Vladimir Moss | November 23 / December 6, 2022
Putin has no ideology. He is a thief, a bandit, a warlord, a
murderer, a billionaire Mafioso “boss of bosses”, and such people do not have
ideologies in the normal sense. If they have one, it is: “Might is right”, or
“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”. However, Putin is also the head
of a very important and powerful state (and not only because of its nuclear
weapons); and almost all heads of state have ideologies, if only as ways of
uniting and motivating their peoples behind them. So Putin pretends to have an
ideology. If someone will object that Putin truly has an ideology and is
sincere in holding it, I shall not dispute that here. My main purpose in this
article is not to delve into the sincerity or otherwise of his professed
beliefs, but to inquire what those beliefs would appear to be, whether
sincerely held or not.
Putin was originally a communist, and unlike, for example,
Boris Yeltsin, he never formally renounced communism. He says he threw his
party card into the top drawer of his desk, and left it there, implying a kind
of indifference to, but not outright rejection of, the party. As we shall see,
he still holds to certain communist beliefs, but claims they are compatible
with Christianity (which they are not). He is loyal to historic Communist
Russia, especially the period of Stalin’s wartime rule, and considers that in
spite of certain “mistakes” in its governance the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991 was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century.
In the 1990s Putin had the opportunity to take part in
certain shady capitalist deals, and acquired a taste for a kind of capitalism,
“anarcho-capitalism”, as it has been called. Indeed, surprising as it may seem,
capitalism is probably the most sincerely held part of his belief structure.
The reason is simple: it pays. And for Putin and his band of thieves, that is
absolutely the first priority. That is why among Putin’s highest priorities is
Russia’s unfettered access to world markets and all the mechanisms of the
global capitalist system.
However, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s
exceptionally strong sanctions in reply, has probably destroyed his chances of
being a “normal” capitalist country – at least, in the foreseeable future.
Fortunately for him (but not for anybody else), he still has vast mineral
resources. So as long as he controls those gas and oil reserves, he is unlikely
to become a complete pauper.
Is Putin a democrat? He certainly pretends to be; and he
holds elections that have deceived enough people into thinking that he really
cares that the will of the people should prevail. But he claims that his system
is not democracy tout court, but “sovereign democracy” – a significant
difference which means he is in favour of democracy so long as it produces only
one consistent winner – himself. He, rather than the people, is the sovereign.
He manipulates elections and electoral processes so as to stack the odds
against all but one candidate. Dangerously popular candidates such as Nemtsov
or Navalny he either kills or poisons or imprisons. As for the constitution, he
feels free to manipulate it so as to keep him or his stooge, Medvedev, in the
presidency. In 2020 he claimed a democratic mandate for changing the
constitution to enable his to remain president indefinitely; but he achieved
that by mixing up the issue of the presidency with other issues, such as gay
marriage, where he could be more sure that the people would agree with him.
“Sovereign democracy” also means that he claims to be the
real sovereign of the whole territory of the former Soviet Union, of the
“Russian world”, including its non-Russian parts. Hence his persistent attempts
to distort the Ukrainian elections, resorting to force in the early 2000s when
they came up with the wrong winner. In the case of Crimea, he invaded first,
and then staged an election. In the case of Georgia, he simply invaded. In 2020
he put forward a new constitution for voting in a referendum. It more or less
guaranteed that he could remain President for life in Russia as his “eternal
friend” President Xi of China is.
With regard to liberalism, the issue is clearer: Putin openly
despises liberalism and human rights. He is profoundly opposed to free speech.
And although he has not destroyed it altogether, his control of the media
(apart from the internet) is more or less complete.
Is he a nationalist? He certainly claims to be, although in a
multi-national country like Russia he has to be careful with his language about
other nationalities. He certainly delights in Russian successes, whether in
sport or culture or science or on the battlefield. He is not a racist in the
manner of Hitler, and displays no obvious anti-semitism; but the similarities
between his and Hitler’s regime are numerous; hence his nickname “Putler”.
