The dragon and the bear

First of all, (sort of) belated blessings for Spring Festival this year, and a Happy Year of the Dragon! It’s the middle of Golden Week, so I’m still in the window!

恭喜发财！幸福安康！万事如意！身体健康！龙马精神，财运亨通！

According to the Yijing, the relevant hexagram seal for this year is qian 谦, or ‘modesty’, composed of an upper trigram kun 坤 (the receptive, field) and a lower trigram gen 艮 (keeping still, mountain).

The judgement associated with this seal is as follows:

MODESTY creates success.
The superior man carries things through.

And the associated image for his seal is that of a subterranean mountain.

Within the earth, a mountain:
The image of MODESTY.
Thus the superior man reduces that which is too much,
And augments that which is too little.
He weighs things and makes them equal.

This image in fact reminds me of something that Fr Thomas Hopko of blessed memory once wrote on the subject. Modesty (that is to say, humility) is not a matter of self-abasement in his view:

Humility does not mean degradation or remorse. It does not mean effecting some sort of demeaning external behaviour. It does not mean considering oneself the most vile and loathsome of creatures. Christ Himself was humble and He did not do this… Genuine humility means to see reality as it actually is in God. It means to know oneself and others as known by God… The humble lay aside all vanity and conceit in the service of the least of God’s creatures, and to consider no good act as beneath one’s dignity and honour.

In order to ‘reduce that which is too much’, we have to have a certain standard as to what ‘too much’ is; and we can’t do that without looking outside of ourselves for the standard. The same goes with ‘augmenting that which is too little’, ‘weighing things’ and ‘making them equal’. The standards are not to be found in us, but to realise that requires that we understand reality by a different measure than our own fallible perspective. Faith may move mountains, even if it is as small as a mustard seed which is buried in the earth. But to understand this parable, we can’t be reading it with the eyes of worldly pride.

~~~

And, by the way, in the interest of rectification of names, it is properly called Spring Festival (春节). That is even though this festival does mark the New Year on the agrarian calendar, and even though it technically falls during winter. Traditionally, farmers used Spring Festival as a yearly marker to prepare for the necessary work that needed to be done by the vernal equinox—hence the name.

Despite the woke usage nowadays, Spring Festival is not, properly speaking, a ‘Lunar’ New Year, because the traditional agrarian calendar is in fact a lunisolar calendar, with intercalations to make up for discrepancies with the solar year, and not a true lunar calendar. And thank goodness for that, because if it were a true lunar calendar, Spring Festival would jump around as much as Ramadan does. But I don’t see anyone lining up to call Spring Festival the ‘Lunisolar New Year’.

And… wait, where and when was the traditional agrarian calendar developed again? It wasn’t developed in Seoul. It wasn’t developed in Tôkyô. And it sure wasn’t developed in Manila (where agricultural work is based on the tropical ‘dry’ and ‘rainy’ seasons with no need for a lunisolar marker for the coming of spring). It was developed along the Yellow River in the Central Plains of China. The agrarian calendar is traditionally accredited to the Yellow Emperor in about 2700 BC, with reforms to it being made during the Shang (1600 BC – 1046 BC) and Zhou (1046 BC – 256 BC) Dynasties. The New Year on this calendar was first celebrated in the Central States: what is now China.

So, for English-speaking people to call it ‘Chinese New Year’ is, even if not exactingly correct as a translation, still completely understandable. Further: it’s asinine for the perpetually-aggrieved wokesters, Redditors and bourgeois Korean and Japanese nationalists to try to ‘correct’ them prescriptively, to the even more incorrect ‘Lunar New Year’.

~~~

Two days before Spring Festival, also, media personality and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson held an interview with the President of Russia, released on the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. It’s a two-hour-long interview, but I highly encourage watching it.

What somewhat surprised me about it, actually, was how unsurprising Putin’s historiographical position was. There was nothing at all idiosyncratic, revisionist or even overtly nationalist in Putin’s reading of medieval and early modern Russian history. If anything, it was a standard textbook treatment of the subject which held to consensus positions on the creation of the Rus’ polity under Ryurik, the baptism of Kievan Rus’, the Tatar yoke, the geopolitical struggle between Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Treaty of Pereyaslavl and so on. But the fact that he dwelt upon the history of medieval and early modern Rus’ far longer than Carlson was clearly comfortable with, shows that Putin not only takes that history seriously but thinks it is worthwhile for Americans to be exposed, even to an abridged textbook version of it.

It somewhat restored my respect for Putin, as well, that he refused to be baited or led, as Carlson was clearly attempting to do, into acceding to or supporting American conservative culture-war aims or narratives. Most notably: when Carlson attempted to push forward his idea that China would attempt to exert its hegemony over Russia in a more intolerable way than America would, Putin at once dismissed this as a ‘bogeyman story’. He further emphasised that China was Russia’s neighbour with a long land border; that it was a valuable partner in trade; and that its leadership is much more interested in compromise than in confrontation or domination. Putin is not about to sell out his good relationship with such a neighbour for a fistful of empty promises from the West.

To give another example, Putin steadfastly declined to delve into the details of any of his dealings with former (or current) American leadership. At first I found this rhetorical tactic a little frustrating. I was wondering why he was protecting these people, or lending them a cover of plausible deniability. But after a while I came to realise that Putin was simply being a diplomat. Even though he clearly has grievances with the way Russia has been treated by America and by the West more broadly, even under Yeltsin’s tenure, he isn’t in the business of singling out particular American political figures for particular instances of blame. For similar reasons, he also didn’t give in to Tucker’s questions about the current state of the American social fabric and its relations with the government… though there it might really be a weak point in his knowledge rather than a gentlemanly attempt not to take sides.

But Putin also, to his credit, refused to offer support even implicitly, for the idea that a change in administration alone could bring about a thaw in relations with Russia. Carlson was clearly leading him with his questions toward an admission that Trump would be preferable to Biden for Russia. But for Putin, it clearly isn’t a question of a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. (I made exactly this point eight years ago also; I’m glad it still holds up!) Putin observes that the American élite mentality which prevails in both parties, and which attempts to destroy anything that it can’t control, needs to shift first.

So, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but a major tip of the hat to Tucker Carlson for holding this interview. It needs to be seen; Carlson has provided a valuable service to the American people to be able to hear the arguments of the other side for themselves. As for Carlson himself, though, as an interviewer… he seemed to be rather out of his depth, and one could get the impression at a couple of points that Putin was playing with him, even trolling him a bit (as when he hinted at Carlson’s unsuccessful attempt to join the CIA).

I hope that (in the spirit of the Yijing for this New Year), we can approach this interview with the Russian President in a spirit of humility, in the interest of correcting our deficiencies or exaggerations in vision, and making things equal.

The spirit of Patriarch Pavle lives on

A couple of weeks back, the Romanian website Iubesc Ortodoxia posted the above photograph of Archbishop Theophanes (Kim) of Korea, riding the bus. At a time when bishops of certain other jurisdictions are toodling about in Holden Caprices and such, at least the spirit of humility that motivated Patriarch Pavle of Serbia still lives on among the bishops of the Far East. May God grant Archbishop Theophanes many years!

Mun Jaein’s pro-marriage, pro-peace, pro-worker Catholicism

One of the global leaders I think gets way too little respect these days is Mun Jaein, the president of South Korea. Although there is much about his politics that I could criticise from the left, his record thus far has been one of a solid reformist socdem whose heart is mostly in the right place. But I found it surprising that with a few admirable exceptions – notably Aleteia and CruxNow – few news sources seem to dwell on Mun Jaein’s active Catholicism.

Along these reformist lines, Mun has done a lot of legwork in his country for working-class people. He has increased the minimum wage and lowered the maximum work week from the utterly insane and inhuman 68 hours to a much more reasonable 52. He has moved to discipline the chaebol conglomerates. He has also notably been a cool head when approaching his neighbours to the north. Mun Jaein is also pro-marriage. Where he stands on the issue of abortion is trickier to pin down – he has been fairly silent on the issue, which may say something to his credit given the normally pro-abortion stance of his party. This gives him a rare and enviable proximity to Eastern European œconomically left but socially conservative leaders like Moldova’s Igor Dodon and Bulgaria’s Rumen Radev.

