THE GLOBAL WORLD OF LOCAL TRADITIONS

Behind every Fascism there is a failed revolution.

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The standard "clash of cultures" interpretation of the Russia-Ukraine war as a conflict between Western liberalism and Russia's authoritarian traditional culture is deeply misleading. Putin is not a Russian traditionalist; he must be located as the last in the series of brutal modernizers of Russia, following Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin. Peter's reforms were opposed by the so-called Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintained the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666. Resisting the accommodation of Russian piety to contemporary forms of Greek Orthodox worship, many Old Believers chose death rather than give up their faith: collective suicides of thousands by fire continued from the 17th century into the 19th century.

The best-known artistic representation of this rejection is Modest Mussorgsky's unfinished opera "Khovanshchina," which deals with the rebellion of Prince Ivan Khovansky and the Old Believers against the regent Sofia Alekseyevna and the young Tsar Peter, who were attempting to institute Westernizing reforms in Russia. After Sofia managed to suppress the so-called Khovanshchina (Khovansky affair), the Old Believers committed mass suicide. One should note that things really changed only with the October Revolution: the first Soviet government (appointed on 26 October 1917) included several prominent figures with an Old Believers background, such as Aleksei Rykov, the first Commissar of Internal Affairs; Vladimir Milyutin, Commissar for Agriculture; Alexander Shliapnikov, Commissar for Labor; and Viktor Nogin, Commissar for Trade and Industry.

The Cabinet secretary was Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, a top Russian expert on the Old Believers. The Bolsheviks regarded the Old Believers and sectarians as a kind of social protest, opposition against the Tsarist regime—and they were right: it was by far not just a question of rituals; Old Believers distrusted the unity of Church and state (which de facto meant the subordination of Church to state) and wanted the religious community to remain a self-organization of common people.