Russian Diary: A Spiritual Chernobyl

Read Dostoevsky before going to the Soviet Union. Dostoevsky said that there are two ages of man: from the ascent of man to the death of God, and from the death of God to the annihilation of man. A grasp of this chronology is the only fitting preparation for what one sees and experiences in the USSR. Having been there three times in the past year, I have no doubt as to which of these two ages that sad part of our world inhabits.

The USSR has experienced the spiritual equivalent of a neutron bomb. The buildings and the people have been left standing, but human souls have been largely destroyed. I had anticipated what I saw in shoddy products, poor construction, and empty shelves, but almost nothing save Dostoevsky could have led me to foresee the dimensions of the spiritual devastation. The Soviet Union is a spiritual Chernobyl. Seven decades of the big lie have left a moral landscape more barren than the moon.

The dimensions of this lie about man are so enormous that there is not an aspect of daily life left undistorted by it. The normal reference points to life are gone.

Sergei Witte, Nicholas II’s Minister of Finance, foretold as much in his memorandum to the Czar of October 9, 1905:

The idea of human freedom will triumph, if not by way of reform then by way of revolution. But in the latter event it will come to life on the ashes of 1000 years of destroyed history. The Russian bunt [rebellion], mindless and pitiless, will sweep everything, turn everything to dust. What kind of Russia will emerge from this unexampled trial surpasses human imagination: the horrors of the Russian bunt may exceed everything known to history . . . Attempts to put into practice the ideal of theoretical socialism — they will fail but they will be made no doubt — will destroy the family, the expression of religious faith, property, all the foundations of law.

Witte’s prophecies have been fulfilled in the Soviet Union. The family, religious faith, property, law — all lie shattered. Even the communists are appalled. Gorbachev has increased religious toleration, not because he is a baptized believer, but because even religion is better than the despair and moral nihilism that his ideology has spawned. In the face of this abnormality, the word normal has become the adjective of highest praise in the Russian vocabulary. Soviet film director Pavel Lungin said in an interview, “everyone is deformed, yet everyone wants to live a normal life. But they can’t.”

Normal life is based upon some recognition of the spiritual truth about man. The last 70 years of dogmatic atheism have blotted this truth out to an extent un-imaginable in the West and even in Eastern Europe. Poland, for instance, in the short space of a year, has transformed itself into a normal country. It was able to do so because the Church had preserved the essential spiritual truth of man’s nature. All the normal reference points to life are already present in Poland.

But in the Soviet Union, these recuperative truths are not gestating below the surface, as they were in Poland, because the Russian Orthodox Church was close to physically destroyed (some 70,000 out of 76,000 churches “missing” since 1917 and a decline to fewer than 10,000 clergy from over 112,000) and then infiltrated and compromised. One must grasp the thoroughness with which the lie has been enforced and accepted in order to comprehend the surreal strangeness of the spiritual vacuum it has produced. If the Soviet Union is imploding, it is not just because of its failed economy or imperial exhaustion, but also because of this spiritual vacuum.

The signs of abnormality are everywhere. The disorientation they produce is obvious even to an occasional visitor such as myself. As one would logically expect, the severance of the vertical relationship between God and man has spread devastation to the relations between the rulers and the ruled, and ruptured the relations among the ruled, including those between men and women. Examples abound. I recall a typical conversation with a privileged Russian student after a lecture at Moscow State University. He said to me, “I don’t believe in this school; I don’t believe in this government; I don’t believe in anything.” Another Russian told me that this type of nihilism is typical only of the disillusioned children of the nomenklatura. To prove his point, he introduced me to a 23-year-old law student from a “normal and good” family. This young man, he said, was the hope of Russia. But the “hope of Russia,” when asked what he believed in, looked puzzled, and then responded, “first, my family, then my friends,” That was it.

One afternoon I observed a woman and a young child pushing a disabled car. The curbside crowd did not move. Nor did the people look away in embarrassment. Their indifference could not have been more complete. While such a scene could doubtless occur in the large cities of the West, here it seemed to express not only the harshness of daily life and brutish manners, but the absence of any social glue or common good. A particularly grotesque spiritual barometer of this absence is the fact that the average Soviet woman undergoes 5 to 7 abortions. One can imagine what this means for the nightmarish relations between Russian men and women. Divorce is endemic.

Remarking upon the incomprehension of the West toward the deformation of the human spirit in the East, an Estonian woman told me: “You who were born free will never understand us who were born slaves.” Having gained the confidence of a new Russian friend over several trips, I asked, “Is there anything Gorbachev can do to ameliorate the situation?” The answer: “No.”

“Why not,” I asked.

“Because,” came the response, “the whole thing is wrong.”

