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| The Fall of the Damned, Luca Signorelli, fresco, Orvieto. |
SPIRITUAL
ROOTS OF RUSSO-AMERICAN CONFLICT
PETRINISM
A dichotomy has existed for
centuries, starting with Peter the Great, of attempts to impose a Western
veneer over Russia. This is called Petrinism. The resistance of those attempts
is what Spengler called ‘Old Russia’. [21] Berdyaev wrote: ‘Russia is a
complete section of the world, a colossal East-West. It unites two worlds, and
within the Russian soul two principles are always engaged in strife—the Eastern
and the Western’. [22]
With the orientation of Russian
policy towards the West, ‘Old Russia’ was ‘forced into a false and artificial
history’. [23] Spengler wrote that Russia had become dominated by Late Western
culture:
Late-period arts and sciences,
enlightenment, social ethics, the materialism of world-cities, were introduced,
although in this pre-cultural time religion was the only language in which man
understood himself and the world. [24]
"MOSCOW
IS HOLY, PETERSBURG SATANIC"
‘The first condition of
emancipation for the Russian soul’, wrote Ivan Sergyeyevich Aksakov, founder of
the anti-Petrinist ‘Slavophil’ group, in 1863 to Dostoyevski, ‘is that it
should hate Petersburg with all this might and all its soul’. Moscow is holy,
Petersburg satanic. A widespread popular legend presents Peter the Great as
Antichrist.
The hatred of the ‘West’ and of
‘Europe’ is the hatred for a Civilization that had already reached an advanced
state of decay into materialism and sought to impose its primacy by cultural
subversion rather than by combat, with its City-based and money-based outlook,
‘poisoning the unborn culture in the womb of the land’.[25] Russia was still a
land where there were no bourgeoisie and no true class system, but only lord
and peasant, a view confirmed by Berdyaev, writing: ‘The various lines of
social demarcation did not exist in Russia; there were no pronounced classes.
Russia was never an aristocratic country in the Western sense, and equally
there was no bourgeoisie’.[26]
The cities that emerged threw up
an intelligentsia, copying the intelligentsia of Late Westerndom, ‘bent on
discovering problems and conflicts, and below, an uprooted peasantry, with all
the metaphysical gloom, anxiety, and misery of their own Dostoyevski, perpetually
homesick for the open land and bitterly hating the stony grey world into which
the Antichrist had tempted them. Moscow had no proper soul’.[27] Berdyaev
likewise states of the Petrinism of the upper class that ‘Russian history was a
struggle between East and West within the Russian soul’.[28]
KATECHON
Berdyaev states that while
Petrinism introduced an epoch of cultural dynamism, it also placed a heavy
burden upon Russia, and a disunity of spirit.[29] However, Russia has her own
religious sense of mission, which is as universal as the Vatican’s. Spengler
quotes Dostoyevski as writing in 1878: ‘all men must become Russian, first and
foremost Russian. If general humanity is the Russian ideal, then everyone must
first of all become a Russian’.[30] The Russian messianic idea found a forceful
expression in Dostoyevski’s The Possessed, where, in a conversation with
Stavrogin, Shatov states:
Reduce God to the attribute of
nationality? … On the contrary, I elevate the nation to God…. The people is the
body of God. Every nation is a nation only so long as it has its own particular
God, excluding all other gods on earth without any possible reconciliation, so
long as it believes that by its own God it will conquer and drive all other
gods off the face of the earth…. The sole ‘God bearing’ nation is the Russian
nation….[31]
This is Russia as the Katechon,
as the ‘nation’ whose world-historical mission is to resist the son of
perdition, a literal Anti-Christ, according to the Revelation of St. John, or
as the birthplace of a great Czar serving the traditional role of nexus between
the terrestrial and the divine around which Russia is united in this mission.
This mission as the Katechon defines Russia as something more than merely an
ethno-nation-state, as Dostoyevski expressed it.[32] Even the USSR, supposedly
purged of all such notions, merely re-expressed them with Marxist rhetoric,
which was no less apocalyptic and messianic, and which saw the ‘decadent West’
in terms analogous to elements of Islam regarding the USA as the ‘Great Satan’.
It is not surprising that the pundits of secularized, liberal Western academia,
politics, and media could not understand, and indeed were outraged, when
Solzhenitsyn seemed so ungrateful when in his Western exile he unequivocally condemned
the liberalism and materialism of the a ‘decadent West’.
RUSSIA
- CZARISTS ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS, ‘BOLSHEVIKS’ OR FOLLOWERS OF PUTIN?
A figure who was for so long held
up as a martyr by Western liberalism transpired to be a traditional Russian and
not someone who was willing to remake himself in the image of a Western liberal
to for the sake of continued plaudits. He attacked the modern West’s
conceptions of ‘rights’, ‘freedom’, ‘happiness’, ‘wealth’, the irresponsibility
of the ‘free press’, ‘television stupor’, and referred to a ‘Western decline’
in courage. He emphasized that this was a spiritual matter:
But should I be asked, instead,
whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my
country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend
your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep
suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development
of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual
exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life
which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.[33]
These are all matters that have
been addressed by Spengler, and by traditional Russians, whether calling
themselves Czarists Orthodox Christians or even ‘Bolsheviks’ or followers of
Putin.
