Understanding the Russian Exodus to Dubai following the Ukraine Invasion
Natalia Savelyeva, PhD The UW-Madison, The Public Sociology Laboratory
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent Western sanctions triggered a new wave of emigration from Russia and redirected tourist flows. The UAE, specifically Dubai, has become one of the most prominent locations for Russian emigrants, businesses and tourists. This report summarizes the pilot stage of a study aimed at understanding the specificities of post-invasion Russian emigration to Dubai, focusing on the well-off segment of the population. How is emigration to the UAE, specifically to Dubai, different from other destinations? Who are the people who choose Dubai over other options and why? How did Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impact the flow of Russians there?
Dubai proved to be a comfortable place for those who wanted or had to leave Russia for different reasons. The UAE maintained direct flights to and from Russia after the war started, with flights from Moscow to Dubai. Later, Pobeda, a low-cost subsidiary of Aeroflot, began flights to Dubai from Moscow in January 2023 and from Vladikavkaz and Volgograd in October of the same year. A round-trip flight from Moscow to Dubai cost about $120 in February 2023. Russians also do not need a visa to enter the country. They can open bank accounts if they have a local employment contract – or enough money and buy property in the UAE. Additionally, Dubai boasts a favorable tax system: there is no income tax, luxury tax or inheritance tax. English is a common language of communication, as expats constitute the majority of the population. Finally, the hostility toward Russians in Dubai is not palpable compared to other countries.
There are no official statistics from the government regarding the number of Russians who have obtained UAE residency. Over a million Russians visited the Emirates in 2022 a 60% increase from the previous year. According to some sources, in 2023 some 2,024 million Russians and East Europeans visited the UAE, constituting 13% of all tourists, while 700,000 had obtained UAE residency (including dependents). Some research suggests that Russians have now become the single largest nationality in Dubai, which is the main destination for emigration from Russia in the UAE. Recently, the real estate agency Betterhomes reported that in the second quarter of 2023, Russians were the third largest nationality among property buyers in Dubai.
It is fair to say that many individuals choosing Dubai as their place of residence possess significant wealth. A New York Times article highlighted a noticeable shift in the destinations of private jets departing from Russia: whereas before the invasion only 3% of
them were bound for the UAE, with the majority heading to European capitals, by May 2022 this figure had risen to 14%. Both sanctioned by the West and persecuted by Russia, rich Russian citizens also try to find a safe haven in the UAE. For example Andrey Melnichenko, Russia's eighth richest man in 2022 by Forbes, with an estimated fortune of $18 billion, ceded ownership of two of the world's largest coal and fertilizers companies to his wife and fled the UAE after being sanctioned.
The dynamics of the real estate market in Dubai offer some insights into the patterns of emigration. The entrance of Russians into the UAE real estate market in 2022 led to a boom in prices. However, by the third quarter of 2023, this wave had subsided. The weakening of the ruble, as well as the fact that everyone who wanted to buy property had already done so, contributed to this trend. Although in terms of real estate purchases Russian citizens rank behind nationals of India and the UK and just ahead of Egyptian and Emiratis, their average spending on property is nearly double that of other nationalities, at $1.1 million. Russians demonstrate a preference for villas over apartments and tend to seek new homes that are ready for immediate occupancy, rather than those that are off-plan or on the secondary market. Additionally, they often prefer to live in close proximity to fellow Russians.
The business relationship between Russia and the UAE was boosted by the war, as well. In 2021, the UAE's imports from Russia were valued at £3.7 billion, but within a year, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, direct trade surged, more than doubling to £8.2 billion. The UAE has become one of the top five destinations for Russian companies seeking to open franchises.
Methodology and Data
The preliminary results of this study are based on the analysis of 10 interviews with new residents of Dubai who moved there following Russia's attack on Ukraine in February 2022. The interviews were conducted in August 2023 and February 2024, both in person in Dubai and via Zoom. They included individuals in their 30s and early 40s of various occupations who had previously lived in different regions of Russia. All but two are married, often with children. The interviewees were recruited through snowballing – via direct recommendations and vouching from friends and colleagues – as well as through direct acquaintances on site. This approach impacted the sample in several ways. Firstly, it predominantly included people with antiwar views. Secondly, it fostered the necessary trust between the researcher and the interviewees. Many were hesitant to openly discuss their political opinions, attitudes toward the war and other sensitive topics, fearing for their safety.
All the interviewees in the sample were more or less opposed to the war from its beginning. Their views ranged from strong criticism openly expressed during the interviews to an implicit lack of support and avoidance of discussing the topic. None of the interviewees provided arguments or adhered to the usual narratives justifying or supporting the invasion.
Those who maintained their businesses in Russia were the most hesitant to speak openly about the war and their views on it.
The New Russian Community in Dubai
Contrary to the common stereotype, often propagated by media outlets that focus on the wealth of Russians who fled to Dubai and their seeming indifference to the war, as well as the luxurious portrayal of Dubai life on Instagram, none of these generalizations accurately represent the real situation. First, Dubai, like Tbilisi and Berlin, hosted a lot of antiwar Russians who wanted to leave the country after the beginning of the war. However, relocation was predominantly feasible for those wealthy enough, belonging at least to the upper-middle class, such as top managers, successful entrepreneurs and business owners, as well as for those who were not wealthy but had a contract for work.
High living costs rendered Dubai unsuitable for those wishing to leave Russia without a significant amount of money or clear job prospects. Dubai also became an attractive destination for those seeking to relocate their capital not due to their antiwar stance but because the war posed a threat to the economic stability of the Russian currency and businesses. These factors influenced both the composition and the “vibe” of the Russian community in Dubai. What unites people within it are not political views or attitudes toward the Russian state, but rather social proximity and professional, business and economic ties characterized by mutual interest, financial gain and economic subordination. This is how a young owner of an IT startup describes his impressions of Dubai:
Dubai is cool overall. It's interesting and fascinating to explore. There's a vibrant audience there. Everywhere you go, you can meet interesting people who have achieved significant things. It naturally filters out those who lack ambition because in Dubai the drive to work, move forward and create something is strong. It's motivating because everything there aligns with this ethos. (Interview 4, male, IT)
There are several major groups that make up the new Russian community in Dubai.
• The first group consists of wealthy Russians who have used Dubai as a destination to safeguard their capital, the origin of which is sometimes known and sometimes not. They form a community that is closed to outsiders.
• The second group includes so-called “info gypsies,” who make a living from social media and internet activities. They moved to Dubai because of the low taxes and, in some cases, following their target audiences and glamorous backgrounds.
• The third group is made up of individuals who making a lot of money from cryptocurrency operations and have relocated to Dubai due to the low taxes.
• The fourth group comprises entrepreneurs and professionals working in international companies. Their motives vary: for some, political views and the shock provoked by the invasion were major stimuli to leave Russia; for others, it
was the impact of the war on the Russian domestic market, opportunities for professional growth in Dubai and the desire to diversify their businesses and finances.
• The fifth group comprises professionals in the fashion, entertainment and food industry who followed people with money able to pay for high-end services.
• Finally, there is a diverse group of individuals in the service sector (e.g., restaurants, beauty salons, etc.) catering to the growing demand. This group is distinct from the previous ones: these individuals reside in immigrant neighborhoods with comparatively cheaper living costs; their income is relatively low; and they are excluded from the social circles that connect the more affluent Russian residents in Dubai.
There is a distinct seasonality and sense of impermanence in the lives of the Russian community in Dubai. The “season” starts in October when the summer heat subsides and ends in May when it becomes unbearable again. During the summer, Dubai residents who can afford to leave do so: they either return to Russia or travel to other countries. Service workers and those whose positions and incomes do not allow for this seasonal change of location remain behind.
Economic Reasoning: Strategies for Professional Escape from the War
The conclusions and observations presented in this text are derived from interviews with new Dubai residents from the fourth group described above, namely entrepreneurs and professionals. In Russia, they belonged to the upper-middle class or higher, with a minimum monthly income of RUB500,000, which is almost ten times more than the average salary in Russia in 2021.1 This group includes CEOs and business owners, as well as middle to top management from various companies.
Initial differences in social position, occupation, views and opportunities resulted in the various paths and motivations that led Russian entrepreneurs and professionals to Dubai. However, unlike many antiwar emigrants who chose other countries, their economic motivations were inseparable from their attitudes toward the war. Young specialists employed by big Russian and international companies who had an antiwar position decided to leave Russia, first, because they were not able to adjust to the changed social reality and (if males) feared being mobilized and, second, because they anticipated the degradation of opportunities for professional development in their sphere in the future.
You can't be a professional in a country that begins to completely close itself off from everyone. This is simply because your work opportunities diminish... and, as a result, the size of the market shrinks. The market becomes
1 In January 2022, the median salary in Russia was RUB37,429. In 2021, the average wage in Russia was RUB54,244 https://sberindex.ru/ru/dashboards/median-wages.
exclusively Russian and its volume isn't sufficient to accommodate expensive specialists. ... There's no space for tens of thousands of highly paid specialists. (Interview 5, female, IT)
I think there's a big problem for young people, for specialists. Staying in Russia now, given the existing blockade, means that in 10 years nobody might need you. ... Your experience will likely lose its international relevance. ... While Russian specialists are competitive in the current climate, I am afraid this will not be the case in a decade. (Interview 3, male, manager)
Young specialists adopted various strategies: some left the country and their previous jobs immediately, while others secured a new job before leaving. For many, the best and sometimes the only viable option was employment in international corporations in Dubai. Several were able to maintain or even increase their income levels compared to what they earned in Russia. However, all of them experienced a decline in quality of life due to the higher cost of living in Dubai.
The trajectories of business owners in fields such as IT and finance were more varied. The war, along with preceding political events (like the blocking of Facebook and Telegram in Russia, for example) and subsequent sanctions, affected some businesses more negatively than others. This adverse impact influenced the decisions of some entrepreneurs to seek new locations. This is how the young CEO of several startups explains his take on the situation back in 2021-2022:
There was a feeling that the same result could be achieved more easily and quickly in other geographies because [in Russia] it feels as though everything presents an obstacle, complicating every endeavor, and we exist in some kind of uncertainty. It's as if we're battling an invisible adversary, yet we could be pursuing entirely different outcomes more actively by employing the same efforts. … When working on an IT project, the aspect of investment, particularly venture financing, is crucial. Various funds previously invested in Russian projects before [2022]. Even then, it was subpar compared to the rest of the world and now it has effectively ended. (Interview 6, male, IT)
Some entrepreneurs left Russia immediately but were unable to reestablish their businesses in Dubai, leading them to become corporate employees or, in the case of those in the higher income segment, to live off their already accumulated capital. Others succeeded in establishing new businesses and severing their economic ties to Russia.
Those who retained their stakes in Russian ventures viewed the situation after the fullscale invasion, in their own words, as a forced but opportune moment to expand their enterprises. Some of them reframed the disturbing situation of the war by adopting the ideology of entrepreneurship. They claimed that crises and instability were beneficial
because they created new opportunities and forced individuals to leave their comfort zones, thereby inspiring innovative business solutions. This framework helped them accept the personal and professional challenges brought about by the war, encouraging them to view the new situation as a chance to realize long-held ambitions related to business expansion.
Well, it was like all those different things, as if this [the war] also pushed toward making such a decision [to move from Russia]. Like, that was it, it had been already so obscure... the level of uncertainty was high and it felt just like the reason not to delay [the decision to move from Russia]... That is, we always thought about some kind of international thing, but all the time we only discussed it, discussed and discussed and nothing pushed us. We [he and his business partners – N. S.] thought, well, maybe this is exactly what would push us. And, so to say, if you do not do it now, then... nothing will push you. Well, we saw it this way because of a habit to look a bit more positively at everything that happens, through a different prism. That probably, it's some kind of sign [for us to move on] and so on. (Interview 6, male, IT)
On the other hand, for those who neither wanted to nor could sever all ties with Russia and were also apprehensive about openly criticizing Putin’s foreign policy, even from Dubai, referencing the ideology of entrepreneurship provided a way to avoid difficult topics. This approach allowed them to remain “positive” and “constructive” and thus to avoid contentious political discussions:
Q.: And if we go back to February 2022, what was your reaction... if you can remember, how did you react to the news that the war had started?
A.: Honestly, I do not really like discussing this, all that anxiety, fears and so forth, nothing good. So, I just work. I can talk about Dubai, but not that. I mean, there's nothing good to discuss here and... Well, in general, yes, I do not like discussing it.
Q.: Because there's no constructive purpose to it? Or are you afraid that discussing it might lead to consequences?
A.: It's a distressing topic. I just decided from the start that I wouldn't discuss it. Maybe you can discuss some nuances [speaking almost in a whisper, unclear]. Well, yes.
Q.: So, [you did not discuss it] with friends, I do not know, family?
A.: Definitely not with family. Maybe with friends, sometimes. I just try to keep my distance from all these...
Q.: From politics?
A.: Yes, yes. Especially when you start discussing it, there's always someone who will disagree with any point of view you have. It can always be very easily twisted. I do not see the point in talking about it. (Interview 7, male, entrepreneur)
Political Reasoning: The War and the Decision to Leave
The group under study possesses an important characteristic that sets them apart from many Russians who were unhappy about the war: they had sufficient resources not only to leave Russia but also to find new, decently paid jobs or business opportunities abroad and to cover the costs of the relatively expensive lifestyle in Dubai. Those who left their business and jobs in Russia due to their political views have lost out in terms of income and living standards compared to how they had it before. But none of them “lost everything” or became poor.
Most interviewees were shocked upon learning about the start of the invasion. The interviewees who openly criticized the Russian authorities and the war in their interviews explained that their decision to leave was driven partly by their inability to either come to terms with the current situation or effect any change. For them, staying in Russia could result in only three outcomes: losing their freedom (being arrested for opposing the war or being drafted), turning to defeatism (due to the inability to adjust to the new reality) or becoming a “collaborator,” as they framed it, meaning to continue living as if nothing had happened:
Well, that was it; I quickly made the decision [to leave]. I realized that the situation was indeed very dangerous and understood that life in Russia would be very difficult, as well. Moreover, when you do not support [the war], how are you supposed to live? How can you simply stay silent and just observe everything unfolding... Now, it has become evident that people are being persecuted for the slightest [reasons]. (Interview 3, male, manager)
...I understood that there was... simply no point [in staying in Russia]: I would either turn to drinking or end up in jail those were my two options. Because I definitely couldn't collaborate, couldn't stay silent, well, that is, something bad would obviously happen to me. (Interview 2, male, real estate)
The fear of being mobilized, which for some emerged even before the “partial mobilization” announced in September 2022, along with a general feeling of insecurity, also played an important role in the decision to leave the country. Overall, the war transformed the daily lives of the most antiwar interviewees. Differences in views with pro-war or disengaged friends, relatives and colleagues brought frustration, while the changing political climate introduced a feeling of existential instability and insecurity:
It's terrible how everything once familiar suddenly turned upside down, leading to immense instability, fear and an indescribable sense of dread. … A profound sadness, sorrow and instability took over, despite the possibility of being in places like Dubai, Istanbul, Bali and beyond. Life saw a drastic change, one that brought about numerous fears. (Interview 4, male, IT)
Interestingly, all interviewees shared a common feeling of powerlessness to influence the situation in Russia, regardless of their previous occupation and political views. But unlike their compatriots with more modest incomes who also felt they could not change the situation or even hold an opinion on it, believing either that “we do not know the whole truth” or “Putin knows better”
2 the arguments of the well-off Dubai residents were different. They never delegated decision-making to more powerful “others,” nor did they doubt the correctness of their opinions. In explaining their helplessness, they referenced to an absence of specific strategies available to influence the situation, such as personal access or collective action. Some mentioned that the decision to attack Ukraine was made by a select group of people beyond their reach:
I'm not a media person at all. ... I definitely didn't feel like I could change something. That is, we need be realistic, as it seemed to me then. And I realized that this [the decision to attack Ukraine] was some other level of decisionmaking or other individuals could influence it, but not me, as just one entrepreneur. Especially since there is no cohesion in the business community. It's just individuals, just agreements and so on. And it seemed, on the contrary, that everything was very much up to one particular person, up to [his] decisions, rather than... Well, yes, overall, that was the feeling I had then. (Interview 6, male, IT).
Others pointed to the realization that little could be done upon seeing the small number of participants and the overwhelming presence of police at antiwar rallies.
… I went to a [antiwar] protest. It was very scary. … As I drove, the closer to the center, the more cars there were, more and more police vans. … I was driving, thinking... well, that's it, Putin is done. I expected to see a howling crowd as I turned the corner, but what I encountered was completely unexpected. It was empty. … Upon arriving, I found myself quickly surrounded by “cosmonauts” [riot police]. There was only a small gathering, I do not know, around 60 to 100 people at most, consisting of elderly men and women, alongside two frail students that was it. … Witnessing this scene, I realized that it was over for me. It was the final straw. It just killed me. (Interview 2, male, real estate)
2 See: Public Sociology Laboratory, 2023. The war near and far: How Russians perceive the invasion of Ukraine, February 2022 through June 2022. Ed. S. Erpyleva and N. Savelyeva. Berlin and Amsterdam: Lmverlag; and Public Sociology Laboratory, 2024. Resigning Themselves to Inevitability. How Russians justified the military invasion of Ukraine, fall-winter 2022. Ed. S. Erpyleva and A. Kappinen. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LhSHRG7QvRP3H-inPvgbHDQvZk1gnPA4/view?pli=1
The interviewees saw this inability to affect the situation as a personal loss of agency and even betrayal to which they could not adjust:
And you know, what's most appalling to me personally is that I'm not doing anything harmful in this world. I'm involved in creation, in business. I'm prosperous and free. Yet, what truly disturbs me is the lack of freedom to express my views… This deeply troubles me because I no longer feel like a free person. Because… Why am I forced to consider acquiring another citizenship? Why must I contemplate finding a place for myself elsewhere? Why can’t I be afforded the opportunity to live freely and hold my own opinions? Why am I denied the right to make my own choices? This deeply upsets me. In Russia, only the right of the powerful prevails. No position exists in the country other than that of power. It's upsetting. (Interview 4, male, IT)
Before the war the interviewees with antiwar attitudes had acquired an experience of being able to change their lives. Their decision to leave Russia was not, despite their fears and anxieties, flight – it was a choice that helped them to get their agency back. They left the situation with which they could not, as they felt, come to terms while preserving their ability to choose and make an impact in other domains. Many of them reported that they helped Ukrainian friends and their own relatives who found themselves in difficult situations after the beginning of the war, as well as antiwar activists, or continued to be involved in charity projects in Russia and other countries. They also had positive justifications for their decision to leave Russia, including the future of their children and possibilities for professional development. In a way, emigration for them was a “displacement” of their agency and a way to get at least some of the control over their lives back:
... you know, do not sacrifice your principles. That's the very foundation of everything. What would I tell my child? When she grows up, she'll ask, "Dad, what did you do?" How would I answer if I had stayed there [in Russia]? But now, my conscience is clear. I've done everything for you, made sure you can speak English and have a future. Most importantly, I haven't sold my soul. (Interview 2, male, real estate)
Even in situations where antiwar interviewees were unable to start a new business outside of Russia, opting instead to continue living off their wealth, they felt that what they had done represented a choice: they chose to leave Russia (though they could have stayed); they chose to close their Russian businesses (though it was not necessary); they chose to live in another country. One of the interviewees explained:
I understand that there are plenty of opportunities to do something in Russia, but due to some ethical considerations, I cannot. Something inside me has shattered; I can no longer tolerate being anywhere near that fucking mess, though I once could. My tolerance for certain things was higher before. But
something about the war changed that. … And, probably, that's why I left [Russia] …. It's like a silent protest, I would say. Of course, I can afford to do this. And it wasn't a flight like... when people ran in September [after the ‘partial mobilization’ was announced – N. S.]. No, of course not. But I understand that with my level of education, age, I won't be able to [do something in Europe], I clearly understand that. I could consider attempting something in Russia, but it would require time. Perhaps I might succeed or perhaps not; it may already be too late by then. I do not know. (Interview 1, male, finance)
Why Dubai?
Why did well-off Russians choose Dubai for emigration? With its proximity to Russia and the availability of direct flights which facilitates family arrangements, such as visiting elderly parents or allowing children and wives to join while husbands got settled Dubai was intuitive to many. A considerable number of Russians had already been residing in Dubai, and for a long time it had been a destination for luxurious vacations for a specific segment of the Russian elite.
