How I Became a Populist Socialist. -Bp. Mikhail (Semyonov)
On March 3, the website Russkaya Vera published a report by the Old Believer historian Yuri Isaev titled Old Belief and the Traditions of Popular Rule. In it, the author analyzes the history of the Old Believer movement and highlights its distinctive populist, grassroots traditions. Isaev argues that the Old Believer protest, in addition to its religious dimension, also possessed a social one. It was “a protest against the formation of the Russian Empire, in which the elite itself abandoned national identity and colonized its own people.” The article draws attention to the role of revolutionary populists who were “inspired by the revolutionary fervor of Archpriest Avvakum and Lady Morozova, whose Lives were for many a cherished and constant companion.” Special focus is given to the Old Believer community which, in its traditional form, functioned as “a unified, autonomous, and far-reaching structure of mutual aid, built on the principles of cooperation and self-governance.” One possible form of such communal aid, Isaev notes, could be an Old Believer bank: “Even if, at the first stage, we were to create a single cooperative Old Believer bank by pooling all our individual shares and transferring our funds from other banks into it, we would gain a powerful financial resource and a shared undertaking.”
The report stirred considerable debate in the Old Believer world. In response, Metropolitan Korniliy (Titov), primate of the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church, published an article titled The Voice of the People and the Church in the newspaper Staroobryadets. In his article, he wrote: “Democracy is the unjust rule of the majority, the rule of the mob, where everyone yells whatever comes into his head.” He condemns the populist movements, saying: “The populists hoped to implement their ideas of violent seizure of power through the Old Believers. According to Herzen, ‘Russia’s schismatics’ could become the initiators of a popular uprising ‘against the cruel yoke of Tsarism.’ … The populists’ hope for transformation through revolution endured until 1917, when the revolution revealed its bloody fangs. Any political aspiration is rooted in the desire to eliminate one’s political opponents and seize power.” The archpastor also denounces the idea of creating an Old Believer bank: “One even hears the idea of creating an Old Believer bank — but such a concept is not Orthodox at all; it is more Protestant in spirit and can obscure the main purpose of man on earth — the salvation of the soul. … Old Believer thinkers condemned the pursuit of wealth.”
This debate shows that social questions are not foreign to the representatives of Old Belief. The topic of Russian populism, which might seem to belong solely to the past, remains relevant today. In this light, we now publish a unique document — an article that has never before been published in our time — by the well-known Old Believer writer, apologist, and educator Bishop Mikhail (Semyonov; 1874 – November 9, 1916), titled How I Became a Populist Socialist, in which he presents his social views.
A. Mikhail
How I Became a Populist Socialist
(Printed by the I.D. Sytin Partnership Press, Pyatnitskaya Street, own building. Moscow, 1907)
I. The First Stage
The title of this article may strike the reader as pretentious. It resembles the pamphlet by Göhre, How I Became a Social Democrat. I confess, I deliberately borrowed the title from the German Christian socialist who became a Social Democrat, believing that I have more right to it than Göhre himself. For Göhre did not truly “become” a Social Democrat—he simply joined the party, disillusioned with Christian (German) socialism. But a Russian priest truly becomes—that is, through a complex evolution, a kind of way of the cross filled with doubts and torments—he dismantles his old gods, often deeply rooted in the heart, and arrives at a new social ideal. And my path is not mine alone—it is the priestly path, the one followed by every Russian priest raised on the Gospel, Dostoevsky, and life itself.
Let me begin with a tiny memory from early childhood.
A noisy, enormous cloth factory… Countless flames. The noise is deafening: giant wheels thunder. Frightening steel arms of machines flash by. Terrifying. And amidst that din wander pitiful, gray, dust-covered figures—child sweepers. Weary, exhausted, and above all, pitiably small.
This was long ago—twenty-five years—but the impression remains vivid and alive. What struck me most was the insignificance of man, his powerlessness before the machine—terrifying, enormous, mercilessly strong.
I have no desire to tell the reader sentimental tales about “how I became virtuous.” I merely point to one vivid fact that left the first note of anxiety on my soul, one that clung to it for decades. I had, by chance, glimpsed the realm of Moloch, and it crushed me at once with its blasphemous might, its triumphant strength—but somewhere within, it also left the seed of a painful thought: This is not how it should be… There must be another way.
There is no need to confess what life did with that passing childhood distress. The evolution, growth, and decay of a “private” soul—mine or anyone else’s—is of no interest. What matters is the evolution of the priest as a priest.
