What Is Russia?

Yesterday I mentioned that I wanted to address the issue of Russia, in contrast to the American state that is largely based on post Enlightenment classical liberalism. That’s an obvious over simplification, in that the American founders were far more serious than to thoughtlessly embrace what we now know as libertarianism—they very consciously looked for models in the ancient world, for example. Nevertheless, the US has, fairly rapidly, devolved into a nation whose civic theology or philosophy is a fuzzy sort of libertarianism on both the Left and the Right. Like fish in the sea, we’re mostly unaware of any alternative to swimming in that body of water. For fish there may not be an alternative, but for humans there is—it’s just that Americans are largely oblivious to the alternatives or terribly uncomfortable with the very idea.

Thus, Americans and Westerners in general are mostly comfortable with the standard narratival portrait of Putin as a dictator, rather than as a thoughtful statesmen who has thought long and hard about what the good for Russia and its people is—and has sought to govern from that standpoint. In this endeavor Putin has not simply tried to impose a solution that he himself invented. Rather, he has drawn on the traditions of Russian political thinking—going back to the opening of Russia to the West in the 18th century. Those traditions happen to be strongly at odds with Western liberal democracy, based on centuries of reflection that is mostly known only to a small group of specialists in Russian thought.

Recently I came across—thanks to a prompt from Ray-SoCa—an article that attempts to explain Russia and Putin, by placing both in the context of what the author terms Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) thinking. That tradition was systematically attacked by the Bolsheviks, but Putin is consciously seeking its restoration to revitalize—in almost a literal sense—Russian political and social culture. I’ll be trying to summarize and contrast the author’s presentation with Western ideas. Be forewarned—I don’t necessarily agree with everything here—although substantially I do. The main purpose is simply to present and contrast. The article itself is quite lengthy, so do follow the link.

Russia's Neo-Byzantinism

The author begins by posing the issue:

What is Russia? How does Russia define herself, and how does she conceive of her relationship to Europe? Specifically, from what tradition do Russia’s current ruling elites draw their vision of Russian civilization? [Who are] the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [who have had] a strong influence on Vladimir Putin and his entourage.

He then proceeds to a remarkable anecdote—I challenge anyone to imagine anything like this being done by an American president or most current Western heads of state:

Let’s start, quite logically, with three authors whose books were offered by Vladimir Putin to governors and members of his United Russia party for the New Year 2014 (see here and here):

• Vladimir Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good

• Nikolai Berdyaev ‘s The Philosophy of Inequality

• Ivan Ilyin’s Our Tasks

All three authors are deeply religious and patriotic, and as such committed to Russian Orthodoxy. All three are passionate about Russia, and hold her as “an original and independent civilization,” in the terms used by Vladimir Putin in his October 27, 2022 speech at the Valdai Forum.

Already we can see that Putin has thought deeply on the whole question of Russia, and that he—like so many Russians—embraces the idea of Russia as a civilizational area, much like Samuel Huntington does. This is a largely foreign concept to Americans, who tend to assume that civilizational or cultural differences are merely superficial and merit little reflection. So let’s look at the thumbnail characterizations for these books.

[Soloviev’s] book The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy, written in 1897, is an attempt to found moral values on a scientific basis, by showing that they are anchored in three impulses of the mind common to all peoples: shame, pity and reverence. Shame causes us not to identify with our base instincts, and manifests itself in modesty; pity is compassion for our equals; reverence, which is the foundation of social hierarchy and religion, is love for superior beings.

Contrast that with traditional—but now jettisoned—Western moral thinking that typically appeals to the ancient Greek paradigm of the Four Cardinal Virtues—Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance, supplemented by the Christian Theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. I would maintain that the difference here is far from absolute, but …

[Berdyaev’s] book The Philosophy of Inequality: Letters to my Contempters Concerning Social Philosophy, written in 1918, is a harsh critique of the paradigms of Western political thought. Berdyaev has a mystical and supernatural conception of power: “The principle of power, he writes, is entirely irrational. … no one in the world has ever submitted to any power for rational reasons.” Power is always personal. That is why democracy — the Rousseauist utopia of the sovereignty of the people — is a lie. “Since the creation of the world, it is always the minority which has governed, which governs and which will govern. … The only question is whether it is the better or the worse minority that governs.” The government of the best, that is to say aristocracy in the proper sense, is “a higher principle of social life, the only utopia worthy of man.” The triumph of democratism “represents the greatest danger to human progress, to the qualitative elevation of human nature.” It is the worship of an empty idea, the deification of human arbitrariness.

