Putin

In a move that predated Soviet abuse of psychiatry by a century, Chaadayev was declared insane and forcibly placed under medical care, his papers seized.

A paradigm emerged from Chaadayev’s ideas. Cut off from the West by the Mongol conqueror and by obscurantist tsars, Russia had missed all the developmental stages of civilizational progress—Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment. The lack of any developmental dynamic meant that progress came from above, from the omnipotent ruler, the tsar. It was a country held together by power, religion, and fear—in Chaadayev’s excellent phrase “a realm of brute fact and ceremony.”

Russia’s inherent shakiness was sensed not only by Russian philosophers, but by travelers to those parts in the nineteenth century. “Russia may well fall to pieces as many expect,” noted the dashing British intelligence officer Arthur Conolly, who often traveled through Central Asia in native guise, using the name Khan Ali, a pun on his own. Not only is he credited with creating the term “great game,” he played it to the hilt until he was beheaded in Bukhara in 1842 at the age of thirty-four.

For the anti-regime intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the destruction of Russia was something they not only sensed but actively desired. One of the major poets of that period, Alexander Blok, claimed he could actually hear the empire collapsing. Blok, who hailed the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as proof that Nature was still mightier than man and his arrogant works, longed for an elemental revolution that would sweep away all the cant and rot, making a place for a new and better civilization to arise. Deeply disillusioned by the actual revolution that took place, he died in 1921, no longer able to hear history in the making because, as he said, “all sounds have stopped.”

In Russia the sense of shaky enterprise, the tendency to build structures that collapse, is balanced by a genius for survival. A Russian hacker with the handle “Lightwatch” put it like this: “The Russians have a very amusing feature—they are able to get up from their knees, under any conditions, or under any circumstances.”

Russia withstood and outlasted the invasions of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler. Russia survived its own tyrants from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin. It survived the implosion of its state structure during the Time of Troubles in the early 1600s, again in 1917, and yet again in 1991.

Those events have inspired great works of art—the opera Boris Godunov about the Time of Troubles, War and Peace about the invasion of Napoleon, Life and Fate about World War II. And those works of art have in turn inspired further acts of heroic survival by Russians, and have spread the fame of Russian fortitude throughout the world. It seems to have always been there. In the mid-900s the Arab traveler Ibn Miskawayh called them “a mighty nation … with great courage. They know not defeat, not does any of them turn his back until he slays or be slain.”

Even one of the American Mafia families took inspiration from Russia when going to war against the other families. As Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, underboss to John Gotti, put it: “Fuck the battle. You learned that from the Russians. Yeah, they were dogs, they kept backing up. They let them Germans come right into their country. They made them freeze their asses off, run out of supplies, and then they destroyed them. So it’s not the battle, it’s the war.”

The principal Russian holiday is Easter, not Christmas. Of course, that is as it should be, because the rising of Christ from the dead is the central mystery and promise of Christianity. (How all that was reduced in the West to bonnets, bunnies, and eggs is a mystery in itself.) The Russians do not wish each other Happy Easter but exchange passionate affirmations: “Christ is risen!” “Truly He is risen!”

The myth of rebirth is central to the work of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov (1829–1903). Said to be the only person in whose presence Count Leo Tolstoy ever felt humble, Fyodorov was an inspiration to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian rocketry and thus of the Soviet space program. Fyodorov’s main idea was that Christianity and science were not at all at odds, but in fact were destined to work together for the greatest of all possible goals, the resurrection of everyone who had ever lived, the rescue of our ancestors from hated death.