives in this world in
order to destroy it. He must not even love the sciences of this
world. He knows one science only, the science of destruction. To
[63]
the revolutionary everything is moral which serves the revolution
—words which Lenin repeated later. The revolutionary destroys
everything which hinders the attainment of his purpose. He is
no revolutionary who holds anything in this world dear. The
revolutionary should penetrate even the secret police and have his
agents everywhere. It is necessary to increase suffering and violence
in order to arouse the masses to rebellion. He must associate with
outlaws, who are the real revolutionaries. He must focus this
world into one invincible destructive force.
According to Nechaev the psychology of the revolutionary re¬
quires the rejection of the world and personal hfe, exceptional
efficiency, exceptional concentration upon the one thing needful,
readiness to face the pain and suffering which he must expect. This
psychology is mysterious in this respect, that in it there is no belief
in the help of God’s grace and eternal hfe, as there is in Christianity.
Many Christian self-denying virtues are required of the revolu¬
tionary, though for a different purpose. The great distinction from
Christianity lies in this, that Christianity does not demand false¬
hood for the realization of its highest end, nor does it permit the
use of any and every, even criminal, means. Something of
Nechaev’s asceticism passed over into Dzerzhinsky, the founder
and controller of the Cheka. Dzerzhinsky was, of course, a fana¬
tical believer who sanctioned every means in order to bring
socialism into being. He was the cause of appalling suffering;
he was covered with blood; but he himself was ready for sacrifice
and suffering; he was in penal servitude for fifteen years. In his
boyhood and youth he was a believing Roman Catholic and pre¬
pared for the priesthood; he switched over his energies, as did so
many revolutionaries. Although the communists softened down
Nechaev’s catechism, a great deal from it entered into Russian
communism, especially in its first period.
At the present time the communists form a state; they are occu¬
pied in construction, not destruction, and on that account are
changing a good deal; they are ceasing to be typical revolution¬
aries. For them also there exists no neighbour, but only the
man far off. For them also the world is divided into two
[64]
camps, and so far as the enemy camp is concerned everything
is permissible.
Nechaev himself spent ten years in the convict prison of
Alexeevsky Vavelin in horrible conditions. There he carried on
his propaganda. He turned the whole prison guard into his agents
and through them corresponded with the party ‘Narodnaya
Volya , to whom he gave advice. He was a man of exceptional
strength. But the triumph of such a man could forebode nothing

II
Anarchism is as much a characteristic child of the Russian spirit
as nihilism and narodnichestvo. It is one of the poles in the spiritual
make-up of the Russian people. The Russians are a State-minded
people, submissively giving themselves to be the material for
founding a great empire, and yet at the same time inclined to re¬
volt, to turbulence, to anarchy. The Russian dionysiac element is
anarchic. Stenka Razin and Pugachev were characteristically
Russian figures and the memory of them is preserved among the
people. The anarchist element is very strong in Russian nine¬
teenth century thought. None of the Russian intelligentsia liked
the State and they did not consider that it was theirs. The State was
‘They’, ‘The others’. ‘We’ lived on a different level, alien from
every State. If the idea of the sacred anointing of authority was
characteristic of the Russian, so also was the idea that all authority
is evil and sinful. We have seen that the basis which the Slavophils
gave to autocratic monarchy included a powerful anarchist
element. Constantine Aksakov was a real anarchist. There are
passages in him which recall Bakunin. And there is a strong
anarchist element in Dostoyevsky also. The Russian narodniks did
not grasp the significance of the State nor consider the question
how to obtain power in the State. Yaroslavsky reproaches them
on this account in his History of the Communist Party. (14) The ideal
future was always represented as stateless. The State is the hateful
present.
The most amazing thing of all is that the ideology of anarchism
£ [ 65 ] B.R.C,
is for the most part the creation of the highest circle of the Russian
landed gentry, and this Russian anarchism acquired a general
European importance. Bakunin, Prince Kropotkin, Count Tolstoi,
grands seigneurs all of them, these were the founders of Russian and
world anarchism. The central figure is Bakunin, who was the
fantastic child of the Russian gentry. He was an overgrown child,
always aflame with the most extreme revolutionary ideas, a
Russian visionary, incapable of methodical thought and discipline,
something in the nature of a Stenka Razin of the Russian gentry.
He was still a man of the ’forties, a friend of Belinsky, Hertzen, the
Slavophils, at that time an idealist and a Hegelian, but in the
’sixties and especially in the ’seventies he acquired importance, and
that a European importance. He quarrelled with Marx about the
First International, into which he wanted to introduce anarchist
principles, decentralization and federalism. At first Bakunin was
on good personal terms with Marx, upon whom he even had
some influence in his teaching about the messianic vocation of the
proletariat. (15) But later on he became Marx’s mortal enemy,
regarding him as an apostle of the State and a pan-Germanist.
Bakunin did not like the Germans; he preferred the Latin peoples,
and his principal book is called The Cat-o’-Nine-Tails German
Empire and the Social Revolution.
There was a very strong Slavophil element in Bakunin. His
revolutionary messianism is Russian-Slav. He believed that the
world-wide conflagration would be kindled by the Russian people
and Slavdom. And in this Russian revolutionary messianism he is
a forerunner of communism. The saying ‘the passion for destruc¬
tion is a creative passion’ is Bakunin’s. Bakunin’s anarchism is in¬
surrection; he wants to raise a world-wide revolt; he wants to
destroy the old world; he believes that on the ruins of the old
world, from the ashes of the old, the new world will spontaneously
arise, Bakunin wants to raise the proletarian masses of the whole
world in rebellion; he would turn to the rabble, the lowest classes,
and believes that the insurgent mob, throwing off all the fetters of
history and civilization, will establish a better and a free hfe; he
wants to unshackle the mob. Bakunin was a narodnik in the sense
[66\
that ne believed in truth hidden in the labouring people, in the
unenlightened masses, and especially in the Russian people, whom
he regarded as pre-eminently a rebel people. All evil lies in the
State, which was founded by the ruling classes and is an instrument
of oppression.
Marx was intellectual; he ascribed an immense importance to
theory, philosophy, science; he did not believe in the type of
politics which is based on the emotions; he ascribed enormous
importance to the development of thought and organization.
Bakunin was exceptionally emotional, and hostile to all intellectual
theories; he thoroughly disapproved of scholars and scholarship.
Above all, it was the authority of the learned that he hated. To
him scientific socialism meant that the pundits were in power.
We must not allow science to control life; we must give authority
to no one. He idealized the outlaw Razin-Pugachev element in
the Russian people. At the outset of the revolution the bolsheviks
made great use of this element in spite of their Marxist theories.
Lavrov, one of the exponents of the revolutionary socialist move¬
ment of the ’seventies, wanted to educate the people and expected
the revolution to follow this education. Bakunin wanted to raise
the people in revolt, without educating them, he believed in the
righteousness and power of the unorganized. To Bakunin light
will flare up from the East and enlighten the darkness of the West,
the darkness of the bourgeois world. The Russian communists
also will come to the same view in spite of their Western Marxism.
“To Bakunin, man becomes man by revolt. There are three
principles of human development; (i) the animal man, (2)
thought, (3) revolt. Bakunin sets revolt over against organization.
To him Marx was a Jacobin and he could not bear Robespierre
and the Jacobins. Bakunin was a communist, but his communism
was anti-State and anarchist. He believed in the Union of Pro¬
ducing Associations. Bakunin was convinced that the Slavs, left to
themselves, would not have founded a State, and upon this was
based his belief in the mission of Slavism. To Bakunin the State
represents above all German influence. He predicted that if in
any country Marxism should come into being it would be a
[67]
terrible tyranny. Some of Bakunin’s predictions sound prophetic
now.
But Bakunin’s atheism was even more militant, crude and vio¬
lent that Marx’s atheism; it was due to his passionate maximalist
Russian temperament. Marx was a man of thought. To him the
conflict with religion was above all a question of change of
thought. Bakunin was an emotional man and his atheism gives the
impression not of a rejection of the idea of God as untrue and
harmful, but of a fight against God. There is something of Mar-
cion’s ideas in his atheism. One of his principal writings is called
God and the State. To Bakunin the State was the source of all the
evil in world history, and meant the enslavement and captivity of
man; but belief in God was the chief support of the State. All
authority is of God. To Bakunin that means that all authority is of
the devil; to him God is the devil, the source of man’s authority
over man, the cause of enslavement and violence, ‘If there is a
God, then man is a slave.’ The idea of God is the denial of human
reason, of justice and of freedom. God is the avenger. All religions
are cruel. It is, in fact, a materialism which is idealist in practice. In
religion, the divine is lifted up into heaven and what is crudely
animal remains on the earth. This is Feuerbach’s thought, re¬
iterated later on by Marx.
Bakunin, in contrast with Belinsky, spoke very harshly about
Christ. Christ ought to have been shut up in prison as an idler
and a tramp. If man is endowed with an immortal soul and with
freedom, then he is an anti-social being. (16) For an immortal soul
does not need the community. The community gives birth to the
individual; the community is the source of morals. In contrast with
Max Sdrner, Bakunin’s anarchism is anti-individual, collective,
communist. Bakunin repudiated personality and its independent
worth and autonomy; this distinguishes him from Proudhon. He
preached an anarchist communism; but as distinct from the anar¬
chist communism of Kropotkin, which was tinged with intel¬
lectual optimism, Bakunin’s was tinged with a sinister shade of
destructiveness and revolt against everything, and especially
against God. Bakunin associated churches and public-houses to-
[68]
 gether; lie cried: ‘The social revolution alone will be able to
acquire sufficient strength to close all the public-houses and all the
churches at one and the same time.’ (17) Bakunin’s militant
atheism goes further than that of the Russian communists who, as
a matter of fact, have not closed all the churches and in whom the
intellectual influence of Marxism can be felt; but in his militant
atheism Bakunin is a predecessor of the communists. Communism
has made great use of his anarchism and spirit of rebellion in the
destructive side of its work, but on the creative and constructive
side, and in their organization, the communists are sharply dis¬
tinguished from Bakunin, who never could organize power and
had no wish to do so. Bakunin, like Nechaev, was hostile to science
and the intelligentsia, and this aversion also played its part in the
Russian revolution.
In comparison with the extremes of Bakunin and Nechaev, the
other currents of Russian revolutionary socialist thought were
mild and moderate. In philosophy they took the form of positiv¬
ism, under the influence of Comte, Mill and Spencer, and even
of the rising neo-Kantianism, but not of militant materialism. A
crude utilitarianism in morals was predominant and, in general,
extreme nihilism. In social teaching many of them came near to
Proudhon, and borrowed something from Marx, with whom
they were beginning to be acquainted. The master minds among
the intelligentsia of the ’seventies were P. Lavrov and N. Mikhail¬
ovsky, the defenders of what was called subjective sociology, that
i§ to say, the point of view which sees it is necessary for sociology
to assign moral value to phenomena. Lavrov and Mikhailovsky in
their own way defended human personality without distinguish¬
ing it from the individual, and socialism to them, as to Hertzen,
has an individualist character. The socialist organization of society
is necessary to ensure a complete life for each individual. Mik¬
hailovsky declared ‘war for individuality’ and set up a theory of a
conflict between personality and organized society.
Lavrov and Mikhailovsky are typical armchair philosophers of
the radical intelligentsia. The weakness of their philosophic posi¬
tion, their superficial positivism, prevented them from giving a
[69]
philosophic basis to the principle of personality, which was the
positive side of their sociological theory. To them personality still
remained the creation of the community, of its social environment,
and it is not clear whence it found its power to fight against the
community, which wants to turn personality into its own organ
and function. Lavrov became known through his Historical Letters,
which became the moral catechism of the narodnik intelligentsia
of the ’seventies. Lavrov gave expression to the theme of ‘repent¬
ance’, of the guilt of the cultured classes before the masses and of
their obligation to discharge their debt. He poses the traditional
Russian question of the price of progress and culture. But the
narodnichestvo of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky belongs to the type
which regards itself as bound by the interests of the people but not
by their opinions. They thought that true enlightened opinions
are to be found among the intelligentsia and not among the people.
It was the duty of the intelligentsia to give the people knowledge,
to serve the interests of the people and work for their freedom,
but to preserve its own independence in opinions and ideas. Mik¬
hailovsky put this in the following way: ‘If the revolutionary
masses broke into my room and wanted to smash the bust of
Belinsky and destroy my library, I should resist them to the last
drop of blood.’ There, as it were, he foresaw the situation in
which the radical intelligentsia were to find themselves placed in
their struggle for revolution. Mikhailovsky less than anybody,
of course can be regarded as a forerunner of communism, much
less so than Belinsky and Bakunin, and in this respect he is like
Hertzen. This was another streak in Russian socialist thought.
The revolutionary masses will desire to smash the bust of Belinsky
precisely because they will be imbued with some of that same
Belinsky’s ideas. Therein lies the paradox of revolutionary
thought.
In the ’seventies there was a strong narodnik movement which
found expression in the ‘going to the people’. This movement did
not at first bear a revolutionary and political character. The
narodniks of the intelligentsia desired to merge themselves into the
people, to enlighten the people, to serve the peasants in their
[70]
daily needs and interests. They wanted ‘land and liberty’ for the
people, and with this was connected the underground organiza¬
tion called Land and Liberty’. The failure of this ‘going to the
people , in which so much self-denial and capacity for sacrifice, so
much faith and hope, so much nobility were displayed, was, of
course, due to the fact that they came up against government re¬
pression and persecution, but not only to that. The tragedy of the
narodnik movement lay above all in this, that the people did not
welcome the intelligentsia, and the people themselves surrendered
those who came desiring to serve them so unselfishly and dis¬
interestedly into the hands of the authorities. The people—that is
to say, chiefly the peasantry—found the point of view of the in¬
telligentsia strange. The people still remained rehgious, Orthodox,
and the lack of religion in the intelligentsia repelled them. The
people saw a gentlefolk’s pastime in the narodnik ‘going to the
people’. All this brought the narodnik intelligentsia face to face
with a political problem and led to the elaboration of new methods
of conflict.

Ill
In the ’seventies a notable exponent of the theory of revolution
was P. N. Tkachev, (i 8) He, more than anyone, should be
regarded as the forerunner of Lenin. Tkachev edited a revolution¬
ary paper abroad, called The Tocsin, which expressed the most
extreme views. Tkachev, by the way, was the first during the
’seventies to talk to us about Marx. In 1875, he wrote a letter to
Engels about Russia’s own particular line of development and
about the special character of the coming Russian revolution, to
which it would be impossible simply to apply the principles of
Marxism. But it cannot be said that Tkachev set narodnik principles
in opposition to the idea of transplanting Marxism to Russian soil.
Tkachev was not a traditional and typical narodnik; as a matter of
fact he did not believe in the people. He was the first to draw the
distinction between a bourgeois revolution, a constitution, etc.,
and that Russian application of Marxism which considers the
development of capitalism necessary in Russia—a point of view
[7i ]
very much akin to Russian bolshevism. There the divergence
between Lenin and Plekhanov is already to be noted.
Tkachev has no desire to allow Russia to be transformed into a
constitutional and bourgeois state. He considers that the absence
of a developed bourgeoisie is Russia’s greatest advantage, as
facilitating the possibility of a social revolution. The Russian
people are socialist by instinct. Tkachev was not a democrat; he
affirmed the authority of the minority over the majority. Tkachev
was called a Jacobin, but that is not entirely true. Jacobinism is a
form of democracy, while Tkachev is above all a socialist and his
socialism is not of the democratic sort, in which respect he is like
Lenin and the communists. Tkachev was an opponent of the
narodnik movements, ‘Land and Liberty’ and the ‘Black Redistri¬
bution’, which rejected the idea of a purely political conflict. His
relation to these currents of thought was very reminiscent of
Lenin’s attitude towards what are called ‘The Economists’, who
placed before the working classes purely economic proposals,
leaving the political conflict to a large extent to liberal tendencies.
In the history of revolutionary currents of thought in Russia
Tkachev is the predecessor of‘The People’s Will’, which, as dis¬
tinct from the narodnik movements of the ’seventies, set itself the
political problem of overthrowing absolute monarchy by terror¬
ism. ‘The People’s Will’ represents the victory of Tkachev over
Lavrov and Bakunin. Tkachev, like Lenin, was an exponent of the
theory of revolution. His fundamental idea was the seizure of
power by a revolutionary minority. This required the disorgani¬
zation of the existing authority by terrorism. The masses in Tka¬
chev’s opinion are always ready for revolution, because they are
only the material of which a revolutionary minority makes use.
Revolutions are made but not prepared for. Tkachev docs not
recognize any sort of evolution. Revolution ought not to be pre¬
ceded by propaganda and the education of the masses.
But Tkachev was definitely opposed to Bakunin’s anarchism;
he thinks the destruction of the State absurd; he speaks of the re¬
placement of conservative institutions by revolutionary, almost in
the same way as Lenin is to speak of it later. Bakunin’s anarchist
[72]
dionysism was completely alien to Tkachev. Bakunin was opposed
to all organization. Tkachev was in favour of organizing a revolu¬
tionary minority which would seize power. He was one of the
few Russian revolutionaries of the past, almost the only one, who
thought in terms of authority, of capturing and organizing it. His
desire was that the revolutionary socialist party should become a
government, and in this respect he is very like Lenin. He pictured
the revolutionary socialist government as sufficiently despotic;
the destruction of everything belonging to the past would be even
more merciless with Tkachev than with Lenin, but the time for
that had not yet come, and Tkachev’s ideas were not particularly
popular in Russian revolutionary circles. The will to power
preached by Tkachev was in sharp opposition to the temper of
the Russian narodnik socialists.
G. V. Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism and Social
Democracy, was already writing decisively and sharply against
Tkachev in the ’eighties. This is one of the basic themes of his book
Our Divergencies. Plekhan6v’s controversy with Tkachev is of
great interest because it sounds as though Plekhanov was arguing
against Lenin and the bolsheviks at a time when they did not yet
exist. Plekhanov rebelled especially against the idea of a seizure of
power by the revolutionary socialist party. He considered such a
seizure would be the greatest misfortune; and pregnant with
future reaction. Plekhanov was also opposed to Bakuninism and
revolt. He was a Westernizer, a rationalist, a believer in ‘enlighten¬
ment’ and an evolutionist. The non-rational impulses of the
Russian were alien to him; he defended science and philosophy
against the revolutionary obscurantism of Bakunin and Tkachev.
Plekhanov, like all the Marxist mensheviks later on, had no wish
to recognize special paths of development for Russia or the possi¬
bility of a peculiarly Russian revolution, and in this he was
certainly mistaken. Tkachev was more in the right. Tkachev, like
Lenin, constructed a theory of socialist revolution in Russia. A
Russian revolution would necessarily not follow the Western
pattern. With this was connected the special problem in the history
of Russian socialist thought, i.e. Can Russia escape capitalist
f 73 ]
.development and the rule of the bourgeoisie? Can the revolution
be socialist? Can Marxist theory be applied to Russia without
taking account of any special path of development for Russia?
Tkachev was right in his opposition to Engels, and his rightness
was not the rightness of narodnichestvo against Marxism, but the
historical rightness of the bolsheviks against the mensheviks, of
Lenin against Plekhanov. In Russia it was not a communist revo¬
lution which turned out to be utopian, but a liberal bourgeois
revolution. Marx was not very fond of the Russians; he could not
endure Bakunin; he did not like Hertzen. In his attitude to Russia
the real pan-German imperialist sometimes made himself felt, but
he ascribed an immense importance to Russia and the possibility
of a Russian revolution. He even learned Russian and followed
Russian controversies about revolution and socialism. He wrote a
notable letter to N. Mikhailovsky. (19) As I have already said, he
valued Chernishevsky very highly, but Marx and Engels spoke
of the bourgeois character of the coming Russian revolution and
were in favour of the ‘People’s Will’ party which concentrated
exclusively upon the overthrow of absolute monarchy, and in
this respect they were much less the forerunners of Lenin than
Tkachev was. Marx and Engels did not understand the special
character of Russia’s path of development and were mensheviks,
however much the bolsheviks have tried to disguise this. But
Tkachev was a bolshevik, as Nechaev was, and even to some
extent Bakunin, though to a less degree, since he repudiated
power and organization. In the ’seventies the controversies were
already indicated, which the Russian Marxists and narodniks
waged in the ’nineties, and the bolsheviks and mensheviks at
the beginning of the twentieth century.
The murder of Alexander II by the decision of the ‘People’s
Will’ party was the end and the disruption of the Russian revo¬
lutionary movement before the rise of Marxism. It was the tragic
climax of the single combat between Russian authority and the
Russian intelligentsia. At the head of the terrorist organization
‘People’s Will’, which was responsible for the murder of 1st
March, 1881, stood the heroic figure of Zhelyabov. Zhelyabov
[74]
himself came from the peasantry; and at first he was a narodnik and
denied the importance of the pohtical conflict. The fruitlessness of
the movement of the intelligentsia towards the people led Zhelya¬
bov to the conclusion that a fight with autocracy was inevitable,
as the first matter to hand. Zhelyabov was certainly not a fanatic
like Nechaev. On the contrary, he was a man marked out for the
experience of the fulness and harmony of life. Least of all was he
materiahst, and of all the Russian revolutionaries he stood the
nearest to Christianity. At his trial for the affair of 1st March, to the
question, was he an Orthodox? he answered: ‘I was baptized in
Orthodoxy, but I repudiate it, although I acknowledge the essence
of Christ’s teaching. This essential teaching occupies an honoured
place among my moral convictions. I believe in the truth and
righteousness of that faith and I solemnly acknowledge that faith
without works is dead and that every genuine Christian should
fight for justice, for the rights of the oppressed and the weak and
if need be, also suffer for them; that is my faith.’ (20) Before his
execution he kissed the Cross. His communist biographer, A.
Voronsky, found this fact very disturbing. He explained Zhelya¬
bov’s sympathies with Christianity by the fact that he was a
narodnik of the ’seventies and not of the ’sixties. I think that a great
part was played in it by the fact that Zhelyabov was a man of the
people; and such a man, from the purest motives, from love of
truth and righteousness, was obliged to devote his life to the
organization of murder. It was a dreadful tragedy of Russian life.
- Zhelyabov was not in his general point of view a forerunner of
Russian communism, but in his methods of organization and in
his action he was. The history of Russian revolutionaries is a
martyrology, and the communists have made use of this martyro-
logy as moral capital. The Russian Government in history com¬
mitted moral suicide by creating martyrs.
 CHAPTER IV

RUSSIAN NINETEENTH CENTURY

LITERATURE AND ITS PREDICTIONS

I
e now pass into another world, into another spiritual at-
W mosphere, the atmosphere of the great Russian literature
of the nineteenth century. This literature is the greatest monument
of the Russian spirit and acquired world-wide importance. But in
relation to the origin of Russian communism, one of its charac¬
teristics is particularly important. Russian hterature is the most
prophetic in the world; it is full of forebodings and predictions;
alarm at impending catastrophe is characteristic of it. Many
Russian writers of the nineteenth century felt that Russia was
hanging over an abyss and falling into it. Russian nineteenth cen¬
tury literature bears witness to the inward revolution which was
being brought about, and to the impending outward revolution.
The whole nineteenth century, of all the centuries in Russian
history the greatest in creative power, was a. century of growing
revolution. The spirit of schism and cleavage which marked this
period brought Russian creative power to its highest intensity. The
Russian literature of this century did not belong to the renaissance
in spirit; only in Pushkin were there some flashes of the renaissance.
That was the Golden Age of Russian poetry. But that Russian re¬
naissance was achieved within a very narrow circle of the Russian
nobility; it quickly came to an end, and literature took other paths.
Beginning with Gogol, Russian literature becomes didactic. It
seeks truth and righteousness, and teaches the bringing of truth
into actual life. Russian literature was not born of a happy creative
profusion, but of suffering and the painful fate of mankind, out of
the search for salvation for all men. But this means that the funda¬
mental themes of Russian hterature were religious. It evinced a
[76]
 sympathy with humanity which amazed the whole world. It was
in the Russian writers that the problem of culture was stated with
peculiar sharpness and the justification of culture was doubted, as
in the currents of Russian social thought; and this was due to a
structure of spirit produced by Orthodoxy, a spirit in which there
remained a very strong ascetic element, a search for salvation, and
the expectation of another higher life. Psychologically Gogol,
L. Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky to a large extent joined hands with
Belinsky, Bakunin, Chernishevsky, Pisarev and the narodniks of the
’seventies, although they were anti-materialist and their work was
coloured by religion. Western people scarcely ever had any doubt
about the justification of civilization; this was a purely Russian
doubt and arose not among those Russians who had not yet
acquired any culture but frequently among those who were to be
found on its highest level. Russian writers, especially the most
notable, did not believe in the stability of civilization, in the stabi¬
lity of those principles upon which the world rests, what was
called the bourgeois world of their time; they are full of terrible
forebodings of impending disaster. European literature does not
know that sort of religious and social unrest, for it belongs to a
civilization which is more fixed and crystallized, more formed,
more self-contented and calm, more differentiated and distributed
into categories. Integrality belonged more properly to the
Russians, entirety, both in thought and in creative life. Russian
thinkers, Russian creators, when they are of note spiritually
always sought not so much a perfect culture, and perfect products
of creative power, as perfect hfe, the perfect expression of truth
in life. This accounts for the realism of Russian nineteenth century
literature, which is frequently misunderstood. The great Russian
literature reached a stage beyond European classicism and roman¬
ticism. It was realist, but certainly not realist in the scholastic
sense of the word. It was realist in an almost religious sense and
in its highest form purely religious. It was realist in the sense of
revealing the truth and the depth of life. In this sphere Gogol’s
manner was more romantic, Tolstoi’s more classic. Russian
writers with unusual acuteness lived through the tragedy of crea-
[ 77 ]
tive power faced by the imperative need to transform life itself, to
bring truth into actual expression. Gogol and Tolstoi were ready
to sacrifice the creation of perfect literary products for the sake
of creating a perfect life. Russian writers were not shackled by
the conventional standards of civilization and, therefore, they
touched the mystery of life and death. They passed out beyond
the boundaries of art. Such were Gogol, Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky.
Pushkin alone stated the problem of freedom in creative activity,
and of the independence of the creative activity of the poet, its
independence, that is, of ‘the mob’, by which he understood, of
course, not the people as a whole but the nobility, officials and
court society among whom he lived. Gogol had already stated
the problem of the social mission of art, of the vocation of the
writer to social service. He desired what in its vulgarized form
Russian communism calls ‘sotsialny zakaz’,x the subordination of
art to social ends. The great Russian writers stood alone in their
day in opposition to the society around them, but they were
certainly not individualists on principle. In their different ways
they were looking for popular, collective, catholic art. In its
exposure of the injustices of existing society, in its search for truth
and repentance, literature fulfilled a social mission which in
accord with the Russian spiritual make-up, was with many a
religious social mission.
Russian poetry was full of forebodings of coming revolution
and sometimes invoked it. Pushkin was considered the singer of
imperial Russia and in fact many reasons could be given for
regarding him as an imperialist in his general outlook, and less of
a schismatic than other Russian writers. He regarded Peter the
Great with hero worship; he was inspired by the greatness of
Russia; but after all his poetry had been published it became clear
how much of it was revolutionary. There is a great difference
between the first and the second half of his literary activity; this
can be seen from the change in his attitude to Radishchev. Pushkin
belonged to the generation of the Decembrists; they were his
friends, but the destruction of the Decembrist movement, as it
xSee footnote on p. 83.
[78]
 were, convinced him of the might of the Russian monarchy.
There were two sides to Pushkin; he had, as it were, two faces; he
had a love for the greatness and might of Russia, but he had also a
passionate love. for freedom. He had an absolutely special love of
his own freedom distinct from the Russian intelligentsia’s love of
it. He is the real singer of freedom.

‘We wait, our yearning hearts are beating

With hope of sacred liberty
As a youthful lover waits to see
The lagging hour of sweet heart-greeting.’

In Pushkin, as it were, two things were for a moment united

which have always been separated among us—the ideology of
empire and the ideology of the intelligentsia. He wrote of
himself:

‘And simple folk for long the thought of me will cherish

Because my lyre made hearts to kindliness incline,
And pity I invoked on those who fall and perish
And Freedom’s praises sang in this cruel age of mine.’

In The Village Pushkin describes the charm and poetry of the

Russian countryside, but he suddenly remembers the injustice,
the slavery, the darkness with which the charm of that country life
is linked and that the charm exists only for the privileged minority.
The poem ends with the words:

‘Ah, shall I see, my friends, a people unafflicted?

A Tsar sweep slavery hence among forgotten things?
Will Freedom like a glorious dawn upon our country
Rise at long last on her light-shedding wings?’

But specially interesting in connection with Pushkin in his revo¬

lutionary mood is the poem Freedom:

‘I sing the freedom of the world

And smite the vice on kingly thrones.’

In this poem there are terrible words about the Tsars:

‘Thou autocrat of evil deed,

On thee and thine my execration!

