Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (2 of 2)
It's Complicated Just Not in the Way We Think
My Attachment to Russian Orthodoxy
The Desert Fathers, the Holy Rule of St Benedict, St Augustine, and St Gregory Palamas have probably had the greatest influence on my spiritual life as well as my ministry as a priest and my thinking as a scholar. Turning to why I became Orthodox, I think that, like many Americans have joined the Church, my first substantial exposure to contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy was through books.
It was Russian authors and scholars who drew me to the Church. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in my undergraduate literature classes; Lossky, Schmemann, Meyendorff, and Florovsky as a graduate student in theology. While I would also read Greek theologians (especially, Zizoulas and Yannaras), my view of the Orthodox Church was shaped primarily by Russians.
Added to this is that in the early 80’s when I was first exploring Orthodoxy the Church of Russia was suffering under the Soviet yoke. Mercifully by the end of the decade, the Soviet Union would collapse and though the Church was free from persecution by the State, it had now faced the enormous task of evangelizing a nation suffering (there’s that word again) the effects of 69 years of Communist, atheistic propaganda. Complicating this further the Church also had to defend itself against what it saw as the aggressive—and opportunistic—proselytizing by Western missionaries of baptized Orthodox Christians.
Given all this, and especially given our love for an underdog, is it any wonder that many Americans gravitated not to simply Eastern Orthodoxy but Russian Orthodox in particular?
A Unwise Love
What I and others overlooked in the first flush of new love, is that the Church of Russia was a source of soft power not only under the czar but also Communism. This state of affairs—as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial points out—is still the case. Under Putin, the Church often serves the foreign and domestic policy agenda of a corrupt regime.
But, as I said, I was in love and so discounted the flaws of my beloved. There was I’ve come to realize a romantic element to my view of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Had I been a bit more diligent in my reading, I would have discovered that the authors I read did not have an easy relationship with the Church (Tolstoy was excommunicated) or the State (Dostoevsky was exiled to Siberia for the political subversive act of reading thinkers critical of the czar).
As for the theologians, these were thinkers of the “Paris School,” that is Russian Orthodox authors whose re-discovery of the ascetical and mystical teaching of St Gregory Palamas revitalized Orthodox theology even while fostering an idealized view of the Church and a frequently anti-Western Christian mentality foreign to the saint himself. Ironically, for all that these authors were (and are) loved in the West, they themselves were not always appreciative of the many blessings of the West.
Nor were they often seen as faithful sons of Russia. Often they were not simply criticized in Russia but their works were actively suppressed.
A Chaste Love
What’s (in my view) essential for Americans interested in Russia’s invasion is the tendency of many to us have a tendency to overlook the complexity, ambiguity, and injustices that are as much a part of the Church of Russia as beautiful liturgies, glorious art, sublime theology, evangelical fervor, and patient and faithful endurance in the face of persecution. To use a Jungian phrase, there is a shadow side to Russian Orthodoxy that the pragmatic and Protestant American mindset too easily discounts.
Authors like David Satter (author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” and an academic adviser to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation) have helped me find a chaste love for Russian. In his recent Wall Street Journal essay
Today’s Russian spokesmen insist that Ukraine is an “artificial nation.” Yet the only artificial nation was the Soviet Union, which re-created the Russian Empire on the basis of socialism. Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Yakuts and Uzbeks were citizens of one country, but the only thing they shared was the false reality of communist ideology. When that ideology collapsed in 1991, the result was the emergence of 15 historical nations, including Russia and Ukraine.
Weeds & Wheat
While there is much to love in the tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church, it is a tradition that developed alongside the Russian imperial aspirations in much the same way Western Christian traditions did in North and South America, Africa, and the Asian subcontinent. This needn’t lead us to deny the truth and beauty that is there to be found in Russian Orthodoxy or Russian culture more broadly anymore than it means we should dismiss Catholicism Protestantism or Western culture. After all, as Jesus reminds us, wheat and weeds grow up together and will only be definitively separated at the Last Judgment (see Matthew 13:24-30).
While a final separation awaits the life to come, this doesn’t mean that we should avoid looking at the real harm done to Ukraine (and other non-Russian nations and ethnic groups) in the pursuit of first czarist, then Communist, and now Putin’s imperial ambitions.
An Unjust War
Just as my neighbor’s sins don’t absolve me of my own, NATO’s missteps and moral failures relative to Russia don’t justify the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. The tendency of many Americans to think otherwise leads once again to the same “soft focus” and romanticizing view of the imperial ambitions and aggression of Russia under Putin.
