How I Became a Popular Socialist

This early essay, by the now-beloved Belokrinitsa hierarch Mikhail (Semyonov), is certainly off the beaten path. Let it be known, for the sake of full disclosure, that this does not reflect my own political opinions or preferences, which remain private.

However, given the current political climate, at least in the West, and in the United States specifically - this article from the turn of the 20th century is, for me personally, a fascinating exercise in the humanization of political opposition - the expansion of perspective, and the strengthening of political tolerance, each of which we desperately need right now.

Semyonov’s political apology is an articulate exposition of Christian political morality, rather than a liberal (as in freedom) morality. Semyonov’s philosophy is a product of his time - and some aspects of his political allegiance I doubt would apply today. Nevertheless, herein is the fundamental notion of the duty of the governing body to do good, socially. To half of the people today - this is so obviously right it is practically an axiom. To the other half - it could not be a more abrasive threat to the equally fundamental individual right of men to pursue their own separate interests… Enjoy!

The title of this article may seem presumptuous. It calls to mind Göhre’s pamphlet “How I Became a Social Democrat.” I confess we have deliberately repeated the title of the German Christian socialist who became a Social Democrat, believing we have more right to it than Göhre himself. Göhre did not “become” a Social Democrat - he simply joined the party, having grown disillusioned with (German) Christian socialism. The Russian priest truly “becomes” one - that is, through a complex evolution, a kind of Way of the Cross of doubt and torment, tearing down old gods, some deeply fused with the heart, he arrives at a new social ideal. And my path is not mine alone but the priestly path in general - the one every Russian priest walks who has been raised on the Gospel, on Dostoevsky, and on life itself.

Let me begin with a tiny memory from distant childhood.

A noisy, great woolen mill… So much fire everywhere. Unbearably loud: enormous wheels clattering. The terrifying steel arms of the machines flashing past. It was frightening. And amid this din wandered pitiful, gray, dust-covered little figures - child sweepers. Tired, worn out, and above all, pathetically small.

That was long ago, twenty-five years now, but the impression is still vivid and sharp. What struck me was precisely this: the insignificance of man, his helplessness before the machine - terrible, immense, mercilessly strong.

I have no wish to entertain readers with anecdotes on the theme of “how I became virtuous.” I am simply pointing to a vivid fact that left the soul with its first unease - an unease it could not shake off for whole decades afterward. I had glimpsed, by chance, the kingdom of Moloch, and it had at once crushed me with its blasphemous might, its triumphant strength; but somewhere it left the seed of a troubling thought: still, this ought not to be… It could be otherwise. There is no need to make confession of what life did with that chance childhood unease. The evolution, the growth and ebb, of a “private” soul - mine or anyone else’s - interests no one: what can hold interest is only the evolution of a priest as priest.

And so I pass over some twenty whole years… Life thrust me into the very center of divergent currents, flung me into Petersburg. I was summoned there, among other things, to combat neo-Christianity - that is, Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, and others. I was to defend the Church, her truth (not her living, earthly truth, which at that time I too did not remember, but her dogmatic, philosophical truth). And I did this sincerely, without falsehood, because the center of my faith, my only life’s stake, was - and is - the image of Christ, God crucified for the world… I spoke and wrote hastily and hungrily, hastening to cry out: “Wait before you condemn our truth - you do not know it. Come closer…”

No doubt I sometimes managed to defend my truth: I gave both mind and soul to its defense. But I myself always remained inwardly defeated by my audience, even when it kept silent. In passing they would toss out an accusation, and one could not shake it off for days and weeks.

