Of Guatemala and Gaza

This past Tuesday, after two and a half years of construction and labour of those monastics and faithful under the guidance of Archimandrite Evangelos Patá, a seminary and mission centre opened in the Huehuetenango District of Guatemala, reports Pravoslavie.Ru. The Orthodox community in Guatemala is one of the explosive success stories of twenty-first century Orthodox mission work, particularly after 2010 when 500,000 Guatemalans—mostly indigenous Maya people—converted en masse. A steady stream of converts into the Orthodox Church has continued since then.

This new seminary and mission centre will ‘serve the spiritual, educational and administrative needs of the faithful’, who are As Fr John Chakos puts it on his blog: ‘The palpable joy that filled this day reflected the vibrant Christian faith of the long suffering Mayan people who endured much throughout their tragic history, but never lost hope.’

How true this is. The ‘tragic history’ of the Guatemalan Mayan people is one which can be attributed directly to American imperialism and the legacy of colonialism. During this time, the Guatemalan military and government forces, trained by the School of the Americas and funded by the American government, used ‘scorched earth’ tactics against the Indigenous people of the country: including death squads, ‘disappearances’, strafing from helicopters, internment camps, forced starvation, torture and sexual violence. Leftists, labour leaders and union organisers were also subjected to this targetted violence from the state. Canadian folk-rock musician Bruce Cockburn, after visiting Guatemala during this time, wrote the song ‘If I Had a Rocket Launcher’ specifically about this situation.

The flocking of Indigenous Maya Guatemalans to the Orthodox Church in the present day, may be considered one of the fruits, primarily, of the career of Archimandrite Andrés Girón, a cleric who took up the cause of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, specifically during this time of the US-backed military dictatorship in the 1980s. For his efforts, Archimandrite Giron was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church on account of his pro-Indigenous stand, and he fled to Mexico after several assassination attempts on him by the right-wing government, after which he joined the Orthodox Church and continued his advocacy work. Although he was an agrarian-minded Christian and not a Marxist, he gained the moniker ‘Father Revolutionary’ from both his supporters and his opponents, particularly when he began supporting progressive land reforms which would benefit the Indigenous peoples. He even began political action against the US-backed military government, at the head of the left-wing, anti-capitalist Asociación Nacional Campesina Pro-Tierra, and direct action by occupying and farming land collectively for the benefit of the people living there.

Archimandrite Andrés Girón

Even though his electoral campaigns did not win him much support in terms of government reform, the Indigenous Mayans quickly gravitated to his social ideals, not to mention his religious convictions. At a time when the Catholic Church was divided between a reactionary hierarchy and a liberation-theological parish priesthood (and the hierarchy winning out more often than not); and when Evangelical Protestantism was marching in lockstep with state violence and American-style capitalism and white supremacy; Orthodox Christianity began to look all the more attractive. When Fr Andrés Girón joined the Orthodox Church in 2010, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Mayans came with him. Stop me if any of this starts to sound familiar.

I beat this drum a lot. I have remarked before, and repeatedly, that the Indigenous peoples of Asia and America are a valuable witness within Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy at its best does not see Indigenous traditions and languages as things to be assimilated from the outside or suppressed from above. It values these traditions and languages in themselves, and transfigures them from the inside.

Orthodox womens’ monastery in Kyltovo, Komi Republic, Russia

For example: Orthodox Bibles, prayer books, patericons and religious texts have been published in Indigenous languages such as Sakha, Nenets, Evenki, Chukchi, Khanty, Skolt Sámi, Komi, Veps, Aleut and Tlingit and Yup’ik. Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, Saint Herman the Wonderworker of Alaska and, later, Saint Tikhon of Moscow defended Indigenous rights against oppression and exploitation first by Russian and later by American pecuniary interests and colonisation. (One can see from these examples that the witness of Fr Andrés Girón was not without precedent!) But Indigenous people themselves have contributed to Orthodoxy in profound and ineluctable ways. Saint Peter the Aleut, Saint Jacob Netsvetov, Saint Olga of Alaska... these Indigenous saints have deeply and without question enriched the experience of American Orthodoxy. And the former two of these saints did so, while Indigenous people in the Americas were undergoing one of the worst genocides of human history.

Now, let us turn our attention, for the sake of comparison, to another Indigenous people. The people of the country of Palestine are descended, indisputably from a scientific and genetic point of view, from the ancient Levantines. Modern Palestinians are genetically closest to the Bronze Age inhabitants of Canaan, with unbroken ancestral roots in the Levant going back nearly 4000 years. (We ethnic Ashkenazim simply cannot claim the same thing: over forty percent of our autosomal ancestral DNA originates in Western Europe--France and Germany.) What appears clear now, is that this Indigenous population of the ancient Holy Land has undergone numerous cultural and religious and linguistic shifts through the millennia. So although Palestinians are culturally Arabic, and the majority are Muslims, their presence in the place where they are long predates the Arab conquests and the rise of Islâm!

Church of St Porphyrios, Gaza, Palestine

Indeed, Palestinians were among the first Christians. Gaza was a Christian city. The Church of Saint Porphyrios, which was bombarded by the Israel Occupation Forces two weeks into their current war, dates back over sixteen hundred years. Gaza was home to Christian saints such as Bishop Saint Porphyrios himself, Abba Dorotheos, Saint Vitalios and Saint Silvanos, to name but a few. Before Palestine was Muslim, Palestinians followed Jesus Christ. And before Palestinians followed Christ, Palestinians were without question among the people who worshipped the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, at the Second Temple.

Despite the prevarication and mealy-mouthed excuses that issue from on high in Washington and New York, there can be very little doubt now that what is going on right now as we speak, in the home territory of this very oldest of Christian Churches, is a genocide of the Palestinian people, at the hands of another US-backed far-right parafascist government: complete with scorched-earth tactics, death squads, weaponised starvation, torture, sexual violence. In short, the Palestinians now are suffering everything that the Indigenous Guatemalans faced from the military dictatorship of that country in the 80s and 90s. And the American government backs the Israeli fascists to the hilt.