[79]
 With fierce delight I yield thy seed
To death, and thee to thy damnation!’

Pushkin was aware of the rebellious element in the Russian

people and foresaw the possibility ‘of a Russian revolt senseless and
merciless’; in Pushkin, at his most harmonious, we must not look
for perfect harmony, and he is aware of the unhealthiness, the
division and injustice of imperial Russia.
But a most terrible impression is produced by Lermontov’s
poem, Prediction, especially in view ofits fulfilment:

‘The day will come, for Russia that dark day

When the Tsar’s diadem will fall, and they,
Rabble who loved him once, will love no more.
And many will subsist on death and gore.
Downtrodden law no shelter will provide
For child or guiltless woman. Plague will ride
From stinking corpses through the grief-struck land
Where fluttering rags from cottages demand
Help none can give. And famine’s gnawing pangs
Will grip the countryside with ruthless fangs.
Dawn on the streams will shed a: crimson light.
And then will be revealed the Man of might
Whom thou wilt know; and thou wilt understand
Wherefore a shining blade is in his hand.
Sorrow will be thy lot, grief melt thine eyes
And he will laugh at all thy tears and sighs.’

This romantic poem written in 1830 foresees the horrors of a

revolution which took place almost a century later.
The third great Russian poet, Tyutchev, had a conservative
rather than a revolutionary outlook, but he felt all the time that a
terrible revolution was impending upon the world; in strange con¬
trast with his conservative Slavophil general outlook, Tyutchev
felt keenly the chaotic, irrational, dark elements belonging to the
night of the world. The harmony and order veneered upon the
world seemed to him unstable and thin.

‘A homeless orphan, man, bereft of power

And naked, stands before that dread abyss,

[80 ]
 Stands face to face in this his direful hour
With its dark emptiness: and all that quickens,
Glad things and light seem now a dream long past;
’Tis unfamiliar things, unsolved, as darkness thickens
Reveal his fated heritage at last.’

Not in nature only but also in history this violent chaotic

element exists, and Tyutchev had forebodings of catastrophes in
history, the triumph of the powers of chaos which will over¬
throw the cosmos. Tyutchev was a conservative who did not be¬
lieve in the stability of conservative principles. He constructed a
reactionary Utopia for the saving of the world from chaotic
revolution. He imagines that Christianity can be used as a con¬
servative power. His purely political poems are weak. Only his
cosmic poems are notable.
Khomyakov, the head of the Slavophil school, was not of a
prophetic nature. A powerful thinker, he was a very mediocre
poet, but he has a whole group of sharply accusatory poems from
which it may be seen that in spite of the Slavophil idealizing of the
historic past, he suffered from the great historic sins of Russia. He
believed that Russia was called to make known to the world the
‘sacrament of freedom’, to bestow ‘the spirit of holy freedom’.
Russia was ‘unworthy of her election’, but she was ‘chosen’.

‘But now alas what sins lie heavy,

Many and awful on thy soul!
Thou art black with black injustice
- And slavery’s yoke has branded thee
And godless flattery and baneful lying
And sloth that’s shameful, life-denying,
And every hateful thing in thee I see.’

And Khomyakov summons to repentance:

‘For all that cries for consolation,

For every law that we have spurned,
For sins that stain our generation.
For evil deeds our fathers learned,
For all our country’s bitter passion
Pray ye with tears the while ye live.
V [81 ] B.R.C.
 O God of Might, of Thy compassion
May’st Thou forgive! May’st Thou forgive!’

He accuses the Russian State of yielding to the basest of tempta¬

tions, a passion for material power. He welcomed the defeat of
Russia in the Crimean War as a just punishment. He had no desire
to see the vocation of Russia in the acquisition of political might;
he demanded the actual realization of justice and in this he stood
in the tradition of the intelligentsia.
It pained Gogol that Russia was in the grip of the spirit of evil
and injustice, that it was full of grimacing masks and that it was
difficult to find a human being in it. It would be a mistake to see a
satirist in Gogol; he saw the metaphysical depth of evil, not only
the social appearance of it. There is now no old Russia of Gogol’s
time with its social evils and injustices. There is no absolute mon¬
archy, no serfdom, none of the old inequalities; but in a deeper
sense Gogol’s Russia remains in Soviet Russia too, and Soviet
communist Russia is full of grimacing masks and the image of man
is distorted in it. Khlestakov, Nozdrev, Chichikov are to be met
with in Soviet communist Russia too. In it they deal in Dead Souls,
and the sham Inspector brings fear upon everyone. Most of all,
Gogol penetrated that spirit of falsehood which tortured Russia.
Gogol passed through a tragic religious experience; he was
crushed by the weight of the evil he perceived; he scarcely saw the
good in life; nor did he see the image of man. He sought a way of
escape by making life Christian, and he has recorded his search in
his book Correspondence with Friends. The book aroused a violent
protest from Belinsky, who saw in it a betrayal of human pro¬
gressive freedom-loving ideals. But in Correspondence with Friends,
Gogol understood the Christianizing of life in a very petty and
narrow-minded way, in fact anti-socially, and he could be inter¬
preted as a defender of the existing order, even of serfdom. In
Correspondence with Friends there was much that was repellent and
much that did not correspond to the depth of Gogol’s own re¬
ligious tragedy. It was a reflection of the inconsistency and ugli¬
ness of Russian life. There was a strong ascetic element in Gogol’s
[8a]
nature, a characteristically Russian element, and it led him to
censure his own literary work.
It was at the beginning of the twentieth century that the pro¬
phetic character of Russian poetry became most distinct; it was
the poetry of decline, of the end of a whole period, and there were
very decadent elements in it. Nevertheless, this poetry saw a dawn
ahead. The symbolist poets felt that Russia was being swept into
an abyss. At times this horrified them; at times it gave them joy,
as making possible a new and better life. Symbolism was an ex¬
pression of the divorce of literature from social activity, and an
escape into an another world. But at the same time the Russian
symbolists, V. Ivanov, A. Belii, A. Blok, suffered from loneliness;
they desired an art that belonged to the whole people; they tried
to conquer the decadent asceticism that had set in; they were in
fact looking for the ‘sotsialny zakaz’,1 to make use of Soviet termi¬
nology. Especially prophetic were the verses on Russia by A. Blok,
the greatest poet of the beginning of the century:

‘I hear the tented foe’s wild riot,

The Tartar’s shrilling trumpet call,
And over Russia see a quiet
Far-spreading fire envelop all.’

In another poem from the cycle, The Field of Kulikov, he writes:

‘Miles flash by, the fields roll on,

Stop them! No more!!
The frightened clouds go on and on
- To sink in gore!’

But his feeling for Russia and his forebodings about Russia found
particular expression in the amazing poem Russia:

‘O Russia, Russia, poor and lowly,

Grey-timbered peasant homes in thee,
The music of thy winds, are holy
As first-born tears of love to me.

To pity thee is not within me,

My cross I bear till thou art healed;
Subordination of art to social ends. Cf. p. 78.

[83]
 Whatever Sorcerer’s charm thy sin be,
Thy devastating beauty yield!

Let him entice, let him deceive thee,

Thou wilt not perish. Passing fair
In trouble, I shall still perceive thee,
Thy glory, veiled, will still be there.

What then? One care the more for sorrow—

Streams noisier for this tear they share—
Thy woods and fields will stand to-morrow,
That broidered scarf still bind thy hair.’

Another symbolist poet, Andrei Belii, exclaims in one of his

poems, ‘Disperse thyself in space, O Russia, Russia mine!’ The
poets of that pre-revolutionary time were mystical, apocalyptic;
they believed in Sophia, in new revelations, but they did not
believe in Christ. Their souls were not sheathed in steel; they were
defenceless, but perhaps for that very reason they were open to
influences from the future, and susceptible to the inward revolu¬
tion which others did not notice.
Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries felt
themselves over an abyss; they did not live in a stable society, in a
strong fixed civilization. A catastrophic outlook became charac¬
teristic of the most notable and creative Russians, for a strong
stable classical culture with its dividing lines, its differentiation of
spheres, with its standards and its spirit of fmiteness, and its fear of
infinity, is very unlikely to lead to foreboding and foresight. Cul¬
ture of that sort gives armour to the soul and bars it from those
influences which come from an unknown future. An eschatological
structure of spirit was built up in Russia, and, facing the future,
faced it with forebodings of catastrophe, and the development of a
particular mystical sensitiveness. The Western spirit was too
securely enclosed in its civilization. Among us the atmosphere
which precedes revolution was steadily increasing. The Russia of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was radically different from
the Russia of the Muscovite period; the latter had its own style of
culture; it was shackled in definite forms. The soul had not yet
awakened; it had not awakened to thought, or to criticism; it had
[84]
not come to the parting of the ways. The touch of the West upon
the Russian spirit brought about a change, and a change in a com¬
pletely different direction from the ways of Western civilization.
The influence of the West upon Russia was absolutely paradoxi¬
cal; it did not graft Western criteria upon the Russian spirit. On
the contrary its influence let loose violent, dionysiac, dynamic and
sometimes demoniac forces. Spirits were unshackled and revealed
a dynamic force unknown in the period before Peter. The limit¬
less aspirations of the Faustian man of the West, the man who
belongs to modern history, in Russia revealed themselves in an
entirely peculiar way, in their own distinctive manner, and found
expression in the creations of Dostoyevsky’s genius. The Russia
which had been inherited from the past, the Russia of the nobility
of the merchant class and the shop-keepers, which the period of
empire had kept in being, came into conflict with the Russia of
the intelligentsia, which w^s revolutionary and social-revolution-
ary in spirit, which aspired after the infinite and sought the City
which is to come. This clash let loose dynamic forces and led
to explosions. At the time when in the West enlightenment
and culture were establishing a sort of order in accordance with
fixed standards—although, of course, a relative order—in Russia
enlightenment and culture overthrew standards, obliterated boun¬
daries and evoked a revolutionary dynamic. The condition of
affairs was reflected in the works of all the Russian writers.

II
The inner revolution which was going on in Russia was re¬
flected most of all in the creative work of Dostoyevsky, it was
reflected in a different way in Tolstoi; the art of Tolstoi was not
prophetic, but he was a revolution in himself. It is interesting to
compare these two great Russian geniuses. The relation between
the artistic element and the intellectual made a sharp contrast
between them. Dostoyevsky was a dynamic artist, probably the
most dynamic in the world. (21) With him everything is steeped
in a molten, fiery atmosphere, everything is in violent movement,
nothing is fixed or finally shaped. Dostoyevsky is a dionvsiac
[85]
artist; he expresses the revolutionary soul and discloses the dialectic
of revolution. The prophetic element is very strong in him; he
faced the future, and foresaw much in it; he foresaw the Russian
revolution and disclosed the ideas which governed it. But Dosto¬
yevsky's view as set forth in A Writer's Diary gives the impression
of conservatism, although it is a peculiar conservatism with some¬
thing of revolution in it. Tolstoi was an artist of the stable and
formed life. Dostoyevsky’s novels are tragedies; Tolstoi’s are epics.
As an artist Tolstoi was not prophetic; he did not look towards the
future. Dostoyevsky’s dynamism and prophecy are due to the
fact that he was entirely engrossed in the human problem. The
subject of his thought was man. In the art of Tolstoi (his novel is
the most perfect in the world’s literature) human life is immersed
in cosmic lite, in the rotation of cosmic life. Dostoyevsky moves
in history, Tolstoi in the cosmos; but it is precisely to history and
not to cosmic life that dynamism and prophecy belong.
On the other hand, in thought Tolstoi certainly was a revolu¬
tionary, one who exposed the injustices of life. He was an anarchist
and a nihilist; he rebelled against history and civilization with un¬
heard of radicalism. Man ought not to obey the laws of the world;
he ought to obey the law of the great Lord of life, God. Positively,
Tolstoi was opposed to communism; he did not accept violence;
he was the enemy of all government and rejected the technique
and rational organization of life; he believed in the divine basis of
nature and life; he preached love not hate. But negatively he was a
forerunner of communism; he rejected the past, the traditions of
history, the old culture, Church and State; he rejected every
economic and social inequality; he fulminated against the privi¬
leged ruling classes; he had no love for the cultured elite. In Russian
narodnichestvo of the ’seventies no small part was played by ‘the
conscience-stricken noble’. But it was in the creative genius of
Tolstoi that the repentance of the ruling classes reached its greatest
intensity. Tolstoi was entirely permeated with the thought that
the life of civilized society is built up upon lies and injustice. He
wished to break with that society completely. In this he was a revo¬
lutionary, but he rejected revolutionary violence. Dostoyevsky
[86]
also was a revolutionary in spite of the conservative appearance
of many of his views. He disliked and chided the revolutionary
intelligentsia, especially because he foresaw the denial of freedom
of the spirit as the final result of the ideas of a revolution which
was based upon godlessness. To Dostoyevsky godlessness inevi¬
tably leads to the denial of the freedom of the spirit; this is clearly
seen in that display of dialectic genius,- The Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor, and in Ivan Karamazov. Herein lies the whole originality
of the charge which Dostoyevsky brings against the revolutionary
intelligentsia. In making these charges he defends the freedom of
the spirit, which in Dostoyevsky is entirely revolutionary and
overthrows the Grand Inquisitor in every Church and State. In
The Possessed he is seen as the prophet of the Russian revolution;
he foresaw a great deal, but he was often unfair.
Dostoyevsky was a revolutionary of the spirit; he wanted
revolution, but revolution with God and Christ. He was the
enemy of atheistic socialism, which to him was another aspect of
the lure of the Grand Inquisitor and a surrender of the freedom of
the spirit for the sake of food and happiness. But he was by no
means a defender of the old bourgeois world; he was also a socialist
on Orthodox grounds, a socialist with Christ. He constructed a
theocratic Utopia which is a denial of the old world, a denial of
the State and of bourgeois life. In this he was very Russian. To¬
wards the end of his life Dostoyevsky turned bitter and joined the
reactionaries, but they could not understand him. But both Tolstoi
and Dostoyevsky rebelled against the injustices of human laws;
they expressed the Russian spirit of antinomianism; they were
both enemies of the bourgeois world and its standards. Both of
them, though in different ways, seek true Christianity as against
the distortions of historical Christianity, and Tolstoi and Dosto¬
yevsky were possible only in a society which was moving towards
revolution, in which explosive materials were accumulating.
Dostoyevsky preached a spiritual communism, the responsibility
of all for each- that was how he understood Russian sobornost;x his
JThe inward, organic and harmonious aspect of Catholicity. See an article by
G. Florovsky in The Church of God. S.P.C.K. 1934.

[87]
Christ could not be adapted to the standards of bourgeois civiliza¬
tion. Tolstoi did not know Christ; he knew only the teaching of
Christ, but he preached the virtues of Christian communism; he
rejected private property; he rejected all economic inequalities.
The thoughts of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoi are on the verge of
eschatology, as is all revolutionary thought. Both Tolstoi and
Dostoyevsky preach fsyechelovechnost, and that is a Russian idea.
Internationalism is a distortion of the Russian idea offsyechelovech-
nost and of Christian universality. According to Dostoyevsky the
Russian people are the Christopher among the nations, they carry
God into human life precisely because they have this all-human
idea, the idea of an all-human brotherhood. Dostoyevsky was in¬
consistent in his attitude to the West, which he both loved and
hated. There was an inconsistency too between the universal all¬
human idea which he ascribed to the Russian people and his
sharp national antipathies. He believed that light would come from
the East, but particularism and nationalism, which were always
alien from original Russian thought, were no part of his mental
outlook. On Russian soil nationalism was always a borrowing
from the German. Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky were the mouth¬
pieces of a universal revolution of the spirit; they would have been
horrified at the Russian communist revolution with its denial of
the spirit; and yet they were its forerunners.
Konstantine Leontyev is a figure of great interest and signifi¬
cance in this matter of foreboding and prediction in Russian
literature. (22) K. Leontyev was an artist, a publicist and a socio¬
logist. He was an entirely original thinker and belonged to no
school or current of thought. He is usually considered a reaction¬
ary, but he was a romantic reactionary. He wanted to arrest the
liberal equalitarian progress, because it led to the reign of pettiness
and the ruin of complex and flourishing culture. To him socialism
meant the reign of the bourgeois spirit, a grey earthly paradise, a
levelling down and a loss of individuality. Like Hertzen the revo¬
lutionary, Leontyev the reactionary states acutely that characteris¬
tically Russian problem, the problem of the petty shop-keeper. A
hatred of the bourgeois spirit was the determining factor of
[88]
Leontyev’s life. He could not endure the thought that ‘the Apostles
preached, the martyrs suffered, poets sang, painters painted and
knights glittered in the lists simply in order that the French or
German or Russian bourgeois in his horrible and ludicrous clothes
might live an individual and collective life complacently on the
ruins of all the greatness of the past’.
Leontyev was a man of the sixteenth century Italian renaissance,
but he became a monk; at first secretly, but later he lived in the
Optima Pustina under the guidance of the Starets Ambrose.
Aestheticism was a salient feature in his character; aesthetic values
were to him fundamental. To the end of his life there remained in
him an invincible two-sidedness; he was a monk in relation to the
world to come—to heaven, and an aesthete in relation to this
world—to earth; he did not desire the realization of Christianity
in life, the realization of social justice, because that appeared to
him to mean the death of beauty, it meant ugliness. Leontyev’s
Christianity was pessimistic and entirely other-worldly. In many
respects Leontyev was a forerunner of Nietzsche. The will to
power, an aristocratic approach to things, a tragic feeling for life,
aestheticism, a-moralism, the concentration of attention upon the
conditions in which cultures bloom and perish, all this links Leon¬
tyev with Nietzsche.
Leontyev’s predictions about the Russian revolution are of
particular interest for our subject. At one time he still believed that
the flowering of an original non-bourgeois culture was possible in
Russia, but later on he became disillusioned in the Russian people
and the Russian mission; he went so far that he began to see the
only mission of the Russian people in the fact that Antichrist will
be born of them. Already in the ’eighties he feels that Russia is
fatefully moving towards revolution and foretells what sort of
revolution that will be. He foresaw the communist revolution in
greater clearness and detail than Dostoyevsky. He foretold that
the revolution would be tyrannical and bloody, that it would not
be liberal but communist, that it would bring no proclamation of
rights and of freedom and that the liberal radical intelligentsia
would be overthrown. The revolution would not be humane and
[89]
it would need the old instincts of domination and submission.
Russian communism would attract the peoples of the East, and
go on to annihilate the bourgeois world of the West. The de¬
struction of the bourgeois world did not distress Leontyev in the
least, but he desired to save the relics of noble aristocratic culture.
For the sake of this, Leontyev was prepared to go to the length of
proposing to the Russian Tsar that he should introduce commun¬
ism from above. Leontyev, in accord with Russian tradition,
hates capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Leontyev’s forebodings and
predictions are accompanied by a feeling of the coming of the end
of the world.
An apocalyptic mood, and that with a pessimistic tinge, super¬
vened in the Russia of the end of the nineteenth century. Behind
this feeling of the coming of the end of the world and of the king¬
dom of Antichrist can be felt the impending end of a whole histori¬
cal epoch, the destruction of the old world; and this feeling had
two sides; it was sorrowful and it was joyful. Russian writers, the
most interesting and subtle among them, had no wish to become
reconciled to Russia’s passing along the humdrum path of the
West—bourgeois, rationalist, liberal, humanist. The apocalyptic
mood takes an original form in Vladimir Solovev, the most con¬
siderable of Russian philosophers. Solovev’s philosophy, like all
original Russian philosophy, was Christian. To begin with, he
constructed a Christian theocratic Utopia; he preached a free
theocracy and believed in the possibility of Christian politics. In
contrast to Leontyev he desired the realization of Christian
righteousness in the fulness of life. He is a representative of Rus¬
sian fsyechelovechnost, the foe of all national particularism; he is a
Christian universalist; he thirsts for the union of the churches and
at one time was inclined to Roman Catholicism. In the first period
of his activity, Vladimir Solovev interpreted Christianity optimis¬
tically; he desired to link it with progress and humanism; he be¬
lieved in the possibility of the development of a divine humanity
on the earth, but he lived through a series of disillusionments and
suffered blow after blow; he was forced to confess that history
certainly moves along no such path as that in which he saw the
[90]
triumph of Christian truth. A keen sense of evil which before had
been but weak now grew within him. At the end of his life he was
finally disillusioned about the possibility of a universal free theo¬
cracy; he believed in the ways of history no more. He begins to
think that history is coming to an end; it has no future- everything
is exhausted; he writes his Story oj Antichrist and in it he prophesies
the speedy appearance of Antichrist. The world-wide organization
of human society would not now be the work of Christianity, or
of a Christian theocracy, but the work of Antichrist. Solovev had
a foreboding of the role of pan-mongolism and the danger
threatening Russia and Europe from the yellow race, and—with
Solovev, as with Leontyev also—the apocalyptic mood, the sense
of the impending end means not the impending end of the world,
but the end of an historical epoch; it is a foreboding of catastrophes
in history. This is an apocalypse within history. They all felt that
Russia hung over an abyss.
N. Fedorov has an immense significance for the Russian apoca¬
lyptic mood. He lived at the end of the nineteenth century, but
became known in the twentieth. With Fedorov the character of
the apocalyptic mood changes. Of the religious philosophers he
especially turns to the future and he understands apocalyptic
actively, not passively. For a long while he was entirely unrecog¬
nized and unvalued, in spite of the fact that such great Russians as
L. Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky and Solovev valued him extraordinarily
highly. In character, N. Fedorov was a Russian eccentric; he cer¬
tainly was not a professional writer and philosopher. He was one
of those Russians who looked for salvation from evil and suffering,
who seek the Kingdom of God and have their plan of salvation.
Fedorov considers that books should not be sold; they should be
given away for nothing. This greatly hampered the spread of his
ideas, but now, after the revolution, of all Russian religious
thinkers of the nineteenth century Fedorov alone is popular, and
in Soviet Russia there is a Fedorov school of thought. This is
understandable. Fedorov considered himself an Orthodox Chris¬
tian, but in him there were many traits allied with communism;
he was a forerunner of modern actualism. Russian apocalyptic
[9i ]
moods were of two sorts: there were revolutionary and there were
reactionary sides to them. But without doubt the passive under¬
standing of apocalyptic gained the ascendency. The Russian felt
himself permeated by the mystical breezes of the impending end
and foresaw the inevitable rule of Antichrist; he was in a condition
of expectancy; the future aroused terror in him, that which the
Apocalypse had foretold was coming to pass upon man; but man
is not an active agent in the fulfilment of the prophecy. The apoca¬
lypse is understood as a divinely fated destiny; human freedom
plays no part in it whatever.
With Fedorov the meaning of apocalypse undergoes a sharp
change. Fedorov understood apocalyptic prophecy of the king¬
dom of Antichrist, the end of the world, of the Day of Judgment,
conditionally, as a threat. There was nothing fated about it. If
people would unite for the ‘common task’ of raising the dead for
the true realization of Christian righteousness in life, if in brotherly
union they would fight against the elemental irrational death¬
dealing powers of nature, then there would be no kingdom of
Antichrist, no end of the world or Day of Judgment; then man¬
kind would pass directly into eternal life. Everything depends on
the activity of men. And N. Fedorov preaches an unheard-of
activity of man, one that should conquer nature, organize cosmic
life, overcome death and raise the dead. This ‘common task’ pre¬
supposes, as its indispensable condition, a brotherly attitude among
men, bringing their differences to an end, realization of their kin¬
ship; but it is to be realized also with the help of science and tech¬
nical skill. N. Fedorov believed that technical skill, if a united man¬
kind wielded it in a brotherly spirit, could work miracles, even the
raising of the dead. He understood philosophy in a practical sense.
A class of learned and academic people, presenting pure knowledge
abstracted from life, ought not to exist. The division between
theoretical and practical reason is evil. Like Marx and Engels, N.
Fedorov thinks that philosophy should not only take cognisance
of the world but should change it. It should form plans for the
salvation of the world from evil and suffering and especially from
death as the source of all evil.
[92 ]
 His posing of the problem of: death of course distinguishes N.
Fedorov radically from Marxism and communism. The life of the
world is in the power of irrational elemental natural forces; these
forces must be regulated and subjected to reason and knowledge.
Man must secure the mastery over them. N. Fedorov appeals to
people to cease fighting each other and to unite for the conflict
against the elemental powers of nature. Here, no doubt, there is a
likeness to communism, though resting on a different spiritual
ground. N. Fedorov hates capitalism even more than the Marxists
and considers it the creation of prodigal sons who have forgotten
their dead fathers. He is also a collectivist, and the foe of individual¬
ism. His Christian faith and his recognition of a duty to the dead
fathers distinguishes N. Fedorov from communism, but he is near
to communism in his extreme activism, his belief in the almighti-
ness of technical skill, his preaching of the collective common task,
his hostility to capitalism, his practical thought, his totalitarian
attitude to life, his inclination to control and plan on a world-wide
scale, his repudiation of theoretical thought, speculation divorced
from practical affairs, and in his recognition of labour as the basis
of life. N. Fedorov was an original sort of communist; the basis of
his thought was religious and there still remained in him unsub¬
dued elements of Slavophilism. In his teaching realist elements
were mingled with utopian; he was a typical Russian thinker.
Among present day disciples of Fedorov the Christian elements in
his teaching have become weaker and the technical elements,
those akin to communism, stronger.
Russian literature and Russian thought bear witness to the fact
that in imperial Russia a single integral culture did not exist, that
there was a gulf between the cultured classes and the masses of the
people, that the old regime had no moral support. Everyone had
visions of bridging the gulf by some form or other of collectivism.
Everything was moving towards revolution.
 CHAPTER V

