Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  The chief Slavophile philosopher, Ivan Kireevsky, who believed that Europeans’ “logical reason” had reached “the highest possible level of its development,” credited them with the awareness that “the higher truths, the living insights, the basic convictions of the mind all lie outside the abstract circle of its dialectics.”16 Luckily for Russia, he continued, “the essence of Russian civilization still lives on among the people and, what is most important, in the Holy Orthodox Church. Hence it is on this foundation and on no other that we must erect the solid edifice of Russian enlightenment, built heretofore out of mixed and for the most part foreign materials and therefore needing to be rebuilt with pure native stone.” Among those who took up the Slavophiles’ rejection of Western modernity, Dostoevsky, in his novel The Devils, depicts the radicals of the 1860s as devoted to blind self-destruction by following foreign ideas they didn’t really understand.

  Another fellow traveler, Tolstoy, advocated a return to the values of the patriarchal peasantry. The “great writer of the Russian land,” as Turgenev called the author of two of the novels widely considered among the greatest ever, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), was a complicated figure. Known for his moralistic philosophy and prescriptions for social reform, Tolstoy respected anarchism and advocated nonviolence, positions he derived from his literal interpretations of the Bible. No other literary shrine compares in hallowed status to his modest family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, about a hundred miles south of Moscow, where he set up a school and experimented with farming methods.

  Descended from old Russian nobility, Tolstoy began writing in 1852 soon after joining the army to earn money to pay off gambling debts. His experience fighting in the Caucasus would later provide him with material for his brilliant novella Hadji Murad. Defying simple characterization, War and Peace explores his theory about individuals’ powerlessness against the forces of history. Partly an account of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, it includes almost six hundred characters, historical as well as fictional. The sweeping novel moves from the lives of two aristocratic families to the tsar’s St. Petersburg court, Napoleon’s headquarters and the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino.

  Anna Karenina tells parallel stories of two marriages. One is of the well-regarded title character, who begins an affair but—unable to bear society’s deceit and hypocrisy—becomes trapped by social conventions. The second involves an independent landowner prone to philosophizing whose character mirrors Tolstoy’s. Also concerned about the tension between the individual and society, the semiautobiographical character Levin works in the field with his peasants and seeks to reform their lives.

  Tolstoy’s later works explore his radical Christian philosophy, which resulted in his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. Although many of his works were censored, his literary fame helped ensure his freedom from arrest. But the end of his life was marked by ill health and an inglorious struggle for influence between his disciples and his longtime wife, Sofia Andreevna. Her nighttime searches of his papers are believed to have finally driven Tolstoy to abandon Yasnaya Polyana for a life of ascetic wandering in the middle of winter. The year was 1910; Tolstoy was ninety-two years old. He got as far as the train station at the nearby town of Astapovo, where he fell ill and soon died of pneumonia. Thousands of peasants lined his funeral procession.

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who believed the Bolsheviks hijacked Russia from its true path, was among those who continued the Slavophile tradition half a century later. The dissident who exposed the Gulag’s horrors in his best-known books, The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, later shocked the audience at a Harvard University graduation ceremony in 1978 by delivering an infamous address that railed against Western culture. People in the West, he said, lived in overly legalistic societies made morally weak by prosperity. “Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity,” he thundered, “that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.”

  Solzhenitsyn, who called for a restoration of the monarchy after his return to Russia from exile in 1994, was hardly unique among Russian intellectuals for being inflexibly dogmatic. His heroism in attacking the Soviet Union blunted criticism of him in the West, however. My father, who co-wrote a biography of him shortly before he was exiled in 1974, had communicated with him through secret notes passed through relatives of Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, Natalia Ryshatovskaya. The relatives would burn the notes after my dad had read them. Despite that implicit authorization of the book and all the information in it, however—my father smuggled the manuscript back into Russia so that Solzhenitsyn’s relatives could criticize it—Solzhenitsyn later accused him of publicizing KGB lies about him. “That was very Russian,” my dad told me. “Here was another prophet fighting for truth by lying. He denounced my book without having read a word, and I stupidly thought I was helping him by increasing his fame in the West, his only real protection.”

  Earlier, Solzhenitsyn’s friend Ilya Zilberberg had risked his young family’s safety by hiding some of the writer’s manuscripts in his communal apartment. They were eventually discovered, evidently because Solzhenitsyn—although usually enormously cautious—had mentioned them over the telephone. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn blamed the mistake on Zilberberg, because, my father said, “Solzhenitsyn could do no wrong, he had to be a saint. In that way, he was much like Lenin whom he so fiercely opposed.”

  Despite their conservatism, most Slavophiles called for the abolition of serfdom and scorned the state ideology under autocratic Nicholas I. Drawn up in 1833 by the education minister, a count named Sergei Uvarov, the doctrine of Official Nationality propounded three pillars for the Russian state: orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality. Chief among them, autocracy meant the tsar’s absolute power, which the other two components served to support. Nationality—narodnost in Russian, which also means “populism”—signified the Russian special “national spirit.” Orthodoxy stipulated obedience to the Church’s values.

