    Red Easter By Israel Shamir

    Easter has no fixed abode; this most important movable feast of the
    Orthodox Christian year flies like a shuttle between March and May and
    weaves the diverse important dates into a single metaphysical narrative.
    In the memorable year 2000, it coincided with the Western Easter
    proclaiming Christendom’s underlying bedrock unity. Last year, Good
    Friday fell on April 9, the Deir Yassin Massacre Day, when apostles’
    children were slaughtered by Jewish terrorists in the land of Christ.
    This year, Resurrection Sunday comes on May Day, weaving back the
    unnecessary tear between the Reds and the Christ. The Russians, amongst
    whom I celebrate today, christened it Krasnaya Pascha, "Red Easter".

    In this unique country - nay, civilisation, - thousands of men and women
    stand up for the all-night-long Easter service and in the morning join
    mass demos under the Red banner. Thus for me, and for many Russians, May
    Day came as a second, unexpected apotheosis of the Easter celebration.

    I came to Russia for the last weeks of their Lent and for Easter. The
    Spring was unusually long and cold; until recently, white snow covered
    the eternally green boughs of the pines and the naked white bodies of
    birches in the forest. Thick ice allowed fishermen to drill holes and
    catch fish in the frozen streams until mid-April. It was good: Russia is
    beautiful like a bride in her white dress of snow and ice, while
    rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed Russian girls in their modest fur coats are
    irresistible on frosty days. And the churches with their multicoloured
    onions and domes are embellished with exquisite icons and frescoes.

    In Soviet days they served as coal stores, hardware shops, or at best,
    museums of atheism. Active churches were a rare thing. The rest was so
    run-down that they inspired no interest -- just dirty old structures
    ready to be demolished when a new bypass has to be built. And a lot was
    demolished. Since 1991, the Church embarked on a huge project of
    regaining surviving churches and repairing them. The result is
    mind-boggling - yesterday’s Cinderellas became today’s Princesses. I
    could not recognise them - their old domes a-blazing with gold plating,
    bells a-ringing, and interiors totally redone. The surviving frescoes
    were lovingly restored, ruined ones were painted anew in the traditional
    Byzantine style. The monasteries turned into soldiers’ barracks or
    boarding schools for young delinquents returned to their original
    purpose and many serious young and spiritual Russians take up the
    Orders. Even the long-demolished Cathedral of St Saviour in Moscow - a
    site of a swimming pool in Soviet days - was rebuilt. Thus the Russians
    succeeded where the Jews failed: they did rebuild their Temple.

    The last days of the Holy Week were quite a build up. The churches were
    full day and night; the believers formed long queues to go to
    confession: the Russian church has no booths for this purpose, and
    confession is a face-to-face interview in a nave. Only after a three-day
    fast and confession one may receive the communion done with bread and
    undiluted wine, as in the church of Apostles. Besides the Communion, the
    Orthodox church also practice pre-Paschal unction reserved in the West
    only for the dying.

    On Easter Saturday, Russian ladies baked their delicious Easter cakes
    and brought them to be blessed by the priest in the church, so in the
    afternoon the church compound was scented by spices, raisins and fresh
    dough. It is their custom to break the fast by eating these sweetish
    cakes with cottage cheese.

    The night-time Easter service was very long, but people did not leave
    early - they felt it was the much-expected culmination of their long and
    hard Lent. Indeed, Orthodox Lent is very strict: even olive oil (do not
    even think of dairy or fish) is permitted on Sundays only, while marital
    joys are banished completely. I went to a church of a nearby monastery,
    a vast structure built in the beginning of the 20th century in Art
    Nouveau style with pre-Raphaelite frescoes, and stood all night long,
    until the dawn, among throngs of smartly dressed Russians with lit
    candles in their hand who answered the priest calling out ‘Christ is
    Risen!’ with their thunderous ‘Indeed, He is Risen!’

    And just a few hours later I stood opposite the Bolshoy Grand Opera
    (where I was recently at the premiere of a specially commissioned by the
    theatre new opera Blumenthal’s Children, a fascinating and provocative
    treatment of the iconoclast Sorokin’s writing by St Petersburg composer
    Desyatnikov) in the May Day demo crowd, listening to a Communist leader
    who repeated just the same call; and from under the Red banners came a
    reply: "Indeed, He is Risen!"

    Paradox? Not really. Even universal faiths have some local colour, and
    Russian Communism and Russian Orthodox Church share the same background.
    On every turn of their development, whether in their old Pravoslav
    Tsardom, or in the Red Republic, the Russians who strove for the unity
    and brotherhood of Man were motivated by compassion and acceptance of
    "losers." They consistently rejected Mammon. The Russians despise money
    and material belongings; for them, poverty is a welcome sign of an
    honest man rather than a mark of social leprosy as in the West. They
    suspect rather than admire a moneybag. The old adage of ‘the Spiritual
    East’ as opposed to ‘materialistic’ West still holds true: who does not
    like East, does not love the Spirit.

