ANOTHER VICTORY DAY in Moscow — sixty-five years now since the Allied Powers defeated the crisply attired Axis of Nazi Germany and her slightly foppish cohort Fascist Italy. Russia commemorates V-E Day a day “late” because the German instrument of surrender entered into force at 23:01 CET on May 8, 1945 — by which time it was already May 9 in Moscow. For this reason most countries within the ex-Soviet sphere celebrate the end of the Second World War a day later than in western Europe. It is also customary on this day for patriotic citizens to wear the orange-and-black ‘Ribbon of St. George’, which recalls the Military Order of the Holy Great-Martyr and the Triumphant George established in 1769 and revived in 1994. The Order of St. George is the highest military honour awarded by Russia after the paramount Order of St. Andrew.

The military parade in Red Square was accompanied by the usual aeronautical fly-past. Above, from right to left, helicopters carry the Russian flag, the Armed Forces flag, the Naval Ensign (a blue saltire on a white field, the inverse of the Scottish flag), the Air Force flag, and the flags of other components of the Russian Armed Forces.

Very gradually and without much publicity, the Russian government has begun to replace the red stars that top the towers of the Kremlin and neighbouring buildings with the double-headed eagles of old.

What made this the most remarkable Victory Day parade so far was the unprecedented move of allowing foreign soldiers to take part. Governments of the countries to which the Soviet Union was allied in 1945 were invited by the Russian government to send delegations of troops to take part in the march-past. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (with 57 seats the second-largest party in Russia’s parliament after the 315 seats of the conservative ‘United Russia’ party) expressed its outrage at the inclusion of foreign troops in the Victory Day parade and responded with protests.

This even included a contingent of soldiers, sailors, and airmen from Poland, a country which was the victim of an unprovoked invasion by the Soviet Union in 1939, though Stalin later forged a disingenuous alliance with the Polish government before setting up his own putative Polish power. The Soviets, of course, were responsible for the notorious massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers at the forest of Katyn.

A detachment from 2nd Battalion the Welsh Guards marched in the parade…

A number of militaries from the former members of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union also participated, including Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.

With a number of high-ranking officials and heads of state in the reviewing stand, security was tight. Snipers were also placed at prominent points to take down any spectators who felt inclined to make Yakoff Smirnoff jokes (“In Soviet Russia, car drives you!”).

Following the parade, Russians engaged in the traditional Victory Day piss-up.

The evening beheld a spectacular pyrotechnic display, a brilliant festival of lights over the Kremlim, smack dab in the heart of deepest Muscovy. The Russians know how to put on a good show.

I can’t remember who it was that, watching the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, said never in his right mind did he expect that within just a decade Washington would be the chief propagator of worldwide revolution and the Kremlin would be a relatively conservative power, guarding jealously its local sphere of influence. What could add more of a dash of the absurd (and yet, eminently sensible) than the Russian government, facing the worst crisis of population decline of any major power, promoting larger families with a poster campaign quoting the conservative American philosopher George Santayana.

I recently discovered that we receive the television channel Russia Today in our humble little flat here in Stellenbosch, and have spent the past few days enjoying it. They are shockingly truthful (almost nasty) in their reporting of international relations, in so far as the truth — for the moment — tends to favour the Russian case in world affairs, and make NATO look like a bunch of ninnies. Saturday — May 9 — was Victory Day in Russia, in which the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War is commemorated and celebrated. RT showed many minutes of splendid highlights from the great parade in Red Square, and I just sat and enjoyed it.

The Russkies still know how to do a military march-past and make it look impressive.

The President and the Prime Minister enjoyed the spectacle, which included a display of some of the latest of Russia’s investment in defense technology. No doubt there was also a bit of schadenfreude, as Mikhail Saakashvili — the fatuous and incompetent US-backed president of neighbouring Georgia who provoked a military conflict with Russia last year — was simultaneously observing massive opposition-led demonstrations against his autocratic rule in the capital of the Caucasian republic.

The best part of the parade for me was the impressive aeronautical display by the Russian Air Force. Here two larger planes accompanied by jet fighters time their refueling demonstration for their appearance over Red Square.

More aeronauticual displays.

Here a radar plane flies in behind one of the Kremlin cathedrals. I was tempted to entitle this one “The reactionary tendency in Russian architecture has led airports to design control towers in the form of traditional onion domes”.

