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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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Politics
5 min read

Politics needs some deep stirring emotion

In politics, the struggle between our reason and desire is a fair fight.
A young woman in a blue suit stands at a wooden box in a parliamentary debating chamber looking upward while speaking.
British Youth Council parliamentary debate.
British Youth Council.

“The government you elect is the government you deserve.” So goes the famous quote, variously attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Joseph de Maistre and George Bernard Shaw. Of all these thinkers, Maistre is perhaps the most interesting, describing the business of government as a kind of religion, a political “faith” – one complete with dogmas, mysteries and even ministers.  

Maistre was, somewhat surprisingly amid the turmoil of eighteenth-century France, a staunch monarchist. His argument was that, if the authority of a political leader was only a product of social convention, then that authority would always lack a sufficient degree of legitimacy, leaving the door wide open for violence and strife. His solution was to defend the divine right of kings. This was a controversial position, as much then as it is now.  

Aside from his famous quote about elections, Maistre’s political philosophy is oft-criticised as polemical, hearkening back to a golden era of European monarchy that never really existed. Nevertheless, within his writings, Maistre laid bare a reality that we often prefer to keep veiled: that our political will is as much about what we find to be emotionally compelling as it is about what we find to be rationally convincing, indeed, the latter is very much dependent on the former. The more social scientists are able to demonstrate the reality of subtle phenomena such as confirmation bias, unconscious bias, and racial prejudice, the more we see that we are often being governed by pre-cognitive or non-cognitive instincts, even those of us who like to think that we are better than that. In the end, we have to concede that when it comes to politics, as with so much else, the struggle between our faculty of reason and the desire of our heart is a fair fight.  

  

“They have few standards by which to judge between falsehood and truth in revolutionary movements.”  

Amy Buller
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In 1930’s Europe, there was certainly a lot of emotionally compelling politics around. Fascinated by the language and culture of the German people, thinker and educator Amy Buller made repeated visits to Germany from the 1920’s onwards, often accompanied by reading parties of British academics, church leaders and university students. In those decades, as the political landscape of Germany began to shift, her purpose became less about countryside walks and studying, and more about the facilitation of urgent, open and honest dialogue between Buller, her fellow travellers, and their German counterparts in the churches and universities wherever she had contacts. As Hitler rose to power, and even before the full horrors of Nazism became widely known, Amy was compelled to find out why so many people, especially young people, were being attracted by what she saw as a “brutish” ideology.  

In 1943, amid the violence and destruction of World War II, Buller published a book, Darkness Over Germany, which gives a first-hand account of the many people that she and her travelling parties had met, and the conversations that had taken place. Like Maistre, Buller proposed that without God, politics was a dangerous kind of faith in something, one that tended towards violence. In the introduction to her book she writes of “…the tragedy of a whole generation of German youth, who, having no faith, made Nazism their religion.”  

It’s common these days to hear complaints about the political apathy of the young, with polls commonly reporting that only about 50 per cent of British 18 to 24-year-olds are intending to vote in the next General Election. However, there are those who raise the caution that this may not be a symptom of apathy, so much as a symptom of the cultural and structural injustices that put barriers in the way of young people engaging with our nation’s political life. Young people are not likely to “believe in” a political system from which they feel excluded. As Buller’s writing notes – when this happens, young people are likely to put their “faith” in something else.   

Maistre’s solution was perhaps too extreme for modern sensibilities: asking the politically minded populace to believe that their leaders were imbued with the authority of God, by God. In the twentieth-century, Buller took a more moderate view. As the Nazis began to view her with suspicion, trips to Germany became increasingly difficult to arrange, so she travelled elsewhere to places such as Hungary and Bulgaria. Wherever Buller went, she found more and more young people who wanted to talk to her about their political hopes and ideals. Summarising the whole, Buller suggested that Europe’s political landscape was eschewing “shallow rationalism” and instead being shaken by a “deep stirring” of emotion, particularly among young people. She recorded the observation: 

“They all want change, and they all want a chance to play a part in that change, but so few have any religious faith, which means that they have few standards by which to judge between falsehood and truth in revolutionary movements.” 

In a recent report, published by the Jo Cox Foundation, increasing the public’s “political literacy” was highlighted as a key response to prevent the outbreaks of abuse, intimidation and violence towards elected officials. As any educator will tell you, literacy is a two-way street – it includes not only the “shallow rationalism” of knowing information, or knowing where to access information, but also the ability to communicate that information effectively to others. Such communication comes from a much deeper, embodied kind of knowing, one which requires one to have assimilated knowledge and worked with it, feeling its malleability, and testing its apparent truth-claims against an internal standard of what is true and false, or right and wrong.  

For Buller, this internal standard was inextricably linked to faith. To the end of her life, she remained open minded as to what form this faith might take, albeit her own religious practice was firmly Christian. Cumberland Lodge, the educational charity she set up to promote her aims, was from the start open to those of all faiths and none, and she warmly welcomed dialogue between those of different faith groups, including atheism. But in 1943, as Amy Buller looked with hope towards the prospect of a post-war Europe, she summed up the political landscape as follows:  

We are now faced with the greater task of bringing healing to the nations, including our own, I am convinced this cannot be done without a faith in God adequate to the tremendous task of reconstruction.  

Given Amy Buller’s open-mindedness, one can read the word “God” in this statement its broadest possible sense, as referring to whatever moral compass one takes as an internal standard of what is true and false, or right and wrong. But the point remains that the political will is therefore not a matter of rational thought, or not only of that, but is an expression of feelings and instincts that run far, far deeper.  

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