How I Became a People’s Socialist. -Mikhail Semyonov

(Printing House of the I. D. Sytin Partnership, Pyatnitskaya Street, own house. Moscow, 1907)

I. The First Stage

The title of the article may seem pretentious. It recalls Herr’s pamphlet How I Became a Social Democrat. We confess: we deliberately repeated the title of the German Christian socialist who became a social democrat, believing that we have more right to it than Herr himself. Herr did not “become” a social democrat; he simply joined the party, disillusioned with Christian (German) socialism. A Russian priest truly “becomes” one—that is, through a complex evolution, a kind of via dolorosa of doubts and torments, destroying old gods, sometimes deeply fused with the heart, he arrives at a new social ideal. And my path is not mine alone, but generally that of a priest—the path any Russian priest follows, raised on the Gospel, Dostoevsky, and life.

I will begin with a tiny memory from distant childhood.

A noisy, large cloth factory… So much fire. Unbearably loud: huge wheels clatter. The terrifying steel arms of machines flash by. It’s eerie. And amid this noise wander pitiful gray, dust-covered little figures of child sweepers. Weary, exhausted, and above all, pathetically small.

This was long ago, 25 years back, but the impression is vivid and bright. What struck me was precisely this: the insignificance of man, his powerlessness before the machine—terrifying, enormous, mercilessly strong.

I do not wish to regale readers with anecdotes on the theme of “how I became virtuous.” I simply point to a vivid fact that left the first unease in my soul, from which it could not free itself for whole decades afterward. I had accidentally glimpsed the kingdom of Moloch, and it immediately crushed me with its blasphemous might and triumphant power, yet somewhere it left the seed of a painful thought: still, this should not be… It can be otherwise. There is no need to confess what life did with this chance childhood unease. The evolution, growth, and decline of a “private” soul—mine or anyone else’s—are of no interest to anyone: only the evolution of a priest as a priest can hold attention.

Thus, I pass over an entire twenty years… Life thrust me into the very center of diverse currents, hurled me into Petersburg. I was called here, among other things, to fight neo-Christianity—that is, Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, and others. I was to defend the Church, its truth (not the living, earthly truth, which even I forgot at the time, but the dogmatic, philosophical one). And I did so sincerely and without falsehood, because the center of my faith, my sole lifeline, was (and is) the image of Christ, crucified for the world’s God… I spoke and wrote hurriedly and avidly, hastening to cry out: “Wait before condemning our truth—you do not know it. Come closer…”

Perhaps at times I succeeded in defending my truth: I gave it both brain and soul. But I myself always remained inwardly defeated by my audience, even when it was silent. A passing accusation would be flung, and one could not shake it off for days and weeks.

“You are lying,” they write from Saratov on behalf of an entire party in a lithographed leaflet, “it is not Christ you defend, but the order of things. One cannot live in your Church with your Christianity. So much slavish falsehood: the Church’s persecution of sectarians and of freedom of faith in general, the Church’s approval of war, even more—of executions, the approval of every existing ‘fact,’ even serfdom, because it is a fact; of the existing popular and social morality—again because it exists, because it is a fact… We see that the Church is a tool in the service of the ‘existing,’ whereas its task is to judge from the height of ‘eternity,’ from the height of the Gospel… And we cannot accept it… you… your Christ. Is it not for this that your repainted, renewed dogmatic truth is thrust forward—to lull us, to make us forget the living untruth and the fact that you are silent about it and dare not speak of it? You want to hypnotize us with dogma…”

“Leave off,” writes the naive, semi-literate but clever and plain-spoken merchant S-v from Samara (known for his open letter to Metropolitan Antony), “you are exactly like a shop clerk… Extolling your Church like goods you are selling off. And who knows, perhaps you really do not see that the goods are water-damaged, and above all, you do not see the mark of the Antichrist upon them… Faith is faith, and you speak well of it, but look— this faith is needed so that God may be set as a watchman over the property of the rich. You have given everything of God’s to Caesar for service, turned God into a watchman, remade the Gospel so that it, too, like the Code of Punishments, threatens only slaves who do not obey their masters, and comforts the robbed: endure, “there” you will receive tenfold.”

