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.

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. … 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.

Lenin was made of one piece; he was a monolith. The part played by Lenin is a notable demonstration of the rôle of personality in historical events. … Lenin was both an out and out revolutionary and a statesman. He combined revolutionary ideas of the extremist type and a totalitarian revolutionary outlook with flexibility and opportunism in the means employed in the struggle and in political practice. It is only such people who are successful and victorious. He combined simpleness, directness and a nihilist asceticism, with astuteness, almost with cunning. In Lenin there was no trace of revolutionary bohemianism — a thing he could not bear; …

Lenin was not a democrat; he asserted the principle not of majority, but of a selected minority; … He drew up a plan of revolution and revolutionary seizure of power which by no means relied upon the development of consciousness among vast masses of workmen and upon the objective economic process. Dictatorship issued from Lenin's outlook as a whole. He even formed his general outlook to conform with the principle of dictatorship.

It is the very religious character of communism, the very religion of communism, which makes it anti-religious and anti-Christian. A communist society and state profess to be totalitarian, but only the Kingdom of God can be totalitarian; the kingdom of Cæsar is always partial. For communism, Cæsar's kingdom becomes God's — exactly as in German national socialism, only more consistently and radically.

… only it is important to notice that étatism is not the only form of the new organization of society. The pluralist rather than the monist social system corresponds more truly with the freedom of the human spirit. The monist social system always leads to tyranny and the oppression of human personality; the monism of the Marxist system is its principal defect. The monism of a totalitarian state is in any case incompatible, with Christianity; it turns the state into a Church, and a heroic conflict is in store against the absolute claims of the kingdom of Cæsar in communism and in fascism. During this struggle Christianity may be cleansed and freed from the stamp of the kingdom of Cæsar which has lain upon the Church since the time of Constantine.