CLASSICAL MARXISM AND RUSSIAN

MARXISM

N arodnik Socialism had spent its force by the ’eighties and the
revolutionary movement could develop no further under
its banner. The rise of the ‘Popular Will’ party, which set in the
forefront of its objective the political purpose of overthrowing
despotic monarchy by terrorism, had already meant the end of
narodnichestvo. The revolutionary intelligentsia were disillusioned
in the peasantry and resolved to rely solely upon their own per¬
sonal heroism. The murder of Alexander II by members of the
‘Popular Will’ party not only failed to bring about the triumph
of the revolutionary intelligentsia but in the time of Alexander III
led to a strong reactionary movement not only in the Government
but also among the public. The revolutionary movement could
find no social basis whatever.
At that time the group ‘Freedom of Labour’ came into being
among the exiles abroad. At its head were G. Plekhanov, P. Axel¬
rod, V. Zasulich, L. Deitch. This was the rise of Russian Marxism
and the Social Democrat movement. After Marx and Engels,
Plekhanov was one of the chief recognized exponents of Marxism.
In past years Plekhanov had taken part in the popular revolution¬
ary organizations, ‘Land and Will’ and ‘The Black Redistribution’.
After years of living in Western Europe,, Plekhanov became
entirely a Western and of a very rationalist sort, fairly cultured,
though his culture was not of the highest kind; more of an arm¬
chair revolutionary than a practical one. He could be a leader of
the Marxist school of thought, but he could not be a leader of a
revolution; that was made clear at the time of the revolution.
But several generations of Russian Marxists were brought up on
[94]
 Plekhanov’s book—and among them Lenin and the leaders of
Russian communism. Marxism on Russian soil was originally the
extreme expression of Russian Westernism. The first generations
of Russian Marxists waged war in the first place with the old
tendencies of the revolutionary intelligentsia, with narodnichestvo,
and dealt it irreparable injury. Russian Marxism looked for eman¬
cipation through the industrial development of Russia, which was
the very thing that narodnichestvo had tried to avoid. Capitalist in¬
dustry was to lead to the formation and development of the
working class, which is the liberating class. The Marxists, there¬
fore, were in favour of the proletariatization of the peasantry,
which the narodniks had no desire to allow. The Marxists thought
that they had found at last an adequate social basis for the revolu¬
tionary struggle for freedom. The proletariat in process of forma¬
tion was the only social force which could be relied on. It was
necessary to develop the revolutionary class-consciousness of this
proletariat; it was necessary to go not to the peasantry which had
rejected the revolutionary intelligentsia, but to the workmen in
the factory. The Marxists considered themselves realists, because
the development of capital was actually taking place in Russia at
that time. The first Marxists wished to rely not so much on the
revolutionary intelligentsia, on the part played by personality in
history, as on the objective social-economic process. The Marxist
assailed the utopian socialism of the narodniks with contempt.
If the typical Russian revolutionary of the narodnik party was
predominantly emotional, the typical Russian Marxist revolution¬
ary was predominantly intellectual. In accord with the conditions
in which Russian Marxism arose, the Marxists from the beginning
specially stressed the determinist and evolutionary elements in the
teaching of Marx. They fought against utopianism and castle¬
building, and prided themselves on having at last found the truth
of scientific socialism which promises certain victory, in virtue of
the law-controlled, objective social process. Socialism will be the
result of economic necessity, of an inevitable development. The
first Russian Marxists were very fond of talking about the develop¬
ment of material productive forces as the chief ground of their
[95]
hope and confidence. Thus they were interested in the actual
economic development of Russia, not as a positive aim and a boon
in itself, but because it supplied them with weapons for the revo¬
lutionary conflict. Such was their revolutionary psychology. The
aims of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia to all appearances
remained the same, but they acquired a new weapon for the con¬
flict; they felt the ground firmer under their feet. Marxism was a
more complex intellectual theory than those upon which the
revolutionary intelligentsia had hitherto relied, and required
greater intellectual powers. But it was regarded as a revolutionary
weapon, and above all as a weapon in the fight against the old
tendencies which had shown themselves to be powerless. At first
the Marxists gave the impression of being less extreme and violent
revolutionaries than the old narodnik socialists or social revolu¬
tionaries as they now began to be called. The Marxists were
opposed to terrorism.
But that was a deceptive appearance which led even the police
astray. The rise of Russian Marxism was a serious crisis for the Rus¬
sian intelligentsia—a severe shock to the foundations of their general
outlook on life. From Marxism there sprang various new tenden¬
cies. And it is necessary to understand the nature of Marxism, its
double nature, if one is to adjust one’s mind to later Russian currents
of thought. Marxism is a more complex phenomenon than is com¬
monly supposed. It must not be forgotten that Marx was born of
the German idealism of the beginning of the nineteenth century;
he was permeated with the ideas of Fichte and Flegel. Like Feuer¬
bach, who was the chief representative of left wing Hegelianism
at the very time that he was calling himself a materialist, the whole
man was saturated with idealistic philosophy and he even remained
a theologian of a sort. Especially in the youthful Marx does one
feel the idealist origin which has left its mark on the whole con¬
ception of Marxism.(23) Marxism, of course, gives very large
grounds for expounding the Marxist doctrine as a system con¬
sequent upon sociological determinism. Economics determine all
human life; upon it depends not only the whole structure of
society but also all ideology, all spiritual culture, religion, philo-
[96]
sophy, ethics, art. Economics is the basis, ideology the super¬
structure. There exists an inevitable general economic process by
which everything is determined. The methods of production and
exchange are the necessary starting points upon which everything
else depends. In an individual human being it is not he himself who
thinks and acts but the social class to which he belongs; he thinks
and acts only as a nobleman, as a merchant—petit bourgeois, or
member of the proletariat. A man cannot free himself from the
economic position which makes him what he is; he only reflects it.
That is one side of Marxism. The strength of the economic
factor in human life is not an invention of Marx, and he is not to
blame for the fact that it has so great an influence upon ideology.
Marx observed this in the capitalist society of Europe which sur¬
rounded him. But he reduced it to a theory and gave it a universal
character. What he discovered in the capitalist society of his own
time he regarded as the basis of all society. He discovered much in
capitalist society and said much that was true about it. But his
mistake lay in taking the particular for the general. The economic
determinism of Marx bears an entirely special character; that is,
the exposure of the illusions of consciousness. Feuerbach had
already done this for religious consciousness. With Marx the
method of this exposure of the illusions of consciousness is very
reminiscent of the assertions of Freud. The ideology which is only
the superstructure—religious beliefs, philosophic theory, moral
values, creativeness in art—reflects reality in consciousness in only
an illusory way. The reality is primarily an economic reality; that
is, the collective fight of man against nature for the maintenance
of life, in the same way as, according to Freud, it is primarily a
sexual reality. Existence reflects reality, but existence is primarily
material economic existence. Spirit is an epiphenomenon of this
economic existence. Marxism does not derive all ideology and all
spiritual culture from economics directly but indirectly through
class psychology, i.e., there is a psychological link in the socio¬
logical determinism of Marx. Although the existence of class
psychology and the distortion of all ideas and beliefs by class
consciousness is an undoubted truth, yet psychology itself is
B.R.C.
G [97 ]
particularly weak in Marxism. Its psychology was rationalistic
and completely out of date.
In order to understand the meaning of the sociological deter¬
minism of Marxism and of the illusions of consciousness which it
exposes, one must turn one’s attention to the existence of an en¬
tirely different side of Marxism, which is apparently a contra¬
diction of economic materialism. Marxism is not only a doctrine
of historical and economic materialism, concerned with the com¬
plete dependence of man on economics, it is also a doctrine of de¬
liverance, of the messianic vocation of the proletariat, of the future
perfect society in which man will not be dependent on economics,
of the power and victory of man over the irrational forces of
nature and society. There is the soul of Marxism, not in its econo¬
mic determinism. In a capitalist society man is completely deter¬
mined, and that refers to the past. The complete dependence of
man upon economics can be explained as a sin of the past. But the
future is otherwise; man can be freed from slavery. And the active
agent which frees humanity from slavery and establishes the best
life, is the proletariat. To it are ascribed messianic attributes, to it
are transferred the attributes of the chosen people of God; it is the
new Israel. This is a secularization of the ancient Hebrew messianic
consciousness. The lever with which it will be possible to turn the
world upside down has been found. And there Marx’s materialism
turns into extreme idealism.
Marx discovers in capitalism a process of dehumanization which
makes man dependent upon the products of his own creation. To
this is due Marx’s brilliant doctrine about the fetishism of goods.
Everything in history and in social life is the product of human
activity, human labour, human conflict. (24) But man falls a vic¬
tim to illusory, deceptive consciousness, as an effect of which the
result of his own activity and labour presents itself to him as an
objective world of things upon which he depends. The objective
economic reality of things does not exist in itself—it is an illusion;
only human activity exists and the active relation of man to man.
Capital is not an objective material reality, existing outside man,
capital is only the social relation of man with man in industry.
[98 ]
 Behind the economic reality are always hidden living people and
social groups of people. And man, by his own activity, can always
dissipate this phantom world of capitalist economics. To this task
the proletariat is called, and it falls a victim to this illusion of
making the products of human toil into fetishes and independent
entities. It is the duty of the proletariat to combat the dependence
of man upon the products of human toil, to fight against the de¬
humanizing of economic life, to bring to light the almightiness of
human activity.
This is an entirely different side of Marxism, and it was strong
in Marx when he was young. The belief in human activity was a
subject he inherited from German idealism. It is a belief in the
spirit, and cannot be connected with materialism. In Marxism
there is an element of genuine existential philosophy, which re¬
veals the illusion and deceptiveness of objectivity, and by human
activity overcomes the world of independent entities. It is only
this side of Marxism which can inspire enthusiasm and call forth
revolutionary energy. Economic determinism humiliates man,
only faith in human activity raises him—faith in an activity which
can accomplish a marvellous regeneration of society.
With this is also connected a revolutionary dynamic conception
of dialectic. It must be said that dialectic materialism is an absurd
combination of words. There cannot be a dialectic of matter; dia¬
lectic presupposes logos, meaning; dialectic of idea and spirit is
alone possible. But Marx transferred the nature of thought and
.spirit to matter. It appears that the material process has its own
thought, reason, freedom and creative activity, and, therefore, the
material process can lead to the triumph of rational interpretation,
to the victory of social reason over the whole of life. Dialectic here
turns into the exaltation of the human will, of human activity.
Everything is then determined not by the objective development
of material productive forces, not by economics, but by the revo¬
lutionary struggle of the classes; that is, by the activity of man.
Man can overcome the power of economics upon his life. There
must be, in the words of Marx and Engels, a leap from the realm
of necessity to the realm of freedom. History is sharply divided
[99 ]
into two parts—the past, which was determined by economics when
man was a slave, and the future, which will begin with the victory
of the proletariat, and will be entirely determined by the activity
of man, social man, when the realm of freedom will come into
existence. The transition from necessity to freedom is understood
in the spirit of Hegel. The revolutionary dialectic of Marx is not,
however, the logical necessity of a self-revealmg and self-develop¬
ing idea, but the activity of revolutionary man, upon whom the
past is not binding. Freedom is necessity absorbed into conscious¬
ness, but that absorption of necessity can work miracles, can com¬
pletely regenerate life and establish something new and unpre¬
cedented. Transition to the realm of freedom is the victory over
original sin, which Marx sees in the exploitation of man by man.
The whole ethical pathos of Marxism is linked with the exposure
of exploitation as the basis of human society, the exploitation of
labour.
It is clear that Marx confuses the economic and ethical cate¬
gories. The doctrine of added value, which is what brings to light
the exploitation of workmen by capitalists, Marx considered a
scientific economic doctrine. But in actual fact it is primarily an
ethical doctrine. Exploitation is not an economic phenomenon
but primarily a phenomenon of the moral order, a morally evil
relation of man to man. There is an astounding contradiction be¬
tween the scientific a-moralism of Marx, which cannot endure an
ethical basis for socialism, and the extreme moralism of the Marx¬
ists in the appraisement of life in general. The whole doctrine of
the class struggle bears an axiological character. The distinction
between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletariat’ is a distinction between evil
and good, unrighteousness and righteousness, between what is
worthy of censure and what is worthy of approval. In the Marxist
system there is a logically contradictory combination of material¬
ist, scientific determinist and a-moral elements, with elements
that are idealist, moral, religious, and myth-creating. Marx estab¬
lishes a real myth about the proletariat. The mission of the pro¬
letariat is an article of faith. Marxism is not only a science and
politics; it is also a faith, a religion. And upon this its strength is based.
 II
At first the Russians accepted Marxism chiefly from an ob¬
jective-scientific point of view. What struck them most was
Marx’s teaching that socialism will be the inevitable outcome of
objective economic development, that it is determined by the
actual development of material productive forces. This was
accepted as bringing them hope. Russian revolutionaries lost the
sense of having no ground under their feet, of being suspended
over an abyss. They called themselves ‘scientific’ socialists—not
utopian dreamers. ‘Scientific’ socialism became an article of faith.
But the solid hope which scientific sociahsm gives for the realiza¬
tion of a longed-for purpose is linked with industrial develop¬
ment, with the organization of a class of industrial workers. An
exclusively agricultural and peasant country gives no such hope.
Therefore, the first step for Russian Marxists was to overthrow
the narodnik world view, and to prove that in Russia capitalism is
developing and must develop. The fight for this theory, that in
Russia capitalist industry was developing and consequently a body
of workers was growing, took the form of revolutionary conflict.
In the eyes of the Marxists, the social democrats became almost
reactionaries.
But Marxism was taken in different ways. For some the de¬
velopment of capitalist industry in Russia meant hope for the
triumph of socialism. A working class emerges. Everyone must
devote his strength to the development of class-consciousness in it.
Thus Plekhanov says: ‘Behind capitalism is the whole dynamic of
our social life.’ In saying this he was thinking not of actual industry
but of the workmen. For others, and especially for the legalist
Marxists, the development of capitalist industry acquired an
adequate significance of its own and the revolutionary, class aspect
of Marxism receded into a secondary place. Such was first and
foremost P. Struve, the representative of bourgeois Marxism.
These Russian social democrat Marxists,who later on were known
as mensheviks, cherished the theory that a socialist revolution was
only possible in a country where capitalist industry was already
developed. And, therefore, a socialist revolution would be possible

[ 101 3
in Russia when she ceased to be mainly a peasant and agricultural
land. This type of Marxist always set great store by the objective-
scientific determinist side of Marxism, but kept also its subjective,
revolutionary class side. The continual talk of the first Marxists
about the necessity of the development of capitalism in Russia,
and their readiness to welcome its development, led to this, that
L. Tikhomirov who had formerly belonged to the ‘People’s Will’
party and later went over to the reactionary camp, accused the
Marxists of being obliged to start by being Knights of the Savings
Bank. The Marxists considered the narodniks reactionaries who
supported obsolete forms of economics. The narodniks regarded
the Marxists as supporters of capitalism and bound to contribute
to its development.
And in actual fact Russian Marxism, since it had arisen in a
country still not industrialized and with no developed proletariat,
was bound to be torn by a moral self-contradiction which weighed
upon the conscience of many Russian socialists. How is it possible
to desire the growth of capitalism, to welcome this growth, and at
the same time to regard capitalism as an evil and a moral wrong
against which every socialist is called to fight? This complicated
question gives rise to moral conflict. The growth of capitalist
industry in Russia presupposed the turning of the peasantry
into a proletariat, depriving them of their means of production,
i.e. reducing a considerable part of the nation to a condition of
beggary.
This double-mindedness in assigning the values of capitalism
and the bourgeoisie is to be seen in Marxism in its most classical
form. Marx, in so far as he took his stand upon the evolutionary
point of view and recognized the existence of various stages in his¬
tory, to which different values are to be assigned, set a high value
upon the mission of the bourgeoisie in the past and the role of capi¬
talism in the development of the material strength of mankind. The
whole conception of Marxism is very much dependent on the
growth of capitalism and adjusts the messianic idea of the proletariat
—which has nothing in common with science—to capitalist indus¬
try. Marxism believes that the factory, and the factory alone, will
[ 102 ]
create the new man. The same problem faces Marxism in another
form. Is the Marxist ideology the same reflection of economic
reality as all other ideologies, or does it claim to reveal absolute
truth independent of historical forms of economic interests? This
is a very serious question for the philosophy of Marxism: is that
philosophy pragmatism or absolute realism? This question, as we
shall see, will be discussed in Soviet philosophy. But the first
Russian Marxists were faced with a moral problem and a problem
of cognition, and it set up a moral and logical conflict. We shall see
that this moral conflict was decided only by Lenin and the bol¬
sheviks. It is precisely the Marxist Lenin who will assert the possi¬
bility of establishing socialism in Russia independently of the
development of capitalism and before a working class of any great
size was organized.
Plekhanov declared himself against confusing the revolution
which was to overthrow the absolute monarchy with the social
revolution. He was opposed to a revolutionary socialist seizure of
power, i.e. to the communist revolution in the course it actually
took. The social revolution must be waited for. The liberation of
the workers should be the work of the workers themselves, not
of a revolutionary clique. This needs an increase in the number
of workers, the development of their consciousness; it presupposes
a greater development of industry. Plekhanov was fundamentally
the enemy of Bakuninism, which he regarded as a mixture of
Fourier and Stenka Razin. He was opposed to sedition and con¬
spiracy, to Jacobinism and belief in committees. A dictatorship
can achieve nothing unless the working class has been prepared
for revolution. He stresses the reactionary character of the peasant
Commune as a hindrance to economic development. One must
rely upon the objective social process. Plekhanov did not accept
the bolshevik revolution, because he was always opposed to the
seizure of power for which neither strength nor consciousness had
been prepared. What is needed above all is the revolutionizing of
thought, not an elemental upheaval, and a revolutionizing of the
thought of the working class itself, not of a partisan organized
minority.
[ 103 ]
 But with such an application of Marxist principles to Russia,
there would be long to wait for the social revolution. The very
possibility of direct socialist activity in Russia would be made a
matter of doubt. The revolutionary will might be finally crushed
by intellectual theory. Thus, the more revolutionary-minded
Russian Marxists were obliged to interpret Marxism in some other
way and to set up other theories of the Russian revolution, to
work out other tactics. In this wing of Russian Marxism, the
revolutionary will overcame the intellectual theories and the arm¬
chair interpretation of Marxism. There occurred unnoticed a com¬
bination of the traditions of revolutionary Marxism with those of
the old revolutionary outlook which had no desire to tolerate a
capitalist stage in the development of Russia, with Chernishevsky,
Bakunin, Nechaev, Tkachev. This time it was not Fourier but
Marx who was united with Stenka Razin. The Marxists who were
bolsheviks stood much more clearly in the line of Russian tradi¬
tion than those who were mensheviks. On the basis of the evolu¬
tionary determinist interpretation of Marxism it is impossible to
justify a proletarian socialist revolution in a peasant country, in¬
dustrially backward and with a feebly developed working class.
With such an understanding of Marxism one must rely first of all
on a bourgeois revolution, on the development of capitalism and
then, when the time comes, bring about the socialist revolution.
This was not very favourable to the stimulation of the revolution¬
ary will.
In consequence of the transference of Marxist ideas to Russia,
among the Russian social democrats a tendency to ‘economisin'
sprang up, which handed over the political revolution to the liberal
and radical bourgeoisie, but considered it necessary to organize a
purely economic trade union movement among the workers. This
was the right wing of social democracy, and it caused a reaction in
its more revolutionary wing. The division became more marked
within Russian Marxism, between the orthodox, more revolu¬
tionary wing and the critical, more reformatory wing. The differ¬
ence between ‘orthodox’ and "critical’ Marxism was to a large ex¬
tent relative and conditional, for ‘critical’ Marxism was in several
[ 104 ]
respects truer to the scientific determinist side of Marxism than was
‘orthodox’ Marxism, which drew entirely original (in respect of
Russia) conclusions from Marxism, conclusions which could
scarcely be accepted by Marx and Engels.
Lukatch, whom we have already quoted, a Hungarian, and the
most interesting and philosophically cultured of communist
writers, who writes in German and displays great acuteness of
mind, makes an original, and, in my opinion, a true judgment
about revolution.(25) Revolution is certainly not determined by
the radical nature of its objects nor even by the character of the
means employed in the struggle. The essence of revolution is
totality, entireness, in relation to every act of life. The revolution¬
ary is one who in every act he performs relates it to the community
as a whole, and subordinates it to the central and complete idea.
For the revolutionary there are no separate spheres; he tolerates no
division of life into parts, nor will he admit any autonomy of
thought in relation to action or autonomy of action in relation to
thought. The revolutionary has an integrated world-view in
which theory and practice organically coalesce. Entirety in every¬
thing—that is the basic principle of the revolutionary attitude to
life. Critical Marxism might have the same ultimate ideals as the
Marxism which was revolutionary, and consider itself orthodox,
but it recognized separate autonomous spheres in life; it did not
affirm totalitarian entirety. One might, for instance, be a Marxist in
the social sphere, but not a materialist; one might be even an
idealist. One might criticize this or that side of the Marxist world¬
view. Marxism in that case ceased to be an entire totalitarian
doctrine; it became a method of cognition in social matters and of
carrying on the social conflict. This is the opposite of revolution¬
ary totalitarianism. Russian revolutionaries in the past, also, had
always been totalitarian. To them revolution was a religion and a
philosophy, not merely a conflict concerned with the social and
political side of life. And Russian Marxism had to work itself out,
to fit in with that revolutionary type and that revolutionary
totalitarian instinct. That is the meaning of Lenin and bolshev¬
ism. Bolshevism also defined itself as the only orthodox, i.e.
[ 105 ]
totalitarian integral Marxism, which refused to tolerate the break¬
ing up of the Marxist world-view into fragments and the adoption
only of separate parts of it.
This ‘orthodox’ Marxism, which was in actual fact Marxism
which had been changed by being given a Russian form, adopted
primarily not the determinist, evolutionary scientific side of
Marxism, but its messianic myth-creating religious side, which
gave scope to the stimulation of the revolutionary will, and
assigned a foremost place to the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle
as controlled by an organized minority, which was inspired by the
conscious proletariat idea. This orthodox totalitarian Marxism
always insisted on the preaching of materialist belief, but it con¬
tained strong idealist elements also. It showed how great was the
authority of an idea over human life, if it is an integrated idea, and
answers to the instincts of the masses. In bolshevist Marxism the
proletariat ceased to be an empirical reality, for as an empirical
reality the proletariat was a mere nothing; it was above all the idea
of a proletariat that mattered, and those who became vehicles for
the expression of this idea might be an insignificant minority. If
this insignificant minority is entirely possessed by the gigantic
idea of the proletariat, if its revolutionary will is stimulated, if it is
well organized and disciplined, then it can work miracles; it can
overpower the determinism which normally controls social life.
And Lenin proved in practice that this is possible. He brought
about the revolution in Marx’s name, but not in Marx’s way. The
communist revolution was brought about in Russia in the name
of totalitarian Marxism—Marxism as the religion of the proletariat,
but it was a contradiction of everything that Marx had said about
the development of human society. It was not revolutionary
narodnichestvo, but orthodox totalitarian Marxism which suc¬
ceeded in achieving the revolution, in which Russia skipped that
stage of capitalist development which to the first Russian Marxists
had appeared so unavoidable. And it was clear that this agreed
with Russian tradition and the instincts of the people.
At that time the illusions of revolutionary narodnichestvo had
already been outlived; the myth about the peasantry had col-
[106]
lapsed. The people had not accepted a revolutionary intelligentsia.
A new revolutionary myth was needed. And the myth about the
people was changed into the myth about the proletariat. Marxism
broke up the conception ol the people as an integral organism; it
analysed it into classes with opposed interests. But in the myth of
the proletariat, the myth of the Russian people arose in a new form.
There took place, as it were, an identification of the Russian people
with the proletariat, and of Russian messianism with proletarian
messianism. The Soviet Russia of workers and peasants came into
being. In it the notion of the people as a peasantry was combined
with the idea of it as a proletariat, and that in spite of everything
that had been said by Marx, who regarded the peasantry as a
petty-bourgeois, reactionary class. Orthodox totalitarian Marx¬
ism forbade any reference to the opposition between the interests
of the proletariat and those of the peasantry. That was the rock
on which Trotsky struck, desiring as he did to be true to classical
Marxism. The peasantry was declared to be a revolutionary class,
although the Soviet Government had constantly to fight it, some¬
times very bitterly. Lenin turned anew to the old tradition of
Russian revolutionary thought. He pronounced that the industrial
backwardness of Russia, the rudimentary character of its capital¬
ism, is a great asset for the social revolution.
There will be no need to deal with a strong, organized bour¬
geoisie. There Lenin was obliged to repeat what Tkachev had
said, and by no means what Engels had said. Bolshevism is
much more traditional than is commonly supposed. It agreed
with the distinctive character of the Russian historical pro¬
cess. There had taken place a Russification and orientalizing of
Marxism.

Ill
Marxism brought the Russian intelligentsia to a crisis and made
it recognize its weakness. This was a change not only in world
outlook but also a change in spiritual structure. Russian socialism
became less emotional and sentimental, more intellectually
grounded, and tougher. The first Russian Marxists were more
[107]
European, more Western folk, than the narodniks. The will to
power awoke in them, the will to obtain power, and the ideology
of power made its appearance. The motive of compassion grows
weaker; it is not there that the power lies to fight for revolution.
Its attitude towards the people as a proletariat is not so much com¬
passion for its oppressed unhappy condition, as the conviction that
it must conquer, that it is the coming power and the liberator of
mankind. But with all these changes of spirit in the intelligentsia,
the underlying foundation remained the same, i.e. the search for
the kingdom of social truth and righteousness, capacity for sacri¬
fice, an ascetic attitude towards culture, an integral, totalitarian
attitude to life, conditioned by the one great purpose—the actual
realization of socialism.
At first, Russian Marxism was a composite phenomenon; it
contained a variety of elements. This was made clear in its later
stages. If one section of Russian Marxists valued above all their
integral totalitarian world outlook, defended their orthodoxy,
and were distinguished by extreme intolerance, if for them
Marxism and socialism were a religion; in another section a
differentiation took place between the various fields of culture;
the religious wholeness was broken up and there occurred a
liberation of the oppressed life of the spirit and of spiritual creative¬
ness. The rights of religion, philosophy, art, and the moral life as
independent of social utilitarianism received recognition, i.e. the
rights of the spirit, which were denied by Russian nihilism, revo¬
lutionary narodnichestvo and revolutionary Marxism. Since they
ceased to see in Marxism and socialism a religion, an entire world
outlook which provides an answer to all the questions of life, a
place was found for religious enquiry and for spiritual creativeness.
However strange it may be at first sight, yet it is actually Marxism
—at first critical rather than orthodox Marxism—which has sup¬
plied us with an idealist, and later on a religious current of thought.
To it belong S. Bulgakov, now a priest and professor of dogmatic
theology; and also the present writer. (26) A crisis took place in the
world view which was directed exclusively to the present earthly
life, and another world was revealed, the world beyond. An end
[ ]
came to the exclusive reign of materialism and positivism among
the Russian intelligentsia.
A fierce battle was fought in defence of the possibility of such a
metaphysical and religious change of front. The idealist tendency
was greeted with fearful hostility, alike in the Marxist and in the
old narodnik and radical camps. This change of front looked like a
betrayal of the fight for freedom. In the Marxist camp this origin¬
ally took the form of a conflict between the orthodox, i.e.
totalitarian tendency, and the critical, which permitted the union
of Marxism with another, non-materialist philosophy, and a
critical revision of certain sides of Marxism. In its later develop¬
ment this movement broke away from its connection with the
various forms of Marxism and became a fight for the independence
of spiritual values in cognition, in art and in the moral and reli¬
gious life. Its adherents strove to give to socialism an ideological
ethical basis. This was a triumph over the tradition of Russian
nihilism, utopianism, materialism and positivism. In the last resort
it came to this, that they began to look for entirety, totalitarianism,
not in revolution but in religion.
At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a real cul¬
tural renaissance in Russia—religious, philosophical and aesthetic.
And with it occurred a return to the traditions of the great Russian
literature and Russian religious-philosophical thought. From
Chernishevsky and Plekhanov they turned to Dostoyevsky, L.
Tolstoi, Vladimir Solovev. But these cultural and idealist tenden¬
cies began to lose their connection with the social revolutionary
movement; more and more they lost the broad social standpoint.
A cultured elite was formed, which had no influence on the wide
circles of Russian society. This was a new schism—and the history
of the Russian intelligentsia has been rich in schisms. In this lay the
weakness of the idealist movement. And it had fateful results for
the ideology of the Russian revolution and its conflict with the
spirit.
Among the intellectual elite at the beginning of the century
there was a real renaissance of Russian culture; a Russian school
of philosophy made its appearance, with an original religious
[ I09 ]
philosophy. Russian poetry again hurst into bloom. After decades
of decline in taste there was a quickening in aesthetic consciousness;
interest awoke in questions of the spirit, as was the case among us
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There appeared in
Russia, perhaps for the first time, people of a refined culture, even
bordering on decadence. It was a time of symbolism, metaphysics,
mysticism. People of the Russian cultural level were at the height
of European culture. Nietzsche had an enormous influence at that
period; and his influence met with Dostoyevsky’s. On the side of
German philosophy, such thinkers as Schelling and F. Baader
again aroused the greatest interest. They passed through Ibsen and
the French symbolists. But Russian symbolism did not remain in
the aesthetic and artistic sphere; it rapidly passed over into the
realm of religion and mysticism. Russian thinkers, like Khomya¬
kov, V. Solovev. K. Leontyev, N. Fedorov, V. Rozanov, who had
become half-forgotten or as yet but little known and appreciated,
were rediscovered and received recognition. Interest in the ‘en¬
lightened’, nihilist, narodnik, stream of Russian thought was lost.
That was the time when, on the watch tower of Vyacheslav Ivanov
(that was what they called the sixth-floor flat opposite the Taurida
Palace where the most exquisite of Russian symbolist poets lived),
the most subtle conversations on aesthetic-mystical subjects used to
take place every Wednesday.
At that time the revolution of 1905 was raging around them.
Between the upper and lower levels of Russian culture there was
almost nothing in common—there was a complete cleavage. They
lived, as it were, on different planets. In general, the movement
might be characterized as an original Russian romanticism, but in
that section of it which was directed towards religion it was a
transition to religious realism. There was nothing reactionary in
the cultural renaissance of the beginning of the century; many of
its active spirits even sympathized very definitely with revolution
and socialism. But interest in social questions had slackened and
those who were active in spiritual culture had no influence what¬
ever on the social revolutionary ferment that was going on; they
lived in a closed circle of the elite. At the same time stormy quarrels
[no]
were taking place between the bolsheviks and the mensheviks, and
the bolshevik party organization was beginning to grow. Plek-
hanov, the head of the menshevist faction of the social democrats,
was a bookish theoretician of Marxism, but not a revolutionary
leader. The real revolutionary leader was Lenin, the founder of the
Russian and world communist movement.
The split among the Russian social democrats, between the
bolsheviks and the mensheviks, began with the Congress of the
Social Democratic Party which took place in London in 1903.
At that Congress the bolsheviks received a quantitative ‘majority’,
the mensheviks a ‘minority’ of votes. The word ‘bolshevism’ itself
has had a very interesting fate. Originally the word was absolutely
colourless, and meant those who sided with the majority at that
Congress. But later it acquired a symbolic meaning. With the
word ‘bolshevism’ was associated the idea.of strength; with ‘men-
shevism’, of comparative weakness. In the upheaval of the revolu¬
tion of 1917 the insurgent masses were captivated by bolshevism
as a power which gives ‘more’, while menshevism suggested itself
as weaker—it gives ‘less’.1 In origin, a humble word of little im¬
port, bolshevism acquired the significance of a standard, or slogan.
The very word itself sounded vigorous and expressive. But it was
very characteristic of the split in Russian culture that both bolshe¬
viks and mensheviks and all active workers in the revolutionary
social movement were not at all inspired by the same ideas which
held sway in the higher level of Russian culture. Russian philo¬
sophy was alien to them; problems of the spirit did not interest
them; they remained materialists and positivists. The cultural
level, not only of the bulk of the revolutionaries, but also of the
leaders of the revolution, was not high, their thinking was elemen¬
tary. They remained alien to that influence of the spirit which
spread over Europe and Russia at the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth centuries. The themes of Dostoyevsky,
L. Tolstoi, V. Solovev, Nietzsche, of German idealism, symbolism
—in general, the themes of Christianity—remained alien to them.
There was a higher intellectual culture among the elements
x‘Bolshe’ is the Russian for ‘greater’, and ‘menshe’ for ‘less’.
[Ill]
grouped around ‘The Liberation Union’, an organization formed
in the years 1903-4 and presenting a broad liberal-radical bloc in
the struggle for political liberty against autocracy. I11 this bloc the
broad groups of the left intelligentsia tried to unite with the liberal
workers of town and country self-government. In it also the more
moderate social democrats took part. But this ‘Liberation Union’,
in which notable intellectual forces played their part, was unable
to assume leadership of the revolutionary movement, because in
Russia a movement could then be successful only under socialism,
not liberalism, and inspired without fail by a totalitarian world
view. The elementary nature and the crudity of the ideas of the
1905 revolution, in which the legacy of Russian nihilism made it¬
self felt, repelled those who were working for the cultural renais¬
sance and evoked a spiritual reaction.
At that time there took place a re-assessment of values in the
world view of the Russian intelligentsia. This found expression in
the symposium Landmarks which made a sensation in its day, in
which the materialism, positivism, utilitarianism of the .evolu¬
tionary intelligentsia, its indifference to the highest values of the
life of the spirit, were subjected to sharp criticism. A conflict was
waged in defence of spirit, but the conflict had no wide social
influence. In accordance with the ancient tradition of the Russian
intelligentsia, the struggle for the spirit was taken as reactionarv.
almost like a betrayal of the struggle for freedom. Such was the
pre-revolutionary cultural atmosphere; while within the revolu¬
tionary movement itself there was evidence of weakness and of
the unpreparedness of the social democrat mensheviks and socialist
revolutionaries who carried on the narodnik tradition.
This was the period of the Imperial Duma and the beginnings of
the Russian parliament, which was still rather limited in its rights;
the period of the formation for the first time of a great liberal
party known as the Kadets, under the leadership of P. Milyukov.
In the upper levels of Russian life, it appeared as if liberalism was
beginning to play a fairly important part, and with it even the
Government had to reckon.
But the greatest paradox in Russian life and the Russian revolu-
tion lies in this, that liberal ideas, ideas ol right as well as ideas of
social reform, appeared, hi Russia, to be utopian. Bolshevism on
the other hand shewed itself to be much less utopian and much
more realist, much more in accord with the whole complex
situation in Russia in 1917, and much more faithful to certain
primordial Russian traditions, to the Russian search for universal
social justice, understood in a maximalizing sense, and to the
Russian method of government and control by coercion. (27)
This was predetermined by the whole course of Russian history,
but also by the feebleness of creative spiritual power among us.
Communism was the inevitable fate of Russia, the inward moment
in the destiny of the Russian people.

