The Baltic benignity of the ‘Russkiy Mir’

Jüri Ratas and Nils Ušakovs

The phrase ‘Russian World’ or ‘Russkiy Mir’ has been making quite a bit of headway in various think-tank output as well as religious news recently. There is, after all, a Russkiy Mir Foundation that promotes both the idea and the various forms of cultural and political production (i.e. soft power, in the Hu Jintao-era Chinese sense) that are associated with it. In the Western press, the idea is treated in an almost-monotonously negative fashion. It is emblematic of Russian revanchism, Russian nationalism, Russian resurgence, Russian ‘aggression’. There is a vague sense as well that the idea of the Russian World is connected to both the Orthodox Church and to Eurasianism. These are partial attempts to grasp the nature of the phenomenon, but they wilfully exaggerate some parts of Russia’s orientation to the outside under the banner of ‘Russian World’, wilfully downplay some others, and wilfully misunderstand yet others.

This is not to be wondered at. As the great American labour journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair put it: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ That applies just as much to people in Western think tanks which ‘analyse’ Russia with specific corporate-strategic or profit-driven aims in mind. It suits the interests of American and Atlanticist élites to have the ordinary English-speaker persist in the belief that contemporary Russian thinking is a blind fanatical repetition of Tsarist Stalinist ambitions for Soviet empire or global domination. Even they might genuinely believe it themselves; psychological projection is indeed often ‘genuine’ at a certain level. However, given that the ‘Russian World’ does describe a certain orientation of the Russian state to the outside, it’s necessary to clarify what it is and is not. In short, it becomes necessary to demystify the concept.

Unfortunately, most of the English-language resources on the ‘Russian World’ are of extraordinarily little help in this task, since they skip over great swathes of Russian history and interpret the Russian national project solely in the light of Soviet nostalgia and post-Soviet insecurities. There are, from the outset, several major problems with this approach. It is necessary to understand, first of all, that the Russian ‘national question’ has long had, and still has, a different tenor than the nationalisms associated with mass politics in continental Europe. The ‘national question’ in Russia is far older than that, and has its roots not in a mass ethnic awakening among the deprived as in the Balkans, but instead in a highbrow left-‘Tory’ critique of Russia’s contributions to the European culture of belles-lettres. Though I do have certain minor quibbles with Dr Rabow-Edling’s thesis (less now than then, actually), she is absolutely right that the ‘national question’ in Russia (at least for those who articulated it first) was more a question of literary-cultural authenticity than one of political unity, still less one of military strength or ‘hard power’. Though this explores the politics of Russian distinctiveness at its historical roots, the literary-cultural, quasi-anarchist Herderian tenor of Russian nationalism has largely been preserved down to the present, and that is also the case with the concept of the ‘Russian world’, a term which is thoroughly Slavophil in orientation.

From the beginning, ‘Russian World’ thinking has been oriented toward the West – toward the Slavic nations and specifically the Russian populations living in Russia’s western ‘Near Abroad’. It is therefore not to be confused either with the Eurasian plans for continental political integration eastward and southward, nor with Russian engagements with supposedly-‘Russophile’ political parties outside the Slavic world. Russian political priorities sort fairly close to home, and it is worthy of note that Russophile political engagements in the Russian diaspora proper tend to be fairly benign centre-left social-democratic political engagements. This is the result of ethnic Russians in the diaspora being fairly numerous in their new host countries but also relatively powerless on the political level.

A case-in-point: Saskaņa, the ‘Harmony Party’ in Latvia led by Nils Ušakovs, which won the largest share of the vote in the national Saeima elections last month. The issues that matter most to Latvia’s sizeable Russian minority, who regularly vote for Saskaņa statesmen, are: protection of pensions, status of non-citizens and minority rights in education – usually in that order. The latter two can be broadly considered ‘Russian World’ cultural priorities even though Saskaņa is no longer affiliated with Putin’s party and is trying hard to ‘face west’ in light of the generalised hostility and unwillingness to coöperate that they face from ethnic Latvian parties. The same holds true for Estonia’s centre-left Keskerakond led by Jüri Ratas: which is similarly dominated by Russian-diaspora voters and statesmen; which similarly pursues left-reformist œconomic policies (like progressive income tax), combined with mildly-conservative ‘Russian World’ cultural politics which do not always align with Russian gæopolitical interests; and which has similarly (though to a lesser extent) faced difficulties forming a government.

