The end of post-Soviet philosophy
For the historian of ideas Mikhail Maiatsky, Putin's Russia has "erased philosophy", replacing it with a pseudo-scientific patriotic ideology, based on the arbitrary rereading of Russian and universal history. A focus on existentialist thinker Ivan Ilyin is not meant to reflect on the meaning of ongoing tragedies. An “aesthetics of renaissance” on which Alexei Losev wrote in the 1980s is more urgent than ever.
A prominent Russian historian of philosophy, Mikhail Maiatsky, who has lived and taught in Switzerland for more than 30 years, has published a text in a collection of essays by various authors entitled Facing the Catastrophe, in which he says that Russia’s war in Ukraine has definitively ended the period of “post-Soviet culture”.
Putin's Russia, in his opinion, has "erased philosophy", replacing it with a pseudo-scientific patriotic ideology, based on an arbitrary rereading of Russian and universal history.
Referring to the reflections of French philosophers like Jacques Ranciére and Gilles Deleuze, Maiatsky defines the conditions in which Russia has been living for almost three years as "the apotheosis of the unpredictable, of randomness, and of a-causality", which destroys all potential and all prospects for the future.
Moreover, it is not really possible to speak of a "post-Soviet philosophy", considering that the first 20 years after the end of the USSR were dedicated above all to the rediscovery of the cultural heritage devastated and almost erased in the 20th century, especially that of Slavophile thought defeated by the Bolshevik revolution.
At the start of the 1990s, collections and studies multiplied such as The Russian Idea (Русская идея) by Mikhail Maslin, who later edited the History of Russian Philosophy (История русской философии) adopted in 2008 by Lomonosov University in Moscow.
Many others have published guides and studies of the history of philosophy for universities, with the aim of achieving a real "reconversion of philosophy", passing from the compulsory studies of the Soviet era, Marxism-Leninism, and atheism, to history and religious philosophy and even to theology.
Several institutes of ecclesiastical studies have been established, the most authoritative undoubtedly being Saint Tikhon's Orthodox University of Humanities in Moscow. Even Catholics opened the Saint Thomas Institute in the capital in 1991, now run by the Jesuit fathers.
But in the last decade, Great-Russian nationalism has progressively overwhelmed all attempts to rediscover the multifaceted spirit of Russian culture of the centuries prior to the "Soviet yoke", settling on Pan-Slavist" positions, the same that exasperated the 19th century debate between Slavophiles and Westernisers.
This orientation saw the Russian idea or the Russian world as the fulfillment of the destinies of history, like the famous essay Russia and Europe by Nikolay Danilevsky of 1869, the so-called "comprehensive catechism of Slavophilism”, a philosophy that has once again been bent for the struggle against the West that humiliates Russia.
The feeling that inspired the tome was the ruinous defeat in the Crimean War, and has been revived recently following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Danilevsky proposed a "biological" quest to find the Russian specimen as the definitive, original, and "pacified" human type, following the succession of 10 historical specimen after the Roman-Germanic type became fossilised, bound to merge into the Russian cultural domain.
A more recent point of reference is the existentialist thinker Ivan Ilyin, called Putin's “favourite philosopher”. Expelled from the USSR in 1922, he died in 1954, after sympathising with Nazism as the only salvation from Soviet communism.
A new Higher School of Politics has now been named after him at Moscow's most prestigious university, the Russian State University for the Humanities, under the direction of one of the greatest ideologues of Eurasianism and universal Russian sovereignism, the populist Alexander Dugin.
In reality, Ilyin focused on the questions of man and the renewal of society, in a very penetrating philosophy of spiritual experience, so much so that in 1918 he wrote his doctoral thesis on Hegel's philosophy as a doctrine on the concreteness of God and man, one of the best Russian researches of philosophical criticism.
He lived in Berlin during the years of Hitler's rise, but then moved to Switzerland where he wrote Axioms of Religious Experience (Аксиомы религиозного опыта), which was published in 1953, based on the key concept of "evidence" understood in a very broad, figurative, and metaphorical sense.
