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THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION

by Nicolas Berdyaev

Ann Arbor Paperbacks for the Study of Communism and Marxism
The University of Michigan Press

Second printing 1966

First edition as an Ann Arbor Paperback 1961

First published in 1931 by Sheed and Ward

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press and simultaneously

in Toronto, Canada, by Ambassador Books Limited

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

I. RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY AND

COMMUNISTIC ATHEISM ... I

II. THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM . . 49

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY AND
COMMUNISTIC ATHEISM

The Russian Revolution has interested the
whole world in Russia and the Russian people.
The peoples of the West are uneasy about the
Communist experiment, accompanied as it is
by a forced implanting of atheism such as the
world has never yet known — an experiment
carried on in a vast country which is little
known to, and little understood by, the West.
What must be of great interest is the psycholo-
gical problem : How was it possible for Holy
Russia to be turned into an arsenal of militant
atheism ? How is it that a people who are
religious by their very structure and live exclu-
sively by faith have proved to be such a fruitful
field for anti-religious propaganda ? To explain
that, to understand Russian anti-religious psy-
chology, one must have an insight into the
religious psychology of the Russian people.

i
The nineteenth century saw the advent of an
original type of Russian, different in spiritual

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

structure from that of mediaeval Muscovite
Russia, and it is this type which gives us the key
to the militant atheism of the Russian Revolu-
tion. In Russia it was a century of thought and
word, in which the structure of the Russian
soul was first realised and expressed ; in which
creative art and thought have left memorials
through which we can study the religious and
anti-religious tendencies of Russian psychology.
But the roots of this soul-structure we are to
study lie embedded in the tragic history of our
past, and above all in the religious schism
(Raskol) within the Russian Church of the
seventeenth century, the effects of which are
still at work in our own day. The Raskol is a
characteristic and decisive phenomenon of
Russian history, and we have not deflected from
its orbit. Russians are, by their very psycho-
logy, inclined to become raskolniki (schismatics) .
The historic religious schism is not to be
explained merely by the fact that a considerable
portion of the Russian people and clergy in
the times before Peter the Great were grossly
ignorant and identified ritual with dogma. The
struggle was carried on not merely to preserve
the ancient rites, the letter of the law, in all
their purity. Deeper motives, to be found in the
psychological history of the Russian people,
were in action. They had long been moved by

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

the feeling of a messianic mission. It found
expression in the fifteenth century, in the teach-
ing of the monk Philothey concerning Moscow,
" the Third Rome." Byzantium had fallen, and
the only Orthodox Empire left in the world,
according to Philothey, was the Russian ; the
Russian nation, alone on the earth, was the
depositary of true Orthodox faith ; all the
outer Christian world had tarnished its purity.
The idea of an Orthodox Empire became the
Russians' central idea — a messianic idea.

When Greek influence showed itself in the
correction of the service-books and the altera-
tion of the rites, this was taken as a betrayal
of the Orthodox Empire, the civil power and
the hierarchy of the Church. Religious and
national sentiment were as closely wedded as
in the consciousness of the ancient Jews. When
the Patriarch Nikon fell under Greek influence,
he seemed a traitor. Antichrist had penetrated
into the Orthodox Empire, into State and
Church. The hierarchy was corrupted. The
true Church went out into the desert and hid
beneath the earth. The Orthodox Empire, like
the town of Kitesh *, became an invisible one.
The raskolniki took refuge in the forests and hid

* According to legend, the " Shining Town " of Kitesh,
rather than fall a prey to the Mongols, sank to the bottom
of a lake. (Translator's note.)

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

from persecution. The more fanatical and
exalted among them burned themselves to
death ; the sect of" self-burners " is a typically
Russian phenomenon.

Another extreme form of the Raskol is bezpo-
povstvo (" priestlessness "), which rejects every
sort of hierarchy, has a strong apocalyptic and
eschatological tendency, and is nihilistic in its
attitude to the structure of the Church, to the
State, and to culture.

Russian Nihilism and the apocalyptic strain
in the Russian character are connected, and
their connection shows itself in the extreme
forms of the schismatic spirit. Nihilistic and
apocalyptic tendencies, hankering after spiritual
nakedness, refusal of the processes of history and
of cultural values, expectancy of some final
catastrophe, are deeply rooted in the psychology
of the Raskol. Its extreme left wing brought
forth a multitude of sects. The monarchism of
the Old-Believers developed into anarchism.
The psychology of the Raskol, a. divorce between
the Church's people and her rulers, between the
common people and the cultured class, grew
more and more strong and violent. The
reform of Peter the Great greatly increased it.
Popular feeling saw in Peter's reform, or, rather,
in his revolution, an act of violence against the
people's soul, and answered it by creating the

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

legend that he was Antichrist. Henceforth the
Orthodox Christian Empire is taken as having
finally disappeared from the visible world, and
the realm of Antichrist takes its place. Imperial
Russia, soaked in Western civilisation, is no
longer the Orthodox Empire in the strict sense
of the word. An attitude of aloofness and
suspicion towards the authorities grows up.
The Russian religious messianic idea remains,
but it settles into a profound divorce from its
actual surroundings. Orthodoxy, bound up
with the dominant Church but opposed to Pro-
testant or " enlightening " influences, kept
much in common with the Old-Believers and
raskolniki. Apocalyptic feelings, connected
with the awaiting of Antichrist, are very strong
among the people, and they come to light also
in currents of religious thought among the cul-
tured classes, in Russian writers and thinkers.
And these tendencies remain as psychological
forces, but in a secularised form, in movements
which are divorced from Christian religious
consciousness. Thus a schismatic and eschato-
logical disposition is the fundamental psycholo-
gical fact of the Russian nineteenth century ; it
will express itself both in a religious way and in
an anti-religious (an inverted religious) way.

The Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth
century was a class of intellectual schismatics,

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an intellectual Raskol. It lived in disagreement
with the present, with Imperial Russia ; it
looked either to an ideal past, idealising the
Russia before Peter, or to an ideal future, an
idealised West. It did not feel the successes of
the Russian State to be its own successes. Lack
of any foundation or root in real life was a
characteristic feature of the Russian soul in the
nineteenth century. And with it went a great
independence and boldness of thought. All
intellectuals, whether Slavophil or Occidentalism
refused their own time as a period in which the
vocation of the Russian people was not fulfilled ;
and such a negative attitude to contemporary
life is a revolutionary element. The Slavophils
looked to the past, to Russia as it was before
Peter the Great, while the Occidentalists looked
to the West ; but both former Russia and
Western Europe were dreams, not realities.

When the Occidentalist, Herzen, found him-
self in the West and saw its commonness, he
underwent a most painful disenchantment ; he
inveighed against the bourgeois spirit of the West,
which has always revolted Russians. As for the
Slavophils, they were convinced monarchists,
but the monarchy of Nicholas I disgusted them.
Russian thought in the nineteenth century, fed
on German romanticism, adopted its themes
and developed them in its own way. It was

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

thought without roots ; and this defect was a
national feature ; it could only dream of some
organised form of culture.

In the spiritual fabric of the cultured intel-
lectual class of Russia in the nineteenth century
a number of features typical of later develop-
ments appeared : divorce from contemporary
life ; consciousness of the gulf that separated it
as a class from the people and from the rulers ;
eschatological feeling as a spiritual disposition
independent of religious faith, sometimes reli-
gious and sometimes social ; expectancy of a
catastrophic end ; maximalism ; little under-
standing of hierarchical degrees and of the
gradual nature of historical developments ; a
tendency to deny the value of the relative, and
to turn it into something absolute ; an inclina-
tion towards opposite extremes ; a curious kind
of asceticism ; contempt of worldly goods and
bourgeois virtues ; a crying demand for the
actual attainment of justice in human life, above
all in social life. One can recognise these
features in the most contradictory tendencies.

The Russian soul of the nineteenth century
was a suffering soul brought to the point of self-
torture. Compassion for human suffering was
the fundamental theme of its literature — a
spiritual disposition that fed upon the painful
aspects of serfdom. It was essentially a non-

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

acceptance of suffering ; not a refusal to suffer,
but a refusal to admit that there was any mean-
ing in it. Now, this Russian suffering and com-
passion had two sources : in some it came from
consciousness of guilt, contrition, an uneasy
conscience ; in others from a feeling of offence,
resentment, a revolt of the oppressed. And the
basic phenomenon which we have to notice is
that we have here a transposition of religious motives
and religious psychology into a non-religious or anti-
religious sphere, into the region of social problems, so
that the spiritual energy of religion flows into social
channels, which thereby take on a religious character,
and become a breeding-ground for a peculiar
form of social idolatry. Creative social energy
was not free to find its realisation in the condi-
tions of actual Russian life, it was not directed
into actual social construction ; it entered into
its own self, modified the texture of the soul,
elicited a passionate visionary social idealism,
and accumulated an explosive force in the
depths of the subconscious mind. No one had
a more profound insight than Dostoievsky into
the fact that Russian Socialism was not a poli-
tical but a religious question, the question of
God, of immortality and the radical reconstruc-
tion of all human life. Socialism, broadly
speaking, was the dominant religious faith of
most of the nineteenth-century Russian intelli-

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

gentsia. It determined all moral judgments. It
was above all a matter of sentiment. The Rus-
sians' interpretation of Saint Simon, Proudhon
and Karl Marx was a religious one ; they took
to materialism also in the same religious spirit.
Dostoievsky revealed the religious psychology
and religious dialectics of Russian Nihilism
and revolutionary Socialism. And once one has
understood the basis of Russian Nihilism, and
recognised it as an original product of the
Russian spirit, one is able to grasp the source
and basis of the militant atheistic element in
Russian Communism.

Russian Nihilism was directed, at its origins,
by religious motives which concealed a per-
verted religious psychology. Russians became
Nihilists through a kind of love of truth and
justice. It was Bielinsky, the Russian Orthodox
literary critic and publicist of the 'forties, that
came in the latter period of his life to hold
the philosophy which laid the basis of Russian
Nihilism and nihilistic Socialism. A typical
intellectual raskolnik, Bielinsky searched for
truth throughout his life and became a Nihilist
and an atheist for love of justice and the welfare
of Ae people and of humanity. In his person

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

the idealism of the 'forties underwent a crisis,
Russian derivatives from Schelling and Hegel
came to an end, and the consciousness of the
intelligentsia was brought into contact with social
realities.

Bielinsky deliberately plunged into those
realities in the name of an idealistic longing for
justice and hatred of falsehood. He began life
as an idealist and a romantic, in love with " the
sublime and the beautiful," and ended it as a
realist and an atheist. The crisis began by his
protesting against the absoluteness of Hegel's
spirit, against everything general and universal,
against all abstract ideas, in the name of con-
crete human personality, with its joys and
sorrows. And then a most interesting psycholo-
gical process took place. Bielinsky passionately
rejected the abstract notions of idealism, but he
settled on living concrete human personality
only for a brief moment, and then set out at
once to subject it to a new set of abstract ideas
which seemed to him to be realistic — the ideal
of social justice and the welfare of mankind. He
threw his passionate nature into a love of
humanity which he himself called " Marat's
love." He declared that he was ready to cut
off the heads of a large section of mankind in
order to make the rest happy, and so anticipated
Bolshevik morals. " If I were the Tsar," he

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

cried, " I would be a tyrant." His motto was
Socialism or death. Obligatory happiness for
everyone ; suffering has no right to exist.

Bielinsky became a citizen of the universe ;
he was completely possessed by the idea of
atheistic Socialism. His love of justice and
humanity turned him into an atheist, with
atheism as his religious faith. " I am a terrible
man," he said, " when some mystical folly gets
into my head." The average Russian is just
such a " terrible man " ; his idea, when he is
an atheist, is just such a " mystical folly." In
Bielinsky, however, there still remains a venera-
tion for Christ as a friend of the poor and the
fallen, who preached a religion of compassion.
Harnack has remarked that the ideas of Mar-
cionism are native to the Russians. It is true
that the Russian atheism of the " earthly
idealists," as they are sometimes called to dis-
tinguish them from the " heavenly," is inspired
by tendencies akin to Marcionism ; it arises
chiefly out of their being tortured by the pro-
blem of evil, injustice and suffering. But
Marcion, though he revolted against God,
Creator of the World, the God of the Old Testa-
ment, as an evil Demiurge, because He created
a world full of evil and suffering, admitted an
unseen, distant God, Father of Jesus Christ, the
Saviour and Redeemer of the world. Russian

1 1

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

atheism rejected every kind of God, because to
admit God was to justify evil, injustice and
suffering and give in to them. Evil was con-
sidered above all as suffering. Bielinsky had
already sharply underlined the problem of how
" the little child's poor tears " are a necessary
condition of creation — the problem which
Dostoievsky later put into the mouth of Ivan
in The Brothers Karamazov. He will not accept
a world whose creation is accompanied by the
sufferings of human beings. He wants to
destroy that world and create a new one where
suffering does not exist. God created an unjust
world full of suffering, and therefore He must be
rejected for moral reasons.

