Translated material
XX century and peace. 1992. #5. SPACE
SPACEYuri Kobishcheanov
The decay of space is the revival of civilizations?
Fracture lines
Over the past hundred years, it has been the collapse of the great empires: Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, British, French, Portuguese and, finally, Sovetskaya, has been taking place for about equal breaks. The current collapse of decays is the most grandiose, and moreover, special: the iron hoops burst, pulling the former communist states. We are talking about multinational states or nominally independent states that were part of the communist empires in which all nations strive for independence. As in previous cases, the struggle for political independence is accompanied not only by the struggle of economic interests (a matter of understanding everyone), but also by the passionate aspiration of peoples to their cultural and historical roots.
Turning to this phenomenon, the researchers are lost in many of its aspects, in the inconsistency of facts. In fact, in Yugoslavia, Serbs, Croats, Bosnyaks and Montenegrins speak the same language, in the CIS SSR, Ukrainians and Belarusians are very close to Russians in language, culture, and often they speak Russian better than in their languages ("artificial", as many Russian intellectuals believe that Ukrainians and Belarusians believe are special nation). The same thing - in Czechoslovakia (Czech and Slovak is closer to each other than even Russian and Ukrainian).
Maybe it's about religion? This explanation is applicable to the Slavic peoples of Yugoslavia, but not to the CIS and Czechoslovakia. In Yugoslavia, this seems to be approaching the Slavic peoples, but in the CIS and in Czechoslovakia - the Slavic peoples - is not suitable. In Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, most believers are Orthodox Christians; In the Czech Republic and Slovakia there are Catholics, and the minority are Protestants. By the way, the percentage of Protestants in Russia and Ukraine (Baptists, Adventists, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.) is almost equally small. Ukrainian Catholics are politically very active, but still they constitute a minority of the nation. There are differences in a religious situation, but they are not so much a reason as a consequence of belonging to a particular civilization. But let's go further. Caucasus: Georgians, most Ossetians and half of the Abkhazians are Orthodox Christians. Armenians are almost all monophysites, sharply different in religion from their Muslim neighbors to a certain extent from the Orthodox Georgians and the Nestorians of the Assyrians. Armenians call Azerbaijanis "Turks" and consider them and Turks one people who bear the general responsibility for the Armenian genocide. And this-despite the "Persian" faith (Shiism) of Azerbaijanis and their warmer attitude to the Shiites-Persias than to the Sunni-Tours. Examples can be multiplied.
On the other hand, the eastern and central Ukrainians and even the faces of mixed Russian-Ukrainian origin, recorded in the passports of the “Russians” (about three million in Ukraine), did not dissolve from Western Ukrainians. Both in Ukraine and in the Baltic states, Russians and Russian, for the most part, do not want to fight against the independence of the countries where they live, or leave for Russia. But from the Caucasian countries (Muslim and Christian), the outcome of the Russians began. Of course, not all and not at once leave, although no one seems to drive them ...
It is clear that we are not dealing with a number of facts, but with the system of factors for the decay of communist multinational empires. Empires are spreading at the seams, or rather, in nations that rush - at different speeds and with unequal unanimity - to where their cultural and historical orientation entails. The latter is clearly related to belonging to a particular civilization.
The world of eastern Christianity
The USSR occupied a unique geographical location between Western Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Islamic region, the Buddhist Central and East Asia, and finally, the Chukotka - a neighbor of American Alaska. Karelo-Finns, Caucasian Greeks and Armenians live in Russia itself; The most northern Muslims in the world (Tyumen and Tobolsk Tatars), the western (Kalmyks) and the northernmost Buddhists in the world (Eastern Buryats); The only pagans in Europe (the Mari of Bashkortostan) and open only in the 60s behind the Kolyma of the Evenks, who did not know anything about the great country of the Soviets ...
In addition to nations, ethno -confessional groups uniting co -religionists participate in the decay scenarios. The vast majority of the Tatars are Muslims, but there are Christians (grunted). Udmurts are mostly Orthodox Christians (though little committed to the churches), but part of the Udmurts (the so -called Beserman) are Muslims. (By the way, this is the only group in the world in language that professes Islam. And they demand to recognize them with a special nationality, and their dialect was a special language.) Among the Georgians were Muslims, Catholics, Judaists. But there are few of them. The Georgians, not taking into account the non -Orthodox ethno -confessional groups inside their people (but including Megrelov and Svan), act as one ethno -confessional group - the Georgian Orthodox Church. The same applies to the Armenians. The Armenian Gregorian Church claims to be represented by the entire Armenian nation.