A new 100,000-square-foot space displaying works from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg will open in Amsterdam this June. The Hermitage Amsterdam will be located in the Amstelhof, a former home for the elderly built in 1683 by the Dutch Reformed Church and transformed into a modern exhibition space by Hans van Heeswijk Architects. The opening exhibition, “At the Russian Court” — a “a deeply researched exploration of the opulent material culture, elaborate social hierarchy and richly layered traditions of the Tsarist court at its height in the nineteenth century” — will display 1,800 works from the massive collection in St. Petersburg and continue until the end of January 2010.

“The opening of Hermitage Amsterdam is the culmination of nearly two decades of planning,” stated Ernst W. Veen, Managing Director of Hermitage Amsterdam. “At the same time, it is a continuation of more than 300 years of close ties between Amsterdam and St. Petersburg, going back to Tsar Peter the Great’s fabled residence in our city.”

The Hermitage Amsterdam will include a café-restaurant (with the appropriately riparian name “Neva”), two museum shops, a research and study center, and an auditorium. The neighbouring Neerlandia building, which the Hermitage has used to show temporary exhibitions since 2004, will be transformed into the family-centered Hermitage for Children.

Two large exhibition halls will be complemented by forty-two smaller chambers for displaying works from the Russian museum. The landscape artist Michael van Gessel will design the courtyard garden, while retaining the old chestnut trees that currently grace the space.

The main entrance to the Hermitage Amsterdam will be from its frontage on the Amstel river. A new jetty is under construction in front of the main façade to allow direct nautical access.

Ingress to the museum will not be through the seventeenth-century doorway atop the front staircase; it is, in fact, a fake. The main entrances to the Amstelhof during its days as a residence for the elderly were actually in the flanking pavilions. The false door was placed as a unifying element for the façade, and to hide the lofty pulpit in the Kerksaal (church hall) that prevented a window from being placed there. Instead, the street grade in front of the Amstelhof will be lowered to alter the former goods entrance to a more suitable height. It’s disappointing that a more appropriate entrance was not envisioned during the design process, instead of scuttling through a modified workman’s door.

The Hermitage Amsterdam plans to mount two large-scale temporary exhibitions each year, alongside a rotating display from the museum’s collection. The grand opening in June will be celebrated with a White Nights Festival, with concerts and events along the Amstel, and the museum remaining open for twenty-four hours.

Given the youthful residence of Muscovy’s greatest emperor in the city, it seems appropriate that Amsterdam was chosen for this effort to promote Russia’s rich cultural and artistic heritage. Indeed, Peter the Great almost certainly saw the Amstelhof while he studied shipbuilding in the Netherlands during his 18-month “grand embassy”.

“Over the past years, we have found many ways to extend our artistic and intellectual resources beyond Russia’s borders,” stated Mikhail B. Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (and Chairman of the Board of the Hermitage Amsterdam). “However, we have worked with a partner to create only one great, freestanding Russian exhibition venue in the West: Hermitage Amsterdam.”

THIS MAP displaying the results of the 2007 general election for the Polish parliament is overlaid with an outline of the nineteenth-century border between the German and Russian empires. The areas formerly ruled by the German Kaiser tend to back the right-wing liberal Platforma Obywatelska (“Civic Platform”) party, while those formerly ruled by the Czar tend to support the conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (“Law and Justice”) party. (The green represents the centrist-agrarian Polish People’s Party, while the dark red represents the already-defunct “Left and Democrats” coalition).

Source: Strange Maps

Here’s a film that has it all: naval battles, mutiny, revolution, civil war, brave men, beautiful women, sin, sacrifice, and betrayal on multiple levels. But “Admiral” («Адмиралъ»), which opened in Russia this month, is notable for another reason: this is the first major film depicting the tsarist White Russians as the good guys to receive at least part of its funding from the Russian government. The eponymous hero of the film is Alexander Kolchak, the naval commander and polar explorer who later led part of the White Army fighting the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.

Born into a naval family in St. Petersburg in 1874, Kolchak graduated from the Imperial Naval College at age twenty and began service in the tsar’s fleet. He made three polar expeditions with the Russian Academy of Sciences, including the one in which Baron Eduard von Toll, renowned expert in Siberian paleontology, went missing and died. For his efforts in exploration, Kolchak was awarded the highest honor of the Russian Geographical Society.

