The Russian World

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".

Tensions in the post-Soviet space have revived a concept that is more than a simplification about language and space. Its universal claim is rooted in Kievan Rus' and is embodied in Moscow's current ambition to “see far”. However, at present, it is confronted more and more by the reactions of “fraternal” peoples.