We see a similar situation in Orthodox Romania and Moldova (although in Romania there are also Romanians -Catholics, and there are many Orthodox in Moldova - unmolled) and in other Balkan countries, in which local Muslims were either persecuted and emigrated into Turkey (Bulgaria) or turn into a special nation (Bosnia). In Ethiopia, the local Orthodox (monophysian) church identifies itself with the dominant Amhar people. If you are Orthodox - be Ampharz in language and culture, if you are a Muslim, Judea -Falash, etc. - then what are you Amphare? Everywhere, even in the original Orthodox Eritrea and Tygrai, in the Church, as in state institutions, the Amphoor language was planted.
Isn't it a familiar picture? The Russian Orthodox Church tends to identify themselves with the Russian nation, although some of the Russians belong to the Old Believers and Protestant churches, not counting the Krishnas and other sectarians, as well as unbelievers who are still the majority in Russia. Until recently, the Russian Orthodox Church did not want to recognize the existence of the Ukrainian and Belarusian nations, it expelled from the Church the Ukrainian, Belarusian, Moldavian, Ossetian, Greek and other languages of believers of the Orthodox.
In all this, you can see something in common for Eastern Christian civilizations - Russian, Balkan, Georgian, Armenian, Ethiopian. Firstly, the desire of the dominant ethno-confessional group is noticeable here to absorb the entire relevant nationality or group of nationalities and become a nation. Secondly, these civilizations turned out to be a favorable basis for the construction of the bureau-communist empire. We will not discuss the question too painful for many, whether Orthodoxy prepared, as well as monophysis, in contrast to other directions of Christianity (for example, Protestantism), a mass consciousness to accept what the Communists carried the peoples.
We note only two seemingly unrelated phenomena. Firstly, the revival of monarchical sentiments in Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, Ethiopia. Secondly, nationalism of the Eastern Christian churches. I understand that this criterion is very relative. The Catholic churches of Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Lithuania, the Lutheran churches of Latvia and Estonia, the Calvinist church of Hungary in a sense are also nationalist. But this nationalism is still not as demonstrative and bloodless as nationalism of the Eastern Christian churches. The first acts as a means of self -preservation, the spiritual struggle for the national existence in the grip of empires, the second passes into great -power chauvinism (Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Georgian, Ambharsky, etc.). This chauvinism is a legacy of prolonged isolation, "cooking in its own juice." It has ancient roots in the most eastern Christian civilization.
Some roots go into the deepest, still pre -Christian layers, others grew and strengthened during the heyday of Byzantium. But the isolation of Eastern Christians from the Christian West was crucial when they were included in the Islamic Empires (for Russia it was a golden horde, for the Balkan and Caucasian countries - the Ottoman state, for the East Caucasus - Persia). In conditions of prolonged isolation, East Christian civilizations closed in themselves and entered a kind of association with the great civilization of Islam. In modern times (Russia - starting from the reign of Peter I) East Christian countries began gradually, step by step to integrate with Western civilization. However, this path has completely passed, maybe only Greece. In other countries, the dual structures of the "Petersburg" type, European on the surface, autochthonous in the outback, have formed. This duality gave Eastern Christian civilizations a remarkable brightness and fruitfulness.
Islam and Slavic-Tourk Unity
Communist regimes subjected all civilizations to the deepest defeat, and now the peoples who survived the era of totalitarianism are painfully trying to restore them. Ruins are still everywhere, but the contours of the future are already visible. The Western, Islamic and East Asian (China, Korea and Vietnam), mainly because the Communists managed to capture only part of their territories, are recovering relatively quickly.
The intellectuals of the Small Muslim CIS countries understand how much they need the help of more powerful Islamic countries in the restoration and development of their civilization. Conventional assistance involves the establishment and mutual recognition of kinship by faith (Islamism, panicism), language and folk culture (pan -Turkism among the Turkic peoples, panranism among Tajiks and Ossetians). In traditional rivalry between Turkey and Iran, the first has an advantage in establishing ethno -linguistic kinship among about two dozen large Turkic peoples of the CIS - while Iran, Pakistan, Arab countries for them (and not for everyone) are only brothers by faith. (They are not Muslims of Turkic -speaking Chuvash, Gagauza, Tuvans, Yakuts, Mountains Altai, Khakasses, etc.). Pantyurkism is often associated with laicism and is opposed to Islamism. The Soviet government fought with both, but they survived it. Try to reproach the Central Asians, Tatars or Azerbaijanis "Asian" - they will live to you vividly to the Arab countries, Turkey, Iran. And they are right: Islamic civilization, borrowing the technical ideas of the West, is experiencing a new heyday and at the same time does not abandon its essence.
