Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 19 – Few events in
recent years have triggered such a fevered discussion in the Russian
blogosphere as the erection of a statute to Ivan the Terrible in Oryol,
something no Russian government had done before, with most horrified but some
enthusiastic about this latest turn in Russian history.
Nonetheless, some of the
commentaries have been extremely thoughtful, offering perspectives on what is
going on that may prove to be more prescient after the current media circus
subsides. The conclusions of three in particular seem especially worthy of note
by those following Russia under the Putin regime.
First, on the APN portal, Russian
commentator Pavel Svyatenko suggests that Putin is promoting the cult of Ivan
the Terrible as a way of promoting Stalinism because the tsar was at least an
ethnic Russian and thus easier for contemporary Russians to accept than it
would be for them to accept immediately the ethnic Georgian Stalin (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=35581).
“Under the guise of the cult of Ivan
the Terrible,” he writes, we are being forced to accept and acknowledge tyranny
and not some abstract one but precisely a Stalinist variant. Because society
isn’t ready to fall on its knees before the Georgian Stalin, we are being tied
to a Russian tyrant from the distant past.”
Once Russians accept “the greatness
of Ivan the Terrible,” he writes, “the next step will be for them to be told
that Stalin is the Ivan the Terrible of today” because “those who are imposing
the cult of Ivan the Terrible really want to renew terror against our people in
the style of 1917-1953.”
But for that to happen, Svyatenkov
says, the powers that be need “moral sanction. A slave who knows that he is not
free is already not a slave. Knowledge of one’s own slavery is the beginning of
freedom.” Therefore, for those who want such a return to the past, it is
essential that Russians become “bearers of a slave’s consciousness” and act on
that basis.
“The victims [of such a system] must
themselves demand that they be killed,” the Russian commentator argues. “They
must celebrate murders. They must tremble before murders. But they must not
pose the main question: by what right are these evil deeds committed and is it
possible to live without them?”
Second, in “Novaya gazeta,” commentator Boris Knorre
argues that the success the new cult of Ivan the Terrible has enjoyed so far
reflects the triumph in the last decade of marginal worshippers of
authoritarianism in the Russian Orthodox Church over those who sought to
promote humanism (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2016/10/18/70219-oprichnoe-bogoslovie).
In the 1990s, there were two
marginal groups in the Russian Orthodox Church who sought to elevate Ivan the
Terrible almost to sainthood. One of
these groups denied that the tsar had committed the crimes with which he is
usually associated, arguing that these were inventions of Western writers
hostile to Russia.
The other did not deny his actions
but rather argued that they weren’t crimes at all but rather they were
necessary steps, however brutal they may have appeared, that saved Russians
from falling into heresy and thus preserving the Russian church and the ability
of Russians to gain eternal life.
Then-Patriarch Aleksii rejected
these efforts arguing that “it was impossible to glorify the holy martyrs and
their cruel oppressors” at one and the same time and in one and the same
way. And he was able to ensure that the
church as an organization kept the then-marginal figures from having their way.
But the current patriarch Kirill has
a very different view. He and his church have denounced much of the humanism
Aleksii celebrated and have been enthusiastic in supporting the erection of
statues to Ivan the Terrible. Many of
the marginal are now in positions of authority both within the church and in
Kremlin circles, Knorre says.
Like Russian society as a whole, the
church milieu in the 1990s was characterized by “a quite large spectrum of
opinions.” But now there is an obvious effort to impose a single view in both
places. And that authoritarianism has
resulted in a situation in which “the defense of Stalin has its supporters
among the upper reaches of the church hierarchy.”
As Per-Arne Bodin pointed out in his
2009 monograph, “Language, Canonization and Holy Foolishness,” the Russian
Church under Kirill has taken the lead in promoting a revision of history in
favor of its most authoritarian elements and this has helped the state displace
the views of the 1990s with the current ones.
“Therefore, even if one supposes
that at the base of the present-day respect for Ivan the Terrible lie political
causes, it is not appropriate to ignore the fact that the preconditions for
this respect were laid by religious backers of black hundreds ideas.” And that
has broader consequences than many now think.
It means, Knorre says, that
“humanism is based exclusively in the secular space, and the supporters of
totalitarian turn back to the past have in their hands the entire arsenal of
religious argumentation. That goes a long way to explain why the latter are
winning.”
And third, religious observer Sergey
Khudiyev on the “Pravoslavny mir” portal argues that the real tragedy of the way
Russians are being encouraged to view Ivan the Terrible now is that this is “another
religion,” “a cult” and “neither Orthodoxy nor any form of Christianity
whatsoever” (pravmir.ru/ob-odnom-novom-religioznom-dvizhenii1/).
“The cult of Ivan the
Terrible,” he writes, “is a cult of reprisals, and it is deeply and organically
connected with the cult of Stalin. This cult has its own psychological and spiritual
dimensions: psychologically, it is rooted in the East European complex of
incompleteness; and spiritually, it has a completely occult character.”
East Europeans and Russians among
them suffer from their sense that they are on the distant periphery of Europe
and that they must, regardless of whether they are liberals or patriots,
measure what they do against what they imagine Europe to be. They lack a sense of “ethical independence”
that could allow them to judge what they are doing in its own terms.
Those who want to glorify Ivan the
Terrible and Stalin to put down the West, Khudiyev says, are showing despite
what they think that for them “the West is the most important place in their
mental map of the world.” But of course,
he adds, “for a Christian, this cannot be the case” because a Christian must
look to values not of this world.
But there is also “a deeper
spiritual problem” in this case, he says.
This is that what is on offer with regard to Ivan the Terrible is “a
definite cult, a new religious movement,” with its own values and ideas all of
which are directed against Christianity in general and Orthodoxy in particular.
And this cult and especially its
occult dimension as pushed by people like Aleksandr Prokhanov distracts
Russians from Christianity just as much as Aum Sinreke or the Branch Dravidians
did. “The sooner we resolve to say that
we are dealing with an un-Christian cult, the less evil it will bring.”
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