Liberating Christianity: Why I Am Not a Communist

Why I’m Not a Communist

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

July 14, 2021

1. Introduction

It frequently happens these days that some uninformed but misguidedly passionate person will accuse people who advocate public policies that are inclusive and actually care for ordinary people Communists. Liberal, progressive Christians get called Communists too. I recently saw someone in effect call Rev. Chuck Currie, an ordained UCC minister and Director of the Center for Peace and Spirituality at Pacific University in Oregon, a Communist. No one who knows the first thing about Rev. Currie and Communism could possibly call Currie a Communist. It won’t do any harm and may do some good for me here to explain why Rev. Currie and I are not Communists.

Let me first state my credentials for writing about Communism. Like Rev. Currie I am an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Earlier in my life, however, I obtained a PhD in Russian history. At the time that I earned that degree Russia was the dominant part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Understanding Russia and especially understanding Leninism, which the Soviet Communists said was their guiding philosophy, required knowledge of the philosophy of Karl Marx. I acquired that knowledge. In addition I lived in Russia, mostly in Moscow, for the 1975-76 academic year doing dissertation research.[1] I saw and worked within the society and economy that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had created. I got to know a fifth year journalism student at Moscow State University and heard some of the things he said about his country. I have thus had more exposure to post-Marxist Communism than have all but a small handful of American scholars and diplomats. I have been called a Communist, mostly I think because I spent that academic year in Soviet Russia. I believe that I am well qualified to offer the following exposition of what Communism really is.

2. Karl Marx

Communism as it existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere grew out of the materialist philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marx combined two seemingly contradictory philosophies that were current in Europe in the nineteenth century. He was on the one hand a disciple of the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and on the other hand a disciple of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Comte was a positivist. For him only the physical was real, and all knowledge came from the observation of natural phenomena. Comte’s philosophy was atheistic. God played no role it.

Hegel’s philosophy was far more complex than Comte’s. Hegel analyzed the development of human society and culture using a system he called dialectic. In dialectic development progress begins with a given reality, a starting point that Hegel called the thesis. Every thesis would eventually generate its opposite, what Hegel called the antithesis. The thesis and the antithesis would eventually produce something new that contained elements of both the thesis and the antithesis. Hegel called this new thing the synthesis.

Perhaps an example will help here. A major thesis of European civilization before the mid-seventeenth century was that God was real, had created all that is, and made Godself known to us through divine revelation. All truth was grounded in and proceeded from God. Beginning in the 1630s (and before that in the realm of astronomy) European civilization produced the antithesis of that thesis. Human reason replaced divine revelation as the source of all truth. In the development of that antithesis God first got pushed to the margins of reality. Eventually in the philosophy of Comte and others God was denied altogether in a rationalistic atheism in which only the material, that is, the physical, was considered real. Today many of us live and function in a new vision of reality that is a synthesis of those two earlier views. We fully accept the reality of God as creator of all that is, but we also value and accept the tremendous advances in the sciences and other areas of human life that have come from the application of human reason to any question to which one seeks an answer. The progression here was theism (the thesis), atheism (the antithesis), and post-modern theism (the synthesis).

Marx took Comte’s positivism as his philosophy, combined it with Hegel’s dialectic, and posited what he called dialectical materialism. Marx was an atheist, and Marxism is an atheistic philosophy. Marxism denies the reality of God altogether. Only the material is real. Yet although reality lacks any spiritual element it nonetheless progresses in a dialectical fashion of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Somehow Marx understood capitalism as a synthesis of two earlier models of life, slavery and feudalism. We needn’t worry about just how he did that.

Marx taught that the process of dialectical materialism would eventually produce an ideal sort of society that he called communism.[2] That’s where the word comes from. For Marx all aspects of human life arose from a society’s class structure. Classes were determined by their relationship to the means of production. In Marx’s day the most significant classes were the capitalists and the workers, a class Marx called the proletariat. The proletarians, that is, the members of the proletariat, worked for the capitalists. Everything in life was determined by the capitalists as the dominant class. The capitalists oppressed the proletariat for the capitalists’ economic benefit. Wages were low. Working conditions were often unsafe. Marx believed in something called the labor theory of value, that is, that it was the labor of the proletarians not the work of the capitalists that produced value. The proletariat however did not benefit from the value Marx thought they produced. Nearly all of that value went to the capitalists, who were the owners of the means of production. Workers were, Marx thought, alienated from the value they produced. That alienation created a contradiction within the capitalist system that would eventually have world changing significance, or so Marx thought.

