The class politics of Eastern Catholicism, part 1: Crusades, Black Death and the Big Four

Map of 13^th-century Venice

I promised that I would write a post on Western Christian gæopolitics in early modernity, from an Orthodox perspective that takes account of world-systems theory. This blog post quickly sprawled out in three different directions, and I soon realised that to retain coherence and not to try the patience of my readers, I had better split it up into three or four separate blog posts. I also decided that given the ecclesiological nature of the discourse, it would be best posted here rather than on Silk and Chai (even though it overlaps strongly with S&C’s wonted subject matter). This, then, is the first part of that series, where I explore the Crusades and the œconomic opportunities and class rifts that they exposed, particularly among the mercantilist northern Italian city-states: particularly Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence. The Maronites play a significant rôle here, because they demonstrated, especially to the Venetians, the value of having a local comprador élite class which could serve as agents of extraction for that city-state’s high financial and commercial interests. For a long time, the Western Church did not act on this insight – not, at least, until the financial depression brought about by the bubonic plague and the ecclesial instability brought about by the Western Schism.

To start with: one of the conceits that several of the sui iuris non-Latin rites of the Catholic Church – in particular, the Maronites and the Byzantine Greek Catholics – have about themselves is that they are ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’. This self-descriptor actually conceals more than it illuminates, which is of course precisely the point. If they were Orthodox Christian, they would be in communion with at least several of the established and visible body of Patriarchal Churches (Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, Moscow, Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Tbilisi, Justiniana, Athens, Tiranä, Warsaw and Prague) that is generally recognised by that name. The descriptor of ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’ is meant to conceal as much as possible the actual gæopolitical and œconomic agenda these churches were created to serve, and which they have served throughout their history.

The first attempts at ‘Unia’ were largely political and œconomic instruments of the merchant city-states of Northern Italy as they attempted to break into the mediæval world-system along the Silk Road and the Maritime Route. Subsequent attempts at ‘Unia’ were deployed by the mercantilist powers, and their ultimate aim was to keep the global semi-periphery from escaping the control of the global core. With a few notable exceptions, today they largely continue in that rôle, particularly in gæopolitical flash-points like the Ukraine and Lebanon. Their aim is to constrain the semi-periphery, and prevent any organised alternative to capitalism from forming – particularly in Russia or in China.

It’s first necessary to understand something about Europe’s historical and current place in the world-system. Historically, Europe was a benighted backwater. Most of the world’s trade was happening around and across Asia, over the southern land route and the Indian Ocean maritime route. One broad swathe of trade routes existed between Damascus and Luoyang, and another trade between Zanzibar and Guangzhou. This trade between Byzantium, India, China and later the Arab world created and transferred the majority of the world’s material wealth, and it was carefully and meticulously regulated on both ends. Standing on the sidelines, beyond Byzantium and Damascus, were the doges of the Italian thalassocratic merchant republics and city-states: particularly the ‘big four’ of Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence. In general, Venice had been content early to sit back and rake in the secondary benefits of trade with Constantinople, but one major motivating factor of the First Crusade had been the desire of Genoa and Pisa to ‘break into’ the trade network with its terminus in the Eastern Mediterranean. As Janet Abu-Lughod puts it:

Appetites whetted and abilities tested by prior sea battles and seeking to expand their horizon from the western basin of the Mediterranean to the eastern, the Genoese enthusiastically answered the call of the Pope for the first foray of that bloody and eventually unsuccessful venture—the conquest of Palestine… It was thus Genoese and Pisan ships that came to the rescue of the French, Flemish and other European knights who had eagerly answered Pope Urban the Second’s call in 1095 for a ‘reconquest’ of the Holy Land from the Muslims…

Venice held back until the operation looked as though it might succeed. Not until ‘1099, after the Frank armies had battered their way into Jerusalem, slaughtering every Muslim in the city and burning all the Jews alive in the main synagogue… did a Venetian fleet of 200 [leave] the Lido port’. It finally arrived in the summer of 1100 just in time to assist in the recapture of Jaffa and other towns. As a reward the Venetians were also allotted one-third of the towns’ land and environs and given special trading concessions in the new Crusader kingdom. Later, Venice received her usual third when the ports of Tyre and Ascalon were taken with her help. Venetians were allowed to form their own quarters and enjoy a position privileged to exploit the commercial opportunities of expanding trade.

This direct entrée to the riches of the East changed the role of the Italian merchant mariner cities from passive to active… The Genoese and to a lesser extent the Venetians had begun the long process of tipping the fulcrum of the world system. By the thirteenth century ‘the centre of gravity [of Europe at least] had definitely moved to the “big four” of northern and central Italy (Venice, Milan, Genoa and Florence) whose powerful merchants had a firm grip on the routes towards the fertile and industrious European hinterland and endeavoured to reach far beyond the declining Islamic façade into the depths of Asia and Africa’.

It would not be entirely accurate to characterise the Crusades between 1100 and 1400 as being a purely predatory enterprise by the volunteer foot soldiers of these merchant republics. As Abu-Lughod makes clear, some Crusaders were authentically and genuinely driven by a pious desire to defend the Christian holy places from Islâmic oppressors. In this, they were motivated by an often stunning degree of idealistic naïveté. However, it is necessary to look at the œconomic motivations of the people who had answered Pope Urban II’s call to Crusade, because many of the high-ranking Crusaders saw it as an opportunity to carve pieces for themselves out of what had once been the Eastern Roman Empire – and certainly the naval city-state powers mentioned above had material stakes in diverting trade towards themselves.

Particularly interesting in the above account is the Venetian and Genoese interest in the coast of Lebanon, and here is where we can begin to see the origins of the Unia – not as a disinterested and pacific desire for Christian unity, but instead as a political stratagem to cultivate and firmly entrench a coterie of native informants and compradors. The Maronites – a religious community tracing its origins to the monastic communities that arose around Saints Mârûn in Syria and ’Ibrâhîm in Lebanon – had firmly and decisively detached themselves for political reasons from Eastern Rome several centuries before. Blessed Theodoret of Kyrrhos notes disapprovingly that the first self-described disciples of Mârûn waged a civil war with other Orthodox Christians over their beloved saint’s body after his repose!