Some foreign-policy “realists” in the U.S. blame the present war on the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but Russia’s desire to dominate Ukraine isn’t new. On Aug. 27, 1991, while the Soviet Union still existed, Pavel Voshchanov, Yeltsin’s press secretary, warned that Russia would re-examine its borders with any republic that didn’t want to be part of a new union. There were reports in the Moscow press based on leaks that in the event of a conflict, the Russian leadership was considering tactical nuclear strikes against Ukraine. In 1993, well before the first expansion of NATO into the former Eastern Bloc in 1997, Russia was laying the groundwork for future aggression, defining as a threat to Russia “acts against the Russian population” in any neighboring country.
As with other former Soviet Republics, Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is not because that country voted to pursue a path independent of Russia. It is rather as Satter points out Russian consistent policy for over 30 years.
This turn to the West—or at least away from Russia—has been a consistent part of public opinion in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics:
On Dec. 1, 1991, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, 90% of Ukrainian voters voted for independence. In the heavily ethnic Russian Donetsk oblast, almost 77% supported independence. In pro-Russian Crimea, the vote for independence was 54%. A week later, Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich—respectively the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus—met at a lodge in Belarus’s Belovezh Forest and signed a statement certifying that the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Gorbachev resigned on Dec. 25, and the upper chamber of the Soviet Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, ratified the union’s dissolution the following day.
The push for Ukrainian independence is not a new thing but represents the re-birth of “national aspirations thwarted after the Bolshevik revolution.” And while, again as Putin’s American apologists and sympathizers point out, it is true that Ukrainian civil society and political culture are flawed, this reflects not only the sins of Ukrainians but also (and more fundamentally) “the moral damage inflicted by the Soviet regime” on Ukraine.
The Moral Damage of the Soviet Era
As is often the case, Putin’s criticism of corruption in Ukraine is equally applicable to Russia a country that (like Ukraine) still suffers the moral damage inflicted by Communism and a post-Soviet society “where property was seized by insiders, gangsters and ex-communist officials and the leaders used war to rally the population around a corrupt regime.”
Whatever Ukraine’s sins, and unlike Russia, Kyiv has not exported its failings to other nations or engaged in military aggression against neighboring countries. Say what you will about Zelensky, unlike Putin he has not used foreign war to distract the population from his regime’s corruption or to bolster his hold on power. And so in the final analysis, “Russia’s inability to rid itself of the Soviet legacy is the underlying cause of the war” in Ukraine.
When the imaginary world of Soviet ideology collapsed, all that was left in Russia was rule by criminals and the drive to dominate Russia’s neighbors to guarantee their hold on power. It is against this background that we need to weigh support for Ukraine.
Given all this what are we to think about the idea that “Ukraine cedes territory” to end the war? While this has a certain appeal to a war-weary West, it rewards Russia for an unjust war that they have been prosecuting for 30+ years against the former Soviet Republics. Contrary to what Russia says, it is not Ukraine’s turn to the West that caused the war; it is rather Russia’s aggression against Ukraine (and other former Soviet republics) that motivated their westward turn. Land for peace doesn’t change this. Maybe more importantly for peace in Ukraine and Europe more broadly, but rather assures that “the Soviet imperialist mentality will survive intact.”
Crimes Past and Present, Theirs and Ours
To all these contemporary crimes, we need to add the deplorable cultural oppression and frankly genocidal policies inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviet Union that Satter summarizes in his essay.
In the 1920s, the communists needed Ukrainian-speaking cadres to strengthen their position in Ukraine, which had been the scene of peasant uprisings in 1919. Ukrainian language instruction, Ukrainian newspapers and lectures to miners in Ukrainian all increased.
Nothing, however, could protect Ukraine from the horror that was visited on the Soviet Union as a whole and reached its apex with the creation of the Gulag, dekulakization (the destruction of the most industrious peasants) and the famine of 1932-33. The last was caused when the Soviet government confiscated grain to feed the cities and for export, imprisoned peasants in their villages and left millions to die from starvation. Ukraine, the agricultural breadbasket of the nation and a potential center of national resistance, suffered disproportionately. Of the seven million victims of the famine, more than half were in Ukraine.
As with injustices against Native Peoples and Blacks in America, the past has a way of not staying in the past. The moral damage reverberates in a people just as it does in a person.1
Yes, current harms (in the American context) may fall short of past wrongs. But—as in Ukraine—current wrongs are experienced against the background of historical oppression that themselves makes it easier to cause harm today while also encouraging a certain tendency to discount the real hurt because of the real gains.