The cartoon caricature of the ‘Russkiy Mir’ which sees ethnic Russians in the ‘near abroad’ as an ideologically-uniform fifth column in lockstep at the service of the revanchist imperial state to their east is therefore, to put it mildly, badly in need of revision. (At worst, it’s just a mutated form of Yellow Peril anti-Asian prejudice.) Even if it did hold true in Crimea, that is no indication that it holds true everywhere, and it is certainly not true in the Baltic states, whose general anti-poor neoliberal policy-making has done far more to alienate Russians living there than political alignments toward the EU have done – though the two are closely linked.

On the topic of the Russian diaspora and its politics as with so many others regarding Russia, it is always best to keep Metternich’s maxim about Russia in the front of one’s mind, that ‘Russia is never as strong as she looks; Russia is never as weak as she looks’. There is definitely something Hu-ish about Putin’s general approach to the Russian diaspora – he is keenly aware of the present limits of the ‘Russkiy Mir’ idea in the political imagination of the ethnic-Russian populations of countries like Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Moldova, the Ukraine, the Central Asian Stans and so forth. Their political calculus, both individually and as groups – struggling minorities wherever they fall – is always going to be a mixture of œconomic self-preservation and cultural aspiration. The example of the Baltic states shows that they are not necessarily a fifth column. But the bloody example of the Ukrainian East, and the blessedly less-bloody example of the Crimea, shows us exactly what happens when these beleaguered populations are forced (by belligerent governments at the behest of Atlanticist gæopolitical masters) to make the fateful choice between Russia and their countries of residence.

Arabia tristis, redux

This week has been a horrific one for the Arab world, and my heart breaks for my friends and brothers and sisters living there. Gaza has been under sustained air attack by Israel since a covert operation by Israelis to abduct or assassinate Hamas leaders went south; Hamas retaliated with missile strikes. Seven Palestinians of Khan Younis were killed in the Israeli air strikes and three more after sustained aerial bombardment; one Israeli was killed by a retaliatory Hamas missile. Israel’s continued violations of areas that are under Palestinian governance, and the continued treatment of Gaza as essentially a massive open-air prison, simply cannot continue if there is ever going to be a lasting and just peace.

In Dayr az-Zûr, the US-led coalition in Syria has been using white phosphorous munitions in crowded civilian areas, killing 15 people and injuring dozens more. The use of white phosphorous as a weapon is considered a war crime by the International Red Cross.

And most seriously – in Yemen, resumed fighting in the port city of al-Hudayda is endangering millions of already-starving civilians and will assuredly worsen the already-catastrophic greatest humanitarian crisis of this century. These millions of civilians are utterly dependent on the water and transportation infrastructure of al-Hudayda to survive. And of course, our government – along with the Saudis and the Emiratis – are responsible more than any other party for destroying it. Why do we persist? So that our military-industrial complex can continue selling arms to the Saudis?

The Arab world continues to burn, bleed, weep and die. And not only are we directly implicated in all this suffering and death, but it serves no meaningful realist purpose in keeping our borders or our civilian populace safe. Indeed, it is merely doing the opposite. So what are we to do? The same as we ought to have done from the beginning: pray – give – organise – speak – and don’t despair. The news is, as usual, horrendous, but despair is the one thing we can’t afford. We just elected a slateful of new representatives, and I admit to being a tentative fan of my new rep Ms Omar, who talks a good game and keeps some good company. So let’s hold them accountable and put them to work doing something constructive – or at least, not destructive – both for the Arab world and for our own national interests.

Through the silence of the guns

Soldiers receiving news of the Armistice, 11 November 1918

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.

　　　　- Kurt Vonnegut

Given that the end of the Great War happened one hundred years ago today, this seems as good a time as any to reflect on the reasons that Armistice Day was originally inaugurated. As the amnesiac great-grandson of a working-class Jewish immigrant soldier whose lungs were destroyed in this war, I am finding that this Armistice Day has for me a peculiar importance. It is not a celebration of war. It is not a celebration of those who wage war. It is a celebration of the end of a war – one that destroyed twenty million lives, including the Armenian, Arabic and Greek victims of the first modern genocides. It is worth considering why Vonnegut (himself a veteran of the Second World War who lived through the bombing of Dresden) thought of the ending of this war as something sacred, as a moment when God spoke through the silence of the guns.

