Berdyaev on Communism

Truths and Untruths from his view

http://www.1260.org/Mary/Text/Text_Berdyaev_The_Religion_of_Communism_en.htm

Men's attitude as regards Communism has been, up till now, rather emotional than intellectual. The psychological atmosphere has been very unfavourable to an understanding of the ideological world in which Communism moves. Among Russian emigrants it has roused a passionate emotional reaction such as one might expect from wounded people; there are too many who, on being asked what Communism is, could answer, "My own shattered life and unhappy lot." In Western Europe men's attitude is characterised either by bourgeois fright and the bourgeois reaction of the capitalist world, or by the superficial and irresponsible toying with Bolshevism (a snobbish fad, for the most part) indulged in by some intellectuals. But hardly anyone has taken the ideology of Communism, the Communist faith, seriously.

The most remarkable of Russian philosophers in the nineteenth century, a Christian philosopher, Vladimir Solovyev, once said that to defeat what is false in Socialism one must recognise what is true in it. The same must be said of Communism, which is one of the extreme forms of Socialism. In Communism there is a great untruth, an anti-Christian untruth, but it also contains much truth, and even many truths. In Communism there are many truths which one might formulate in a whole series of paragraphs, and only one untruth; but that untruth is so enormous that it outweighs all the truths and spoils them.