Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nikolai Berdyaev was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and Christian existentialist who lived from 1874 to 1948. He is known for his philosophy centered on human freedom, creativity, and personhood, and for writing over twenty books on subjects ranging from Christian theology to Russian national identity. He is frequently cited as one of the important Russian Orthodox thinkers of the twentieth century.
Berdyaev was expelled from the Soviet Union on the 29th of September 1922, as part of a mass deportation of intellectuals by the Bolshevik government, on what became known as the Philosophers' ships. He had already come into conflict with Soviet authorities after founding the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture in 1919 and being accused of participating in a conspiracy against the government in 1920.
During a midnight interrogation in 1922, Berdyaev refused to beg or humble himself before Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, and instead firmly stated his moral and religious objections to Bolshevism. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounted the episode in The Gulag Archipelago, noting that the authorities judged there was no point in putting Berdyaev on trial and released him.
Berdyaev wrote over twenty books, including The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916), The Meaning of History (1923), The Origin of Russian Communism (1937), and The Russian Idea (1946). He himself said he truly appreciated only two of his pre-exile works: The Meaning of Creativity and The Meaning of History.
Nikolai Berdyaev's work is featured in the dedication of Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World. This reflects the breadth of Berdyaev's influence on European intellectual life during his years in Paris.
Berdyaev remained a member of the Russian Orthodox Church throughout his life while describing his own views as anticlerical. He considered Orthodoxy closer to early Christianity than either Catholicism or Protestantism, and along with Sergei Bulgakov, he helped revive the Orthodox doctrine of apokatastasis, which had largely been neglected since the seventh century.