But Pantyurkism appeared, along with the former pro -Turkish, and the non -Soviet aspect. Outside of the Soviet Empire, only Turks-Sosmans of Turkey, some peoples of Iran (including most of the Azerbaijanis), Uyghurs of Western China and fragments of other ethnic groups live from the Turkic peoples. But all the rest - and these are more than thirty peoples - from the Yakuts and Dolgan Taimyr to the Gagauz, Karaim and Crimean - these are former Soviet people. So a smart thought was born in the Central Committee-shaped heads-to use pantyurkism (as before Pan Slavism) to collect former Soviet lands in the new Slavic-Turkic Eurasian Commonwealth (as a synonym for the Union). The trends of Western politics in the east of this dawn in the east of Western politics: to use the Russians to hold the Turkic-Muslim peoples from their return to the bosom of Islamic civilization.
It is funny that this idea, reflecting the fears of Washington and Jerusalem, meets complete approval not only among nomenclature internationalists, not only among the “Russian -speaking Turkologists” like V.V. Zhirinovsky, but also a significant part of Russian soils, who, undoubtedly, do not realize the possible consequences of the “Eurasian” plan.
There are in the West there are also minds, which the revived Eurasian Empire is no less frightening than the expanding Islamic block. They bet on pro -Western Turkic unity, led by liberal Turkey. They are very impressed by the liberals-antifundimentalists of Central Asia and Azerbaijan. But ... unlike the prosperous Turkey, the Muslim CIS countries are full of marginal elements. The abyss that separates them from Europe and East Asia is so wide and deep that it can hardly be overcome over the next century. But the revival of their own civilization inevitably returns them to a spiritual association with the southern neighbors - the Islamic states of the Middle East.
By the way, Turkish society is far from so one in its Western orientation, as the local information and political elite is trying to present. Despite more than seven decades of the reign of the followers of Kemal Ataturk, in Turkey, along with the Laician-nationalist, mass Islamic consciousness (in particular, among the multimillion-dollar Kurdish people in the east and southeast). Among the Turks and anti -Christian, anti -Western sentiments are preserved, Islamic fundamentalism is being revived. Perhaps the Turkish pro-Western elite, at the same time, Pantyurkist and anti-Islamist, hopes to strengthen its position not only in the Western world, but in his own country, based on an alliance with former socialist Turks?
Ukraine and Belarus: the way to Europe
But the Slavic-Turkic unity is unacceptable for most Slavic peoples. In Ukraine and Belarus, the Russians are surprised to see that Slavophilism and pan -Slavism are not opposed to Westernism, but mean strengthening the Slavic unity within the European community (or in the narrower framework of the Eastern European Commonwealth).
Ukrainians and Belarusians are generally similar to Poles, Slovaks, Chekhov in their individualism, attitude to property (which so outraged by M. Gorky and his Chelkash), to thieves and easy money. Of course, much has changed under the influence of the Soviet system, but still Ukrainians and Belarusians never had either a Russian village community or artel, but there were only specifically pan -European forms of a community organization. The fact is that Ukraine and Belarus have developed the entire history, except for Soviet lights, developed as part of Europe. Kievan Rus was quite a European state, then the period of the Commonwealth began, then - the coexistence of the Commonwealth and the Ukrainian "Kozatsky Republic", and later - the Russian and Austrian empires. Moreover, even Russia was in one way or another Europeanized, and its Baltic-Polish-Ukrainian West did not break with Europe.
Although the Kozat traditions, as well as Orthodoxy, make Ukraine a very peculiar part of Europe, but still this is not the Christian East. Nowadays, Ukrainians, following the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Baltic states, turned to face Europe. Despite the sophisticated provocations of all kinds of “specifics” and the evil stupids of its own nationalists, Ukraine did not allow infringement in the rights of national minorities, including hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars and millions of Russians. She, as far as possible, fulfills all economic and financial obligations, does not put forward territorial claims against the neighbors, although it is surrounded by "lost provinces" from all sides, which are still inhabiting Ukrainians. All this is understandable: the nation is determined to "return to Europe", and for this you need to behave in European.
