The H*hol Diaries - Chapter 3: The Salvation of the Slavic Soul

Another vignette from Kiev on the eve of the war.

I did my best to stay as far away as possible from politics while I was in Ukraine. Everyone was already entrenched in their positions and I could not compete with the power of Hollywood and the Kholomoisky-owned media.

But I did get a chance to meet some pro-Russians in the city, and I took it.

I was invited to the house of a pro-Russia journalist, whose name I won’t mention here, but who ended up getting vanned by the secret police a month into the start of the special operation. He was in poor health when I met him, and he seemed generally demoralized and depressed.

His apartment was adorned with Orthodox iconography and the first thing that he asked me was whether or not I was a believer. I replied in the affirmative, not keen on bringing up my misgivings on the Old Testament upon our first meeting. Seeing as I like the transcendent qualities of the actual Christian parts of Christianity and I was baptized as an infant, I figure that it’s good enough for most people, even though the priests would beg to disagree.

We crossed ourselves and sat down to eat blini and drink vodka.

“So are there many pro-Russians left in the city?” I asked.

“About 30% now,” he replied. “It used to be more, but the last years since the Donbass started have been hard.”

I nodded my agreement with his assessment. I had been in Ukraine a decade ago, and I didn’t remember such high levels of vitriol and hate, even though the Orange Maidan was in full swing at the time.

“Is it the power of propaganda that’s brought about the change?”

To this, my journalist friend sighed and said the following, which stuck with me.

“Ukrainians are facing an identity crisis. As the Soviet memory fades, they need something to latch onto. They are being fed an artificial identity now. As you know, most of Kiev is Russians who settled in the city over the centuries. But they don’t know who they are anymore. So, they’re becoming Ukrainians. You, having grown up abroad, you missed this process.”

I found myself agreeing with him. The search for identity is probably the defining Zeitgeist of our era. To quote Tyler Durden:

I’ve certainly felt a lack of identity keenly in my own life. But such is the lot of an immigrant. Your parents know who they are - visitors, tourists who have come to make some money and then retire in their home country. But you, being born between two cultures, or rather, two anti-cultures, well …

“Kievans consider themselves tourists as well. They have allowed the propaganda to sow doubts in their head about who they are. They feel that they are interlopers and transplants who aren’t Ukrainian enough. There, somewhere in the West of the country, are the real Ukrainians, who have a real identity. The Kievans want to be like them.”

Once again, I found myself agreeing. The imperial culture of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union has collapsed. Now, without an overarching higher identity to participate in, there’s little nothing left to ground people. The older generation is still loyal to a now-dead political project. But the younger generations have nothing.

“So what is to be done?” I asked.

“The Ukrainian identity is an anti-identity. It’s built on being anti-Russian. There are no positive qualities to it. They only define themselves relative to Russia and try to do the opposite.”

“So what is to be done?” I repeated.

“We have to become Orthodox again. Embrace Christian identity.” He said.

I could understand why he was so reluctant to state his proposed solution so plainly. Making positive suggestions or assertions opens oneself up to critique. I couldn’t help myself, and I immediately punished him for opening up about his views as I launched an attack on his position.

“And how many people are Orthodox in Kiev? In Ukraine? It’s about 10% if even that, right? The Soviet identity has more of a hold on people than Christianity, unfortunately. Why not something simpler? Slavic identity, for example.”

Here, we couldn’t find much common ground. My journalist friend was deeply suspicious of ethnic identity projects, for understandable reasons. He dropped the Paul quote about Greeks, Jews and Scythians on me, which was expected.

“That sounds dangerously close to idolatry and paganism,” he said.

“And so what if it is?” I countered.

“You cannot build an identity around race. It comes at the cost of your soul.”

And that was as far as we got. Two Russians stuck in Kiev keeping their heads down because of an oppressive occupation regime who couldn’t find common ground on identity. It was almost comic, really.

I see Christianity as a tool, mostly and an elective identity at best. One can choose to become a Christian or not. One can’t choose to be become a Greek, a Jew or a Slav. You are either born what you are or not. Ethnos is innate and cannot be taken away from you. There is no need for faith, here. It is not a matter of belief, simply a matter of conscious awareness. In general, any religion or belief system either works to the benefit of the lot of the ethnic group that adopts it or, if it doesn’t, it is to be discarded. As a way to develop the moral character of a nation, Orthodoxy is alright, I suppose. It makes people steal less, or at least reinvest the money that they’ve stolen into the church, which is better than stashing it abroad, at least. But it doesn’t do much for spiritual growth, which leads to people looking elsewhere to New Age and Eastern practices to fill in the gap.

Bottom line: I’m not really against it, so long as it boosts the demographic birth rate of the Slavic people and makes them more effective in battle.

Christ won and Russia will as well.

But my rationale isn’t good enough for the faithful, I’ve found.

The problem with simple ethnic identity is that there isn’t a lot of praxis behind it. How does one be or do being Slavic? Whereas with Orthodoxy, there’s a special ritual that you have to do every other day. On some days you eat bread and fish, on the other day, you sprinkle some water on your doorstep - it keeps you busy reinforcing your identity by doing stuff.

But, I’ve found that people act out their ethnic identity everyday without knowing it.

Ask a fish what water is, and you’ll only get a confused burble as a response. It takes a foreigner to notice these qualities, which, I sort of am. There are many qualities of Slavic identity that you see in society if you have fresh eyes to notice it.

A skinny kid will selflessly jump into a fight to save your ass while you’re getting beat up on the streets of St. Petersburg by hachis. If someone starts yelling at a bureaucrat or a bank employee, people will often join in and start voicing their discontent together. Slavs will always band together to outwit the god-awful bureaucracy, just because its fun. Hell, I’m writing this article in a cafe near the DMV equivalent here because I cut a deal with a woman in line. I gave her my higher number in the queue and she promised to call me when our numbers are about to be called in exchange. She’s already called me once to tell me that I’ve got an hour to go and I offered to get her a coffee when I head back.

I gave a drunk man a ride home the other night on my dime and he sobbed about his ex to me before calling me his brother and stumbling out after a handshake and a hug. A police officer pulled me out of a nasty situation when I quarreled with an AWFL in public and sent me home with a friendly clap on the back and without even a warning.

Slavs enjoy bending the rules. We enjoy showing off how little we care about material things with random acts of spontaneous generosity. The surliness is juxtaposed by bouts of extreme openness and honesty. We also enjoy starting fires when we’re drunk.

There’s an identity lurking in there, somewhere. A warrior identity, I’d say.

French people show their Gallic rebellious spirit by eating and drinking and taking long lunch breaks. Americans are lonely and strive to build castles for themselves to bunker down in. Germans seek spiritual development through mastery of their craft. Chinese people are committed to constantly testing and improving their luck through gambling and fortune cookies.

And on it goes.

But, oh yes, we were in the middle of a conversation, weren’t we.

“Does Russia support pro-Russians in Ukraine in any way?” I asked.

“No, we’re on our own”.

“What will it take to change the situation in Ukraine?”

“A military intervention.”

On that point, he ended up being completely right. He was released from detention, but has since deleted all of his contact information. I hope he’s doing alright.