THE RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS MIND

by G. P. Fedotov

PRE-CHRISTIAN PAGANISM

All Christian nations must be "twice-born," but since Grace transforms nature rather than destroys it, they carry deep within them traces of their heathen past. The process of transformation is never complete...perhaps this tincture of native heathendom accounts primarily for the characteristic national features of Christianity...Christianity was incorporated into each nation by undergoing a kind of adaptation to, or investment of the pre-Christian legacies which hide in the subconscious of the national soul...

The Russians are no exception. With them the tie between Christian and Pre-Christian elements is perhaps still stronger than in most nations of the West...Russia did not know either the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation with their cleansing, spiritualizing, and sweeping out of medieval superstitions. The Russian peasant had been living in the Middle Ages throughout the nineteenth century. Many an author has said, after personal contact, that the Russians are the most religious people of Europe. But it is rather the difference of age rather than of the quality of mind or culture. The same historical reasons which had preserved religious freshness in the Russian folk in the midst of an age of rationalism also kept many elements of heathen customs, heathen cults, and even heathen world-view in a state of good preservation both in and out of the Christian Church. Therefore an acquaintance with Russian paganism is an important preliminary for understanding Russian Christianity.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

No fixed boundaries ever existed between Slavic and neighboring peoples. In the process of continuous colonization of new territories, Slavic tribes fused easily with the aborigines. The influence which had been mutual since prehistoric times appeared in language, customs, and anthropological types. The northern Great Russian, that is, the Russian in a narrow sense as distinct from the Ukranian and White Russian, in his physical outlook is a product of both the Slavic and Finnish races. The infiltration and blending of the newcomers with the Finnish aborigines was mostly a peaceful process...But with the inhabitants of the southern steppes, that is, the nomads, the struggle never ceased. The annals of ancient Kievan Russia are full of wars or rather of one continual war against Turkish nomads...The Russian folk epics, even in the last centuries, lived on the legendary glory of these campaigns. The southern Russians, however, were also touched by oriental influences, especially since, in spite of the Nomadic character of the population, the northern coasts of the Black Sea were saturated with ancient culture. The girdle of Greek colonies surrounded it from the Danube to the Caucasus, and the Byzantine emperors still possessed many towns in the Crimea...

Beneath the Graeco-Roman civilization, another cultural current, and a more ancient one, connected the Russian steppes with Asia, through the Iranian nomads. Assyro-Babylonian and particularly Persian influences can still be clearly read on archaeological relics. Iranianism was the first traceable cultural element in these areas which was preparing the soil for the future Russian state on the Dnieper River. (Please understand the figure of the Medes, and their prophetic association with modern Russia, and their involvement in the judgments of Babylon in both the books of Jeremiah and Daniel, in the light of these things...Jeremiah 50 and 51; Daniel, chapter 6)...

At the same time, the northern Slavs, whose main center was Novgorod...were harassed by the inroads of Norsemen, who inundated the whole of Europe in the ninth century as robber-soldiers, merchants, and founders of kingdoms...Probably about the middle of the eighth century, the Norsemen, or "Varangians" as they were called by Russians and Greeks, appeared on the Black Sea and began their inroads upon Constantinople...They tied the Baltic basin (Novgorod) and the Dnieper-Black Sea basin into the famous "Great Road from the Varangians to the Greeks." (Thus opening the way for Greek Orthodoxy as the future national Religion in Russia). This commercial road, a system of water-ways, was the beginning of the first Russian state.

The Varangians were not very numerous, and their expeditions in Russia were not of a violent character. They acted rather as a police force for the native population whose Slavic language, now called Russian, they soon adopted. The Kiev-Varangian dynasty of the Rurikovichi was the first dynasty of Russian princes. From Kiev, in the course of the tenth and the eleventh centuries, they succeeded in uniting all the other Norse principalities and Slavic tribes on the eastern European plain. A powerful though loosely knit state was created which entered into military and diplomatic relations with Byzantium (a Roman, military, but also "Christian?" state), as well as with neighbors in the West: Bulgers, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Lithuanians. No natural frontiers delineated the new state, which was geographically shapeless, always moving eastward, and open to the most various cultural influences...The western neighbors of the Russians were heathens until the tenth century; those on the east were Jews and Moslims. Christianity was coming from the south, from Byzantium. Under these circumstances, the Russian Slavs had no opportunity to develop their primitive paganism into an independent culture...

