Dostoevsky on Socialism

Part I
Philosopher Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky (1870-1965) gives us a fine analysis of
Fyodor Dostoevskys complex views on socialism. While Dostoevsky supported just
economic arrangements for workers and the peasantry, he also vehemently rejected
the atheism and materialism that underpinned so many socialist ideals. Russias
great writer was truly a prophet, right down to foreseeing famine, cannibalism and
the deaths of 100 million people that would characterize twentieth-century
Communism. Let it be noted that the sponsors of this experiment were the forces
of international capital, the same liberal oligarchs who control the West to this day.
Translated by Mark Hackard.
I could never understand the notion, says Dostoevsky, that only one-tenth of
people should attain higher development, and the remaining nine-tenths should serve
only as a means and material to that goal while themselves remaining in darkness. I
dont want to think and live in any way but with the faith that our ninety million
Russians (or however many will be born) will all someday be educated, humanized
and happy.(Diary of a Writer, 1876, Jan.) In Dostoevskys notebooks, the thought of
these unhappy nine-tenths of humanity is repeated many times. From the years of his
youth to the end of his life, he was concerned over questions of social justice, the
necessity of securing every person the means for developing a spiritual life, the
protection of the dignity of the human person and a defense against arbitrary rule.
In his novels, Dostoevsky speaks much of the wounds inflicted upon mans soul by
the offenses resulting from social and economic inequality. In Diary of a Writer, he
write much about the cruel force of capital, about a proletariat exhausted by poverty
and labor, etc. Dolinin says that Like a true follower of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky dreams
of achieving harmony on earth through love, but he himself stirs up class struggle in
his every stroke whenever he begins to speak of the oppressed past and present, in the
West and in Russia.
The most influential movement from the nineteenth century to our day, one that has
tried to enact social justice in full measure, is socialism. And Dostoevskys attitude to
socialism will be the subject of our chapter. Dostoevsky himself was a participant in
the socialist movement as a member of Petrashevskys Circle, and for that he was
almost subject to execution and endured eight years of hard labor and exile. Inasmuch
as Dostoevsky spiritually matured, within him there developed an ever-growing
hatred for that type of socialism which was most widespread from the second half of
the nineteenth century up to our time, a hatred namely for revolutionary atheist
socialism based upon a materialist worldview morally and religiously unfounded. For
Dostoevsky the highest value was the individual human person and his free spiritual
development. Yet revolutionary socialism focuses all its attention upon material
goods and neither values the individual person nor cares for the freedom of spiritual
life.
In Dostoevskys reading, the spiritual makeup of the bourgeois and the materialist
socialist is homogeneous: both value material goods above all else. The present
socialism, write Dostoevsky, in Europe and here in Russia, removes Christ
everywhere and cares foremost about bread, summons science and asserts that the
reason for all human calamities is one poverty, the struggle for existence, society.
These socialists, in my observation, in their expectation of a future arrangement of
society without personal property, love money terribly in the meantime and value it
even to the extreme, but namely in accordance with the idea they attach to it.
(Dostoevskys wonderful letter to V.A. Alekseev on the three temptations offered by
the devil to Christ, June 7
th
, 1876, No. 550)
Beforehand there was a moral formulation of the matter: There were Fourierists and
Cabetists, arguments and debates over various quite refined things. But now the
leaders of the proletariat have already done away with all this and the struggle is
governed by the slogan, Ote-toi de l que je my mette (Get out of here, Im taking
your place). Any means therein are counted as permissible: the ringmasters of
materialist socialism say they do not consider them, the bourgeoisie, capable of
becoming brothers to the people, and therefore they simply move against them with
force, while brotherhood is denied outright:
Brotherhood will be formed from the proletariat later, and you you are one hundred
million souls condemned to extermination and nothing more. You are finished for the
sake of humanitys happiness. Others among the ringmasters directly say that they
need no brotherhood whatsoever, that Christianity is nonsense and that the future of
humanity will be designed on a scientific basis. (Diary of a Writer, 1877 Feb.)
If the moral foundations of societys structure are rejected, then social unity will
prove unachieveable. How shall you unite men, asks Dostoevsky, answering
Gradovsky with regard to the latters article containing criticism of the authors
Pushkin Speech, to reach your civil goals if you have no basis in a great and initial
moral idea? Dostoevsky at once points to this initial great idea: all moral principles,
he says, are based upon the idea of personal absolute self-perfection ahead, in the
ideal, for this holds everything within, all aspirations and all cravings, and, it would
be, thence derive all of our civil ideals. Just try and unite men into a civil society with
the only goal of saving our tummies. Youll get nothing but the moral formula of
Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous. With such a formula, no civil institution will last
long. (Diary of a Writer, 1877, Feb.) On the contrary, Dostoevskys short formula
composes the whole essence of the Christian worldview. The Christian ideal of
personal absolute self-perfection leads to the Kingdom of God, in which every
member loves God more than himself and all people created by God as himself.
