“Ukraine and its allies, including London, are threatening Russia for the last 1000 years, … to cancel our culture – they have bullied us for many, many years” – Yevgeny Popov, Russian Duma (“Parliament”) member, TV host (BBC News)
This is a narrative that the West doesn’t hear, whether it doesn’t want to, or probably more realistically, is dumbfounded about. This is because what Popov (and Putin and Russia in general) is referring to is outside of the West’s memory bank.
We have become ignorant of the past and are being accused of continuing to repeat it (Santayana was right).
The West’s bubble and Russia’s stronghold are not in the least bit overlapping, and we are experiencing the result.
How does this relate to our question of, “Why do we see behaviors such as experienced with Sandy Hook (here)?”
It is because the sources for these behaviors are buried deep in an onion and multiple layers must be pealed away in order to drill down to both the environmental forces around and those forces within individuals that drive their behaviors and subsequently influence group attitudes and their resulting behaviors.
The Russian cultural bubble, nee stronghold, is an example of the reverse of the bubble forming process that influenced the Boers in South Africa (here) – where now a long history of internal forces, values and attitudes of a few have been used to overwhelm the external forces and environment of the many to create a specific and unique stronghold. The result has been Russia’s little understood (or accepted) view of itself and its relationship with outsiders, particularly the West.
This indeed has a long history as Popov and Putin (here) refer to. It will be important to pull out important but long buried and forgotten pieces to shed light on (into) the roots of this stronghold. We’ll choose to begin with just important events, not Popov’s free interpretation, from well over ~1000 years ago in as best a nutshell presentation as possible. Keep in mind these are but small rootlets tied to the growth of a major tap root of Russian history. Note also the threads of Western incursions coupled with cultural conflicts.
From the 7th to the 3rd millennium BC, the Slavs, a conglomeration of tribes defined in linguistic (of Indo-European origin) and cultural terms, migrated from the east into the steppes (Ukraine) of eastern Europe north of the Black Sea.(1) They are the only historical migratory tribes to remain permanently.
In 27 BC the Roman Empire was established after the collapse of the Roman Republic in Rome.
In 476 the western portion of the Roman Empire crumbled into feudal kingdoms. The eastern portion continued as the Byzantine Empire, now centered in Constantinople.
A few years later, in 482, is the traditional year of the founding of Kyiv, although evidence suggests a date sometime from the 6th to the 7th century.
In 838 envoys of the Viking Rus’ tribe show up in Constantinople, attracted by the Byzantine Empire. The Vikings, of northwestern European ancestry, came from the Baltic Sea down the Volga and Dnieper Rivers through the steppes and Kyiv into the Black Sea. The title Rus’ is of Scandinavian root and in Swedish it means, ‘men who row.’ They were traders who did not see violence, coercion and trade as being incompatible.(2) The Rus’ tribe become the ancestors of the Russian people (here).
In 882 the Vikings struggled for control of the outpost in Kyiv. Achieving this, they and the region they control become known as the Kyivan Rus’.(2)
By 980 the area the Kyivan Rus’ control extends in the north from the Baltic to the Black Sea in the south and from east of the future village of Moscow to the west into what is now Poland and Hungry.(3) With the baptism of Volodymr in ~988, Constantinople finishes establishing (Orthodox) Christianity in the medieval state of Kyivan Rus’.
Very important was the year 1054, which most of us cannot remember, when the Great Schism of AD 1054 occurred. This was the breakup of the Christian church into two parts—the Western and the Eastern churches—as the result of growing estrangement (presumed heresies) from the 5th through the 11th century. These two parts were to turn into the western Latin Church (the Roman Catholic Church, based in Rome) and the Eastern Orthodox Church (based in Constantinople, in the Byzantine Empire). The mutual excommunications by the Latin Pope and the Eastern Patriarch in 1054 became a watershed in church history. The excommunications lasted until 1965 but the schism has never healed.
In 1147, some 6 or 7 centuries after Kyiv, Moscow is founded.
Significant in Russian memory is the year 1240 when Alexander Nevsky (prince of Novgorod and of Kyiv) halts the eastward drive of Swedish and German western invaders at the river Neva (north of Moscow). He was canonized as a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church in 1547.
