In his editorial, In the Power of Murky Intuition, Autocratic Russia is Losing the Instinct of Self-Preservation (https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/125354824/posts/4359682819 for my translation), Russian intellectual Aleksandr Tsipko addresses Russia’s propensity, because of its authoritarian power structure, to “eternally intrud[e] into the world of the unpredictable.” This tendency, he argues, is based on an autocratic leader’s irrational intuition, which is exactly what he considers Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to be the result of. In turn, Tsipko attributes the reason for Russia’s autocratic system to the Russian people’s preference to be told how to think and live their lives rather than to think for themselves. This lassitude on the part of a largely illiterate peasant population, according to 19th/20th-century philosopher Nikolay Trubetskoy, brought about this authoritarian system of power “from below,” that is, this system of governance was not so much imposed by a ruling class as requested and permitted by the people themselves.

With the foregoing as a springboard, Tsipko advances the viewpoint that this authoritarian system of governance was also the product of Russia’s cultural lag, which, he bemoans, was due to Russia’s having experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment. It was under the influence of these two periods in European history that the philosophy of “Christian humanism” was adopted by the West – so seems to be Tsipko’s reasoning – and it is to this “world” that he wants Russia to return. This turn of phrase “returning [Russia] to the world of Christian humanism” is somewhat curious, since it could be difficult to argue that Russia was ever governed by that philosophy. It would perhaps be more reasonable to assume that Tsipko meant “to bring [Russia} into the world of Christian humanism.”

Russia, which for 70 years was interchangeable in identity with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics/USSR, for at least the past 500 years, except for the short reprieve from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the rise of Putin as its new dictator, has been under such rule. Historically, Russia has been a country contrasted by privilege and deprivation, of an aristocratically entitled landed class vice a peasantry living in abject poverty. These two social classes book-ended a developing industrial class, which engendered the proletariat or working class. It was the proletariat and a co-opted peasantry that the Bolsheviks politicized in order to come to power, at the expense of the rich landowners, the non-agricultural aristocracy, and, eventually, the intellectuals, who had initially cooperated with the Bolsheviks, only to be overcome by the thugs the Party produced and into which it devolved – a Party of thugs. It sued for peace during WWI, then engaged in a civil war against its minority brethren, the Mensheviks, in the aftermath of which the country descended into chaos as the Bolsheviks turned the proletariat and peasantry against the hands that fed them and on their backs climbed to absolute power.

This is the history with which Putin, in the role of chief thug and henchman, identifies as he attempts to reinstate the Soviet Union. While Tsipko argues that Putin’s Russian Orthodox confession should lead him “to realize the self-worth of each human life,” he maintains that “that segment of the population that does not want to take responsibility for its fate, goes with the flow, agrees with those in power, and to whose liking is the irrationality of the decisions of the autocratic power, increasingly became Putin’s social base.” This is to intimate that this segment of the population is also bearing the brunt of human sacrifice in Putin’s war on Ukraine, i.e., the Russian state as Putin envisions it takes precedence over “the self-worth of each human life.”

It is in this overarching context that Tsipko laments the Renaissance and Enlightenment not making landfall in Russia; therefore, the philosophy of Christian Humanism was, and remains, unknown to Russians. In his article, he defined humanism as “the value of human life and respect for the opinion of the other person as an equal.” Ipso facto, for humanism to be Christian, loosely would mean to display an ethic based on the teachings of Christ in relation to valuing and respecting the other person. For Tsipko not to recognize this characteristic in Russians speaks volumes regarding the negative influence of the Russian Orthodox Church on the people it supposedly shepherds. Ostensibly established to meet their spiritual needs, it offers nothing more than ritualistic assurances of salvation. [Comment: The English gloss ‘church’ for the Russian word tserkov’/церковь is linguistically correct since the word ‘church’ and the Russian tserkov’ both derive from the same Biblical Hebrew word. However, this is not a positive statement; rather, it is rife with negative implications, as is the case with its Western alter ego, The Roman Catholic Church. Please see: https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/125354824/posts/4069473697 Theoretical Reconstruction of the Derivation of the Conceptual Word ‘Church’]

I would suggest that having never come under the influence of the Reformation has been the real source of all the adverse symptoms seen by Tsipko in current Russian society. What has been needed is not a national institution based on ritualistic salvation, which through the centuries has allowed itself to be co-opted by the state to the deathly detriment of those attending its worship services. On the contrary, men of the caliber of Wycliff, Luther, Tyndale, Calvin, and others, who believed in the Word of God alone as represented in the Bible to be absolute truth and therefore the only guide for faith and practice, were not raised up in Russia to wage spiritual warfare against the state church and its heresies.

It is obvious from his article that Tsipko believes in God – “Sometimes it seems to me that God has abandoned us” and “if God leaves me on this earth and gives me the possibility to reason…,” and as such appeals to Dostoyevsky, whom he considers “one of the greatest thinkers in the history of humanity.” Although he doesn’t elaborate on this sentiment, Tsipko most certainly has in mind the story of redemption in Dostoyevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment; and, in Brothers Karamazov, in Dostoyevsky’s plot line, contained in the verse which stands at the beginning of the novel: Истинно, истинно говорю вам: если пшеничное зерно, падши в землю, не умрёт, то останется одно; а если умрёт, то принесёт много плода. (Евангелие от Иоанна. Глава XII, 24.)/Verily, verily I say to you: Unless a grain of wheat, having fallen to the ground, does not die, it remains alone; but if it dies, it will bring forth much fruit. (Gospel of John. Chapter 12:24) Tsipko may also be thinking of the chapter entitled the Grand Inquisitor, in which Christ is held in contempt by the grand inquisitor, i.e., the pope. The concept of self-sacrifice may be foremost in Tsipko’s understanding of at least these, the two best-known of the great 19th-century novelist’s works. However, there is a world of difference in seeing this as a model for living based on human effort as opposed to grasping the full significance of believing in Christ as that perfect sacrifice, Whose blood covers the sins of those who believe, in order to live a life pleasing to God. The former is humanism with a Christian spin; the latter is the consequence of the Faith wrought by the Reformation.

And only the latter, lived out in humility as a result of having become one with Christ through faith can offer the salvation that Tsipko longs to see Russia experience.