After all, Vonnegut was not the straightforward pacifist he is popularly imagined to be. Even when Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions, he was nowhere even close to the naïve certitude of the pacifists of his childhood, that this war could end all wars. In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five (one of my favourite books, not coincidentally) he recounts a conversation he had with Harrison Starr to the effect that ‘there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers’. Vonnegut (and Starr) seem to have been proven right time and again, not just about the First World War. We can only truly end war when we can end the perversions of the human heart; and the fact that the human heart is universally perverse is every bit as evident as the fact that water will freeze below zero. But Vonnegut celebrated Armistice Day regardless, just as he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five regardless. There’s something cussedly admirable about a guy who understands that war is inevitable, and who will still throw his shoulders in trying to stop glaciers.

Even ‘inevitable’ wars have a certain terrible logic. When one studies the history of the Balkans, and clears away the miasma of clichés about the Balkans being a ‘powder-keg’, the Great War takes on a far different shape. The Balkans may have been a keg, but Europe’s great powers brought all the powder – the stoking of nationalist rivalries; the advent of factory and rail; the deprivation of the peasant under various forms of predatory lending, whether by village loan-sharks or by London and Frankfurt. Seen thus, the war becomes a kind of apocalypse, a tearing-away of the veil over the ‘civilised’ Victorian and Edwardian niceties of European politics – dominated as they were by high finance, industrial capitalism and nationalism, and a burgeoning machine-rationalism that was capable of completely subsuming the person. One of the great problems that Berdyaev, Solovyov, St Maria (Skobtsova) all had with the pacifism that dominated in their day, was precisely that it propped up an illusion of peace. A pacifism that seeks to ignore or explain away or whitewash these very real injustices and sicknesses of the human soul that underpin a presumably-stable liberal world order, is ultimately self-defeating – and in Solovyov’s view even a precursor of Antichrist.

But such a pacifism is very far from the only kind of witness for peace that there is. Those witnesses for peace that centre on the person in her depth, do (ironically) have a tendency to look more radical in a political sense, than those which seek for peace within a rationalistic exterior legal framework. But theologically speaking, any witness for peace that points back to the depths of the person, and of the human heart, has to be marked by an inner striving and an interior life marked by a search for the truth of Christ in quietude (not to be confused with quietism). Lest one think I am being a Byzantine chauvinist here, let me hasten to observe that one sees this kind of hesychasm not only in the tradition of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, but also in the West: Julian of Norwich, Lancelot Andrewes, Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is what Vonnegut points to in his brusque, laconic way. There’s a hidden genius in the original ceremonial of Armistice Day, which Vonnegut (along with the modern peace movement) asks us specifically to observe. It asks us to keep silence, in the remembrance of the guns that fell silence, and of the moment in which God spoke through the stillness. The quietude that came over the soldiers when the apocalyptic, relentless industrial machinery of death – the guns, the gas and the bombs – all fell silent: that is what Vonnegut asks us to remember. That moment of silence on Armistice Day therefore represents a kind of civic hesychasm, a quietude that cuts through all the false pieties and all the forms of idolatrous sentimentality whether nationalist or internationalist – and goes straight to the heart, to the inner man. And that is what renders it sacred.

The inconvenient politics of everyday acts of decency

I have only ever met His Beatitude Vladyka Tikhon (Mollard) once; and that was at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Minneapolis. My first impression (and at that, the all-too-brief impression of a lay parishioner of a visiting bishop) was that of a calm, genteel and well-educated man, not overbearing in his intellect but demure and irenic in his demeanour: in other words, a temperamental conservative. That impression has been expanded upon and deepened by several things I have read about him recently: not only his pastoral letters on various topics of importance, but his actions, like condoling with the victims of the horrific tragedy in Pittsburgh, or sending birthday greetings to the sole canonical Orthodox bishop in Kiev.

Let me assure you, gentle readers, of my awareness that by remarking on these acts by our Metropolitan myself, I am contributing somewhat to the sense that these things are not simply what a bishop, or indeed what a human being, ought to do at such times. Of course we ought to comfort the bereaved! Of course we ought to celebrate our friends’ birthdays! And, in a less politically-fraught time, perhaps, these little and unobtrusive acts of simple neighbourly and friendly decency would pass as unremarkable. But now they have a deeper significance, as Vladyka Tikhon himself alludes in his letters.

