The standard interpretation of the Russia-Ukraine war is that it is a “clash of cultures” pitting Western liberalism against traditional Russian authoritarianism, but this is deeply misleading. Far from being a traditionalist, Russian President Vladimir Putin is merely the latest in a series of murderous modernizers stretching from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin.
When Stalin was asked to define Bolshevism in the late 1920s, he described it as a combination of Russian dedication to a cause and American pragmatism. Once in power, he sought to imitate the US industrialist Henry Ford’s achievements throughout the Soviet Union, brutally erasing all traces of Russian tradition through, most prominently, the violent collectivization of agriculture.
Stalin was also a great admirer of Peter the Great, who built a new capital for Russia on the Baltic Sea (St Petersburg) to establish a direct link with Western Europe. Peter’s reforms faced resistance from so-called Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians whose liturgical and ritual practices predated the reforms carried out by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in 1652 to 1666. Many Old Believers ultimately chose death over compromising their faith. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, thousands died by self-immolation.
Things only really changed in Russia with the October Revolution; and even then, the first Soviet government included several prominent figures with Old Believer backgrounds. The Bolsheviks correctly saw such sectarians as representatives of a long-running social protest against the czarist regime. The Old Believers had always distrusted the unity of church and state (which really meant the former’s subordination to the latter), insisting that the religious community remain a self-organization of common people.
Not surprisingly, state persecution of religious believers intensified under Stalin, and the Orthodox Church’s subordination to the state continues to this day. Putin, indeed, has mobilized the Church for his own political ends.
According to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, Russians need not fear nuclear war, because Christians should welcome the end of the world.
“We await the Lord Jesus Christ who will come in great glory, destroy Evil, and judge all nations,” he said late last year. Thus, what appears as a reactionary move – a return to the old orthodoxy — might in fact be a perverted expression of the rejection of the domination and exploitation that passes under the guise of “modernization” in the temporal world.
A very different, but illustrative, example of such resistance is Canudos, the 19th-century outlaw community deep in the Brazilian backlands of Bahia, which became a home to prostitutes, beggars, bandits, outcasts and the poor under the leadership of the apocalyptic prophet Antonio Conselheiro.
According to Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy of the Workers’ Party of Brazil: “This community developed a ‘mutual, cooperative and solidary concept of work’ ... a kind of socio-mystical, religious, assisting, community power inspired by the ‘equalitarian fraternity of the primitive Christian communism,’ in which there was no hunger. ‘They all worked together. Nobody had anything. Everybody worked the soil, everybody labored. Harvested... Here’s yours... Here’s yours. Nobody got more nor less.’ Conselheiro had read Thomas More, and his experiences were similar to those of utopian socialists Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Canudos was razed by the Brazilian army, and Conselheiro was beheaded in 1897.” (He had already died of illness.)
This refuge from money, property, taxes and marriage did not disintegrate because of its internal tensions; it was destroyed by the armed forces of Brazil’s “progressive” and secular government. Canudos was a place where the victims of historical progress had acquired a space of their own. Utopia actually existed for a brief moment, and that was too much for the modernizers. How else could one account for the slaughter of all inhabitants of Canudos, including women and children? The very memory of freedom had to be erased.
The obvious counterargument to the defense of Canudos is that religious fundamentalist projects like the Islamic State are no different. However, a clear line separates the two. While Canudos openly welcomed the Other, the Islamic State — like all religious fundamentalists — does not.
If today’s “fundamentalists” sincerely believe that they have found their way to truth, why do they feel so threatened by non-believers? After all, when a Buddhist encounters Western hedonists, he does not get worked up or feel the need to condemn them; he just shakes his head at their self-defeating search for happiness.
Pseudo-fundamentalists are obsessed with non-believers’ sinful lives because the sins reflect their own temptations. Unlike the truly faithful, they envy, rather than pity, those who satisfy their appetites.
Whereas Tibetan monks regard Tibet as “the center of the world, the heart of civilization,” European civilization is decidedly ex-centered. Our central longing is to recover some ultimate pillar of Wisdom, secret agalma, or spiritual treasure that we lost long ago. Colonization was never only about imposing Western values on others; it was also a quest for lost spiritual purity. This story is as old as Western civilization itself: For the ancient Greeks, Egypt was the mythical storehouse of ancient wisdom.
In our own societies, the difference between authentic fundamentalists and perverted fundamentalists is that the first (like the American Amish) get along with their neighbors, because they are concerned with their own world, not with what others are doing. Perverted fundamentalists, by contrast, are haunted by ambivalence, motivated by a simultaneous horror and envy of sinners — an unholy brew that pushes them toward acts of violence, be it terrorist bombings or brutal invasions.
Putin’s regime has nothing in common with an authentic Russian spirituality that rejects European modernization. His fantasized “Eurasia” is merely a term to legitimize his own misbegotten modernization project. That is why we must not dismiss Russia as a deeply conservative and traditionalist country that is forever lost to modernity. After all, the Russian spirituality embodied by the Old Believers rejects authoritarian state power. To defeat the perverts now ruling in the Kremlin, it would have to be reawakened.
Slavoj Zizek, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, is International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and the author, most recently, of Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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