In the Russo-Japanese War, Kolchak commanded the Sokol-class destroyer Serdityi and sunk the Japanese cruiser Takasago. When the war ended, he participated in the rebuilding of the Russian Navy which had been severely reduced by the Asian war, and was on the Naval General Staff from 1906.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Kolchak was a high-ranking officer in the Baltic Fleet combating the rather significant German Navy. Withing two years, however, he was the youngest officer to be promoted to Vice-Admiral, and replaced Admiral Andrei Eberhardt as Commander of the Black Sea Fleet in August 1916.

Kolchak was removed from his command after a series of mutinies and disturbances among the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet contemporary to the upheavals of the February Revolution of 1917. He was sent to visit the Allied nations as a military observer and envoy instead, and travelled to Britain, America, and Japan. When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, Kolchak volunteered his services to the British Army, and the General Staff seriously considered sending him to Mesopotamia. Whitehall, however, felt Kolchak would be more useful fighting the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the admiral returned to Russia and joined the White forces with which he gained his greatest renown.

Twentieth Century Fox got behind the director Andrei Kravchuk’s film of Admiral Kolchak’s life, with most of the funding coming from the state-controlled Channel One. The film has opened in 1,247 cinemas across Russia — a record — and Variety reports that by its first weekend “Admiral” had earned $13.2 million from over 2 million ticket sales. Kolchak the movie looks well-set to recoup the budget invested, $20 million. “While the film’s budget does not sound big to a U.S. audience,” the Discovery Institute’s Russia Blog writes, “Russian filmmakers have proved once again that they can outpace Hollywood’s production with a tenth of a Hollywood film’s budget. Also, unlike Hollywood, most of Russia’s blockbusters are historic novels put on film.”

Comparing “Admiral” to the Western box-office hit “Titanic”, co-producer Anatoly Maximov told Reuters that the film “is a story of love amid extreme catastrophe but this time it’s not a ship which is sinking, it’s the entire country”.

“It’s very important we talk about our history, our country, our officers,” director Andrei Kravchuk said. “If we understand that we had such a history, such people… we can fill ourselves with dignity, and the notion of motherland and patriotism, which can seem worn and tarnished, gains new, concrete, visible meaning.”

“Admiral” is but the latest in the recent revival in Russian cinema. Eighty-five Russian films were released in 2007 and another 200 are currently in production, compared to just forty-two releases a decade before. While much of the funding for this flourishing industry comes from the commercial sector, the Russian government is estimated to provide as much as a third of all funding for Russian films. The cinematography department of the Ministry of Culture invested $80 million in feature films in 2007, a figure that rose to $85 million for this current year.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the current renaissance is that most of the films have been long high-quality historical dramas that have also proved successful at Russian box offices. Subjects and time periods have ranged from as long ago as Alexander Nevsky to as recently as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but most tend to take place during the rule of the tsars.

“Admiral” also shows the help the White Army received from Great Britain, the United States, and France. These three countries all sent troops to fight alongside the Whites, who also counted Poles and Czechs among their ranks. It was the “Czechoslovaks” who betrayed Admiral Kolchak in the end, stealing a great portion of the tsarist gold reserve and high-tailing it back to Prague where the legionnaires set up a bank with their ill-gotten gains.

The creation of “Admiral” is a most welcome development, and one that we hope will be imitated in Russia (as it obviously will be) but elsewhere in Europe and the European diaspora. It’s heartening that both Russia is slowly but surely coming to terms with the great evil of her revolution. Equally, however, it is a great disappointment that the United States not only fails to grasp the evil of its revolution, but still foolishly persists in propagating it around the globe, often at the point of a gun.

Trailers & more pictures after the break.

“Alexander: Battle of the Neva”

“1612″

“The Sovereign’s Servant”

“The Island” (specially praised by the Patriarch of Moscow)

“9th Company”

“Russian Ark” (the film composed of one shot completed in a single take)

And of course there is the successful Night Watch and its sequel, Day Watch.