Behavior is right only inasmuch as it consciously or instinctively is guided by such a
love, with which is closely connected love for impersonal absolute values truth,
beauty, etc. Not only personal individual relations, but also social ties, any social
hierarchy, and any social subordination and command carried out in good conscience,
should in finality ascend to the ideal of absolute good under God. This notion was
naively but correctly expressed by Dostoevskys Captain Lebyadkin, who responded
after listening to the arguments of the atheists: If there is no God, then what kind of
captain am I after this! (Demons) In Russian philosophical literature, thought on the
religious basis of social life is especially well developed in Vladimir Solovievs The
Justification of the Good and in S. Franks book The Spiritual Foundations of Society.
Atheist socialists, having rejected the idea of unselfish moral duty and counting the
drive for advantage and self-preservation as mans only motive of behavior, at the
same time demand that the citizen of the future society renounce rights to property,
family and freedom. Man can only be so designed through terrible violence, his
placement under dreadful systems of spying and the continuous control of a most
despotic power. (Diary of a Writer, 1877, Feb.) In a society deprived of the spiritual
ideal, people are such that, give them bread, and they will become enemies to each
other out of boredom. (Letters, No. 550) Never shall they be able to allot amongst
each other, says the Grand Inquisitor, and even the bread acquired by them will turn
to stone in their hands.
Dostoevsky compares the project of building a society without a moral foundation, a
society based only on science and upon imaginary scientific axioms like the struggle
for existence, to the construction of the Tower of Babel; attempting to design
something along the lines of an anthill, men will not create wealth, but rather will
come to such ruin as to end in cannibalism. (1877, November) In Demons Shigalev
developed the program for his anthill. Proceeding from limitless freedom, I
conclude, he says, with unlimited despotism. Pyotr Verkhovensky relates that he
has every member of his [secret] society watching over the other and obligated to
inform. All are slaves and in slavery are equal. In extreme cases, slander and
murder, but mainly equality.
Shigalevs project seemed a caricature created through Dostoevskys antipathy toward
atheist socialism. Now, however, we must admit that the Bolshevik Revolution
enacted the Shigalev system and even very likely surpassed it. In Bolshevik socialism,
spying has been reached the point that parents and children often do not trust one
another. The Bolshevik despotism is more multidimensional and petty than the
despotism of some African potentate; slander and murder are applied on the widest
scale. There is not the slightest freedom of conscience under the Bolsheviks (for a
teacher there is not even freedom of silence on religious matters), nor is there freedom
of thought, freedom of print or legal guarantees defending the individual from
arbitrary rule; the exploitation of workers by the state is carried out to a degree
undreamed of by capitalists under the bourgeois regime.
Dostoevsky insistently repeats that revolutionary atheist socialism will lead to such
devastation as to bring about anthropophagy. His prophecy was realized literally: in
the USSR there were at least two periods of cannibalism, in 1920-21 as a result of
famine caused by War Communism, and in 1933 as a result of famine caused by the
rapid shift from individual agriculture to collective farms. A shocking picture of cases
of cannibalism can be found in Soviet literature, such as in Vyacheslav Ivanovs short
story Empty Arapia, for example.
Conceiving clearly by which paths its likely impossible to arrive at the establishment
of social justice, Dostoevsky himself neither developed a specific positive ideal of
social order, nor did he adopt one from other thinkers. In 1849 during his
interrogation, Dostoevsky confessed that socialist systems, just as Fouriers system,
did not satisfy him, but alongside this announced that he considered the ideas of
socialism, under the condition of their peaceful achievement, sacred and moral, and
most importantly universal, the future law of humanity without exception. Such a
conviction Dostoevsky preserved until the end of his days. This is clearly visible from
his article on the occasion of the death of George Sand in 1876. With deep emotion,
Dostoevsky touchingly speaks of George Sands socialism, which was seeking to
secure the spiritual freedom of the individual and was founded upon moral principles,
not upon the necessity of the anthill. (1876, June) But at this time of his life,
Dostoevsky required that social order definitively was based on Christs testament. He
wrote to V.A. Alekseev in June of 1876:
Christ knew that by bread alone, one cannot bring man to life. If there will be no
spiritual life, the ideal of Beauty, then man will languish and die, he will go mad and
kill himself or descend into pagan fantasies. And as Christ in Himself and in His
Word bore the ideal of Beauty, He then decided it better to imbue in souls the ideal of
Beauty; having this at heart, all men will become brothers to one another and then, of
course, working for one another, they will be wealthy. (No. 550)

Dostoevsky on Socialism
Part II

Philosopher Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky (1870-1965) continues his analysis of
Fyodor Dostoevskys views on socialism. Dostoevsky sought to build a more just
society rooted in love for Christ and ones neighbor, a vision sadly quite remote
from the regnant Mammonism that relentlessly destroys national identity and
traffics in mens souls. Translated by Mark Hackard.

