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1 Russian moral traditions before 1917
It is impossible to understand the moral and spiritual culture of late Soviet Russia without considering some of the ideas and practices that were important in Russia before 1917. Certain things need to be highlighted if what happened in the late twentieth century is to be put into context, and some of the longer-term continuities in Russian spiritual culture adequately established. Russians were always drawn to ethical ideals, but by the late nineteenth century at least two major ascetic traditions had established themselves and were in various ways permeating Russian life: the monastic ‘hesychast’ tradition with its roots in Byzantine Orthodoxy and beyond, and the secular moralism of the Russian intelligentsia, which originated with certain trends in the Enlightenment. In addition to these two intellectual tendencies, Russian literature started to play a defining role in the moral formation of intellectuals. Political, economic and social factors must also be taken into account.
Language and religion played a vital role in the formation of Russian attitudes to conscience. Etymology is important, because the central conveyor of the idea of conscience in Russia was the Russian language itself. It is important to remember that the Bolsheviks criticised Russian tsarism while at the same time deploying the Russian language itself. The dissident poet, Yosif Brodskii, whose trial in 1964 was an important moment in the growth of the dissident movement, stated in one of his essays: ‘Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them comes a moment when centers cease to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but languages.’1 The moral vocabulary of Russian civilisation continued to operate during the Soviet era, and the mentalities of the dissidents and party reformers owed much to it.
Russia owed its moral and religious vocabulary to Byzantine Orthodox culture and more generally to the Graeco-Roman civilisation that it grew out of. The Russian word for conscience ‘sovest” was borrowed from Church Slavonic, and was a translation of the Greek word synedeisis.2 The Byzantine understanding of conscience was partly derived from the Stoic conception of natural law. This found expression in Justinian’s law code of 534AD, which became the foundation of the Byzantine legal tradition. Cicero, who helped to formulate these ideas, described conscientia as ‘a “knowing with” … a moral awareness or capacity for judgment, a knowing in company with oneself’.3 The Russian word for ‘conscience’ – sovest’ has the same associations. The prefix so, meaning ‘with’, and the suffix vest’, signifying knowledge, come together to mean something like ‘knowledge with’.
As well as ‘conscience’, the words for truth, istina and pravda, have always had a powerful resonance in Russian. As the Russian religious philosopher Pavel Florenskii observed, istina is related to the adjectives for true, authentic and real, istyi, istinnyi and istovyi. Florenskii also suggested that istina is connected to the Russian verb ‘to be’, est’, and thereby has ontological associations, although this remains unproven.4 The other Russian word for truth, pravda, also contains a range of associations. In his essay in Landmarks (1909), the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev juxtaposed philosophical truth, filosofskaya istina, with the intelligentsia’s truth, intelligentskaya pravda, thereby suggesting that pravda carried more practical associations. Berdyaev believed that the intelligentsia lacked a respect for istina, subordinating it to utilitarian considerations. At the same time, Berdyaev suggested that the Russian intelligentsia needed to unify the philosophical and practical dimensions of the word pravda; it was important that the intelligentsia found a way of combining its commitments to philosophical truth, pravda-istina, and truth as justice, pravda-spravedlivost’, so as to bring theory and practice together.5 Although the Bolsheviks attempted to take control of the word pravda by using it as the title of their party newspaper, the word retained its own broader religious and philosophical appeal throughout Soviet history. Solzhenitsyn used the word when in 1974 he paid tribute to people who continued to ‘live in the truth’ (‘ zhivet po pravde’).6
There are two words in the Russian moral lexicon for a lie: lozh’ and vran’e. Although there is overlap in the meaning of the words, lozh’ is used for lies of a more substantial and serious nature. When Solzhenitsyn issued ‘Live Not by the Lie’, it was this word that he used; and generally in late Soviet Russia, when people attacked the pervasive dishonesty of the country, it was this kind of lie that they had in mind. Vran’e, on the other hand, was traditionally regarded as a less important matter. Before the First World War in an essay, ‘Pan-Russian vran’e’, the writer Leonid Andreev argued that Russians have no talent for lying of the lozh’ kind, but that vran’e is as widespread as the aspen tree: ‘It pops up uninvited everywhere and chokes other varieties.’7 Dostoevskii also noted the prevalence of vran’e, stating in 1873 that there could hardly be any educated Russian who was not addicted to lying, often for the sake of hospitality or good social relations. Lying, he said, was so pervasive that people hardly noticed they were doing it; the truth was habitually considered prosaic and banal. In his view, the habit of never being really honest about oneself in public had been developing over a period of two hundred years.8
There are also two words for morality in Russian: moral’ and nravstvennost’. In the Soviet era, some writers used moral’ to refer to the subjectively moral dimension, and nravstvennost’ to the objective sphere, while others used them in the reverse sense. In the end, the difference between the two words is not clear, and in practice, most writers used the terms interchangeably. One writer suggests that the two words reflect quite closely the difference in German between Moralität and Sittlichkeit, as described by Hegel.9