And so, I pass over twenty full years… Life thrust me into the very center of diverse movements—it flung me into Petersburg. I was summoned there, among other things, to fight against neo-Christianity—that is, against Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, and others. I was meant to defend the Church and its truth—not the living, earthly truth (which, at that time, I too had forgotten), but its dogmatic, philosophical truth. And I did so sincerely and without deceit, for the center of my faith—the only living hope I had—was (and still is) the image of Christ, crucified for the world, the God-man…
I spoke and wrote hastily and eagerly, hurrying to cry out: “Wait before you condemn our truth—you do not yet know it. Come closer…”
At times, I may have succeeded in defending my truth: to its defense I gave both my mind and soul. But inwardly, I was always defeated by my audience, even when it remained silent. In passing, they would toss an accusation—and it would cling to me for days and weeks.
“You lie,” came a printed leaflet from Saratov, issued in the name of an entire political party. “It is not Christ you defend, but the status quo. One cannot live in your Church with your form of Christianity. There is so much slavish falsehood: the persecution of sectarians and, in general, the suppression of religious freedom by the Church; the Church’s approval of war—even executions; its endorsement of every existing ‘fact,’ including serfdom—simply because it is a fact; of the prevailing public and national morality—again, merely because it exists, because it is a fact…
We see that the Church is merely an instrument in service of the status quo, when it ought to judge from the height of ‘eternity,’ from the height of the Gospel… And so we cannot accept it… or you… or your Christ. Was not your repainted, refurbished dogmatic truth brought forward to lull people to sleep, to make them forget the injustice of life, and the fact that you remain silent about it and dare not speak? You want to hypnotize us with dogma…”
“Leave it be,” writes a naïve, semi-literate, but clever and plainspoken merchant S–v from Samara (known for his open letter to Metropolitan Antony), “you sound just like a shopkeeper… You praise your Church like merchandise you’re trying to sell. And who knows—you may truly not see that the merchandise is spoiled, and worse—that it bears the mark of Antichrist… As for faith—you speak well of it—but just look: this faith of yours is used to make God a watchman over the property of the rich. You’ve given everything of God over to Caesar for service. You’ve turned God into a guard, reworked the Gospel so that it, like the Code of Punishments, only threatens slaves who don’t obey their masters and comforts the robbed: ‘Be patient, in the next world you’ll receive tenfold.’”
I felt there was a frightening amount of truth in those words. How could I deny it, when Irinei Orlovsky once preached that the poor were needed in order to enrich the aesthetic picture of life? That not all flowers in the meadow should be red—some should be blue and purple too. That not everyone should be well-fed and rich—because that would be unappealing, sparse, and, apparently to the well-fed, tiresome.
And this kind of bald cynicism was no rarity. How much effort, in fact, is spent by us in praise of “poverty,” simply to soothe the wealthy! Understandably, alongside such sermons, those letters from Saratov and Samara burned like coals. I felt the pressing need to free the truth of the Gospel from its enslaved, servile role. I felt that neither we, nor Christ, would find faith so long as our word and thought remained in bondage—and worse, so long as that very thought itself was inwardly corrupt, debased, and servile by its very psychology.
I recalled the words of Samarin—a kind of pillar of Orthodox consciousness:
“When the existing order of things—say, for example, serfdom—is placed entirely under the direct protection of the faith; when the Church is compelled, so to speak, to give its approval, blessing, and sanctification to everything that exists in the moment, but which did not exist yesterday and may not exist tomorrow—then, naturally, all the most reasonable unmet needs, all the most peaceful hopes for improvement, even faith itself in the people’s future—all this becomes accustomed to seeing Christianity as an obstacle that, sooner or later, must be stepped over, and gradually inclines toward falling away from Christ and the Church.”
I remembered those words—and how clearly I remembered them. The circumstances were now different than two or three years ago. Back then, I had myself cited these “words of Samarin” as a form of self-justification: the state, I said, exploits the Church for its own ends and discredits it—we don’t want this; we ourselves are burdened by the union, as if it were a curse… Therefore, mistrust toward us is illegitimate and unfounded.