Therefore, while practical considerations like flights, visa policies and the relative ease of opening a bank account and getting a residence permit (Dubai ID) were significant factors for some, for others Dubai's familiarity either through connections with friends who had already moved there or personal experiences of visiting, whether on business trips or family vacations played a crucial role. One of the interviewees cited his numerous previous visits as the reason for choosing Dubai:
So, my whole family, dad, mom, sister and I, flew there in '97, when dad gave her $10,000 and said: here, you can either buy a fur coat or we can start a business from Dubai. We bought all sorts of cool stuff and brought it all back to N [name of the Russian city where they lived – N. S.]. And somehow we got acquainted with the place in this way. Everything was completely different here [from how it is now – N. S.], it was like Sharm El Sheikh, like Egypt. No restrictions, everything was very Russified, much like in Turkey. Few people spoke English, but many could speak Russian. So, the economy was very much geared toward Russians. … It [Dubai] won the heart of my family and we visited whenever there was a chance to relax. Not always, of course, but we did visit. Plus, I have an allergy to pollen, very severe pollinosis. When it would start in the spring and it could turn into asthma, everyone would be like: well, let's go to Dubai again. Because we were a family of entrepreneurs, there was an opportunity. Although we lived, of course, in some two-star hotels, it didn't matter, we were there. Still, by the standards of those times, I was probably considered a bit of a rich kid [mazhor], I suppose... [In 2022] I decided to go to Dubai because I understood how to open a legal entity here. Although I've
never been here as a tourist, everything was very clear to me. I knew all the procedures, how to get an Emirates ID, everything, I knew it all. I just never did it, although I wanted and dreamed of some business here, simply because I've always felt a connection to this place. (Interview 2, male, real estate)
The constraints imposed by the war constitute a significant factor that limited the scope of choices for people wanting to leave Russia. Europe and the US were unreachable for many of my interviewees due to the visa situation, sanctions and constantly changing policies toward Russian citizens, which created a lot of uncertainty. These restraints led interviewees to consider Dubai as a potential place of residence. An IT entrepreneur explains how he ended up in Dubai:
I didn't have a visa to the US, which was the only place I could seriously consider [for relocation]. … At that moment, the situation in Europe was uncertain how they would perceive us [Russian citizens – N. S.] and what the prospects might be. There were no clear options regarding which countries were accessible. Consequently, the simplest choices for me were either X [country of his ethnic origin] or Dubai. (Interview 6, male, IT)
Besides that, whereas corporate specialists had their options limited by the job offers they received, entrepreneurs were hesitant about entering European or American markets for economic reasons – either because their products were not competitive enough or they were unsure how to adapt to them.
For well-off Russians Dubai had several advantages compared with Turkey and postSoviet countries like Kazakhstan, Georgia or Armenia, which became destinations for many Russian war emigrants. Dubai offered a decent standard of living – high-quality apartments, good schools and kindergartens, a vibrant food scene and opportunities for the higher income levels they were accustomed to. Upon arrival, many interviewees found that Dubai was not so different from the large Russian cities they were accustomed to. They could easily encounter compatriots from the same social class, communicate in Russian and enjoy everyday comforts. Dubai did not feel like a completely foreign place to them – they could still speak Russian frequently and use English when necessary, without needing to put in much effort to assimilate. As a young female working in real estate observed:
You just do not feel like a stranger here. … It's as if you're in Russia, only somewhat filtered. It’s important for me not to be an alien, which means not feeling like I am in emigration. … You speak Russian 85% of your personal time, not including work hours. The work ratio is 70 [English] to 30 [Russian] for me. (Interview 10, female, real estate).
Another interviewee explained:
If you wish to maintain a certain standard of living, you wouldn't choose to move to Kazakhstan, for example, to Almaty, where there are still certain peculiarities. The country has its own distinct national identity and customs. Arriving there as an immigrant, you'd need to assimilate and make an effort to interact with everyone. Here [in Dubai], you do not need to; it's an immigrant country. … So, if you're a resident of Moscow, accustomed to a certain level of services and quality of life or if you're like us, simply wanting to relocate, the options become limited. (Interview 2, male, real estate)
One might ask: If someone is opposed to the restrictions of authoritarian politics in Russia, why would that individual choose another authoritarian country as their place of residence? For many new Russian residents, Dubai has become an example of “benevolent authoritarianism,” where individuals benefit from the government's policies, enjoying security and economic stability unlike in Russia. This has had an interesting effect. Firstly, the experience of emigrating from Russia, particularly due to the war, has made these immigrants not just respect but value UAE's governance more than they might have under different circumstances. Secondly, their appreciation for the safety and business opportunities in the UAE has, for some, intensified their criticism of the Russian political system. Here is how a young woman working in real estate, describes the evolution of her political views after she moved to Dubai:
Well, my political views were quite fluid before the war. … When the war started, for the first three months, I kept saying that there obviously shouldn't be a war, but I found it difficult to fully understand my political stance at that moment. I just needed some time. It was only after arriving in Dubai and seeing the contrast in how a country with certain resources can have its rulers invest everything in its development, striving to turn it into a global metropolis, that I began to see things differently. In contrast, there's my native country, blessed with a rich cultural and natural heritage and abundant resources, yet its rulers appear to squander those treasures endlessly. I reached a point where I couldn't communicate with anyone, even my best friends. I removed them [from social media], saying: I do not want to know you, I condemn you. It was only here that my perspective fully formed. Perhaps, had I remained in Russia, I would not have reached this conclusion. (Interview 10, female, real estate)
Thus, in the context of war, increasing economic instability and the strengthening of authoritarian and conservative tendencies in Russia, Dubai was perceived by new Russian immigrants as a form of favorable authoritarianism for the affluent. At the same time, it was often contrasted with European countries, which, for many, became riskier and less appealing than before the war.
Between the West and Those Who Remain
Thanks to various studies,1 we can observe significant differences in how individuals who left Russia redefine their identities and attitudes toward different “others” – primarily toward those who stayed in Russia and those who hosted or could potentially host them (receiving communities).
The interviewees who left Russia for Dubai did not harbor frustration toward those who wanted to but could not leave, attributing this to the lack of necessary resources for such a move. However, all but one interviewee mentioned that those who stayed particularly their colleagues or business partners with whom they had worked before and who continued their pre-war activities economically felt better off after the war began. For instance, one former top manager of a Russian energy company recalls:
[There] it only got better. Because Western competition has disappeared altogether. And the guys there, they just really like it. … Everything became more stable. Because previously, many people still bought and ordered everything from the West. But now you have no choice; you need to develop your own. (Interview 8, male, consulting)
Unlike interviewees with less oppositional views who maintained their businesses in Russia, those in the sample who were antiwar experienced a sense of loss and possibly even sacrifice, considering their lives already stable and prosperous before the war. This feeling was especially pronounced since individuals from their social circles stayed and continued living as if nothing had happened, further intensifying their frustration with the policies of other countries that discriminate against Russian citizens. Such policies automatically lumped all Russians together, both the “bad” and the “good” ones, indiscriminately penalizing them.
Well, I understand that it's difficult to identify the good Russians and so on. But damn, if there were at least some attempts to do something for people like us. So that we... you know, those who are hanging out in Moscow, everything is cool for them, they are fine, their business is booming, yes, they do not care that people are getting poorer. Those who had an opportunity [after the war started], they are growing that's the first thing. They have great conditions, everything is generally good with food, no problems with cars, flights. Sure, before they paid a million rubles for a direct business class flight to the Maldives; now they pay one and a half million and fly through Istanbul, for example. Sure, but they think: we earn more after all, it's not cut and dried [ne vse tak odnaznacho] and maybe Putin is right because, after all, we started
3 Sergeeva, I., & Kamalov, E. (2024, February 22). A Year and a Half in Exile: Progress and Obstacles in the Integration of Russian Migrants. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ckf4v
to earn more. … And here we are, sitting here, having given up everything, showing precisely that what, in principle, a healthy person should have done. And so for us, the American visa no way, flying to Europe no way, but for them everything is fine. (Interview 2, male, real estate)
This frustration intensifies upon realizing that their fellow citizens, particularly those unaffected by the war who continue to enjoy life in Russia, as well as the benefits of traveling or residing in Dubai to offset any loss in comfort, are managing to have the best of both worlds. The same interviewee continues:
[There are people here in Dubai who] openly say "war," who do not mince their words, not using phrases like “those events” they do not use any such euphemism. But despite this, there are more people who think: Dubai is a place where ... you can still fly to your Moscow because Emirates operates flights. And you can get a bank card to make everything OK, to make everything satisfactory. And that's why they are here. They fly back and forth, hypocritically posting about how great everything is in their beloved Moscow, how amazing it is there. (Interview 2, male, real estate)
A Tiny World with Butterflies and Unicorns
People who moved to Dubai had a distinct experience compared to their fellow citizens who relocated to ex-Soviet republics or to Europe. Firstly, they did not encounter discrimination based on their views and nationality within the hosting community, which eliminated the pressure to prove in the UAE that they are “good Russians.” Secondly, since the UAE prohibits public political demonstrations, they could not engage in political activities such as rallies, which were observed in other countries. Thirdly, the host community in the UAE does not expect them to be emotionally or politically engaged with the ongoing war, welcoming people regardless of their views.
Initially, Dubai was an attractive option compared with other countries because holding a Russian passport and nationality did not pose an issue there. A unique situation was created by the authoritarian regime's restrictions on political demonstrations; general orientation toward including anyone who can pay and comply; economic stability and prosperity as the main sources of its political legitimacy; and, finally, a cautious foreign policy aimed at maintaining ties with both Western countries and Russia. This approach transformed the UAE into an enclave where Russians could temporarily escape from political news and the war launched by their country and also avoid blame and stigma. Consequently, this made Dubai more attractive for relocation compared to other post-Soviet countries. One interviewee explained his decision not to move to Georgia or Armenia but Dubai:
Q.: [Why did not you go to] Georgia, Armenia or Turkey?
A.: Well, they are basically, it's very much the same ... well, let's say, infrastructure like schools [is not as good there] and again this propaganda
from the other side... I didn't want to deal with that. Not that I wanted to forget [about the war]. But I think for many it was important that the situation was already oppressive, you doomscrolled all the time and you've already destroyed your life by making such a decision [to leave Russia] and on top of that, some have burned quite serious bridges. Then, arriving in, let's say, Tbilisi and seeing everything adorned with yellow-blue flags, like on Twitter, adds another layer of complexity. (Interview 2, male, real estate).
At the same time, this conscious avoidance of a highly politicized climate does not mean that the interviewee truly wants to forget about the war. For him, as for other antiwar interviewees, it is still important to be able to remember and to share their emotions and concerns about the war with others. However, as in the case of their career paths and life in general, these individuals prefer to have the ability to choose and to be in control, instead of being told what they should feel, when and how. For example, the same interviewee quoted above explains that he remains emotionally involved in the war and expresses gratitude for having new friends in Dubai in his case, a Belarusian couple who can understand him:
We've met a Belarusian couple here and, well, probably, if not for them, I might have gone insane too, because, well, I'm politically active and all these things, I still experience them and continue to live through them. Of course, I've unsubscribed from some channels, cleared up my information space a bit, because I try to channel my energy into something positive somehow. … They [the Belarusian couple] are cool because they are very... with them, I really feel this... they understand everything without many words. They are awesome people. With Y. [husband’s name – N. S.] there... he supports me, tells me what's happening, when some troubles occur, we somehow pull each other through and offer support, because otherwise, without these conversations, sometimes you feel like you can't do anything. (Interview 2, male, real estate)
“We live here in a tiny world with butterflies and unicorns; there is no conflict here,” this is how one of my interviewees described life in Dubai. Paradoxically, like the previous interview demonstrated, while this distance from the war affords many people a sense of everyday comfort and normalcy (with many noting that some of their colleagues are Ukrainians and there are no tensions between them), it also irritates those holding the most radical antiwar views.
In different post-February 2022 Russian emigrant communities, researchers observe diverse practices of moral and emotional management. For instance, according to a study by Ekaterina Korableva,2 Russian emigrants in Georgia welcomed the constant reminders of the war and the criticism from locals, as it helps them remain conscious of the conflict and
4 Ekaterina Korableva, Migrants from Russia in Georgia during the War in Ukraine: Political Performance and the “Unpredictable Border,” Russian Analytical Digest No. 301, 22 September 2023
maintain their awareness. The emotional and moral management among new Dubai residents, however, differs significantly. Many of them found it necessary to occasionally forget about the war while in Dubai. This creates an intriguing disposition among antiwar emigrants from the sample: on the one hand, the atmosphere of “nothing is happening” prevailing both in big Russian cities and in Dubai feels annoying, but on the other, it offers a sense of relief.
I just feel sorry for the country, I worry about the country [Russia – N. S.]. This whole story [the war], let's say, upsets me, to put it mildly. [There is] these streams of [Ukrainian] refugees, I've been to those camps for Ukrainian refugees. Two million people who passed through Berlin. I was in Poland. Everywhere. … It's a nightmare. Horrifying. … That's what I do not like about Dubai. In Dubai they do not talk about the war. It's like Rublyovka just moved to the Palm.3 And everyone is so happy. It feels like everyone just happened to meet, as if we're all at a resort. It's as though it were August and we've found ourselves in Monte Carlo by chance. No, we're not here by accident, we're all fucked. But no, here it's all about the positive only. Dubai is happiness, joy. … Toxic positivity. This is pure self-delusion, reminiscent of Instagram where people peddle various courses. It's all such toxic positivity, that's Dubai. Of course, everyone discusses some problems, at work during the day everyone is yelling, screaming. But in the evening, you go out and there boundless happiness, joy starts, everything is good for everyone there. Everyone is so kind, from the point of view... you spend a month there and you really start feeling good. … And considering that all of Moscow is there. It's like a new Moscow. Of course, it's nice to be there. (Interview 1, male, finance).
The “toxic positivity” atmosphere mentioned in the previous fragment distinguishes Dubai from the sometimes “toxic negativity” found in other countries that have become shelters for other groups of Russian emigrants. The same interviewee describes this difference, summarizing his own experience of residing in various countries:
[In Dubai] there's a different cross section of people. Successful, wealthy entrepreneurs with a high degree of adaptability have moved here. Berlin, on the other hand, has attracted more journalists... [people from the Russian opposition] ... who carry their resentment with them. They fled from something. Dubai is somewhat an attempt to simply reorient business. People who can afford something move here. An average entrepreneur usually has a more positive approach because it's very difficult otherwise, with a negative approach, fatalism and so on. Here [in Dubai], they just get things done. ... And in general, Dubai is like the New York of the Middle East. You get infected with
5 Palm Jumeirah, the palm tree-shaped archipelago of artificial islands in Dubai, features the most expensive and prestigious properties and hotels.
this feeling that well, if they managed to build this beautiful mirage on the sand, then... it means everything is possible. It means we'll manage too. (Interview 1, male, finance)
Conclusion
Unlike many antiwar emigrants who chose other countries, for new Dubai residents from Russia, economic motivations were inseparable from their attitudes toward the war, with entrepreneurial ethics impacting their framing of its effects. They saw Dubai not as a refuge but as a place of new opportunities for professional or business development. Individuals from my sample were able to reestablish their professional careers and, though most of them had to adopt a more modest lifestyle compared with what they had in Russia, none experienced dramatic changes in their class status.
Moving to Dubai felt like emigration without the usual challenges, partly because my interviewees had sufficient funds or secured jobs to afford the move and partly due to the unique characteristics of the location itself. They found Dubai an easy place to assimilate due to its extensive expat community, widespread use of the Russian language and accessible cultural and social settings reminiscent of home. Although Dubai is known for its opulent lifestyle, the true privilege reserved for the affluent is the ability to shed certain aspects of their former lives while maintaining others in this foreign setting.
For most of the Russian emigrants from my sample, Dubai represents a form of “benevolent authoritarianism” offering security, economic stability and a degree of political neutrality. It compares favorably both with Russia and Europe, which are seen as unstable and hostile. Especially by emigrants with antiwar views who were able to reestablish their careers, Dubai is perceived as a safe spot where individuals can find stability and take control over their lives. This control refers not only to the decision to leave Russia and lead a new life in expensive Dubai, but also to the choice of a politically neutral environment: not proRussian and not pro-Ukrainian, free from propaganda from both sides, a place where they can choose when to remember and when to forget, where sometimes it feels that there is no war at all.
While there are many characteristics that distinguish Russian emigrants in Dubai from their compatriots who remained in Russia and those who relocated to other countries, there is one notable trait that seems unaffected by class background and location: a pervasive sense of political powerlessness. Successful entrepreneurs and well-paid professionals feel just as isolated and alienated from each other in political matters as ordinary people earning a median salary, far removed from the glamor of big cities. Russian politics felt inaccessible not only to the general public but also to the most privileged individuals: the wealthy, influential and those involved in developing sectors of the Russian economy.
Islam, Orthodox human rights, and the ‘Destructology’ pseudo-science: Roman Silantyev's Trajectory
Alexander Verkhovsky, SOVA Research Center
This article is devoted entirely to a single person – Roman Silantyev. Why does this person deserve a separate and detailed analysis? Silantyev rose to fame on two separate occasions. The first time was in the 2000s, as an expert on Islam. 1 The second time was in May 2023 as an expert for the prosecution in the notorious case of Berkovich and Petriichuk (see below). This was when the general public learned about the pseudo-science of “destructology” created by Silantyev and he was profiled in the mass media several times.
Silantyev is definitely an influential behind-the-scenes player. In his own words, he has advised government agencies, including the Federal Security Service (FSB).2 His public behavior is often scandalous. But there are additional reasons to be interested in him. Silantyev has views on many other political and ideological issues and actively promotes them. He is both an academic public expert and an important figure in the “political wing” of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). I think he is a sincere person, although he may deliberately misinform his target groups. I would say that Silantyev is a bright and relatively radical representative of the official Church ideology, and his work gives an idea of the context in which this ideology exists. This includes its interaction with state repression and propaganda apparatus.
An Expert on Islam
Silantyev demonstrated his general approach to social problems in his role as an expert on Islam, and in this capacity, he was quite adequately portrayed by both Kristina Kovalskaya and Sofia Ragozina. In the 2000s, he was already a respected specialist in the religious studies community and frequently participated in conferences at institutions such as the Russian Academy of Public Administration (RAPA). In the 2010s, he was the second-most cited
1 At least two scholarly works refer to him in that capacity. Christina Kovalskaya, “Nationalism and Religion in the Discourse of Russia's Critical Experts of Islam,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 28, no. 2 (2017): 141–161. Sofia Ragozina, “Zashchishchaia ‘traditsionnyi’ islam ot ‘radikal'nogo’: diskurs islamofobii v rossiiskikh SMI,” Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov' v Rossii i za rubezhom, no. 2 (2018): 272-299.
2 “Avtor kursa po novoi nauke destruktologii podtverdil svoe sotrudnichestvo s FSB,” Interfaks, November 25, 2019.
expert on Islam in the Russian media3 and a regular participant in the Carnegie Center seminars.
He has been the author of numerous articles and reports on Islam, as well as a number of books that have caused more or less of a stir.4 These books vary in length and style. They always contain huge amounts of factual information. Each controversial statement the author makes, as well as many others, are backed up by references to sources, just as they should be. These sources themselves are of varying quality most often media or law enforcement reports. But most importantly, when reading Silantyev, one always feels a severe lack of criticism of sources as such. Some books are systematic and thorough, like The Recent History of Russia’s Islamic Community; others are more like collections of materials, such as the short book 100 Most Famous “Russian Muslims.” None of these books can be called neutral: the author always clearly indicates which groups and figures he considers more or less harmful or beneficial.
A number of Muslim leaders have been accusing Silantyev of Islamophobia since the early 2000s. Back in October 2001, Chairman of the Council of Muftis of Russia (CMR) Ravil Gaynutdin appealed to Metropolitan Kirill (Patriarch since 2009), head of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, with a request to “dismiss Roman Silantyev, the secretary of the Interreligious Council and a DECR employee, who is known for his anti-Muslim stance.”5 But the muftis of the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims (CSAM), a group competing with the CMR, have always been on good terms with Silantyev, even though he has sometimes spoken unfavorably of them as well. The CSAM continues to support Silantyev at the time this article was written.6
His most scandalous book, The Recent History of Russia’s Islamic Community, first published in 2005, contained a lot of compromising information about various Muslim activists, imams, and muftis, often presented in rather scathing terms. However, no one managed to refute the facts presented, and no one seriously tried. The book received rather
3 Sofia Ragozina, Politicheskii obraz islama (na materiale tsentral'nykh rossiiskikh pechatnykh SMI, 2010-2017) (PhD diss., Russian Academy of Sciences, 2019, 136.
