The Oncoming of the Second World War in the Journalism of Nikolai Berdyaev

Two articles by Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev – “Christian Conscience and the Dialectics of War” (1938) and “Soviet Russia and the World War” (1940) – are published in Russian for the first time; both articles are devoted to the consideration of the tragic events of the late 1930s, and also contain a philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of war. In the published arti­cles, Berdyaev links the political and the ethical, discusses pacifism and militarism, the nature of Soviet regime, communism and national socialism, not limiting himself to criticism, but offer­ing a way out of the state of global collapse (the reader can judge for himself how possible this way out is after reading the text). The archival publication is preceded by a brief overview of the evolution of Berdyaev’s views on the problem of war, a significant part of which was ex­pressed in the journalism of the 1910s. The articles “Christian Conscience and the Dialectics of War” and “Soviet Russia and the World War” show how Berdyaev’s views on war changed since the 1910s, and complement the “war” corpus of the thinker’s texts, which it would be incor­rect to limit exclusively to the period of World War I. The texts of the articles are based on materi­als from collection 1496 of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.