    Today, Russian Reds are reconciled with the Church; the Communist Party
    members attend the services and joined the Pravoslav tradition. Gennady
    Zuganov, the CPRF leader, congratulated the demo with the May Day - and
    with Christ’s Resurrection as well. Rogozin, the leader of a breakaway
    Rodina faction, now a big party by its own right, was even more eloquent
    in referring to Easter. As various Red and nationalist parties and
    groups represent a clear majority of the Russians, it is an important
    and a positive change from the days when churches were dynamited and
    worshippers discouraged.

    It is a good change, for the Reds’ loss of power can’t be understood but
    in context of Russian spiritual quest. The Russian Communists modernised
    Russia, they created a society of mutual support. They could not give
    villas and Cadillac cars to everybody, so they gave what they could.
    Everybody had more or less the same: they had their safe and assured
    employment, their free accommodation, free electricity, telephone,
    heating, public transport.

    But they forgot to attend to spiritual needs of the Russians. They
    forgot the teleological ‘What for’. And people can’t live without a
    purpose. This lack of purpose became obvious when the pressing material
    needs of the people were satisfied. The Russians accepted Communism -
    not in order to live better; they had a greater goal of spiritual
    perfection. The trouble began from the top: the de-spiritualised Soviet
    elites of the last decades drifted to the right; they loved Margaret
    Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and had accepted the neo-liberal world-view
    a long time before the collapse.

    Indeed, in the West, the neo-liberals solved the problem of "What for"
    by creating massive social insecurity: people are not liable to think of
    spirit if they can be thrown out of their homes by a bank. Gorbachev
    copied their solution when he allowed the Soviet ship to capsize. He was
    supported by the pro-Western reformers.

    The West is full of variety and contains many ideas and paradigms. But
    the Russian Westernisers were a narrow-minded lot; they embraced the
    Chicago school of Milton Friedman with fervour; and despised the Russian
    people, their history and tradition. They privatised Russian national
    property, sold it to the trans-national companies and tried to integrate
    Russia as a supplier of raw materials. However, their victory was not as
    final and conclusive as they thought.

    There are clear signs of Russians reasserting their history after the
    clean break of 1991. It is not only churches lovingly restored and
    filled with worshippers; not only restoration of historic names - thus
    Kalinin Avenue (named after a Soviet leader) became again the Invention
    of the Cross street. It was done by the winners of 1991. But the Soviet
    past is being reintegrated, too. The great celebrations of V-day due on
    May, 9 are a sign of the change. The liberal reformers of 1991 asserted
    that there was no difference between the Commies and the Nazis, between
    Hitler and Stalin. They mocked the veterans saying "Pity you weren’t
    defeated: we would live like Germans". They forbade celebrations of
    V-day: not out of love to Hitler, but because of their hate to the
    Soviet anti-Mammonite past.

    This year, every street in Russia bears some congratulatory poster
    blessing the vets for their great victory. Here again, it is not a sign
    of hate to Germany or to National Socialism, but of reconciliation with
    the Soviet past. At the May Day demo, Stalin was acclaimed by Zuganov
    and other Communist leaders as ‘the father of the great victory’. There
    were his portraits a-plenty. It’s not that the Russians miss the Gulag
    or industrialisation; but Stalin and his rule are part and parcel of
    Russian history. Likewise, the French Restoration regime of Louis the
    Eighteenth called Napoleon ‘the Corsican Monster’, but just a few years
    later, by 1840s, the late Emperor regained his place in the Pantheon of
    France.

    The struggle for Russia's future is far from over; it has just started.
    Some people may think that this great country became an irrelevancy, a
    rusty oil pipeline and a consumer of Chinese goods and American ideas.
    But Russia is alive: Russians write great books still unknown in the
    West. Three books of the last decade, The Last Soldier of the Empire by
    Alexander Prochanov, The Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin and The Sacred
    Book of Werewolf by Victor Pelevin are as enjoyable, challenging and
    uplifting as Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez. There are no
    contemporary writers or books in the West of a similar stature. In a
    properly arranged world, these treasures of spirit would be considered
    among great achievements of mankind. Indeed, who cares for oil - it is
    Russian writing that we should import!

    Russians do read a lot. Another positive change since the Soviet days is
    freedom of creativity and publishing. In Soviet days, stifling Party
    control blocked incoming ideas and books and stopped their creation in
    Russia. Even revolutionary Marxist books were banned, unless written in
    boring Sovietese. Now, in a tiny bookshop in a Moscow Underground for a
    few roubles one can buy new editions of Guenon and Joyce, Murakami and
    Pavic, St Augustine and Chesterton - and certainly, the Russian writers
    and philosophers old and new, with their fusion of metaphysics, theology
    and politics: from pre-revolutionary Bulgakov, Florensky, Rozanov to
    contemporary Alexander Dugin, Serge Averintsev and Alexander Panarin. I
    felt myself as Gulliver in Brobdingnegg, the Land of Giants: there are
    hundreds of Russians one can discuss most complicated questions with and
    find oneself out of one’s depth.