I suppose we might say that our oligarchy constitutes government by “the worse minority.” Of note here is that Berdyaev is not championing arbitrary and unaccountable power without norms. He acknowledges a “better” and a “worse”—in other words standards, which is precisely what much of Western thought rejects.

In discussing the Ilyin book, Our Tasks, the author provides a fairly detailed biography of a thinker who was strongly anti-Bolshevik, but who also saw an emerging threat from the West. Against the Bolsheviks Ilyin wrote:

As a result of a long brewing process, evil has now managed to free itself from all internal divisions and external obstacles, show its face, spread its wings, utter its goals, muster its forces, realize its ways and means; moreover, it has openly legitimated itself, formulated its dogmas and canons, praised its own no longer hidden disposition, and revealed to the world its spiritual nature. Nothing equivalent or equal to this has been seen in the history of humanity, at least as far as can be remembered.

But:

Ilyin set a program for rebuilding Russia after the collapse of the Soviet regime, which he hoped was near. With prophetic accuracy, he warned the Russians about the designs of the West on the dismemberment of the Russian state. The West, he understood, dreams of carving up Russia into “a giant Balkans”, a tragedy which would produce irreparable global chaos. Putin’s description of the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of modern times” echoes Ilyin’s words.

…

[Ilyin] advocates a third way between democracy and totalitarianism, which he defines as “a firm, national-patriotic dictatorship inspired by the liberal idea.” A new idea is needed, he claimed, for a new Russia.

This idea should be state-historical, state-national, state-patriotic, state-religious. This idea should stem from the very fabric of Russian soul and Russian history, from its spiritual hunger.

The author then recounts some of the history that shocked Russians into realizing the malign intent of the West toward Russia, convincing many Russians that friendship could not be expected from the West—the Napoleonic invasions, the “Christian” (really liberal) West siding with the Ottomans against Russia and Balkan Christians in the Crimean War and the later wars leading up to the Treaty of San Stefano (1878). The author notes that much of the seminal history of the West has little if anything in common with Russian historical experience. While that may be an extreme judgment, it does find support in Putin’s words:

“In order to revive national consciousness, we need to link historical eras and get back to understanding the simple truth that Russia did not begin in 1917, or even in 1991, but, rather, that we have a common, continuous history spanning over 1,000 years and we must rely on it to find inner strength and purpose in our national development.”

He also gets into an extended discussion of Slavophile thinking, the idea of Russia playing a leading role for all Slavs—noting the lack of realism in this.

The article concludes with a very lengthy discussion of Russian thinking that traces Western enmity to medieval developments in the Catholic (and Protestant) West, and especially the institution of the papacy. Anyone who is at all familiar with Russian thinking on history and politics will recognize here a fundamental theme that characterizes much of Russian thought. Whatever one may think of the merits of the argument, it is certain that this view of history is central to centuries, now, of Russian reflection on their identity. It, therefore, goes hand in glove with the Russian critique of liberal democracy:

The early founders of the Slavophile movement, such as Alexis Khomiakov (1804-1860), insisted on religion, rather than ethnicity, as the main ingredient of civilization. For Khomiakov, Orthodoxy is the very soul of Russia, and what sets Russians apart from Western peoples, whether Catholics or Protestants. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, the Church is the community of believers, united in the love of Christ. This is why all Russians, from peasants to boyars, will make any sacrifice to defend the Church. From the eleventh century, the Roman papacy destroyed this spiritual communion by imposing a radical separation between the institutional Church and lay people, so that “the Christian was no longer a member of the Church, but a subject of it.”

The divergences between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, and their effects on the collective souls of peoples, is a rich and complex subject on which I cannot dwell here. What is most important to understand is that these are not simply doctrinal or liturgical differences; there is a fundamental difference of political philosophy. The struggle for papal supremacy, which is rooted in Augustine’s theories and which dominated West European history since the beginning of the Gregorian reform (eleventh century), is a radical departure from the Orthodox tradition established in Constantinople in the fourth century, which Catholics deride as “caesaropapism”.

This is why Konstantin Leontiev, one of the most influential Russian political philosophers, characterized the essence of Russia as “Byzantinism” rather than simply Orthodoxy. Russia is heir to Byzantine civilization in its intricate political and religious aspects. In his book Byzantinism and Slavdom, published in 1875, Leontiev defines Byzantinism as, essentially, autocratic despotism sanctified by the Church: “from whatever angle we examine the life and state of Great Russia, we will see that Byzantinism, that is, Church and the tsar, whether directly or indirectly, penetrate deeply into the very subsoil of our social organism.”

