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War & peace

14 March 2023

9 min read

Moscow letter: why Russia critiques the West

Beyond condemning the invasion of Ukraine, there is also a need to understand why Russia thinks what it does, explains Malcolm Rogers, the Anglican chaplain in Moscow.

Malcolm Rogers

The Rev Canon Malcolm Rogers is Chaplain of St Andrew’s, Moscow, an Anglican church serving the international community in the Russian capital.

On 24 February 2022, Russian tanks crossed the border of Ukraine. President Putin believed that the ‘special operation’ would be swift, that Ukrainian resistance would crumble and that the Russian soldiers would be welcomed as liberators. It will go down as one of the most catastrophic failures of intelligence in history and, as a result, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have died, and the lives of millions of people have been devastated.

There can be no justification for the invasion of Ukraine. But if there is to be any lasting peace in the future, and if Europe is to live even in an uneasy peace with its eastern neighbour, then we need to hear the Russian critique of the West. We may well not agree with it, but unless we engage with it and try to understand where people are coming from, we are storing up yet more trouble for the future.

Sir Laurie Bristow, the former ambassador in Moscow, was often asked what Putin was thinking. His answer was simple: 'Listen to what he says’. People have mocked the long historical narratives in his speeches, but they are not to be ignored. There is no reason not to assume that Putin speaks what he believes. The conflict, certainly in his mind, is not economic but ideological.

The points below are a summary of some of the criticisms of the West that have been expressed in his speeches, in the Patriarch’s addresses and views published in Russian state-controlled mass media. It is possible that these views are now held, at least tacitly, by about 70% of the Russian population.

Putin’s defensiveness

Putin’s first criticism of the West is that NATO was planning to expand into Ukraine and place nuclear missiles there.

NATO, it is claimed, is an anti-Russian alliance, whose ultimate goal is the fragmentation of Russia. Russia, with its size, natural resources, military might and influence is too much of a threat to Western (US) hegemony.

NATO went back on an agreement given to Gorbachev in 1990 that it would not expand beyond its current borders. Since then, it has grown from 17 to 30 countries, and has steadily expanded East, incorporating the Baltic States, and offering promises – although vague – to Ukraine and Georgia that they would one day be able to join NATO.

How we tell history matters. The story deep within Russian consciousness tells of how Russia, as a nation, was held together by the Orthodox faith and by the ‘heroic’ defence of the land against invaders. In the centre of the new main Cathedral of the Armed Forces (consecrated in June 2020, and a powerful symbol of the union of army and Orthodoxy) there is an icon of Christ the Saviour. Around it are four scenes depicting the defence of Russia against the Mongols, Swedes and Poles, Napoleon and Hitler. It must not be forgotten that 26 million people from the Soviet Union died in the second world war and Hitler intended to turn the Slav peoples into a slave people.

The current conflict has become part of this narrative. Ukraine has become the Western Trojan horse. Many Russians have never thought of it as an independent country; for many Kyiv is their physical and spiritual mother. But after Maidan in 2014, which it is claimed was facilitated by western money and information, it is considered to have become a western puppet. As a result of the revolution, a democratically elected pro-Russian president (Yanukovych) was replaced by a pro-western president (Poroshenko), and it has followed an increasingly anti-Russian and pro-Western line. It was therefore only a question of time before, whether openly or in secret, nuclear weapons directed at Russia would have been placed there.

In September 2022 the Patriarch spoke of how Russia, in her history, has only engaged in defensive wars: the ‘special operations’ are perceived by the leadership as defensive. This was a conflict, it is claimed, that needed to be fought now, in order to prevent a bigger war in the future. They are necessary to secure the future of Russia against an aggressive NATO, who have always wanted to break up Russia, and are now showing their true colours by fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. There is a current poster on billboards which shows a Russian soldier superimposed on the image of Alexander Nevsky, who defeated the invading Swedes (1221-1263). Underneath is the slogan, “A time for heroes.”

A cultural conflict

Putin’s second position is that Russia is standing up against an arrogant, even satanic, West which wishes to impose its economic, cultural and moral values on Russia and on other nations.

In his speech to the Federal Assembly on 21 February 2023, Putin spoke of how the West has lost touch with its moral and spiritual roots, has rejected ‘traditional spiritual and moral values’. It has replaced Christian tradition with what is called totalitarian liberal individualism. There is bemusement about gender debates (it is not illegal in Russia to practise homosexuality, but it is illegal to promote it), and a perception that in the West the rights of small minorities have come to dominate public debate and set the public agenda. Western Churches are accused of having sold out to the agenda of liberal individualism, and of losing their spiritual foundations. It is said that, having sown the wind the West will, in time, reap the whirlwind.