“You lie,” they write from Saratov in the name of an entire party, in a lithographed sheet - “it is not Christ you are defending, but order. One cannot live in your Church with your Christianity. So much slavish falsehood: the Church’s persecution of sectarians and of freedom of belief in general, the Church’s approval of war, and worse still, of executions, its approval of every existing ‘fact,’ even serfdom, simply because it is a fact; of the existing popular and social morality - again simply because it exists, because it is a fact… We see that the Church is an instrument in the service of ‘what exists,’ whereas her task is to judge from the height of ‘eternity,’ from the height of the Gospel… And we cannot accept her… you… your Christ. Is it not for this that your repainted, refurbished dogmatic truth has been put forward - to lull us to sleep, to make us forget the injustice of life, and the fact that of this you are silent and dare not speak. It is with dogma that you wish to hypnotize us…”

“Enough,” writes the naive, half-literate but sharp-witted merchant S-v of Samara (known for his open letter to Metropolitan Anthony) - “you are exactly like a shop clerk… You praise your Church as though it were goods you were selling off. And who knows - perhaps you truly do not see that the goods are spoiled, and, worse, that upon them is stamped the seal of Antichrist… Faith is faith, and you speak well of it, but look closer and you find that this faith is needed only to set God up as a watchman over the property of the rich. All of you have handed over what is God’s to Caesar’s service, turned God into a watchman, refashioned the Gospel itself so that it too, like a criminal code, threatens only the slaves who will not obey their masters, and consoles the plundered: endure, ‘there’ you will receive it back tenfold.”

I felt that here there was terribly much truth. How could I deny it, when Irenei of Orel proved in a sermon that the poor exist precisely so that the picture of life might be aesthetically richer. Not every flower in the meadow can be red - blue and violet ones are needed too. If everyone were well-fed and rich, it would be - evidently to the well-fed - unlovely and dull, and would grow tiresome.

And this brazen cynicism was no rarity. How much effort, indeed, we ourselves expend in praising “poverty,” for the sake of the peace of mind of the rich. Understandably, alongside such sermons, the letters from Saratov and Samara burned like hot coals. The necessity was felt of freeing the truth of the Gospel, first of all, from its slavish, subservient role. It was felt that there would be no faith, neither in us nor in Christ, so long as our word and our thought remained in servitude - and, above all, so long as that very thought remained, by its own inner psychology, rotten, corrupted, slavish.

I recalled the words of Samarin, in his way a pillar of Orthodox consciousness: “When the existing order of things - serfdom, say - is placed wholesale under the direct protection of faith; when faith is, so to speak, forced to give its approval, its blessing, its consecration to everything that exists at the present moment, though it did not exist yesterday and may not exist tomorrow - then, naturally, every reasonable need left unsatisfied by the present, every peaceable hope for something better, indeed faith itself in the nation’s future, all of this comes to regard Christianity as a barrier which, sooner or later, must be stepped over, and gradually inclines toward falling away from Christ and the Church.”

I recalled these words - recalled them well indeed. The circumstances by then were already different from what they had been two or three years before. At that time I myself had cited these “words of Samarin” as a kind of self-justification - the state, I would say, makes use of the Church for its own ends and thereby discredits her; we do not want this; we ourselves feel this alliance as a curse… And therefore distrust of us is unlawful and groundless.

So might a priest with a “troubled” conscience have spoken a year ago. So I myself spoke. Now the priests of God Most High have shown that this alliance - their slavish service to Caesar alone in place of God - does not strike them as a “curse” at all. A whole army of slaves of Moloch, standing by mistake near the altar of Christ, has displayed such zeal in its blasphemous struggle against the truth that one begins to fear for the very integrity of Christianity itself. A fear is born that (as in Rozanov’s “A Troubled Night”) the last of the slaves will walk out of the disgraced temple crying: “Away from this filth, gentle on the outside, bloody within. Here the mystery of iniquity has begun its work.”

And the thought of Samarin rose before the mind in the sharply accusing new form of Lamennais’s visions. Seven purple-clad rulers in a hall draped in black. Now the fifth, rising, approaches the throne of bones with a swaying gait and sets his foot upon the trampled crucifix. He takes up a skull filled with blood, drinks from it, and says to his companions: “You have thought long and well on how to destroy freedom. Your means are effective and vigorous, but they are not enough. Turn men into beasts - that is good; strike them with fear of an implacable justice, with cruel executions, or else, sooner or later, they will tear you to pieces. The executioner must be the first minister to a good prince.”

Beside him, this “fifth” one, the seventh - who had likewise drunk from a human skull - spoke thus, standing upon the crucifix: “There is no more Christ; it is war to the death, an eternal war between Him and us. But how are we to turn the peoples away from Him? Listen! We must buy the priests of Christ with wealth, with honors, with power. And they will command the people, in Christ’s name, to submit to us in all things - whatever we do, whatever we order. And the people will believe them, will hand over their conscience to them, and our power will stand firmer than ever before.”

