Rusofilia

In an article for Foreign Policy magazine (June 26, 2022), Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian analyst and chief editor at @ukraine_world, wrote: "If you're looking for the roots of Russia's violence against its neighbors, its desire to erase their history and its rejection of the ideas of liberal democracy, you will find some of the answers on the pages of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Dostoevsky." Yermolenko sees a straight line from Pushkin's ideology to today's Russian neo-imperial rhetoric. According to him, Western scholars who present the golden age of Russian literature as merely the intellectual struggle between Westernizers and Slavophiles are "missing the nationalist and imperialist undercurrents common to both” (FP). Even Westernizers, Yermolenko argues, believed in Russian "exceptionalism" and turned against opponents for what they thought liberal Europe stood for: Dropped onto Russian soil, even Western progressive ideas morphed into a new and stronger tyranny—whether under Russia's great modernizer Peter the Great or the Bolsheviks, whose murderous tyranny was built of (FP). Yermolenko's thought will not change the war's outcome, but world mandataries read magazines like Foreign Policy, and social media shape public opinion. Yermolenko has 60.8K followers, which in the Twitter universe amounts to a large sphere of influence, mainly because among them are opinion leaders and some of the most influential media conglomerates in the world. Ezra Klein from The New York Times; Yaroslav Trofimov, Chief Foreign-Affairs Correspondent of The Wall Street Journal; Richard Ensor, The Economist Ukraine correspondent; Leonid Bershidskiy from Bloomberg, as well as electronic media giants, such as NBC, Great Britain News, France 24, Radio Canada, and even USAID, an agency that implements foreign assistance policies for the United States government. It is easy to prove Yermolenko wrong about Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy (and I hope this thesis may help dispel such unfounded notions). Yermolenko accuses Tolstoy of promoting the idea that war was a "divine fact." https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1532469595247984640.html Not only was Tolstoy a known pacifist but, even further against the Ukrainian journalist's allegations of a typical anti-Western attitude, the author praised leader Westernizer Alexander Herzen. As an admirer of Tolstoy, Tarkovsky quotes the author's correspondence several times in his diaries: "To demonstrate the weakness of revolutionary theories you only have to read what Herzen says about violence being invariably hoist with its own petard, by the very cause which gave rise to it" (Diaries 318). The main target of the authors that Yermolenko accuses was Catholicism, not the West, per se. Just like Pushkin, Dostoyevsky believed that Russia was lucky to have been "saved" from the corruption of the Roman Church, which should only deal with spiritual matters and not politics. In The Idiot (1869), Prince Myshkin claims: Catholicism is even worse than atheism, for it preaches a distorted Christ. It continues the Roman Empire's zeal to subordinate; it is a power shot through with fraud and superstition, bartering sincere feelings for money. Even Socialism sprang from Catholicism in an effort to replace the lost moral power of religion. (Loc. 10852) Yermolenko's appeal to analyze Russian culture as a way of explaining contemporary political issues is in tune with a trend in International Relations that is looking at a growing body of work in film and the turn to the aesthetic and intertextual, a trend that "seeks a further conversation with cinema and poetics to develop an interpretive canon in global politics" (Moore 59-82). In the Journal Alternatives, Moore debates filmic representations of belonging and spirituality shaped by a Russian hermeneutic tradition. About Tarkovsky, Moore claims that "throughout his films and written work, he articulates a particular form of Russian interpretivism" (59-82). That culture in general—and cinema, in particular—should be taken seriously as a cross-section of global politics is only natural. Lenin knew how powerful cinema could be in inducing the population's ideas, attitudes, and behaviors. Such indoctrination was the perfect vehicle for propaganda. Tarkovsky is seen by many filmmakers in Russia today as a symbol of resistance to tyranny (like Boris Pasternak); and, like the great poet, his response to the tyrants of his age was the assertion of an inner freedom, not bound by ideologies. – Anastasia Pleshakova, Komsomolskaya Pravda (4 April 2007) After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, new scholarship came out based on opened archives. The new research indicated that one of the most important things that brought about the regime's demise was the impossibility of eradicating