SPIRITUAL
ROOTS OF RUSSO-AMERICAN CONFLICT
PART 1
by Kerry R Bolton
Whatever Russia is called
outwardly, there is an inner eternal Russia whose embryonic character places
her on an antithetical course to that of the USA.
The rivalry between the USA and
Russia is something more than geopolitics or economics. These are reflections
of antithetical worldviews of a spiritual character. The German conservative
historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, who wrote of the morphology of cultures
as having organic life-cycles, in his epochal book The Decline of The West had
much to say about Russia that is too easily mistaken as being of a Russophobic
nature. That is not the case, and Spengler wrote of Russia in similar terms to
that of the ‘Slavophils’. Spengler, Dostoyevski, Berdyaev, and Solzhenistyn
have much of relevance to say in analyzing the conflict between the USA and
Russia. Considering the differences as fundamentally ‘spiritual’ explains why
this conflict will continue and why the optimism among Western political
circles at the prospect of a compliant Russia, fully integrated into the ‘world
community’, was so short-lived.
Of the religious character of
this confrontation, an American analyst, Paul Coyer, has written:
Amidst the geopolitical
confrontation between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the US and its allies, little
attention has been paid to the role played by religion either as a shaper of
Russian domestic politics or as a means of understanding Putin’s international
actions. The role of religion has long tended to get short thrift in the study
of statecraft (although it has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance of
late), yet nowhere has it played a more prominent role—and perhaps nowhere has
its importance been more unrecognized—than in its role in supporting the
Russian state and Russia’s current place in world affairs.[1]
Background Information: RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
QUOTING
THEORETICIAN ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: “AFTER
THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR, THE MAIN ENEMY OF THE USA WILL BE THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH”
RUSSIA’S ‘SOUL’
Spengler regarded Russians as
formed by the vastness of the land-plain, as innately antagonistic to the Machine,
as rooted in the soil, irrepressibly peasant, religious, and ‘primitive’.
Without a wider understanding of Spengler’s philosophy, it appears that he was
a Slavophobe. However, when Spengler wrote of these Russian characteristics, he
was referring to the Russians as a still youthful people in contrast to the
senile West. Hence the ‘primitive’ Russian is not synonymous with ‘primitivity’
as popularly understood at that time in regard to ‘primitive’ tribal peoples.
Nor was it to be confounded with the Hitlerite perception of the ‘primitive
Slav’ incapable of building his own State.
To Spengler, the ‘primitive
peasant’ is the wellspring from which a people draws its healthiest elements
during its epochs of cultural vigor. Agriculture is the foundation of a High
Culture, enabling stable communities to diversify labor into specialization
from which Civilization proceeds.
However, according to Spengler,
each people has its own soul, a conception derived from the German Idealism of
Herder, Fichte et al. A High Culture reflects that soul, whether in its
mathematics, music, architecture; both in the arts and the physical sciences.
The Russian soul is not the same as the Western Faustian, as Spengler called
it, the ‘Magian’ of the Arabian civilization, or the Classical of the Hellenes
and Romans. The Western Culture that was imposed on Russia by Peter the Great,
what Spengler called Petrinism, is a veneer.
Spengler stated that the Russian
soul is ‘the plain without limit’.[2] The Russian soul expresses its own type of
infinity, albeit not that of the Westerner’s Faustian soul, which becomes
enslaved by its own technics at the end of its life-cycle.[3] (Although it
could be argued that Sovietism enslaved man to machine, a Spenglerian would
cite this as an example of Petrinism). However, Civilizations follow their
life’s course, and one cannot see Spengler’s descriptions as moral judgements
but as observations. The finale for Western Civilization according to Spengler
cannot be to create further great forms of art and music, which belong to the
youthful or ‘spring’ epoch of a civilization, but to dominate the world under a
technocratic-military dispensation, before declining into oblivion like prior
world civilizations. While Spengler saw this as the fulfilment of the Western
Civilization, the form it has assumed since World War II has been under U.S.
dispensation and is quite different from what might have been assumed under
European imperialism.
