Putin

The myth of rebirth also animates the Russian body politic at its moments of crisis. No invasion is too great not to be withstood and ultimately repelled, no collapse of the state from within can lead to permanent diminishment or ruination. What explains this? Is it the inbred hardiness of people who have endured centuries of harsh winter? Is it the cunning, also developed over centuries from dealing with the severities of invasion and tyranny? Is it simply a straightforward response to the straightforward Darwinian imperative: Do or Die? It is all of these, but there is also something else.

The source of Russia’s ability to overcome any trauma has been the cluster of values, images, and ideas that gave the nation its irreducible identity. But now there is a void at the core of the collective psyche. For the first time in its more than thousand-year history, Russia is without icons.

A Russia Without Icons

The Russians were iconoclasts even before they had icons.

In 988 Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev, “a fundamentally good man who led a life of lechery and murder,” had a spiritual awakening and decided to convert his people from paganism to one of the three great religions in that part of the world. According to the ancient Chronicles, a mixture of legend and history, Vladimir dispatched envoys to see what those religions had to offer. The loss of Israel did not make Judaism seem a fortunate enterprise. Islam’s prohibition on alcohol made it out of the question, for, as Vladimir himself remarked in a two-line poem:

The Russian cannot bear to think
Of a life devoid of all strong drink.

However, his envoys reported from Constantinople that the beauty of the cathedrals was such that “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.” So, beauty won the day. Or at least beauty coupled with realpolitik, for it made more economic and military sense for Vladimir’s domain, Kievan Rus as it came to be called, to ally itself with Byzantium, the great power in those parts.

But before Christianity with all its beliefs, rituals, and icons could be fully implemented, the old paganism had to be done away with. In that belief system life was a struggle between the Dark God and the Bright God, but there were many lesser deities as well, chief among them Perun, god of thunder and lightning. Grand Prince Vladimir “directed that the idols be overthrown and that some should be cut to pieces and others burned with fire. He thus ordered that Perun should be bound to a horse’s tail and dragged … to the river. He appointed twelve men to beat the idols with sticks.”

In all this can be observed several tendencies that would persist through the centuries: Change comes from the top down. Ideology tends to be imported. Not only must new sacred images be introduced, but the old ones must first be desecrated and destroyed.

The tenacious persistence of cultural forms in Russia is at times nothing short of amazing, as James Billington observed in his classic The Icon and the Axe: “Just as the iconostasis of a cathedral was generally built over the grave of a local saint and specially reverenced with processions on a religious festival, so these new Soviet saints appeared in ritual form over the mausoleum of the mummified Lenin on the feast days of Bolshevism to review endless processions through Red Square.”

And in 1917 Vladimir Lenin showed himself little different from Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev when it came to a passion for iconoclasm. Lenin, who actively hated the very idea of God, persecuted both the symbols of Christianity and its priests, who were imprisoned and executed in large numbers. In his book Soviet Civilization Andrei Sinyavsky describes “the Bolsheviks’ extravagant acts against sacred objects, as when they did not just remove the icons from a church but used them to make floors for the village baths without even sanding off the saints’ faces. Or when they lined them up against a wall and shot at them, as if, for these atheist resisters of God, the icons were living beings.”