Russian nihilistic and atheistic Socialism
arises out of compassion for suffering personality
and defence of it against society. The purely
Russian Socialism of the so-called narodniki
(" lovers of the people ") was individualistic at
its origin ; one still notices that in the 'seventies
in N. Mikhailovsky, who built up a whole
theory of " the struggle for individuality." But
Russian atheistic Socialism ended by rejecting
personality and dealing with it cruelly and
mercilessly. That is the fatal outcome of its
inner logical process. One sees this in Bielinsky,
with his readiness to inflict great suffering in
order to abolish suffering, and destroy human

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

persons for the benefit of human personality.
For " Marat's love " of mankind is always like
that. It begins by protesting against the
" universal " that oppresses and tortures per-
sonality, and ends up by proclaiming a new
" universal " — love of humanity ; not, how-
ever, the love of living human persons, but love
of the idea of humanity ; love of something " far
off," the abstract idea of justice and a perfect
social order. And this new " universal " turns
living human personality into its own tool and
instrument, denying its absolute value and
interior life. Compassion turns into cruelty,
freedom into compulsion and violence ; defence
of personality against the tyranny of society
leads to extreme social despotism. Such is the
fate of an atheism which seemed to be deter-
mined by noble spiritual motives. And that is
what disclosed itself in the Russian Nihilism of
the 'sixties ; it was a paradox combining in
itself a struggle for personal freedom and an
extreme violation of personality by social utili-
tarianism, a denial of its right to individual life
and creation. Nihilism does not understand
the mystery of the Cross, the meaning of suffer-
ing, and that is why it fails as a religion.

Russian Nihilism of the early 'sixties was
largely founded by priests' sons, who had been
believers in their childhood and were brought
13

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

up in the school of Orthodoxy. The most
striking examples are Dobroliubov and Cherny-
shevsky, both of whom, like all our " en-
lighteners," were literary critics and publicists.
Ghernyshevsky was also an economist. Dobro-
liubov's diary, which was published, shows in
what type of soul Nihilism and anti-religious
feeling can grow up. His childish, youthful soul
astounds one by its religiousness, its earnest
faith, its moral purity, its seriousness, its severe
ascetic character ; and it remained such to
the very end of his life. He died very young
(Russian Nihilism of the 'sixties was, indeed,
above all a Youth Movement, a revolt of
young souls ; Pisarev, too, the most pugnacious
and brilliant of Russian Nihilists, was quite a
young man when he died) . As a child, Dobro-
liubov was tortured by the experience of sin.
His conscience reproached him with his most
insignificant misdeeds, such as eating too much
jam or sleeping too long ; he had a passion for
purity. He loved his parents, especially his
mother, in a most touching way. Though still
in his early childhood, he was wounded by the
decadent, unspiritual life of the Russian clergy.
He was thunderstruck by the death of his
parents, especially of his mother, taking it as a
manifestation of evil in the world. He lost his
faith because he could not stand the scandal

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

and injustice of the world, or the baseness of his
Orthodox Christian surroundings. He wanted
light, and he seemed to be surrounded by the
kingdom of darkness. He decided that man
himself must bring light into this dark unjust
world, and he became a Nihilist " enlightener "
(prosvetitel) .

Russian prosvetitelstvo (self-devotion to the
" enlightenment " of the people) generally
takes the form of Nihilism, and in this the
radicalism and maximalism of the Russian
makes itself felt. Dobroliubov's life was short
and joyless. His Nihilism was directed by
nothing but noble and pure spiritual motives ;
he could not see the corrupting results of
Nihilism. Dobroliubov did not understand the
meaning of the Gross ; he suffered but did not
bear the Cross.

Chernyshevsky, the chief theorist of Russian
Nihilism in the 'sixties and of atheistic Socialism,
was also a man of the clerical class, a priest's
son. There was an ascetic element, inherited
from Orthodoxy, in his* mental outlook. He
was an honest, pure, disinterested, self-sacrific-
ing man, who spent nineteen years as a convict
for an insignificant political offence and bore
the trial courageously. His novel, What's to be
Done? in which he proposes a Nihilist social
Utopia, is very weak as a work of art, but it

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

contains strong ascetic and moral elements. The
hero, Rakhmetov, sleeps on nails so as to harden
his character ! Early Nihilism was characterised
by the quest of truth at all costs, a protest
against every conventional lie and hypocrisy ;
it was especially a denudation, a throwing away
of all veils and garments, a belief that, once that
was done, the truth of life would be revealed.
The naive materialism that the Russian Nihilists
professed like a religious faith was determined
chiefly by moral, one may even say ascetic,
considerations. They held that any sort of
idealistic or spiritual metaphysics was an unlaw-
ful luxury, a mental debauch, a forgetfulness of
the sufferings of the common people. It was
their duty to live in poverty and be satisfied
with bare necessities. Bukharev, one of the
most remarkable and original of Russian theo-
logians in the nineteenth century, appreciated
Ghernyshevsky's book What's to be Done ? very
highly from the moral point of view. He saw in
it certain true, though unconscious, Christian
elements. The youth Pisarev made a real mas-
sacre of aesthetics and art, and rejected Pushkin ;
he did so for ascetic reasons. ^Esthetics are a
useless and inadmissible luxury. The only art
that can be allowed is art that serves the actual
needs of mankind. The thinking realist, as
Pisarev called his ideal of human personality,
16

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

must turn to unbeautified reality, and, above
all, free himself from all illusions and self-deceit,
from every mental or artistic luxury.

The Nihilism of the 'sixties had already
brought forth the main themes that operate and
triumph in the Bolshevik Revolution : hatred of
all religion, mysticism, metaphysics and pure
art, as things which deflect energy from the
creation of a better social order ; substitution
of social utilitarianism for all absolute morality ;
exclusive domination of natural science and
political economy, together with suspicion of
the humanities ; recognition of the labourers,
workmen and peasants, as the only real men ;
oppression of interior personal life by the social
principle and social utility ; the Utopia of a
perfect social structure. Perfection in life is to
be attained not by changing man, but by
changing society. It is understood first and
foremost as freedom from suffering and the
advent of happiness.

The demands of Russian Nihilism entered into
Communism and are being executed by it.
Here we have to deal with the spiritual sources
of Russian Nihilism, and show up its funda-
mental self-contradiction. As a peculiar pro-
duction of the Russian spirit, a Russian spiritual
sickness, it could only be experienced by a soul
that had grown up on the spiritual soil of

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Orthodoxy, but had lost its faith. As in our
popular schism, so also in our intellectual
Nihilism, one is conscious of an ascetic denial of
the world and of culture that proceeds from the
Orthodox religious character. The gradualness
of history is foreign to Orthodox consciousness ;
Orthodoxy is the least evolutionary, the most
eschatological form of Christianity. Doubts as
to whether culture is justifiable are a traditional
theme of Russian religious and social thought.
Is not culture perhaps bought at too dear a
price ? Is it not foreign to the common people ?
Does it not transform real life into something
false, conventional, artificial, illusory ? Purely
Russian questions, these. Nihilism, at its sources
and in its purest form, is asceticism without grace ;
asceticism not in the name of God, but in the name of
the future welfare of mankind, in the name of a perfect
society. And this graceless, Godless asceticism
urges men to perform deeds of prowess, to make
sacrifices, to lay down their lives. It will not be
reconciled with the injustice and suffering of
the world, but desires its end and ruin, and
the advent of a new world. Its psychology is
eschatological.

With this graceless asceticism, Nihilism is torn
by a fundamental contradiction : it begins by
wanting to emancipate personality and free it
from the slavery of social surroundings, with

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

their norms and rules, traditions and preju-
dices, and yet it finally enslaves the human
person to social utility and the interests of
society ; it denies the right of personality to
lead its own spiritual and creative life ; it
rejects religion, philosophy, art, morality as
qualitative contents of personal life, and throws
down all values that exalt personality. And it
is obliged to do so, because it considers human
personality to be a mere product of social sur-
roundings, and denies its spiritual nature. It
rejects morality for moral reasons. It professes
the grossest utilitarianism, yet it is moralist
through and through. It ends up in moralistic
social utilitarianism. Now, that means the com-
plete subjection of personality to society. Per-
sonal moral conscience is done away with and
replaced by the moral conscience of society, the
group, the movement, the party. This comes
out with extraordinary force in Communism.
The social motives in Communism proved to be
stronger than those of personal emancipation ;
stronger than the yearning for personal perfec-
tion and truth, which is a considerable force in
Pisarev's Nihilism. Nihilism denied all spiritual
and cultural values, but it recognised one value
as supreme, the value of social truth, justice, the
welfare of the people, the happiness of the lower
working classes. It is immoral to think of any-

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

thing except that higher value ; everything must
be sacrificed to it. The conflict of religious faith
and scientific knowledge, which played such a
large part in the rise of infidelity in the West,
plays quite a secondary one in Russia. Russian
infidelity, Russian militant atheism, has moral
and social motives at its basis. The Russian
soul is troubled not so much by any conflict
between Christianity and science as by that
between it and social truth, by the fact that
Christianity backs up social untruth. It is
wounded, above all, by the conventional, false
and hypocritical rhetoric indulged in by Chris-
tians. Science itself becomes, for Russian
Nihilism and atheism, an object of religious
faith and idolatry, and this only confirms the
fact that it is not a question of mere objective
science.

Vladimir Solovyev expressed the fundamental
paradox of Russian Nihilism thus : " Man has
evolved out of a monkey — therefore it is our
duty to love one another." To profess the
theory of man's origin from the monkeys, and
profess it in the grossest manner, becomes a
social duty. If you profess the truth that God
created man after His own image and likeness,
you will probably be in favour of serfdom, a
defender of social injustice ; you will justify
social evil and be an enemy of the working

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

people. Darwinism, like materialism, has
become a necessary part of the Communist
catechism. As a matter of fact, it is in no way
favourable to Communism, and rather justifies
the capitalist system. But for Russian Nihilists
and atheists, science has become a catechism
that lays down an obligatory doctrine to be held
by faith.

In the 'seventies the extremes and roughness
of Russian Nihilism were toned down, and social
preoccupations finally got the upper hand in it.
It was a time when the intelligentsia went out to
the simple working people, to the peasantry, to
work for their welfare and their emancipation.
It witnessed the final formation of Russian
narodnichestvo— the belief that the real truth of
life is to be found in the working people (narod),
especially in the peasantry. But the intellectual
narodniki were divorced from the people's faith,
from Orthodoxy, and they infected them with
atheism. The left wing of the Russian intelli-
gentsia, Nihilist in its views on religion and
philosophy, Socialist and " a lover of the
people," was made up of people partly from
the class of nobles, and partly from various other
branches of society, generally from the lower
classes. But the psychology of these two classes
was different. For the nobles it was generally
the result of a stricken conscience, repentance
21

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

for social sin ; for the others, a matter of honour
and indignation, a revolt of the oppressed.
Mikhailovsky gave up righting for his own
rights and cried out, " The peasant is whipped,
let me be whipped too." A characteristic fea-
ture of Russian atheistic Socialism and narod-
nichestvo, was an extraordinary capacity for self-
sacrifice. Its adepts, the best among them at
least, denied themselves the pleasures of their
own temporal life ; they went lightheartedly to
prison, to forced labour, to the scaffold, without
the consolation of belief in an eternal life here-
after— a very interesting psychological pheno-
menon. They were people who held earthly
good and happiness to be the only object of life,
and yet they were prepared to make sacrifices
and undergo suffering in order to further that
end, which they personally had no hopes of
attaining in their lifetime. And so they were
called " earthly idealists." The comparison
with contemporary Christians was by no means
a favourable one. The greater mass of decadent
Christians of the nineteenth century gave little
proof of capacity for self-sacrifice ; they clung
to the good things of this world and consoled
themselves with those of the next. This did
much to strengthen anti-Christian and anti-
religious feeling. Religious and philosophical
spiritualism and idealism were associated with

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

injustice in earthly living, with practical
materialism. A justice that was put away into
heaven seemed a hindrance to the realisation
of justice on earth. The Christian martyrs,
saints and ascetics were forgotten ; they were far
away in the remote past. Contemporary Chris-
tianity was too much used as a means to earthly
goods and interests. Denunciation of the un-
truth, falsehood and hypocrisy of so-called
Christian society inspired and nourished anti-
religious psychology. The unworthiness and
sinfulness of Christians became a victorious
argument against Christianity itself.

