Last week I posted a quote from Igor Shafarevich’s book The Socialist
Phenomenon. A couple of readers have asked me for more information. I’m sorry, I don’t have any, and no time to google it. Here is what I know. In
the mid-1980s I wrote a book about communism that no-one wanted to publish.
I used Shafarevich as one of my sources, but have since lost the book. He
tried to link modern socialism with all the millenarian & apocalyptic
movements of the past–the Spartacus rebellion and so on. However, he came
at it all from a spiritual angle, trying to show how these things arose
through the perversion of basic spiritual needs. He was, in short, very
Russian. (I dimly recall, in fact, that he was accused of antisemitism, on
what grounds I do not know. I don’t recall any antisemitism in his book.)
He was actually a mathematician by profession. Here is a more extended
quote, which I also used in my unpublished book. It gives the flavor of his
work very well: “There is no doubt that if the ideals of utopia are
realized universally, mankind, even in the barracks of the universal City of
the Sun, shall find the strength to regain its freedom and to preserve God’s
image and likeness — human individuality — once it has glanced into the
yawning abyss. But will even THAT experience be sufficient? For it seems
just as certain that the freedom of will granted to man and to mankind is
ABSOLUTE, that it includes the freedom to make the ultimate choice –
between life and death.”