Probably the most difficult – but potentially most rewarding
– juggling-act that Putin is trying to pull off is to be the successor not only
of the Russian democrats of the 1990s, and of the Soviet communists of the
period 1917-91, but also of the pre-revolutionary Orthodox Russian tsars. Of
course, this is an impossible feat; the ideological contradictions between the
three are too great. But this does not stop Putin from trying in this way to be
the heir of “all the Russias”, understood temporally as well as spatially.
What attracts Putin to Orthodox tsarism is its
authoritarianism, its rejection of the concept of human rights (as opposed to
the values of the Gospel) and its appeal to the growing number of Russian
Orthodox patriots. There are other, less obvious, but not inconsiderable
benefits. Thus Putin, who loves nothing better than to squeeze his oldest and
poorest subjects ever more tightly while indulging in a billionaire’s
lifestyle, can claim to be following the teaching and example of his fellow-KGB
Agent, the Moscow Patriarch Cyril Gundiaev, who urges his mainly poor Orthodox
parishioners not to aim for riches and be content with their lot, in accordance
with the Gospel, while indulging in very conspicuous consumption himself.
Putin has played the part of an Orthodox Christian in general
well. He claims to have been baptized in his childhood, and dutifully goes to
church on major feasts, putting out candles and crossing himself. He even
claims to have an Orthodox spiritual father – the ambitious and talented
Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkhunov) of Pskov.
But there are flaws in Putin’s performance in relation to
Orthodoxy and the Orthodox autocracy, some of them important. The rest of this
article is devoted to an analysis of them…
First of all, there is Putin’s religious ecumenism. The
Russian Federation has four official religions. Among them, Orthodoxy is
clearly the most favoured, but not in the sense confessed by the tsars, that
is, as the one true faith. Indeed, Putin goes out of his way, both at home and
abroad, to show his great respect for other religions, especially Islam and
Judaism. While hotly defending Russia and Russia’s political system against all
rivals, he does not do the same in regard to Russia’s traditional religion,
Orthodox Christianity.
Of course, in this respect he is following the consistent
practice of all the political and ecclesiastical leaders of Russia since the
1960s, including that of Patriarch Cyril. However, ecumenism is a pre-eminently
western doctrine, which since the early twentieth century has been promoted
especially by the Anglo-Saxon nations as part of their liberal programme of
human rights. It was therefore rejected as a form of western capitalist
propaganda by Stalin, who in 1948 organized a Pan-Orthodox Conference in Moscow
to counter and condemn the first General Assembly of the World Council of
Churches that was taking place at the same time in Amsterdam. In 1961 the KGB
changed course, and sent KGB Major-General Nikodem Rotov, Metropolitan of
Leningrad (Agent “Sviatoslav”), who also happened to be a secret Catholic
bishop, to the General Assembly of the WCC in New Delhi to spy on western
churchmen, and to propagate the Soviet view of the world. (Nikodem was
accompanied by Metropolitan Anthony [Bloom] of Sourozh, based in London, who
was suspected by many of working simultaneously for the KGB and MI5.) Both
patriarchs of the post-Soviet period, Alexis II (Agent “Drozdov”) and the
present Cyril (Agent “Mikhailov), were disciples of Nikodem, and continued his
ecumenist policies. In 2016 Cyril even had a “summit” with Castro and Pope
Francis I in Havana…
But Putin is, of course, anti-western
Putin’s regime claims to be the successor not only of the
RSFSR and the USSR but also of the pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox Empire.
It may be described as neo-Soviet and neo-Fascist, without the apparatus of
conventional Marxism but with “Communist Christianity”, drawing support from a
heady mixture of conflicting constituencies: nationalists and democrats and
monarchists, Orthodox Christians and pagan mystics and dyed-in-the-wool
atheists, westerners and capitalists, mafiosi bandits and Slavophile patriots.
Putin aims to find a place in his all-embracing heart for all the Russias of
the last century – and all its faiths going back to the tenth century.