His rapid, effective response to the coronavirus crisis in particular seems to have been motivated by his Catholic piety, as he is on record as consulting the Catholic bishops on how to respond. The peculiarly Asian variant of Catholicism which Mun Jaein espouses reminds me strikingly of Thomas Han Hongchun and the Confucian social theory of Kang Xiaoguang (which Kang himself likened to Catholic social teaching).

One can observe Mun Jaein’s faith in action through his policies, but also through his speeches. It is particularly interesting to observe how Mun Jaein notes the example of the Catholic Church in Korea as having been built up by a great number of martyrs, and lays particular stress on how the Catholic Church ‘embraced the down and out’, ‘emulated the life of Jesus in the form of a social calling’, and opposed ‘colonisation, division, war and dictatorship’. Particularly intriguing are his references to the internationalist spirit and the Catholic emphasis on solidarity between nations as being a source of inspiration for his policy of realist détente with the North and hope for eventual Korean reunification. (One would think that this dimension of Catholicism would make him more of a liberal internationalist in terms of international relations theory, but it seems to have had the opposite effect!)

It is through statements like these that we can begin to see how Mun has formulated his priorities on peace with North Korea, and a much warmer relationship with mainland China – both of which policies have gotten him some major flak from right-wing critics, in particular the Buddhist leader of the People Power Party, Ju Hoyeong. Also intriguing is that Mun Jaein’s foreign policy realignment toward the continent has earned him a number of critics from both American Blob-aligned think tanks like the neoliberal Lowy Institute, and Korean neoliberals and security hawks like Lew Hanjin. (I note with shame and dismay that The American Conservative continues down its sorry degenerate slide toward a right-wing variant of hawkish idealism under Bloom’s supremely-inept and idiotic mismanagement.)

I observe all of this from an Orthodox Christian lay perspective – and one which has in the past been critical of Roman Catholic approaches in the East. I understand that his perspective may differ from mine on several points, but I cannot help but applaud Mun Jaein’s sincere Roman Catholic devotion to the Prince of Peace. That devotion carries him in a genuinely positive direction. Speaking for myself, I admire him for his peaceable, realistic and independent foreign policy stance; for his equally-sincere opposition to the redefinition of sexuality and family relations by crazed Western gender theorists; and for his attention (however reformist and incremental) to the bread-and-butter human needs and dignity of South Korea’s workers. This is one variant of the constructive, measured, hard-headed and big picture-oriented politics that I would like to see more of. Thank you, Mr Mun, and may God grant you many years.

So what did South Korea do right?

South Korean drive-in coronavirus testing facility

The one bright spot in this saga of the novel coronavirus is the performance of South Korea’s health care system, as they managed not only to ‘flatten the curve’ but actually smash it. Whereas China was learning by trial-and-error which solutions to the outbreak in Wuhan would prove most effective, South Korea was watching and taking careful notes. Once the disease hit their borders they implemented the plans they had with an astounding vigour and efficiency. So what did they actually do right?

1. Aggressive rapid testing. South Korea used its month’s reprieve from new cases of the coronavirus to develop a reliable test for COVID-19 which is easy to administer and quick to return results. Then both public and private laboratories working together unrolled 10,000 individual tests in February, the vast majority of which of course came back negative. Because they had implemented this aggressive régime of testing, once the case load started ramping up, they actually had the means to process 12,000 coronavirus tests per day throughout the country. Many of these are done in drive-in testing centres where patients are tested for coronavirus through the windows of their cars and given their results within the hour. Oh, yeah: and it’s free at the point of use.
   
   Here, though, our government essentially squandered the brief window of reprieve bought for us by China’s much more Leviathan-esque testing and containment policies. Instead of authorising public state labs to start doing tests to prepare for the inevitable ramp-up, the administration sat on its hams. Very possibly, the administration was pressured to do so by the big pharma companies which stand to profit by developing proprietary coronavirus tests, treatments and vaccines which they can sell. A government fettered to unfettered capital simply did not deliver the kind of timely and efficient results that South Korea’s mixed œconomy did.


2. Innovative use of GPS and GIS. The South Korean government implemented a tracking and public access database system that allowed the public to view each individual confirmed case of COVID-19, as well as keep tabs on the position and movement of these cases. In the United States, we would likely consider this an intolerable breach of civil liberty, and an intrusion into individual privacy. However, there is little question that in South Korea’s case, this aggressive use of surveillance technology and public access to information about the spread of the disease and infected areas absolutely did save lives and prevent the rampant proliferation of new cases.


3. Social solidarity; deference to authority and the elderly. It may sound a bit oxymoronic, but concerted efforts at social distancing are in fact, in the case of a pandemic, a form of social solidarity. I could do so, but I’m not going to attempt to tie the South Korean public’s coronavirus response directly to Confucius or Mencius. Attributing broad social trends like this to a vague cultural-stratum ‘Confucianism’ is and should be rather suspect. This sort of analysis indeed can be lazily or frivolously used to tell just-so stories about any difference in outcomes between an East Asian and a Western nation, whether positive or negative. And it’s also important to emphasise that this respect for authority is not the same thing as what most Westerners mean by ‘authoritarianism’.
   
   But it absolutely is the case that the Korean public has a number of cultural advantages in this case. It’s a foregone conclusion that South Korea wouldn’t have the kind of outcomes it does, if ordinary South Koreans hadn’t listened to the relevant public authorities, considered health to be a public matter instead of a merely individual one, and limited their own personal freedoms of movement and association out of respect for, and solidarity with, the elderly and immune-compromised.
   
   American insistence on resisting any and all forms of constraint or limits – even if those limits are soft and imposed by custom, social stricture or religious dictum instead of by the state – has already come to the fore in a particularly ugly and crass way as we’re facing down this crisis. You see young people going out to St Patrick’s Day parties in defiance of the state government and the CDC’s recommendations. You even see people publicly defying the advice of the CDC because ‘this is America’ and ‘I’ll do what I want’. This is what happens when you have more respect for comedians and talk-show hosts than for scientists and schoolteachers. It’s also what happens when you consider health as a merely individual matter: the attitude that ‘I’m young’, ‘I’m healthy’, ‘I’m being careful’ and ‘I’m not about to put my life on hold’ is dangerous and irresponsible. The people who have this attitude show a cavalier disrespect for the elderly that in this case could be lethal.

Again, this is not a call to panic. In panics human beings tend to revert to their baser selves, not their higher ones, and that is precisely what we do not want at this point. To be frank, the time for a concerted, humane (in the Confucian sense of ren 仁, or in this case in 인) action on the coronavirus was a month and more ago. But what should be done still can be done in advance of the logarithmic inflection point. Follow the recommendations of the CDC. Keep your hands clean, cover your cough, don’t share your fork. Moreover, call your parents – and grandparents and other elderly relatives if you have them – and make sure they’re okay.

South Korea has demonstrated that a liberal political system is not necessarily an impediment to an effective response to a pandemic. But if you’re going to have such a political system, you need to have, and what’s more you need to actively and ferociously preserve, the underlying forms of humility; solidarity; family feeling; deference to authority; self-limitation including in movement, speech and privacy; and acknowledgement of collective limits that elsewhere in the industrialised world we seem to have left by the wayside. A liberal political system is untenable without a certain set of illiberal presumptions about the way the political world functions.

China’s tightening hand on religion, and global theopolitics

It’s a sad thing to have to say, but you know the old saw ‘believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see’? It’s more necessary now than ever. I’m seeing a lot of online commentators and journalists, including Orthodox Christians, get snookered by a report about Chinese Christians being denied funerals which I can’t independently verify, except through an international lobbying and pressure group called CESNUR, which runs the magazine Bitter Winter. A bit more on this later.

There is, in fact, the substantive news from the People’s Republic which indeed should be concerning for all people of faith. The new set of regulations on religious groups which is now in effect in China requires all religious groups to proclaim their loyalty to the state; and it also provides for mechanisms whereby the state may choose to interfere in the selection and comportment of religious officials. The policies are more stringent than those which came before, but they are of the same tenor as policies which have been in place for years now. This should be especially concerning to Christians.