Marx taught that eventually the proletariat would rebel against capitalism in what he called a socialist revolution. The proletariat would supplant the capitalists as the dominant class. They would take ownership of the means of production and would create a socialist society, economy, social structure, political structure, and culture. The task of the now dominant proletariat would be to eliminate classes altogether. It was to create a society of only one class that was called a classless society, there being only one class meaning that there were actually no classes. That classless society, which was the ultimate goal of the socialist revolution, Marx called communism. Since for Marx all of history had been driven by class conflict, history would cease developing because with no class conflict the action of the dialectic of history would stop. The function of the government in this socialist phase was precisely to create that classless society that would exist in an idealized earthly paradise of communism.

In this communist utopia everyone would be cared and provided for. If a mantra of capitalism had been “from each according to their ability, to each according to their ability” with the “each” that received being only the owners of the means of production, the mantra of communism would be “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” with the each here meaning everyone in the society.

Marx’s vision of the communist society was a lot like and probably owed a good deal to a vision of an idealistic society from the New Testament book of Acts. In that book we read:

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common….There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. Acts 4:32-35 NRSV.

That is a vision of a classless society. No one owned anything personally. Everything was held in common, and resources were distributed not according to what anyone had earned but according to what each member of the community needed. That was the vision of the unknown author of the book of Acts. It was Marx’s vision of communism too.

That’s the theory. As philosophically problematic as the theory was, it was at least motivated by a legitimate concern. The lives of the workers in the industrialized nations of western Europe really were quite miserable. In films and on TV we see images of life in Victorian England in which everyone has a beautiful home, beautiful clothes (by the standards of the day anyway), and clearly plenty of money. There were such people in Victorian England, but they were a small percentage of the population. A great many more people lived in squalor and worked for meager wages in unsafe conditions in factories and mines. Marx and many other people were sympathetic to the plight of the workers and angry at the capitalists, who created and perpetuated those conditions.

Fair enough. We can share Marx’s concern for the living conditions of the workers in Victorian England and elsewhere, but if we are to understand Marx’s theories in any depth we must consider two things. They are the philosophical flaws in Marxist ideology and the horror Marxists in Russia and elsewhere created when they tried to put that ideology into practice in the real world.

Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism was flawed from the beginning. There were several things wrong with it. Economists today say that Marx was wrong when he said it was the labor of the workers that creates economic value. More significantly, Marx contended that the merely physical has a metaphysic, that it acts and changes through time in a way we can discover and describe. He saw history proceed through a dialectical progression. For him all reality was material, but it wasn’t static. There was no spirit behind it, but it functioned as though there were. That contention simply makes no sense.
Spirit may have a dialectic. Humanity may develop in a dialectical manner, but the material is just there. It’s static. There is nothing in it that could generate a dialectic. Even if Marx were correct that history progresses in a dialectical fashion, he was profoundly wrong about the nature of reality. His ontology was all wrong. His philosophical materialism was simply inconsistent with the contention that history progresses through time.

Then there is Marx’s atheism. It is related to but distinct from his philosophical materialism. Marx clearly thought in ethical terms. His concern for the welfare of the working class was a moral concern. To him something was morally wrong about the way the economy, society, and political structures of his day functioned. Whatever else he may have gotten wrong, he was right about that one. Yet where in his materialist ontology does that moral concern come from? In what is it grounded? What in philosophical materialism leads us to have any moral concern at all? The answer is that truly nothing does. In any purely materialist ontology people’s moral concerns are simply left hanging in mid air. They have no support, and because they don’t they are easily abandoned when it seems expedient to do so. Marx’s philosophical materialism led him to deny the reality of God and of any spiritual dimension to life. That aspect of his philosophy would come to have tragic consequences.