Archbishop Alexios of Gaza

But if there is another Indigenous genocide occurring right now in Gaza, there is also another Fr Andrés Girón, in the saintly Archbishop Alexios of Gaza. Archbishop Alexios has courageously declared that he will not abandon his flock there even if he is the last Christian standing in Gaza. And he has dedicated his work to giving food and clean water and shelter to any who have come to need it, even as they are being denied these by the military. And he has rededicated himself to praying for the dead, the dead without number: and many of these dead are Christians.

The Indigenous Christians of the Holy Land need our solidarity, and they need it now more than ever. But, just as Efraín Ríos Montt has gone down to Sheol, while the relatives of people he ordered to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands are flocking to the Church to be joined to Christ, so too will Netanyahu and his hateful right-wing butcher-regime and his death squads go down to the pit, while the names of the innocents who died at Saint Porphyrios shall be sung by the heavenly choirs without end. Of this I am sure. And if God wills it, may He let Gaza again breathe, be free and be green, as Guatemala may now (to a certain extent) do.

How the war is impacting Sápmi

In Arctic news, Sámi activist and anti-war protester Andrei Danilov is currently seeking (and being denied) asylum in Norway. Norway’s government claims that it cannot offer him asylum because he currently has a Swiss visa. But his case shows rather clearly, and sadly, how the current war is dividing Sápmi from itself, as the four states which encompass the Sámi nation draw up battle lines between them. Norway is a NATO member; and although Sweden and Finland are not formally aligned with NATO, their governments have certainly drifted closer to the NATO sphere in recent years.

Within Russia, Sámi opinion appears to be deeply divided, just as it is among the rest of the Russian population. Hard polling data among Kildin Sámi in Murmansk Oblast are not readily available on this particular question, but it seems reasonable to assume that there is a significant ‘Z’ contingent, a small but vocal anti-war contingent, and a solid majority between them who simply don’t want to get into trouble.

There is a substantial body of anecdotal literature to back up this trifurcated view. A significant number of Sámi within Russia, such as Anna Igontova (one of the three elected representatives of the Russian section of the Sámirađđi since 2018), have come out in favour of Russia’s ‘special military operation’. So has Kola’s Sámi Association, and the Russian Arctic indigenous advocacy organisation RAIPON. Others, like Andrei Danilov and exile organisations like ICIPR, are coming out strongly against Russia’s assault on the Ukraine. In addition, RAIPON and ICIPR have issued statements questioning each other’s legitimacy and right to speak on behalf of the indigenous peoples of the Russian north.

First order: this is truly heart-breaking, and it should be so for anyone interested in the welfare of indigenous peoples in the Arctic or anywhere else. What we are seeing is the instrumentalisation of indigenous concerns to prop up political actions elsewhere that they, prima facie, have nothing to do with. We should condemn equally this instrumentalisation, whether it comes from the Russian government, or the governments of NATO-aligned countries like Norway and Germany. It seems to me that both NATO and Russia are now actively playing the same chess game over the Arctic.

Second order: we need to understand why the Russian government gets the kind of support it does from RAIPON and other organisations like the Kola Sámi Association, which come the closest to actually democratically representing the Skolt, Kildin and Ter Sámi peoples within Russia. It isn’t enough to take the ‘official dissident’ line that these organisations are merely suborned by the Russian state to suit its own ends, though clearly a significant degree of political pressure has been applied there. As a broad generalisation: Russia’s indigenous nations have been active supporters of the current government for a number of years now, including on questions like the recent revisions to the Russian Constitution.

The first thing we need to understand about this, is that Russia’s smaller ethnic nations have by and large carefully cultivated a sense of civic nationalism that is defensively oriented against the ethnic nationalism perpetrated on some of the seedier corners of the Russian far-right. A careful distinction has to be made here between the terminology of ‘russkii’ (русский) and ‘rossiiskii’ (российский). English doesn’t preserve this linguistic distinction, and translates both terms as ‘Russian’. The first term is an ethnic designation. The ethnic ‘Big’ Rus’ of Novgorod, Pskov, Moscow, Tver, Ryazan, Rostov and so forth; the ‘White’ Rus’ of Minsk and Polotsk and Turov; the ‘Little’ Rus’ of Galich and Volhynia; and the Carpathian Rus’ of Užhorod and Maramoroš—are all русский. The second term, российский, is a civic designation. The idea behind российский is that you can be Tatar, Nenets, Nivkh, Ket, Evenki, Sakha, Tuva, Buryat, Selkup, Bashkir, Chuvash, Chechen, Dagestani, Adyghe or Sámi, and still be every bit as российский as this guy on YouTube.

The entire concept of российский civic-nationalism was eagerly embraced by most Russian indigenous groups, precisely because—in the wake of the collapse of the concept of the ‘new Soviet man’—the российский self-identifier was all that stood between them and oblivion. And this, of course, in a time when a great swathe of Russia’s ethnic-Russian population was also facing oblivion at the hands of a clique of neoliberal capitalist economists who literally left millions of them to starve or die deaths of despair, and of a government which had been rendered powerless to assist them. Perhaps ironically, this shared suffering between the русский-Russians and the post-Soviet, newly-российский indigenous peoples in the nineties, helped to forge a new sense of sympathy and solidarity between them.

But the generalised atmosphere of grievance also brought out the worst in some of the far-right enthusiasts for Руси-as-opposed-to-Россия. Ethnic violence in Russia, many of the organised forms of it being associated with the far-right ‘Russian March’ (of which Western liberal darling Aleksei Navalnyi has been a staunch supporter and for which support he has never apologised), peaked in the early 2000s. This allowed Putin—whether genuinely or cynically—to position himself as a defender of the interests of all россияне, when he cracked down on the ‘Russian March’ and its associated far-right ethnic extremism. This strategy worked—spectacularly. In the words of Mikhail Alekseev, writing for Edinburgh University Press:

Putin has faced practically no ethnic minority backlash over his Ukraine policy since the autumn of 2013. No survey or other systematic data on the issue have been available, but the reputable Levada Centre poll of 20–23 March 2014 showed that 88 per cent of Russia’s population (+/− a sampling error of 3.4 per cent) backed what the questionnaire described as ‘Crimea’s joining of Russia’. Only 6 per cent of those surveyed opposed it (Levada Centre 2014b). In a telephone ‘megasurvey’ of 48,590 Russians in eighty- three provinces, conducted on 14–16 March 2014 by the independent but government-loyal Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) and the Kremlin-run VTsIOM service, 91 per cent of the respondents sup- ported, and only about 5 per cent opposed, Crimea’s annexation. In all but one of the predominantly non-Russian ethnic republics (Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino- Balkaria, Karachaevo- Cherkessia, Mari El, North Ossetia, Tatarstan and Tyva) residents polled in the megasurvey supported Crimea’s annexation at about the same rate as residents of Russia did on average, plus or minus three percentage points.