Also of great importance is the year 1299 when the “see” of the Eastern Orthodox Church (residence of the Patriarch and seat of government of the church) was transferred from Kyiv to Moscow.
The next very significant event in our root is the year 1453 when Constantinople falls to the Ottoman Empire and the seat of Eastern Orthodoxy with it. The Byzantine Empire ends and discussion over its successor begins in earnest.
The fall of Constantinople occurred during a period (~1430s onward) when the territory once held by the Kyivan Rus’ was taken by the West and split between the Polish Kingdom (roughly from modern day Poland to just north of the Crimea) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (north of Kyiv to the Baltic Sea).(4)
A spiritual solution for the successor of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire appeared in the early 1500s. The monk Philotheus formally outlined Moscow as the Third Rome in his Epistles, based on historical poetic references. The Third Rome for Philotheus is not a city but “the Tsardom of our sovereign”, Moscow – Russia as a whole as a spiritual space, embracing the Orthodox Church and its children – Russian people, whose faith is different from the faith of Muslims – “Hagarene descendants”, and Catholics – “Latins”. The fact that Russia was formally perceived as God’s chosen nation was not a basis for expansion or world domination – Philotheus had not written a word of this kind in his Epistles. The Moscow as the Third Rome concept here was aimed solely to plant another task in the minds of Russian rulers: to care for Church and cherish Orthodoxy.(5)
“Moscow, the Third Rome“, however, eventually evolves into both a theological and a political concept comprising three important cultural aspects:
- Theological: linked with justification of necessity, the inevitability of the unity of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Moscow’s duty to protect the “true” Orthodox faith from further “Latin” heresies (the Great Schism);
- Social: derived out of the feeling of unity in East Slavic territories being historically tied together through the Eastern Orthodox faith and Slavic culture; and
- Governmental (State Doctrine): according to which the Moscow Prince (Tsar) acts as a supreme ruler (Sovereign and legislator) of Eastern Orthodox nations and becomes a defender of the Eastern Orthodox Church. As a consequence, the Church should facilitate the Sovereign in execution of his function supposedly determined by God, in an autocratic administration.
While the date of 1547 may not ring a bell, you remember the name: Ivan the Terrible (Grand Prince of Moscow (1533–84). This is the year he is the first to be proclaimed Tsar (“Caesar”) of Russia, further building the connection of Russia with Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. His reign saw the completion of the construction of a centrally administered Russian state and the creation of an empire that included non-Slav states. Ivan engaged in prolonged and largely unsuccessful wars against the West (Sweden and Poland), and, in seeking to impose military discipline and a centralized administration, he instituted a reign of terror against the hereditary nobility.
It is during this time that Prince Andrei Kurbskii, in his letters to Ivan the Terrible, spoke of the Russian state as “The Holy Russian Empire.” There are notable similarities both with the idea of Moscow, the Third Rome (above) and the development of the concept of Holy Rus or Holy Russia – as the Kingdom of Heaven, the eternal czardom of God in the Heaven and on the Earth, as an important religious and philosophical doctrine that appeared and developed from the 8th to the 21st centuries.
The next two contributors you may also remember. The first, reigning from 1682 to 1725 is Peter the Great. Peter inherited a nation that was severely underdeveloped compared to the culturally prosperous European (western) countries. While the Renaissance and the Reformation swept through Europe, Russia rejected westernization and remained isolated from modernization. It has been suggested that this opposition to the West (i.e., Europe) was inherent to the Byzantine Empire, that is, the “Second Rome,” particularly after the Great Schism of 1054. Russia, in turn, followed it in real politics taking an anti-Western, anti-European stance.(5) Peter fought this and undertook extensive reforms in an attempt to mirror Western culture, focused on the development of science and recruited several experts to educate his people. He established St. Petersburg in 1712 emphasizing western cultural ideas, and moved the capital there from Moscow. This did not have a lasting effect on the culture.
