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The Origin of Russian Communism Contents NICOLAS BERDYAEV THE ORIGIN OF RUSSIAN COMMUNISM GEOFFREY BLES FIFTY-TWO DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON -3- Printed in Great Britain by Robert MacLehose and Company Ltd The University Press Glasgow for Geoffrey Bles Ltd 52 Doughty Street London WC 1 First Published 1937 New Edition 1948 TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY R. M. FRENCH -4- CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.--THE RUSSIAN IDEA OF RELIGION AND THE RUSSIAN STATE 7 I. THE FORMATION OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA AND ITS CHARACTER. SLAVOPHILISM AND WESTERNIZATION 19 II. RUSSIAN SOCIALISM AND NIHILISM 37 III. RUSSIAN Narodnichestvo AND ANARCHISM 58 IV. RUSSIAN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE AND ITS PREDICTIONS 76 V. CLASSICAL MARXISM AND RUSSIAN MARXISM 94 VI. RUSSIAN COMMUNISM AND THE REVOLUTION 114 VII. COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANITY 158 AUTHOR'S NOTES 189 -5- This page intentionally left blank.] -6- INTRODUCTION THE RUSSIAN IDEA OF RELIGION AND THE RUSSIAN STATE I Russian Communism is difficult to on account of its twofold nature. On the one hand it is international and a world phenomenon; on the other hand it is national and Russian. It is particularly important for Western minds to understand the national roots of Russian Communism and the fact that it was Russian history which determined its limits and shaped its character. A knowledge of Marxism will not help in this. The Russian people in their spiritual make-up are an Eastern people. Russia is the Christian East, which was for two centuries subject to the powerful influences of the West, and whose cultured classes assimilated every Western idea. The fate of the Russian people in history has been an unhappy one and full of suffering. It has developed at a catastrophic tempo through interruption and change in its type of civilization. In spite of the opinion of the Slavophils it is impossible to find an organic unity in Russian history. The Russians held sway over too vast an expanse of territory--the danger from the East, from the Tartar invasions (from which it protected the West as well), was too great. And the danger from the West itself was also great. We distinguish five different Russias in history: the Russia dominated by Kiev, the Russia of the Tartar period, the Russia of the Moscow period, the imperial Russia of Peter and finally the new Soviet Russia. It would not be true to say that Russia is a land of new culture, that not long ago she was still half barbarous; in a definite sense Russia is a land of ancient culture. The Russia of the Kiev period gave birth to a higher culture than that of the contemporary West. Already in the fourteenth century there existed -7- in Russia a classically perfect ikonography and a remarkable architecture. Russia of the Moscow period developed a very high culture in the plastic arts with an organic integrated style and highly finished forms of life. This was an Eastern culture--the culture of the Christianized Tartar Empire. The culture of Moscow was developed in constant opposition to the Latin West and to foreign customs. But in the Muscovite Empire intellectual culture was very weak and lacked expression. The Muscovite Empire was almost without thought and speech, but during this period, in addition to the development of the plastic arts, the elemental basis of the life of the time was given significant form; and this was lacking in the Russia of Peter, though the latter awoke to the expression of ideas in words. Thinking Russia, which produced a great literature and sought after social justice, was dismembered and styleless and had no organic unity. The inconsistency of the Russian spirit is due to the complexity of Russian history, to the conflict of the Eastern and Western elements in her. The soul of the Russian people was moulded by the Orthodox Church--it was shaped in a purely religious mould. And that religious mould was preserved even to our own day, to the time of the Russian nihilists and communists. But in the Russian soul there remained a strong natural element, linked with the immensity of Russia itself, with the boundless Russian plain. ( 1 ) 1 Among Russians 'Nature' is an elemental power, stronger than among Western peoples, especially those of the most elaborated, i.e. Latin, culture. The nature-pagan element entered even into Russian Christianity. In the typical Russian two elements are always in opposition--the primitive natural paganism of boundless Russia, and an Orthodox asceticism received from Byzantium, a reaching out towards the other world. A natural dionysism and a Christian asceticism are equally characteristic of the Russian people. A difficult problem presents itself ceaselessly to the Russian--the problem of organizing his vast ____________________ 1For Author's Notes see p. 189 ff. -8- territory. The immensity of Russia, the absence of boundaries, was expressed in the structure of the