A leading Russian specialist in the history of philosophy, Mikhail Mayatsky, who has lived and taught in Switzerland for more than thirty years, has published a collection of essays by various authors entitled “Facing Catastrophe” and believes that the Russian war in Ukraine has definitively closed the period of “post-Soviet culture”. Putin’s Russia, in his opinion, has “eliminated philosophy”, replacing it with a pseudoscientific patriotic ideology based on an arbitrary reading of Russian and world history. Referring to the reflections of French philosophers such as Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze, Mayatsky defines the conditions in which Russia has been living for almost three years as “the apotheosis of the unpredictable, of chance and of non-causality”, which destroys all potential and all perspectives for the future.
On the other hand, one cannot speak of a true “post-Soviet philosophy”, considering that the first twenty years after the fall of the USSR were devoted above all to the rediscovery of the cultural heritage devastated and practically erased in the twentieth century, especially that of Slavophil thought that was defeated by the Bolshevik revolution. At the beginning of the nineties, collections and studies such as The Russian idea by Mikhail Maslin, who later became the author of the History of Russian Philosophy The Lomonosov University of Moscow adopted this philosophy in 2008. Many others have published textbooks and studies on the history of philosophy for universities, with the aim of achieving a real “reconversion of philosophy”, moving from the compulsory studies of the Soviet era, Marxism-Leninism and atheism, to religious history and philosophy or even theology. Many institutes of ecclesiastical studies have also been born, the most authoritative of which is undoubtedly the Orthodox St. Tikhon’s Institute in Moscow, and even the Catholics opened the St. Thomas Institute in the capital in 1991, which is currently run by the Jesuit fathers.
Over the past ten years, Great Russian nationalism has progressively dismantled all attempts to recover the multiform spirit of Russian culture of the centuries before the “Soviet yoke”, adopting positions similar to the “Pan-Slavist” ones that had exasperated the debate between Slavophiles and Westerners in the 19th century. It readopted positions that considered the idea or the “Russian world” as the fulfillment of the destinies of history – such as those of the famous essay Russia and Europe Nikolai Danilevski’s 1869 work – the so-called “complete catechism of Slavophilism” – brought philosophy back to the focus of the struggle against the West that humiliated Russia. A sentiment that at that time derived from the ruinous defeat in the Crimean War and that now revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Danilevski proposed the “biological” investigation of the Russian type as the definitive, original and “pacified” human type, after the succession of ten historical types after the Romano-Germanic one, already fossilized and destined to be recast in the Russian cultural domain.
A more recent point of reference is the existentialist thinker Ivan Ilyin, considered “Putin’s favourite philosopher”, expelled from the USSR in 1922 and died in 1954, a sympathiser of Nazism as the only salvation for Soviet Communism. A new School of Political Philosophy bearing his name has now been opened at the most prestigious university in Moscow, the Higher School of Economics, entrusted to the direction of one of the main ideologues of Russian Eurasian and universal sovereignty, the popular Alexander Dugin. In reality, Ilyin had concentrated on the questions of man and the renewal of society, on a philosophy of very intense spiritual experience, to the point that in 1918, while still in Russia, he wrote his doctoral thesis on Hegel’s philosophy as a doctrine on the concreteness of God and man, one of the best Russian investigations of philosophical criticism. He lived in Berlin during the years of Hitler’s rise, but then retired to Switzerland to finally write, in 1953, the Axioms of religious experiencebased on the key concept of “evidence” understood in a very broad, figurative and metaphorical sense: it proposed the condition of the human soul as opposed to the blindness of superficial visibility, the capacity for multiform contemplation and deep sensitivity, to find the direction to follow after all the maelstrom.
Even these philosophers, even though they are considered to be the inspirations of militant Russia, are not capable of making us truly reflect on the meaning of the tragedies that are taking place. Nothing can really justify Russia’s world war, starting with Ukraine and all the territories of its lost empire, and ideological claims have no real roots even in the most extreme Russian philosophy of the ancient and recent past. The events of the last two years have no adequate definition, there is no “Eurasianism” or “sovereignty” that would explain the semantic meaning of the destruction, and the “Russian world” that is proclaimed is an empty world, conceptually even before it is socially, politically, militarily or economically.
Maiatsky also refers to a recently published American collection of essays, Experts’ Scenarios on Russia’s Futurewhich attempts to identify the future effects of the ongoing war; but here it becomes clear to what extent war trivializes and empties human attitudes and reactions of meaning, making it impossible to assess the true scope of conflicts, especially when they multiply and overlap. Who is the aggressor and who is the attacked is obvious, but it becomes insignificant in the ideological cauldron of clichés: “we are one people”, “Ukraine does not exist”, “we are not fighting against the Ukrainians, but against American imperialism” and other similar expressions about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians or the territorial integrity of Armenia or any other case. Russia has inaugurated the “era of infantilism”, according to the philosopher, demonstrating that it is not capable of abiding by the rules of international politics, but is only interested in bending them according to its own interests, seeking justifications that are completely unfounded.
What is happening is not only irreparable, but, as Hannah Arendt said, “something has happened that cannot be punished or forgiven.” The death of tens of thousands of peaceful Ukrainians, including hundreds of children, is an irreparable fact, not to mention the psychological trauma of millions of children and adults on all sides: morality does not take sides, it simply fades away into nothingness. There is no “Russian world,” there is only the triumph of resentment, sadism, indifference and frustration: Mayatsky proposes writing on Putin’s grave, when he dies, the words “He put an end to the Russian project.”
On the other hand, a very common expression among Russians who have emigrated to so many countries is “we are dead”, preemptively giving themselves over to the grave or dreaming of a future rebirth. The very concept of “emigration” has changed after February 2022, with an artificial division between those who managed to escape because they had the chance, those who could not, and those who, even though they could, did not leave. Those outside hope that Putin’s regime will collapse as soon as possible, those inside try to survive and hope that everything does not collapse on top of them, and it is impossible to separate the camps of those who are against or for the war; the feeling of losing one’s personal, family, and even national and ethnic reality prevails, on both sides of all the barricades. The exodus of these two years has created a new demographic, not to say anthropological, condition, devoid of cultural, religious, geographical and political references, and this indeterminacy does not concern only Russians and Ukrainians, considering the reciprocal frequentation and the intermingling of the artificial and computer world in which we all live.
We are all balancing on the borders of history, we feel the tremor of the thin sheet that prevents us from moving, for fear of losing spiritual integrity, even before territorial integrity. The war does not stop, on the contrary, it seems to stretch on to infinity; peace conferences and invitations to negotiations seem like skirmishes devoid of content because of the necessary pauses for the torrid heat and the replenishment of weapons, to resume the offensives in the autumn before the new winter interruption. There is tiredness and habituation at the same time, there is no longer any point in watching the news, which only increases anger, dullness and depression. There is no solution, there can only be resurrection, a human rebirth after the shameful reduction of religious revival to the service of the most inhuman politics.
One of the few philosophers who knew how to preserve the legacy of Russian religious thought during the Soviet decades, Alexei Losev, in 1982, shortly before his death, wrote an essay on the Renaissance aestheticswhere he took up the intuitions of the great theologian Pavel Florensky, who died in a concentration camp in 1937. Between the “submission to God” of the Middle Ages and the “struggle against God” of the new times, two positions that he defines as “theological biopolitics”, there remains only true humanism, which believes in a God who wants to experience humanity in order to make it reborn from all destruction, through the purification of repentance and the free choice of one’s own destiny.
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