    Russians are aware of their problems and think of new solutions. Their
    problems are our problems, too: the Soviet collapse coincided with (or
    ushered in) the global Ice Age of social deep-freezing. More and more
    people in the once-protected West find themselves marginalised; the
    Third World outpoured unto New York and London; compassion is outlawed;
    spiritual search is non-existent.

    The recently demised Russian thinker Alexander Panarin believed that the
    Orthodox Christian paradigm has a way to deal with the coming
    neo-liberal Ice Age by bringing in the Christian Eros as the force to
    revitalise the Universe. Russia may yet raise again the banner to summon
    the defeated, the outcast, the disenfranchised, the discarded against
    the new Masters of the World, he wrote.

    In his view, Orthodox Russian Christianity is different and can offer a
    solution to perplexed mankind because it is centred on the Lady. Indeed,
    Her image occupies the place usually preserved for the Cross in the
    Western churches. She is often presented as the Queen sitting on the
    throne with the crowned Child on Her lap. For the Russians, the Mother
    of God represents Nature. She is divine, connected with the Spirit and
    bears Him in Her womb. The Russians’ love to Christ who is Spirit is not
    divorced from their love to the Lady who is Mother Earth and their
    Compassionate Intercessor. God the Father, the God of Old Testament, the
    God of Justice has very little presence in the Russian universe.

    If Dan Brown were to visit Russia, he would never write his Da Vinci
    Code, for the female divinity is not suppressed or replaced here. In his
    very American bestseller, the Catholic Church tries to suppress the cult
    of Mary Magdalene as it is afraid of femininity; while the Jews (of all
    people) protect and guard Mary’s remains. In real life, Jews have no
    female saints and dislike Our Lady even more than they dislike Her Son,
    while the Church venerates the Lady and adores the female saints. But
    Dan Brown had to fit his perfectly normal, true and justified longing
    for the Earth-bound and Spirit-connected Mediatrix into the
    Judaeo-American neo-Calvinist picture of the world, where Jews are
    always right and the church is always wrong. That is why he turned
    everything upside down; the New York Times spread its fame and the
    public bought it. In Russia, he wouldn’t be able to misrepresent: here,
    the Lady reigns supreme, and the ideas of Compassion and Connection to
    nature and spirit wait to be unleashed.

    II

    Will it happen? Russia is at the crossroads. While new-found freedom of
    creativity, publications and religious freedom are very important
    achievements, probably they could have been had without the great social
    cost the Russians were forced to pay. Their national assets - from oil
    and gas to land and factories - were privatised and taken over by a
    small group of extremely well-connected oligarchs. Now Western companies
    try and buy these assets. Russian industry is in poor shape;
    de-industrialisation proceeds unhindered. Once an advanced country of
    great science and modern industry, Russia is being converted into a raw
    materials’ supplier. Though oil money makes this decline relatively
    comfortable for many Russians, in case of economic downturn catastrophe
    is inevitable.

    Russians feel themselves threatened by the aggressive US drive to
    acquire military bases and political influence in the ex-USSR republics.
    The Orange revolution in the Ukraine and the possibility of NATO forces
    entering this Slav hinterland made the threat acute. Russian James
    Bonds, Putin’s ex-colleagues from St Petersburg branch of the State
    Security, are strongly represented in the state apparatus; usually such
    people - like George Bush the Senior - are considered patriotic chaps,
    but now the Russians are worried not only by their lack of liberalism
    and corruption, but also by their inability to meet the American
    challenge and their readiness to give in to American demands, including
    the much discussed question of a US presence at Russian nuclear
    facilities. The media is concentrated in a few hands; though as opposed
    to the West, there is a prominent state-owned media, but it is also
    quite pro-Western or provides poor-quality entertainment.

    At the May Day demo, the Reds demanded just one hour a day on the state
    TV to be devoted to their programmes: this exceedingly humble request is
    not likely to be met. Meanwhile, TV broadcasts Swan Lake and concerts of
    rock groups, while political discussion is kept under wraps. The Reds
    and the Nationalists are unhappy with the regime, for it is not doing
    enough to stop embezzlement, corruption, privatisation,
    de-industrialisation and impoverishment of the people. Though the regime
    took up some of their slogans, their words remain words only and are not
    accompanied by action.