4 Noveishaia istoriia islamskogo soobshchestva Rossii (Moscow: Ikhtios, 2005); Noveishaia istoriia islama v Rossii (Moscow: Algoritm, 2007); Sovremennyi islam v Rossii. Tematicheskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Algoritm, 2008); Musulmanskaia diplomatiia v Rossii. Istoriia i sovremennost (Moscow: MGLU, 2009); Sovet muftiev Rossii: istoriia odnoi fitny (Moscow: RISI, 2015); 100 samykh izvestnykh “russkikh musulman” (Yekaterinburg: Yekaterinburgskaia eparkhiia, Missionerskii otdel, 2016); Sovremennaia geografiia islamskogo soobshchestva Rossii (Moscow: RISI, 2016); Russkie musulmane (Moscow: MGLU, 2020).
5 “Sekretar Mezhreligioznogo Soveta OVTsS – Borets. s Islamom?” Islam.ru, October 24, 2001, https://rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=304132.
6 “Muftii Asharin nagradil Romana Silant'eva vtoroi medal'iu,” IslamNews, February 19, 2024, https://islamnews.ru/news-muftiy-asharin-nagradil-romana-silanteva-vtoroy-medalyu).
favorable assessments from several serious religious scholars7 and was not actually Islamophobic. The same can be said about the conflicts in subsequent years. For instance, when a court banned Elmir Kuliev’s “translation of the meanings of the Quran” in 2013, CMR Deputy Chairman Rushan Abbyasov accused Silantyev and the muftis of the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of calling for the ban.8 But they did not: they considered Kuliev’s text to be Wahhabist and harmful, but on the contrary, called for his translations of the Quran to be removed from the list of potentially banned books.9
Nevertheless, Silantyev almost never acted as “just a researcher.” He has always had a public mission, around which he built a suitable theory. He classified all “non-traditional” Muslims as Wahhabis, although he was definitely aware of the differences between different movements. Though, at times, he may have sincerely failed to distinguish some groups from others, such as Fethullah Gulen's followers from the rest of Said Nursi's followers.10 At the same time, “Wahhabism” was understood only as a terrorist ideology and practice. This was followed by a clear conclusion: “There are only two ways to fight” against radicals – “displace them or destroy them.”11 Their views should be banned, and the imams and muftis who defend them should be deprived of their official status, right up to the complete closure of the Russian Council of Muftis.12
Silantyev did not invent facts, but very often failed to analyze them, simply interpreting them in the way he found convenient. For example, it is true that Mufti Nafigullah Ashirov wrote that the radical Islamic party Hizb ut-Tahrir was not a terrorist party,13 and it is also true that Mufti Ashirov made numerous very radical statements, including those cited by Silantyev. But it is not true that Hizb ut-Tahrir commits or plans terrorist attacks, or that it is a Wahhabi party in the doctrinal sense, or that Mufti Ashirov supported this party. Another example: it is true that Said Buryatsky, a famous ideologue of the Salafi terrorist underground in the Northern Caucasus, studied at the Al-Furqan madrasa
7 “Vedushchie rossiiskie religiovedy ne schitaiut islamofobskoi knigu ispolnitel'nogo sekretaria Mezhreligioznogo soveta Rossii,” Blagovest-Info, December 5, 2005, https://www.blagovestinfo.ru/index.php?ss=2&s=3&id=3213.
8 Roman Silantyev, “Moiu pozitsiiu predstavili s tochnost'iu do naoborot,” Regions.ru, October 4, 2013, http://regions.ru/news/2479400/.
9 “Rossiiskii islamoved predlagaet sozdat' ‘belyi spisok’ musulmanskikh knig,” Newsru.com, September 23, 2013, https://www.newsru.com/religy/23sep2013/silantyev.html
10 Roman Silantyev, “Religioznyi faktor vo vneshnepoliticheskikh konfliktakh na Kavkaze,” Religiia i konflikt (Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia (ROSSPEN), 2007): 130-150.
11 Andrei Ivanov, “‘Islamskoe gosudarstvo’ prishlo v Rossiiu,” Svobodnaia pressa, November 7, 2014, https://svpressa.ru/politic/article/103317/?rss=1.
12 See, for example: Roman Silantyev, “Pora stavit' vopros o polnom zaprete vakhkhabizma v Rossii,” EurAsia Daily, January 29, 2016, https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2016/01/29/roman-silantev-pora-stavit-vopros-o-polnomzaprete-vahhabizma-i-deyatelnosti-soveta-muftiev-rossii; Roman Silantyev, Sovet muftiev Rossii: istoriia odnoi fitny (Moscow: RISI, 2015).
13 “DUM Aziatskoi chasti Rossii vystupilo s zaiavleniem po povodu soderzhaniia propagandistskikh materialov ‘Hizb ut-Tahrir’,” Sova Center, November 28, 2005, https://www.sova-center.ru/religion/news/communitymedia/right-protection/2005/11/d6512/.
in Buguruslan (Orenburg region), which was closed by the authorities, but Silantyev did not even try to prove that it was the madrasa that had influenced him so greatly.
Confronting and counteracting radicals and their accomplices falls within the framework of the concept of “traditional religions” (which the state should assist and support, including in their opposition to “non-traditional” ones), which was already well developed in the early 2000s. In this concept, the distinction between “traditional” and “nontraditional” trends within one religion presented a challenge: no criterion was found that would be suitable in this regard for all “traditional religions.” Thus, the question of how Silantyev determined which Muslims should be considered “non-traditional” and, therefore, undesirable or even hostile, is of fundamental importance, because this term is practically official and is very actively used in politics. He does this quite simply: “For Russia, the only traditional Islam is the one whose followers are ready to be law-abiding citizens of their state and respect the Christian majority.”14 With a single phrase he combines statism and the idea of the hierarchy of religions, both views quite typical of the Church leadership.15
It is clear that such a declaration is not an expert's opinion, but a slogan, by means of which the expert tries to influence his target audience. This pragmatic approach seems to be quite typical for Silantyev. Notably, in his 2019 textbook on destructology (see below), when the state policy towards “non-traditional Muslims” had long since settled and it was no longer necessary to scare the public and the authorities with a united Wahhabi front, Hizb ut-Tahrir, supporters of Said Nursi, Tablighi Jamaat, and the Muslim Brotherhood were no longer classified as Wahhabis, but were described in the chapter “Non-wahhabi destructive Islamists sects.”16
In another example, when Silantyev spoke in support of the authorities of the Republic of Mordovia, which banned headscarves for schoolgirls, one of the arguments of the defenders of headscarves was that in Chechnya, on the contrary, schoolgirls are forbidden to come to school with uncovered heads. In response, Silantyev quickly transformed the theme of traditionality into that of ethno-cultural uniqueness: “In Chechnya, people are not against the wearing of headscarves; but in Mordovia they are.”17
Thus, Silantyev’s activities as an expert on Islam were largely devoted to the promotion of his views and, most importantly, attempts to influence public policy. It is unclear to what extent Silantyev was merely following the state’s repressive policy against
14 A. Melnikov, “Prinuzhdenie k mezhobshchinnomu miru,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, February 2, 2011.
15 They took shape a long time ago and I presented them as follows: Alexander Verkhovsky, “‘Kirill’s Doctrine’ and the Potential Transformation of Russian Orthodox Christianity,” Orthodox Paradoxes. Heterogeneities and Complexities in Contemporary Russian Orthodoxy, Ed. Katya Tolstya (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2014): 71-84.
16 As clearly demonstrated much later, in the textbook on destructology: R.A. Silantyev, I.V. Malygina, M.A. Poletaeva, A.I. Silantyeva. Osnovy destruktologii (Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom, 2019).
17 “Sviashchennosluzhiteli o khidzhabakh u shkol'nits,” Novosti Federatsii, October 30, 2014, http://regions.ru/news/2536112/.
“non-traditional Islam” and to what extent he actually influenced its content. In private conversations with the author, many experts on Islam stated that his influence was significant, but we have no proof of this.
However, it should also be noted that Silantyev retained the ability to sometimes be critical of the use of harsh measures. For example, he was one of the main proponents of banning the religious tracts of what he considered to be “Wahhabi” or “sectarian” movements because he believed that banning fundamental works would prevent the spread of the corresponding beliefs.18 But he recognized that expanding the list of prohibited texts is ineffective in the fight against terrorism and that “the prosecution of controversial works often seems unduly harsh.”19
A Head of the Human Rights Center of the World Russian People's Council
Roman Silantyev is not only a scholar. He is also a longtime staff member of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1998, before even graduating from university,20 he started working for the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, where his work concerned interfaith relations. He remained a ROC employee until 2009. And from 2010 he was the director of the Center for Geography of Religions at the DECR,21 until this center was abolished at the end of 2015.22
In July 2001, Silantyev was appointed executive secretary of the Interreligious Council of Russia. The ICR is a club of seven (at the time) “traditional religious organizations”: ROC, three Muslim associations, two Jewish, and one Buddhist. In the 2000s, the ICR was seen as a collective partner of the authorities and as an embodiment of the then gaining popularity of the concept of “traditional religions.” Silantyev held this position until 2005, when he had to leave because of protests against his book (see above). Between 2004 and 2006, he also served as secretary-coordinator of the Interreligious Council of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Starting in 2005, Silantyev, already a PhD candidate in Religious Studies, began teaching not only at the Faculty of International Economics at MGIMO, but also at the Moscow Theological Academy, where he read Islamic studies to graduate students. Since the
18 “Slushaniia v Obshchestvennoi palate: ‘Primenenie i vozmozhnost' sovershenstvovaniia zakonodatel'stva ob ekstremizme primenitel'no k religiozno-obshchestvennym protsessam. Otvetstvennost' za oskvernenie pochitaemykh veruiushchimi predmetov,’” Sova Center, April 26, 2012, http://www.sovacenter.ru/religion/discussions/law/2012/04/d24294/.
19 “Karta etnoreligioznykh ugroz. Severnyi Kavkaz i Povolzh'e,” Institut natsionalnoi strategii (Moscow, 2013), 10.
20 In 1999, Silantyev graduated from the Faculty of Geography of Moscow State University and started graduate studies at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In June 2003, he defended his PhD thesis there on “Ethnosocial, political and religious aspects of the split of the Islamic community in Russia.”
21 “Tsentry,” WRPC website, https://vrns.ru/o-vrns/tsentry.php.
22 “Tsentr geografii religii,” Drevo, Otkrytaia pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia, https://drevoinfo.ru/articles/19433.html.
mid-2010s, his academic career has been linked more to the Moscow State Linguistic University (see more on this below), but since the fall of 2022, he also became a professor at the Department of Islamic Studies at the Kazan Theological Seminary.23
In October 2006, Silantyev became, and still is, the head of the Human Rights Center (HRC) of the World Russian People's Council (WRPC).24 WRPC is, in fact, the political project of the Patriarchate, dating back to 1993. But while the large conferences (councils, or sobors) of the WRPC were relatively pluralistic, its leadership and bodies followed the ideological line of the leadership of the ROC, especially since Metropolitan Kirill became patriarch, and the WRPC could take a more distinct ideological and even political position than the church leadership itself could afford.
So when in 2009 Silantyev was appointed the new deputy chairman of the Expert Council for State Religious Examination under the Russian Ministry of Justice, he was in fact there both as a religious scholar and as a representative of the WRPC. It must be noted that many expected this council, headed by Alexander Dvorkin, the main Russian voice fighting against “totalitarian sects,” to cause a great deal of trouble, but that didn’t happen.25 The Human Rights Center of the WRPC under Silantyev deals with a variety of issues. In the past, protests in defense of Christian minorities in non-Christian countries and in countries that were “too secular” occupied a prominent place on its agenda. The center’s tasks also included protecting the Russian Orthodox Church and the country as a whole from various threats such as radical Islam, pressure from secularists, “totalitarian sects,” and Orthodox religious associations unfriendly to the Moscow Patriarchate, primarily in Ukraine.
Among these topics, Silantyev saw occasional opportunities to display a certain radical judgment. For example, in 2013, he suggested sending, if not troops, then at least volunteers to Syria to protect Christians from jihadists.26 This sounded radical at the time, although later it was troops that were sent to Syria, albeit not exactly for the purpose of protecting Christians. However, as head of the Human Rights Center, Silantyev generally did not deviate from the usual rhetoric and agenda of the church leadership. It is worth noting that with respect to “totalitarian sects” Silantyev was more moderate than the
23 “Monografiia professora Kazanskoi dukhovnoi seminarii rekomendovana dlia ispolzovaniia v vysshikh dukhovnykh uchebnykh zavedeniiakh,” Pravoslavie v Tatarstane, November 17, 2022, https://tatmitropolia.ru/newses/eparh_newses/kaznews/?id=76919.
24 “Tsentry,” WRPC, https://vrns.ru/o-vrns/tsentry.php.
25 A list of the Council's opinions since 2009 is available here: “Expert Council for State Religious Expertise under the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation,” Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, last updated December 15, 2001, https://minjust.gov.ru/ru/activity/advisories/47/.
26 “Islamoved predlagaet rassmotret' vopros o napravlenii v Siriiu rossiiskogo dobrovol'cheskogo korpusa,” Interfaks-Religiia, September 9, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20220813203731/http://interfaxreligion.ru/?act=news&div=52581.
authorities. For example, he supported the ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses, but argued that they should not be imprisoned, since they were seeking the image of martyrs.27
The center also did some work on protecting ethnic Russians from the “threat posed by migration,”28 although this issue, important to society in general, was not a typical one for church leadership. Of course, Silantyev did not defend racist violence against migrants, but he discussed the issue in a rather idiosyncratic manner. At the very beginning of the 2010s, when the far-right movement was at its peak, Silantyev, like the then head of the Department for External Church Relations, Father Vsevolod Chaplin, believed that it was necessary to single out relatively sane individuals among Russian nationalists and cooperate with them. As an example of positive evolution, he cited Russia's most famous neo-Nazi, Maksim (Hatchet or Tesak) Martsinkevich, who switched from bad deeds, such as attacks on migrant workers, to good ones, that is, attacks on alleged pedophiles and drug dealers.29 At the end of 2013, infamous for the official anti-migrant campaign and racist riots, Silantyev insisted that to end the ethnic clashes, it was necessary, first of all, to fight “ethnic crime” (this expression always means organized crime among ethnic minorities). This statement was accompanied by the song titled Zero Tolerance by a neo-Nazi music collective You Must Murder; the song’s content was similar to the title of the band.30
It can be said that Silantyev did sympathize to some extent with Russian nationalists in the years when many people saw them as a promising political movement, that is, in the early 2010s and possibly earlier, but then he lost his interest in them. It can also be assumed that, similarly to the ideology espoused by Patriarch Kirill, ethnopolitics for Silantyev is subordinated to “higher” issues – the politics of the empire, religious politics, and the theme of “civilizational confrontation” with the West.
During the years of the Donbas war of 2014-2015, Silantyev spoke in support of the “Russian Spring” and on behalf of the HRC threatened to seek recognition of the Kyiv Patriarchate as an extremist organization in response to the seizures of Moscow Patriarchate
27 “Iegovistov ne nado sazhat' v tiur'mu, tam im sozdaiut oreol muchenikov – ekspert,” Roman Silantyevreligious scholar, destructologist” community on VK. February 21, 2019, https://vk.com/wall-116428179_1630.
28 For example: “Pravozashchitnyi Tsentr VRNS o situatsii v Penzenskoi oblasti,” WRPC, June 15, 2019, https://vrns.ru/human-rights-center/5131.
29 Ivan Zuev, “‘Russkii marsh’ dolzhen byt' za russkikh, a ne protiv nerusskikh,” Nakanune.Ru. November 2, 2012, https://www.nakanune.ru/articles/17085/.
For more on Tesak's activities, see: Martsinkevich Maksim (Tesak), “Russian Nationalists” Sova Center Directory, https://ref-book.sovacenter.ru/index.php/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0 %B8%D1%87_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BC_(%D0%A2%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%B0 %D0%BA).
30 “Prichinoi mnogikh mezhnatsional'nykh konfliktov iavliaetsia pereizbytok tolerantnosti,” Roman Silantyev's VK account. December 21, 2013, https://vk.com/wall-54908436_916.
churches in Ukraine.31 He was planning to participate in a large international conference of pro-Russian far-right activists from various countries in 2015,32 but authorization for the conference was apparently withdrawn by the authorities, and as a result it was held in a more modest format33 and without Silantyev. He also contributed to the then (and even now) popular theme of fighting “Russophobia,” understood very broadly, including anti-Russian actions in ethnic or general cultural sense, both anti-Orthodox in general or directed against the Russian Orthodox Church in particular and simply anti-Putin. But at that time, others (Alexander Shchipkov, first of all) were key players in this theme in the WRPC,34 and for Silantyev the theme of “Russophobia” had almost no continuation.
With the appointment of Konstantin Malofeev, a sponsor and organizer of loyal Orthodox nationalism, to the post of first deputy head of the WRPC in 2019 (the head of the WRPC is the Patriarch, so Malofeev practically headed the organization35 ), one could expect a turn to the theme of Russian nationalism, including in the activities of the HRC.36 But Malofeev's political activism was rather limited then37 (clearly at the request of the Kremlin) and is still unfolding very gradually.38 In March 2020, Silantyev declared: “Earlier the Human Rights Center was mainly concerned with interethnic and interreligious conflicts and fighting destructive movements; now the range of issues we work on has become much broader.” 39 The broader range of problems includes the protection of children from “LGBT propaganda,” and also the protection of the rights and interests of the Russian Orthodox majority in general.40 According to the HRC, “changing the ethno-confessional balance itself can provoke extremism,”41 and therefore migration should be restricted. However, this thesis
31 “Vo Vsemirnom russkom sobore groziat sudebnym presledovaniem tem, kto pytaetsia zakhvatyvat' khramy na Ukraine,” Interfaks-Religiia, February 26, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140706031115/http://interfaxreligion.ru/?act=news&div=54571.
32 “Vsemirnyi slet natsionalistov namechen na oktiabr',” Roman Silantyev's VK account. February 24, 2014, https://vk.com/wall-54908436_1644.
33 Still, it has become the largest such event in Russia. See: “V Sankt-Peterburge proshel Mezhdunarodnyi russkii konservativnyi forum,” Sova Center, March 23, 2015, https://www.sova-center.ru/racismxenophobia/news/racism-nationalism/2015/03/d31558/
34 “Vsemirnyi russkii narodnyi sobor sozdal spetsial'nyi issledovatel'skii tsentr po izucheniiu rusofobii,” WRPC, April 3, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150703195009/http://www.vrns.ru/analytics/3676/.
35 Till March of 2024.
36 “Address by K.V. Malofeev, Deputy Head of WRPC,” WRPC, https://vrns.ru/documents/33/5341.
37 Tsargrad, community // Russian Nationalists Sova Center Directory (https://ref-book.sovacenter.ru/index.php/%D0%A6%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B4,_%D0%BE%D0 %B1%D1%89%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE).
38 See about this period, for example, the chapter "The Prehistory of Today's Far Right Field" in Vera Alperovich, “Nationalists ‘tame’ and ‘wild,’” Public activity of far-right groups, summer-fall 2023, Sova Center, January 12, 2024, https://www.sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/publications/2024/01/d49146/#_Toc155772674.
39 “Sobornoe zastupnichestvo,” Human Rights Center WRPC, WRPC, 2020.
40 Ibid.
41 “Pozitsiia Pravozashchitnogo tsentra VRNS po novomu variantu ‘Strategii protivodeistviia ekstremizmu v Rossiiskoi Federatsii do 2025 goda’,” WRPC, June 3, 2020, https://vrns.ru/news/pozitsiya-pravozashchitnogotsentra-vrns-po-novomu-variantu-strategii-protivodeystviya-ekstremizmu-v/.
has long been a popular cliché, and the topic of the fight against LGBT became an official mainstream in 2020.
The HRC did not defend the interests of the aforementioned majority regularly, but did not ignore the topic entirely either. For example, during a conflict between ethnic Russians and Roma in the village of Chemodanovka (Penza region) in 2019,42 the HRC wrote about the conflict multiple times, spoke unequivocally in support of the “Russian side,”, and justified its decision to speak out against the lynching of the Roma people by the fact that “ethnic organized crime groups…have a serious advantage in the field of extrajudicial killings.”43 Surprisingly, however, the HRC of the WRPC did not join the active anti-migrant media campaign that unfolded in 2021.44 By that time, news related to “destructology” (see below) was unquestionably dominating the HRC news.
