Good morning, everyone. It's a very great pleasure and a great privilege to be invited to share today's discussion.
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.
I remember when it was simply a twinkle in your eyes. 20 years ago.
And it's wonderful to see how much has happened since.
I offered to introduce the subject by looking at issues around the character and distinctiveness of Russian nationalism,
and specifically Russian Christian nationalism as a historical phenomenon and a current reality.
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.
I'm breaking down my presentation into three portions.
It's in the 15th century that the idea first emerges that the Grand Principality of Moscow is the inheritor of the Byzantine Empire.
The fall of the city of Constantinople in 1453 generated a great deal of intellectual upheaval in the eastern Christian world,
and at least one Russian intellectual of the era took the opportunity of saying
that it was quite clear that since the first Rome and second Rome had fallen,
Moscow, the major Orthodox principality left standing in Eastern Europe, was the third Rome.
And he said famously, a fourth. There will never be.
In spite of a short lived and probably doomed attempt in the 1920s and early
1930 suggests that Bucharest might be the fourth Rome after the fall of Moscow.
I think we can stick with the source analysis of the 15th century.
The third Rome, Moscow and the Bruce Principalities associated with Moscow recast as the successor states not only of the Byzantine Empire,
but of the Roman Empire, which of course, is technically what the Byzantine Empire always was.
That means to say that the forms of authority encoded and embodied in the Principality of Moscow had about them
the same kind of central finality and authority that belonged to the figure of the Emperor in Constantinople.
The ruler was anointed, equipped by God for absolute authority,
autocratic authority over the people, and the coronation ritual exemplified this in various ways.
And various aspects of court protocol and thinking about both church and state reflected this until the time of Peter the Great.
In some ways beyond that, but in that relatively brief period from, let's say, 1500 to 1700,
Moscow reinvented itself as an empire, a Christian empire whose ruler was called Caesar.
So. During the post-Vietnam period in Russia after the reforms, the westernisation of Peter the Great.
That particular legacy, for obvious reasons, mattered a great deal less.
I don't imagine that Catherine the Great spent a great deal of time reflecting on her inheritance from Byzantium,
and although autocracy was very definitely part of the political map in those centuries,
the particular form of Christian autocracy reflected in 15th and 16th century literature didn't seem to appear so much.
But what brought this back to life in the 19th century, apart from one particular strand I'll come to in a moment,
what brought it was practically back to life was, of course, the crisis in the Balkans in the late 19th century,
the activities of the Ottoman Empire against the Southern Slavs, as we know from the novels of Tolstoy and many other sources,
revived the sense that the Orthodox state was, if you like, de facto, perhaps de diarrhée, the protector of Orthodox minorities elsewhere.
So, Nicholas, the first world in the 19th century had, you might say, shifted the the tone,
a feel of Russian autocracy back a little bit further towards the Byzantine model.
It's in his reign that the formula of orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality became sort of governing features of Russian identity.
But the Balkan wars, the persecution of the Orthodox minorities, especially in Bulgaria,
but also to some extent in Serbia, these became a kind of rationale for Russian political activism in the area.
And those of you who remember Anna Karenina will recall the strong struggles of conscience which living
goes through towards the end of that novel about how far you should be involved in the Balkan conflicts.
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,
which at a particular moment in history transformed itself into a duty of authority to intervene as a protector of integral orthodoxy.
Elsewhere, orthodox minorities, in particular against anti-Christian violence.
That has certainly been one of the elements in the remarkable comprehensive revival of Russian
self-mythologizing that we've seen in the last decade or two decades in Putin's Russia.
I think it's quite important to recognise that its roots are not simply, not simply the opportunism of a contemporary dictator,
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.
A notion that the emperor has a sort of universal duty to protect Christian communities is deep rooted in the fifth and sixth century,
thinking about the role of the Roman Empire in late antiquity in the early Middle Ages.
But as we've seen, this particular application of it gives a special edge to Russian exceptionalism.
Secondly, I want to turn to that other 19th century phenomenon, which feeds into this in a rather paradoxical way,
and that is what happens in the middle of the 19th century with the slum of your movement in Russia.
That is the recovery of a sense of specifically Slavic identity,
a highly distinctive cultural and religious ethos which is supposed to reside in the Slavic nations.
Rather, in contrast to the emphasis on autocracy in the third Rome tradition.
The odd thing is that many of the slum officials were surprisingly egalitarian and rather suspect to the autocratic state at the time.
The ideal human community for the slum officials was the village community in which an egalitarian,
participatory, communal identity was reflected in ways of decision making, land ownership and so forth.
And this peasant communal ideal was itself deeply linked in fourth level field rights with a theological rationale.