That’s what a priest with a “troubled” conscience could say a year ago. I said it myself. But now the priests of the Most High God have shown that the union—this slavish service to one Caesar in place of God—does not seem to them a curse at all. An entire army of slaves to Moloch, mistakenly standing near Christ’s altar, displayed such zeal in their blasphemous fight against truth, that I began to fear for the very integrity of Christianity itself. A fear was born that (as in Rozanov’s Anxious Night) the last of the slaves would flee the dishonored temple crying:
“Out! Out from this filth—meek in appearance, but bloody within. Here the mystery of iniquity hath begun to work.”
And Samarin’s thought rose again in my consciousness, but now in the sharply accusatory visions of Lamennais.
Seven purple-clad men in a hall draped in black. The fifth stands, totters, and approaches a throne made of bones, and places his foot upon a fallen crucifix. He lifts a skull filled with blood, drinks from it, and says to his companions:
“You have devised many clever and excellent plans to destroy freedom. Your methods are effective and forceful, but they are not enough. Turn men into beasts—that is good. Strike them with fear of unrelenting justice, with cruel executions—otherwise, sooner or later, they will tear you to pieces. The executioner must be the first minister of a good prince.”
And beside him, this “fifth,” the seventh—who, like the others, drank from a human skull—spoke while standing atop the crucifix:
“There is no more Christ; this is a war not for life, but unto death—an eternal war between Him and us. But how can we divert the nations from Him? Listen! We must buy off Christ’s priests with wealth, honors, and power. Then they will command the people, in the name of Christ, to submit to us in all things—whatever we do, whatever we command. And the people will believe them, will entrust their conscience to them, and our power will be stronger than ever before.”
And they did so—they bribed them… A heavy and agonizing darkness came… Yes, a heavy and agonizing darkness.
Is it any wonder that I was frightened by this looming darkness and wanted to cry out to my fellow brothers: “Flee! Your closeness to the pagan and wicked principle of slaveholding power is ruinous—especially now…” And the result of this call had to be a rupture—a break, neither hidden nor masked—with the former forms of political thinking.
It is often said that a priest, seemingly, ought to be indifferent to forms of government and so forth. Perhaps that’s true. Very well may be. In any case, right now that doesn’t matter to us. The fact remains that the connection to the previous regime had a corrupting effect, and that bond—whatever else—needed to be broken as decisively and clearly as possible. This is a stage through which every priest who does not wish to sell Christ for the favor of worldly power must necessarily pass—and will inevitably pass. And so, the break with the state became the first stage of my path.
But that didn’t settle the question. In what form, then, ought a Christianity freed from bondage to reveal itself in its conception of earthly “social life”? To discover a living, practical program for this earthly life was extremely difficult. From the past remained stubborn stains of servitude. The consciousness itself was infected with the “leprosy of the centuries.” And on such spoiled soil, at first only false and compromising forms could take root. The “spirit of compromise” triumphed—the Satan of our age (in Ibsen’s words)—in the figure of Dostoevsky and the German socialists. Thus was born the half-truth of my pamphlet, The Accursed Questions and Christianity.
II. In the Bondage of Compromise
Dostoevsky was—and remains, and will likely long remain—the “evil genius” of Christian thought. In his work, alongside seeds of “revelation,” lie elements of a potent narcotic poison, one that powerfully corrupts—above all—the idea of Christian sociality.
At the crossroads, in search of an answer to how one might understand the world and come to terms with its injustice, my thoughts could not but encounter Dostoevsky along the way.
He had walked the same path: first of sorrowful bewilderment, then of mortal terror before life, before the “Baal who reigns in our world of moneylenders,” a path our entire generation of “ailing Christians” endures. And so, I naturally met him at that same intersection.
Read two or three pages of Summer Impressions of Winter Notes. One chapter is even titled “Baal,” and it is filled with sorrowful horror at the degradation of man in the “kingdom of machines”—machines that work not for the laborer, but for the usurer. A city as vast as the sea—filled with the screech and howl of machines. The poisoned Thames. The gleaming crystal palace of the exhibition. Something apocalyptically triumphant, grand, beautiful. It is a temple… Yes, to Baal. Wealth, luxury, mirrors, and gold. And against this backdrop—man, crushed and pitiful.
A Sabbath of runaway Black men—workers—who, in drunkenness and debauchery, a kind without cheer, heavy and silent, waste on Saturday what they earned all week through toil and curse. Women for sale, even girls, in Haymarket… All the filth of a shameful social order’s dregs. Mothers bringing their daughters to market. All this—sacrifices to Baal. This drunkenness, debauchery, loss of awareness—systematized, put on display, encouraged—for Dostoevsky, these are “souls laid at the foundation of Baal’s cursed tower.” “Baal reigns, and does not even demand obedience, because he is certain of it. Poverty, suffering, the murmuring and stupefaction of the masses do not trouble him at all.” “And for the pariahs of his kingdom, the prophecy will not be fulfilled for a long time. Long will they be denied palm branches and white garments, and long will they continue crying out to the throne of the Most High: ‘How long, O Lord?’”