The fight against migration and other nationalistic topics were taken up by the leadership of the WRPC itself, headed by Malofeev, who is actively pursuing it. The patriarch himself also felt it necessary to speak twice about the threats posed by migrants at the end of 2023.45 The church leadership nearly made its position official/practically codified its official position in the WRPC political declaration in March 2024.46 So Silantyev now rarely speaks out on these topics and does so more legalistically. He assures for instance that “no one wants to profess the national superiority of the Russians.” He proposes rather moderate measures to tighten migration policy. He approves of anti-migrant vigilantism (which began to rise again in 2022-2023), but only if it stays within the law. However, even here, he has proposed an original idea: “If a fight breaks out between migrants, that is one kind of responsibility. If migrants attack the indigenous population, the terms and consequences may be doubled. …Believe me, this will lead to a dramatic drop in crime.”47
42 “Vynesen prigovor za draku v Chemodanovke,” Sova Center. July 14, 2021, https://www.sovacenter.ru/racism-xenophobia/news/counteraction/2021/07/d44562/?sphrase_id=2007967; Aleksandr Verkhovsky, “Poboishche v Chemodanovke: draka russkikh s tsyganami ili sotsial'nyi protest?” Forbes, June 18, 2019, https://www.forbes.ru/obshchestvo/378127-poboishche-v-chemodanovke-draka-russkih-s-cyganamiili-socialnyy-protest.
43“Pravozashchitnyi Tsentr VRNS o situatsii v Penzenskoi oblasti,” WRPC, June 15, 2019, https://vrns.ru/news/pravozashchitnyy-tsentr-vrns-o-situatsii-v-penzenskoy-oblasti/.
44 Vera Alperovich, “You die and start again from the beginning…” Public activity of far-right groups, summerfall 2021, Sova Center, December 24, 2021, https://www.sova-center.ru/racismxenophobia/publications/2021/12/d45513/
45 “Patriarkh obespokoen vozmozhnoi poterei russkoi identichnosti iz-za pritoka migrantov,” Sova Center, October 26 – December 21 2023, https://www.sovacenter.ru/religion/news/authorities/elections/2023/10/d48826/.
46 “Nakaz XXV Vsemirnogo russkogo narodnogo sobora ‘Nastoiashchee i budushchee Russkogo mira’,” WRPC, March 27, 2024, https://vrns.ru/news/nakaz-xxv-vsemirnogo-russkogo-narodnogo-sobora-nastoyashchee-ibudushchee-russkogo-mira/.
47 “Kak ne dopustit' rosta prestuplenii na natsional'noi pochve, sovershaemykh migrantami,” Radio Komsomol'skaia Pravda, January 7, 2024, https://dzen.ru/a/ZZv4bSGnORBFOP4-.
In the conclusion of this chapter, it is impossible not to mention the accusations of antiSemitism against Silantyev. In connection with the case of Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriichuk (see below), he said in May 2023: “It is not the first time I have observed that Jews are actively supporting Wahhabis, as if to spite Russians.”48 The Russian Jewish Congress (RJC) accused him of anti-Semitism and even appealed to law enforcement agencies.49 It does not seem, however, that Roman Silantyev is exactly a Judophobe. For example, he considered the statement by Vice-Speaker of the State Duma Pyotr Tolstoy about the role of “those who jumped out from beyond the pale” during the Revolution of 1917 to be completely erroneous and inappropriate. But he felt it necessary to add that condemnation of anti-Semitism should not be harsher than condemnation of Russophobia (and as already mentioned, he has a very broad interpretation of this term).50
It is more probable to assume that he thinks of ethnicity in a very essentialistic way, and could therefore, for example, draw attention to Berkowitz's Jewishness in order to emphasize the absurdity, from his point of view, of a Jew standing up for jihadists (to which he equates Wahhabis). This is not the first instance of such a clear manifestation of his primordialist approach. For example, in 2017, Silantyev co-authored an article about Russianspeaking Jews who joined various Islamist organizations.51 The subject of the article itself is quite legitimate. But it is interesting that the authors of the article did not bother to explain based on what criteria they consider the people mentioned in the article to be Jews, and even more so, how the fulfillment of these criteria was ascertained. Only one of the characters is said to have practiced Judaism before Islam, and several others repatriated to Israel. The nuances of terminology are also interesting. For example: “a ‘Russian’ Wahhabi of Jewish origin, Viktor Dvorakovsky, was put on the federal wanted list.” The quotation marks around the word “Russian” are of interest.
The essentialist understanding of ethnicity, undoubtedly dominant in late Soviet society and presently dominant in Russian society, is not in itself equal to ethnic nationalism, but, naturally, it contributes greatly to sympathy for the latter.
48 “Ekspertiza mezhnatsional'noi rozni,” Kommersant, May 25, 2023, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6001933.
49 Konstantin Rodman, “‘Dve degradiruiushchie organizatsii,’ Roman Silant'ev obvinil REK i DUM v khaipe,” Sobesednik, June 6 2023, https://sobesednik.ru/politika/20230606-dve-degradiruyushhie-organizacii-roman-s.
50 “Pravoslavnyi pravozashchitnik schitaet glavnymi vinovnikami revoliutsii dvorian, a ne ‘vykhodtsev iz-za cherty osedlosti’,” Interfaks-Religiia, January 25, 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20170126190025/www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=65948.
51 A. Kasiuk, R. Silantyev, M. Poletaeva, A. Amelenkov, “Russkoiazychnye evrei v ekstremistskikh i terroristicheskikh organizatsiiakh islamistskogo kharaktera,” Vestnik MGLU, Gumanitarnye nauki, no. 11(784), (2017): 209-219.
The Inventor of the Science of “Destructology”
This pseudoscience was personally invented by Silantyev himself. Its foundations were provided in an article he published in 2018.52 According to it, this new science is needed because security challenges are becoming increasingly hybrid the same group can, for example, commit terrorist attacks and sell drugs. The article even offered a preliminary classification of destructive trends, ranging from trading dietary supplements all the way to the Islamic State, and specifically promised to create an applied science that would be useful for teachers and law enforcement officers.
The possibility of creating a new science about multiple “destructive,” or socially dangerous, trends at once stemmed from Silantyev's previous experience. Previously, he had applied general approaches to very different trends within Islam, conceptualizing them as a single Wahhabi threat. For many years, he has also been involved in the fight against "totalitarian sects" (Alexander Dvorkin's calque of the English “destructive cults”), as he classified many movements, including obviously very peaceful ones, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses53 and Hare Krishna,54 and other “sectarians,” such as Jews for Jesus.55
The aforementioned Silantyev’s article claimed that such a generalized approach to security threats is not unique. As an example, the author cited a certain “terrorology” as a comprehensive science about terrorism (the creators of this science are Vitaly Kaftan and Igor Sundiev), and mentioned as an analog the allegedly emerging science of “dissidentology,” dedicated to various “deniers” of scientifically established facts, medical, historical, geographical (flat-earthers), etc. Silantyev recognized that “destructive neoplasms” are heterogeneous and therefore it was not easy to create a single science encompassing them. But it was necessary to do so in order to cover the whole spectrum of threats and contribute to the protection of the “spiritual security” of the country.56
In his article, he even introduced a rather peculiar classification, dividing destructive currents into “socio-commercial,” which included neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and a specifically Russian variant of romanticization of criminal life, the Prisoners Criminal Unity (Arestantskoe Ugolovnoe Edinstvo, known by the abbreviation AUE); “socially significant” new formations, which included magicians, healers, Falun Dafa, etc.; “socially dangerous,”
52 Roman Silantyev, “O nekotorykh teoreticheskikh osnovaniiakh destruktologii kak novoi nauchnoi distsipliny,” Vestnik MGLU, Gumanitarnye nauki, no. 2(791)/2, (2018): 262-269.
53 “Mezhreligioznyi sovet Rossii privetstvuet reshenie suda o zakrytii moskovskoi obshchiny ‘Svidetelei Iegovy’,” RIA Novosti, March 30, 2004, https://ria.ru/20040330/557761.html?chat_room_id=557761.
54 Roman Silantyev, “Mezhreligioznye sovety Rossii i SNG,” Religioznaia tolerantnost. Istoricheskoe i politicheskoe izmereniia, (Moscow: Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, Academia, 2006): 207.
55 Oksana Alekseeva, “Evrei protiv sektantov,” Kommersant, May 16, 2001, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/264846.
56 “Avtor kursa po novoi nauke destruktologii podtverdil svoe sotrudnichestvo s FSB,” Interfaks, November 25, 2019.
which included subcultures fascinated by suicide, medical dissidents, etc.; and “socially aggressive,” which included the bulk of extremist and terrorist (as defined by Russian legislation) associations. The classification would later be changed, of course: for example, in Fundamentals of Destructology, the textbook on the new pseudoscience, published the following year, he uses a different classification system.
By 2018, Silantyev had already had a long history of collaboration with the Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU). He had been an assistant professor of world culture there since 2008. The MSLU published two editions of his book Muslim Diplomacy in Russia. History and Modernity, and in 2020, it published Russian Muslims. Developing his book on diplomacy, Silantyev defended his doctoral dissertation at MSLU in 2014. However, the thesis was not written under the academic supervision of the MSLU, but under that of the chief official strategic institute of the country the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS), and the review on behalf of the RISS was signed by Dmitry Volodikhin,57 a wellknown patriotic historian and science fiction author (science fiction is not mentioned coincidentally here, see below; by 2020, Volodikhin was assistant to the chairman of the Publishing Council of the Moscow Patriarchate.58)
In 2016, Silantyev became a professor at MSLU and was working at two departments (theology and world culture); at the same time, incidentally, he became a member of the Higher Attestation Commission expert council on theology.59 And then, by the end of 2018, the Destructology Laboratory was founded at the MSLU with Silantyev as its director. According to the lab’s web page, in addition to the laboratory head, there are six more employees: Anna Korolenko, Galina Khizrieva (also the director of the Center for Linguistic Expertise at the MSLU), Olga Strekalova, Shamil Kashaf, Elena Zamyshevskaya and A. M. Shirshov.60 Since then, a number of books have been published on the topic, including a textbook, Fundamentals of Destructology.61
57 “Otzyv vedushchei organizatsii na dissertatsiiu…” MSLU, https://web.archive.org/web/20140715014309/http://www.linguanet.ru/science/dissD/dissD5/D52014/Silantyev%20R.A./SilantyevR-vedotz.pdf.
58 “V Moskve predstavili sbornik statei ‘Dukhovnyi krizis v russkoi literature i revoliutsionnye potriaseniia KhKh veka’,” Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov, January 27, 2020, http://www.Patriarchia.ru/db/text/5582353.html.
59 “Tsentry,” WRPC, https://vrns.ru/o-vrns/tsentry.php.
60 “Destructology Laboratory," MSLU, https://linguanet.ru/proektnaya-deyatelnost/laboratoriyadestruktologii/.
61 R. Silantyev, I. Malygina, M. Poletaeva, A. Silantyeva, Osnovy destruktologii (Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom, 2019); R. Silantyev, S. Chekmaev, Destruktologiia. Kak bystro i nadezhno lishitsia deneg i zdorovia (Moscow: Izdatelstvo M.B.Smolina, 2020); R. Silantyev, O. Strekalova, Nekromanty nashikh dnei (Moscow: Piatyi Rim, 2020); R. Silantyev, Yu. Ragozin, Parapravoslavnye sekty v sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom, 2021); R. Silantyev, S. Chekmaev, Yu. Ragozin, Satanisty protiv “biomusora” (Istoriia mizantropicheskoi ideologii v Rossii, ili Ubei biomusor! (Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom, 2022).
Aside from Anna Silantyeva, the co-authors of the textbook are other members of the Department of World Culture at the MSLU,62 and Malygina is the head of this department. Apparently, the textbook was being prepared before the lab was created. But later, Silantyev's other co-authors were not colleagues at the laboratory, with the exception of Olga Strekalova (a former employee of the General Prosecutor's Office). One co-author, Yurii Ragozin, is a longtime employee of the missionary department of the Novosibirsk diocese,63 an advocate of censorship and equating “cultural extremism” with political extremism for the sake of “spiritual security.”64
Another co-author – Sergei Chekmaev, a science fiction writer – is even more interesting.65 In fact, Silantyev is no stranger to this genre. We do not know what works he has written, but at the very beginning of the 2010s he, together with Chekmaev, was involved in the organization of the “patriotic fiction” collections for the Antiterror-2020 series and was even twice awarded prizes for co-authoring the forewords to these anthologies.66 The collections with the distinctive titles Antiterror 2020 and Ruthless Tolerance – with all the variety of works included therein – fit well into the wave of revanchist fiction. Incidentally, he received one of the awards at the Bastcon convention, a conference of fiction writers organized by “the literary and philosophical group Bastion headed by its spiritual leader...writer Dmitry Volodikhin,”67 mentioned above in another capacity.
In an interview on science fiction that Silantyev gave as one of the organizers of a science fiction forum in Yekaterinburg in 2013, he explained his ideological approach to science fiction. In particular, in response to a question about values, he answered: “Yes, imperialism, traditions, traditional religions, of which our president also says that they are the backbone of the country, first of all, Orthodox Christianity, which has played an exceptional role, without which the country would not have been possible, but Muslims have also played a significant role.” He went on to say that there were enough movies “about the anti-retreat troops, the Gulags, the suffering of the intelligentsia – it is no longer interesting,
62 Anna Silantyeva appears to be working or studying at the MSLU. But there is no other information about her.
63 “Ragozin Yurii,” Missionary Department of the Novosibirsk Diocese, http://ansobor.ru/page.php?id=65.
64 “Yurii Ragozin. Opasnye igry v tolerantnost,” Russkaia narodnaia liniia. February 22, 2022, https://ruskline.ru/opp/2022/02/22/opasnye_igry_v_tolerantnost.
65 “Chekmaev Sergei Vladimirovich,” Laboratoriia fantastiki, https://fantlab.ru/autor172.
66 “Vostokoveda Rakhamima Emanuilova i islamoveda Romana Silantyeva nagradiat za vklad v razvitie rossiiskoi fantastiki,” Interfaks-Religiia, August 19, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110901022009/http:/www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=41915; “V Moskve vrucheny premii za sborniki fantastiki ‘Antiterror-2020’ i ‘Besposhchadnaia tolerantnost’,” Ibid, January 30, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20140724013408/http:/interfaxreligion.ru/new/?act=news&div=43977.
67 Pavel Vinogradov, “Rossiiskaia fantastika: put' k vozrozhdeniiu,” Nevskoe Vremia. January 28, 2010, http://fan.lib.ru/w/winogradow_p_w/text_0180.shtml.
not in demand, and people are simply furious...People want to know something good about their country.”68
Incidentally, Snezhnyi Kom Publishing, which has published three destructology books, also specializes in science fiction. So it is not surprising that the “destructology” books, and not only those co-written with Chekmaev, resemble pamphlets rather than research monographs. Similarly to his prior work as an expert on Islam, Silantyev amasses a huge number of facts, but arranges them to strictly align with a predetermined concept.
For example, the book Necromancers of Our Days is about the Citizens of the USSR movement that is, people who believe that the USSR continues to legally exist. The author of another book on this movement, Mikhail Akhmetyev pointed out that Silantyev calls Citizens of the USSR “necrocommunists,” while almost all of them have nothing to do with Soviet ideology proper. Silantyev also refers to the associations of Citizens of the USSR as “sects”; this word is understood by “destructology” very broadly – as associations that are based “on ‘rigid opposition to society’ and conspiracy doctrines, have hierarchies with ‘external’ and ‘internal’ circles, require unconditional obedience to leaders, and have developed dubious enrichment schemes.” To which Akhmetyev reasonably responds that, in the vast majority of cases, “communities of Citizens of the USSR do not meet even these criteria.”69
In the book, Silantyev and Strekalova merely speculate that Citizens of the USSR might turn to terror. But at the conference Xenophobia and Extremism: Global Challenges and Regional Trends on October 26, 2021, Silantyev titled his report on them openly as follows: “New Generation Terrorism – Sects of Necrocommunists and ‘Living Nonhumans’.” Despite the fact that no terrorist attacks had been committed by Citizens of the USSR by that time, except for a ridiculous and unsuccessful attempt to assassinate a rabbi in 2019.70 We are clearly dealing with the same old alarmism, but this time on a very meager factual basis.
The latest book so far, Satanists against “Biotrash” combines two typical “destructological” approaches: the authors try to use one very general concept to unite rather heterogeneous phenomena while at the same time relying uncritically on media reports and press releases from law enforcement agencies. The book includes rather heterogeneous chapters on the teenage suicide cult (known in Russia as Blue Whales), on Satanists and neoNazis, and on school shootings. The introductory chapter is devoted to some unified
68 Roman Silantyev, “Nuzhno ne zanimat'sia kopaniem v griazi, a nakhodit' preemstvennost' v nashei istorii,” Nakanune.Ru, October 11, 2023, https://www.nakanune.ru/articles/18203/.
69 Mikhail Akhmetyev, Grazhdane bez SSSR: Soobshchestva ‘sovetskikh grazhdan’ v sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow: ROO Tsentr “Sova”, 2022): 7.
70 “Vynesen prigovor o pokushenii na ubiistvo glavy evreiskoi obshchiny Krasnodara,” Sova Center, June 17, 2021, https://www.sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/news/counteraction/2021/06/d44405/.
"misanthropic ideology" (sometimes called Satanist by the authors), the development of which is outlined starting with the Church of Euthanasia, Crowley, LaVey, etc.
I cannot assess the credibility and the selection of the facts in the chapters on Blue Whales and school shootings. But it should be noted that the whole topic of Blue Whales is often characterized as typical moral panic.71 In the chapter, the authors, relying on the opinion of other experts Denis Davydov, the director of the Safe Internet League, known for fighting for Internet censorship, and Eastern Orthodox psychologist Mikhail Khasminskii understand suicide groups on social networks as a psychological weapon that operates mainly from Ukraine.72 Note that the book was published as early as the fall of 2022. It is important to note that the authors do not replicate all media myths. For example, the book’s recommendations on how to prevent and counteract school shootings state that it has nothing to do with shooter computer games.73 A “destructological” approach is designed to construct one's overall threat picture, not simply compile the ones already available.
The chapter devoted to Satanists and neo-Nazis (who are for some reason lumped together) is easier to analyze. Misanthropic sentiments are indeed not uncommon among both. In the case of neo-Nazis, this is especially evident in the movement that calls itself “people hate.” The pages devoted to Satanists are full of stories of human and animal murders. But the authors fail to separate real crimes or threats from fictional or at least dubious ones. For example, the authors could not pass up the only “Satanist” group on the list of banned extremist organizations, the Noble Order of the Devil, although they immediately specified that its members “did not manage to kill any people.” From the history of this group we know that these young people (many of them minors) did manage to make speeches, get drunk, take drugs, jump on graves, and have sexual relations. However, in describing all of the above, including the alleged “sexual slavery” of the group leader, the book refers only to the media,74 not the verdict, which essentially had just one charge –committing lewd acts.75 Neither are the descriptions of ideological variations of Satanism and misanthropy always reliable. The book goes as far as to mention the Islamic version of Satanism, allegedly promoted by the famous Islamist Geydar Dzhemal, by the name of “clumsy (krivorukie) Manicheo-Sheytanists.”76 Clearly, for Geydar Dzhemal, an intellectual with a counterculture background, a name like this was nothing but a joke.
71 A.S. Arkhipova, M.D. Volkova, A.A. Kirziuk, E.K. Malaia, D.A. Radchenko, E.F. Iugai, “Gruppy smerti: ot igry k moral'noi panike,” Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia narodnogo khoziaistva i gosudarstvennoi sluzhby pri Prezidente Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2017.
72 Roman Silantyev, Sergei Chekmaev, Yurii Ragozin, Satanisty protiv “biomusora” (Istoriia mizantropicheskoi ideologii v Rossii), ili Ubei biomusor! (Moscow: Snezhnyi Kom, 2022): 98.
73 Ibid., 216.
74 Ibid., 69-70.
75 “V Mordovii vynesen prigovor po delu ‘bandy satanistov’,” Sova Center, July 19, 2010, https://www.sovacenter.ru/religion/news/extremism/counter-extremism/2010/07/d19332/.