Peter also had a problem with an all powerful and rich (and stodgy) Orthodox Church. He diminished the power of the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy by eliminating the supreme religious office of Patriarch, who had wielded near-equal power with the Tsar. In the place of this single powerful figure, Peter established the Holy Synod of eleven or twelve members, not necessarily churchmen, to administer the temporal affairs and the finances of the church. In 1722, he appointed a civilian Procurator of the Holy Synod, charged with supervising church administration and exercising jurisdiction over the clergy. In this way, Tsar Peter made the church subordinate to the state.
The next major contributor reigned from 1762 to 1796 – Catherine the Great. Catherine was also enamored with Western thought, read constantly about the Enlightenment, and interacted with Voltaire often. She backed out of war with Denmark and brought the army home. This was due to extreme state financial difficulties primarily due to a large serf population that paid no taxes, and a rich and propertied church that also did not pay taxes.
She resolved these two issues in one stroke. By imperial manifesto issued on February 26, 1764, all ecclesiastical lands and property became state property, and the church itself became a state institution. All church serfs were upgraded to the status of state peasants; as a result, one million male peasants—more than two million persons, counting wives and children—came under state control, and now paying taxes to the state. Power and administrative autonomy were stripped from the clergy, high and low, and all priests became salaried employees of the state.
During the 19th to early 20th centuries the “Moscow as the Third Rome” concept gave rise to a kind of belief that Russia is destined to lead and protect universal Orthodoxy and Christian faith. The belief, being in tune with the mood of Russian society, had an impact on both the inner political structure of the state (including its Soviet period) and its foreign policy. This suggests that the Moscow as the Third Rome concept may be seen as Russia’s informal geopolitical doctrine.(5) (This is an interesting observation as it comes from two Russian researchers).
A major development begins during the 1850s. The “pan-movements” arise in Central and Eastern Europe – Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism (the 19th-20th century political movements for the unity of all Slavic and Germanic peoples). The rise of Bolshevism and Nazism owe more to Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism than to any other movement.(6) Important also is the fact that the pan-movements started with absolute claims to chosenness.(7)
Pan-Slavism takes the official name “Holy Russia” quite literally.(8) By this time (mid-19th century) “Holy Russia” had acquired two meanings:
- A name for Russia as a whole, as in the epic poems; and
- The “mystical ideal of Russia” as a haven for the “new chosen people.”(9)
Commentary on this phenomenon: “… essential was the fact that the totalitarian governments inherited an aura of holiness: they had only to invoke the past of “Holy Russia” or “The Holy Roman Empire” to arouse all kinds of superstitions in Slav or Germanic intellectuals. Pseudomystical nonsense, enriched by countless and arbitrary historical memories (recall Popov), provided an emotional appeal that seemed to transcend, in depth and breadth, the limitations of nationalism.(10)
Pan-Slavism offered a new religious theory and a new concept of holiness. It was not the Czar’s religious function and position in the Orthodox Church (see above, Moscow, the third Rome) that led Russian Pan-Slavs to the affirmation of the Christian nature of the Russian people … who carry God directly into the affairs of this world. It was because of claims to being “the true divine people of modern times.” (11)
One Pan-Slavic author called the Russian people the “only Christian people on earth.” (12)
The concept continued to develop strength, as reflected by various authors. In 1871 in Russia and Europe, (a standard work for Pan-Slavism), the Slavophile writer Danielewski praised the Russians’ “political capacity” because of their “tremendous thousand-year-old state that still grows and whose power does not expand like the European power in a colonial way but remains always concentrated around its nucleus, Moscow.”(13)
In 1937, N. Berdyaev, in The Origin of Russian Communism, wrote: “Religion and nationality in the (historical) Muscovite kingdom grew up together, as they did also in the consciousness of the ancient Hebrew people. And in the same way as Messianic consciousness was an attribute of Judaism, it was an attribute of Russian Orthodoxy also.”(14)
And in 1947, M. N. Katkov wrote: “All power has it derivation from God: the Russian Czar, however, was granted a special significance distinguishing him from the rest of the world’s rulers. … He is a successor of the Caesars of the Eastern Empire, … the founders of the very creed of the Faith of Christ. … Herein lies the mystery of the deep distinction between Russia and all the nations of the world.” (15)
Again Katkov: “Government in Russia means a thing totally different from what is understood by this term in other countries … In Russia the government in the highest sense of the word, is the Supreme Power in action …” (16)
Commentary: “Power (in a totalitarian state) was conceived as a divine emanation pervading all natural and human activity. It was no longer a means to achieve something: it simply existed, men were dedicated to its service for the love of God, and any law that might regulate or restrain it its “limitless and terrible strength” was clearly sacrilege. … The Pan-Slav movement only had to adhere to this power and to organize its popular support, which eventually would permeate and therefore sanctify the whole people – a colossal herd, obedient to the arbitrary will of one man – rules neither by law or interest, but kept together solely by the cohesive force of their numbers and the conviction of their own holiness.(17)
(sigh)
There in a nutshell is the long history involved in the growth and augmentation of this pseudomystical root and myth that has become the Russian stronghold. Driven by the few and imposed upon the many, regardless of how “modern” Russia seems, how “Westernized” portions of the culture seem, and how “well” global business interactions seem, the root of the stronghold is still there.