Religion as well as language was vital in the formation of Russian moral attitudes. Following the moment when Prince Vladimir embraced Eastern Christianity in 988, Russian culture developed within an Orthodox framework. Certain themes are particularly important in Russian spiritual culture. One of these is the positive role of suffering in the life of the religious believer. Belief in the therapeutic role of suffering has a long heritage in Russian thought. One particularly Russian feature of the spirituality that developed in the early centuries of Russian Christianity was the idea of non-resistance to evil. Already at that time, there were accounts of suffering being welcomed by the sufferer; in 1015 the Princes Boris and Gleb apparently refused to struggle against murder by their elder brother Svyatopolk, and even invited murder upon themselves.10 According to the religious philosopher Georgii Fedotov, there then emerged a distinctive view of the Christian way of salvation; it was a spiritual tendency that involved an imitation of Christ’s self-humiliation and voluntary sacrificial death.11
Russian spirituality always had a powerful other-worldly and monastic dimension. Although early Russian Christianity had strongly social tendencies, from the fourteenth century onwards there was a divergence between the mystical and social dimensions. In Orthodox countries the hesychast debates of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the victory of those who promoted a contemplative spirituality. Hesychasm had its roots in the Eastern monasticism of the fourth century, in which monks who lived in solitude rather than in community were known as hesychasts. It emphasised the use of breathing techniques, ‘prayer of the mind’ and the ‘Jesus prayer’.12 Hesychasts believed that a direct, mystical knowledge of God was possible, and they downplayed secular concerns. In particular, a monk from Mount Athos, Grigorii Palamas (1296–1359) played an important part in defending hesychasm and making it central to an emerging pan-Orthodox world-view.13 Following the influence of St Sergius in Russia, hesychasm became central to the lives of the mystics of Russia’s northern forests, who cultivated poverty, silence and prayer.14 It has been suggested that the focus on personal piety and the possibility of direct access to God in the hesychast tradition involved an ‘Eastern anticipation of protestantism’.15
In the early sixteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church split into two groups: the ‘possessors’, whose religious ideals were practical and social and who came to be associated with St Joseph Volotskii, and the ‘non-possessors’, backers of St Nilus Sorskii, who embraced the hesychast traditions of the church. The divisions between the groups were intertwined with the struggles of the Russian state under Ivan III and Vasilii III for greater control over monastic lands. The Josephites were victorious, and the followers of Nilus were condemned as heretics. The hesychast movement then went underground for about two centuries, before re-emerging again in the eighteenth century. Its re-emergence was associated with the publication of The Philokalia in Russian. This was an anthology of ascetical and mystical texts initially compiled by Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth. A Slavonic version of this was published in 1793 by the Ukrainian monk, Paissii Velichkovskii, and it was subsequently followed by two Russian translations in 1857 and 1883, edited by the monk, Theophan the Recluse.16
The idea of ‘conscience’ was central in the texts of The Philokalia. According to Stephen Thomas, syneidisis (conscience) is understood in The Philokalia as part of the broader concept of nipsis, which means ‘watchfulness’. Syneidisis does not infallibly discern God’s voice in terms of right and wrong, as it does in the Western religious writings of Hutcheson, Butler or Newman, but is nevertheless ‘part of a conceptual system to describe ascesis, the spiritual struggle necessary for fellowship with God’. At the same time, it does not represent a secular autonomous faculty for the discernment of justice. Within the context of the call to fellowship with God, conscience condemns people when they experience a tension between the way things are and the way they ought to be; people thus sometimes experience a ‘pricking of conscience’ (katanixis).17
Conscience as syneidisis was used in a variety of ways in The Philokalia. St Philotheus of Sinai, for example, describes it as the ‘heart’s purity’ and the ‘soul’s mirror’, and St Peter of Damascus calls it ‘the natural knowledge given us by God’.18 St Mark the Ascetic suggests that conscience is ‘nature’s book’, and that ‘a good conscience is found through prayer, and pure prayer through the conscience’.19 Some ascetic thinkers believed that people could not act against their conscience without experiencing punishment; St Isaiah the Solitary declared: ‘If we do not obey our conscience, it will abandon us and we shall fall into the hands of our enemies, who will never let us go.’20
Dorotheus of Gaza suggested that when God created man, he breathed into him a divine spark that could illuminate the difference between right and wrong, but that since the fall that spark had become buried. However, he stated that divine revelation had through the law and the prophets, and the resurrection of Christ, given people the power to renew their consciences, if they were obedient to its promptings. According to Stephen Thomas, Dorotheus’s teaching encapsulates the basic elements of the Eastern Orthodox interpretation of conscience:
[In Dorotheus’ view] conscience is an originally innate capacity to judge of good and evil which in the context of fallen human nature has been obscured and which requires the divine Logos to uncover it. Even after the acceptance of faith, syneidisis can become opaque again, so that the life of faith is a continual fall-redemption-death-resurrection drama rather than a definable moment.’21
The victory of the Josephites in the early sixteenth century coincided with the spread of messianic ideas in Russia. The idea of Moscow as the Third Rome was likely first suggested in the reign of Ivan III (1462–1505), and marked the beginning of a strong messianic tradition, which particularly influenced Muscovite ideology. This tradition was also powerfully at work in the seventeenth century when, following his election as Patriarch in 1652, Metropolitan Nikon of Novgorod sought to reform various aspects of church ritual; notably congregations were informed that they should bow to the waist rather than to the ground, and to make the sign of the cross with three fingers rather than two. The reforms were introduced with little consultation. Furthermore, the fact that Nikon was trying to adapt Russian rituals to contemporary Greek forms was controversial, and there was widespread suspicion that westernising influences were at work.
The schism that resulted had a major effect on religious attitudes i...