China’s politics are formally – if not substantively – Marxist. They have never been liberal. (In fact, even China’s most respected democrats have not been liberals, which is what endears them to me.) China conforms to a particular illiberal erastian, or cæsaropapist, direction in theopolitics. The Ming and Qing Dynasties also sought to exert governmental control over religious practice, and did so with varying degrees of success, centuries before Marx was born. The government considered these policies necessary considering that the single bloodiest civil war in human history, the Taiping Rebellion, was caused by a millenarian religious movement that opposed the government. This is the historical context in which the new religious regulations need to be considered. Considered, but not necessarily justified.

One of the consequences of the multipolar world we now live in, is that a plethora of illiberal options are presenting themselves to challenge and supplant a liberal international order that is rapidly losing what’s left of its legitimacy. One of these options is the China model.

Those of you who follow my blog will be well aware that I see several intriguing and encouraging trends happening within the ambit or at the margins of the China model, even if I remain ambivalent about the model itself. Things like postal savings banks; reforestation; traditional clothing; traditional pædagogy; slow food; food sovereignty; and the Confucian revival all suggest a reawakening of the third China even as it continues to be governed by the second.

At the same time, the reason why I continue to be ambivalent about the China model despite all these healthy green shoots, is precisely that it rests on a cæsaropapist preference for the relations between religion and the state. The Chinese state is unabashed and overt in its desire to control the appointments of bishops, lamas and imâms. Even if Chinese history points to reasons to sympathise with or better understand this desire for control, at the same time, state control of religion almost always leads to abuses. Even if the story about the state denying religious funerals to believers is false – which, considering the source, I strongly suspect it may be – there are still very good reasons to criticise Zhongnanhai’s new round of regulations on religious activity.

Regarding the source of the funerals story: CESNUR is a ‘non-profit’ run by Massimo Introvigne, a lawyer with ties to the Brazilian intégriste organisation Tradição, Família e Propriedade (or TFP) through its Italian affiliate Alleanza Cattolica. There’s little other way to describe CESNUR but as a kind of international ‘cult lobby’. They represent and advocate for fringe religious movements with bizarre and evil belief systems, which abuse their members and exert totalitarian control over their members’ lives: the Unification Church, the Scientologists, the Eastern Lightning Sect, The Solar Temple and Aum Shinrikyô. They routinely act as a legal defence and pressure group for these groups within Western democracies like France and Germany, and oppose the legal restrictions these governments place on clearly-harmful cults and hæretical groups.

There is a method to CESNUR’s madness, though. CESNUR seems to operate on a principle – if it can be called that – of maximal religious liberty over-against the state, even to the point where said maximal religious liberty infringes on the laws of the state or even commonsense moral laws necessary for a functioning society. Personally I have to wonder – given CESNUR’s links to TFP and other far-right Catholic groups – if the ultimate aim of CESNUR isn’t instead to actively undermine the legitimacy and the credibility of state institutions in sæcular countries. If they are indeed acting as agents of a reactionary intégriste Catholicism, they may using a tactic of ‘heightening the contradictions’ and stressing the limits of religious tolerance in sæcular states, in order to undermine confidence in the idea of sæcular government.

Because of course the reactionary intégriste Catholics are at ultimate odds with the People’s Republic, even though China is not a liberal state. As demonstrated above, it is Marxist-Leninist in form if not in ideology, and its goals are post-liberal: officially the People’s Republic of China is sæcular, but it clearly does have a religious policy which is cæsaropapist in content. The intégristes, who (claim to) desire a state which is subservient to the goals of the Church – a form of papocæsarism – will of course look on the cæsaropapists in Zhongnanhai as their penultimate rivals. It’s a return to the high-mediæval enmity of Henry IV and Gregory VII, or the subsequent rivalry between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

As I’ve said before, Orthodox Christians need to watch these contests between religion and state carefully. However, we shouldn’t be overly-eager to fall on one side or the other. Obviously I can’t give full blessing to the tightening regulation of religion by the Chinese government. But we do live in societies with laws. Neither should we lightly take the side, in the name of ‘religious liberty’, of sectarians, hæretics and radical raskolniki who promote strange and evil doctrines, and abuse women and children to suit their delusional, lascivious and power-hungry ends. Orthodox Christian activist Dr Aleksandr Dvorkin of FECRIS may occasionally paint with too broad a brush and overzealously pursue his anti-cult activities, but his aims and his basic reasoning are fairly sound. We should also ask the intercession of Saint Irenæus of Lyons for those harmed and abused by such sects.

We also have to bear in mind that we witness to a mode of theopolitics which is neither intégriste nor erastian nor sæcular. We witness to a theopolitical harmony the icon of which is the brotherhood of Moses and Aaron, which is currently not evidenced anywhere in reality, but toward which the governments of Russia and several of the Eastern European republics are currently aiming.

Sëstry: two faces of the ‘new Russia’

Dina (Katya Gorina) and Sveta (Oksana Akinshina) in Sëstry

Though not technically a Kazakh film, Kazakh director Gul’shad Omarova’s screenwriting debut, before directing Shıza in 2005, was a 2001 Russian-language road movie called Sëstry (or Sisters), directed by Sergei Bodrov, Jr (son of Sergei Bodrov, Sr – who also got writing credits on this film – and the lead actor in Brat and Kavkazskii plennik). So I’m actually glad I reviewed Brat first, but I still feel at something of a disadvantage in reviewing Sëstry here, in part because the plot and characters of Ya ne vernus’ have many surface similarities to this film. But they are films separated by half a generation, and the broad thematic concerns of the two films are therefore quite different. Sëstry is ultimately a film about doubt; Ya ne vernus’, a film about faith in uncertainty. Post-Soviet questions loom large in the mind of Sëstry – whether œconomic uncertainty, pop-culture or ethnic identity – in a way that they don’t as much (though they are by no means entirely absent) in Ya ne vernus’.

A mid-level ethnic-Dagestani gangster named Albert ‘Alik’ Murtazaev (Roman Ageev) gets released from prison after serving his term. However, he lost some money that he owed to his former gang, and now the leader of the gang (Kirill Pirogov) is out to get his million rubles back. Alik sends his eight-year-old daughter Dina (Katya Gorina) and his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter Sveta (Oksana Akinshina) into hiding to escape from the criminals. The two daughters lead very different lives, and do not get on well at all in the beginning. Dina is spoiled and materialistic, precocious in some wrong ways and painfully naïve in others. Sveta lives a poorer life with her maternal grandmother, listens to Viktor Tsoi (whose memory she treats with hagiographical reverence), and trains at a range with her rifle, dreaming of becoming an army sniper. When Alik’s gang discovers the two girls, they are forced to flee and wander around on the road to elude them, all the while trying to contact their parents. Apart from Viktor Tsoi, another connexion with Igla is Seifullin (Aleksandr Bashirov, who played Spartak there), a Central Asian Muslim who takes the girls under his protection against the gang toward the end of the film; and Sergei Bodrov, Jr himself makes a cameo as Danila Bagrov, his character from Brat.

The briskly-paced film is driven in large part, just as Ya ne vernus’ is, by the odd-couple repartee of the two girls as they are flung together for survival and begin to form a bond. A substantial portion of the road-film drama to Sëstry arises from the fact that Russia is still in recovery from the Chechen war and still not socially or œconomically out-of-the-woods, so to speak. The police are still shown to be less powerful than the criminals, and occasionally on the take (though one policeman chooses to die rather than betray the girls to the mafia). The people they meet, even the people who help them, are reticent and suspicious – and understandably don’t want to get caught in the middle of a gang war. Ethnic tension is also something they need to navigate: Dina doesn’t look quite Russian, and that complicates their situation somewhat. At one point they get taken in by an extended family of Roma, who help them get back on their feet by busking and – at one point – gambling with Danila Bagrov.