If one carefully pays attention, one can catch in the following articles the crafted performance that is the reality of the Russian Stronghold, which survives by intentionally creating Incomplete and/or Missing Information, by feeding compliant and aligned Attitudes that become Behaviors seemingly by Choice, and ultimately results in the majority’s Regression to the historically created Cultural Mean.
Putin’s ‘surreal’ version of Ukrainian history alarms experts
Russia’s Orthodox Church paints the conflict in Ukraine as a holy war
Why Patriarch Kirill supports Putin’s War
The Russian Orthodox Leader at the Core of Putin’s Ambitions
(Addendum, May 23, 2022: Just after posting this discussion, an article by Andrey Kortunov, a Russian political scientist, appeared (here). In it he strongly emphasizes what most of the West does not grasp, that the Russian Ukraine conflict is not ethnic, not radical nationalism, not fundamentally religious, and not about territory, although those subjects appear in Kremlin propaganda and the media. He affirms what this post has attempted to shine light upon through the development of the historical root, that the conflict primarily concerns a clash between very different ways of organizing social and political life. Ukrainian society, leaning west, is since 1991 organizing from the bottom up (e.g., strongly contested elections) while Russian society is historically organized from the top down (i.e., Putin’s statement in February that there is only one decision maker in the country). Given this broader and more fundamental basis for the war, it is hoped that this post makes more sense. Kortunov concludes with three possible scenarios for how the war ends, all of which have global implications with all of us having to learn to live in a world that will continue to have two incompatible models of social organization: you guessed it, Strongholds – JE)
We’ve only just begun to peal away layers of the corporate human onion.
More thoughts on “going deeper” next post.
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1 – The Gates of Europe, Serhii Plokhy, 2015, p 14
2 – Ibid., p 25-6, maps x, xi
3 – Ibid., p 25
4 – Ibid., p 58-60, map xiii
5 – The “Moscow as the Third Rome” Concept: Its Nature and Interpretations since the 19th
to Early 21st Centuries, Klimenko, A. N.; Yurtaev, V. I. Geopolítica(s) 9(2) 2018: 231-251
6 – Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arndt, 1951, p 222
7 – Ibid., p 233
8 – Ibid., p 226 (Note 18)
9 – https://orthochristian.com/100728.html
10 – Arndt, Op. cit., p 226
11 – Arndt, Op. cit., p 233, and notes 35, 36
12 – Arndt, Op. cit., p 233 (Note 35)
13 – Arndt, Op. cit., p 223 (Note 5)
14 – Quoted from Arndt, Op. cit., p 242 (Note 61)
15 – Quoted from Arndt, Op. cit., p 247 (Note 69, quoting from Salo W. Baron, Modern
Nationalism and religion, 1947).
16 – Quoted from Arndt, Op. cit., p 248 (Note 71, quoting from Salo W. Baron, Modern
Nationalism and religion, 1947).
17 – Arndt, Op. cit., p 248.
Road Signs and Blind Spots 