The Independent Analytical Centre for Geopolitical Studies “Borysfen Intel” allows analysts to express their views on specific political, economic, security, information situation in Ukraine and the world at large, based on personal research and geopolitical analysis.
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Valeriy Shvets
When you write about some other nation, you always risk being accused of a prejudiced attitude to it, especially if your own people is at war with that other people. In this case, it is better to use authoritative evidence of representatives of that other people. Such indisputable authority to the Muscovites is Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev. Although his childhood and youth are connected with Ukraine, and in adulthood he already lived abroad, where he died, he can be considered with the greatest certainty the most outstanding Russian intellectual of the 20th century. He managed better than anyone else, to understand the essence of the Bolshevik coup (mutiny) of 1917.
In the Russian Empire the only treasure for Berdyaev was the Russian people. He simply did not notice other peoples. Here is what he wrote about the revolution of 1917 (“Reflections on the Russian Revolution”): “Those who see in bolshevism exclusively external violence against the Russian people of a gang of robbers, look at it superficially and erroneously”. The current Russian nationalism interprets 1917’s events in the Russian Empire precisely as follows: an international gang of rascals with a predominantly Jewish component raped a morally perfect, chaste Russian people.
But Berdyaev believes: “The Bolsheviks are not a gang of robbers who attacked the Russian people on its historical path and bound it hand and foot, and their victory is not accidental. Bolshevism is a phenomenon much deeper and more terrible, more sinister. A gang of robbers would have been a more innocent phenomenon. Bolshevism is not an external phenomenon, but an internal phenomenon for the Russian people, its serious spiritual disease, an organic ailment of the Russian people. Bolshevism is just a reflection of the inner evil that exists in us. Bolshevism is not an independent ontological reality, it does not have being-within-self. It is a hallucination of the people’s sick spirit”. That is, according to Berdyaev, Bolshevism is just a temporary disease of the people's healthy organism.
Here Berdyaev, despite his extraordinary insight, did not abstract at all from the main trend of the Russian intelligentsia to believe in the exceptional nature of the Russian people’s moral traits. It (the Russian intelligentsia) was sure that to transfer power to the broad strata of the people was enough for freedom and justice to emerge on the territories of the former Russian Empire. The Russian intelligentsia, finding no high moral qualities in its own environment, was looking for them where, instead of the real picture of life, it had only fantastic ideas about some ideal society, the specific features of which it did not even know how to understand. So, the Russian intelligentsia thought that it was enough to transfer power to the people, that is, to destroy the existing, predominantly noble, ruling elite, and everything would be fine. But let us keep in mind that at each new historical bend the Russian people demonstrate the same moral qualities. This means that we are not talking about a disease, but about the basic and, at this, an exclusively constant condition of it.
Berdyaev ignored the historical fact and did not consider it to be decisive for the nature of Soviet power, that in the leading structures of Soviet power at the beginning of its existence, ethnic Jews often exceeded the number of representatives of other ethnic groups of the former Russian Empire. “Soviet power is not a democratic power and has not been appointed by any constituent assembly. But no power was created formally, it is always created by force... This power turned out to be popular in a very unflattering sense for it... And the Bolsheviks did not direct the revolution, but were only its obedient implement... The Bolsheviks were not at all maximalists, they were minimalists, they acted in the direction of the least resistance, in full accord with the instinctive desires of the soldiers, exhausted by an unbearable war and thirsting for peace, the peasants, desirous of the landlords’ land, and the angry and vindictive workers”.
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…at each new historical bend the Russian people demonstrate the same moral qualities
In the first half of the 20th century, the ruling elite of the Russian Empire twice underwent fundamental changes. Until October 1917 it was the power of an enlightened minority of the society with the predominance of the Russian noble element in it. In 1917, it was replaced by a really international and poorly educated mass of people from the social bottoms of the Russian society with obvious leadership of positions of narrow-minded small-town Jews.