From William of Tyre’s Histoire de Outremer

But what was originally, and might have remained, an intriguing footnote in Byzantine religious history, gained an interesting œconomic and political significance during the Crusades. Although their motives for separating themselves from the Byzantine Orthodox Christians around them had more to do with the politics of holy places than with any sort of doctrinal difference, doctrinal differences between the Maronites and the Orthodox nevertheless accumulated. Despite the warnings of several of their leading churchmen against it, by the 1100s – according to contemporary sources William of Tyre and Jacques de Vitry – the Maronite community had embraced the early-mediæval hæresy of monothelitism: probably on account of the military aid they had received from the al-Jarâjima cavalry from the Taurus mountains who inclined to that belief. Still, when the Frankish, Flemish and Italian Crusaders arrived – exhausted and low on supplies – on the Lebanese coast, they were surprised to discover that they were welcomed warmly by the local urban élites who belonged to this sect. The local Maronite leaders fed the Crusaders, resupplied them, furnished them with guides and interpreters, and even sent a supporting unit of archers with them.

The Maronite Patriarch made the first gesture of unity with Rome in 1182, when he sent a missive to the Pope recognising his supremacy over the Church, recognising the entire body of Roman Catholic doctrine, and establishing formal communion. It appears from the record that the impetus for this first instance of Uniatism – again, undertaken for political reasons with the Maronites being opposed to both Constantinople and the Arab Caliphate – came largely if not entirely from the Maronites themselves. Even so, the political and financial potentials of such alliances were not lost on the Italian doges who observed them. They had seen the value in keeping handy a clique of allied locals, particularly ones in a position of relative military and œconomic dominance.

From the perspective of Venice in particular, indirect imperialism became of great strategic importance over the coming centuries. The Fourth Crusade in particular highlighted both the œconomic benefits of dominating important trade hubs like Constantinople, and the political limits of direct conquest and expansion. Venice was not really concerned with exercising direct political authority, so much as controlling points of distribution of trade goods into Europe. Again, from Abu-Lughod, concerning the Fourth Crusade:

Between July 1203 and April 1204 the ‘Latins’ who had set out to fight the infidels instead besieged their fellow Christians and, when the city was finally entered, set it on fire, plundered its riches, and then piously celebrated Palm Sunday and Easter Day ‘with hearts full of joy for the benefits our Lord and Saviour had bestowed on them’.

The Count of Flanders and Hainaut, Baldwin IX, still in his twenties, was elected Emperor of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, his coronation taking place a few weeks later in the great Church of Saint Sophia. The Venetians wanted no high office, they wanted only to expand their merchant empire. They ‘appropriated the best part of the imperial territory’, claiming three-eighths of the city and empire, including all of Crete, from which Venice would direct her spice trade into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries… This, when added to her continuing Egyptian connexion, made Venice the dominant force controlling European access to the spices and silks of Asia.

The siege of Constantinople, 1203

Abu-Lughod then goes on to point out that in the wake of this conquest of Constantinople, Venice entered into a period of marked expansion. Its culture flourished. Private business flourished. Its political system became more efficient. Industrial, naval and transport technologies not so much progressed as leaped explosively forward. Even though Venice was jealous of this new prosperity and wanted to prevent Genoa in particular from benefitting, the other three of the big four Italian mercantile city-states also found themselves on this upward trajectory.

However, with very few exceptions, despite their interest in trade with the Orthodox world (and beyond), and despite the growing body of knowledge that the Crusaders were bringing back from their Muslim contacts in the Levant, the Italian city-states did not pursue a religious-ideological attempt at unifying West and East for the next couple of centuries. This was because such attempts at bringing about political unity between the two halves of Christendom were, from the Italian mercantile perspective, not œconomically necessary. They were doing remarkably well at diversifying, intensifying and expanding their trade networks, and using their presence in various ports around the Eastern Mediterranean to extract wealth and resources, without such a strategy.

A number of events changed that calculus, however. The first and most important of these was the Black Death. The Black Death reached Venice and Genoa through their trade networks, having been imported from Caffa, which had been besieged by Mongols who were carrying the plague. These outbreaks of bubonic plague were utterly disastrous for the merchant republics. As Abu-Lughod notes:

The results were catastrophic.

Something like three-fifths of the inhabitants of Venice died within the next 18 months … Three plague-ridden centuries followed 1348 … In 1500 the population [of Venice] was about the same size as it had been two hundred years earlier.

Genoa suffered a similar fate. By 1350 her population was only about 60 percent of what it had been in 1341 and never did recover fully.

The Black Death hits Venice

Venice and Genoa both went through a ‘Great Depression’ that lasted until the late 1300s. Abu-Lughod tells us that this had an indelible impact on the political culture of the city-states of northern Italy; power became further concentrated among a handful of family patrimonies across all of the Big Four and their mercantile-republican systems became more openly oligarchic in substance if not in structure. In addition, the ‘bandwidth’ of each city-state’s trade network narrowed. Volume of trade decreased, but not as precipitously as the diversity and interconnexion of the trade networks.

The decrease in population across the entire Mediterranean basin meant that the Big Four were increasingly dependent for logistical purposes on local mercantile compradors who served Venetian or Genoese interests from within their native ports. Though it’s unlikely that these big mercantile empires thought of employing a union between the Western and Eastern churches as a stratagem for easier control of local comprador élites, this consideration did sweeten the deal for them when the proposal was made. This, however, will be covered in a subsequent blog post.

Continued in Part 2 and Part 3.

On ‘weird’ Christianity and its critics

This blog has existed for a long time – through both its Anglo-Catholic and its Orthodox phases – on the edges of the ‘weird’ Christian phenomenon, which was recently highlighted in one op-ed piece written by Tara Isabella Burton for the New York Times. I’m more heavy metal than punk, admittedly, but her characterisation of the countercultural proclivities of the segment of young and disaffected Christendom I belong to hits straight home. It’s somewhat unfortunate that this op-ed is somewhat loose and all over the place, because there is a distinct and eloquent core to it that recognises and speaks directly to the project this blog represents:

The Weird Christian movement, loose and fledgling though it is, isn’t just about its punk-traditionalist aesthetic, a valorization of a half-imagined past. It is at its most potent when it challenges the present, and reimagines the future. Its adherents are, like so many young Americans of all religious persuasions, characterized by their hunger for something more than contemporary American culture can offer, something transcendent, politically meaningful, personally challenging. Like the hipster obsession with “authenticity” that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real.

