1 00:00:00,330 --> 00:00:05,460 Good morning, everyone. It's a very great pleasure and a great privilege to be invited to share today's discussion. 2 00:00:06,180 --> 00:00:13,800 And I want to echo what's been said in tribute to List for all that she's done over these years to make this a reality. 3 00:00:13,840 --> 00:00:17,670 I remember when it was simply a twinkle in your eyes. 20 years ago. 4 00:00:17,880 --> 00:00:20,070 And it's wonderful to see how much has happened since. 5 00:00:22,320 --> 00:00:31,350 I offered to introduce the subject by looking at issues around the character and distinctiveness of Russian nationalism, 6 00:00:31,710 --> 00:00:37,980 and specifically Russian Christian nationalism as a historical phenomenon and a current reality. 7 00:00:39,300 --> 00:00:49,290 Now I want to link this with some global perspectives as well, which I hope will be evident in due course and in good traditional fashion. 8 00:00:49,650 --> 00:00:52,650 I'm breaking down my presentation into three portions. 9 00:00:57,060 --> 00:01:08,040 It's in the 15th century that the idea first emerges that the Grand Principality of Moscow is the inheritor of the Byzantine Empire. 10 00:01:09,900 --> 00:01:18,990 The fall of the city of Constantinople in 1453 generated a great deal of intellectual upheaval in the eastern Christian world, 11 00:01:20,220 --> 00:01:26,220 and at least one Russian intellectual of the era took the opportunity of saying 12 00:01:27,090 --> 00:01:31,140 that it was quite clear that since the first Rome and second Rome had fallen, 13 00:01:31,920 --> 00:01:39,180 Moscow, the major Orthodox principality left standing in Eastern Europe, was the third Rome. 14 00:01:39,600 --> 00:01:42,750 And he said famously, a fourth. There will never be. 15 00:01:44,580 --> 00:01:50,010 In spite of a short lived and probably doomed attempt in the 1920s and early 16 00:01:50,010 --> 00:01:54,510 1930 suggests that Bucharest might be the fourth Rome after the fall of Moscow. 17 00:01:54,720 --> 00:02:01,230 I think we can stick with the source analysis of the 15th century. 18 00:02:03,090 --> 00:02:19,260 The third Rome, Moscow and the Bruce Principalities associated with Moscow recast as the successor states not only of the Byzantine Empire, 19 00:02:19,650 --> 00:02:24,010 but of the Roman Empire, which of course, is technically what the Byzantine Empire always was. 20 00:02:26,310 --> 00:02:34,830 That means to say that the forms of authority encoded and embodied in the Principality of Moscow had about them 21 00:02:34,830 --> 00:02:41,730 the same kind of central finality and authority that belonged to the figure of the Emperor in Constantinople. 22 00:02:43,410 --> 00:02:48,660 The ruler was anointed, equipped by God for absolute authority, 23 00:02:49,110 --> 00:02:58,260 autocratic authority over the people, and the coronation ritual exemplified this in various ways. 24 00:02:59,610 --> 00:03:08,460 And various aspects of court protocol and thinking about both church and state reflected this until the time of Peter the Great. 25 00:03:08,680 --> 00:03:16,260 In some ways beyond that, but in that relatively brief period from, let's say, 1500 to 1700, 26 00:03:17,820 --> 00:03:27,450 Moscow reinvented itself as an empire, a Christian empire whose ruler was called Caesar. 27 00:03:27,750 --> 00:03:37,720 So. During the post-Vietnam period in Russia after the reforms, the westernisation of Peter the Great. 28 00:03:39,160 --> 00:03:43,420 That particular legacy, for obvious reasons, mattered a great deal less. 29 00:03:45,370 --> 00:03:52,390 I don't imagine that Catherine the Great spent a great deal of time reflecting on her inheritance from Byzantium, 30 00:03:53,410 --> 00:03:58,660 and although autocracy was very definitely part of the political map in those centuries, 31 00:03:59,050 --> 00:04:08,050 the particular form of Christian autocracy reflected in 15th and 16th century literature didn't seem to appear so much. 32 00:04:10,120 --> 00:04:17,080 But what brought this back to life in the 19th century, apart from one particular strand I'll come to in a moment, 33 00:04:17,320 --> 00:04:23,650 what brought it was practically back to life was, of course, the crisis in the Balkans in the late 19th century, 34 00:04:25,120 --> 00:04:34,210 the activities of the Ottoman Empire against the Southern Slavs, as we know from the novels of Tolstoy and many other sources, 35 00:04:35,410 --> 00:04:49,060 revived the sense that the Orthodox state was, if you like, de facto, perhaps de diarrhée, the protector of Orthodox minorities elsewhere. 