Ultimately, then, the political strategy of the indigenous nations of Russia is entirely a defensive one. This is understandable. They naturally distrust the elements of the far-right that seemed to have gained in prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They also view liberal politicians as (to put it politely) unreliable, both because they backed the economic policies that immiserated Russians of all ethnicities, and because they flocked to the same politics of grievance as the far-right did when Putin came to power in 2000. They may not, and as seen from some of the anecdotal evidence above clearly do not unanimously, support all of Putin’s policies. But their political options are few and unenviable.

A side note here. People in Russia are not stupid, and they do have access to foreign news media. Among the Finno-Ugric nations of the Russian Federation (including not only the Sámi but also the Karelians, Veps, Votes, Ingrians, Erzyans, Mokshas, Maris, Udmurts, Permian-Komis, Mansis and Khants) in particular, I would imagine that the hateful racialist rhetoric coming out of, for example, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance toward Finnic-Ugric peoples in general probably hasn’t won them many friends in that quarter. Now, of course, I’m not a Mari, nor am I a Moksha, nor anything in between. But if I were, I’d imagine it would be rather hard for me to sympathise with Ukrainians who consider me a barbarous Asiatic element that has contaminated historical Muscovy and are thus the distant historical scapegoats for all of their political woes. Note also how this charge echoes the grievance-politics of русский far-right ethno-nationalism. In fact, I’d probably be more willing to tolerate the annoying and somewhat-creepy sexualised patronisation of probably otherwise well-intentioned filmmakers like Aleksei Fedorchenko, than I would the caliper-wielding eliminationism of the race-purists who publish material for Ukrainian government ministries.

In addition, I would imagine that a lot of ethnic minorities in Russia are carefully scrutinising, insofar as they are able, how the ethnic Hungarians (also speakers of a Finno-Ugric language), Romani and Jews are currently being treated inside the Ukraine… in part because they fear that a resurgent русский ethno-nationalism could lead to the same treatment in Russia. They see Hungarians essentially being kicked out of their schools in Transcarpathia. (To get an idea of how unpopular the Ukrainian national cause is in Hungary because of this, consider: Hungary is a member of NATO and its government has, correctly, officially denounced the Russian assault. And yet, Orbán Viktor handily won his recent re-election there on a campaign promising not to send weapons into the Ukraine.) They see Roma being beaten, stripped naked, sprayed with iodine, tied to lampposts and left to freeze. And of course they see marches in honour of war criminals who perpetrated the Shoah. All of this context makes the entire narrative of Ukraine-as-hardscrabble-liberal-democracy versus Russia-as-despotic-villainous-aggressor an incredibly hard sell, particularly to ethnic minorities in Russia who remember all too well how the domestic русский ethno-nationalist far-right has treated them in the recent past.

Again, none of the foregoing is to excuse, let alone to defend, Russia’s recent actions in the Ukraine. Putin lost my support precisely when I heard that he bombed Kharkov. But some level of strategic empathy is called for in this instance. The Sámi in Russia, like other indigenous peoples there, have lived through three decades now of extreme uncertainty. If Western media imagine that they are the victims of state repression and manipulated by propaganda, one must even more so consider that the context of their very real hopes and fears rests precisely on this uncertain footing. Where can they look for defence? Not to the capitalist Western countries, who showed zero concern for their health, safety and welfare in the nineties. (Even now, Danilov is being denied asylum—see how much Norway cares for the Sámi!) Not to the old Soviet ideals—these can only be of comfort in nostalgia, in total abstraction from the present reality. And certainly not to the liberals, who happily allied themselves with the worst forms of far-right ethno-nationalist grievance politics. But if Putin fails, then they will find themselves again the scapegoats of a politics of grievance. That is not a happy place to be.

So, again, if you are a person of conscience, pray for the Sámi: whether they are pro-war, anti-war or anywhere in the middle. Pray for the Sámi in the West as well as in the East. My position, and it will continue to be my position unless and until something drastic happens, remains the same as that of the Sámirađđi: I oppose military action as unjust, I oppose escalation, I oppose punitive sanctions aimed at the civilian populace… and I advocate for a negotiated settlement that respects both Ukrainian sovereignty and Russian security.

Hope and false hope: a riposte to Sebastian Milbank

As a student of Russian history, I want to take the opportunity here to respond to an article by Sebastian Milbank in the Critic. Although much better-intentioned and prima facie far more reasonable-sounding than most articles of its type these days, this article still unfortunately manages to exemplify certain tendencies of wishful thinking and misunderstanding of Russia that typifies the Atlanticist establishment discourse on that country. Milbank writes:

Despite the flood of opinion and attention directed towards the war between Russia and Ukraine, very few in the West, including many policy-makers, really understand the depth and complexity of the history involved.

Truer words were never spoken, and this especially holds true for think-tank denizens like Michael McFaul and Anders Åslund, who have been busy on cable news and Twitter firing off (and then occasionally attempting to retract, when shown to have… to say the least… unfortunate ramifications) historically-illiterate hot takes like gunslingers in a John Woo cop flick. However, although Milbank’s footwork in attempting to understand that history is commendable, he doesn’t quite do enough of it to exonerate himself completely from his own charge. Continuing with Milbank’s article:

Putin’s 5000 word essay on [Russian and Ukrainian shared history]… reveals the sophistication and historical scale of Russian thinking on the subject… it is that marriage of strategic and historic vision with rapacious gangsterism that has seen Putin succeed so often at frustrating western expectations.