I say it’s ‘somewhat unfortunate’ that this blog piece is so loosely-structured and free-form, because it opens itself up to a lot of bad-faith criticism, such as some of the criticism it got at the National Catholic Reporter from Jamie Manson – which is, in roughly equal parts: illiterate fact-free griping about Bernie Bros, Dreher-bashing and Katie Kelaidis-style fashion-shaming of women who wear veils.

I do not at all begrudge Manson her bashing of Dreher or even her defence of Pachamama-as-Marian-image – a position on which I am agnostic for Christological reasons, but to which I’m generally sympathetic on account of my antipathy to iconoclasm. But her oblique woke-liberal bellyaching about Bernie Bros (‘socialism — as we've seen in its young, white-male dominated form in the U.S. — does not inherently disassociate anyone from racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia’) is simply not based in facts. American socialism is predominantly young and millennial, yes, but it isn’t white-dominated or male-dominated, and it does and has dissociated itself strongly from racism, misogyny and other forms of gender discrimination, particularly after 2016. Manson’s continued use of this ideological fiction fails to indict socialism, but it does say something about her own priorities – that these identity politics issues matter more to her than œconomic inequality.

The veil-shaming crap follows from this somewhat. It’s actually no less perverse and no less purity-policing to tell women that they shouldn’t wear a veil in a church setting, than to tell them that they should. The only difference is that the mainstream norm for appropriately-feminine behaviour has changed. If, as Manson suggests, ‘head coverings were compulsory for centuries because the female body was seen as a threat to men's chastity’, and that this is a moral problem, then it is incumbent on us not to simply leave it there but to inquire why this is a moral problem. The initial, and valid, feminist reaction was against norms which policed the way a woman dresses to meet the psychosexual demands of men in their community. It placed the burden of incapably-restrained male libido unfairly on the women.

But this knife cuts both ways. Now the norm is for women to not cover their heads, anywhere. Katie Kelaidis complains about the resurgence of headscarves in Orthodox churches, at bottom because they make her feel insecure. I would argue that, if we accept it as morally axiomatic that it’s not a woman’s responsibility to restrain men’s libido for them, neither is it a woman’s responsibility to dress a certain way to suit other women’s insecurities. If my defence of veils in church sounds individualistic, that’s because to some extent it is. Call it the ‘oikonomia defence’. Outside a certain set of broad civic boundaries and strictures against lewdness common to most settled cultures past and present, I don’t believe in policing women’s dress.

But on the few occasions where she actually addresses what I take to be the ‘punchline’ of Burton’s piece, Manson misses the point and does so in profound ways that make me wonder if she actually read the piece or if she is just reacting to it. For example, when she says this:

Weird Christians claim to want a faith that is "totally demanding," but they do not seem inclined to do the demanding work of examining the relationship between the exaggerated medieval rituals they fetishize and the barbaric economic and social injustices of the Middle Ages.

I dare not speak for others in the broader ‘weird Christian’ ambit; I’m sure they’re more than capable of speaking up for themselves. But speaking for myself in my own little idiosyncratic corner of the Orthosphere, I happen to be doing exactly this, and I have been doing it for a long time. Even in the places where I tend to vaunt the Middle Ages for various reasons – particularly polities which did away with the death penalty, or banned torture of prisoners, or made it mandatory to feed the poor on public feast-days – I am not blind to the political failings of those times, which were often incurably deep. Being Orthodox, I am an intense critic of the Crusades (especially the fourth one). And being aware of the œconomic consequences of the Norman invasion, I am also intensely critical of feudalism.

Lest one think from the above descriptions that I’m being a chauvinist triumphalist convertodox here, I don’t ignore political failings and faults in our ‘holy lands’ either. Even mediæval Russia, even Kievan Rus’ with its deep-rooted Christian radicalism, was rife with princely backstabbing, and the hyperdox hang-ups of rural Russian priests of this time are more than occasionally embarrassing to read (though they did come in for some censure from their bishops, even back then). On a note of personal self-criticism, I’m well aware that there’s a certain unresolved sexual component to my own straight-Shôta yearning for green and pleasant pastoral idylls of an English and Tory flavour, and I’m doing my best to keep it in view and in check.

So it’s simply wrong – egregiously so – for Manson to allude that being drawn to the ‘smells and bells’ of mediæval ritual automatically demands that you turn off your brain or that we take refuge in ‘kitsch and camp’, particularly given the punchline of Burton’s piece which directly contradicts this point. There are certain aspects of mediævalism which we would do well to reappropriate against the new nationalist right, rather than surrendering them wholesale. A very important one of these is a certain broad sense of civilisational humility, which is missing as much on the ‘woke’ left as it is among the new nationalists.

However – and here I allow myself the conceit that my ‘weird’ Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican brothers and sisters would broadly agree with me – the point of having a prisca theologica is not to take refuge in an idealised and static imagery of the past, but instead to creatively articulate the basis for a transfigured future. That means throwing off the balance of a status quo that has little use anymore for public considerations of Christ. Are we ‘unique’ in that? Dear God, I hope not – I hope Manson’s right about that. But it behooves our critics to note that a genuine transfiguration of society in a more just direction requires a hierarchy of values – not of people, but of values – for which Christian antiquity provides a useful guidepost.

Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu: guts, but little glory

Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu

I honoured this past Victory Day by watching Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu, the 1975 war movie by (and starring) Sergei Bondarchuk that directly inspired the people’s film 28 Panfilovtsev. It belongs very firmly in the category of ‘gritty’ war films. That’s a category that Hollywood simply doesn’t and can’t do very well. I suspect the American film industry is simply too given both by financial pressure and by force of habit to sanitising war in various ways. The only two Hollywood films I can think of, off the top of my head, that come closest to being ‘gritty’ like this film – and even these ones don’t quite fit the bill – are Clint Eastwood’s 2006 companion films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

I have to wonder if one reason that Hollywood, in fact, doesn’t and can’t do truly unsparing war films like this one is because there is simply no parallel experience in American history. There is nothing in our collective memory to match the total, mechanised, genocidal slaughter to the tune of twenty-five million Soviet people on their own home territory. In general, we do not have to grapple with the presence of mass death on our literal front porches. We do have as part of our history the genocides of the American Indians on the frontier, but outside a very small and select (but growing) group of Native-produced films these genocides are only ever treated – if they are even acknowledged or mentioned at all – from a ‘revisionist’ outsider perspective, and that largely as a result of the Vietnam War. The closest we come to any sort of parallel experience is the Civil War. But even this is not a particularly good parallel because we tend to elevate the Civil War in our storytelling, generations after the fact, to the level of misty, shrouded mythology of glorious ‘gods and generals’: something which simply could not be done for the generation that fought the Second World War in their own front yards.

Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu is indeed a state-funded Soviet film about the Second World War – based on a novel by Mihail Sholohov – and there is of course a clear-cut villain that must be fought back. But it is also a film which does not shy away from showing us the brutal human costs of war – physical, mental, even spiritual. In more than one scene it comes close to showing the war as a total, meaningless waste: and this sentiment is even placed on the tongues of the more sympathetic characters. Oni srazhalis’ shows us, uncomfortably, the random and often meaningless deaths of characters we have begun to familiarise ourselves with. It shows us soldiers who become permanently disabled, who lose their hearing and who develop PTSD. It shows us families that have been torn apart. It alludes to wartime prostitution and the degradation of families. If films like Tuǵan jer show us a missing generation and an uprooted generation, then Oni srazhalis’ shows us what is happening to this generation as it is in the process of being torn apart at the seams and scattered to the winds.

Oni srazhalis’ follows a regiment of Soviet soldiers in retreat from the front, as they are being pushed back by the Wehrmacht across the Don. In this platoon are Pyotr Lopahin (Vasilii Shukshin), Nikolai Streltsov (Vyacheslav Tihonov), Ivan Zvyagintsev (Sergei Bondarchuk), the youngster Kopytovskii (Georgii Burkov), the cook Nekrasov (Yurii Nikulin) and the old veteran Poprishchenko (Ivan Lapikov). We see at once from their retreat that they have limited means of keeping their morale up, and the darkly-witty banter we see between them – about women, about families, about tobacco and alcohol and food – seem to alternate between attempts to stave off despair, and to genuinely build connexions with each other. Lopahin and Streltsov, early on, show very different attitudes to the war even though both of them are having the same sorts of internal struggles. Streltsov sees no point in being cheerful, while for Lopahin, staying cheerful seems the only way to stay sane. The relationships between these men, however, always remain on the level of the human: their jokes and their jealousies, their boasts and their stumbles.

In their retreat the beleaguered platoon still has to engage the enemy and halt their advance before they can pull away; the Soviet forces are show digging foxholes and trenches in a hurry before the air raids. These battles are necessary for these men, for the whole platoon, to survive… but at the same time there is very little glory in slowing a Nazi advance deeper into Russian territory in the hopes that a fresh wave of Soviet troops will advance. In these battle scenes there is a palpable sense of grim resolve, but very little of what American audiences would consider heroism. These are ordinary men who are forced to survive, to stave off the common end. They have rifles, Molotov cocktails and a limited supply of grenades against the grim mechanical might of the German Luftwaffe and Panzer divisions – and we are not spared the details as the German tanks roll over the foxholes. At the same time, we do cheer, as we should cheer for the underdog, when the vulnerable Soviets manage to take down a tank with their limited resources. Several more engagements with the Germans follow, and the soldiers make it to the Don River where they are meant to hold while a fresh platoon is called up to halt the German advance.

Filmic symbolism is heavily employed in these scenes, as at the beginning and end of the film. The ‘Rodina’ is repeatedly symbolised by wheat, by wheat fields, by barns and agricultural technology. In the first pitched battle against the Germans, the Wehrmacht sets fire to the fields and bombs a windmill which bursts into flames before Streltsov’s eyes, as he is wounded by a nearby mortar shell. Later, Zvyagintsev – who was a combine operator before the war – finds a few lonely strands of long grass in the field which have gone unburnt, plucks the heads and chews them, and mutters to himself: ‘What a waste… what a waste.’ We can tell by his expression that he is not simply talking about the fields themselves, but about the sum total of what has happened to the country. Later we see a German Panzer division deliberately destroying a village with its barns and food supply, burning it and running the tanks through the rubble. The minimalist scoring, often with only a choir singing softly in the background, and stretches of total silence that accompany these sequences, contributes to a filmic atmosphere that alternates between the grimly realistic and the surrealistic. In a certain sense, any attempt to portray the war realistically demands a certain level of this surrealism.

Perhaps surprisingly for a Soviet film of this era, religion – and in particular the Orthodox Christianity of the common soldiery – is portrayed with a significant degree of sympathy. It’s notable that the director’s own character in the film, Ivan Zvyagintsev, is the one who, trapped in his foxhole with the German tanks advancing on him, looks up at the sky and crosses himself and lifts up a heartfelt prayer to God. Later, Zvyagintsev mutters that he should not have been so silly, and that he should be allowed some leeway because he is not a Party member… but the intensity of that moment, in which Zvyagintsev is helpless and turning to God in his helplessness, is not lost on the viewer.

Again, the film does not spare us the grisly details of these engagements. Streltsov is the victim of a ‘near miss’ by a mortar: one scene of the film passes silently, in multiple vision, swimming before our eyes as it swam before his. Streltsov sees the advancing soldiers and tries to fire his gun, but cannot even manage to stand up straight or hold his head up. His ears are bleeding. We are made to think, after that engagement, that he is dead… but we are later told that he was evacuated to a field hospital. At the very end of the film we see Streltsov, deaf and suffering from what is clearly a degree of PTSD, coming back to his old platoon out of loyalty – though clearly incapable of fighting again.

Speaking personally, a particularly harrowing scene in the film is when Zvyagintsev – who is caught when a nearby landmine went off behind him – is evacuated to a field hospital and operated on. Zvyagintsev is clearly in excruciating pain as his back and legs are riddled all over with shrapnel, and the field surgeons are trying to operate on him. They have to cut off his clothes, and Zvyagintsev starts cursing out the surgeon for cutting away his boots, and then hitting on the nurse who sees him naked, before he breaks down and starts weeping into his pillow. Although it first seems as though Zvyagintsev is merely trying to stave off and master the pain through the cursing and banter, it becomes clear that he is in fact traumatised and has no willpower or control left. One has to applaud Bondarchuk’s superlative acting skill here in holding that tension for so long.