36 00:04:51,340 --> 00:04:58,640 So, Nicholas, the first world in the 19th century had, you might say, shifted the the tone, 37 00:04:58,660 --> 00:05:04,630 a feel of Russian autocracy back a little bit further towards the Byzantine model. 38 00:05:06,040 --> 00:05:14,650 It's in his reign that the formula of orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality became sort of governing features of Russian identity. 39 00:05:15,880 --> 00:05:21,610 But the Balkan wars, the persecution of the Orthodox minorities, especially in Bulgaria, 40 00:05:21,610 --> 00:05:30,970 but also to some extent in Serbia, these became a kind of rationale for Russian political activism in the area. 41 00:05:31,990 --> 00:05:40,930 And those of you who remember Anna Karenina will recall the strong struggles of conscience which living 42 00:05:40,930 --> 00:05:47,410 goes through towards the end of that novel about how far you should be involved in the Balkan conflicts. 43 00:05:49,390 --> 00:06:01,990 So that's a first point to bear in mind. There is a history of Russian self-mythologizing in terms of the Christian Orthodox Empire, 44 00:06:02,890 --> 00:06:15,910 which at a particular moment in history transformed itself into a duty of authority to intervene as a protector of integral orthodoxy. 45 00:06:16,180 --> 00:06:21,730 Elsewhere, orthodox minorities, in particular against anti-Christian violence. 46 00:06:26,410 --> 00:06:36,160 That has certainly been one of the elements in the remarkable comprehensive revival of Russian 47 00:06:36,160 --> 00:06:41,680 self-mythologizing that we've seen in the last decade or two decades in Putin's Russia. 48 00:06:43,090 --> 00:06:51,280 I think it's quite important to recognise that its roots are not simply, not simply the opportunism of a contemporary dictator, 49 00:06:52,450 --> 00:07:04,570 but key into a very deep strand in the Russian self-image, which has to do with that sense of the third throne and its protective authority. 50 00:07:07,430 --> 00:07:20,329 A notion that the emperor has a sort of universal duty to protect Christian communities is deep rooted in the fifth and sixth century, 51 00:07:20,330 --> 00:07:25,820 thinking about the role of the Roman Empire in late antiquity in the early Middle Ages. 52 00:07:27,170 --> 00:07:35,150 But as we've seen, this particular application of it gives a special edge to Russian exceptionalism. 53 00:07:38,770 --> 00:07:45,310 Secondly, I want to turn to that other 19th century phenomenon, which feeds into this in a rather paradoxical way, 54 00:07:46,210 --> 00:07:51,220 and that is what happens in the middle of the 19th century with the slum of your movement in Russia. 55 00:07:52,390 --> 00:07:57,940 That is the recovery of a sense of specifically Slavic identity, 56 00:07:58,390 --> 00:08:06,930 a highly distinctive cultural and religious ethos which is supposed to reside in the Slavic nations. 57 00:08:09,480 --> 00:08:14,070 Rather, in contrast to the emphasis on autocracy in the third Rome tradition. 58 00:08:14,700 --> 00:08:23,250 The odd thing is that many of the slum officials were surprisingly egalitarian and rather suspect to the autocratic state at the time. 59 00:08:24,810 --> 00:08:32,280 The ideal human community for the slum officials was the village community in which an egalitarian, 60 00:08:32,280 --> 00:08:40,020 participatory, communal identity was reflected in ways of decision making, land ownership and so forth. 61 00:08:41,520 --> 00:08:51,420 And this peasant communal ideal was itself deeply linked in fourth level field rights with a theological rationale. 62 00:08:54,030 --> 00:08:58,800 Christian communal identity was the opposite of individual self-assertion. 