I felt that there was a terrifying amount of truth here. How could I deny it, when Iriney Orlovsky in a sermon proved that the poor are needed precisely so that the picture of life may be aesthetically richer? Not all flowers in the meadow are red and red; blue and purple are needed too. Not everyone can be sated and rich—it would be ugly and meager, and would pall (evidently, on the sated).

And this frank cynicism was no rarity. How many efforts, indeed, do we make in praising “poverty” for the sake of the rich’s peace of mind. Understandably, alongside such sermons, the letters from Saratov and Samara burned like coals. The necessity was felt to first free the truth of the Gospel from its slavish servile role. It was felt that there would be no faith in us or in Christ as long as our word and thought remained in service—yes, and above all, as long as that very thought was inwardly, by its very psychology, rotten, depraved, slavish.

The words of Samarin came to mind—a kind of pillar of Orthodox consciousness: “When the existing order of things, for example, even serfdom, is placed entirely under the direct protection of faith; when it is, so to speak, imposed upon her to approve, bless, and sanctify everything that exists at the present moment but did not exist yesterday and may not exist tomorrow, then naturally all the most reasonable needs unsatisfied by the present, all the most peaceful hopes for the better, finally, faith itself in the people’s future—all this becomes accustomed to viewing Christianity as a barrier that must sooner or later be stepped over, and little by little inclines toward falling away from Christ and the Church.”

They came to mind—oh, how they came to mind. The circumstances were already different from two or three years ago. Back then, I myself quoted these “words of Samarin” as self-justification: the state, they say, uses the Church for its own purposes and discredits it; we do not want this; we ourselves are burdened by the alliance as by a curse… Therefore, distrust toward us is unlawful and unfounded.

Thus could speak a priest with a “troubled” conscience a year ago. Thus spoke I. Now the priests of God Most High have shown that the alliance—their slavish service to one Caesar instead of God—does not seem a “curse” to them. An entire army of Moloch’s slaves, mistakenly standing near Christ’s altar, displayed such zeal in their blasphemous struggle against truth that it became frightening for the very integrity of Christianity. Fear was born that (as in Rozanov’s Anxious Night) the last slaves would leave the dishonored temple crying: “Out of this filth, meek in appearance, bloody within. Here the mystery of iniquity has begun to work.”

And Samarin’s thought arose before consciousness in a new, sharply accusatory form—visions of Lamennais. Seven purple-robed figures in a hall hung with black. The fifth, rising, approached the throne of bones with a wavering gait and placed his foot on the fallen crucifix. He took a skull filled with blood, drank from it, and said to his comrades: “You have thought much and well to destroy freedom. Your means are effective and energetic, but they are insufficient. Turn people into animals—that is good; strike them with fear of inexorable justice, cruel executions; otherwise, sooner or later they will tear you to pieces. The executioner must be the first minister to a good prince.”

And beside him, this “fifth,” the seventh, having drunk like the others from a human skull, spoke thus while standing on the crucifix: “There is no more Christ; it is war not for life but for death, eternal war between Him and us. But how to distract the peoples from Him? Listen! We must buy Christ’s priests with wealth, honors, power. And they will command the people, in Christ’s name, to submit to us in everything, whatever we do, whatever we order. And the people will believe them, entrust them with their conscience, and our power will be stronger than ever before.”

And they did it, and they bribed… A heavy and tormenting darkness descended… Precisely a heavy and tormenting darkness.

Is it surprising that I took fright at this threatening gloom and wanted to cry out to my comrades: “Save yourselves! Your proximity to the pagan and evil principle of slave-owning power is ruinous, especially now…” And as a result of this call, a break had to appear—not hidden or masked—with former forms of state views.

It is often said that for a priest, apparently, the forms of power and so on should be indifferent. Perhaps so. Very possibly. In any case, this is not important for us now. The fact is that the connection with past power corrupted, and it had to be severed as decisively and clearly as possible. This is a stage that every priest who does not wish to trade in Christ for the sake of power must necessarily pass through and will inevitably pass through. And thus the break with power became my first stage.