At the end of the film, the remnants of their regiment are assembled. We recall the beginning of the film when a long line of them is marching through a ravine; now there are barely 20 men left. We see poor Streltsov struggling even to stay standing straight as the regimental banner is unfurled and as Poprishchenko kisses it. This is undoubtedly a patriotic note on which to end the film, and the voice-over quotation from Sholohov’s novel cements that. But it is also a deeply ambiguous one, as though Bondarchuk is defying us – in our comfort, from our position as the audience – to share in that expression, to say too easily that Streltsov’s, or Zvyagintsev’s, suffering is somehow ‘worth it’. In this he places himself firmly head and shoulders above the trumpeting maudlin sentimentality of Spielberg’s ‘serious’ war films. Like Eastwood thirty years later in Flags of Our Fathers, Bondarchuk is not content to lay the sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War to rest in a simple expression of heroic resolve, not content to propagandise for any abstract cause. Unlike Eastwood, though, he doesn’t attempt to draw some sort of didactic lesson from the suffering of the soldiers. Instead, he lets them speak for themselves in their suffering, even when they don’t say anything at all.

It is very difficult to find a war film that says anything human about war. Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu comes damn close. It’s easy to see how Druzhinin and Shal’opa took this film as a direct inspiration for 28 Panfilovtsev: what with that film’s similar insistence on the ambiguity of its protagonists’ heroism, and the similar scenario of having to stave off repeated German advances with no supplies and dwindling reserves of human strength and will. As I think 28 Panfilovtsev bears witness, this is a Russian film but not exclusively so. It is one which is important for understanding the development of Kazakh film as well. If you want to understand – not simply acknowledge intellectually, but understand – how the Soviets experienced the Second World War, I recommend watching Oni srazhalis’, followed by Tuǵan jer, and then Oni srazhalis’ once more.

Holy Martyr Hesychios of Antioch

Saint Hesychios of Antioch
القدّيس الشهيد إيسيخيوس الأنطاكي

The tenth of March is the feast day in the Orthodox Church of Saint Hesychios, a martyr of Antioch who suffered at the beginning of the fourth century. A Hellenised Syrian who served in a high position in the Roman administration, he was stripped of his honours and executed for confessing Christ. He was glorified by God in the same wave of persecutions under Maximian in which shone forth Saint ’Ilyân of Homs.

Holy Martyr Hesychios [Gk. Ἡσύχιος, Ar. ’Îsîkhiyyûs al-’Anṭaki إيسيخيوس الأنطاكي] was probably born in the latter half of the third century. He embarked on a career in the Roman military, where he proved himself to be both capable and trustworthy. We know this because he attained to the ranks of the agentes in rebus or angeliaphoroi, the couriers of the Magistros in the Roman military postal system. Hesychios was given by the Roman government a valuable sash for his services, a mark of singular honour and merit among the mighty.

When the persecutions of Emperor Maximian began, a decree went down that all Christians serving in high office who refused to recant their faith in Christ were to be stripped of their honours and expelled from their offices, to live without honour as civilians. This happened to Hesychios when he refused to honour the Roman gods. When Maximian heard of this, he ordered additionally that Hesychios be stripped of all his clothing and be made to wear a rough sleeveless mantle made of hair, and to be as disdained and dishonoured as if he had consorted with women of ill repute.

When this was done Maximian invited the former angeliaphoros before him and goaded him: ‘Well, Hesychios, are you not ashamed that you lost the honour and office of courier, and that you have been debased to this kind of life? Or maybe you don't know that the Christians, whose way of life you preferred, have no power to restore you to your previous great honour and office?’

To which Hesychios answered: ‘Your honour, O Emperor, is temporary. But the honour and glory which Christ gives is everlasting and without end.’

Upon hearing this, the displeased Maximian ordered that Hesychios be taken out to the Orontes (now the Nahr al-‘Âṣi), and that a millstone be hung around his neck, and that he be cast into the river. This sentence was carried out, and thus the laudable athlete Hesychios attained to the laurels of martyrdom and the everlasting glory which he had sought from Christ. Holy martyr Hesychios, who disdained the honours of the world and sought the imperishable glories of the kingdom of heaven, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion of Saint Hesychios, Tone 4:

Thy Martyr, O Lord, in his courageous contest for Thee
Received the prize of the crowns of incorruption and life from Thee, our immortal God.
For since he possessed Thy strength,
He cast down the tyrants
And wholly destroyed the demons’ strengthless presumption.
O Christ God, by his prayers, save our souls, since Thou art merciful!

Orontes River (Nahr al-‘Âṣi) at Antioch

Tag der Befreiung

A scene from Berlin, May 1945

Today, the eighth of May, is not celebrated in all of Germany. However, as a one-time public holiday (Feiertag), it was commemorated today in Berlin. It has been celebrated as a day of remembrance (Gedenktag) in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern since 2002, and in Brandenburg since 2015. It seems that the former constituent states of what once was East Germany are continuing to insist on holding the Tag der Befreiung, the Day of Liberation, that had been a public holiday there during the Deutsche Demokratische Republik between 1950 and 1990. This is as only good and right and proper, but on this day there needs to be a common consensus on what gets celebrated and how.

It strikes me that the East German states like Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg and Berlin are at least starting to retell some of the appropriate stories about their past. They have had longer to come to grips with it, for one thing: despite the political failures of the DDR particularly after 1953, one upside was that Walter Ulbricht demanded as early as 1950 that East Germans come to terms with what was done during and after the war, and public remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust became something acceptable. This process would not begin in earnest until 1970 in the West, with Willy Brandt and his famous and touching visit to Warsaw. In general, the attitude of the East German states toward their position in Europe between Russia and the West, and in particular their œconomic position, seems a lot more honest and realistic than the attitude in the West – though of course the West does not see it that way. But there seems to be an improper emphasis from the top nowadays, on a selective storytelling that politicises the results of the war and recreates in part the same political, class and even racial divisions that undergirded the rise of the National Socialists to power in the first place.