It is worthy of note that the Anarchist revolt
against the false contemporary world, which
called itself Christian, came from men of the
upper aristocratic class of the Russian nobility.
Such is the Anarchism of Bakunin, of Prince
Kropotkin, and the peculiar religious Anarchism
of Count Leo Tolstoy. Bakunin combined
Anarchism with militant atheism ; he rebelled
against God, the Creator of the world, as against
Satan, and he saw in Him the source of power
and government, that is, of the greatest evil of
life on earth. His Anarchism has an almost
mystical note in it ; it is a kind of religious
phenomenon. The old Russian messianic idea,
purely religious in its basis, rises up again in
a new way in Bakunin. The Russian and

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Slavonic world has the great mission of light-
ing a vast fire which is to burn up the old sinful
world. This passion for destruction is a creative
passion. Out of the ash-heap, out of the ruins
of the old world, a new world will arise, free and
beautiful. This revolutionary, messianic idea
of Bakunin has found its way into Russian
Communism, which believes that the Russian
people are to send forth a light that will
illuminate the bourgeois darkness of Western
Europe.

Tolstoy, though no atheist, was a kind of
religious Russian Nihilist. His appearance was
only possible on the spiritual background of
Russian Orthodoxy. He also separated him-
self in an anarchical and nihilistic spirit from
the world of falsehood and untruth, revolted
against its history and culture, and overturned
all its values. He searched passionately for true
life, and in its name he yearned for denudation,
for the rejection of all earthly trappings. Divine
justice is only to be discovered in Nature, in life
according to Nature. Tolstoy preached a Chris-
tianity of his own. Psychologically it still con-
tained many strong Orthodox and ascetic ele-
ments, but in his impassioned and indignant
criticism of historical Christianity and the
Church, with its dogmas and sacraments, one
often comes across the same themes and argu-

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

merits that occur in anti-religious propaganda.
He repents of the social and cultural sin and
falsehood on which the so-called Christian
world is founded.

It is typical of Russian psychology that the
Russian soul has suffered bitterly from the crisis
of culture and been inclined to criticise it. And
so it rebels against religion and the Church, in
so far as they have become part of culture and
submitted to its laws and norms. Not only the
Russian anti-religious movements of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, but also the
religious movements revolted against " his-
torical " Christianity, that is, against Chris-
tianity as it appears and acts in history and so
submits to the untruth, violence, injustice and
evil that rule history. We have here a very
characteristic Russian tendency, which some-
times took the form of a radical rejection of
Christianity and religion, and sometimes that
of a yearning for some sort of pure Christianity
unspoilt by history. Russian thought was pre-
occupied by the philosophy of history, but the
relativity of history disgusted its absolute, con-
sciousness. Every earthly city is evil, unjust,
relative, subject to the prince of this world.
Christians have no lasting city, they seek the
city that is to come. And the quest of that
city is shared even by those Russian souls

Alere

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

which have denied God in its name, out of
protest against the earthly city full of evil and
injustice. Russian atheists seek the Kingdom
of God upon earth, but without God and against
Him. The psychology of Russian atheism is
a survival of ancient gnostic and anarchical
ideas : the Creator of the world is an evil God,
who made an evil, unjust world full of suffering,
and therefore every power on earth is an evil,
satanic power, belonging to the prince of this
world, and to fight injustice is to fight an evil
God, the author of the world. These ideas
already appear in the extreme forms of the
Russian Raskol and the Russian sects. They
operate also in the revolutionary intelligentsia,
but in its consciousness they are combined with
the most superficial of Western materialist
doctrines. Russian atheism, in its most pro-
found forms, may be expressed in the following
paradox : God must be denied, in order that
the Kingdom of God may come on earth. In
Russian religious psychology there was always
a strong prophetic element. Torn up from its
religious roots and perverted, it remains in
Russian atheism with its social basis. That
atheism comes, above all, from having forgotten
that Christ, our God, Himself suffered and was
sacrificed for us.

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

iii

But what is most interesting of all in our
subject is the way Russian Nihilism and
atheism passed into Communism. In the new
psychological phenomenon of the Communists'
militant atheism we can watch the fatal logic of
that Nihilism and atheism which are connected
with the Russian quest of external social justice.
The Russian Communists' atheism is quite a
different psychological phenomenon, connected
with quite another soul-structure. Why did
the Russian soul, with its compassionate love of
mankind and its hankering for justice, absorb
the teaching of Marx, which would seem to be
so foreign to it ? Dostoievsky foresaw a great
deal, but Marxism was not yet within his ken.
He only knew French Socialism. With the
victory of the Revolution, Russian atheism and
anti-religious sentiment enter a completely new
phase.

Karl Marx, who began by following L.
Feuerbach in his views on religion, later de-
clared that it was " opium for the people " (he
uses that expression in his essay on Hegel's
Philosophy of Law), and considered that religious
faith was the greatest hindrance to the emanci-
pation of the proletariat, and therefore of all
mankind. Poor weak man has a strong, rich

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

God, and gives up to Him all his wealth and
strength. The struggle against God means that
man will attain wealth and strength ; once he
is rich and strong he will have no need of God.
Religion transports the realisation of man's
welfare into an illusory, imaginary world of
unreality, and so hinders its really being
attained ; it weakens man's activity and para-
lyses his determination to organise social life.
Religion holds out illusory consolations and
therefore it sanctions injustice, poverty and
weakness in earthly life. Heaven is the arch-
enemy that prevents earth from being set right.
The tone of Marxian atheism is quite different
from that of traditional Russian atheism, which
had included strong elements of compassion,
pity and a sort of asceticism, whereas Marxian
atheism is chiefly concerned with strength — the
power of organised society. Religious faith
must be plucked from the heart of man and the
idea of God destroyed, in order that human
society may become powerful, human life be
definitely organised and rationalised, and that
the final victory over the elemental powers of
Nature and the elemental irrational forces in
human society may become possible. The
Marxian type of atheism is not moved at all
by pity ; on the contrary, it is pitiless. In order
to procure power and riches for the social collec-
28

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

tivity it proclaims ruthless cruelty towards men.
There is no humanitarian element left in it. It
comes from Feuerbach, but it goes one further
than him and rejects his religion of humanity.
It was not in the name of man that Marx
raised the standard of revolt, but in the name
of the mightiness of a new deity, the social col-
lectivity. He is not so much moved by pity for
the suffering humiliated proletariat, longing to
alleviate its sufferings and liberate it from
humiliation, as by the idea of the coming
might and power of the proletariat, the future
messiah destined to organise an earthly empire.
The pathos of Marx is, above all, one of power ;
it is full of strength and longs for conquest ; it
is a victorious psychology. He wants man, as a
social and socialised being, to become a power-
ful organiser and constructor.

Already at the end of the nineteenth century
a strong Marxist movement grew up in Russia,
entered into battle against the old " people-
loving " Socialism, and essentially modified the
outlook and tendency of the radical Russian
intelligentsia. The intellectual elements pre-
vailed in it over the sentimental. And at the
beginning of the twentieth century Russian
Marxism split up. The more cultured Marxists
went through a spiritual crisis and became the
founders of an idealist and religious movement,

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

while the majority began to prepare the advent
of Communism. And so we come to the chief
psychological riddle : Why did the Marxian
type of atheism, apparently so uncongenial, win
the day in Russia ? Why did the Russian
Revolution adopt the Marxian creed? Why
did it become the obligatory catechism of the
Communist Party ?

The Marxian type of atheism, inspired by
the will to rule and the pathos of power, gained
the upper hand in Russia when the Revolu-
tion was victorious ; the compassionate people,
yearning for justice, the oppressed and the
persecuted, became masters of the situation,
and themselves changed into oppressors and
persecutors. Compassionate atheism, the
atheism of weakness, changed into a domi-
neering atheism, an atheism of power. Suffer-
ing rejects its own meaning and wants to turn
into happiness. A psychological metamorphosis
took place. The expression on Russian faces
changed. A sort of new anthropological type
appeared, that had grown up and formed in the
War, and triumphed in the Revolution. The
victorious, organising atheist made his appear-
ance. The suffering soul-structure of the old
Russian revolutionaries turned out to be abso-
lutely useless and inapplicable to the new
conditions and the new epoch. And the old
30

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

revolutionaries, formed in the time of oppression
and persecution, underwent a spiritual re-birth.
Communism made a natural selection of a par-
ticular kind of soul-structure. The young men
came straight into life with a new mentality.
They had a psychology of the victorious, a
psychology of the members of one class that
have conquered those of another, which reminds
one of the attitude of races and nations that
have conquered other races and nations. A
conqueror who triumphs and is conscious of his
strength has a different psychology from that
of a weak, oppressed, enslaved man, who pities
the weak and the oppressed. The spiritual out-
look of men who seek truth and revolt against
dominant untruth, differs from that of men who
look upon themselves as the bearers of truth
that has conquered and dominates. Old Rus-
sian Nihilism and atheism was born either of
repentance and compassion on the part of the
privileged cultured classes or of offence and
resentment on the part of the oppressed.
Neither of the two felt themselves to be vic-
torious. The penitent revolted noblemen
deserted the governing class, but they left their
dominant position and lost their power over
life. It was they who came into power in
the victorious Revolution. The dominant part
in it was played by those who had been offended

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

and oppressed, and the resentment that charac-
terised them took on new forms. The type of
the avenger comes in. Atheism becomes an
atheism of revenge, it persecutes religion, closes
churches, oppresses the clergy. The avenger
considers that he was offended and oppressed
because of the domination of religious beliefs
that maintained that offence and oppression.
When an offended and oppressed man, whose
mental outlook is one of resentment, comes into
rule and power, it is difficult for him to act
nobly and magnanimously ; nobility and
magnanimity are aristocratic virtues that
flourish in souls free from resentment.

In former Russia the people, especially the
peasant and middle classes, were more believing
in and truer to Orthodoxy than the upper
classes, the nobility, which had come under
the influence of the free-thinking philosophy of
enlightenment and Voltairianism in the eigh-
teenth century and the intelligentsia. At the
Revolution the idea of enlightened philosophy,
which in Russia always inclines to Nihilism,
came down among the common people and, in
a very vulgarised form, took possession of the
labouring and peasant youth. It is a process in
the popular sphere analogous to that which
took place in the intelligentsia of the 'sixties.
But the psychological difference is enormous.
32

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

Among the masses, atheism and Nihilism
mean a protest against the beliefs which, as
their consciousness, worked upon by anti-
religious propaganda, teaches, held them in
slavery. In Communism we now find an anti-
religious psychology different from that of
former Nihilism.

Between Bielinsky, Dobroliubov, Cherny-
shevsky, etc., and Lenin, Stalin and (above all)
the souls they hold sway over, there is an abyss.
Their spiritual texture is completely different.
The anti-religious psychology of the Com-
munists is one of victorious and triumphant
offence and revenge, which pay off their scores
and get their own back. The psychology of the
victorious triumphant " proletariat " is one of
compensation for former humiliation. That is
precisely how Marx lays down his doctrine of
the proletariat's messianic vocation. It is the
most oppressed class in capitalist society, and it
makes up for this by being conscious of its
messianic vocation to set mankind free, its
mighty power that is to come. The most
remarkable modern social theorist, de Man,
very rightly interprets Marx's teaching on the
great mission of the proletariat in the spirit of
Adler's psychology : the working class suffers
from humiliation and social inferiority and
makes up for it by nursing the idea of a higher

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

vocation, so as to satisfy its longing for
superiority.

