This article is based on this dutch article of Martijn Benders
They Call Themselves Liberal, But Carry the Old Testament in Every Cell of Their Body
One persistent misconception about communism is that it was the communists who sent writers to Siberia—the exile to Siberia as a communist invention. Nothing could be further from the truth: sending dissidents to Siberia was actually a religious tradition dating back to the 17th century. The first known writer to be exiled to Siberia was Avvakum Petrov, a priest and the leader of the Russian Old Believers during the Schism of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century. Avvakum was a staunch opponent of church reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon and defended the church’s traditional rituals and belief practices.
Because of his views and active resistance against the official church, Avvakum was arrested multiple times and eventually exiled to Siberia. During his exile, he continued to defend his faith and wrote his autobiography, which is considered one of the earliest masterpieces of Russian literature. His works are crucial to the Russian literary tradition, especially for their vivid language and profound personal expression of faith and suffering.
Petrov was exiled to Siberia in 1666, where he stayed for more than ten years. During this period, he endured harsh conditions, including imprisonment in an underground pit. Ultimately, in 1682, after about 15 years of exile, he was burned at the stake.
Let me quote the opening of his work The Life Written by Himself, a work that Tolstoy could only read “with tears in his eyes”:
“All-holy Trinity, O God and Creator of all the world! Speed and direct my heart to begin with wisdom and to end with the good works about which I, an unworthy man, now desire to speak. Understanding my ignorance and bowing down I pray to thee; and as I beseech thee for aid, govern my mind and strengthen my heart to prepare for the fashioning of good works, so that illumined by good works I may have a place at thy right hand with all thine Elect on Judgment Day. And now, O Master, bless me so that sighing from my heart I might proclaim Dionysios the Areopagite on the divine names which are the eternally connatural and true names for God, those which are proximate and those which are consequent, that is to say, laudatory. These are the connatural: He is that is, Light, Truth, Life. Only four are of the essential, but of the consequent there are many. These are: Lord, the Almighty, the Unfathomable, the Unapproachable, the Thrice-radiant, the Trisubstantial, the King of Glory, the Omnipresent, Fire, Spirit, and God; understand others after this manner. From this same Dionysios on Truth: For the falling away of Truth is repudiation of self, for Truth is connatural; for if Truth is connatural, the falling away of Truth is repudiation of the connatural. But God cannot fall away from the connatural, and that which cannot be, is not.”
It is interesting to note that the mention of “Dionysios” in Avvakum’s work does not refer to Dionysus, the Greek god of intoxication and wild spirits, but to Dionysius the Areopagite, an early Christian mystic and theological figure. Dionysius the Areopagite, also known as Pseudo-Dionysius, was a very influential author of various theological and mystical works, including those on the hierarchy of angels and the divine names. His writings had a profound influence on Christian mysticism and theology, both in the East and the West.
“The perfect and true mystic is not he who merely reaches the divine darkness, but he who, having arrived there, can no longer see nor know.” – From Mystical Theology by Dionysius the Areopagite.
One of the contentious issues of the time was that the Russian liturgy lasted over six hours and consisted of a long monotonous chant by the head priest. The modernists did not have the patience to spend six hours of their lives and had thus divided the holy texts over multiple voices so that the liturgy could be significantly shortened. A bit like a modern Chekhov or Platonov translation, so to speak: stripping everything down in service of the convenience of the imaginary consumer.
Avvakum did not agree with this abbreviation, and when Siberia could not break him, even after a prolonged stay in an underground pit, they threw him on the stake. That is the true nature of this “modernization” and the sacred laziness that must be defended to the death.
Now, I myself am a pre-Socratean like Nietzsche was, with some differences: I am not a fan of Sparta, and I am convinced that the Kingdom of the Gods was a psychotic consequence of the transition from tribe to family. Man was forced to live in a family unit, and the absence of a tribal connection was simply projected into the heavens. So no, I don’t believe in a holy tribe in the sky, and I see precisely that development as a regression in human evolution.
The later emergence of (what I consider fairly psychopathic) monotheism, in which all those tribe members are once again swept together and become an extension of the reigning power—The Holy King in the Sky, an extension of the Earthly King—my god, no. That earlier construction with tribe members in the sky was a lot friendlier and less… fascistic. But anyway, I digress. Let’s read another piece from Avvakum’s book:
“I was born in the Nizhny Novgorod area, beyond the Kudma River, in the village of Grigorovo. My father was the priest Pyotr, my mother Maria, as a nun Marfa. My father was given to hard drink, but my mother fasted and prayed zealously and was ever teaching me the fear of God. Once I saw a dead cow at a neighbor’s, and that night I arose and wept much over my soul before the icon, being mindful of death and how I too must die. And from that time I grew accustomed to praying every night. Then my mother was widowed and I, still young, orphaned, and we were driven out, away from our kin.”