And beside these scenes of adult enslavement—most painful and poignant for me—are the sufferings of children. “I remember once, in a crowd,” Dostoevsky writes, “I saw a little girl, no more than six years old, all in rags, dirty, barefoot, starved and beaten: through her tattered clothing her bruised body was visible. She walked as if she had lost her mind, wandering aimlessly through the crowd, God knows for what reason. Perhaps she was hungry… But what struck me most—she walked with such a look of grief, such hopeless despair on her face, that to see this small creature already bearing so much curse and hopelessness was unnatural and terribly painful. She kept shaking her disheveled head side to side, as if reasoning with herself, spreading apart her little hands in gesture, then suddenly clapping them together and pressing them to her bare chest.” This too was a morning offering to the same god of wicked capital.
Such scenes, such an image of the world, were far too familiar to me for me not to accept them. And Dostoevsky’s conclusion was equally comprehensible: “Baal must be destroyed.”
Yes… yes… But how?
As is well known, Dostoevsky answered this question with a sharp critique of socialism, offering instead his own “Russian socialism”—the socialism of Vlas, who collects alms to build temples.
Dostoevsky’s Russian socialism was a servile, compromising, and beggarly product of a soul corrupted and crushed entirely by hard labor—but Dostoevsky’s language, the narcotic and hypnotic aura of his beautifully painful depictions of his “repentant heroes” (Zosima, Alyosha), masked the slavish motives and origins of his system.
“Russian socialism” is a system that seeks to elevate everyone to the moral level of the Church as a spiritual brotherhood—while still maintaining outward equality in social positions. It “demands the spiritualization of the entire state and social structure through the incarnation within it of the truth and life of Christ.”
“Not through institutions, not through phalansteries and various kinds of social anthills, but through active love, through the tender compassion of Zosima and Alyosha—that is where salvation lies. 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 reform our environment and make it better. That is the only way to improve it.”
Forget about your “rights.” Forget about transforming the world overnight through “reforms.” Heal souls…
All these ideas—here laid out in a plain and condensed form—appeared luminous and convincing when surrounded by Dostoevsky’s dazzling scenery of hysterical images and his characters steeped in suffering. But one question continued to arise: Are we truly to forget about those little girls for sale in Haymarket, about the horrors of their condition? Are we really powerless to act against the very fact of their being sold? Is it really impossible to destroy the Sabbath of the “runaway negroes” and give them a festival of their own?
To accept in full the notion that we must wait—that we are now able and allowed to save only that one girl, those few individuals we happen to meet along the way—was something I could not accept. The remnants of my social conscience rebelled, a conscience that even the Antichrist’s gospel of mere “love for the neighbor” could not wholly obscure.
And here, Dostoevsky found reinforcement in the Christian socialists, who came close to him in the core idea of preaching active love. They “wanted to bring Christ into the kingdom of machines,” as Naumann declared—in other words, they wanted exactly what I did.
“To remove poverty from the world—that is our task. And to accomplish that task, God has given us the machine. He has given us billions of iron slaves, the ability to produce a limitless quantity of goods. He has said: ‘In it—in the machine—My children, I give you the means to eliminate want. Take the machine, and with it, illuminate the earth. Take it and use it to build a new age!’ God gave us textile mills so that no one would be without clothing, and freight ships so that no one would go hungry…”
I wanted the same thing—to force the machine to serve the laborers. Exactly that. Nothing more was needed; this was all I had been seeking. It was the practical extension of Dostoevsky’s vision.
And along with it came their broad and democratic program: labor protections, the struggle for a shorter workday, the prohibition of child labor, regulation of women’s labor…
I was captivated. I decided that the best expression of Christian consciousness would be precisely a synthesis of Dostoevsky and the Christian socialism of Naumann and the Americans. And so I became a convert—and, perhaps, even an apostle—of compromise.
