‘Yes, but…’
‘Russia has always strived to develop a fundamentally non-European state structure, a fusion of Slavic autocracy and Western democracy.’
‘A difficult task?’
‘Almost impossible, as our history attests, but it has not stopped us trying!’
• Thousands of anti-austerity protestors take to the streets of St Petersburg and Moscow, clashing with Omon units on the Lomonsov bridge over the Neva and the Great Moskvoretsky Bridge, in full view of St Basil’s Cathedral;
• Russian National Unity paramilitaries begin to organise in response to President Babel’s declaration that ‘fascist reactionaries will play no part in Russia’s multicultural future’;
• Several negro, gay, and trans people are found dead in the back streets of Moscow’s Vnukkovo district following an assault on a local schoolgirl;
• Citizens’ food distribution centres open up all over the country. Those in Tverskaya Ulitsa in Moscow, Bolshaia Pokrovskaia in Nizhny Novgorod, and the Kalininsky District of St Petersburg are immediately surrounded and shut down by armed militia operating under direct orders from the Kremlin;
• Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg, both with a string of convictions for defrauding the French cosmetic company Yves Rocher, distance themselves from earlier statements made during interviews with Russia Today where they had reminded people of their activism in the ‘Stop Feeding the Caucasus’ campaign, and described dark-skinned Caucasian immigrants as cockroaches. ‘Cockroaches can be killed with a slipper; as for humans, I recommend a pistol’;
• Yulia Navalny is interviewed about her fears for her husband, a man identified as one of the top hundred most influential thinkers by Time Magazine back in 2012. ‘He is under threat from Nazis!’ she claimed;
• A mayor of a small provincial town is arrested for quoting Bulgakov in reference to vnenarodnost, the alien character of the intelligentsia, along with cryptic allusions as to who was responsible for the mass famine of 1921;
• ‘For God’s sake’, demands a historian accused of writing anti-Semitic articles, ‘even Putin openly stated that 85 percent of the Bolshevik leaders were Jews’;
• Utro Rossii (Dawn of Russia) patriots begin talking openly about Novus Ordo Seclorum, the total population manipulation and resource extraction enacted by a One World Government masked under talk of Liberty and Equality.
‘Essentially, Russia has historically had three options. Slow absorption into Europe, as Krizhanich or Golitsyn wanted. Isolationism, as preached by Ioakhim. Or forced modernisation, like Peter the Great and Stalin tried. But in more recent times there was the relatively large and often overlooked anti-Marxist and pro-Christian underground that was dedicated to overthrowing the Communist state. This was something my grandparents and parents participated in. Their programme included statements like, “The life and dignity of the person are inviolable; all citizens are equal before the law; the freedom of labour is provided for everyone by the right of each citizen to land and to credit; all methods of dissemination of thought are free; gatherings and demonstrations are free and the secret political police must be disbanded”.’
‘Sounds very reasonable.’
‘Their plan was to start a military coup and establish a theocratic state!’
‘I get nervous when people bring God into politics!’
Iryna nodded. ‘But God can be a radical force. St Michael the Archangel said, “Towards the unholy hearts who seek entrance into the most Holy House of the Lord with no mercy I point my sword”.’
‘And who in your opinion are the Unholy?’
‘Christ was sent to the world and not to the Jewish people alone. What was the first thing the Bolsheviks attacked? Tradition in the form of religion. In the Kremlin alone they destroyed the Church of Our Saviour near the Terem Palaces, the Church of Konstantin and Elena, the Church of Annunciation in the Rye Yard, then the two chapels at the Spassky Gates and the Church of the Nativity of John the Baptist. You are no doubt familiar with Filofei’s theory, “Dva Rima padosha, a tretii, a chetvertom ne byti”?’
‘That two Romes have fallen, Moscow is third and a fourth will never be!’
‘The Bishop’s Council that met in Moscow in 2013 declared, “Orthodoxy is being reborn as the foundation of national self-consciousness, uniting all the healthy forces in society—those forces which strive for the transformation of life on the basis of a sure foundation and the spiritual and moral values that have entered the flesh and blood of our peoples”.’
‘But still, so much for prophets, I say.’
‘Indeed, but we need a strong Orthodox Church now. Otherwise the Muslims will overrun us. In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, there is a line predicting our regenerative qualities: “A star shall rise in the east”.’
‘God aside, your writers are seers!’ he complimented her.
‘Not all. Lev Tolstoy participated in the destruction of the national faith.’
‘And for Dostoevsky, “A people without nationality is like a man without a personality”.’
‘It is true, Dostoevsky became highly conservative in his later years. He believed Russia carried a divine candle to light the darkness of this world.’
‘And are those beliefs still prevalent?’
‘Among some on the nationalist Right, yes!’
‘Such messianic fervour can lead to madness!’
‘To have no sense of mission is worse. Of course there are many who are simply touched by the aesthetic of what Leontiev calls “the beards, pussy-willows, icons, poetry of prayer and fasting”. But thinkers like Theodosius of the Caves and Kirill of the White Lake thought nationality a holy ideal. Berdyaev suggests that through faith we could stop “the exploitation of man by man, as well as the exploitation of man by the state”, which for him was the way our economic elites converted man into an object. Solzhenitsyn was the same.’ Iryna stopped to quote him. ‘“I think Russia, which has thrown open the gates of Hell in the world, is alone capable of trying to close them… there are in the West no hands of such strength and no heart of such wisdom… either the world will soon perish or the hands to defeat hell will come from the enslaved East”.’
‘And Tolstoy said, everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.’
‘Touché!’
• OPEC reduces the cost of a barrel of oil to $28;
• The Federal Bank’s life-long President, Janet Yellen, raises US interest rates for the third quarter in succession on advice from consultants operating out of Tel Aviv;
• Otkritie Bank officials close foreign exchange counters after a 300 percent increase in demand for Euros;
• Fighting is reported outside a branch of Sberbank opposite Kursky station in Central Moscow when people are turned away by private security guards;
• Russia reassesses its GDP forecasts downwards by 23 percent over the previous quarter;
• Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, is declared bankrupt, having failed to service the substantial foreign debt it incurred in order to buy out TNK-BP;
• Superstitious belief is reinvigorated by unexplained thunderclaps across the skies of western Russia;
• Talk of EU and American stealth weapons becomes common.
He walked alone, a mere speck striding across the panorama of Palace Square. In front, the washed-out walls of the General Staff building were crumbling like marzipan in mercury drizzle. The green-and-white confection of the Winter Palace provided a backdrop to the scene.