Russians are always inclined to take things in a totalitarian sense; the sceptical criticism of Western peoples is alien to them. This is a weakness which leads to confusion of thought and the substitution of one thing for another, but it is also a merit and indicates the religious integration of the Russian soul.

Revolution is certainly not determined by the radical nature of its objects nor even by the character of the means employed in the struggle. The essence of revolution is totality, entireness, in relation to every act of life. The revolutionary is one who in every act he performs relates it to the community as a whole, and subordinates it to the central and complete idea. For the revolutionary there are no separate spheres; he tolerates no division of life into parts, nor will he admit any autonomy of thought in relation to action or autonomy of action in relation to thought. The revolutionary has an integrated world-view in which theory and practice organically coalesce. Entirety in everything — that is the basic principle of the revolutionary attitude to life. … Russian revolutionaries in the past, also, had always been totalitarian. To them revolution was a religion and a philosophy, not merely a conflict concerned with the social and political side of life. And Russian Marxism had to work itself out, to fit in with that revolutionary type and that revolutionary totalitarian instinct. That is the meaning of Lenin and bolshevism. Bolshevism also defined itself as the only orthodox, i.e. totalitarian integral Marxism, which refused to tolerate the breaking up of the Marxist world-view into fragments and the adoption only of separate parts of it.

Russian socialism became less emotional and sentimental, more intellectually grounded, and tougher. The first Russian Marxists were more European, more Western folk, than the narodniks. The will to power awoke in them, the will to obtain power, and the ideology of power made its appearance. The motive of compassion grows weaker; it is not there that the power lies to fight for revolution. Its attitude towards the people as a proletariat is not so much compassion for its oppressed unhappy condition, as the conviction that it must conquer, that it is the coming power and the liberator of mankind. But with all these changes of spirit in the intelligentsia, the underlying foundation remained the same, i.e. the search for the kingdom of social truth and righteousness, capacity for sacrifice, an ascetic attitude towards culture, an integral, totalitarian attitude to life, conditioned by the one great purpose — the actual realization of socialism.

According to the Russian spiritual make-up, the revolution could only be totalitarian. All Russian ideologies have always been totalitarian, theocratic or socialist. Russians are maximalists, and what appears to be a utopia is the most realistic in Russia. … For the Russian left-wing intelligentsia, the revolution has always been both a religion and a philosophy; the revolutionary idea has always been integral.

Generally speaking, Russians but poorly understood the meaning of the relative, the fact that historical progress advances by stages, the differentiation of various spheres of culture. Russian maximalism is due to this. The Russian spirit craves for wholeness. It cannot reconcile itself to the classification of everything according to categories. It yearns for the Absolute and desires to subordinate everything to the Absolute, and this is a religious trait in it. But it easily leads to confusion, takes the relative for the Absolute, the partial for the universal, and then it falls into idolatry. It is a property of the Russian spirit especially to switch over the current of religious energy to non-religious objects, to the relative and partial sphere of science or social life.

The typical Russian cannot go on doubting for very long; his inclination is to make a dogma for himself fairly quickly, and to surrender himself to that dogma whole-heartedly and entirely. A Russian sceptic is a Western type in Russia. There was nothing sceptical in Russian materialism; it was a faith.

When out of everything that Christ did, we snatch out only one side, distorting and exaggerating its meaning — isn't this called heresy [The word "heresy" comes from the Greek αίρέω "I choose"].

Economics determine all human life; upon it depends not only the whole structure of society but also all ideology, all spiritual culture, religion, philosophy, ethics, art. Economics is the basis, ideology the superstructure. There exists an inevitable general economic process by which everything is determined. … The strength of the economic factor in human life is not an invention of Marx, and he is not to blame for the fact that it has so great an influence upon ideology. Marx observed this in the capitalist society of Europe which surrounded him. But he reduced it to a theory and gave it a universal character. What he discovered in the capitalist society of his own time he regarded as the basis of all society. He discovered much in capitalist society and said much that was true about it. But his mistake lay in taking the particular for the general.

In Belinsky there was the characteristically Russian search for an integral outlook which will give an answer to all the questions of life, unite the theoretical and practical reason, and give a philosophical basis to the social ideal. Integrated truth, as later expressed by N. Mikhailovsky, who was also in the line of descent from Belinsky, is both truth in the abstract and that truth which finds expression in justice. The same idea of wholeness will be found in N. Federov in a religious setting, and in Marxist Leninism. The Russian critical publicists will always preach an integrated outlook, will always connect truth and righteousness, will always be teachers of life.

