Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

This is the message I have been promulgating for fifteen years. Not just at the Rhodes Forum, but across the world, at conferences, in articles. But, of course, our every step is attended by accusations that we are a front for a Putin-led propaganda campaign, while in Russia, by contrast, the very fact that we are not a state organisation and are not promoting the state’s policies means that it is very difficult to secure coverage of our activities. There is not much one can do when some people continue to believe that the possession of a Russian passport means that one is inevitably an agent of the Kremlin. All I would ask is that they examine the work we have conducted already, or the statements we have issued. They will see nothing there that is designed to promote one set of values to the exclusion of all others – and why would there be, given that to do so would be a betrayal of everything the DOC was set up to achieve? When you see people attacking an organisation that has been created to promote openness and peace, then it shows the scale of the task before us. It would be funny if it were not also so dangerous.

The Holy Fire. No other miracle is known to occur with such regularity, taking place at the same time, in the same place, for eleven centuries. Each year, on the day preceding Orthodox Easter, in the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, a blue light emanates from within Jesus Christ’s tomb, eventually forming a column of flame. Moments later candles and lamps around the whole church are lit from this fire.

Thousands of pilgrims gather to witness and participate in this prodigious occurrence, and a handful will also convey the Holy Fire back to churches in their own countries. It is an event that is tightly embroidered into the fabric of the Orthodox Church, an institution that is in turn one of the threads from which Russian history and culture is woven. For over a millennium, the church was one of the primary methods for transmitting information about my nation’s traditions and values from one generation to another. But during the Soviet era, it seemed that this thread might be broken for ever.

The Bolsheviks were not interested in accumulating money or smart houses for themselves; they wanted to create a new, better world for the people of their country, and were willing to sacrifice everything to fight for the best future for the working class.

And yet the only instrument they had at hand was the destruction of much of our nation’s history. In order to forcefully introduce a reluctant population to their cherished ideals of brotherhood and freedom, they tried to cut us adrift from a set of beliefs and values that had once run right through the heart of Russian life. They would create citizens who were not just convinced of the virtues of socialism, but who could not even consider the possibility of living under another kind of system.

Their year-zero approach meant that they had an antagonistic relationship with almost anything that occurred before 1917. In the new society they were building, the thousand-odd years of Russian culture and history that preceded the revolution had little use outside of an oversimplified kind of pedagogy: the tsars (with the honourable exceptions of Ekaterina and Peter the Great) were presented as murderers and fools who had existed only to advertise the benefits of socialism.

Lenin and his followers were avid for the complete transformation of society, and the comprehensiveness of their ambitions for intruding into the lives of its citizens was unprecedented. They were not content with simply seizing the means of production, or control of the government – the Communists wanted to mould a new kind of human, Homo Sovieticus .

This process began in Russia and over the next seventy years would be replicated across the whole of Eastern Europe, as well as much of Asia, Africa and Latin America. All political opposition was crushed and the public sphere was colonised by a totalitarian incarnation of socialism that crept into every corner of the people’s lives. The Bolsheviks went to war against the pillars of civil society: the church, private enterprise and a free-thinking intelligentsia. Peasant traditions – the stories and memories passed on from one generation to another, which had always been a significant element in the transmission of cultural information in Russia – were another object of great suspicion. The press became a vehicle for propaganda, holidays simply an opportunity to conduct vast parades celebrating the regime’s benevolence. The old ways of education were infiltrated, banned or simply left to rot, and in their place the state stepped in to ensure that it alone was responsible for forming the minds of future citizens. Textbooks were rewritten; teachers, priests and professors who were considered to be in possession of reactionary tendencies were replaced with pliable, ideologically correct substitutes; and all organisations that were not directly controlled by the Communist Party were proscribed.

Although the revolution created a range of opportunities for the poor and dispossessed that would have been unimaginable before 1917, it also introduced restrictions on the lives of many who had flourished under the tsars. With the gift for coining macabre neologisms that distinguished them, the Bolsheviks dismissed these so-called class enemies as ‘former people’. A ‘clean’ autobiography became ever more important. For instance, life was made extremely difficult for Christians. Thousands of churches were destroyed, including the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (which was replaced with a swimming pool), and, very pointedly, no places of worship were built in the many new towns and cities that were being created across the country. Society as a whole was permeated with a very negative attitude towards religion: you would see it on television, hear it on the radio, read it in books – an atmosphere that seeped through your skin.

And while most Christians were not subject to outright persecution, if you professed your faith too publicly you would find your life pinched by a thousand tiny restrictions. The children of a priest could not join the Komsomol or the Communist Party, for instance, and church services were largely suppressed. A friend of mine, who is now a bishop, was not allowed during his military service to carry weapons because he was a believer. Instead, he was sent to a special construction regiment whose ranks were filled with the dregs of society. He was regularly beaten by the drunken men who were supposed to be his comrades, and when he was not the subject of their abuse he suffered under his unit’s savage discipline. But he endured it.

It was only later that Soviet leaders came to understand that it is not possible to fight history. During the Great Patriotic War, many previously incarcerated clerics were released so that they could perform church services for people whose morale had been shot to pieces by the shocking and humiliating sequence of defeats suffered by the Red Army after the Nazi invasion. This was complemented by the introduction of military awards that explicitly referenced heroic figures from the country’s past, such as Alexander Nevsky, as well as the reappropriation of the term ‘Motherland’. Yet even with these manipulative compromises, most Russians were alienated from their past. For example, party leaders under Nikita Khrushchev sold off sacred land that had once belonged to the Russian Empire. They had no connection to it and thus felt little compunction at doing so. A huge site in the middle of Jerusalem, formerly the site of the Russian Religious Mission, was given up to the Israelis in return for a small amount of cash. Unable to pay in cash, the Israelis offered oranges instead. The freedoms that accompanied Khrushchev’s reign were not extended to the church, which instead endured a renewed bout of repression at his hands.