Gennadii Aliaiev Poltava Yuri Kondratuk National Technical University (Poltava, Ukraine)
A Discussion on Christian Socialism: Semen Frank’s Forgotten Paper The reason for the present study is the discovery of a paper of Semen Frank’s which had previously never appeared among the bibliography of his works before. The paper bears the title: Christianity and Socialism. It was published in “Vestnik russkago studencheskago Hristianskago Dvizhenia” (“The Herald of the Russian Students’ Christian Movement”) in 1930 (Issue 4.) There is also another paper of Frank’s on the same topic: The Problem of “Christian Socialism,” which was first published in journal Put’ (“The Way”) in 1939. This latter looks like it is intended to make a positive statement, but the afterword written by Nikolai Berdyaev, reveals its polemical involvement. The newly discovered paper, which Frank had written almost a decade before, could help to recreate content of this implication. This paper explicitly involves a discussion: Semen Frank responded to Sergey Bulgakov’s The Orthodox Christianity and Socialism (Letter to Editor), which had been printed before in both—Vestnik and Put’. The text is relatively short but important in order to specify the different approaches of the Russian religious philosophers to this important issue, as well as the discussed subject. However, we must acknowledge the fact that the “discussion on the Christian socialism” mentioned in the title is not a particular event in the history of philosophy. In a wider context, we speak about the relation between Christianity and socialism which European thinkers have been discussing at least since the 1830s. On the other hand, along with a number of other sources, this paper still belongs to a concrete historical situation (the Russian emigration of the late 1920s and early 1930s), and it can be called a “discussion.” However, this discussion never crossed the line to become a polemic; it remained within the frameworks of stated positions, with the positions of thinkers that were close to each other, but somehow still substantially different.