RUSSIAN WORLD Russia, the stepmother motherland

In a reckless reversal of fronts, the Soviet vanguard of world feminism today is transformed into the celebration of the “heroic mothers”, awarded in the Kremlin by Putin. The true victim of war is precisely the myth of the mother, of the Russian woman who cares for the whole family and the whole town, assuming the suffering and humiliation, like Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona, the soul of the entire village of the persecuted

The celebrations of March 8 for Women’s Day are felt in a very special way in the Russian and ex-Soviet world, since the date was solemnized and almost claimed as exclusive by the Russians since the times of the revolution. Indeed, it was the women of Petrograd -the capital whose name had been changed to remove the German root- who on March 8, 1917 rebelled against the authorities to ask for bread, because the war regime had reduced to starvation to the population. Tsar Nicholas II had moved to the front, where he had concentrated all his armies in a vain attempt to defeat the German adversary, and only the cadets remained to defend the palaces of power, devastated by the feminine impetus.

Thus began the “February revolution”, since the date still corresponded to February 25 in the variant of the Julian calendar, later transformed into March 8 by the Bolsheviks after the “October revolution” of November 7. The ambiguity of the dates does not cloud the pride of the claim, although the Americans have tried to confuse the ideas, with the characteristic “evil” that to this day the Russians emphatically denounce, attributing a series of events to Women’s Day before and after, from the uprising of the suffragettes to other public demonstrations that the feminist movement later launched. In a reckless reversal of fronts, the Soviet vanguard of world feminism is now transformed into the celebration of the “heroic mothers” awarded by Putin in the Kremlin, both for the dignity of the elderly mothers who receive their fallen children in Ukraine defending the homeland as well as the great contribution of young women willing to engender numerous children, destined in turn to sacrifice themselves in future wars to preserve “traditional values”, which are also already the exclusive property of mother Russia.

Maternity in relation to the people is, in fact, the underlying reason for the conflict with the Ukraine, where the natural mother of all Russian cities, the Kiev of ancient Rus’, and the stepmother “of all subsequent Russias” “, the Moscow of the renaissance after the Tatars. It is no coincidence that in the days after the celebration of March 8, Putin decided to launch hypersonic bombs precisely against Kiev, so as not to limit himself to the grueling “Bakhmut challenge”, the small village considered crucial to the fate of the war and which everyone will forget about as soon as its total destruction ends. Actually the real battle in Bakhmut is between the Wagner mercenaries and the high command of the Russian defense ministry, to decide who really rules in Russia. The big target remains the renegade mother that the Tatars razed to the ground in 1240, thus allowing Moscow to seize the entire family, precisely thanks to their alliance and trade with the Mongol Khans. And the current heir, the “Great Khan” Xi Jinping, seems to be on the verge of finally realizing the dream of his ancestor Genghis Khan (“Khan of the Oceans”): for Asia to dominate the entire world.

For Moscow Russia, kyiv should never have occupied a place in history again, as it did only four centuries after the Tatar-Mongol invasion. It is no coincidence that the controversy between the Russians and the Ukrainians refers precisely to the link with the original root, which according to the former would have been preserved thanks to the renaissance that the Muscovites staged after the foreign invasions, while the latter affirm that the fusion of the Russians with the Tatars has produced a monstrous ethnic-political miscegenation. “Scratch the Russian and you will find the Tartar”, Napoleon also said when he observed the fire in Moscow, which forced him to return to Paris with his tail between his legs. Indeed, the tsar who definitively defeated the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible, did not actually exterminate his adversaries, but integrated them into the Russian administration and army, leaving a very significant presence in the territorial composition.

Even today in the Russian Federation there are two republics of Tatar ethnicity, Tatarstan, whose capital is Kazan (the city where the Virgin had inspired Ivan’s victory) and Bashkortostan, whose capital is Ufa, two regions with strong independence tendencies although not very friendly among themselves. yes, as was the case with the loosely amalgamated Mongolian tribes of the Golden Horde times. There are scattered Tatar presences in many other local realities of Russia, and they are a thorn in the side of the “holy Crimea” that was reconquered in 2014 , where the most irreducible khanate had its headquarters for centuries, despite the wars, deportations and persecutions that have not managed to eliminate its traces and claims. Beyond the numerous ethnic groups in the Federation, in the Caucasus, in North Karelia and in the entire Asian part, that of the Tatars could once again represent the real danger for the dissolution of Russia.