B. R.C-
H [ IJ3 ]
 CHAPTER VI

RUSSIAN COMMUNISM AND THE

REVOLUTION (28)

T he Russian revolution was universal in its principles as is

every great revolution. It was brought about under the flag
of internationalism, but for all that it was profoundly national and
became more and more national in its results. The difficulty of
forming a judgment about communism is due precisely to this
twofold character that it has—it is both Russian and international.
Only in Russia could a communist revolution take place. Russian
communism must appear to Western people to be Asiatic, and a
communist revolution of that sort would scarcely be possible in
the countries of Western Europe. There, of course, everything
would happen in a different way. The very internationalism of the
Russian communist revolution is purely Russian and national. I
am inclined to think that even the active share of the Jews in
Russian communism is very characteristic of Russia and the
Russian people. Russian messianism is akin to Jewish messianism.
Lenin himself is a typical Russian. In his characteristic, expressive
face there was something Russo-Mongolian. In Lenin’s character
there were typical Russian traits, and those not specially of the
intelligentsia but of the Russian people—simplicity, wholeness,
boorishness, dislike of embellishment and rhetoric, thought of a
practical kind, a disposition to nihilist cynicism on moral grounds.
In several ways he recalled the Russian type which found ex¬
pression in the genius ofL. Tolstoi, although it did not overcome
the complexity of Tolstoi’s inner life. Lenin was made of one
piece; he was a monolith. The part played by Lenin is a notable
demonstration of the role of personality in historical events. Lenin
could become a leader of revolution and realize those plans of his
[ “4 ]
which had been worked out long before, because he was not a
typical member of the Russian intelligentsia. In him characteristics
of the Russian sectarian intelligentsia existed side by side with
characteristics of the Russians who had made and shaped the
Russian state. He united in himself traits of Chernishevsky,
Nechaev, Tkachev, Zhelyabov, with traits of the Grand Princes of
Moscow, of Peter the Great and Russian rulers of the despotic
type. In this lies his originality. Lenin was both an out and out
revolutionary and a statesman. He combined revolutionary ideas
of the extremist type and a totalitarian revolutionary outlook with
flexibility and opportunism in the means employed in the struggle
and in political practice. It is only such people who are successful
and victorious. He combined simpleness, directness and a nihilist
asceticism, with astuteness, almost with cunning. In Lenin there
was no trace of revolutionary bohemianism—a thing he could not
bear; in this he was a contrast to people like Trotsky or Martov,
the leader of the left wing of the mensheviks.
In his private life Lenin liked order and discipline; he was a good
family man; he liked to sit at home and work and did not like end¬
less arguments in cafes, to which the Russian radical intelligentsia
were so much inclined. There was no anarchic element in him; he
could not bear anarchism, of which he always exposed the
reactionary character. He could not endure revolutionary roman¬
ticism and high-flown talk. As president of the Council of People’s
Commissars and the leader of Soviet Russia, he was continually
exposing this sort of thing in communist circles; he fulminated
against communist swagger and communist humbug. He set him¬
self against ‘childhood’s malady of leftism’ in the communist party.
In the year 1918, when chaos and anarchy threatened Russia,
Lenin made unheard of efforts in his speeches to discipline the
Russian people and the communists themselves. He appealed to
elementary things, to labour, to discipline, to a sense of responsi¬
bility, to knowledge and learning, to positive constructiveness,
and not to destruction only; he inveighed against high-flown
revolutionary talk and exposed anarchic propensities. He exor¬
cized the abyss and he checked the chaotic collapse of Russia; he
[US]
checked it by despotism and tyranny. In these ways he is like Peter.
Lenin preached a cruel policy, but personally he was not a cruel
man; he did not like it when people complained to him of the
cruelty of the Cheka; he said that it was not his business, and that
it was unavoidable in a revolution; but probably he himself could
not have directed the Cheka. In private life there was a great deal of
kindliness in him; he was fond of animals; he liked to joke and
laugh; he took a touching care of his wife’s mother and often gave
her presents.
These traits in his character gave Malaparte an excuse for calling
him a petit bourgeois, which was not quite true. (29) In his youth
Lenin had had a great respect for Plekhanov and behaved to him
almost with veneration, waiting for his first interview with Plek¬
hanov with passionate enthusiasm. (30) Disillusionment in Plekha¬
nov, in whom he saw the pettiness of self-love, ambition, and a
haughty contempt for his comrades, meant for Lenin disillusion¬
ment in people in general. But the first shock which settled Lenin’s
attitude to the world and life was the execution of his brother who
had been involved in terrorist activities. Lenin’s father was a pro¬
vincial civil servant who served long enough to attain the rank
corresponding with the military rank of general and conferring
hereditary membership of the nobility. When his brother was
executed society in the neighbourhood turned their backs on
Lenin’s family, and this too meant disillusionment in people for
the young Lenin; a cynically placid attitude to mankind grew in
him. He did not believe in man, but he wanted to organize life in
such a way that people might live more freely and that there
should be no oppression of man by man.
In philosophy and art and spiritual culture, Lenin was a very
old-fashioned person; he had the tastes and sympathies of the
people of the ’sixties of last century; he combined revolution in
the social sphere with reaction in the spiritual. Lenin insisted upon
the original and distinctively national character of the Russian
revolution. He always said that the Russian revolution would not
be as the doctrinaires of Marxism pictured it. In this way he always
introduced a corrective to Marxism; he propounded the theory
[ 116 ]
and tactics of the Russian revolution, and he realized it in actual
fact. He accused the mensheviks of following Marx in a pedantic
way and of desiring the abstract transference of its principles to
Russian soil. Lenin was not a theoretician of Marxism like Plekha-
nov, but a theoretician of revolution; everything he wrote was
but a treatment of the theory and practice of revolution. He never
elaborated a programme; he was interested in one thing only—
the seizure of power, and the acquisition of strength to achieve
that; and for this reason he triumphed. Lenin’s whole general out¬
look on life was adapted to the technique of revolutionary con¬
flict. He alone, long before the revolution, gave thought to what
would happen when power had been seized, and how the power
was to be organized.
Lenin was an imperialist and not an anarchist; his whole thought
was imperialist, despotic. Hence his straightforwardness, his
narrowness of outlook, his concentration upon one thing, the
poverty and asceticism of his thought, the elementary nature of
the slogans addressed to the will. Lenin’s type of culture was not
very high; there was much which was inaccessible to him and un¬
known to him. Every refinement of thought and of the life of the
spirit repelled him. He read a great deal and studied much, but he
had no breadth of knowledge or great intellectual culture. He
acquired knowledge for a definite purpose, for conflict and action.
He had no capacity for contemplation; he had a good knowledge
of Marxism and a certain knowledge of economics. In philosophy
he read simply for controversial purposes, in order to settle
accounts with heresies and deviations from Marxism. In order to
expose Makh and Avenarius by whom the Marxist bolsheviks,
Bogdanov and Lunacharsky, were attracted, Lenin read a whole
philosophical literature. But he had no philosophical culture, less
than Plekhanov had; he fought all his life for that integral totali¬
tarian view of life, which was necessary for the struggle and for
the focusing of revolutionary energy. From this totalitarian system
he would not suffer a single brick to be removed, he demanded
the acceptance of all of it as a whole, and from his point of view he
was right. He was right in thinking that the attraction ot Avenarius
[ “7]
and Makh or Nietzsche would make a breach in the wholeness of
the bolshevik outlook and weaken it tor the struggle. He fought
for wholeness and consistency in the conflict. The latter was im¬
possible without an integrated dogmatic outlook, without a dog¬
matic confession of faith, without orthodoxy. He demanded
deliberate thought and discipline in the struggle against every¬
thing elemental; this was his basic theme.
He permitted any method in the fight to achieve revolution.
To him ‘good’ was everything which served the revolution; ‘evil’
everything which hindered it. Lenin’s revolutionary principles
have a moral source; he could not endure injustice, oppression and
exploitation, but he became so obsessed with the maximalist
revolutionary idea, that in the end he lost the immediate sense of
the difference between good and evil; he lost the direct relationship
to living people; he permitted fraud, deceit, violence, cruelty. Lenin
was not a vicious man; there was a great deal that was good in
him; he was unmercenary, absolutely devoted to an idea; he was
not even a particularly ambitious man or a great lover of power; he
thought but little about himself; but the sole obsession of a single
idea led to a dreadful narrowing of thought and to a moral trans¬
formation which permitted entirely immoral methods of carrying
on the conflict. Lenin was a man of fate; therein lay his strength.
Lenin was a revolutionary to the marrow, precisely because
through his whole life he defended an integral totalitarian outlook
of life and permitted no infringement of it whatever. From this
arose a thing which is difficult to understand at first glance—the
passion, the fury, with which he fought against the smallest de¬
clension from what he saw as orthodox Marxism. He insisted
upon orthodox views; that is to say, the views which agreed with
the totalitarian general outlook about cognition, about matter,
about dialectic and so on, from everyone who considered himself
a Marxist and desired to be of service to the social revolution. If
you were not a dialectic materialist, if in purely philosophical
questions you favoured the views of Makh, then you were be¬
traying the totalitarian integral theory of revolution and ought to
be excluded.
[ n8 ]
 When Lunacharsky attempted to talk about the search for God
and the making of gods, although the discussion was of a purely
atheistic character, Lenin attacked him furiously; and Lunacharsky
belonged to the bolshevik group. Lunacharsky was introducing
complications into the integrated Marxist outlook and that was
enough for him to be excommunicated. Grant that the menshe-
viks had the same ultimate ideal as Lenin, grant that they also were
devoted to the working classes, still they had not this integrated
view; they were not totalitarian in their attitude to revolution;
they complicated the affair by their talk of Russia needing a bour¬
geois revolution first, about socialism being realized only after a
period of capitalist development, about the need to wait for the
development of class consciousness among the workers, about the
peasantry being a reactionary class, and so on. The mensheviks
also attached no special importance to an integrated general out¬
look, to a compulsory profession of dialectic materialism; a num¬
ber of them were ordinary positivists and even, what was really
dreadful, Neo-Kantians, that is to say they held a bourgeois philo¬
sophy. All this weakened the revolutionary will. To Lenin,
Marxism is above all the doctrine of the dictatorship of the prole¬
tariat. The mensheviks did not consider a dictatorship of the pro¬
letariat possible in an agricultural peasant country. The menshe¬
viks wanted to be democrats; they wanted to rely upon a majority;
Lenin was not a democrat; he asserted the principle not of majority,
but of a selected minority; on that account they often flung the
taunt of ‘Blancism’ at him. He drew up a plan of revolution and
' revolutionary seizure of power which by no means relied upon
the development of consciousness among vast masses of workmen
and upon the objective economic process. Dictatorship issued
from Lenin’s outlook as a whole. He even formed his general out¬
look to conform with the principle of dictatorship. He asserted
dictatorship even in philosophy and demanded the dictatorship of
dialectic materialism over thought.
Lenin’s purpose, which he followed up with unusual logical
consistency, was the formation of a strong party representing a
well organized and iron disciplined minority and relying upon the
[ II9 ]
strength of its integrated revolutionary Marxist outlook. The
party had to have a doctrine in which nothing whatever is to be
changed and it had to prepare for dictatorship over life as a com¬
plete whole. The very organization of the party, which was cen¬
tralized in the extreme, was a dictatorship on a small scale. Every
member of the party was subjected to this dictatorship of the
centre. The bolshevik party which Lenin built up in the course of
many years was to provide the pattern of the future organization
of the whole of Russia, and in actual fact Russia was organized on
the pattern of the bolshevik party organization. The whole of
Russia, the whole Russian people, was subjected not only to the
dictatorship of the communist party but also to the dictatorship
of the communist dictator, in thought and in conscience. Lenin
denied freedom within the party and this denial of freedom was
transferred to the whole of Russia.
This is indeed the dictatorship of a general outlook for which
Lenin had prepared. He was able to do this only because he com¬
bined in himself two traditions: the tradition of the Russian revo¬
lutionary intelligentsia in its most maximalist tendency, and the
tradition of Russian Government in its most despotic aspect. The
social democrat mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries re¬
mained in the stream of the first tradition only, and that in a miti¬
gated form. But combining in himself traditions which in the
nineteenth century had been in mortal conflict, Lenin was able to
fashion a scheme for the organization of a communist state and to
realize it. However paradoxical it may sound, still Bolshevism is
the third appearance of Russian autocratic imperialism; its first
appearance being the Muscovite Tsardom and its second the
Petrine Empire. Bolshevism stands for a strong centralized state.
A union was achieved of the will to social justice and the will to
political power, and the second will was the stronger. Bolshevism
entered into Russian life as a power which was militarized in the
highest degree, but the old Russian State also had always been
militarized.
The problem of power was fundamental with Lenin and all his
followers; it distinguished the bolsheviks from all other revolu-
[ 120 ]
tionaries. They too created a police state, in its methods of govern¬
ment very like the old Russian State. But to organize government,
to subject to it the labouring and peasant masses, could not be a
matter of the use of armed force alone, or of sheer coercion. An
integrated doctrine was needed, a consistent general outlook, and
symbols which held the State together were required. In the
Muscovite Tsardom and in the Empire the people were held to¬
gether by a unity of religious faith; so also a new single faith had to
be expressed for the masses in elementary symbols. Marxism in its
Russian form was wholly suitable for this.
Of extraordinary interest in understanding the preparations for
the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the dictatorship of the
communist party, is Lenin’s book: What is to be done? It was
already written in 1902 while there was as yet no split between the
bolsheviks and the mensheviks, and it provides a shining example
of revolutionary polemics. In it Lenin is chiefly concerned to com¬
bat what is known as ‘economism’ and the trust in elemental im¬
pulses in preparing for revolution. Economism was the denial of
the integrated revolutionary outlook and of revolutionary action.
To this trust in elemental impulses Lenin opposed the conscious¬
ness of a revolutionary minority which was called to take control
of the general process. He demanded organization from above,
not from below, that is to say, organization of the dictator, not
the democratic, type. Lenin ridiculed those Marxists who were
always waiting for the development of the elemental impulses of
society. He asserted the dictatorship not of an empirical proletariat
which was very weak in Russia, but of the idea of a proletariat with
which an insignificant minority could be permeated. Lenin was
always anti-evolutionist and, in fact, was an anti-democrat, and
that had its effect upon the youthful communist philosophy. Being
a materialist Lenin was certainly not a relativist, and he hated
relativism and scepticism as products of the bourgeois spirit. Lenin
was an absolutist; he believed in absolute truth. It is very difficult
for materialism to construct a theory of knowledge which admits
absolute truth, but that did not disturb Lenin at all. His astonishing
naivete in philosophy was due to his integrated revolutionary will;
[ 121 ]
absolute proof is asserted not by cognition, not by thought, but by
an intense revolutionary will, and his desire was to select people of
that intense revolutionary will. Totalitarian Marxisn}, dialectic
Marxism, is, in his view, absolute truth. This absolute truth is a
weapon to be used for revolution and the organization of dictator¬
ship. But a teaching which gives a basis to a totalitarian doctrine
and embraces the whole of life, not only politics and economics
but also thought and consciousness and all creative culture, can
be only a subject of faith.
The whole history of the Russian intelligentsia was a prepara¬
tion for communism. Into communism there entered the well-
known traits—thirst for social righteousness and equality, a
recognition of the working classes as the highest type of humanity,
aversion to capitalism and the bourgeoisie, the striving after an
integrated outlook and an integrated relation to life, sectarian in¬
tolerance, a suspicious and hostile attitude to the cultured elite, an
exclusive this-worldliness, a denial of spirit and of spiritual values,
a well nigh religious devotion to materialism. All these had
always belonged to the Russian radical intelligentsia. If the rem¬
nants of the old intelligentsia which remain and have not joined
up with bolshevism, have not recognized their own proper char¬
acteristics in those against whom they have rebelled, that is a
historical aberration, a loss of memory due to emotional reaction.
The old revolutionary intelligentsia simply did not think about
what it would be like when it acquired power. It was accustomed
to accept itself as powerless and oppressed, and power and ability
to oppress seemed to it to be the child of another wholly alien type,
while all the while it was its own child. Here lies the paradox of
the final stage in the development of the Russian intelligentsia, its
transformation in a victorious revolution. Part of it was converted
to communism and adapted its psychology to the new conditions.
Another part of it did not accept the socialist revolution and forgot
its own past.
The War had already produced a new spiritual type, a type in¬
clined to transfer war-time methods to the ordering of life in
general, prepared to put the theory of violence into practice, and
[ 122 ]
with a love of power and a great respect for force. This is a world¬
wide phenomenon; it is seen equally in communism and in fascism.
In Russia there appeared a new anthropological type, a new facial
expression; people of this type have a different gait, different
gestures from those of the members of the old intelligentsia. Just
as in the ’sixties with the appearance of the nihilists, the milder
type of idealists of the ’forties was replaced by a harsher type, so
under the conditions of victorious revolution, itself the result of
war-time conditions, the same process took place on a much
bigger scale. Moreover, the old intelligentsia, linked by origin
with the ‘thinking realists’ of the nihilist period, plays the same
part as the idealists of the ’forties played in the ’sixties, and repre¬
sents the milder type. As the result of its memory being enfeebled
by emotion, it forgets that it is descended from Chemishevsky
who despised Hertzen as a mild idealist of the ’forties. The com¬
munists ironically called the old revolutionary and radical intelli¬
gentsia ‘bourgeois’, as the nihilists and socialists of the ’sixties had
called the intelligentsia of the ’forties ‘nobility and gentry’. In the
new communist type the impulse of power and authority has
crowded out the old impulses of love of justice and sympathy. In
this type there has been produced a harshness which passes into
cruelty.
This new spiritual type was very favourable soil for Lenin’s
plans. It became the material out of which the communist party
was organized, and became the dominant power in a vast country.
The new spiritual type called to rule in revolution was recruited
from the workmen and peasants. It went through military and
party discipline. These new people, from the masses, were alien to
the traditions of Russian culture; their fathers and grandfathers
had been illiterate, devoid of culture of any sort and lived entirely
by faith. These people had a ressentiment in regard to those of the
old culture, which in the moment of triumph turned into revenge.
A great deal is explained psychologically by this. In the past the
masses had felt the injustice of a social order based upon oppression
and the exploitation of the workers, but they had meekly and
peacefully borne their painful lot. But the hour had come when it
[ I23 ]
would no longer endure and the people’s whole structure of soul
changed. This was a typical process. Meekness and peacefulness
may turn into fierceness and ferocity. Lenin could not realize his
plan of revolution and seizure of power without a change in the
soul of the people. This change was so great that the people who
had lived by irrational beliefs and been submissive to an irrational
fate suddenly went almost mad about the rationalization of the
whole of life without exception. They believed in a machine in¬
stead of in God. The Russian people having emerged from the
period of being rooted in the soil, and living under its mystic
domination, entered upon a technical period in which it believed
in the almighty power of the machine, and by the force of ancient
instinct began to treat the machine like a totem. Such switchings
over are possible in the soul of a people.
Lenin was a Marxist and believed in the exclusive mission of the
proletariat. He believed that the world was approaching a period
of proletarian revolutions, but he was a Russian and he made his
revolution in Russia, a country of an entirely peculiar character.
He had a very particular sensitiveness for the historical situation;
he felt that his hour had come and that it had come thanks to the
War which had brought about the dissolution of the old order.
He had to bring about in a peasant country the first proletarian
revolution in the world. He felt himself free from any of the stereo¬
typed doctrines with which the Marxists mensheviks bored him;
he proclaimed a workman and peasant revolution, a workman
and peasant republic; he decided to make use of the peasantry for
the proletarian revolution, and he succeeded in this, to the em¬
barrassment of the Marxist doctrinaires.
Lenin began with an agrarian revolution, making use of many
things which the socialist narodniks had previously asserted. The
revolutionary elements of narodnichestvo and revolt entered into
Leninism in a changed form. The socialist revolutionaries who
represented the old traditions were seen to be superfluous and
were shouldered aside. Lenin did everything better, more quickly
and more thoroughly; he gave more. This led to the proclamation
of a new revolutionary morale, corresponding with a new psycho-
[ 124 ]
logical type and with the new conditions. Things were seen to be
quite other than they had been in the days of the old revolutionary
intelligentsia; they were less humane and permitted every sort of
cruelty. Lenin was an anti-humanist as he was an anti-democrat;
in this he was a man of the new epoch, an epoch not only of com¬
munist but also of fascist revolution. Mussolini and Hitler are to
imitate him. Stalin will represent the final type of dictator-leader.
Leninism is not, of course, fascism, but Stalinism is already very
near fascism.
In 1917, that is to say, fifteen years after the book What is to he
done? Lenin wrote Revolution and the State, perhaps the most in¬
teresting of all his writings. In this book Lenin sketched out a plan
for the organization of revolution and of political power, a plan
designed to hold good over a long period. The remarkable thing
is not that he sketched this plan but that he carried it out; he fore¬
saw clearly how everything would go. In this book Lenin con¬
structs the theory of the part to be played by the State in the transi¬
tional period from capitalism to communism, a period which may
be more or less protracted. There was nothing of this in Marx
himself, who had no concrete vision of how communism would
be realized and what forms the dictatorship of the proletariat
would take. We saw that to Lenin, Marxism is first and foremost
the theory and practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat. From
Marx it was possible to draw even anarchic deductions and the abso¬
lute repudiation of the State. Lenin rebelled decisively against
these anarchic deductions, which were obviously unfavourable to
the organization of revolutionary power and the dictatorship of
the proletariat.
In the future, certainly the State ought to die out as an un¬
necessary thing, but in the transitional period the role of the State
must even increase. The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. of the
communist party, means stronger and more despotic political
power than in bourgeois states. In accordance with the Marxist
theory, the State was always the organization of class rule, the dic¬
tatorship of the ruling classes over the classes that were oppressed
and exploited. The State will die out and finally be replaced by an
* i12s]
organized society after the disappearance of classes. The State
exists so long as classes exist. But the complete disappearance of
class does not take place immediately after the victory of the
revolutionary proletariat. Lenin certainly did not think that after
the October revolution in Russia communist society would
finally come into existence. There would still have to be a pre¬
paratory process and a bitter struggle. During this period of pre¬
paration, when society is not yet entirely class-free, the State, with
a strong centralized authority, is necessary for the dictatorship of
the proletariat over the bourgeois classes to crush them. Lenin
says that the ‘bourgeois’ State must be destroyed by revolutionary
violence and the newly formed proletarian State will die out to the
degree that the class-free communist society is realized. In the past
the proletariat had been subject to the domination of the bour¬
geoisie. In the transitional period of the proletarian State, con¬
trolled by a dictatorship, there must be a crushing of the bour¬
geoisie by the proletariat. In this period civil servants will obey the
orders of workmen.
In his book, Lenin relies chiefly on Engels and continually
quotes him. ‘While the proletariat still needs the State, it needs it
not in the interests of freedom but in order to crush its opponents,’
Engels writes to Bebel in 1875. Here Engels is clearly seen as the
forerunner of Lenin. According to Lenin democracy is certainly
not needed by the proletariat and for the realization of commun¬
ism. It is not the way to the proletarian revolution. Bourgeois
democracy cannot evolve into communism. A bourgeois demo¬
cratic government must be destroyed for communism to be
realized, and democracy is unnecessary and harmful after the
triumph of the proletarian revolution because it is opposed to
dictatorship. Democratic liberties only hinder the realization of
communism, and indeed Lenin did not believe in the real existence
of democratic liberties. They only mask the interests of the bour¬
geoisie and its dominance. In bourgeois democracies also dictator¬
ships exist, dictatorship of capital, of money. In all this there is
incontestably some truth. With socialism all democracy will die out.
The preliminary phases of communism cannot give freedom and
[126]
equality. Lenin says this frankly. The dictatorship of the proletariat
will mean cruel violence and inequality.
In spite of the doctrinaire understanding of Marxism, Lenin
asserted the obvious primacy of politics over economics. The
question of a strong government is to him fundamental. In spite
of the doctrinaire Marxism of the mensheviks, Lenin saw in the
political and economical backwardness of Russia something ad¬
vantageous to the realization of the social revolution. In a country
of autocratic monarchy, unaccustomed to civic rights and liberties,
the dictatorship of the proletariat is more easily brought about
than in Western democracies. This is incontestably true. The age¬
long instinct of submission must be used by the proletarian State.
K. Leontyev foresaw this. In an industrially backward country
with capitalism but little developed it will be easier to organize
economic life in agreement with the communist plan. Lenin
found himself in the tradition of Russian narodnik socialism. He
asserted that revolution would take place in Russia in a distinctive
way, not in the Western way, i.e. in actual fact not according to
Marx, not according to the doctrinaire understanding of Marx.
How and why will the violence of coercion, the absence of all
freedom which characterizes the transitional period leading to
communism, the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, be
brought to an end? Lenin’s answer is very simple, too simple.
Regimentation, coercion, iron-dictatorship must be passed
through first of all. The coercion will be exercised not only upon
the remains of the old bourgeoisie but also upon the workman and
"peasant masses, the very proletariat which is the dictator. Later on,
Lenin says, people will become accustomed to preserving the
elementary conditions of social life and adapt themselves to the
new circumstances, and then the use of force upon people will be
abrogated. The State will die out. Dictatorship will come to an
end.
Here we meet with a very interesting phenomenon. Lenin did
not believe in man. He recognized in him no sort of inward prin¬
ciple; he did not believe in spirit and the freedom of the spirit, but
he had a boundless faith in the social regimentation of man. He
[ I27 ]
 believed diat a compulsory social organization could create any
sort of new man you like, for instance, a completely social man
who would no longer need the use of force. Marx believed the
same thing, that the new man could be manufactured in factories.
This was Lenin’s utopianism, but it was a utqpianism which could
be and was realized. One thing he did not foresee; he did not fore¬
see that class oppression might take an entirely different form,
quite unlike its capitalist form. The dictatorship of the proletariat,
having increased the power of the State, is developing a colossal
bureaucracy which spreads like a network over the whole country
and brings everything into subjection to itself. This new Soviet
bureaucracy is more powerful than that of the Tsarist regime. It is
a new privileged class which can exploit the masses pitilessly. This
is happening. An ordinary workman very often receives 75
roubles a month, but a Soviet civil servant, a specialist, gets 1,600
roubles a month, and this portentous inequality exists m a com¬
munist state. Soviet Russia is a country of state capitalism which
is capable of exploitation no less than private capitalism. The
transitional period may be drawn out indefinitely. Those who are
in power in it acquire a taste for power and desire no changes,
which are unavoidable for the final realization of communism.
The will-to-power becomes satisfying in itself and men will fight
for it as an end and not as a means.
All this was beyond Lenin’s view. In this he was particularly
utopian and very naive. The Soviet state has become like any other
despotic state. It uses the same methods of falsehood and violence.
'It is first and foremost a state of the military police kind. Its inter¬
national politics are as like the diplomacy of bourgeois states as
two peas. The communist revolution was distinctively Russian,
but the miraculous birth of the new life did not take place. The
old Adam has remained and continues to act, if in another form.
The Russian revolution was achieved under the flag of Marxist-
Leninism, not of narodnik socialism which had an old tradition be¬
hind it. But at the moment of revolution narodnik socialism lost in
Russia its integrality and revolutionary energy; it was played out;
its- force was halved. It could play its part in the February (still
[128]
bourgeois) revolution of the intelligentsia; but it cherished the
principle of democracy more than the principle of socialism and it
could play no part in the October revolution, i.e. the completely
matured socialist revolution of the masses. Marxist-Leninism
absorbed all the necessary elements of narodnik socialism, but re¬
jected its greater humanity, its moral scrupulousness, as obstacles
to the acquisition of power. It was nearer the moral standpoint of
the old despotic government.

