Leviathan Reckoned As Dead

For Love of the Russians

Peter Hitchens, brother of the late atheist, Christopher Hitchens, is a disciple of the Lord Jesus.  By God's grace he has come to tread a diametrically opposite path to the one he once trod.

He has recently written a startling piece in First Things.  It deserves to be read by every thinking person.  Hitchens spent years living in Russia as a western correspondent.  He has an abiding love and sorrow and hope for the Russian people.  No doubt he prays fervently that the Lord would lift up the light of His countenance upon them.  Reading his article makes us want to join with him.

We can confidently state that you will not read the like amongst the Western chattering classes, or Commentariat.  We never have.  For that alone, his piece is worth reading, for its contrarian view.

We provide a few excerpts in the hope that it draws our readers to its pages.  Firstly, the contrarian disclosure:

Yet the experience of living in that sad and handsome place [Moscow] brought me to love Russia and its stoical people, to learn some of what they had suffered and see what they had regained. And so, as all around me rage against the supposed aggression and wickedness of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, I cannot join in.

Hitchens goes on to speak of the horrors of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union--horrors that prematurely aged everyone in that national Gulag.

 A few miles away, near the turbulent Taganka Theatre, is a small park, with trees and a pond. A friend of mine, Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, remarked in the early 1990s on how the grass grew badly there and the trees were stunted. Only as the pace of reform quickened did he discover why. Men and women still living nearby came forward to recall what they had seen there as children in 1937, in the early summer mornings, as they hid in the foliage of the trees. Silent men had dug great pits in the park. Unmarked vans had arrived, and more silent men, wearing long rubber aprons, had flung corpses into the pits, dozens of them, bloody from the execution chamber. The pits had been filled and covered over. And the children, when they climbed down from the trees and hurried home, were ordered by their frightened parents never to speak of what they had seen—at school, with friends, in shops, anywhere. Nor did they, for more than fifty years.  This, remember, was in the very center of the capital city of a great empire.

Imagine such things being done in the very centre of a large city in this country.  Hitchens goes on to speak of the Cult of Pavlik Morozov--an icon fostered by the State about a child who was a traitor to his family and allegedly betrayed his parents to the State over their opinions.

The Morozov cult was not quite as horrifying as the worship of Moloch, the dreadful Carthaginian deity who required fiery child sacrifice. But it was so far from the beliefs and morals of the Christian world that I am amazed it is not better known and more studied in the West. “Comrade Pavlik,” a thirteen-year-old peasant boy from a Ural village, was revered as a martyred Soviet youth because he had denounced his own father to the secret police. His family had then murdered him in revenge. Poems, films, books, and even an opera celebrated this unlovely person. Though post-Soviet scholarship has established that the story is almost wholly untrue (Pavlik existed but was probably killed in a meaningless village squabble), the official worship of him continued at least until 1991 when—to my amazement—I found a statue of him in a small park in central Moscow.

He describes his experience of watching a movie in 1990 made to tell the truth (finally) about the Soviet regime.

As I watched the frank and sometimes jeering parade of failure and unhappiness unroll on the screen, I became aware that everyone else in the theater was weeping. For the first time, they were seeing an honest account of how harsh their lives were, contrary to the unceasing propaganda proclaiming the U.S.S.R. an unmatched, enviable success. Now they were free of the lies, and free to mourn.

Hitchens is no apologist for Putin--or Vlad the Impaler--as we nominate him on this blog.  But, given the horrors of Bolshevism, he remains a pale imitation of that evil.

Here I risk being classified as an apologist for Vladimir Putin. I am not. I view him as a sinister tyrant. The rule of law is more or less absent under his rule. He operates a cunning and cynical policy toward the press. Criticism of the government is perfectly possible in small-circulation magazines and obscure radio stations, but quashed whenever it threatens the state and its controlled media. Several of the most serious allegations against Putin—alleged murders of journalists and politicians—have not been proven. Yet crimes like the death in prison (from horrible neglect) of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who charged Russian officials with corruption, can be traced directly to Putin’s government, and are appalling enough by themselves.

What Hitchens does rail over, however, is the hypocrisy and double standards operating throughout the West.  He serves to underscore how we Christians must learn to stand aside from the binary worldview of the Western Establishment which overlooks the evil of its allies whilst magnifying those of its opponents.  One is reminded of Orwell's 1984 where keeping a nation on a perpetual war footing allows all sorts of shortcuts to be taken over the fields of liberty.  For example . . .

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who locks up many more journalists than does Mr. Putin, who kills his own people when they demonstrate against him, and who has described democracy as a tram which you ride as far as you can get on it before getting off, has for many years enjoyed the warm endorsement of the West. His country’s illegal occupation of northern Cyprus, which has many parallels to Russia’s occupation of Crimea, goes unpunished. Turkey remains a member of NATO, wooed by the E.U.

Is there hope for the former Soviet Union?  Of course.  There is always hope when the Spirit of God moves over the ceaseless turbulent waters.  Russia is no exception.

Out of utopian misery has come the prospect of rebirth. It is as yet incipient. But I see great possibilities in it, in the many once-blighted churches now open and loved and full again, in the reappearance of symbols of pre-Bolshevik Russia, in the growth of a generation not stunted and pitted by poisoned air and food, nor twisted by Communist ethics. Many Russians will never recover from the cynicism they were taught, the mistrust, the contempt for religion and the foul cult of Comrade Pavlik. But their children can, and may. Why then, when so much of what we hoped for in the long Soviet period has come to pass, do we so actively seek their enmity?

Read the whole piece.  It is worth the time.