As I have said before, one condoles with the Jews of Squirrel Hill by condoling with the Jews of Squirrel Hill. As Israeli-American journalist Mairav Zonszein puts it: ‘showing support for Israel does nothing to combat anti-Semitism or bolster the safety of Jews in the United States’. One should think that this is a fairly obvious thing. But Orthodox and Catholic priests showed greater common sense, greater grace and greater humanity in this instance than did Israeli leaders like Naftali Bennett. How is this so? It is not the show of solidarity itself that is political, but instead an environment of strategic calculation which lends it a political ‘look’. It may look naïve, but the true and unmediated love of neighbour comes only from a certain (implicit or explicit) trust in the Most High, the ‘source of mercy, consolation and hope’, who can ‘free’ us ‘from the assault of attitudes and ideologies of prejudice and hatred, fear and anxiety about those who are indeed our neighbours’. And that was true of the Tree of Life congregation themselves, who reached out to help Honduran refugees without pausing to consider that they were not Jews or white Americans, but (largely) Catholic Hispanics and mestizos. They did a right and decent thing, even though this right and decent thing was seen as inconveniently radical.

A similar trust pervades likewise with the birthday wishes of Metropolitan Tikhon to his brother Metropolitan Onufriy. It is a simple letter (but not a simple-minded one), expressing simple but heartfelt sentiments. Some observers might even call it naïve, in a political environment fraught with questions of imperial legacies and ideological constructs like New Rome, Third Rome, Hellenism and the ‘Russian World’. But who is to say that the simpler approach isn’t the correct one here? Has Metropolitan Onufriy ever once alluded to a ‘Russian World’ or proclaimed a Third Rome? Even these concepts are broadly (and in some cases wilfully) misunderstood, both by their supporters and by their detractors, and I will get to that at a later post. For now, though, it is worth dwelling on the position of Metropolitan Onufriy himself.

Metropolitan Onufriy is a man of deep faith, whose guilt and transgression in the eyes of the state he lives in, is that he sat in silent protest at a state event commemorating the Ukrainian armed forces, when doing so would mean taking a side in a civil conflict in which members of his flock were murdering each other. (Sound familiar?) Indeed, he was doing the only right and honourable pastoral thing in refusing to stand, even though it brought down a charge that he was taking sides. He was saying, in effect, that ‘East Ukrainian Lives Matter’ (and Russian, American, Black and Asian lives) and refusing to assent to a lie that would erase them from the picture. Of course, the nativist right-wing over there could no more tolerate such a protest, however civil, than the one over here could. They had to find a way to punish the good Metropolitan for his protest, and they did so by attacking his Church and by branding him an enemy of the state. Note that all of the ideological miasma, the talk about duelling Romes and Greek vs Slavic Orthodoxy, arose in the aftermath, when the Œcumenical Patriarchate chose to intervene on Poroshenko’s side. Again, we see that the simple, decent thing which Metropolitan Onufriy did in virtue of his office, is inconveniently radical in the eyes of those with an agenda.

There is the risk of engaging in something of a tautology, pointing out that even small everyday actions toward our neighbours are political. (After all, what is politics but the question of how to treat our neighbours?) But that is the thing about tautologies; they happen to be true. The recent actions and words of Metropolitan Tikhon show clearly that even these small gestures can have important political ramifications in a world awash in what Dr Aleksandr Shchipkov would call ‘post-digital idols’. It can be difficult to rid oneself of the imperialist hangover (doubly so for those of us living in the sole post-Cold War empire left standing) and start seeing clearly again with eyes of faith, but it can be done.

Saint Willibrord, Apostle to the Frisians

Holy Hierarch Willibrord of Echternach

Beknownst to my readers, I have a particular devotion to Bede the Venerable, whose historical works were (along with the religious philosophy of Berdyaev) responsible to a significant extent in bringing me into the Orthodox Church. At the same time, I find that the English saints of the Orthodox Church – even the ones most closely connected with Saint Bede – have been woefully neglected on my blog! I do intend to rectify this; I am currently reading the Life and Letters of the learned Saint Ealhwine [Alcuin] of York, a student and follower of Holy Bede. Saint Willibrord, the Northumbrian saint commemorated today who ended up becoming a bishop in Utrecht and a missionary in Fryslân, is one of those treated in Ealhwine’s hagiographical work.

Willibrord was born to an English freeman in Northumbria named Wilgils and his wife, who sadly goes unnamed in Ealhwine’s account. Wilgils and his wife were both deeply observant Christians; indeed, Wilgils undertook after his wife’s death the life of a hermit in a little temple devoted to Saint Andrew the Apostle, ‘dwelling in the headlands between the North Sea and the Humber’, during which he became celebrated as a wonderworker and elder to many common people, who flocked to meet him.

