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Newsflash Archives > Leaving Russia
Leaving Russia
"Wake Now! There's a Greater Pleasure!"
Recollections on a week in Russia... and some thoughts on the future
- by Dr. Robert Moynihan
MOSCOW, Russia, November 3, 2007 -- "Well...," I said to my Russian friend, Leonid Sevastianov. "I leave tomorrow. So what is, as you always say, the 'bottom line'?"
"Well," said Sevastianov, a young Russian Orthodox scholar who has studied at the Gregorian in Rome and at Georgetown in Washington, "you can begin by citing Nikolai Nekrasov, a very famous 19th century Russian poet who tried to understand the contradictions of Russia in the pre-Revolutionary Czarist time, when Russia was beginning to enter the modern world, but was still called 'Holy Russia.'
"In one poem he wrote: 'It is impossible to understand Russia with the intellect. It's impossible to measure Russia by ordinary means. Russia has its own identity and destiny. You can only believe in Russia...' What do you think?"
"Ok," I said. "I'll begin with Nekrasov..."
***
I have spent eight days in Moscow. Is it possible to draw any conclusions about Russia from a visit of only a little more than a week? Perhaps not. What follows is only an attempt. I offer it aware of its profound limitations.
***
I write on Saturday evening, typing on my laptop, seated at a wooden table in the "American Bar and Grill" near Mahakovskaya Square. (Yes, they serve American hamburgers and French fries.)
It is in the Tverskaya Street neighborhood, where many American expats live (it is close the American Embassy in Moscow), and it is about a 20-minute walk from the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, where I have been staying in the new Curia next to the church as a guest of the bishop.
But, there is no wireless Internet in the Curia.
So each evening I have walked over to Tverskaya Street, my laptop on my shoulder, to find a hotel lobby -- the Sheraton, the Grand Marriott, the Ritz Carlton -- where I can sit and type, and then connect to the Internet by free hotel wireless, to send these dispatches.
The night before last, I walked back from the Sheraton to the Curia at 3 a.m. in a cold, steady rain, my sweater draped over my head like a monk's hood, for protection.
Not far from where I am now, a 20-minute walk down the street toward the Kremlin, is the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
I wrote there on several evenings, to a background of live classical and modern piano music, seated on a plush sofa under sparkling chandeliers (not a bad place for a traveling writer).
But here one can see clearly some of the contradictions of Russia today.
In the Ritz, a cup of coffee costs $20, an ordinary lunch $250, and an ordinary room $1,200.
Up and down the Tverskaya, new boutiques are selling Armani, Gucci, Prada, and other expensive Western brands.
Property prices in Moscow, the economic vortex at the center of an economically booming Russia (as the price of oil nears $100 a barrel -- and Russia has the largest oil and gas reserves in the world), are astronomically high.
A two-room apartment in a nondescript high-rise apartment building can cost $500,000.
And BMWs and Mercedes are now common on the streets.
The city's traffic jams are also notorious. Moscow was made for horse-drawn carriages, and often now there is city-wide gridlock for hours at a time.
Russia is filled with new millionaires ("oligarchs," they call them), who swagger around the streets of the capital with bodyguards, and blondes in long fur coats on each arm...
And Russia is filled with impoverished babushkas (grandmothers)...
With the most expensive foreign shops -- and with ancient, onion-domed churches where the faithful wait patiently in line to go to confession...
With modern technology -- and with millions of abandoned children...
The country is booming -- but things are stretched, the wealth isn't reaching the poor, there are millions in poverty in the countryside, outside of the main cities...
Every school child still learns the poetry of Pushkin by heart -- but in their cars, the Russians are listening to the rap/hip-hop music of the American rap group 50 Cent...
***
The things I have seen on this trip have been like the dabs of paint in an impressionist painting. The reds and blues and greys which Monet scattered across his canvas were seemingly incoherent, but from a distance, the colors took on form: a cityscape, a cathedral...
So my limited, partial observations from this trip can form only a personal, impressionistic image of Russia in late 2007.
Do I know Russia? No.