At one of Fr. Grigory Petrov’s gatherings, S. N. Bulgakov defended his paper “Christian Politics,” in which he proposed organizing “unions of Christian politics” for the sake of struggling against social systems hostile to freedom and, by extension, hostile to the spiritual person. Sergei Nikolaevich proposed creating something like a political party modeled on the Western Christian socialist parties—but founded upon genuine, not fraudulent, socialism like that of Stoecker.
I spoke out strongly against the proposed Christian political organization. In my novella In the City, in the first part, there is a dialogue that reflects this position:
Fr. Peter (speaking to an intellectual):
“If we are to speak of the Church’s role in life, then its ‘politics’ align generally with those who stand for truth… for the rights of the lesser… We can extend our hand to those who struggle for the rights of the oppressed, for the uniting of the weak against the injustice of the strong.”
Fr. Nikolai: “Rights?.. No…”
He is pale, trembling as in hysteria. His face is pained, wounded…
“Rights… No… no… May God forbid it. That is Judas’s betrayal. That is the second temptation: ‘Make these stones into bread…’ In your program there is no Christ, no crucified Christ, no God. If I ever come to believe that Christ never existed, that His cause on earth is impossible, then I will accept this so-called ‘Christian politics.’ Perhaps that will be in a week or two—but only when Christ has died. The Church cannot ally itself with a group that tells the oppressed: ‘Take your rights,’ because there are no rights in the Church, even though she says, ‘Woe unto the oppressors.’ The Church can only stand outside the fight—as the conscience of humanity, as its judgment. We can call only for such deeds as we could preach with the Chalice of the Lord’s Blood in our hands, only form such unions and organizations where there are no ‘rights,’ but only self-denial, even if we think that such self-denial could create a life richer than socialism.”
Fr. Nikolai in that scene—he was me, in my earlier objections to Fr. Petrov and S. Bulgakov.
Naturally, on the basis of such convictions, I saw as acceptable only the Church’s own “factories of happiness”: parish brotherhoods, Christian pastoral mediation between labor and capital, Church-run housing projects for the poor, and so on and so forth. The very most I could concede to were Naumann’s half-measures—while excusing myself, as hypocrites do, by saying that Christ placed no value on external forms, believing the essence of world history to lie in the development of individual souls.
III. A Quarrel with Dostoevsky and the German Christian Socialists
It took only a small push for the nightmarish influence of that “cruel talent” and his accommodating Christians (Naumann, Stoecker, and the like) to collapse.
That push came from a random passage in Dostoevsky. If you recall, when replying to Gradovsky, who had claimed that the improvement of institutions—not only the moral development of individuals—was necessary, and that Christian perfection in someone like Korobochka would not abolish serfdom, Dostoevsky answered with wild, terrifying words: “One must understand Christianity,” he writes to Gradovsky. “If Korobochka were a Christian, there would be no serfdom on her estate, even though all the deeds of ownership would still remain in her chest. And what does it matter to a Christian Korobochka whether her peasants are serfs or not? She is their mother…” and so on.
This was a clear illustration of the idea of spiritual brotherhood being maintained alongside social inequality. But for me, these lines were a revelation. What? That the fact “the deeds lie in the chest” is supposed to be irrelevant? That Korobochka is a mother?
No—no need for such a “mother.” It is precisely necessary to understand Christianity, and that means understanding that in human relationships, the most terrible, the most sinful thing is not that someone might sic the dogs on a man while holding legal deeds in hand, but that such deeds upon souls exist at all. And if the deeds are still lying in the chest, the shame remains whole and untouched.
This is the very essence of Christianity, as I’ve written elsewhere (in Capital Letter Mail): that it calls not only for the condemnation of the visible facts of sin and violence, but more importantly—and more urgently—for the condemnation and rejection of evil in the forms where it has hardened, frozen, and crystallized; where the leprosy and syphilis of the soul have taken the shape of collective sin. That is, we are called to recognize as our own sin every barred window of a prison, every flickering light of a house of shame…
Christ first and foremost condemned the old morality and the old society as the quintessence of former bondage. And only by condemning society, the property deed, the moneylender, and the very notion of property could He “confidently hope to purge the evil” from each individual soul.
Korobochka—a mother? God forbid. First and foremost, we must renounce the figure of “Korobochka the mother.”
But then the question arose: how should we regard the entire system built on such an anti-Christian foundation? Only with rejection. I understood then that the whole preaching of Zosima’s compassion or Korobochka’s “motherhood” was not merely an error—it was a deception. The compassion of Zosima’s type, so hostile to Christ’s type of loving hatred toward the evil of the world, was invented by people to serve their own interests.