76 Silantyev et al. Op.cit., 51.
On the other hand, the chapter's descriptions of the actions of neo-Nazi groups, such as Pavel Voitov's gang called “Misantropic Division,” are quite adequate.77 But the main focus of this chapter, ideally suited to the concept of the book, is the MKU network community (the most popular reading of this Russian acronym is “Maniacs. Kult of Murder”): it combined neo-Nazism and pure “people hate”; it was indeed set up by a Ukrainian and operated in Ukraine, Russia, and a few other countries; finally, it was built on the network principle and was, essentially, independent action by separate groups and individuals inspired by common ideas and acting, at least in part, on assignments from “curators,” gradually becoming more and more radical. A different matter is that the real scale and nature of MKUs activities are still largely unknown. All that can be said for sure is that the community was popular online and its main materials were inarticulately edited videos of violent scenes and false reports of alleged terrorist attacks. Silantyev and his coauthors rely on law enforcement reports that were circulated in the media, but these, too, are actually quite vague.
The observations of the Sova Center make it possible to say only the following: MKU is not a vertical community, but a multitude of people of ultra-right views, who were interested in the ideas and materials of MKU to some degree; some of these people were already organized into independent ultra-right groups. Some did commit violent crimes (likely more in Ukraine than in Russia). A great many of the ultra-right (at least a hundred) were detained in Russia in 2021-2022 in connection with this case, but by the end of January 2024 we know of only 25 people convicted of graffiti, vandalism, or violence, and in at least half of these cases, their connection to MKU was not proven.78 So it is still difficult to assess the real harm caused by this particular community inside Russia. But for the authors, everything is clear: this is the most dangerous terrorist network, responsible for “dozens of murders and attacks,” which “became a specialized project in which its creators united misanthropes in general, ultra-right, Columbine fans, and suicidal people.”79 Yet not a hint of what exactly the subcultures of school shooting and suicide have to do with the MKU is provided in the book. Further, MKU is linked to the activities of Ukrainian special services engaged in Internet warfare, but this connection is corroborated only by the opinion of the information and analytical outlet One Homeland80 – an anti-Ukraine website devoted mainly to the course of the war.
77 Ibid., 76-87.
78 The bulk of the detentions and arrests occurred in 2021-2022, which culminated in the organization being banned as a terrorist group. As of February 2024, the Sova Center has information about 25 people allegedly linked to M.K.U. and convicted of crimes ranging from incitement graffiti to knife attacks and preparation of a terrorist attack. But only half of the cases have any known connection to M.K.U.. See: “Verkhovnyi sud priznal M.K.U. terroristicheskoi organizatsiei,” Sova Center, January 16 – March 15, 2023, https://www.sovacenter.ru/racism-xenophobia/news/counteraction/2023/01/d47493/; Natalia Yudina, “The New Generation of the Far-Right and Their Victims. Hate Crimes and Counteraction to Them in Russia in 2023,” Sova Center, February 14, 2024, https://www.sova-center.ru/en/xenophobia/reports-analyses/2024/02/d47069/.
79 Silantyev et al. Op.cit., 88.
80 Ibid 91-91; Aleksandr Sevidov, “‘Rytsari’ informatsionnoi voiny,” Odna Rodina, March 30, 2017, https://odnarodyna.org/content/rycari-informacionnoy-voyny.
“Destructology” is a politically actual science. This book is proving that very different “destructive currents” are being projected from the West, where it originated, to Russia through Ukraine. Therefore, “rockets turned out to be the best cure for misanthropic ideology.”81 The topic of the influence of Western countries is covered only in passing, apart from the introductory chapter on the roots of “misanthropic ideology.” It is only in reference to Blue Whales that the authors express bewilderment at the fact that the “curators” of the teenage suicide operate from Ukraine: after all, Ukrainian teenagers suffer from it as well. And then the authors cite Yevgeny Venediktov, director of the Center for Research on Legitimacy and Political Protest, who is sure that Blue Whales is the job of Western intelligence services.82 However, later, Silantyev himself said that the organization of serial murders and school shootings in Russia was being carried out by Western specialists and that “Ukrainian security services are involved in this role only as executors.”83
Practical Application of “Destructology”
Evidently, “destructology” as a one-size-fits-all pseudo-science somewhat resembles a similar phenomenon in the legal sphere Russian anti-extremism legislation. The way it was conceived and the way it is developing and being implemented in the practice of law enforcement, this legislation is intended to cover a wide range of activities that are considered by the authorities to be ideologically motivated and threatening to state and public security, and that the authorities are prepared to criminalize. For example, in the sphere of religion, since the late 2000s, anti-extremism law enforcement has been applied not only to politicized religious groups and movements, but also to those that were seen as encroaching on “spiritual security” and even on traditionalism in terms of religion itself.84 Silantyev, as is clear from what has been said above about his work as an Islamic scholar and fighter against “sects,” was, and continues to be, quite supportive of this broad understanding of antiextremism. Over time, the state has of course expanded its understanding of “extremism,” mainly by being willing to criminalize all new forms of speech and behavior that were seen as threatening.
But the idea so intrinsic to “destructology” of understanding any socially destructive behavior as an element of a single whole provided a sound basis for an expansion of antiextremism and anti-terrorism policies that was surprising, even for today’s Russia. In early June 2020, the Human Rights Center of the World Russian People’s Council recommended drastically expanding the list of threats that the state must fight within the framework of its
81 Silantyev et al. Op.cit., 202-203.
82 Ibid., 106-107.
83 Ivan Petrov, “Sponsor prokazy: zachem VSU geroiziruiut maniakov sredi rossiiskikh detei,” Izvestiia, February 3, 2023, https://iz.ru/1463040/ivan-petrov/sponsor-prokazy-zachem-vsu-geroiziruiut-maniakovsredi-rossiiskikh-detei.
84 Alexander Verkhovsky, “The State against Violence in Spheres Related to Religion” in Religion and Violence in Russia: Context, Manifestations, and Policy (Washington D.C., CSIS, 2018): 11-42.
anti-extremism and anti-terrorism policies: “We recommend expanding the classification of new forms of extremism, manifested not only in organizations, to include the names of subcultures and decentralized network communities. For example, the Columbine subculture does not fall under the definition of an extremist organization, but in fact carries out terrorist activities. Suicidal games on social networks, the AUE subculture, and the necrocommie [necrocommunist, AV] subculture, which, although not calling for violence, promotes the idea of secession of part of the country's territory, should also be recognized as forms of extremist ideology.”85
And the state partially follows these recommendations. In fact, at the time when the Human Rights Center was adopting them, the Supreme Court decision of August 17, 2020 was already being prepared, banning the so-called Prisoners Criminal Unity as an extremist organization, despite the fact that such an organization has never existed as such. What actually exists is commercial exploitation of teenage romantic notions of criminal subculture and a myth about a certain movement on this basis.86 In 2022, the so-called Columbine Movement, that is, supporters of school shootings, was banned as a terrorist organization, although this is only a subculture, as well as individual killers usually not connected with each other. Religious groups, whose harmful practices consisted only of “non-traditional healing” were prohibited as extremist on more than one occasion (the latest example is one of the local organizations of Falun Dafa; several foreign organizations of this movement were declared “undesirable”87). Organizations of Citizens of the USSR began to be recognized as extremist as early as 2019. And all the bans listed here entail new criminal charges. However, in the case of religious groups or Citizens of the USSR, it is impossible to claim that it is the influence of the HRC or Silantyev personally that has an impact here.
During the COVID pandemic, Silantyev also classified anti-vaxxers as a “destructive formation” and part of “medical dissidence,” but neither his traditional methods of frightening the audience with the terrorist potential of anti-vaxxers88 nor direct calls to criminalize their activities89 were effective in this case. The authorities never implemented such broad repressive measures.
“Destructology” is intended for and is already being used in forensic examinations, albeit so far, apparently, only by Silantyev personally and his colleagues. Only a few
85 “Pozitsiia Pravozashchitnogo tsentra VRNS po novomu variantu Strategii protivodeistviia ekstremizmu v Rossiiskoi Federatsii do 2025 goda,” WRPC, June 3, 2020, https://vrns.ru/news/pozitsiya-pravozashchitnogotsentra-vrns-po-novomu-variantu-strategii-protivodeystviya-ekstremizmu-v/.
86 Dmitrii Gromov, AUE: kriminalizatsiia molodezhi i moralnaia panika (Moscow: Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 2022).
87 “Sud kassatsionnoi instantsii podtverdil reshenie o priznanii ‘Falun Dafa’ ekstremistskoi organizatsiei,” Sova Center, July 12, 2021, https://www.sova-center.ru/misuse/news/persecution/2021/07/d44548/.
88 Melnikov Andrei, “Ob okkul'tnykh korniakh dvizheniia bortsov s privivkami,” NG-Religii, November 30, 2021, https://www.ng.ru/ng_religii/2021-11-30/9_520_vaccinations.html.
89 “Roshal predlozhil vvesti ugolovnoe nakazanie za podstrekatelstvo protiv vaktsinatsii,” Vesti, October 21, 2021, https://www.vesti.ru/article/2628936.
instances of this use are known,90 and what is known is most likely but a small fraction. Alas, the reports of these forensic examinations are not available for study because they are not published. In fact, we do not even know the number of cases where “destructological” expert examinations were conducted, and no other examinations by the same experts in their main specialties. Expert conclusions can only be leaked into the public space if the defense side allows it, but usually defense lawyers are not inclined to do so.
Sometimes this concerns people who are far from public life, like Polina Dvorkina, who killed her father and tried to shoot boys in a kindergarten after falling under the influence of misandrist ideas.91 At other times, the accused are quite socially active, but for some reason their lawyers did not make their findings public, as in the case of the active hate preachers schema-hegumen Sergius (Nikolai Romanov), a prominent Orthodox fundamentalist, and his assistant Vsevolod Moguchev, a former ultra-right winger.92 These examples show that Silantyev and his colleagues also participate as experts in trials in which the law is on the side of the prosecution.
This is important to note, as the most well-known expert report by Silantyev and coauthors was the complex report on the case of Evgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriichuk, dated May 3, 2023.93 The two women are accused of justifying terrorism (no verdict has yet been delivered) for a play they staged about the wives of jihadists, and in this case the charge clearly has no legal precedent.94 The play focuses on the fate of women who, for one reason or another, often romantic, became involved with jihadists and were later brought to trial. The play is clearly filled with sympathy for these women. Jihadism itself remains in the background, but is presented as an evil force.
It was obviously Silantyev who wrote the “destructology” section of the expert report, while his lab colleagues authored the other two sections: Elena Zamyshevskaya was responsible for the psychology section, and Galina Khizrieva for the linguistics section.95 The
90 Aleksandr Soldatov, Andrei Karev, “Tsaritsa nauk,” Novaia gazeta, May 6, 2023, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2023/05/06/tsaritsa-nauk-media); Vadim Redkin, “‘Sektoved’ glazami ‘sektanta’,” Krasnoyarskii rabochii, November 11, 2023, https://krasrab.ru/news/stati/33642
91 “Ocherednoi prigovor vynesen s ispolzovaniem destruktologicheskoi ekspertizy, vvedennoi v sudebnuiu praktiku rukovoditelem Pravozashchitnogo tsentra VRNS,” WRPC, July 5, 2023, https://vrns.ru/news/ocherednoy-prigovor-vynesen-s-ispolzovaniem-destruktologicheskoy-ekspertizyvvedennoy-v-sudebnuyu-pr/
92 “Eks-skhiigumen Sergii i ego pomoshchnik prigovoreny k realnym srokam,” Sova Center, January 27–September 8, 2023, https://www.sova-center.ru/religion/news/extremism/counter-extremism/2023/01/d47545/.
93 In January of the same year, a preliminary examination was carried out at the MSLU; it concerned a video of a 2019 play reading. We do not know who the authors of that expertise are.
94 “Delo ‘Finista Yasna Sokola’,” Sova Center, May 5 – June 30, 2023, https://www.sovacenter.ru/misuse/news/persecution/2023/05/d48066/; Venera Galeeva, “Ot IGIL do feminizma. Chto imenno potianulo na ugolovnoe delo v spektakle ‘Finist Yasnyi Sokol’,” Fontanka, May 5, 2023, https://www.fontanka.ru/2023/05/05/72278702/
95 The text is not known in its entirety, but in large part: “Meduza publikuet ‘ekspertizu’ po delu ob ‘opravdanii terrorizma’ v spektakle ‘Finist yasnyi sokol’,” Meduza, May 5, 2023,
report describes jihadists’ ideas as the ideas expressed by the play itself, even though they are barely mentioned; the report also equates the romanticization of loving a terrorist with the romanticization of terrorism itself. Although none of the characters are described as being involved in jihadism themselves, the report claimed that the play contained signs of “a subculture of Russian neophyte Muslim women who are wives (including virtual wives) of extremists and terrorists” in ISIS. Note that women who practically support their jihadist husbands certainly exist in reality and even form communities (or at least they used to), but the play contains no mention of any subculture or complicity in jihadism. And yet the report substantiates the thesis that the play justifies terrorism, although this judgment is inherently juridical and should not appear in the report (this legal norm is violated almost everywhere). Finally, noting the play's criticism of Russia's “androcentric social structure,” Silantyev also found, for some reason, that the play contained signs of radical feminism, even though they clearly were not present there.
The most striking idea expressed in the expert report was that the defendants, in their theatrical performance, were able to simultaneously promote the ideology of the Islamic State and radical feminism. The authors of the report explained that radical Islamism is based on preaching the inescapable humiliation of Muslims in a non-Muslim world, and radical feminism is based on preaching the equally inescapable humiliation of women in a world of male domination, so there is a common denominator here.
Berkovich and Petriichuk’s trial turned out to be a very high-profile case, probably because the play was successful and won two Golden Mask awards (the highest Russian theater prize), and even more so because Berkovich became widely known in 2022 for her anti-war poems. The interest surrounding the case brought light to the expert report and, of course, to its main author. Several small dossiers about Silantyev were published in different media outlets. But his co-authors also received attention. For example, some recalled that the psychologist Zamyshevskaya authored an expert report in the case of “discrediting the army” against Ilya Myaskovsky, an activist from Nizhny Novgorod. She saw “signs of informational and psychological influence” in his anti-war publications due to the presence of the words “war” and “shoot.”96
“Destructology” in general also received some attention. In May of that year, 204 scientists signed an open letter protesting against such abuse of the scientific method, among them a number of academicians and members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), including Evgeny Alexandrov, Chairman of the RAS Commission on Pseudoscience.97 At the https://meduza.io/feature/2023/05/05/meduza-publikuet-ekspertizu-po-delu-ob-opravdanii-terrorizma-vspektakle-finist-yasnyy-sokol
96 Aleksandr Lugov, “Kogda ‘Net voine’ amoralno. Delo aktivista Ilyi Myaskovskogo,” Svoboda, December 26, 2022, https://www.svoboda.org/a/kogda-net-voyne-amoraljno-delo-aktivista-iljimyaskovskogo/32193651.html.
97 Council on the Ethics of Scientific Publications, “Open letter,” May 30, 2023, https://publicationethics.ru/2023/05/open-letter-against-forensic-pseudoscience/.
end of June, at the request of the defense, the Russian Federal Center for Forensic Science under the Ministry of Justice (RFCFS) reviewed a expert report and concluded that destructology was not present on the list of registered scientific specialties, and therefore no such expert report could exist.98 This caused yet another wave of arguments about what can be considered a science at all, including in relation to forensic examination. But apparently, the RFCFS is formally right: forensic science is based on the law that governs it, and the law understands only “registered sciences.” However, this position too was challenged by one of the most prominent theorists and practitioners of forensic science, Elena Galyashina, who since the beginning of the war has taken a very tough stance against those experts and scientists whom she sees as opposition to the political regime.99
In the case of Berkovich and Petriichuk, the prosecution later carried out another examination, which was not “destructological.” But it remains to be seen whether the expertise written by Silantyev and his colleagues will be recognized and accepted by the court. The court's decision in such a high-profile case will probably be important for the future of “destructology” as an expertise tool, although other “destructological” expertise has been accepted by the courts in the past, so it is likely that the applied use of this method in courts will continue. And it will certainly continue outside the courts, in the preparation of official opinions.
Who Is the Enemy?
Finally, there is a topic that is not yet covered by “destructology,” but which Roman Silantyev finds deeply resonant: the onset of “liberal fascism.” He addressed this particular threat in 2015 at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Human Rights. That meeting was devoted to the threats posed by various radical currents. He argued that “there are more fascists who hold liberal views in Russia than fascists of illiberal views” and that the country was facing an unprecedented surge of Russophobia “coming from representatives of liberal circles.” 100 Silantyev also spoke about the need to protect the majority, traditionally minded and supportive of President Putin, from various minorities. He ended with the statement that, as a representative of the World Russian People’s Council, he had the right to speak on behalf of the ethnic Russians.101 Speaking in this manner in front of the council in 2015 was clearly provocative, but my personal impression was that this address was delivered quite
98 “Tsentr pri Miniuste nazval nenauchnoi destruktologicheskuiu ekspertizu po delu Berkovich,” Kommersant, June 30, 2023, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6081434; “VFBU RFTsSE pri Miniuste Rossii v otvet…” VLAger Telegram channel, June 30, 2023, https://t.me/vlagr/10580.
99 “Na zlobu dnia – vneplanovaia,” Elena Galyashina's VK, September 12, 2023, https://vk.com/wall205712135_2714.
100 Transcript of a special meeting of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights on the topic ‘The Growth of Radicalism in Society as a Threat to Human Rights,’ website of the President of the Russian Federation, March 30, 2015, http://www.presidentsovet.ru/events/rost_radikalizma_v_obshchestve_kak_ugroza_pravam_cheloveka/report/
101 Ibid.
sincerely.102 The use of the word “fascism” in this case did not refer to any political science terminology. As is generally accepted in Russian political rhetoric, it was used simply to label liberals as a dangerous threat, comparable in this respect to fascism, which in turn is associated with the existential threat to the country posed by the aggression of Nazi Germany.
A year earlier, a week after the Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over Donbas, Silantyev called Igor Strelkov, one of the key figures of the 2014 Donbas irredenta, who was later convicted by the International Criminal Court for being complicit in the plane attack, a hero. Silantyev explained that the friendship between different peoples of Russia was growing stronger in the trenches of the Donbas War, where they united to “shoot fascists, Banderites, and other liberal scum.”103 While taking a decidedly anti-Ukrainian stance on all topics discussed in relation to Ukraine since at least 2014, Silantyev has always understood it in the broader context of confrontation with the West. For example, he linked the history of the establishment of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, in opposition to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, to his view of the United States manipulating the Patriarch of Constantinople.104
As one could gather at least from what was written above about the book Satanists against “Biotrash”, for Silantyev, the West is the source of liberal evil. And long before the current official fashion of focusing on the “Anglo-Saxons,” he preferred to talk about the UK and the US. For Silantyev, they were the main enemies in the great confrontation of civilizations, and he occasionally spoke quite definitively about their machinations. For example, when asked about ISIS, he could refer directly to the fact that the radicalization of Islam was set up by the United States, that “there is a hypothesis that the Wahhabis are one of the projects of British intelligence,” and that in general, the United States supported nongovernmental organizations, human rights activists, and “sects” in order to destabilize regimes around the world.105 Silantyev often used the word “human rights defenders” as a pejorative, but he explained that he was referring to “wrong” human rights defenders, as opposed to those like his WRPC Human Rights Center: “In Russia, human rights defenders protect only minorities, based on their political or financial interests. But the majority also needs protection.”106
102 As a member of that Presidential Council at the time, I attended that meeting.
103 “Pravoslavnyi pravozashchitnik nazval Strelkova ‘geroem nashego vremeni’,” Interfaks-Religiia, June 24, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140625133352/http://interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=55688.
104 See for example: Roman Silantyev, “Konstantinopol' otkryl novyi front protiv russkikh sviashchennikov,” Vzgliad, September 14, 2018, https://vz.ru/opinions/2018/9/14/941823.html.
105 Maksim Vasyunov, Roman Silantyev, “Zapad prines khristian v zhertvu,” Pravoslavie.ru, September 9, 2014, https://www.pravoslavie.ru/73464.html
106 “Roman Silantyev, ispolnitelnyi direktor programm Vsemirnogo russkogo narodnogo sobora: ‘Bolshinstvo tozhe nuzhdaetsia v zashchite’,” Izvestiia. December 25, 2006, https://iz.ru/news/320318.