However, this did not resolve the question. In what form, then, should Christianity, liberated from slavery, reveal itself in its constructions of this “earthly, social life”? Finding a living earthly program was very difficult. From the past remained hard-to-erase stains of slavery. Consciousness turned out to be infected with the “leprosy of the ages.” And on bad soil, at first only false, compromise forms could take root. The “spirit of compromise,” the satan of our age (in Ibsen’s expression), triumphed in the person of Dostoevsky and the German socialists. The half-truth of my brochure Cursed Questions and Christianity was born.

II. In the Slavery of Compromise

Dostoevsky was, is, and probably will long remain the “evil genius” of Christian thought. In his work, alongside the seeds of “revelation,” are laid elements of a powerful narcotic poison, energetically decomposing above all the idea of Christian social order.

At the crossroads, in search of an answer to how to understand the world and reconcile with its untruth, my thought could not fail to encounter Dostoevsky on its path.

He had traveled the same road—first of sorrowful bewilderment, then of mortal horror before life, before “Baal reigning in our world of usurers”—the same road that our entire generation of “sick Christians” experiences, and I naturally met him at one crossroads.

Read two or three pages of Summer Impressions of Winter Impressions. One chapter is even called “Baal,” and it is filled with the impression of sorrowful horror at the desecration of man in the “kingdom of machines” laboring not for the worker but for the usurer. A city boundless as the sea— the screech and howl of machines. The poisoned Thames. The glittering crystal palace of the exhibition. Something apocalyptically triumphant, great, beautiful. This is a temple… Yes, of Baal. Wealth, luxury, mirrors, and gold. And against this background—a crushed and pitiful man.

The witches’ sabbath of runaway negroes—workers who, in drunkenness and debauchery, dull, joyless, heavy, and silent, give away on Saturday what they earned through a week of toil and cursing. Women and even girls selling themselves in Haymarket… All the pus of the shameful sediment of life’s order. Mothers who bring out their daughters for sale. All these are sacrifices to Baal. This drunkenness, debauchery, loss of consciousness, in which there is “something systematic, ostentatious, encouraged,” for Dostoevsky are “souls laid at the foundation of the accursed tower of Baal.” “Baal reigns and does not even demand obedience, because he is convinced of it. The poverty, suffering, murmuring, and stupefaction of the masses do not trouble him in the least.” “And for the pariahs of his kingdom, the prophecy will not come true for a long time. They will not be given palm branches and white robes for a long time, and for a long time yet they will cry out to the throne of the Most High: ‘How long, O Lord?’”

And alongside the pictures of adult slavery—especially for me—sickening and comprehensible pictures of children’s suffering. “I remember once, in the crowd,” Dostoevsky relates, “I saw a little girl, no more than six years old, all in rags, dirty, barefoot, emaciated, and beaten: her body, showing through the rags, was covered in bruises. She walked as if not remembering herself, not hurrying anywhere, God knows why staggering in the crowd; perhaps she was hungry… But what struck me most was that she walked with such grief on her face, such hopeless despair, that to see this tiny creature already bearing so much curse and despair was somehow unnatural and terribly painful. She kept shaking her disheveled little head from side to side, as if reasoning about something, spreading her tiny hands apart, gesticulating with them, and then suddenly clapping them together and pressing them to her bare little breast.” And this again was a morning sacrifice to the same god of evil capital.

Such pictures, such a view of the world, were too comprehensible to me for me not to accept it. Dostoevsky’s conclusion was also comprehensible: “Baal must be destroyed.”

Yes… yes… But how?

As is known, Dostoevsky answered this question with a sharp critique of socialism, in place of which he proposed his own “Russian socialism”—the socialism of Vlas, collecting alms for churches.

