For Berdyaev, the problem with communism is that it seeks to become a new religion with unassailable dogmas—therefore implacable in its repression of "heresy"—and whose main article of faith would be Marx’s statement: “Religion is the opium of the people.” We are, then, faced with a paradoxical phenomenon that tries to abolish one faith in what lies beyond, only to replace it with another faith—this time with no God but dialectical materialism and no heaven but the classless society. However, by erasing God from the horizon, it also destroys freedom, and with it, the human person.
Berdyaev places part of the blame for the rise of communism on Christians themselves. At the same time, he clearly distinguishes between Christian faith and its degeneration into bourgeois morality. His analysis of Christianity is strikingly lucid, to the point that this book could almost be read as a work of apologetics. This, for example, has since become a common idea, but at the time few recognized it: “The sciences... forget that, if they have experienced growth in modern times, they owe it above all to the liberation of the human spirit from its ancient superstitions—and that this was achieved by the Christian faith.”
And it was achieved not only by “casting out demons” from the world, but also by revaluing human labor, since “Greco-Roman civilization, aristocratic in principle, despised labor, considering it fit only for slaves. Christianity came to sanctify it.”
Probably for that reason—and because of the dehumanization of labor brought about by early capitalism—Berdyaev is among those who are anti-communist precisely because they are anti-capitalist. As with other thinkers of his time, for him communism is an inevitable outgrowth of capitalism.
This is a fairly balanced analysis, which begins with the idea that “to overcome the lie of socialism, one must first understand its truth,” since “communism has so far been considered more from a sentimental and emotional point of view than from an intellectual one.”