63 00:09:01,070 --> 00:09:10,250 The identity of the person communion was all about understanding your own destiny, calling and capacity in terms of the community you were part of. 64 00:09:11,660 --> 00:09:23,630 And there's a fundamental appeal to non-violence and cooperation as essentially bound up with that Slavic communal identity. 65 00:09:23,870 --> 00:09:30,590 And of course, as many of you will know, the great word support was coined by some of the Islamophobe thinkers. 66 00:09:31,060 --> 00:09:41,629 Conspiracy is a rather bad English translation to describe the mutual communal ideals that were thought of as intrinsic not just to Russian, 67 00:09:41,630 --> 00:09:43,460 but to Slavic identity. 68 00:09:46,500 --> 00:09:54,620 Slightly unkind and slightly more objective observer might well say you're simply describing premodern forms of communal awareness. 69 00:09:55,440 --> 00:10:03,240 But at the time, it suited club affiliated publicists and thinkers to underline this particular aspect, 70 00:10:03,480 --> 00:10:11,550 partly as a protest against what they saw as the westernising autocratic tendencies represented by Peter the Great. 71 00:10:13,200 --> 00:10:21,360 The point was to get back behind Peter the Great and even behind Ivan the Terrible to another kind of Slavonic political ideal, 72 00:10:21,960 --> 00:10:31,430 corporatist, non-violent, and so forth. Now this is the curious and rather ambivalent element, 73 00:10:32,000 --> 00:10:40,550 which helps to produce some aspects of our present crisis built into this Flavourful sense of identity 74 00:10:41,540 --> 00:10:54,380 was also an ideal of non resistance as somehow characteristic of Slavic political psychology. 75 00:10:55,850 --> 00:11:06,420 Some social apologists noted that the first canonised saints after Vladimir in the 11th century were 76 00:11:06,440 --> 00:11:15,380 Vladimir sons who were killed by their brother dynastic war and refused to resist their brothers violence. 77 00:11:15,560 --> 00:11:27,440 It's as if from the beginning Russian sanctity is non-violent, and that feeds in to another strand of self-mythologizing, 78 00:11:28,580 --> 00:11:33,050 which is that of Russia as the victim nation, the martyr people. 79 00:11:35,780 --> 00:11:44,359 The not always very edifying, somewhat Machiavellian than negotiations of the late medieval Muscovite princes in 80 00:11:44,360 --> 00:11:51,980 relation to the Tartar overlords were reinterpreted as an exercise in Christian humility. 81 00:11:53,420 --> 00:11:59,510 Instead of fighting the Tartars, the Muscovite princes collaborated to protect their own people. 82 00:12:01,610 --> 00:12:08,870 It's a, say, edifying version of a not always very edifying history, but it's part of that same mythology. 83 00:12:10,100 --> 00:12:20,210 Russia is a martyr. People overrun by the toddler hordes in the 13th century kept in subjection until the 15th century. 84 00:12:21,500 --> 00:12:25,700 The ideal forms of political authority in that period were not heroic resistance, 85 00:12:26,150 --> 00:12:30,980 but patient suffering and the acceptance of compromise for the sake of the common good. 86 00:12:33,860 --> 00:12:40,370 Some of the field writers go back yet further to the mythology of the beginnings of the Russian states and 87 00:12:40,370 --> 00:12:47,780 the alleged invitation from the Slavonic tribes or other people to the Viking Rurik to come and rule over us. 88 00:12:48,650 --> 00:12:57,380 Humility as authority is something which has to be accepted, worked with, endured patiently. 89 00:12:58,670 --> 00:13:02,510 And there's the irony, you might say, in this love of your view. 90 00:13:04,790 --> 00:13:10,040 On one hand, the ideal form of human society is egalitarian and co-operative. 91 00:13:10,460 --> 00:13:17,870 On the other, as a matter of fact, most forms of available human authority are dominant and coercive. 92 00:13:18,740 --> 00:13:25,670 And the best thing you can do is to collaborate and to accept with humility. 93 00:13:28,200 --> 00:13:40,410 So part of that legacy is the picture of Russia as constantly, patiently suffering through the aggression of others. 