Christ is Risen, dear reader! This is the Easter greeting from Moscow, as today is the Resurrection Sunday of the Eastern Churches. Read about it below; next Friday, May 6^th, we shall launch my new book, the Pardes, in London. You may come and get the book signed between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. in a yet unspecified location near Cambridge Circus in the West End (Tube: Leicester Sq, Trafalgar sq, or Piccadilly Circus). Call on May 6, after 3 p.m. on 07979022139 (from abroad +447979022139) for exact location.     

 

Red Easter

By Israel Shamir

 

Easter has no fixed abode; this most important movable feast of the Orthodox Christian year flies like a shuttle between March and May and weaves the diverse important dates into a single metaphysical narrative. In the memorable year 2000, it coincided with the Western Easter proclaiming Christendom’s underlying bedrock unity. Last year, the Good Friday fell on April 9, the Deir Yassin Massacre Day, when apostles’ children were slaughtered by Jewish terrorists in the land of Christ. This year, Resurrection Sunday comes on May Day, weaving back the unnecessary tear between the Reds and the Christ. The Russians, among whom I celebrate today, christened it Krasnaya Pascha, “Red Easter”.

In this unique country – nay, civilisation, - thousands of men and women stand up for the all-night long Easter service and in the morning join mass demos under the Red banner. Paradox? Not really. Even universal faiths have some local colour, and Russian Communism and Russian Orthodox Church share the same background. On every turn of their development, whether in their old Pravoslav Tsardom, or in the Red Republic, the Russians strove for unity and brotherhood of Man, were motivated by compassion and acceptance of losers. They consistently rejected Mammon. The Russians despise money and material belongings; for them, poverty is a welcome sign of an honest man rather than a mark of social leprosy as in the West. They suspect rather than admire a moneybag. The old adage of ‘the Spiritual East’ as opposed to ‘materialistic’ West still holds true: who does not like East, does not love Spirit.

I came to Russia for the last weeks of their Lent and for Easter. The spring was unusually long and cold; until recently, white snow covered the eternally green boughs of the pines and naked white bodies of birches in the forest. Thick ice allowed fishermen to drill holes and catch fish in the frozen streams until mid-April. It was good: Russia is beautiful like a bride in her white dress of snow and ice, while pink-cheeked and blue-eyed Russian girls in their modest fur coats are irresistible in the frosty days. And the churches with their multicoloured onions and domes are clad in exquisite icons and frescoes, glorifying Our Lady.

The Russian Christianity is centred on the Lady. Her image occupies the place usually preserved for the Cross in the Western churches. She is often presented as the Queen sitting on the throne with the crowned Child on her lap. If Dan Brown were to visit Russia, he would never write his Da Vinci Code, for the female divinity is not suppressed or replaced in this country. In his very American bestseller, the Catholic Church tries to suppress the cult of Mary Magdalene as it is afraid of femininity; while the Jews (of all people) protect and guard Mary’s remains. In real life, Jews have no female saints and dislike Our Lady even more than they dislike Her Son, while the Church venerates the Lady and adores the female saints. But Dan Brown had to fit his perfectly normal, true and justified longing for the Earth-connected Mediatrix into the Judaeo-American neo-Calvinist picture of the world, where Jews are always right and the church is always wrong. That is why he turned everything upside down; the New York Times spread its fame and the public bought it.

In Russia, he won’t be able to misrepresent: here, the Lady reigns supreme, and the Russians have no need or fear of the Magdalene’s remains. If recovered, she would be venerated like every saint; for indeed the Orthodox Church grants her the highest rank of holiness, ‘equal to Apostles’. That is why the Gnostic heresy does not fascinate the Russians as it does the Westerners. Russian priests are married men; and it completely undermines another complaint of Dan Brown.

On a deeper level, relationship of Man and Nature in the Russian Orthodox Universe differs from the Western view. The Nature represented by the Mother of God is divine, connected with the Spirit and bears Him in Her womb. The Russians do not feel the need to change Nature; they try to fit into their landscape.

This attitude is successful as we can learn from mass attendance of churches – in no place in the West you will find so many believers; but again, Russia is not in the West. The Western Churches will do well if they draw from this reservoir of spirit and tradition.