Nevertheless, it is claimed, because of its economic power, the West has been successful in exporting liberal individualism and has trampled over other cultures and value systems. Globalisation is perceived as Americanisation. Putin regularly speaks of wishing to create a multipolar world, not dominated by the hegemony of the United States and the dollar.

This is an argument which is persuasive in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is noteworthy that of the 180 nations who were eligible to vote in the UN resolution on 23 February 2023, 141 nations demanded that Russia should immediately leave Ukrainian territory, but 39 countries either abstained or voted against the resolution, including China and India. There has been no change since a similar resolution in March 2022. About 40 countries have introduced sanctions against Russia, representing only 16% of the world’s population (Wilson Center). It is difficult to imagine, given the virtually universal opposition to the invasion in the West, that there is a deep global divide which is growing. As Russia’s doors to the West close, they are opening to the East and South. At St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow, our western members have left the country, but they are being replaced by increasing numbers of people from India and Indonesia.

Meanwhile the conflict is spoken of in church circles in increasingly apocalyptic language, as Armageddon, or pre-Armageddon, a ‘war of the army of the Archangel Michael against the devil’, a Holy War for the defence of Orthodoxy and traditional values against ‘liberalism, globalism, secularism and post-humanism’ (Alexander Dugin, 27 Oct 2022). Both President Putin and Medvedev have at times used this apocalyptic language, declaring that Russia is engaged in a war against satanic forces.

Understanding Russophobia

Putin’s third criticism is the West is Russophobic, and has neglected the fate of Russians – particularly those in the Donbas, and is guilty of double standards.

In his book on the origins of the first Crimea war, 1853-6, Orlando Figes writes that the immediate cause of the conflict was a dispute between church wardens over some keys (to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). Of such things, history is made! But he also partly blames Russophobia in both England and France for stoking the conflict. He writes of tracts and articles written at the time, “The stereotype of Russia that emerged from these fanciful writings was that of a savage power, aggressive and expansionist by nature, yet also sufficiently cunning and deceptive to plot with ‘unseen forces’ against the West and infiltrate societies”. That could have been written today. For many years, long before the current war, the stereotype of the bad guy in films has either been a Russian or eastern Slav.

Russia’s foreign policy has done nothing to counter Russophobia. There is an understandable huge fear of Russia in Eastern Europe, and Moscow has never recognised or acknowledged any of the atrocities committed in the Soviet era (although, to be fair, it has taken the UK about 100 years to begin to recognise some of the harm that the British empire inflicted on its colonies). And certainly some, at least on the surface, relish in the Russophobia. A man I met in the supermarket (this was just after the Salisbury poisonings) said to me, ‘You don’t need to be afraid of me. I’ve tied my bear up outside.’

The accusation of Russophobia is often levelled at any criticism of the Moscow regime, but among other things, Russophobia is blamed for what is perceived as the neglect of the role played by the people of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany. That may sound strange to us, but it is a huge thing in Russia. For the last ten years, on Victory Day, after the tanks have rolled through Red Square in the morning, there has been a far more significant event in the afternoon, usually neglected by western media. Up to 2 million people have gathered in Moscow, and similar numbers in other Russian cities, for the march of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, to commemorate those who died in the second world war.

Russophobia is also blamed for the fact that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was treated as a defeated enemy, and never given sufficient respect. It is blamed for the neglect of the fate of Russians left behind on the wrong side of the border after the collapse of the Soviet empire. That was particularly true after 2014 in Ukraine, when it is claimed that Russian majority areas such as the Donbas and Crimea were discriminated against. Kyiv refused to implement the Minsk agreement, which would have allowed elections of self-determination and which would almost certainly have been pro-Russia (Kyiv’s response is that Moscow had invaded Crimea, destabilised the Donbas and did not implement its part of the Minsk agreement). Certain incidents in which Russian speakers were targeted by Ukrainian nationalists were widely reported, as were the anti-Russian views of some of the right-wing nationalist groups in Ukraine, such as the Azov Brigade - which has led to Putin declaring that this is a war against Nazis. Putin has said that he will stand up for persecuted Russian minorities.

There is also the accusation of double standards. While the West has condemned Russia’s special military operations, which Russia claims is to guarantee its security, de-nazify and de-militarise Ukraine and protect the predominantly Russian population in the Donbas, the West has embarked on its own military expeditions, most notably in Iraq, Libya and Syria, justifying them in terms of either guaranteeing its own security or extending democracy.

