LONDON, 6 August 2007 — Americans have no idea how close Russia is to Europe both culturally and spiritually. But then neither do most Europeans. That part of the subject appears to be off the political map in any discussion of the expansion of the European Union, yet Russia has much more claim to be a part of the Union than Turkey and no other single act would bring the kind of stability to the European landmass that its people crave for. The last thing that is wanted is for Europe to step blindly into a new Cold War, yet if something fairly dramatic is not done soon there is a danger that that could happen.
Maybe I’m favoring Russia because of just perambulating around Moscow on a fine summer’s day when my part of Europe is drenched in rain, viewing one magnificent old restored building after another, risqué art shows, sublime new architecture, the wonder of the rebuilt cathedral of Christ the Savior and endless walks along the leafy river, combined with the joie de vivre of nicely dressed Russian women, good cheapish Russian food on street corner cafes and a well made cappuccino wherever you want it, not to say the glories of the old Stalinist metro and Moscow State University’s magnificent sugar cake skyscraper, but I don’t think so.
After three hours in the city’s Tretyakov gallery I emerged stunned. I know my Russian music, its ballet, its great novelists, playwrights and poets (which other European country has achieved so much on so many fronts?) but I was not prepared for the art, most of which had been effectively closed to foreign eyes for seventy years. But even 20 years after glasnost I confess I’d never heard of 19th century artists like Monye, Serebryakova, Kramskoi and Zaryanko. They rival anything done in the rest of the world at that time. Unlike the prophets of doom, I have few fears for this fast growing oil economy. The money is putting Russia’s legions of well-trained scientists and engineers back into work. It is simply pump priming a ready-made engine. Watch their inventiveness and productivity over the next decade and even if oil prices come down with a bump they will be on their way — ahead of India, Brazil and China. Foreign investors, despite the re-nationalizations in the oil and gas sector, are pouring in.
The capitalist businessmen, indeed, are Russia’s best chance of persuading Western politicians to see sense.
The stereotype of pre-revolutionary Russia lives on — a despotic czar, a serf economy that lived long after the abolition of slavery by the Europeans (but not the Americans) and a malign, primitive, Asiatic influence rooted in the savage conquest by first the Mongols and then the Tartars.
But as the great historian of Europe, Norman Davies, has written, “Late Imperial Russia was a magnificent beast. It was Europe’s chief source of agricultural exports and the chief recipient of external investment...Russian aristocrats, merchants, artists and professors were thoroughly integrated into every aspect of European life. Politically, Russia was thought to be making serious liberal progress after 1905”
“What Russia needed was an indefinite prolongation of the European peace”, Davies observed. It did not get it. War with Germany threw it off the rails. But now it is back on them where is Europe?
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One of the joys of Moscow today is the seemingly infinite number of small, restored, orthodox churches, with their golden domes pointing skyward. Nearly every time I poked my head in people were praying, often a choir singing or a priest dispensing incense. Russia in fact is the inheritor and guardian of the part of the Roman Catholic Church (after the split, Orthodox) that the Roman emperor, Constantine, moved to Constantinople when he made it the capital of his empire and the founding seat of Christian power.
In 1204 when the thousand-year-old Christian capital was sacked (by Christian armies from the West) it led to the rooting of Orthodox Christianity among the Slav peoples, although Christianity had arrived in Russia two centuries earlier. When the Ottomans finally captured Constantinople in 1453 the Orthodox Church was from now on the heritage of Russia. A Muslim Russia would have meant a very different history for the West. A Christian Russia means it is an integral part of the European civilization.
It is true the Reformation and the Enlightenment never penetrated Russia. The czar wielded a kind of power that the rulers of Britain and France could only dream of. Yet the greatest of them, Peter, used that power to do what Ataturk later did to Turkey — give Russia a Westernized make over.
The EU must now pick up the unfinished business of modernizing and stabilizing Russia that ended in 1914. This is far more important — and should be more natural — than any of its other far-flung ambitions. Russians, I dare to suggest, would welcome it.
