RUSSIAN WORLD The Russian Army, Guilt and Atonement

Between the protests and the flight, resignation seems to prevail in Russia. The Russians are afraid of losing Putin, because they don’t know what awaits them next. The gray Kirill and the prophecy of Orthodox theologian Georgy Kočetkov: “May each of us learn to live in Christ, so as not to be ashamed of our faith and our life… We must seek the path of service to God and neighbor ; even if we have an enemy in front of us, we must learn to love enemies”.

After ten days of mobilization, an apocalyptic sense of self-destruction spreads in Russia, with mixed feelings of panic and resignation that turn this entire year of war into a huge abyss for society and consciences from which nobody knows how to get out. In addition to the endless queues of fugitives, whose number already exceeds that of the soldiers at the front (there is talk of more than 250,000 emigrants), spontaneous and disorganized protests have taken place in many cities, with more than a thousand barracks damaged by Molotov cocktails. and more than two thousand people arrested for sedition and resisting the draft.

The most angry and violent demonstrations occurred in Dagestan, the Caucasian republic that is located in the south of the Russian Federation and the most affected by the losses of combatants in Ukraine. The policemen could not disperse the crowd in Makhačkala square even with shots in the air, and more resistance is expected in the area and in other peripheral provinces of the empire that until now had sacrificed for everyone. However, in most regions there were no major rebellions and people lined up with their heads bowed, perhaps carrying bags loaded with bottles of vodka, the only real weapon of Russian resistance to the blows of fate.

Between protest and flight, resignation seems to predominate now, which has always been a distinctive trait of the Russian people, and particularly evident in these months of warlike exaltation that people have welcomed as a fatal consequence of their own historical guilt and their own nature irreducible to universal norms. Those who oppose it are above all women, deprived of the support of children and husbands, and who have always been the “critical conscience” of the Russian people, while the male population finds no arguments to escape the violence of the State. The limited critical mass of dissidents, like Navalnyi, have long since been reduced to silence, locked up in lagers or exiled; local protests, on the other hand, are easy to control in the peripheries of the empire according to the always valid principle of “divide and rule”, unavoidable in such a vast territory.

A true backlash, many analysts say, can only occur if there is a defeat on the battlefield, when it becomes clear that the war has not fulfilled the regime’s dreams of grandeur and has left the country in international isolation and economic and social stagnation. The classic example is February (actually March 8) 1917, the first revolution in Petrograd, when the few soldiers left to defend the institutions decided to hand over the countryside to the women who were protesting the lack of bread, abandoning the Tsar to his fate on the front lines of the First World War with the armies destined to succumb to the Germans. It was the end of the tsarist empire, although the inability to find an alternative ended up handing over the country to the soviets of Lenin and Trotsky.

For now, the situation in Russia is not so serious economically, since Western sanctions will be felt over time with a progressive burden. But there is still no lack of bread or vodka on Russian tables, although it is likely that this will be sold out by the end of the year. The grotesque proclamation of “victory” by the annexation of four small Ukrainian regions is certainly not enough to comfort the disheartened spirits, trying tirelessly to reproduce the enthusiasm for the recovery of Crimea in 2014. If the Sevastopol peninsula, a place A summer classic, it could ignite easy enthusiasms, the Don and its environs are not so satisfying, and very few Russians can identify them on a map.

The submission of the Russians to Putin, moreover, is characterized by the anonymity of the ruling class, a very Soviet heritage of the generation to which the current “pseudo-tsar” of the Kremlin belongs. Putin is not a true “strong man”, he is not a charismatic leader and he does not tend to exalt the cult of personality in the manner of Stalin. He came to the throne (it would seem) a hundred years ago, no one knows whether in a democracy or an autocracy, and he holds the Soviet patent for the only professional organization in power (the KGB); he is a mediocre man culturally and even religiously, despite expressions of allegiance to the Orthodox Church. The consensus he enjoys is not towards himself, but towards the system with which he identifies in his gray tones, and time and physical weaknesses bring him closer to characters like Brežnev or Černenko, or to the clumsiness of czars mediocre like Nicholas I or Alexander III, rather than Ivan the Terrible or Lenin. The perpetuation of Putin in government is the guarantee of the only true quality of power that interests ordinary people: stability, the exclusion of internal conflicts, the certainty of continuity that avoids revolts and coups, the uniformity of the political landscape. , in analogy with the geographical of the unlimited Russian lands.

The Russians are afraid of losing Putin because they don’t know what to expect next. Certainly nothing good, knowing what excesses the Russian people are capable of in one way or another. Americans are childish, Europeans are decadent, Asians are treacherous; we Russians are good and kind, if they let us live in peace. That is what the mass of the population thinks. After the death of Stalin came the convulsive stage of the internal struggles in the Politburo, with the group of Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich who tried to eliminate Khruščev. He won by putting everyone in jail or retiring them, and weathered ten turbulent years, the “Khruscevian spring,” which then led to the long Brezhnev stagnation. These are the atmospheric times of the very short spring and the very long winter that are reflected in the Russian society and soul: it is useless to seek change, we only wallow in the mud of the thaw.

The religious aspect of these feelings of passivity and skepticism is also well represented by the gray tones of the ecclesiastical hierarchies. Starting with Patriarch Kirill, a man who has also been in power for a long time and is certainly not an example of sanctity recognized by popular devotion. Despite being a much more established and popular figure than Putin, with a certain ability to educate the masses in the great values ​​of religion, Kirill is part of a distant and anonymous elite, unlike the starets who welcome the faithful in search of enlightenment at the end of pilgrimages to the great monasteries. The rhetoric of the “crusades” is not really based on convictions of faith, on the need to redeem the world from immorality and secular degradation. What actually prevails is the feeling of guilt and the need for one’s own redemption.

One of the “alternative” priests since the times of anti-Soviet religious dissent, the 72-year-old theologian Georgy Kočetkov, spoke at a religious holiday in 2019 inviting all Russians to repentance: “We are not truly aware of our faults, of our duplicity and laziness, of pride and resentment, of the lack of lucidity that often turns into drunkenness, of our hope in nothing… none of us deny that the consequences of totalitarianism are terrible, but it is easy for us turn your back on the past and not see the faults of the present”. Father Georgij’s response is forceful: “We have chosen all this, we have let it happen, and the time has come to repent.”

Among the faults for which it is necessary to apologize, Kočetkov recalls the inveterate racism and anti-Semitism, which “sees everywhere the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy against us”, and the presumption of the superiority of the Russian people over all others, “including Ukrainians and Belarusians, who are not granted the dignity of being autonomous peoples, and appropriating what we want to refer to the Russian world in any other nation”. The priest considers that in all this an inveterate “Soviet heritage” prevails that contaminates any other expression of the national consciousness, and that it is high time to look for “a third way”, a rediscovery of faith in Christ and not in the greatness of Holy Russia: “that each of us learn to live in Christ, so as not to be ashamed of our faith and our life… when panic spreads we try to hide behind the stove, but that is not Christian behavior. We must seek the path of service to God and our neighbor; Even if we have an enemy in front of us, we must learn to love our enemies”.

As Father Georgij goes on to say on his blog, “Russians are all those who love the beauty of Russia and are willing to share responsibility for our history, our present and our future, for the whole world…the real Russians are those who see in their neighbor a Russian man to love, to help walk together along the paths of life”.

Putin’s mobilization is based on the assumption that “around us there are only enemies who want to destroy our country.” This could be an opportunity to live the path of conversion proposed by Father Kočetkov: around us there are only enemies to love, with whom to build another future together.

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