And so it was done, and they were bought… A heavy, tormenting darkness set in… A heavy and tormenting darkness indeed.

Is it any wonder, then, that I was frightened by this looming darkness and wanted to cry out to my fellow priests: “Save yourselves! Your proximity to the pagan and evil principle of slaveholding power is ruinous, especially now…” And the natural result of this call had to be a break - open and unmasked - with the old forms of state-minded thinking.

It is often said that for a priest the forms of political power ought, presumably, to be a matter of indifference. Perhaps so. Very possibly. In any case, that is not what matters here. The fact is that the bond with the old power was corrupting, and this bond, in any case, had to be broken as decisively and clearly as possible. This is a stage that every priest unwilling to trade Christ for the favor of power must necessarily pass through, and inevitably will. And so the break with power became my first stage.

Yet this did not settle the question. In what form was Christianity, once freed from slavery, to unfold itself in shaping this earthly “social life” of ours? To find a livable, earthly program was no easy matter. From the past there remained stains of slavery not easily scoured away. Consciousness turned out to be infected with the “leprosy of the ages.” And on such poor soil, at first, only false, compromise-ridden forms could take root. The “spirit of compromise” - Satan of our age, in Ibsen’s phrase - triumphed, in the persons of Dostoevsky and the German socialists. Out of this was born the half-truth of my pamphlet, The Accursed Questions and Christianity.

Dostoevsky was, and is, and will likely long remain, the “evil genius” of Christian thought. In his work, alongside the seeds of “revelation,” are laid elements of a powerful narcotic poison, vigorously dissolving, above all, the very idea of Christian social life.

At the crossroads, in search of an answer as to how to understand the world and make peace with its injustice, my thought could not but meet Dostoevsky along its way.

He had walked the same path - first a sorrowful bewilderment, then a mortal horror before life, before “Baal reigning in our world of moneylenders” - which our whole generation of “sick Christians” now lives through; and I naturally met him at that same crossroads.

Read two or three pages of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. One chapter is titled simply “Baal,” and the whole of it is full of a mournful horror at the desecration of man in this “kingdom of machines,” toiling not for the worker but for the moneylender. A city vast as the sea - the shriek and howl of machines. The poisoned Thames. The gleaming crystal palace of the exhibition. Something apocalyptically triumphant, grand, beautiful. This is a temple… yes, a temple of Baal. Wealth, luxury, mirrors and gold. And against this background - man, crushed and pitiful.

A sabbath of fugitive Negroes - laborers who, in drunkenness and depravity, dull, joyless, heavy, and silent, hand over on Saturday what a week’s labor and cursing had earned them. Women, even girls, sold in the Haymarket… all the pus of a shameful social order come to a head. Mothers leading their own daughters out for sale. All of these - sacrifices to Baal. This drunkenness, this depravity, this loss of consciousness in which there is, as Dostoevsky says, “something systematic, deliberate, encouraged” - these are “souls laid into the foundation of the accursed tower of Baal.” “Baal reigns and does not even demand submission, being already assured of it. The poverty, the suffering, the murmuring and stupefaction of the masses trouble him not in the least.” “And for the outcasts of his kingdom the prophecy will long remain unfulfilled: long will they go without palm branches and white robes, and long will they still cry out to the throne of the Most High: ‘How long, O Lord?’”

And alongside these pictures of adult bondage — for me, especially — come the sore and all-too-comprehensible pictures of children’s suffering. “I remember once, in a crowd,” Dostoevsky recounts, “I saw a little girl, no more than six, all in rags, filthy, barefoot, wasted and beaten: her body, showing through the rags, was covered in bruises. She walked as though not aware of herself, in no hurry to get anywhere, wandering God knows why through the crowd; perhaps she was hungry… But what struck me most was that she walked with such an air of grief, such hopeless despair upon her face, that to see this small creature already bearing so great a curse and despair was somehow unnatural and even painfully strange. She kept swaying her tousled little head from side to side, as though pondering something, spreading her small hands apart and gesturing with them, and then suddenly clasping them together and pressing them to her bare little chest.” And this too was a morning sacrifice to that same god of evil capital.