CHALLENGE
TO RUSSIA’S IDENTITY
Spengler’s thesis that Western
Civilization is in decay is analogous to the more mystical evaluations of the
West by the Slavophils, both reaching similar conclusions. Solzhenitsyn was in
that tradition, and Putin is influenced by it in his condemnation of Western
liberalism. Putin recently pointed out the differences between the West and
Russia as at root being ‘moral’ and religious:
Another serious challenge to
Russia’s identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are
both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic
countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values
that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral
principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and
even sexual. [34]
Spengler saw Russia as outside of
Europe, and even as ‘Asian’. He even saw a Western rebirth vis-à-vis opposition
to Russia, which he regarded as leading the ‘colored world’ against the whites,
under the mantle of Bolshevism. Yet there were also other destinies that
Spengler saw over the horizon, which had been predicted by Dostoyevski.
Once Russia had overthrown its
alien intrusions, it could look with another perspective upon the world, and
reconsider Europe not with hatred and vengeance but in kinship. Spengler wrote
that while Tolstoi, the Petrinist, whose doctrine was the precursor of
Bolshevism, was ‘the former Russia’, Dostoyevski was ‘the coming Russia’.
Dostoyevski as the representative of the ‘coming Russia’ ‘does not know’ the
hatred of Russia for the West. Dostoyevski and the old Russia are transcendent.
‘His passionate power of living is comprehensive enough to embrace all things
Western as well’. Spengler quotes Dostoyevski: ‘I have two fatherlands, Russia
and Europe’. Dostoyevski as the harbinger of a Russian high culture ‘has passed
beyond both Petrinism and revolution, and from his future he looks back over
them as from afar. His soul is apocalyptic, yearning, desperate, but of this
future he is certain’.[35]
‘HIP-HOP
DIPLOMACY’ = ‘ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITANISM’
To the ‘Slavophil’, Europe is
precious. The Slavophil appreciates the richness of European high culture while
realizing that Europe is in a state of decay. We might recall that while the
USA—through the CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom—promoted Abstract
Expressionism and Jazz to Europe (like it now promotes Hi-Hop, which the State
Department calls ‘Hip-Hop diplomacy’), the USSR condemned this as ‘rootless
cosmopolitanism’. Berdyaev discussed what he regarded as an inconsistency in
Dostoyevski and the Slavophils towards Europe, yet one that is comprehensible
when we consider Spengler’s crucial differentiation between Culture and
Civilisation:
Dostoyevsky calls himself a
Slavophil. He thought, as did also a large number of thinkers on the theme of
Russia and Europe, that he knew decay was setting in, but that a great past
exists in her, and that she has made contributions of great value to the
history of mankind. [36]
It is notable that while this
differentiation between Kultur and Zivilisation is ascribed to a particularly
German philosophical tradition, Berdyaev comments that it was present among the
Russians ‘long before Spengler’:
It is to be noted that long
before Spengler, the Russians drew the distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’,
that they attacked ‘civilization’ even when they remained supporters of
‘culture’. This distinction in actual fact, although expressed in a different
phraseology, was to be found among the Slavophils.[37]
Dostoyevski was indifferent to
the Late West, while Tolstoi was a product of it, the Russian Rousseau. Imbued
with ideas from the Late West, the Marxists sought to replace one Petrine
ruling class with another. Neither represented the soul of Russia. Spengler
stated: ‘The real Russian is the disciple of Dostoyevski, even though he might
not have read Dostoyevski, or anyone else, nay, perhaps because he cannot read,
he is himself Dostoyevski in substance’. The intelligentsia hates, the peasant
does not. He would eventually overthrow Bolshevism and any other form of
Petrinism. Here we see Spengler unequivocally stating that the post-Western
civilisation will be Russian.
For what this townless people
yearns for is its own life-form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoi’s
Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But
to Dostoyevski’s Christianity, the next thousand years will belong.[38]
To the true Russia, as
Dostoyevski stated it, ‘not a single nation has ever been founded on principles
of science or reason’.[39]
RUSSIA’S
TRANSFORMATION
By the time Spengler’s final
book, The Hour of Decision, had been published in 1934 he was stating that
Russia had overthrown Petrinism and the trappings of the Late West. While he
called the new orientation of Russia ‘Asian’, he said that it was ‘a new Idea,
and an idea with a future too’.[40] To clarify, Russia looks towards the
‘East’, but while the Westerner assumes that ‘Asia’ and East are synonymous
with Mongol, the etymology of the word ‘Asia’ comes from Greek Aσία, ca. 440
BC, referring to all regions east of Greece.[41] During his time Spengler saw
in Russia that, Race, language, popular customs,
religion, in their present form… all or any of them can and will be
fundamentally transformed. What we see today then is simply the new kind of
life which a vast land has conceived and will presently bring forth. It is not
definable in words, nor is its bearer aware of it. Those who attempt to define,
establish, lay down a program, are confusing life with a phrase, as does the
ruling Bolshevism, which is not sufficiently conscious of its own
West-European, Rationalistic and cosmopolitan origin.[42]
Of Russia in 1934, Spengler
already saw that ‘of genuine Marxism there is very little except in names and
programs’. He doubted that the Communist program is ‘really still taken
seriously’. He saw the possibility of the vestiges of Petrine Bolshevism being
overthrown, to be replaced by a ‘nationalistic’ Eastern type which would reach
‘gigantic proportions unchecked’.[43] Spengler also referred to Russia as the country
‘least troubled by Bolshevism’,[44] and the ‘Marxian face [was] only worn for
the benefit of the outside world’.[45] A decade after Spengler’s death the
direction of Russia under Stalin had pursued clearer definitions, and Petrine
Bolshevism had been transformed in the way Spengler foresaw.[46]
References:
[22] Berdyaev, op. cit., 1
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