The Telos Press Podcast: Marcin Skladanowski on Russia, Traditional Values, and Western Liberal Democracy

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Marcin Skladanowski about his article “Criticism of Western Liberal Democracy by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’,” from Telos 193 (Winter 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 193 are available for purchase in our store.

From Telos 193 (Winter 2020):

Criticism of Western Liberal Democracy by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’

Marcin Skladanowski

Introduction

As the observable processes of social life become more secular in the post-Christian countries of the West, there has been a noticeable attempt to make Russia look like a defender of “traditional Christian values” and emphasize the church’s right to be present in public life and shape this life in its various aspects. This is mostly self-aggrandizement, clearly seen in the statements of President Putin,^[1] with the close cooperation of Kirill (Gundyayev), Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’.^[2] Such rhetoric resonates in the West, to a certain extent, both in conservative Christian groups and in far-right political and intellectual circles.^[3]

The basis of this article is the conviction prevalent in Russia that it has a special mission as a defender of “traditional Christian values,” which works in combination with the associated myths of Russian moral conservatism. This conviction is expressed both by the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church (including Patriarch Kirill) and by the Russian establishment (including President Putin). It also appears in the statements of certain Christian conservative circles in the West that perceive Russia and Russian Orthodoxy as a supporter in their fight against the secularization of Western societies.

Perceiving Russia as an ally in the fight against secularization in the West is a myth, a delusion, or an illusion, which results from a lack of understanding about the foundation of Russian Orthodox criticism of the West. Under the surface layer of defending religion in the public—including the political—domain can be found a conception of the individual and society that differs significantly from the one typical of Western Christianity and the Western societies that were shaped by it. This is the context for presenting the main aspects of criticism advanced by the Moscow Patriarchate against Western liberal democracy: the accusations of individualism, egoism, hostility toward the idea of community, rejection of Christian social conventions, and anthropocentrism.

This article seeks to demonstrate the anthropological foundations of this criticism, which reveal Russian Orthodox moral conservatism as a myth that has been supported and developed for political purposes. Russian Orthodox anthropology was formed as a synthesis of Byzantine anthropology and Asian concepts of personhood and society at the time of the Tatar yoke (Mongolo-Tatarskoye Igo, 1243–1480), a period that influenced the direction in which the Moscow Rus’ (later Russia) and Russian Orthodoxy developed. These motivations behind the “moral conservatism” of the Russian Orthodox Church make it a tool in the hands of contemporary Russian politics that seeks to isolate Russia from the West culturally.

Sources and Methodological Remarks

Among numerous authors that analyze the propaganda of contemporary Russia, particularly of note are the works of Marlène Laruelle, Mark Galeotti, Mark Bassin, Zoe Knox, and Kristina Stoeckl. From the perspective of the political sciences, these authors contribute not only to the spread in the West of the mechanisms of Russian social and political life but also to the dissemination of the primary content to which the representatives of Russian establishment refer, both in internal politics and international relations. In the present article, to avoid repeating the claims made by these well-known authors, I would like to approach the issue of the criticism of Western liberal democracy found in Russian public debate from the religious (including the theological) perspective. Although this perspective also includes political, economic, and military aspects, the priority is given to anthropological and ethical issues. This critical trend toward the contemporary West is represented by the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) including Patriarch Kirill (Gundyayev). It is not limited, however, to church circles. The elements connected to the religion-based concept of personhood and society, as well as the resulting ethical values, are also present in the criticism of the West expressed in statements by President Putin and other members of the Russian political elite and intellectual circles who often appeal to Orthodoxy.^[4] These views are rooted in the Russian religious tradition. The present article thus focuses primarily on the statements of Patriarch Kirill, although it also takes into account the statements of representatives of Russian political and intellectual elites as long as, in their criticism of Western liberal democracy, they refer to religious reasons.