On the edge

Perhaps the Russian critique of the West can be best summarized by Sahid, a taxi driver from Dagestan. We’d arrived in Moscow, a couple of weeks ago, after one of our epic journeys from the UK back to Russia and were exhausted. But he was very talkative! He defended the ‘special operations’: ‘Imagine that you are a peaceful guy, wanting to live a peaceful life. You are sitting on a bench. Someone comes and sits next to you. And then they start to push you to the edge of the bench. At some point, however peaceful you are, you are going to have to do something. You are going to have to either push back or be pushed off the end of the bench’. In other words, Sahid was saying what many Russians are saying to the West, you have pushed us so far, and we are not going to take any more. The tragedy is that, once again, the Ukrainian people – the border, edge people – are paying the price.

Weekend essay

Comment

Royalty

21 April 2023

8 min read

Fanfare for the familial: what the coronation really showcases

The culmination of family saga or a snapshot of the universal family? John Milbank analyses the wider meaning of the coronation.

John Milbank

John Milbank is a theologian, philosopher and poet. A co-founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, he is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham.

King Charles and Prince William hold a tree sapling upright.

The family tree. King Charles and Prince William with a Queen’s Green Canopy sapling.

The Royal Family.

Nothing rivets our attention more than a family drama played out in public. Currently we are fascinated, either avidly or guiltily, by the tensions surrounding Harry’s attendance and Meghan’s absence at the coronation of King Charles III.

Monarchy is popular and comprehensible in a way that law, finance, mercantile logistics and military strategy are not, just because it involves real persons and their relationships. This translates great matters of state into terms which resonate with the ordinary person - however terrible, besides consoling, those matters may turn out to be.

Yet for many of the more formally educated this is not right at all. We should not be confusing the private with the public, the intimate with the objectively open.

Familiarity, and still more the familial, is thought to contaminate the ethical.

Fairness is, today, supposed to require a lack of association with the parties involved, such that increasingly the interviewers of a candidate for a job are not allowed to have any previous knowledge about her. Familiarity, and still more the familial, is thought to contaminate the ethical, which suggests that ideally appointments should be made by artificial intelligence and all judgements be systematically computed.

Already our individual assessments are no longer trusted, along with the quirkiness of intuition and all tacit knowledge acquired by direct acquaintance. Instead, we are expected to act as much like robots as possible and to reach verdicts only by box-ticking according to pre-assigned criteria.

For such an outlook, monarchy is a supreme anomaly: the subversion of public process by private whim rendered hereditary. It surely enthrones not just a man but corruption and forms the capstone for the continuing operation of a decadent inherited establishment.

Yet there is another way of looking at all this. Is it any accident that King Charles, who has not arrived at his position by following due process or pandering to the needs of faction and fashion, has consistently been able to argue for and to promote more serious long-term concerns of the common good than have most politicians? Our built environment, the stability of nature, the sustaining of craft-skills and the training in disciplined virtue of the young, whatever their class origins, all matter supremely, and yet it is the Crown and not Parliament that has been most freely able to point to these things and to do something about them.

Where do any of us first learn to obey, to share and to sacrifice, besides how to exercise our positive creative talents? Always within the bosom of the family, in whatever conventional or unconventional way this may be constituted.

More fundamentally, there are reasons to doubt the simple association of the private with interested corruption, and the publicly abstract and objective with ethical disinterest. Where do any of us first learn to obey, to share and to sacrifice, besides how to exercise our positive creative talents? Always within the bosom of the family, in whatever conventional or unconventional way this may be constituted. Moreover, within this bosom, rivalry and even competition are actually discouraged, even though they inevitably arise. Our parents want us to succeed, but not at the expense of our siblings. Self-expression and self-realisation are fostered rather than suppressed and yet they are not permitted to overrule cooperation.

Within the family we learn that nothing is possible for us alone and that we have a part to play in a greater whole. School expands this vision and yet to some degree it already undermines it. We are now openly and almost shockingly encouraged to compete and to outperform; the less successful children are effectively abandoned by their new surrogate parents. The Victorians deliberately tried to counteract this by encouraging also house and school loyalty and a genial competition in sports and debating with other schools and colleges.

Yet when we leave school and university and join a workplace of whatever kind this geniality starts to vanish, and the competition becomes more cut-throat. We now need to help undercut rival operations and even systematically to exploit our clients or customers. In consequence, evil gets ever more reduced to crime: we are allowed to do some pretty bad things so long as they stay within the rules and we, and above all our employers, stay out of jail.

Some of us will go on to become politicians or will have pursued that career from the outset. Now things get worse: in the international context even the rule of law becomes patchy and shaky. Even where the international rules are followed, it is understood that national self-interest prevails and is wholly legitimate. It would be beyond shocking for a parent to tell their children that they must pursue selfish family interests at school, and work to sustain that at the expense of all other people, by whatever means possible. It’s just such an attitude that defines the mafiosi or the camorra. And it would still be shocking for a businessperson to tell their employees that they must pursue profit at the expense of their own town or country, even if this is often what covertly pertains.