Do I understand Russia? Again, no -- in fact, as Nekrasov wrote, understanding Russia is impossible!
But I have seen some things, a few things, and seen them with my own eyes.
That is all I can claim.
And these are the images that linger in my mind:
* I see Archbishop Pavel Pezzi, in utter stillness, kneeling before the altar of the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Immaculate Conception on Saturday, October 27, at the moment when Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz laid his hands on his head and consecrated him a bishop.
The stillness, the concentrated attention on one point, as Kondrusiewicz's gnarled, powerful, now somewhat puffy hands settled on Pezzi's head, made that moment take on, for me, an odd timelessness.
I can still see it in my mind's eye: the tough, stout Belorussian, who grew up in the old USSR, standing over the stocky, barrel-chested Italian theologian who had sat at the feet of Don Luigi Giussani in Milan, and in that moment, making him a bishop.
It was electric, unforgettable. It was the most dramatic moment of this trip.
To me, it still is present, as if that transmission of apostolic succession continues in some other dimension outside of this time and space.
* I see Kondrusiewicz, standing at his church lectern, delivering his final homily in Moscow after 16 years here as bishop, on the eve of his departure for Minsk, his new assignment in Belorussia. He addresses himself directly to Pezzi, asking him to care for the flock Kondrusiewicz is handing over to his care. His voice is cracking with emotion. And yet, though almost in tears, Kondrusiewicz does not seem weak, but strong.
* I see my last conversation with Kondrusiewicz. He speaks of his concerns for the future of the diocese here. And he speaks of his three conversations with Sister Lucy of Fatima. When Our Lady spoke of "Russia" in 1917 at Fatima, and of Russia's coming conversion, Sister Lucy told him, the word "Russia" was a metaphor for the whole world, for a worldwide conversion.
* I see my first conversation with Pezzi. We sit in his office conference room in the Curia. He tells me he hopes to build on the foundation Kondrusiewicz has laid in pastoring the Catholics of Moscow, and to build relationships of fraternal Christian collaboration with the Russian Orthodox.
* I see the picture in the Moscow Times of Putin's unprecedented visit to the martyr's field in Butovo (Tuesday, October 30). He is embracing Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexi. I am still stunned by the image: a former KGB agent seemingly doing a form of public repentance for the actions of the KGB under the Soviets.
* I see the eyes of Gennady Zuganov, head of Russia's Communist Party, wary and yet unwavering, as I asked him why he is visiting the national celebration of Orthodox Russia, and he says, "Why not? There is no contradiction."
***
Yesterday, I went back to a place I visited in 2000, more than seven years go, on the Balshaya Ordinka: the convent of Martha and Mary established by the Russian Orthodox saint who was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Her name was Elizabeth.
She was the sister of the Czarina, Alexandra, who married the last Romanov Czar, Nicholas II.
She was German, and the flower of Europe's 2,000 years of cultural development since the time when the German tribes fought against the invading armies of Rome.
She was raised in the noblest traditions of Christian faith and culture, to do her duty in life, to serve her fellow man, and God.
In her family heritage were Roman Catholics, but her father was a strict Lutheran. But she was also the grand-daughter of Queen Victoria of England (she spoke English as well or better than she spoke German). And, after her marriage to Russia's Grand Duke Serge, she converted... to Russian Orthdoxy.
I have read her letters to her father, who encouraged her to remain a Lutheran and not embrace that mystical, and (as he believed) mystifying, faith of the Greek East. But, after years of soul-searching, she embraced Orthodoxy.
In 1905, her husband was assassinated. Pieces of his body were strewn in the street in front of their home on the Balshaya Ordinka. She heard the bomb blast, rushed out, and then began to collect the pieces of her husband's body and with her own hands placed them on the altar of their private chapel. She prayed all night, and the next day announced that she would give up the aristocratic social world of parties and balls, and become a nun.
She never had any children. But, after she opened orphanages and clinics for children, she began to be known as the "Great Mother" of Russia.