Dostoevsky was by all appearances a supporter of a type of Christian socialism, but
he says nothing specific about its economic and legal structure. He has only one
mystical-economic position announced by him through the name of some kind of
interlocutor of his, the paradoxalist, and it is a position he obviously approves. A
nation should be born and rise, in its vast majority, on the soil from which the bread
and trees grow.
In the land, in the soil, there is something sacramental. If you want humanity to be
reborn for the better, almost making men from beasts, then endow them with land,
and you shall achieve your aim. At the very least we have the land and the commune.
Speaking on France, the paradoxalist directly clarifies his thinking: In my opinion,
work in a factory: the workshop is also a legitimate business and will always be born
alongside already cultivated land such is its law. But let every worker know that he
has somewhere a garden under the golden sun and grapevines, his own, or more
likely, a communal garden, and that in this garden lives his wife, a glorious woman,
not one picked up off the road. Let him at least know that there his children will
grow with the earth, with the trees, and with the quail they catch; that they are at
school, and school is in the field; and that he himself, having worked enough in his
age, will arrive there to rest, and then to die. The bases for development of such a
system he located in Russia. The Russian factory worker has still kept a connection
with the countryside, and the Russian peasantry has the village commune. (Diary of
a Writer, 1876, July-August)
As is known, love for the village commune among Russian populists was tied to the
dream that the habit of communal land ownership would ease the enactment of
socialism for the Russian people. This dream was hardly reasonable, as land in the
village commune was divided into plots cultivated by each family individually. At the
present time under the Bolshevik regime, the shift from a familys individual work
over a delegated plot of land to the collective labor of the kolkhoz in communal fields
is being accomplished extremely painfully.
Besides notions of each mans connection to the land, Dostoevsky also has many
considerations on a just social order, but they all concern only the moral and religious
conditions for the appearance and preservation of such an order; on its actual
structure he provides no information.
In the West, Dostoevsky says in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, liberty,
equality and fraternity are declared as principles upon which life should be built. But
where the bourgeoisie holds power, freedom is in the possession of the millionaire: he
does as he wishes, and those without any millions are at their mercy. Such criticism of
the bourgeois regime is expressed in various forms by Marxists and especially
Bolsheviks. And Dostoevsky recognizes that in the capitalist system, freedom
provided by the law to the citizen remains without the possibility of its realization
among those classes of the populace who do not have the material means to enjoy it.
Dostoevsky characterizes the equality that concerns people in modern society as
envious: it is comprised of the wish to degrade those spiritually superior. (Diary of a
Writer, 1877, February) Instead of fraternity, Dostoevsky finds everywhere only
fighting for ones own equal value; genuine brotherhood, meanwhile, exists where the
ego sacrifices itself for society, and society itself gives over all rights to the person.
Such a genuine brotherhood exists foremost where internal freedom is achieved
through overcoming ones will, and there will be a noble equality free from envy for
others spiritual gifts. In a society guided by such principles, there is no necessity to
sacrifice all ones property for the common benefit, even more so as even the
renunciation of property by all the rich would be only a drop in the sea and would
not destroy poverty.
One must do what the heart orders. If the heart orders you to give away your
estate, then give it away, but there is no need for dressing up in homespun coats or
adopting the simple life for this; it is better to raise a peasant to your level of
refinement. Only your resolve to do everything for the sake of active love is
obligatory and important. We must be concerned more about light, the sciences and
strengthening love. Then wealth will grow as a matter of fact, and genuine wealth.
Dostoevsky calls such a solution to the social question the Russian solution; it is
based on the Christian ideal of life, and he considers the spirit of the Russian people
that developed Russian Orthodoxy to be Christian in its preponderance. (Diary of a
Writer, 1877, February)
Having become acquainted in Dostoevskys Pushkin Speech with similar thoughts of
his on the conditions for resolving the social question, Professor Gradovsky penned a
critical article; he said that Dostoevsky put forth a mighty propagation of personal
morality, but no hint of social ideals. In other words, Gradovsky understood
Dostoevsky as a follower of the notion that only personal improvement in the spirit
of Christian love is needed, while forms of social order are irrelevant, for kind and
loving people will fill any social form with good content.
Such a unidimensional social philosophy exists. In this sphere, there are two opposed
doctrines. According to one, all of mans shortcomings, his vices and crimes, are
conditioned upon the imperfection of the social structure; it stands to perfect the
social structure, and mans behavior will become good. According to the other
doctrine, quite to the contrary, correct behavior both in individual and social relations
depends only upon personal morality, and forms of social order are irrelevant.