II
Any judgment on the Russian revolution presupposes a judg¬
ment on revolution in general, as an entirely special and, in the
last resort, spiritual phenomenon in the destinies of peoples.
Rationalist and moralist judgments on revolution are entirely
fruitless and so are such judgments on war, which is very like
revolution. Revolution is irrational; it is a sign of the dominance
of irrational forces in history. The makers of revolution may
consciously profess the most rational theories and make the revo¬
lution on those grounds, but revolutions are always a symptom
of the growth of irrational forces, and this must be understood
in a twofold sense. It means the old regime has become entirely
irrational and no longer justifiable in any sense; and that the
revolution itself comes into being through the unshackling of the
irrational elements in the masses. The organizers of a revolution
always desire to rationalize the irrational element in revolution, but
all the same they are its instruments. Lenin was an extreme ration¬
alist; he believed in the possibility of finally rationalizing social life,
but still he was a man of destiny, a man of fate, i.e. of the irrational
in history. Revolution is destiny and fate.
Three points of view are possible about revolution: (i) The
revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, i.e. the point of view
of people actively engaged in it; (2) the objective, historical and
scientific, i.e. of people who regard it intelligently but take no
part in it; and (3) the point of view of religious apocalypse and
philosophy of history, i.e. of people who have taken the revolu¬
tion into their inward experience, lived through the suffering of it
B.R.C.
1 [ 129 ]
and risen above its daily conflict. The revolutionaries and counter¬
revolutionaries understand the meaning of revolution less than
anybody. Revolutionaries usually do not understand the meaning
of revolution, for it is not covered by their rationalist ideal. But
since they face the future, they may be instruments in the hands of
the highest Tribunal ofjudgment for making its meaning realized.
Whereas counter-revolutionaries, as men who powerlessly and
fruitlessly face the past, are those upon whom judgment is passed,
impenitent, and, being in this condition, understand nothing. Ob¬
jective historians can explain a great deal in the examination of
origins, in disclosing secondary historical causes, but they do not
set themselves to understand the meaning of revolution. They
usually speak from a certain distance and say that the revolution
was necessary, predetermined by the past, but the revelation of its
meaning is not the affair of historical science; it is the business of
the philosophy of history. But even the philosophy of history can
approach the problem of the meaning of revolution only if it is
based upon a religious foundation. As a matter of fact, the
philosophy of history is always in a certain sense a theology
of history, and always has a religious basis, consciously or
unconsciously.
Now a religious philosophy of history inevitably takes an
apocalyptic colour, and for such a religious, Christian philosophy
of history the fact is revealed that the meaning of revolution is an
inward apocalypse of history. Apocalypse is not only a revelation
of the end of the world and of the last judgment. Apocalypse is
also the revelation of the continual nearness of the end within
history itself, within time which is still historical, of a judgment
upon history within history itself, an exposure of its failure. In our
sinful, evil world an uninterrupted progressive development is
impossible. In it much evil, much poison is always accumulating.
In it die process of dissolution is always going on. Too often it
happens that no positive creative regenerative forces are to be
found in the community, and then judgment upon that community
cannot be escaped; then inevitable revolution is ordained in the
heavens; then a rupture of time takes place. An interruption comes,
[ 130 ]
and those forces triumph which appear irrational from a historical
point of view, but which, if we regard them from above and not
from below, indicate the judgment of Meaning upon the Meaning¬
less, the action of Providence in the darkness. The reactionary G.
de Maistre was not a pure reactionary; he recognized this meaning
ofrevolution.(3i)
Revolution has an ontological meaning. This meaning is pessi¬
mistic and not optimistic. The revelation of this meaning goes
against those who think that society can exist indefinitely in a
peaceful and quiet condition while terrible poisons are accumu¬
lating in'it, when evil and injustice prevail in it, behind seemly
ideahzations of the past. It is difficult to understand those Christians
who consider that revolution is not permissible because of its
violence and bloodshed, and at the same time regard war as wholly
permissible and morally justifiable. War produces still more
violence and sheds still more blood. Revolution, with its use of
force and its bloodshed, is a sin, but war is a sin also, often a greater
sin than revolution. All history is to a remarkable degree a sin,
bloodshed and violence, and it is difficult for the Christian con¬
science to accept history; this is a fundamental paradox of Christian
thought. Christianity is historical; it is the revelation of God in
history and not in nature; it recognizes a meaning in history; but
at the same time, Christianity could never fmd room for itself in
history; it always passes judgment upon the injustices of history; it
does not allow optimistic views about history. For that reason
'history must come to an end, must be judged by God, because in
history the justice of Christ is not made a fact.
Revolution is a small apocalypse of history, judgment within
history. Revolution is like death; it is a passing through death
which is the unavoidable consequence of sin. As the end of history
as a whole will come in the passing of the world through death to
arise into a new life, so also within history and within the indivi¬
dual life of man an end periodically comes, and death, for resur¬
rection into a new life. This is what gives revolution its horror,
its grimness, its pattern of death and blood. Revolution is a sin
and the evidence of sin, as war is a sin and the evidence of sin. But
[I3i]
revolution is the fate of history, the inevitable destiny of historical
existence. In revolution judgment is passed upon the evil forces
which have brought about injustice, but the forces which judge,
themselves create evil; in revolution good itself is realized by forces
of evil, since forces of good were powerless to realize their good in
history. And revolutions in Christian history have always been a
judgment upon historical Christianity, upon Christians, upon their
betrayal of the Christian covenant, upon their distortion of Chris¬
tianity. For Christians especially, revolution has a meaning and
they, above all, must understand it. It is a challenge to Christians
and a reminder that they have not madejustice a fact of experience.
To accept history is to accept revolution also; to accept its mean¬
ing as a catastrophic interruption in the destinies of a sinful world.
To deny any meaning to revolution must bring with it the re¬
jection of history also. But revolution is horrible, grim; it is ugly
and violent, as the birth of a child is ugly and violent, as the pains
of the mother who bears it are ugly and violent, as the child who
is born is ugly and subject to violence; such is the curse on a sinful
world. And upon the Russian revolution, perhaps more than upon
any other, shines the reflected light of the Apocalypse. Judgments
passed upon it from the point of view of what is normal, of
normal religion and morals, of the normal understanding of law
and economics, are all of them ludicrous and pitiful. The malevo¬
lence of those who made the revolution cannot but repel, but it
cannot be judged solely from the point of view of individual
morality.
In the Russian revolution there were, incontestably, features
which belong naturally to all revolutions, but it is also a unique
distinctive revolution accomplished once for all. It was the off¬
spring of the peculiar character of the Russian historical process
and the uniqueness of the Russian intelligentsia. Never again will
there be a revolution of that same kind. Communism in the West
is a phenomenon of another sort. During the first years of the
revolution a legend sprang up among the masses about bolshevism
and communism. To popular thought bolshevism was a revolu¬
tion of the Russian masses, an inundation of the elemental forces
 of Russian nature. But communism came of alien parentage; it is
Western; it is not Russian, and it imposed upon the people’s
revolution the yoke of a despotic organization. To put it in
scholarly language it rationalized the irrational. This legend is
very characteristic, and witnesses to the feminine nature of the
Russian people, which is always liable to be violated by an alien
male principle. That was the way the people'took Peter. In the
Russian revolution, as indeed in every revolution, occurred the
chaining and unchaining of chaotic forces. The popular masses
raised by the revolution at first threw aside all restraint, and the
transition to the rule of the masses threatened chaotic collapse.
The popular masses were integrated, disciplined and organized in
the elemental force of the revolution by the communist idea and
by communist symbolism. In this respect communism rendered
Russia an indisputable service. Russia was threatened by complete
anarchy, and this was checked by the communist dictatorship,
! which found the slogans to which the people agreed to submit.
The dissolution of Imperial Russia had begun long before. By the
time of the revolution the old regime was completely effete, ex¬
hausted and played out. The War consummated the process. It
cannot even be said that the February revolution overthrew the
Russian monarchy. The monarchy in Russia fell of itself. No one
defended it. It had no adherents. The religious beliefs of the people
by which the monarchy had been upheld had begun to break up.
Nihilism which embraced the intelligentsia in the ’sixties had be¬
gun to spread to the masses. The semi-intelligentsia which emerged
from the masses were definitely atheist and materialist. Malevo¬
lence was a stronger force than large-heartedness. The Church had
lost its position as the guide of national life. The subjection of the
Church to the monarchic government, the loss of the corporate
spirit, the low cultural level of the clergy, all this had a fatal signi¬
ficance. There was no organizing spiritual force. Christianity in
Russia was living through a profound crisis.
A fateful figure for the destinies of Russia was Rasputin. He
was a man of the people; he belonged apparently to the sect known
as Flagellants and he undoubtedly possessed mystical powers. It
[ 133 ]
was said of him that he had gifts which make a man a Starets1 and
a saint, but he turned them to evil use. In him the terrible dark¬
ness in Russian life was concentrated. The relations between the
Tsar and Rasputin are of a much profounder character than is com¬
monly supposed. The last Russian Tsar is a tragic figure. He
paid heavily for the sins of the past, for the sins of his dynasty. He
believed sincerely in the spiritual meaning of royal power, and it
was painful to him to feel the break between Tsar and people, and
his isolation as Tsar. He desired union with the people. The Tsar
had no intercourse with them; he was separated from them by the
wall of an almighty bureaucracy, and all the while he felt himself
spiritually to be the people’s Tsar. And then, for the first time, he
met the people in the person of Rasputin. He was the first man
belonging to the masses who was given immediate access to the
court. The Tsar, and the Tsaritza especially, believed in Rasputin
as in the people. He became a symbol of the people and of the
people’s religious life. The Tsar sought for religious support
among the tragic events of his reign; he desired the support of the
Church. He found none in the upper hierarchy because that itself
was in slavish dependence upon him. Rasputin, however, appeared
as popular Orthodoxy not in immediate dependence upon the
Tsar and capable of being a support to him. And clinging to Ras¬
putin as to popular Orthodoxy, the Tsar and the Tsaritza (who
had immense influence with him) brought the Church into de¬
pendence upon Rasputin, the Flagellant, who nominated the
bishops. This was a terrible degradation for the Church and it com¬
pletely compromised the monarchy. Rasputin, a muzhik, morally
corrupted by his contact with the court, finally aroused even the
conservative court circles of Russian society against the monarchy.
During the War, before the February revolution of 1917, all
classes of society except a small number of the highest bureaucrats
and court officials were, if not opposed to the monarchy in prin-

*A monk distinguished by his great piety, long experience of the spiritual life,
and gift for guiding other souls. Lay folk frequently resort to Startsi for spiritual
counsel. Starchestvo (p. 15) is an abstract noun describing the system. See The
Way of a Pilgrim (Philip Allan, 1931).

[ !34 ]
 ciple, at least opposed to the monarch and especially to the
Empress. That was the end of the dynasty. In the past the monarchy
had played a part in Russian history which was often beneficial; it
had rendered signal services, but the part had long been played
out. The Russian monarchy, which had its roots in religion, was
condemned from above, condemned by God and principally
because of its violation of the Church and the religious life of
the people, because of its anti-Christian ideas of Caesaro-Papalism,
because of its false linking of the Church with the monarchy,
because of its hostility to enlightenment. It was a judgment upon
the Church also on its historical side. We shall return to this in the
final chapter.

Ill
The Russian revolution could be brought about only by be¬
ginning as an agrarian revolution, and relying upon the discontent
of the peasants and their old hatred of the land-owning nobility
and the civil servants. The memory of the horrors of serfdom, of
the degradation of the human dignity of the peasants, had not
faded out among them. The peasants were ready to avenge their
grandfathers and great-grandfathers. The world of the ruling
privileged classes, especially of the nobility, their culture, their
manners, their outward appearance, even their speech, was com¬
pletely alien to the people, to the peasantry, to whom it was like
the world of another race, a world of foreigners. It was only an
"agrarian revolution, which is not merely a social and economic
revolution, but above all a revolution of morals and life, that made
a dictatorship of the proletariat possible in Russia, or rather, the
idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, since a dictatorship of
the proletariat and, in general, the dictatorship of a class, is an im¬
possibility. This dictatorship was exercised over the peasantry also,
and treated them with brutal violence, as, for instance, in the com¬
pulsory collectivization, the establishment of the Kolkhozes. But
this violent treatment of the peasantry was perpetrated by their
own people, by those who were sprung from the masses, not by
the gentry, not by the privileged blue blood. The peasant is no
[ 135 ]
longer addressed as ‘thou’ or, if he is, then he can say ‘thou’ also in
reply.
An agrarian revolution means the end of a civilization based
upon the dominance of the nobility throughout life. The nobility
had already long ceased to be the leading estate it had been in the
first part of the nineteenth century, when from it sprang not only
great Russian writers but also revolutionaries. After the liberation
of the peasants the nobility were ruined and dislodged by the
growing bourgeoisie. A large part of the land belonged to the
peasants, but with the low level of agricultural skill and the lack of
social organization the lot of the peasants was hard, and among
them there was constant discontent and dreaming of a new order
of things. If no longer in an economic sense, yet at least morally
speaking, the gentry still ruled in life. The remains of feudalism
lasted on until the revolution of 1917. The regime still continued
on a class basis. The existence of enormous estates belonging to a
small group of magnates psychologically and morally aroused in
the peasantry indignation and protest, all the more because the
Russian gentleman did not usually administer his estates in person.
This is even more, much more, a psychological and moral ques¬
tion than a purely economic one. To the Russian peasants the
theories of Roman law about property were always strange. The
peasants considered that the land was God’s; in other words, it be¬
longed to no human being. The peasants always considered the
acquisition of land by the gentry an injustice, as they did serfdom.
The communal collective ownership of land was much more to the
mind of the Russian people and especially to the Great Russians,
thanks to the existence of the commune.
The peasants dreamed of a ‘Black Redistribution’, i.e. a redistri¬
bution of the land among the peasants. In earlier days they even
believed that the Tsar would do this. A revolutionary narodnik
organization of the ’seventies called itself the ‘Black Redistribu¬
tion’, to correspond with these feelings of the peasantry. The
Russian communist revolution actually brought about this ‘Black
Redistribution’. It took all the land away from the nobility and
private owners. Like every great revolution it brought about a
[ 136 ]
shift of social classes. It brought down the ruling controlling
classes and raised the masses who had formerly been crushed and
oppressed. It dug up the soil very deeply and brought about almost
a geological revolution. The revolution unshackled the strength of
the workmen and peasants for the making of history. This gave
communism its dynamic strength. An enormous vital power
which had been hitherto unsuspected was revealed in the Russian
people. With it, in actual fact, took place a lowering of the level of
culture, for a high culture is always created by qualitative selection
and in the comparatively restricted circle of the elite. In the revo¬
lution the bolsheviks came into power in an ugly way, with an
ugly expression of face, ugly gestures, and this is not only due to
the fact that they did not belong to the stratum of society in which
cultural forms and manners are produced and which tallied with
the understanding of beauty, but also to the fact that they had
more hatred, revenge, ressentiment, which are always ugly; they
had as yet no style of any sort, no cultivation. There is always an
ugly side to revolution, in which those who are over keen to be
true to beauty cannot take too active a part. The bolshevik masses,
as a matter of fact, did introduce a definite style of life, that which
is bred of war, and a disintegrating war. This is one of the princi¬
pal factors in the Russian communist revolution. Rhetoric and
theatricality (of which there was so much in the French revolution)
do not come natural to Russians. For this reason the Russian
revolution was cruder, though this fact perhaps gave it an ad¬
vantage.
The Russian communist revolution owed a very great deal to
the War. Lenin, like Marx and Engels, attached immense signifi¬
cance to war as the most favourable moment for introducing an
attempt at communist revolution. In this connection there is an
astounding inconsistency among the communists, an inconsistency
which may give the impression of hypocrisy and cynicism but
which they themselves explain as a dialectic relation to reality.
Who is more indignant than the communists with the imperialistic
war, and who protested against it more vigorously? It was pre¬
cisely the communists, though they were not then known as such,
[ 137]
and were simply the left wing of the social democratic internation¬
alists, who desired to paralyse the War or at any rate gave the im¬
pression of wanting to do so. But at the same time in Russia it was
precisely the communists who more than anybody else benefited
from the War. War brought them their victory. The communists
or the sociahst internationalists who had protested against the War
saw very clearly that a world war could be nothing but favourable
to themselves. I do not think that one can convict them of insin¬
cerity and falsehood. It was a dialectic insincerity or falsehood.
Marxism considers in general that good is realized through evil
and light through darkness. Such indeed is its attitude to capitalism
as the greatest evil and injustice and at the same time as a necessity
for the triumph of socialism. In the capitalist factories the mighty
humanity of the future is prepared. As a matter of fact it was cer¬
tainly not the wish of the communists that the War should not
occur; only they wanted to get rooted into the minds of the
masses that the war between capitalist states is that direful evil
which will make rebellion against it possible and necessary. Com¬
munism desired and desires war, but only in order that war be¬
tween nations may be turned into war between classes.
The whole fashion assumed by Russian and world communism
was due to the War. Had there been no war, then all the same
there would have been a Russian revolution in the end, but prob¬
ably it would have come later and it would have been different.
The unsuccessful war created the most favourable conditions for
the victory of the bolsheviks. The Russians are by nature prone to
maximalism, and the maximalist character of the Russian revolu¬
tion was very true to type. Contradictions and cleavages had reached
their maximum intensity in Russia, but it needed the atmosphere
of war to produce the type of victorious bolshevism among us,
the new type of the bolshevik conqueror. It was the War with its
experiences and methods which regenerated the type of Russian
intelligentsia. War methods were transferred to the internal life of
the country. A new type appeared, that of the militarized youth;
in contrast with the old members of the intelligentsia he is clean
shaven, alert, with a firm vigorous gait; he looks like a conqueror;
[ 138 ]
he makes no^ bones about the methods he uses; he is always ready
for violence; he is possessed by the will-to-power; he forces his
way to the front; he wants to be not only destructive but also con¬
structive and an organizer. It was only with the help of such young
men drawn from the peasants, the workmen and the semi-intelli¬
gentsia, that the communist revolution could be brought about; it
could not be done with the dreamy compassionate person who
belonged to the old intelligentsia, and who was always ready to
suffer.
But it is very important to remember that the Russian commun¬
ist revolution came to birth in misery and from misery, the misery
of a disintegrating war; it was not born of a creative abundance of
strength. Revolution, as a matter of fact, always presupposes
misery, always presupposes an intensifying' of the darkness of the
past. There is nothing more appalling than a disintegrating war,
a disintegrating army, and a colossal army numbered by the
million at that. The disintegration of a war and of armies creates
chaos and anarchy. Russia was faced by such chaos and anarchy.
The old government had lost all moral authority; people had no
faith in it, and during the War its authority sank still lower.
People did not believe in the patriotism of the government and
they suspected it of a secret sympathy with the Germans and a de¬
sire for a separate peace. The new liberal democratic government
which came on the scene after the February revolution proclaimed
abstract human principles; abstract principles of law and order in
which there was no organizing force of any sort, no energy with
which to inspire the masses. The Provisional Government relied
upon the Constituent Assembly, to the idea of which it was de¬
voted in a doctrinaire sort of way. In an atmosphere of disintegra¬
tion, chaos and anarchy it wanted, from the noblest motives, to
continue the War to a victorious end at the very time when the
soldiers were ready to flee from the front and to turn the national
war into a social war.
The position of the Provisional Government was so difficult and
hopeless that it is hardly possible to judge it severely and condemn
it. Kerensky was only a man of revolution in its first stage.
[i39]
Moderate people of liberal and humanist principles can never
flourish in the elemental sweep of revolution and especially of a
revolution brought about by war. The principles of democracy
are suitable to times of peace, and not always then, but never to a
revolutionary epoch. In the time of revolution men of extreme
principles, men who are disposed to dictatorship and capable of
exercising it, are those who will triumph. Only dictatorship could
put an end to the process of final dissolution and the triumph of
chaos and anarchy. What was needed was to provide the insur¬
gent masses with slogans in the strength of which those masses
would consent to be organized and disciplined. Inspiring watch¬
words were needed. At that moment bolshevism, which had long
been prepared by Lenin, showed itself to be the one power which
on the one hand could put an end to the dissolution of the old and
on the other hand could organize the new; only bolshevism could
control the situation. It only corresponded to the instincts of the
masses and their real attitude to things, and it, like a true dema¬
gogue, turned everything to its own use.
Bolshevism made use of everything for its own triumph. It
made use of the weakness of the liberal democratic government,
of the unsuitability of its watchwords to weld the insurgent masses
together. It made use of the objective impossibility of carrying on
the War any longer when the spirit of it was hopelessly lost by the
unwillingness of the soldiers to go on fighting, and it proclaimed
peace. It made use of the disorganization and discontent of the
peasantry and divided all the land among the peasants, destroying
what was left of feudalism and the dominance of the nobility. It
made use of the Russian traditions of government by imposition,
and instead of an unfamiliar democracy of which they had had no
experience it proclaimed a dictatorship which was more like the
old rule of the Tsar. It made use of the characteristics of the Russian
spirit in all its incompatibility with a secularized bourgeois
society. It made use of its religious instinct, its dogmatism and
maximalism, its search after social justice and the kingdom of God
upon earth, its capacity for sacrifice and the patient bearing of suf¬
fering, and also of its manifestations of coarseness and cruelty. It
[140]
made use of Russian messianism, which still remained, though in
an unconscious form, and of the Russian faith in Russia’s own
path of development. It made use of the historic cleavage between
the masses and the cultured classes, of the popular mistrust of the
intelligentsia, and it easily destroyed such of the intelligentsia as
did not submit to it.
It absorbed also the sectarian spirit of the Russian intelligentsia
and Russian narodnichestvo while transforming them in accordance
with the requirements of a new epoch. It fitted in with the absence
among the Russian people of the Roman view of property and
the bourgeois virtues; it fitted in with Russian collectivism which
had its roots in religion; it made use of the breakdown of patri¬
archal life among the people and the dissolution of the old religious
beliefs. It also set about spreading the new revolution by methods
of violence from above, as Peter had done in his time; it denied
human freedom, which had been unknown to the masses before,
and had been the privilege of the upper cultured classes of society,
and for which the masses had certainly not been roused to fight.
It proclaimed the necessity of the integral totalitarian outlook of a
dominant creed, which corresponded with the habits, experience
and requirements of the Russian people in faith and in the domina¬
ting principles of life. The Russian spirit is not prone to scepticism,
and a sceptical liberalism suits it less than anything. The spirit of
the people could very readily pass from one integrated faith to
another integrated faith, from one orthodoxy to another ortho¬
doxy which embraced the whole of life. Russia passed from the
old Middle Ages to a new Middle Ages, avoiding the ways of the
new history with its secularization, its differentiation of various
fields of culture, with its liberalism, its individualism, its triumph
of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism.
The old consecrated Russian empire fell and a new one was
formed, also a consecrated empire, an inverted theocracy. Marx¬
ism, itself so un-Russian in origin and character, assumed a
Russian style, an oriental style approaching Slavophilism. Even
the old Slavophils’ dream of transferring the capital from St.
Petersburg to Moscow, to the Kremlin, was realized by the Red
[ Hi ]
communists, and Russian communism proclaimed anew the old
idea of the Slavophils and Dostoyevsky—ex Oriente lux. Light
proceeds from Moscow, from the Kremlin, a light to lighten the
bourgeois darkness of the West. At the same time communism
creates a despotic and bureaucratic state, called into being to
dominate the whole life of the people, not only in body but also
in soul, in accord with the traditions of Ivan the Terrible and the
rule of the Tsars. Marxism in its Russian form proclaims the
dominance of politics over economics, the power of the Govern¬
ment to change the life of the country in any way it likes. In its
grandiose schemes which were always on a world-wide scale,
communism makes use of the Russian disposition for making
plans and castle-building which had hitherto had no scope for
realization or practical application. Lenin desired to overcome
Russian sloth, the product of the life of the gentry and of serfdom,
to conquer Oblomov and Rudin, the ‘superfluous people’, and
in this positive task it seems he was successful.
A metamorphosis has taken place, i.e. an Americanization of the
Russian people, the production of a new type of practical man
with whom day-dreaming and castle-building passed into action
and constructiveness, of a technician, a bureaucrat of a new type.
But here also the special characteristics of the Russian spirit had
their say. The faith of the people was given a new direction, the
Russian peasants now reverence the machine as a totem. Technical
undertakings are not the ordinary matter-of-fact customary
affair that they are to Western people; they have been given a
mystic character and linked on with plans for an almost cosmic
revolution.
Russian communism from my point of view is a phenomenon
which is entirely explicable, but explanation is not justification.
The unheard of tyranny which the Soviet regime presents lies
under moral condemnation, however much it may be explained;
it is a shameful and infamous thing that the most completely
organized institution created by this first experiment in communist
revolution should be the G.P.U. (formerly the Cheka), that is to
say, a government police organ incomparably more tyrannical
[ H2 ]
than the gendarmerie of the old regime, which fastens its grip even
upon ecclesiastical affairs. But the tyranny and cruelty of the
Soviet Government have no necessary connection with the social
economic system of communism; it is possible to conceive com¬
munism in economic life united with humanity and freedom.
This would presuppose another spirit and a different ideology.

