RUSSIA MOLD OF AN ENIGMA

Years ago I wrote a text with that title. It remains unpublished as I am aware of the ferocity, irreverence and animosity with which the subject is treated by the dominant Anglo world, but Russia continues to surprise and fascinate. For me Russia was always a fascinating Mold of an enigma.

In his books about the History of the Boyars, Alexis Markoff tells us that that immense country lacked a middle age and there were no reforms or counter-reforms, neither Lutheran nor Calvinist nor Anglican.

There were sects. It was the schism in the seventeenth century led by Patriarch Nikon who wanted to return to the original liturgy and the first customs of the early Syrian Christians without alcohol or tobacco, sharing goods. In matters of faith, all fundamentalisms are dangerous and determine those wars of religion that are the cruelest. The Old Believers prohibited alcohol, prostitution and corruption in the court of the first Romanov.

This dynasty was established in 1613 by Miguel Feodorovich and enlarged by Peter the Great, the great monarch who created the great Russian fleet and founder of St. Petersburg. The Old Believers were part of a fundamentalist sect that was defeated and cornered.

Many fled to Siberia or passed through Alaska to the United States where they established colonies, adopted polygamy, rejected the inventions and comforts of modern life and their attitude was very similar to that of the Hamish of Pennsylvania.

The preachers of this brotherhood of the Staroi Vierushi were all gyrovagus monks escaped from their monasteries who refused to abide by the monastic rule of Saint Basil. They killed their Archimandrites and Idumeans. They fell into some aberrations similar to that of the Spanish converts. Everything rolled into the abyss and then degenerated. There was a brotherhood that preached free love and they said that God was reached through dance and orgy.

They danced nonstop like Turkish dervishes until they reached ecstasy. Others on the contrary, the Castrados, preached chastity at all costs, condemned clumsy treatment and never tasted vodka. To achieve perfection, when they barbarously took the tonsure they were emasculated. The Russian soul is bipolar split into two halves. One looks to the east (vostoknik) and another to the west (zapadniek) Peter the Great belonged to the last cast.

He was a Westerner. The first thing he did was trim the Russians, snip their huge caftans that dragged down to their feet, finish off the boyars, and ridicule the priests. Once in Moscow he celebrated a black mass and was branded an antichrist by the patriarch Adrian.

An Orthodox priest is the antinomy of a Catholic priest. The Byzantine clergy dislike the razor and sport Merovingian scalps and long patriarchal beards in the belief that men shaved according to Saint John Chrysostom cannot enter paradise. The almighty tsar lost that battle for the Europeanization of his subjects but would win other more important ones. He replaced the patriarchate with the Holy Synod.

The church would then be subject to the power of the state, a subtle maneuver in a country with a strong Christian inclination and a lover of its tradition such as Russia. At the same time that it modernized the cities, it traced roads, channeled the rivers. Those reforms cost a lot of blood, however, writes Markoff.

I have to make a warning: if I had lived in those times as I have been a pipe smoker for many years, the zealous defenders of the tradition would have uprooted me or outspoken me. Because they believed that the tobacco leaf grows in the gardens of the devil. Some of this is happening now. We return to the fanaticism of the uncompromising. Fat smokers want to cut off our noses and threaten us with cancer of the tongue. Since they already have it installed in their bottles of whited sepulchres and the tongue of vipers

 

06/14/2022