One of those faiths is communism, and Putin has clearly not
renounced that. As he said in 2016 to the Pan-Russian People’s Front: “You know
that like millions of Soviet citizens – over 20 million – I used to be a member
of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), and not just a regular
member: for almost 20 years I worked for the organization called the Committee
for State Security of the Soviet Union [KGB]. This organization derives from
the Cheka [Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and
Sabotage], which was then called the armed unit of the Party. If for some
reason a person left the Communist Party, they were immediately fired from the
KGB. I did not join the party simply because I had to, though I cannot say I
was such a dedicated communist, but I treated this with great care. As opposed
to numerous party functionaries, I was not one of them; I was a rank-and-file
member. As opposed to many functionaries, I did not trash my membership card, I
did not burn it. I would not want to criticize anyone now – people had
different motives and this is their own business. The Communist Party of the
Soviet Union fell apart; my membership card is still out there somewhere.
“I have always liked communist and socialist ideas. If we
consider the Code of the Builder of Communism that was widely published in the
Soviet Union, it strongly resembles the Bible. This is not a joke; it was
actually an excerpt from the Bible. It spoke of good things: equality,
fraternity, happiness. However, the practical implementation of these ideals in
this country had little in common with what the utopian socialists Saint-Simon
or Owen spoke about. This country had little resemblance to their City of the
Sun.”
Andrei Melnikov writes: “Vladimir Putin’s words to the effect
that the communist ideology is ‘very close’ to Christianity, were uttered in a
documentary film ‘Valaam’ that was shown on January 14 of this year [2018] on
the television channel ‘Russia 1’. They elicited a strong reaction even in
spite of the fact that the Russian president had expounded similar views
earlier. The head of the government’s thought has probably sounded particularly
clear now in view of the beginning of the presidential campaign. Let us not
note that the maker of the film was the journalist Andrei Kondrashov, who was
recently appointed head of Putin’s pre-election campaign headquarters. The
president visited Valaam monastery in June, 2017, and he has been there before.
“‘Faith,’ said Putin on the television screen, ‘has always
accompanied us. It has become stronger when our country was suffering
particularly intensely during the most God-fighting years, when priests were
killed and churches destroyed. But at the same time, you know, they created a
new religion’ – the communist ideology, - which ‘is very akin to Christianity’.
‘Freedom, brotherhood, equality, justice – all these are invoked in the Holy
Scriptures, it’s all there. And what of the ‘Law Code of the Builder of Communism’?
This was a sublimation, a primitive excerpt from the Bible, they didn’t think
up anything new there’.
“Let us recall that the president said similar things
earlier. For example, during his speech in 2016 before the activists of the
Pan-Russian People’s Front – a structure that had played the role of locomotive
in the preceding electoral campaign of the acting president. ‘I very much like
and to this day I still like communist and socialist ideas,’ said Putin then.
‘If we look at the ‘Law Code of the Builder of Communism’, which was published
in large quantities in the Soviet Union, we see that it is very reminiscent of
the Bible. This is no joke, this is in fact an extract from the Bible.’ ‘But
the practical incarnations of these remarkable ideas in our country were far
from what the socialist utopians expounded. Our country was not like the City
of the Sun’, explained the head of the Russian state to the PPF activists.
“However, this time Putin added one more ‘burning’ topic –
the fate of Lenin’s body in the Mausoleum. The past year was marked, in
connection with the 100th anniversary of the revolution, by a sharpening of the
discussion over the burial of the leader of the world revolution. One of those
who expressed himself in favour of a ‘normal’ burial of Lenin was the head of
Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov, after which he had a bit of a quarrel with the
president of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Ziuganov.
“‘Look,’ said Putin, ‘they put Lenin in the Mausoleum. In
what does this differ from the relics of the saint? For the Orthodox, or simply
for Christians? When they tell me: there is no such tradition in the Christian
world, how come? Go to Athos and look. There they have holy relics. Yes, and
her (on Valaam) there are also holy relics, those of Sergius and Herman.’ ‘In
essence, the authorities at that time thought up nothing new. They simply
adapted what humanity had already long ago invented to their own ideology,’
explained the head of the state.