    But the Reds and the Nationalists are not in fighting shape. They were
    defeated in 1993, when Yeltsin shelled the Parliament and took
    dictatorial powers. In 1996, the Red leader Zuganov actually won the
    presidential election, but the results were falsified, and Zuganov did
    not dare ‘to do a Yushchenko’ and forcibly take what was his by right.
    Since then, the Reds suffer from a certain weakness. This could change
    because of an alliance with two outsider groups.

    A new force, National Bolsheviks led by Edward Limonov, a charismatic
    poet, are anything but vegetarian. Very young, practically teenagers or
    in their early twenties, the NBP made a few spectacular actions:
    takeovers of ministries and even of the President public reception
    office. They carry out an unusual form of ‘terror’ - instead of bombs,
    they throw eggs, rotten tomatoes and pies, slapstick-comedy-style, into
    politicians and officials’ faces. The authorities were duly terrified
    and meted out a five-year jail sentence for a well-aimed pie. Some forty
    NBP young men and women are now in jail, but their readiness to go into
    action where others just talk made them the cutting edge of the
    opposition. They are courted now by Communists and Liberals alike. At
    the May Day demo, Limonov was standing next to Zuganov and Rogozin,
    leaders of much bigger parliamentary parties.

    The second force is quite different. These are a mixture of liberals and
    neo-liberals. Their numbers are tiny, their two parties could not even
    make it to the Parliament. They also had a demonstration on May Day at
    some distance from the main event; it was attended by two or three dozen
    people. But they have a lot of money and strong positions in the media,
    business and power structures. They are also dissatisfied with Putin;
    they want to speed up privatisation, open the country for foreign
    investors, privatise social housing, bring in immigrants, remove
    limitations of free movement within Russia, withdraw from Chechnya and
    win release of UKOS boss Hodorkovsky.

    Though their demands are the very opposite to those of the Reds and the
    Nationalists, there is a tentative coalition of these groups against the
    President. The Reds and the Nationalists feel they can use some of the
    Liberals’ media access and money to advance their agenda; the Liberals
    need the masses mobilised by the Reds and the active fighters of NBP. In
    return, NBP dropped its more radical slogans and now speaks for greater
    freedom and democracy, for amnesty and general softening of oppressive
    policing.

    All sides in the new setup believe in their ability to come out the top
    dog. The liberals are certain they will eventually get the power in the
    land; but so do the Reds and the Nationalists. The liberals have a
    precedent of the Ukraine to go by. There, Communists and Nationalists
    supported Yushchenko and installed pro-American neo-liberal regime. In
    case of a revolution, the liberals will rely upon their connection with
    the West, their media power and political sophistication.

    That is why some opposition forces in Russia prefer to support the
    President as the lesser evil. These supporters of the President include
    Left.ru, our Moscow friends, a very good left group, and the "Eurasia"
    of Alexander Dugin, an important and much admired Russian Orthodox
    thinker. They feel that the revolution will be utilised by their
    enemies, and the enemies of Russia. They say that they already tried to
    support the liberal agenda in 1991, and this experience cured them from
    entering such alliances.

    Their opponents say that the President is under American control anyway;
    he gave up the Russian positions in Cuba and Ukraine, Georgia and
    Vietnam. He carries on privatisation. Though he speaks like a Red
    nationalist, his actions follow the liberal blueprint. They also feel
    that an ‘Orange’ revolution is inevitable: the Americans are fomenting
    it, and ordinary people are dissatisfied with the regime. With the
    support of the liberals, they can create instability and hope for the
    best. "Let us enter the melee," as Lenin used to say, "and sort out our
    strategy later".

    Their slogan is ‘After February, October’ - a reference to the events of
    fateful 1917. The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar as is sometimes
    claimed; it was achieved by the liberal Westernisers who seized power in
    February 1917 in order to introduce full-blown capitalism in Russia; but
    the Russian soul had a very strong faith-based rejection of Mammon. Thus
    a few months later, in October 1917, the Bolsheviks kicked the Mammonite
    liberals out. While now the liberals intend to replicate their Ukrainian
    success, their tactical partners hope to repeat the 1917 feat. It is not
    impossible: Even a few months before it occurred, nobody expected the
    Bolshevik victory of October 1917. Indeed, the liberal revolutionaries,
    the victors of the February revolution, were well-positioned to rule. In
    order to win, the Bolsheviks cooperated with the German General Staff,
    with New York Jewish bankers and even with British Intelligence - but in
    the end they dispatched their yesteryear supporters without a thank you.

    It is a dangerous game, but revolutions usually are. Should we be
    satisfied with the ‘lesser evil’ or may we try and gain the whole lot? I
    have no clear-cut answer. While a return to Soviet Communism is as
    unlikely as restoration of the Pravoslav Empire, the creative forces of
    the Russians may still move mankind forward, out of its present impasse.
    The divine spark in Man’s soul is not easy to extinguish, the Spirit
    will win as sure as Christ is Risen.

    Resurrection Sunday 2005, Moscow