The old anti-religious psychology of Russian
Nihilism still had religious and even orthodox
roots, that fed on the experience of sinfulness
and guilt, though in a perverted way. The new
is already quite severed from them : its spiritual
mainspring is different. The anti-religious
psychology of militant atheism is determined by
a desire to dominate and wield power. It is an
undeniable psychological fact that man is better
able to bear the trial of persecution than that of
triumph. One sees it in the history of Chris-
tianity. Christians nobly bore the trial of
persecution and became martyrs ; and to-day
we see the same thing in Russia — the Orthodox
Church is glorious in her martyrs. But Chris-
tians have not borne the trial of triumph well ;
they easily become persecutors. And the fact
that they did so when they were in power was
a scandal that led men to abandon the faith
and become atheists. There was a time when
men suffered persecution for atheism and the
right to unbelief; they were thrown into prison
and burnt at the stake. But in the hour of their
triumph atheism and unbelief become perse-
cutors, imprisoning and shooting faithful Chris-
tians. Russian atheism was born as something
oppressed that rebels against the injustice and
34

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

evil of the world ; it rejected God because the
world is evil, unjust and full of the sufferings of
innocent people. Yet when it triumphed it
became a persecutor, created a new injustice,
producing evil and causing an immeasurable
amount of suffering. Nihilism grew up in pure
ascetic souls that sought for truth and justice.
But now it is transformed ; it becomes amoral
no longer in theory only but in actual life ; it
grants free play to the evil instincts and rejects
the justice in whose name it denied God.
It is a fatal psychological process. In accord-
ance with the Russian spiritual type, it was not
so much the scientific as the messianic elements
of Marxism that dominated in Russian Com-
munism : the idea of the proletariat as the
liberator and organiser of mankind, the bearer
of a higher truth and a higher justice. But that
messianic idea is militant, aggressive, pugna-
cious and domineering : the idea of exultant
strength. There is no room here for the
victimised, passive, all-suffering elements of old
Russian messianic consciousness. The prole-
tariat Messiah is not at all a suffering victim ;
he is a victor, a world-organiser, a condenser of
strength. That is, of course, above all an idea
and not an empirical fact. Russia is a land of
peasants ; the factory proletariat is an insignifi-
cant portion of the Russian people, and the
35

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Revolution has not at all increased that mes-
sianic class. But an idea, a myth, is a tremen-
dous moving force in history, and has proved
to be such in Russia also. It has created a
completely new soul-formation, in which suffer-
ing and sympathy, sacrifice and asceticism are
crushed out by power and domination, strength
and organisation. And this is the outcome of it ;
the fact that the idea of God is driven out of
man's consciousness in no way leads to man
and the things of man being finally freed and
finding their self-expression ; the result is that
certain strange inhuman or superhuman forces
appear in this consciousness and begin to
oppress him. That is, from our point of view,
an extraordinarily interesting and important
psychological process.

A fundamental fact in anti-religious psycho-
logy is the appearance in the human soul of
idols and idolatry. Man is by his nature a
\ religious being, and the soul of man cannot live
empty of religion. Veneration and adoration
of something higher cannot be torn from the
human soul ; man cannot live without a rela-
tion to something superhuman. Only a super-
human principle can make up the idea of man
36

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

itself. That is a fundamental truth of anthro-
pology which must be admitted quite apart
from various forms of religious belief. Now,
when faith in a true living God fails, and the
very idea of God is pushed out of man's con-
sciousness, the images of false gods arise in his
soul and religious worship is paid to them.
Man has a tendency to idolatry that cannot be
uprooted ; he has a capacity for turning
absolutely anything, every kind of value, into
an idol. He makes an idol of knowledge, or
art, or the State, or nationality, or morality,
or social justice and organisation. And to all
these idols, behind which are hidden genuine
values, man pays divine worship. Idolatry
always makes use of undoubted values and
goods, but they are spoilt and corrupted by it
as the result of a violation of man's spiritual
harmony. It always employs man's former
religious psychology, directing to its own
service all his store of religious energy, accumu-
lated in human souls by positive religious
processes.

Without a religious soul-formation devotion
to any ideal would be impossible ; man could
not sacrifice himself in the service of any idea,
even atheistic. Absolute egoism will never
succeed among men, and least of all will it
succeed among Russian Nihilists and revolu-

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

tionaries. Idealistic atheism always means
essentially the adoption of some form of idolatry,
for complete emptiness of soul can only lead
to suicide. If the Communists succeeded in
uprooting every form of faith from the human
soul they would destroy faith in Communism —
the capacity for making sacrifices in virtue of
the Communist idea and of consecrating all
one's energy to it.

I Communism comes forward claiming to be
a new religion, and it requires great stores of
religious energy and great strength of religious
faith if it is to be put in practice. And precisely
because Communism is itself a religion it
persecutes all religions and will have no religious
toleration. Communistic atheism has nothing
in common with laicism and liberalism. It
looks upon itself as the only true religion and
will suffer no other to live alongside of it. It
demands religious adoration of the proletariat
as the chosen people of God ; it deifies a social
collectivity called to supplant God and man.
The social collectivity is the one and only
criterion of moral judgments and acts ; it
contains and expresses all justice and truth.
Communism creates a new morality which is
neither Christian nor humanitarian. It has
its orthodox theology and sets up its own cult
(the cult of Lenin, for instance), its own
38

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

symbols, its own feasts, its " red baptisms " and
" red funerals." It has its own dogmatic
system, obligatory for all, and its catechism ;
it exposes heresies and excommunicates heretics.
This religious character of Communism finds
a congenial breeding ground in the religious
psychology and character of the Russian people.
The Russian people are passing from one
mediaeval period into another, after experiencing
the renaissance only in its small upper class.
The workman is not at all inclined to pass from
Christian faith to enlightened rationalism and
scepticism ; he is more inclined to go over to a
new faith and a new idol-worship. Russian
idealistic Communists (and the Soviet order
depends entirely on them) are as believing in
spiritual outlook as were the old Russian
Nihilists, although their faith is now connected
with different emotions and longings. Com-
munists are by no means sceptics, and that is
why the sceptical people of the West find them
so difficult to understand. Real fanaticism is
always a product of idol-worship. Christian
fanaticism also was the result of idolatry within
Christianity, of an idolatrous perversion of the
Faith. And Communism is fanatical in so far
as it is idolatrous, in so far as it turns relative
social values into absolute ones. That is what
idol-worship always does.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Nihilism, seen from one side, is a desolation,
a turning of everything into nothing ; every
relative value and benefit of culture is rejected
and exterminated. But, on the other hand, it
always proceeds to turn some relative values and
benefits into something absolute, to deify some-
thing or other, to give divine honours to some
unworthy object that is utterly devoid of divine
attributes. Without that, its pathos and the
self-devotion of its convinced adepts would be
impossible. Russian Nihilism and atheism took
on the features of that religious maximalism
which is innate in the Russian character. The
Russian soul, having lost the Christian faith,
hankered after salvation, the saving of the
people, of humanity and the world from evil
and suffering. The Russian revolutionary of
the twentieth century did not believe in the
Saviour ; but he considered himself to be a
saviour and a victim — that is just the pathos of
his martyrdom. The Russian revolutionary
accepted sacrifice and martyrdom, but he did
not accept or understand the mystery of the
Cross. The quest of salvation, understood
either religiously or socially, is so characteristic
of the Russian soul that it continually falls into
doubt as to its right to cultural creation. That
sort of doubt was experienced by Gogol and
Tolstoy in a particularly acute way.

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

The ancient Russian messianic idea goes on
living in the deep spiritual layers of the Russian
people. But in the conscious mind its formula
changes, the thing " in the name " of which it
acts ; the messianic idea rises out of the
collective unconsciousness of the people's life
and takes on another name. Instead of the
monk Philothey's Third Rome we get Lenin's
Third International. It takes on Marxist
clothes and Marxist symbolism, and adopts the
characteristics of the Russian messianic idea ;
the vocation of the Russian people is worked
into it. The international and the Russian
national type are so intertwined that it is
difficult to distinguish them. Internationalism
appears as the national Russian vocation and
takes on the character of the Russian idea.
The same psychological springs are at work.

Marxian Communism aims at the complete
rationalisation of life, but it is itself under the
influence of the Russian irrational element,
collective and unconscious. Anti-religious pro-
paganda adopts quite unrational forms ; a
burning idolatrous fanaticism enters into it.
Quasi-scientific arguments against faith drawn
from popular pamphlets take on the nature of
a fanatical faith. Already in Russian Nihilism
science was never a wholly objective research ;
it became an idol, an object of religious faith.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

We see the same thing in Russian Communism.
Scientific theories, sometimes of the most
doubtful kind, become like battle-cries.
Marxism itself, of which the Communist masses
have a very rudimentary knowledge, is a
religious symbolism, the banner of an army in
battle, not a scientific theory. It is the same
with Darwinism, the mechanistic explanation
of life, and so on. If you are a Darwinian you
are on the side of the working class and are
numbered among the elect. If you believe in
Lamarck you must be on the side of the
exploiters, the bourgeoisie ; you are thrown into
prison and perish there. If you are a mechanist
you belong to the chosen people, the saved ;
but if you are a vitalist you are excommunicated
and death awaits you.

Russian Communists are suspicious and
hostile to the progress of modern physics ; they
see in the great contemporary discoveries of
physical science a bourgeois reaction unfavour-
able to materialism. They call Einstein and
Planck representatives of bourgeois science — even
of clericalism. It is obvious that all this has
no relation to objective scientific knowledge.
Marxism, for Russian Communists, represents
something quite different from what it means
to German Socialists. The so-called Russian
Mensheviks (Social Democrats) are also Marxists,
42

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

and more consequent ones for that matter.
But their Marxism does not save them ; it has
not the character of a religious creed, it is not
capable of engendering an inverted theocracy.

It is psychologically interesting that the
Communists' faith, which worships as its object
the mighty collectivity of the future, feeds not
so much on positive as on negative feelings.
Communism cannot exist, it cannot be pathetic
and intense, without an enemy to inspire it with
loathing and spite. It is something very like
what is felt by the dualistic, Manichean religious
type. The elect of the messianic Communist
faith are unable to bear sin and repentance ;
evil is entirely attributed to an evil god which
is called either " the world-wide bourgeoisie " or
" world-wide imperialism," or " world-wide
counter-revolution," and so forth. The world
is always divided into two halves, two camps,
one of which contains nothing but light, and
the other nothing but darkness. Idolatry
encourages this sort of dualism.

I leave aside here the point that Communism
suggests a great deal of fruitful matter of
thought as regards the social reform of human
society, the curing of the contradictions,
injustices and evils in our capitalist society of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That
is not now my theme ; I am dealing not with

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

the social question, but with a psychological
question. And what I want to point out is that
the anti-religious psychology of Communism is
a religious psychology turned inside-out.

In spite of the enormous psychological
changes wrought in the Russian soul by the
Revolution, its fundamental psychical formation
remains the same as before. It was built up
by Orthodoxy and it is still preserved, although
the Orthodox faith has disappeared and is
fought against. Ascetic denial of history and
culture adopt the form of Nihilist denial of
historical succession and Nihilist destruction of
cultural values. Eschatological feeling and the
obsession of the super-mundane take the form
of man's caring for nothing on earth except the
Last Judgment of social revolution and the City
that is to come — the perfect Communist society.
Religious absolutism and maximalism become
denial of relativity, denial of the gradual
measured process of historical labour. These
psychological features — perversions of the Ortho-
dox ascetic doctrine on life — are already found
in the Russian Nihilists, Bielinsky, Dobroliubov,
Chernyshevsky, Pisarev ; in the anarchist
Bakunin ; and in another way, under a reli-
gious banner, in Tolstoy. The same features,
in a completely different social atmosphere, are
passed on to the more idealistic Communists —

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

the fanatics of Communism, not its business
men. The same spiritual energy that flowed
in the service of God flows in that of idols.

