RUSSIA IN AMERICA - An essay in universal history

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An essay in universal history
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16. RUSSIA IN AMERICA
But perhaps the most striking success of Russia as the Third Rome was on the American continent. In 1794 the Russian Holy Synod sent a mission to convert the Indians of Alaska to Orthodoxy. The mission was successful and by 1815 already had its first saint - St. Peter the Aleut, who was martyred by Roman Catholics in San Francisco. The most famous member of this mission was the Valaam monk St. Herman of Alaska, who died in 1837 and was canonized in 1970. And there were other saints sent into this mission-field.
"From 1823," writes Lebedev, "there begins a second special Church mission, whose most prominent representative turned out to be the young priest Fr. John Popov-Veniaminov, later Metropolitan Innocent of Moscow and Kolomna. This great and wonderful man was born in 1797 in the village of a poor village reader near Irkutsk. He finished his studies at the Irkutsk seminary, where he displayed great interest both in theological and in secular sciences. In 1823, with the whole of his family, wife and children, he arrived at the island of Unalaska and began his apostolic ministry among the Aleuts, Kadyaks, Eskimos and Indians of the west coast of Alaska and Northern California (the city of Novo-Arkhangelsk on the island of Sitka). Teaching the local inhabitants various arts and household crafts, he with their help built a church, introduced schools, work-houses and hospitals, and baptized thousands of natives without ever resorting to violence or any pressure, but acting only through love and the word of truth. Fr. John mastered six local languages, and studied and described the everyday life, manners and anthropology of the bribes, the local geography and climates, becoming a true father of the 'wild' peoples, or, as St. Herman of Alaska used to say about himself, their 'nanny'! For the Aleuts he composed an alphabet and translated the Gospel of Matthew and some necessary prayers and other books into their language. His works on the ethnography of the peoples of Alaska, California and the adjacent islands are still used in science to this day and are considered models. Even then, during his lifetime, they were highly valued by the academies of science of Russia and Europe! Father John Popov-Veniaminov continued the best traditions of the Russian missionaries of Siberia, the Altai and the Far East. In those times that was not simple, it demanded courage, asceticism. The point is that the interests of the apostolate of the Church in those places often contradicted the interests of the Russian-American Company (RAC), which traded in furs and sea animals. 'Industrial' people and RAC officials sometimes displayed cruelty, and sometimes were inclined mercilessly to exploit the natives, although one has to say that these were excesses, but not the rule! As a rule, even our 'industrials' behaved in a friendly and fraternal manner to the native population of America. Shelikhov considered marriages between Russian and Indians as very desirable. There were mixed marriages. The children from these marriages (Creoles) often turned out to be very capable people, while some of them attained high rank in state service in Russia. Catherine II and Paul I prescribed only friendly relations towards the natives under threat of punishment. A special decree of Emperor Alexander I ordered the RAC 'first of all to venerate humanity' in all the peoples of America, and in no case to resort to cruelty and violence. Russia often sent notes of protest to the USA, whose merchants sold firearms to the Indians. The USA replied that they were 'free', and that they could not ban this trade in death... But in the 19th century among our workers in RAC there were people who were completely foreign to Orthodox, who simply did not understand it (for example, the RAC's 'chronicler', Khlebnikov). And sometimes it was difficult for our missionaries to defined whom they had to enlighten first of all - the Aleuts and Indians, or our own people, the Russians!... In such circumstances only an all-encompassing (spiritual and secular) education of the apostles of America, like Fr. John Popov, could force some of the officials of RAC to venerate the Church and her missionary work. In 1840, on the recommendation of Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), who had become friends with Fr. John, Tsar Nicholas I appointed the priest Popov-Veniaminov, who had been widowed by this time and had accepted monasticism, as the first bishop of the newly formed Kamchatka, Kurile islands and Aleut diocese. When the Tsar gave this name to the diocese, people remarked to him: 'But Your Majesty! There is not a single church on the Kurile islands!' 'Build them!' snapped the Emperor. That is how the new hierarch of the Russian Church Innocent (Veniaminov) appeared..."206
Metropolitan Philaret said of St. Innocent, who later succeeded him in the see of Moscow, that he had the apostolic spirit. His labours, together with those of Archimandrite Macarius in the Altai and Archbishop Nicholas in Japan, give the lie to the idea that Russian Orthodoxy in this period was "ossified" or "paralysed".207 In fact, the labours of these men, supported by the Tsars, proveD both the vitality of Russian Orthodoxy and the continuing vitality of the Church-State "symphony".
