For over seventy years, the CPSU monopolised almost every element of the people’s cultural and social formation, cutting ties with folk traditions and the beneficial effects of civil society and swarming into every corner of people’s lives, and it left a vacuum once the Soviet Union collapsed. If, since 1991, schools have been unable to transmit a sense of vospitanie to their pupils (though of course the burden should not fall on their shoulders alone), it is more important than ever that other institutions step up and provide it.
Once such institution is, of course, the family, which has been a constant source of refuge and resilience for Russians throughout history, and remains one of the most important bulwarks against the alienation and loss that threatens us all. Few better vehicles for the transmission of culture and values have ever been invented, and the warmth and support provided by families is ever more important in an increasingly atomised, morally confused world.
I am a secularist who believes in the separation of church and state, but there is no doubt that the Russian Orthodox Church is another institution that can play a role in this process. It has always been central to the history of our nation, as well as in the development of our civilisation, and amid the humiliation and misery of those dreadful years after the end of the Soviet Union, the Orthodox faith provided succour and support to many thousands of my fellow Russians – a service to the nation of almost incalculable value. Alongside this, its endeavours have helped to preserve the best and most important of Russia’s traditions.
Charities are another potential pillar of a values-based society. I personally am closely involved with The Foundation of Andrew The First-Called. I have been a member of the Foundation since 1998, and a number of years ago I became chairman of its board.
Its creation was inspired by the work of St Andrew, known to Russian Orthodox believers as Andrew The First-Called. It was Andrew who first preached the Gospel in Russia and what is now known as Ukraine, and he remains an important figure, especially among members of the Russian Navy, for whom he acts as a patron saint. The foundation was established with the idea that through education, publications and public activity, it would be able to celebrate the great historical achievements of Russia and its population, and to communicate our nation’s heritage and values to younger generations. We want to promote responsibility to other people and to the environment in which we live, as well as the idea that service to our country should be an important element of every citizen’s mentality.
We are involved in and support religious and social events. Alongside more numinous activities such as public processions, pilgrimages (most famously from Vladivostok to Moscow) and the restoration of churches, monasteries and nunneries across Russia, there have also been unambiguously secular events such as historical conferences, or our attempts to restore a monument to the Russians who died in the Crimea between 1920–21, the result of a forced evacuation during our Civil War.
What connects these two strands is a single vision: we want to preserve our historical heritage and values and strengthen the Russian people’s connection to them. We know that the past century has, for many Russians, been full of pain, struggle and suffering. Wounds opened a century ago have still not been closed. This is why we have been at the forefront of attempts to heal them. With this in mind, we have worked hard to try and effect a reconciliation between the various fragments of the Russian Orthodox Church,[22] which looked to have split irrevocably in those years when our nation was divided by blood and anger. By facilitating the return of some of our faith’s most holy relics to Russia and encouraging dialogue between each confession’s leading figures, we aim to bring people from both sides closer to each other, joined by the understanding that whatever differences we may all have had in the past, we have only one homeland, and that it is our responsibility to restore and cherish it. It is a reconciliation that will, we hope, affect the lives of those living within our borders, but also the ten-million-strong Russian diaspora – those people and their descendants who have been scattered across the globe by the cruel winds that have blown through our recent history.
We have helped with the preservation of the Russian cemetery in Paris and, just as significantly, the archives contained within the city. These, which are probably the largest Russian archives outside of the Princeton Library, were on the brink of being destroyed because there was nowhere to store them. We were able, together with the émigré community there, to fundraise and create a programme that would ensure its preservation. A bright future is not possible without an understanding of the past, for without a strong sense of the connection between past and present and without knowing about all the many thousands of ways in which what has gone before informs what we are living through now, we run the risk of becoming, in a sense, orphans.
It was with this spirit in mind that in 2017 we launched a project called ‘Russia 1917. Images of the Future’. Users of social networks were presented with the programmes offered by the various political groupings that were vying for power in Russia in that transformational year.
What surprised all of us was that the youngest participants voted almost overwhelmingly in favour of the policies and vision offered by the Bolsheviks. But perhaps we should not have been taken so off-guard. Their generation wants a new project: they want to have the chance to play an active role in shaping an alternative future for the world, one that allows individual nations to become more than just pallid, dependent imitations of the United States; they recognise that GDP growth is an arid, impoverished rubric for a nation’s health – it says little about a population’s happiness, or about their hopes and fears for the future; and they want to be part of a country that means something.
This was an ideal that was once represented by the Bolsheviks. The Soviet Union, for all its manifold faults, was a competitor to the West. Its existence alone was a challenge to the world of capitalism and profit; it offered the promise of a different, fairer, way of arranging a nation’s business. So while perhaps there was something unanticipated about their support for the Bolsheviks, their desire for a change seems to be of a piece with much of what I see happening around me as I write this.
There was a time when many of the things we talked about at the Foundation and also at the Dialogue of Civilizations were regarded as illusions, almost insulting to professional economics. But I think things are changing. Terms like ‘neo-liberal orthodoxy’, which were almost outlawed years ago, are now a matter of common currency. I spoke with the head of a New York-based economic think tank recently. I told him that I was struck by the fact that in a recent speech he had stated that we were in the depths of a crisis. In his response to me, he began his analysis of the situation with a discussion of values, something that has not hitherto been acknowledged to have any connection with the economic models that have governed our world for the past twenty years. I asked him: if we are talking about a crisis in the world today, should we really be saying that we are talking about a crisis in humanity? Without pausing for a second, he said yes. It was a conversation that could not have taken place even five years ago – that it was possible shows both how serious the issues we’re facing are, but also that perhaps a new kind of consensus is emerging that might help us solve them.
This is becoming the new mainstream discussion. Whatever you think about the extraordinary shocks in 2016 that have left much of the conventional wisdom about the world and the way it works in tatters, one thing is clear: people are tired of the political paradigm that has reigned for so long. They want to dismantle the existing system and replace it with something that works for them, not rich corporations or entitled elites. I believe that, increasingly, there is a demand not only for different answers, but for different questions entirely. If we are going to have a conversation about inequality, or the way in which tension and violence might mount in a particular country, then we need to address the anthropological basis, to start thinking about values and how they have to be returned to the centre of our social and political lives: simply growing a country’s GDP by a couple of percentage points is no longer an adequate response. People are, finally, looking for something more.
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Notably, the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which was set up in New York in the 1920s by émigrés who refused to recognise the former’s authority once it had, as they saw it, fallen under the control of the Bolsheviks.