Consciousness is changed, yet the sub-
conscious basis would seem to be identical.
But the great difference between the service of
God and the service of an idol is that a man
who serves God is spiritually nourished by
grace, whereas the servant of an idol has no
such nourishment. An idol has no spiritual
food to give and no grace to send down ; it is
created by a misguided application of spiritual
energy, and in its service the soul remains shut
up in itself, self-centred, with no outlet to super-
human realities. That is the fatal side of the
worship of false gods. Religious psychology
remains, only religious ontology is lacking.
Anti-religious psychology in the Russian people
often bears traces of a religious faith that has
not disappeared. The Russian peasant in
Dostoievsky's story who took the Blessed Sacra-
ment and shot at It, dealt with It none the
less as something holy. Sacrilege always pre-
supposes some sort of belief in sanctity, other-
wise it loses all its meaning ; one cannot
commit sacrilege to an ordinary piece of
matter. And as a matter of fact the sacrilegious
element plays a large part in the Communist's
anti-religious propaganda. The man who com-

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

mits sacrilege not only makes a mockery of what

others deem holy, he himself enters into a special

relationship with the sacred objects he mocks.*
* * * *

In conclusion, I should like to recapitulate
my version of the fundamental moving forces
in anti-religious psychology, the pathos of
atheism. It cannot be better studied than in
Russian psychology. Anti-religious psychology
is constituted above all as ■ the result of the
human soul's inability to bear the experience
of evil and suffering, personal and social ; it
gives in under the scandal and temptation
implied by the problem of theodicy — the
justification of God. The conflict of religious
faith with reason and science is a secondary
matter, often a mere pretext for unbelief, used
by the soul to convince itself of the Tightness
and purity of its unbelief. When a man tells
himself and others that he would like to believe,
but that scientific honesty and conscientious-
ness do not permit of his doing so, he is deceiving
himself. In reality it means that his faith has
not stood the trial of life, experienced by him
outside the sphere of knowledge. But faith
never disappears for good and all. It is trans-

* I may add that alongside of anti-religious propaganda
in Soviet Russia there is also a religious revival, a re-birth
of the persecuted suffering Church.

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

formed, it goes on existing in another shape ;
it can be applied to the very reason and
science which are used for its rejection.

The great Russian genius, Dostoievsky, had an
admirable insight into the psychology and logic
of atheism, especially Russian atheism, and did
more than any other to throw light on them.
He saw the primary source of unbelief to consist
in experience of the phenomenon of suffering, yet
without acceptance of the meaning of suffering —
that is, of the Cross. And the fundamental
Christian answer to the anti-religious revolt
against suffering to be that God Himself, the Son
of God, suffered, so that ever since then to
suffer is to bear the Cross.

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

Men's attitude as regards Communism has
been, up till now, rather emotional than
intellectual. The psychological atmosphere has
been very unfavourable to an understanding of
the ideological world in which Communism
moves. Among Russian emigrants it has
roused a passionate emotional reaction such as
one might expect from wounded people ; there
are too many who, on being asked what Com-
munism is, could answer, " My own shattered life
and unhappy lot." In Western Europe men's
attitude is characterised either by bourgeois fright
and the bourgeois reaction of the capitalist world,
or by the superficial and irresponsible toying
with Bolshevism (a snobbish fad, for the most
part) indulged in by some intellectuals. But
hardly anyone has taken the ideology of Com-
munism, the Communist faith, seriously.

The most remarkable of Russian philosophers
in the nineteenth century, a Christian philo-
sopher, Vladimir Solovyev, once said that to

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

defeat what is false in Socialism one must recog-
nise what is true in it. The same must be said
of Communism, which is one of the extreme forms
of Socialism. In Communism there is a great
untruth, an anti-Christian untruth, but it also
contains much truth, and even many truths.
In Communism there are many truths which
one might formulate in a whole series of para-
graphs, and only one untruth ; but that un-
truth is so enormous that it outweighs all the
truths and spoils them.

Communism should have a very special
significance for Christians, for it is a reminder
and denouncement of an unfulfilled duty, of the
fact that the Christian ideal has not been
achieved. Christian justice has not worked
itself out fully in life, and in virtue of the
mysterious ways of Divine Providence the forces
of evil have undertaken the task of realising
social justice. That is the spiritual meaning of
all revolutions, their mysterious " dialectics."
Christian " good " has become too conventional
and rhetorical, and so the carrying out of certain
elements of that " good " which is proclaimed
in theory but very inadequately achieved in
practice, is undertaken in a spirit of terrible
reaction against Christianity. The sin and
baseness of Christians, or, rather, of false Chris-
tians, have shut off and darkened the light of

5°

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

Christian revelation. Throughout almost all
its later history, the Christian world has been
infected by a sorry duality ; Christians have
lived, so to speak, in two different rhythms,
the religious rhythm of the Church, governing
a limited number of days and hours in their life,
and the unreligious rhythm of the world,
governing a greater number. The greater part
of their life has not been enlightened and
sanctified by the Truth of Christ. The most
unjustified and unenlightened aspect of it has
been economic life, social life, which has been
abandoned to its own law. Economic life in
capitalist societies is not subjected to any higher
religious and moral principle. Marx was right
when he said that capitalist society is an
anarchical one. Its collective life is deter-
mined by the free play of private interests, and
there is nothing more opposed to the spirit of
Christianity than the spirit of a capitalist
society. It is not by mere chance that the epoch
of capitalism has coincided with abandonment
of Christianity and a weakening of Christian
spiritual idealism. And the idea of Commun-
ism, which in our day oppresses and persecutes
all religions and all churches, is of religious
and even Christian origin. It was not always
materialist and atheist ; in the past it had in
it a religious and spiritual note. It must be

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

remembered that the first Communist, the first
to trace the outline of the Communist Utopia,
was Plato ; that there was a primitive Christian
Communism, founded on the Gospel ; that
there existed a religious type of Communism
in the Middle Ages and at the time of the
Reformation ; that Thomas More, the author
of the Utopia, is numbered by the Catholic
Church among the Blessed ; that the Com-
munist and Socialist movements of the early
nineteenth century in France were of a spiritual
and even religious character, though vague and
indefinite. The very word " Communism "
comes from communion, commonness, mutual
participation, and such a spiritual community
between men presupposes that they partake of
some single, higher source of life — God. Only
in God and in Christ is real communion among
men attainable ; brotherhood is only possible
under one and the same Father. It is true that
modern Communists aim at obtaining com-
munity by an exterior, mechanical, obligatory
organisation of society.* But the idea itself —
communion, sharing among men — that is,
Communism in the deeper sense of the word —
is the great eternal dream of mankind.

* The German sociologist Tonnies draws a fruitful
distinction between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, but he
only speaks in terms of naturalist sociology.

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

The tragedy is that materialistic Communism
is easier to achieve than Christian Communism.
One can attempt to bring it into being by means
of violence and imposition, without taking into
account men's spiritual freedom and sinfulness.
By such means spiritual community is unattain-
able, yet it is possible to create a new organisa-
tion of society. But Christianity recognises
spiritual freedom and therefore it cannot
believe in a forcible organisation of community.
When Christendom attempted to organise it
in the form of mediaeval theocracy, ignoring
liberty, it broke up and the design was con-
demned to failure. Christianity recognises the
inherent value of human personality, and is
incapable of organising a society in which
personality is humiliated and denied. Materia-
listic Communism rejects the value and meaning
of human personality, and so its task is lighter.
But when Communists accuse Christianity of not
having realised itself in actual life and freed
humanity from evil and suffering, they fail to
see and understand the most important thing
of all — the freedom of the human spirit, and
the impossibility of organising a perfect society
by external, mechanical, forcible means, and
of doing away with sin.

It is, however, true that some limit must be
set to the prevalence of sin in social life, and that
53

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Christians must strain their wills towards the
transfiguration of society in the spirit of Christ.
It is nothing but a hypocritical fallacy when
conservative bourgeois Christianity argues that
to transfigure and improve human society and
introduce greater justice into it is impossible,
because of the sinfulness of human nature. In
reality the attempt to do so is not imperative
because we are optimistic about human nature
after the manner of Rousseau, but precisely
because we are pessimistic about it and con-
sider that some order must be set up that will
put a limit to the outbreak of sin in social life.
It is the bourgeois ideology born of capitalism
which has been optimistic, and believed in a
natural harmony arising out of the conflict of
private interests. Communism is possible, and
universal Communism may one day be possible,
not at all as the result of human nature's
sinlessness, but precisely because of its sinfulness.
And society will be radically rearranged by
the forces of sin, if truth does not trouble to do
the rearrangement. Utopias are much more
capable of being carried out than has been so
far believed. Sin itself can very well realise
a Utopia. But the guilt and responsibility
for the evil which that will involve will fall
both on " good " turned into mere rhetoric,
and on "the good" who were capable of
54

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

judging others but no longer capable of judging
themselves. Communism, in its sinister and
Godless form, is the fate of so-called " Christian "
societies and at the same time a reminder, the
judgment which those societies did not want
to pass on themselves and which will therefore
be passed upon them. And that is why it is so
difficult to distinguish, in Communism, between
truth and untruth.

The honour of having discovered Com-
munism does not belong to the Russian people ;
they received it from the West. But they
undoubtedly have the honour of its first
incarnation in actual life. And so we come to
the question of what constitutes the attractive-
ness of Communism, why it is so infectious, why
its ideas were victorious in the Russian Revolu-
tion, and why the Communist creed moves
masses and creates enthusiasm.* Now, it is
impossible to understand that if Communism is
considered merely as a political and economic
phenomenon and subjected to rational criticism
from the standpoint of political economy.
Communism, both as a theory and as a practice,
is not only a social phenomenon, but also a

* It is only as regards the very first stage of the Revolu-
tion that one can explain the popularity of Communism
by the fact that it flatters the masses, connives in their
instincts and interests, and calls upon them to " rob the
robbers."

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

spiritual and religious phenomenon. And it is
formidable precisely as a religion. It is as a
religion that it opposes Christianity and aims
at ousting it ; it gives in to the temptations
Christ refused, the changing of stones into
bread and the kingdom of this world.

As a social system, Communism could be
neutral towards religion. But, like every
religion, it carries with it an all-embracing
relation to life, decides all its fundamental
questions, and claims to give a meaning to
everything ; it has its dogmas and its dogmatic
morals, publishes its catechisms, has even the
beginnings of its own cult ; it takes possession
of the whole soul and calls forth enthusiasm and
self-sacrifice. Unlike most political parties, it
will not admit secularised politics, divorced
from an all-embracing Weltanschauung. Its un-
human activity is, as it were, an explosion of
religious energy stored up in the human soul
by a lengthy religious process. If the Com-
munists succeeded, by anti-religious propa-
ganda, in finally tearing from the heart of man
all religious feeling, faith, and readiness for self-
sacrifice in the name of faith, they would make
faith in Communism impossible too ; they
would put an end to their own existence and
nobody would be left who was willing to make
sacrifices for the sake of the Communist idea.

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

Thus even in the name of an anti-Christian idea
they make use of the Christian formation of the
soul, the Christian capacity for faith and
sacrifice. There is no denying the deplorable
fact that Christians themselves, in the bourgeois
period of history, have given proof of much less
energy and power of self-sacrifice than the
Communists. The figures of the great saints
and ascetics were pushed back into the remote
past ; Christianity has been going through an
unheroical, decadent period and thereby pre-
paring the successes of Communism. It is an
undeniable fact, quite impossible to conceal,
that the youth of Soviet Russia are sincerely
and unconditionally fired with enthusiasm for
Communism. We see it in the energy which the
Communist youth voluntarily expends for the
realisation of the Five Years' Plan.