Dostoevsky’s Russian socialism was a slavish, compromise, beggarly product of a soul corrupted and crushed to dust by hard labor, but Dostoevsky’s language, the narcotic and hypnotic effect of his images illuminated by beautiful pain—his “dissolute heroes” (Zosima, Alyosha)—masked the slavish motives and sources of the system.

“Russian socialism” is a system that should elevate everyone to the moral level of the Church as a spiritual brotherhood, while preserving the external inequality of social positions; it “demands the spiritualization of the entire state and social order through the embodiment in it of the truth and life of Christ.”

“Not in institutions, not in ‘phalansteries’ and all sorts of social anthills, but in active love, in the loving compassion of Zosima, Alyosha—there is salvation. In the resolve to do everything for the sake of active love.”

Our life is bad because we ourselves are bad. “By becoming better ourselves, we will correct the environment and make it better. After all, this is the only way to correct it.”

Forget about your “rights,” forget that the world can be remade at once by “reforms.” Heal souls…

All these thoughts, set forth here concisely and drably, in the brilliant setting of Dostoevsky’s hysterical pictures and images steeped in suffering, seemed bright and convincing. Only one question arose: but must we really forget about all those girls selling themselves in Haymarket, about the horrors of their situation? Is nothing to be done with the very “fact” of sale? Can the witches’ sabbath of “runaway negroes” not be ended and a holiday obtained for them?

To agree entirely with the solution that we must wait, that now we can and should save only that one girl, those separate units encountered on the road, was unwilling… Against this rebelled the remnants of social conscience, which the Antichrist’s preaching of pity only for one’s neighbor could not obscure.

And here the Christian socialists helped Dostoevsky—those who approached him so closely in the basic idea of preaching active love. They “want to bring Christ into the kingdom of machines,” as Naumann declares—that is, they want precisely what I wanted.

“To drive poverty out of the world is our task. To fulfill this task, God has given us the machine. He has given billions of iron slaves, the ability to produce countless products. He said: ‘In it (the machine), My children, I give you the means to destroy want. Take the machine and illuminate the earth with it, take it and build a new age with it!’ God gave cloth factories so that no one would lack clothing, and transport ships so that no one would go hungry…”

And I wanted the same—to make the machine work for the toilers. Precisely. Nothing more need be desired: this was what I needed. A practical supplement to Dostoevsky.

And alongside this, their program—so broad, democratic: workers’ insurance, the fight to shorten the working day, prohibition of child labor, regulation of women’s labor…

I found myself captivated: I decided that the best expression of Christian consciousness would be precisely the union of Dostoevsky with Naumann’s Christian socialism, that of the Americans. And I became a proselyte and, perhaps, an apostle of compromise.

At one of the meetings at Fr. Grigory Petrov’s, S. N. Bulgakov defended his paper “Christian Politics,” in which he proposed, in the name of Christianity, to organize “unions of Christian politics” to fight against a social order hostile to freedom and, consequently, to the spiritual personality. Sergei Nikolaevich proposed an organization of a sort of political party, like the Western Christian socialist ones, only on the basis of genuine socialism, not the card-sharper’s socialism of Stöcker.

I spoke out as a strong opponent of the proposed Christian political organization. In my story In the City, in its first part, there is this dialogue:

“Fr. Peter (to the intellectual):

— If we speak of the Church’s role in life, then its ‘politics’ generally coincides with the politics of those who are for truth… for the rights of the lesser… We can join hands with those who fight for the rights of the offended, for the unification of the weak against the untruth of the strong.

Fr. Nikolai: — Rights?.. No…

Pale, trembling as if in hysterics. Face suffering, sick…

— Rights… No… no… There will be none. God forbid. This is Judas’s betrayal. This is the second temptation. Turn stones into bread… In your program there is no, no Christ, crucified Christ, God; if ever I come to the thought that there was no Christ, that His cause is impossible here, then I will accept this ‘Christian politics.’ Perhaps in a week, in two, but only then, when Christ dies. The Church cannot be in alliance with a group that says to the offended: ‘Take your right,’ because there are no rights in the Church, though it will say: ‘A curse on the oppressors.’ The Church can stand only for struggle, as the conscience of humanity—its judge. We can call only to such deeds as we can preach with the Chalice of the Lord’s Blood in our hands, to arrange such unions and organizations where there are no rights and there is only self-sacrifice, though we think that this will arrange life richer than socialism.”

