Even in politics and government – which make no sense at all unless you have the idea of order – the idea of lawlessness is entering. If you look at how the world is divided, you see that almost half of the world now is in the Communist camp. And Communism, if you look at it objectively, is a very strange form of political/economic order, because it makes no sense. As far as politics is concerned, it is tyranny, which the Communists claim to be against. As far as economics is concerned, it does not work, and yet the whole point of installing it is to make it work better than capitalism. Therefore, from the point of view of those who introduced Communism into the world governments, it makes no sense because it does not accomplish what it means to accomplish and because it produces the slave states that Solzhenitsyn writes about very eloquently. And yet it takes over the world. The rest of the world seems to be falling into this, or at least powerless to stop the movement of Communism. What is the reason for that?

Now I will say a word about Communism. It is not simply a system of politics or economics. Politically, it holds together only by terror, by the Gulag. For anyone who wants to understand what is happening in the world today, Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipelago, tells exactly what life was like in Russia for sixty years and in other countries for thirty years or less, and what is coming to the rest of the world. It is written very humanely. Solzhenitsyn does not have any bitterness about what happened; he has suffered through it himself and gives a very accurate description of what it is all about. Economically, it fails. Solzhenitsyn points out that the Tsarist government exported wheat, while the Soviets have to import wheat – to name just one of their failures. The two most serious “accomplishments” of the Soviet Union are the building (after stealing Western secrets) and stockpiling of enough weapons to destroy life on earth, and its network of prison camps – the Gulag.

But how can people believe in this Marxist system? If you do believe in it, you have to admit that it is a very strange philosophy. It is not an ordinary philosophy, such as that it is better to have the people vote or that it is better to have one monarch over many people; it is not simple like that at all. It is like a dream world, a fantasy world. It is like the movements which were common in the 16th century. Someone would proclaim himself to be Jesus Christ or the prophet of Jesus Christ, and people would begin to follow him. He would cause a big uprising, there would be a peasant revolt, and finally the prince would come along and chop them all down, and everybody would be peaceful again. But in the meantime, he had gotten the whole country excited, and people had thought that some kind of great religious thing was happening.

Communism has this same idea – only now without God. If you examine it, it is actually a chiliastic idea – that Paradise is coming to earth, just ahead of us. It is very interesting to read about the beginning of the Communist movement in the 19th century, because the writings of its early “prophets,” such as Fourier in France, are absolutely fantastic nonsense. Fourier talks about the coming age of world peace and prosperity, when all the fountains will be overflowing with pink lemonade, and we will pick meat chops from trees, and all kinds of fantastic things.

One wonders how people could take this seriously. But they did. Even Marx was inspired by this in the beginning, until he finally became mature and saw that, since this was all made up of fairy tales, he had to place it on a “scientific” basis. Therefore, he developed what is called “scientific materialism.” He then set forth the means of bringing this into reality by overthrowing the bourgeois governments. But when he comes into power, what is his answer? He promises actually the same thing that those earlier sectarians were promising. Even Lenin, at the foundation of Russian Communism, had this idea: first of all, there is the revolution – you change society, overthrow and kill all the kings, the middle class, and so forth; you take all their possessions, and give power to the workers. (That’s a very vague thing: the “workers.” The workers were the first to go to prison.) You give power supposedly to the “people,” but actually it is only a few who take it over for them, holding it for them, as it were, because they are not yet able to take care of it themselves. And after a certain number of years this so-called Dictatorship of the Proletariat withers away, and then people become peaceful, happy, contented, and there are no more problems.

Someone even asked Lenin what would happen if somebody were to have a religious idea or want to go back to the old-fashioned ways of doing things. They asked him: “Won’t you need a police department at least?” And he said: “There will be no need for a police department because the people themselves will be so changed under the new conditions of society that, when anybody has a non-social idea, he will be automatically squashed like a bug by the people themselves.” In other words, the people will be so happy that they will take the initiative in squashing others, and there will be no need for police, or armies, or anything of the sort. This is an absolute fairy tale! And this is what Communist ideology is based upon. It is a very strange political philosophy. It partakes of the same principle of lawlessness; it is a kind of lawlessness which pretends to be orderly. It is a forerunner of the coming of Antichrist.

The reason why Communism takes over the world is not because it is much “smarter” than capitalism or democracies or anything of the sort. It is because in the West there is a spiritual vacuum, and when this vacuum is present Communism simply marches in, taking one little territory after the other until, at present, it has conquered nearly half the world.

But Communism does not have the final answer because it is a very negative thing. In fact, if you look at what has been happening in Russia in the last ten or twenty years, you can see that there is a full revolt, as far as the people’s mentality is concerned; it is against this whole system of Communism. Although the dictatorship is just as strong as ever, and although the secret police is very strong and is everywhere, nonetheless, the people are rising up more and more. That is, they are rising up not in armed revolt but in their minds, and are becoming independent. This means that sooner or later the whole system is going to collapse.

And so Communism does not have the answer; it cannot conquer the whole world and then bring peace and happiness as it claims it can. But in the meantime it is preparing for one very important thing which has to happen before the end of the world can come, and that is that there has to be one, unified world government from which Christianity has somehow been kicked out. And that Communism has been doing very successfully. Humanity’s tie with both the past and with Christianity is being destroyed, and Communism is becoming the main agent for preparing events connected with the end of the world – the establishment of a global anti-Christian empire.

Father Seraphim Rose