For historical events like these, all possible ideological perspectives – including, I should note, the leftist one – are draped in multiple layers of irony. The military defeat of the fascist war machine in Europe is something that deserves to be remembered and celebrated, surely. It strikes me as on a certain basic level inhuman to deny the descendants and loved ones of the people who fell fighting against the Nazis an opportunity to express both grief and gratitude in a public way. The vast majority of that sacrifice fell on the shoulders of Soviet soldiers: 34.5 million who fought, and 8.6 million who died. In the West, that particular insight is rapidly going down the Orwellian memory hole (particularly ironic given the attitude of Orwell toward the Soviets!), while modern Russians are mocked or ridiculed in the Western press for expressing this memory in any organised public way, or while the coronavirus outbreak becomes an opportunity for Western Schadenfreude. If there were any justice in our historical remembrance, this would be a time for finding common ground rather than playing up differences for political gain.

All that having been said, we should never pretend that this victory came without a cost, or that the ground gained was somehow final. In one sense, the costs of the war were visited heavily upon the German people themselves, something which unfortunately does not register much in the traditional telling of the war’s aftermath, whether in Russia or in the Western countries. To be sure, many of these ‘good Germans’ were not in fact entirely innocent (occupying land and homes that had once belonged to Jews or Slavs or Roma), but that does not entirely justify how they were treated by the occupying armies. On the other hand, in the broader perspective the temptations of fascism are never as far away as we would like them to be, even in countries that consider themselves ‘allies’. And even putatively pro-Allied sentiment in the West can unfortunately still be a cover for various forms of selective storytelling and bigotry.

If Victory Day in Europe is truly to be a Tag der Befreiung, what must be commemorated first and foremost must be, not an ideological abstraction like liberty or human rights or even the brotherhood of nations, but instead the historical truth, in all its messy complexity. Anything less than that is no real liberation at all.

Skif: a Eurasian tribute to eighties Hollywood

Kunitsa (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) and Lyutobor (Aleksei Faddeev) in Skif

Rustam Mosafir – the director of 2015’s Begletsy – returned in 2018 with the big-budget action movie Skif (literally, The Scythian, but released in English under the title of The Last Warrior). This is a film that places itself readily in the sweet-spot ambit of reviewers like RedLetterMedia. It readily approaches the Tarantino threshold for æstheticisation of violence to the point where it becomes campy – but it skirts the line with enough adroit self-awareness that it never quite crosses it. Ostensibly set in the vicinity of Krasnodar during the Kievan Rus’ period (and shot on location in Crimea), though in such a way that it skirts the blurry line between historical fiction and sword-and-sorcery low fantasy, it is a grim, brutal, cynical depiction of the age that nonetheless carries itself with a suitably compelling degree of swagger.

As my brief description may suggest, Mosafir’s most recent film is in many ways an entirely deliberate throwback to Hollywood thrillers and action movies of the eighties and nineties: the Mad Max trilogy, the Lethal Weapon films, Conan the Barbarian, Rob Roy and the Death Wish movies, to name a few. (Mosafir directly credits as his inspirations in this film Mel Gibson, George Miller, Robert Howard and Charles Bronson.) As such there are strong thematic preoccupations with honour, power and its dangers, trust and betrayal, fate and destiny. The characters inhabit a universe of blood oaths and kingly intrigues, of human sacrifice and inhuman rage, where tribal clashes between East and West end messily and with gruesome results. There are also some bitterly cynical intimations, particularly toward the end of the film, about the very nature of political power.

The last band of Scythians – a warlike nomadic people who have all but faded entirely from history – make their living as hired killers for lords and khans who can pay their price in gold. They call themselves the ‘Wolves of Ares’, and they are led by a red-bearded man named Yar (Vitalii Kravchenko) and by a spiritual elder named Anagast (Viktor Solov’ev). The Wolves of Ares kidnap the wife, Tatyana (Vasilisa Izmailova) and newborn son of a loyal Rus’ warrior named Lyutobor (Aleksei Faddeev), with a ransom demand knifed to the door-jamb of his house. The demand is that Lyutobor poison his liege, the knyaz Oleg of T’mutarakan (Yurii Tsurilo). Lyutobor dutifully reports this to his lord, and Oleg subsequently frames Lyutobor for poisoning him – the idea being that he would use the opportunity to get his wife and son back, and also find out who in the T’mutarakan court tried to suborn Lyutobor to assassinate Oleg. Lyutobor’s only hope to find his family rests in a Scythian captive that his people took when they raided his home: a young fighter named Kunitsa (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who hopes to challenge Yar for control of the Wolves when he grows strong enough.

The film’s primary relationship – the one that sets forth the thematic problems of trust, honour, betrayal and vengeance – is the tense relationship between Lyutobor and Kunitsa. At first, neither of them likes or trusts the other in the slightest. As far as Lyutobor is concerned, Kunitsa is just an animal. On the other hand, Kunitsa thinks Lyutobor’s Christianity makes him weak and that his scruples make him naïve. However, despite in the beginning Lyutobor forcing Kunitsa to swear an oath to Ares on his blood-stained sword, Kunitsa proves over and over again that he is willing to honour his word – and so he gains Lyutobor’s grudging respect. On the other hand, Kunitsa comes to admire Lyutobor for his tenacity as well as for his prowess in battle. It wouldn’t be quite right to call this a ‘buddy’ film, despite the subtle hat-tips to Lethal Weapon in this relationship. Lyutobor and Kunitsa gain respect for each other through a number of encounters and survival scenarios, and the natural flow of these events effectively builds audience sympathy and investment in that friendship. But at the same time, the two of them stand on either side of a religious and cultural divide that, even toward the end of the film, is never quite bridged. The film seems to intimate that the only force that can bridge it is bloodshed, even political mass murder.

