The Russian World

With his blonde dreadlocks and a rocker’s leather jacket, Shaman sports the extreme, futuristic face of the Russian identity, moving away from the West by aping it in every detail, but in an "I am Russian" version. The videoclip with the new anthem that has taken Moscow by storm alternates frenzied fans and wheat fields.

As was the case in the 1990s, food becomes the dimension of identity lost and identity to be found. Average salaries drop and then the only food remains the "spirituality" of traditional moral values, relying on the miracles invoked by metropolitans and patriarchs, but entrusted to the hands of cooks left without ingredients.

As war looms over Latin Easter and Orthodox Holy Week, the philosophers of the "rebirth of the Russian idea", like Florensky, Berdyaev and Bulgakov, come to mind; they contrasted the authenticity of the Church, which announces Christian redemption, to the false ideological truth of the intelligentsia.

In Kiev while Onufryj - leader of the Orthodox jurisdiction still linked to the Moscow Patriarchate - is calling on the Ukrainian government to stop the eviction, antagonist Epifanyj has already appointed a new superior of the Monastery of the Caves. The long history of the forge of the many souls of Russian Christianity developed in the mid-11th century through the enlightened leadership of the son of the first Prince Vladimir, Jaroslav "the Wise."

We are incapable of learning from history, otherwise there would be wars. But while one wonders how to finally succeed in bringing the fires to an end, one can still find inspiration in a distant date, when in 1686 the war between the reign of the Czar of Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom of Reczpospolita was ended.

For years he denied being the founder and commander of the "Wagner Company," which he now glorifies as the "best army in the world." His biography - from prison to catering to today's railings against the rest of the Kremlin elite - is a synthesis of late and post-Soviet history.

In an incautious shift, Soviet women, once the vanguard of world feminism, have morphed into today’s “heroic mothers”, worthy of prizes awarded by Putin in the Kremlin. However, the myth of the mother has become a casualty of the war, that of the Russian woman who takes care of the whole family and all the people, taking on the burden of suffering and humiliation, like Solzhenitsyn's Matryona, soul of the entire village of the persecuted.

Everyone desires an end to war, but it cannot just be a question of surrender or compromise, identity and dominance on the battlefield. It is an inner war, being fought in churches and consciences, in universities and schools, on the streets and in the homes of every country east and west.

A bombastic language and lack of content have produced a soporific and deadly effect on ordinary Russians, prey to despair amid fears of another military call-up. Online, a surreal diatribe about gorgonzola describes, better than any other example, Russians’ desire “not get involved", to turn away from feelings of guilt and shake off the rhetoric of "traditional values".

The ecclesiastical dimension appears increasingly secondary in the exaltation of the "Russian World," pointing to the people and the empire more than liturgies and bishop's miters. Everywhere imprinted on flags, T-shirts and digital memes is the slogan "We are Russians, God is with us!" Tsar Nicholas I's battle cry in the mid-19th century Crimean War.

The ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine has stirred up two ghosts, awaken two unfinished identities, whose actual legacy in people's lives will long be difficult to define.

Debating whether Russia wants to wage war on NATO, or the allies that want to destroy Russia, does little to alter the actual situation, in which both contenders are focused solely on the strategies and goals to be achieved.