Psychologically, this film is remarkably astute. One has to give some mad acting props to the thirteen-year-old Oksana Akinshina here. She is cool, unflappable, instantly relatable and not given to overacting – she carries herself with a distinctively-Russian sang-froid, which is all the more evident and convincing when she’s staring down the scope of a rifle. But she is able to convey profound and complex emotion – disdain, compassion, terror, pain, relief, joy, sorrow – with subtle facial and body language that backfills her sparse spoken dialogue with reams of subtext. Katya Gorina performs well, too, giving a bit of a sly edge to her spoiled eight-year-old character that ends up becoming endearing. By the bittersweet end of the movie, we’re invested enough in the two half-sisters’ relationship that we actually come as close as Sveta does to tears – and her tears carry that much more weight for their rarity.

Dina and Sveta show us two faces of (what was then called) the ‘new Russia’ – the Russia that was warily making its way out of the gloom of the Eltsin years, and which hadn’t quite left it behind. Dina is clearly sheltered, but much cleverer than an eight-year-old ought to be (as when she asks Sveta how far she’s gone with her boyfriend). The two of them bond over, of all things, Indian belly-dance. Still, it’s Sveta who needs to acquaint her with the facts of life, with the nature of their father’s business and the seriousness of their situation. Sveta’s own blunt cynicism, her harsh criticisms of Dina’s lifestyle, her dim view of Alik’s ‘business’ and her hardscrabble ethic are abrasive and even jarring – particularly when she straight up breaks into what she thinks is her friend’s dacha to steal food. But it’s what keeps her and Dina alive, and Dina ultimately learns to appreciate it.

The soundtrack – another nod, perhaps, to Igla – consists mostly of 1980s Soviet and early-RF rock numbers from Kino and Agatha Christie. The film is lit like a BBC made-for-TV production from the same era. That’s not a compliment. However, otherwise, the cinematographer makes some bold and interesting choices, including a bit of over-the-shoulder shaky cam when the gangsters first break into the girls’ apartment, and innovative framing when moving from indoor sets to outdoor ones. Sëstry is nowhere close to being as claustrophobic as Brat (though you get flashes of it when Alik meets up for the second time with members of his gang in an old junkyard), but the film retains both Brat’s low-budget but high-efficiency props department and its anti-climactic and perfunctory approach to violence. I have to say here that I prefer the gritty realism of post-Soviet Russian film’s treatment of violent death, to the unwarranted glamour with which modern American action movies are always lavishing on it. This is absolutely a matter of æsthetics, but of course matters of æsthetics are usually indicators of something deeper.

Sëstry isn’t quite my favourite Soviet or post-Soviet gangster movie, but it’s got more than its fair share of brilliant glimmers. It truly is a shame that Sergei Bodrov, Jr (may his memory be æternal!) was not given more time to sit in the director’s chair. He clearly inherited more than a bit of his father’s talent for directing film. As a bookend or as a companion piece to Brat and its sequel, it’s charming and fits in well.

Igla: black sheep of the Kazakh film family

Moro (Viktor Tsoi) in Igla

Igla (Игла, The Needle) is a film which I found more interesting on account of its reverberations in later Kazakh cinema than on its own merits. A 1988 ‘Kazakh New Wave’ contemporary of Mest’ and Otyrardyń kúıreýi, Igla does not in the same way dwell on grand questions of fate and identity; however, it unfortunately more than makes up for that by way of pretentious art-film mannerisms and postmodernist meandering. There’s something significant in the fact that the other two films here explicitly centre Kazakh film within an East Asian ambit; tying Kazakh destiny to both historical Mongol domination and contemporary Soviet-Korean ‘lostness’. Here, musician-turned-leading-man Viktor Tsoi, himself of Soviet-Korean descent, seems to embody a part of that ‘lostness’, no matter whether he occupies a Russian or a Kazakh cultural milieu. But whereas for Chae Sungu in Mest’, his lostness carried with it shame and emasculation; Tsoi’s character here wears that same lostness as a badge of honour and masculine pride. Igla balances Tsoi’s rock-star-sized ego and prima donna on-screen presence against Nugmanov’s desire to ‘play around’ with the filmic medium, and the result is something that is a bit more than the sum of its parts. (Rather disappointing is the inexplicable lack of hedgehogs in the film, though.)

In Igla, a drifter named Moro (Viktor Tsoi) comes to Alma-Ata to collect on a debt owed to him by a small-time crook and part-time factory worker named Spartak (Aleksandr Bashirov). Not having a place to stay, he drops in on his ex-girlfriend Dina (Marina Smirnova), whom he quickly discovers is addicted to morphine. Moro decides to help Dina kick the habit with a trip to the Aral Sea, but soon finds himself on the wrong side of a drug-smuggling gang led by a hospital surgeon named Artur (Petr Mamonov), who is the one who got Dina addicted in the first place. The two plots collide with Moro in the middle.

There’s not all that much more to the story than that; it’s a short film, and much of it lingers on extended sequences in Dina’s apartment or else on the Aral Sea, which has been turned into a desert. In addition to this modern man-made desert, dingy block apartments, rusty chain-link fences and abandoned parks form the backdrop for much of the film. Nugmanov enjoys linking these extended sequences either with close-ups of a digital clock showing the time, or with white century text on black title cards. Very often radio or television programmes are playing in the background, and key events in the plot are often narrated or ‘foreshadowed’ by what the television is broadcasting at the time, adding to an almost paranoid sense of surrealism. The core message of the film – insofar as it even has one, which is somewhat doubtful – is very much anti-drug. However, it portrays morphine abuse and its effects in candid ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier Soviet cinema. Further small eccentric touches, like the occasional animated scrawls that indicate a character’s thought process (as they occasionally do in, say, James Gunn’s Super or, indeed, Baikonur and Absurdistan), add to the countercultural feel of the movie.

Also interesting is that the Soviet state is rendered a nearly-absent presence, passive and almost invisible – I say ‘almost’ because the sole representations of Soviet government apparatus or ideology present themselves through the near-ubiquitous televisions that Nugmanov either places in the frame or has playing in the background. (Igla’s ending title card is an ironic dedication to ‘Soviet television’.) They serve almost as a ‘chorus’ to the main action, which happens in a heavily-stylised, almost caricatured criminal underworld. The soundtrack is shared between these television ‘samples’, and contemporary rock music – mostly from Viktor Tsoi’s own band Kino.

Igla is really mostly about Viktor Tsoi, though, and what he represented to a generation of Russian youth. Tsoi is to Russian culture what Cui Jian 崔健 is and has been to Chinese culture. Moro, Tsoi’s alter-ego in the film, is a mullet-rocking, jeans-wearing leather-clad ‘bad boy’, a Byronic anti-hero, often seen wearing shades and with a cigarette flopping out of his mouth. He gestures with his middle finger and says ‘fuck’ a lot. He is – almost more so than any other filmic Russian protagonist I can think of, off the top of my head – instantly recognisable and sympathetic to an American audience: he is the avatar of an alienated, rebellious and cynical youth culture. He even pulled a James Dean two years later and died in an auto wreck, lending him personally (and his performance in this film particularly, which was his last) a martyrific mystique.

There are a number of comparisons that can be made here. Igla has the counterculture cult-film appeal of Repo Man and, a bit more distantly, the hapkido-filled rage of Billy Jack. It anticipates the cynical thematic sensibility of Trainspotting and the subversively genre-savvy wink-nods of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It sounds like I’m talking it up a bit too much, though, with these comparisons. Igla has its own cult-film brilliance, but it’s much more rough, experimental and protean than any of these comparisons would suggest. It took me about halfway through the film for me to figure out quite what it was up to.

Igla’s influence on later Kazakh cinema, though – particularly in the crime-thriller subgenre – gives it an importance and a place of honour there which director Rashid Nugmanov had no reason to expect when he made it. Aqan Sataev’s Réketır pays explicit homage to Igla in multiple scenes; including the shell game scene and even the ambiguous ending. Gúl’shad Omarova’s Shıza also plays up the Viktor Tsoi cigarette-smoking black-leather-and-sunglasses æsthetic with its own definitively young leading man – though it does so with its tongue firmly in its cheek. If Ivan groznyi is the stately forefather of Kazakh cinema, then Igla is almost certainly the black sheep of the family. But it’s a family member that can’t be ignored.