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the most famous Russian writer and historian of our age, has died at eighty-nine years of age. Solzhenitsyn was the earliest to bring first-hand knowledge of the Gulag, the Soviet system of prison colonies and labour camps, to wider Western attention. For this noble task, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and expelled from the Soviet Union four years later, returning in 1994. After the fall of the Soviet regime, he despised Boris Yeltsin’s incompetence, identifying 1998 as the low point of Russia’s recent history. “Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order,” Solzhenitsyn explained. “I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits.”

He gave cautious support to the presidency of Vladimir Putin, and was pleased that while, in his words, “Moscow is still communist”, there was a growing readiness under Putin to admit (and even broadcast on state television) the crimes and outrages of the Soviet regime.

“Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible — a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments.”

Influenced by his experience in exile in both Switzerland and New England, Solzhenitsyn insisted on the need for local self-government in Russia. “Today I continue to be extremely worried by the slow and inefficient development of local self-government. But it has finally started to take place. In Yeltsin’s time, local self-government was actually barred on the regulatory level, whereas the state’s ‘vertical of power’ (i.e. Putin’s centralized and top-down administration) is delegating more and more decisions to the local population. Unfortunately, this process is still not systematic in character.”

Solzhenitsyn expressed further disappointment with the new Western imperialism being waged against Russia, embodied in the 1999 War against Serbia which turned so many Russian minds against the Western powers they had previously been quite friendly to.

In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn was asked whether he was afraid of death:

“No, I am not afraid of death any more. When I was young the early death of my father cast a shadow over me — he died at the age of 27 — and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one’s existence.”

When the interviewer from Der Spiegel wished him many more years of “creative life”, Solzhenitsyn calmly responded “No, no. Don’t. It’s enough.”

Born in the Caucasian spa town of Kislovodsk in 1918 just a year-and-a-month after the Bolshevik revolution, Solzhenitsyn’s father was a wealthy self-made man who died in a hunting accident shortly before his birth. He was raised in humble circumstances in a Russia mired by civil war that did not end until the last tsarist general, his back to the Pacific Ocean, surrendered in 1923. All land was confiscated by the Soviet government and the Solzhenitsyns’ holdings were turned into a collective farm.

His well-educated mother had encouraged Alexander’s academic disposition and raised him in the Russian Orthodox Church. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University while simultaneously taking correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History. He had not questioned the Soviet apparatus until his service in the Red Army during the Second World War, for which he was twice decorated. In February 1945, he wrote a letter home from Soviet-occupied East Prussia in which he included a passing comment that questioned Stalin’s handling of the war. The letter, like all letters sent home by soldiers, was opened and read by the security apparatus. Solzhenitsyn was arrested, beaten, interrogated, and four months later given the standard sentence of eight years in a labour camp followed by permanent internal exile.

It was during his imprisonment and internal exile, when he spent every night writing in secret, that Solzhenitsyn rejected Marxism and developed the religious philosophy for which he became known. In 1962, with the approval of Nikita Khrushchev, his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published. It was the first book ever printed in the Soviet Union to deal openly with the system of forced labour in prison camps and caused a sensation both in the USSR and the West. In 1964, Khrushchev was ousted by the Soviet politburo, and Solzhenitsyn’s moment in the sun came to a swift conclusion as he was denied permission to publish and had some of his papers seized by the KGB.

Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, but refused to receive the award for fear that he would not be allowed to return to the Soviet Union and so be separated from his family. In 1974, the government of the USSR deported him to West Germany and stripped him of his Soviet citizenship. Feted in the West, he spent some time in Switzerland before accepting an invitation to reside at Stanford University in California. In 1976 he moved to the woodland town of Cavendish in the state of Vermont, which remained his home for the next eighteen years of his life. Two years later, Harvard University awarded him an honorary degree, and the incident took place which ended the West’s love affair with the exiled Soviet dissident.

Giving the 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard University, Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered a sharp and stunning rebuke to the modern West, repudiating its liberalism, materialism, and supremacism.

“There is this belief,” Solzhenitsyn said, “that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different.”

He went on to describe the mentality which led the Western elites to adopt multiculturalism and pluralism, while they simultaneously lacked the courage to defend their Western culture or to challenge Communist governments which did not have the support of the peoples they governed. Solzhenitsyn described this lack of courage as “the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days”.

