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

Russia has still not managed to evolve a coherent set of morals and ethics that can fill the void left by the collapse of communism, or insulate it from the dangers of the twenty-first century. This nation of 200 nations, of more than 140 million souls, needs a guiding philosophy to ensure that its centre can hold. We need a story that we can tell about ourselves that will help explain who we are, and why it is worth our while to persist even when storm clouds begin to gather. Otherwise, as we know from grim experience, things fall apart.

I do not believe that a person can be forced to be good (bad, yes, but that is a different matter). Values are not something that can be imposed from above; they cannot be the result of legislation – those of us who have experienced communism, or its legacy, at first hand know in our bones the truth of this – or forcing people to go to church every Sunday. (In the course of the twentieth century, we saw how every project designed to create a new human being failed catastrophically, with unbearable costs. In the West, I can see ever greater attempts to make morality and ethics a question of legal fiat rather than consensus – who knows how the Homo Europeanus experiment will end?) The creation, or recovery, of a value-based society must instead be a consensual enterprise informed by the work of thinkers and theologians, and, perhaps most significantly, a deep if critical engagement with tradition and history: no new story, no new body of ethics, can ever proceed from a policy of oblivion.

In Russian, the word for education, vospitanie , means more than simply the classes a child takes at school; it is also about introducing them to the best of their traditions and culture. Vospitanie involves developing one’s character and values, not just acquiring academic qualifications. This is why the degradation of education, which is in many ways also the degradation of culture, has been one of the great tragedies of the post-Soviet era. If you want to rebuild a society’s moral core, then you need an understanding of what was lost in the first place. Instead, schools and universities that once were the envy of the world have been left to languish and decay as state spending on education was halved between 1990 and 1995, becoming symbols of the country’s lack of faith in its future.

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] 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. 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.