Nothing is more profitable to human mediocrity than pity. It is beneficial for the individual, because—as I said more fully in another place (Capital Letter Mail)—a person hides within it from the torment of seeing the world’s suffering and humiliation. But it is equally useful to the self-preserving egoism of the bourgeois class: pity demands only concessions, a bit of charity, and therefore gives the bourgeoisie both the “sweet joy of helping one’s neighbor” and an escape from greater sacrifice. Ultimately, charity and pity, by their very nature, demand gratitude and patience in return.
Clearly, the preaching of Korobochka’s motherhood is nothing more than a criminal attempt to lure people into an unequal bargain. From this, I concluded that Christianity must fight most of all against ideas that corrupt Christianity—against falsifications—especially the idea of “charitable compassion,” which Christ Himself condemned as a kind of counterfeit.
In the play Two Ideas (soon to be published), a slave girl of a German feudal lord rips down a crucifix in a public square and, in a frenzy of ecstasy, delivers the following accusation to the Christians:
“I tore it down… Yes, I did… You don’t need Him… I won’t let you disgrace His wounds with your mouths. Blasphemers, crucifiers!… He wanted you, like Him, to suffer the shame and evil of this world. But you use your own hands to multiply His wounds and the wounds of His world so that you might find your happiness in them. You’ve turned His agony into sweet wine for the indulgent. You have covered the whole world in sores—you kill bodies and souls alike—just to obtain and offer others the joy of ‘suffering for the Lord.’ You don’t need Him…
I understood… I was there when He died, I saw it… And then I wanted to run to His feet, to kiss them, and suddenly I saw that He shuddered and pulled away. And I understood: He was afraid. He was afraid that I, drunk with joy at kissing Him, at pitying Him, would fail to see the torments of the poisoned world onto which He had poured new rivers of pure blood—to frighten it into awakening.
Yes, yes. He shed His blood to wash the leprosy from the world. But you, in His name, only grow and spread that leprosy. You come to Christ’s cross on feast days to indulge in intoxicating sentimental pity, and then on weekdays you offer that same cross to your slaves, so that in the presence of His sufferings they might find comfort in endurance, not rise up in protest, and kiss your hands in gratitude—hands that beat them. You saved yourselves, your dinners, and made Him the lawyer of your slaveholding, and on holidays you swap Him in for dancers and harlots…”
“A God as watchman, a God for leisure and new ‘intoxicating’ sensations—no thank you…”
These lines were written on the same day I happened to come across both Dostoevsky’s article about Korobochka the “mother” and the words of Ivan Karamazov about the saint who warmed lepers with his breath. And that day, I cast off Dostoevsky, rejecting his preaching of pity, of drunken compassion and self-denial, as nothing more than a bourgeois forgery of Christianity—one in which Christ exists only to provide the rich with the joy of “charity” and to hold back revolt with the gospel that “suffering is a great happiness.”
But once that reevaluation had begun, it was easier to dispense with his successors.
The program of the Christian socialists could appeal only at first glance. The concern for workers, their families, the promise to think only of the hungry—this sounded good, but it was a lie. Look closer at such humanistic constructions from every bourgeois group, and you’ll see the forgery.
“Private property,” writes Naumann, “we will regard just as Christ did. Jesus, for ethical reasons, was a radical opponent of capital accumulation: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.’ A heart striving for eternal blessedness must not cling to possessions. Money should not be the measure of a man. Jesus was no communist—He had no intention of separating Galilean fishermen from their boats and homes. He merely denies the excess of ownership. The Christian understanding of property must gradually replace the Roman one. Jesus desires to reduce want, sorrow, and crime. That is the constant earthly goal of Christianity. There should be no helpless poverty, no unemployment—but we must move forward by holding to what already exists: Jesus came not to destroy, but to fulfill. He gives to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.”
What are all these words, if not deception?
Is it not clear that the Christian socialists want to use Christianity as a shield of faith before the world, and under the shadow of this shield prepare room for reactionary forces? Is it not clear that their real aim is to discredit socialism at its root and replace its vibrant slogans with proposals that ultimately serve only the schemes of reactionary powers?
The Christianity of Christ cannot be so half-hearted. It must always be direct and bold.