Mest’: the anger and displacement of Soviet Koreans

The Daoist monk (Oleg Li) and An’s wife (Valentina Te) in Mest’

The Criterion Collection’s restored version of Ermek Shynarbaev’s and Anatoli Gim’s 1989 epic Mest’ (or Revenge) was an interesting watch, to say the least. It’s the tale of a multi-generational grudge held by the Chae family against a wicked, murderous schoolteacher named An, and the quest for revenge which passes from father to son. But a bit surprisingly to me, actually: the film is as much about the displacement, rootlessness and disorientation of the Korean diaspora in the Soviet Union as much as it is about themes of revenge, mercy and divine justice. Despite being a significant piece of Kazakhstani cinema, it is very much so a movie that is made for, about and significantly by Soviet Koreans.

The film begins in the 1600s, with the King of Joseon (Oleg Li) and his courtiers watching a tortoise fight to make its way back to the sea; they muse briefly on the aim and purpose of human life as, in the corridor, the Crown Prince fights with, and is beaten by, a fellow youngster named Sungu. The King, ashamed of his son, appoints the captain of the Palace Guard his son’s mentor and guardian, and threatens to execute him if, by the time he is twenty, the Crown Prince is not able to defeat any warrior in the kingdom. A dozen years pass, and the Crown Prince has become the new King of Joseon, while Sungu (Aleksandr Pan) has become a courtier-poet. The King orders a guard who has deliberately lost to him in a wrestling match to be beaten to death. Sungu objects, but is unable to save the guard – he then leaves the court of Joseon and wanders off toward the west, into the blinding light of the setting sun.

Fast forward two hundred and fifty years. A schoolteacher named An has been thrown out of the Chae household. Crawling into a barn and covering himself with straw to spend the night, he eventually is shown to be making a living teaching writing to local boys and girls. One girl – the daughter of old Chae – slacks off in class; in a rage, An takes a sickle from the barn door and beheads her with it. Old Chae vows revenge – even putting his farm in hock so he can chase An all the way to China – but he has become too old and weak to carry out his revenge. He takes a second wife, a deaf-mute peasant girl, who bears him a son who is also named Sungu (and also played, as an adult, by Aleksandr Pan). Sungu, whose mother loves him but cannot understand him or speak to him, becomes something of a poetic prodigy – but his life is interrupted when his father takes ill, and calls him to his deathbed. Old Chae tells him what happened to his sister, and tells him never to rest until he has taken revenge on An. From then on, Chae Sungu is driven by a single purpose in life: to hunt down the man who murdered his sister, and kill him with the same scythe he used on her.

Mest’ is a highly disturbing and yet profound film; and there’s a lot going on in it such that it’s hard to know where to begin in describing or examining it. The first thing that comes to mind is the omnipresence of fate in the film; the characters seem to be less acting of their own accord, as they are being ‘ruled from afar’, in the words of An’s wife (Valentina Te), whose rôle in the film seems to be half-Cassandra, half-Fate herself. Fate seems to be accompanied by – and indeed signified by – disease in the film: the bloody disease which takes the life of Old Chae; the disease which nearly kills An’s wife; and the disease which ultimately afflicts Chae Sungu himself. There is a sense of despair and powerlessness which hangs over these characters, which is connected to the rootlessness that they all feel. Old Chae’s only offspring by his first wife was murdered; the second one was fated only to avenge the first. An’s wife, who was doomed to die from a young age, has her life saved by a mendicant Daoist monk (also Oleg Li) who informs her that her fate is to marry An and ultimately atone for his sins. And of course Chae Sungu is forced onto his path by family feeling.

There is a deep irony to all of these ‘fates’, particularly given how important family is shown to be to the Koreans even in their exile. Fate is linked to infertility. Of the three of them, Old Chae is the only one who is capable of having children (and even then, these children are either the victims of violence or damned to a cycle of revenge). An’s wife, it is strongly hinted, is rendered infertile by her disease. And Chae Sungu’s disease – which is tied up with his fate and quest for revenge – prevents him, after he moves to Sakhalin from consummating a romantic relationship with the Romanian expat Elza, who explicitly tells Sungu she wants to settle down and have babies.

Speech and poetry are also themes which crop up again and again. We do not hear, for example, old Chae’s daughter utter a single word before she is cursed at and slain by An. Old Chae himself is struck speechless at key points in the narrative – as when he tracks An down to a mine in China and unsuccessfully tries to kill him in the barracks. The second wife he takes, with whom he has Sungu, is a deaf-mute. The only words she utters are either to Sungu or to An’s wife, and at that in a flashback or a dream. And of course, after Sungu is told of his sister’s death and his quest for revenge, he falls silent for an entire year. He is unable to compose any poetry after that, as he tells the Daoist monk. He finds himself almost wholly unable to speak to Elza. He recovers his voice only toward the end, as it seems he is being guided by the ghosts of his father and sister to An’s house, where he plans to deliver his revenge, only to find a development he did not expect.

The tormented, often-powerless Sungu is made to stand in for the Korean diaspora in the Soviet Union. For the most part he carries himself with the righteous and stoic dignity of a youxia – but this is a dignity that is shown to be without a future. In the very end of the film, we are shown Sungu having washed up on a Sakhalin shore, seeing possibly illusory visions of a royal procession of the Kingdom of Joseon from across a shallow inlet. This otherworldly collapsing of time and space is accompanied by the dialogue of two elderly Soviet-Korean sisters harvesting clams along the shore, who talk about their fear of the sea and their desire to escape. It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to describe this film as elegiac, though. Even if they’re a displaced people, even if they’re bereft of a ‘place’ of their own, even if they’re bereft of a future and a past, the collapse of space and time in that ending scene seems to imply that they aren’t content to be forgotten.

Cinematographically speaking, Mest’ makes some interesting choices – the treatment of the Joseon court feels slightly claustrophobic (and Shynarbaev himself admitted in one interview that he was largely relying on his co-writer Gim’s knowledge of court customs), but the Korean village and later the Sakhalin coastal landscapes set in the modern time frame are treated with exquisite attention to detail. Visually, the film is arrestingly beautiful. (Hedgehogs are a recurring visual motif. Not sure if a Freudian point is being made there or not.) The soft-focus lighting effects in the film create a ‘glow’ around objects and people, creating a dreamlike quality even to the grim and disturbing sequences like An’s murder of the little girl Chae. The score and some of the special effects add to the eerie and surreal quality, particularly as Chae Sungu’s quest reaches its end.

I’m still not entirely sure what to make of Ermek Shynarbaev’s and Anatoli Gim’s film. Even though I can understand why the Criterion Collection added it and even though I can see why it’s a favourite of Martin Scorsese, the story overpromises and ends up in a bizarre, surrealistic cul de sac. For example, without spoiling too much, I still don’t understand what exactly happened to An’s wife. Still, just for the cinematography (and the hedgehogs!), I’m more than happy to recommend it for watching at least once.

Eastern folk religion and Western political theology

Chinese traditional ancestral altar

There’s an interesting op-ed in the Korea Times by Dr Mark Peterson about ritual ancestor veneration in Korea. There are a couple of very interesting aspects to this article – one of which being that the attitudes of Roman Catholics and Protestants to the latreía-douleía distinction seem to be very neatly inverted when they are exposed to a non-Christian East Asian cultural environment.

Given the polemics between the Western communities over these two specific terms – two modest examples of which I have linked above for convenience – one would expect that the Catholics, who are normally (and rightly) so heavily-invested in the distinction between latreía λατρεία and douleía δουλεία when defending the practice of honouring the saints and the Theotokos, would come readily to the defence of the practice of ancestor worship among the Rujia 儒家. Likewise, one would expect to find the Protestants, who make no such distinction or else minimise its importance in their exchanges with the Catholics, would be the ones to most fervently attack the practice as, in Dr White’s words, ‘rank idolatry’. And yet, this didn’t happen. In Korea, it seems, historically the Roman Catholics were the ones who attacked the veneration of ancestors as idolatrous; whereas the Protestants were much more lenient. Dr Peterson, though he is clearly coming at this from a certain perspective and clearly has a favoured ‘side’, leaves open the question of why this turned out to be the case.