94 00:13:42,970 --> 00:13:48,310 The titles that the Germans and the Poles and the time of troubles at the end of the 16th, 95 00:13:48,310 --> 00:13:53,440 beginning of the 17th century, Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars. 96 00:13:53,800 --> 00:14:00,970 Napoleon didn't realise it, but he did wonders for Russian self-perception of Russian self-mythologizing by attacking Moscow. 97 00:14:02,110 --> 00:14:08,829 It was a perfect exemplification of the Summerfield narrative here yet again was rationalist, 98 00:14:08,830 --> 00:14:14,890 individualist, aggressive Western ism assaulting the very citadel of sacred community. 99 00:14:16,090 --> 00:14:24,220 Holy Mother Moscow representing the Slavic humble Christian co-operative reality. 100 00:14:28,860 --> 00:14:38,070 That goes with in some forms and some who are writing are still further tongue screwed, in which strangely, Russia is feminised. 101 00:14:39,630 --> 00:14:47,610 If you look at the prison writings of, say, Anderson, one of the great writers of the gulag in the late 20th century, 102 00:14:47,860 --> 00:14:53,069 otherwise, under intense battles, the Navy wrote Under the Skin more than once picks up. 103 00:14:53,070 --> 00:14:56,760 This idea of Russia is in contrast to the Western nations. 104 00:14:56,760 --> 00:15:03,100 Russia is then meaning Russia as passive and CFC like others. 105 00:15:03,220 --> 00:15:09,180 And that's, of course, a mixed blessing. It means that we are strangers to aggressive imperialism. 106 00:15:09,840 --> 00:15:19,830 The eyebrows raised a little at this point because our corporate ethnic ethos is feminine, receptive. 107 00:15:20,130 --> 00:15:31,430 Passive, humble, enduring. So the first two elements we see. 108 00:15:32,390 --> 00:15:38,060 But the deep tension and a rather dangerous chemical reaction. 109 00:15:39,320 --> 00:15:47,360 On the one hand, Russia is the orthodox state called upon as part of its imperial identity to protect others. 110 00:15:48,080 --> 00:15:55,310 On the other, Russia is a victim states. Russia is the Christian motto People who bear the cross in the world. 111 00:15:56,510 --> 00:15:57,470 We do just escape. 112 00:15:59,570 --> 00:16:15,650 Putting those together can, of course, mean that the exercise of coercive force by the Russian state is always an only a reaction to its victim age. 113 00:16:16,370 --> 00:16:20,030 The fact that it has been oppressed, attacked by others. 114 00:16:21,170 --> 00:16:25,070 By definition, Russian violence is. 115 00:16:27,670 --> 00:16:30,850 Responsive. Not aggressive. Defensive. 116 00:16:31,810 --> 00:16:33,340 Not imperialistic. 117 00:16:36,490 --> 00:16:42,820 I think having sketched very broadly, you know, the Russian historians, the audience will have to forgive me for the crudity it was. 118 00:16:43,120 --> 00:16:54,190 Having sketched that you may see some of the components that we've themselves into the ideology around Ukraine aggression. 119 00:16:56,290 --> 00:17:01,079 On the one hand, the Christian Russian state is indeed called. 120 00:17:01,080 --> 00:17:08,050 So the patriarch of Moscow repeatedly tells us to defend its faithful who are under threat elsewhere. 121 00:17:09,460 --> 00:17:18,370 We've seen in the last decade and more how that's worked out in ecclesiastical terms, the way in which the Patriarchate of Moscow has repeatedly, 122 00:17:18,370 --> 00:17:25,150 consistently attempted to set up what you might call safe orthodox jurisdictions in other countries, 123 00:17:25,840 --> 00:17:32,440 safe places for Russians to maintain that Russian orthodoxy, even orthodox countries and orthodox violence. 124 00:17:33,340 --> 00:17:38,720 But here we see how this translates into a very political and geopolitical agenda. 125 00:17:38,770 --> 00:17:48,459 Also, the condition of Ukraine can be represented, has been represented as, so to speak, 126 00:17:48,460 --> 00:18:00,370 the covert takeover of an orthodox country by non-Orthodox and anti orthodox anti-Christian elements at its most extreme. 127 00:18:00,700 --> 00:18:07,179 This, of course, veers off into globalists, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic fantasies and all the rest of it, 128 00:18:07,180 --> 00:18:11,230 all those very sadly familiar tropes in the Russian imagination. 