RUSSIAN WORLD The inevitability of war

Of all the sovereigns in the thousand-year-old history of Russia, among the princes of kyiv, the tsars and emperors of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, party secretaries and federation presidents, the only ones who did not go to war are those who lasted less than twenty years. For everyone else, the approach of a possible deadline must have awakened deep-seated instincts in the Russian soul, those related to the impending Apocalypse: if my power ends, all history will end.

Even the most worldly and frivolous among the great Russians throughout the centuries, Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, after more than 15 years of court balls and unbridled luxury (she had ascended the throne in 1741), when he realized the problem that was coming, he embarked on the anti-Prussian adventure, after having signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1757, with the accession to the Franco-Austrian league against Frederick II the Great (who for his part remained in power for more than forty years). The empress, who was often prey to mystical crises and longing for redemption, understood the war as a defense of Russia’s borders from the invading targets of the Prussians, which in her opinion should be demilitarized for the safety of Europe and the whole. the world world. In reality, the conflict expanded to become the “Seven Years’ War”, and has also been considered the real “First World War”, because it spread not only to Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, but even to the Indies and North America.

To put things in their place, another empress had to intervene, Catherine II the Great, a German who had discovered the universal vocation of Russia, and therefore invaded and subdued the Crimea of ​​the Tartars. Therefore, it cannot be stated that the presence at the top of female personalities increases the chances of a peaceful reign. Today’s Putin faithfully follows in the footsteps of the two most important empresses of the Russian 18th century.

Russia’s warlike bent has reappeared in our days unexpectedly, but certainly not unpredictably. The underlying question is still related to the geographical dimensions, rather than to the ferocity of the character of those that the Byzantines of the 9th century called “the Rhos”, barbarians with shiny hair, one of the possible explanations of the eponymy of the Eastern Slavs of the northern lands. Russia is too big not to constantly fear being invaded, and it mobilizes in every possible way to protect its own borders, her own u-krainas, the Eurasian controlled areas, land and sea, social and political, cultural and religious .

Approaching half a year of war in Ukraine, while we wonder if there is a way to end a conflict that is psychologically exhausting Europe and not only Europe (there is only one suggested solution: the surrender of the Ukrainians), we must realize that in reality there is a factor that we can no longer exclude from our lives, and that is precisely war.

Speaking to the Moscow Duma on July 7, Putin warned that “in Ukraine we haven’t even started to do things seriously,” and it’s not just the aggressive and depressive manias of an out-of-control leader. On the contrary, so far the Russian president seems to be the only one capable of somehow curbing the anxiety of the hawks in the Kremlin, who would like to pounce again on kyiv and Lviv, take Odessa and perhaps Moldova, starting with the shadowy adviser Nikolai Patrušev (the one who would govern the state if Putin died), or the former president and eternal dauphin Dmitry Medvedev, who due to despair over the failure of the conquest even held a gun to his head, although fortunately his hand was shaking from the excess of vodka that he had ingested.

The Russians and the Ukrainians have been at war with each other since the origins of Kievan Rus’, and they will continue to fight until the evening of doomsday, like the Arabs and the Israelis, the Armenians and the Azeris, the Libyans and the Georgians with each other. , as it happens in all the fracture zones of history. The point is that Europeans, Americans, “Westerns” (including the Japanese and Australians, who are the most “Eastern” peoples), all “civilized” men and veterans of world wars of the 20th century, in short, we had convinced ourselves that there would never again be war, that we had found the formula for eternal and universal peace.

It was not like that and we knew it very well. We ourselves have accumulated an impressive number of wars in all latitudes and on all continents, including the lands that border the Mediterranean, from the Balkans to the Middle East and North Africa. Illusion and hypocrisy prevented us from believing in the “third world war in pieces” that Pope Francis has been warning us about for almost a decade. What do they want someone who comes from Tierra del Fuego to understand? We are calm, we have money and democracy, nothing bad will ever happen to us. In any case, we must deal with environmental and ecological threats, with ethnic and moral discrimination, with refined and sacrosanct questions. Instead, the words of the greatest Russian commentator on War and Peace, Lev Tolstoy, resonate terribly current:

«War is not something pleasant, but the most abominable thing in life; it is necessary to understand it and not turn it into a game, accepting seriously and serenely this terrible necessity. That’s what it’s all about: discarding lies and making war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war becomes the favorite pastime of idle and superficial people… The condition of the soldier is the most honorable. But what is war, what is required to be successful in the military field, what are the customs of the military field? The purpose of war is to kill, the instruments of war are espionage, betrayal and instigation of betrayal, the ruin of the inhabitants, looting and robbery at their expense to supply the army; deceit and lies, defined as military cunning. The customs of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, corruption, drunkenness. And despite that, he is the upper class, respected by all. All the kings, except the emperor of China, wear military uniforms and the greatest reward is given to those who have killed the most people… They gather, as they will tomorrow, to kill each other, massacre, mutilate dozens of thousands of men and then hold services of thanksgiving for having killed many people (the number of which is also exaggerated) and proclaim victory, believing that the more people they have killed, the greater the merit. How God does up there to look at them and listen to them!” he yelled in a high-pitched, shrill voice. «Ah, my soul, in recent times living has become painful for me. I see that I begin to understand too many things. And it is not convenient for man to taste the fruits of the tree of good and evil… Well, but it will not be for long! », He added hopefully.

Before our eyes, the Kremlin has the entire world in check. What did we do wrong? Asks the editor of the Russian column “Ideas”, Maxim Trudolyubov. Were our convictions wrong, on the basis of which we thought we could build a world of peace? In 1945 the representatives of the capitalist and communist countries, of the East and the West, of the Jewish organizations and of the Christian Churches met, and together they created the United Nations Organization, a gigantic circle of solemn proclamations that today seems to be so forgotten that very few know how to spell their secretary’s surname correctly. The UN had to prevent, limit and quell all wars in the world, and we must conclude, at least at this stage, that it has failed miserably in its mission.

At the base of the great idea of ​​peace lie indisputable values ​​such as the absolute dignity of the human being, the superiority of international law and even reciprocal economic dependence. Now we return to discuss the principles that have always instigated the powerful to war: the affirmation of national and cultural identity, the defense of territorial and political interests, the rejection of economic dependence on international powers. Those enlightened principles that the philosopher Kant, at the time of the Russian empresses, tried to describe in the treatise “For Perpetual Peace”, says Trudolyubov, “today seem like elements of political satire on eternal rest”, in the cemeteries where they venerate the fallen Buryats or Chechens of the invasion of Ukraine, or in the ruins of Mariupol and other cities devastated by the Russian army.

The war will not end soon and to build peace we must learn to take it seriously. As Tolstoy wrote, “War is the very body of man, a feeling of loneliness that merges with the feeling of pain.” We cannot “be idle and calm at the same time”, warns the great writer, because “a secret voice tells us that, if we are idle, we are also guilty”. Leisure was the condition of Paradise, on earth we must act to build an ever new world, to rebuild again after each failure and destruction. With the help of God, who does not incite us to war, but he knows that we are not capable of living in peace.

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