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

Yes… yes… But how?

As is well known, to this question Dostoevsky answered with a sharp critique of socialism, in place of which he offered his own “Russian socialism” - the socialism of Vlas, gathering alms for churches.

Dostoevsky’s Russian socialism was, in essence, a slavish, compromise-laden, beggarly product of a soul corrupted and utterly crushed by penal servitude; yet Dostoevsky’s language - the narcotic, hypnotic glow he cast over his images of “dissolute heroes” bathed in beautiful suffering (Zosima, Alyosha) - masked the servile motives and sources of the whole system.

“Russian socialism” is a system meant to raise everyone to the moral level of the Church as a spiritual brotherhood, while preserving the outward inequality of social positions; it “demands the spiritualization of the whole state and social order through the embodiment within it of Christ’s truth and Christ’s life.”

“Not in institutions, not in ‘phalansteries’ and social anthills of every kind, but in active love, in the loving pity of Zosima and Alyosha, lies salvation. In the resolve to do everything for the sake of active love.”

Our life is bad because we ourselves are bad. “By making ourselves better, we shall also mend our surroundings and make them better. For it is only by this means that they can be mended at all.”

Forget your “rights,” forget the notion that the world can be remade all at once through “reforms.” Heal your souls instead…

All these thoughts, set down here briefly and without color, seemed luminous and persuasive amid the brilliant staging of Dostoevsky’s hysterical scenes and suffering-soaked images. Only one question arose: but surely one cannot simply forget about all those girls being sold in the Haymarket, about the horror of their condition? Surely nothing can be done about the very “fact” of that sale? Surely the sabbath of the “fugitive Negroes” cannot be abolished and a holiday won for them instead?

To agree wholly with the answer that one must wait, that for now one can and should save only that one girl, only those separate individuals one happens to meet along the way - this I did not want. Against it rose what remained of a social conscience that even the anti-Christian preaching of pity for one’s neighbor alone could not entirely darken.

And it was here that the Christian socialists came to Dostoevsky’s aid - coming so close to Dostoevsky in the basic idea of preaching active love. They “wish to bring Christ into the kingdom of machines,” as Naumann declares - that is, they wanted exactly what I too wanted.

“To lead poverty out of the world - that is our task. And to accomplish this task, God has given us the machine. He has given us billions of iron slaves, has given us the means to produce countless goods. He has said: ‘In it (the machine), My children, I give you the means to destroy want. Take the machine and light up the earth with it; take it and build with it a new age!’ God gave us woolen mills so that no one need lack for clothing any longer, and cargo ships so that no one need go hungry…”

And I wanted the very same thing - to make the machine work for the toilers. Precisely that. Beyond this there was nothing more to wish for: this was exactly what I needed. A practical supplement to Dostoevsky.

Beside it stood their program, so broad, so democratic: security for workers, the struggle to shorten the working day, the prohibition of child labor, the 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 the Christian socialism of Naumann and the Americans. And I became a proselyte, and, I daresay, an apostle of compromise.

At one of the gatherings held by Fr. Grigory Petrov, S. N. Bulgakov was defending his paper “Christian Politics,” in which he proposed that, in the name of Christianity, “unions of Christian politics” be organized to combat a social order hostile to freedom and, consequently, to the spiritual person. Sergei Nikolaevich was proposing the formation of a kind of political party - like the Western Christian-socialist ones — only on the footing of a genuine socialism rather than Stoecker’s sham of one.

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

“Fr. Peter (addressing the intellectual):

- If we speak of the Church’s role in life, then her ‘politics’ coincide, on the whole, with the politics of those who stand for truth… for the rights of the lesser ones… We can extend a hand to those who fight for the rights of the wronged, for the union of the weak against the injustice of the strong.