In the Tsar's encouragement of the American mission "was reflected, as in a drop of water, the essence of the politics of the Third Rome - the widening of the boundaries of the Church. In her expansion to Alaska and Northern California, to the possessions of Japan and China, and to the sands of Central Asia, Russia derived not only commercial and military-strategic advantages (although these, too, were not of little importance), but brought to the new lands the light of her Orthodox Faith and spirituality. Besides, as has already been pointed out, she related to the peoples of these new lands with great respect. In contrast to the expansion of the Roman Catholic church, the Russian Orthodox Church and state did not convert one people to Christianity by forcible means! Amidst the pagan tribes of Siberia, the North, the Far East and America, the Russian spiritual missions were very active in preaching the Word of God, building churches and monasteries, hospitals, homes for invalids and the elderly, providing medical help and what would now be called 'social security', often quarrelling because of these good works with the local secular bosses. As regards the Mohammedan peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, here there was almost no missionary work. After the unsuccessful attempts to create spiritual missions for the Tatars and Kalmyks in the 18th century, Russia renounced special ecclesiastical missions in Mohammedan areas distinguished for their strong predeliction for Islam. Orthodoxy was not imposed on the Mohammedan people; they were left to live freely in accordance with their own customs, but Orthodox churches naturally arose on their lands for the Russians who had settled there, so that all those desiring it among those peoples received the opportunity to learn Orthodoxy!"208
However, in 1867 the Tsar sold Alaska and the Aleutian islands to the United States for $7.2 million. Could the need to pay for the armies in Central Asia have motivated this unexpected decision? Or the cost of defending 10,000 Russians and 40,000 Indians against the expected influx of American explorers and settlers? If so, then it was a mistake - there were gold deposits under the Alaskan soil.209 But more importantly, Alaska, in contrast to Central Asia, had proved to be fertile territory for Russian missionaries, and the Indians were therefore not merely colonial subjects but brothers in Christ. What could justify the abandonment of thousands of brothers in Christ to a heretical government (even if the church buildings remained in the hands of the Orthodox, and permission was granted to the Russian Spiritual Mission to continue its work in Alaska)? Was not the Third Rome obliged to protect the interests of her converts in the New World?
As it turned out, Divine Providence protected the Orthodox Indians where the Russian tsar did not: in 1917 Russia herself came under the yoke of the atheists, so from that point of view it may have been just as well that the Orthodox Alaskans found themselves within the borders of another State.
17. “THE NEW MAN"
Soon after ascending the throne, Tsar Alexander II lifted the ban on travel abroad and the limitations on the numbers of university students; censorship on the press was eased. The Decembrists, whom Nicholas I had repressed, were allowed to return from exile - Prince Volkonsky, a relative of Tolstoy, was given a rapturous reception in Moscow… These developments, together with the fact that the leading Slavophiles of the pre-war period, such as Khomiakov and Kireyevsky, died soon after the war, meant that by the beginning the ideological struggle was shifting in favour of the westerners. Only this new wave of westernism was much more radical than its predecessor… The generation that came of age after the Crimean War was characterized by a sharp and categorical rejection of the values of their fathers. The latter, whether they were Slavophiles or Westerners, were generally believers in God and lovers of their country. But the sons were almost invariably Westerners – and of the most extreme kind: not believers but positivists and atheists, not liberals but revolutionary socialists.
Perhaps the most typical representative of this new generation was Dmitri Pisarev. “Allow us, youths,” he wrote in May, 1861, “to speak, write and publish, allow us to shake off through our natural scepticism those things which have become stale, that clapped-out junk, which you call general authorities.’ ‘Here is the concluding word of our youth camp: what can be broken should be broken; that which withstands a blow can stay, but that which will fly off into fragments is rubbish; in any case beat to the right and to the left, no harm will come of it nor can come of it…’ ‘Literature in all its varieties must strike at one point; it must with all its powers emancipate the human person from those various restrictions which make him ashamed of his own thought, caste prejudices, the authority of tradition, the striving for a common ideal and all that outdated rubbish which hinders the living man from breathing and developing freely.”
In 1862 there appeared two novels that portrayed the “new man”: Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons... Chernyshevsky gave a positive portrayal of the new man in the figure of Rakhmetev. “This monolithic titan,” writes Orlando Figes, “who was to serve as a model for a whole generation of revolutionaries (including Lenin), renounces all the pleasures of life in order to harden his superhuman will and make himself insensible to the human suffering which the coming revolution is bound to create. He is a puritan and an ascetic: on one occasion he even sleeps on a bed of nails in order to stifle his sexual urges. He trains his body by gymnastics and lifting weights. He eats nothing but raw steak. He trains his mind in a similar way, reading ‘only the essential’ (politics and science) for days and nights on end until he has absorbed the wisdom of humankind. Only then does the revolutionary hero set out on his mission to ‘work for the benefit of the people’. Nothing diverts him from the cause, not even the amorous attentions of a young and beautiful widow, whom he rejects. The life he leads is rigorous and disciplined: it proceeds like clockwork, with so much time for reading every day, so much time for exercise and so on. Yet (and here is the message of the story) it is only through such selfless dedication that the New Man is able to transcend the alienated existence of the old ‘superfluous man’. He finds salvation through politics.
