We have written elsewhere on Russian Christian Neo-Fascism. When, in February 2022, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine we were temporarily residing in St. Petersburg, where Sofya was involved in several artistic projects and Carlos was about to start teaching contemporary philosophy at the European University. In the wake of the invasion we left St. Petersburg, leaving behind not only a number of very interesting projects, but also many good friends for whom we now fear, since they are not precisely supporters of Putin’s regime, which, in a recent academic essay Alisher Ilkhamov (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) persuasively qualifies as Neo-Nazi.
Now, a few days ago the Corriere della Sera drew our attention to an article published online in the pro-governmental Russian news agency RIA Novosty and titled “Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной” [What should Russia do with Ukraine?]; it is signed by Timofey Sergeytsev, a Russian political strategist affine to the Kremlin and co-author (with Dmitriy Kulikov and Iskandar Balitov) of a book titled in turn Судьба империи. Русский взгляд на европейскую цивилизацию [The Fate of the Empire: A Russian View of European Civilization]. Timothy Snyder (Levin Professor of History at Yale) has insightfully twitted it under the rubric: “Russia issued a genocide handbook for its war on Ukraine.” An English translation of such article can be read here.
Its author endorses the view that Ukrainians, in their majority, are Nazis because they oppose Russia – that is to say, opposing Russia makes them Nazis. Which other proof is there that they are Nazis in the strict sense of the term “Nazi?” None, acknowledges the author: they lack a Nazi party, a Führer, full-fledged racial laws, etc. Yet, he goes on to say, that does not rule out their Nazism: it shows, instead, that their Nazism is all the more pervasive and all the more dangerous. In short, their Nazism is there because it is not there, and the fact that it is not there actually proves that it is there. In other words, an elephant is a giraffe precisely because you cannot see a giraffe when you look at it, but an elephant – therefore it is a giraffe!
Not only is Nazism invisible in Ukraine, it is also disguised as Europeanism, the author contends. Put differently, the Ukrainians’ aspiration to “independence” and their desire for “development” in Western liberal democratic terms is an additional proof of their Nazism. In short, their Nazism lies in their aim to be a modern democratic country. Once more: an elephant is a giraffe precisely because you do not see a giraffe when you look at it, but an elephant – therefore it is a giraffe!
This (if A, then B; no A, then B) is the Kremlin’s “logic” – a combination of paranoia and mysticism; paranoia because a suspected object ends up substituting the real object in a sort of ontic replacement (an elephant is a giraffe); mysticism because the only way to agree to that substitution is to believe in it beforehand as the symptom of a secret ontology (an elephant is a giraffe).
Interestingly, among the participants in an informal philosophy seminar that Carlos conducted at the Russian Christian University for the Humanities in St. Petersburg between November 2021 and February 2022, a number of them showed clear preference for mysticism over logic. Mysticism, too, is the cornerstone of Russian Christian Ortodoxy, which, unlike Protestantism and Catholicism, emphasises not so much individual introspection as the individual’s mystical union with God. And mysticism is also a key component in Russian Cosmism, the Russian New Age, and even the neo-Soviet pretension that under Stalinism peopled lived happily. So we start to wonder whether the Kremlin’s mystical “logic” must be seen as a particularly brutal variant of Russian mysticism.
A variant that tacitly needs all other variants to be there, as well. For when you educate people to believe, and to believe above anything else, they will believe anything the Kremlin asks them to believe, e.g. that elephants are actually giraffes, or at least there will be many more chances for it to happen.
Please reconsider the image above. If you still see an elephant in it, you have a serious problem according to the Kremlin and its forespeakers: you belong in a decadent Western civilisation which gives too much weight to logic and rational thought. Russia is above such things. Russia is sacred: it is a mystical entity which casts light on all things, thereby making transparent their hidden truth. Russia shows you that elephants are disguised giraffes.
P.S. Possibly here is – as per the Kremlin’s “logic” – one of the best intangible (i.e. mystical) “proofs” that Ukrainians are Nazis, and that they have all been brainwashed and pushed into Nazism by the CIA: Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (Evgeny Afineevsky, 2015). The fact that this documentary, which premiered at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival (in Italy), won the People’s Choice Award for best documentary at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival (in Canada), means that it is a purely Nazi product, since, in Timofey Sergeytsev’s words, “the collective West is in itself the architect, source, and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism.”