Then there is Marx’s exclusive focus on class. Marx had a moral concern about the class he called the proletariat, but it was a concern about a whole tier of society with little or no focus on individuals. In Marxism class matters, individuals don’t. The combination of this characteristic of Marxism with its atheism would produce tragedy of worldwide significance in the decades after Marx’s death. If individuals aren’t what matter, if they have no moral standing as individuals, it is easy for those with power to dispose of them at will with no moral qualms. Marx’s disregard of the moral worth of individuals is one of his ideology’s tragic flaws.

3. The Soviet Experience

Then there is the matter of the horror Marxists produced when they tried to organize their reality around Marxist principles. On October 25, 1917 (old style, November 7 new style) a small group of Russian Marxists, called Bolsheviks at the time, led by Vladimir Ilych Lenin, staged a coup d’état in St. Petersburg. They seized control of the government, such as it was, of the enormous Russian Empire. It wasn’t a coup against the tsars. Russian autocracy had ended the previous March when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the member of his Romanov family he had designated as his successor declined to take the position. Lenin’s coup was against something called the Provisional Government. That entity was made up of well-intentioned but utterly ineffective Russian liberals. Pushing them aside was relatively easy. They had little or no support among the Russian people. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the Bolsheviks became called what happened that day the Great October Revolution, and they celebrated it every November 5.[3] It wasn’t really a revolution at that point at all. It was merely a coup d’état by a small but tightly organized and committed group against a small group of men who were hardly organized at all and who seemed to be committed to nothing other than calling a constitutional convention to form a new government, something they never did.

The horror of Soviet Communism began at the very start of the Bolshevik regime. One of the first things Lenin did after he assumed power was create something called the Cheka, from the first letters of the Russian words for Extraordinary Committee. It would eventually become the NKVD and then the KGB. Its function was to eliminate all internal threats to the Soviet regime.[4] To them eliminate mostly meant kill. The Bolsheviks had to fight a long civil war against tsarist and other opponents.[5] Somehow the Bolsheviks managed to win that civil war. They were able to do it in large part because the various factions fighting against them never organized themselves into a unified force. Be that as it may, by 1921 the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power over most if not quite all of the former Russian Empire.[6]

Lenin died on January 21, 1924, after he had suffered a series of debilitating strokes. It has been fashionable in some circles in our country and in Russia to portray Lenin as the good Communist and Stalin as the bad Communist. Lenin may in a sense have been a good Communist, but he was not a good man. He presided over the creation of the instruments of terror that Stalin would use so brutally in the years after Lenin’s death. Lenin had no qualms about murdering people who he saw as a threat. He created the one party state that would rule Russia and all of the USSR until December 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved itself. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the government it created and controlled tolerated no political opposition and for much of its existence was perfectly happy to eliminate it brutally.

Now we come to Stalin. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, nee Dzhugashvili (1878-1953) was a Georgian not a Russian. Stalin was the name he took as his revolutionary name.[7] He had been around for quite a while before Lenin died. He had played a minor role in the Bolshevik coup of 1917 serving for a time as Lenin’s bodyguard. He fought in the civil war particularly around a city on the southern reaches of the Volga that was called Tsaritsyn at the time. It would later be named Stalingrad and today is the city of Volgograd. He became Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1922, possibly against Lenin’s wishes. In any event Lenin very probably came to regret the choice of Stalin for that position. After Lenin’s death Stalin maneuvered himself into a position of total power.

What Lenin had added to Marxism facilitated Stalin’s rise. Lenin added to Marxism the notion that imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. More importantly, he defined the Communist Party as the one and only party of the proletariat. It was the party of the socialist revolution. It consisted of the most class conscious members of the proletariat. Any act against the Party was an act against the revolution. Stalin accused the men known as the Old Bolsheviks, the men who had served with Lenin, both to his left and to his right in the Communist Party of being counterrevolutionaries. They were unable to thwart Stalin’s grab for total power. Stalin became in effect the dictator of the Soviet Union, all under the guise of heading the Communist Party and representing the interests of the proletariat. In the 1930s Stalin staged the famous show trials of several Old Bolsheviks, who one after another confessed to horrendous crimes against the Communist Party and the Soviet state. Each was promptly executed after the end of their show trial.

