Faith Decides—the Russian People Watch

Recent remarks by Western politicians—Angela Merkel in Munich—confirm that counting on their understanding of how the Russian world functions may be a poor calculation.

Let us look at old icons. They are patterns of behaviour, attitudes and actions repeated almost unchanged over the centuries, entrenching the fatalistic power of the stereotype of passively observing miraculous events blessed by the entire cosmos. Faced with such a vision of history, one’s own activity and opinion are unimaginably alien, even hostile to the sacred cause.

All that remains is to keep our fingers firmly crossed that the next russkiy saviour and defender does not decide that the time has come to mount a white horse straight from the Apocalypse and pose as St George the Victorious (Георгий Победоносец) with the ribbon of St George on his chest.  

To Western minds this is entirely ‘illogical’, but ‘faith’, in a very particular sense, will be decisive. We are a species capable of losing its way even in something it previously devised as rigorously logical. The first and last letters, Alpha and Omega, are a biblical symbol of dominion over beginning and end. But this is a divine attribute, inaccessible to us. Around us swirls an elemental mass of letters that complicate everything: wild, disobedient.

‘St George’, a Novgorod icon from the early sixteenth century, Ruzhnikov Collection, Paris.

Trotsky defeats the counter-revolution in 1918.

General Zhukov at the victory parade in Moscow, 24 June 1945.

Putin practises plot twists in July 2002.