I will here reiterate what I have said previously on the subject of this assault. From a moral standpoint, it is inexcusable, full stop. The invasion of the Ukraine was wrong, and Putin bears responsibility. Speaking from a personal standpoint, it is negatively impacting the lives of several people I know and care about deeply. In light of this, however, I also believe that the Atlantic alliance’s hybrid-war tactics of blanket sanctions on necessities targetting civilians, while at the same time making weapons sales to an ill-disciplined and bigoted Ukrainian military are making the situation worse than it already is (as it usually does when we consider the sort of campaigns NATO usually wages). However, at least at first, Putin represented a turn away from ‘rapacious gangsterism’ under Yeltsin, and the heights of ‘greed and violence’ not only in Russia’s government but in its shattered society, which had been encouraged by the West throughout the 1990s in the name of free-market reform.

But about those ‘Western expectations’ Milbank drops in at the end… I am also going to speak to those in my conclusion. These ‘expectations’, insofar as they are bad-faith, insurmountable expectations, seem to lie at the root of a lot of the paranoia with which Russia and Russians currently tend to view the world.

The essay spoke of “three Russias”… Putin is not just blowing hot air when he describes Ukraine as an artificial concept… he refers to a unitary medieval Russian “state” that was torn apart through internal conflict and external invasion, and was laboriously put back together through the conflicts that built the Russian Empire…

It would be well, first of all, to acknowledge where the ‘three Russias’ concept in Putin’s essay came from, and the long history it has in the cultured forms of Russian political philosophy which embraced human dignity and pluralism. The clearest and most influential (at least in modern times) articulation of the ‘three Russias’ theory came in the form of GP Fedotov’s work on the Russian religious mind. Fedotov’s threefold typology of Russian spirituality (which he considered to be upstream of political culture) does present some problems, but is worth reading precisely for this reason: he helps to deflate some of the caricatures of the ‘three Russias’ (in his case referring to Kiev, Moscow and Novgorod), some of which Milbank seems to fall into here.

Putin’s actual essay is, likewise, far more nuanced than Milbank makes it out to be. He fully acknowledges the decentralisation of political power within the Kievan Rus’ (or, in his usage, ‘Ancient Rus’’) polity. He primarily cites the Tale of Bygone Years (a.k.a. the Primary Chronicle) to further his argument for a unified state; however, Putin could equally, and more effectively, have cited the Tale of Igor’s Armament, which dates to the early 13th century. In the 1200s, the anonymous poet who wrote Igor’s Armament was already lamenting the loss of brotherly feeling and unified leadership among the Rus’ principalities. That would better seem to justify the idea that, at one time, the Rus’ polity did have both of these political goods.

But if the deep history of Russia complicates Ukrainian nationalism, it equally complicates Russian nationalism. Like German nationalism, they are the product of romantic 19th century historiography, whose purpose was as much to construct as to discover a national history…

First of all, this strikes me as rather high-handed coming from someone with a historical view of his own country that is clearly deeply coloured by 19th century Romantic myths. Sebastian clearly and, indeed, commendably loves William Wordsworth, and calls for a ‘folk revival’ of the national myth in his own country to counter the pernicious effects of capitalism and urbanisation. Those are all good things, to my mind. But to then turn around and fault other countries for having similar national self-understandings based on Romantic 19th-century historiography seems rather… self-unaware, to say the least. There is nothing uniquely pernicious about Romanticism in Russia that separates it from the English variant or ties it to later völkisch German perversities, particularly when Russian Romantics like Khomyakov looked explicitly to England rather than to Germany for inspiration.

Second, let’s be real. All history is invention, insofar as it consists not of disconnected facts jumbled together helter-skelter, but instead employs a consistent hermeneutic strategy. Though all decent and responsible history must be answerable to fact, it must also be ordered. And all decent and responsible history furthermore consists in a personal engagement with and interrogation of these ordered facts. Now, nationalist histories may be (and usually are) indecent and irresponsible; but merely pointing to their inspirations and origins and the fact that they are histories rather than mere chronicle betrays an intolerable post-modernist scepticism that is always already selective while pretending to be otherwise.

One of the reasons Kiev draws the hostile and covetous attention of the rulers of Moscow is that Ukraine represents, however nascently and potentially, an alternative vision of Russian identity and politics to that of Putin and his cohorts.

Here is where we leave the realm of history and begin to enter the realm of wishful thinking.

That Putin is a nationalist is not in question. Saying his view of Russian history is thereby distorted and errant is perfectly defensible.

However, to claim that Kiev is the target of Moscow’s political-cultural envy on account of its ‘alternative vision of Russian identity and politics’ is a remarkable form of projection. It’s the functional equivalent of American nationalists claiming in the wake of 11 September that the terrorists ‘hate us for our freedom’. With very few exceptions, the Ukrainian political experience from 1990 to the present, with its sky-high wealth inequality, endemic and flagrant government corruption, risible law enforcement and constant careening from one bloody political crisis to the next, has been nothing that any Russian statesman, least of all Putin, has any desire to emulate (or, more accurately, return to).

11th century Kievan Rus was not a “state”, and even by the standards of medieval kingdoms it tended towards heterogeneity and decentralisation... Nor was it an ethnic unity.

Ironically, in Ukrainian nationalist discourse, particularly since 2014, this acknowledged ethnic diversity of Great Russia is precisely what makes it undesirable. Ukrainian nationalists, fancying themselves as the true inheritors of a pure Rus’ bloodline, are quick to point to the mixed heritage of, say, Saint Andrei Bogolyubskii as proof of the mongrel Tatar and Volga Finnic heritage of Muscovy. By the way, I fully agree with Milbank that this made Saint Andrei more in keeping with the diversity of historical Ancient Rus’, rather than less. But on balance this fact does not serve his argumentative point about Ukrainian nationhood being any kind of enviable alternative for Russia as a whole.

As to the Viking heritage of the Rus’ ruling class; again, this is on its face an unobjectionable fact. However, again, I do not think this fact alone serves the point which he wants it to serve. If the Viking ruling-class element was merely one among many sources of the Rus’ identity, then does it make much sense at all to fault them as essentially defective Swedes in their later history, when additional waves of nomads from the east came to replace the Pechenegs and the Tatars?

Something resembling democracy flourished in many Russian cities, nowhere more so than Novgorod, the true Venice of the North, a great city-state in which the commons, the aristocracy and the clergy shared power, and where many positions (including that of the Archbishop) were subject to popular election...

