RUSSIAN WORLD Post-Soviet Muscovy at the end of the world

The great refrain of Putin’s propaganda, expressed in an increasingly radical and apocalyptic way, is similar to the recent statements by the Iranian ayatollahs in the face of accusations of repression of women and the people: “We have our culture and our values, and no one can impose another model of life on us.”

Meduza’s “Signal” column collects a tasty anecdote from 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini sent a letter in his own handwriting to Soviet Secretary Gorbachev, the only written document he addressed to a foreign leader. The Iranian leader expressed his concern that the collapse of the ideological influence of communism, caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall, could disintegrate the Eastern bloc that opposed the moral decadence of the West. Khomeini assured Gorbachev that this value gap could be filled by Islam through a strong relationship between Iran and the Soviet Union, and recommended reading the medieval philosopher Abu Ali ibn Sinna (Avicenna) in order to convert to the Muslim religion. The late Soviet leader thanked him for the advice, but he was careful not to follow it.

Thirty years after the end of the USSR, on the centenary of its foundation (December 30, 1922), the Khomeinist shadow once again looms over the future of Russia, at war to defend traditional values ​​against the world dominated by evildoers. Anglo-Saxons. This is not a mass conversion to Shiite Islam, although the Chechen Kadyrov’s proclamations about Russian “jihad” in Ukraine seem to lend a Mohammedan dignity to Putin’s policy of aggression. The question is precisely the restoration of the typically Soviet ideological attitude, which divides the world into factions in order to make sense of its own existence.

One of Putin’s main advisers, the secretary of the Security Council Nikolaj Patrušev, gave a long interview to the Argumenty i Fakty magazine, in which he takes up the theses repeatedly put forward by the head of the Kremlin -and by the patriarch Kirill- about the metaphysical struggle in which Russia is called to sacrifice itself for the good of the whole world. In his opinion “in the West there is no place in the world for our country, a huge crowd of powerful people from all over the world is hostile to Russia because we have great resources, an unlimited territory and intelligent and self-sufficient men who love their country.” country, its traditions and its history”. The powerful Russophobes identify themselves with the “corporations”, which intend to “impose a system of global exploitation”, subjecting the new “third world” to the domination of the “golden billions” of the big western economies.

The project that Patrushev denounces inevitably involves weakening Russia, which must “be dismembered, erasing the Russian language and the Russian world.” To achieve this, even “disintegrative technologies” are used, capable of breaking the internal unity of any adversary in order to “divide it into small countries, and for that reason Russia must once again be just Muscovy”. The term recalls the time when Moscow claimed kyiv’s heritage as the “mother of all Russian cities”, since the ancient capital had been destroyed by the Tatar invasion.From the 15th century grand dukes, who prospered through trade under the protection of the Mongols, Muscovy was consolidated with the figures of the first tsars and patriarchs, distinguishing itself from western “Ruthenia”, the current Ukraine of the Russians, subject to Poland and papist influence.

That is why even today, explains Putin’s secretary and possible successor, “this whole story with Ukraine was thought up in Washington to divide the greatness of the unique Russian people. Millions of people have been forbidden to speak their mother tongue, it forces them to forget their roots.” The war in Ukraine is not, therefore, a conflict between Moscow and kyiv, but rather an aggression by NATO and all Western forces against Russia, using the Ukrainians as a “sacrificable human arsenal”. This is the great refrain that Putin’s propaganda repeats, expressed in an increasingly radical and apocalyptic way, and very similar to the recent declarations of the Iranian ayatollahs before the accusations of repression of women and the people: “We have our culture and our values, and no one can impose another model of life on us”.

Even those who interview Patrushev react with apprehension: “You present us with a very bleak picture, as if the end of humanity is just around the corner.” But the ideologue assures that “the potential of the human race has not yet been exhausted.” Russia wants to propose a “different culture in the use of resources, which knows how to conserve and protect natural and intangible treasures.” This requires financial independence and technological sovereignty, “and for this reason the cult of scientists, engineers and workers must be revived.” Young people must learn to “be inspired by the ideals of creative work for the good of the Fatherland, and not waste time playing electronic games in the offices of Western companies.” Taking up characteristic expressions of the Orthodox patriarch, the secretary assures that “the Russian man is not capable of hating, his nature is made to unite; Only Westerners are filled with hatred against their adversaries, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Russia.”

The man of today’s Muscovy then once again assumes the characteristics of life in the Soviet Union: solidarity and rejection of consumerism, the involvement of all in the construction of a perfect society, the communist utopia lived as a moral elevation and example. for the whole world, up to the great policy of “friendship between peoples”. Many Kremlin initiatives in the year of the “war revival” 2022 are grotesquely reminiscent of the attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere of Soviet times, such as the restoration of the university course on “Fundamentals of Russian Statism”, which is in fact a reissue of that other about “Scientific Communism”. In all schools these principles are deepened in small doses in the “Conversations about important things”, as in their day the lessons of atheism were mandatory, a true patriotic religion now reconverted to Orthodoxy .

It is about a post-communist and post-communist Soviet mentality, where what matters is Russia’s role as world leader, its geopolitical rather than economic-ideological legacy. The consensus of this nostalgic line is based on the opinion shared by half of the Russian population -who grew up in Soviet times-, as shown by several recent surveys. A 2020 Levada center poll showed that 75% of Russians believe the Soviet era was “the best period in our country’s history”, though less than a third expressed a desire to restore the previous regime. Putin’s radicalism, in its orthodox-sovereignty and militant variant, is the attempt to combine nostalgia for the past with fears of the present. It is above all men, the elderly and the people of the villages who adhere to the theses of the regime, but often the young also allow themselves to be fascinated by the discourse that “before we were better off” and see nothing that attracts them in the future.

Nostalgia is the refuge produced by resentment, and this is true not only for Russia but for many segments of the population in all countries of the contemporary world. In this way, the repressions, genocides, wars and tragedies of the past are forgotten, and the identity crisis is resolved in the face of increasingly destabilizing social and technological processes, to take refuge in an imaginary world that can be controlled, colorful and mythological. It’s not a world you can really believe in, but rather a facade you can hide behind; and probably the first who do not believe in the idealization of post-Soviet Russia are Putin and Patrushev.

As one of Russia’s most astute writers, Dmitrij Bykov, observes in Business online, “The archaic world is making a desperate attempt to cling to life, according to Tyutchev’s formula: bathed in blood, we fight with the dead, who have risen to celebrate a new funeral.” The first half of the 21st century will then be a “long divorce from the practices of the past, from radical and nostalgic governments, and there will be a long war in different dimensions.” Finally, a “biological revolution” must ensue. a complete refoundation of Russia, says Bykov, a “new revelation of the incarnate Christ”. On the other hand, although the Russians have always liked to express themselves with eschatological categories, it cannot be forgotten that the Gospel itself reminds us that “it is necessary to let all these things happen, but the end is not yet” (Mt 24:6).

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