Communist Party officials obviously do not agree. A two-hour debate on God and private property at Pravda with the economic editor, Egor Gaidar, proved instructive. He suggested to me that our two societies really shared a great deal in common. After all, it was the object of communism to alleviate poverty and want, just as you are trying to do in the West, he suggested. I replied, “We have absolutely nothing in common. Marxism-Leninism is not an economic, social, or political enterprise. It is a metaphysical enterprise whose purpose is the transformation of man into God and the world into a terrestrial paradise. You have succumbed to the oldest temptation of man, that whispered by the serpent to Eve: ye shall be as gods. In order for man to be a god, he must have no God before him. Therefore, your metaphysical enterprise requires atheism as its foundation.” I then tried to demonstrate that the horrors of the Gulag were a logical outcome of this premise and that they would recur as long as the premise was in place. As Nicolas Berdyaev said, “Where there is no God, there is no man either.” Atheism logically leads to dehumanization.

Mr. Gaidar, who had explained that he was not a believer, disagreed. He said, “Our argument clarifies itself to one point. Can we have morality without religion, without God? I do not need the idea of God to believe in the idea of good.” I replied, “Well, good luck to you.”

Solzhenitsyn wrote, “if you choose a lie as your principle, then you must use violence as your method.” After visiting several very high Party and government officials, I concluded that the Party wishes to dispose of violence as a method but cling to the lie as its principle. Of course, without this lie, communists would have nothing to justify the inhuman suffering and destruction of the past seven decades. Psychologically, the lie is almost more necessary for them in order to live with the past, than it is a source of hope for the future.

This internal contradiction — clinging to the lie while attempting to excise the violence that naturally flows from it — helps to explain the current confusion in Soviet society, why real reform is despaired of. Despite the excitement of glasnost and perestroika, one gets the sense from the surreal atmosphere, so unlike that of Poland, that the underlying reality has not changed. The editor-in-chief of the main Soviet television newscast, Eduard Sagalayev, voiced these fears in a recent Zhurnalist magazine interview:

I have a constant feeling that glasnost is freedom of speech but only in the dose allowed . . . by our leadership . . . And all we write and say, we say not because we are free, but only because they allow us to do so. All the laws which have been, or will be, passed in the near future regarding [freedom of] the press, freedom of conscience, freedom to leave and return, yes all this, I perceive to be a mere house of cards of democracy, a house of cards of the rule of law, which can be brought down with one blow. And then the bottom line will be revealed, which is: we were and remain a people deceived, we’ve lived and still live in a mythological environment behind the looking glass. The rare excursions into provincial life which I and my colleagues undertake, indicate nothing has changed, and any changes that have occurred are for the worse.

This is not an uncommon assessment of Gorbachev’s five years of “reform.” As Gennady Cherepanov, a dissident lawyer, concludes, “The time of hope is over. To sweeten communism is impossible. It has to be destroyed.” But what will replace it?

Can the free market cure the ills of the USSR? Free market reforms are almost all one hears of, both from our economists and theirs. It would almost seem that, if we would only send over a few more free market economists, the Soviet Union could be transformed into a Milton Friedman theme park. Of course, purely economic reforms are necessary, but we almost never, in our prescriptions for their recovery, address the spiritual problem at the heart of their sickness.

When I had the chance to address this problem before a Moscow audience, people repeatedly told me that they, communist and non-communist alike, could “never again” repeat the horrors of their past. But, of course, people have been using that phrase for most of the twentieth century, yet the horrors continue. What is required to protect them from this nightmare? As the American political thinker Paul Eidelberg said, “Unless there is a being superior to man, nothing in theory can prevent some men from degrading others to the level of the subhuman.” The principle that man is the highest thing, which is the basis of Marxism-Leninism, has been the vehicle for a devastating dehumanization. Individual human life can only be sacred if there is a God to sanctify it. So long as the Russians have a regime based upon the explicit denial of this higher power, they will never establish any effective prevention against the replication of the horrors through which they have lived. In order to be free, they must first bend the knee, not only as individuals, not doing so furtively, but with the open acknowledgment by the state and, most importantly, by the Party, of the source of the inalienable rights of all men in their Creator.

What could possibly transform the Soviet Union in this way? What could move it to such an acknowledgment? What could re-humanize it after its spiritual Chernobyl? Only one thing: massive evangelization. A spiritual problem of this magnitude requires a spiritual response of the same proportion. It was Christianity that lifted Russia out of barbarism 1000 years ago, and it is the only thing that can do so again. Zoya Krakhmalnikova, who was exiled to Siberia in the early 1980s for “anti-Soviet” Christian activism, said, “unless we return to Christian civilization, we will not renew our society.

Russians are a people guided by ideas. They need something to believe in. First they believed in the Church, then in Stalin. Stalinism, too, was like a faith. It promised paradise on earth. Now people have lost faith in paradise on earth and are searching once again for eternal beliefs.

This much was intimated in a recent story told by a Moscow architect who is trying to save landmark buildings. He said, “I recall Volodya, a fine young architect who suddenly quit. I saw him one day on the street, a missionary looking like Christ with a beard. I said, ‘Come back and help save our buildings.’ Volodya said: ‘No, save souls, not buildings. Without souls all the buildings you save will be lost.'” Perhaps Dostoevsky was wrong. Perhaps there is a third age of man — in which he moves from the acknowledgment of God to the recovery of man.

Author

  • Robert R. Reilly

    Robert R. Reilly is the author of America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, forthcoming from Ignatius Press.

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