The Russian need to comprehend everything in the world morally and religiously has its own truth. The Russian soul does not put up with the worship of senseless, immoral and godless power, it does not accept history as a natural necessity. … Russia is an independent value in the world, insoluble in other values, and this value of Russia must be conveyed to the divine life. … The purpose of the life of peoples is not welfare and well-being, but the creation of values, the heroic and tragic experience of their historical fate. And this presupposes a religious attitude to life.

Like the German romantics, Russian thought strove after wholeness and did so more consistently and radically than the romantics, who themselves lost wholeness. The wholeness of the Christian East is set in opposition to the rationalist fragmentariness of the West. This was first pointed out by I. Kireevsky and it became a fundamental Russian theme rooted in the depths of Russian character. Russian communist atheists assert wholeness, totalitarianism, no less than the Orthodox Slavophils. Psychologically, Russian orthodoxy is wholeness, totalitarianism; …

The Slavophils were warm defenders of the Commune, which they regarded as organic and as the original Russian structure of economic life among the peasantry, as all the narodniks thought. They were decided opponents of the ideas of Roman Law on property. They did not regard property as sacred and absolute; owners of property they regarded as stewards only. They repudiated Western, bourgeois, capitalist civilization. And if they thought that the West was decaying, it was because it had entered upon the path of that bourgeois civilization, because in it the unity of life had been split asunder.

No one is going to deny that the national character of the Jews possesses wholeness and inner unity.

Western people scarcely ever had any doubt about the justification of civilization; this was a purely Russian doubt and arose not among those Russians who had not yet acquired any culture but frequently among those who were to be found on its highest level. Russian writers, especially the most notable, did not believe in the stability of civilization, in the stability of those principles upon which the world rests, what was called the bourgeois world of their time; they are full of terrible forebodings of impending disaster. European literature does not know that sort of religious and social unrest, for it belongs to a civilization which is more fixed and crystallized, more formed, more self-contented and calm, more differentiated and distributed into categories. Integrality belonged more properly to the Russians, entirety, both in thought and in creative life. Russian thinkers, Russian creators, when they are of note spiritually always sought not so much a perfect culture, and perfect products of creative power, as perfect life, the perfect expression of truth in life.

Russian literature and Russian thought bear witness to the fact that in imperial Russia a single integral culture did not exist, that there was a gulf between the cultured classes and the masses of the people, that the old régime had no moral support. Everyone had visions of bridging the gulf by some form or other of collectivism. Everything was moving towards revolution.

The problem of power was fundamental with Lenin and all his followers; it distinguished the bolsheviks from all other revolutionaries. They too created a police state, in its methods of government very like the old Russian State. But to organize government, to subject to it the labouring and peasant masses, could not be a matter of the use of armed force alone, or of sheer coercion. An integrated doctrine was needed, a consistent general outlook, and symbols which held the State together were required. In the Muscovite Tsardom and in the Empire the people were held together by a unity of religious faith; so also a new single faith had to be expressed for the masses in elementary symbols. Marxism in its Russian form was wholly suitable for this.

…one section of Russian Marxists valued above all their integral totalitarian world outlook, defended their orthodoxy, and were distinguished by extreme intolerance, … for them Marxism and socialism were a religion; …

Lenin was an absolutist; he believed in absolute truth. … Totalitarian Marxism, dialectic Marxism, is, in his view, absolute truth. This absolute truth is a weapon to be used for revolution and the organization of dictatorship. But a teaching which gives a basis to a totalitarian doctrine and embraces the whole of life, not only politics and economics but also thought and consciousness and all creative culture, can be only a subject of faith.

Lenin … fought all his life for that integral totalitarian view of life, which was necessary for the struggle and for the focusing of revolutionary energy. From this totalitarian system he would not suffer a single brick to be removed, he demanded the acceptance of all of it as a whole, and from his point of view he was right. … He fought for wholeness and consistency in the conflict. The latter was impossible without an integrated dogmatic outlook, without a dogmatic confession of faith, without orthodoxy. …

Lenin was a revolutionary to the marrow, precisely because through his whole life he defended an integral totalitarian outlook of life and permitted no infringement of it whatever. … Grant that the mensheviks had the same ultimate ideal as Lenin, grant that they also were devoted to the working classes, still they had not this integrated view; they were not totalitarian in their attitude to revolution; they complicated the affair by their talk of Russia needing a bourgeois revolution first, about socialism being realized only after a period of capitalist development, about the need to wait for the development of class consciousness among the workers, about the peasantry being a reactionary class, and so on.