Fr. Nikolai of these lines is me in my objections at that time to Fr. Petrov and S. Bulgakov.

Naturally, on the basis of this view, I considered possible only all sorts of church “factories of happiness,” like parish brotherhoods, Christian pastoral mediation between labor and capital, church organization of apartments for the poor, and so on and so forth. The most I would agree to were Naumann’s half-measures, stipulating, like hypocrites, that Christ attached no value to external forms, placing the essence of all world history in the development of individual souls.

I did not know then that in a week or two, precisely for the sake of faith in Christ, I would have to renounce my false point of view.

III. Quarrel with Dostoevsky and the German Christian Socialists

It took only a small push for the nightmarish influence of the “cruel talent” and the compliant Christians (Naumann, Stöcker, and others) to collapse.

This push came from a chance passage in Dostoevsky. If you remember, objecting to Gradovsky against his thought that institutions must be improved, not only personalities, that the Christian perfection of Korobochka would not abolish serfdom, Dostoevsky answered with positively wild, terrible words: “One must understand Christianity,” he writes to Gradovsky: “if Korobochka were a Christian, there would be no serfdom at all on her estate, despite the fact that all the serf documents remained in her chest. And what business is it of Christian Korobochka whether her peasants are serfs or not. She is their mother… etc.”

This was an illustration of the words about spiritual brotherhood while preserving social inequality. For me, these lines were a revelation. What? The fact that “the serf documents are in the chest” is indifferent? Korobochka is a mother…

No, such a mother is not needed. Precisely, one must understand Christianity, and that means understanding that in life’s relations, the most terrible and sinful thing is not that, using the documents and deeds, a person is hunted down with dogs, but the very “documents” on souls. And if the documents lie in the chest, the whole shame remains intact and untouched.

That is the essence of Christianity, as we have partly already said in Stolichnaya Pochta, that it demands condemnation not only of the facts of sin and violence, but above all demands the condemnation and negation of violence and evil in those forms where evil has become fixed, frozen, crystallized, where the leprosy and syphilis of the soul have embodied themselves in the form of general sin—that is, to condemn, as one’s own sin, every prison window and every light in a house of shame…

Christ above all condemned the old morality and the old social order as the quintessence of former slavery, and only by condemning the social order, serf deeds, usury, and property could He “firmly hope to eradicate evil” in every individual soul.

Korobochka a mother? God forbid—first of all, one must renounce the mother-Korobochka.

But then the question arose: how to regard the entire system built on such an anti-Christian foundation? Only negatively. I understood that the whole preaching of Zosima’s pity or Korobochka’s “motherhood” was not a mistake but a deception. Pity of Zosima’s type, so hostile to Christ’s type of loving hatred toward the world’s evil, was invented by self-interested people.

There is nothing more profitable for human insignificance than pity. It is profitable for the individual because, as I have already said in more detail elsewhere (Stolichnaya Pochta), a person hides in it from the torment of seeing the suffering and degradation of the whole world. But it is also profitable for egoistic bourgeois self-preservation: pity demands only concessions, charity, and thus simultaneously gives the bourgeois the “sweet joy of helping one’s neighbor” and saves him from greater sacrifices. Finally, charity, pity, and the like demand, by their very nature, gratitude and patience as light.

Clearly, the preaching of Korobochka’s motherhood is a criminal involvement in a bad bargain and nothing more. Hence, I decided, Christianity must above all fight against ideas that decompose Christianity, against falsifications—that is, against ideas of charitable pity, which Christ condemns as a kind of counterfeit.

