It is Long Past Time to Put an End to the Dangerous but Widespread Notion that Spiritual and Political Freedoms are Not Interdependent, Epstein Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 3 – Since Pushkin, many members of the Russian intelligentsia have sought consolation in the idea that regardless of how much tyranny exists in society as a whole, individuals can maintain spiritual and creative freedom and even that “oppression promotes spiritual flowering,” Mikhail  Epstein says.

            But there is an enormous danger that those who believe that have been tempted to “substitute this ‘secret’ freedom for freedom in general and thereby end by justifying the most severe lack of freedom” in society, the Russian cultural specialist at Emory University says (svoboda.org/a/taynaya-svoboda-mihail-epshteyn-o-pushkinskom-mife/32101910.html).

            Indeed, Epstein documents that members of the Russian intelligentsia have done precisely that again and again in tsarist, Soviet and now post-Soviet Russia, only to suffer the consequences of the delusion that these two kinds of freedom are separable and the one can exist without the other, a deception that has harmed not only them but the entire population.

            It is long past time to put an end to this dangerous delusion which has spread from the Russian intelligentsia to many who analyze Russian and are seduced by the comfort that such a notion appears to provide.