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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.

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Freedom

Trust

10 April 2023

9 min read

Reviving post-liberal society

There’s a crisis of trust, anxiety, and relationship in post-liberal society. Graham Tomlin looks into what might revive it.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A loose rabble of a protest in the street is siluhetted against light and a shower of rain

A protest in Santiago, Chile.

Ignacio Amenábar on Unsplash.

Much has been made in recent times of the alleged demise of liberalism. From the heady heights of 1989, when Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay announced ‘The End of History’ and it seemed that liberal democracy was the only game in town, things don’t look so auspicious now. Back then, it seemed that of the three great twentieth-century political creeds, fascism had met its ugly end in the Second World War, communism had crumbled in the ruins of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and so western, free market, secular liberalism was the last one standing, the only realistic political and philosophical option for the future of the world.

Then a whole series of events challenged that narrative. The attack on the twin towers in 2001 announced that religion was not a spent force in the modern world but a powerful motivator outside the western European and American bubble, for better or worse. Throughout the twentieth century, Christianity had been quietly growing in Africa from just 9% of the continent’s population in 1900 to 48% a century later, and it continues to grow. The remarkable rise of Chinese Christianity after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, the resurgence of Islam worldwide and the prediction that in coming decades, atheists, agnostics and others who do not affiliate with any religion will make up a declining share of the world’s total population, made the prediction of a secular future suddenly seem foolish. The financial crash of 2008 put paid to the hope of gradual economic growth in the trusted hands of the market, and then the rise of Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdogan and, of course, the political and social earthquake of Brexit placed a huge question mark over the assumption of a globalised, liberal order gradually taking over the world.

In the wake of these events, a growing number of voices started to call attention to the travails of liberalism. Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed argued that liberalism had failed to achieve its lofty goals:

“A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equality, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity and, of course, expand human liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.”

The crisis in liberalism is a theme that runs through the worried pages of many political broadsheets or cultural commentaries. Is liberalism dying, or is just going through a period of sickness before recovering in new forms? Most people think it’s not on its last legs yet, and yet the crisis in liberalism have led us into a number of crises in modern life, many of which can be traced to the flaws which lie alongside the strengths of the liberal project.

A crisis in trust

First, we have a crisis of Trust. Liberalism presented itself as a rejection of the tyrannical and stifling control of social, religious and political convention. The controlling eye of Church, school, family and government was seen as oppressive, contravening the rights of the individual. Throwing off the yoke of such supposed authorities was essential to living an authentic life. John Stuart Mill, one of the great pioneers of liberalism, wrote of the ‘despotism of custom’. And while Mill’s rejection of starched Victorian conformity may be understandable, the result of the revolt he helped to unleash was to undermine trust in authority and government.

A society full of mutual suspicion cannot function well, and is not good for us.

Examples abound. A recent one was Baroness Casey’s recent report on the Metropolitan Police, that accused it of being institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Before that, the abuse of expenses trashed the reputation of MPs; the financial crash taught us bankers couldn’t be trusted; and the phone-tapping scandal bersmirched the reputation of journalists. In addition, a number of studies suggest that the length of tenure of CEO’s has decreased in recent years as they struggle to maintain legitimacy, while here in the UK, we have gone through Prime Ministers as quickly as football managers. The Church is no different – the many stories of child abuse, the betrayal of vulnerable adults, the prejudice against minorities have all eroded levels of trust in the clergy. Whether you look at business leaders, bishops, local politicians, estate agents – levels of trust in sectors of our society that are crucial for the good functioning of social life are at a very low ebb.

It's hard to tell whether the crisis stems from our increasing scepticism that truth-claims are only ever power-plays, or because the rise of movements like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter have led to our leaders being held to a higher sense of accountability. Have standards in public life diminished? Have our leaders become less trustworthy? Are our institutions more systemically corrupted? Or is it that we now expect far more of our public figures than we used to and therefore constantly find them wanting? Whatever the answer, the overall result is catastrophic. Trust is essential for the good functioning of any human community. A society full of mutual suspicion cannot function well, and is not good for us. As Graham Greene once put it:

“it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all: oneself.”

Liberalism's tendency to challenge past authorities may been justified. Taken to the extreme it has been, however, has bred a society in which it’s hard to put your faith in anyone.

A crisis of anxiety

As well as a crisis of trust, we have a crisis of anxiety. Economic liberalism valorized free markets, liberating individuals to benefit from the mutual exchange of goods and releasing human enterprise from the shackles of convention and control. Deregulation would liberate the human spirit of adventure to develop a future shaped by progress. Rather than accepting to live within the limits and rhythms of the natural world and the givenness of a broader cosmic order, the liberal instinct was to declare the freedom of the individual to self-create, to forge individual identities in the search for autonomy and self-realisation.

