Attitude of K. Leontiev to communism/socialism. On the failed “union of socialism... with russian monarchy and fiery mysticism”

The article analyses the attitude of the prominent Russian religious and conservative thinker K. N. Leontiev (1831–1891) to socialism and communism, particularly the question why it had a complicated, ambivalent and in some aspects even positive character. As can be seen from many of his judgments, Leontiev preferred socialism and socialists to bourgeoisie and capital. However, what exactly caused these preferences, is still being debated. Sometimes one can fi nd statements that Stalin implemented much of what Leontiev wrote and predicted. Nevertheless, as the article argues, such statements are not feasible. For Leontiev, socialism was a masked, new feudal, reactionarism. It was socialism that Leontiev pinned his hopes on, where he saw the possibility of thwarting the enthropic all-round unifi cation and secondary, all-mixing simplification of society, which in his views were brought about by European liberalism and democratism. The article also studies the question about the social foundation of the so-called restrictive socialism of Leontiev, namely the land community. Another topic studied in the article is the history of relations of Leontiev and L. Tikhomirov. In the final section of the article an attempt is made to analyse Leontiev’s mistakes in his predictions related to communism and the reasons for these