The Problem of Russia

Hear Chesterton, this is from 1906:

There is one of these pseudo-historical phrases in connection with Russia which is especially irritating to the intellect. Whatever else you call Russia, do not call it medieval. The standing peculiarity of Russia is that it is the one country in Europe which never passed through the Middle Ages at all. It has none of the distinctive things which the Middle Ages made. Little or nothing of the great Gothic architecture, the cathedrals and the churches; little or nothing of the typically medieval universities; little or nothing of the chivalry and knighthood; little or nothing of the elaborate legalities deduced from the Roman Law. But there is one example of a medieval thing with a medieval name which towers above all others. If Russia were medieval she would probably have always kept, at least in form, that strictly medieval thing, a Parliament.

The peasant in Russia is pre-medieval, and I suppose pre-historic. The government and national direction of Russia is post-medieval, is almost modern. The whole thing began in the eighteenth century, and it began as one of the despotisms of the eighteenth century. Those despotisms all had a definite character. One of them was destroyed in France. One of them survived in Russia.

From the essay THE SINS OF THE RUSSIAN PRINCES, in the collection LUNACY AND LETTERS which was published in 1958 (26 years after the author of each essay was dead) by SHEED AND WARD LTD. which would seem to be the editors of the Catholic Truth Society.

I would tend to agree when I consider the condition of peasants. In England or France, they went (at least from the Plague of 1347 on), very largely, from being serfs into being peasants who were free. In Russia, farm workers went from 17th C. on from being free to being serfs.

In France, the process was completed in 1789 - one of the tolerably good things about that otherwise pretty bleak 4th of August - and in Russia on the contrary, the Revolution saved the process from a reversal attempted by the last Czar. First a Czar tries to give peasants freedom, then the Revolutionaries, by their hatred of Kulaks, reversed the process and made them serfs again. But under so incompetent masters that Moscow needed to plunder Kuban and Ukraine for wheat during the Holodomor.

The big mistake of Nicolas II in politics was, he thought he could give Russians a kind of modernity, perhaps even freedom, by introducing industrialism. But industrialism was reversing to a kind of slavery, after free peasantry had introduced freedom. So, industrialism without a well rooted free peasantry is bad. And it made a Revolution that was worse. And the semi-heirs of that Revolution (even those who have ceased to demonise the Czars) still idealise industrialism and still are indifferent to small property - as Putin proved in the lockdowns, while they were regional (as I recall) the businessmen who did get into difficulty were not compensated, as the Russian ruling class to this day seems to see small property as a quaint, perhaps agreeable (from time to time) thing, but not as a necessity for dignity and for freedom.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Lewis IX
25.VIII.2022

Apud Carthaginem sancti Ludovici Noni, Regis Francorum et Confessoris, vitae sanctitate ac miraculorum gloria praeclari, cujus ossa postmodum Lutetiam Parisiorum sunt relata.