I am a bit more familiar with the Roman Catholic side of this argument, having done a bit of study on it. The debate over whether Ru ancestral rites are considered ‘veneration’ or ‘worship’ goes back to the Rites Controversy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. To make a long story rather shorter, the controversy went like this. The early Jesuit missions into China during the late Ming Dynasty, led by Matteo Ricci, observed the Confucian ancestral rites and concluded that they were a form of douleía, not latreía. Proceeding accordingly, they began importing Christian doctrine and attempting to accommodate existing ritual practices by using ‘Confucian’ and ‘Buddhist’-sounding language. The Jesuits were supported, at first, by the Kangxi Emperor 康熙帝. When word of these efforts reached Rome, however, thanks to the efforts of the Franciscans and Dominicans, Pope Clement XI put the kibosh on these efforts by declaring the ancestral rites to be latreía and therefore idolatry. Subsequent Jesuit missions to China were banned from the throne of Peter.

I have written before about how the Jesuit missions in China unfortunately helped to promote a disfigured and distorted Orientalist view of the country and its intellectual and political heritage in the West. This was something only partially corrected by the unsupported and incomplete attempts of Russian Orthodox clerical Sinologists to rectify this view – Sinologists who were informed, by the way, by long experience, understanding of and in some cases even sympathy with the Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian cultures on China’s western and northern borders. The Jesuits may have had some correct ideas in sorting latreía from douleía in the ancestral rites, but unfortunately their influence did not stop there. They overstepped their mark, as the scholastic hieromonks Bichurin and Kamensky clearly identified. The early, rosy and optimistic Jesuit approach to China that was later vulgarised into chinoiserie in Western Europe was certainly damaging; but even more so was the later reaction – the jaded, racist view of China as an inscrutable and faceless heathen menace – which was encouraged particularly by the Franciscans and Dominicans who came after Clement XI’s decree. These mendicant orders, which did so much to destroy the indigenous cultures of the Americas as accessories to Spanish and Portuguese conquest and colonialism, sought with papal blessing to do the very same thing on the same grounds and by the same methods to the Chinese civilisation. The Rites Controversy would not be revisited by the Vatican until 1939, by which time most of the missionary societies in China had already been well-established.

I offer my apologies to my Catholic readers if I appear to be a bit harsh and polemical in my assessment here. But the unfortunate truth is that the Jesuit missionaries in China were being more than a bit unfair and dishonest to their European compatriots when they portrayed the veneration of ancestors as merely a ‘civil rite’ with a merely social significance. In so doing they built up a false, one-sided image of traditional piety and Chinese folk observances as a kind of ‘rationalist humanism’ and a ‘social ethic’ that could be baptised as-is, and this would only pave the way for future disappointment and misunderstanding. It might have gone far better for them if they had openly acknowledged the metaphysical-theological dimension within these rites and presented it honestly to their superiors. A more fruitful attempt at engaging the deeper body of teachings might then have taken place, without the equally-unfortunate reaction from the Pope and the mendicant orders. I don’t think it’s an accident, either, that the explicitly metaphysical and religious ‘turn’ in the Changzhou School 常州學派, with its emphases on calendar reform and the reassertion of a Sinocentric political cosmology, occurred in the wake of the Jesuit missions. The Qing scholars were by no means a tabula rasa (and neither were the indigenous peoples of America, for that matter!); they were studying the West even as the West was studying them.

But what really baffles me is the experience of Protestant lenience toward ancestral veneration. This experience particularly contrasts with the historical fact that the colonial Protestants in the New World were more brutal and callous and genocidal to the Natives they found there than the Catholics were. However, the attitude seems to have changed with the time and the place. According to Anglican scholar James Addison, it appears that almost the exact same controversy as for the Catholics played out among the Protestant missionaries in China between 1877 and 1907. In the end, it seems, the issue was resolved not by a considered discourse on the fundamental meaning or orientation of the rites, but by the triumph by default of a kind of liberal œcumenism which was content to ignore or downplay the issue entirely.

This history is particularly fascinating to me, in part because it has never really gone away. In fact, the attitudes which have had the most historical purchase among the Western confessions – the diplomatic accommodationism of the Jesuits; the confrontational assimilationism of the mendicant orders; the sæcular œcumenism of the Protestant missionaries – are still pretty much the default options the Western confessions avail themselves of in dealing not only with the traditional Chinese popular devotions but with the Chinese state as well, whether under Kangxi or under Xi. This is doubtless an oversimplification, but we have seen this most recently in the (deeply-Jesuit) accommodationist attitudes of the reigning Pope to the Chinese state, as well as in the quasi-Franciscan (in fact, Salesian) critique of Pope Francis in that political stance from Cardinal Emeritus Joseph Zen. In practice, despite the occasional outburst of evangelical activism against Chinese state persecution, the Protestant confessions seem to have taken on a broad variety of political tactics ranging from subservience to negotiation to confrontation.

Now that I think about it, it seems blindingly obvious to say. But from the beginning the Rites Controversy was not really so much about Ru or about ancestor veneration, per se, as it was about political theology. (I should be clear here: this is not to downplay the importance of the content of the rites themselves, and still less to make a Daniel Bell-style case that mainland China is actually a crypto-Confucian meritocracy, but instead to draw attention to the various Western political hermeneutics they have historically been subject to.) The fact that the ancestral rites stood or fell from a Catholic perspective based on their ‘civil’ status should have tipped me off, but I guess I’m just thick that way.

The corresponding punchline to this realisation is that we Orthodox Christians can be satisfied with none of the above approaches. The accommodations of Pope Francis do troublingly seem to bespeak a preference for diplomatic Westphalianism that subordinates religious concerns to temporal ones. On the other hand, all the democracy and human-rights talk of Cardinal Zen may be seen to conceal a dark, deadly Falangist-intégriste mentality, particularly if it proceeds from the same blank-slate and zero-sum assumptions about culture that guided the earlier Franciscan missions to China. This bespeaks a spiritual fascism, an ecclesiastical totalitarian envy, a religion of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Unlike Cardinal Zen’s apologists, in this light I can no longer think it either accidental or innocent that he plays to the most militantly-reactionary wing of American Catholicism. And the scattershot responses of the Chinese Protestants to a hostile and controlling government unfortunately reveal but one commonality: a sæcular alienation from political theology as a whole. The degree to which the Protestant missionaries in Korea, who would otherwise scoff at prayer to the saints, embraced ancestral and civil douleía; and the degree to which Catholic missionaries rejected both despite their normally-careful distinction between worship and veneration; may therefore be considered a function of this divergence in political theologies.

So it may indeed be time for Christians in general to look at the Rites Controversy and Christian-Ru relations with both a critical and humble eye, and at this particular instance of ironic rôle-reversal in particular. It will almost certainly be necessary – on the part of us Orthodox Christians – to revisit the careful, scholarly, but admittedly-fragmentary writings of Hieromonks Hyacinth and Peter on the subject, and of course the Irkutsk model of evangelism that for a time was so effective on China’s northern frontiers.

An outsider’s view of the Evenks’ long struggle

There is a ‘white’ historiography, a ‘red’ historiography, and a history of the people that more often than not cuts against the grain of both. Having just finished the book Gaining Ground? by Gail Fondahl, which attempts a ‘bottom-up’ view of land-use issues from the perspective of the Evenki people of Siberia who were among the accidental hosts and mission of Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, it seems that this truism holds up rather well, at least in some regards.

Reading about the current Evenki struggles to revive their culture in the face of the very logic of colonialism is not easy, particularly when set against the backdrop of the political history of their western neighbours. The Evenkil, who hunt and trap and herd reindeer (for transportation and milk, not for meat), have lived a hard existence on what may be termed marginal territory for a very long time. The contacts between Tsarist Russia and the Evenk people were far from wholly friendly – the Cossacks as they moved eastward during the 1600s took hostages to enforce the Tsarist tax policy which demanded from the head of every Evenki clan a certain percentage of the furs that they trapped. At the same time, apart from the occasional swindler, rogue trapper or squatter, the Tsarist government largely left Evenki land claims alone – under the guise of a kind of protective paternalism. The Evenkil were seen as ‘backwards’ and in need of enlightenment – in particular by the Westernising monarchs Peter and Catherine. One exception seems to have been during a miniature gold rush in the late 19^th century that brought Russians and Koreans flooding into traditional Evenki lands – and the Tsarist government more often than not supported the prospectors over the indigenous people.