Yet a politician can readily get up and say that the interests of Britain or whatever other country come, for her, first and last. Even the claim to be fighting for freedom and democracy (or some such) cannot survive if it is seen to clash with the interests of the nation: despite everything Biden has had to concede to Trump on this one.

The very selfishness and ruthlessness that is excoriated at the domestic hearth is ultimately encouraged in the public citadel.

There thus results something that has perplexed me ever since I was a child. The very selfishness and ruthlessness that is excoriated at the domestic hearth is ultimately encouraged in the public citadel. Does this mean, as the French philosopher Henri Bergson suggested, that most ethics really exists just to ensure the solidarity and efficiency of a war-machine; that what we take to be ‘moral’ is little more than an ethnic survival mechanism?

Bergson accordingly suggested that real ethics must be global and universal. But as we are discovering today, that seems too abstract and unrooted for most people. We cannot really love everyone effectively and equally. That is why Augustine suggested instead an ‘order of love’ whereby we extend our love in ever-widening circles from the closest to the most far-off, while allowing that our sympathy with remote people has to take the form of some support for those who are truly close to them.

The only way, therefore, to counteract the tendency of morality to mutate into disguised crime the nearer one reaches the boundaries and the margin of society is to extend the familial principle, such that all are variously sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons (as indeed we truly are as constituting a single race). At the same time, one big human family can only be an effective family if it is also a family of cooperating families – a vast extended family if you like, on a principle of covenanting cousinship.

The world religions, and especially the Christian religion, have exactly operated this principle of an extension of the familial across all borders which can alone ensure that ethical action is both immediate and real, and yet not the mask of a collective egoism. Beyond the merely political community, the Church like the family is all-inclusive in its purpose: it offers at once citizenship, educational formation, reconciling process and collective cult, linking us to the divine.

At the most ultimate boundary of the human race it can also ensure that humans respect other natural creatures. And at the most ultimate boundary of all, that of finite reality as such, it can ensure that the principle that reigns is not mere utility or survival but our love of God who is in himself inner loving relation.

The aim of the ethical as love is itself relational connection and it is only the latter that puts a break on our worst instincts which we cannot always for ourselves override.

Such covenanting cousinship, or dividing only in order to link, always puts relationality at the centre, instead of mere self or collectivity. The aim of the ethical as love is itself relational connection and it is only the latter that puts a break on our worst instincts which we cannot always for ourselves override. Family members check each other, as do citizens, and as also should corporate bodies, if they seek finally organic cooperation rather than unlimited competition.

It not only should be but also actually is the same with nations. As the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling declared, it is in the end nations interacting with other nations that put a brake on tyranny arising within nations -- something that no mere constitution or inner balance of power can curb forever. For a nation thinking of itself alone always risks descending into a shared ruthlessness that will typically be exercised both within and without.

The Church as an extended family is not a democracy but a ‘mixed constitution’ involving single headship, the wise advice of a few and the popular consent and modification of proffered norms by the many. From a Christian perspective a good social order, as familial, should echo this, and that is why constitutional monarchy would appear to be a suitable, though by no means the only possible form, for a Christian country to take.

An aristocracy ought in theory to be the opposite of a mafia: not the subordination of public interest to family but a particularly strong and sacrificial association of person and family with public interest

Its mixed constitution involves some role for ‘aristocracy’ or wise leadership in the widest sense. An aristocracy ought in theory to be the opposite of a mafia: not the subordination of public interest to family but a particularly strong and sacrificial association of person and family with public interest. This is one crucial and political way in which the familial principle of the order of love can be constituted and rendered real. Of course, today, what we have instead is rather the covert extension of the rule of the mafiosi as big moneyed crime undercuts law and even operates outside its sway altogether.

As a seeming anachronism, monarchy stands at the apex of the aristocracy and yet also transcends its concerns by a more direct linkage to the whole population, to whose attitudes and needs it needs to be especially alert. I have already mentioned just why and how King Charles performs this role effectively and in such a way as to counteract existing trends which more and more make a mockery of ordinary morality and decency, reducing it indeed to discipline for the mass troops, corralled into the service of armed power.

Charles instead continues to serve the religious (and not just Christian) principles of the extended familial, of the order of love and covenanted cousinship, upon which alone the survival of ethics depends. Not only is there no salvation outside the Church (thus understood) -- there can be no genuine moral life either.

For these reasons the coronation, which we eagerly await, will be indeed a truly Christian event and sacrament: an influx of grace in these unprecedentedly darkening times.