Unrestrained

THE SOVIET mathematician Igor Shafarevich once spelled out the elements that have inspired socialists throughout the ages. Having won many prizes, he was freed from Soviet oversight and spent his days in the Moscow University library. Not surprisingly, it was well-stocked with books about the history of socialism. To the Soviet authorities, a renowned mathematician who perused those old volumes must have seemed harmless enough and perhaps admirable.
His book The Socialist Phenomenon, written at Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion, was published in 1980. Socialism began as a Christian heresy. Its constant themes have been the abolition of private property (central to The Communist Manifesto), the destruction of the family, and finally, as an ultimate goal, the abolition of religion. Equality was a continual obsession. Shafarevich concluded that “a striving for self-destruction,” for nothingness, for “the death of mankind,” is the true goal of socialism.
The abolition of property, pursued in the Soviet Union and then China, caused the deaths of tens of millions of people. It also created a governing class, consisting of those who told others what to do in the absence of property rights. This was the dictatorship of the proletariat, an extreme form of central planning. Both China and the Soviet Union also sought to abolish religion.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/07/unrestrained