Novichok and Holy Russia

Russia’s recovery from Bolshevism and Return to Christian Values is a Beacon of Hope – yet where were these values in Salisbury?

It seemed like the Barsetshire Chronicles had met John Le Carre when a Russian former spy and double agent and his daughter were poisoned by a chemical substance.  The cathedral city of Salisbury has been the site of the first chemical attack on these islands.  Since then one British subject has died from novichok poisoning and another has finally been released from hospital.

The evidence appears to point to Russian actors.  Russia denies this.  The alternative, put forward by conspiracy theorists, that British intelligence was responsible seems far-fetched to British ears.  To regard such an accusation as credible would require most of us to reconstruct completely our understanding of how the British state functions.  This is far easier for a Russian who is familiar with a state that commits crimes. History is clear, the Soviet state committed moral crimes against its people.  One only needs to peruse Solzhenitsyn to find this out.  The idea that the British Government would have fabricated or staged the poisoning may seem incredible to us, but not to a Russian citizen.

Neither is it very persuasive to draw an equivalence with the British State’s assassination of Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Syria.  These are cases of war zones and the former state is one where the government is an ally of the British and the latter state is no friend of the Islamists.  By contrast, in Salisbury an attack was made on British soil with a chemical weapon, with callous disregard of the danger to lives and the local economy.  In parenthesis  it is simplistic to imagine that the vast state of Russia and its intelligence services are as centralised as those of the British state, nonetheless, on balance, as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt, the Russian state appears to be guilty.  Western allies rallied to the cause of Britain – showing Brexit Britain continues to have international stature.

Herein lies the main point – Russia may have seen many dramatic changes since the fall of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless its starting point is very low if we recall Stalin, the KGB and the GUlag.  It is a low that is now far more familiar to those in the West, as the Soviets enforced by the jack boot what left-wing university professors in the West are re-educating middle-class students to support – abolition of capitalism and suppression of the Church, mass abortion and shifting women en masse into the work place.  Once we grasp this then we can understand how a nation that is seeing a resurgent Church can also be connected to a crime that was committed with a cavalier attitude to the sanctity of innocent life.

After the regicide of the Tsar Russia began a moral decline into atheistic tyranny.  Truth was sacrificed to a materialistic ideology and the sanctity of the person was as nothing.  The state became all intrusive and claimed citizens’ loyalty over and above human loyalties to family, Church and God. 

Of course the resurgence of Orthodoxy and the veneration of the Romanovs is proof that for all this state oppression the human values of the Russians did not disappear, but simply went underground.  Yet as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, the effect of the totalitarian system of Communism was to replace Truth with the Lie.  In effect – the attempt to abolish the Logos.  It was in that sense a Satanic project.  Russia hit a nadir in its civilization, whatever the nostalgia now for the certainties of the Soviet period, following the abuse of the common weal by capitalistic oligarchs. 

Countries' stories are not straight lines, but always revert to national archetypes.  If we think of the history of nations and cultures as cyclical rather than progressive we not only get a more accurate understanding of what is happening, but can rationalise the apparent contradictions of that vast country Winston Churchill once described as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.  Russia has hit the bottom point of a cycle and now is rising up again, but that does not mean the powers that be in the Russian establishment are untainted by the brutal system of the Bolshevik state of which many of the current establishment were part. Furthermore, any revolution is disruptive and undoubtedly criminal elements have benefited from the collapse of the Soviet Union, just as there has been the opportunity to resuscitate former traditions of value.

Quite apart from the apparent direct attack on our soil, why is this so important to us?  Because, continuing the theme of the cycle in the history of nations, it seems that Western civilization has reached a tipping point and is in precipitous decline.  The doctrines of the postmodernists and cultural Marxists have spread like a destructive contagion out of the university campuses and into mainstream life.  These destructive forces are too subtle to manifest themselves in the same bloody way that they did in Russia, but these forces are now more insidious.  Therefore Russia’s rediscovery of Christian tradition is the great hope of the West and to see it tarnished by the apparent disregard for the sanctity of the human person can seem to undermine this hope.

What must therefore be understood is this :  The shadow of brutal Bolshevik atheism is cast long over modern Russia, on the one hand.  On the other hand, the forces of tradition, religious faith and the Church were never extinguished and are now resurgent, with the support of the same state still tainted by a Bolshevik past.

Two parallel ideas are underpinning post -Soviet Russia, that of Holy Russia and that of Greater Russia.  In the figure of Vladimir Putin both ideas are honoured, although perhaps the latter to the greater degree.  Putin recognises the importance of religious faith and apparently was secretly baptised and raised as a believer.  Yet to believe he is manipulating religious belief and imposing it upon people to disguise his alleged tyranny is a complete misunderstanding of a very simplistic Western mind-set.

The Russian Church is a grass-roots phenomenon, its flame was kept burning by the people.  The Government has recognised this as a fact, just as Stalin had to recognise it during the German invasion.  A cultural Marxist narrative of religion being a means of control simply will not do as an intelligent analysis of what the situation is in Russia.

Furthermore, Putin is not having to contrive at remaining in power – he is very popular because he stood up to the oligarchs and because he, like the Russian people at large, felt the humiliation of the fall of the Soviet Union.  He is a patriot, for all his faults.

The western media may describe Putin as a kleptocratic reincarnation of Hitler, but this is almost a back-to-front misunderstanding.  Putin’s mind-set is defensive not aggressive, I believe.  He wishes to maintain Russia’s status and a sphere of national interest on the world stage.  That need not affect Western interests.  His speech at Munich in 2007 goes a long way to explain his world view.  The expansion of NATO, the stationing of US missiles on his border and Western intervention in the Ukraine, prior to his annexation of the Crimea have all created a feeling of encirclement. Russia had not expected this and initially believed that the end of the Cold War would mean a partnership of equality between the United States and the Russian Federation, with mutual respect for their different traditions.

We are rightly proud of our own turning point after another event in Munich, when we were to go on to stand alone against Hitler.  Yet this moment of true pride in our national valour sometimes misleads us into thinking every international situation is one of a moral test to resist the temptation of appeasement.  Anthony Eden arguably made this mistake over the Suez Canal.

Russia is changing or going full circle, rediscovering values and traditions we are on the point of losing.  Russia needs to know it is still an equal player on the world stage and that its own traditions, which are not liberal-democratic, can be regarded with respect.  Let us remember the U.S. started intervening in Russia’s choice of leader before Russia ever did so in US elections. 

For this reason President Trump, in the teeth of opposition from the Washington establishment and the military-industrial complex, is approaching Russia in the right way.  Friendship and mutual respect will bring the best out of relations with Russia.  Were Russia no longer painted as a pariah state we might also learn something from how traditional values can resurrect after Marxism.  This is a very necessary lesson we could learn as our own traditions and values, from Christianity to the meaning of gender are being corroded by unchallenged cultural-Marxists.

So what about Novichok?  Well again it seems that President Trump has it right in an approach that is both realist and principled.  While the UK is rightly going through the process of a criminal investigation, the President took a clear stand against Russia with the recall of diplomats, but he is now adopting the constructive policy of engagement.  For unlike National Socialist Germany, engaging with Christian Russia will undoubtedly lead to benefits for both civilizations. Engagement should not always be regarded as appeasement.