Mammon has conquered the earth—not only the hearts and minds of men, but also their relationships. All inventions, all discoveries in technology—he alone has claimed them. That which should have freed humanity from the cruel dominion of physical law and made it master of nature has, in Mammon’s hands, become a terrible instrument of torture, a scourge beneath which defenseless masses writhe like fish on dry land. The higher culture rises, the deeper the majority of people fall into the abyss. The more glorious the progress, the grander the development, the more dreadful the fate of those whose labor makes that progress and development possible. The closer man believes himself to be to the goal of his aspirations, the more horribly he is deceived. In our time, the poor in the great cities are coarser, more embittered, more wretched than the forest-dwelling savages.
To crush Mammon, one must strike him in the realm of his dominant influence in the modern world. Whoever wants to disarm the enemy must deprive him of nourishment. In order for Mammon to fall, we must reject, as a lie and as usury, the very principle of private property.
I had to become a socialist.
Strange as it may seem, I had already confessed to my socialist beliefs a year earlier, in an article for the Church Gazette, written at the request of the editorial board of the official Synodal journal.
The last year—1906—I spent working on the issues of child labor, women’s labor, and the condition of the poor in the capital. It is obvious that such a year must have sharpened my hostility toward the “predatory usurious” system.
At a glass factory in Simbirsk Province, I saw children of twelve or thirteen darting about through a “beautiful hell” all night in the winter heat, near an unbearable furnace, and every fifteen minutes being “cooled off”—a technical term—by plunging into an icy hole in the river.
I saw women in a lead white factory, with corpse-colored, dark green faces, ruined gums, trembling limbs. I saw their children, born only to die horribly the next day, or the next month, in the convulsions of lead poisoning. Their fathers, unable to drink like men, lapping at water like dogs from chronic spasms.
Life brought me face to face with the horrors of Petersburg’s urban poor—where “seven-year-olds are already depraved and thieves.”
It was plain that from a Christian standpoint, there could be no hesitation in choosing between the socialist and bourgeois worldviews. Thus, I had to become a socialist for the sake of Christ. But why, then, did I become specifically a populist socialist?
IV. Why a Populist Socialist, and Not a Social Democrat or Socialist-Revolutionary?
Why precisely a populist socialist, and not a Social Democrat or Socialist-Revolutionary? The reasons are clear. My worldview was born from an expanded conception of the person—but not from the rejection of the person.
I rejected the old understanding of the person and his duties. Korolenko, under whose charming influence I had lived since childhood, tells a legend of the “angel of unknowing.” This angel, by God’s will, lived on earth, spreading smiles, joy, and happiness. But one day, blood fell upon his bright garment—the blood of a man whom he, unknowingly, had led to his murderers… And then the joy faded from the angel’s eyes, and in place of “cheerful ignorance,” his soul received the torment of “sorrowful knowledge.”
For me, Korolenko’s angel has always been a symbol of humanity in whom the “social conscience” has awakened to replace the purely personal one—where the realization dawns that it is not enough to pour oil and wine into the wounds of one person crushed by the wheel of life, while making no effort to stop the “wicked course” of the wheel itself.
That thought, I say, was always with me. Now it had taken on clear and vivid form.
I understand the person as an indivisible part of society, fused with it inseparably—“chemically.” The development of personality apart from and isolated from the improvement of the whole system to which it belongs as a part is impossible.
A person cannot distinguish between his “own wounds” and society’s wounds. Nevsky Prospect, the prison, slavery—these are a disgrace to each individual, a stain not only humiliating but also corrupting. One can never become personally free so long as the very concept of unfreedom exists, so long as prisons and “deeds of bondage on human beings” remain.
The phrase of the slave Epictetus—“a slave can still be free even in the quarries”—is a perverse, slavish phrase, because the unfreedom of others, even “the slaveholding of the masters,” their disgrace, equally annihilates my freedom and my personhood.
The human person is part of the street, part of the entire social order. A girl on Nevsky sells her body… Judas in Gethsemane betrays his Lord… My person, my freedom, is not merely morally implicated in both facts—it is wholly “there,” on Nevsky, in Gethsemane. The cursed kisses on the girl’s cheeks. The cursed kiss on the cheeks of the Lord.
I must feel all the falsehood and vileness of that cursed kiss on my own lips (for I am the one who kisses), and on my own cheeks (for I am the one betrayed). And if so, then the conclusion follows: I will become free and pure only when there no longer exists a Nevsky Prospect filled with souls for sale, when Pilate’s judgment itself becomes impossible. In short: human liberation is possible only alongside the liberation of all life, for evil must and can be hated not primarily in persons, but in its “crystallizations”—in the regime, in the prison, in the legal deeds of ownership and bondage.
