From Necropolis: Esenin

 In 1917, Klyuev’s influence, which essentially resonated with Esenin’s own worldview, gave way to the influence of the left-wing SRs. It was at that time that the SRs explained to Esenin that the Rus’ that was to come, the one he had been dreaming of, was, in fact, the new state. This new state would also be built on a religious foundation: not on a pagan or a Christian foundation, but, rather, on a socialist one; not on a faith in redeeming gods, but on faith in the self-organized human being. They explained to him that “there is socialism and then there is Socialism”—that socialism with a lowercase letter is merely a social and political program, but that there is Socialism with a capital letter, too: a “religious idea, a new faith and a new knowledge to which the knowledge and old faith of Christianity are giving way…The best even of professional Christian theologians see this, know this.” “The new universal idea (Socialism) will act as dynamite; it will break the chains that Christianity has fastened even more securely over the human body than ever before.” “In Christianity, the whole world was saved by the sufferings of one Person: in the Socialism that is to come, each person will be saved by the sufferings of the whole world.”