Even so, it is interesting to read how Gail Fondahl narrates the Evenki reception of the Revolution. For the most part, the Evenkil regarded the war between the ‘reds’ and the ‘whites’ as having little to do with them and little impact on their lives. Evenk hunters welcomed ‘Mr Soviet’ when he replaced the local ‘white’ Russian traders, since Mr Soviet gave them better bids on the furs they trapped and lower prices on guns, ammunition and other equipment. (More importantly, at first ‘Mr Soviet’ kept his word when he made a deal and didn’t try to cheat them.) And when Russian Communist party apparatchiks arrived in Evenk households and described the revolution and its aims to them, most Evenkil politely paid attention and shrugged their shoulders: largely because the way Marxism was described sounded to Evenki ears like the way they had been living all along. Here Fondahl describes a fictionalised Evenki family hearing out a Soviet party apparatchik for the first time:

When Anna was almost a teenager, Tyan and Basuk were visited by a man who explained that Soviet power ruled, and that they should join a collective. Tyan and Basuk had a hard time making out where this fellow was coming from; he seemed pleasant enough and brought tea and candy. He also brought several pamphlets with red print, which he said he wanted them to be able to read. Tyan knew how to sign his name; this man said they should both attend literacy school. He also asked if Basuk, Tyan, Tyan’s family (father and mother, and older brother and his family), with whom they nomadised would collectivise. When it turned out that all he wanted was for them to continue doing what they had always done, but call themselves the “Sable Collective”, they saw little harm and agreed.

Indeed, it’s telling that Fondahl uses the traditional Russian word obshchina (that is to say, the patriarchal-syndicalist peasant commune so idealised by the Slavophils) to describe the communal life of the Evenki people prior to contact with the Russians. Apart from the herds (reindeer often belonging to a single family or family member), it was the traditional Evenki way to share everything communally: land, water, meat, furs, medicines, supplies, storehouses or labazy. What is interesting, however, is that Fondahl sees more continuity than disruption between late Tsarist policy and early Soviet policy. For the most part, the early Soviets (including Stalin in his first few years) simply seem to have left the Evenkil alone – though the attitude of the Soviets to the Evenkil was still one of condescending paternalism and a desire to ‘rationalise’ the ‘backward’ Siberian natives. It was only when collectivisation, sedentarisation and political repression began being carried out more forcibly and aggressively – in the 1940’s and 1950’s – that the Soviets began to show their more savage face to the Evenkil. The Evenkil were hit particularly brutally by all three policies, such that the Evenki population was reduced from 38,800 in 1926 to 24,150 in 1959. (There are 38,400 Evenkil living in Russia today.)

Even stranger is the history of ‘privatisation’ in the Evenki lands. The alienation of Evenki lands from the traditional obshchina did not happen all at once under Eltsin. Soviet policy beginning under Brezhnev, in particular the transitions away from the early-Soviet kolkhoz, was responsible for the breakup of the obshchina and the imposition of individual tenure over traditionally-Evenki lands. (As often as not, this individual tenure also meant the leasing of Evenki hunting grounds to individual non-Evenks: Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars and Poles.) The Evenks themselves were increasingly force-sedentarised into townships and villages under late Soviet rule. Ironically, Evenki women found themselves far better-suited to advocate themselves under the late Soviet government: both because they had been sedentary longer and better understood Russian psychology, and because they had fewer hurdles to jump through to lay claim to their ancestral lands under glasnost.

The infamous 1990s made things at once better and worse. The ‘better’ part would seem obvious: liberalisation of the laws allowed (at least on paper) the Evenkil to advocate for themselves without fear of repression. But from an œconomic perspective, most Evenkil – poor, landless, often dependent on now-defunct government-run stores for supplies – were at this point ill-equipped to deal either with the post-Soviet bureaucracy, or with the overall atmosphere of shock-therapy privatisation that was so utterly alien to their (both traditional and the Sovietised) way of life and thinking. The fall of the Soviet Union coincided with massive rises in alcoholism, delinquency and suicide – the same as for their Russian brethren – but also with a certain degree of hope that perhaps things could return to the way they had been. It has been an uphill struggle, however. The Russian government under Eltsin, though it was eager to get the photo-ops that came with a European-style ‘liberalisation’, in practice was not particularly sympathetic to Evenkil claims to their ancestral lands – and certainly not amenable to the restoration of traditional patriarchal-communal land tenure as had been the case under the obshchinas.

The Evenkil who present themselves in Gail Fondahl’s book have, therefore, a very complicated view of the history of their neighbours – one that doesn’t lend itself to the easy black-and-white characterisations of Russia (or the Soviet Union) that seem to be so pervasive in the West. They have little reason to love any of the previous governments, but they do have a slightly more-sympathetic view of the older obshchina and kolkhoz systems under which they were basically left to themselves and had a better œconomic situation overall. In the modern day, the challenges of the Evenks in Russia involve trying to restore some of the elements of the Soviet kolkhoz that have since been abandoned, advocating for better environmental protections and using the more liberal legal atmosphere in Russia to attain some status for their cultural rights (particularly as those rights pertain to their old œconomic livelihoods such as hunting, fishing and reindeer herding). As such, many Evenks tend to be sympathetic to the left-leaning ‘loyal opposition’ Just Russia party, which makes a point of supporting and advocating for the œconomic needs of Russia’s indigenous peoples at the local level.

Again, though, it is still of immense interest to me that the obshchina as a method of social organisation with its own inner reason, is not necessarily unique to the Russians or to the Slavs but indeed is also claimed by the Evenkil themselves. One of my big questions is – and this is where Dr Fondahl’s book leaves me somewhat in the dark – was the terminology of the obshchina a Russian way of describing traditional communal Evenki life by analogy to the way of life of the Russian free peasantry? Or was it instead an Evenki method of describing their social organisation to outsiders – particularly to the Russians, who along with the Chinese and the Koreans were their most significant neighbours for the first two hundred years of contact? If the latter is true, particularly: the Evenkil themselves may be an important witness for the social-political ideals of the Orthodox Church in the world, for the realisation of sobornost’ as conceived of by the Slavophils. And if that is true, other indigenous peoples with similar and analogous inward principles of life, are equally important to us: not as mere missionary projects; certainly not as passive recipients of Western largesse; but instead as living natural-law witnesses to the love and unity of Christ we Orthodox Christians still struggle to embody in the world.

In this respect, the research work of Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff – the White Russian and the sociologist specialising in the Evenkil and the Manchus who was mentor to the great Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, father of Chinese sociology and one-time head of the Democratic League – would seem to be of the utmost importance.

This is something I look forward to reading myself. I beg my readers’ pardon in advance for what may appear to be mystical or theosophical speculation, but it is deeply, deeply intriguing to me that the populist political-poetic impulse that led to a revaluation of Qu Yuan 屈原 by Wen Yiduo 聞一多 as tapping into a subaltern vein that hearkened back to the elder, ‘rustic’ shamanistic practices of the ancient Chinese, should be matched on the scholarly, sociological side by an equal impulse to locate the deep roots of Chinese culture in the social psychology of the ‘Tungus’. There is some truth in the deep heart of Chinese antiquity that seems to have fired the imaginations of both Fei Xiaotong and Wen Yiduo; and that same communal truth, essentially Christian in form and content, in the depths of Slavic antiquity seems to have fired those of Khomyakov and the later Russian populists. And somehow, the Evenkil seem to be standing astride that truth, worthier in an infinite degree than the gold beneath their feet sought by the Russians and the Koreans.

Why the worldview of Patriarch Kirill matters now

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, now Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’

Given the sweep of current events within the Orthodox Church, I’m finding it’s necessary to counter some of the obscene calumnies that have been coming from certain quarters of the religious press with regard to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’. I confess I am not surprised to see these calumnies coming from such a source as Katie Kelaidis, who has a rather prurient obsession with other women’s fashion choices and wants to see racism and subjugation of women lurking around every corner.