Fr. Nicholas: - Rights?.. No…

Pale, trembling as if in hysterics. His face suffering, sick…

- Rights… No… no… It shall not be. God forbid. This is Judas’s betrayal. This is the second temptation. Turn the stones into bread… In your program there is no Christ, no crucified Christ, no God; if I should ever come to think that there was no Christ, that His work is impossible here, then I will accept this ‘Christian politics.’ Perhaps that will be in a week, in two - but only when Christ has died. The Church cannot be in alliance with a group that says to the wronged man, ‘Take what is your right,’ because there is no ‘right’ in the Church, though she may say, ‘Cursed be the violent.’ The Church can stand only for struggle, as the conscience of mankind - its judgment. We can call people only to such deeds as we can preach with the chalice of the Lord’s Blood in our hands; in founding such unions and organizations there are no rights, only self-renunciation - even though we imagine this might build a richer life than socialism.”

This Fr. Nicholas of the lines above - that was myself, in my objections at the time to Fr. Petrov and to S. Bulgakov.

Naturally, on the strength of this outlook, I considered admissible only various ecclesiastical “factories of happiness” - things like parish brotherhoods, pastoral mediation between labor and capital, church-run housing for the poor, and so on and so forth. The most I would concede were Naumann’s half-measures, adding - hypocritically, like all such people - that Christ assigned no value to external forms, holding that the essence of all world-history lay in the development of individual souls.

I did not know then that within a week or two I would have to renounce this false position of mine - precisely for the sake of faith in Christ.

A small jolt was enough to bring down the nightmarish influence of the “cruel talent” and of the accommodating Christians (Naumann, Stoecker, and the rest).

That jolt came from a chance passage in Dostoevsky. If you recall, in answering Gradovsky’s argument that it is institutions, not merely individuals, that need improving - that the Christian perfection of Korobochka would not by itself abolish serfdom - Dostoevsky replied with words that were, quite plainly, wild and terrible: “One must understand Christianity,” he writes to Gradovsky. “If Korobochka were a Christian, there would be no serfdom at all on her estate, notwithstanding that all the deeds of bondage would still lie in her chest. And what does it matter to Korobochka the Christian whether her peasants are serfs or not? She is their mother… and so on.”

This was meant to illustrate the idea of spiritual brotherhood coexisting with the preservation of social inequality. To me these lines were a revelation. What? That the “deeds of bondage lying in the chest” - this is a matter of indifference? Korobochka - a mother…

No. This “mother” is not wanted. One must indeed understand Christianity — and to understand it is to grasp that in the relations of life the most terrible, the most sinful thing, is not that men, by means of deeds and bills of sale, should be hunted down with dogs, but the very “deeds” laid upon souls. And so long as the deeds lie in the chest, the whole disgrace remains intact and untouched.

The very essence of Christianity - as we have already said in part in the Stolichnaya Pochta - is that it demands the condemnation not only of the bare facts of sin and violence, but, even more, the condemnation and rejection of violence and evil in precisely those forms where evil has taken root, has hardened, has crystallized - where the leprosy and syphilis of the soul have been embodied as a shared, communal sin - that is, it demands that we condemn, as our own sin, every barred window of a prison and every lit lamp of a house of shame…

Christ, before all else, condemned the old morality and the old social order as the very quintessence of the former slavery, and it was only by condemning the social order — the bills of bondage, the usury, the property - that He could “firmly hope to root out evil” in each individual soul.

Korobochka - a mother? God forbid. Before anything else, one must renounce Korobochka the mother.

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

Nothing is more advantageous to human nothingness than pity. It is advantageous to the individual because - as I have already said at greater length elsewhere (in the Stolichnaya Pochta) - a man hides behind it from the torment of seeing the suffering and degradation of the whole world. But it is equally advantageous to bourgeois self-preservation in its own self-interest: pity demands only concessions, only charity, and so it gives the bourgeois, at one and the same time, the “sweet joy of helping one’s neighbor” while sparing him from greater sacrifices. And finally, charity, pity, and all the rest demand, as their very light and essence, gratitude and patience from those they touch.

It is clear that the preaching of Korobochka’s motherliness is nothing but a criminal drawing of people into a bad bargain. From this I concluded that Christianity must, above all else, struggle against the ideas that corrupt Christianity - against these falsifications - that is, against the idea of charitable pity, which Christ himself condemns as a kind of forgery.