129 00:18:12,610 --> 00:18:20,980 Slightly more specifically, it means that Ukraine, in attempting to reconstitute itself as something like a Western democracy, 130 00:18:21,790 --> 00:18:30,760 has quite clearly been co-opted at best captured at worst, by a wholly alien theology and philosophy. 131 00:18:32,500 --> 00:18:39,460 Ukrainians may not know it, but they are actually victims of a new form of Ottoman oppression. 132 00:18:40,780 --> 00:18:52,720 The great Antichrist has taken over so the protective responsibility of a third Rome is revitalised in that context. 133 00:18:54,580 --> 00:19:05,740 On the other side of that is, of course, when an immediate neighbour, Ukraine, is co-opted by violently anti-Russian anti-Christian forces, 134 00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:17,320 when it talks about entering NATO's, when its cultural climate more and more comes to resemble that of the Godless West. 135 00:19:18,580 --> 00:19:31,120 It's quite clear that Russia is under threat. The wholly passive, non-violent people of Russia are yet again being attacked by Vikings, 136 00:19:31,570 --> 00:19:40,870 Tartars, Teutonic Knights, Poles, Napoleon, Napoleonic troops, Hitlerian troops, you name it. 137 00:19:41,680 --> 00:19:45,910 But this is part of that narrative yet again, Russia, the martyr nation, 138 00:19:46,810 --> 00:19:56,410 is under threat and therefore some deeply heartbroken Russians forced to take up arms in its own defence. 139 00:20:00,310 --> 00:20:05,290 That's what I mean by saying that the tensions between those two bits of Russian mythology 140 00:20:06,280 --> 00:20:10,960 form a very particular and rather explosive chemistry when they're brought together. 141 00:20:11,470 --> 00:20:17,600 Not for the first time and. Also not the first time. 142 00:20:17,840 --> 00:20:29,540 The memory of Stalin's mythologising of the Great Patriotic War in the early 1940s is resurgence in this context yet again. 143 00:20:30,170 --> 00:20:37,730 A massive military presence has to be activated in order to resist the martyrdom that threatens. 144 00:20:41,620 --> 00:20:44,889 So much for the Russian tradition. But in the last few minutes left, 145 00:20:44,890 --> 00:20:52,090 I want to add that I mentioned that gives this a particularly perhaps puzzling is the 146 00:20:52,090 --> 00:20:59,830 wrong word but certainly provoke dimension in the context of contemporary geopolitics. 147 00:21:03,230 --> 00:21:08,480 I'm looking at it partly through the lens of the Christian and ecclesiastical discourse that has been around, 148 00:21:08,600 --> 00:21:13,340 but that has clearly been co-opted very effectively by Putin and his colleagues, 149 00:21:15,320 --> 00:21:28,310 and that is the international resistance to modernising, liberalising, equalising trends in social mores. 150 00:21:30,410 --> 00:21:39,620 We talk glibly in this country about inclusivity, and we mean by that usual code is rights not only for women, 151 00:21:40,010 --> 00:21:46,580 but for sexual minorities and the like, which is why, of course, for Patriarch Kirill in Moscow. 152 00:21:46,760 --> 00:22:00,290 Gay pride marches in Kiev are the most visible and offensive sign possible of assault on the sacred society, the holy community. 153 00:22:01,560 --> 00:22:05,130 A sign that Ukraine has been captured and must be released. 154 00:22:05,940 --> 00:22:16,230 But the configuration of this in terms of a particular set of political and social issues around gender and sexuality, 155 00:22:16,980 --> 00:22:22,590 isn't entirely modern and paradoxically largely Western phenomenon. 156 00:22:24,180 --> 00:22:31,799 This is why you see the initially rather puzzling sympathy and resonance between the 157 00:22:31,800 --> 00:22:36,660 language used in Moscow and the religious right in the United States of America, 158 00:22:37,260 --> 00:22:41,790 and why there are many on the religious right in the United States who are strongly, 159 00:22:42,210 --> 00:22:52,080 not violently opposed to any action in defence of Ukraine, because Moscow is, in this instance, fighting for their cause and their corner. 