First, for a point of clarity, the bishops within Milbank’s church, the Church of England, are not popularly elected, they are appointed. In the Roman Catholic Church, bishops are appointed as well; they are certainly not elected by the laity. Novgorod’s process of electing bishops was well outside the norm anywhere in Europe, not just in the Rus’ polities.

I am neither insensitive nor entirely immune to the pull of this semi-mythologised reading of Kievan Rus’ history. The reigns of Vladimir the Great and Yaroslav the Wise and Vladimir Monomakh, as well as the examples of the Martyr-Princes Boris and Gleb, are truly admirable examples of enlightened Christian rulership and law. However, Russian history is never as straightforward as it first appears, and there is often a heavy undercurrent of irony in it. First of which is the fact that Kievan Rus’ retained the institution of slavery, or, in the terminology of Rus’ times, kholopy (meaning ‘the help’, with overtones of servility).

Although landed peasants in Rus’ enjoyed this degree of dignity and freedom, landless peasants were not free in medieval Rus’, and indeed they were often treated like chattel. This was also an inheritance from pre-Christian Scandinavia, in the form of thralldom. The institution of kholopy only finally disappeared during the Muscovite period which is the focus of Milbank’s narrative of Russian decline. Its last gasp happened under the reformer-Tsar Aleksei the Quiet, notably during a period of political centralisation and concentration of power.

In his history of the Russian religious mind, Fedotov was quick to deflate this idea of Kiev long being this centre of an enlightened land of liberty governed by wise Christian philosopher-kings and lawgivers. In fact, much of his first volume can come across as quite harsh in its assessments of the way actual history showed the rulers of the various principalities to be a greedy, fractious, vengeful and conniving lot on the whole. It was the monks, the hermits and (in Moscow at least) the holy fools who tended to authentically bear witness to the magnanimous spirituality and Scandinavian openness of the post-baptismal Vladimir the Great.

Except that even here, Fedotov notes that the monks of Kiev and especially Galich had already fallen under the spell of a timocratic emphasis on honour and blood-vengeance that quickly eroded this humane inheritance. Vladimir (whose administrative core later drifted to Moscow) fared little better, with the monks adopting a cynical attitude of flattery toward their princes. Fedotov is clear in his preference for Novgorod, where the tradition of clergy and monastics speaking truth to power and embodying the Gospel seemed to have held out the longest.

However, Fedotov’s rosy view of a free, middle-class, proto-democratic medieval Novgorod, which Milbank here uncritically adopts, was already in need of substantial revision by the time the Soviet Union was on its way out. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, at the very beginning of his essay The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, points to the research of Siberia-exiled Russian historian Sergei Platonov in showing that Novgorod was in fact a vulgar oligarchy with few actual democratic procedures. Any democratic and independent yeoman-class tendencies in the Russian North arose after Novgorod’s fall to Moscow, rather than before. The grain of truth to Fedotov’s characterisation of Novgorod lies in his understanding of its inner spiritual character, which was in fact allowed to flourish independently in the wake of the fall of Novgorod’s oligarchy under a sort of benign neglect from Moscow in the years following. Again, this speaks to the thick layer of irony that underlies the historical experiences of Russian folk-democracy.

Moscow was an insignificant trading post, set amongst the vast forests that still cover much of the central belt of Russia today...

This is inaccurate. Moscow was indeed a natural point of trade, being located on the confluence of the Moscow and the Volga Rivers. But – as it was a natural meeting place for the diverse peoples Milbank mentions earlier (the Finnic Merya and Murom peoples, the Turkic Volga Tatars and Bolghars, and the Slavic Vyatich and Krivich peoples) – it was far from insignificant. It had been inhabited for centuries, even millennia, before its first mention in the Chronicle, with the first settlement dating back to the Neolithic. Archaeological evidence suggests the existence not only of herding and agriculture but also metal crafts and organised trade. It was not a key political capital, but it was considered important enough to need engineered defences (like a moat, the remains of which date back to roughly 1100). This idea that Kiev was an urban centre of civilised culture and Moscow a mere forest village, in addition to simply being factually wrong, plays into a modernist, nationalist narrative that militates against the idea of Rus’ being a diverse, peaceful or democratic polity.

Estimates vary, but this force killed over 1,500 high ranking figures in Novgorod alone during their most infamous massacre, and employed methods of torture and execution that were considered grisly even by the brutal standards of the time.

That is actually something of a lowball estimate, with Russian historians credibly laying between 2,000 and 12,000 total deaths at the feet of Ivan's oprichniki during his rule. But let us take a look at some of Ivan’s contemporaries in Western Europe for a fair comparison, if we are to speak in terms of Milbank’s ‘standards of the time’. The Duke of Alva, the viceroy of the Habsburgs in the Spanish Netherlands, was said to have tortured to death between 5,000 and 18,000 Dutch during his five-year tenure there, between 1567 and 1573. And on the other side of the religious equation, the monstrously bloody, misogynistic and monk-hating founder of the Church of England, Henry VIII, executed nearly 60,000 Englishmen over his 36-year reign (and women, too, to be fair - some of whom he happened to be married to at the time). The Massacre of Novgorod was indeed the most spectacularly gruesome episode in Muscovite history to that date, but we should be clear-eyed about the fact that Muscovy was far from sui generis in terms of its brutality, even ‘internal’ brutality. The fall of man being what it is, we should not be surprised at this.

A successful Ukrainian parliamentary state ruled from Kiev, uniting Catholics and Orthodox, Russian and Ukrainian speakers, looking to Constantinople rather than Moscow, offers an alternative model of what it is to be Russia.

In the immortal words of Luke Skywalker: ‘Impressive. Every word in that sentence was wrong.’