In the play Two Ideas (now being prepared for print), a slave-girl belonging to a German feudal lord tears a crucifix down in the public square and, in a mad ecstasy, hurls this accusation at the Christians:

“I tore it down… Yes, I tore it down… You have no need of Him… I will not let your lips go on dishonoring His wounds with your mouths. Blasphemers, crucifiers!.. He wanted you to suffer, as He did, the disgrace and the evil of the world. But with your own hands you multiply His wounds and the wounds of His world, so that in them you might find your own happiness. You have turned His agony into sweet wine for the lustful. You have covered the whole world in wounds, you kill bodies and souls alike, only to win for yourselves - and to hand to others - the joy of ‘suffering for the Lord’s sake.’ You have no need of 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 Him flinch and draw back. And I understood: He was afraid. He was afraid that I, drunk with the joy of kissing Him, of pitying Him, would fail to see the torment of a poisoned world - onto which He had poured new rivers of pure blood, only to frighten the world with them.

Yes, yes. He shed His blood to wash the leprosy from the world. And in His name you multiply and nourish that very leprosy. On feast days you go up to the cross of Christ to draw a voluptuous intoxication from your pity, and on ordinary days you offer that same cross for your slaves to kiss, so that beside His sufferings they might find the comfort of patience, so that they might not rebel, and might gratefully kiss the very hands that strike them. You have saved yourselves, and your dinners, and made of Him an advocate for your slaveholding, and on holidays, for variety’s sake, you replace Him with dancing-girls and harlots…

A God who stands watch, a God for rest and for fresh ‘drunken’ sensations - Him we do not need…”

These lines were written on the very day I chanced to come across, together, Dostoevsky’s article on Korobochka the mother and Ivan Karamazov’s words about the saint who warmed lepers with his own breath. And I settled my account with Dostoevsky, recognizing his preaching of pity, of drunken compassion-as-self-renunciation, as nothing but a bourgeois counterfeit of Christianity - one in which Christ exists only to give the rich the joy of “charity” and to keep the poor from revolt through the preaching that “suffering is a great happiness.”

But once the reckoning had begun, it was easier to deal with those who carried the idea further.

The program of the Christian socialists could please only at first glance. Concern for the workers, for their families, the promise to think only of the hungry - this sounded good, but it was a lie. Look more closely into this kind of philanthropic construction, common to every bourgeois group, and you will notice the falsification at once.

“On property,” writes Naumann, “we shall look as Christ Himself looked upon it. Jesus, on ethical grounds, was a radical opponent of the accumulation of capital: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.’ A heart that desires eternal blessedness must not attach itself to property. Money must not be the measure of men. Jesus is no communist; He has no intention of cutting off the Galilean fishermen from their boats and their houses. He denies only the excess of property. The Christian conception of property must of itself come to replace the Roman one. Jesus wishes to lessen 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 holding to what exists: Jesus came not to destroy but to fulfill. He renders unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

What are all these speeches, if not deception?

Does it not turn out, then, that the Christian socialists wish to use Christianity as a shield of faith before the eyes of the whole world, and under the shadow of that shield to prepare a place for a resisting reaction; does it not turn out that they think only of thoroughly discrediting socialism at its root and of setting up, in place of its bright slogans, proposals that, in the end, serve nothing but the petty interests of reactionary forces. The Christianity of Christ cannot be so half-hearted. It will always be direct and bold.

Mammon has subdued the earth. Not only the hearts and thoughts of men, but their relations with one another. Every invention, every discovery in the field of technology, he - he alone - has seized for himself. That which was meant to free mankind from the cruel dominion of physical law and to make man master of nature has, in Mammon’s hands, become a fearful instrument of torture, has become a scourge under whose blows the defenseless masses writhe like fish. The higher culture rises, the deeper the majority of men fall into the abyss. The more glorious the progress, the more magnificent the development, the more terrible the fate of those by whose labor that progress and development are achieved. The nearer a man believes himself to be to the goal of his strivings, the more terribly he is deceived. In our day the poor of the great cities are coarser, harder, more wretched than savages of the forest.

To crush Mammon, one must attack him precisely in the sphere of his mighty present-day relations. Whoever wishes to render an enemy harmless must cut off his food. For Mammon to fall, the principle of private property must be rejected - as a lie, and as usury.”