THE ROLE OF NATURE

Nature, of course, is the necessary source of every primitive world view. It is even commonly...accepted that paganism is identical with nature worship. The Russian peculiarity is one of quantity rather than quality. But the quantitative difference is very large...One can hardly imagine any Russian lyrical song without a background of nature, used not merely as a framework or scenery for human drama. A human being...is identified with, rather than (merely) compared to some animal or vegetated being--a bird; a tree; a flower...The destiny of human and animal or vegetated beings are blended in one: they blossom and die together.

In prosaic folk tales, beasts are familiar actors and partakers in human life. Besides the purely animal epic belonging to the common store of mankind there are many Russian stories of animals carrying business with men in a friendly or cunning but rarely mischievous way. In case of conflicts the guilt lies more often on the side of the man than the beast, who represents the less sophisticated and more straightforward moral standard. THE BEAR PARTICULARLY APPEARS AS AN HONEST, EVEN VENERABLE AND MIGHTY BEING. SOME FEATURES IN THE BEAR TALES SUGGEST THE IDEA OF A RELIGIOUS BEAR CULT IN PREHISTORIC TIMES.

Among the actors in Russian tales one encounters the elementary forces of nature: wind, frost, sun, and moon...The cult of solar deities has left noticeable traces in Russian folklore, particularly in the yearly feast calendar. The days of summer and winter solstices (Saint John and Christmas) are marked by pagan rites which are similar to those of other Indo-European nations. And yet, in spite of the tenets of the traditional school of Russian ethnographers, we venture to say that Russian paganism was perhaps less "solar" than any other in the Aryan religious world...The names of Perun, God of Thunder, and Veles, God of Cattle (or Wealth) are more stable in literary tradition, although not without difficulty of interpretation.

These difficulties, however, are beyond our field of interest. What is essential in order to understand specifically Russian features against the western background is to mark the secondary character of celestial deities in Russian paganism. Perhaps this is the reason for the general underdevelopment of Russian mythology. Throughout the world the most plastic and picturesque mythological ideas are connected with the celestial world. The eastern Slav did not look passionately at the night sky, like the Semite in the desert, nor was he particularly struck by the might of the sun, though he used it to celebrate the stages of its annual life by the winter, spring, and summer festivals. His attention was more attracted by the mysteries beneath, by what happened on earth where his personal and tribal life took place...

THE CULT OF MOTHER EARTH

In Mother Earth, who remains the core of Russian religion, converge the most secret and deep religious feelings of the folk. Beneath the veil of grass and flowers, the people venerate with awe the black moist depths, the source of all fertilizing powers, the nourishing breast of nature, and their own last resting place. The very epithet of the earth in the folk songs, "Mother Earth, the Humid," known also in the Iranian mythology, alludes to the womb rather than to the face of the Earth. It means that not beauty but fertility is the supreme virtue of the earth...Earth is the Russian "Eternal Womanhood," not the celestial image of it: mother, not virgin; fertile, not pure; and black, for the best Russian soil is black.

As a mother who nourishes man during his life and after death gives him rest, the Earth is the embodiment of kindness and mercy. There is, however, something impersonal and generic in her. Unlike the spirits of water and forest, Earth had no indwelling spirits nor was she embodied in human form. She was shapeless as her body under the surface is shapeless. Many myths connected with her are now forgotten, for Christianity succeeded in destroying all traces of sexual associations in the cult of the Earth. Yet, Mother Earth must have had a mate, a celestial god of the Sun or of Thunder. Of this marriage between Earth and Heaven in Russian folklore we know nothing...It is remarkable, however, that Motherhood alone survived through the ages, thereby proving itself stronger than the eroticism of the primitive myth. Speaking in classical terms, this means that in the Russian Earth-goddess, Demeter was more strongly expressed than Aphrodite...