Stalin created one of the most oppressive and violent political systems the world has ever seen. All dissent was crushed. Thousands upon thousands of people if not more were arrested, usually on trumped up charges of counterrevolutionary activity. If they weren’t promptly executed they were sent into the Gulag, that vicious collection of prison camps Stalin created and about which Solzhenitsyn has written so powerfully. Most of the people sent into the Gulag were never seen again. Stalin made it everyone’s duty to spy on everyone else and report anything even slightly suspicious to the authorities. No one could trust anyone, and nearly everyone kept their political opinions very much to themselves while they mouthed the slogans of the Communist Party. It became common for people to advance in their employment or profession by charging the person ahead of them in the hierarchy of counterrevolutionary activity, which almost invariably resulted in the person disappearing and the person making the charge assuming the now vacant position that person had held. I have read one account of a man in Leningrad whose job it was to spend eight hours a day shooting people accused of counterrevolutionary activity in the back of the head. People were sent into the Gulag for offenses as minor as telling a joke that poked a little fun at Stalin. Stalin made a child who had turned in his parents a national hero. The Soviet Union under Stalin was a living hell on earth.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worse of it was what the Ukrainians call the Holodomor (more correctly transliterated as Golodomor). In Russian “golod” means hunger and “mor” refers to death. The word means death by starvation. There was a famine throughout the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933. Stalin used the famine as a vehicle for committing what the Ukrainians call genocide against them. Stalin intentionally made the famine worse in Ukraine through such actions as refusing foreign aid and confiscating food from private homes. He may have been trying to force Ukrainian peasants into complying with his policy of the collectivization of agriculture, or perhaps he was punishing them for having opposed that policy when it was first instigated in the late 1920s. The famine lasted nearly continuously from spring 1932, to July 1933. The total number of deaths in the Holodomor is unknown, but we do know that millions of Ukrainians had starved to death by the end of 1933. The Holodomor is a tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust. The Soviets denied for years that it had ever happened. Relevant information and documentation is only now coming to light.

Stalin became a human monster of the same order as Hitler, or perhaps even worse. Yet somehow he got the Soviet people to believe that he was their dearest friend and protector. Many of them still see him as a great wartime leader. In 1939 he entered into the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Nazis in which the two totalitarian nations pledged not to attack each other and to divide up Poland between them. Stalin was taken completely by surprise by the Nazi invasion of 1941. It is true that the people of the USSR, or at least the Russians, rallied to the national defense against the Germans. Soviet industry produced weapons that were at least as good as the German weapons and often better. The United States shipped a good deal of material support to the Soviets. Yet most of that aid came after Stalin’s forces had turned the tide of the war in Europe against the Germans in the almost inconceivably bloody battle of Stalingrad (23 August, 1942-2 February, 1943). Stalingrad had some military significance because it is on the Volga and can control traffic up and down that river, Russia’s main waterway for the transportation of people and goods. Yet Hitler probably attacked it mostly because it was named at the time for Stalin. Stalin probably ordered that it be defended to the last person standing for the same reason. The Red Army scored a major military victory at Stalingrad through a brilliant flanking maneuver that surrounded most of the German forces and forced them to surrender. But the victory was won at a horrendous cost. The Germans and their allies lost around 800,000 men, including those captured or missing. Soviet forces lost around 1,100,000 men. Approximately 40,000 civilians died in the battle.[8] The Battle of Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle of World War II, and the Germans never recovered from their loss there. After Stalingrad they began their retreat back to Germany. The Red Army pursued them all the way to Berlin.

The Stalinist terror may have eased up some during the war but probably not by much. Even in Leningrad under siege and blockade by the Germans in which one million or more of the city’s residents died, mostly by starvation, the NKVD, a successor of the Cheka and a predecessor of the KGB, kept at its work trumping up charges of counterrevolutionary activity against innocent people. The terror continued after the war too. It appears that before his death Stalin was preparing a purge campaign against Jewish doctors, again on trumped up charges.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953, and the country went into deep mourning. The people thought they had lost their Dear Leader (he called himself Vozhd, the Russian equivalent of the German Fȕhrer). In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev began a destalinization program. He gave a famous secret speech to the Party leadership in which he condemned Stalin for the way he purged the Communist Party of most of its capable leadership and for creating a cult of personality. He did not, however, condemn any of Stalin’s national policies. Eventually all images of Stalin disappeared in the Soviet Union except in Stalin’s native Georgia. When I was there in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language study tour Stalin’s picture was everywhere, even in taxi cabs.