The Ukraine is ‘parliamentary’ only in the very loosest sense of the word. Since its independence in 1991 it has had only two successful orderly and peaceful transitions of power: the election of Viktor Yanukovych in 2010, and the election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019. The Ukraine’s HDI has remained pretty much stagnant over the past 10 years, and has consistently lagged behind Russia’s for that same period. The Catholics in the country tragically tend to despise the Orthodox. And among the Orthodox there was a nasty three-way schism (UOC-MP, UOC-KP and UAOC) that has now, thanks to the Phanar’s ineffectual and uncanonical intrusion in 2019, morphed into a somehow even nastier three-way schism (UOC, UOC-KP and OCU). It is also not simply repeating Russian talking points to point out that Russophone Ukrainians in the Donetsk Basin – who rebelled, it must be said, in response to Ukrainian police actions against Russophone activists in Kharkov in early April of 2014 – have been under sustained military bombardment by the Ukrainian Army for the past eight years.

As for Constantinople: it does not actually exist as any kind of independent political power anymore, and has not existed as such since 1453. As an ecclesiastical power, its control lies in the hands of a small coterie of wealthy Greek-Americans. It is an unfortunate reality of Orthodox politics that we tend to look back and wax nostalgic for past empires, whether Byzantine or Russian, when doing so is least profitable. But the fact remains: Ukrainian clerics and politicians looking for clear moral and spiritual guidance today can no more ‘look to’ Constantinople than they can ‘look to’, say, Maghas in ancient Scythia.

The problems of social dysfunction, rampant official corruption and government opacity that the Ukraine currently faces are problems that are deeply familiar to most Russians. And that was before the war that is currently hideously destroying whatever semblance of public order was left. No, the horrors of the current war are sufficient to themselves without indulging this flight of fancy that Russia somehow envies what the Ukraine had become.

... We should look to the deep history of Ukraine and Russia as a source both of explanations for the present horror, but also the great secret of history, like the last voice trapped in Pandora’s box: the hope that things were once very different, and could be again.

I wouldn’t put it in precisely these terms, but I agree with the substance of this sentiment, and that is a hope which I share. I would, however, make a needed distinction between ‘hope’ and ‘false hope’. My Russian and Ukrainian friends here (and, yes, I do have both) do not see much room for hope at the moment, and – echoing Peter Hitchens in his recent thoughts on the subject – I find my own hope in this situation to be rather tenuous.

Suppose Russia were to do away with Putin tomorrow. Suppose they were to institute a suitably democratic form of government. It might be modelled on the medieval veche of Pskov and Novgorod. It might be modelled the noble zemsky sobor which more closely resembled the ancient Scandinavian ting. It might be modelled on the obshchina, the rural commune of the free black-earth peasantry of the Russian North. Or it might be modelled on the mir (village-level cooperative society) and artel’ (artisanal guild, later a proto-labour union) of later Tsarist Russia, in which the old democratic spirit managed to cling on until Witte and Stolypin dealt them the death-blow. Suppose this new, independent and democratic body were to hold elections and deliberate on policies about how they would orient themselves geopolitically.

Bear in mind that most Russian people rightly and with fondness remember their role in ending the Nazi terror in Europe: a great struggle against a clear and inhuman evil; a struggle paid for mostly in Russian blood. Bear in mind that their immediate neighbours, the Ukraine among them, view this same struggle with what may generously be termed indifference, given the state-sponsored veneration of figures like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych and state support provided to units like the Azov Battalion. Bear in mind that many of the older generation of Russian voters today remember vividly the misery, deprivation and anarchic violence of the 1990s which Milbank rather selectively cites as a time of ‘democratic federalism and the chance for real liberty’. What on earth makes Milbank think that this body would make laws and enact policies substantially different from those which Putin did?

Whether democratic or autocratic, Russia will always be different from its neighbours, let alone from those of us living in England or America. And sadly, as the official policies of imposing blanket sanctions on life necessities, restrictions of freedom of movement and business on the Russian people themselves bear witness, when Russians fail to demonstrate that they are sufficiently like us to suit our imperial whims, we punish them collectively, as a whole people. The Western failure to understand, let alone respect, this difference is one of the deeper root causes of the current war in the Ukraine. Actually sorting out that conflict in a way that is lasting and just will be a painful process, and a Scandinavian democratic makeover for Russia will not do the trick.

Statement of the Sámiráđđi on the situation in Russia

The Sámiráđđi, the Council of the indigenous Sámi people, Europe’s only indigenous nation, who bravely stood alongside the Water Protectors here in the United States during the standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline, has put out this statement from its Russian section:

The Section on the Russian side of the Saami Council cannot ignore the current situation in the country or remain silent about it. In no case will we touch upon the question of who is right and who is wrong, but each of us understands that there is no justification for military action. In any case, all this touches us, so the Section on the Russian side considers it necessary to comment on this topic.

Now, the citizens of the Russian Federation, including the Saami people in Russia, are in a situation where no one knows what awaits us in the future. We cannot plan anything and we find ourselves in a very unstable situation.

Sanctions already introduced by different countries, and possible future sanctions, will primarily hit, not businessmen and owners of mega-corporations and banks, but ordinary residents of the country. Already, prices on the electronics market have increased by 30% in one day, and we expect the prices to increase even more, not only for electronics, but also, for food and essential goods. The sanctions and the measures introduced do not separate the citizens of the Russian Federation by area of work or nationality, so the Saami people in Russia find themselves in an extremely unstable, one might say, dangerous, situation. None of us can predict how the aggravated situation will end, but already now we must be prepared for additional difficulties affecting international work.

For example, the sanctions have affected the work of Russian banks, which means that transactions to Russia will be difficult. This involves both projects and salaries and makes cooperation more difficult. Sberbank has conducted transactions in Norwegian kroner through a US bank, transactions in euros through a German bank, and both of these countries imposed sanctions on working with Sberbank and many other banks.

Now we are talking about the partial blocking of Facebook by Roskomndazor [The federal service for supervision of communications, information technology, and mass media] (partial blocking implies a strong slowdown in traffic on this site).

Russia was suspended from membership in the Council of Europe, the Committee of Foreign Ministers, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Council for Human Rights, many sporting events were canceled, and they were suspended from participating in Eurovision. These data are changing very quickly, perhaps at the moment this information is no longer relevant, but the fact remains that international cooperation for Russian citizens, in any direction, is now as difficult as possible.

Some of the countries closed entry for citizens of the Russian Federation, including those who had work and study visas. We do not rule out the possibility of sanctions that will annul existing visas for Russian citizens.

