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CHAPTER VIITHE WEST1. Russia and EuropeUNTIL the last hundred years Russia has been broadlyspeaking a recipient; first, mainly from Byzantium andthe steppe peoples; then from the West, on a very smallscale since the late fifteenth century, on a large scale sincePeter the Great. During the last hundred years Russiahas continued to be a great recipient, but at the same timeshe has been a mighty giver. She has given one of theworld's great literatures, and much in music and the artof the theatre; she has shared conspicuously in thecreative achievements of the sciences; and, for good orill, she has given the successor to the French Revolution,the Soviet Revolution with its new trinity of communism,the one-party state, and economic planning.Communism was born out of the West, out of Marx andEngels, and the October Revolution was international inits philosophy and appeal. But what has triumphed hasbeen the Revolution in Russia and Russian Communism.Thus the international influence of Communism has beentwofold. On the one hand it is the re-export to Europe,and the world, of Marxism as formulated by Lenin andpropagated through the Communist International, whichhe founded early in 1919; on the other hand it has becomethe export of a specifically Russian achievement.The elements of moral and apocalyptic "appeal to socialjustice and to a new man refashioned in a new world,which were implicit in Marxist Communism, becamefused in Russia with something that was perhaps akin tothe messianic, oecumenical trends of thought and feelingthat have been so conspicuous in past Russian social andreligious thought. Various writers have found in theRussian Communist party with its absorption of theindividual in the whole, its ascetic discipline, and itsattitude to dogma, parallels with the Orthodox church,which moulded so much of Russian life throughout thecenturies. At any rate, the new revolutionary Russia was314