THE PROSPECTIVE RUSSIAN VICTORY OVER THE COLLECTIVE WEST IN THE UKRAINE PROXY WAR WILL OPEN THE FIRST VISTA OF POTENTIAL HISTORIC EXODUS FROM THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM

THE PROSPECTIVE RUSSIAN VICTORY OVER THE COLLECTIVE WEST IN THE UKRAINE PROXY WAR WILL OPEN THE FIRST VISTA OF POTENTIAL HISTORIC EXODUS FROM THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM

Author: Sean Mitchell

The prospective Russian victory over the combined forces of NATO operating through, and behind, the cover of predominantly Ukrainian blood will, hopefully, at least start a process whereby the West will eventually be cured of its unipolar, hegemonic hubris. Whilst it is crucial for the progress of the world generally that the civilisationally Anglo-Saxon Collective West replace its bid for neo-liberal hegemony with geo-political humility, it is particularly relevant for Britain to seek reconciliation with Russia. In fact, more specifically, it is now of deep, historiosophical significance for the whole world that England restore its traditional intellectual relationship with Russia, which accompanied its long history of commodity exchange with that country at the other end of the European Continent that is also, as Winston Churchill so resonantly said of Britain, “in Europe but not of it”.

It is historically pivotal for the origin of what is now globalised Anglo-Saxon liberalism to reprise the very first mercantile-diplomatic international relationship England formed after its emergence as a nation defined by Protestant freetrade exceptionalism in 16^th century because it is that same previously insignificant nation on the World stage that would go on to build the largest empire in history, and from which the arrogance of the current Anglo-Saxon Collective West assumes its universal privileges. The foundation myth of English Protestant globalist exceptionalism was forged in the white heat of the cannons that defeated the Catholic hegemon of the Spanish Armada, and whilst Drake, Howard and race-built galleons all rightly have their honoured place in that historical memory, it is almost totally overlooked that a strategically crucial proportion of the timber and tar that built those victorious English ships came from Russia. But more importantly than the exchange of commodities, early modern Muscovy had its first substantive relationship with Western European modernity through that accidental encounter with 16^th England, and it spent the next half a millennium metabolising that modernity into its own distinctive national traditions. That long, painful historical process is now complete, and it is time for the influence to flow in the other direction: the fruits of that heritage are a potential philosophical-spiritual treasury for the whole world, but they are of particular historical significance for the country which ‘awoke’ Muscovy from its ‘dogmatic slumbers’ to half a millennium of dialectical engagement with liberal modernity in the first place, and even more specifically its capital city of London.

I suspect it will be somewhat of a surprise for non-Russianists to learn that proto-liberal, rational, Protestant England’s very first commercial crusade to challenge the Roman Catholic globalist hegemony of Spain and Portugal through a bluewater trading relationship was with Russia. Whilst it is true that it was the product of accident rather than design when John Cabot persuaded the evangelically-inspired Edward VI and the commercially anxious Protestant burghers of London to launch the first merchant adventurer expedition of religiously reformed England, which sailed down the Thames in 1553 passing the former Tudor royal palace at Greenwich to receive a grand congratulatory salute of support from the court, and then set off around the Northern Cape to find the fabled North-East Passage to the riches of the Indies and thereby circumvent Portuguese control of the established trade routes, it proved to have no less subsequent historical significance because of its unintended origins. Lost in the wilderness of ice floes of the White Sea which, unbeknown to the overall commander of the flotilla of three ships, Sir Hugh Willoughby, precluded any marine-based North-East Passage to the Indies anyway, two of the ships’ crews perished. However, the third ship under the command of Captain Richard Chancellor, on the appropriately named Edward Bonaventura (given that whatever the more prosaic commercial imperatives motivated the merchants of London to finance this expedition, for Edward VI and key members of his court this journey was the maiden voyage of England’s Protestant crusade to challenge Catholic dominance of the high seas), made a forced landfall at the mouth of the Dvina River and, after travelling to Moscow and meeting Tsar Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), obtained England’s very first free trade agreement.

The place where Captain Chancellor made his unexpected first contact subsequently became the newly-built exclusive gateway for The Muscovy Company of London formed in 1554 to sustain the uniquely close (of any other European country) Anglo-Russian relations for the next hundred years as a port called Archangel. There is an overlooked reminder of these events next to the old Port of London Authority building (now The Four Seasons Hotel) in the form of Muscovy Street where the company was based and 16^th century Russian ambassadors stayed. However, indicative of how this history has been neglected for many years (and is almost completely ignored now the political class of the Collective West wants to cancel Russia’s role in European history altogether) is that The London Encyclopedia still repeats the error that this street is named for Peter the Great who frequented a pub on Great Tower Street during his repeated visits to the Tower of London, ignoring the fact that the Anglo-Russian relationship dates back much further than the Tsar’s stay in London as part of his fact-finding mission to learn about Western European modernity during his Grand Embassy of 1697-8.