It is idle to suppose that the religious persecution in Russia is directed only against the Orthodox Church, which was the dominant church and associated in the past with monarchy and reaction. Sects, for instance the Baptists, are regarded as still more dangerous than the Orthodox, and the struggle against them is regarded as more difficult, just because in the past it was they who were persecuted by, and not associated with, the authorities of the old régime. Christians who recognize the justice of communism in the domain of social life, are considered more harmful and dangerous than Christians who are openly in favour of restoration of the old social order and engage in counterrevolutionary activity. A free-thinking, atheist and materialist bourgeoisie is to be preferred to Christians who sympathize with communism; it can be used for the socialist work of construction; it is usually indifferent to the question of a 'general outlook', whereas the Christian communists make a breach in the integral wholeness of the communist 'world outlook'.

I am a supporter of Christian Personalism, certainly not of individualism which is hostile to the principle of personality. In a bourgeois capitalist community personality is levelled down and is looked upon merely as an atom. [I am even inclined to think that in the deep sense of the word the individual is revolutionary and the mass is conservative.] Individualism is hostile to the Christian idea of the communion of men, whereas the realization of personality presupposes the communion of men.

When I say that the world is moving towards a new Middle Ages, I certainly do not mean a return to the old Middle Ages and least of all to feudalism. The phrase is only an indication of the type of society in which man will strive after wholeness and unity as opposed to the individualism of modern history, and in which the significance of the religious principle will increase, even though it may be in the form of militant antireligion.

In this book I have tried to show that Russian communism is more traditional than is commonly thought and that it is a transformation and deformation of the old Russian messianic idea. Communism in Western Europe would be an entirely different phenomenon in spite of the similarity of Marxist theories. To the traditional Russian character of communism are due both its positive and its negative sides: On the one hand the search for the Kingdom of God and integrated truth and justice, capacity for sacrifice and the absence of the bourgeois spirit; on the other hand, the absoluteness of the State, and despotism, a feeble grasp of the rights of man and the danger of a featureless collectivism. In other countries communism, in the event of an attempt to bring it into existence, may be less integrated, make less claim to take the place of religion, may be more secular and more bourgeois in its spirit. The problems of communism stimulate the awakening of the Christian conscience and should lead to the development of a creative social Christianity, not in the sense of understanding Christianity as a social religion, but in the sense of revealing Christian truth and justice in relation to social life. This will mean emancipation from social slavery, that social slavery in which Christian consciousness finds itself

… the type of holy fool better than any other expresses the characteristic folk and spiritual features of a Russian person. Love for Christ and for His Cross, love unto death, with the desire to imitate Him as much as possible, lives in the heart of every Russian who consciously affirms his Christianity. For holy fools, this love is brought to the most extreme limits. The means for this lies in the renunciation of the world and its blessings, gracefully elevated to a supernatural level. Spiritual "nomadism" and freedom, reaching the level of anarchic individualism, are fully developed in the life of the holy fools. Contempt for form, for every measure, a thirst for the absolute in everything, hatred for any "sleekness", for any generally accepted rules, for the petty-bourgeois spirit, wherever it manifests itself, receive their fullest expression in "foolishness". All this is trampled underfoot in the name of Christ and His Truth, the holy fool scoffs at all this and, believing in transfiguration in the future life, he is sanctified by the cross and the immeasurable suffering that results from this for him. Here is a synthesis of the most secret aspirations of the Russian people, the last clue to the success of the almost superhuman feat of "foolishness in Christ."

… the synthesis of the most secret aspirations of the Russian people, the last clue to the success of the almost superhuman feat of "foolishness in Christ." But is this success possible only in Russia? This can be doubted. Without even returning to the fact that the first holy fools in Russia were people from the West, how many other souls, engulfed in the flame of love for Christ and His cross, far beyond the borders of Russia, they felt the same impulses and aspired to similar feats, although they were brought up, it would seem, in a completely different spiritual discipline. Let us recall only St. Ulfa in the 8th century, the first steps of the ascetic life of St. Francis of Assisi, Blessed John Colombini in the 14th century, and the "originality" of St. Philip Neri in the 16th century.

In a 17th-century French collection of "spiritual hymns of divine love for the edification and comfort of pious souls" one can read the following:

Poetically weak, this hymn is nonetheless remarkable. One might think that it was written in the 16th century by St. Basil the Blessed in Moscow or in the 18th century by Xenia in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, here we are in Bordeaux, and the author is a Jesuit, Joseph Suren (1660-1665). It is difficult to sum up the state of foolishness more precisely and more expressively. Whatever some modern Orthodox theologians say, there is no fundamental difference between the spirituality of the West and the East, there are only inevitable shades due to the difference between peoples and races. But how can there be a fundamental difference, when the source of spirituality here and there is the same: the Father, who attracts, the Son, who leads, and the Holy Spirit, who unites?