Christian communal identity was the opposite of individual self-assertion.
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.
And there's a fundamental appeal to non-violence and cooperation as essentially bound up with that Slavic communal identity.
And of course, as many of you will know, the great word support was coined by some of the Islamophobe thinkers.
Conspiracy is a rather bad English translation to describe the mutual communal ideals that were thought of as intrinsic not just to Russian,
but to Slavic identity.
Slightly unkind and slightly more objective observer might well say you're simply describing premodern forms of communal awareness.
But at the time, it suited club affiliated publicists and thinkers to underline this particular aspect,
partly as a protest against what they saw as the westernising autocratic tendencies represented by Peter the Great.
The point was to get back behind Peter the Great and even behind Ivan the Terrible to another kind of Slavonic political ideal,
corporatist, non-violent, and so forth. Now this is the curious and rather ambivalent element,
which helps to produce some aspects of our present crisis built into this Flavourful sense of identity
was also an ideal of non resistance as somehow characteristic of Slavic political psychology.
Some social apologists noted that the first canonised saints after Vladimir in the 11th century were
Vladimir sons who were killed by their brother dynastic war and refused to resist their brothers violence.
It's as if from the beginning Russian sanctity is non-violent, and that feeds in to another strand of self-mythologizing,
which is that of Russia as the victim nation, the martyr people.
The not always very edifying, somewhat Machiavellian than negotiations of the late medieval Muscovite princes in
relation to the Tartar overlords were reinterpreted as an exercise in Christian humility.
Instead of fighting the Tartars, the Muscovite princes collaborated to protect their own people.
It's a, say, edifying version of a not always very edifying history, but it's part of that same mythology.
Russia is a martyr. People overrun by the toddler hordes in the 13th century kept in subjection until the 15th century.
The ideal forms of political authority in that period were not heroic resistance,
but patient suffering and the acceptance of compromise for the sake of the common good.
Some of the field writers go back yet further to the mythology of the beginnings of the Russian states and
the alleged invitation from the Slavonic tribes or other people to the Viking Rurik to come and rule over us.
Humility as authority is something which has to be accepted, worked with, endured patiently.
And there's the irony, you might say, in this love of your view.
On one hand, the ideal form of human society is egalitarian and co-operative.
On the other, as a matter of fact, most forms of available human authority are dominant and coercive.
And the best thing you can do is to collaborate and to accept with humility.
So part of that legacy is the picture of Russia as constantly, patiently suffering through the aggression of others.
The titles that the Germans and the Poles and the time of troubles at the end of the 16th,
beginning of the 17th century, Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars.
Napoleon didn't realise it, but he did wonders for Russian self-perception of Russian self-mythologizing by attacking Moscow.
It was a perfect exemplification of the Summerfield narrative here yet again was rationalist,
individualist, aggressive Western ism assaulting the very citadel of sacred community.
Holy Mother Moscow representing the Slavic humble Christian co-operative reality.
That goes with in some forms and some who are writing are still further tongue screwed, in which strangely, Russia is feminised.
If you look at the prison writings of, say, Anderson, one of the great writers of the gulag in the late 20th century,
otherwise, under intense battles, the Navy wrote Under the Skin more than once picks up.
This idea of Russia is in contrast to the Western nations.
Russia is then meaning Russia as passive and CFC like others.
And that's, of course, a mixed blessing. It means that we are strangers to aggressive imperialism.
The eyebrows raised a little at this point because our corporate ethnic ethos is feminine, receptive.
Passive, humble, enduring. So the first two elements we see.
But the deep tension and a rather dangerous chemical reaction.
On the one hand, Russia is the orthodox state called upon as part of its imperial identity to protect others.
On the other, Russia is a victim states. Russia is the Christian motto People who bear the cross in the world.
We do just escape.
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.
The fact that it has been oppressed, attacked by others.
By definition, Russian violence is.
Responsive. Not aggressive. Defensive.
Not imperialistic.
I think having sketched very broadly, you know, the Russian historians, the audience will have to forgive me for the crudity it was.
Having sketched that you may see some of the components that we've themselves into the ideology around Ukraine aggression.
On the one hand, the Christian Russian state is indeed called.
So the patriarch of Moscow repeatedly tells us to defend its faithful who are under threat elsewhere.
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,
consistently attempted to set up what you might call safe orthodox jurisdictions in other countries,
safe places for Russians to maintain that Russian orthodoxy, even orthodox countries and orthodox violence.
But here we see how this translates into a very political and geopolitical agenda.
Also, the condition of Ukraine can be represented, has been represented as, so to speak,
the covert takeover of an orthodox country by non-Orthodox and anti orthodox anti-Christian elements at its most extreme.