In many documents, the Saami Council states that the Sami are one people who live regardless of state borders. Now, this is high on the agenda, to make sure that the Sami people from the Russian side can continue to participate in international meetings and conferences, including visiting other countries.

Now, more than ever, the Sami people in Russia need international support to continue cooperation between the Sami of the four countries.

We hope that this difficult situation will soon be resolved in the least painful way.

Note that the Sámi, in their own words, find military action wholly unjustified, although they understandably decline to choose a side in the conflict. Sanctions are economic warfare, and if they are not targeted, they will hurt ordinary people. The Sámi understand this, even if modern Western people, who still fancy themselves ever so much more sophisticated and knowledgeable, do not. The only indigenous people in Europe have stood up again alongside Asian indigenous nations like Ainu Moshir (which, like Sápmi, straddles both sides of an arbitrary international border, and which the Japanese government has thrown under the bus again) in demanding for themselves geopolitical neutrality. It is unlikely that the Western powers plus Japan will allow them to take it peacefully.

Speaking personally as an Orthodox blogger based in America, I stand fully with the Sámi and the Ainu peoples, both in calling for an end to the war, and also for maintaining neutrality as far as possible. I call for an immediate end to American sanctions on civilians in Russia, so as not to hurt poor folk and innocents living far from any field of battle.

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.

Ovsyanki: one last fire on the river

Miron (Yuri Tsurilo) and Aist (Igor Sergeev) in Ovsyanki

I recently watched the 2010 film Ovsyanki (literally, ‘The Buntings’, but rendered with the inept English title as Silent Souls) written and based on a novella by Denis Osokin, and directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko. I’ve got some very strong, but decidedly mixed feelings about this film. It purports to be a depiction of the dying culture of the Finnic Merya people of the Volga basin in central Russia, as seen through the eyes of two natives of Kostroma Oblast: a grieving widower Miron, the director of a paper mill who wants to give his dead wife a ‘traditional’ Merya riverside cremation; and his employee Aist, a middle-aged bachelor and poet who also had a connexion with the departed woman.

I have some mixed feelings about the concept, for starters. The Merya people were a real, historical tribe, which spoke a Finnic tongue closely related to the still-living Mari language. They are attested in a sixth-century source, Jordanes’ Getica, as one of the peoples alongside the neighbouring Mordvins who were conquered and subject to the rule of the Gothic king Ermanaric [or Aírmenareiks 𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌼𐌰𐌽𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐌺𐍃]:

23. 116. Soon Geberich, king of the Goths, departed from human affairs and Ermanaric, noblest of the Amali, succeeded to the throne. He subdued many warlike peoples of the north and made them obey his laws, and some of our ancestors have justly compared him to Alexander the Great. Among the tribes he conquered were the Golthescytha, Thiudos, Inaunxis, Vasinabroncæ, Merens, Mordens, Imniscaris, Rogas, Tadzans, Athaul, Navego, Bubegenæ and Coldæ.

Conveniently for Osokin and Fedorchenko, these people were assimilated entirely and successfully into the Russian populace – a fact acknowledged ruefully by Aist in the film – and apart from a handful of toponyms very little actually remains of the Merya language or culture. The river-funeral and wedding rites described in the film seem to be, at best, very recent Romanticist attempts at neopagan reconstruction – if they are not, in fact, whole-cloth sexual wish-fulfilment fantasies on the part of Osokin and Fedorchenko. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are unworthy of consideration, but it does mean that we must treat the narrator as, to a certain degree, unreliable. The film becomes not so much genuine ethnography as the expression of a certain form of post-Soviet cultural insecurity and longing. It is quite believable that people who live in Volga towns with Finnic names attempt to reconstruct a meaningful local, historically-rooted identity for themselves: there is, in fact, a local attempt to revive the Merya language the way Aist is seen to be doing in the film.

This much having been said, Ovsyanki is a deeply-touching and remarkably well-made film. Technically both a road movie and a buddy movie as well as a retrospective romance between Miron and his wife Tanya, Ovsyanki seems to imbue these almost-misleading genre labels with a defying sense of middle-aged male pathos. Fedorchenko is a fan of long static takes, slow pans and a range of focus which provide the film a strong slice-of-life sense, and he uses these to convincingly convey a number of strong emotional effects: grief and humour and sensuality. The score of the film is understated and sombre; and the colours largely cool and muted – the bright yellows and oranges are reserved for Aist’s flashback memories of his childhood life, before his mother died and his father fell into depression.

The story itself is fairly simple, but it runs deep and is made to carry a great deal of thematic weight. Miron (Yuri Tsurilo) asks Aist (Igor Sergeev) to assist him in cremating Tanya (Yuliya Aug), which he wants to be as quiet and as private an affair as possible. Aist takes along the two buntings he bought, afraid that if he leaves them alone for days that they will starve to death. Miron processes his grief by telling Aist the intimate details of his marriage with Tanya, a kind of wake observance which Aist calls ‘smoking’. They bathe and decorate Tanya’s body, wrap it in a blanket and bundle it into the back of Miron’s car, and set off for Gorbatov on the Oka River, which is the preferred site for riverside cremations. As they proceed, Miron reminisces about Tanya, and Aist recalls his father the poet (Viktor Suhorukov), and how the death of his mother affected him. They get to Gorbatov and perform the rite, but Miron gets lost on the way home to Neya and the film takes a very different turn for the two men, who, as Aist tells us early on in the film, are fated not to make it home.

As with Shaman (and, indeed, with many films made by ethnic minority peoples under the Soviets – like Baksy, Shal and even Baikonur), a key theme here is the juxtaposition and clash of a primordial and protean antiquity with industrial modernity. The key difference here, is that the films made by these existing cultures tend to portray their own antiquities as having a firm reality: the life of the aul, the fight for survival on the taiga, the abiding love of Nazira for Gagarin. Industrial technology is portrayed as something aberrant, something less than real, or somehow contingent in its ability to solve problems.

Ovsyanki differs markedly from this, in that it portrays a dying or dead culture which dreams of resurrection. It seems noteworthy that the film presents us with a close relationship between the vital life of the culture – expressed as marriage and fertility rituals – and the funerary rites surrounding death. Tanya’s dead body is adorned like a new bride’s before she is carried out of the house. Miron tells Aist he took delight in bathing his wife in vodka while she was alive; and Miron and Aist do the same thing to her, dead, on the pyre as they prepare to cremate her.