In the play Two Ideas (preparing for publication), a slave girl of a German feudal lord tears down a crucifix in the square and, in a mad ecstasy, hurls this accusation at Christians:

“I tore it down… Yes, I tore it down… You don’t need Him… I don’t want you to dishonor His wounds with your lips. Blasphemers, crucifiers!.. He wanted you, like Him, to suffer the shame and evil of the world. But with your own hands you multiply His wounds and those of His world, to find your happiness in them. And you have remade His torments into sweet wine for voluptuaries. You have covered the whole world with wounds, killing both bodies and souls, only to obtain and give others the joy of ‘enduring for the Lord.’ You don’t need Him…

I understood… I was there when He was dying, and I saw… And I wanted to throw myself at His feet, to kiss them, and suddenly I saw that He shuddered and drew back. And I understood: He was afraid. He feared that I, drunk with the happiness of kissing Him, pitying, would not see the torments of the poisoned world, onto which He had poured new rivers of pure blood to frighten the world with them.

Yes, yes. He shed it to wash away the leprosy from the world. You, in His name, multiply and grow this leprosy. And on holidays you approach Christ’s cross to take intoxication in voluptuous pity, and on weekdays you offer the same cross for your slaves to kiss, so that around His sufferings they may find consolation in patience, not rebel, and gratefully kiss your hands that beat them. You saved yourselves, your dinners, and made Him the advocate of your slave-owning, and on holidays you replace dancers and harlots with Him for variety…

A watchman-God, a God for rest and new ‘drunken’ sensations—is not needed…”

These lines were written on the day when, by chance, Dostoevsky’s article about the mother-Korobochka and the words of Ivan Karamazov about the saint who warmed lepers with his breath came to hand at the same time. And I liquidated Dostoevsky, recognizing his preaching of pity, of drunken compassion-self-sacrifice, as simply a bourgeois counterfeit of Christianity, in which Christ exists to give the rich the joy of “charity” and to restrain rebellion with the preaching that “suffering is great happiness.”

But once the revision began, it was easier to deal with his continuers.

The program of the Christian socialists could please only at first glance. Care for workers, their families, the promise to think only of the hungry—this was good, but it was a lie. Look closer at such humanitarian constructions of all bourgeois groups, and you will notice the falsification.

“On property,” writes Naumann, “we will look as Christ looked on it. Jesus, for ethical reasons, was a radical opponent of the accumulation of capital: ‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth.’ The heart that desires to acquire eternal bliss must not be attached to property. Money must not be the measure of people. Jesus is not a communist; He has no intention of excommunicating Galilean fishermen from their boats and houses. He only denies the excess of property. The Christian concept of property must of itself replace the Roman one. Jesus wants to reduce want, grief, crime. This is the constant earthly goal of Christianity. There must be no helpless poverty, no unemployment, but we must go forward while adhering to the existing: Jesus did not come to destroy but to fulfill. He gives to Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

What do all these speeches represent if not deception?

Does it not turn out that the Christian socialists want to use Christianity as a shield of faith before the face of the whole world and, under the shadow of this shield, prepare a place for resisting reaction; does it not turn out that they think only of fundamentally discrediting socialism and, in place of its bright slogans, putting forward their own proposals, which in the end arrange only the affairs of reactionary forces?

The Christianity of Christ cannot be so half-hearted. It will always be direct and bold.

Mammon has conquered the earth. Not only the hearts and thoughts of people, but also their relations. All inventions, discoveries in the field of technology—he, and he alone, has appropriated to himself. What should have freed humanity from the cruel power of physical laws and made it master of nature, in Mammon’s hands has turned into a terrible instrument of torture, become a scourge under whose blows the defenseless masses writhe like fish. The higher culture rises, the deeper the majority of people fall into the abyss. The more glorious the progress, the more majestic the development, the more terrible the fate of those by whose labor progress and development are realized. The closer a person considers himself to the goal of his aspirations, the more terribly he is deceived. In our days, the poor in big cities are coarser, more embittered, more unhappy than the savages of the forests.

To crush Mammon, one must attack him in the sphere of his powerful relations of modernity. Whoever wants to disarm an enemy must deprive him of food. For Mammon to fall, the principle of private property must be rejected as falsehood and usury.

I had to become a socialist.