This, of course, veers off into globalists, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic fantasies and all the rest of it,
all those very sadly familiar tropes in the Russian imagination.
Slightly more specifically, it means that Ukraine, in attempting to reconstitute itself as something like a Western democracy,
has quite clearly been co-opted at best captured at worst, by a wholly alien theology and philosophy.
Ukrainians may not know it, but they are actually victims of a new form of Ottoman oppression.
The great Antichrist has taken over so the protective responsibility of a third Rome is revitalised in that context.
On the other side of that is, of course, when an immediate neighbour, Ukraine, is co-opted by violently anti-Russian anti-Christian forces,
when it talks about entering NATO's, when its cultural climate more and more comes to resemble that of the Godless West.
It's quite clear that Russia is under threat. The wholly passive, non-violent people of Russia are yet again being attacked by Vikings,
Tartars, Teutonic Knights, Poles, Napoleon, Napoleonic troops, Hitlerian troops, you name it.
But this is part of that narrative yet again, Russia, the martyr nation,
is under threat and therefore some deeply heartbroken Russians forced to take up arms in its own defence.
That's what I mean by saying that the tensions between those two bits of Russian mythology
form a very particular and rather explosive chemistry when they're brought together.
Not for the first time and. Also not the first time.
The memory of Stalin's mythologising of the Great Patriotic War in the early 1940s is resurgence in this context yet again.
A massive military presence has to be activated in order to resist the martyrdom that threatens.
So much for the Russian tradition. But in the last few minutes left,
I want to add that I mentioned that gives this a particularly perhaps puzzling is the
wrong word but certainly provoke dimension in the context of contemporary geopolitics.
I'm looking at it partly through the lens of the Christian and ecclesiastical discourse that has been around,
but that has clearly been co-opted very effectively by Putin and his colleagues,
and that is the international resistance to modernising, liberalising, equalising trends in social mores.
We talk glibly in this country about inclusivity, and we mean by that usual code is rights not only for women,
but for sexual minorities and the like, which is why, of course, for Patriarch Kirill in Moscow.
Gay pride marches in Kiev are the most visible and offensive sign possible of assault on the sacred society, the holy community.
A sign that Ukraine has been captured and must be released.
But the configuration of this in terms of a particular set of political and social issues around gender and sexuality,
isn't entirely modern and paradoxically largely Western phenomenon.
This is why you see the initially rather puzzling sympathy and resonance between the
language used in Moscow and the religious right in the United States of America,
and why there are many on the religious right in the United States who are strongly,
not violently opposed to any action in defence of Ukraine, because Moscow is, in this instance, fighting for their cause and their corner.
And here again, the paradox is the distinctive exceptionalist view of Russian Christian identity
has in this particular been reinforced and deepened is perhaps the wrong word,
but certainly intensified, broadened perhaps by a very particular Western set of culture wars agenda items.
And that's one element in the whole picture, which I think has not yet received quite the attention it deserves.
You know, thinking about how this fits into a global pattern of self understanding and conflict.
It's part, of course, of that. Very broad crisis of participatory democracy, which geopolitics currently faces.
Part of the reaction there. And once again, modern, profoundly modern sense of pushing back against.
What's regarded as almost conspiratorial agenda for the dissolution of traditional social force.
It's given particular diffusion and particular intensity in the social media world of the United States and elsewhere.
It's borrowed for similar purposes by parts of the Islamic world in defence of Islamist agendas.
And here it is once again being borrowed by the Russian Patriarchate and the Russian state to make sense of its actions in Ukraine.
Now, a great deal could be said about all of that,
about the size and the geopolitical location of both Putin's style of government and this particular military action.
But I hope and what I've said so far, I've given you some sense of how left to itself.
You already have a quite explicit mixture within the Russian mythological psyche.
And I should say I'm using mythological in the neutral sense are not just using the swear word.
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.
Add to that the international cultural wars dimension and the crisis of democratic confidence.
And you have, I think, something of the mindset which can narrate the invasion of Ukraine,
the butchery of the innocent, the attempt to crush the legitimately elected government.
You can relate to that in terms of self-defence, protection of minorities.
And the defence of traditional durable social forms against those sinister agencies which seek to dissolve them in favour of unaccountable,
absolutist secularism.
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,
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,
to large numbers of the citizens of the Russian Federation, to a good many of the United States.
And we might also give a bit of attention to some of the lessons that might be learned from how communities mythologise themselves.
The risks of a victim narrative. The risks of a global protective narrative, because of course, those are not confined to Russia.
It's quite important about those in mind.
Also, as part of a wider discussion about peace and its enemies, which this meeting and this organisation seek to address.
Thank you very much for listening. Which.