Dostoevsky Debunked Socialism 50 Years Before the Russian Revolution
The great Russian writer affirmed both the gift of life and the criminal error of socialism in his 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment.”
[This article originally appeared on the The Epoch Times.]
The firing squad leveled their weapons at the prisoners, who stood motionless, as though frozen, like the crystallized Russian winter landscape. Moments before, the prisoners had been made to put on the white shirts of condemned men, and told to kiss the Cross. Then they were tied to a pillar in the Semyonov drill ground, three at a time.
It was the end. What thoughts must have flashed through the prisoners’ minds in that all-consuming moment? One of the men, Fyodor Dostoevsky, in a letter to his brother, gives us a glimpse into the workings of his mind when, as he believed, his life was about to slip away. “No more than a minute was left me to live. I remembered you, brother, and all yours; during the last minute you, you alone, were in my mind, only then I realized how I love you, dear brother mine!”
But just before Dostoevsky was led to the pillar, the guards announced that his Imperial Majesty, Tsar Nicholas I, had granted them a pardon, sparing their lives. It was, perhaps, a cruel kind of joke, a punishment in itself, to warn these men to reform the lives that they had almost lost. The prisoners were sentenced to four years of exile in Siberia instead of the death penalty. Dostoevsky took the warning to heart, for his life and his beliefs did change, unalterably, after this experience. We see in Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother that the change had already begun: “There has never yet been working in me such a healthy abundance of spiritual life as now.”
His affirmation of the gift of life—now brought home to him with astonishing clarity and force after his near loss of it—glows with almost visionary inspiration: “When I look back at the past and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against my heart and spirit—my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness. ... Now, changing my life, I am being reborn into a new form.”
Leaving Progressive Ideas Behind
Dostoevsky was, indeed, in need of a “new form.” The reason Dostoevsky found himself nearly executed and then banished to the hinterlands was because of his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle—a club of intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism—and a secret revolutionary and terrorist group embedded within the former, dedicated to bringing about this “utopia” even through violent means.
Russia was ripe for radical politics in Dostoevsky’s day, and, like many young men then, he was drawn into the intoxication of new, “progressive” ideas, most notably, socialism. It was these ideas that Dostoevsky began to shake off like dead leaves from a tree during his time in Siberia.
That day, when Dostoevsky stared down the barrel of an executioner’s gun into the reality of death, haunts his fiction, including the 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment.”
In the novel, a young student, Raskolnikov, who has adopted progressive and nihilistic ideas, decides to murder an old pawnbroker. On his way to commit the crime, all sorts of seemingly insignificant details grip his attention.
“As he passed the Yusupov garden, he was deeply absorbed in considering the building of great fountains, and of their refreshing effect on the atmosphere in all the squares. … Then he was interested by the question why in all great towns men are not simply driven by necessity, but in some peculiar way inclined to live in those parts of the town where there are no gardens nor fountains. … ‘So probably men led to execution clutch mentally at every object that meets them on the way,’ flashed through his mind.”
Raskolnikov’s observation about the psychology of a condemned man is no doubt a reflection of Dostoevsky’s own experience. It may seem paradoxical that a man about to be murdered (or about to commit murder) could think of anything other than that fact, and yet it’s not so hard to imagine that with seconds left to live, everything becomes important, everything noteworthy. The mind latches on to what it can, refusing to acknowledge the great reality about to occur. Or, the mind is suddenly given a deeper sight into the importance of everything when it’s slipping away.
Dostoevsky’s experiences as a young man inform and shape “Crime and Punishment” in even more profound ways than just this incidental reference. Due to the crucible of his mock-execution and subsequent Siberian exile, Dostoevsky went from a man willing to commit violence to bring about a socialist utopia to a man utterly opposed to socialism. He attacks socialist ideas in multiple ways throughout “Crime and Punishment,” written some 15 years after his return from Siberia. In many ways, the novel is a philosophical battle between new philosophies—such as nihilism, socialism, and utilitarianism—and the old view of the world founded upon a Christian ethic and a desire to preserve tradition.
One of Dotoevsky’s most striking and eloquent rebuttals of the socialist error comes from a friend of Raskolnikov’s, the boisterous, brash, but good-hearted Razumikhin, whose name, incidentally, means “reason” or “intelligence.” It’s worth quoting at length:
“You know [the socialists’] doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted! … Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery [a building designed to allow a self-contained utopian community] ! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery.”
Razumikhin summarizes, then demolishes the central socialist principle: that human beings are, in the end, mere material machines that can be programmed to behave in an orderly and prosperous way using the right system and proper environmental influences. For a socialist, the root of problems in our world can be reduced to an unjust social system. Fix the system, and you will fix the problems. That system, by the way, requires the demolition of the old structure of society which is, of course, inherently unjust and oppressive. With the old ways gone, and the new scientific social systems in place, human life will become happy, just, and prosperous.
But the socialists, as Razumikhin points out, have overlooked just one important detail: a cog in this social machine that won’t fit into place. There is one variable in the equation that cannot be predicted. It is the human soul. There is something in us that cannot be programmed like a machine, something that, by its nature, remains free, and therefore unpredictable. It is this force, more so than environment, that determines the outcome of our lives and the destiny of entire nations. The origin of both good and evil in society lies in that secret citadel inside every human being. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, another great Russian writer, experienced the triumph of the socialist ideologies that Dostoevsky had challenged in his day. Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Are human actions the result of environment or choice? Does injustice arise from scientific error or sin? Does it come down to the system or the soul? Like all great literature, “Crime and Punishment” grapples with such fundamental questions.
One argument that Dostoevsky gives against the socialist doctrine that is even more powerful than Razumikhin’s isn’t an argument at all. It is an experience. It is the experience of Raskolnikov before, during, and after he commits murder—a murder that he justifies as the elimination of a useless individual who inhibits the creation of a proper social “system.”
Through the course of this tense psychological drama and spiritual epic, we see Raskolnikov encounter forces that cannot be accounted for in the materialist socialist explanation of the universe, forces that no system or ideology can control: guilt, regret, self-sacrifice, judgment, forgiveness, and love. It isn’t that someone convinces him, intellectually, of the reality of such things—they are simply there, in all their mysterious glory. “Life had stepped into the place of theory.”
When you finish “Crime and Punishment,” you know in the deepest part of your being that humans are not machines, that the soul exists, and, therefore, along with it, so does free choice, culpability, and the possibility of both real sorrow and real joy—a joy that no mere “system” could artificially create.
And yet, socialism is all the rage in all of the West and even going further than it ever did as its supporters believe they can destroy human nature itself and replace it with AI and brain implants and create their always hoped for but ridiculous utopia by making humans digitally controlled.
Great article, Walker. The ideas that you are rejecting here--that human beings are products of a larger system with no free will--remind me of these "progressive" DAs that George Soros has been installing across the country. They operate on the principle that unjust systems breed crime, not the deliberate intent of the criminal. So they work on reducing penalties for crime, to undermine the criminal justice system, because this, to them, is the true problem.