IV
The Russian communist state is at the present moment the only
totalitarian state in the world based upon the dictatorship of a
world view, on an orthodox doctrine which is binding upon the
whole people. Communism in Russia has taken the form of an
extreme etatism which holds in an iron grip the life of a huge
country, and that unfortunately is in entire accord with the ancient
tradition of Russian statecraft. The old Russian autocratic monar¬
chy was rooted in the religious beliefs of the people; it recognized
itself and justified itself as a theocracy, as a consecrated Tsardom.
The new Russian State is also autocratic; it also is rooted in the be¬
liefs of the people, in the new faith of the working class and peasant
masses; it also recognizes and justifies itself as a consecrated state,
as an inverted theocracy. The old Russian monarchy rested upon
an orthodox world outlook and insisted upon agreement with it.
The new Russian State rests upon a world outlook and with a still
greater degree of coercion requires agreement with it. The con¬
secrated kingdom is always a dictatorship of a world outlook,
-always requires orthodoxy, always suppresses heretics. Totali¬
tarianism, the demand for wholeness of faith as the basis of the
kingdom, fits in with the deep religious and social instincts of the
people. The Soviet communist realm has in its spiritual structure a
great likeness to the Muscovite Orthodox Tsardom. The same
feeling of suffocation is in it. The nineteenth century in Russia
was not an integrated whole; it was divided up; it was the century
of free enquiry and revolution. The revolution created a totali¬
tarian communist realm in which the free spirit was stifled, free
enquiry disappeared. In it the experiment is being made of sub¬
jecting the whole people to a political catechism. Russian etatism
[ H3 ]
always had Russian anarchism as its obverse. The communist
revolution in its day made use of anarchist instincts, but it arrived
at an extreme etatism which suppresses every manifestation of
those instincts.
The Russian people have not realized their messianic idea of
Moscow the Third Rome. The ecclesiastical schism of the seven¬
teenth century revealed that the Muscovite Tsardom is not the
Third Rome; still less, of course, was the Petersburg Empire a
realization of the idea of the Third Rome. In it a final cleavage took
place. The messianic idea of the Russian people assumed either an
apocalyptic form or a revolutionary; and then there occurred an
amazing event in the destiny of the Russian people. Instead of the
Third Rome in Russia, the Third International was achieved,
and many of the features of the Third Rome pass over to the
Third International. The Third International is also a consecrated
realm, and it also is founded on an orthodox faith. The fact that
the Third International is not international but a Russian national
idea is very poorly understood in the West. Here we have the
transformation of Russian messianism. Western communists,
when they join the Third International, play a humiliating part;
they do not understand that in joining the Third International they
are joining the Russian people and realizing its messianic vocation.
I have heard that at a French communist meeting a French
communist asserted, ‘Marx said that the workmen have no father-
land. This used to be true, but now it is no longer true; they have
a fatherland, that is, Russia, Moscow, and the workers should de¬
fend their fatherland’. This is absolutely true and ought to be
understood by everybody. Something has happened which Marx
and the Western Marxists could not have foreseen, and that is a
sort of identification of the two messianisms, the messianism of
the Russian people and the messianism of the proletariat. The
Russian working class and peasantry are a proletariat; and the pro¬
letariat of the whole world from France to China is becoming the
Russian people—a unique people in the world; and the messianic
consciousness of the working class and proletariat is bringing
about an almost Slavophil attitude towards the West. The West
[ 144 ]
is always identified with the bourgeoisie and capitalism. The
nationalization of Russian communism, to which all bear witness,
has its source in the fact that communism has come into existence
in only one country, in Russia, and the communist realm is sur¬
rounded by bourgeois capitalist states. A communist revolution in
a single country inevitably leads to nationalism and a nationalist
standpoint in political relations with other countries. For example,
we see that the Soviet Government is at the present time much
more interested in its connection with the French Government
than in its connections with French communists. Only Trotsky
has remained an internationalist and continues to assert that com¬
munism in a single country is not feasible and necessitates world
revolution. For this reason he has been ejected. He was not wanted
because he did not fit in with the constructive national period of
the communist revolution. In Soviet Russia now they talk about
the socialist fatherland and they want to defend it; they are ready
to sacrifice their lives for it. But the socialist fatherland is still the
same Russia, and in Russia perhaps popular patriotism is coming
into being for the first time. This patriotism is a positive fact, but
nationalism can take a negative form. The danger from Japan and
Germany strengthens Russian patriotism. A defeat of Soviet
Russia would be a defeat of communism, a defeat of the world
idea which the Russian people proclaim.
The Five Year Plan which is so amazing to many Western
people is a very simple and prosaic thing. Russia is a backward
Country industrially. It must in some way or other be industrial¬
ized. In the West this process takes place under the capitalist flag,
and according to Marx this is what ought to take place, but in
Russia industrialization must proceed under the communist flag.
In a communist regime this is only possible when enthusiasm for
industrialization has been created, when it has been turned from
the prose of life into poetry, from a hard fact of labour into mysti¬
cism, when a ‘myth’ of the Five Year Plan has been created.
But all this is being brought about not only with the help
of enthusiasm, poetry, mysticism and the creation of myth, but
by terror and the G.P.U. The people have been brought into a
B.R.C.
K [ 145 ]
 condition of state serfdom. The communist regime in the transi¬
tional period is a regime of serfdom. In spite of Marx and the bour¬
geois political economists I think that commercial development
is possible even under communism. Even under the old regime
capitalist commerce was developed in Russia under government
pressure. Inevitable economic laws are the invention of bourgeois
political economy; such laws do not exist; Marxism demolished
them, but not quite finally. For the industrialization of Russia
under the communist regime a new motive behind labour was
required, a new psychological outlook; it was necessary that the
new collective man should make his appearance. Russian com¬
munism put enormous efforts into the creation of this new psycho¬
logical outlook, this new man. It achieved a greater victory
psychologically than economically. There appeared a new genera¬
tion of young people who showed themselves capable of devoting
themselves with enthusiasm to the success of the Five Year Plan,
who face the problem of economic development not as a matter of
personal interest but as social service.
It was easier to do this in Russia than in Western countries where
bourgeois psychology and capitalist civilization had struck their
roots deep. Even the Russian merchant of the old regime who
made his pile by crooked dealings and became a millionaire was
apt to think this a sin, would try to pray his sin away and in his
better moments dreamed of a different life, e.g. of pilgrimage or
monasticism; so that even that merchant was bad material out of
which to form a bourgeoisie of the Western European type. It is
even possible that the bourgeois spirit in Russia will actually make
its appearance after the communist revolution. The Russian
people never was bourgeois; it had no bourgeois prejudices, nor
reverence for bourgeois virtues and criteria, but the danger of be¬
coming bourgeois is very great in Soviet Russia. Into the young
people’s enthusiasm for the Soviet regime the Russian people’s re¬
ligious energy has entered. If this religious energy becomes ex¬
hausted, so will the enthusiasm, and self-interestedness will make
its appearance, which is quite possible even in communism. But in
any case the Five Year Plan is not realizing socialism; it is realizing
[ Mb ]
state capitalism; it is not the interests of the workers, not the value
of a man and of the worth of human labour, which are recognized
as the supreme value, but the state itself and its economic power.
Communism in the period of Stalin may be taken as a continuation
of Peter the Great’s work. The Soviet government is not only the
government of the communist party which professes to realize
social justice; it is also a state and has the objective nature of every
state; it is interested in the preservation of the state and in its power,
in its economic development without which the government may
fall. Inherent in every government is the instinct of self-preserva¬
tion, which may become its principal aim. Stalin is a ruler of the
Eastern Asiatic type.
Stalinism, that is to say communism of the constructive period,
is being imperceptibly transformed into a peculiar sort of Russian
fascism. All the characteristics of fascism are inherent in it, a
totalitarian state, state capitalism, nationalism, ‘leaderism’, and a
militarized youth. Lenin did not reach dictatorship in the present-
day sense of the word. Stalin is a leader-dictator in the contempo¬
rary fascist sense of the word. Objectively the process taking place
is one of integration, the assembling of the Russian people under
the standard of communism. From the intellectual and the moral
point of view I react antipathetically to the Soviet Government;
that government has stained itself with cruelty and inhumanity, it
is steeped in blood; it holds the people in a deadly grip; but at the
present moment it is the one power which provides some sort of
'defence for Russia against the dangers wrhich threaten it. The
sudden collapse of the Soviet Government without any organized
force in existence capable of taking its place, not for a counter¬
revolution but for creative development of the social results of the
revolution, would be a danger to Russia and would threaten it
with anarchy. This must be said of the Soviet autocracy, as it
could have been said of the autocratic monarchy. There is growing
up in Russia not only a communist but a Soviet patriotism which
is simply Russian patriotism. But the patriotism of a great people
must be a faith in a great and world-wide mission of that people;
otherwise it would be restricted to a provincial nationalism and
[ 147 ]
lacking in world perspective. The mission ot the Russian people
is recognized to be the realization of social justice in human society,
not only in Russia but in the whole world, and this fits in with
Russian traditions. But it is a terrible thing that the attempt to
realize social justice should be associated with violence, crime,
cruelty and falsehood, horrible falsehood. The abominable staging
in the Soviet law courts of stereotyped ‘confessions’ by the falsely
accused alone is enough to inspire aversion for the whole system.

V
Such was the character of the Russian revolution. It happened
in such peculiar circumstances that ideologically it could fit in only
with a very much transformed Marxism, transformed, that is to
say, in a direction opposed to determinism. Marxism was used to
prove the impossibility of the proletarian socialist revolution in
Russia. If in actual fact economics are the determining factor in the
whole social process, then in an economically backward Russia we
must still await the development of capitalist industry and we can
count upon only a bourgeois, not a proletarian, revolution. That
is the view of sociological determinism. But the Russian revolu¬
tion took a line which bore witness to the fact that economics are
not the determining factor in everything. And so there has ap¬
peared in Soviet Russia the new philosophy of Marxist Leninism.
It continues to regard itself as a Marxist philosophy, but a Marxist
philosophy of the period of proletarian revolution. Marx still
livpd in the heart of bourgeois capitalist society where in actual
fact everything was determined by economics and freedom was
not to be seen. But Marx and Engels taught that a leap would
happen from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom, and
that then only real history would begin, in which man, social man
of course, will not be controlled by economics but will himself
control them.
For the Russian communists that time has come; that is the
feeling they have; they see themselves in the realm of freedom;
they are not in a capitalist world; they are in the elemental tide of
proletarian revolution, a thing which was still unknown to Marx.
[ 148 ]
They are not controlled by economics; they do not depend upon
the necessity of capitalist development; they themselves, by their
revolutionary activity, control economics in any way they like.
They feel they have the power to change, by revolutionary
activity, not only Russia but also the whole world; and the young
Soviet philosophy is attempting to give a new interpretation to
dialectic materialism. Its basic category is that of self-originating
movement; (32) the source of movement lies within, and not in a
thrust from outside coming from environment, as mechanical
materialism thinks. Real freedom is inherent in matter, and in it is
the source of activity which changes environment. The character¬
istics of spirit, freedom, activity, reason, are transferred to matter,
that is to say, a spiritualization of matter is taking place. It is con¬
tinually repeated in Soviet philosophical and sociological litera¬
ture that the principal thing is not ‘productive forces’, that is to
say, economic development, but ‘industrial relations’, that is to
say, class warfare and the revolutionary activity of the proletariat.
This revolutionary activity is self-priginating movement; it does
not depend upon environment, upon economics; it re-makes en¬
vironment and controls economics in its own way; they want to
construct a philosophy of activism, and for that, materialism, both
mechanical and economic, is most unfavourable. The philosophy
of activism, promethean, titanic, is, of course, a philosophy of the
spirit as it was with Fichte, and not a materialist philosophy; but
it is not permitted in Soviet philosophy to speak of spirit. Material¬
ism remains sacrosanct. Hence the characteristics of active spirit
must be transferred to matter; and this is what they are trying to
do and thereby doing violence to logic and philosophical termino¬
logy. Materialism is imperceptibly turning towards a peculiar
sort ofidealism and spiritualism. Already in Marx himself, especially
in his youth, as we have said, the doctrine of the illusion in¬
herent in the capitalist system, that man is dependent upon the
products of his own creative activity, gave grounds for this atti¬
tude. Materialism cannot be dialectic. Dialectic cannot be inherent
in matter which is formed by the jostling of atoms. Dialectic
presupposes the existence of the Logos, of a Meaning which is
[ 149]
revealed in dialectic development. Dialectic can be inherent only in
thought and spirit, not in matter. Dialectic materialism is com¬
pelled to believe in a Logos of matter itself, in a Meaning revealed
in the development of material productive forces, that is to say, in
the rationality of irrational processes.
Soviet philosophy is a state orthodox philosophy; it detects and
excommunicates heretics. This orthodoxy consists in the assertion
of dialectic materialism as the general line in philosophy. Heresy is
either the assertion of matter to the exclusion of dialectic or the
assertion of dialectic to the exclusion of matter. The first is the
heresy of mechanical materialism represented by Bukharin and
several naturalists; the second heresy is represented by Deborin,
who was inclined to idealism. It is necessary to assert a dialectic
which is also a revolutionary actualist philosophy and which
continues to assert materialism. Logically this is impossible, but
psychologically it cannot be avoided. Orthodox dialectic material¬
ism, which recognizes the possibility of self-originating move¬
ment, of freedom for the revolutionary proletariat, has been
decreed by the Central Committee of the Communist party. Stalin
who is devoid of any philosophical training and has less under¬
standing of philosophy than the young Soviet philosophers,
among whom there are knowledgeable people, pronounces an
ex cathedra judgment upon what is the true philosophy. In the same
way Hitler too will be recognized as a judge of philosophical
truth. This is characteristic of the dictatorship of a world outlook
and of the authoritarian regime which is fundamental to it.
Soviet philosophy is a philosophy of social titanism. The titan in
it is not the individual but the social whole. For it even the laws of
nature are not binding. The unchangeableness of these is regarded
as an idea which belongs only to bourgeois science and philosophy.
The Marxist philosophy of Plekhanov, Kautsky and the menshe-
viks is regarded as bourgeois and belonging to the ‘enlightenment’.
Soviet philosophy is in opposition to the enlightened materialism
of the eighteenth century. For it everything is controlled not by
enlightenment of thought, not by the light of reason, but by the
exaltation of the will, the revolutionary titanic will. Philosophy
[Do]
should not only take cognizance of the world but it should re-make
the world; it should create a new world. The segregation of theo¬
retical ideas in a particular sphere, the creation of a caste of scholars
and academicians, is an achievement of the bourgeois world.
Theoretical reason should be united with practical reason, philoso¬
phical work should be combined with labour, with social con¬
struction, and should serve the ends of the latter. Soviet philosophy
enters into the Five Year Plan. Truth, and absolute truth at that,
is known only in action, in conflict, in labour. The titanic exalta¬
tion of revolutionary will presupposes the existence of a real
world upon which the action is consummated, the action of
changing it. This is a necessary realist presupposition which they
confidently assert is a materialist presupposition. Consciousness is
conditioned by existence and occurs in existence, but existence is
conceived as material although matter is conceived in an almost
spiritual way. Philosophical controversies, which in Soviet Russia
are prolonged over years and are then printed, are problems de¬
bated not so much from the point of view of truth or error as from
the point of view of orthodoxy or heresy, that is to say, they are
theological rather than philosophical controversies.
The philosophy of titanism presupposes a change in the under¬
standing of what freedom means. Marxist Leninism, or the dia¬
lectic materialism of the period of proletarian revolution, gives a
new meaning to freedom, and, in fact, the communist meaning is
very different from the usual meaning. On this account Russian
tommumsts are honestly shocked and indignant when they are
told that there is no freedom in Soviet Russia. Here is an instance.
A Soviet young man went to France for some months with the in¬
tention of then returning to Soviet Russia. Towards the end of his
stay he was asked what impression France left upon him. He
answered: ‘There is no freedom in this country.’ The astonished
retort was, ‘What do you mean? France is the land of freedom.
Everybody is free to think what he likes and to do what he likes;
it is with you that there is no freedom.’ Then the young man ex¬
pounded his idea of freedom. In France there was no freedom and
the young man from the Soviet Union felt stifled in it because it
was impossible to change life in France, to make a new life. The
so-called freedom there was of the kind which leaves everything
unchanged; every day was like its predecessor; you might turn
out a government every week but that altered nothing; and so the
young man who came from Russia was bored in France.
In Soviet communist Russia, on the other hand, there was real
freedom because any day might change the life of Russia, and
indeed the life of the whole world; it might re-make everything.
One day was not just like another. Every young man felt himself a
world-builder; the world had become plastic and out of it new
forms might be modelled. It was this more than anything which
acted on him like a charm. Everyone feels himself a partner in the
common business, which has a world-wide significance. Life is
absorbed not in the struggle for one’s own personal existence but
in the reconstruction of the world. So freedom is understood not
as liberty of choice, not as liberty to turn to the right or to the left,
but as the active changing of the world, as an act accomplished
not by the individual but by the social man, after the choice has
been made. Liberty of choice divides and weakens the energies.
Real constructive freedom comes after the choice has been made
and the man moves in the defined direction. Only that sort of
freedom, freedom for the collective construction of life in the
general direction of the communist party, is recognized in Soviet
Russia; and it is precisely this freedom which is actual and revolu¬
tionary. French freedom is conservative; it hinders the social re¬
construction of society and leads to everyone wanting to be left in
peace and quiet.
Freedom, of course, must be understood also as creative energy,
as the act which changes the world; but if freedom be under¬
stood exclusively in that way, and what takes place inwardly before
that act, that realization of creative energy, is lost sight of, then
the denial of freedom of conscience and freedom of thought is
inevitable. And we can see that in the Russian communist realm
freedom of conscience and thought is absolutely denied. There
freedom applies exclusively to the collective not to the individual
consciousness; the individual person has no freedom in relation to
1 152 ]
the social whole; he has no personal freedom and has no personal
consciousness. For the individual person freedom is simply ad¬
aptability to the collective whole. But when the individual has
adapted himself and merged himself in the collective whole he
acquires enormous freedom in relation to all the rest of the world.
Freedom of conscience, and above all of the religious conscience,
presupposes that there is a spiritual principle in the individual
which does not depend upon the community. This, of course,
communism does not recognize. We shall see in the following
chapter that, for communism, the kingdom of Caesar and the
Kingdom of God coincide and are identified, and so in communism
based upon materialism the crushing of individual personality is
inevitable. Revolutionary communist ethics are inevitably merci¬
less to the living concrete man, to one’s neighbour. The individual
man is regarded merely as a brick necessary for the construction
of communist society. He is but a means to an end.
The interpretation by communism of the life of each man as the
service of a supra-personal purpose, the service not of himself but
of the great whole, is healthy, true and wholly in agreement with
Christianity, but this true idea is distorted by the denial of the
independent worth and value of each human person and of his
spiritual freedom. There exists also in communism the true idea
that man is called in unitv with his fellow men to control and
J

organize social and cosmic life, but in Russian communism this

idea, to which radical expression was given by the Christian
"thinker, N. Fedorov,(33) tookan almost maniacal form and turned
man into a tool and a mere means for that control.
All these distortions are due not so much to the social and
economic system of communism as to its false spirit. Freedom of
the spirit is not denied by economics, which are powerless in re¬
lation to the spirit, but by spirit itself; by a spirit which is hostile to
freedom. The militant anti-spiritual materialism of communism
is a phenomenon of spirit, not of matter. It is a false orientation
of spirit. Communist economics in themselves may be neutral.
It is communist religion, not economics, which is the foe of Chris¬
tianity, of the spirit, and of freedom. Truth and error are so
[ 153 ]
intermingled in communism because communism is not only a
social phenomenon but a spiritual phenomenon too. In the idea of
a classless labouring society in which each works tor others and for
all, for the supra-personal purpose, the denial of God and of free¬
dom need not be included. On the contrary, this idea is more com¬
patible with Christianity than the idea upon which the bourgeois
capitalist society is based. But the combination of this idea with
a false world outlook which repudiates spirit and freedom leads
to fatal results. It is the very religious character of communism,
the very religion of communism, which makes it anti-religious
and anti-Christian. A communist society and state profess to be
totalitarian, but only the Kingdom of God can be totalitarian; the
kingdom of Caesar is always partial. For communism, Caesar’s
kingdom becomes God’s—exactly as in German national socialism,
only more consistently and radically. And this too inevitably
evokes spiritual conflict.
It is a fatal mistake to give this spiritual conflict the character of
a social conflict, which is out to defend the old capitalist bourgeois
society or the old regime. It robs the struggle against communism
of all its strength. The whole world is moving towards the dissolu¬
tion of the old capitalist societies, to the conquest of that spirit
which has been their inspiration. The movement towards social¬
ism, that is to say, socialism understood in a broad and not in a
doctrinaire sense, is a world-wide phenomenon. This world crisis
leading to a new form of society, the character of which is not yet
clear, is being achieved by transitional stages. Such a transitional
stage is what is known as ‘linked’ controlled state capitalism. This
is a difficult process and it is accompanied by the process of making
the State absolute. In Soviet Russia this stage, which is not yet
socialism, finds much support in the ancient traditions of an abso¬
lute state. And there is much that is elementary in what is happen¬
ing in Soviet Russia, the elementary civilizing of the working
class and peasant masses as they emerge from a state of illiteracy.
There is nothing specifically communist in this, but the civilizing
process is accomplished by replacing the religious Christian sym¬
bols by the Marxist communist symbols. What is abnormal and
[ 154 ]
 unwholesome is that the associating of the masses with civilization
takes place with the complete destruction of the old Russian in¬
telligentsia. The revolution of which the intelligentsia always
dreamed has come to be the end of the intelligentsia. This is owing
to the age-long cleavage in Russian history between the intelli¬
gentsia and the masses, and also to the dishonest demagogy by
which the Russian communists reached their triumph. It led to a
terrible shortage of cultured man power. The idea of proletarian
culture is self-contradictory and false from the point of view of
communist ideals, seeing that communism seeks to destroy the
existence of the proletariat as a class and must strive after culture
for the whole community. This was understood by Trotsky.(34)
Russian communism, if one looks more deeply into it in the light
of Russia’s historical destiny, is a deformation of Russian ideas, of
Russian messianism and universalism, of the Russian search for
the kingdom of truth and righteousness, that Russian idea which
in the atmosphere of war and dissolution assumed such ugly forms.
But Russian communism had more links with Russian traditions
than is generally supposed, not only with its good traditions, but
also with some very bad ones.

For twenty-five years the celebrated procurator of the Holy

Synod, K. P. Pobedonostzev, ruled the Russian Church and in
ideas the Russian State also. He was the spiritual leader of the old
monarchist Russia during the period of its decline. Lenin was the
'spiritual leader of the new communist Russia. He was for many
years the dominant force in the preparatory process for revolution,
and after the revolution he ruled Russia. Pobedonostzev and Lenin
represented ideas which are polar opposites, but in spiritual struc¬
ture there is a likeness between them. To a large extent they
belong to one and the same type. Pobedonostzev was a more
remarkable, complex and interesting person than one thinks when
considering simply his reactionary politics. I once characterized
Pobedonostzev’s world outlook as ‘nihilism on a religious basis’.
He was a nihilist in relation to man and the world; he had abso¬
lutely no belief in man; he considered human nature absolutely
[155]
bad and contemptible. A contemptuous and disparaging attitude to
human life and to the life of the world grew upon him, and this
attitude of his extended to the bishops with whom he came into
contact as procurator of the Holy Synod. He despised the bishops
and refused to see any sort of human spiritual qualities in them,
and considered that the representative of the State should control
the bishops. As procurator of the Holy Synod he subordinated the
Church to the State because he did not believe in the human
qualities of either bishops or lay folk. Man was so hopelessly bad
that his only salvation lay in being ruled with a rod of iron. You
must not give freedom to man. Only by the violence and coercion
of monarchist government could the world be held in check.
From his disbelief in man and his nihilist attitude to the world,
Pobedonostzev drew most extreme reactionary conclusions. He
believed in God, but he could not transfer this belief in God to his
relations with men and the world. In his private life this man, who
acquired the reputation of a grand inquisitor, was gentle; he was
touchingly fond of children; he was afraid of his wife and was not
in the least ferocious to his ‘neighbour’. He had no love for 'the
man far off’, for man, humanity, progress, freedom, equality and
so on. Can there be any likeness then between him and Lenin?
Lenin also had no belief in man, and he also adopted a nihilist
attitude to the world; he had a cynical contempt for man and he
too saw salvation only in ruling man with a rod of iron. Like
Pobedonostzev he thought that it was only possible to organize
human life by coercion and force. As Pobedonostzev despised the
ecclesiastical hierarchy over whom he had control, so also Lenin
despised the revolutionary hierarchy which he controlled. He re¬
ferred to the communists in mocking language and had no belief
in their human qualities. Both men alike believed in regimentation,
in the forcible organization of the people, as the only way out.
Society cannot be based upon human qualities. It must be so
organized that the hopelessly bad human material shall be sub¬
jected to regimentation and made accustomed to the conditions of
life lived as a community.
Lenin also taught that the world and man are ruined by sin, and
[ x5<>]
to him the sin was the exploitation of man by man, the sin of class
inequality. Lenin did not believe in human nature, in the highest
principle in man, but he did not believe in God, as Pobedonostzev
believed. He believed in a future life, not in the world to come but
in a future life in this world, in the new communist society which
for him took the place of God. He believed in the victory of the
proletariat which to him was the New Israel. But the communist
society is to be realized not in the strength of people’s good
qualities but by the power of regimentation, compulsion, organi¬
zation. Lenin’s communist government is just as authoritative and
autocratic as the monarchist government of Pobedonostzev. From
his disbelief in man and from his nihilist attitude to the life of the
world, Lenin drew the reverse conclusion, an extreme revolution¬
ary conclusion. An extreme revolutionary and an extreme re¬
actionary conclusion can both alike be drawn, but the life of this
world was vain and evil both for Lenin and for Pobedonostzev.
Like Pobedonostzev, Lenin too in his private life was not an evil
man; there was no little kindliness in him and a human attitude to
his neighbour. Lenin also loved children and animals; he was not
an inquisitor. It is an astounding thing in the destiny of Russia and
the Russian people that up to the revolution Russia was ruled by
a man who did not believe in man and took a nihilist attitude to
the world, and after the revolution by a man who also did not be¬
lieve in man and took a nihilist attitude to the world. This is highly
symbolic and explains a great deal. A Russian government cannot
Become humane, and the obverse of this fact is Russian anarchism.
A nihilist attitude to the world and to man is a distorted form of
ascetic Orthodoxy, and we now come close up to the last problem,
the religious problem, to the relation between communism and
Orthodoxy.
 CHAPTER VII

COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANITY

I
T he question of the relation of communism to religion and
particularly to the Christian religion requires special con¬
sideration. The implacably hostile attitude of communism to all
religion is no accidental phenomenon; it belongs to the very
essence of the communist general outlook on hfe. The communist
state, in fact, is the dictatorship of a general outlook on life. The
communist regime is extreme etatism. In it the state is totahtarian,
absolute, and demands an enforced unity of thought. Communism
carries on a persecution of every church, and above all of the
Orthodox Church, on account of the part that it has played in
history. Communists profess a militant atheism and they are com¬
pelled to carry on anti-religious propaganda. Communism in
actual fact is the foe of every form of religion and especially of
Christianity, not as a social system, but as itself a religion. It wants
to be a religion itself, to take the place of Christianity. It professes
to answer the religious questions of the human soul and to give a
meaning to hfe. Communism is integrated; it embraces the whole
of hfe; its relations are with no special section of it. On this account
its conflict with other religious faiths is inevitable. Intolerance and
fanaticism always have a religious origin. No scientific, purely in¬
tellectual theory can be so intolerant and fanatical, and communism
is exclusive as a religious faith is.
The Russian religious temperament, Russian sectarian and
schismatic psychology play an immense part here. But an implac¬
able militant attitude to religion was fore-ordained by Marx him¬
self. Marx in his Introduction to the Criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of
L ife said that religion was the opium of the people: a phrase which
has acquired so definite a meaning in present-day Russia. Marx
[U8]
 thought that for the liberation of the working class, and conse¬
quently of all mankind, it is necessary to tear religious feeling out
of the human heart. Marx said, ‘Not religious freedom of con¬
science but the freedom of conscience from religious superstition.’
Religious beliefs reflect human slavery, slavery to the elemental
powers of nature and the irrational forces of society. They exist
only until man, social man, finally overcomes the elemental and
irrational forces which surround him with mystery. In his thoughts
on religion, Marx was the pupil of Feuerbach, but he developed
Feuerbach’s thoughts in a social direction. Feuerbach was the
greatest genius in the atheistic philosophy of the nineteenth cen¬
tury, with a very acute mind and with many gifts for anthropolo¬
gical philosophy in general. Feuerbach, as is well known, desired
to convert theology into anthropology; to him man was not
made in the image and likeness of God, but God is made in the
image and likeness of man. Religion is but the expression of man’s
highest nature, withdrawn from man, become alienated from him
and transferred to the transcendental region of another world. Re¬
ligion has impoverished and despoiled man; the poor man has a
rich God. All his wealth is transferred to God and communicated
to Him. Belief in God is the expression of man’s weakness, poverty
and slavery. The man who was strong, rich and free would have
no need of God. Everything that was highest he would have in
himself.
From this Marx drew the conclusion that belief in God keeps
'the proletariat in slavery, poverty and degradation. Religious be¬
liefs give an illusory, fictitious consolation; they transfer victory
into an unreal sphere and, therefore, are a hindrance to real victory
and liberation. The triumphant proletariat will dispose of all
illusory, fictitious consolations, consolations of the other world; it
will realize victory here upon earth. Marx’s teaching about the
illusions of consciousness, religious and ideological illusions which
reflect man’s slavery and dependence, his weakness and humi¬
liation, is taken from Feuerbach. But Marx gave the teaching
about the illusory nature of consciousness a more sharply social
character. Marx’s militant atheism requires above all a change of
[ 159 ]
consciousness. Religious beliefs must be destroyed not by
imprisonment and persecution but by revolutionizing thought;
and this is to happen as a result of the revolutionary class war of the
proletariat. Marx was particularly interested in the conflict against
religious belief during his youth. To him it was above all an intel¬
lectual conflict, as it was also for Bruno Bauer. He found himself
in the current of left Hegelianism. Later on his interest in questions
connected with the working out of a general outlook weakened,
and he concerned himself chiefly with economic problems, but he
remained a militant atheist. Still it should be said that anti-religion
with Marx took a less extreme form of expression than with
Bakunin in Russia or with During in Germany. During, who re¬
presented a type of socialism opposed to Marxism, with an anar¬
chist tendency, says outright that in socialist society religion will
be prohibited. Engels who wrote his principal book in the form of a
criticism of Diiring’s philosophical and social views, even takes
exception to this prohibition of religion of his. Militant enlighten¬
ment usually assumes the form of militant atheism. Reason having
mastered itself and liberated itself from the traditions in which it
was shackled, set itself to oppose belief in God. This is always only
a transitional stage in which reason fails to recognize how much it
depends upon negative emotional reaction; and a more mature
and actually more free reason recognizes its limits and changes its
attitude to religious faith. Enlightening reason in Russia is in the
first militant stage, and it is wholly swayed by the emotions. This
is to be seen in Lenin.
Lenin was a passionate and convinced atheist and hater of re¬
ligion. I use the word ‘atheist’, although I do not believe in the
existence of pure atheists. Man is a religious animal and when he
denies the true and living God he makes himself false gods, images
and idols, and worships them. Lenin had very much coarsened
Marxist ideas on religion, as Leninism coarsened Lenin’s own.
Lenin had almost a genius for blunt coarseness, and such was his
style. To Marx the problem of religion was above all a problem of
changing one’s thoughts, combined, of course, with the social con¬
flict. To Lenin the problem of religion is almost exclusively a
[ 160 ]
problem of revolutionary conflict and his way of putting the
problem was adapted to the needs of this conflict. Lenin summoned
men to the ‘assault of heaven’, but in Lenin’s fight against God
there is no depth, not the profound motives of Feuerbach and
Nietzsche, nothing of what is revealed in Dostoyevsky, no inward
drama. Lenin’s thoughts on religion which are scattered about in
his works were collected together and published separately. (3 5)
One comes across, for instance, such phrases as this: ‘Every little
god is the lying with a corpse.’ Lenin gives his definition of re¬
ligion and it is rather the definition of a demagogue than of a
scientist: ‘Religion is one aspect of: the spiritual oppression which
falls everywhere upon the masses who are condemned to eternal
labour for others by their need and their loneliness.’ And here is
another definition: ‘Religion is a sort of spiritual brandy in which
the slaves of capital drown the image of their humanity and their
demand for some sort of worthy human life.’ This definition was
made as early as 1905.
Lenin particularly hated any attempt to combine Christianity
with socialism. A reforming spirit in the Church was a more harm¬
ful thing in his opinion than the Black Hundred. A progressive
and regenerated Christianity was worse than the old corrupt
Christianity. ‘A Roman Catholic priest who seduces a girl’,
writes Lenin, ‘is much less dangerous than a “priest without
cassock’’, a priest without the crudities of religion, an intelligent
and democratic priest who preaches the making of some little god
or other, for you can expose the first priest, condemn him and
get rid of him, but you cannot get rid of the second so easily, and
to expose him is a thousand times more difficult.’ This category
of ‘priest without cassock’ plays no small part in anti-religious
propaganda and it is a category which is very inclusive indeed.
‘Priests without cassock’ seems to include everyone who is not a
materialist, everyone who acknowledges a spiritual principle in
life, albeit in the very smallest degree, and all philosophers who
are guilty of any spiritual or idealist leanings. Even Einstein was
recognized as ‘a priest in disguise’, because he acknowledged the
existence of a cosmic feeling which might be called ‘religious’.
L [ 161 ] BR.C.
Lenin liated the very word ‘religion’ and he was sharply opposed
to regarding socialism as a religion, as Lunacharsky wished to do
at one time. Lunacharsky was also a sort of‘priest without cassock ,
because he preached ‘god-construction’, which in actual fact was a
form of atheism and even militant atheism. But with all Lenin s
hatred of religion he was opposed to the policy which would
thrust the religious question to the fore and regard the fight
against religion as an independent problem, distinct from the
revolutionary class struggle. Lenin even spoke against the deliber¬
ate insult of religious feelings, though he himself insulted them
coarsely. He recommends the reading of French atheist philosophy
of the eighteenth century, and this shows how much the atheism
of Marx and Lenin depends on the bourgeois enlightenment of
that century.
Although the spirit of the eighteenth century enlightened
materialism is very powerful in communism still, the Russian
communists, who are specialists in anti-religious propaganda,
draw a distinction between the radical bourgeois fight against re¬
ligion in the name of intellectual enlightenment on the one hand
and the proletarian revolutionary class struggle against religion
on the other. In Soviet anti-religious literature, which is very
extensive (for anti-religious propaganda is afforded an honoured
position), Plekhanov is reproached on this very ground that he
combated religion as a man of enlightenment and, therefore, took
up a ridiculously kindly attitude to religion. Plekhanov thought that
the spread of enlightenment would lead to the natural dying-out
of religious beliefs; religion would disappear of its own accord
without any passionate or violent struggle. To Plekhanov it was
primarily a question of a change in consciousness, that is to say, a
scientific and philosophical question. Against this the Leninists set
the revolutionary class struggle, that struggle which inevitably
becomes persecution. They continually stress the fact that the fight
against religion is not scientific as it was for the men of enlighten¬
ment, but a class fight. Such authoritative Western Marxists as
Kautsky and Kunov are also explained as men of enlightenment
who do not understand revolutionary class war. Kautskv and
l 162 ]
 Kunov were positivists, not dialectic materialists, that is to say,
they were infected with bourgeois radicalism. Kautsky’s book The
Origin of Christianity was very influential in its day in Marxist
circles, and use was made of it for anti-religious propaganda in
early days in Soviet Russia. The same may be said of Kunov’s
book The Origin of Belief in God. But from the time that the
general line was decreed in Soviet philosophy and in anti-reli¬
gious propaganda, Kautsky’s and Kunov’s books were rejected
and recognized as unsuitable to orthodox Marxist Leninism.
Kautsky connects Christianity with a movement of the Roman
proletariat. This point of view was recognized as dangerous, since
it might suggest to the working class and peasant masses a sym¬
pathy for Christianity.
Besides this, Kautsky regarded Christianity less from the point
of view of class warfare than as the result of the influence of social
environment, that is to say, he tended towards the mechanical not
the dialectic explanation, and that is heresy. Kunov was con¬
demned because he made use of the theories of bourgeois scholars,
for example, Taylor’s Theory oj Animism, in order to explain the
origins of religious beliefs. He was a positivist, not a dialectician.
The purpose of anti-religious propaganda required that religion
should be regarded simply as a weapon of class oppression; every
other point of view on religion is regarded as bourgeois. Only
orthodox dialectic materialism provides the one true meaning of
the nature of all religion. A young Soviet philosopher wrote a
- book on the origin of religion from the point of view of Marxist
sociology. During a debate in which this book was discussed, the
author was attacked in a threatening way because he says nothing
in his book about Lenin’s views on magic and totemism. With a
gesture of despair the author exclaimed that in the whole of
Lenin’s works there was not a single word about magic or totem¬
ism and that he did not know what to do. The bearing of this
absurd dialogue is easily understood: the works of Lenin arc the
Scriptures and in the Scriptures all problems must have been de¬
cided beforehand.
The weakest side of Marxism has always been its psychology
[ i63 ]
and in Leninism, on account of its prevailing demagogy, psycho¬
logy is still more weak and crude and elementary. Even the
psychology of classes and social groups is not in the least worked
out, and its place is taken by elementary moral accusations. Here
Leninists are wholly incapable of a clear intellectual position.
Their position is merely emotional. So subtle a domain as the field
of religious psychology is wholly inaccessible to them. In its anti-
religious propaganda Soviet literature stands at a very low intel¬
lectual level, and aesthetically its style is intolerable. It is quite the
most inferior sort of literature in Soviet Russia. The Soviet anti-
religious caricatures are unusually crude, tasteless, and for all their
simple directness are but poorly understood by the masses of the
people.
A complete methodology is being worked out for the fight
against religion. Anti-religious propaganda is imposed as a binding
duty upon all Soviet philosophers who are regarded as orthodox,
that is to say, who profess the ‘general line’. The fight against re¬
ligion, all religion, enters into the Five Year Plan, which is not
only an economic plan but a plan for the complete reconstruction
of life. At the same time religious beliefs are recognized as being
very much alive among the people, more alive than anything con¬
nected with political and economic life, and it is precisely on the
religious front that the communists suffer their heaviest defeats. In
anti-religious propaganda, what are called religious prejudices and
superstitions among the peasants and labouring masses have to be
reckoned with. The methods of anti-religious propaganda must
take these things into consideration. Can one be a communist, a
member of the party, and at the same time a believing Christian?
Can one take part in the social programme of communism without
sharing the communist world outlook, without being a dialectic
materialist and one of the godless? This is a fundamental question.

II
In contrast with the social democrats, the communists do not
admit that religion is a private affair and simply a matter for the
individual conscience. On the contrary, they consider that religion
[ l64 ]
is one of the most public and social of matters. The recognition of
religion as a private affair, that is to say, the recognition of the
subjective right to freedom of conscience, is a regular plank in the
liberal democratic platform, and this principle is borrowed for
social democracy from liberal democracy. Marx himself, having
stigmatized religion as ‘opium for the people’ and the greatest
obstacle in the way of securing freedom for the working class and
for humanity, could not consider religion a private affair. The
question of religion enters into the social struggle. Russian com¬
munism draws a logical and extreme deduction from Marx’s
point of view about religion, a deduction which social democracy
was unwilling to draw, because it had absorbed a number of
liberal principles. Communists usually called the social democrats
‘social traitors’, and, by the way, considered them traitors on the
religious question. The social democrats, while continuing to con¬
sider themselves Marxists, admitted people who were believing
Christians to membership of the party, even ministers of religion
and professors of theology. But this means that social democracy
does not wish to be a ‘world outlook’; it wishes to be only a poli¬
tical party, only a system of social reform. I am not speaking of
English socialism, which is connected with Christianity far more
than with Marxism.
Communism, on the other hand, does want above all to be a
‘world outlook’; it is totalitarian and on that account the religious
question is very important for it. Russian communism (and, as a
matter of fact, communism in general is a Russian creation)
builds its whole programme upon a definite ‘world outlook’. In
Section 13 of the constitution of the communist party, not only
the Russian party but also the international, it says that every
member of the communist party must be an atheist and carry on
anti-religious propaganda. It is required of members of the party
that they break off every kind of relation with the Church. Lenin
clearly established the principles by which the communist must
be controlled in his relation to religion. He expounded in what
sense religion may be considered a private affair; religion is a
private affair in relation to a bourgeois state; in a bourgeois state the
[ i65 j
communist must stand for freedom of conscience, for the separa¬
tion of the Church from the State, must defend the principle that
religion is a private affair. But the whole argument changes when it
is a question of the relation of religion to the communist party and
consequently in a communist state and society. Religion is certainly
not a private affair within the communist party. It is then the
most public and the most social of matters; then a merciless fight
against religion becomes necessary. The communist, the real in¬
tegral communist, cannot be a religious man, a believing man; he
cannot be a Christian. A definite world outlook is binding upon a
member of the communist party; he must be a materialist and an
atheist, and, what is more, a militant atheist. It is not enough to
share in the socialist programme of communism to make one a
member of the communist party; communism is the profession
of a definite faith, a faith which is opposed to Christianity. All
Soviet literature asserts such an interpretation of communism.
Communists are fond of emphasizing that they are opponents of
Christian evangelical morality based upon love, pity, and sym¬
pathy, and that perhaps is the most dreadful thing in communism.
On opportunist grounds an exception is made in the case of the
workers in this matter of religion. Since there still exist among the
working classes traces of religious prejudices, those who cling to
them may still be accepted into the communist party if they share
the social programme of communism, without making enquiries
about their religious beliefs, but in the case of members of the in¬
telligentsia this is not permissible. The story of the Swedish com¬
munist Hedlund, is very characteristic. He endeavoured to assert
that religion is a matter for every man’s conscience and that it is
possible to be a communist as well as a believing Christian. Hed¬
lund was very sharply attacked for this, and subjected to very
severe treatment by Yaroslavsky (36), the chief specialist in anti-
religious propaganda. It was explained to him that within the
ranks of communism religion is not considered a private affair. At
the present time a member of the communist party cannot attend
church or profess religious belief of any sort; more than that, he
places himself under suspicion if he shows any coolness in anti-
1166 ]
 religious propaganda and does not profess militant communism.
In its very make-up and in the spiritual structure of its adepts, the
communist party is something in the nature of an atheist sect, a
religious atheist sect which has got the Government into its hands.
It is idle to suppose that the religious persecution in Russia is
directed only against the Orthodox Church, which was the
dominant church and associated in the past with monarchy and
reaction. Sects, for instance the Baptists, are regarded as still more
dangerous than the Orthodox, and the struggle against them is
regarded as more difficult, just because in the past it was they who
were persecuted by, and not associated with, the authorities of the
old regime. Christians who recognize the justice of communism in
the domain of social life, are considered more harmful and danger¬
ous than Christians who are openly in favour of restoration of the
old social order and engage in counter-revolutionary activity. A
free-thinking, atheist and materialist bourgeoisie is to be pre¬
ferred to Christians who sympathize with communism; it can be
used for the socialist work of construction; it is usually indifferent
to the question of a ‘general outlook’, whereas the Christian com¬
munists make a breach in the integral wholeness of the communist
‘world outlook’. It was Lenin who made this pronouncement.(37)
Religious persecution is not recommended in the handbooks
devoted to anti-religious propaganda, and Yaroslavsky, the specialist
on godlessness, says there is nothing gained by making martyrs, but
in actual fact they do make martyrs. Priests are reduced to exist¬
ence under inhuman conditions; they are lishentsi, ‘deprived’ of
the most elementary human rights, pariahs in the Soviet State. It
is clearly desired to place ministers of religions in such a position
that they cannot exist. The material and moral position of priests,
against whom no charge of any sort has been brought, is intoler¬
able, so that sometimes they prefer to be put into prison. But be¬
sides all this, bishops and priests are continually being arrested,
exiled to Solovky and shot. Communists who go to church are
excluded from the party. Soviet employes are dismissed if they go
to church; they can attend church only in secret, somewhere on
the outskirts of the town. To profess one’s faith openly in Soviet
[ l67 ]
Russia calls for heroism and frequently involves martyrdom. The
priest may speak about God only in church in his professional
capacity; outside church he is forbidden to speak about Him.
Freedom of conscience, of course, does not exist in Soviet Russia.
The Soviet constitution, which separated the Church from the
State and proclaimed freedom of conscience, has no meaning
whatever. Coercion is not only a matter of practice, it enters into
the theoretical world outlook of communism; it is part of its
teaching. Representatives of the Soviet Government, when they
are spoken to about anti-religious persecution, commonly reply
that there is no such persecution, that they persecute solely the
counter-revolutionaries of which there arc very many among the
bishops and priests and the believing laity, and that the Church is
persecuted only in so far as it is the home of reaction and counter¬
revolution. But this diplomatic explanation is contradicted by the
fact that in all their writings which set out their general point of
view and their own faith, the communists demand a militant con¬
flict against all religion. They will say that this conflict is in the
realm of ideas and takes place in thought, and this was the view
that Marx took of the fight against religion. But this is a purely
theoretical argument.
The really important thing is that now the Russian communists
represent the Government. The State is in their hands, and this
State belongs to the period of dictatorship, a dictatorship of world
view, a dictatorship which is not only political and economic but
also intellectual, a dictatorship over spirit, conscience and thought.
This dictatorship makes no bones about the means it employs; it
employs all means. This state of affairs is an ideocracy; it is one of
the transformations of the platonic Utopia. It is this which makes
the denial of freedom ot conscience and thought inevitable, and
makes inevitable religious persecution. All controversies in the
sphere of theory, ideas and philosophy, and all disputes in the
practical, political and economic world in Soviet Russia, are
fought out under the banners of orthodoxy and heresy. All those
who incline to the 'right’ or to the ‘left’ in philosophy or in politics
are regarded as inclined to heresy; and the exposure of heretics and
l *«8]
the persecution of those convicted of heresy is continually taking
place. But the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy is a re¬
ligious, a theological distinction, it is not philosophical and politi¬
cal. When politics are placed under the banner of an orthodoxy,
then the State is regarded as a Church, and persecution on the
ground of faith and opinion cannot be avoided. Christian theo¬
cracy in the Middle Ages was like this, and so is the Soviet com¬
munist ‘theocracy’, so is Hitler’s Third Reich, and so is every state
which professes to be totalitarian. I have already said that Ivan the
Terrible, the most notable exponent of the theory of autocracy,
founded the conception of an Orthodox Tsardom in which the
salvation of the souls of his subjects was one of the duties of
the Tsar. The functions of the Church are transferred to the State.
The communist government also is concerned for the salvation
of the souls of its subjects; it desires to bring them up in the one
saving truth; it knows the truth, the truth of dialectic materialism.
The communist government, which is an unlimited government,
finds its motive power in hatred of Christianity, in which it sees
the cause of slavery, exploitation and darkness of mind.
The communists are extraordinarily ignorant and unenlightened
in religious matters. But they are controlled by motives which be¬
long to the world of ideas; they are inspired by their own religious
faith. The communist government not infrequently displays a great
pliancy in politics. It can be very opportunist in international
politics and make concessions in economic politics. It is even
ready to grant a certain liberty in art and literature. Communism
is changing; it is developing; it is becoming nationalized, and more
cultured. Communist life is becoming bourgeois, and this last pro¬
cess constitutes a great danger not for communism alone, but also
for the Russian idea in the world. But there is a domain in which
communism is changeless, pitiless, fanatical and in which it will
grant no concessions whatever. That is the domain of‘world out¬
look’, of philosophy and consequently of religion also. Soviet
philosophical literature as a whole, and its literature concerned
with anti-religious propaganda in particular, is most unenlightened
most fanatical and stereotyped. The dogmatism of this literature
[ l69 ]
exceeds anything that has occurred in Christian theology. It some¬
times looks as though the Soviet government would rather go on
to the restoration of capitalism in economic life than to granting
freedom of conscience, freedom of philosophic thought, freedom
to create a spiritual culture. This hatred for religion and Chris¬
tianity has its roots deep down in the past of Christianity.

