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9 January 2025

4 min read

Russia’s waiting reformation

Putin’s world is not the only take on Russia.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Graffiti on a wall, spells out in Russian character the name Navalny.

Anti-Putin pro-Navalny graffiti, Saint Petersburg.

Dor Shabashewitz via Wikimedia Commons.

When I presented the book I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko for purchase at the counter, my only thought was for what the bookseller would think. Was I a Putin sympathiser and apologist for the war in Ukraine? It says a lot about how we have unconsciously embraced Putin’s world as the only take on Russia. There is an indigenous saying that Russia is not Moscow and Moscow is not Russia. By the same token, Putin is not Russia, however much he would like us to think this; it is naïve and prejudiced of us to allow the largest country in the world to be defined by its dictator.

Elena Kostyuchenko, and Alexei Navalny in his posthumously published book Patriot, belong in different generations to Putin and inhabit another moral universe. Navalny has done more than anyone to call out the epic levels of corruption and dark cynicism of the Putin era. This is a Mafia state, as Luke Harding observes. Navalny believes there are twenty people who rule in Russia, with staggering levels of visible and hidden wealth, and a further one thousand who eat from their trough. The rest of the country includes those who are duped by state media, those who don’t want to know or keep their heads down or don’t care, and those who testify to the truth.

This latter cohort shows remarkable courage, because they are being silenced, one by one, through prison or murder. Navalny died in prison after previously being poisoned in Siberia; Kostyuchenko was poisoned while in Germany and has been targeted for assassination elsewhere. Before them lies a sobering roll call of journalists and politicians like Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov and Igor Domnikov whose murders are clearly attributable to what they have said about the crimes of Putin and his associates.

Elena Kostyuchenko’s journalism takes her to Russia’s abandoned people and places. Derelict and decaying hospitals where the young, the addicted and the dispossessed gather; the mothers of Beslan who are beaten up and persecuted because they want the truth about that fateful siege; psychiatric hospitals with no resources or patient care; landscapes depleted by corrupt extractive industries. She is inspired by the fearless reportage of Politkovskaya and her writing bears the imprint of Svetlana Alexievich, with its gift for listening and attention to the wonderful ordinariness of human life. Her walk down the dark parade of Russia’s casualties is a tribute to the finest traditions of journalism, which carry the echo of the voice of Christ in their attention to those who lose out in this world.

In prison, Alexei Navalny learned the Sermon on the Mount by heart; his conversion from the routine atheism of his Soviet upbringing being triggered by the birth of his and Yulia’s first child, Dasha. He is wry, sardonic, stubborn, implacable – displaying an other-worldly willpower. It is hard to compute the courage it took to return to Russia after being poisoned with Novichok, knowing it would surely lead to imprisonment, mistreatment and death:

One day I made the decision not to be afraid. I weighed everything up, understood where I stand – and let it go.

Of the pain inflicted on him in prison for speaking the truth about Putin’s Russia, he says:

I have decided that this is my own pared-down version of suffering for the faith, a moment of suffering for being a believer. Happily it does not entail being dismembered, stoned to death, or having the lions set on me.

And yet the totality of his life was not far short of this. He skates over much of the abuse, but references being woken every hour of every night for a personal roll call. When other prisoners were primed to shout at Navalny for long periods from close range, it is deeply moving to visualise him shouting back and not backing down. Over time, his bespoke prison regime became steadily more abusive and isolating, directed in his view from the Kremlin.

There is absurdity at the heart of the system and he confronts those responsible for it, rather than meekly submitting to it. In the late Soviet era, criminal law was so comprehensively drafted that anyone could be picked up for an infringement if this was politically expedient. In Putin’s Russia, we have returned to the Stalinist period where offences are simply made up in a dark Wonderland. It is rule by law, not of law.

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, uses a particular metaphor. He says that Putin and his Kremlin officials act like priests who mediate a believer’s relationship with God. They have become intermediaries for how Russians are supposed to experience their country, telling them what to think and feel about it. If so, then Russia is ready for a new reformation, where people claim their own organic relationship with a nation that means so much to them. There are already enough martyrs for this new reformation while Putin continues to speak power to truth. Those of us who care about its people and its future do not need Putin’s malign priesthood to interpret Russian life. There is a different Russia, waiting to be discovered.

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The Wild God we can't coerce

Weird and increasingly encountered beyond the wilderness.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A pianist raises his arms while sitting at a grand piano amid recording equipment.

Nick Cave recording Wild God.

nickcave.com

Christianity is a wild thing.

I say this, even while only half-understanding what I’m saying. It’s something that I’m learning. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that it’s something that I’m unlearning. Because, admittedly, I’m far more familiar with a somewhat domesticated view of my own faith tradition. The kind that allows me to fashion fences out of my expectations; to put parameters around God’s presence and boundaries upon his behaviour. Both of which are a farce, of course - but a comforting farce, none the less.

