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Articles

Onward Christian soldiers

Russian philosophy was brought to the public eye by the recently deceased Sir Isaiah Berlin. In this article, David Limond explains the thinking of a philosopher who married political thinking and Christianity in a particularly Russian way.

Pliny famously thought that there was always something new out of Africa and the Chinese are said to believe it’s a curse to live in interesting times. Slouching as we are towards the end of the twentieth century and with the ice of the Cold War melted, it increasingly seems that there’s always something new out of the erstwhile Soviet Union and that much of what’s new from there is ‘interesting’ indeed – a euphemism which surely covers a multitude of sins. Strange politics and stranger religions are breeding fast in the confused and often febrile post-Communist vacuum. Despite decades of misreading, misjudging and misunderstanding the nature of life and politics in the USSR and its Socialist Commonwealth of associated states, clutches of selfprofessed experts in universities, think-tanks such as the US’s RAND Corporation and in government departments still produce reams of foreign policy advice for North-Western politicians. But what can philosophy offer in the search for an understanding of possible futures involving Russia and the more or less willing countries which make up its residual empire? One service which it can provide is reviving debate on pre-Revolutionary Russian philosophers especially those from whom contemporary Russian thinkers, writers and – most importantly – political actors claim to draw inspiration.

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