We do not know and shall never know whether Iarilo (a Slavic form of Dionysus) was once the bridegroom of Mother Earth. Nor can it be discovered of Perun, god of thunder. The ancient chroniclers assign to him a place of supreme deity over the Russian Slavs. The conversion to Christianity in Kiev and Novgorod meant, first of all, the breaking of Perun's wooden idols. It is quite possible that the Scandanavian warriors had shaped the Slavic godhead into the image of the Teutonic Thor. Ye once upon a time he was a Slavic god whose former power is attested to, among other remains, by his long survival in the Russian cult of the prophet Elijah, his successor as thunderlord...

There is no Russian parallel to Athena, or any other Virgin Goddess, and it seems that neither purity nor beauty was essential to the Russian worship of Sacred Womanhood...Mother Earth is shapeless and faceless. The Beauty to which the Russian is so sensitive is not embodied primarily in the woman. Beauty dwells in nature. And the beauty of nature for the Russian is the embracing, the enveloping, rather than the contemplated. Man is lost in nature, unwilling to master her.

Hence it follows that the greatest religious temptations for a Russian will be pantheism of a sensual kind. Sacred matter rather than spirit is the object of veneration. Personality is undeveloped, social ties extremely strong, on the basis of blood relationship. Romanticism in any form is basically un-Russian. Sensual mysticism, however, is a necessary complement to the social discipline of the 'rod,' (the ancient ties between the family, the clan, and the tribe). The spirit of Dionysus is (nevertheless) perpetually attempting to infringe upon the laws of Mother Earth. The Russian Religious Mind, pp.3-20.

It was upon, or against this spiritual mindscape that Eastern Christianity came 1,000 years ago, carrying with it the oracles of the Divine Male Principle--Dionysus indeed, the Mystery of Christ, who is not simply the Lord of Nature but the very apotheosis of Nature itself. But this Christ was also one with the Solar Apollo--the Logos, the consort of the Muses, and the inspirer of higher thought-forms in men...

"The son of Zeus (the Clear Bright Sky) and Leto (the daughter of the older Titans, or Giants)...He has been called 'the most Greek of all the gods.' He is a beautiful figure in Greek poetry, the master musician who delights Olympus as he plays on his golden lyre: the lord too of the silver bow, the Archer god, far-shooting (the rays of his Solar Presence as he goes); the Healer, as well, who first taught men the healing art. Even more than of these good and lovely endowments, he is the God of Light, in whom is no darkness at all, and so he is the God of Truth. No false word ever falls from his lips. Mythology, by Edith Hamilton, p.30.

This Apollo had already begun his historic journey Westward toward the fulness of these times, and the end of this age. In going, the Lord left to the East that other part of Himself that rules there still--that same primal overshadowing, and all pervading and Terrible force of Nature. What came Westward is that transcendent and perfect part of the Christ-Mystery that neither the Roman, the Greek, nor the Russian orthodox churches--because of their own religious and political attachment to the powers of the earth--could ever comprehend...

