Review

Books

Change

Politics

9 January 2025

4 min read

Russia’s waiting reformation

Putin’s world is not the only take on Russia.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Graffiti on a wall, spells out in Russian character the name Navalny.

Anti-Putin pro-Navalny graffiti, Saint Petersburg.

Dor Shabashewitz via Wikimedia Commons.

When I presented the book I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko for purchase at the counter, my only thought was for what the bookseller would think. Was I a Putin sympathiser and apologist for the war in Ukraine? It says a lot about how we have unconsciously embraced Putin’s world as the only take on Russia. There is an indigenous saying that Russia is not Moscow and Moscow is not Russia. By the same token, Putin is not Russia, however much he would like us to think this; it is naïve and prejudiced of us to allow the largest country in the world to be defined by its dictator.

Elena Kostyuchenko, and Alexei Navalny in his posthumously published book Patriot, belong in different generations to Putin and inhabit another moral universe. Navalny has done more than anyone to call out the epic levels of corruption and dark cynicism of the Putin era. This is a Mafia state, as Luke Harding observes. Navalny believes there are twenty people who rule in Russia, with staggering levels of visible and hidden wealth, and a further one thousand who eat from their trough. The rest of the country includes those who are duped by state media, those who don’t want to know or keep their heads down or don’t care, and those who testify to the truth.

This latter cohort shows remarkable courage, because they are being silenced, one by one, through prison or murder. Navalny died in prison after previously being poisoned in Siberia; Kostyuchenko was poisoned while in Germany and has been targeted for assassination elsewhere. Before them lies a sobering roll call of journalists and politicians like Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov and Igor Domnikov whose murders are clearly attributable to what they have said about the crimes of Putin and his associates.

Elena Kostyuchenko’s journalism takes her to Russia’s abandoned people and places. Derelict and decaying hospitals where the young, the addicted and the dispossessed gather; the mothers of Beslan who are beaten up and persecuted because they want the truth about that fateful siege; psychiatric hospitals with no resources or patient care; landscapes depleted by corrupt extractive industries. She is inspired by the fearless reportage of Politkovskaya and her writing bears the imprint of Svetlana Alexievich, with its gift for listening and attention to the wonderful ordinariness of human life. Her walk down the dark parade of Russia’s casualties is a tribute to the finest traditions of journalism, which carry the echo of the voice of Christ in their attention to those who lose out in this world.

In prison, Alexei Navalny learned the Sermon on the Mount by heart; his conversion from the routine atheism of his Soviet upbringing being triggered by the birth of his and Yulia’s first child, Dasha. He is wry, sardonic, stubborn, implacable – displaying an other-worldly willpower. It is hard to compute the courage it took to return to Russia after being poisoned with Novichok, knowing it would surely lead to imprisonment, mistreatment and death:

One day I made the decision not to be afraid. I weighed everything up, understood where I stand – and let it go.

Of the pain inflicted on him in prison for speaking the truth about Putin’s Russia, he says:

I have decided that this is my own pared-down version of suffering for the faith, a moment of suffering for being a believer. Happily it does not entail being dismembered, stoned to death, or having the lions set on me.

And yet the totality of his life was not far short of this. He skates over much of the abuse, but references being woken every hour of every night for a personal roll call. When other prisoners were primed to shout at Navalny for long periods from close range, it is deeply moving to visualise him shouting back and not backing down. Over time, his bespoke prison regime became steadily more abusive and isolating, directed in his view from the Kremlin.

There is absurdity at the heart of the system and he confronts those responsible for it, rather than meekly submitting to it. In the late Soviet era, criminal law was so comprehensively drafted that anyone could be picked up for an infringement if this was politically expedient. In Putin’s Russia, we have returned to the Stalinist period where offences are simply made up in a dark Wonderland. It is rule by law, not of law.

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, uses a particular metaphor. He says that Putin and his Kremlin officials act like priests who mediate a believer’s relationship with God. They have become intermediaries for how Russians are supposed to experience their country, telling them what to think and feel about it. If so, then Russia is ready for a new reformation, where people claim their own organic relationship with a nation that means so much to them. There are already enough martyrs for this new reformation while Putin continues to speak power to truth. Those of us who care about its people and its future do not need Putin’s malign priesthood to interpret Russian life. There is a different Russia, waiting to be discovered.