Today, the Russian Reds are reconciled with the Church; Zuganov’s Communist Party is in favour of the Pravoslav tradition. It is a good change, for the Reds’ advent to power and subsequent loss can’t be understood but in context of Russian spiritual quest. The Russian communists did not overthrew the Tsar as it is claimed. In October 1917, they removed the liberal Westernisers who seized the power in February same year. The liberals were for introducing capitalism in Russia; but the Russian soul had a very strong faith-based rejection of Mammon. The Communists were as anti-Mammonite as anybody; they modernised Russia, they created a society of mutual support. They could not give villas and Cadillac cars to everybody, so they gave what they could. Everybody had more or less the same: they had their safe and assured employment, their free accommodation, free electricity, telephone, heating, public transport.

But they forgot to attend to spiritual needs of the Russians. They forgot the teleological ‘What for’. And people can’t live without a purpose. This lack of purpose became obvious when the pressing material needs of the people were satisfied. The Russians accepted Communism – not in order to live better; they had a greater goal of spiritual perfection. The trouble began from the top: the de-spiritualised Soviet elites of the last decades drifted to the right; they loved Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and accepted the neo-liberal world-view long time before the collapse.

Indeed, in the West, the neo-liberals solved the problem of “What for” by creating massive social insecurity: people are not liable to think of spirit if they can be thrown out of their homes by a bank. Gorbachev copied their solution when he allowed the Soviet ship to capsize. He was supported by the pro-Western liberals, the heirs of February 1917 reformers.

The West is full of variety and contains many ideas and paradigms. But the Russian Westernisers were narrow-minded lot; they embraced the Chicago school of Milton Friedman with fervour, despised Russian people, their history and tradition. They privatised Russian property, sold it to the trans-national companies and tried to integrate Russia as a supplier of raw materials. However, their victory was not as final and conclusive as they thought.

There are clear signs of Russians reasserting their history after the clean break of 1991. It is not only churches lovingly restored and filled with worshippers; not only restoration of historic names – thus Kalinin Avenue (named after a Soviet leader) became again the Invention of the Cross street. It was done by the winners of 1991. But the Soviet past is being reasserted, too. The great celebrations of V-day due on May, 9 are a sign of the change. The liberal reformers of 1991 asserted that there was no difference between the Communists and the Nazis, between Hitler and Stalin. They mocked the veterans saying “Pity you weren’t defeated: we would live like Germans”. They forbade celebrations of the V-day: not out of love to Hitler, but because of their hate to the Soviet anti-Mammonite past.

This year, every street in Russia bears some congratulatory poster blessing the vets for their great victory. Here again, it is not a sign of hate to Germany or to Nazis, but of reconciliation with the Soviet past. Stalin is referred to in much more positive words. It’s not that the Russians miss Gulag or industrialisation; but Stalin and his rule are a part and parcel of Russian history.

The struggle for Russian future is far from over; it just started. Some people may think that this great country became an irrelevancy, a rusty oil pipeline and a consumer of Chinese goods and American ideas. But Russia is alive: the Russians write great books still unknown in the West, make new great cinema, and think of new solutions to the problems. Their problems are our problems, too: the Soviet collapse coincided with (or ushered in) the global Ice Age of social deep freezing. More and more people in the once-protected West find themselves marginalised; the Third World outpoured unto New York and London; compassion is outlawed; spiritual search is non-existent.

But Russians had additional problems, too. The US rulers are too ruthless, too keen: they try to use the critical moment to strip Russia of its assets and enslave its people. Thus a new challenge to Russia came into being; and great civilisations are formed by their responses to the challenges.  The recently demised Russian thinker Alexander Panarin wrote of invigorating cold wind of challenge waking up the Russian soul from its long slumber. He believed that the Orthodox Christian paradigm has a way to deal with the coming neo-liberal Ice Age by bringing in the Christian Eros as the force to revitalise the Universe. Russia may yet raise again the banner to summon the defeated, the outcast, the disenfranchised, the discarded against the new Masters of the World, he wrote.

Will it happen? Russia is on the crossroads. While President Putin’s ability to change and lead powerful reform can’t be dismissed out of hand, there are other options. The Americans are fomenting an Orange revolution in Russia like they did in the Ukraine; but destabilisation can have unpredictable consequences. Nobody could expect the Bolshevik victory even a few months before it occurred. Yes, the Bolsheviks were supported by the German General Staff, by New York Jewish bankers and by the British Intelligence – but in the end they dispatched the yesteryear supporters without a thankyou. This eventuality can be repeated. While return to Soviet Communism is as unlikely as restoration of the Pravoslav Empire, creative forces of the Russians may still move mankind forward, out of the present impasse. The divine spark in Man’s soul is not easy to extinguish, the Spirit will win as sure as Christ is Risen.

Resurrection Sunday 2005, Moscow