In an interview on The Fall of Communism

Next you’ve chosen Dostoevsky by Nicholas Berdyaev.

The reason I like this so much is that it lays bare the thinking of two great Russians. Berdyaev fled the Revolution in 1921 having initially welcomed it as an expression of human freedom, much like the 1989 revolutions. But when he realised the oppressive nature of the new regime, he couldn’t tolerate it any more than it could tolerate him as an apostle of freedom.

I have always found Dostoevsky so Russian, so dense and overwhelming. You need to suspend your own life almost to read him. He’s sometimes too Russian, and I feel almost as though I haven’t got time for him because I’m trying to lead my own life. So, Berdyaev helps me into Dostoevsky. He sees Dostoevsky as a fellow spirit dealing with the dilemmas of human freedom and the sacrifices people are willing to make for freedom. This relates to my experience of 1989.

I met a man in Timisoara who told me that his 13-year-old daughter had asked him why they weren’t out there on the streets. He said: “What would happen to you children if we were killed?” And she replied: “Don’t the people on the streets have children too?” And I spoke to a man whose four-year-old son had his leg in plaster when he took him out to demonstrate, thinking the protest would be peaceful. He pinned a notice to the boy’s back saying: “We want to live too.” The boy looked at him and said: “Do we have to die? Do they shoot children?”

This puts the revolutions in perspective as more than a rush for jeans and fridges. Berdyaev quotes Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground, saying: “Man’s whole business is to prove to himself that he is a man and not a cogwheel.”

Berdyaev and Dostoevsky focus on the freedom we have to choose between good and evil, and this makes the book relevant not only to 1989 but to today as well, because, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a reluctance among people in general, both “underground” and “overground” to accept the burden of responsibility that comes with freedom. The sense of responsibility towards one another and any sense of the state belonging to them. They see the state treating them unfairly, as indeed it often does, so they withhold their blessing from it. And that undermines its legitimacy. It is as if it is too strong, and too weak at the same time. And there is an absence of a new social contract between the rulers and the ruled.

This is a slim volume but it speaks volumes about the 20th century and the beginning of this one. Even this autumn, looking ahead to the Copenhagen summit and the incredible damage man has done to the world – there is this sense in both capitalism and communism of man playing God. Dostoevsky wrote about man’s deification of himself and his lack of humility towards his fellow man and nature, and that remains relevant to our times.