You see, there is nothing ‘comfortable’ about a God who cannot be wholly predicted or comprehended, let alone controlled or contained. A wild God is always going to be a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked and too unused to the sensation of being cosmically baffled.

But, affronting as it may be, I am trying my best to sit in the knowledge that the God I believe in is a wild God. And I’m finding this wildness increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps it’s all the Rowan Williams I’ve been reading, or my newfound interest in the Romantics (as in, the eighteenth and nineteenth century poets, not the 1970’s American rock band). Or maybe it has more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album, which I have been listening to relentlessly over the last week.

In this musical offering, Nick Cave introduces us to his ‘Wild God’, who I think is my God too. It’s just that ‘wild’ has never been the first adjective I reach for when describing him.

Until now, I suppose.

Let me clarify what I mean by wild, because what I’m not saying is that God is inherently chaotic, unruly, reckless or irrational. Wild Gods, as we know them from the myths and legends, act on tempestuous whims, and are more than a little havoc prone. They are perilous, largely because one can never truly know where they stand with them. That couldn’t be further from what I mean. The entire Old Testament - as complex, nuanced and masterful as it is - can be understood as a collection of ways in which the God at its centre is saying – this is who I am, this is what I desire, this is what I’m going to do, this is where you stand with me. If you were to read the Bible, it would become pretty clear pretty quickly: God is insistent that those who seek to know him will never have to second guess him. God’s wildness does not mean that we cannot know the essence of who he is or how he feels towards us. I like to think that we can endeavour to know him accurately, but never exhaustively.

Rather, what I’m trying to get my head and heart around is the knowledge that God, and therefore Christianity, cannot be wholly domesticated. Despite my best efforts, it cannot be made into an entirely comfortable and cozy thing. To make it so, one would have to dilute it, shrink it, bleed any truth out of it. In his poem - Sometimes a Wild God -Tom Hirons writes,

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all’.

There’s an innate weirdness to the Christian worldview, a pure wildness at the heart of it. It’s brimming with mystery and mysticism. As Hirons hints, it’s bigger and more consequential than our comfort-zones would like it to be. And, what’s more, much of it is communicated through the natural world. Biblical narratives and poetry are endlessly pointing us toward the places and spaces that are outside human cultivation – the stars, the mountains, the oceans – the things that pre-date and will outlive us.

Christianity is wild in that there’s an alluring organic-ness about it. Its truth sits beyond human manipulation and coercion.

For millennia, whole lives have been given over to this truly wild and, I believe, wildly true story. Can I give you just two recent examples? Two people who have (utterly unexpectedly) adventured their way into this wild and wonderful way of seeing the world? Two people I’ve had the joy of learning from over the past year?

First up is Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical.

Buddhism, Witchcraft – you name it, he’s tried it.

He told Justin Brierley and I the story of how he his adventures have led him to arrive at the wildest possible destination: Christianity.  

And then there’s the renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, who decided to do a 101-day wild vigil in Dartmoor. Despite not being a Christian, on the very last night, he prayed. While praying, he looked up and saw something utterly unexplainable, something ‘properly Old Testament’. And that was it – after a night of dancing, several other ‘odd’ experiences, and eighteen months of deep pondering – he was able to say, ‘I went into the forest expected to be wedded to the wild and I came out wedded to Christ’.

Thinking about it, it’s probably no accident that ‘Christianity’ began on the margins, and from there, worked its way into the cities. There was a time where the prediction of Jesus’ arrival was being yelled out into the countryside, so loudly that people were emptying the surrounding towns to come and hear more. A time when rumours of redemption were being whispered in the rural hills. A time when its chief messenger was an inexplicably weird man named John the Baptist; who shunned his prestigious priestly heritage to live in the wilds, to dress in camel skins, to eat honey and insects and insist upon the imminent coming of the long-awaited Messiah. This Messiah, by the way, who would be born where animals are kept, sleep on mountains, retreat into deserts, walk on water, speak to storms, and break people (including himself) out of stone graves.

You see what I mean, Christianity is a wild story to believe and live in accordance with.

It’s the story that drove the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ of the Third Century AD to reject civilisation and all its comforts, in order to seek God in the silence and solitude of the desert. It’s the story that is still inspiring people to live in caves on Mount Athos, secluded islands just off the coast of Wales and forests in the heart of Ireland. An uncontainable message has, since its inception, been lived out in uncontainable places.

Honestly, you want weird? Christianity can darn-well give you weird.

Don’t be fooled by over-familiarity or be swayed by that pesky left-side of your brain, the part that wants to convince you that you know all that there is to know. Christianity is a story that I, myself, had forgotten was quite this wild.