I had to become a socialist.

Strange as it may seem, I had already declared my socialist confession a year before this - in an article for the Church Gazette, written to commission from the editorial board of the official Synodal organ.

Through the last year - 1906 - I worked on the question of child labor, of women’s labor, of the condition of the poor in the capital. Naturally, such a year could only sharpen my enmity toward the “predatory-usurious order.”

At a glass factory in Simbirsk province I saw children of twelve and thirteen, through a whole winter night, darting about amid a “beautiful hell,” beside an unbearable heat, and every quarter hour being “cooled off” - the technical term - in an ice-hole.

I saw women at a white-lead factory with cadaverous, dark-green faces, with rotted gums, with trembling limbs. I saw their children, born only to die a terrible death the next day, or within the next month, in convulsions of lead poisoning. Their fathers, who cannot drink like men, because of constant convulsions, and lap like dogs instead.

Life set me face to face with the horrors of the life of Petersburg’s poor, in that world where “at seven years old already a debauchee and a thief.”

Clearly, from a Christian point of view, there could be no wavering in the choice between the two worldviews - the socialist and the bourgeois. And so, in Christ’s name, I had to become a socialist. But why did I become, specifically, a Popular Socialist?

Why precisely a Popular Socialist, and not a Social Democrat or a Socialist-Revolutionary? The reasons are clear. My worldview was born on the ground of an expanded concept of the person - not on the ground of its negation.

The old concept of the person and of the person’s obligations, I rejected. In Korolenko - under whose enchanting influence I had lived since childhood - there is a legend of the angel of ignorance. This angel, by God’s will, lived on earth, sowing smiles, joy, and happiness. But then one day the blood of a man fell upon his bright garments - a man to whose murderers he himself had, in ignorance, led the way… And then the joy in the angel’s eyes grew dim, and in place of “joyful ignorance” his soul took on the torment of “sorrowful knowledge.”

For me Korolenko’s angel was always a symbol of humanity in which a “social conscience” had awakened in place of a merely personal one - the realization dawning that it is not enough to pour oil and wine on the wounds of one man crushed beneath the wheel of life, without trying to stop the “evil turning” of the wheel itself.

This thought, I say, was with me always; now it took on definite and vivid form.

I understand the person as an indivisible part of society, fused to it inseparably, “chemically.” The development of the person, apart from and in isolation from the improvement of the whole complex of which it forms a part, is impossible.

The person cannot distinguish between his own “wounds” and society’s wounds. The Nevsky Prospect, the prison, slavery - all of this is the disgrace of every single person; on each of us it lies as a stain that not only shames but corrupts, and one can never, in any way, become personally free so long as the very concept of unfreedom exists at all - so long as there is a prison, there is violence, there are “bills of sale upon a human being.”

The slave Epictetus’s phrase - “even in the quarries a slave may be free” - is a corrupt, slavish phrase, because the unfreedom of others, and even the “slaveholding of masters” and their disgrace, destroy my own freedom and personhood just the same.

The human person is a part of the street, a part of the whole social order. A girl on the Nevsky sells her body… Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane betrays his Lord… My person, my freedom, is not merely morally interested in either fact - it is wholly, entirely “there,” on the Nevsky, in Gethsemane. The accursed kisses on the girl’s cheek. The accursed kiss upon the cheek of the Lord.

I must feel the whole falsehood and vileness of that accursed kiss both on my own lips (I who kiss) and on my own cheek (I who am betrayed), and if this is so, then the conclusion follows: I shall become free and clean only when the Nevsky itself, with its souls for sale, no longer exists, when the very judgment-seat of Pilate becomes impossible. In short, the liberation of man is possible only together with the liberation of the whole life of all, and evil must and can be hated, above all, not in the man but in its “crystallizations” - in the regime, the prison, the deeds and bonds of bondage.

To recognize oneself as human is to recognize oneself as god… upon Golgotha.