Ill
The hatred which the Russian communists feel for Christianity
involves a self-contradiction which those whose judgment is sub¬
jected by communist doctrine are not in a position to observe.
The best type of communist, that is to say, the man who is com¬
pletely in the grip of the service of an idea and capable of enormous
sacrifices and disinterested enthusiasm, is a possibility only as the
result of the Christian training of the human spirit, of the re¬
making of the natural man by the Christian spirit. The result of
this Christian influence upon the human spirit, frequently hidden
and unperceived, remains even when the people consciously re¬
fuse Christianity, and even become its foe. If it were granted that
anti-religious propaganda were finally to destroy all traces of
Christianity in the soul of the Russian people, and annihilate all
religious feeling, then the actual realization of communism would
become impossible, for no one would be willing to make sacrifices,
no one would interpret life as service of a higher purpose, and the
final victory would remain with the self-seeking type who thinks
only of his own interests. This last type of person, even now,
already plays no small part, and the growth of the bourgeois
spirit is due to him.
According to its own ideas communism desires the existence
not only of righteousness but also of brotherhood in human re¬
lations, a communism among men, but it is absurd and ridiculous
to suppose that the brotherhood of man can be realized by the ex¬
ternal coercion of social regimentation, by growing accustomed to
it, as Lenin says; it requires the action ot profound spiritual forces.
Materialist and atheist communism is either doomed to fail and
perish or is bound to establish a society which is like a mechanism
[170]
in which the human form can no longer be distinguished. None
the ress the communists, indebted as they are in many ways to
Christianity, basing—as they do—their whole activity upon the
switching over of religious energy, that is to say, the application
of it to something which is not religious, hate Christianity and re¬
ligion in general.
There must be deep and serious causes for this, causes which
cannot be simply due to the profession of an abstract theory of
hostility to religion. Christians, who condemn the communists
for their godlessness and anti-religious persecutions, cannot lay the
whole blame solely upon these godless communists; they must
assign part of the blame to themselves, and that a considerable part.
They must be not only accusers and judges; they must also be
penitents. Have Christians done very much for the realization of
Christian justice in social life? Have they striven to realize the
brotherhood of man without that hatred and violence of which
they accuse the communists? The sins of Christians, the sins of the
historical churches, have been very great, and these sins bring with
them their just punishment. Betrayal of the covenant of Christ, the
use of the Christian Church for the support of the ruling classes,
human weakness being what it is, cannot but bring about the
lapse from Christianity of those who are compelled to suffer from
that betrayal and from such a distortion of Christianity. In the
Prophets, in the Gospels, in the Apostolic Epistles, in most of the
Doctors of the Church, we fmd censure of the riches of the rich
and repudiation of property, and the affirmation of the equality of
all men before God. In Basil the Great, and especially in John
Chrysostom, may be met judgments upon social injustice due to
wealth and property, so sharp that Proudhon and Marx pale before
them. The Doctors of the Church said that property is theft. St.
John Chrysostom was a complete communist, though of course
his was not communism of the capitalist or the industrial period.
There are good grounds for asserting that communism has Chris¬
tian or Judaic-Christian origins.(3 8) But there soon came a time
in which Christianity was adapted to the contemporary kingdom
of Caesar. The discovery was made that Christianity is not only the
[ 171 ]
truth with which the world may be set aflame, but that it might^be
socially useful for the establishment of the kingdom of Caesar.
Christians—hierarchs, bishops, priests—set about defending the
ruling classes, the rich, and the powerful. False inferences were
drawn from the doctrine of original sin to justify every existing
evil and injustice. Suffering and trial were recognized as useful for
the salvation of the soul, and this was applied chiefly to the op¬
pressed classes, doomed to suffering and hardship, and was not
applied to the oppressor and the violent. Christian humility was
falsely interpreted and this interpretation used for the denial of
human worth and for the demand of meek submission to every
social evil. Christianity was used to justify the humiliation of man
and to defend oppression.
It must always be remembered that the Church bears two differ¬
ent meanings, and the confusion of these two meanings or the
denial of one of them has fatal results. The Church is the mystical
Body of Christ, a spiritual reality, continuing in history the Life
of Christ, and its origin is revelation, the action of God upon man
and the world. But the Church is also a social phenomenon, a
social institution; it is linked with its social environment, and feels
its influence; it finds itself in interaction with the State; it has its
own law and polity and its origin is social. The Church as a social
institution, as part of history, is sinful, liable to fall and to distort
the eternal truth of Christianity, passing off the temporary and
human as the eternal and divine. The Church in history is a very
complex divine-human and not only divine process, and the
human side of it is fallible; but the eternal truth of the Church of
Christ acts secretly and operates through the Church as a social
institution which is always relative and fallible. The Marxist-
Leninists see the Church only as a social phenomenon and institu¬
tion and see nothing behind it. To them the whole is thrust into
the foreground; to them there is no spiritual life; that is only an
epiphenomenon. Existence is flat, two-dimensional; there is no
measurement of depth. But communism must be understood as a
challenge to the Christian world. In it is to be seen the Highest
Tribunal and a reminder of duty unfulfilled. The communists
[ J72 ]
themselves do not understand this and cannot understand it. The
communists expose the evil violent actions of Christians but they
themselves continue to do the same evil and violence. Their respon¬
sibility may be less because they do not know the truth of Chris¬
tianity, but they are responsible for the fact that they do not
desire to know it.
There are two very significant books by Hecker published in
English. (39) They convey a very hazy impression. If Hecker simply
defended communism and the communist point of view all would
be clear, but his attitude to Christianity is different from that
of a thorough-going communist and, probably on account of his
own past, he would like to preserve a certain value in Chris¬
tianity, though one which sets him in sharp contradiction to the
Christianity of the Church. His attitude to Christianity reminds
one of that of the rationalist-moralist type of sectarian. Everything
that Hecker says about Christianity witnesses to the fact that he
entirely fails to see and understand the mystical side of it. To him
the Church is simply a social phenomenon, defined by its environ¬
ment and infected with all the ills of the ruling classes in history;
he is incapable of recognizing the spiritual side of it. Religion he
derives from fear which was afterwards sublimated. He explains
it in a purely sociological sense. Hecker regards it as undoubted
that man is descended from a simian ancestor, that is to say, that
he has an animal origin. In conformity with the philosophy which
is dominant and obligatory in Soviet Russia, he takes, of course,
the dialectic point of view, although no traces are to be seen in
him of the assimilation of Hegelianism. In the Orthodox Church
Hecker sees only its outward side (ceremonies behind which, of
course, he sees no mysteries), the link with the monarchist state
and slavish dependence upon it, and the subservience of the clergy.
Hecker’s exclusive this-worldlmess does not allow him any feeling
for the theme of salvation and eternal life. The value of Chris¬
tianity for him is simply a matter of ethics and the organization of
social life. Orthodoxy appears to him as a form of Christianity
which has not evolved any system of ethics as its own and exerts
no influence for the betterment of social life. The problem of
l 03 ]
religion appears to him to be finally subordinate to the social use
which he can make of it, and therefore the question of its truth
does not arise. This is Anglo-Saxon pragmatism—a thing which is
readily perceived in Hecker and which in actual fact contradicts
the communists’ general outlook, which claims the knowledge of
absolute truth.
Hecker is the apologist of Russian communism to the West,
but he is certainly not a thorough-going communist; his general
outlook is eclectic. Hecker is an admirer of Leo Tolstoi and ap¬
parently is disposed to understand Christianity as L. Tolstoi under¬
stood it, that is to say, principally as an ethical code. This is the
result of Hecker’s sectarian Christianity. I am myself disposed to
think that L. Tolstoi was the awakener of the Christian conscience
in a torpid Christian world and that there was much truth in his
criticism of historical Christianity. I have already said that there
were elements of Russian nihilism in L. Tolstoi which make him
one of the forerunners of Russian communism, but it is impossible
to deduce from this, as apparently Hecker is inclined to do, that
communism realizes Tolstoi’s ideas. Communist ideology and
especially its practice are diametrically opposed to the teaching of
Tolstoi. Communism represents the extreme of violent resistance,
extreme etatism, the lure of technical 'civilization and industry,
the denial of the essential brotherhood of man, the disruption of
immediate links with the soil, the destruction of the religious
principle of life. L. Tolstoi taught non-resistance, an anarchic
repudiation of the State and of technical civilization, the acknow¬
ledgement of the essential brotherhood of man, links with the soil
and the affirmation of the religious principle of life.
In his attacks upon the past of the Orthodox Church in Russia,
Hecker is frequently true in his facts. Nothing is easier than to
show that the history of the Church and in general the history of
Christianity is to a considerable degree a history of human sin,
treachery, decadence and subservience in despite of conscience.
From the time of Constantine the Church has not so much
mastered the kingdom of Ctesar as been subjected to it. The history
of religion as linked with its social environment, with social
[ 174 ]
claims and interests, has always been more prominent and more
powerful than the history of religion as linked with revelation and
the spiritual life. But it is only spiritual weakness and blindness,
only the subjugation of the spirit to its outward environment,
which leads from that to the conclusion that there is no such thing
as revelation and no such thing as the spiritual world.
There is no doubt that the Church, as a social institution, was in
a state of subjection in Russia and even enslaved by the State. The
degrading dependence of the Church upon the State belonged not
only to the time of Peter but also to the Muscovite period. It is
even indisputable that the clergy in Russia were in a degraded
and dependent position and that they lost all sense of leadership
especially from the time of the schism. The level of the episcopate
was particularly low; the bishops who, during the period of the
Tartar yoke and to some extent the Muscovite period, had a sense
of spiritual leadership, became civil servants, governors, the re¬
cipients of stars and ribands, and drove in their carriages. The
bishops usually persecuted the Startsi, that is to say, men who were
specially spiritual, and every spontaneous manifestation of reli¬
gious life. Corresponding facts are to be seen in the Roman
Catholic Church too. It is incontestable that in the Revolution the
Ordiodox Church has to pay for the sins of its past. Church people
cannot suddenly repudiate the links of the historical Church with
the old regime. But to see all this does not justify the hangman;
and the protest against the slavish subjection of the Church in the
'old kingdom of Caesar certainly cannot lead to the demand for
slavish subjection to a new kingdom of Caesar, although this may
call itself communist. With all the actual truth to fact of much
that Hecker says about Orthodoxy, and that might be said of the
past of Catholicism and Protestantism, his general judgments are
mistaken and entirely out of perspective; and this is inevitable
since for Hecker spirit and spiritual life do not exist. In his view
the Orthodox Church amounts to no more than outward for¬
mality, faith in ceremonial and relics of old superstitions. His
sympathies are only with the rationalist sects. But what has acted
upon the Russian soul and moulded it is the hidden spiritual life
[ 175 ]
of Orthodoxy, not outward official ecclesiasticism. It is useless for
Hecker to regard the liturgical life of the Church as mere outward
formality, as something in the nature of superstitious magic, when
in fact spiritual depth and the reflection of heavenly life exist in it.
Khomyakov’s teaching about the Church, that is to say, his teach¬
ing about sobornost1 and freedom, seems to Hecker a Utopia which
has never been realized in actual fact, simply because to his mind
reality is exhausted by empirical data; and he is incapable of under¬
standing a world of ideas in the ontological sense behind the
empirical world and opposed to it even while it acts upon it.
Therefore he sees in the Church only a crude empiricism and does
not see its ideal form, that is to say, the mystical Body of Christ.
All Russian creative religious thought of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, beginning with Khomyakov and the Slavo¬
phils down to the thinkers of the beginning of the twentieth,
censured the sins of the historical Church of Russia, and frequently
spoke more sharply than Hecker; the statement that the Russian
Church was paralysed belongs to Dostoyevsky the Orthodox
Christian. Neither Russian communism nor Hecker’s books are
required to show the humiliating falsity of the relation which ex¬
isted between the Church and the old state. This was frequently
referred to very severely by men who were believers and even
considered themselves supporters of the monarchy—Khomyakov,
Samarin, Aksakov, Dostoyevsky, Solovev and many others.
Russian creative religious thought, from Khomyakov onwards,
had entered upon the path of religious reformation within Ortho¬
doxy. Indictments of the spiritual hierarchy, and especially of the
episcopate, are very commonly found among those representatives
of Orthodoxy who have nothing in common with sectarianism.
Not only the sectarians but also those Russian religious thinkers to
whom Hecker is disposed to ascribe no significance whatever,
were distinguished by a certain nonconformity. But Hecker says
nothing about the immense and beneficial part played by the
Church in social life during the Tartar period, or about the love of
the poor in ancient Russia. He makes no reference to the positive
1See footnote on p. 87.
[U6]
phenomena of Russian sainthood. He does not understand that
Russian Orthodoxy, alien though it is from moralism, was in the
last resort that which gave their inward training to the souls of
those too whose minds have abandoned it, and which evoked in
the souls of the Russian people the search for the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness, and which brought into being that humanity
and sympathy which are so widely reflected in Russian literature.
Heckcr does not understand that if real marks of saintliness were to
be found in Chernishevsky, marks of the podvizhnik,1 he derived
them from the Christianity of his childhood and youth. Decadence
in the official Church and weakening of Christian life among the
people preceded the revolution. And so it always happens. Formal
Orthodoxy frequently presented a horrible appearance. At the be¬
ginning of the twentieth century a religious renaissance took place
in a very restricted circle in Russia, and it was a phenomenon be-
longnig not so much to popular life as to a cultured elite. For that
reason, as I have said already, it was ineffective socially. Rasputin
was a symbol of the disintegration of the old world and evidence
of the spiritual inevitability of revolution; but Hecker’s under¬
standing and appraisement of the whole Russian religious-philo¬
sophical movement is too inaccurate, and after all he cannot class
it with official State Orthodoxy.
In the first place, Hecker uses the term 'the search for Goa
incorrectly; it is not applicable to currents of thought which
regarded themselves definitely as Christian. Speaking of the
‘neo-Christians’ (a permissible term as long as one is speaking of
Christians who believe in the possibility of a new creative epoch
in Christianity), Hecker reckons amongst them V. Rozanov who
was undoubtedly a thinker of genius, but was a definite foe of
Christianity and may rather be called a neo-pagan. Many in¬
accuracies of statement might be pointed out in Hecker. He looks
at those spiritual phenomena which he is writing about, from
a distance; his judgments are too sweeping; he has no light and
shade, no appreciation of individual characteristics. Moreover, it
must be pointed out that everyone who adheres to the philosophy
1One who performs great exploits in the ascetic life; a spiritual ‘athlete’.
m [ 177 ] B.R.C.
of communism loses the ability to distinguish the individual
thing.
What Hecker finally and hopelessly fails to understand is the
problem of personality in Christian consciousness. Defence of the
principle of personality he apparently identifies with individualism
and egoism. He seems to think that when the Gospel calls upon a
man to lay down his life for his friend it is declaring against the
principle of personality. But the recognition of the absolute value
of every personality as made in the image and likeness of God, the
inadmissibility of treating the human personality as a mere instru¬
ment or tool, lies at the very basis of Christianity. It is precisely
Christianity which teaches that the human soul is of more value
than all the kingdoms of the world. Christianity pays endless
attention to every individual man and to his individual fate. A
human being, always individual and never to be repeated, is for
Christianity a more primary and deep reality than society. A man
may and frequently ought to sacrifice his life but not his personality;
the personality within him he ought to realize, and sacrifice is
the condition of realizing personality. It is personality which is
called to eternal life, which is the conquest of eternity. Personality
is a spiritual-religious category and indicates the task which is set
before men. Personality is an entirely different thing from the in-
dividuum, which is a biological and sociological category and the
subordinate part of the family and the community. Personality
cannot be a part of anything, neither of the community nor of the
world; it is an entirety and in virtue of its depth it belongs to the
spiritual world and not to the natural. (40) All the limitation and
falsity of communist philosophy is due to the failure to under¬
stand the problem of personality, and this turns communism
into a dehumanizing power hostile to man; it takes the com¬
munity, the socialist community, a social class, the proletariat,
and makes it into an idol, and the real human being is denied and
rejected.
I ought to say a word or two about Hecker’s false interpretation
of my own views. The terminology which I use, the words
‘aristocratic principle’, ‘the new Middle Ages’, etc., clearly lead
[ 178 ]
him astray. He regards me as a supporter of feudal aristocracy,
which is almost laughable. A supporter of feudal aristocracy in
our day would have to be regarded as mad. In actual fact, I am a
supporter of the classless society, that is to say, in that respect I am
very near to communism. (41) But for all that, I am a supporter of
the aristocratic principle as a qualitative principle in human society,
but a personal qualitative principle, not one which depends upon
class or property; that is to say, I am a supporter of spiritual aristo¬
cracy. Class inequality ought to be overcome in human society,
but personal inequality would come out all the stronger for that.
Man should be distinguished from man by his personal quality
not by his social position, his class or his property. The qualitative,
that is to say, the personal aristocratic principle, cannot disappear
from human society. On the contrary, it will become all the clearer
in a classless society, when classes no longer exist, for classes mask
and conceal personal qualitative differences among men and make
them symbolic, not real. A man occupies a high position in the
community not on the strength of his personal qualities and his
spiritual aristocracy, but symbolically, in virtue of what is con¬
ferred upon him by his belonging to a certain class. I am a sup¬
porter of Christian personalism, certainly not of individualism
which is hostile to the principle of personality. In a bourgeois
capitalist community personality is levelled down and is looked
upon merely as an atom. (42) Individualism is hostile to the Chris¬
tian idea of the communion of men, whereas the realization of
personality presupposes the communion of men.
When I say that the world is moving towards a new Middle
Ages, I certainly do not mean a return to the old Middle Ages and
least of all to feudalism. The phrase is only an indication of the
type of society in which man will strive after wholeness and unity
as opposed to the individualism of modern history, and in which
the significance of the religious principle will increase, even
though it may be in the form of militant anti-religion. Hecker
also completely fails to understand the new problems of Russian
religious thought. These problems, while not sundering the links
with the inward spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church, are
l 179]
concerned with creative efforts in the Christian world. The prob¬
lem of Christian anthropology is sharply stated and, in connection
with it, the problem of Christian culture and Christian society.
Russian creative religious thought has introduced the idea of God-
humanity. As in Jesus Christ, the God-Man, there occurred an in¬
dividual incarnation of God in man, so similarly in humanity
there should occur a collective incarnation of God. God-humanity
is the continuation of the incarnation of God; it brings forward
the problem of the incarnation of the truth and righteousness of
Christ in the life of humanity, in human culture and human society
The idea of God-humanity as the essence of Christianity is but
little developed in Western Christian thought; it is an original
product of Russian Christian thought, in which Christian philo¬
sophy is understood as the philosophy of God-humanity, as
christological. It passes beyond the boundaries of Greek and
scholastic thought as well as those of the rationalist thought of
modern times. This whole sphere is completely alien to Hecker
who does not understand it at all. As a pragmatist and social utili¬
tarian he judges the significance and value of a phenomenon of
spirit and thought solely by its immediate social effect. But there
can be very effective movements in the world which are com¬
pletely hostile to spirit and thought, when man is thrust wholely
into the outward side of things and achieves aims which are per¬
haps important but other than the deeper aims of spirit and
thought. The problems of Russian religious thought are concerned
with the more distant future when the pressing economic questions
have been decided; its orientation is towards eternity.
Hecker takes the so-called ‘Living Church’ under his protection
and he assigns it, of course, a clear primacy over the Patriarchal
Orthodox Church. It seems to him, as it has seemed to many in
the West, that the movement of the ‘Living Church’ is something
in the nature of a Reformation, that it is akin to Protestantism.
This is a mistake. There was no sort of reformation movement in
Russia at the time of the revolution, though there was among the
clergy at the very beginning of the twentieth century. The leaders
of the ‘Living Church’, which has now lost all significance, were
[ 180 1
devoid ot any religious creative idea. It was a mere self-adjustment
by a part of the Orthodox clergy to the existing government; it
was not reformation but conformism. There the traditions of the
old slavery of the Church hierarchy to State authority made
themselves heard. Apart from other considerations the adherents
of the ‘Living Church’ are unworthy of any respect because they
became informers against the Patriarch and the hierarchs of the
Patriarchal Church, they became ecclesiastical spies and adjusted
themselves to those who held power. They were linked with the
G.P.U. which issued its instructions to the ‘Living Church’. This
revived the old relation between Church and State, the Procura¬
tor being a member of the G.P.U. No fundamental reforming
movement of any sort ever arose from compliance and subser¬
vience, from delation and spying; such movements have arisen
when those who spoke for them sacrificed themselves, not others.
The ‘Living Church’ movement had no religious ideas of any
sort; it said nothing but that the Church ought to adapt itself
to the Soviet Government, but'that is not a religious idea. Its
adherents did not rise even to the idea that there is Christian truth
in communism; they were interested not in communism but in
the Government. I mvself hold much more radical ideas than the
adherents of the ‘Living Church’ and I believe more than they do
in the new creative ideas of Christianity, in the new outpouring of
the Holy Spirit upon man. But I am utterly opposed to the ‘Living
^Church’ because I consider that sort of conformism in religious
life is inadmissible. The Orthodox Church in Russia ought to
establish some sort of concordat with the existing government, as
the Metropolitan Sergius is tryingtodo. The Church cannotoccupy
itself in political strife, and all suspicion of connection with the
old regime ought to be removed from it. But the Church must
rise above the kingdom of Caesar. A condemnation by the Church
of the capitalist regime, its recognition of the justice of socialism
and of a labouring community, would in my opinion be very
right, but under the Soviet regime it loses all religious meaning,
for it becomes the mere carrying out of the demands of the
G.P.U.
[i8i]
 IV
We now approach the fundamental problem of communism,
the problem of the relation between man and society. Hecker
shares all the weaknesses of the communist statement and the com¬
munist solution of this problem, that is to say, for him the prob¬
lem of man has no dimension of depth. What was the case with
Marx? Marx was an admirable sociologist but a very feeble
anthropologist. Marxism states the problem of society but not
that of man. In its view man is a function of society, a technical
function of economics. Society is the phenomenon, while man is
the epiphenomenon. Such a degrading of man is a striking con¬
tradiction to the accusatory teaching of Marx about the verding-
lichung of human life and about dehumanization. There remains
in him a rooted duality of thought: Is the turning of man into a
function of the economic process a sin and an evil of past capitalist
exploitation or is it the ontology of man? In any case, the fact is
decisive that the first attempt to realize communism on Marxist
soil which we see in Russia also regards man as a function of
economics and also dehumanizes human life as the capitalist
regime does. Therefore, no such revolution in world history as
Marx and Engels hoped for has taken place.
Meanwhile, communism claims to have created not only the
new society but also the new man. They talk a great deal in Soviet
Russia about the new man, about a new spiritual make-up.
Foreigners who have visited Soviet Russia are also fond of talking
about it; but the new man can only come into being in the event
of man being regarded as of supreme value in life. If man is con¬
sidered simply as a brick in the structure of society, if he is but an
instrument in the economic process, then one must speak not so
much of the appearance of the new man as of the disappearance of
man, that is to say, of the intensifying of the process of dehuman¬
ization. Man is deprived of the measurement of depth; he is turned
into a flat two-dimensioned being. The new man will exist only if
he has a measurement of depth, if he is a spiritual being; otherwise
man does not exist; he is but a function of the community. In his
dimension of depth, man is a sharer not only in time but in eternity.
[ 182 ]
If man is wholly relegated to the time process, it nothing of eternity
and for eternity exists in him, then the image of man, the image of
personality, cannot be preserved. In its atheistic materialist form
communism entirely subordinates man to the time process; man
is only a transient unit in a series of moments and every moment
is but the means which produces the next. Thus man loses his in¬
terior existence; human life is dehumanized. Marxism reyealed a
crisis in humanism. In Marx, especially during his younger days,
when he still kept traces of German idealism, there were possibi¬
lities of a new humanism; he began with a revolt against de¬
humanization, but later he himself was influenced by the process
of dehumanization, and in relation to man communism inherited
the sins of capitalism.
In Russian Marxist communism this process of dehumanization
went even further and was conditioned by the whole set of cir¬
cumstances in which Russian communism arose. There entered
into Russian communism the traditions not of Russian humanism,
which had a Christian origin, but of Russian anti-humanism, de¬
riving from Russian state absolutism, which always regarded man
as a mere means to an end. Marxism considers evil as the pathway
to good. The new society, the new man, is born of the growth of
evil and darkness; the soul of the new man is formed by negative
emotions, by hatred, revenge and violence. This is the demoniacal
element of Marxism and it is called dialectic. Dialectically, evil
passes over into good, darkness into light. Lenin proclaimed that
everything was moral which served the proletarian revolution.
He knows no other definition of good. From this it follows that
the end justifies the means, every sort of means. The moral im¬
pulse in human life loses all independent significance, and that is
undoubted dehumanization. The end for the sake of which every
means is justified is not man, not the new man, not the complete¬
ness of humanity, but only a new organization of society. Man is
a means for this new organization of society and not the new
organization of society for man.
The communist is defined psychologically chiefly by the fact
that for him the world is sharplv divided into two opposed camps
[i33]
—Ormuzd and Ahriman, the kingdom of light and the kingdom
of darkness, without any shading. This is almost a Maniclncan
dualism which at the same time commonly makes use of a monist
doctrine. The kingdom of the proletariat is the light kingdom of
Ormuzd; the kingdom of the bourgeoisie is the dark kingdom of
Ahriman. To those who belong to the kingdom of light every¬
thing is permissible for the. annihilation of the kingdom of dark¬
ness. The fanaticism, intolerance, cruelty and violence of the
thorough-going type of communist is explained by the fact that
he feels himself faced by the kingdom of Satan and he cannot en¬
dure that kingdom. But at the same time he depends negatively
upon the kingdom of Satan, upon evil, upon capitalism, upon the
bourgeoisie. He cannot live without an enemy, without the feeling
of hostility to that enemy; he loses his pathos when that enemy
does not exist, and if there is no enemy he must invent one. The
prosecutions of‘saboteurs’ are due to this requirement of creating
a class enemy. If the class enemy finally disappeared and com¬
munism easily existed the communist pathos would also disappear.
The revolutionary pathos is to a large extent due to a hostile atti¬
tude to the past. The question is sometimes put: To what extent
does communism actually belong to the future and is it concerned
with the future? Undoubtedly it is more concerned with the
future than is fascism, which is an entirely transitional pheno¬
menon. A world problem is connected with communism; but in
communism there is too great a dependence upon the past, a fall¬
ing in love with hatred of the past; it is too much shackled to the
evil of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Communism cannot con¬
quer hate, and in that lies its chief weakness. Hatred always turns
to the past and always depends upon the past. A man who is
gripped by the emotion of hatred cannot be concerned with the
future, with a new life; only love turns a man towards the future,
frees him from the heavy shackles of the past, and is a means of
creating a new and better life. The preponderance of hate over
love is terrible among communists. One cannot entirely blame
them for this. In that respect they are victims of past evil.
The spirit of communism, the religion of communism, the
[ i84]
 philosophy of communism, arc botli anti-Christian and anti-
humanist. But the social system of communism possesses a large
share of truth which can be wholly reconciled with Christianity,
more so, in-any case, than the capitalist system, which is mosr anti-
Christian, Communism is right as against capitalism. The falsity
of the communist spirit and of its spiritual servitude can be con¬
demned only by those Christians who cannot be suspected of de¬
fending the interests of the bourgeois capitalist world. It is pre¬
cisely the capitalist system above all which crushes personality and
dehumanizes human life, turns man into a thing and an article of
merchandise; and it does not become the defenders of this system
to condemn communists for repudiating human personality and
dehumanizing human life. It was the industrial capitalist period
which subjected man to the power of economics and money, and
it does not become its adepts to teach communists the evangelical
truth that man does not live by bread alone. The question of
bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread
for my neighbours, for everybody, is a spiritual and a religious
question. Man does not live by bread alone, but he does live by
bread and there should be bread for all. Society should be so
organized that there is bread for all, and then it is that the spiritual
question will present itself before men in all its depth. It is not per¬
missible to base a struggle for spiritual interests and for a spiritual
renaissance on the fact that for a considerable part of humanity
„ bread will not be guaranteed. Such cynicism as this justly evokes
an atheistic reaction and the denial of spirit. Christians ought to be
permeated with a sense of the religious importance of the elemen¬
tary daily needs of men, the vast masses of men, and not to despise
these needs from the point of view of an exalted spirituality.
Communism is a great mentor for Christians; it is a frequent
reminder to them of Christ and the Gospels and of the prophetic
elements in Christianity. In regard to economic life two contra¬
dictory principles may be postulated. One of them says: In econo¬
mic life follow up your own personal interest and this will pro¬
mote the economic development of the whole, it will be good for
the community, for the nation, for the state. Such is the bourgeois
[185]
ideology of economics. The other principle says: In economic life
serve others, serve the whole community and then you will re¬
ceive everything which you need for your life. Communism
asserts this second principle, and in that respect it is right. It is
abundantly clear that the second principle corresponds to Chris¬
tianity more closely than the first. The first principle is just as anti-
Christian as the Roman theory of property. Bourgeois political
economy, having invented the economic man and eternal econo¬
mic laws, regards the second principle as utopian. But the econo¬
mic man is transient, and a new motive for labour is entirely
possible, a motive which corresponds more with the value of a
man. One thing is clear: this problem cannot be only a problem of
a new organization of society. It is inevitably a problem of a new
make-up of man, of a new man. But the new man cannot be pre¬
pared in mechanical ways; he cannot be the automatic result of a
certain organization of society. A new spiritual make-up pre¬
supposes a re-training of man spiritually. To this last problem
communism is obliged to devote much attention, but it does not
possess the spiritual strength for solving it. It is impossible to create
the new man and the new society while proclaiming that econo¬
mic life is a function which concerns civil servants alone. This is
not the socialization of economics, but their bureaucratization.
Communism in the form in which it has appeared in Russia
is extreme e tat ism; it is the appearing of the monster Leviathan
which has laid its paws upon everything. The Soviet Govern¬
ment, as I have already said, is the one totalitarian state in the
world which is carried to its logical consistent end; it is a trans¬
formation of the ideas of Ivan the Terrible, a new form of the
terrible hypertrophy of the state in Russian history. But to under¬
stand economic life as social service certainly does not mean the
conversion of every economic agent into a civil servant, nor the
recognition of the state as the only economic agent. It is indis¬
putable that a part of commerce, of commerce on the most con¬
siderable scale, ought to pass over to the state. But side by side
with this one must recognize the co-operation of men, the labour¬
ing syndicate, and the separate man established by the organiza-
[.86]
tion of society in conditions which exclude the exploitation of
one’s neighbour; and the state will have controlling and medi¬
ating functions, such as will not permit the oppression of man by
man. It does not enter within the scope of my present task to go
into the details of these questions; only it is important to notice
that etatism is not the only form of the new organization of society.
The pluralist rather than the monist social system corresponds
more truly with the freedom of the human spirit. The monist
social system always leads to tyranny and the oppression of human
personality; the monism of the Marxist system is its principal de¬
fect. The monism of a totalitarian state is in any case incompatible
with Christianity; it turns the state into a Church, and a heroic
conflict is in store against the absolute claims of the kingdom of
Cassar in communism and in fascism. During this struggle Chris¬
tianity may be cleansed and freed from the stamp of the kingdom
of Caesar which has lain upon the Church since the time of Con¬
stantine. Christianity seems to me to be compatible only with a
system which I would call a system of pluralist socialism, which
unites the principle of personality as the supreme value, with the
principle of a brotherly community of men. At the same time it is
necessary to make a distinction, which the communists do not
make, between the realization of righteousness in the life of the
community, presupposing the impulse of coercion, and the reali¬
zation of the brotherhood of men, of their true community or
communion, presupposing the freedom of man and the action of
grace.

In this book I have tried to show that Russian communism is more

traditional than is commonly thought and that it is a transformation
and deformation of the old Russian messianic idea. Communism
in Western Europe would be an entirely different phenomenon in
spite of the similarity of Marxist theories. To the traditional Rus¬
sian character of communism are due both its positive and its
negative sides: On the one hand the search for the Kingdom of
God and integrated truth and justice, capacity for sacrifice and the
absence of the bourgeois spirit; on the other hand, the absoluteness
[187]
of the State, and despotism, a feeble grasp of the rights of man
and the danger of a featureless collectivism. In other countries
communism, in the event of an attempt to bring it into existence,
may be less integrated, make less claim to take the place of religion,
may be more secular and more bourgeois in its spirit. The prob¬
lems of communism stimulate the awakening of the Christian
conscience and should lead to the development of a creative social
Christianity, not in the sense of understanding Christianity as a
social religion, but in the sense of revealing Christian truth and
justice in relation to social life. This will mean emancipation from
social slavery, that social slavery in which Christian consciousness
finds itself. The world is living through the danger of a dehuman¬
ization of social life, the dehumanization of man himself. The very
existence of man is in danger from all the processes which are
going on in the world. Only the spiritual strengthening of man
can combat this danger. When Christianity appeared in the world
it defended man from the danger arising from demonolatry. Man
was in the power of cosmic forces, of demons and spirits of Nature
which tormented him. Christianity focused man spiritually and
subjected his fate to God; thus was prepared the possibility of
man’s power over Nature. At the present time Christianity is
again called upon to protect man, to protect his whole image from
a demonolatry which torments him anew, from servitude to the
old cosmic and the new technical forces. But this can only be done
by a rejuyenated Christianity which is true to its prophetic spirit
and which is turned towards the Kingdom of God.
 AUTHOR’S NOTES

(1) Page 8. See the interesting book: Das Antlitz Russlands und
das Gesicht der Revolution, by Fedor Stepan.
(2) Page 11. v. G. Fedotov, Saints of Ancient Russia.
(3) Page 22. v. Hershenzon’s book, Young Russia.
(4) Page 30. The Anarchist element is particularly strong in K.
Aksakov.
(5) Page 32. v. P. Sakulin, Russian Literature and Socialism.
1922.
(6) Page 33. v. P. Sakulin, op. cit.
(7) Page 33. See an interesting book by Cornu, Karl Marx,
VHomme et son (Enure. 1934.
(8) Page 38. v. Belinsky's Socialism. Essays and Letters. Edited and
commented by Sakulin, 1925. The remarkable letters from
Belinsky to Botkin are collected in this book.
(9) Page 38. See an interesting book recently published, Hegel bei
den Slavery, about 250 pages are devoted to Hegel in Russia.
This part was written by D. Chizhevsky, a great authority
on the history of Russian philosophical thought. Insufficient
attention is paid to the double crisis of Hegelianism in
Russia.
(10) Page 48. See a very interesting book for material about
Chernishevsky, The Love of the People of the ’Sixties.
Academia. 1929.
(11) Page 50. op. cit., p. 61.
(12) Page 52. v. G. Plekhanov, N. G. Chernishevsky.
(13) Page 63. v. Michael Bakunin’s Social-politischer Brief vechsel
mit Alexander Herzen und Ogarev, 1895, in which Nechaev’s
Catechism of a Revolutionary is printed.
(14) Page 65. v. E. Yaroslavsky, Aus der Geschichte der Kommunis-
tischen Partei der Sowjetunion, Erst Teil.
(15) Page 66. v. Cornu, op. cit.
[ i89]
(16) Page 68. v. M. Bakunin, The Cat-o’ -Nine-Tails German Em¬
pire and the Social Revolution. 1922.
(17) Page 69. Ibid.
(18) Page 71. v. G. Plekhanov, Our Divergencies; and A Historical
Revolutionary Chrestomathy, Vol. 1.1923.
(19) Page 74. v. K. Pazhitnov, The Development of Socialist Ideas in
Russia, Vol. 1.1924.
(20) Page 75. v. A. Voronsky, Zhelyabov. 1934.
(21) Page 85. See my book, Dostoyevsky’s Outlook on Life.
(22) Page 88. See my book, Konstantine Leontyev, a Sketch of the
History of Russian Religious Thought.
(23) Page 96. v. Cornu, op. cit., and also Der Historische Materialis¬
ms Die Friihschriften, Kroner. Verlag. In these two recently
published volumes Marx’s earlier writings are collected.
(24) Page 98. Writing of Feuerbach, Marx says: ‘Der Haupt-
mangel alles bisherigen Materialismus ist dass der Gegen-
stand, die Wirklichkeit, Sinnlichkeit nur unter der Form
des Objects oder der Anschauung gefasst wird, nicht aber
als sinnlich-menschliche Tatigkeit, Praxis, nicht subjectiv.’
The sen iiber Feuerbach.
This passage is entirely contradictory to materialism and
approaches existential philosophy.
(25) Page 105. Lukatch, Geschichte undKlassen-Bewusstseit—Studien
uber marxistische Dialektik.
(26) Page 108. My first book, published in 1900, Subjectivism and
Idealism in Social Philosophy, was an attempt to synthesize
revolutionary Marxism and the idealist philosophy of Kant
and Fichte.
(27) Page 113. In an article written in 1907 and appearing in my
book, The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia, I definitely
foretold that if the present great revolution took place in
Russia, then it was inevitable that the bolsheviks would
triumph.
(28) Page 114. The literature dealing with Russian Communism
is immense, but the bulk of it is of no great value. The
following may be noted: Rene Fiilop-Miller, Geist und
[190]
 Gesicht dcs Bolshevismus; Waldemar Gurian, Le Bolchevisme;
C. Malaparte, Le bonhomtne Lenine; Fedor Stepan, Das
Antlitz Russlands mid das Gesicht der Revolution; Berdyaev,
Probletne du Comtnunisme.
(29) Page 116. v. the very able book, Le bonhomtne Lenine, by C.
Malaparte.
(30) Page 116. Lenin’sjubilee Collection.
(31) Page 131. G. de Maistre, Considerations sur la France.
(32) Page 149. v. Historical Materialism, by various writers of the
Institute of Red Professors of Philosophy, under the
editorship of Galtsevitch. 1931.
(33) Page 153. N. Fedorov, The Philosophy of the Common Task.
(34) Page 155. See the recently published interesting book, L’idee
socialiste, by Henri de Man.
(35) Page 161. v. Lenin on Religion.
(36) Page 166. Yaroslavsky, On the Anti-Religious Front; and
Against Religion and the Church.
(37) Page 167. The matter was dealt with in the journal, Under
the Marxist Flag.
(38) Page 171. v. Gerard Walter, Les Originesde Comtnunisme.
(39) Page 173. Julius Hccker, Religion and Communism; and Mos¬
cow Dialogues.
(40) Page 178. See my Myself and the World of Objects.
(41) Page 179. See my Christianity and the Class Struggle.
(42) Page 179.1 am even inclined to think that in the deep sense of
the word the individual is revolutionary and the mass is
conservative.
 '

I
*
 NICOLAS BERDYAEV

“ Nicolas Berdyaev is one of the most

important writers of the present
time.”—The late Archbishop of
Canterbury (Dr. William Temple).

Truth and Revelation

i/s net

The Beginning and the End

2/s net

Slavery and Freedom

2/s net

The Russian Idea

i 8s net

The Divine and the Human

18s net

The Destiny of Man

i/s net

Freedom and the Spirit

12s 6d net

Spirit and Reality

i os 6d net

Solitude and Society

i os 6d net

The Meaning of History

i os 6d net

Towards a New Epoch

6s net
 NICOLAS BERDYAEV
his autobiography
DREAM AND REALITY
“This most revealing book is in my opinion Berdyaev’s best. It
is worthy of being placed alongside the Confessions of St.
Augustine and Rousseau”.—kenneth walker in Sunday Times

“This book cannot be dispensed with. It contains the essence of

what Berdyaev was trying to say in twenty books, and one must
be grateful for it and for the excellent English of the translation.”
—the dean of st. Paul’s in The Spectator

“In an age of unexampled perplexity the record of the inner life

of such a spiritual giant as Nicolas Berdyaev demands the
deepest reflection”. —XIXth Century

“Berdyaev’s autobiography is a book of the greatest interest. He

was one of the most original thinkers of his day, and his own
account of his mental pilgrimage is extremely illuminating”.
-LORD DAVID CECIL

“Berdyaev puts the whole of himself into everything he writes,

but none of his published works is so self-revealing as this
autobiography. For here is the explanation of his pursuit of
absolute truth, his worslflp of abstractions, and his refusal to be
bound by the programme of any party, or the creed of any
church”. —Oxford Magazine

“This is the most important book of 1950 and would easily tilt
the scale against all the novels, essays, etc., produced in any
publishing year”. —paul o’shea in The Standard

Royal Octavo * With Portrait • jos. net

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