Stalinism completely discredits Marxism, Leninism, and Communism, but we have to ask whether a Stalin of some sort was inevitable or only possible in a system that styled itself as Marxist-Leninist. The evidence suggests that it was inevitable. Marxism-Leninism produced Mao Zedong in China, Castro in Cuba, and the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Mao was if anything even more brutal in his attacks on the Chinese people and Chinese culture than Stalin had been in Russia. Lenin’s ideology of the Communist Party as the only legitimate party of the proletariat certainly opened the door for Stalin. That ideology made it easy for Stalin to convince people that any act against the Party, its policies, or against Stalin himself was counterrevolutionary and deserving of death.

But what about Marxism itself? After all, Marx’s vision of the classless communist society, unrealistic as it surely was, was a vision for an earthly paradise not the earthly hell of Soviet Communism. I’ve already mentioned here the two aspects of Marxism that played into the hands of the Soviet Communists as they established a totalitarian system in the former Russian Empire. The first of them is Marxism’s atheism. The Soviet Communists had significant success in their campaign to turn the Russians and the other people of the Soviet Union atheist. Churches, synagogues, and mosques always existed in the USSR, but people always said that only old women go to church. That was largely true of the Russians in the 1970s when I was there, but it seems there was generation after generation of old women, so the church never died out completely. A Russian student at Moscow State University my late wife and I got to know a little bit asked us if we believed in God. We said yes. He said that was the one thing about us westerners that he just couldn’t understand. He had had atheism drilled into him by the Soviet education system. That was a heritage of atheistic Marxism.[9]

Then there was the fact that Marx made a class, the proletariat, and not individual people the object of his affection. In Marxism individuals matter only to the extent that they belong to one class or another. They have no intrinsic moral value in themselves. The combination of atheism and a focus on class not on individuals created a deadly mixture under the Soviets, especially under Stalin.[10]

Consider: You are a leader of a great country like Russia, great in geographic scope and in cultural heritage. Your Marxist ideology tells you that your task as a leader is to transform that country from what it had been into something new and supposedly better. You face opposition, and you have neither a religious belief that keeps you from doing horrible things nor do you place any value on individual lives. So what do you do? You don’t go through the tedious, time consuming, and uncertain process of trying to convince your opponents to support your policies. No, you just take those opponents out. Why not? They stand in the way of what you consider to be progress or at least in the way of a transformation you wish to bring about whether you actually consider it progress or not. You have no qualms about killing because you don’t believe in a God who tells you not to kill. Those opponents of yours have no moral value as individuals. So you kill them. Problem solved.

If you’re Joseph Stalin you kill supposed opponents by the millions. Stalin famously said that one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. A statistic about people who don’t matter, who are expendable, who (you think at least) need to be gotten out of the way. There is nothing in Marxism that tells you not to kill them. Marxism tells you that what matters is the creation of communism. So you kill. You build the Gulag and cause probably millions of people to disappear into it never to be seen again. Why not? They don’t matter. They’re just in the way of what you want to do. So kill them. Why not? You’re presented with an ethnic group of many millions of people, and you don’t like them. They’re different, and they are not willingly going along with your policies of transformation. So kill them. Kill them by the millions. Why not? There’s nothing in your Marxism that tells you that it’s wrong to do it. Marxism says create communism, so if you think someone’s blocking the road to communism or can be made to look like they’re blocking it take them out. Kill them, and it really doesn’t matter how many you kill. They don’t matter. They’re only a statistic. Only communism matters.

4. Conclusion

That’s why I’m not a Communist. I can’t speak for him, but it may be why Rev. Currie isn’t a Communist either. We are Christians. We call ourselves liberal or progressive Christians, and we are convinced that we understand the gospel of Jesus Christ better than our conservative coreligionists do. Jesus Christ wasn’t about how your soul gets to heaven when you die, or at least he wasn’t primarily about that. He was about building the realm of God right here on earth. The realm of God is what the world would be if God were in charge and the people who are in charge weren’t, to paraphrase John Dominic Crossan. It is radically nonviolent. It is a world in which everyone has enough because no one has too much. It is a world of justice for the lowly, the least, and the lost. Not due process justice, although surely it has that too. Distributive justice, justice that works to assure that everyone is cared and provided for. I suppose Jesus’ vision of the realm of God has some similarities with Marx’s classless society of communism, but only in the details. The realm of God is precisely the realm of God.