“These words on ‘relics’ received a stormy reaction from the
State Duma Deputy Natalya Poklonskaya, who in the course of the past year, in
unison with Kadyrov, spoke out for the burial of Lenin. ‘In my view, it would
be incorrect and a consciously self-interested distortion, for political or
other motives, to use and interpret ‘in one’s own way’ the words of the
president on a certain parallel between the dead body of Ulyanov in the
Mausoleum, on whose conscience are millions of murdered people, and the holy
relics in the monasteries and churches. The opinion he voiced is not about
that, but about government regimes and the attempt to create a false religion
at a definite stage of history,’ wrote Poklonskaya in her account on Facebook.
“However, the words on the Mausoleum were received with
rapture by the communists headed by Gennady Ziuganov. On the one hand, this is
understandable: Ziuganov has himself expressed analogous ideas about the
similarity between the moral imperatives of communism and those of
Christianity. ‘If you take the Moral ‘Code of Law of the Builder of Communism’
and the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus Christ and put them side to side, you will
be surprised: the texts coincide completely,’ declared the leader of the Communist
Party of the Russian Federation in 2012 in an interview on the same ‘Russia 1’
channel. On the other hand, the rhetoric of compromise addressed to the older
generation, who are not indifferent to their memories of the Soviet past,
contributes to the rising popularity of Pavel Grudinin, a candidate for the
presidency from the CPRF.
“If all this is understandable for the communist electorate,
there remains the question: to what extent do the thoughts of the president
chime in with the point of view of the church? If we are to take the opinion of
Patriarch Cyril of Moscow and All Russia as the official position of the ROC,
then it is impossible for us not to register the striking consonance between
his sermons and the speeches of Putin on the issue in question, with the
exception, perhaps, of his words on Lenin. On April 6, 2011 in Kiev the head of
the ROC said: ‘Even the years of life in the conditions of unbelief did not
root out in us that very programme which was laid as a certain Code of
development of our Orthodox peoples. And in this sense the unbelievers of the
Soviet period were in a rudimentary way Orthodox Christians – they remained in
the same system of values… At that time atheist ideology wanted to reform the
system of values, but did not encroach on morality. Take the very ‘Code of Law
of the Builder of Communism’ – it was dictated from the Bible. Without God, but
the same morality.’ However, with regard to the burial of Lenin, the
representatives of the Church in 2017 more than once said that it was necessary
to wait with that.
“‘Putin’s real ideas about Christian values are hidden from
us,’ thinks the leader of the Centre for the Study of Problems of Religion and
Society at the Institute of Europe RAN, Roman Lunkin. ‘The president has not
spoken about fulfilling the Gospel commandments or about his parish life.’ ‘For
Putin the important things in public are formalities – his baptism in
childhood, Orthodoxy as an element consolidating society, his principled visits
to a simple church service at Christmas and more officially – at Pascha,’ said
the religious expert of ‘NGR’.
“A leading expert of the Centre for Political Technologies,
Alexei Makarkin, pointed to the fact that ‘in his interview Putin did not say
that this was Christian tradition in its pure form, that would have been
strange: he spoke about copying tradition, and the striving of the essentially
antichristian party to borrow something.’ ‘In this way each auditorium can read
what it wants,’ explained the political expert. ‘The main auditorium –
nostalgic Russians – can read in it the main thing that Putin is against – that
Lenin should be taken out of the Mausoleum, at any rate now. At the same time
there is another variant for people holding other views, in the first place
believers: who, from the point of view of the believers, will copy Jesus
Christ? He will be copied by the Antichrist, who will try to make out that he
is Jesus, being in actual fact his most terrible enemy. For the Christians
there could be the following interpretation: since the president recognizes
that the communists can copy certain Christian traditions, that means that
everything is in fact like that – the enemies of Christ are trying to copy,
while at the same time distorting, ‘said Markarkin of the ‘NGR’.”
