Russia Must Serve as a new ‘Noah’s Ark’ to Save Humanity, Izborsky Club Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 2 -- The influential Izborsky Club has issued a 49,000-word collective essay urging that Russia serve as “a Noah’s ark” for humanity given the destruction its authors see all around their country, thus elevating this apocalyptic vision which has long circulated in Russia to a new political level.

            The essay is published in the latest issue of the right-wing Moscow newspaper Zavtra (zavtra.ru/blogs/russkij_kovcheg_al_ternativnaya_strategiya_mirovogo_razvitiya) and represents the latest development of thinking first promoted by Izborsky club member Sergey Pisarev a decade ago and expanded by him in a book last year.

            According to the report’s authors, “our Ark in fact opens a new dimension on that very same ideology which we have been developing for 15 years” because it extends the domestic vision of the Izborsky Club to the entire world and posits an anthropological difference between those who will survive the current turmoil and those who won’t.

            “We again see the approach of a Flood, not the Biblical one which renewed the ancient land” but an invisible one that will sweep aside the ideas that the West has spread for the last 500 years and that only a saving remnant has resisted. “Not everything is lost,” however, and “Russia can become the Ark” of salvation.

            Not Russia in its “current state” but Russia “in its potential.” The Izbrsky club essay says that “we assert that today as never before people of the Ark are needed.” Russia can take the lead in saving them whether they are Russians or from somewhere else as long as the latter follow the same principles.