The undoubted leader not only of them, but of the entire revolution, especially after his death, was Lev Davidovich Trotsky. In 1929, Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union, and his supporters-Trotskyites were subjected to mass repression. In the late 1920s — early 1930s, the second change of the ruling elite in the new Russian Empire took place, caused by the same popular factor. The bureaucratic apparatus of the state increased several-fold. Its main personnel was already recruited from actually uneducated strata of the society. Remember that while the first secretary of the RCP(b) Stalin had a primary education, his successor in the 1950's and 1960's was a man who did not attend school at all. In the midst of the next change in the ruling elite, Russians were the predominant ethnic element at all levels of government. It was at that time that the Soviet Union began to quickly turn into a gloomy medieval totalitarian state with concentration camps, mass repressions, resettlements, famines, total Russification of all aspects of state life. It was the end of the 1920s’ Ukrainian renessance. It was replaced by the shot Ukrainian renessanse of the 1930's. Ukrainian, Belarusian, Jewish schools were closed...
Berdyaev has an explanation for this evolution. “Bolshevism was a perverted, turned — inside-out implementation of the Russian idea, and so it won. The Russians have a very weak hierarchical feeling, but a strong propensity for autocratic power which also helped. The Russian people did not want to hear about any legal, constitutional state... There was a terrible coarsening of life, a coarsening of way of life, a soldierly-vulgar style reigned. The Bolsheviks did not so much create this rude life, rude way of ruling, as reflected and expressed the ongoing coarsening of the people's life. The government, which would like to be more cultured, could not exist, would not correspond to the state of the people. The cultural strata, more refined, faithful to traditions, could no longer dominate Russia. God seemed to have transferred power to the Bolsheviks as punishment for the sins of the people”.
Interestingly, the current Russian nationalists continue, despite Berdyaev's conclusions, to play the Jewish card. For example, according to the perception of the Holodomor in Ukraine, they fall into two categories. The first — does not recognize the fact of the Holodomor, the second — blames Jews for it. Their leading trend — Bolshevism — is a Jewish conspiracy against the God-bearing people. However, the most terrible manifestations of Bolshevism occurred precisely in the 1930s, when the Jewish star almost disappeared from the political horizon, and the Russian star shone in all its beauty.
Almost thirty years had passed since the Bolshevik coup of 1917 in Muscovy. Had the character of the Russian soldier's behavior changed now in the occupied territory not of Ukraine but of Germany? Here is an extract from the outstanding Polish writer of Jewish origin, Stanislaw Lem’s letter dated from May 6, 1977, to Michael Kandel, the American translator of his works. In this letter, Stanislaw Lem refers to the memoirs of a German doctor who had survived all those events. (I apologize for the lexicon of the author of the memoirs, but he wrote exactly that — Ed.).
...In turn, the Russians were a brat who was aware of his meanness and infamy in a wordless, deaf, cast off all restraints way; so, raping 80-year-old women, causing the death from lust, casually, incidentally, plunging, breaking and destroying all signs of prosperity, order, a civilized viability, demonstrating through the selflessness of that destruction their considerable Foresight, Initiative, Attention, Concentration, Will Power — thanks to this they avenged not only the Germans (ultimately — to DIFFERENT Germans) for what the Germans had done in Russia, but they also avenged the world outside their prison in the most infamous of all possible ways: by shitting all over — no animals show such, so to speak, Ekskremental Cruelty, which was shown by the Russians, clogging and filling with their excrements the smashed salons, hospital rooms, bidet, toilets, shitting on books, carpets, altars; that shitting on the whole world, which they now COULD, was such a joy! To dig up, to pound, to crap, and to all that to rape and kill (they raped women after childbirth, women after major operations, raped women lying in pools of blood, raped and shit...”. Volodymyr Fedko: Stanislaw Lem on the psychotype of the Soviets“... www.ar25.org/article/stanislav-lem-pro-psyhotyp-sovyetiv.html).
On the way to Germany, a Russian soldier passed through the territory of his allied Poland. It was Poland, Polish man and Polish women, who were the main rehearsal ground for the performance, the main action of which was then on the territory of Germany. For some reason the Poles do not remember this now. They are more concerned about the events in Volhynia between Ukrainians and Poles, although behind these events one can see the impudent face of a Muscovite — their “liberator”.