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Article

Change

Identity

Joy

7 January 2025

5 min read

Embrace those grey areas: they might burst into colour

Resist notions of black-and-white existence.

Lauren Westwood

Lauren writes on faith, community, and anything else that compels her to open the Notes app.

A pile of folded knitted jumpers sit on a grey back ground, one is also grey, the others are red and brown.

Anna Evans on Unsplash.

All too often, the world demands us to be one thing, or to be another. In our responses, our ideologies, our beliefs, we are expected to be this, or to be that. In or out. Yes or no. Red or blue. Black or white. The world likes when we label ourselves with a certainty that makes us easier to market to, to capture in a strategic plan, or to reach in an algorithm.

On a social level, these self-categorising definitions – what I believe, who I vote for, what I consume – can become a filtering system for who gets access to us, and who does not. In a combination of association and assumption, we decide who ‘our people’ are, and who they are not. And it seems straightforward.

That is until you realise two things: most of life occurs not in the confines of black or white certainty, but in the grey, in-between area. And none of us are straightforward.

After living through what was dubbed ‘the largest election year in history’ in a multi-national community, I can appreciate that a person is unlikely to experience uncomplicated commiseration or celebration. In the days following several of these major elections, I witnessed friends express disappointment, relief, uncertainty and acceptance in an exceptionally short span.

We may like to believe that we are clear-cut individuals who hold easily defined, nicely organised ideas and beliefs, but the reality is far messier. Our attitudes, views and feelings are lightly tethered to a spectrum and, almost always, we find ourselves somewhere in the middle.

Think about it. Can you remember the last time you felt sustained unadulterated happiness, without concern for something or someone lingering at the back of your mind? The reverse is true, too. I’ve known people in the trenches of grief to laugh out loud at their favourite Instagram reels. Typically, it doesn’t take much to drag us away from the highs and the lows of life. We are geared to live in the in-between spaces.

Make space for all that occurs within the confines of what the world expects and accepts. To embrace the mess of the in-between.

This pull we feel to the middle is not surprising. One of the early church leaders, Paul, said that ‘if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.’ We are new creation beings, surrounded by new creation ideas, in an old creation world. Our social constructs, systems and very lives are built on the premise of being somewhere in between the old and the new, a grey area of partly present and partly future.

Paula Gooder, the New Testament theologian, says of Paul’s writing: ‘With Jesus’s death and resurrection, the new creation lies with the old creation. From time to time, you will see moments of perfection, moments of resurrection, and those are the moments that keep us going in the difficult time … Although you’ve got new creation lying on top, you’ve still got old creation lying underneath. If you want to ask the question of why the world is as awful as it is, it’s because we’re living in old creation.’

In embracing the Kingdom of God in being both now and not yet, we are engaging in an act of resistance against notions of black-and-white existence by living in a grey area that is fit to burst into bright, celestial colour.

On the surface, the story that shapes our origins of existence, the creation narrative of Genesis suggests a God who works in binaries – night and day, land and sea. But we know that there is also the less easily defined twilight, dusk and dawn, marsh and mist. Creation itself indicates that living solely in duality is an impossible feat. After all, we weren’t made for separation, but for unity and reconciliation. All around us, the natural world witnesses to a God who created the things in-between and, like the setting and rising of the sun, he made them to be spectacular and captivating.

In his criticism of Richard Dawkins and the new atheist movement, Terry Eagleton echoes the excitement that dwells in the in-between, writing that Dawkins ‘would seem to divide neatly down the middle between things you can prove beyond all doubt, and blind faith. He fails to see that all the most interesting stuff goes on in neither of these places.’

While certainty has its moment and its merits, I don’t think living in a grey area is a bad thing. In fact, I think we’d all be better off if we could get used to it. If, in compassion, we could assume that our neighbour, too, is occupying space in the grey area, floating somewhere between joy and sorrow, clarity and confusion, relief and pain. If, in humility, we could accept that we don’t always have the answers and grow comfortable with saying ‘I don’t know.’ If, in fairness to ourselves and to others, we could allow for the myriad of feelings between delight and distraught.

In a world that not only expects polarisation but increasingly feeds it for profit of votes or views, this is a counter-cultural way of living. It is radical to acknowledge that our feelings, opinions and even our beliefs can rarely be defined as immovable. We are evolving beings and, as such, the stuff we hold in our minds and hearts today will morph and grow and potentially come to change tomorrow.