Ilyin thought that the condition of the human soul was opposed to the blindness of superficial visibility, the capacity for multiform contemplation and profound sensitivity, to find the direction to take after all the upheavals.
None of these philosophers, even if deemed the inspiration of militant Russia, can really offer reflections on the meaning of the ongoing tragedies.
Nothing can really justify Russia's world war, starting with Ukraine and all the territories of its lost empire – its ideological appeals have no real roots even in the most extreme Russian philosophy of the ancient and recent past.
The events of the past two years do not have an adequate definition, there is no "Eurasianism" or "sovereignism" that makes explicit the semantic meaning of the destruction, and the proclaimed "Russian world" is empty conceptually, even more than socially, politically, militarily, and economically.
Maiatsky also turns to a recently released American collection of essays, Experts' Scenarios on Russia's Future, which seeks to identify the future effects of the ongoing war, showing how much war trivialises and empties of meaning human attitudes and reactions, making it impossible to assess the true extent of conflicts, especially when they multiply and overlap.
Who is the aggressor and who is the victim are obvious, but this becomes insignificant in the ideological cauldron of clichés: “We are one people", "Ukraine does not exist", "Our fight is not with the Ukrainians, but with American imperialism”, plus other references to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, or the territorial integrity of Armenia, so on.
Russia has inaugurated the "season of infantilism" according to the philosopher, showing that it is incapable of abiding by the rules of international politics, that it only wants to bend the rules to its own interests, looking for completely groundless justifications.
What is happening is not only irreparable, but as Hannah Arendt put it: “All we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses”.
The death of tens of thousands of peaceful Ukrainians, including hundreds of children, is an irreparable event, not to mention the psychological trauma of millions of children and adults on all sides: morality does not take one side or the other, it simply vanishes into thin air.
There is no "Russian world", there is only the triumph of resentment, sadism, indifference, and frustration. Maiatsky suggests to place the following inscription on Putin's tomb: “He put an end to the Russia project”.
After all, a very common expression among Russians émigrés is "we are dead", preventively handing themselves over to burial or dreaming of a future rebirth.
The very concept of "emigration" changed after February 2022, with an artificial division between those who could escape and managed to do so, those who could not, and those who could leave but did not.
Those on the outside hope for a quick collapse of the Putin regime, those on the inside try to survive and hope that everything does not collapse on them, and it is impossible to determine who is against and who is for the war. The sense of bewilderment of one's own personal, family, even national and ethnic reality prevails, on both sides of the divide.
The exodus of the past two years has created a new demographic, if not exactly anthropological, condition devoid of cultural and religious, geographical, and political references, and this indeterminacy does not only concern Russians and Ukrainians, given the interaction of Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology in the world in which we all live.
We are all teetering on the cusp of history, feeling the thrill of the thin blade that prevents us from moving, fearful of losing our spiritual wholeness, even before we lose our territorial integrity.
The war is not stopping; on the contrary, it seems to extend indefinitely. Peace conferences and invitations to negotiations appear to be skirmishes without content, due to necessary breaks from the scorching heat and the reloading of weapons, to resume autumn offensives before the new winter break.
Exhaustion and addiction are felt simultaneously, and it no longer makes sense to watch the news, which do nothing but fuel anger, dullness, and depression.
There is no solution, only resurrection, a human rebirth after the shameful reduction of religious rebirth to the service of the most inhuman politics.
One of the few philosophers who was able to preserve the legacy of Russian religious thought during the Soviet decades, Alexei Losev, published an essay in 1982, a few years before his death on the Aesthetics of the Renaissance (Эстетика Возрождения), in which he took up the intuitions of the great theologian Pavel Florensky, who died in a concentration camp in 1937.
Between the "submission to God" of the Middle Ages and the "struggle with God" of the new age, both positions defined as “theocratic biopolitics”, only true humanism remains, the one that believes in a God who wants to experience humanity in order to make it reborn from all destruction, through the purification of repentance and the free choice of one's own destiny.
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