While this last point may seem somewhat abstract, it is nevertheless important for Americans to keep it in mind. Like Russia—indeed like all imperial l powers—it is easy to minimize the remaining damage of past wrongs while overemphasizing the real progress that has been made. This why it is especially easy for politically active Americans to sympathize unwisely with Russia as it—like the US—strives to hold on to a loss of power and influence in the world.2
Kenosis, Limited Government, and A Free & Just Civil Society
At its core, I think the temptation Americans—and especially politically conservative American converts to Orthodoxy—is rooted in a certain identification with a former imperial power struggling to find its place in a world in which it is no longer quite as important as it once was. As the evangelical writer David French points out, even if it feels otherwise the loss of influence and even power is not the same as persecution.
One of the most admirable elements of Russian Orthodox spirituality is the tradition’s emphasis on the importance of Christians imitating the or the self-emptying (kenosis; see Philippians 2) of the Son at His Incarnation. This is a hard path for the individual and almost unimaginable for the nation. In the latter case, this is because the nation is not an individual but the aggregate of individuals with different—and adverse—motivations both vicious and virtuous.
Self-emptying for the nation is, however, not merely analogical.
In an American context, it takes the former of not just limited government but an appreciation of how a modest government can play in fostering a variety of voluntary societies. Here I think OST can play a role in helping us understand not simply the causes and the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but also how both countries can find a way forward when hostilities end. American political philosophy gives us an intuition of what it means for Russia and Ukraine to embrace a kenotic future as both nations work to create virtuous and free societies. Again, Satter
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853-56) led to the emancipation of the serfs, and defeat in the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) led to Russia’s first constitution. We need to support a decisive Ukrainian victory to punish aggression—and to free Russia from the burden of its past.
The way forward requires not simply the cessation of armed conflict at some point in the future, but the embrace of a model of a civil society built on voluntary associations whose independence the State not only recognizes but supports by its own willingness to stand aside. Creating such a society can play a role in helping Russia overcome the sting of losing a war of its own choice even as it can help Ukraine avoid the understandable but ultimately unhealthy response to Russia.
American Civil Society’s Failures & the Appeal of Russian Orthodoxy
Turning to America and my own attraction to an idealized view of the Russian Orthodox Church, I think it was my attempt to overcome the absence of a living sense of civil society. While others must answer for themselves, in an American context that has led to the unfortunate situation of Americans—and tragically, Orthodox Christians in America—excusing (or worse, supporting) Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
What then should we do? Let me offer an answer from my own pastoral practice.
As I say before I begin the Eucharist canon: “For those who love us and for those who hate us, may the Lord our God accept the sacrifice we are about to offer.”
In the theological anthropology of the Orthodox Church, human beings are both sins’ victims and perpetrators. The way forward in Russia, Ukraine, as well as here in the West requires that we accept this about ourselves as well as those we love and, what is infinitely harder, those who hate us.
Reconciliation between nations as well as between neighbors requires that we see each other not simply as those who do wrong to us but as those who have been wronged.
As an aside, David French, “Activism and Apathy Are Poisoning American Politics,” points out that
…there’s a remarkable amount of consensus on … the topic is the sins of America’s past or the virtues of our founding documents. As More in Common wrote, “Both Democrats and Republicans alike grossly overestimate whether members of the opposing party hold extreme views.”
These findings are consistent with earlier findings that extreme perception gaps exist on issues involving race, sex, religion, and guns. The message is consistent and clear, our opponents are much less extreme than we think they are.
What does seem to be the problem is that an unwillingness to see both American sins as well as virtues is an indication that the person is not part of the mainstream of American civil society or political culture but an activist.
And yes, it is also the case that politically active Americans on the Left often overlook Ukraine’s shortcomings through a similar unwise empathy. Glenn Greenwald emphasized what he calls “Media Rewrites Ukraine’s Dark History.” Morally, however, whatever its sins, Ukraine remains the victim of an unjust war and has a claim on Western sympathy and assistance.
This comment is not to be understood in any way as a justification or an excuse for Russia's war on Ukraine. Given the tumultuous history shared between the peoples of both "regions," (for want of a better description), and the Russian state's long-existing imperialistic ambitions (again, rooted in that long history, whether czarist or communist) we might safely assume that many in control of the newly emerged Russian state were looking for an opportunity to annex Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That being said, the US's spawning of a pseudo-church within Ukraine unwisely helped to energize the present aggression. On all sides. The US's meddling in the internal affairs of Holy Orthodoxy for politically strategic purposes is appalling. Let's be frank about that.