As strange as it may seem, I declared my socialist confession a year ago, in an article in Tserkovnye Vedomosti, written at the request of the editorial board of the official Synodal organ.

The last year—1906—I worked on the question of child labor, women’s labor, the situation of the poor in the capital. Obviously, such a year was bound to sharpen my enmity toward the “predatory-usurious.”

At a glass factory in Simbirsk Governorate, I saw how children of 12–13 years old rush about all winter night amid a “beautiful hell,” near unbearable heat, and every quarter hour are “cooled”—a technical term—in an ice hole.

I saw women at a white lead factory with corpse-like, dark-green faces, destroyed gums, trembling limbs. I saw their children, born only to die horribly the next day, the next month after birth, in convulsions of lead poisoning. Their fathers, who cannot drink like people because of constant convulsions and lap like dogs.

Life placed me face to face with the horrors of the life of St. Petersburg’s poor, there where “seven-year-olds are depraved and thieves.”

Clearly, there could be no hesitation in choosing, from a Christian point of view, between two worldviews—socialist and bourgeois. And so, in the name of Christ, I had to become a socialist, but why did I become precisely a people’s socialist?

IV. Why a People’s Socialist, and Not a Social Democrat or a Socialist-Revolutionary?

Why precisely a people’s socialist, and not a social democrat or a socialist-revolutionary? The reasons are clear. My worldview was born on the soil of expanding the concept of personality, but not on the soil of its negation.

I rejected the old concept of personality and its duties. In Korolenko, under whose enchanting influence I had been since childhood, there is a legend about the angel of ignorance. This angel, by God’s will, lived on earth, sowing smiles, joy, and happiness. But one day, blood fell upon his bright garments—the blood of a man to whom he, in ignorance, had himself led the murderers… And then the joy in the angel’s eyes dimmed, and instead of “joyful ignorance,” his soul accepted the torment of “sorrowful knowledge.”

For me, Korolenko’s angel has always been a symbol of humanity, in which “social conscience” has awakened in place of personal conscience, revealing the awareness that it is not enough to pour oil and wine on the wounds of one crushed by the wheel of life without trying to stop the “evil course” of the wheel itself.

This thought, I say, was always with me: now it has clothed itself in definite and vivid forms.

I understand personality as an indivisible part of society, fused with it inseparably, “chemically.” The development of personality outside of, separately from, the improvement of the entire complex into which it enters as a part is impossible.

Personality cannot distinguish between its own “wounds” and social wounds. Nevsky Prospect, prison, slavery—all this is the shame of every personality; it lies as a stain on each not only dishonoring but also decomposing, and one can never become personally free as long as the very concept of unfreedom exists, as long as there is prison, violence, “deeds of sale on a person.”

The phrase of the slave Epictetus—“a slave even in the quarries can be free”—is a depraved slavish phrase, because the unfreedom of others and even the “slave-owning of masters,” their shame, equally destroy my freedom and personality.

Human personality is part of the street, part of the entire social order. A girl on Nevsky sells her body… Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane betrays his Lord… My personality, its freedom, is not only morally interested in both facts, but is entirely “there,” on Nevsky, in Gethsemane. Accursed kisses on the girl’s cheeks. The accursed kiss on the Lord’s cheeks.

I must feel all the falsehood and vileness of the accursed kiss on my own lips (I kiss) and on my own cheeks (I am betrayed), and if so, the conclusion: I will become free and pure only when Nevsky itself with its selling souls ceases to exist, when Pilate’s judgment itself becomes impossible. In short, the liberation of man is possible only with the liberation of the entire life of all, and evil can and must be hated above all not in man, but in its “crystallizations” (regime, prison, deeds of sale, and serf documents).

To realize oneself as a human being means to realize oneself as a god… on Golgotha.