His father was a drunken priest and his mother a nun. He was banished from his village together with his mother, but he devotes not a letter to why, which makes this text not very interesting to me, rather a text that gets on my nerves, for I am someone who wants to know why.
This is enough reason for me to put the book aside. I don’t know why Tolstoy read this with tears in his eyes—it is a tragic story, but it lacks authenticity. The man continued the extreme rigidity he got from his parents, and the interesting part about him is mainly why anyone would want to burn him on a stake at all.
But no, sending writers to Siberia is not an invention of the communists but a very long Russian tsarist tradition that reached its peak under Tsar Nicholas II. The first tsars to use this practice were the successors of Catherine the Great, but it was especially during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) that the banishment of intellectuals increased significantly. Nicholas I is known for his strict and repressive regime, especially after the Decembrist uprising in 1825, which he saw as a direct threat to autocracy.
Nicholas I sent several prominent intellectuals and writers to Siberia, including:
Alexander Herzen: Although he was not physically exiled to Siberia, he suffered under strict surveillance and later became an important figure in the Russian revolutionary movement in exile.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: After being involved with a group that criticized the government, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, but this was commuted at the last moment to exile in Siberia, where he spent four years in a labor camp.
When it comes to the tsar who sent the most writers to Siberia, that could be Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917). During his reign, especially in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, political repression and censorship increased. Many intellectuals, including writers, were exiled to Siberia as part of a broader attempt to suppress political dissent and rebellion.
So what Stalin did was merely an extension of this—he copied an existing model and modernized it into a more industrial form, entirely fitting the spirit of the times. Stalin also came from an extremely religious background and returned to his old familiar rigidity after driving millions of people to their deaths.
Alexander Herzen, who was exiled from Russia by the Tsar, was present at this revolution. On February 25, 1848, demonstrators gathered outside the Paris City Hall, many waving the red flag, which at the time was seen in France as a symbol of social revolution. The crowd demanded that the red flag be adopted as the national flag of the new republic, replacing the Tricolor, the blue-white-red flag that had been a symbol of the French Republic since the French Revolution of 1789.
Lamartine made a famous speech in which he opposed replacing the Tricolor with the red flag. He argued that the Tricolor represented the entire nation and was connected to the great revolutions of France that had brought liberty, equality, and fraternity. He declared that the red flag was only a symbol of the bloodshed in Paris and did not represent the broad ideals of the French nation.
In short, an early form of socialism-communism was banned in favor of a “revolution” that took place sixty years earlier. Lamartine was also a poet but above all a remarkable figure: raised as a devout Catholic, Lamartine became a pantheist and wrote works like Jocelyn and The Fall of an Angel. In 1847, he wrote History of the Girondins in praise of the Girondins.
They were quite belligerent, by the way. Read along: “To combat internal unrest, the Girondins, like most Jacobins, were for war with Austria, the liberation of Piedmont, and the destruction of the town of Koblenz, where many exiled emigrants resided.”
War to keep things together and even calling for the “destruction” of the town of Koblenz because of emigrants? I’m not making this up; it comes directly from Wikipedia and is attributed to the progenitors of moderate left and liberalism.
Where does the eternal enmity towards Russia come from? It seems to me just a religious matter: Eastern religion versus Western religion. One side throws old-fashioned religionists on the stake because they disdain a six-hour liturgy, the other side wants to raze the town of Koblenz to the ground in the name of Liberalism.
Nietzsche, by the way, believed that writers only performed well under the unrelenting gaze of strict Kings: maybe he was right in that, and that’s why Russian literature is of a higher caliber than Western literature. If the Gulag looms, you write better—that’s the talk—but the annoying thing about censorship is precisely that you never know what you didn’t know wasn’t reaching you. And I don’t think the censorship in the West was ever less, it was just much more Christian: hidden, in back rooms, stealthy and sneaky. No, I still prefer my own explanation: it’s the consumption of wild mushrooms that managed to ensure better literature in the East. The common Westerner doesn’t believe that wild mushrooms have such a big influence—but then again, they demand the destruction of a town as liberals, which Foucault would call an excellent example of Christian parrhesia. They call themselves liberal, but carry the Old Testament in every cell of their body.
Martijn 25-07-2024