In fact, what the film has to say about honour and trust is that both of these things are fragile, and built on a landscape of power-struggle and intrigue that can roll over and crush them at any time. With the notable exceptions of Kunitsa and Anagast – both of them Scythians! – and Lyutobor’s loyal wife Tatyana, all of the major characters go back on their word or violate a relationship of trust in some way, and they do it for gain, in power or in wealth. At the beginning of the film, a Qypchaq warrior named Qumai (played by Rustam Mosafir himself) challenges Lyutobor to a wrestling-match, but when Lyutobor beats him fair and square, the humiliated and enraged Qumai draws a knife and tries to stab Lyutobor in the back. This sets the tone for a number of encounters and relationships in the film. Although kinship, friendship and religious obligation are expressed by most of the characters in Skif, the only ones ever shown to 100% hold up their end of a bargain are Scythian. And in the end they suffer a dreadful, tragic price for this honesty.

Scythian lore exercises a powerful grip on the Russian imagination. The obvious point of reference is the Aleksandr Blok poem Skify, which ties the character of the Russian nation to the ancient Asiatic steppe nomads. But it goes back further than that. As religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev highlights, the great Slavophil cultural critic Aleksei Khomyakov in Semiramis spoke of the civilisational principle of iranstvo: the principle of fire and sunlight and the sacredness of the spoken word, which is opposed to the animistic principle of kushitstvo with its emphasis on power, monuments and necessity. In Khomyakov’s ethnographic imagination, the Scythians embodied the ‘Iranian’ principles of sacred truth, hatred of the lie, and the idea that true freedom consists in keeping one’s word – and then passed on these traits to the Russians. This same imagination seems to fuel Mosafir’s low-fantasy vision of whom the Scythians were and what they believed, though if Oleg is any indication, he expresses a strong doubt that the Russians inherited it except indirectly.

The logic of Skif appears, at first, to be ‘Cushitic’. The gods that go unseen are false. Power is invested – even by supposedly ‘Christian’ characters like Oleg – in magic totems of wood and stone, which must be sated by blood. Necessity overrules any conception of the sacredness of one’s word. Sons betray fathers; fathers kill sons. Lords and servants cheat each other. Men betray other men to their deaths for purses full of gold. Alliances are broken; tribes are massacred. The world we get to view through the eyes of Lyutobor is bleak and brutal. But it seems like Mosafir is in ultimate agreement with Berdyaev and Khomyakov, given that the few fleeting glimpses we get of any sort of spiritual freedom – including a particularly poignant and bittersweet one at the very end of the film – come through the perspective of the Scythians themselves.

This political angle on the amoral nature of acquiring and keeping political power, and the options available for a person of integrity under it, prompts a contrast with another genre film, but not a Hollywood one. Despite several echoing similarities in theme and in plot beats between Skif and Zhang Yimou’s Hero – with Jet Li’s Wuming sharing certain qualities and temperament with both Lyutobor and Kunitsa and with Yurii Tsurilo’s Oleg displaying a similar outlook to Chen Daoming’s Qin Shihuang – the final tragic choice of Wuming to uphold the state order without regard for his own life at the end of Hero, stands in stark contrast to Lyutobor’s penultimate choice to defy the state order without regard for his own life.

The Scythians left their archaeological traces across a good quarter of the Eurasian continent, from the Balkans across Crimea and the Caucasus to Kazakhstan. They also left their genetic traces among human progeny in a broad swathe of the same. In the modern day, the Ossetian people of the Caucasus, who are descended from the Sauromatai tribe of Late Antiquity and the Alan people of the Middle Ages, still speak a language which is descended from Scythian. I do have to wonder a bit if Mosafir consulted at all with these Ossetian neighbours while they were filming this in (relatively) nearby Crimea.

The production values and cinematography in Skif are every bit as polished and lavish as one would come to expect from a modern action flim, though again Mosafir appears to be quite fond of stylistic throwbacks to the silver era of eighties and nineties genre films, action movies and crime thrillers. The palette is washed out with the exceptions of the blood effects, which are always a vivid red. Certain scenes – like the one in which Lyutobor imbibes a psychoactive drink after being captured by a forest tribe and goes berserk – rely on fish-eye lens first-person camerawork and filters to capture the violent psychedelia of the practice: actually, no Western film, but instead the Kazakh films Otyrardyń kúıreýi (with which Skif shares similar thematic material) and Igla come the closest in my experience to these effects. In fact, Mosafir’s portrayal of Lyutobor’s berserkergang – including both the indiscriminate bestial rage during the episode and the extreme physical and emotional weakness of the warrior in dénouement – appears to be remarkably accurate from what historical knowledge of the practice we have.

The action scenes are nicely choreographed, and Mosafir takes delight in favouring us with numerous mobile first person takes to provide a sense of disorientation in combat. The elaborate and outlandish costumes – leather and metal spikes and face-masques galore – and ubiquitous face-paint further entrench the inevitable comparisons with Mad Max, as Mosafir no doubt intended. I will say, however, that some of the CGI blood effects, particularly in Lyutobor’s last confrontation with Qumai and even during the berserkergang, were unintentionally hilarious and came close to having the opposite of the intended effect: this is why I say earlier that Mosafir is playing on the ragged edge of the Tarantino threshold. The musical score is eclectic: a mixture of traditional symphonic accompaniment, ethnic drumming and instrumentation including some khöömi throat-singing, and a bit of modern darkwave dance music (during the end credits). The soundtrack is excellent in that it is suitably subdued, and supports the action rather than distracts from it.

This film is entirely watchable and entertaining as a popcorn action thriller. It’s well-paced, is visually lush, has solid dramatic tension and a decent emotional core. At the same time, I note with some dismay, many of these new movies from modern Russian directors – both in the ‘mainstream’ like this one and in the art-house circuit like Fedorchenko’s ethnofuturist dramas – are soused in a double faith, a dvoeverie, that self-alienates them from the native strength of the Orthodox Christian belief. I’m not entirely sure what is driving this. In Mosafir’s case, I wonder – both from Begletsy and from this film – if he feels that Orthodoxy in Russia has something opportunistic about it, something too close to the amoral logic of princely power.

