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

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the population was introduced to a similar kind of mental stress. People were exposed to challenges they had never been confronted with before, but nobody explained to them why they were being forced to suffer like this. We were all enthused by the freedoms offered by the democratic system that had been brought in with such fanfare, and yet we no longer knew what it meant to be Russian. The collapse of the Communist system was not just a political or administrative event; it was a moral catastrophe that robbed an entire society of the norms and ethics that had guided its citizens’ lives for over seven decades, and replaced them with a single imperative: if an act is not expressly forbidden by law, then anything goes.

A healthy, confident culture can absorb ideas from other countries, taking what works in its particular context, and rejecting what does not fit. But in Russia during the ’90s, with the state having abdicated its role as provider of ideology and cohesion, we imported whole systems of thought and belief from the West without any sense of how they might fit with our own. They did not complement what we had already; instead, they began to destroy it. Society became atomised and many people began to privilege self-interest and profit above the communal values with which we had all been raised. (I do not trust anyone who claims they can happily exist alone, without the comforting, sustaining exchanges that come from living alongside others. It is not natural for a human being.) We soon discovered, to our cost, that though it is easy to create consumers – you could build branches of McDonald’s, sell Levi’s jeans, import Mercedes cars, and the whole process needed only a few nudges from the state before it was up and running – it is far more difficult to create a healthy, functioning democratic culture overnight. We had none of the institutions of civil society, and the old traditions that for centuries had been the connective tissue that bound the country together had been allowed to wither away. When the country was hit by a succession of crises that exposed its new weakness, society crumbled.

We needed to be given a narrative that explained who we were and where we were going, and why that was a good thing, but with communism defeated, and the old methods of transmitting cultural information long-destroyed, there was now a huge vacuum where ideas and identity should have been. There was not a single political institution that was dedicated to the health of the society. It was not enough to be able go out and buy a new car or watch – especially since only a limited proportion of the population could afford these panaceas. These items were, we would learn, little more than a sticking plaster.

Clerical organisations were the only bodies left with authority, the only bodies trying to heal the grievous wounds that had been inflicted on the Russian population. And perhaps it was not surprising that people responded as warmly to them as they did. We were, after all, a society suffused with belief (ever since the 1920s, there had been an understanding that many traditionally Christian values had been present in Communist ideology, so even though the faith itself was afforded no space, many of its tenets were already sewn into our souls), it was just that now there was nowhere we could turn to channel this emotion. A ‘superstition’ that the Bolsheviks had assumed would eventually crumble into dust had instead proved surprisingly durable. And what was true of the Orthodox Church in Russia was true also of Islam in the Caucuses, and of Judaism, which in the years since 1991 has enjoyed an astonishing, almost unparalleled renewal. [21] Much Western coverage of Russia has tended to focus on the somewhat misleading contention that Orthodox Christianity has become a kind of adjunct of the state, but this is an unfortunately one-eyed view of the religious landscape in Russia. While 80 per cent of the population would self-identify as Christian, church attendance rarely struggles above 4 per cent. Compare this to the Eid celebrations, in which 250,000 Muslims spill into the streets of Moscow. Russia contains Europe’s biggest mosque and 10 per cent of its population is Muslim. All this should be kept in mind by anyone tempted to make generalisations about the country.

For those people who did not know where their lives were heading, or to whom they could turn, the church or mosque or synagogue became a place they could visit and find somebody who at least tried to listen to their concerns and reassure them. If they were hungry, they might even find a meal. These places of worship became a source of hope to men and women who had lost everything, and while there were few attempts at proselytisation, I think many rediscovered the religion that had lain dormant within them for most of their lives.

It was out of respect for the great service they provided that I began to communicate with members of the priesthood and also to start contributing money from my own pocket. In the years since my clandestine baptism, my relationship with Christianity had evolved, albeit slowly. Once I became an officer and had embarked on my adult, professional life, I came to believe that although our understanding of the physical world was expanding more quickly than at any previous time in human history, we still knew little or nothing about metaphysical life. Perhaps, I concluded, there was something else we could not understand, that remained forever out of our grasp.

I only really came to the church relatively late in life, in 2003, at the age of fifty-four. It was in that year that, for the first time, along with a group of others, we brought the Holy Fire from Jerusalem to Moscow, in time for the Easter service at the Christ the Saviour cathedral – the resumption of a ritual abandoned under communism, and one we have reprised every year since. I believed that anything that could bring people together, which could provide support and inspiration to the people left disillusioned by the collapse of the USSR, could only be positive.

To begin with, I considered the initiative more from that perspective and did not consider myself religious at all; I did not even cross myself as I entered the church, since I believed it would be an act of hypocrisy. It took three years for me to be able to come to some kind of accommodation within my soul, so I could reconcile myself to the truth of what I was actually engaged in.

And even today, I would hesitate before proclaiming that I should be called devout. (I know I am not a perfect man, far from it, but I know too that I have never betrayed anybody, nor have I ever used my position to harm somebody as a means of advancing my own selfish interests.) To deserve that description, there are many rules that must be followed, many pieties observed – and the life I have led, and the life I lead now, discount me from this. I have little time and I am constantly travelling, but my belief runs deep.

Homo sapiens emerged on the savannahs of Africa around a hundred thousand years ago. We evolved family and community structures as ways of ensuring survival in an often hostile, unforgiving environment. Domestic life, caring for the future of your children, working for the common wealth of the people you live alongside, fair treatment of other members of society – all these are rooted in the prehistory of mankind, hardwired into our consciousness. As societies developed, these qualities were joined by other things worth celebrating: people learned about rights and responsibilities and, through freedom of speech and democracy, discovered new ways of being free.

It is only in the past thirty years, as post-modernity’s moral relativity has been absorbed into the bloodstreams of societies across the world, that these values, which we had become accustomed to regarding as inherent in mankind, have become increasingly threatened. Other assaults have come from the mass media – which, rather than reflecting society, increasingly seems determined to be the force that shapes it – and, perhaps most insidiously, the technological innovations that are altering the world around us at an almost incomputable rate. How can we hold on to our humanity when the rate of development in, inter alia, information technology, communication technology, biotechnology and artificial intelligence is outstripping our ability to even comprehend it, let alone control it?