Dostoevsky harshly rejected the first of these one-dimensional theories, and
Gradovsky assumed that he must have been a representative of the opposite and also
unidimensional doctrine. Vladimir Soloviev termed this one-sidedness abstract
subjectivism in morality. In The Justification of the Good, he clearly and
convincingly proves that subjective good is insufficient, and in addition a collective
incarnation of good made from the perfection of the social order is necessary and
so human society would become organized morality. The state is never solely
comprised of good people, and therefore it is necessary to organize such a social order
that would promote the restraint of evil and the achievement of good.
Like Pushkin, Dostoevsky strikes us not only with the force of his artistic creation, but
also with the force of his mind. Therefore its difficult to permit that he fell into such
a crude unidimensional theory of abstract subjectivism. And he in fact was
indignant over Gradovskys criticism and wrote him an answer in Diary of a Writer,
in which he attempted to prove that he was free from the one-sidedness ascribed to
him. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky is interpreted as a proponent of abstract subjectivism in
our time, as well. We shall examine this question in detail.
Answering Gradovsky, Dostoevsky clearly says that religious and moral ideas, along
with the improvement tied to them, serve as a point of departure in the search for a
corresponding organization of society: due to these ideals, men will begin to search
for how they should organize themselves to preserve the jewel of great value they
received, not losing anything from it, and find such a civil formula of common living
that would help them advance to all the world the moral treasure theyve obtained in
all its glory.
If the spiritual ideal of any nation begins to shake and weaken, alongside it the
entire civic rule collapses. (1880, August) Not only that, even with the existence of
well-organized social forms, morally unsuitable men contrive in certain cases to find
the means to bypass the law and distort the spirit of social forms, from which, of
course, it does not follow that these forms have no meaning. Dostoevsky therefore
resolves to say that personal improvement is not only the beginning of everything,
but the continuation of everything and its outcome. (Ibid) However tempting it may
be to interpret these words in the spirit of abstract subjectivism, we must remember
that they were written in the response to Gradovsky, where Dostoevsky removes
himself from the professors reproach over one-sidedness, and by these words he only
wants to express the notion that social and civic ideals are connected organically to
moral ideals, and that it is impossible to divide them into two halves isolated from
one another. (Ibid)
Consequently, Dostoevsky did not deny the necessity of a certain ideal of just social
organization. Without a doubt, he had such an ideal or was searching for it. In which
direction? By all appearances and as in his youth, in the direction of socialism, though
neither revolutionary nor atheist, but Christian. As has been said, he hoped like the
populists that a perfected order would evolve from the Russian village commune. He
considered it necessary that every worker, and especially his wife and children, keep
their ties to the land and have a garden, whether personal or communal. Especially
valuing freedom, he was confident that the social ideals developed by Russia and
deriving from Christ and individual self-perfection would be more liberal than
those of Europe. (Ibid)
Dostoevsky also considers possible the preservation of property rights, and apparently
even land and production rights, in the future order. It will be said, of course, What
kind of socialism is this? In answering, we will remind the reader that there exist
attempts to develop the ideal of a socialist order in which the right of personal
property to the means of production would be preserved, though subjected to legal
restrictions, due to which the economy would serve not the goal of personal
enrichment, but the needs of society and the state. We shall point, for an example, to
the work of Professor S. Gessen, The Problem of Legal Socialism. (Contemporary
Notes, 1924-1928) One hardly has to keep the word socialism for signifying such a
complex social order that combines valuable, practicable dimensions of the socialist
ideal with valuable dimensions of individual management. However, we will not
argue over words. It is only important that the creative efforts of many states such as
the United States and Great Britain are directed toward the development of such a
complex social order.
Looking at how difficult this process of developing a new system is and what kind of
special knowledge, both theoretical and practical, it demands, we fully understand
why Dostoevsky has no defined teaching on it. As a religious thinker and moralist, he
confidently spoke of the religious and moral bases of a just order, but as a man of
extraordinary intellect, he understood perfectly well that to elaborate a concrete
doctrine on a new economic system and its legal forms was a matter for politico-
economic specialists and practical social agents. Besides that, the actualization of
these problems was premature in his time. Only fifty years after his death, due to the
extreme primacy of technology, the rationalization of production, and the ever-
decreasing number of workers needed for physical labor, the development of a new
economic system became urgently necessary.
We examined Dostoevskys most important literary creations and became acquainted
with his thoughts on central questions of worldview. Everywhere with him, we found
as the basis Christ and His two commandments that compose the essence of
Christianity love for God more than for oneself and love for ones neighbor as
oneself. Therefore, we can call his worldview authentically Christian.

Source: souloftheeast.org