Theoretically, Communism is Marxism ;
Marxism is the obligatory creed of the Com-
munist party. Can Marxism, a doctrine well
known in the West, help one to understand the
attractiveness of the Communist idea ? But
Marxism is also the basis of the German Social
Democratic Party, in which one can perceive
very little enthusiasm and abnegation ; it is a
business-like, moderate party, very unlike a
religious movement, and by no means fanatical.
The complication and difficulty of understand-

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

ing Russian Communism lies partly in the fact
that it is at once an international worldwide
phenomenon and a national Russian one. In
it the rationalistic doctrine of Marxism has been
broken up by the irrational Russian element
and deformed. Here we find something of a
process that is repeated in all great revolutions.
Revolutions are brought on by irrational
elemental forces generated in the obscure sub-
conscious life of the people ; and yet at the
same time they always aim at rationalising life
and take their stand on some rational doctrine
that becomes their conventional war-cry. The
French Revolution, for example, drew its in-
spiration from the rationalistic " enlightened "
philosophy of the eighteenth century, but the
active forces in it were demoniacal and irra-
tional. And the Russian Communist Revolution
is absolutely intent on rationalising life com-
pletely so that every irrational element and
every mystery is utterly driven out of it ; yet it
also is moved, and moved with the utmost
intensity, by irrational demoniacal elements,
for which the rationalistic doctrine serves
merely as a conventional system of symbols.
It is not at all the rationalistic, objective,
scientific elements of Marxism that are at work
in Russian Communism, but the mythological
and religious elements. This curious combina-
58

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

tion of the rational and irrational element in
the Russian Revolution actually gave rise to a
legend, which is popular among the simple
people, peasants, workmen and middle classes,
that there is a distinction between Bolshevism
and Communism. Bolshevism is held to be a
purely Russian thing, a popular thing, an out-
break of revolution on the part of the Russian
people, whereas Communism is a foreign thing
that has come in from outside and bound the
popular Revolution with the chains of rational
organisation. And there is a real distinction
between the irrational and rational elements in
the Revolution, corresponding to that conven-
tional distinction between the two terms. A
revolutionary idea always includes some rational
element, and in this case it is taken from
Marxism. The question is : What is there in
Marxism that can sweep on and inspire the
masses into a vast and powerful movement ?

At the basis of Marxism lies the theory of
economic or historical materialism, according
to which the entire process of history and social
life is determined by economics, by the deve-
lopment of material productive forces, and by
the various forms of production and exchange.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Economics are the " basis " of all life, its
primordial authentic reality, whereas all the
rest, all " ideology," spiritual life, religious
belief, philosophy, morals, art, all the culture
which man considers to be the flower of life, is a
'superstructure," an epiphenomenon, a falla-
cious and illusory reflection in man's conscious-
ness of the real economic processes. Marx is
not the only thinker who has insisted on the
overwhelming importance of economics, that
is, of the degree of mastery over the elemental
forces of Nature which socially organised man
has reached ; other historians and Utopian
Socialists did so before him — Saint Simon, for
example, who anticipated Marx in many
respects. But Marx made the idea into a
system of universal economic metaphysics, and
he combined his economic metaphysics or
ontology (i.e., his teaching on the nature of
being, on the ultimate reality) with the doctrine
of the class struggle, which is the special
" discovery," or rather " revelation," of his own
genius. This last had also been spoken of
before him by a more modest science, history ;
but the idea of the proletariat's messianic
vocation belongs to Marx alone. The theory of
economic materialism by itself could not be an
inspiration for anyone : a doctrine according to
which all human life is determined by economic
60

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

processes is rather a sad one, apt to make a
man drop his hands in despondency. But
Marx by no means limits himself to that
unhappy truth. He is pessimistic about the
past, which is seen by him in its very darkest
colours, but he is an optimist as regards the
future, in which he sees nothing but the brightest.
Marx and Engels teach that mankind can jump
from the realm of necessity into that of freedom.
It is only the past that has been a realm of
necessity determined by economics. The future
will bring in the realm of freedom ; social
reason will finally vanquish all the irrational,
elemental forces of Nature and society, and
social man will become the mighty king of the
universe.

In prodigious contradiction with his own
materialism, Marx believes in the " dialectics "
inherited from Hegel. He believes that
the " dialectic process " will inevitably lead
through evil to good, through the meaningless
to the triumph of meaning. Hegel's dialectics
are connected with the idea of a universal
Logos : in them the Logos, the Meaning of the
universe, must infallibly triumph. The world-
process, for Hegel, is " dialectic " because it is
a " logical " process, a self-revelation of
Intelligence ; dialectics of its parts are only
possible as the result of their being absorbed

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

into the logical heart of the whole. There is
not the slightest possibility of translating such
panlogical dialectics into the language of
materialism, for matter is ignorant of the Logos
and the triumph of Meaning. Yet Marx lays
down a system of materialistic dialectics, and
he is able to do so because he introduces the
panlogical principle into the heart of matter
itself, into the material economic process. He
believes that that process will lead through the
struggle of contradictory forces into the triumph
of Meaning, Reason, Logos — to the realm of
freedom, to Order, to victory over the necessity
introduced by the elemental irrational forces
of Nature. A mad belief : for it remains
incomprehensible why the elemental, material,
economic process does not lead to the complete
triumph of meaninglessness, slavery and dark-
ness ; such a process is by nature irrational
and can guarantee no triumph of reason. Yet
Marx looks ahead to a perfect Communist
society which will be the very incarnation of
reason, justice and order ; there will be nothing
irrational, nothing unjust in it ; life will be
rationalised once and for ever — the triumph of
panlogism. In Marx we find an astounding
combination : an acute feeling and conscious-
ness of a furious struggle between demoniacal,
irrational forces in history (they remind one of

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

the violent forces which Jakob Bohme perceived
struggling at opposite poles in the life of the
universe), and an absolute conviction that
reason, meaning, justice, order and organisation
will be victorious in social life. Such an incon-
ceivable combination of demoniacal social
irrationalism and social " panlogism," such a
blackening of the past and brilliant concept
of the future, are attractive features of his
system. Moreover, the brilliant future is inevit-
able, the realm of freedom is pre-determined.
In the future the elemental economic principle
will have no more power over the life of human
societies, which will be determined by social
reason in its victory over every other element.
The dialectics of the material process lead
infallibly to the Kingdom of God on earth (but
without God), to the realm of freedom, justice
and power. By itself the theory of economic
materialism would be unable to enlist enthu-
siasm ; it would merely remain one out of many
scientific hypotheses. What does rouse enthu-
siasm is Marx's messianic faith. It finds its
complete expression in the idea of the prole-
tariat's messianic vocation. The aspect of
Marxism which looks forward to the future
Socialist society and to the great mission of the
proletariat has nothing in common with science
— it is a faith, " the substance of things to be
63

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

hoped for, the evidence of things that appear
not." Marx's " proletariat " and his perfect
Socialist society are " invisible things," an object
of faith. Here we are in contact with a
religious idea.

According to Marx, the basis of the historical
process is not only economics, the development
of material productive forces (that alone could
not rouse much feeling), but also the class-
struggle. All the violence of Marxism is
founded on the notion of that struggle. It is its
subjective aspect ; its scale of values is con-
nected with it. And undoubtedly Marx's very
idea of a class is " axiological," conceived in
terms of intrinsic value. The distinction be-
tween " proletariat " and " bourgeoisie " unwit-
tingly coincides with that between " good "
and " evil." In his conscious thought Marx
remains a complete amoralist, but his teaching
on the class struggle is moralistic through and
through — with a curious negative kind of
moralism. There is no good or justice, but
there is evil and injustice. And they arouse
indignation and hatred. He believes in an
original sin lying at the basis of human society,
the sin of one man's exploiting another, which
always takes the shape of class exploiting class.
Marx wants to give " exploiting " a purely
economic character : he combines the idea
64

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

with the theory of an additional price extorted
from the workers and appropriated by the
exploiting classes. But, philosophically speaking,
it is obvious that the idea cannot be purely
economic : it is necessarily ethical. When we
say that exploiting is practised, we make a
moral judgment. If the amoralist denial of the
distinction between good and evil is accepted,
it is incomprehensible why the exploiting of
man by man should call forth revolt and
condemnation as an injustice. Marxism is
an extreme form of determinist philosophy,
despising every moral appreciation. For
it, moral freedom is non-existent. Neverthe-
less it implies at its basis the idea of original
sin — an original sin which infects all the
history of the world, all classes of society, and
disfigures all human beliefs and every form of
ideology.

The sin of exploitation cuts off all possibility
of apprehending truth and creates an illusory
doctrine to maintain and justify itself. Economic
realities receive an illusory expression in men's
consciousness — such is Marx's fundamental
idea. He is forced to regard as illusory all
former ideas and beliefs. In their fundamental
principle Marx and Freud are not far apart.
Both aim at unmasking the illusory nature of
man's conscious life, its deception and untruth ;

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

and behind that illusion, deception and untruth
of consciousness they see certain unconscious
impulses, which Marx holds to be economic
class interests and exploiting, and Freud libido,
sexual impulses and the complexes they give
rise to. Marx has not yet discovered the sub-
conscious mind ; his psychology is rationalistic ;
but he aims continually at unmasking the lie
of consciousness, of conscious ideas and theories.
Now, a man who unmasks the lie and illusion of
consciousness must himself be conscious of
having the truth and know by what means truth
can vanquish untruth, and reality defeat
illusion. And so Marx believes that the
historical moment has come when truth is to
be at last revealed. At last he has succeeded
in unmasking illusion and revealing truth, in
finding the key to the understanding of the
world's history, in discovering the secret of the
life of human societies. Truth is revealed to
him, light enlightens the darkness that engulfed
all the past, because in his person the class
which is called to be the liberator of mankind
thinks and perceives the truth. Relativity is
overcome ; proletarian truth is no mere reflex
of economics, but an absolute truth. Every
social class has been infected in various ways by
the sin of exploiting and therefore shut off from
the truth. The very organisation of society on
66

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

a class basis reflected man's weakness, his
dependence on the elemental forces of Nature
and of society itself ; for a society founded on
the class struggle is enslaved to irrational forces
and has no power over its own self. Religious
beliefs merely reflect the weakness and help-
lessness of man against those natural forces,
the low development of material productive
forces, and man's dependence on his neighbour,
man's slavery. And then capitalist society
takes shape. Marx considers it to be society's
wickedest and most unjust form, in which one
class exploits another to the utmost limit.
Yet, at the same time, such a society develops
mankind's productive forces, generates power,
and brings into life a new class unknown to past
history, the proletariat.

The proletariat is the only class that is
innocent of the original sin of exploitation. It
is the class that produces all the material
treasures and goods on which human society
lives. It is exploited and crushed : the most
disinherited class, deprived of the means of
production, living in servile dependence on
Capital. But in it there grows up a force, a
collective power, that will be revealed when
capitalist society has crashed to its doom. The
proletariat is a messianic class ; its vocation is
to be the liberator of all mankind, it is even
67

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

identified with true humanity, it is already not
merely a class, for it is outgrowing the society
which includes it as a class. Truth is being
revealed to it and it is already introducing
justice in virtue of its social position. The
messianic concept of the proletariat includes the
freeing of the oppressed, that is, the achievement
of social justice, and the attainment of might
and power by a socially organised humanity.
With the proletariat's victory social rationalism
will utterly triumph and master the irrational
forces of the world. Its victory will bring
with it the final rationalisation of life, a final
regulation and ordering ; everything irrational,
obscure and mysterious will be banished from
life. The anarchy which Marx perceived in
capitalist society will come to an end. The
proletariat is clothed in all the virtues.