Saint Wilgils’s more famous son, however, was heralded to Saint Wilgils’s worthy wife with a heavenly vision, as Alcuin recounts, during which she swallowed a bright heavenly body like unto the moon, which caused her body to glow with light. Awed and afraid upon waking, she sought out a priest to tell her the meaning of this dream. The holy father told her that the heavenly light she had swallowed was a son she had conceived the night before; and that this son would by the example of his holy life become a bright full moon beckoning many toward the true light of Christ.

When their son was born, his eldern christened him Willibrord (after the old Teutonic custom of giving the son a dithematic name whose first element matches his father’s), and, when he came of age, gave him to Saint Wilfrid at the new monastic cathedral at Ripon to be taught both sæcular letters and learning and the holy disciplines of the monks there; he took so earnestly and so well to his learning in both that Saint Ealhwine likens him to the Holy Prophet Samuel. Though he was slender and slight in shape (though later Alcuin says he was ‘of rniddle height, dignified mien, comely of face, cheerful in spirit, wise in counsel, pleasing in speech, grave in character and energetic in everything he undertook for God’), it was said that Willibrord’s wisdom far outstripped his years, even when he first took the tonsure at Ripon.

He was sent abroad from Ripon, at his own request, to learn from the holy men of Ireland, in particular Bishop Ecgbert and his companion Wichtberht. He spent twelve years with these two holy Irish churchmen, after which the will took him to undertake missionary work ‘in the northern reaches of the world’, by which Ealhwine meant heathen Saxony and Frisia (in both of which lands Ecgbert and Wichtberht had once preached and taught themselves). When he was thirty-three, Willibrord, along with eleven followers, went to the nether-lands to preach the Gospel: some of them were martyred there; others went on to further attainments in the world as monastics.

At the time, Frisia was ruled by Redbad, who was antagonistic to Christianity and anything smacking of Frankish domination. Willibrord thus left Frisia for Francia and was met by King Pippin, who was highly impressed with Willibrord’s preaching and sought to have him anointed as a bishop. Willibrord steadfastly gainsaid it, until the king’s costenings had been joined by those of his companions and by that of his conscience when it became clear that it was the will of God. He went before Pope Saint Sergius, who, being apprised of the Northumbrian monk’s character, welcomed Willibrord with great warmth of brotherly affection, lost no time in anointing him as bishop, and held back nothing from Willibrord by way of blessings, whether chalices for use in the Liturgy or the relics of holy and beloved saints to bear back northward with him. When he returned to Francia, now-Bishop Willibrord was strengthened and heartened by the love bestowed on him by the saintly Pope in Rome, and he undertook his missionary work with heightened zeal and energy.

Bishop Saint Willibrord preached among the Frisians (to little avail) and the Danes, who were then ruled by Ongendtheow, described by Ealhwine as ‘a man more savage than any wild beast and harder than stone’. Willibrord, with Ongendtheow’s assent, chose thirty Danish children to be baptised into the Christian faith and sent to the Frankish court of King Peppin. On the return trip he visited a certain island on the march, held holy by the Frisians and the Danes both, and there baptised three more locals in the name of the Holy Trinity and slaughtered three wild oxen for their fare, setting his face against the heathen laws forbidding the drawing of water or the shedding of blood on the island. King Redbad, roused to wrath at this flouting of his writ, cast lots thrice a day for three days to see which among Willibrord and his followers should be put to death. Only once did the short lot fall to one of Willibrord’s baptised, and that one went to a martyr’s death. This only heightened King Redbad’s fury, and he upbraided the saintly Willibrord for his insult to the old gods; however, Willibrord was unfazed. Instead he answered King Redbad that he should believe in Christ, be baptised in the name of the Trinity, and repent of all his former sins. Though King Redbad was impressed by Willibrord’s fearless witness, he nonetheless would not believe; instead he sent Willibrord back to Pippin and the Franks.