160 00:22:53,820 --> 00:23:01,080 And here again, the paradox is the distinctive exceptionalist view of Russian Christian identity 161 00:23:01,410 --> 00:23:08,520 has in this particular been reinforced and deepened is perhaps the wrong word, 162 00:23:08,520 --> 00:23:18,720 but certainly intensified, broadened perhaps by a very particular Western set of culture wars agenda items. 163 00:23:20,490 --> 00:23:26,130 And that's one element in the whole picture, which I think has not yet received quite the attention it deserves. 164 00:23:26,400 --> 00:23:31,920 You know, thinking about how this fits into a global pattern of self understanding and conflict. 165 00:23:35,410 --> 00:23:46,720 It's part, of course, of that. Very broad crisis of participatory democracy, which geopolitics currently faces. 166 00:23:48,250 --> 00:23:58,450 Part of the reaction there. And once again, modern, profoundly modern sense of pushing back against. 167 00:24:00,930 --> 00:24:07,260 What's regarded as almost conspiratorial agenda for the dissolution of traditional social force. 168 00:24:09,660 --> 00:24:18,540 It's given particular diffusion and particular intensity in the social media world of the United States and elsewhere. 169 00:24:19,590 --> 00:24:25,890 It's borrowed for similar purposes by parts of the Islamic world in defence of Islamist agendas. 170 00:24:26,100 --> 00:24:36,510 And here it is once again being borrowed by the Russian Patriarchate and the Russian state to make sense of its actions in Ukraine. 171 00:24:39,130 --> 00:24:42,160 Now, a great deal could be said about all of that, 172 00:24:42,160 --> 00:24:50,200 about the size and the geopolitical location of both Putin's style of government and this particular military action. 173 00:24:51,280 --> 00:24:57,640 But I hope and what I've said so far, I've given you some sense of how left to itself. 174 00:24:57,850 --> 00:25:04,810 You already have a quite explicit mixture within the Russian mythological psyche. 175 00:25:05,620 --> 00:25:09,730 And I should say I'm using mythological in the neutral sense are not just using the swear word. 176 00:25:10,270 --> 00:25:20,380 This is about the the self imagining of communities, the image of how the French would say of communities who already have that explosive mixture. 177 00:25:20,770 --> 00:25:28,270 Add to that the international cultural wars dimension and the crisis of democratic confidence. 178 00:25:29,620 --> 00:25:38,380 And you have, I think, something of the mindset which can narrate the invasion of Ukraine, 179 00:25:39,670 --> 00:25:43,480 the butchery of the innocent, the attempt to crush the legitimately elected government. 180 00:25:43,600 --> 00:25:49,960 You can relate to that in terms of self-defence, protection of minorities. 181 00:25:51,650 --> 00:26:03,200 And the defence of traditional durable social forms against those sinister agencies which seek to dissolve them in favour of unaccountable, 182 00:26:04,340 --> 00:26:06,260 absolutist secularism. 183 00:26:08,630 --> 00:26:20,690 It's quite a good story, and while I guess most of us in this hall today would not regard it as a story we would very much want to sign up to, 184 00:26:21,980 --> 00:26:30,230 because I think it's important that we put a little bit of imaginative energy into understanding why it feels like a good story to some people, 185 00:26:30,680 --> 00:26:37,220 to large numbers of the citizens of the Russian Federation, to a good many of the United States. 186 00:26:38,690 --> 00:26:48,470 And we might also give a bit of attention to some of the lessons that might be learned from how communities mythologise themselves. 187 00:26:50,240 --> 00:26:59,640 The risks of a victim narrative. The risks of a global protective narrative, because of course, those are not confined to Russia. 188 00:27:01,080 --> 00:27:02,690 It's quite important about those in mind. 189 00:27:02,690 --> 00:27:15,140 Also, as part of a wider discussion about peace and its enemies, which this meeting and this organisation seek to address. 190 00:27:16,190 --> 00:27:28,190 Thank you very much for listening. Which.