Now, it is perfectly clear that Marx's " prole-
tariat " is not the empirical working class
which we observe in actual life. It is a mythical
idea, not an objective reality. Marx's prole-
tarian myth resembles J. J. Rousseau's demo-
cratic myth, but its content is radically different,
for proletarian Communism is opposed on prin-
ciple to formal democracy. The myth of the
proletariat has an active force, it is intensely
dynamic and explosive. The " proletariat "
category conceived by Marx is above all

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

axiological, appreciative. The " proletariat "
is a mythical notion and, at the same time, the
supreme value, good and justice — a positive
power. The distinction between " proletariat "
and " bourgeoisie " does not record an empirical
fact observed as such in actual existence ; it is,
first and foremost, an appreciation, a judgment.
There is a strong axiological element in the
whole Marxian theory of the class struggle.
Marx would never have arrived at his concept
of a class and especially of the proletariat, if he
had not introduced into it an estimate of
loftiness and baseness, " good " and " evil."
For Marxism, like every extreme revolutionary
ideology, contains an unconscious survival of
dualistic Manichean tendencies, of the sharp
opposition between the kingdom of a good god
and that of an evil god. That dualism will
be overcome with the victory of the proletariat.
But the most important aspect of Marx's
teaching concerning the proletariat's messianic
vocation is the fact that he applied to the prole-
tariat the characteristics of God's chosen
people. Marx was a Jew ; he had abandoned
the faith of his fathers, but the messianic expec-
tation of Israel remained in his subconscious-
ness. The subconscious is always stronger than
the conscious, and for him the proletariat is a
new Israel, God's chosen people, the liberator

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

and builder of an earthly kingdom that is to
come. His proletarian Communism is a secu-
larised form of the ancient Jewish chiliasm.
A Chosen Class takes the place of the chosen
people. It was impossible to reach such a
notion by means of science. It is an idea of a
religious kind. Here we have the very marrow
of the Communist religion. For a messianic
consciousness is surely always of ancient Hebrew
origin ; it is foreign to Hellenic thought. And
such is Russian messianic consciousness also.
Messianic feeling, messianic consciousness, im-
parts an enormous power ; it inspires, calls
forth enthusiasm, incites to self-sacrifice. And
it is this which inspires the Socialist Labour
movement. If it has grown weak in the
Socialist Democratic movement, if that move-
ment has taken on a bourgeois tone, in Commun-
ism such messianic consciousness is very strong
indeed. Communists have an acute feeling that
a fatal hour of history has arrived, a worldwide
catastrophe, after which a new era will begin
for mankind. Only such a feeling as that can
make their unhuman energy and activity
possible. The Marxist theory of a catas-
trophe of capitalist society is nothing else but
faith in the certain coming of the Last Judg-
ment. Revolutionary Communism has a very
strong eschatological element in it. The time

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

and hour are nigh, a gap in time is approaching.
That is what the chief theorist of " religious
socialism " in Germany, Tillich, expresses by
the word Kairos : a kind of intrusion of eternity
into time. Marxism is quite incapable of ex-
pressing it in terms of its superficial materialist
philosophy, but it is just what lies in its under-
ground, its subconsciousness. And that is what
its force consists in. Here lies the unwinding
of the chain of determinism : a break appears
in evolution, a leap from the realm of necessity
into that of freedom ; history ends and super-
history begins.

In the Russian Revolution a meeting and
union of two messianic consciousnesses took place,
that of the proletariat and that of the Russian
people. The Russian people become, as it were,
identified with the proletariat, though, of course,
the coincidence is by no means an objective fact.
The previous essay showed the messianic feeling
which for centuries possessed the Russian people.
It was shown there how it suffered a tragic
shock in the religious schism of the seventeenth
century and took on new shapes in the extreme
sects ; how it found its way into the upper
cultured class of the nineteenth, among Russian
writers and thinkers ; how it remained in a
secularised form among the Russian revolu-
tionaries of the nineteenth century ; and how

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

it is found in an extreme form in the anarchist
Bakunin. Dostoievsky expressed the same mes-
sianic feeling in his idea of the Russians as the
" God-bearing " people. When K. Leontyev
lost faith in a positive religious vocation of the
Russian people, he began to believe that it was
destined to give birth to anti-Christ : in other
words it is messianic, but in an evil sense.
And in its latest form, not only secularised but
even made completely Godless, Russian mes-
sianism appears in Bolshevism, in Communism.
Russian Communism believes that Light will
come out of the East, that the light of the
Russian Revolution will illuminate the bourgeois
darkness of the West. The Russian people did
not achieve their ancient dream of Moscow, the
Third Rome. Imperial Russia was very far
from resembling a Third Rome. But, instead
of the Third Rome, they have established the
Third International. And in that Third Inter-
national a sinister combination has taken place
between the Russian national messianic idea
and the international proletarian messianic
idea. That is why the Russian Revolution,
inspired by the proletarian international idea,
is none the less a Russian national revolution.
The Communist religion is not of Russian
origin, but it has been reflected in a peculiar
way in the Russian religious type, which is
72

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

characterised by an eschatological expectation
of the advent of God's Kingdom on earth.

What is true in Communism ? One can lay
down a whole series of assertions in which truth
is on its side. First of all there is its negative
truth, its criticism of the falsehood of bourgeois
capitalist civilisation, of its contradictions and
diseases. Then there is the truth of its denounce-
ment of a degenerate, decadent pseudo-Chris-
tianity, adapted to the interests of the bourgeois
epoch of history. But there is also positive
truth in its scheme for organising and regulating
the economic life of society, on which men's lives
depend, and which can no longer be abandoned
to the free play of individual interests and
arbitrariness. The idea of methodically plan-
ning out the norms of economic life is, on
principle, a right idea. The liberal principle
of formal freedom in such matters produces
enormous injustices and deprives a considerable
portion of humanity of all real liberty. The
truth contained in Communism is that society
ought to be a working society of labourers, and
that the working-classes ought to be called to
play their part in history and share its culture
(though it is true that Communism has not a

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

right understanding of the qualitative hierarchy
of labour). The Russian Communists who
pasted up the slogan " If any man will not
work, neither let him eat " on every fence in
Soviet Russia probably did not suspect that
those words belong to St. Paul the Apostle.
Communism is right when it declares that man
should not exploit man and class exploit class.
Man's mastery over Nature's elements ought
not to lead to the dominating of his neighbour.
It is true that the dissociation of society into
classes struggling against each other must be
overcome, and that classes should be replaced
by professions. It is true that political organs
ought to represent men's real economic needs
and interests, and therefore be arranged on a
basis of profession and labour. That truth is
connected with Communism's criticism of
democracy as a form of political life. Politics
should serve economics : * it is social realism
that demands it. It is true that political life
should go hand in hand with a complete con-
sistent philosophy of life ; for politics without a
soul, without some great idea, cannot enliven
the souls of men. It is true that theory and

* In Russian Communism politics dominate economics
at present, which is in flagrant contradiction with
Marxism. But that is a characteristic of revolutionary
dictatorship, not an ideal of normal social order.

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

practice should be united in some all-embracing
entire type of culture and life. The upper
cultured class, the elite, cannot remain detached
from social life, deprived of a social basis ; it
should serve the social whole. Finally, it is
true that national selfishness and isolation,
producing hostility and war, should be over-
come by some supernational organisation of
mankind.

Communism states before the whole world
the great problem of its radical social recon-
struction. The whole world is burning, thirst-
ing for transformation, seeking a new and
better life. The strength of Communism lies
in its having a complete design for recon-
structing the world's life, in which theory and
practice, thought and will are at one. And in
that respect it resembles the theocratic design
of the Middle Ages. For Communism subjects
the life of individual man to a great, worldwide,
super-individual end. It goes back again to
the concept of life as a service — an idea com-
pletely lost in the de-Christianised, bourgeois
liberal epoch. Every young man feels he is
building up a new world. It may very well be
the building of the Tower of Babel, but it fills
the life of the very least among men with some-
thing super-individual which sweeps him on
and sustains him. Economics are no longer

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

a private affair, they are a world affair. Man
is being forcibly freed from private life, he is
reconstructing the world. Communism denies
individual man, but it accepts collective man as
omnipotent. Every human being is called to
reconstruct the world collectively. The weight
of the past, of history and tradition, which are so
strong in the West, is thrown aside. It is as
though the creation of the earth were beginning
afresh. The very freedom of the Western
nations prevents the radical reconstruction of
the world ; there the preservation of the status
quo gives a feeling of freedom, while change is
felt as its violation. Nevertheless, Communism
has no idea of freedom as the possibility of
choice, of turning to right or left, but only as
the possibility of giving full play to one's energy
when once one has chosen which way to turn.
Freedom of choice seems to it to be a freedom
that weakens and saps energy. If one compares
Soviet Russia with France, for instance, one can
say that the first is a land of coercion, while the
latter is one of liberty. Yet in a land of liberty
it is very difficult to reform social life ; the very
principle of formal freedom has become a
conservative principle. That is one of the
paradoxes of freedom.

The Russian Revolution has given proof of
enormous vital strength. But its force cannot

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

be entirely attributed to Communism, which
is merely its conventional formula ; it is above
all the vital strength of the Russian people, a
force formerly held in leash and now unchained.
But the untruth in Communism is greater
than its truth. It has even disfigured that
truth. It is above all a spiritual, not a social
falseness. What is false and terrible is the very
spirit of Communism. Its spirit is the negation
of spirit, the negation of the spiritual principle
in man. Its untruth is its rejection of God.
Everything flows from that source. Godlessness
cannot go unpunished. Communism is in-
human, for denial of God leads to denial of
man. Communism has not stopped midway
in the transitional realm of humanism. It has
denied God not in the name of man, as gener-
ally happens, but in the name of a third prin-
ciple— the social collectivity, its new divinity ;
and consequently it has also denied what it calls
the Christian " myth," whereas Humanism did
not get as far as its logical, complete rejection.
For the Christian " myth " is not only about
God but also about man ; it is a theandric
" myth." At first men tried to get rid of only
one half of it, the " myth " about God, leaving
the " myth " about man intact. The idea of
man's central, supreme position is a remains of
the Christian " myth." Man is God's idea,

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

God's creation, the image and likeness of God.
That constitutes his supreme dignity and
absolute significance. The dialectics of the
humanistic process were such that at first men
denied God, but still left His image and like-
ness in man and based man's absolute signifi-
cance on that resemblance. That is brought
out with extraordinary strength and acuity in
Feuerbach's anthropological philosophy. He
denied God and put anthropology in the place
of theology ; but man, for him, is still endowed
with divine attributes. Man creates God in his
own image and likeness — which is merely an
inversion of the Christian truth that God
created man in His. The Christian " myth "
about man is kept by Feuerbach ; his philo-
sophy is Godless, but not inhuman. The anthro-
pological myth is still Christian in origin.
Now Marx followed up Feuerbach, and adopted
all the arguments of his atheism, but he went
much further in his destruction of the Christian
theandric " myth." He no longer has Feuer-
bach's faith in man as a divinity. He proclaims
a doctrine that is not anthropocentric, but
sociocentric or proletariocentric. His man has
lost the image and likeness of God ; he is the
image and likeness of society. He is entirely
a product of his social surroundings, of the
economics of his epoch and the class to which
78

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

he belongs. Man is a function of society and
even, more precisely, of a class. Man does not
exist ; only his class exists. And when classes
have ceased to exist, man too will cease to
exist ; there will only be the social collectivity,
Communist society.

Such is the final result of the denial of God,
of His image and likeness in man, of the spiritual
principle in man. All the negative aspects of
Communism follow from that. It is social
idolatry. Rejection of the living God always
leads to the creation of false gods. The social
collectivity which receives divine honours steps
into the place of both God and man. The
centre of consciousness is shifted. There is no
more personal conscience, personal reason, no
more personal freedom. There is only collec-
tive conscience, reason, freedom. A very
instructive example in this connection is
Trotsky's autobiography, very self-centred but
also a work of great talent, which witnesses to
the dramatic fate of revolutionary personality
in the revolutionary collectivity. After Lenin,
Trotsky is the chief creator of the Bolshevik
Revolution. He is a very typical revolutionary.
But he is not a genuine Communist, a Com-
munist through and through. He still admits
the possibility of individual opinion, individual
criticism, individual initiative ; he believes in

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

the part to be played by heroic revolutionary
personalities and counts himself, of course,
among theifc number. He does not grasp what
one may call the mysticism of collectivity — the
most unpleasant side of Communism.

All the untruths of Communism come from its
Godlessness and inhumanity ; the falseness of
the sanguinary coercion by which it wants to
found social justice, the falseness of the tyranny
that cannot bear man's dignity ; its admission
of every conceivable means to further the end
it considers as supreme and unique ; rancour,
hatred and revenge as a way of obtaining perfect
life, the brotherhood of men. There was a
demoniacal element in Marx's teaching, which
gave it its invincible dynamism. He believed
that good can be produced by evil, that light
can be obtained through darkness, that freedom
would result from dire blind necessity. Evil
must increase, darkness must thicken. That is
how he understood the dialectics of the social
process. The workmen's lot must grow worse
in capitalist society (the Verelendungstheorie) , the
labourers must become more and more em-
bittered and penetrated by vindicative and
violent emotions. That is the basis of Marx's
revolutionary messianic hope. He wants the
working class, which is an empirical reality, to
be saturated with proletarian consciousness.

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

When that happens, feelings of resentment,
envy, hatred and revenge will grow up in it.