Forced and wholesale conversions of the masses (which is the way the great Orthodox Church did business from the time it first took up the bed and the cause of the Roman emperors--a very unholy marriage with the Caesars and later the Czars of the Eastern world), resulted in the mere, almost static superimposition of one system of belief over the other system. A worldly, yet mystical form of Christianity was imposed on top of a more powerful form of (pre-Adamic) paganism which continued to dwell, untouched, just below the surface of the Russian consciousness. But hardly could it result in the real spiritual transformation of the mind of the people themselves. What the Eastern church brought to Russia was a Mystery (indeed, a wholly sublime and Messianic one, complete with visions of angels and archangels, and the Lord of Judgment seated on His Heavenly Throne), the height of which it did not even comprehend itself, and which remained a mystery right into the 20th century, throughout the Soviet era and remains so in the midst of present world events. The key to understanding the mystery lies in what Paul termed the discerning of spirits, a gift which the World-church, despite its pretenses to every spiritual gift, lacks. (I Corinthians 12:10). It exists in the ability to discern the difference between the truly Christ-like, and perfected (nonviolent) character of the sons and daughters of Adam, and the Universal Person of Christ itself. The latter (the Angel of Divine Presence) dwells majestically in all things, and particularly in the collective Presence of every primal (so-called "pagan," ancient angelic), soul. What does the Scriptures say about those angels who left their former estate? (See 2 Peter 2:4-6). The very same holds true for those sons and daughters of Adam who, being once enlightened, returned in time to mingle with these warrior spirits, forgetting the Word that gave them life, and in the process brought forth giants (or titans).

RELIGIOUS BYZANTINISM

About 1000 A.D. Russia was officially converted to Christianity by the baptism of the Kievan Prince Vladimir and his subjects. Of course, it was only the beginning of the Christian mission, supported by the state, among Slavic and Finnish tribes of the eastern European plain. Yet from the very outset Vladimir had to make a choice of tremendous historical significance: between the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity, between Byzantium and Rome. The Christian Church was still united at the time of conversion. But the relations between its Greek and Latin halves were hopelessly spoiled and were moving towards the final break of 1054. Vladimir chose the Greek Church...and thus determined the destiny of Russia. She became a province of Byzantine culture and the bearer of the Eastern Orthodoxy...The whole Russian mind and heart were shaped by this Eastern Christian mould. After 1054 official ecclesiastical relations with Western Catholic Europe became practically impossible: after the Mongolian conquest of 1240, the political and cultural ties with the West were almost severed. These two facts are the source of both the originality and the limitations of Russian culture; of both its greatness and its flaws...

It is certainly untrue to say that medieval Greece, or the "Roman Empire," as she called herself, was a barbarian state (which it largely was). On the contrary, until the twelfth century, Byzantine civilization surpassed, beyond question, that of the European West. Until the year 1000--the time of the Russian conversion--western Europe can be considered as a dark and backward province of the one Christian civilization, the center of which was definitely not in Rome, but in Constantinople...The latter was a treasure store of classical literature which preserved for us the ancient pagan and Christian traditions of Greece...Byzantium was a museum and a library of Christian Greece. When the West began to spread its wings for original thought and art it soon overtook Byzantium in creative richness and power...

The relative immobility of Byzantium must not be conceived in too literal a sense. There were changes, but they were slow; there were conflicts, but they were less acute than in the West. Byzantium never had a sufficient cleavage with antiquity to allow it to start a new culture. The term "Middle Ages," therefore has no application, in its full sense in the Christian East. The tradition of Hellenistic culture was never broken...

This lack of creative vitality prevented Byzantium from achieving the final synthesis between the pagan and Christian elements of its heritage. It was, in principle, a totalitarian culture claiming a Christian (orthodox) sanctification of the whole life, state, war, economics, family, school, art, and learning. And yet big undefined elements of paganism remained, without any serious attempt at transformation. The school was the guardian of pagan traditions, blended only superficially with Christianity. The monastery, on the contrary, never was in Byzantium the place of learning it often was in the West. From time to time a strange figure arises out of the twilight of the Byzantine schoolrooms: a semi-pagan philosopher, a neoplatonist or occultist...Palace and hermitage were the two foci of the Byzantine world. The tension between them was the only serious drama in this static culture...