The order of nuns she founded, the order of Martha and Mary, worked with her from 1906 to 1917. Then the Communist Revolution occurred, in October 1917, and Lenin came to power. There was a knock on the convent door. Elizabeth and one sister, Barbara, were arrested, and over several days transported to the Ural Mountains. The following summer, on July 18, 1918, Elizabeth was taken from her prison and brought to a mineshaft. Her guards threw her alive down the mineshaft.
For three days, peasants later said, they heard hymns and psalms coming from the mineshaft. Then, silence.
***
Across the room where I sit, two young Russian women drink beer. They puff on cigarettes, and the acrid smell drifts over toward my table. One twirls her blond hair with her manicured fingertips, the other munches on chicken wings, leaning delicately forward over her plate. As they leave, they smile toward men sitting at nearby tables.
***
Not far away is an ancient Russian Orthodox monastery. After leaving the American Bar and Grill, I walked toward it, and entered. No one asked me who I was; I was free to go in.
In the church vestibule, long lines of people -- old, young, middle-aged, men, women -- are waiting to go to confession. A woman walks up to a priest. He places a stole over her head, and bends down next to her. I think she is whispering to him. Then he stands up, and she waits, her head beneath the stole, for many minutes.
I go inside the church. There are many people, a hundred or more, approaching relics and icons. An old woman drops to her knees, and kisses the stones of the church floor. I draw near. The stones are shining, polished with the kisses of believers.
***
Am I pessimistic about Russia? No.
Am I optimistic? No, not optimistic either.
I am realistic.
Russia is a great country. It is a rich country. And it is filled with contradictions.
Looking at the many and profound challenges the country faces, it would be wrong to embrace either a simple optimism, or pessimism.
My conclusion is simply this: in a place of such possibilities, and contradictions, there is an opportunity for the human spirit. There is a chance to remember the past, the time of "Holy Russia" under the Czars, and the time of "atheist Russia" under the Communists, and to construct out of the triumphs and failures of that past a better future, for Russia, and for the world.
Our time is not different from other times in the extent of the evil we face. The great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, once said that our world is filled with contradictions, and always will be. "The world is a continuous battle between good and evil," he said, "and the field of the battle is the human heart."
So what is the conclusion? That we need to work together, Catholics and Orthodox, Americans and Russians, and all men and women of good will, to make the good shine brighter, clearer, and the bad less brilliantly and seductively.
And we have an extraordinary assurance that we will win in our common struggle for our human future, for we have the words of Our Lady to the three shepherd children: "In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. Russia shall be converted, and a period of peace shall be granted to the world."
***
I will end as I began: with the words of the Russian poet Nikolai Alekseyevich Nekrasov (1821-1878). Nekrasov's work centered on the themes of compassion for the sufferings of Russia's peasantry.
In the lines which follow, Nekrasov considers the rich and the poor who crowd into a church vestibule, much like the vestibule I just saw.
The poet castigates the rich of his time for not realizing that Christian charity should move them to build a more just society. They take vacations in Italy, they take no thought for the poverty and suffering of Russia's poor.
The same words could apply to many of today's Russian oligarchs (and equally to all who enjoy great wealth). They are multi-millionaires who have benefited from the privatizing since 1991 of much of the former Soviet economy, and who now take vacations on the Riviera, and in the Seychelles, and the Caribbean, while millions in Russia, and elsewhere, worry about having sufficient resources to raise their families in a decent way.
The spectacle of this inequity, especially coming on the heels of a Soviet regime which preached economic and social equity (the "classless" society) for 70 years, is the final and most striking contradiction in Russia.
And it is this contradiction which commands the attention of the consciences of men and women of good will, whether they be believers or unbelievers, Christians or atheists, Orthodox or Catholic.
***
Thoughts at a Vestibule
by Nicolai Alekseyevich Nekrasov (1821-1879
Here's a vestibule. On holidays
Overcome by slavish fear,
The whole population, in a state of awe,
Rushes to the sacred doors.
Having left their names and ranks.
All these visitors return then to their homes,
They are all so deeply satisfied
You might think this was their calling!
