Paul Robinson — The West’s new ‘Cold War’ is with Dostoevsky’s Russia, not Stalin’s

"All great nations,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in an 1873 letter to the future Emperor Alexander III, “have manifested themselves and their great powers…and have brought something, if only a single ray of light, into the world, precisely because they have remained themselves, proudly and undauntedly, always and presumptuously independent.”

The West firmly disagrees. Despite their stated commitment to multiculturalism, most Western states in fact believe that the whole world should be like them – secular, democratic, and capitalist. Consequently, they tend to interpret any attempt by Russia to be “presumptuously independent” as an aggressive act. As Russian foreign policy has become more assertive in the past decade, the result has been a crescendo of accusations that Russia has started a “new Cold War”.

Former U.S. National Security Agency spook John Schindler claims that Russia is aggressively promoting its agenda through “Orthodox jihad”, which “bears more than a little resemblance to Holy War in a Russian and Orthodox variant.” Schindler writes that Vladimir Putin, “has created and nurtured a virulent ideology, an explosive amalgam of xenophobia, Chekism and militant Orthodoxy which justifies the Kremlin’s actions and explains why the West must be opposed at all costs.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks agrees. Noting that in January 2014 the Kremlin distributed books by three late 19th/early 20th century Russian philosophers – Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Ivan Ilyin – to regional governors, Brooks argues that Russian foreign policy rests upon “a highly charged and assertive messianic ideology.”…..

First Russia was the devil because it was atheistic. Now it is the devil because it is the wrong kind of Christian. All in a couple of decades. WTF?

Western ideology has always had universalistic tendencies, from the era of the medieval crusades onwards. It shares these tendencies with Islam, but less so with Orthodoxy, which has rarely shown any proselytizing zeal or given holy sanction to anything other than defensive war. Although some Byzantine rulers did attempt to harness religion to support their wars, their efforts were sporadic and generally met resistance from the Church authorities.

Schindler cites Putin’s admiration of Ilyin as evidence for his thesis that Russia is engaged in “Orthodox jihad”. Far from supporting holy war, Ilyin in fact wrote that “all my research proves that the sword is not ‘holy’ and not ‘just’.” This position is in line with Orthodox theology, which generally maintains that while war is sometimes necessary, it should never be seen as a positive good but only as the lesser of two evils. As Father Stanley Harakas, one of the leading experts on the subject, comments, “The Eastern Orthodox Patristic tradition rarely praised war and, to my knowledge, never called it ‘just’ or a moral good.” Schindler’s soundbite, “Orthodox jihad”, is an oxymoron.  

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The West’s new ‘Cold War’ is with Dostoevsky’s Russia, not Stalin’s

Paul Robinson | professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Russian history, military history, military ethics, and international security, and he blogs at www.irrussianality.wordpress.com