The Russian World

The patriarch has tried to distance himself recently from the country’s political leaders, stressing his superiority in the relationship between Russia’s political and clerical power. At least two issues underscore a gap between Church and State, namely the response to the demographic crisis with monks criticised for being celibate, and the ban on organised prayers in private homes.

If various terms are used to describe the new generations, Russians today are increasingly seeing the ‘Putin generation’ emerge. One wonders what fate is in store, although in reality it is difficult to discern any real social and ideological convergence. They are rather reminiscent of the ‘silent ones’ of the Second World War years.

Proposals and ideas about ending the war are multiplying, but for Putin, any negotiations with Trump would only be an intermediate stage in an ongoing process. For Ukraine the situation is becoming increasingly grim, not only due to the uncertainties of Western aid but also to the decreasing participation of Ukrainians in the war effort.

Author Viktor Erofeev, from exile in Berlin since 2022, publishes a novel entitled Velikij Gopnik, illustrating how Putinism emerged from Russian subconscious and the backyards of Leningrad to reach levels of extremism towards its very soul, incapable of ‘accepting a normal life’.

It is not at all clear whether "homeland" means the same thing for Trump's followers or Putin's subjects, whether it indicates the nativism of "blood and soil" or rather the "spiritual" union of those who have a shared vision of state, region, or the whole world. For now, the newly elected president of the United States has promised a solution to the Ukraine war by 20 January, the day of his inauguration (coincidentally the Orthodox feast of the Baptism of the Lord).

Nostalgia for the Soviet simplification of the world, even shared by the opposition, is pervasive while ‘making America great again’ resonates in the Caucasus or Siberia as much as the infantilized world of Massachusetts.

The war in Ukraine is forcing the peoples of these countries to make a clear choice, against their own conscience. Moldovans want a place in the world, not just in the "Russian world", to which they already belong. Even more heart-wrenching is the choice Georgians have to make this weekend, deciding their country’s future in addition to picking their representatives in parliament.

In 1846 Nicholas I went privately to Rome to see Pope Gregory XVI to beg him not to give in to the liberal and republican temptations that were also taking hold in the Holy City. And the desire to ‘defend the values’ of Christian Europe led him to the Crimean War. Today, on the contrary, Pope Francis with the ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ mission of Card. Zuppi to Moscow sees the world's crisis in the light of the Gospel.

Russian economists insist on the prevalence of ‘locality’: a marketing strategy common to all sovereignisms, but one that works in a very limited way in Russia, being a country that is not exactly advantaged in its agricultural and industrial production capacities. And which - from gastronomy to so many aspects of social development - has historically always assimilated elements from abroad.

Putin is but the latest in a line of varjagi in Russian history, who tried to ‘bring civilisation’ to the lands across the border and around the world. Today, annexation is calculated not so much in square kilometres, but in sums of ‘traditional values’ such as the socialist revolution or the tsarist defence of autocracies might have been in the past.

The Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow’s main university held a forum on current events in Russia where speakers expressed positions that were not obvious and unambiguous. Without openly criticising the country’s power structure, philosophers show that they do not want to give up on the true dimension of the Russian soul, that of openness to all variants of the spirit.

Today, Orthodoxy in Russia is increasingly characterised as a separate religion, which retains the formal aspect of Slavic-Eastern rite Christianity, while at the same time increasingly extending to other ‘patriotic’ confessions, to the point of also associating Islam and Buddhism in the single expression of the trinitarian homeland.