On the other hand, the Ukrainians can hardly claim “East Slavic purity”, although many of their territories remained safe from the ravages of the Mongols thanks to the protection of Lithuania and Poland. The Ukrainian identity itself became strongly established from the 17th century onwards with the Cossacks, as much the heirs of the Asian nomads as they were of the Turkish merchants and wandering warriors of the Polish kingdom. The descent of the Cossacks is also disputed by the two souls of Moscow and kyiv; the revolt against the kings of Vilna and Krakow led a large part of the nomadic fighters to seek the protection of the Russian tsar, who sent them to the most remote regions, probably to annex the Asian lands to Russia, giving rise to an infinite series of revolts -from Steñka Razin to Yemelián Pugachev- that have profoundly marked Russian history from the 18th century to the present day. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mighty Wagner company, after all, brings to mind the exploits of Cossack mercenaries, and Putin’s “cook” seems to rise to the glory of the hetman who rebels against all powers to save all. the village.

There is no doubt that the Kiev renaissance then marked a massive “invasion of the West” in the Russian world, not only in a military sense but more properly a cultural and ideological one; even more so, even religious and theological. The disputed capital that the Russians recaptured in 1682 was the seat of the prestigious Academy of Metropolitan Petro Mogila, who introduced Jesuit scholasticism to give systematic content to the Orthodox tradition. The Academy became the “mother of all Russian schools”, including the University of Moscow, founded in 1752 by the genius of Mikhail Lomonosov, a Russian Leonardo and Galileo who had studied at the Kiev Academy.

As the Russian historian and political scientist Sergey Medvedev explains, “for Russia, the year of war has meant the death of the founding myths” of Russian identity, and the bombing of Kiev is the most paradoxical image of this: destroying Rus’ to save Russia. “Great Russian culture” collapses in the most grotesque of human catastrophes, to the point that they are ashamed to read Pushkin and Dostoevsky. But the pride of the “second army in the world” also collapses, a pitiful jumble of bandits, sadistic rapists and mobiki, those mobilized without art or part who are relentlessly massacred as cannon fodder to conquer a few kilometers of the devastated Donbass, the old land of the Cossacks The myth of “revolutionary and rebellious Russia” disappears in a desolating spectacle of terrified submission, which accepts death as its destiny with a much deeper resignation and cowardice than in Stalin’s time.

And, above all, the victim of war is precisely the myth of the mother, of the Russian woman who cares for the whole family and the whole town, assuming the suffering and humiliation, like Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona, the soul of all the village of the persecuted The myth of the mother, on the other hand, is even more original than the whole theory of “traditional moral and spiritual values” and constitutes even its oldest roots. The Varangian prince Oleg the Wise called Kiev the “mother of all Russian cities” as early as 862, a century before Vladimir the Great’s Christian baptism, having defeated his relatives Askold and Dir, who had seized the “Kyj pass”, the Varangian merchant who built the bridge over the Dnieper and thus gave a reason for being to a state scattered in a boundless territory. Thus the Frontier was born, the “u-krayna” around the river, a maternal bosom for those that the Varangians called the gard (gorod in Slavonic, the cities) in the extension to which they had given the name of Gardariki, the “land of the cities.” Later the Byzantines substituted that name for the of Rus’, whose inhabitants were feared like the red-haired Rhos barbarians.

Oleg the Wise referred the honor of the mother to the pagan myth of “Mother Moist Earth”, the goddess Mokoš who was a synthesis of the Scandinavian religion with the Iranian and the Turanian, traditions that later mixed with Christianity in what always it has been called dvoeverie, the pagan and Christian “double faith” of the Russians. Russian icons of Mary compulsorily represent the Mother of God embracing the Child, to the point that the Russians considered one of the greatest examples of Western heresy and degradation to be Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, who instead of hiding in the gaze the Son, looks into the viewer’s eyes, imposing her overflowing femininity. The masterpiece of the Renaissance is preserved in Dresden, the German city that has been fatal for the Russians, where Putin himself served as a KGB officer and witnessed the collapse of the Soviet empire live. Perhaps already then, scandalized by the audacity of the Western woman, the new tsar thought that his destiny was to recover lost mother Russia.

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