the official and local Orthodox Church. When the era of Communism began in Russia in 1917, the USSR was the first state to treat the elimination of any form of religion as an ideological imperative. As Karl Marx declared in The Communist Manifesto: "Communism begins where atheism begins" (Frost). Tarkovsky's use of religious and spiritual themes were at odds with the atheistic principles of the Soviet Union. Being a Slavophile went against the internationalist spirit of Communism. Like the Tsarist government before them, the Bolsheviks upheld Western Europe as an excellent model to follow. Since the Slavophiles criticized Nicholas I's (1796-1855) regime, his government censored their journals and tried to suppress the movement. Tarkovsky's religiosity and Slavophilism would not have ingratiated him with any Russian government in Russia…until now. At least, that is what one could believe by observing how the current president, Vladimir Putin, touts himself as a devout Christian with tight connections to the Orthodox church and champions Russia's Slavic-Asian roots against the corrupting influence of the West. In that sense, Putin's regime would seem dangerously akin to Tarkovsky's thought. Therefore, part of this conclusion will be devoted to weeding out the coincidences that could erroneously pair the filmmaker with any of the negative aspects of the current Muscovite regime. Putin claims an affinity with the nineteenth-century thinkers who influenced Tarkovsky. In fact, he has said that Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is his favorite novel. Putin's professed admiration for the Russian authors has been taken as a sign that the West should reconsider its view of Tolstoy, Tyutchev, Lermontov, and other giants of Russian thought. Why Tarkovsky, and Why Now? Tarkovsky's influence is alive and well. Russia's Alexander Sokurov, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mexico's Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Carlos Reygadas, Denmark's Lars von Trier, the United States' Terrence Malick and Gus van Sant, and Hungary's Béla Tarr (the director most often called Tarkovsky's successor) all look up to the Soviet director and mention him as an inspiration. Tarkovsky is still taught in every film school in the world. On the other hand, Tarkovsky admired the same authors as Putin. So, in our time, it has become desirable and indispensable to weed out the coincidences of Tarkovsky's intellectual and ideological affinities from those of Putin's regime. I will briefly address how Putin's colonialist ambitions are nowhere to be found in the nineteenth-century authors discussed in this thesis and how Yermolenko and Putin have misread them. If one were to look for Putin's ideological roots, one would find them more in contemporary Western thought than in nineteenth-century Russia. At least, that is what philosopher, historian, and sociologist Aleksandr Dugin said during an interview for the BBC (October 18, 2016) that continental philosophy, especially postmodernism, was instrumental in helping him articulate his ideas. Dugin believes in Russian exceptionalism based on postmodernism's relativism, suspicion of science, and rationality and critique of European liberal democracies. Dugin claims his compatriots are better off with an autocratic government that promotes the cult of personality. "We have our own special truth." He claims Putin's apologist's rejection of the West and dream of returning to a more essential Russia is a plagiarism of Slavophilism. However, as stated in Chapter ONE, the Slavophiles also recognized that their contemporary society was far from ideal. The Slavophiles believed Peter the Great's reforms had corrupted Russia and created a wedge between the nobility and the peasantry. They also despised his state bureaucracy and church reforms because they undermined spiritual authority (Britannica). Viewing Russia as potentially able to develop according to the "Christian community" model, the Slavophiles also thought that once such a society was established, Russia's duty would be to revitalize the West by reintroducing spiritual values. Even though Tarkovsky overlaps with Putin's Russia on specific issues, such as intense nationalism, a rejection of the West, and a suspicion of science and technology, the axis of his critique is spiritual. Putin's nationalistic and religious speech is a political strategy to rally support for his military expansionism. In the case of the communist government, Tarkovsky opposed Marxist-Leninist ideology, which denied the existence of the soul and pretended to engineer a perfect society through the simple transformation of people's material circumstances: It is hard to overstress the importance of the fact that Russia received its Christianity from Byzantium and not from the West. In the spirit of the Byzantine tradition, the Russian empire came to see itself as a theocracy, a genuinely Christian realm where church and state were united. The godlike statues of the Tsar were a legacy of this tradition. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, the Russian church proclaimed Moscow to be the third Rome, the direct heir to Byzantium and the last remaining seat of the Orthodox religion, with a messianic role to save the Christian world. (Figes 300) In the case of the West, Tarkovsky bemoaned the materialism that led Europe to its decline by moving away from nature and seeking beauty in objects and relative comfort. The Russian people, by contrast, adhered to the Russian Orthodox faith. Thus, according to the Slavophiles, through their common faith and church, the Russian people were united in a "Christian community" that defined natural, harmonious human relationships. The nineteenth-century authors mentioned by Yermolenko did not promote Russian military capabilities. Instead, they resented how the Tsarist government tried to impose foreign values and eliminate their own. Central to Russia's experience of itself as a different place has to do with an opposing mentality. According to Lesley Chamberlain in Motherland: I have assumed this sense of the people and the nation trying to see themselves, especially with the help of Western philosophy, in terms of a new, probably unattainable definition of the good man […] Russian thinkers wanted to find a moral way of being that philosophers would call a moral ontology" (xiv). According to nineteenth-century thinker Piotr Lavrov, "Russia wanted to define itself as an ethical category" (Chamberlain xiii). Does anything about this religious, spiritual, and moral ideology have anything to do with how Putin's government accumulates power, poisons opponents, suppresses freedom of expression, and keeps adding territories to Russia? If the pre-revolutionary philosophers are responsible for Russia's current military expansionism, it would be—as others have noted—for not preventing the catastrophe of Bolshevism by using lyrical, poetical, metaphorical language and not realizing that the bulwark for freedom in politics has to be guaranteed by solid institutions that can withstand the ambitions of a "strong man;" for their theorizing on freedom and liberty, only as an inner force; and for using metaphorical and not simple language to instruct their audience about the risk of exchanging one strong man for another. Hence, Russia went from an absolutist ruler in the figure of the Czar to another, in the figure of the leaders of the Communist Party to…Putin. Just as the concept of sobornost may have facilitated the disposition of the Russian people toward collectivism, the thoughts of the thinkers that Tarkovsky read may have also done so by emphasizing personhood as the foundation of human dignity without paying attention to the legal and political institutions necessary for its defense. The adoption of a metaphysical language perhaps prevented appreciation of the impending danger: Marxists and Modernists deployed a totalizing discourse that frequently culminated in appeals to "overcome" empirical limits of time and even death, whether in the act of revolution or transcendence, by transforming knowledge into action, economics into justice, and humanity into super-humanity. (Hamburg and Poole 266) The nineteenth-century thinkers Yermolenko alludes to could have sinned by omission, not commission. As the most successful inheritor and promoter of their ideas, Tarkovsky only found light and love in them: "All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love" (Sculpting 180). Could any of Putin's ideas be in tune with this? Perhaps he should read Dostoevsky and find, as Tarkovsky did, that "man must have an ideal in order to be able to live without tormenting other people. An ideal is a spiritual or ethical concept of law" " (Diaries 11). Wholeness, as a primary impulse in Tarkovsky's work, is self-fulfilled in the end, which comes only with death in the paradoxical nature of life. Thus, the filmmaker's time was, in a tragic sense, out of sync. He could not find an existential mooring in the present, so he longed for an idealized past. Thus, Tarkovsky's tragedy is that of the exiled. The Russia he yearned for—even while living there—was, like all utopias, a paradise lost, out of reach…except in his films. In them, we can find the Motherland that he imagined, and that gave him a spiritual mooring. Tarkovsky believed that modern art had taken a wrong turn in abandoning this search for the meaning of existence to affirm the value of the individual for its own sake. But the fact that he is still beloved and respected worldwide should give us some comfort. Even in these nihilistic times, the demand for his films reveals the underlying truth in his belief that "art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art" (Sculpting 38). So, there is hope.