RUSSIAN REGRESS?

fr.Cyril Hovorun

Response to the article by Eugene Vodolazkin “The Age of Concentration”The First Things, October 2017

Reading Eugene Vodolazkin’s “The Age of Concentration” (June/July) reminded me of several points raised by the Russian lay theologian Alexei Khomiakov, who in the nineteenth century laid a foundation for the modern Slavophile movement.

That movement’s main contention—ultimately idealistic and Hegelian—was that a presumed “Russian civilization” (though the word “civilization” was not used until Toynbee) is and should remain essentially different from the West.

The Slavophiles’ idealistic Russian nationalism turned within a few decades into the pogroms and the Black Hundreds movement. Vodolazkin’s idealistic perception of a new age of “inner strengthening and social reconsolidation” is likewise masking a more brutal reality. The current Russian consolidation, which Vodolazkin praises, has been called by some observers the “post-Crimea consensus.” Most Russian elites, both liberal and conservative, together with the majority of the Russian population, accepted their nation’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014. Many of them also accept the war that Russia still wages in eastern Ukraine. This military campaign—dubbed “the Russian spring”—has been aided by propaganda and misleading narratives propagated by Russian intellectuals from the beginning.

Here is only one of many examples of the brutal reality misrepresented by the essay. Vodolazkin states that the individualistic principle “That’s your problem” played prominently in Russia during its post–Cold War rapprochement with the West. This suggests that the principle is Western in origin. It also suggests that Russia, in its current antagonism toward the West, is now discarding the principle. However, the Russian state’s conduct toward its soldiers fighting in Ukraine disproves this suggestion. Russians killed in military operations there are not even given proper burials. They are either burnt in special crematoria on wheels, or buried with numbers instead of names on their graves. Russian media and most intellectuals keep surprisingly silent about this scandal. Even the mothers of the fallen soldiers are silenced, by either threats, or money, or both. When the Russian soldiers Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev were captured in 2015, Russian authorities behaved as if it were the soldiers’ “own problem.” Eventually, the two returned home in a prisoner exchange—on the insistence of the Ukrainian government. Nor does the Russian state seem to care about another of its soldiers recently captured in Donbas, Viktor Ageev. According to Ageev, Yerofeyev was killed upon his return to Russia, because he had told too much to the Ukrainians about the Russian presence in Donbas.

Vodolazkin tries to justify the wall between Russia and the West, which was raised in paper by the Slavophiles and then in concrete by the Communists. He implies that the wall should exist because of a metaphysical incompatibility between the two civilizations. I think this is a wrong assumption. There are no metaphysical reasons for a wall between East and West, which—to use Benedict Anderson’s famous definition—are only imagined communities. The only reason why Russians are currently rebuilding the wall is to protect the “personal” political regime of Vladimir Putin. The only incompatibility between the West and modern Russia is between truth and post-truth, care for human life and waste of life, international cooperation and geopolitical manipulation.