Are you human? You are god. The whole world is yours, your creation, your thing, your thought, the blood or ichor of your spirit. The design on your teapot is yours, the red lanterns on evil streets are yours… Prison windows are yours. All the souls around you, leprous and crippled, are yours… And you must experience the vileness of all this “yours.” Tear from yourself—and thus from the world—all the pus-stained garments. With the soul’s cry, its terrible pain, shake off from it and from the world the blood, shame, sin…

Every soul must bear the entire world, the evil world, like an entirely leprous body.

This is terrible, but this is Christ’s social order—the one that will destroy streets of slaves, slavery, violence, poverty. Here is the apotheosis of “sociality.”

But obviously, such a view, while advancing the principle of sociality, at the same time represents a kind of cult of personality. The negation of personality seemed to me and always will seem criminal. The social structure itself, it seems, can be based only on the “cult of personality.”

Man is divine, his future boundless. And this future will be built by personalities.

Understandably, under these conditions, I could not accept social democracy with its teaching that negates man as a personality. I fully agreed that personality is the “foam” of existing social conditions, the result of the environment. This did not oblige me to accept the dogma of the insignificance of personality. For me, personality is the synthesis of separate forces scattered as sparks in the mass, but the synthesis itself is a “new fact” and a new historical factor.

In the process of uniting scattered sparks into the “foam” of personality, a miracle occurs: from the elements emerges more than what seems given in them.

And I could not abandon the thought that personality, created by the synthesis of the moment’s mood, cannot thrust itself into history as a “biblical stone” destroying kingdoms. After all, personality is divine, and only its cult, its growth, can promise a rich, colorful, strong social order.

If you will, in the name of sociality and social good, I returned to the idea of personal perfection. The expansion of personality seemed to me a necessary condition for social arrangement on principles broader than simple satiety.

—“Do you believe in God and the soul, Nina?” asks the leader of the free in our as-yet-unwritten play Masters and Slaves.

—“No.”

—“Nor do I. But it seems we still need to love God… Yes, it’s all the same, Nina… All the same, I don’t believe. It is necessary to love… Not that god invented by people to stand watch over their samovars, fur coats, and wives. No, the real God. The One Who is in us. We need to love ourselves… You know what our misfortune is… We don’t love ourselves and therefore cannot be free and bring freedom into life… We didn’t understand Christ. Love your neighbor as yourself… As yourself. But Christians—and we with them… We with you?.. We decided that we need to and can love our neighbor more than ourselves. But that’s a lie, Nina, a lie… Whoever doesn’t love himself, hasn’t found himself—cannot love his neighbor, will bring him not what he needs. Better to say: not all that he needs. How can he bring “full” genuine, human freedom?

Are we free, do we acutely feel every desecration of freedom as a desecration of our own freedom? A thousand people died of hunger—that’s terrible. But a girl wanders Nevsky—that’s less terrible? So is that the thought of a free person, for whom the enslavement of the soul, the slavery of body and spirit, is the most terrible of all? People are shot by the hundreds—that’s shameful, terrible, but the fact that people don’t feel nervous convulsions when a lackey is given, tossed “a tip.” That’s not terrible?

No, a person must see himself, love himself and hate himself and say: man—that sounds shameful… Vile. But man is god. He can and must someday put Jupiter in Uranus’s place and Uranus in Jupiter’s. And we need to resurrect the great dead man, so that into the future triumph does not pass the man-louse.

We will fight for the liberation of the body, for the destruction of all slavery—but in the name of “man,” his spirit… In the name of the colors of the future spirit. In the name of future great souls…

In this monologue, excluding its, admittedly, dubious atheism, was and is my “credo.” But where in the socialist parties could I find an echo? Only among the people’s socialists. With the same Korolenko and his Mikeshin, peering inquisitively into the starry sky. Around him and his angel of sorrowful knowledge with a broad and aching social conscience, and his “murderer” with a tormentingly anxious conscience that punishes him even for killing a robber, could I find “my peace.”

On the party’s banner, alongside the old “Freedom for each. Land and machine—to the worker,” is placed one more word: “In the name of man.” Man is my “credo.”

And, of course, becoming a people’s socialist, I do not cease to be a Christian and a Christian socialist, only not in the image of Stöcker or Naumann.