Pippin died shortly afterward, however, and his successor Karl (also called ‘the Hammer’) came to the throne; he made great incursions into the lands of the Frisians, and Saint Willibrord lost no time in preaching the Gospel and baptising the Frisians that had fallen under Frankish sway. (Later, Saint Willibrord would baptise and christen Karl’s son, Pippin the Short.) The bishop preached Christ and also lived according to the way of Christ; he forgave and would not avenge himself upon even those among the heathen and the wealthy landowners who attacked and reviled him, although he was ruthless in his destruction of their idols. (Ealhwine’s hagiography of Saint Willibrord, in good mediæval fashion, recounts the gruesome ends of his attackers, which are attributed to divine justice; but it equally stresses that Saint Willibrord would not allow his followers to lay hands on them.)

Saint Willibrord had, as seems to be fairly common with the Northumbrian saints, a definite soft spot for the poor and the suffering. Much of his wonderworking seems to be related to this. He had his followers dig a trench in a seaside hamlet that was suffering from thirst, and bade the trench give forth fresh water instead of bracken – and the trench became a spring. On another occasion, he met twelve thirsty beggars on the road, and Saint Willibrord bade one of his followers give them his flask. The twelve beggars all drank their fill from the flask, and his followers were amazed afterward to find the flask as full as it had been before – not with water, but with wine! This wine-filling wonder he repeated several times on various occasions, when the folk he met were in want, either at his monastery or in his missionary work.

Saint Willibrord lived to be an old man, and was beloved not only as a wonderworker but as an elder and a spiritual counsel to many, not just to the Frankish nobles. He met his repose peacefully, and was buried at the very Abbey he founded with the backing of King Pippin of Herstal, on the Frankish march at Echternach (now in Luxembourg). Miracles and healings attributed to him continued at the Abbey long after his death, and he was quickly recognised to be among Christ’s holy saints.

Our father among the Saints, Holy Hierarch Willibrord, pray to God for us!

Moved to compassion by the plight of the heathen,
Who languished in noetic darkness, ignorant of the one, true God,
O clement and pious Willibrord,
Thou didst leave behind all things comfortable and familiar, And didst set out for the land of the Frisians,
To convert them, by thy preaching, to the peerless Christian Faith,
With zeal enlightening them in the laver of regeneration.

The other Russian, inequality, secondary simplification

Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont’ev

Konstantin Leont’ev is a truly fascinating figure, in many ways antipodean after the best tradition of Russian thinkers, but also in a certain sense separate from the rest. Not for nothing is he called – ‘the other Russian’. Leont’ev began his career as a democratic idealist, drawn to the romance of revolution, to the striking figures he found at their heads: people like Napoleon and Lord Byron. But during the 1860’s his political views took a sharp turn rightward; he became a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, a Tsarist and an apologist for the unmitigated power of the autocratic state. He shows a similarly antipodean relationship to religion: at times he can be Orthodox to the point of hyperdoxy, evincing the terrors at the heights of the Byzantine religious consciousness, naked before the Judge of All; at other times he delivers himself of opinions that reveal something of a deep, sensual and libidinous rodnoverie. Interestingly, in his autobiographical collection of writings, these two antipodes: democratic-revolutionary and reactionary; Christian and pagan; neurotic and narcissist – are at war in his psyche from the very beginning. Little wonder that Nikolai Berdyaev found Leont’ev such a mesmerising figure; his philosophy never managed to get fully out from under Leont’ev’s reactionary spell, and that same philosophy (particularly when Berdyaev veered leftward politically) was that much richer for it.

Konstantin Leont’ev served as an army doctor in the Crimean War, having studied medicine prior to that. It was during and after the Crimean War that he formed much of his political consciousness, but more importantly, he adapted a kind of poiēsis of science from his medical studies. This comes into play in his doctrine of the evolution of civilisations. He believes that civilisations tend to ‘develop’ (though he has certain problems with the word) according to three stages. There is, first, a process of flourishing in primitive simplicity; then one of flowering complexity; and finally one of secondary fusion and simplification. He uses the medical analogy of a disease in the lungs to describe this process, which at its pinnacle causes a spectacular differentiation within the lung tissue, but which either reverts to the ‘primitive simplicity’ of health, or else triumphs and produces the simplification of the body through death and decomposition. The analogy is limited in its usefulness, and Leont’ev quickly abandons it; however, his analysis of the development of social orders is compelling and even convincing in some cases. He had in mind modern Europe when he spoke of the process of secondary simplification, as here:

Oh, the massive, blood-soaked but picturesque mountain of universal history! Since the end of the last century you have been labouring in torments of new births. And out of your suffering depths merely a mouse crawls out! A self-satisfied caricature of the people of former days is born, the average rational European, in his comic clothes that even the ideal mirror of art cannot reflect, with a small and self-deluded mind, with his creepy, practical goodwill!

