Excellent book on the various influences in Russian history, culture, and religion that helped shape how Communism was implemented in the Soviet Union.
Berdyaev cites the Muscovite period and the reign of Peter the Great as particularly influential, because that was when the governments were most absolutist and repressive, using methods to control the population and the church that prefigured those used by the Bolsheviks.
He cites the messianic cast of mind of the Russian Orthodox Church, which thought of Moscow as the Third Rome (after the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires) and believed that it had a great mission to fulfill in the world. Similarly, Soviet Russia took upon itself a special mission: it was the means by which communism was to be spread throughout the world.
Berdyaev also discusses how the Russian Orthodox peasantry, unlike their Western Christian counterparts, never developed a strong concept of private property. They saw the land and its resources as belonging to God, and anyone who works them ought to be able to make a living off them. They had a feeling that the gentry were wrong to have such large estates, so that when the Bolsheviks began confiscating the estates and turning them into collective farms, the peasants were easily sold on the idea.
Berdyaev himself was a disenchanted Marxist who converted back to the Russian Orthodox Church. He was among the exiles in the “philosophers’ ships” of the 1920’s, when Lenin threw out much of Russia’s dissident intelligentsia. Unfortunately, despite his disappointment with Marxism, Berdyaev did retain (at least at the time he wrote this book—I don’t know about later in life) the same mistake to which some Christians are prone: the view that socialism is a more moral economic system than the free market, and that there must be some way to make it work without resorting to evil means or evil results.
Berdyaev cites the Muscovite period and the reign of Peter the Great as particularly influential, because that was when the governments were most absolutist and repressive, using methods to control the population and the church that prefigured those used by the Bolsheviks.
He cites the messianic cast of mind of the Russian Orthodox Church, which thought of Moscow as the Third Rome (after the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires) and believed that it had a great mission to fulfill in the world. Similarly, Soviet Russia took upon itself a special mission: it was the means by which communism was to be spread throughout the world.
Berdyaev also discusses how the Russian Orthodox peasantry, unlike their Western Christian counterparts, never developed a strong concept of private property. They saw the land and its resources as belonging to God, and anyone who works them ought to be able to make a living off them. They had a feeling that the gentry were wrong to have such large estates, so that when the Bolsheviks began confiscating the estates and turning them into collective farms, the peasants were easily sold on the idea.
Berdyaev himself was a disenchanted Marxist who converted back to the Russian Orthodox Church. He was among the exiles in the “philosophers’ ships” of the 1920’s, when Lenin threw out much of Russia’s dissident intelligentsia. Unfortunately, despite his disappointment with Marxism, Berdyaev did retain (at least at the time he wrote this book—I don’t know about later in life) the same mistake to which some Christians are prone: the view that socialism is a more moral economic system than the free market, and that there must be some way to make it work without resorting to evil means or evil results.
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