And so I affirm that at the basis of the Russian revolution, which took place in a semi-Asiatic, semi-barbarian element and in the atmosphere of a decomposed war, lies a religious fact connected with the religious nature of the Russian people. The Russian people cannot create a middle humanistic kingdom; they do not want a rule of law state in the European sense of the word. This is an apolitical people in the structure of its spirit, it is striving towards the end of history, towards the realization of the Kingdom of God. They want either the Kingdom of God, brotherhood in Christ, or fellowship in Antichrist, the kingdom of the prince of this world. The Russian people have always had an exceptional, unknown to the peoples of the West, detachment, they did not feel exceptional chainedness and attachment to earthly things, to property, to the family, to the state, to their rights, to their furniture, to the external way of life. The Russian people were chained to earthly life by sin, and their sins were no less, even more than those of the peoples of Europe. The Russian people are probably a less honest and respectable people than the peoples of the West. But the peoples of the West are chained by their virtues to earthly life and to earthly goods. The Russian people, by their virtues, are detached from the earth and turned towards heaven. Orthodoxy brought them up spiritually in this. European man considers his property sacred and will not allow it to be taken from him without a cruel struggle. He has an ideology that justifies his attitude to earthly goods. A Russian person, even if the sin of greed and money-grubbing has taken possession of his nature, does not consider his property sacred, has no ideological justification for his possession of the material goods of life, and deep down he thinks that it is better to go to a monastery or become a wanderer. The ease of overthrowing property in Russia came not only from the weakness of legal consciousness among the Russian people and the lack of bourgeois honesty, but from the exceptional detachment of Russian people from earthly goods. What seemed to the European bourgeois a virtue, the Russian person seemed to be a sin. And the Russian landowner was never completely sure that he owns his land honestly.

The Slavophiles 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.

One of the chief supports of narodnik socialism was the fact that the Roman conception of property was always alien to the Russian people. The absolute nature of private property was always denied. To the Russian mind what was important was not one's attitude to the principle of property, but one's attitude to the living man. And that, of course, was the Christian position.

Both of them, though in different ways, seek true Christianity as against the distortions of historical Christianity, and Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky were possible only in a society which was moving towards revolution, in which explosive materials were accumulating. Dostoyevsky preached a spiritual communism, the responsibility of all for each that was how he understood Russian sobornost; his Christ could not be adapted to the standards of bourgeois civilization. Tolstoi did not know Christ; he knew only the teaching of Christ, but he preached the virtues of Christian communism; he rejected private property; he rejected all economic inequalities.

The thoughts of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoi are on the verge of eschatology, as is all revolutionary thought. Both Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky preach fsyechelovechnost, and that is a Russian idea. Internationalism is a distortion of the Russian idea of fsyechelovechnost and of Christian universality. According to Dostoyevsky the Russian people are the Christopher among the nations, they carry God into human life precisely because they have this all-human idea, the idea of an all-human brotherhood.

This is even more, much more, a psychological and moral question than a purely economic one. To the Russian peasants the theories of Roman law about property were always strange. The peasants considered that the land was God's; in other words, it belonged to no human being. The peasants always considered the acquisition of land by the gentry an injustice, as they did serfdom. The communal collective ownership of land was much more to the mind of the Russian people and especially to the Great Russians, thanks to the existence of the commune.

Have Christians done very much for the realization of Christian justice in social life? Have they striven to realize the brotherhood of man without that hatred and violence of which they accuse the communists? The sins of Christians, the sins of the historical churches, have been very great, and these sins bring with them their just punishment. Betrayal of the covenant of Christ, the use of the Christian Church for the support of the ruling classes, human weakness being what it is, cannot but bring about the lapse from Christianity of those who are compelled to suffer from that betrayal and from such a distortion of Christianity. In the Prophets, in the Gospels, in the Apostolic Epistles, in most of the Doctors of the Church, we find censure of the riches of the rich and repudiation of property, and the affirmation of the equality of all men before God. In Basil the Great, and especially in John Chrysostom, may be met judgments upon social injustice due to wealth and property, so sharp that Proudhon and Marx pale before them. The Doctors of the Church said that property is theft. St. John Chrysostom was a complete communist, though of course his was not communism of the capitalist or the industrial period. There are good grounds for asserting that communism has Christian or Judaic-Christian origins.

The first principle is just as antiChristian as the Roman theory of property.