Fifty more years had passed, and the Russian national character fully manifested itself in the Russian-Chechen war. Looting, violence, rape, humiliation of human dignity, tortures, killing people without trial and investigation. All that — according to the old proven recipes. Another twenty years had passed and all that happened again in the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Berdyaev actually identified Bolshevism with the Russian people. His being right, is proved, if nothing else, by the fact that the only country in the former Soviet Union, which fully preserved Bolshevik symbols, which has not pulled down a single monument to Lenin, the country which begins with the Red Square (in the center of which there stands a pyramid with the remains of its leader) is Muscovy. And in Ukraine, after the beginning of its decommunization, the greatest resistance was in the areas with a significant Russian ethnic component among the local population.
During a certain period of his life Berdyaev had some illusions about the revolution in Russia. But the disappointment was great.
“...The Bolshevik revolution brought nothing new... Bolshevism rests on the same soldiers’ bayonets, on the same dark and brutal physical force on which the old, decaying power relied. Nothing has changed. The mass remained in the same darkness... It is no accident that in the dark mass it is so difficult to tell Bolsheviks from Black Hundreders... hatred of the bourgeoisie is the dark East’s primordial hatred of culture... This has nothing to do with revolution, democracy, socialism, significant changes in the society and people. All this is an eerie and sinister masquerade. Autocracy and despotism continue their triumph and make an orgy”.
A strange combination of democracy and socialism in one sentence is divided by a comma. The farther to the East, the more corpses were along the road to socialism. For example, in Kampuchea, every third person was killed.
Berdyaev was looking for examples of successful revolutions and found them, at first glance, in a completely unexpected place. “Italian Fascism, despite the popular belief, was also a revolution of perfect young people who had gone through the school of war, full of energy and thirst for predominance in life. Those young people have a psychological resemblance to Soviet young people, but their energy was directed in a different direction and got not a destructive, but a creative character. We live in the era of Caesarism. So, valuable will be people like Mussolini, perhaps, the only creative European statesman who managed to subdue to himself and the state idea the aggressive rapacious instincts of the youth, gave vent to energy”. That is, the Russians’ inclination to the authoritarian government has not bypassed Berdyaev himself.
And from myself, I would add the following. Despite some common features, the revolutions of different peoples are different, like the peoples themselves. Revolutions are always a return to the sources, to the deep morality of the peoples, to their instincts. Therefore, our latest revolution is rightly called the Revolution of Dignity. It is dignity that was characteristic of the Ukrainian people throughout the history of its existence. This is something that has constantly been humiliated and destroyed by our greatest enemy. The feeling of dignity is something that our greatest enemy does not have, and this fact causes its greatest rage.
That is, a revolution is always a return to the roots. If it comes to a revolution in Muscovy, we can imagine what sort of revolution it will be based on the one that already was there. If Moscovia wins in the Russian-Ukrainian war, its further actions in the occupied Ukraine will be exactly as they once were. The soul of the people is quite an inert substance. A century for it is like a moment. A Muscovite’s soul in relation to the Ukrainiansis fully manifested today in almost unconditional support to the insolent expansionist policy of their president. Even during the recent rather massive protests in Muscovy they have never condemned the Russian-Ukrainian war.
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A simple change of president in Muscovy would not affect Russian-Ukrainian relations. A revolution in Muscovy would further exacerbate them. Revolutionary Muscovy could become an even greater threat to us and to the whole Europe.
It should not be assumed that there will be peace with Muscovy after the change of its ruler. In fact, it is always the peoples that war, not the rulers. The main argument should be only our strength, realized under favorable circumstances in the world and in Muscovy itself.
Nikolai Berdyaev believed: “The Russian people must be withdrawn from the Bolshevik state and to overcome Bolshevism in itself”. True, he did not say how this could be achieved. I think a radical remedy for such recovery would be only the total defeat of Muscovy in its current war with the world.