Yet on other days this ornate vestibule
Is beset by much more wretched sorts:
Schemers and position-seekers,
By a widow and an aged man.
To and fro each morning without cease
Couriers bustle with their papers.
Some returning seekers whistle a tune
While some others walk and weep.
Once I saw some peasants who stopped by,
Simple Russian villagers.
Having crossed themselves they stood aside
And they hung their flaxen heads.
Then up came a doorman. -- "Let us in," they said
With a look of torment and of hope.
He surveyed the visitors: how ugly they all looked.
Sunburned hands and faces
Threadbare coats upon their backs,
On bent shoulders knapsacks,
Crosses round the neck and bloodied feet
Shod in hand-made bast
(Must have come from far away,
From some far-flung province).
Someone yelled out to the doorman: "Send them off!
Our boss doesn't care for ragged mobs!"
And the door was shut. In time
They untied their bags
But the doorman spurned their meager offerings
And they walked off through the burning sun,
Saying: God will be the judge!
With their arms thrown wide in consternation,
I observed them 'til they disappeared,
And they never donned their caps.
While the owner of this lavish palace
Was still nestled in deep sleep's embrace...
You who think so highly of a life
Full of thrilling, shameless flattery,
Gluttony, philandering and play,
Wake now! There's a greater pleasure:
Call them back. For you are their salvation!
But the sated are to goodness deaf.
Heavenly thunder doesn't frighten you,
Earthly thunders you hold in your hands
That is why these unknown men must carry
Grief disconsolate within their hearts.
But what does this desperate sorrow mean to you?
What do you care for these desperate folk?
A life racing by in endless holidays
Keeps you from awakening.
And why care? For you the people's good
Is an idle game for scribblers;
You will live a glorious life without it
And you'll die a glorious death!
Your declining days will pass
Peacefully like some Arcadian idyll:
Under Sicily's charming skies,
In the fragrant shade of trees,
Contemplating crimson suns
As they sink into the azure sea
Casting shining rays of gold, --
Lulled by the soft melody
Of Tyrrhenean waves -- just like a child
You will slumber, satisfied in every need
By your dear and loving family
(Who await your death impatiently);
Your remains they'll transport back to us
To reward them with a funeral feast.
Like a hero you'll be lowered to the grave,
By your homeland silently cursed,
Glorified by boisterous praise!...
Still, why bother such a personage
With the pains of trivial folk?
Rage at them instead -- a great idea!
It's less dangerous... and more amusing,
Find ourselves some kind of solace...
What a peasant bears is no big deal:
It's what fate that guides us
Has decreed... And anyway, he's used to it!
In some lowly inn outside the city gates,
These poor men will drink their final rubles down
And then head for home, begging all the way,
Moaning humbly... O my homeland!
Tell me now of some abode --
I have surely never seen it --
Where your sower and your guardian,
The meek Russian peasant, does not moan?
In the fields he moans, and on the roads,
In the prisons and stockades he moans,
And in ore mines, wearing iron chains;
Moans burst out from barns and stacks of hay,
And from carts where he sleeps in the steppe;
In his own poor hut he moans,
Warmed by nothing on God's earth;
In each godforsaken town he moans,
In the vestibules of courts and palaces as well.
Go out to the Volga: hear whose moan
Rises over Russia's greatest river?
In our land, this moan is called a song --
It's the boatmen straining in their traces!...
Volga! Volga! In the spring your torrents
Cannot flood the fields as much
As our people's awful pain
Floods our land --
Where you are, there's moaning -- O, my people!
What can all this endless moaning mean?
Will you ever waken, filled with strength,
Or, obeying fate's command,
Have you done all that you can,
Fashioning a song so like a moan,
While your soul remains forever mired in sleep?
—Nikolai Alekseyevich Nekrasov
A Very Special "Russian Christmas" in Washington, D.C.
On December 17, a week before Christmas, the Moscow Boys' Choir and a leading Russian orchestra will travel to America to perform an exceptional "world premiere" concert of Russian Christmas music at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington...
For more information, click here.
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