From the historical point of view, one cannot help seeing in this religious dualism of Byzantium the heritage of the two religious worlds: Judaism and Hellenism. If is is true that the whole of Byzantine culture was a blending of Orientalism and Hellenism, the Orientalism was represented in the religious sphere by Judaic transcendentalism, and the Hellenism by the mystical and sacramental elements of Christianity. What is amazing in this synthesis is the small place left to the New Testament and to the historical God-man Christ. Practically the whole of Byzantine religion could have been built without the historical Christ of the Gospels, upon a simple myth of the heavenly saviour similar to Hellenistic saviour myths. The divine, glorified Christ is, certainly, the main object of the Byzantine cult--together with His Mother, the Queen of Heaven. Yet strangely, his earthly life, and His good news of the Kingdom of God, and particularly His teaching, attracted little attention. The Gospels became a book of mysteries of Christ; a source of theological speculations. (Though) Christ Himself was the Word of God, His own spoken word was little heeded--or rather, was almost inaccessible beneath all the allegorical exegesis. Of the ethical teaching of Jesus what remained most forceful was His uncompromising commandments, obviously beyond human achievement, reinforced by the promise of Terrible Judgment.

A corollary of this attitude toward Christ was in the character of Byzantine preaching. The Greek sermon was mostly theological. Its paramount aim was to disclose the meaning of a particular feast in the Church calendar and its mystical significance. The sermon itself was a continuation of the liturgy, sharing in its solemn, theurgical style, but the moral implications were often neglected. This gives us the key to a tremendous gap in the Byzantine religion: the weakness of ethical life.

The Greek fathers of the fourth century, with all their Platonic and mystical interests, had been prophetic teachers to their nation. They considered the struggle against evil in personal and social life the main task of a Christian. But after some real efforts at transforming and Christianizing the national life in the first century after Constantine, the Church seems to have exhausted herself and given up the fruitless struggle. The sanctification of the whole life became a symbolic consecration, not a real change. The Orientalism of the state, rebuilt by Diocletian, was paralleled by the orientalization of social life which had fallen to the level of oriental, pagan societies. Slavery was not only one of the basic social institutions but the model type of all social relationships. Everyone was the slave of his superiors and master to his inferiors. The ethics of slavery, in the disguise of Christian humility, were accepted and idealized by the Byzantine Church. In reading the Byzantine historians one is appalled by the amount of cruelty and perfidy occurring at every step: regicides; tortures and mutilations of vanquished foes; blinding and castration not only of individuals but of whole captive armies. Perhaps half of the Byzantine emperors came to the throne through revolt, and often by shedding the blood of their predecessors, despite the sacred character of the monarchy. Certainly there was cruelty in the Western Middle Ages too, but in Byzantium one is confronted by a cold, passionless cruelty which finds no moral opposition from either the narrating authors or--with rare exceptions--from the contemporary Church. The mixture of cruelty and perfidy is often considered as typically oriental...

It is true that one draws this impression from the descriptions of life in high society and the imperial palace. The middle classes and the simple folk may have led a more decent life. Unfortunately, we know very little about the life of the lower classes in Byzantium. Byzantium had its religious focus not at the base but at the top of the social pyramid. The "basileus" was the model of devotion, and the palace the center of theological and ecclesiastical interests. The Patriarch who headed the Church was always connected with the palace and often shared its political activities and crimes. Spiritual independence and sometimes real holiness could be achieved in seclusion from the world, in a monk's cell. But this cell was more remote from the folk life than the cell of a Western monk...The monks in Byzantium did not preach to the people and rarely taught them. They did little to change the fundamentally pagan character of society, which continued the life of the ancient Hellenistic empires in a considerably deteriorated form. A certain amount of hypocrisy was naturally created by the half-conscious feeling of incompatibility between the pagan structure of society and Christian standards. This was the general impression of the Russian Slavs when they came into contact with their Byzantine teachers: "The Greeks have been deceivers up to this day," was the verdict of an ancient Russian annalist. The Russian Religious Mind, pp.21-36.

This was the form of Christianity inherited by Russia, and by and large the dynamics of Church and State remained the same. But not entirely so. While the Mystery remained a mystery, even to the church, (continued)...

