Staunton, January 14 – A return to
“traditional values” is being promoted by the Russian leadership to reinforce
public support and demanded by some Russians for a variety of reasons; but in
fact, such values “tested by time over many centuries which are now being
propagandized in Russia simply don’t exist, according to Tatyana Shcherbina, a
Russian poetess and essayist.
In this, Russia is hardly exceptional,
there are no “traditional values” defined in that way in France, Germany or any
other country. Instead, she argues, what exists is “national character which
manifests itself in various ways and various circumstances and in everyday
customs” (chaskor.ru/article/traditsionny_li_tsennosti_37077).
That reality becomes more obvious if
one looks at the case of other countries.
“Today’s ‘European values,” for example, have been promoted since the 18th
century but they have been applied consistently for “all of a half a century,
and it is not the case that they will remain what they are now forever.”
In 2006, she notes, there was an
Internet forum on the question: “What are Russian [ethnic or otherwise]
values?” The two most popular answers
were the public bath and support for a great power status for the country. The
other participants “answered that they didn’t know or simply went along.”
Very few traditions routinely invoked
are that old: the British monarchy and the Muslim haj to Mecca being among the
few that do exist. “Russian traditions,
besides the bath and great power interest are much younger.” And many would be appalled if they knew the
realities of the “traditions” that they say they want to bring back.
In the 17th century,
Russian women were said by travelers to be more interested in work and more
honest than men. But in the same century, Shcherbina notes, girls were given in
marriage at 12, and when Peter I tried to raise the marriage age to 17, he was blocked by the Holy Synod which lowered his
proposed age to 13.
“Today,” the
Russian poetess says, “this would be called pedophilia, but not a tradition.”
Among the most
stable Russian traditions are serfdom, including its Soviet variant, autocracy,
“frequent wars (fratricidal, conquest, defensive, and civil), the miserly low
value of ‘the little man’ (and each can become him), and the instability of
property relations.” No one is really interested in returning to these
“traditions.”
The underlying
Russian “value” – laziness of Oblomovism – is about the lack of motivation:
nothing one does is certain to work and so there is little incentive to try and
a great deal of interest in simply sitting and reflecting “about the fate of
the world” and questions like “to be or not to be.”
Sometimes the
need to do something can be satisfied by vodka and drugs which help people to
withdraw from reality, she says. But Shcherbina adds that it is important to
recognize what this laziness really represents. “It is also a modus vivendi
which allows one to preserve his or her honor and dignity” without having to
expend much energy.
There is
another Russian traditional characteristic, she continues, and that involves
the penetration of the values of prisons into the lives of those not in them.
When a high enough percentage of people are in or have passed through prison,
it undermines respect for law as an institution.
It might seem
that Orthodoxy is “the core Russian tradition,” but many of the things about it
are anything but old. In the Russian Empire,
just as in most Orthodox countries, people celebrated Christmas on December 25.
Only after Stalin restored the Church did the Russian Orthodox begin to market
it on January 7.
So it is with many
traditions that are proclaimed as being eternal, and that provides the key to
understanding why some people promote them: “Today’s propaganda of ‘traditionalism’
has a specific goal,” and that is to promote the idea that the powers that be
are eternal as well – or alternatively to allow people to avoid having to face
the present and the future on their own.
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