Against this background, the role of religion in the country's moral
resurrection was necessarily limited. Church hierarchs pursued their
commercial interests and were in turn imitated by ordinary priests
who pursued theirs, blessing businesses, banks, homes and automobiles
and exorcising "unclean powers" for a fee. At the same time, the
church did not allow itself the slightest political role, remaining
silent on such genuine moral issues as Russia's pervasive corruption
and the killing of noncombatants in Chechnya.

The government, meanwhile, contributed to Russia's moral malaise by
seeking new legitimacy for authoritarian rule through the
glorification of state power. One aspect of this effort is the cult
of personality that has been created around Putin. First, a
children's alphabet book appeared in Russia illustrated with
photographs of Putin as a boy. This was followed by the production of
sculptures of Putin and paintings of the president gazing out from
the Kremlin over the Moscow River in the visionary manner of Stalin
or Kim Il-sung. Then, on Putin's fiftieth birthday, he was the
subject of laudatory hymns from youth groups, all of which were given
extensive coverage in the press. He was presented with a crystal
crocodile from Moldova, a slow growing Siberian pine tree from Tomsk,
a reproduction of the Czarist Cap of Monomakh and a golden crown
encrusted with jewels. He also had a mountain named for him in
Kyrgyzstan.

Putin is also the beneficiary of his own youth movement, "Forward
Together", which announced its existence with a pro-Putin rally at
the Kremlin wall in which young people in t-shirts emblazoned with
Putin's picture carried signs declaring, "Together with the
president" and "Youth follows the president." Forward Together has
since embarked on an effort to "purify Russian literature." On June
27 last year, the group organized a protest in Moscow directed
against Vladimir Sorokin, a popular contemporary writer. Forward
Together members rigged up a huge toilet bowl as a supposed monument
to the writer, then tore up his books and threw them in the bowl,
pouring in chlorine after the ripped pages as a supposed
disinfectant. Two weeks later, government prosecutors charged Sorokin
with pornography, although there is no provision in Russian law for
punishing an author for his work.

Perhaps more important than the Putin personality cult, however, is
the development of a new ideology that identifies Russia's future
well-being with the power of the Russian state. Propounded by
intellectual and political figures who describe themselves as
"statists" (gosudarstvenniki), this outlook treats Russian history as
the story of the development of the Russian government, in which the
Soviet period was but an episode. An inevitable result of this
approach is the de facto rehabilitation of communism and the glossing
over of the lessons of the communist period, making it that much
harder for Russian society to gain the democratic moral orientation
it so desperately needs.

This is particularly obvious in the teaching of history in which the
Gulag and mass repression are described as a tragic page in the
nation's history but not the most important. Instead, attention is
drawn to the Soviet Union's victory in the Second World War, the
improvement of the material standard of living and the building of a
superpower. There is no attempt to say that the Gulag was the basis
of the Soviet system, or that the system was itself defective. Nor is
there any effort to analyze seriously the Soviet ideology or to
compare Soviet communism with its competitor in mass annihilation,
Nazism.

In keeping with the tendency to see the Soviet past as part of a
progressive trend that was on the whole positive, some now seek to
rehabilitate even those figures from the Soviet past who were
directly involved in mass repression. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov has
suggested that the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the
Cheka and the founder of the "Red Terror", be reinstalled in the
square in front of the headquarters of the FSB (formerly the KGB
headquarters). A plaque commemorating Yuri Andropov, the former
Soviet leader who, as head of the KGB, was responsible for the
suppression of the dissident movement in the 1980s, has already been
reinstalled on the wall of the main FSB building.

More Building, Fewer People

The problems of lawlessness, lack of respect for human life and moral
disorientation shadow the visible changes in Moscow that have led
many to describe Russia as a political and economic success. The
improved appearance of Moscow (although not the rest of the country)
is indisputable, but it is mainly a product of the high price of oil.
Every dollar difference in the price of oil translates into roughly
$1 billion in budget revenue; a high price for oil has therefore
become the key to the government's ability to balance the budget, pay
state employees and repay Russia's foreign debt. If the price should
fall significantly and stay relatively low, as it did in much of the
1980s and 1990s, Russia will be plunged into a severe economic
crisis. At that point, the invisible moral factors in Russia's
situation will be become critical to its stability.

There has been a very unfortunate tendency, both in Russia and the
West, to interpret success in Russia strictly in economic terms. Much
of the discussion of the Russian reform experience, for example,
concerned the relative merits of "shock therapy" versus government
regulation. But a market economy is based on a system of equivalent
exchange that can only be guaranteed within a framework of morality
and law. Without such a framework, the result is no longer a free
market but just another articulation of the rule of force.

In the final analysis, Russia can only overcome the systemic problems
that threaten its future on the basis of respectfor the dignity of
the individual and the establishment of the authority of transcendent
values as reflected in the rule of law. Unfortunately, this is
precisely the element that has been missing in the whole reform
process. W.H. Auden famously called the 1930s a "low, dishonest
decade." What we see in Russia today is a low, dishonest decadence.

Perhaps the most striking example of the way these factors shape
Russian society is the country's progressive depopulation. Russia
combines one of the lowest birth rates in the world with the death
rate of a country at war. According to Igor Gundarov, the head of the
Russian state center for prophylactic medicine, if present trends
continue, the population of Russia will be reduced by half in 80
years, to about 73 million, making the present Russian state
untenable.

In the years 1992-94 there was an almost vertical rise in the death
rate. Mortality rose one-and-a-half times by comparison with the
second half of the 1980s. The rise was so dramatic that Western
demographers at first did not believe the figures.

The rise in the death rate was explained as a result of the sudden
impoverishment of the population. Poverty alone, however, could not
have been the reason for the rise in deaths. The economic level in
the 1990s fell to that of the 1960s but in the 1960s the death rate
in the Soviet Union was the lowest in the developed world. Gundarov
concluded that poverty, state encouraged alcoholism, and the
downgrading of the system of public health accounted for only 20
percent of the reduction in longevity in Russia. The remaining 80
percent was attributable to the spiritual condition of the population
in the wake of the failure to offer any new ideal for Russian society
after the fall of communism. "There proceeded an attempt to
'transplant souls' and replace the old, non-market soul with a new,
pragmatic businesslike approach to life", Gundarov said.

This change was unaccompanied by an effort to provide . . . a reason
for which the change should be undertaken. For many people, who
needed something to live for, this change was intolerable and they
lost the will to live because life no longer had any meaning.

Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian religious philosopher, wrote that,

"In the soul of the Russian people, there should appear an immanent
religiosity and immanent morality for which a higher spiritual
beginning creates internally a transfiguring and creative beginning."

In this, he saw the hope for the future. The Russian people, he
wrote, need to enrich themselves with new values and replace a
"slavish religious and social psychology" with a "free religious and
social psychology." They need to recognize the godliness of human
honesty and honor. "At that point", he wrote, "the creative instincts
will defeat the rapacious ones." We and the Russian people are still
waiting for "that point."

Essay Types: Essay