Defining “Western liberal democracy” might pose some difficulties in the Russian intellectual context. In the Western sociopolitical context, it is understood as a political system created under the influence of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century as a result of the American and French Revolutions. This system is based on subjectivity and the freedom of the individual, as well as on the separation of the state and church—or, rather, the ideological neutrality of the state. However, the main problem in the Russian context is the centuries-long anti-Western intellectual and religious tradition, which perceived the West, including Western Christianity, as the main enemy of the Rus’, and later Russia, since the Union of Florence and particularly after the fall of Constantinople.^[5] An important characteristic of the West was supposed to be a decline—moral, religious, and social—that made it distinct from the Orthodox Rus’. The accusations issued against the West of being “liberal,” even if various terms are used, are a permanent element of Russian anti-Occidentalism, regardless of which political system in the West is meant. Certain crucial elements of these accusations are repeatedly found both in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century criticism of the West, which justified the political and religious concept of Moscow as the Third Rome,^[6] and in the anti-Western, mostly anti-Catholic polemics of the nineteenth-century Russian Slavophiles^[7] and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eurasians,^[8] as well as in the general anti-Western Soviet ideology. For the sake of the present article, we assume that by Western liberal democracy one mainly understands a political, social, and economic system accompanied by values and a lifestyle shaped after World War II and especially after the social and cultural changes of the 1960s. At the same time, one should remember that contemporary Russian criticism is aimed at the stereotypical image of the West. This image was created in Russia mostly in the 1990s (known as “the bad nineties”). There is a clear connection between the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia, in its industrial, cultural, or military dimension, the acceptance of Western patterns of life, and the rejection of those values traditional to Russian society that were not destroyed even in the Soviet period.^[9] To a large extent, the image of the West, both in the official statements of the Russian establishment and in state-controlled media, as well as in Church discourse, is selective, stereotypical, and constructed to influence Russian society. This is why the concepts of democracy, different from Vladislav Surkov’s idea of “sovereign democracy,”^[10] and liberalism have acquired an unequivocally negative meaning and have become a threat to Russian society. The response to this threat, from the religious perspective, is supposed to be the traditionally Orthodox concept of personhood and society.

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Notes

1. Vladimir Putin, Mysli o Rossii: Prezident o samom vazhnom (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2016), p. 169.

2. “Vystupleniye Svyateyshego Patriarkha Kirilla na 137-y Assambleye Mezhparla-mentskogo soyuza,” Moscow Patriarchate website, October 16, 2017.

3. Marlène Laruelle, “Introduction,” in Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe–Russia Relationship, ed. Marlène Laruelle (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), pp. xii–xiii.

4. Andrey Kobyakov et al., Russkaya doktrina: Gosudarstvennaya ideologiya epokhi Putina (Moscow: Institut russkoy tsivilizatsii, 2016), pp. 152–56.

5 Anton Kartashev, Ocherki po istorii Russkoy Tserkvi, vol. 2 (Minsk: Belorusskiy ekzarkhat, 2007), pp. 175–76.

6. Emmanuel Lanne, “The Three Romes,” Concilium 6 (1996): 10–18; Aleksandr Saltykov, “Pravoslavnoye mirovozzreniye i ucheniye o Tret’yem Rime,” in Moskva—Tretiy Rim, ed. Mikhail Kudryavtsev (Moscow: Troitsa, 2008), pp. 3–5.

7. Larisa Belenchuk, Prosveshcheniye Rossii: Vzglyad zapadnikov i slavyanofilov (Moscow: Pravoslavnyy Svyato-Tikhonovskiy gumanitarnyy universitet, 2015), pp. 19–38; Vasiliy Zen’kovskiy, Istoriya russkoy filosofii, vol. 1 (Rostov-on-Don: Feniks, 1999), pp. 217–24; Sergey Nikol’skiy and Viktor Filimonov, Russkoye mirovozzreniye, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiya, 2008), pp. 66–70.

8. Boris Tarasov, “Fedor Tyutchev o naznachenii cheloveka i smysle zhyzni,” in Fedor Tyutchev, Rossiya i Zapad, ed. Boris Tarasov (Moscow: Kul’turnaya revolutsiya, 2007), pp. 17–18; Aleksandr Shmeman, Osnovy russkoy kul’tury (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Svyato-Tikhonovskogo gumanitarnogo universiteta, 2017), p. 94.

9. Aleksandr Dugin, Noomakhiya: voyny uma. Tsivilizatsii granits (Moscow: Akademicheskiy proyekt), p. 58.

10. Andrei P. Tsygankov, The Dark Double: US Media, Russia, and the Politics of Values (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019), pp. 74–75.