Opposition to the West and all those who can be understood as “liberal scum” also implies the existence of a circle of those figures and experts with whom Silantyev has collaborated or is collaborating. It should be said at once that there are no truly radical characters among them, but there are those who combine ideological motivation with the desire to fit into the mainstream, or at least not to oppose it. We already mentioned Denis Davydov, the director of the Safe Internet League, Dmitrii Volodikhin, the leader of the Bastion group, and repeated collaboration with the RISS. Silantyev's texts looked organic and fit well with the reports of the Institute of National Strategy by the prominent nationalist intellectual Mikhail Remizov107 (he, by the way, became a member of the WRPC Council in 2019). A “destructology” textbook was published by the Smolin Publishing House, which also publishes works of its owner, Mikhail Smolin, for example, his book Russia Will Remain an Empire. And so on.
Some of Silantyev's partners may be considered radicals by some, but that is debatable. For example, the critic of “non-traditional Islam” Rais Suleimanov, whom Ragozina also categorized as an “expert alarmist,” was once even persecuted in Tatarstan.108 Komsomol’skaya pravda journalist Dmitry Steshin, who helped Silantyev write the book about Citizens of the USSR, is known, among other things, for his personal relationships in the 2000s with the leaders of the neo-Nazi group BORN, who were sentences to life for a series of political murders, but was only a witness in that case.109 However critical he may be of certain officials, Silantyev himself has never, as far as we know, had any problems with the authorities.
Conclusion
The sharp escalation of the conflict with the West in 2022 allowed many semi-official experts, and especially propagandists, to become noticeably radicalized, but Silantyev had practically no need to do so he had already been supporting the positions now endorsed by the state. This was also true to the full extent of his public position on Ukraine. Of course, it is hard to say whether such a close convergence between his positions and those of high-ranking officials is to some extent the result of his influence. But sometimes, this does seem to be the case.
Back in March 2022, Silantyev said that the influence of neo-paganism was growing in Ukraine and, generally, a certain particular “religion of hatred” was forming.110 In October of
107 The final version was compiled in the book Needinaia Rossiia, Doklady po etnopolitike, ed. M.V. Remizov (Moscow: Institut natsionalnoi strategii, Knizhnyi mir, 2015).
108 “Vozbuzhdeno ugolovnoe delo v otnoshenii kazanskogo religioveda Suleimanova,” Sova Center, February 9, 2016, https://www.sova-center.ru/religion/news/extremism/counter-extremism/2016/02/d33791/.
109 Mariia Klimova, Egor Skovoroda, “11 druzei BORN,” Mediazona, January 19, 2015, https://zona.media/article/2015/01/19/11-druzey-born
110 “Prishlo vremia sdelat' odnoznachnyi vybor,” Interfaks-Religiia, March 18, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20220331190242/http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=interview&div=548.
the same year, General Alexei Pavlov, an assistant to the Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, in an interview on the same topic, spoke about the decisive political influence of “sectarians” and Satanists in Ukraine.111 Silantyev later expanded this idea, on the basis of his “destructological” research, to reflect his notion of a complex impact of the enemy on Russian society. And he formulated this opinion, as was customary, using strong expressions and rather liberal interpretations of the facts and figures: “Ramzan Kadyrov's statements that Russia is at war with Satanists are true. Since 2014, Ukraine has been purposefully killing our citizens, mostly children, through information and psychological operations. This includes the spread of ‘death games’ on social networks, propaganda of neoNazism and the Columbine terrorist movement, and phone terrorism. Because of this, we have lost up to 500 children who were driven to suicide and died in school shootings.”112
Silantyev only had to develop this idea a little further, which he did in 2023. According to him, since “the Ukrainian authorities chose neo-paganism leaning towards Satanism as their ideology,”113 a “religion of Ukrainian-ness” and “esoteric Nazism” were taking root there; unless the current regime changes, they would replace Christianity, at least among the elites. But still, relying on his understanding of religious tradition, Silantyev remains optimistic about history: the interview quoted above is titled The Monks’ Prophecy About the Reunification of Russia is Coming True.114 In other words, Silantyev acts specifically as a systematic and diverse fighter in the “total war”115 waged by the West and by liberalism in general against everything that the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church defends. The positions of the Russian authorities and the Moscow Patriarchate are coming closer and closer together, and therefore Silantyev is increasingly in demand.
Today, at the beginning of 2024, it is difficult to name a topic where Silantyev’s approaches would be more radical or substantially different than the official ones. Of course, some past unresolved disagreements remain, such as whether medical dissidence should be criminalized. There might be other disagreements, but they are irrelevant in today’s acute global confrontation. For instance, Silantyev is willing to concede that even a Satanist convicted of a series of murders could actually repent if he enlisted, went straight from prison
111 Aleksei Pavlov, “Chto variat v ‘vedminom kotle’. Na Ukraine nabrali silu neoiazycheskie kulty,” Argumenty i fakty, October 25, 2022, https://aif.ru/society/religion/ chto_varyat_v_vedminom_kotle_na_ukraine_nabrali_silu_neoyazycheskie_kulty
112 “Roman Silantyev: Voina na Ukraine nachinaet priobretat religioznyi kharakter,” Radonezh, November 2, 2022, https://radonezh.ru/2022/11/02/roman-silantev-voyna-na-ukraine-nachinaet-priobretat-religioznyyharakter.
113 Mikhailov Vladimir, “Religioved Silantyev objasnil izgnanie UPTs iz Kievo-Pecherskoi lavry ‘ukrainskim satanizmom,’ MK, March 14, 2023, https://www.mk.ru/social/2023/03/14/religioved-silantev-obyasnil-izgnanieupc-iz-kievopecherskoy-lavry-ukrainskim-satanizmom.html.
114 “Prorochestvo monakhov o vossoedinenii Rusi sbyvaetsia” (Radio KP interview), WRPC, January 11, 2023, https://vrns.ru/news/prorochestvo-monakhov-o-vossoedinenii-rusi-sbyvaetsya/.
115 “Shchit ot destruktiva. Kak protivostoiat' provokatsiiam iz-za rubezha?,” WRPC, April 24, 2023, https://vrns.ru/news/shchit-ot-destruktiva-kak-protivostoyat-provokatsiyam-iz-za-rubezha/.
to the front and fought for six months to earn a pardon.116 Unlike some of the fighters against the threat of the liberal Western, Silantyev today does not criticize the authorities harshly, even when he probably considers their actions insufficiently ambitious. In the past, Silantyev obviously enjoyed the image of a somewhat radical and even scandalous critic, but now he is willing to give it up.
116 “Religioved vyskazalsia o pomilovannom za uchastie v SVO sataniste,” News.ru, November 21, 2023, https://news.ru/society/religioved-vyskazalsya-o-pomilovannom-za-uchastie-v-svo-sataniste/.
Is Mikhail Prishvin a liberal or a conservative? ‘The Bard of Nature’ and his place in today’s ideological landscape
Boris Knorre, The George Washington University
Russia’s current ideological landscape features several writers-cum-columnists who oppose liberal ideas, claim that state interests have priority over those of the individual, and also proclaim priority of the “traditional values” they correlate with Russia as the bulwark of Eastern Orthodoxy and anti-globalism in today’s world. Well-known and well-studied names include Alexander Dugin, Egor Kholmogorov, Alexander Prokhanov, Zakhar Prilepin, et al.1 Russian reference writers who are popular among the conservative patriotic camp include Konstantin Leontiev and Lev Tikhomirov for the tsarist period, Ivan Ilyin and Ivan Solonevich for the interwar emigration, Lev Gumilev and Alexander Solzhenitsyn for the dissidence, Alexander Panarin for the early post-Soviet times, etc.2
These authors, both historic and contemporary, can be seen as the “iconostasis” of Russia’s current ideological playbook. Yet, there are sometimes less famous thinkers whose influence on Russian culture is nonetheless quite significant. A careful consideration of their works reveals that today’s Russian ideological landscape is far more complex than it might appear to be if we confine ourselves only to the picture painted by the official propaganda.
One such thinker is Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin, a writer both Russian and Soviet, since he embarked on this writing career long before the 1917 Revolution and finished in the middle of Soviet history. His books informed the typical Soviet perception of him as a field
1 Marlène Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: And Ideology of Empire (Washington D.C., Baltimore MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press: Johns Hopkins University Press); Mariya Engström, Contemporary Russian Messianism and New. Contemporary Security Policy 2014. 35:3. 356 – 379; Andreas Umland, Post-Soviet “Uncivil Society” and the Rise of Aleksandr Dugin: A Case Study of the Extraparliamentary Radical Right in Contemporary Russia (Ph. D. in Politics, University of Cambridge, 2007); K.U. Roman, Zwrot polityczny w literaturze rosyjskiej, czyli „Lewy Front Sztuki” według Zachara Prilepina. Poznanskie Studia Slawistyczne PSS NR (June, 2014): 229 – 241
2 Julia Zlatkova, Byzantism and Slavdom: Political Ideology of Constantine Leontiev. Cyril and Methodius: Byzantium and the World of the Slavs International Scientific Conference Thessaloniki (2015): 121 – 131; Marlene Laruelle, In search of Putin's philosopher Why Ivan Ilyin is not Putin’s Ideological Guru. Intersections (March 2017); Anastasiya Mitrofanova, Politizatsiia “pravoslavnogo mira” [Politicization of the Orthodox world]. (Moscow: Nauka, 2004); Alexander Buzgalin, Ivan Il’in i Postsovetskiy Konservatizm. Predislovie k stat’ye Kh.R. Petera. Al’ternativy (2012), no 4.
naturalist picturing the world of nature. This reputation was solidified by his fairy tale The Sun’s Storehouse3 which was even placed on the Soviet school curriculum. In Russian culture, Prishvin was presented as the “bard of nature,” and his ideas contributed to the development of environmental movements. Russian biologists today are influenced by Prishvin’s ideas. For instance, Olga Grinchenko, chairman of the M. A. Menzbir Moscow Regional Department of the Russian Society for the Salvation and Study of Birds, curates a specially protected nature reserve “Crane Homeland,” named after the well-known Prishvin novel4 , and is expanding the project into a national park with the same name. The territory of the park plans to include places from three districts of the Moscow and Yaroslavl regions in which Prishvin lived, hunted and made his observations of nature.
However, post-Soviet readers began to discover a Prishvin who was far more than merely a “bard of nature,” and even his philosophy of nature turned out to be much more multidimensional than it had appeared in the Soviet era. The change in the perception of Prishvin, who came to be seen as a philosopher and a religious thinker dwelling on the urgent political issues of his day, was largely influenced by the publication of his works discussing ‘god-seeking’ [bogoiskatel’stvo] in Russia and his search for God, which were printed only after the collapse of state-mandated atheism. In addition, Prishvin was seen in a radically new light thanks to the efforts of Lilia Riazanova and Yana Grishina, the head curators of the Mikhail Prishvin Museum in the village of Dunino in the suburbs of Moscow. They published 18 volumes of the diaries that Privshin kept for 50 years, from the age of 32 in 1905 until his death in 1954. After the publication of these texts, it became clear how multifaceted Prishvin’s views were.
Prishvin's works turned out to be in great demand in post-Soviet Russia because his reflections touch on almost all of the main painful issues of national identity, the history of Russia and political events of which he was a contemporary: issues of nationalism, liberalism and conservatism, the nature of power in Russia, Russian religiosity, the role of the Orthodox Church, the 1917 Revolution, messianism and the content of socialist ideas. Therefore, humanities scholars across various fields (philosophers, philologists, historians, etc.), who hold different ideological positions, actively appeal to Prishvin's work and discover interesting ideas and details from the history of Russian thought. However, there are also some researchers, cultural figures and employees of the Russian media who draw attention to Prishvin in order to confirm the official ideological line of the modern Russian regime.
In this article, I scrutinize the statements and ideas of Prishvin where he reflects on the problems of social structure, expresses dreams of an ideal human community, and focuses on issues of freedom, power and duty, from both a civil-political and a religious
3 Mikhail Prishvin, Kladovaya solntsa (Moscow: ‘Sovetskaya Rossiya’, 1977).
4 Mikhail Prishvin, “Zhuravlinaya rodina,” in Sobranie sochineniy v 8 tomakh. vol. 3 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1983): 30 – 160.
perspective. I am trying to answer the question of how liberal and conservative views correlate and intertwine in Prishvin's worldview. Was Prishvin more conservative or liberal? Therefore, I draw special attention to the analysis of those cultural attitudes inherent in the church tradition, which Prishvin spoke about when contesting the conservative ideas popular in Russian culture about the limits of human freedom and the social order.
In doing this, I highlight the works of Alexander Podoksenov, professor of Bunin Yelets State University, one of the main Post-Soviet researchers of Prishvin's oeuvres, who initially took an unbiased view of Privshin, but later switched to the ideological rails of Prishvin's interpretation. I also consider the explanations of Prishvin's ideas made by Alexey Varlamov, member of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art and rector of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, Yana Grishina, head curator of the Mikhail Prishvin Museum in Moscow suburbs, Elena Knorre, senior research fellow of the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IWL RAS) in Moscow, Natalia Borisova, professor at the Yelets Ivan Bunin State University and I emphasize the importance of the latest interpretations and disputes around the religiosity of Prishvin found in the works by Svetlana Poshina and Elena Borovskaya, associate professors from the Moscow City Teachers' Training University and a researcher Ivan Aleksandrov.
“Kashchey’s Kingdom.” The Evolution of Prishvin’s Ideas Against the Backdrop of his Development as a Writer
Prishvin is a thinker with a fairly rich and complex philosophical world whose components are difficult to fit into a simple outline. Throughout his lifetime, his views noticeably evolved in a non-linear manner.5 His mother came from a family of Old Believers who had converted to the official Orthodox Christianity. Some elements of the Old Believer tradition did survive in Prishvin’s family: from childhood, Mikhail was introduced to popular Old Believer myths and religious intuitions and the young writer was particularly affected by eschatological expectations widespread in the Orthodox milieu. 6
Even as a child, Prishvin perceived the social world as corrupt, depraved, and hostile to human beings, and he referred to it using the well-known folklore image of “Kashchey’s Kingdom.”7 Kashchey (or Koshchey) The Immortal is an evil and scary figure of East Slavic mythology, who appears often in Russian folk tales. He communicates with the world of the dead, thwarts the happiness of the living, and is invulnerable to ordinary people, as his death
5 Varvara Burtseva, “‘A Soviet Piece, but Without Sycophancy’: ‘The Sun’s Storehouse’ as a Philosophical Manifesto,” Proceedings of the International academic conference “Literary heritage of M.M. Prishvin: the context of national and world culture," dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the writer. (Russian Federation, Moscow, February 20 – 22, 2023).
6 Alexey Varlamov, Okhotnik za schast'em (Moscow, 2021): 10.
7 Prishvin frequently turns to the idea of Kashchey’s kingdom in his diaries, but The Chain of Kashchey is the principal vehicle of this idea.
is enclosed in a mysterious needle hidden in several magical animals and objects nested within one another.8
Elena Balashova9 believes that the original impetus for choosing this personification of evil came from Alexander Veltman’s novel Kashchey the Immortal.10 The principles upon which this kingdom rests are many: they include trade based on the power of financial capital, enmity between people and communities, alienation that manifests in a variety of forms, etc. Prishvin sees these principles as links in a single corrupt “Chain of Kashchey,” “the symbol of isolation, unfreedom, of the evil that had bound the entire world.”11 That was the image Prishvin decided to use for the title of his biographical novel The Chain of Kashchey.12
Prishvin sees the world as being symbolically separated, owing to Kashchey’s curse; all people are victims of this curse that transforms our existence into “shards of shattered life.”13 Therefore, the disharmony we see around us is inherent in human beings, that is, it has existed for as long as humans have been on Earth. However, a new era adds new shapes to this “traditional” evil: Kashchey locks all of humanity into the “egoism of property,” unfair distribution of land between people when the “haves” dictate what kind of life the “havenots” will live. In his focus on this issue, Prishvin echoes popular social ideas of the prerevolutionary era that had been voiced by the progressives of the time, criticizing the traditional order of property relations that hinge on the power of capital as an impermissible evil.
Some scholars did note that in Prishvin’s telling, the picture of the world cursed by Kashchey serves as a folklore analog of Adam’s Fall.14 Prishvin himself makes several mentions of Adam’s curse in The Chain of Kashchey. He imbues the Biblical text with a socialist interpretation that has Adam commit his sin twice: first when he tasted of the mythological “tree of knowledge of good and evil” and then, when he was already exiled from Paradise, instead of eating his bread by the sweat of his face (Gen 3: 19), he began using the toil of the second, “landless Adam.” That is, he started the practice of one person
8 Anna Zhuchkova, Karina Galay, “Funktsional'noye znacheniye mifologicheskogo obraza Koshcheya bessmertnogo i yego otrazheniye v russkikh volshebnykh skazkakh,” Vestnik slavyanskikh kul'tur (2015), no 3: 165 – 175.
9 Elena Balashova, “Ideya roda i ’Kashcheeva tsep'‘ M. Prishvina,” Lit-info.Ru. http://prishvin.litinfo.ru/prishvin/kritika/balashova-ideya-roda-i-kascheeva-cep.htm?ysclid=lod0oswkm3782855011
10 Alexander Vel'tman, Romany. (Мoscow, 1985).
11 Natal’ya Lishova, “Motiv puti v romane «Kashcheeva tsep'” M. Prishvina: kompozitsionno-strukturnoe svoeobrazie”. Philologos (2011), № 8: 48-54.
12 Mikhail Prishvin, Kashcheeva tsep'. (Мoscow, 1984).
13 This image suggests that Prishvin alludes to the Cabbalistic picture of the world as a shattered vessel. But there is not enough evidence that Prishvin consciously used this reference.
14 See: Elena Balashova, “Ideya roda i ’Kashcheeva tsep'‘…
exploiting another and eating the bread that another person had toiled for.15 Such an understanding of Kashchey’s kingdom came from Prishvin’s personal situation: his father died when he was seven, and his mother was essentially held in bondage to banks by being forced to pay back the debts of her late husband.16
A serious manifestation of alienation and discord in Prishvin’s adolescence was also the conflict with his school teacher Vasily Rozanov, a famous Russian thinker who taught geography at the Yelets gymnasium, where Prishvin studied. The conflict led to Prishvin’s expulsion from the Gymnasium with a “wolf-ticket,”17 which almost drove Prishvin to suicide, but ultimately resulted in the young man leaving home and coming to his merchant uncle in Siberia, who managed to negotiate with the local school to continue the boy’s education.
Since childhood, Privshin perceived the institution of the Church as an integral part of the chain of Kashchey, not an exception from it. The novel The Chain of Kashchey mentions clerics either as Kashchey’s emissaries or as personifications of Kashchey himself. When, for instance, as a small child, Prishvin learned his family wanted to talk his distant relative Maria Ignatova (whom he called Marya Morevna18) into going to see an elder at a monastery,19 he stated outright that he saw Kashchey himself in the elder’s image.
Ultimately, young Prishvin chose the task of breaking “the chain of Kashchey” as his most important life goal and objective: overcoming alienation and misunderstanding between people, thus liberating oneself from the bonds that shackle life and mind.20 In search for ways of handling this task, Prishvin started to adopt various ideological and political doctrines At the start of his student years, he became interested in the idea of the Populists (narodniki) because he initially saw the people through a Romantic lens, believing that the Russian people, common peasants, had some hidden inherent religiosity, a desire to overcome evil and emerge from the cursed “Kashchey’s kingdom.” Quite soon after that, however, he began to doubt Populist ideas and abandoned them, although he continued to maintain friendships with some Populists. In particular, together with peasant poets, he
15 The second Adam personifies those peasants who had no land and who ultimately had to beg to scraps of land from those who had it, and consequently, “those peasants” had to toil both for themselves and for the rich. See: Mikhail Prishvin, Kashcheeva tsep'. Lit-info.ru. http://prishvin.lit-info.ru/prishvin/proza/kascheevacep/kaschej.htm
16 Alexey Varlamov, Okhotnik za schast'em, 15.
17 A ”wolf-ticket” in pre–revolutionary Russia was the colloquial nickname of a document with a mark of unreliability, which prevented admission to educational institutions, public service, etc.
18 Marya Morevna – is also a mythological personage, princess, heroine of Russian folk tales, who has great magical power and fettered Kashchei the Immortal.