Marx was an atheist. We progressive Christians know that God is real every bit as much as conservative Christians do. We are believers. We are people of faith. Ultimately that is why I am not a Communist. Marx’s atheism, actually anybody’s atheism, is just wrong. God is real. I don’t believe that God damns people who don’t believe that, but I know that those people are wrong. God is real. Marx’s focus on class rather than the individual contradicts the foundational tenets of my faith. Each person is a child of God with immense individual moral value. That in the end is why I am not a Communist.

[1] My dissertation was not on a subject directly relating to the USSR. It was a study of the ideology of Konstantine Petrovich Pobedonostsev, who tutored the last two tsars in civil law and from 1880 to 1905 served as Over Procurator of the General Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. I have turned that dissertation into a book with the title Reflections on a Russian Statesman. It is available on amazon.com. The Russian Orthodox Church has a Holy Synod today, but it isn’t what the Holy Synod was under the tsars. Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, abolished the Patriarchate of Moscow and replaced it with the Holy Synod. The Church reestablished the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1918. Today the Holy Synod is the chief administrative body of the Church between Bishop’s Councils.

[2] A note on capitalization. I write the dreamed of classless society of which Marx wrote communism with a lower case c. I write Communism with a capital C when the reference is to a particular Communist party, most prominently the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[3] At the time of the Bolshevik coup Russia was still using the Julian calendar while the rest of Europe used the more accurate Gregorian calendar. Hence the difference in dates.

[4] “Soviet” is the Russian word for council. Starting with the Revolution of 1905 Russian workers organized themselves into councils, soviets in Russian. The Bolsheviks had a significant number of supporters in the workers’ soviets. They claimed that their government was a government in the form of the soviets. It never really was, but never mind.

[5] The United States sent soldiers to Siberia for a time to fight the Bolsheviks.

[6] Finland, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the part of Poland that had been part of the Russian Empire were not part of the original Soviet Union, which was formed in 1922. Finland never was again part of any Russian state. The Russians reincorporated the three Baltic states into the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. Poland was never again part of any Russian state although of course it came under Soviet domination after World War II and remained there until the late 1980s.

[7] Lenin and others did the same thing. Lenin’s family name was Ulyanov not Lenin.

[8] Battle of Stalingrad | History, Summary, Location, Deaths, & Facts | Britannica. By comparison, total US deaths in all of World War II are placed at 405,399. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war. I do not mean to belittle American losses. They were many and real. Yet the Soviet Union lost orders of magnitude more people in the war than the US did. Perhaps Americans would understand contemporary Russia better if they were more familiar with that history.

[9] Before I left Russia I gave this man a copy of a book by Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), a great Russian theologian of the early twentieth century. My friend nearly broke into tears. He said I would never know what I had done for him. I’m not sure what he meant by that. Perhaps he had heard of Berdyaev in school and knew that he was an important figure in the Silver Age of Russian culture before World War I. If he did he surely heard nothing but lies about him. I don’t think this man was much interested in theology, but I suspect he was very interested in Russian culture and particularly in aspects of that culture that the Soviets had either covered up or grossly distorted. My guess is my friend reacted the way he did not because Berdyaev was a theologian but because Berdyaev was very Russian.

[10] My major PhD professor at the University of Washington in the 1970s, the late Donald W. Treadgold, once said that one reason the Soviets were so much more brutal than the tsars had been was that at least the tsars had been Christians. I don’t know if he was right about that or not, but it is an interesting observation to contemplate. Don (he let me call him that only after I got my degree) was himself a Christian, which made him a very rare bird in American academia in the 1970s.

[3] At the time of the Bolshevik coup Russia was still using the Julian calendar while the rest of Europe used the more accurate Gregorian calendar. Hence the difference in dates.

[5] The United States sent soldiers to Siberia for a time to fight the Bolsheviks.

[7] Lenin and others did the same thing. Lenin’s family name was Ulyanov not Lenin.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Why I Am Not a Communist

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