The ancient Church was heir of the cult of both the Synagogue and the Hellenistic mysteries. From the Synagogue came, and remained forever, the Psalm type of prayer and Scripture reading; from Hellenism, the framework of mysteries in words and symbolic actions. The mysteries were destined for the few, for the initiates only. Yet since the whole Empire belonged to the initiates, the mysteries were brought forth to the masses. The danger of this vulgarization was met by a retroactive process. The Church now tried to protect and to hide the mysteries again, particularly the Eucharist, which is the core of the Church life and its cult. Hence the tendency, and afterward the rule of pronouncing secretly the prayers of consecration as well as many others; the development of the altar railing into the High Iconostasis, completely hiding the sanctuary from the lay people...(If the Church had known the full and epic meaning of the Mystery--particularly of the Eucharist, and of those who would offer it in the truest and fullest way in the last days--we assume that it would have readily divulged it to the people themselves. It would have wanted to participate in the gift of prophecy, and would have been zealous to see, as the prophets did, right into the events of the 20th century. But then Paul says: How else shall God judge the world?)...Hence also, under the use of late neoplatonic theurgical language, the new verbal vestments of mysteries, which made them sublime and inaccessible, even dangerous for the unworthy, in its full sense, "mysteria tremenda."

At the same time, between the sixth and eighth centuries, another mighty influence helped shape the Eastern cult: the imperial palace. Many of the court ceremonies and adoration formulas, the silk and gold vestments, were adopted by the Church. Even now, after more than a thousand years and on foreign Slavic soil, the Constantinopolitan palace still lives in every Orthodox Church, particularly in the Cathedral. The beginning of the episcopal Mass, for instance, closely follows the ceremony of the Emperor's dressing. (p.52).

...the books of the Church, the Psalms and the Gospels (Paul's epistles remained an obscurity), but the Lives of the Saints, and a great wealth of apocryphal books and other literature of the type, were translated into the language of the Slavonic Church--which was at that time the language of the peoples themselves. This provided those who belonged to the Church, or who were moved by its presence, and various other intellectuals, and somewhat in general the people themselves, with a more or less access to these works. But all of it only added to the overall mysterium that pervaded and governed the Russian state of mind (moreso than in America where the church and the palace are not cut of the same cloth as it is, and where the Scriptures are poured over in a more academic, but also in the most gregarious and free-wheeling ways). On the one hand because of the very narrow channels of interpretation actually open to the people (lacking the evolving Western point of view), and on the other hand because of a vast network of shared myths and superstitions, nationalistic in scope, and a great many of them apocalyptic in nature. The Russian religious mind is actually obsessed with end-days scenarios, with visions of judgment, with descriptions of the Antichrist, and with a pervading sense of certainty that Russia itself is somehow central to it all, and that all of the deprivations and sorrows that Russia has experienced in its history have been a prelude and a preparation to the Messianic role to which it has been called. It is the pagan (angelic) spirit in Russia, however, that has been called to it. The true child of God (the true Christian, true Jew, true Muslim) has never been called by God to participate in the deeds of mortal combat, in the killing of other human beings. If they do it is in direct violation of the precepts of Christ. It was the pagan spirit in Russia that was called to its feet in 1917 to overthrow both the Czar and the Church, to end the mindless conspiracy of both against the soul and the spiritual welfare of the people. And it is the pagan, and by this we mean the primal angelic spirit that dwells in humankind, that must rise up again, as it is written: Cast in the Sickle for the harvest of the earth is ripe. (Joel 3:9-14).

The (onion) dome of the Byzantine temple is large and round (containing a multiple layer of spheres), a living symbol of heaven descending upon earth. Therefore, longing is not the most essential emotion of the faithful, nor joy, but fear and exaltation. Man, sinful, and unworthy man, is called to contemplate the Divine Glory. He stands in the palace of the Heavenly King who is imagined seated upon a throne behind the Iconostasis, seeing everything in man's heart and mind. The contrition, self-humiliation, fear, and beseeching of man on the one side, and the radiant glory of God on the other: between these two religious poles runs a whole gamut of liturgical emotions. (p.56)...