Again, you’re welcome to read the whole thing if you’d like; I’ve linked it above. It’s fairly tedious, I warn you. But here are the relevant paragraphs of her shameless screed:

The extent and influence of Kirill’s reactionary socio-political vision should not be underestimated. It’s a deeply anti-Western, anti-democratic, and anti-human rights worldview which has already had a significant effect on Russian domestic policy and has helped garner Russia’s recent prestige among radical conservatives around the world—particularly in the West. The “axis between Russian Orthodox and American Evangelicals,” as the Economist calls it, has been well documented, and, as Slate’s Ruth Graham points out, it’s not a coincidence that Russian spy Maria Butina sought to infiltrate American politics through the religious right.

Patriarch Kirill has described the Putin-era as a “miracle from God” and offered his powerful opposition to pro-democracy protests in Moscow in 2012. He has frequently supported government policy in sermons and on state-run television, positioning Russia in the role of spiritual defender in response to Western objections to Russian human rights policy: “We have been through an epoch of atheism, and we know what it is to live without God. We want to shout to the whole world, ‘Stop!’” His 2011 book, Freedom and Responsibility, posits a contemporary political landscape in which two antagonistic worldviews—one liberal, secular, and humanistic, the other religious and traditional—are engaged in an existential battle.

Leaving aside the various, what can be generously termed lazy factual errors above – for example, that His Holiness Pat. Kirill did not powerfully oppose the pro-democracy protests in 2012 (as reported by the New York Times), and that the political rôle of Ms Butina has been gravely overestimated by prosecutors and investigators (as reported by CNN) – this is an egregious, gross misreading of His Holiness’s politics and theology. It is true that Freedom and Responsibility does posit the antagonism between a globalist liberalism and a the rise of religious reaction; however, what is left out is the key point that Patriarch Kirill advises against siding wholly with one or the other! Kelaidis is counting in bad faith on her readers not to educate themselves by reading what Kirill actually wrote, and instead letting them come to a false conclusion that Kirill is an apocalyptic fundamentalist waging an existential war against ‘human rights’ as such!

If this characterisation were true it would indeed be cause for concern, but it’s not. It is infinitely more instructive for English-speakers not versed in Russian to read the English-language essay he wrote in 1999, ‘Gospel and Culture’. This demonstrates the position which he has held since before he was elected Patriarch by the Synod. Here too, he says:

We have come close to the juncture between two centuries, summing up the one ending and looking with anxiety and hope at the one to come. We look to it with anxiety because we cannot help but see how many unresolved problems humanity faces today, in what a hopeless situation—both spiritual and material—millions of people live. The world is faced, on the one hand, with an aggressive globalising monoculture which tries to impose itself everywhere, dominating and assimilating other cultural and national identities and, on the other, with nationalistic upheavals, tribalisation, and disintegration of the human family. Yet in the midst of contemporary hopelessness and despair, as Christians we live with hope in the eschatological expectation of parousia—the coming of Christ—and Christ’s ultimate triumph over the forces of evil.

Then-Metropolitan Kirill sums up the problems of global Christendom at the end of the twentieth century, including ‘the accumulated arsenal of [nuclear] weapons’, ‘fratricidal wars waged in the former Yugoslavia [and] Chechnya’, ‘the disparity between North and South, the gap between rich and poor’, ‘infant mortality’ and ‘millions infected with HIV/AIDS’ in terms most œcumenists of the day would have agreed with entirely. And he continues as here:

Mission as a witness to the spiritual and ethical heritage of Christianity becomes the number one task for the churches. For fifty years the World Council of Churches has spoken about concrete matters such as overcoming the consequences of the Second World War, liberation from social oppression, disarmament and the elimination of racial discrimination and sexism. We have to acknowledge that it is vital for Christians to address these issues, as they are common concerns for the whole human community.

In this spirit, he goes on to deplore, in the strongest terms, the shameful ways in which Western fundamentalist Protestant missionaries have imposed themselves upon non-Western cultures. His focus in the essay itself is on Russia, but note below how he includes especially those in the global South. He stresses the demands upon the idea of mission, that it is incumbent upon all churches to be respectful of different cultures. This is particularly important given the current crisis in the Ukraine:

To ignore a local church means to break a whole into pieces, to tear the seamless robe of Christ. Missionary efforts from abroad should be made in each place as a support and assistance to the indigenous church or churches… Everyone who, armed with the Bible, sets off to enlighten peoples should remember that by the end of the twentieth century there are indigenous Christian churches virtually everywhere. Independent actions taken by missionary groups at the expense of these churches represent an attempt to redraw the map of the world, and wherever they are taken there is always tension, alienation, bitterness.

The holy martyr Cyprian of Carthage wrote about the church schisms of his time: ‘Who is so impious and perfidious and so infected with the passion for strife that he believes that he can or dare break the unity of God, the robe of the Lord, the church of Christ?’ This question can well be addressed in our day to those who act to the detriment of local churches, tearing the faithful away from the church and thus excommunicating themselves from the world Christian community. St Cyprian made it clear that these people were enemies of the church and Christian faith: ‘What unity is respected, what love is cherished or what love is comtemplated by him who, indulging in strife, cuts the church, ruins faith, disturbs peace, eradicates love, defiles unity? … Indeed, he arms himself against the church and impedes divine construction; he is an enemy of the sanctuary, an agitator against the sacrifice of Christ, a betrayer of the faith and devotion; he is an apostate.’

These words uttered in the third century are still relevant today. At the end of the twentieth century we can state that the work of sectarians and schismatics to destroy the unity of churches continues. And this work is not Christian mission, it is spiritual colonialism. Our urgent task therefore is to get rid of colonial practices and develop a new attitude to mission—or rather, to return to the apostolic and early church understanding of mission not as enslaving or bribing people but rather as liberating and bringing them into the light of Christ’s truth. The twentieth century has been the time of a mass collapse of colonial regimes and the liberation of peoples, nations and regions from foreign domination, from the yoke of foreign cultures. The colonial ideology should be overcome in the realm of church and mission as well. Indeed, for many peoples in the southern hemisphere, Christianisation meant, above all, Europeanisation and destruction of their traditional culture, which the Europeans believed to be low and pagan.

Particularly in the last paragraph, these hardly sound like the words of an apocalyptic fundamentalist, let alone a member of the radical nouvelle-droite as insinuated by Ms Kelaidis. What’s more, Patriarch Kirill’s broad-strokes thesis of Freedom and Responsibility, though updated to include the challenges posed by radical Islamic fundamentalism, does not differ in any substantial respect from Metropolitan Kirill’s views in ‘Gospel and Culture’ – for those who would hold to the notion that his position in the church has corrupted the man and everything he says. In Freedom and Responsibility too, he emphasises the dangers, both to indigenous peoples and to the environment, of both the globalist monoculture and the ‘super-consumerist society’ and the global fundamentalist and nationalist backlash – and suggests charting a different path that avoids the pitfalls of both.

This attack on the head of the Russian Church, from within another branch of the Orthodox Church, is perhaps a kind of projection: the sign of a guilty conscience. After all, in so much of the global South, among the Orthodox Churches it has not been the Russian hierarchs imposing an unwanted ethno-linguistic hegemony over newly-independent post-colonial peoples, but rather the Greek ones – and this has been true in the patriarchates of Jerusalem and Alexandria particularly. Russia’s own history on colonial issues, particularly within Russia’s own historical borders, is sketchy at best; however, particularly in East Asia the Russian Church has walked the walk: they have been steadfastly supportive and respectful of indigenous clergy in ways that the Greek churches have not been, even during traumatic events like the Russo-Japanese War, and even in difficult political situations like that in North Korea.

And with recent events in the Ukraine, the issue of colonial interference and imposition of parallel structures in violation of the dignities of the indigenous church – to wit, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky) of Kiev, which has been suffering grievously from displacement, violence and land seizures over the past four years – this ill-founded and ill-tempered attack on Patriarch Kirill looks even more so like a classical case of seared conscience.

The worldview of Patriarch Kirill, and deflating the lies and calumnies against it, matter now precisely because they are a key factor in campaigns of collective defamation and the manufacture of consent for war. This is particularly dangerous in an increasingly-unhinged media environment where Russia is already designated as the scapegoat and the external cause of America’s domestic cultural and political problems. I pray that this may soon pass and, now as then, that cooler heads may prevail.