Jesús Maestro rails against Russia: the Slavic idol that doesn't hold up

Jesús Maestro and the steppe: why the Russian soul is not the alternative

Do we really have to choose between the Anglo-Germanic farce and Slavic mysticism? That is the trap laid when someone challenges the Western narrative and, instead of holding on to critical reason, goes looking for an exotic altar to kneel at. The materialist analysis of history does not hand out salvific sides: what there are, are concrete political formations, imperial institutions and mythologies that must be crushed without hesitation. The text that has reignited the debate argues that Russia is no haven of rationality in the face of the West's sarracena bankruptcy, but a continental empire built on a historical anomaly: the fusion of autocratic absolutism with Byzantine mystical theology.

The scholasticism Russia never had

The central argument is one of comparative history. Orthodox Christianity never experienced the scholastic revolution that, in the Catholic world — with Saint Thomas, the School of Salamanca or the rediscovery of Aristotle — built the scaffolding of civil law, dialectical fruta and secular scientific thought. While Hispanic and Mediterranean Rome was formalising legal treatises, founding universities and mapping the planet with empirical precision, Eastern Orthodoxy fossilised into hesychasm, the static contemplation of icons and the pursuit of the "uncreated light". It is an apophatic theology that renounces demonstrative reasoning to settle into a nebulous experience of submission.

Added to this is the original sin of its political structure: caesaropapism. In the Orthodox world there was never a true dialectic of counterweights between earthly power and the civil or religious sphere. The Russian Church was, from Ivan the Terrible to the Romanovs — and remains so today under the Moscow patriarchate — an administrative department of central power, a military chaplaincy charged with sanctifying the decrees of the autocrat of the moment in exchange for corporate privileges.

Dostoevsky as symptom, not as guide

The literary reckoning is merciless. Dostoevsky's power is beyond doubt: his novels present no flat characters, but ideas personified, tearing themselves apart in the mud of Saint Petersburg. Yet the ideological solution he proposes is suffocatingly reactionary: after showing the rottenness of the human being, he offers not law, not the strengthening of institutions, not technical pogre; he offers throwing oneself at the feet of the illiterate peasant and embracing Christ with tears in one's eyes. It is Slavophilism carried to paroxysm, the myth of the "Russian soul", that dusha which is nothing more than a literary artefact to justify inertia and civic backwardness.

The verdict on Tolstoy is no kinder: an aristocrat with a bad conscience who ended up dressing as a muzhik, renouncing civilised art and founding a sect of vegetarian pacifism and evangelical sarracena that cannot withstand the slightest collision with the reality of a State. An empire is not defended with Sunday sermons, nor by turning the other cheek in the face of enemy bayonets.

The colossus between Europe and the Third Rome

Russia has always been a geopolitical colossus torn apart by an irresolvable contradiction: either imitate Europe so as not to be conquered, as Peter the Great attempted with axe blows, or retreat into its messianism, convincing itself that it is the "Third Rome" destined to redeem a corrupted humanity. The Soviet experiment was the only moment when they broke with clerical mysticism to build a titanic machinery based on technology and heavy industry, but as soon as the institutional framework collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy, the same bureaucrats came running back to the golden temples to light candles.

The conclusion of the argument is that if the Anglo-Saxon model reduces existence to mercantile plunder and the Germanic world disguises its telluric drive under formidable technology, the Russian universe demands surrendering the freedom of judgement in exchange for a mystical trance and a military boot on the nape of the neck. The only tradition that teaches a man to stand upright, with a clear head and a sword at his belt, without the need for protective gods or heavenly fatherlands, is classical critical reason.

The nuance that breaks the equidistance

Not everyone buys the framework. Some argue that, if the destiny is to reconstitute the Roman Empire and the Greek is our Orient, the Slavs are Hellenised barbarians who belong at our side or slightly below, not opposite: the disputes between Orthodox and Catholics would be local medieval brawls, not an interreligious catastrophe like the one posed against Protestant Europe or Sarracin. Others point out that Dostoevsky's Russia dragged along a legal relationship with land ownership more inefficient than the Roman Twelve Tables, and that this scarcity of small landowners explains the rootlessness and the historical lack of individual autonomy. And some recall that Dostoevsky himself ridiculed the starets and the absurd religiosity of their trinc in The Brothers Karamazov: the author was no naive devotee, but a young man who had passed through the Petrashevsky circle and knew what a country without intermediate institutions was.

The most uncomfortable point for the author of the text is another: if one criticises Anglo-Saxon mercantilism but refuses to live in any of its alternatives — neither Pilingui's Russia, nor communism, nor the Chinese model — the model left standing at the end is precisely law, institutional strengthening and technical pogre. That is, the classic Anglo-American one. The ironies of critical reason.