You are a man? You are a god. The whole world is yours - your creation, your possession, your thought, the blood or the ichor of your spirit. The pattern on your teapot is yours; the red lanterns on the wicked streets are yours… The windows of the prison are yours. Every soul around you, the lepers and the cripples, are yours… And you must live through the vileness of all this that is “yours.” Tear from yourself - and thereby from the world - every garment stained with pus. With the soul’s own cry, with its own terrible pain, shake off from it, and from the world, the blood, the shame, the sin…

Every soul must bear the whole world, the evil world, as though it were one single leprous body.

This is terrible, but this is Christ’s own social vision - the one that will destroy the streets of slaves, slavery, violence, want. Here is the apotheosis of “social being.”

But it is plain that such a view, in advancing the principle of social being, at the same time represents a kind of cult of the person. The negation of the person seemed to me, and will always seem to me, criminal. The very structure of society, it seems, can be founded only upon a “cult of the person.”

Man is divine; his future is boundless. And that future will be built by persons.

Naturally, under these conditions, I could not accept Social Democracy with its doctrine denying man as a person. I fully agreed that the person is the “foam” of present social conditions, the product of environment. But this did not oblige me to accept, as well, the dogma of the person’s nothingness. For me the person is a synthesis of separate forces, scattered like sparks throughout the mass, but the very synthesis itself is a “new fact,” a new historical factor.

In the process by which scattered sparks come together into the “foam” of a person, a miracle takes place: out of the elements comes something more than, apparently, was given in them.

And I could not give up the thought that a person, formed by the synthesis of a moment’s disposition, cannot enter history as some “biblical stone” that shatters kingdoms. For the person is divine, and only its cult, its growth, can promise a rich, vivid, strong social life.

If you will, in the name of social being and the social good, I found my way back, too, to the idea of personal perfecting. The expansion of the person seemed to me a necessary condition for building a social order on foundations wider than mere satiety.

“Do you believe in God and the soul, Nina?” asks the leader of the free men, in our as-yet-unwritten play Masters and Slaves. “No.” - “Nor do I. But it seems, still, that one must love God… Yes, it’s all the same, Nina… I don’t believe it, all the same. One must love… Not the god men invented to set as a watchman over their samovars, their fur coats, their wives. No - the real God. The one within us. One must love oneself… Do you know what our misfortune is… We do not love ourselves, and so we cannot be free, and cannot bring freedom into life… We have not understood Christ. Love thy neighbor as thyself… As thyself. But Christians - and we along with them… you and I?.. we decided that one must, and can, love one’s neighbor more than oneself. 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 he needs. Better to say: not all that he needs. How can he bring him the ‘whole’ of real, human freedom?”

Are we free? Do we truly feel every violation of freedom, in its sharpness, as a violation of freedom? A thousand people have died of hunger - that is terrible. But a girl wandering the Nevsky - is that any less terrible? Is this really the thought of a free man, for whom the enslavement of the soul, the bondage of body and spirit, is the most terrible thing of all? People are shot by the hundreds - that is shameful, terrible; but the fact that people feel no nervous shudder when a lackey is given, is tossed, a coin “for tea” - is that not terrible?

No - a man must see himself, must love himself, and must hate himself, and must say: “man” - the word rings shamefully… vilely. But man is a god. He can, and someday must be able to, put Jupiter in Uranus’s place and Uranus in Jupiter’s. And the great, dead man must be raised again, so that it is not the man-louse who passes into the coming triumph.

Let us fight for the liberation of the body, for the destruction of every form of slavery - but in the name of “man,” of his spirit… In the name of the colors of the spirit to come. In the name of the great souls of the future…

In this monologue — setting aside its admittedly questionable atheism - lay, and still lies, my “creed.” But where, among the socialist parties, could I find an echo of it? Only among the Popular Socialists. In that same Korolenko, in his Mikesha searching the starry sky with such probing eyes. Beside him, and beside his angel of sorrowful knowledge with its broad, aching social conscience, and beside his “murderer” tormented by a conscience so restless it punishes him even for killing a bandit - there I could find “my own peace.”

On the party’s banner, alongside the old slogan “Freedom for each. The land and the machine to the worker,” one more phrase has been set: “In the name of man.” Man - that is my “creed.”

And, of course, in becoming a Popular Socialist I do not cease to be a Christian, and a Christian socialist - only not after the fashion of Stoecker or Naumann.

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