NOT BY BREAD ALONE
Russia's spiritual needs are as neglected as its economic ones,
argues Stephen Handelman
Moscow 'WHAT frightens me most is the fact that the Revolution has brought about no in- dications of spiritual revival,' wrote a disillusioned Maxim Gorky after the Rus- sian cataclysm of 1917. It has made people neither better nor more open-hearted. . . . Man is rated as cheap as before.' Seventy- three years later, and with remarkably little sense of irony, the Central Commit- tee of the Soviet Communist Party came to much the same conclusion about the economic-political revolution which over- turned its own authority in the age of perestroika. In a resolution published last week, the Party chiefs warned that the emerging atmosphere of a free market had brought about the 'commercialisation' of Soviet culture. 'Profit-oriented' movies, books and even videos were poisoning youth and degrading the country's aesthe- tic values, they said.
Modern Soviet hand-wringers over the fate of Russian culture are unlikely to make any more headway than Gorky did: another age of new thought is upon Russia, and the steamroller of revolutionary capi- talism is driving everything else before it.
Nevertheless, spiritual revival, or the search for it, has infused and complicated most of the dramatic periods of Russian history. The latest spasm has arisen, some- what inconveniently, just as the Soviet leadership finds itself more preoccupied with matters of bread than with the spirit. The debate this month over various strategies to push the country into the promised land of free enterprise has only deepened national foreboding about the loss of cultural and moral integrity. 'The main thing is not bread,' fretted the octogenarian scholar Dimitri Likhachev from his roost in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. 'I have been through several famines, including the blockade of Lening- rad, myself, so I have the right to say that the main thing is for people to learn to be human. If we have bread and still become beasts, there will be no reason for us to live.' A glance at the tense, disorderly queues in the capital might persuade Likhachev that a more regular supply of bread and other commodities might ease the beastly temper of the average Soviet shopper. But his point is not lost on most people here. The outpouring of grief and shock which accompanied the murder two weeks ago of Alexander Men, a Russian Orthodox priest whose appeals for a moral renaiss- ance made him popular among the Mos- cow intelligentsia is a case in point.
In the current atmosphere, Father Alex- ander's death is regarded as particularly ominous. The body of the 55-year-old priest was found just outside the gate of his home in the cathedral town of Zagorsk. He had been struck with a sharp object on the back of his head while walking along a deserted path towards a railway station. Father Alexander was heading towards the parish church in the nearby town of Push- kin°, where he had served for the past 25 years. He managed to struggle back to his front door, but died before he could name his assailant or assailants. Father Alexan- der had taken the same route every morn- ing. 'He only missed his schedule twice in the years I knew him,' said Elena Senakos- soya, one of his friends. 'First, when he had a temperature, and second, the day he was killed.' Police initially called it a robbery, another in the growing number of crimes of violence plaguing the country. His friends, however, argued it was just as logical to believe he was the victim of a political assassination. Father Alexander was a celebrated priest of the perestroika era. Although he was never an open political dissident, he had been under regular observation by the authorities for most of his career. He was a friend of some of the country's leading intellectuals, including Alexander Solzhe- nitsyn (whom he is said to have baptised) and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and his little church in Pushkino was a frequent gather- ing place of the Moscow intelligentsia, particularly those anxious to seek out once-forbidden roots in religion. 'He was a real missionary,' recalled Lev Anninsky, a prominent Moscow theatre critic who was one of his oldest friends. 'He was also a philosopher who wanted to continue the work of early Russian intellectuals in bringing the Church out of its mediaeval darkness — a work that was rudely inter- rupted by the 1917 Revolution.' Anninsky added that Father Alexander had been the recipient of numerous hate letters from ardent nationalists who disliked his ecumenical ideas as well as from anti- Semitic groups (the priest came from a Jewish family). 'He knew he was going to die.'
Clearly recognising the issues at stake, President Mikhail Gorbachev and Mr Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the Russian Republic, each sent letters of condolence to Father Alexander's family. Mr Yeltsin has even ordered his own Ministry of the Interior to take charge of the murder investigation. But an investigation almost seems beside the point. As with almost everything else in Russia today, perception matters more than reality. Whether or not Father Alexander's murder was political, he has turned into a symbolic victim of the threats to Russian spiritual renewal.
'It is as though some evil force has broken through the forbidden boundaries,' commented the government newspaper lzvestia. 'Just as Russia was stepping on the path of purification, straightening her- self out thanks to the efforts of our nation's healthiest forces, this has happened.' lzvestia did not spell out which 'evil force' it had in mind. For that, Russia had at hand its greatest living prophet, who last week made his own unmistakable waves in the rising tide of anxiety about the darker developments in national life. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, thundering from exile in the United States, published a 16,000-word manifesto in the largest circulation Soviet daily Komsomolskaya Pravda which called on Russians to wrest back control of their culture from commissars and entrep- reneurs alike.
Solzhenitsyn's manifestation, the first time in decades he has been allowed to address a Soviet public directly, was a pointed coincidence. It had more to do with the long, stubborn campaign by the writer to win rehabilitation on his own terms from his native land than with the murder of his old clerical acquaintance. But his message consolidated the inchoate fears of his countrymen around a single issue: moral regeneration. The prosperity promised by economic reforms was not enough, he argued. Nor was democracy. 'Even when we struggled to shake off the Tatar yoke, we still had our Christian faith and our morality,' Solzhenitsyn said. He advocated a return to some of the tradi- tional institutions of Slavic culture, shorn of the excrescences of empire and com- munist ideology. However, he also man- aged to reflect without realising it the recently published concerns of the Central Committee as he lashed out against Soviet media for spreading the `least decent ele- ments' of Western culture.
Even more than the death of Father Alexander, Solzhenitsyn's powerful voice, unmuffled at last in his native land, has brought the debate between bread and the spirit to the top of the national agenda. His timing, it must be said, is impeccable. As Gorky discovered at the beginning of the country's century-long experiment with utopia, politics alone will not cure the Russian soul. 'The clock of communism has struck for the last time, but its concrete structure has yet to collapse,' Solzhenitsyn wrote. 'We should beware lest, instead of becoming free, we end up being flattened under its ruins.'
Stephen Handelman is Moscow Bureau chief of the Toronto Star.
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