To become aware of oneself as a human being means to become aware of oneself as a god… on Golgotha.
Are you a human being? Then you are a god. The whole world is yours—your creation, your possession, your thought, the blood or pus of your spirit. The design on your teacup is yours; the red lanterns on wicked streets are yours… The prison windows are yours. All the souls around you, the leprous and the crippled, are yours… And you must suffer the vileness of all this “yours.” You must tear from yourself—and therefore from the world—all the garments soiled with rot. By the cry of your soul, by its dreadful pain, you must shake from it and the world the blood, the disgrace, the sin…
Each soul must carry within itself the whole world, this wicked world, like a leprous body.
This is terrifying, but it is Christ’s true society—the one that will abolish the streets of slaves, slavery itself, violence, poverty. Here is the apotheosis of “society.”
But it is clear that such a view, while elevating the principle of society, also implies a kind of cult of the person. The denial of personhood has always seemed, and will always seem to me, a crime. Society itself, it seems to me, can only be built on the “cult of the person.”
Man is divine; his future is limitless. And that future will be built by persons.
It is obvious that under these conditions I could not accept Social Democracy with its doctrine that denies man as a person. I fully agreed that the person is “foam” rising from existing social conditions, a product of environment. But that did not compel me to accept the dogma of personal nothingness. For me, the person is a synthesis of scattered forces, like sparks dispersed among the masses—but the very act of synthesis is a “new fact” and a new historical factor.
In the process of gathering these scattered sparks into the “foam” of personality, a miracle occurs: from the elements comes forth something greater than what appears to be present in them.
And I could not give up the belief that the person, formed by the synthesis of the moment’s mood, is capable of hurling itself into history like a “biblical stone” that shatters kingdoms. After all, the person is divine, and only its cult, its growth, can promise a rich, colorful, and powerful society.
If you like, it was in the name of society and the common good that I returned again to the idea of personal perfection. The expansion of the person seemed to me a necessary condition for building a society on principles broader than mere satiety.
“Do you believe in God and the soul, Nina?” asks the leader of the free people in our as-yet-unwritten play Masters and Slaves.
“No.”
“Neither do I. But still, it seems one must love God… But it’s all the same, Nina… I still don’t believe. Yet one must love… Not the God invented by men to stand guard over their samovars, fur coats, and wives. No, the true God. The One within us. We must love ourselves… You know what our misfortune is? We don’t love ourselves, and therefore we cannot be free, nor bring freedom into life… We misunderstood Christ. ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’… As thyself. But Christians—and we along with them… You and I? We decided it was necessary and even possible to love our neighbor more than ourselves. And that is a lie, Nina, a lie… He who does not love himself, who has not found himself, cannot love his neighbor—he will bring him not what is truly needed. Or at least, not all that is needed. How can he bring complete freedom, full and truly human?”
Are we free? Do we feel the violation of freedom with the full sharpness of those who are truly free? A thousand people have died of hunger—yes, that is terrible. But a girl wanders Nevsky Prospect—should that be less terrible? Is that the thought of a free person, for whom the enslavement of the soul, the bondage of body and spirit, is the worst of all evils? Hundreds are shot—that is shameful, horrific—but what about the fact that people do not feel even a nervous twitch when tossing a coin “for tea” to a servant? Is that not horrific?
No, we must see ourselves, love ourselves, and hate ourselves, and say: “Man—that sounds disgraceful… Loathsome.” But man is a god. He can, and must someday, move Jupiter to Uranus’s place, and Uranus to Jupiter’s. And we must resurrect the great man who has died, so that the louse-man does not pass into the future triumph.
Let us struggle 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 the great souls yet to come…
In that monologue—excluding, of course, its dubious atheism—lies my own “creed.” But where could I find its echo among the socialist parties? Only among the Populist Socialists. In the writings of Korolenko himself and his Mikesha, gazing inquisitively into the starry sky. There, beside him and his angel of sorrowful knowledge—with a vast and aching social conscience—and his murderer, tormented by a troubled conscience that punishes him even for killing a bandit, there I could find “my rest.”
On the banner of that party, alongside the old slogan “Freedom for each. Land and machines for the worker,” there is one more word: In the name of man. Man is my “creed.”
And so, having become a Populist Socialist, I have not ceased to be a Christian—and a Christian Socialist—only not in the image of Stoecker or Naumann.