A " worker " must be distinguished from a
" proletarian." A workman is a labourer, and
labour is sacred ; his lot is a hard one, and
must be improved, one must struggle to free the
workers from slavery. But a proletarian is not
simply a workman, he is a workman full of the
messianic idea of the proletariat and its future
power. The proletariat is not an empirical
reality at all ; it is an idea. And in that aspect
Marxism, which consciously professes the most
naive materialism, is an extreme idealism. It
wants to subject reality to an " idea," and that
" idea " coerces and cripples reality. One
must not take Communism's materialist appear-
ance too literally ; it is conventional, a mere
struggle against religion and Christianity. In
reality Communism is highly spiritual and
idealist. Its very materialism is spiritual and
idealist, matter itself hardly plays any part in
it. And its spirituality is a dark, Godless
spirituality. One must accuse Communists of
being men of an " idea " too much, not too
little. Living personality does not exist for
them. No doubt Communism is characterised
by an extreme obsession with economics,
amounting to a perfect nightmare, which
oppresses life and crushes out all its other

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

aspects. The Soviet Communist Press is filled
with nothing but economics, it contains nothing
else at all> But it is a very peculiar kind of
economics ; they are spiritual and metaphysical
economics, that take the place of God and
spiritual life and reveal real being, the essence
of things.

Economics are no invention of Marx, any
more than materialism is. The latter he got
from enlightened bourgeois society of the eigh-
teenth century, the former from capitalist
society of the nineteenth. But Marxism gave
economics a metaphysical and even religious
colouring. The messianic hope is bound up
with them. The Five Years' Plan, whose
prosaic object is to industrialise Russia and
which, objectively, is not Socialism at all, but
State capitalism, is experienced as a religious
emotion. The hierarchy of values had already
been spoilt by bourgeois capitalism, which denied
the superiority of spiritual values. It had
already witnessed a qualitative lowering of the
level of culture ; it was a society that worshipped
Mammon. And the unique importance that
technical science acquires in Communist "con-
struction " is inherited from industrial capitalist
civilisation, and is often an imitation of
America. But in Communism the passion for
technical science assumes an ominous eschato-
82

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

logical note. Communism is torn by a funda-
mental contradiction ; it is inspired by a vast
idea of reconstructing the world ; it rouses
inhuman energy in men and fills them with
enthusiasm, and yet at the same time it creates
a grey, dull earthly paradise, a realm of
bureaucracy, in which everything will be
rationalised and there will be no more mystery
and infinity. Economics turn out to be man's
only province ; outside them there is no longer
any life, any being. The death-blow is given
once and for ever to the great ideas of God and
Man, and with them the whole content of
human life falls, leaving only economics and
technical science.

It is impossible to understand Communism if
one sees in it only a social system. But one can
comprehend the passionate tone of anti-religious
propaganda and persecution in Soviet Russia, if
one sees Communism as a religion that is striv-
ing to take the place of Christianity. Only a
religion is characterised by the claim to possess
absolute truth ; no political or economic move-
ment can claim that. Only a religion can be
exclusive. Only a religion has a catechism
which is obligatory for everyone. Only a
religion can claim to possess the very depths of
the human soul. No political programme or
State can lay down such a claim. Communism

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

persecutes all religions because it is itself a reli-
gion. Recognising itself as the one true religion,
it cannot suffer other false religions alongside of
it. Besides, it is a religion that aims at making
its way into life by force and coercion, taking no
account of the freedom of the human spirit. It
is the religion of the Kingdom of this world, the
last and final denial of the other world, of every
kind of spirituality. That is precisely the reason
why its very materialism becomes spiritual and
mystic. The Communist State is quite different
from the ordinary lay, secularised State. It is
a sacred, " theocratic " State, which takes over
the functions that belong to the church. It
forms men's souls, gives them an obligatory
creed, demands their whole soul, exacts from
them not only " what is Caesar's " but even
" what is God's." It is most important to
grasp this pseudo-theocratic nature of the
Communist State. Its whole structure is deter-
mined by it. It is a system of extreme social
monism, in which there is no distinction be-
tween State, society and church. Therefore,
such a State cannot tolerate any church along-
side of it, or if it tolerates any it is only tem-
porarily and for opportunist reasons. The old
Christian theocratic State was also unable to
bear any other religion or church competing
with it. That was in essential contradiction

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

with Christian spiritual freedom and so contri-
buted to the break-up of theocracy. But com-
munistic " theocracy " is more consistent with
itself, for spiritual freedom is no part of the faith
that inspires it.

Christianity has not put its truth into full
living practice. It has found its realisation
either in conventional formulae or in theocracies
which deliberately ignore freedom (which is the
fundamental condition of any genuine realisa-
tion), or it has practised a system of duality, as
in modern history, when its power has weakened.
And therefore Communism has made its appear-
ance as a punishment and a reminder, as a
perversion of some genuine truth. Communism
contains an eschatological element. The Apoca-
lypse does not only signify the revelation that
history is ended. There is an apocalypse
within history too. The end is always nigh,
time is always on the verge of eternity. The
world of our day is by no means an absolutely
closed world ; but there are times when that
cessation of time in the presence of eternity is
felt with greater acuteness. The eschatological
element means not only judgment passed on
history, but also judgment passed in history.
And Communism is a judgment of that kind.
The truth that refused to realise itself in beauty,
in divine beauty, is carried out in ugliness.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Here we stand before a vitally interesting
phenomenon. The Russian Communists are
the first men in history who have attempted to
introduce the Communist idea into real life.*
But how did they enter into life, with what
spiritual features, with what sort of expression
on their faces ? They entered it with a look of
unheard-of spiritual and moral ugliness, of
unprecedented gracelessness. The grace of
beauty did not light up their entry upon the
scene of life. That is why Communists are so
resentful ; they are irritated by the fact that
they produce such an impression of indecency.
Everything about them turned out to be dis-
figured : an ugly expression on their faces,
hideous gestures, an odiously ignoble turn of
mind, the monstrous atmosphere of revolu-
tionary life in Soviet Russia. The thing has a
profound ontological meaning. There may
well be a great deal of social truth in Com-
munism. I am convinced that there is. But
the deformity it acquires when once that truth is
put into practice means that it is mixed with a
great deal of untruth, that God has stood aside
from the path it has chosen for its realisation.
Ugliness is always a sign of ontological corrup-
tion. For genuine, enlightened, transfigured

* Before them there had been no more than partial
outbreaks of Communism.

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

being, full of grace, is beautiful. The Russian
Communist Revolution has nothing of those
fine theatrical gestures and splendid feats of
rhetoric that marked the great French Revolu-
tion. The Russian people are not theatrical or
rhetorical. Lenin wrote and spoke on purpose
in an ugly coarse manner, without the slightest
ornament ; it was typical of the asceticism and
poverty of Russian Nihilism. Trotsky seems
to be the one and only man in the Russian
Revolution who is fond of fine gesture and
theatrical effect, and wants to preserve the
beauty which the figure of a revolutionary
implies. And yet the hideousness of Russian
Communists has also its positive aspect. It
expresses the truth that they have abandoned
truth, the untruth in their way of practising
truth. Which does not mean, of course, that
beauty always characterises those who oppose
Communism.

With what must one oppose Communism?
How should one struggle against it ? The way
men usually oppose it and struggle against it
is calculated rather to strengthen Communism
than to weaken it. It gives new arguments to
its defenders. For what is most terrible in it is
87

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

the mixture of truth and falsehood. It cannot
be opposed by any sort of Restoration, by the
capitalist society and bourgeois civilisation of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indi-
vidualistic and liberal principles are already
outlived ; they have no more vital force left.
When a relative principle claims absolute signi-
ficance, what one needs to set against it is above
all a real absolute principle, not some other
relative principles likewise claiming absolute
significance. When a time revolts against
eternity, the only thing to set against it is
genuine eternity itself, and not some other time
which has already roused, and not without
reason, a violent reaction against itself. It is
no use opposing Communism with ideas ; it can
only be done with religious realities. Marxism
has given the lie to exalted ideas as they appear
in history. It is false, not because exalted ideas
govern history (for the old humanism is done
for), but because God exists as a tremendous
reality, and strength and the last word belong
to Him.

The only thing to pit against integral Com-
munism, materialistic Communism, is integral
Christianity : not rhetorical, tattered, decadent
Christianity, but renascent Christianity, work-
ing out its eternal truth towards consistent
life, consistent culture, consistent social justice.

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

The whole future of Christian societies depends
on whether Christianity or, rather, Christians
decisively leave off supporting capitalism and
social injustice : on whether the Christian world
sets to work, in the name of God and of Christ,
to put into practice that justice which the Com-
munists are now introducing in the name of a
Godless collectivity, an earthly paradise. If the
labouring classes have become an exceptionally
favourable breeding-ground for the poison of
Godlessness, if militant atheism has become
nothing less than " opium for the people," the
guilt must be attributed first of all by no means
only to the agitators of revolutionary Socialism,
but also to the Christians, to the old Christian
world. It is not Christianity, of course, that is
to blame, but Christians : they are too often
pseudo-Christians .

Good which does not work itself into life,
which has turned into conventional rhetoric
so as to hide actual real evil and injustice, can-
not avoid raising revolt, and righteous revolt,
against its own self. The Christians of our
bourgeois epoch of history have created most
painful associations in the minds of the working-
class ; they have not done Christ's mission to the
souls of the oppressed and exploited a harm that
can with difficulty be remedied. The situation
of the Christian world face to face with Com-

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

munism is not merely that of the depository of
eternal and absolute truth, but also that of a
guilty world, which has not practised the truth
it possesses, but rather turned traitor to it.
Communists do practise their truth and they
can always oppose that fact to Christians. Of
course, Christian truth is much harder to carry
out than Communist truth. Much more, not
less, is demanded of Christians than of Com-
munists, of materialists. And if Christians
carry out less, and not more, Christian truth
itself is not to blame. The historical tragedy
is that genuine Christianity can, apparently,
never obtain complete mastery and power in
this world. Mastery and power have only
belonged to pseudo-Christianity. The world
turns away from integral Christianity.

Meanwhile Christianity is the only basis on
which a solution can be found for the painful
conflict between personality and society, which
Communism resolves in favour of society
completely crushing personality. And it is also
the only basis on which a solution can be found
for the no less painful conflict between the
aristocratic and democratic principles in culture,
resolved by Communism in favour of completely
overthrowing the aristocratic principle. On a
basis of irreligion, either aristocracy oppresses
and exploits democracy or democracy vulgarises

THE RELIGION OF COMMUNISM

the souls of men, lowers the cultural level, and
destroys nobility.

Integral Christianity can accept all that is
true in Communism and reject all that is false.
If there is not a Christian revival in the world,
a rebirth not only among the ilite but also among
the great masses of the people, atheistic Com-
munism will conquer over the whole earth.
Will that happen ? We cannot tell ; it is the
secret of man's freewill. There is no reason to
be very optimistic. Christianity has still to
undertake the creation of a new type of sanctity
among the very dregs of the world. The future
belongs, whatever happens, to the working
classes, to the workers ; it is inevitable, and it
is just. And all depends on what their spirit
will be : in whose name will they renew life,
in the name of God and of Christ, of the
spiritual principle in man, or in the name of
Antichrist, of divinised matter, in the name
of a divinised human collectivity, in which the
very image of man disappears, and the human
soul expires ? The Russian people have stated
the problem before the whole world.

ANN ARBOR PAPERBACKS FOR THE
STUDY OF COMMUNISM AND MARXISM

AA34 THE ORIGIN OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM Nicolas Berdyaev

AA43 LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION Leon Trotsky

AA55 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION Nicolas Berdyaev

AA 56 TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM Leon Trotsky, with a Foreword by Max Shachtman

AA 57 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION and LENINISM OR MARXISM? Rosa Luxemburg, with a new

Introduction by Bertram D. Wolfe

AA 66 FROM HEGEL TO MARX Sidney Hook, with a new Introduction by Sidney Hook

AA 67 WORLD COMMUNISM: A History of the Communist International F. Borkenau

AA 73 KARL MARX: The Story of His Life Franz Mehring

AA 83 MARXISM: The Unity of Theory and Practice Alfred G. Meyer

AA 90 THE MEANING OF MARXISM G. D. H. Cole

AA 96 THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT Karl Kautsky

AA99 THE NEW COURSE Leon Trotsky and THE STRUGGLE FOR THE NEW COURSE MaxShachtm;

AA 112 THE ABC OF COMMUNISM Nikolai Bukharin

For a complete list of Ann Arbor Paperback titles write:

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS / ANN ARBOR

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The Russian revolution, main
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