It is after this Western
decline—which now means U.S. decline—that Spengler alluded to the next world
civilization being Russian.
THE
RUSSIAN HAS BEEN FORMED LARGELY AS THE RESULT OF BATTLING WITH TARTARS, MUSLIMS
AND MONGOLS
According to Spengler, Russian
Orthodox architecture does not represent the infinity towards space that is
symbolized by the Western high culture’s Gothic Cathedral spire, nor the
enclosed space of the Mosque of the Magian Culture,[4] but the impression of
sitting upon a horizon. Spengler considered that this Russian architecture is
‘not yet a style, only the promise of a style that will awaken when the real
Russian religion awakens’.[5] Spengler was writing of the Russian culture as an
outsider, and by his own reckoning must have realized the limitations of that.
It is therefore useful to compare his thoughts on Russia with those of Russians
of note.
Nikolai Berdyaev in The Russian
Idea affirms what Spengler describes:
There is that in the Russian soul
which corresponds to the immensity, the vagueness, the infinitude of the
Russian land, spiritual geography corresponds with physical. In the Russian
soul there is a sort of immensity, a vagueness, a predilection for the
infinite, such as is suggested by the great plain of Russia.[6]
The connections between family,
nation, birth, unity and motherland are reflected in the Russian language:
род [rod]: family, kind, sort,
genus
родина [ródina]: homeland,
motherland
родители [rodíteli]: parents
родить [rodít’]: to give birth
роднить [rodnít’]: to unite,
bring together
родовой [rodovói]: ancestral,
tribal
родство [rodstvó]: kinship
Western-liberalism, rationalism,
even the most strenuous efforts of Bolshevik dialectal materialism, have so far
not been able to permanently destroy, but at most repress, these
conceptions—conscious or unconscious—of what it is to be ‘Russian’. Spengler,
as will be seen, even during the early period of Russian Bolshevism, already predicted
that even this would take on a different, even antithetical form, to the
Petrine import of Marxism. It was soon that the USSR was again paying homage to
Holy Mother Russia rather than the international proletariat, much to Trotsky’s
lament.
‘RUSSIAN
SOCIALISM’, NOT MARXISM
Of the Russian soul, the
ego/vanity of the Western culture-man is missing; the persona seeks impersonal
growth in service, ‘in the brother-world of the plain’. Orthodox Christianity
condemns the ‘I’ as ‘sin’.[7]
The Russian concept of ‘we’
rather than ‘I’, and of impersonal service to the expanse of one’s land,
implies another form socialism to that of Marxism. It is perhaps in this sense
that Stalinism proceeded along lines often antithetical to the Bolshevism
envisaged by Trotsky, et al.[8] A recent comment by an American visitor to
Russia, Barbara J. Brothers, as part of a scientific delegation, states
something akin to Spengler’s observation:
The Russians have a sense of
connectedness to themselves and to other human beings that is just not a part
of American reality. It isn’t that competitiveness does not exist; it is just
that there always seems to be more consideration and respect for others in any
given situation.[9]
Of the Russian traditional ethos,
intrinsically antithetical to Western individualism, including that of property
relations, Berdyaev wrote:
Of all peoples in the world the
Russians have the community spirit; in the highest degree the Russian way of
life and Russian manners, are of that kind. Russian hospitality is an
indication of this sense of community.[10]
TARAS
BULBA
Russian National Literature
starting from the 1840s began to consciously express the Russian soul. Firstly
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s Taras Bulba, which along with the poetry of
Pushkin, founded a Russian literary tradition; that is to say, truly Russian,
and distinct from the previous literature based on German, French, and English.
John Cournos states of this in his introduction to Taras Bulba:
The spoken word, born of the
people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native
earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with
Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete
body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils,
and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.