There is a definite insecurity to Aist’s (and his father’s) poetic whims, and one which seems doomed to be swept away by the river of time. In Ovsyanki, it is modern, industrial society which is real, and the Meryan ethnofuturist dream which seems to belong to the ephemera – or else to some eschatological state of completion outside of history. Aist even says this explicitly toward the end of the film. Aist’s father writes his Romantic Merya poems on a Soviet typewriter – his most beloved possession, which also gets a river burial. Tanya is cremated with a toy rubber hedgehog bracelet around her wrist, bought at a magazin. The lumber for the pyre consists of axe-handles, bought in bulk at a hardware store. The holy places of the Merya are dominated by steel bridges, industrial parks, concrete lots. Natural scenery is present in this movie – and lots of it – but it is always out of the centre of focus, cut through or else otherwise dependent on the industrialisation which seems to be the dominant force. Even so, water is given a particular prominence and power in the film, and the Volga and the Oka rivers which are so important to the film’s Merya spirituality seem to have the last say – or at least, the main characters hope that they do. The paganism of the film is poignant in its deliberate state of incompletion and uncertainty, but at the same time profoundly pessimistic with regards to its own historical place.

I enjoyed Ovsyanki, despite its toying on the very ragged edge, without quite managing to fall into, the trap of pretentiousness. The more so since the rites that Osokin and Fedorchenko ascribe to the Merya people appear to be fictitious. Certainly it’s an art-house film, and it knows which audience it’s meant for. But it’s concise and meaningful, and it actually earns its keep as far as storytelling goes: everything that Aist sets up for us in the narration, manages some sort of payoff in the action and imagery in the film. Even the two buntings which Aist brings with him, and which are always on the seat of Miron’s car throughout the movie – and which serve as symbols of spirituality and feminine genius in several different ways – have a significant rôle to play in the film’s conclusion. I found it to be a profound and moving film, and it’s certainly worth watching once.

The tragic electoral irrelevance of life issues

I am pro-life. The person who made me pro-life was my daughter Eleanore, who was yet unborn at the time. Just as with folks like Mehdi Hasan, my pro-life turn had absolutely nothing to do with religion – I was an Episcopalian both before and after it, and my basic beliefs on religious subjects had not changed at all. Still, I oppose abortion as a practice, I believe it is the deliberate destruction of human life, and I support efforts to curtail it along multiple dimensions including both legal sanctions and œconomic measures to make carrying a child to term and raising it to adulthood less of a financial burden. I’m a huge fan of crisis pregnancy centres and donate to charities like ZOE. I voted for the pro-life presidential candidate Mike Maturen in 2016. I would like to see (for starters) a legal regime implemented here similar to what Western European countries like Finland and Austria have: mandatory paid parental leave and social benefits for expecting mothers; mandatory physician consultations, ultrasounds and waiting periods; and legal confinement of termination to life-threatening cases past the first trimester.

That having been said, in American politics there is no other group of issues that is more cynically used as a manipulative and pandering ploy for votes, unless it’s gun politics. Senator Rand Paul recently caused quite a stir and got in trouble with his party when he said this exact thing at a Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last year. But he said nothing but simple truth. Republicans have voted, repeatedly, to keep funding not just Planned Parenthood but research using parts from aborted fœti – and the president gleefully signs off on this funding. The ‘pro-life’ stance of the Republican Party is an utter sham. They’ll condemn the abortion lobby to their supporters, but turn around and fill their pockets when they think voters aren’t looking.

The same goes with the delusional notion that Republicans will appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe. That idea should have been utterly discredited when Trump snubbed Amy Coney Barrett – a lawyer with impeccable pro-life credentials – for nomination, in preference to the pro-choice Brett Kavanaugh. Yes, Kavanaugh is pro-choice. He has said so himself, openly and repeatedly. We may speculate on the reasons Trump passed over Barrett for Kavanaugh. They may be as simple and contemptible as mere misogyny. Or it may have been that Trump wanted a judge who would reliably cover for executive abuses and executive lawlessness, as Kavanaugh did under Bush. Nonetheless, this is what the president did. And what tops the farce of this nomination and the argument over it, is that the last Republican holdout against Kavanaugh – Senator Susan Collins – was convinced to nominate Kavanaugh because he’s pro-choice!

In either case, both his budgetary arrangements and his Supreme Court nominations should put the lie to the oft-repeated claim by the president and his supporters that he’s the ‘most pro-life in history’. It’s really a rather pathetic claim. And I say so not merely because it’s an obvious electoral sham and ruse. The party clearly has no qualms about funding corporate abortion providers, or shoving aside pro-life women for more biddable men without the same qualms. But the cause of ending the obscene practice of destroying life in the womb for the sake of convenience and œconomic efficiency, has been tarnished irrevocably by its willing association with this reality-TV huckster who lies as much to them as he does to everyone else. The real reason that the president appears at events like the March for Life is for the attention, the rush he gets from campaign-rally adulation.

There is the occasional rare case of a politician who is willing to stand up and do something against his own partisan interest – like, say, John Bel Edwards or, as mentioned above, Rand Paul. But what is striking to me is how utterly irrelevant life issues actually are in our national political life, in terms of actual outcomes and changes in the culture. Instead, unborn children, rather than being valued for themselves with their own inherent human dignity, serve as mascots or totemic tribal markers for a farkakte movement conservatism that has long since lost any intellectual or moral coherence. On the other side, sadly, they are regarded as moral irrelevances and inconveniences, as ‘blobs of tissue’, and that is equally monstrous. At this point, absent some sort of revolution of values, a revolution of hearts toward a society that values people over wealth, our culture will remain a culture of death regardless of what the big political machines do.

EDIT (29 June): It seems this post was premonitory, although that was completely accidental. A Louisiana regulation signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor was just struck down by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court with Bush nominee Justice John Roberts casting the deciding vote. You literally cannot make this up. If nothing else, this ruling shows definitively that the Republican Party does not care to end abortion, and that the issue is, unfortunately, literally irrelevant to electoral politics except as a symbolic totem for the party faithful.