  The formulation reflected the Orthodox Church’s traditional role as a subservient enforcer of state authority, sealed by Peter the Great, who first established the Synod, the governing church council, as a state department in 1721. That function, critics believed, helped explain the Church’s repressive nature. “The church has always favored whips and prisons,” wrote Vissarion Belinsky, the literary critic who is considered the main father of Russia’s revolutionary tradition, in a famous letter to Nikolai Gogol. Responding to Gogol’s growing support for autocracy late in his life, Belinsky assailed his assertion that Russians were innately religious. The Church “has always groveled to despotism,” he wrote. “But what has that to do with Christ?”

  Richard Pipes later interpreted the Church’s basic doctrine as “the creed of resignation.” Russian Orthodoxy “considers earthly existence an abomination, and prefers retirement to involvement… preaches patient acceptance of one’s fate and silent suffering.”17 The lack of independence, Pipes argued, was responsible for the Church’s rapid demise under the Bolsheviks, who were able to strip and destroy thousands of churches and subject tens of thousands of priests and monks to torture, arrest, and murder in a country of millions of supposedly devout believers.

  Still, the Russian Orthodox Church, as the historian James Billington has argued, was central to developing the first recognizably Russian culture by providing the mediums for artistic expression, attacking secular literature and music and focusing painting on the icon. “The Orthodox Church brought Russia out of its dark ages,” he wrote, “providing a sense of unity for its scattered people, higher purpose for its princes, and inspiration for its creative artists.”18 The Church also reinforced the Russian claim of a special destiny. Inherited from Kievan Rus’, which adopted Christianity in the tenth century, Byzantine Orthodoxy had the effect of helping isolate Moscow from the West following the decline of Byzantium. At the center of its ideo
logy, Billington argues, is the belief that “Russian Christendom represents a special culminating chapter in an unbroken chain of sacred history” and that “Moscow and its rulers are the chosen bearers of this destiny.”19 Orthodoxy remains especially hostile to the Catholic Church, which it often accuses of seeking to convert Russians.

  For centuries, the Church and nationality were considered virtually synonymous: Russians were unquestioningly Orthodox. The word for “peasant,” krestianin, is a version of “Christian,” khristianin. Little surprise, then, that after almost a century of turmoil and state-enforced atheism under communism, the Church’s resurgence has played an important, if mostly superficial, role in the ongoing quest for a national identity. Onion domes and icons are instantly recognizable as Russian around the world, symbols of a religion with a powerful aesthetic appeal. Even Pipes praises the “beauty of its art and ritual.” Standing under the vaulted ceilings of one of Moscow’s old churches during a daily service today imparts a serene sense of timelessness, as if nothing has changed for centuries. The air is usually thick with the smell of incense and smoke from candles crackling in front of gilded icons. There are no pews; worshippers stand, coming and going as choirs sing and priests recite centuries-old texts in Church Slavonic.

  Although church and state remain formally separate, many Russians now see Orthodoxy as official in all but name. In the 1990s, Yeltsin gave the Church tax breaks on trade in alcohol and tobacco, enabling it to do very lucrative business. Patriarch Alexiy II, who spearheaded the Church’s revival before his death in 2008, was often seen on state television with Yeltsin and, later, Putin. His publicly intimate relationship with the former KGB officer turned president was not as unlikely as it may have appeared. Like most Soviet-era priests, Alexiy is believed to have been a KGB agent; his code name was Drozdov.

  The Church continues to flourish under Putin, who attends services regularly, wears a cross and claims to have hid his faith under communism. State officials and businessmen have endowed religious orders, built new churches and restored old ones. Alexiy in turn endorsed Medvedev’s presidency in 2008, then blessed his inauguration, as he did Putin’s in 2012. But although the alliance between Orthodox Church and Kremlin has served both well, some members of the Church, which is now flush with wealth and influence, have shown signs of trying to forge a measure of independence—most visibly during the street protests against parliamentary elections in December 2011, when various Church authorities temporarily joined demonstrators in criticizing the rigging of votes.

  However, the Church has been hobbled by a lack of devout supporters. Although more than two-thirds of Russians, almost a hundred million people, claim to believe, only some 10 percent regularly attend services. One opinion poll revealed that a mere 4 percent of those questioned said they look to religion as a source of moral values. Most of those who identify with religion appear to be motivated chiefly by nationalistic views that extol Orthodoxy. Some conservative voices in the Church blame its ongoing attempt to cultivate political influence with the Kremlin for undermining its authority among Russians.