Taras Bulba is a tale on the
formation of the Cossack folk. In this folk-formation the outer enemy plays a
crucial role. The Russian has been formed largely as the result of battling
over centuries with Tartars, Muslims and Mongols.[11]
 |
Cossacks - Wikipedia |
Their society and nationality
were defined by religiosity, as was the West’s by Gothic Christianity during
its ‘Spring’ epoch, in Spenglerian terms. The newcomer to a Setch, or permanent
village, was greeted by the Chief as a Christian and as a warrior: ‘Welcome! Do
you believe in Christ?’ —‘I do’, replied the new-comer. ‘And do you believe in
the Holy Trinity?’— ‘I do’.—‘And do you go to church?’—‘I do.’ ‘Now cross
yourself’. [12]
Gogol depicts the scorn in which
trade is held, and when commerce has entered among Russians, rather than being
confined to non-Russians associated with trade, it is regarded as a symptom of
decadence:
I know that baseness has now made
its way into our land. Men care only to have their ricks of grain and hay, and
their droves of horses, and that their mead may be safe in their cellars; they
adopt, the devil only knows what Mussulman customs. They speak scornfully with
their tongues. They care not to speak their real thoughts with their own
countrymen. They sell their own things to their own comrades, like soulless
creatures in the market-place…. . Let them know what brotherhood means on
Russian soil! [13]
Here we might see a Russian
socialism that is, so far from being the dialectical materialism offered by
Marx, the mystic we-feeling forged by the vastness of the plains and the
imperative for brotherhood above economics, imposed by that landscape. Russia’s
feeling of world-mission has its own form of messianism whether expressed
through Christian Orthodoxy or the non-Marxian form of ‘world revolution’ under
Stalin, or both in combination, as suggested by the later rapport between
Stalinism and the Church from 1943 with the creation of the COUNCIL FOR RUSSIAN
ORTHODOX CHURCH AFFAIRS.[14] In both senses, and even in the embryonic forms
taking place under Putin, Russia is conscious of a world-mission, expressed
today as Russia’s role in forging a multipolar world, with Russia as being
pivotal in resisting unipolarism.
RUSSIA
AND FAITH ARE INSEPARABLE
Commerce is the concern of
foreigners, and the intrusions bring with them the corruption of the Russian
soul and culture in general: in speech, social interaction, servility,
undermining Russian ‘brotherhood’, the Russian ‘we’ feeling that Spengler described.
[15]
The Cossack brotherhood is
portrayed by Gogol as the formative process in the building up of the Russian
people. This process is not one of biology but of spirit, even transcending the
family bond. Spengler treated the matter of race as that of soul rather than of
zoology. [16] To Spengler, landscape was crucial in determining what becomes
‘race’, and the duration of families grouped in a particular
landscape—including nomads who have a defined range of wandering—form ‘a
character of duration’, which was Spengler’s definition of ‘race’.[17] Gogol
describes this ‘race’ forming process among the Russians. So far from being an
aggressive race nationalism it is an expanding mystic brotherhood under God:
The father loves his children,
the mother loves her children, the children love their father and mother; but
this is not like that, brothers. The wild beast also loves its young. But a man
can be related only by similarity of mind and not of blood. There have been
brotherhoods in other lands, but never any such brotherhoods as on our Russian
soil. [18]
The Russian soul is born in
suffering. The Russian accepts the fate of life in service to God and to his
Motherland. Russia and Faith are inseparable. When the elderly warrior Bovdug
is mortally struck by a Turkish bullet, his final words are exhortations on the
nobility of suffering, after which his spirit soars to join his ancestors.[19]
The mystique of death and suffering for the Motherland is described in the
death of Tarus Bulba when he is captured and executed, his final words being
ones of resurrection:
‘Wait, the time will come when ye
shall learn what the orthodox Russian faith is! Already the people scent it far
and near. A czar shall arise from Russian soil, and there shall not be a power
in the world which shall not submit to him!’[20]
References
[1] Paul Coyer, (Un)Holy Alliance: Vladimir Putin, The
Russian Orthodox Church And Russian Exceptionalism, Forbes, May 21, 2015,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulcoyer/2015/05/21/unholy-alliance-vladimir-putin-and-the-russian-orthodox-church/
[2] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West, George Allen
& Unwin, London, 1971, Vol. I, 201.
[3] Ibid., Vol. II, 502.
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