No! Never yet in the history of our times has anybody seen such a monstrous combination of mental pride before God and ethical submission before the ideal of a homogeneous, grey, labouring and godlessly passionless all-mankind!

Is it possible to love such a mankind?

Should one not, with all the strength of even a Christian soul, hate—not the people who are stupid and have lost their way—but a future of theirs such as this? Yes, one should! One should! Thrice, one should!

This is the estimation of Leont’ev of the bourgeois European. It is true, Leont’ev by his own admission cannot stand the pretensions of the ‘radical’ intellectuals of his own day; though he makes a couple of notable exceptions for Aleksandr Herzen (whose work I am now eagerly looking forward to reading) and JS Mill, whose æsthetic modes of thought render them more sympathetic. (Even at his most democratically-minded, he understands that equality, in a metaphysical sense, is a problematic proposition. His democracy is an æsthetic one. He loves it not so much for itself, but for the brilliantly-colourful men-of-deeds that arise out of it.)

But neither does he have much use for the capitalist mass man, the respectable European who reads the newspapers, the suburbanite. He detests, even loathes, the very idea of ‘a world in which all people everywhere live in identical, small, clean and comfortable little houses the way people of middle income live in our Novorossiysky towns’. What fit world is that for heroes to come out of, for great deeds still remaining to be done? The equality he sees in such a world is the equality of death and decomposition. For the reactionary Leont’ev, any conservatism that regresses to such a vulgar mean is no conservatism at all worth espousing. Indeed, he says this outright: ‘Cosmopolitan democratism and political nationalism—these are but two shades of one and the same colour!’ So what does he propose in its place? Konstantin Leont’ev puts forward five—not canons, precisely, in the Kirkian sense, but something a little looser than propositions:

1. The state should be diversified, complex, strong, class-structured and cautiously mobile. In general, strict, sometimes to the point of ferocity.
   
   
2. The church should be more independent than the present one. The church hierarchy should be bolder, more powerful, more concentrated. The church should have a mitigating influence on the state, and not vice-versa.
   
   
3. Everyday life should be poetic, varied in its national unity, and insulated from the West…
   
   
4. The laws and principles of authority should be stricter; people should try to be personally kinder; the one will balance the other.
   
   
5. Science should develop in a spirit of profound contempt towards its own utility.

For a doctor and a natural scientist, noteworthy in particular is his emphasis on poetry. Leont’ev places as much emphasis on that in the very midst of his politics as do Chesterton, Tolkien and Lewis. ‘The highest poetry and the highest politics have a deeper connexion than people usually think. When poetry declines, so does profound thought.’ He believes that social orders must indeed have a mystical, metaphysical foundation in order to last (it would have been quite interesting to see what the man would have made of Morris).

And further, he believes that in order to forestall the process of secondary simplification, to stop the progress of decay and to ‘survive as a state and culture’ in the face of threats from China, India and the West, it is necessary for Russia, not to disappear within a hodge-podge synthesis and levelling, but instead to ‘fuse together this Chinese state system with Indian religiosity and European socialism, gradually forming new, stable social groupings’. The two of them likely would not have seen eye-to-eye, but this threefold civilisational analysis (China; India; Europe) and especially the conclusion that some conservative, mediated form of socialism could be adapted to an authentic civilisational flourishing, has distinct parallels in the New Confucian thought of Liang Shuming. Likewise, Leont’ev’s thought here is not quite Slavophil; his attitude toward the state is far too cavalier. But it is easy to see where the Slavophils have influenced him.

This ‘other Russian’, this proud reactionary and literary critic who could nevertheless never quite put away his old romantic attachments to revolution, is very deeply worth considering at our present political moment, particularly when the forces of consolidation, civic monoculture and secondary simplification are still afoot and rampant within our own body politic.

Pointless video post – ‘Yo m’enamori’ by Sava

I have had the first album, Aire, by the German mediæval folk band Sava for a long time; and it has long been one of those albums that I keep going back to in my darker and more melancholy moods. Folk music, that is to say the music that comes out from amongst the folk without attribution, at its most real gives voice to certain heart-stirrings. That is certainly the case with their rendition of the traditional Sephardic Jewish love song ‘Yo m’enamori’ here, simply-expressed in its lyrics, yet bewitchingly expressive in its minor key. Do enjoy!