“Allowing the publication of Chernyshevsky’s novel was one of the biggest mistakes the tsarist censor ever made: for it converted more people to the cause of the revolution than all the works of Marx and Engels put together (Marx himself learned Russian in order to read it). Plekhanov, the ‘founder of Russian Marxism’, said that from that novel ‘we have all drawn moral strength and faith in a better future’. The revolutionary theorist Tkachev called it the ‘gospel’ of the movement; Kropotkin the ‘banner of Russian youth’. One young revolutionary of the 1860s claimed that there only three great men in history: Jesus Christ, St. Paul and Chernyshevsky. Lenin, whose own ascetic lifestyle bore a disturbing resemblance to Rakhmetev’s, read the novel five times in one summer. He later acknowledged that it had been crucial in converting him to the revolutionary movement. ‘It completely reshaped me,’ he told Valentinov in 1904. ‘This is a book which changes one for a whole lifetime.’ Chernyshevsky’s importance, in Lenin’s view, was that he had ‘not only showed that every right-thinking and really honest man must be a revolutionary, but also – and this is his greatest merit – what a revolutionary must be like’. Rakhmetev, with his superhuman will and selfless dedication to the cause, was the perfect model of the Bolshevik.
“Chernyshevsky’s hero was also an inspiration to the nihilistic students of the 1860s. His asceticism, his belief in science, and his rejection of the old moral order appealed to them. Their ‘nihilism’ entailed a youthful rebellion against the artistic dabbling of their father’s generation (the ‘men of the forties’); a militant utilitarianism, materialism and belief in progress through the application of scientific methods to society; and a general questioning of all authority, moral and religious, which was manifested in a revolutionary passion to destroy… As Bakunin put it, since the old Russia was rotten to the core, it was ‘a creative urge’ to destroy it. These were the angry young men of their day. Many of them came from relatively humble backgrounds – the sons of priests, such as Chernyshevsky, for example, or of mixed social origins (raznochintsy) – so their sense of Russia’s worthlessness was reinforced by their own feelings of underprivilege. Chernyshevsky, for example, often expressed a deep hatred and feeling of shame for the backwardness of Saratov province where he had grown up. ‘It would be better’, he once wrote, ‘not to be born at all than to be born a Russian.’ There was a long tradition of national self-hatred among the Russian intelligentsia, stemming from the fact that they were so cut off from the ordinary people and had always modelled themselves on the West.”210
In Fathers and Sons Turgenev portrayed the new man in the figure of Bazarov, calling him a “nihilist”, that is, “a person who does not take any principle for granted, however much that principle may be revered”.211 Being a “man of the forties” himself, Turgenev had intended him as a caricature of the nihilists, materialist, morally slippery and artistically philistine (although later he would pretend otherwise). Bazarov believed only in natural science: we see him dissecting frogs, and he dies from a disease contracted from dissecting a human corpse. He “takes deliberate pleasure in describing himself and his allies as ‘nihilists’, by which he means no more than that he, and those who think like him, reject everything that cannot be established by the rational methods of natural science. Truth alone matters: what cannot be established by observation and experiment is useless or harmful ballast – ‘romantic rubbish’ – which an intelligent man will ruthlessly eliminate. In this heap of irrational nonsense Bazarov includes all that is impalpable, that cannot be reduced to quantitative measurement – literature and philosophy, the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, tradition and authority, religion and intuition, the uncriticised assumptions of conservatives and liberals, of populists and socialist, of landowners and serfs. He believes in strength, will-power, energy, utility, work, in ruthless criticism of all that exists. He wishes to tear off masks, blow up all revered principles and norms. Only irrefutable facts, only useful knowledge, matter. He clashes almost immediately with the touchy, conventional Pavel Kirsanov: ‘At present,’ he tells him, ‘the most useful thing is to deny. So we deny.’ ‘Everything?’ asks Pavel Kirsanov. ‘Everything,’ ‘What? Not only art, poetry… but even… too horrible to utter…’ ‘Everything.’ […] ‘So you destroy everything… but surely one must build, too?’ ‘That’s not our business… First one must clear the ground.’
“The fiery revolutionary agitator Bakunin, who had just then escaped from Siberia to London, was saying something of this kind: the entire rotten structure, the corrupt old world, must be razed to the ground, before something new can be built upon it; what this is to be is not for us to say; we are revolutionaries, our business is to demolish. The new men, purified from the infection of the world of idlers and exploiters, and its bogus values – these men will know what to do. The German social democrat Eduard Bernstein once quoted Marx as saying: ‘Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.’”212
The growth of nihilism fairly soon elicited an anti-liberal reaction in the Russian government. Thus in 1866, Count Dmitri Tolstoy, a relative of the novelist, was appointed Minister of Education. As A.N. Wilson writes, “he caused an immediate about-turn in educational policies. He regarded the superficial materialist outlook of the young to have been caused by not doing enough Latin and Greek, and he abolished the teaching of science in all Russian grammar schools. The police, the army, the Holy Synod were all, likewise, put into reverse gear…”213
However, these measures were reactionary rather than truly regenerative; they were reactions to the illness that treated the symptoms but not the cause; they did not bring health to the patient – that is, educated society, which continued, on the whole, to despise the government and all its works. Profound exposures of the nihilism of the “new man” would appear: in the later novels of Dostoyevsky, in some of the writings of the Optina elders, and, much later, in the collection of essays by ex-Marxists entitled Vekhi (Signposts). The State, however, produced very little in the way of a creative response to this threat to its very existence; and this failure must be counted as one of the causes of the Russian revolution…
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