Russian soul. The Landscape of the Russian soul corresponds with the landscape of Russia, the same boundlessness, formlessness, reaching out into infinity, breadth. In the West is conciseness; evrything is bounded, formulated, arranged in categories, everything (both the structure of the land and the structure of the spirit) is favourable to the organization and development of civilization. It might be said that the Russian people fell a victim to the immensity of its territory. Form does not come to it easily, the gift of form is not great among the Russians. Russian historians explain the despotic character of Russian government by this necessary organization of the boundless Russian plain. Kluchevsky, the most distinguished of Russian, historians, said, 'The state expands, the people grow sickly.' In a certain sense this remains true also of the Soviet-Communist government, under which the interests of the people are sacrificed to the power and organization of the Soviet state. The religious formation of the Russian spirit developed several stable attributes: dogmatism, asceticism, the ability to endure suffering and to make sacrifices for the sake of its faith whatever that may be, a reaching out to the transcendental, in relation now to eternity, to the other world, now to the future, to this world. The religious energy of the Russian spirit possesses the faculty of switching over and directing itself to purposes which are not merely religious, for example, to social objects. In virtue of their rdigious- dogmatic quality of spirit, Russians--whether orthodox, heretics or schismatics--are always apocalyptic or nihilist. Russians were true to type, both in the seventeenth century as Dissenters and Old-ritualists, and in the nineteenth century as revolutionaries, nihilists and communists. The structure of spirit remained the same. The Russian revolutionary intelligentsia inherited it from the Dissenters of the seventeeth century. And there always remains as the chief the profession of some orthodox faith; this is always the criterion by which membership of the Russian people is judged. -9- After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Second Rome, the greatest Orthodox state in the world, there awoke in the Russian people the consciousness that the Russian Muscovite state was left as the only Orthodox state in the world and that the Russian people was the only nation who professed the Orthodox Faith. It was the Monk Filofei who expounded the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome. He wrote to the Tsar Ivan III: 'Of the third new Rome'. 'Of all kingdoms in the world, it is in thy royal domain that the holy Apostolic Church shines more brightly than the sun. And let thy Majesty take note, O religious and gracious Tsar, that all kingdoms of the Orthodox Christian Faith are merged into thy kingdom. Thou alone, in all that is under heaven, art a Christian Tsar. And take note, O religious and gracious Tsar, that all Christian kingdoms are merged into thine alone, that two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth. Thy Christian kingdom shall not fall to the lot of another.' The doctrine of Moscow the Third Rome became the basic idea on which the Muscovite state was formed. The kingdom was consolidated and shaped under the symbol of a messianic idea. The search for true, ideal kingship was characteristic of the Russian people throughout its whole history. Profession of the true, the Orthodox Faith, was the test of belonging to the Russian kingdom. In exactly the same way profession of the true communist faith was to be the test of belonging to Soviet Russia, to the Russian communist state. Under the symbolic messianic idea of Moscow as the Third Rome there took place an acute nationalizing of the Church. Religion and nationality in the Muscovite kingdom grew up together, as they did also in the consciousness of the ancient Hebrew people. And in the same way as messianic consciousness was an attribute of Judaism it was an attribute of Russian Orthodoxy also. But the religious idea of the kingdom took shape in the formation of a powerful state in which the Church was to play a subservient part. The Moscow Orthodox kingdom was a totalitarian state. Joseph Volotsky was the founder of state Orthodoxy. Ivan the Terrible, who was a remarkable theoretician of absolute monarchy, taught that a Tsar must not only govern the state, but -10- also save souls. It is interesting to note that the Muscovate period was the period of Russian history in which the smallest number of saints was produced. The best period in the history of the Russian Church was the period of the Tartar yoke, when spiritually it was most independent and displayed a strong social sense. ( 2 ) (Ecumenical consciousness was weakened in the Russian Church to such an extent that Russians ceased to regard the Greek Church, from which the Russian people received their Orthodoxy, as a true Orthodox Church; they began to regard it as a crippled expression of the true faith.
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