The typical Byzantine icon of Christ is (not that of the suffering, crucified Saviour of the West, but) that of the Pantocrator, the Lord Omnipotent. It is the image of the glorified Christ regnant on His heavenly throne. We are not even sure that it is not an image of the Eternal God rather than that of Christ. In fact, he bears a designation around His head as the One (the Angel of Divine Presence) who spoke to Moses. The Greek tradition did not know any image of God the Father as distinct from the Son because in the theology of icons only the Incarnation makes legitimate and humanly possible the representation of the Godhead. But, as the Son is the image of the Father, so through the face of the Son we see the Father as well. Thus, the Pantocrator is really the icon of both the Father and the Son: the Godhead in all His glory and majesty...

It was said that the iconographic type itself originated in the Zeus of Phidias. This was, indeed, the evolution of Christ's image in the pictorial arts: after the Good Shepherd (Hermes), came Christ as Asclepius, the mild healer of the fourth and fifth centuries; then Christ as Zeus. Yet the expression of Phidias' Olympian god had changed. Sorrow and severity are written upon this divine face as if it were forced, unwillingly, to contemplate men's crimes and sins. Christ-Pantocrator is, indeed, the Christ of the Last Judgment or of the "Terrible Judgment" as it is called by the Greeks, not the Redeemer, but the Judge. (p.30).

Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the Stars, how high they are...(Job 22:12).

 

LADY LIBERTY OR MOTHER RUSSIA?

AS EMIGRES GO HOME, OTHERS DEFEND LIFE IN AMERICA

By Alison Smale

The Russians are not, as the old movie would have it, coming. They have gone.

Some have slammed the door on America--the country where, as one of them put it, his Russian friends have become "slaves to the dollar"--and have gone back home to Moscow, to St. Petersburg, to Kiev.

And by voicing just what they feel about this place, they have left in their wake a small but impassioned debate about how Russians really view America...

In a story (in the Brooklyn weekly newspaper, the Russian Bazaar), Velentin Labunsky...wrote at great lengths about the complaints of three departing immigrants a 24-year-old female student, a 30-year-old male journalist and a 50-year-old former headmaster.

Broadly speaking, the three, who had been in America from one to four years, bemoaned the obsession with materialism, the emptiness of conversation, (the constant need to be entertained), the ugliness and what the student deemed "the utter treelessness" of their part of Brooklyn, and the functionality and inelegance of what she branded "the American uniform, jeans and sneakers."

Above all they lamented the lack of what Russians call "dukhovnost," the spiritual dimension of life.

The headmaster, his wife and son, who became a computer programmer, depicted a four-year struggle to establish themselves in New York City. When finally they had a halfway decent apartment, good jobs, a car, had paid off their debts and even had some money to spare, he said, "we suddenly found a terrible emptiness inside."

"There in St. Petersburg, we lived poorly, but to the full,"...Suddenly deprived of their full spiritual life, "We really realized that human beings do not live by bread alone," the headmaster added.

"When we were struggling here to survive, we didn't think about this. But when we had finally staggered to our feet, we started to look for America's dukhovnost. And we just couldn't find it. I don't want to heap dirt on America, a country that accepted us as its own. But neither I, nor my family, could accept the values of this world, all their serials, their humor, their TV. And not because it's worse than ours. It just isn't ours."...

"I calmed down a lot," (said the 30-year-old journalist), being back here. Here I really feel as if I am in my place, where I belong. One reason is that I realized I have to be really in the center of Russian culture--and not on its edges."

Maskim, who is back at his old job at a Moscow newspaper, said the education of his 7-year-old son also played a big part in the decision to move back.

"The school we can get him into here will give him a much better education than the public school in Brooklyn...My son will always be able to go to America--it won't be closed off to him," Maskim added. "Russia is getting more Americanized, and anyway America is a more universal culture than ours. It will be accessible. If we stayed in America, he would be completely American, and not know our culture, which is more Eastern, and harder to get to know. I write poems--I want him to be able to read them." The New York Times.