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

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.

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.

This may read like a crude characterisation, but I would argue that a new divide has split the world. On one side there are all the nations in the West who adhere to a neo-liberal model of politics and economics, and believe that the rest of the world should be encouraged to adopt the same values. For them, there is only one route to prosperity and civilisation. I see this as a form of chauvinism that is not only insensitive, but which, it is becoming increasingly clear, has failed on its own terms. There is no attempt to understand local conditions or listen to local terms, which means that their interventions invariably come to resemble the damage caused by a bull in a china shop. The other side bears little resemblance to the relatively cohesive socialist bloc of the twentieth century’s second half. In comparison to the united Western system, it is dispersed and disparate. There is little that China, or the Arab nations, or even the central European countries that have joined the EU but have remained on its periphery, have in common, except that they have chosen to push back against attempts to force their culture and economies into a shape that pleases the politicians of the developed world.

You could argue that Russia’s adverse geography has also had its own role in shaping the Russian mentality, far more so than in other countries. The harsh conditions, the sheer remoteness of so many communities, implanted a sense of solidarity in the Russian soul. It is the distinguishing element in our psychological make-up. Without this emphasis on the welfare of the man next door to you, without this acknowledgement of the extent to which we depend on others, and thus have corresponding responsibility for them ourselves, people would simply not have survived.