Russia’s traditional attachment to Byzantinism has much to do with her sense of mission to collect and save the heritage of the Eastern Roman Empire assassinated by the international brigades of the Pope under the pretext of liberating the East from Islam, when the Frankish crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1205. This mortal wound, from which Byzantium would never recover, Westerners have carefully repressed from their collective memory, but Russians have engraved it in theirs. It resonated with another cornerstone of their national narrative, the victory of their national saint and hero Alexander Nevski against other crusaders in 1242. As Nikolai Trubetzkoy points out, Russia’s identification with Orthodoxy was deepened and strengthened during the humiliation of the Tatar Yoke, even benefitting from the khans’ religious tolerance and support of the Church.

…

For Russians, the betrayals of the West since the nineteenth century are only the repetition of a pattern that started in medieval times. This is precisely the argument of the film “The fall of an Empire: the Lesson of Byzantium”, aired on the Russian government-controlled television station Rossiia (RTR) on January 31, 2008. It was produced, directed and narrated by Father Tikhon Shevkunov, head of the Sretenskii monastery in Moscow, and a friend of Putin. In the film, the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire is attributed to corrupt domestic oligarchs and the pernicious actions of the West. The story of Byzantium is explicitly presented as a warning for Russia’s contemporary rulers: they are exhorted to rein in the oligarchs, fortify the ramparts against the West, or face destruction. As I wrote in an earlier article, we Westerners don’t know what Russia is, because we don’t know what Byzantium is.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Russian patriots were passionate about Russia’s mission, not only as heir, but as liberator of Constantinople. Already Catherine II, Empress of all the Russias from 1762 to her death in 1796, had hoped to rebuild the Byzantine Empire by including Greece, Thrace and Bulgaria, and pass it on to her grandson, predestined by his name Constantine.

In 1877, Dostoevsky told his readers again and again, “Constantinople must be ours.” Since Russia “unhesitatingly accepted the banner of the East, having placed the Byzantine double eagle over and above its ancient coat-of-arms,” she assumed the responsibility of liberating Constantinople, also known as Tsargrad:

…

…

Byzantinism is, in any case, the model of Putin’s Russia, We might call it Ilyinism, but it seems to be in fact a shared conviction of all major Russian philosophers of the last two centuries, including Dostoevsky.

John Schindler, a former professor at the U.S. Navy War College, wrote in a 2014 piece for the National Review Online, titled “Putinism and the anti-WEIRD Coalition” (in which WEIRD stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic”):

Putinism includes a good amount of Ilyin-inspired Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism working hand-in-glove, what its advocates term symphonia, meaning the Byzantine-style unity of state and church, in stark contrast to American notions of separation of church and state. Although the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is not the state church, de jure, in practice it functions as something close to one, enjoying a privileged position at home and abroad. Putin has explained the central role of the ROC by stating that Russia’s “spiritual shield” — meaning her church-grounded resistance to post-modernism — is as important to her security as her nuclear shield. Meanwhile, Kremlin security agencies have publicly embraced Orthodoxy too, with the FSB espousing a doctrine of “spiritual security,” which boils down to the ROC and the “special services” working together against the West and its malign influences.

As Schindler correctly notes, Westerners who are horrified by Putin’s reactionary conservatism only have to blame themselves for it.

When Washington, DC, considers having successful gay pride parades a key benchmark for “advancement” in Eastern Europe, with the full support of U.S. diplomats, we should not be surprised when the Kremlin and its sympathizers move to counter this.

By its crusade for sexual deviancy the West is, dialectically, making Russian conservatism more and more attractive to decent peoples. “One of the big talking points from the Kremlin and the ROC is that Russia represents the actual global consensus on such matters, while the West is the decadent outlier.” The West is definitely the world’s WEIRDo, and has already lost the battle for the minds.

Trump likes to tell us how well he gets along with foreign leaders from widely divergent cultures, but all of which share deep misgivings—not to say antipathy—for the liberal West: Putin, Xi, Erdogan—Trump gets along famously with all of them, by his account. The Art of the Deal should therefore result in easy and quick positive results. For my part, I’m skeptical. I don’t doubt that some form of deal may be possible in the short term, but I’m doubtful that a long term rapprochement can come about without a serious transformation in the West. Whether we’re beginning to see signs of that is a matter of debate. However, consider all the above and ask yourself whether you see the basis for a deal that can extend into the future, or which, like arms control agreements, would be tossed into the waste basket on the whim of Western leaders. Oh, yeah—like Trump. How much has Trump learned in four years out of office? We’re about to learn.