The Russian World

It was the members of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia who gave rise to it with the call to "go to the people" after the abolition of serfdom. But today the dictatorship of the "simple man" is destroying Russia even more than the tormented Ukraine, much more than militant Soviet atheism has done in seventy years.

Russian spirituality recognises a category of saints known as strastoterptsy, 'those who suffered the passion', often persecuted for political reasons, who were able to live through their ordeal by bearing witness to a deep faith. Like the Orthodox priests who today are willing to pay a price to invoke an end to the aggression of Ukraine: "I am not dead and I have not flown to Mars, I am not abandoning the priesthood, but I cannot pray for war".

In an 1864 novel by Dostoevsky, a short imperial officer sits in the basement of his home, angry at the whole world and eager for revenge. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, unlike the war litany of the priest, Natasha “prayed to God to forgive them all, and her too”. These are the two faces that show how Russian culture, today a victim of propaganda and ideology, can help to truly understand what is happening in this war.

In the fog of mistrust and hostility that has long imobilized relations between Catholics and Orthodox in Russia, the charge of proselytism has been progressively "neutralised". However, another accusation remained, far more incisive and historically well-founded in its various interpretations: that of Uniatism in Ukraine. The history of a Church since 1596 reluctant to exalt the Moscow "third Rome".

Historical revisionism and appeals to popular conscience can no longer justify one system against another, one country against another, one ideology against another. Whatever the outcome of the war will be, it will be a different world for everyone and not only for Russia and Ukraine.

The grotesque and tragic Russia described by Vladimir Sorokin in his 2006 novel “Day of the Oprichnik” unravels the tormented soul of a country that is always its own first enemy, and for this it needs to feel at war with all the others. It almost seems that the political and religious leaders of present-day Russia feel the duty to turn the nightmares of literature into facts.

From the "old-believers" to the samizdat, dissent has always been a feature of Russian society. Despite the heavy censorship and repression exercised by Putin in recent years, it is once again emerging "from under the rocks", according to Solzhenitsyn's famous expression.

What will remain of Putin’s regime after this war no longer matters that much. It has achieved its goal, which was not Kyiv’s conquest, but the disintegration of the hated world order called “globalisation”. Ukraine also marks a point of no return for Orthodoxy, which will now be tested by the military imposition of Putin's dogma.

The conflict between Moscow and Kiev reignites every century in a 'family fight', as the young Nikolai Gogol described it in the extraordinary novella 'Taras Bulba', coming from the Ukrainian countryside and taken under the protective wing of the great imperial poets in St Petersburg. The dream of Christians and all men of good will is that it is the pacifying embrace between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill will avert conflict.

The defection of Alexandrian priests to the Russian patriarchate seems unstoppable. The real “canonical war” within Orthodoxy is being played out today in Africa where Moscow's interests are as much spiritual as they are material, pastoral, political, liturgical and military.

In the Ukraine battleground, the great Asian empire wins again. No one has ever equalled it, neither the British with their Commonwealth, nor the Americans who tried to “export democracy” last century. However, a break with the West would leave Russia all alone vis-à-vis China. And the two Asian empires will have to show their cards.

Russia is home to more than 200 nationalities, but expresses a culture dominated by a single people, the Russian, which in Asia presents itself as European and in Europe repeats the battle cry of the Asian peoples. Russia's own claims to "security guarantees" in negotiations with the West to prevent the Ukrainian conflict from escalating contain all the suggestions of a nation that perceives itself as "intercontinental".