The Russian World

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.

If dialogue between the Churches was a way out of the tensions of the world wars of the 20th century, today’s new conflicts show that the efforts of that great work could not eliminate the reasons for divisions, which very often closely linked to historical-political events rather than spiritual issues, as was the case in the most ancient schisms.

On the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, just past according to the Orthodox calendar, the Russian rite of immersion in the water of the kupel, through an opening in the frozen ice in the form of the Cross: if one survives the triple immersion in the water of icy death, then one can truly hope for new life.

The great tune of Putin's propaganda, expressed in an increasingly radical and apocalyptic terms, echoes the latest statements by Iranian ayatollahs against charges of oppression of women and people: “We have our culture and our values, and no one can impose another way of life on us.”

In the thirty-year post-Soviet period, Christmas had split into two, accepting 25 December of the Gregorian calendar, without conflict with 7 January of the Julian calendar of the Orthodox Church. With the war, Christians return to quarelling over the dates of the liturgical calendar, evoking how the first schism in the 2nd century was overcome thanks to Irenaeus, a saint from Asia who went to preach in Gaul, inaugurating the meeting of souls and the great currents of Christian spirituality.