“The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

Solzhenitsyn went on to condemn the materialism of Western culture, fostered by the welfare state. He argued that the extreme safety and prosperity of the Western world caused Western people to be unwilling and reluctant to defend the most essential and important values that their culture and tradition were based upon, for fear of relinquishing the “physical splendour” they enjoy “to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about”.

“Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.”

The wide freedom allowed by the rule of law in the West is admirable, Solzhenitsyn argued, but in these circumstances it led to a system in which morality and legality were confused, whereby what is legal is automatically also considered acceptable:

“One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it. I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”

The hyperindividualism of the West, Solzhenitsyn argued, hampered the necessary civil good from being enacted:

“A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; there are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him, parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that every single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Actually an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself; from the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. Thus mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of restrictions imposed by democracy.”

“Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”

“And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists’ civil rights. There are many such cases.”

“Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society.”

“The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.”

Again referring to the legalism of Western society, Solzhenitsyn criticized the attitude which purported to refuse morality a place in political decisionmaking:

“Very well known representatives of your society say: we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria.”

“… no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.”

But what, Solzhenitsyn asks, is the cause of these unfortunate circumstances in which the West finds itself? “How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about?”

“How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.”

“This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.”

“This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.”

“However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.”

“As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.”

“We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the [Communist] East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.”

“It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. … Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?”

“If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.”

“This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”

Harvard was not amused. It had identified a genius, it had awarded him laurels, it had graced him with earthly dignities, but he had seen through all its pretensions and glanced the rotten core of its very soul. Harvard is one of the highest temples to Man in our realm. It was founded as a Protestant seminary, and Man’s usurpation of God’s role is inherent (if only implicitly) in Protestantism. In Catholic Christianity, not even the Pope can change the Truth; in Protestant Christianity, every single individual person is the arbiter of every single aspect of doctrine, belief, and morality. Catholicism is authority, Protestantism is the absence of authority, and the liberal Enlightenment thinking which easily superseded Protestantism at Harvard is the negation of authority.

Communism has ceased to play a part on the world stage, but if Solzhenitsyn is remembered centuries from now I do not think it will be for his criticism of Communism but for his repudiation of the West’s rejection of Christianity and it’s embrace of the Enlightenment. His experience of the prison camps of the East, in which humanity was despised, allowed Solzhenitsyn to see through the vain pomp and glory of the West, in which humanity is worshipped. Solzhenitsyn understood, to the incomprehension of the self-satisfied elites of our time and place, that it was neither communism nor capitalism, neither money nor equality, neither economics nor politics that should be worshipped, but only God.

May God in His mercy grant eternal rest to the soul of
Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
1918–2008

Christians in Russia yesterday solemnly remembered the brutal killing of the country’s Imperial Family by the Bolshevik revolutionaries 90 years earlier. Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina Alexandra, their daughters the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and the Tsarevich Alexei have all been added to the canon of saints of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Imperial Family were first officially recognized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church outside the Soviet Union in 1981, and the Moscow patriarchate extended the same recognition in 2000.

The Grand Duchess Elizabeth was particularly renowned for her holiness, which only augmented after the assasination of her husband, the Grand Duke Sergei, at the hands of a socialist revolutionary. St. Elizabeth visited the assassin in his cell urging him to repent, but he was obstinate and even refused a pardon from Nicholas II. She gave up everything she had, including her wedding ring, and founded the Convent of Martha and Mary, becoming its abbess. The Grand Duchess’s convent operated a hospital, pharmacy, orphanage, and chapel on its grounds to aide the poor, the sick, and the orphaned. Lenin ordered her arrest, and on July 17, St. Elizabeth and a number of her companions were hurled down a mineshaft by the Bolsheviks. Still alive, they began to sign hymns, and were only silenced after grenades were repeatedly thrown down the mineshaft. The relics of St. Elizabeth Romanov are enshrined at the Convent of St. Mary Magdalene (which she and her husband helped to found) on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

Pilgrims venerate an icon of Tsar St. Nicholas II outside the “Church on Blood in Honor of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land” which was built on the site of the Imperial Family’s execution.

The uniforms of the Kremlin guard regiments (below) were recently redesigned to look more like the uniforms of the Imperial Guard regiments from the time of Nicholas II.

Elsewhere: Murdered Tsar Nicholas II attracts loyalty and controversy (Gerald Warner)