*
This article goes a long way to answering the question that
has exercised and divided Russian True Orthodox Christians: is Putin’s regime a
reincarnation of the antichristian Soviet regime (in a fascist, nationalist
mode) or something new? If the former, then it lies under the same anathema of
the Moscow Council of 1918 that fell on the obviously antichristian Soviet
regime and all those who cooperated with it. If the latter, then we must
consider the possibility that Putin’s regime is actually worse than the Soviet
regime, being antichristian in a different, more subtle and more profound
manner.
The word “Antichrist” has a dual meaning. The preposition
“anti” in Greek can mean either “against” or “in the place of”. The Soviet
regime was clearly “against” Christ – it murdered millions of Christians, and
persecuted the faith in word and deed. However, it did not pretend to “take the
place of” Christ or God. For how could it take the place of a being that,
according to communists, does not exist?
But the Soviet regime came to an end in 1991, and with it so
did the open persecution of Christians. There was nobody left in Russia who was
openly “anti” – in the sense of “against” – Christ. There were still very many
atheists and heretics, but no more “God-fighters”; all the surviving former
God-fighters were living on their pensions; “God-fighting” was no longer legal
or in any way approved.
But in 2000 Putin came to power. Now Putin had just recently
been director of the FSB (KGB), the executive branch, as it were, of the Soviet
government’s war against God. For such a man to become president was therefore
a profound shock and a stern warning for those with eyes to see and ears to
hear. It was as if the head of the Inquisition had become head of the World
Council of Churches, or Himmler – the president of Germany after the war. It
was tolerated in Russia, first, because, as surveys showed, most Russians still
considered the Soviet Union to be their native country, and Lenin and Stalin to
be heroes; and secondly, because the West clung on to the stupid belief that
over seventy years of the most terrible blood-letting in history – far longer
and far more radical than Hitler’s twelve years in power – could be wiped out
and reversed without any kind of decommunization, without even a single person
being put on trial for the murdering of innocent people in the name of the
“collective Antichrist” of Soviet power. The tragic farce has reached such a
stage that the KGB has become a hero of Russian literature and cinematography,
with its own church in the middle of its chief prison, the Lubyanka in Moscow –
not, as it might be thought to commemorate the martyrs who suffered so terribly
within its walls, but for the executioners! The West concurred with this filthy
whitewash; the official Orthodox Church (itself ruled by KGB agents) concurred;
the masses of the Russian people concurred by voting Putin into power
repeatedly.
And then the “rebirth” took place: without repenting in the
slightest of his communist past, and while gradually reintroducing more and
more Soviet traditions and symbols, Putin underwent a conversion to Christ! Or
rather, from being part of the body of the Soviet Antichrist, which was “anti”,
that is, “against” Christ, he is now preaching a form of Communist Christianity
that, as Makarkin puts it, “copies” Jesus Christ, placing its own ideas “in the
place” of Christ’s and passing them off as His. And if the “copy” is a poor one
– just as Lenin’s stinking body is a very poor imitation of the fragrant relics
of the saints, and the murderous “Code of Law of the Builder of Communism” is a
very poor imitation of the Sermon on the Mount - this does not matter, so long
as the masses are taken in by it, or, if not taken in by it, at least convinced
that Christ and the antichristian state are now on the same side...
So the Russian revolution has mutated from one kind of
Antichristianity to another, from Lenin’s Antichristianity that was openly
against Christ, to Putin’s Antichristianity which pretends not to be against
Christ but to copy Him and take His place… There can be no doubt that this new,
more sophisticated kind is more dangerous than the former – and closer to the
kind that will be practised by “the personal Antichrist” himself at the end of
time. For of that Antichrist, the Lord said: “I have come in My Father’s name
and you do not believe Me: if another shall come in his own name, him you will
believe” (John 5.43). In other words, you have rejected the real Christ, and as
a direct result you will accept an imposter, a man-god, for the real thing, the
God-Man.
But we must not be deceived, remembering Putin’s words: “Once
a chekist, always a chekist…”