Qyz-Jibek: a slow stunner of a tragic period drama

Tólegen (Quman Tastambekov) and Jibek (Merýert Ótekesheva) in Qyz-Jibek

The Kazakh film I’m reviewing today is the 1970 Kazakhfilm production Qyz-Jibek directed by Sultanahmet Qojyqov, the retelling of the epic tragic romance of the same name which had earlier been rendered into a production for the Soviet theatre. This film is glacially slow-paced, with barely enough of its Romeo-and-Juliet story to justify padding out its 142-minute runtime, and features a heavily-stylised formal cinematic language and theatrically-inspired acting direction that recalls the preferences of Eisenstein. As such it is certainly not be to everyone’s tastes. I won’t lie, it took me a long time to get all the way through it. But it is a stunningly beautiful film, which took full advantage of all of the technical versatility of its filmic medium. It lavishes gleeful attention on the natural beauties of the Kazakh landscape with its sapphirine lakes, dry rugged mountains and deserts and vast high grasslands. There are also a number of technically-impressive wildlife shots of swans and owls. The film also builds dramatic tension with close-up shots of the main actors. Careful craft clearly goes into practically every take. It’s a film which is difficult to like, but which one cannot help but appreciate just because it’s so pretty.

The story involves the ill-fated romance and courtship of the titular Jibek (Merýert Ótekesheva) with the warrior Tólegen (Quman Tastambekov), and Tólegen’s death at the hands of the cruel and treacherous brigand Bekejan (Asanáli Áshimov). There is a tone of high tragœdy about the original story, since the political forces that surround the two lovers through their families doom their marriage to a bitter end. The internecine conflicts for political power between Tólegen’s father Bazarbaı (Káýken Kenjetaev) and the clan of Bekejan, with Jibek’s father Syrlybaı Han (Kenenbaı Qojabekov) caught in between, offer some ideological overtones that resonated with a mediæval Kazakh audience.

There is a great deal of creative use of colour in the film, particularly red, white and black. The colour scheme actually mirrors that of Beloe solntse pustyni in some ways: a film which came out the same year. The duels and cavalry battles are intricately choreographed and spectacularly shot with a mixture of wide-angle ærial and mobile shots. The violence is highly stylised in a way that appears to præfigure Sergei Bodrov’s steppe dramas Kóshpendiler and Mongol. Attention is lavished in close-up on blood spatters across the sand, and these are often mirrored by flowering red blossoms in the field. Atmosphere is also used to great effect, with clouds and sunsets providing some of the needed lighting effects for the duels and battles between Tólegen and Bekejan.

The costumes and the set-pieces are equally lush; there is a great deal of effort put into giving the appropriate texture to seventeenth-century nomadic Kazakhstan. Each shot is meticulously framed, as though the director wanted to get the perfect angle to deliver the correct emotional impact – though my one complaint is that the editors were far too overly fond of wipes, and sometimes used them inappropriately. The scene in the yurt between Tólegen and Jibek on their wedding-night is admirably restrained: the eroticism is actually heightened and sublimated by the fact that it is expressed symbolically and refrains from ever ‘showing too much’. Despite this restraint, one can certainly see echoes of this scene in the (much more explicit) parallel sequences in Ermek Tursynov’s Kelin.

One can’t quite shake the feeling, as one is watching it, that one is watching the local equivalent of an Arthurian romance or a cinematic interpretation of some other folk tale. Despite the very disparate intended audiences, I was reminded more than once of the Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland version of The Adventures of Robin Hood: Quman Tastambekov does have a certain expression, bearing and mode of delivery that strongly recalls Errol Flynn at times. Certainly Tólegen is portrayed with a measure of Robin Hood’s humour, cunning and general nobility of spirit. On the other hand, the romanticised and æstheticised violence – along with the thematic concerns with a political anarchy that is only barely and imperfectly constrained by a veneer of traditional steppe courtesy – carries with it certain echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. The film ends abruptly and discordantly, showing us one fragment of the death of Jibek after she learns of her husband’s fate.

These purely-stylistic comparisons don’t quite do the film justice, though, unless we take the parallel a little deeper. This film is iconic in a way that Robin Hood would be to the British or that the entire Western genre would be to us Americans. It has a mythopœic depth. That is to a significant extent because this film stands solidly at or near the fountainhead of the dastanic epic style in Kazakhstani cinema: with its high romance; its ideological focus on the struggle, here unrealised, for the unification of the tribes; its valorisation of an epic hero (or two in this case, Tólegen and Jibek) imbued with the martial and hospitable excellences of the steppe. It portrays an important national legend – not quite on the same level as Alpamıs, yet not very far off from it either.

The distinctions between Tólegen and Bekejan are highlighted here for the typically dastanic ideological purpose of highlighting the virtues of the Kazakh people. Tólegen is an obedient son – in most things. His choice of bride is not particularly welcomed by his father. And yet he loves his father dearly and rides to his rescue in battle. Tólegen is also shown to be brave, resourceful, respectful of the steppe traditions of fair play and hospitality – yet not without a certain degree of cunning. Bekejan, on the other hand, is portrayed as suitably masculine to work as a foil for Tólegen, but without respect for the steppe traditions. Though he is a formidable warrior, he is lascivious, disrespectful – and ultimately treacherous and ungrateful for Tólegen’s assistance in battle.

The version I watched was officially dubbed-over in Russian, with some of the original dialogue and particularly the singing being audible. The soundtrack features a great deal of Kazakh folk song and traditional dombyra airs: rendered in Russian to be intelligible to a broader Soviet audience, but still retaining their original flavour and melody. The singing and dombyra were provided by the characters

And so, when all of these elements are put together, there is an extent to which it is meant to feel as though we are watching not so much a film as a moving painting, an objet d’art meant to capture as much of the traditional Kazakh spirit as possible: whether in the costumes or the music or the landscapes or the cavalry battles. There is not as much of a sense of ethnographical voyeurism here as there is in, say, Amangeldy – because this is a film which has Kazakhs telling a uniquely-Kazakh story about themselves. The story itself, however, is one which has both a specific local political meaning and a universal appeal: the star-crossed lovers caught in the middle of a tribal feud.

Once again, though: although it is exquisite as an artistic accomplishment, and although it is an important landmark in the development of Kazakhstani film, this movie has a tendency to try the patience of the casual watcher. The martial set pieces are engaging and exciting enough, and the eye is naturally drawn to appreciate the framing and movement and technical mastery of the medium, but you have to navigate between them through turgid expository dialogue and establishing action whose delivery is theatrical to the point of being maudlin. I do recommend it for its sheer stunning beauty, but it is not the sort of film that I would go out of my way to rewatch for enjoyment.