The expression of Europeanism in religion was the national ecumenism widespread in Ukraine and among the Ukrainian diaspora: intellectuals, including among the clergy of the Orthodox (Ukrainian autocephalous), uniate (Ukrainian Catholic) and Protestant churches, strive for prayer consent and subsequent organizational unification. In Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church rejects ecumenism as an official product imposed on it at the time of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB; Becoming more independent, she seeks to become more self -sufficient.
Balkan boiler
Slovenia and Croatia have never broken with Europe. Slovenia, like Slovakia, is an unresolved mystery to international lawyers. In essence, it had never before was an independent state, once belonged to the Czech Republic, then Austria, after the First World War - "the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes", Yugoslavia. In Austria and Yugoslavia, it was the poorest province until Tito began to develop it. And then the West Slavic character of the Slovenes manifested itself, at the same time similar to both Slovak and Czech similar to Slovak and Czech. According to religion, most of the Slovenes are Catholics, the minority is Protestants (like Czechs and Slovaks). Some of them live in neighboring Austria and Italy, and this also affects the Western orientation of the Slovenian nation.
Otherwise, the fate of the Serbohorvat lands has developed. Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia had their own kings, then Croatia was divided between Hungary and Venice, then entered the empire of the Habsburgs, while Serbia and Bosnia were under the Turkish yoke for many centuries, and Montenegro maintained independence. In Bosnia, like everywhere in the Ottoman Empire, which determined the belonging not to the nationality, but to the ethno -confessional group (there were four of them: Muslims, Orthodox, Catholics and Jews). In the nineteenth century, the lands of the Serbs were divided between Austria-Hungary, Turkey and the Serbian kingdom.
And although the Orthodox Seti and the Catholics of Croatia and Herzegovina, who spoke the same language with them, as well as the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina lived within the same states for a long time, they did not merge into the same nation. On the contrary, ethno-confessional groups were transformed into the nation of Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosnyakov. All of them strive to integrate into the European community, but by no means with the same determination and unanimity. Croats who do not break with the West are most consistent in this. Many decades ago, they made the bulk of the Yugoslav emigrants to Western Europe, North and South America. But the Serbs, Montenegrins and Bos, who so "want to Europe", interpret the desirability of a "special development path." Isn't it very similar to Russia?
Albania is very similar to Bosnia, where Muslims (their vast majority), Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants also make up ethno -confessional groups that speak the same language. But in Albania, as well as in Kosovo and Metokhia (Western Macedonia), these groups were integrated into one Albanian nation, which, despite the reviving Islam, strives after a long isolation to Europe.
Similar to the Balkans, the situation in Romania (along with Moldova): she also strives for Europe, but how ready is for this - another question. According to their political behavior, Moldovans turned out to be much more oriental Christians than Ukrainians co -reliable. And this is despite the Romanesque language, the Latin alphabet and other attributes of Europeanism.
The path of Russia
Let us turn to Russia - the largest after the death of Byzantium of Eastern Christian civilization. It formed on the ruins of many civilizations: Novgorod-Pskov Rus, Perm the Great, Ugra, the Golden Horde, Siberian Kyrgyzia. Amuria. She filled their territories together with their population. Then do not forget about Astrakhan, Orenburg and Kyakhta - three gates of Russia to Asia, and, of course, about the influence of Byzantium. Relations with Slavic Europe, Germany, Sweden, and France were no less important. If in the XVI-XVP VV. Russia has developed into a special civilization, then, starting from the era of Peter I, it developed in association with Europe. The Bolsheviks first dealt with European -educated people and the clergy, Orthodox and Old Believers, then peasantry and craftsmen were destroyed. The roots of Russian civilization were chopped, the soil was poisoned. Information, a powerful stream coming from the West, increasingly determines the mass consciousness of the Russian people. Liberation from imperial burden, the transformation of Russia into a national state gives it a chance to save the remnants of its original civilization from final destruction. But it is difficult for her to compete with such a powerful civilization as Western. Apparently, the preservation and revival of the Russian village and old urban culture is still not hopeless and, in any case, not barren. But this must be done not in the confrontation between Western civilization or civilization of Islam, but in cooperation with them, as well as with the national intelligentsia of small peoples - from Vepsi to Chukchi - which works on the preservation and revival of their ancient cultures.