In
2009, Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State, presented her Russian
counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with a “reset” button she
thought symbolized a new era for Russian and American diplomacy.
Lavrov
pointed out the word the Americans had chosen, “peregruzka,” meant
“overcharged,” not “reset.” Though the two leaders laughed off the mistake, the
mistranslated button was a symbol of persistent misunderstanding between the
two nations.
Russia
has long been characterized by many in the West as enigmatic; indeed, almost
beyond understanding. It was Winston Churchill who in October of 1939, mere
weeks after the invasion of Poland by Nazi armed forces, speculated on the role
of Russia in the war, famously depicting
Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
He
added: “…but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It
cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany
should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun
the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe.
That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.”
In
other words, Churchill could not envision the dismemberment of the Soviet Union
by the German war machine without Russia fighting for her “life interests.”
History proved him right. Russia survived, though gravely wounded.
The
claims of Russia to her unique, historic life interests again came to the
forefront when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s and Russia the nation
and empire appeared on the verge of total disintegration. Russia found itself
in desperate need of a Weltanschauung that would replace the
communist ideology that had held the nation in its grip for seventy years. If
she did not, she might even face the prospect of radical shrinkage back to the
proportions of Kievan Rus, her empire absorbed into Eastern Europe and the Far
East. For some, if not most, of Russia’s political and intellectual leaders,
the prospect of seeing the Russian empire virtually disappear was unthinkable.
Discerning
that a U.S. Marshall Plan was not in order for Russia, several main figures
came forward with ideas for a Russian reset button, one which they saw as
including the “historic life interests” of Russia in the post-communist era.
One, of course, is Vladimir Putin, whose embrace of Russian Orthodoxy has been
a reason for the elevation of Christianity to a place of influence it occupied
for over a millennium.
One of the spiritual and philosophical
influences behind Putin has been Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Partly due to Putin’s
influence, Solzhenitsyn’s master work The Gulag Archipelago is
now required reading in Russian schools.
Solzhenitsyn
openly rejected the secularist and leftist liberal political philosophy
dominating the cultures of Europe and America. Russia, he said, had her own
unique spiritual and historic heritage, a heritage that clashed with the
dominant ideology of the West. Though he admired the spirituality of the
American heartland, he saw the West in general as drowning in a vortex created
by moral degradation, anti-religious sentiment, and extreme individualism.
Perhaps
the most succinct and prescient analyses of the errors of the liberal
democratic West and the failure of the West to understand Russia and Russian
spirituality is found in his speech at Harvard University, given in 1978 some
eleven years before the collapse of East Germany and the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn
reminded the Harvard graduates that the West was not the one and only advanced
culture. Russia also deserved high regard as an ancient and autonomous
entity:
“Any ancient and deeply rooted, autonomous culture… constitutes
an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking… For one
thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking
systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore
never understood it…”
In other words, if Russia was an enigma, it
was due to Western blindness, a blindness that was largely due to spiritual
cataracts. If Russia seemed inscrutable, it was because American and the
rest of the West failed to understand the Russian soul and the Russian nation.
No reset was possible unless the West returned to its own Christian spiritual
roots. Until spiritual eyeglasses provided vision, the materialistic but
powerful West would remain blinded by its sense of total superiority.
The
West, he went on to say, thought of itself as possessing the most attractive
system, and regarded other nations as culturally inferior entities that needed
to come up to speed, rejecting their “wicked governments” and “their own
barbarity” in order to take “the way of western pluralistic democracy and
adopting the Western way of life.
Countries are judged on the merit of their
progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which develops out of
Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of
measuring them all with a Western yardstick.”
Russia
had its own ancient and autonomous character and was in some ways more advanced
than the secularist West, which he saw as declining in courage, and as inclined
toward overemphasis on individual rights seldom ameliorated by a corresponding
emphasis on individual obligations. Such was the emphasis on individual rights
that “destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space.”
The result was that evil had boundless freedom to expand in every part of
society, expressing itself as individual “rights,” be those rights exhibiting
themselves in pornography, violence, and even anarchy. A firm belief in the
basic goodness of human nature coupled with an almost complete misapprehension
of the evil inherent in human nature had led the West to embracing what
amounted to spiritual and moral anarchy.
The
spiritual condition of the West meant its system was not the ideal model for
Russia, which Solzhenitsyn characterized as possessing spiritual strength the
West had once possessed, but which it had rejected. The West was spiritually
exhausted due to the repudiation of the Christian principles on which it was
based. As Russia was, even in the midst of the communist regime, gaining her
spiritual strength, a vitiated West had virtually nothing to say to her beyond
advocacy of runaway materialism and out-of-control individualism.
Solzhenitsyn
went on to point out the basic error that led to the decadence of the West; namely,
the assumption of the Enlightenment that mankind has no higher force above him,
but is autonomous -- mankind as the center of everything that exists. In
effect, the West, including America, which at its inception believed quite
differently, rejected the idea that all “individual human rights were granted
because man is God’s creature.” Freedom, he said, is conditional in that it has
grave religious responsibilities, an idea that had roots thousands of years
old.
He
concluded any commonality between Russia and the West had to be spiritual:
“[If] the world has not come to its end, it has approached a
major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to
the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We shall have to rise
to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature
will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our
spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension
will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth
has any other way left but -- upward.”
For
Solzhenitsyn, Christianity, specifically the Russian Orthodox Church, had
informed the Russian soul and Russia since the end of the first millennium,
with roots going back to the Eastern Roman Empire. The path leading to
restoration of true greatness lay in a return to God and a repudiation of the
dark inheritance of a so-called Enlightenment that fostered atheism and sought
to tear down Christianity.
Having
experienced firsthand the brutality of a regime motivated by atheism,
Solzhenitsyn saw a similar deleterious influence at the core of the crisis of
the West. Once again, runaway atheism was revealing its inherently destructive
nature. In his Templeton Prize Lecture of May 1983, “Godlessness: The First
Step to the Gulag,” he said:
“And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal
trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find
anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten
God. The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension,
have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.
“…the world had never before known a godlessness as organized,
militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within
the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their
psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than
all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely
incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the
central pivot.
[In the West] …the concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed
for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by
political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become
embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart
before it enters a political system.”
The
West, including America, was sliding toward an abyss of its own making. The
young were deliberately being taught godlessness and hatred of their own
society. The subsequent corrosion of the human heart and hatred was fast
becoming the signature of the contemporary free world, which appeared anxious
to export to the rest of the world its own philosophy of godlessness and
immorality.
The
solution, he concluded, was repentance and return to God:
“…[W]e can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of
God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can
our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our
bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in
the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment
amounts to nothing… If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours
alone.”
Solzhenitsyn’s
powerful insights hold much truth. If there is to be a reset between the West
and Russia, it must be based on the mutual and ancient Christian roots of both
entities. Here in the United States, there is a Christian commonality that
still exists, but it desperately requires fostering and revival.
In
the meantime, Christianity in the West and in Russia remains a key to the
relationship between the two.
Therein
lies a way to rapprochement.
Therein
lies a possibility of a “reset button.”
The
way will not be easy, as the present leaders of the West have largely bowed to
the forces of a spiritually arid and atheistic secularism.
But
there is hope that some will seek to hear and to heed the voice that says,
“This is the way. Walk in it.”
Fay
Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She holds a M.Div. from
Princeton Theological Seminary, where she received the seminary’s prize for
excellence in systematic theology. Her thoughts have appeared in many online
magazines, including Russia Insider, National
Review, CNS, RealClearReligion and Fox News. She has also presented her
views on radio and television. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.