19 An elder in the Orthodox church practice is a special spiritual monk who is particularly close to God and can see the future and help handle crucial turning points in people’s lives. Such an elder could help connect the destinies of different persons by pointing out to a young man and a young girl that they should marry.
20 Petr Maslyuzhenko, “Kashcheeva tsep' v kladovoy solntsa. K 135-letiyu Mikhaila Mikhaylovicha Prishvina,” Russkaya narodnaya liniya. 05.02.2008. https://ruskline.ru/analitika/2008/02/05/kaweeva_cep_v_kladovoj_solnca/
continued to publish his works in the Scythians periodical published by the writer Razumnik Ivanov-Razumnik.21
Prishvin then turned to Marxism; after enrolling into the School of Chemistry at Riga Polytechnic, he joined the Fraternitas Arctica Russian student corporation, as well as a Marxist circle who inspired him to translate August Bebel's Women Under Socialism into Russian. At that time, Prishvin believed that he could find the truth that would help liberate the common people from the cursed “chain of Kashchey” in Marxism. He was struck by Bebel’s description of the imminent global disaster, as this idea aligned quite well with the fears of the end of the world that had been the bugbear of his childhood. Bebel helped Prishvin see an answer to his question and to his fears of the end of the world, since Marxists viewed this “end” of one social order as the “beginning of a new life.”22 In 1897, Prishvin was arrested for his Marxist ties and disseminating Marxist literature, and spent a few months in the Mitau prison in Livonia. Upon returning home from university, he abandoned Marxism.23
The world of sectarians and a quest for the invisible “City of Kitezh”
As a counterpoint to the cursed “Kashchey’s kingdom,” Prishvin develops the concept of a certain “invisible city” of Kitezh or the country of Belovodye (White Waters), and this idea will come to dominate his worldview. The myth of the “city of Kitezh” is an ancient Russian myth of a city that, during the Tatar-Mongol invasion, due to the righteousness of its people, was hidden by God in a place inaccessible by regular human beings and was thus protected from being raided by Tatar-Mongol Khan Batu.24 The idea of a mysterious country called Belovodye is based on an Old Believer25 legend.26
Prishvin’s infatuation with the belief in the mythical Belovodye was greatly influenced by his mystical leanings and the loose interpretations of this myth he had encountered during his Populist “going to the people” [khozhdenie v narod]. Prishvin put great stock in all kinds of meetings with unusual “wanderers” (nomadic people who are “not of this world”). In The Chain of Kashchey, he describes an encounter in Siberia with an unknown wanderer with the gigantic Book of Margarit, or the Book of Pearls,27 who gifted him the answer to his question about searching for a just kingdom, “If you go East with faith in your heart, you
21 Alexey Varlamov, Okhotnik za schast'em, 298.
22 Ibid., 55.
23 Ibid., 56.
24 Vladimir Komarovich, Kitezhskaya legenda. Opyt izucheniya mestnykh legend (Moscow, Leningrad, 1936).
25 Old Believers are one of the variants of Russian Orthodoxy, formed in the second half of the 17th century due to the rejection by part of the Orthodox population of the church reform of Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. The Old Believers themselves are not a monolith, but are a complex of movements and organizations confessing the preservation of ancient Russian pre-reform rites and rituals. See in more details: Elena Yukhimenko, Staroobryadchestvo: Istoriya i Kul’tura (Moscow, 2016).
26 Alexander Chuviyurov, “Legenda o Belovodye v pismennoy i ustnoy traditsii,” in Ustnoe i knizhnoe v slavyanskoy i evreyskoy kul'turnoy traditsii. Sb. statey. iss. 44 (Moscow, 2013): 86 – 122.
27 The Book of Margarit is a collection of excerpts from the works of St. John Chrysostom.
will find white waters, and golden mountains upon white waters.”28 Idealization of Belovodye is linked with the belief that this place of harmony between the heavenly and the earthly is still the “Kingdom of the ‘golden age.’”29
Yet for Prishvin, the city of Kitezh became the most relevant image and symbol, gaining even more importance than Belovodye. The myth is based on a source text, The Kitezh Chronicle,30 which names a specific site connected with the righteous city, Lake Svetloyar in the Nizhny Novgorod Region. By the late 19th century, the symbolic and metaphoric significance of the city of Kitezh had gone far beyond the location itself, and the Silver Age transformed the city of Kitezh into a symbol of the best part of Russia that is hidden from the eyes of earthly people. Some writers Sergey Durylin, for instance began to link the concept of the city of Kitezh with the image of the “invisible Church of Christ,” which can only be seen by the righteous; it is connected with the visible church, but is not identical with it.31 Unlike Prishvin, Durylin was a devout Orthodox Christian, but this did not prevent Prishvin and Durylin from finding points of connection in their ponderings of the “invisible city” and the “invisible church.”
Certainly, the significance of the city of Kitezh for Prishvin went far beyond the specific place in the Nizhny Novgorod Region. Consequently, in 1906 and 1907, Prishvin’s quest for the “invisible city” took the form of wandering the Russian North: for two years running, he traveled for months at a time in the thick forests of Karelia and the Arkhangelsk Region. On his first journey, he visited sketes32 on the river Vyg, where Priestless Old Believers and some sectarians lived. Both in the sketes on the Vyg and in other remote settlements in the Russian North, Prishvin encountered the most whimsical religious beliefs, traditions, legends, and superstitions. He included tales about them in his books In the Land of Unfrightened Birds. Sketches from the Land of the Vyg and The Bun that are of considerable ethnographic value. The first book even earned Prishvin a medal from the Russian Geographical Society. Materials collected during another journey to the Trans-Volga region formed the basis of At the Walls of an Invisible City,33 whose title alone reflects Prishvin’s interest in searching for the city of Kitezh. Out of all of Prishvin’s books, this one
28 Mikhail Prishvin, Kashcheeva tsep' (Мoscow, 1984): 107.
29 Natalya Borisova, Zhizn' mifa v tvorchestve M. M. Prishvina (Yelets, 2001): 68.
30 Marina Urtmintseva, “Kitezhskiy letopisets v literaturnoy i zhivopisnoy traditsii (P.I. Melnikov i M.V. Nesterov),” Vestnik Nizhegorodskogo universiteta im. N.I. Lobachevskogo. no. 4 (2011): 322–327.
31 Sergey Durylin, Stat'i i issledovaniya 1900-1920 godov (St. Petersburg, Vladimir Dal, 2014): 120; Anna Reznichenko, “Sergey Nikolaevich Durylin. Prozaik, poet, filosof, bogoslov, iskusstvoved, etnograf,” in Russkaya literatura XX veka. Prozaiki, poets, dramaturgi. Bibliographicheskiy slovar’. vol.1 (Мoscow, 2005): 672.
32 Skete [skit] - is a hermitage place of residence for monks, remote from cities and large human settlements. However, the Old Believers, not only monks, but also secular clergy and family communities chose secluded, such remote places from civilization, due to the fact that they were fleeing from persecution by the state authorities.
33 Mikhail Prishvin, “U sten grada nevidimogo (Svetloye ozero),” in Sobranie sochineniy v 8 tomakh. vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1982): 387–474.
exhibits the greatest focus on searching for another, better faith, as well as the desire to understand the Russian religious mind.34
Prishvin’s quest for the “invisible city” manifests itself not only in his journeys through the real world, but also, to an equal degree in his philosophical quest; in other words, his search transpires both at the level of folklore material and at the level of symbols and ideas. 35 His ponderings are archetypical of many Silver Age philosophers, and that brings him in contact with Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius, who held meetings of the Religious and Philosophical Society (RPhS) in St. Petersburg. Prishvin began to frequent these meetings, and became a member of the Society in 1909. However, he did not agree with all the interpretations of the “invisible city” proposed by Silver Age thinkers. In particular, he did not find the idea of the mysterious kingdom of Inonia from Sergey Esenin’s eponymous poem to be particularly appealing. His disliked Inonia because, instead of Christian humility and conciliation, the concept of Inonia was based on common peasant all-permissiveness [muzhitskaya vol’nitsa] and attendant chaos, on going beyond the limits of the permissible, abandoning social norms, etc. 36
Prishvin met some urban sectarians directly upon recommendations of the RPhS. At some point, he became very interested in the Khlysty (flagellants), in particular in the wellknown Cult of Legkobytov, leader of the sect embodying one of the variants of the Khlysty. He was invited to convert into their faith.37 Prishvin did not want to “jump into the vat,” as he himself framed it, but his great interest in religious life persisted.38 After the outbreak of the First World War, he distanced himself somewhat from the Religious and Philosophical Society. His 1914–1915 diaries contain contradictory assessments of decadent philosophers, and in 1916, he became a frontline war correspondent to gain his own idea of the conflict and of the life of people who fought in it. He distanced himself from the philosophers even more following the Bolshevik coup; he made an even more stringent revision of the worldview that had concerned him previously and even decided to become an agnostic to declare “war on other’s thoughts in my mind,”39 not to identify his worldview with any kind of doctrine.
He was openly contradictory in some of his opinions on religious and political phenomena, which his diary entries make particularly clear. It prompted his biographer Alexey Varlamov to offer the following description of Prishvin:
34 Alexey Varlamov, Okhotnik za schast'em, 95.
35 Elena Knorre, Syuzhet «puti v Nevidimiy grad» v tvorchestve M.M. Prishvina 1900 1930 gg. Thesis for obtaining the degree of candidate of philological sciences (Moscow, 2019).
36 See also an annotation on this point: Elena Knorre, Syuzhet «puti v Nevidimiy grad»…, 133 – 136; Sergey Yesenin, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v semi tomakh, vol. 1. Preparation of texts and comments by A. Kozlovsky (Moscow, 1995): 346 – 362.
37 Alexander Etkind, Khlyst (Moscow, NLO): 454-482.
38 Alexey Varlamov, Okhotnik za schast'em, 95.
39 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1920 – 1922 (Moscow: Moskvskiy rabochiy, 1995): 157.
Prishvin’s Diary is the kind of thing where one could take their pick of any kind of artificially selected quotes that would paint Prishvin as a great fighter against the system, a conformist, a Christian writer, a pantheist, a pagan, or even a theomachist, a consistent realist or modernist, or even a postmodernist, a patriot, a Russophobe. Much depends on the reader’s and researcher’s own stance, and consequently, each one of us truly has their own Prishvin.40
Between “I want to” and “I must.” Critical re-thinking of liberal democratic ideas
Prishvin's opinion on the February Revolution was ambiguous, but he viewed it positively rather than negatively. However, after the Bolshevik coup in October, when Prishvin saw the lawlessness, banditry and cruelties stemming from the revolution, he, like many Russian writers, began to express a negative assessment of Bolshevism and to assume a more negative perspective on those ideas that had paved the way for the revolution. In the late of October 1917, he published the article about Vladimir Lenin titled “Murderer” in the Volya Naroda (Will of the People) newspaper. This piece described Lenin as both a “murderer” and a “thief” who robbed Russia and destroyed the achievements embodied in the “Constituent Assembly.”41
In 1918, the people’s gathering, acting under the Bolshevik’s auspices, took away Prishvin’s family estate the house and manor in the village of Khrushchevo near the town of Yelets in the Lipetsk Region the place where the writer had spent his childhood. This confiscation of his property was accompanied by threats to his life, an event which ended up causing severe mental trauma for Prishvin. He continued to relive this event throughout his entire life. Whenever he came upon former gentry estates demolished by Soviet authorities, whether intentional or not, he ended up associating their destruction with the plundering of his own family manor.
These reflections proved to be associated with his own trauma, evoking negative emotions not simply in relation to revolutionary events as such, but also to the liberal ideas and enlightenment movements in which he himself was, to some extent, involved. He reproached pre-revolutionary liberals for embarking on the mission of educating the people and for paving the way for the revolution because the liberals had an unrealistic and romanticized perception of the people, as they thought the educational system they had organized might bear fruit among the peasants. That is, Prishvin believed that the liberals’ mistake was in believing that the people were capable of receiving an education, as well as reforms and political freedoms. For instance, he notes in 1926:
40 Alexey Varlamov, Okhotnik za schast'em, 208 – 209.
41Mikhail Prishvin, “Ubivets”. Volia naroda. 31.10.1917. no. 159: 6, http://prishvin.litinfo.ru/prishvin/proza/cvet-i-krest/ubivec.htm?ysclid=lplkxol44c379669884
I told Ialovetsky (a friend he went hunting with – B.K.) the thoughts I always had as I looked on the ruins of the estates that had once belonged to liberals, to people that had given their everything to the cause of the people’s education: the same happened to Vorgunin in the suburbs of Elets; he built many model schools in the district, and then was rewarded by being allowed to live in a single little room on the top floor of his own house. “Strictly speaking,” I said, “these were the people that paved the way for the revolution. Why, then, did it happen that way?” Ialovetsky was silent. “Maybe,” I ventured a guess, “they caught it so badly precisely because they had paved the way for the revolution!”42
That is, Prishvin began to justify the misfortunes suffered by former Enlightenment supporters under the terror of the new political regime. In 1927, while dwelling on some liberals who had shared his political views and rejected monarchy as a matter of principle, Prishvin stated that they deluded themselves twice in their views on the revolution: in 1905 by having taken liberal reforms seriously, and then in 1917 by believing that would be possible to take an uncompromising stance, to live in the new society without cooperating with the Bolsheviks and without taking food rations from them.
Prishvin explains his negative assessment of liberals by accusing them of lacking independent thinking, charging them with being a “product” of monarchy, of depending on it in their own way; without the monarchy, they begin to feel how groundless their ideals are and leave the political stage.
The Russian revolutionary is the flip side of monarchy, and liberal personages were double-dealers: they satisfied their revolutionary sentiments through their activities and had, therefore, to perish with the monarchy.43
And in 1933, he proclaimed “the end of liberalism that had nourished the old revolution,” at the same time stating that his own books (connected with liberal aspirations) were now outdated and he therefore had “to search for a new outlet for his creative efforts.”44 Later, as Stalin’s repressions became a political force to be reckoned with, Prishvin began to explain to himelf the totalitarian nature of Soviet power, collectivization, and inescapable duress [‘prinudilovku’] as a natural response to the chaos that engulfed Russia in the first years after the revolution. He sees the problem as people moving away from everyday Russian traditions when the rural way of life had been “inside people as their duties to the land (their family and kin).”
45 Ultimately, “what has previously been done out of tradition
42 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1926 – 1927 (Mocow: “Russkaya kniga," 2003): 408.
43 Ibid., 421.
44 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1932 – 1935. (Saint-Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo “Rostok," 2009): 262.
45 Ibid., 586
now had to be done under duress.” As the writer was ruminating on this manner, he dared to view freedom not as the broadest range of choices, but as “inurement to necessity so that, like it or not, it hearkens back to Anti-Duhring sensibilities46 . Nevertheless, Prishvin himself stated that his view on freedom as “inurement to necessity” differs from that expressed in the philosophy of dialectical materialism where freedom is a “conscious necessity”.
Freedom is gained through long-standing inurement to necessity: having become used to necessity, people begin to carve out their freedom; therefore, freedom is insight into necessity, as dialectic materialism says, however, I say that freedom is inurement to necessity.47
He also launches into a criticism of individualism, believing it to have triggered such powerful centrifugal forces in society that it took major external coercion to pull society back to order from chaos. He believes such trends to have manifested both in Russia and the West.
The culture of the “personal” resulted in liberalism, in the decomposition of state, and hence the return to necessity (fascism in the West, Bolshevism in the East). Therefore, the decomposition of the culture of the personal resulted in the need for the “extra-personal” (“come hell or high water” etc.)48
Finally, he asks the dialectical question outright: how should the life of a society conform to the principles of “I want to” and “I must,” which, from a purely dialectical standpoint, means that if at some point in time, the life of a country is dominated by the principle of “I want to,” then afterwards, the time of the “I must” principle will inevitably come.
Generally, once you start remembering, thinking, asking questions of younger people who had been involved in the revolution body and soul, why, it would have been nice for everyone to be able to live as they want to. It was difficult later to obey the “Must” that arrived on the heels of “I want to.” Yet little by little, they came to realize: nothing could be done about it, no one can forever live as they want to. This is where obedience started, i.e. voluntary, conscious submission to necessity.49
Moreover, he even begins to justify Stalin’s era as “a school of obedience necessary for the Russian people.”
46 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science. (Moscow, 1977): 134 – 146.
47 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1932 – 1935, 586.
48 Ibid., 313.
49 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1940 – 1941 (Moscow: ROSSPAeN, 2012): 478.
Now the entire issue of the possibility of revival and of revealing inner patriotism hinges on the matter of time: when the time of obedience is finished, then Stalin’s era will be understood as a school of obedience necessary for the Russian people. If the time of obedience is cut short, then Germans will inevitably subjugate us, and we will be in obedience to them until we overcome their imprisonment from inside. But who could know how long the time of obedience should be? No one can know it, and anyone who starts talking about the end of the time of obedience without overcoming their personal interests is not a prophet, but a claimant to the throne50 .
Finally, Prishvin saw some kind of a Soviet-time substitution move in that the humanism that had previously been opposed to bio-struggle was now being paradoxically combined with that very struggle (under the slogan of the necessity of class struggle) and ultimately degenerated into some kind of “bio-humanism” that comprised “principles (words) that are human, and the power (cause) of the beast.” Prishvin, therefore, believed that “humanism (liberalism) was thoroughly defeated, and we see that.”51
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” On Prishvin’s inner rebelliousness
Keeping in mind Prishvin’s aforementioned anti-liberal statements, it would still be incorrect to draw any conclusions from them without taking into account other statements showing that while Prishvin did criticize liberals, he largely adhered to a liberal stance.
In The Early Century, a novel that Prishvin had planned as his autobiography, he notes the loss “of the native God Whom people are consistently attempting to replace with the dominant doctrines of the century, trying out those doctrines one after another.”52 Hence the question of how Prishvin saw this “native God.” We could suppose that when Prishvin speaks of the “native God” he regrets the loss of Russia’s native religious tradition. More likely, however, he regrets the loss of the way of life he remembered since childhood, including the way of life of people who were more thoroughly embedded in the cycle of nature, in tilling the land. Let’s note therefore, that the “native God” of whose loss Prishvin speaks is a certain totality of culture broadly understood, a culture that had emerged in Russia before the revolution, a complex of a way of life that is institutionalized or generally accepted by society.
50 Ibid.: 479.
51 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1932 – 1935, 81.
52 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. Ranniy dnevnik. 1905 – 1913 (Saint-Petersburg: “Rostok” 2007): 301.
However, if we consider this loss of the “native God” as a rejection of the ecclesiastical tradition that was taking place in the early 20th century and ultimately peaked in the destruction of churches, then Prishvin’s attitude is far more complex than mere regrets. Let’s leave outside of our consideration the question of how much of a practicing Christian Prishvin was, and let’s focus on a crucial leitmotif that Prishvin reiterates virtually throughout his diaries. These are the words of Christ, spoken in response to Jews who demanded He tell them by what power He worked His miracles, i.e. prove His right to drive merchants out of the Temple of Jerusalem and to call for the spiritual revival of the Jewish people.
And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house a house of merchandise. And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up. Then answered the Jews and said unto him, What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things? Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body. (John. 2: 16-21).
Prishvin repeats the words “Destroy this temple” quite frequently when reflecting on destroyed churches by the early Soviet regime. Repeating Christ’s words while discoursing on Bolshevik Church-destroying campaigns, Prishvin appears to apply Christ’s judgment to the Russian ecclesiastical tradition and to the way of life associated with it, thus hinting that they deserve to be destroyed as much as the Old Testament tradition. Therefore, churches being destroyed and bells being toppled is a sad thing, but it had to be expected. In 1930, Prishvin recalls these words of Christ as he watches a Church bell being broken into pieces.
I have spent the entire day working on the bell’s photographs. “Destroy this temple”… It’s only [heard for] some 30 versts, while my bell will toll throughout the earth, in all tongues. But… This “but” draws into the subject: what my word should be like to toll like bronze! 53
We see that just as Prishvin alludes to Christ’s words about “destroying the temple,” he also adds some rather (ecclesiastically) audacious thoughts on his literary works and his life being somehow able to recreate this temple in a manner similar to what Christ had said. The “bell” of his word, of this writing will toll in place of church bells. And it gives an explanation why Prishvin quite frequently adds a conclusion to the cited above words of Christ, “and in three days I will raise it up.”54 However, as he spoke about “raising up” the temple, he meant not his literary work alone, but also his life experience of being in communication with wild nature. He perceived communication with wild nature as
53 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1930 1931 (Saint-Petersburg: “Rostok” 2006): 12.