Yet today, Generation Z perceive climate change as the number one threat to their future. Climate Change Anxiety is an increasingly recognised syndrome, leading people to forego – out of despair - bringing children into such a damaging world, and fuelling high levels of mental health problems especially amongst young people. Add in a global pandemic, spread rapidly around the world by our fondness for limitless travel, that saw levels of anxiety rocket. We now have war within the borders of Europe, for the first time since 1945, with the added prospect of China being drawn into the war on the side of Russia. And as a result of this, and never quite learning the lessons of the 2008 financial crash, we have a cost of living crisis more severe than has been known for decades. The progress of the sophisticated algorithmic technology of social media fuel increases levels of anxiety and mental health problems for those addicted to clickbait or the desire for likes, and talk of an epidemic of mental health problems doesn’t seem an exaggeration.

A crisis of relationship

Third, we have a crisis of relationship. At liberalism’s core is the idea of the freedom of the individual from societal expectations and strictures. Michael Freeden, Professor of Political Theory of Nottingham University, summarised the heart of liberalism as “a rallying cry for individuals desiring space to be free from unjustifiable limitations." Theorists such as Ronald Dworkin argued that the individual is best placed to choose their own vision of the good (and therefore the state must remain neutral on such notion), leaving the playing field open to myriad definitions of what people ought to aspire to – almost as many as there are people.

If that is our central moral ideal – that the individual should be free from obligation or restriction from everyone else, should we be surprised that we end up more distant from each other?

The liberal ideal of individual freedom – that each person should be free of interference from their neighbour in their choice of the good life as long as they don’t harm others – is superficially attractive. Attractive, that is, until we realise that it gives us no good reason to care for one another, and in fact encourages us to think of our neighbours as potential infringements on our freedom to do as we choose. The result has been a slow erosion of the social bonds that tie us to each other. If that is our central moral ideal – that the individual should be free from obligation or restriction from everyone else, should we be surprised that we end up more distant from each other? Should we be surprised that we treat each other as enemies on social media? Or that we refuse to have contact with those of another political tribe? Or that we abandon those older ties, those social institutions that bound us to each other - family, parish, church, local voluntary societies?

Now, a crisis of trust, anxiety and relationships is, in fact, a crisis of Faith, Hope and Love.

This trio has a long history in Christian life and thinking ever since St Paul coined it in a letter to the fledgling church in Corinth in the first century, in words that echo in many a wedding service today: “Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Christianity focusses attention on these three ‘theological virtues’ as they are known, and the Church, with all its flaws and failures, has continued to be a school in which they can be learnt, though a number of distinct practices.

Trust is built when people keep their promises.

First, faith. The creeds begin with the simple word ‘Credo’ – I believe. It’s the first thing you do as a Christian, to put your trust in something - or better, someone - who you cannot see, cannot prove, and yet you are invited to do exactly that – take the risk of faith. Trust is built when people keep their promises. The God that the writers of the Bible speak of describe him with exactly that idea: that he is faithful to his promises, like a marriage partner who does not give up on the other, no matter how wayward they might be. Being a Christian starts to teach you to trust God, in a way than might even lead to learning to trust people again. That doesn’t mean accepting deeply flawed and abusive institutions, but it does mean giving people the benefit of the doubt - the assumption of trust rather than mistrust – that tends to bring the best out of most people.

If our hope is in our political leaders to deliver radical solutions to combat mental wellbeing, it’s unsurprising Generation Z despairs.

Second hope. In politics false dawns are as predictable as taxes. If our hope is in our political leaders to deliver radical solutions to combat mental wellbeing, it’s unsurprising Generation Z despairs. Christian hope on the other hand, rests not on any human promise or expertise, not (thank God) on the superior qualities of bishops or popes, but on something entirely outside human capacity – the story of the Resurrection of Jesus, the conviction of a divine break-in to the order of the universe that has always had the capacity to bring a sense of hope in the darkest moments of an individual’s or a community’s life.

When I look into the eyes of my neighbour I see not a potential threat to my personal autonomy, but a person of infinite value.

Last, love. At the heart of the Christian faith is the conviction that each person (whatever his or her qualities, background or even character) is infinitely valuable because loved by the God who made them. The outworking of this idea in history is to make love, not suspicion or even tolerance the ideal bedrock of social life. This is the tie that binds. When I look into the eyes of my enemy I see my brother. When I look into the eyes of my neighbour I see not a potential threat to my personal autonomy, but a person of infinite value, whom I am bound to love as God does, however annoying, contrary or wrong their personality or political opinions.

These three qualities – faith, hope and love, are like muscles. The more you exercise them, the more they grow stronger. A life, or a society that chooses to root itself in Christian faith tends to grow in its capacity for faith, hope and love.