  Among them is a young but prominent deacon named Andrei Kuraev, who teaches philosophy at Moscow State University and a seminary in Sergiyev Possad, site of Russia’s most important monastery. When I spoke to the youthful-looking bearded priest with long brown hair in the study of his expensively decorated Moscow apartment, he was dressed in a traditional black cassock and round wire-rimmed glasses and kept glancing between two mobile phones on his desk and a flat-screen television mounted on a wall, which was broadcasting news on a state-run station. He told me the Church had been forced to sacrifice its independence. “It must serve the people, not the authorities,” he said. “Without an independent Church that plays the key role in society, Russians will lose their power in this part of the world and become just another ethnic group.” Russia was on the threshold of becoming an “Islamic state,” he concluded, never mind that only 6 percent of the population is believed to be Muslim.

  Seeking to boost the number of young believers, the Church has successfully lobbied to make classes about Russian Orthodoxy mandatory in state schools. It has also railed against foreign missionaries and campaigned against reconciling with the Vatican, partly because Russians for centuries saw the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, a once powerful Catholic state, as an existential threat. But critics say the Church’s leverage against the government is still limited by its general lack of concern with serving ordinary people. Although some individual priests have worked hard to help the needy, the hierarchy leaves most charity work to foreign aid organizations, its official position being that those who do not succeed don’t deserve pity.

  Yuri Samodurov, a soft-spoken human rights activist who is the former director of Moscow’s Sakharov Museum, told me the Church was bent on “monopolizing” Russians’ religious beliefs. “It insists on dictating our morality and ideology,” he said, “because its main goal isn’t helping people but increasing its own power.” Church leaders denounced Samodurov for organizing a controversial art exhibit in 2003 called Caution! Religion, which featured works such as Jesus’s face on a Coca-Cola logo with the words “This is my blood.” After Orthodox believers vandalized some of the works, a court cleared them of “hooliganism” charges. The Church then sued Samodurov and other organizers, who were found guilty of “instigating religious and ethnic hatred.”

  The current Russian Orthodox patriarch is a sharp-tongued former Church spokesman who has criticized “human rights” as “a cover for lies and insults to religious and ethnic values” and praised Putin’s rule as a “miracle of God.” Although billed a modernizer when he took over in 2008, Kirill I has done little to satisfy supporters’ hopes that he would oversee a regeneration of the Church by transforming it into a real moral ballast for Russians still battling with communism’s terrible legacy. When bloggers noticed in 2012 that an official photograph of Kirill had been doctored to remove a Breguet watch worth more than thirty thousand dollars—although its reflection on a well-polished table remained visible—public anger at the patriarch, who had denied rumors he owned a Breguet, prompted more accusations the Church is little more than another corrupt government department.

  Kirill’s response to the arrest of members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot helped seal that image. Dressed in bright neon dresses and balaclavas, the women—more a performance-art group sustained by a rotating cast of about thirty women than a traditional rock band—became an icon of protest after creating videos of impromptu public appearances during which members cavorted and profanely criticized Putin before his reelection to a third term in 2011. After they’d managed to perform for several minutes in Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral, Christ the Savior—where they called on the “Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin” to “chase Putin out”—three of the women were arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism,” a common catchall charge used against dissidents. One member was later released.

  Thanks to their stoic demeanor and eloquent, even literary statements during their trial, the young women have come to be seen as true inheritors of the Soviet dissident tradition. Although they apologized, saying they’d been making a political statement about the government’s ties to the Church, prosecutors sought to build a broad spiritual indictment against them by accusing them of inflicting moral damage on Russia and inciting religious hatred. Outside the courtroom, nationalist groups burned pictures of the group’s members. Abroad, however, Pussy Riot—which had emerged from the street-art collective Voina—generated a chorus of support from pop stars and politicians. Amnesty International described the women—two of whom had small children at home—as “prisoners of conscience.”

  Nevertheless, one particularly outspoken minister responded by calling the singer Madonna—who had supported the defendants during a concert in Moscow—a “whore.” Such behavior appeared to provide another striking sign of the Kremlin’s blindness or indifference to the terrible press it all b
ut courted by making the previously unknown group an international cause célèbre. However, prosecuting Pussy Riot appeared to fit Putin’s drive to split society by stoking his version of a culture war. Unwilling to respond to calls for change with anything other than a crackdown, the authorities banked on support from the majority of conservative Russians by portraying a minor disturbance as an assault on Russian Orthodoxy. For his part, Kirill, leader of a church with which many still sympathize after its repression under the communist regime, accused Pussy Riot of blasphemy and doing the devil’s work. The following year, Putin enacted a so-called blasphemy law that punishes “public actions expressing obvious disrespect toward society and committed to abuse the religious feelings of believers” with fines and up to three years in prison.

  The affair provided more evidence of the Church’s closeness to the authorities and reinforced its reputation for remaining rigidly hierarchical, intolerant of dissent and wary of competition. After a Gorbachev-era Soviet law declared all faiths equal in 1990, the Church successfully lobbied to marginalize other religions. It also continues to help isolate Russia from the West by advocating a vision of the country’s future that is rooted in nationalism, opposed to liberal democracy and little changed in the last thousand years.