54 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1926 – 1927 (Mocow: “Russkaya kniga," 2003): 392.
something sacred, transcendent, religious, mysterious something bordering upon liturgy.55 Some places in his diaries attest to that, and it may explain Prishvin’s religiosity that is profoundly individualistic and impossible to categorize.
My friend, the edifice of our church has been razed to the ground, brick by brick, and I have been all my life collecting the bricks and assembling them into a monument. There are moments, and these are the moments that sustain me, when my effort is successful, and I even think proudly that I am doing this: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Still, I could not admit it so clearly, it is as if I am just putting my feet in someone else’s right steps. I am not Czar Berendey in this great Berendey’s realm around me, but still, I go daily down Berendey’s path to the swamp and I frequently recognize myself in Berendey.56
This attitude to nature influenced Prishvin’s perception of the Church. He believes that the good and the positive that the Church possesses has been taken from nature and the Church laid it up within herself (the Fathers had a sense of nature and included it in the ecclesiastical rhythm), but the Church ultimately presents the things it has borrowed from nature in some dried, museumified, refined, non-living state. The Church cannot convey the natural good in a living state, it cannot convey the very original to people.57 Prishvin categorizes believers in Christ into two groups: “truly divine believers find Christ in nature, discover Him in something close to them, while others get to know Christ through the Church and worship Him in their own way, following the accepted norm.”58 He also posits for himself the concepts of the “natural Christ” and the “artificial Christ” with the first one linked to nature and the second - to the Church. Therefore, for Prishvin, the Christ that the Church preaches is artificial.
Now let us describe in more detail both what it is that makes Prishvin unhappy about the Church tradition and the related behaviors.
The Church’s “Original Sin”
Prishvin’s criticisms of the Church and churchmen have a clear common theme: the Russian Church tradition being so devoted to anthropological pessimism. Clerics are fixated on human sinfulness and on preaching suffering as the integral and principal element of life. For Prishvin, the Church calling upon people to suffer and mortify the joys of life nearly equals negating it. Consequently, Prishvin feels this mortification and negation of life in the
55 Ibid., 392.
56 Ibid.
57 See for details: Ivan Aleksandrov, “«Razmyshleniya» M.M. Prishvina o pravoslavii v rannem dnevnike 1905 -1913 gg.,” Molodoy uchenyy (2012), no 5 (40): 275-277; Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. Ranniy dnevnik. 1905 – 1913, 591, 636.
58 Ibid., 591.
Orthodox liturgies themselves. In 1932, for instance, he offers the following description of his impressions of Vespers:
…In the evening, during my ramblings, I followed the sound of bells and walked into a church – it was Candlemas… The singing was good, and the priest said sensible things. And it struck me that it was the same throughout the entire country, including the tundras: the same wished-for play was performed everywhere… This theater piece teaches us the proper way to die… But why is there no piece that would teach us the proper way to live?59 .
Here, Prishvin’s criticism of Christianity comes quite close to that of Vasily Rozanov, known for his criticism of Christianity and particularly of Russian Orthodox theologians’ teaching on sin that emphasizes the sinful and distorted human nature.60 However, while criticizing Christian asceticism in general, Rozanov did find positive aspects in the Russian Church tradition, noting that it adjusts Christ’s teaching by justifying somewhat the joys of living.61 Prishvin, on the contrary, finds the Church tradition mostly to deny living.
Christians have a sin, they hasten to suffer: why should everyone living life to the hilt hasten that way when suffering will certainly come all by itself. Second, they call upon the little ones (people who aren't experienced in different complexities of life - B.K.) to follow them while these little ones might have lived their lives without suffering.62
The bard of nature openly admits that “the Church binds peoples to sin by constantly speaking about sin.”63 Moreover, he claims that the Church is not only fixated upon sin, but also essentially has people fixate more on manifestations of evil than on manifestations of good: speaking about the Antichrist, they gear people toward the Antichrist, not toward Christ, the Church teaches the proper way to die, but not the proper way to live… etc…
Once I was given some Christian book… it had one subject only: sin, sin, and sin again… The fool who keeps repeating “I am bound, I am bound” remains bound forever. The person who repeats day and night “I am a sinner, I am a sinner” does, indeed, become a sinner… the person who affirms with strong conviction, “I am not bound, I am free” becomes free.64
59 Michail Prishvin, Dnevniki 1932 1935, 62.
60 Vasiliy Rozanov, “Zloye legkomysliye,” in Literatura i zhizn', http://dugward.ru/library/katalog_alfavit/rozanov.html
61 Alexey Varlamov, Rozanov. (Moscow, 2022): 308 – 311.
62 Michail Prishvin, Dnevniki 1923 – 1925 (Saint-Petersburg, 2009): 30.
63 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1926 – 1927 (Mocow: “Russkaya kniga," 2003): 523.
64 Ibid., 523.
As Prishvin dwells critically on the “original sin” as the leitmotif of church sermons, he arrives at an unusual conclusion. He believes that Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia because they attempted to eliminate this leitmotif from the people’s mind. Prishvin thinks that Bolsheviks attempted to remove the idea of the original sin from the mind of the Russian person.
It was not Christ, but Bolsheviks who removed the original sin from humankind: Bolsheviks’ optimism lies precisely in a new human being, and the new human being (without the original sin) lives according to the human being’s own plan.
Therefore, Prishvin believed that the anthropological pessimism that the Church had been imposing on humanity for a long time played a dirty trick on the Russian people, and the Church is responsible for the collapse of monarchy and for Bolsheviks counting to power. The bard of nature considered Bolsheviks to have thus attempted to respond to the urgent existentialist and anthropological demand that people’s mind be freed from being subject to the “original sin” and thus to be freed from anthropological pessimism, and consequentlyfrom social passivity and submission to injustice. In his opinion, the fundamental flaw in the ideology of socialism promoted by the Soviet authorities is eliminating the human personality, replacing the personal principle in human beings with the mass element, with the statist (état) element.
Prishvin discovers an attempt of such a transformation of the anthropological conscience not only in the political dimension, but also in the religious realm - in the phenomenon of the Fedorovians. There are followers of Nikolay Fedorov whose ideas had been titled as Philosophiya obshchego dela (“Philosophy of the Common Task”), who preached physical immortality and resurrection of the dead on earth as a commandment for humanity; ultimately, Fedorov preached apocatastasis, or universal salvation in eternity for every person who has ever lived on earth, and not just salvation of the few elect righteous.65 Social justice was an important message of Fedorov’s soteriology. The traditional teaching of the Church states that people will be inevitably divided into the righteous elect and the sinful who are to suffer for all eternity, and Fedorovians proclaimed this doctrine to be socially bankrupt and demanded that it be amended.
However, the ideas of resurrection on earth suggested by Fedorov’s followers attracted Prishvin with its emphasis on the value of life as such thereby opposing the traditional ecclesiastical fixation on sin and suffering, on denying the joys of life, and on preaching dying. It is no accident that the Fedorovians’ criticism of the Orthodox church tradition used the term “deathgodhood” [smertobozhnichestvo]. That is, they reproached the Church for emphasizing death instead of life.
65 See in more details about Fedorovians: Boris Knorre, V poiskakh bessmertiya. Fedorovskoye religioznofilosofskoye dvizheniye: istoriya i sovremennost’ (Moscow, 2008).
Prishvin openly admits that Fedorov’s doctrine is essentially a variant of the communist idea: “the Philosophy of the Common Task is our communism” and claims that “Fedorov is a Christian Orthodox Bolshevik, that the Philosophy of the Common Task is essentially a communist idea wrapped in religion.” Accordingly, Prishvin addresses to Fedorov’s followers the same rebukes he had addressed to socialism. For instance, he reproaches the Fedorovians for neutralizing the personal principle in the “Common Task,” and he levels a similar charge against socialism.
Appropriating Prishvin in today’s Russia
After the so-called political “conservative turn” of 2012, there were several attempts to make Prishvin suitable for the ideological paradigm of Putin’s time that strives to present Russia’s pre-revolutionary and Soviet periods as mutually binding links in a single historical chain. Several publications have tried to present Prishvin as a protagonist of the “Russian world,” a proponent of “traditional values,” a promoter of the centralization of state power, etc.
For instance, Alexander Podoksenov’s66 works of the last ten years present Prishvin as an author who used his mythopoetic language to assert the priority of a national statebuilding idea, painting Prishvin as an admirer of Stalin. While analyzing At the Walls of the Invisible City (1908),67 one of Prishvin's pre-revolutionary god-seeking books, Podoksenov attempts to demonstrate that even back then Prishvin was a critic of the liberal prerevolutionary reforms. In particular, according to Podoksenov, Prishvin was opposed to the Decree on Strengthening the Foundations of Religious Tolerance, issued on 17 April of 1905) , the Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order issued on 17 October of 1905 , that granted to the population the essential foundations of civil freedoms, in particular, the freedom of conscience and religion, and he was a fierce opponent to all new religious movements.68
At the conference “Mikhail Prishvin in the Context of Today’s Humanities Knowledge” held early 2023 at Yelets Ivan Bunin State University, the university’s vice rector Svetlana Dvoryatkina noted that “in the view of Russia’s current foreign political and economic situation” Prishvin’s works are particularly important for “fostering spiritual
66 He is a professor of Bunin Yelets State University, one of the main researchers and rehabilitators of Prishvin’s oeuvres.
67 Mikhail Prishvin, “U sten grada nevidimogo (Svetloye ozero),” in Mikhail Prishvin, Sobranie sochineniy v 8 tomakh. vol.1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1982): 387–474.
68 Aleksander Podoksenov, “O Probleme "bogoiskatel'stva" v mirovozzrenii i tvorchestve M.M. Prishvina,” Religiovedenie, no.4 (2007): 79 – 89. There are inaccuracies in the text of A.Podoksenov. When mentioning two liberal government regulations of 1905, Podoksenov non-critically reproduces inaccuracies in the titles and an error in the date of one of the regulation made by A.L. Kiselev, commentator of Prishvin in the publication of “At the Walls of the Invisible City” in the 8-volume Collected Works issued in 1982. In particular Podoksenov (following Kiselev) points out 1908 year of the April Decree instead of 1905.
riches, love for one’s ‘little Motherland,’ or birthplace, and carefully preserving the traditions of one’s own people.”69 Natalia Borisova, a professor at the same university, suggested relying on Prishvin in defending the “Russian world.”70 She noted the invariable monarchism of Prishvin’s thought, claiming that he perforce asserted that monarchism and centralized rule are right for Russian culture. A renowned Russian literature scholar Ivan Esaulov said at the same conference that Prishvin today has to help understand the Christian foundations of Russian literature and this needs to be reflected in the school literature curriculum.71
Elena R. Borovskaia and Svetlana A. Poshina72 attempt to showcase Prishvin as a proponent of traditional values with a particular focus on Eastern Orthodoxy as the ideological foundation of ethnically and culturally important linchpins of today's Russia. They attempt to interpret the plot of Prishvin’s most famous story for children, which had been included in USSR school curriculums, in the spirit of ideas that help “align Christian values and Russia’s traditional values,” especially refusing the freedom of all-permissiveness that is condemned by the Church.73
On May 6, 2022 at the Graduate Student Conference held at the Moscow Theological Academy at Sergiev Posad, Deacon Sergei Krasnikov also painted Prishvin as an official proponent of the church (even if he was only represented by secular clergy). The image of Prishvin as practicing Eastern Orthodox is only being asserted in video and radio Orthodox broadcasts. For example, the program on the Orthodox radio station "Radio Vera" stated that "Prishvin came to the Church in his later years."74 This conclusion is actually made by many analysts who base it on the fact that Prishvin’s second wife Valeriya D. Prishvina (Liorko) was a practicing Orthodox believer and had an influence on the writer.
Even the official Russian propaganda turns to Prishvin. For instance, the news program Vesti on the state-owned Russian television channel “Russia-1” (the flagship channel of the All-Russia State Television and Radio Company (VGTRK)) dedicated an episode to him on February 4, 2023. The show used Prishvin’s out-of-context anti-liberal snippets to present him as an outright anti-liberal. For instance, they declared that Prishvin “sharply calls to account idle liberals who chatted and dreamed Russia away” and quoted Prishvin's other statements concerning the dishonesty of liberalism. At the same time, the
69 Nataliya Borisova, “Russkiy mir v tvorchekom nasledii Mikhaila Prishvina,” Paper presented at the Conference “M.M. Prishvin in the context of modern humanitarian knowledge,” Yelets (3 – 4 of February 2023).
70 Ibid.
71 Ivan Esaulov, “‘Rassmotret' khristianskoye osnovaniye russkoy literatury’ (M.M. Prishvin): nasha zadacha,” Paper presented at the Conference “M.M. Prishvin in the context of modern humanitarian knowledge. Yelets (3 – 4 of February 2023).
72 Now these authors are associate professors at the Moscow City Teachers' Training University.
73 Elena Borovskaya, Svetlana Poshina, “Khristianskiye tsennosti v ‘Kladovoy solntsa’ M.M. Prishvina,” Vestnik PSTGU. iss.4(19) (2010): 38, 41-42;. Alexander Zelenenko, “Vazhneyshiye printsipy khristianskoy pedagogiki i utrata ikh sovremennoy shkoloy,” in Traditions of Education in Karelia. (Petrozavodsk, 1995): 105–109.
74 «Nevidimyy grad» Mikhaila Prishvina. Radio Vera (22 of January, 2022), https://radiovera.ru/nevidimyj-gradmihaila-prishvina.html?ysclid=lg468s3n99240486644#84f19674c8d6fbd5a5db9c6759e86ab8
host insisted that Prishvin had seen Stalin “not as a blind accident, but as a logical response of Russian history to the tragic errors and lies of Russian liberalism.”75
How substantial are these attempts to interpret Prishvin from this perspective? Based on the outline of Prishvin's worldviews, such attempts are clearly at odds with the complex world described by his ideas. Indeed, in 1914-1915, Prishvin seeks to distance himself from the liberal intelligentsia, while after the revolution, he makes fragmentary critical statements against liberals, populists, and various ideologues who make the claim of trying to educating the people, but this alone does not justify calling Prishvin a statist, anti-liberal, or supporter of the systemic Orthodox religion. His stance remains equivocal. His critical thoughts on educationists and liberals express Prishvin’s grievance against them, but not a wholesale rejection of their ideas. In the 1920s, while entertaining such critical thoughts, Prishvin ruminates on how to rehabilitate the intelligentsia, and Yana Grishina, in opposition to those researchers trying to appropriate Prishvin ideologically, draws special attention to this line because “throughout its history, the intelligentsia has been in spiritual opposition to the authorities.”76
Prishvin, however, did not significantly change his negative opinion of the prerevolutionary system. He did not lapse into romantic nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia and church life, but neither did he become a run-of-the-mill practicing Orthodox in the 1940s, under the Soviet authorities, when he resumed his interest in church life under the influence of his second wife. He continued to treat the church with critical mistrust, both because he could not accept its anthropological pessimism and because the Orthodox tradition came to submit to the state (even though the state generally remained godless). It is no accident that in the 1940s, when the authorities assumed a more lenient stance toward the church, intending to use it for their political goals, Prishvin accused the church of “Sergianism.”77 That is, he continued the line of criticism leveled against the Moscow Patriarchy by the Russian Church abroad and by underground religious communities, who rebuked the church for conformism and submission to the authorities.
It is even less appropriate to attempt to paint Prishvin as a monarchist by citing his anti-revolutionary and anti-Bolshevist statements, as does the aforementioned Yelets University Professor Natalya Borisova. Prishvin’s negative attitude to the monarchy is evidenced in his recollection of the feeling he experienced when he heard the news of Nicholas II having been dethroned it was an unequivocal feeling of relief: “I recalled the awakening of 1917, when the shooting in the street and it suddenly felt as if a huge burden,
75 Ispolnilos' 150 let so dnya rozhdeniya Mikhaila Prishvina. Vesti (TV-broadcast) (04 February 2023, 20:58). http://smotrim.ru/video/2558683?ysclid=lpuazwkiim642305923
76 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1920 1922, 298.
77 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1940 – 1941, 579-580. The term “Sergianism” was coined when the Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) signed the Declaration on loyalty toward the USSR in 1927, at the height of Bolshevik persecutions of the Church. Accordingly, the name “Sergius” in this context became a by-word for all kinds of ecclesiastical opportunism.
the load of an entire lifetime, had fallen off my shoulders: it was that there was no longer a czar.”78 Prishvin recounts this recollection in a diary entry from 1930, that is, when he had already seen all the misfortunes of the revolution and had assumed a more critical attitude toward the revolution.
Prishvin also had an extremely negative view toward the imperialistic war Nicholas II had dragged Russia into in 1914, even though he had seen the events of the war first hand as a war correspondent. He also viewed the church as a crucial social force bearing responsibility for the war, since Orthodoxy (and other Christian denominations, too) tended to fixate upon enemies and manifestations of evil:
The name of God splits the world asunder: one half, angels, saints, and various acceptable people, assembles around God, while the other half assembles around the Enemy: his supporters, demons, devils, evil spirits, imps; and a war starts. Well, if there is a cause for war and war is inevitable, let it be! But more frequently, it so happens that human beings barely have time to handle their earthly affairs and are not prone to war and, most importantly, they have no cause for war, but the ecclesiastical superstructure forces them also to see the world as split into hostile parts…79
As for Prishvin’s few complimentary and positive remarks about Stalin mentioned above, we should side with Yana Grishina, who notes that “Prishvin, like all or many of his contemporaries, fell under the spell of Stalin’s speeches…and still could shake Stalin’s influence off.”
80 Quite opposite to Podoksenov, she notes that Prishvin’s few positive remarks about Stalin had never been consistent or systematic and had been instead fragmentary, accidental, and mandated by the need to understand life around him. She notes that in the context of totalitarianism “the writer found it the hardest to believe in absolute evil; he resists, he cannot help hoping, he seeks at least some meaning in what is happening, at least some chance, but he allows himself to ponder the time and the authorities only in his diaries; never did he publish a single word about Stalin.”81
Finally, after World War II, in 1950, when the USSR had proven its right to existence, Prishvin made a very sharp statement incompatible with any kind of etatist or imperial convictions a statement that can be seen as essentially prophetic. Observing the triumphalist statements of the Soviet authorities and individual cultural figures Prishvin states:
78 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1930 1931, 249.
79 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki 1928 – 1929 (Moscow: Russkaya kniga, 2004): 454.
80 Yana Grishina, Kommentarii, In Mikhail Prishvin. Dnevniki 1936 – 1937. (Saint-Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo ‘Rostok’, 2010): 841.
81 Ibid., 842.
My homeland will say a new word, thereby indicating the way for the entire world. Didn’t Germans, the English and the French think the same way? This way of believing in one’s country’s mission is bound to end in a war…82
Conclusion
A consideration of Prishvin’s critical statements concerning both supporters of socialism and the church yields one common denominator: a refusal to accept those things that are forced upon people, massification, and subjugation to the official ideology, be it pre-revolutionary, Bolshevik, or Stalinist. Clearly, Prishvin intended to protect his own personality and creative works from being subsumed by totalitarian norms, be they secular or ecclesiastic.
Both his political and religious statements manifested his protest against oppression. For instance, while criticizing the church, he spoke against ideational and ascetic oppression based on the teaching of the original sin and distorted human nature, while his criticism of the Soviet authorities mostly concentrated on direct physical and ideological oppression that denied human dignity and individual people’s personal freedom of choice.
For Prishvin, therefore, the principles of humanism, personal freedom, human rights, and the possibility of personal fulfillment were his highest values, shaping him as a person of liberal convictions. When he criticized liberalism, his focus was not on liberal principles as such, but on certain liberal notions divorced from reality and presenting themselves as standardized problem-solving formulas. Therefore, we can suppose that attempts made in light of the current Russian political situation to parade Prishvin as an argument in favor of state patriotism are unsuccessful. They proceed from a black-and-white, simplified and schematic picture of the world, while Prishvin is a thinker who is too complex and non-linear to be fit into any scheme or to serve as a foundation for any simplified picture.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to express his gratitude to Elena Knorre, Senior Research Fellow at the Gorky Institute of World Literature for her recommendations, inspiring discussions and encouragement throughout this research.
82 Mikhail Prishvin, Dnevniki. 1950 – 1951 (Moscow: “Rostok," 2016): 101.