The Anglo-Russian relationship helped to develop English global trading modernity because The Muscovy Company, that was formed to exploit the offer of free trade from the Tsar Ivan IV, was England’s first merchant-adventurer joint stock company, and thus the model for the later companies like the Virginia and East India Companies which subsequently built Britain’s globalised blue water trading empire. But for 16^th century Russia this was, to use the most famous metaphor in Russian literature coined by Pushkin to describe the impact on Russia of Peter the Great’s determination to become a European power, the first true ‘window onto the West’ unimpeded by the hostile powers of Poland and Sweden who controlled Russia’s access to the Baltic. As the famous London-based, 20^th century, émigré Russian literary critic, D. S. Mirsky, put it: whilst Captain Chancellor’s establishment of contact with Muscovy via the Northern Cape was of substantial commercial significance in English history,

It was of even greater importance for Russia, as the most important single cause of the great commercial revolution that transformed medieval and feudal Russia into the mercantile monarchy of the Tsars (D. S. Mirsky’s Introduction to Milton, J. A Brief History of Moscovia, London: 1929)

This statement comes from Mirsky’s introduction to the text of a short book written by no less a figure than “the second greatest poet in the English language”, John Milton. Again, because of the way this history more generally has been so neglected, I suspect it will come as a great surprise to non-Russianists that the tribune of radical Puritan Protestant religious liberty, who wrote this short book in the same decade as he temporarily gave up poetry to become a powerful advocate of the English Revolution culminating in his appointment as Oliver Cromwell’s “Secretary of Foreign Tongues” whose job it was to persuade (some would say propagandise) the rest of Europe that very first judicial execution of a king in European history by the new English Republic was necessary for the success of liberty, was also a keen advocate of the Anglo-Russian relationship a hundred years after its initial establishment.

Milton’s advocacy of the Anglo-Russian relationship becomes even more extraordinary when we consider his attitude towards Russia. Notwithstanding the fact that Milton’s radical liberal politics and rationalistic, evangelical-reformist religious world view were the antithesis of politically autocratic and religiously ritualistic, image-centred Russia, he celebrates the Anglo-Russian relationship as a great learning opportunity about which he wants to raise awareness amongst the English, and he condemns his free trade liberal compatriots who see it purely in terms of the mercenary commercial opportunities that it presents:

The discovery of Russia by the northern Ocean, made first, of any nation that we know, by English men, might have seemed an enterprise almost heroic if any higher end than the excessive love of gain and traffick had animated the design. Nevertheless that in regard that many things not unprofitable to the knowledge of nature and other observations are hereby come to light, as good events ofttimes arise from evil occasions, it will not be the worst labour to relate briefly the beginning, and prosecution of this adventurous voyage until it became at last a familiar passage (Milton, J. A Brief History of Moscovia, p. 80, London: 1929).

Although I think the main reason Milton scholars have largely ignored his booklet on Russia is because it is such an anomaly in his wider worldview that does not fit with their broader interpretation of Milton as one of the intellectual fathers of English liberalism, they have some justification in that the version cited here was originally published posthumously in 1682 and is a rather unsatisfactory precis of existing texts that did not really add anything new to what was already available in print. However, as the Russianist scholar Chester Dunning argues, its superficiality is due to the fact that Milton’s best chapters had already been published back in 1662 (to mark the magnificent entry into London of the new Russian ambassador who arrived to re-establish Anglo-Russian relations with Charles II’s court after they were frozen by the Tsar due to the execution of Charles I) under a pseudonym because Milton was lying low just outside London’s northern city wall at the time to avoid execution for his role as chief intellectual defender of the Republic’s regicide in the very different political environment of Restoration England. What is significant about this pseudonymous pamphlet, The Rarities of Russia, is the further insight it gives us into Milton’s insistence on the value of the Anglo-Russian relationship at a time when his whole radical Protestant liberal world seemed to have collapsed, and one would have expected him to have nothing but bitterness about the restoration of inter-monarchical relations between England and Russia. But the reality is quite the opposite with The Rarities of Russia not only developing the theme of learning from this very different culture at the other end of Europe (even in relation to its religion), but with Milton demonstrating himself to be truly committed to the deep, foundational principles of liberalism by making a highly resonant plea, that is all the more poignant in our own times, for peaceful co-operation and understanding between nations even as diametrically opposed as Russia was to everything he believed his own country should stand for:

there should be no schism in the great body of the world, but that the several parts of it should have the same care for one another. And seeing mankind is but one family (for God hath made of one blood all nations of the earth, for to dwell upon the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the place of their habitation), the world a great house, sundry countries several rooms, it is fit that we who are in the parlour should know the out-lodgings of this great house, and the world be acquainted with itself before it be dissolved for itself at the Day of Judgement. That part of the world called Russia or Muscovia (which hath thought it its interest to court us with an ambassador civilly, whom we have thought our interest to entertain honourably) hath these peculiar rarities and commodities (quoted in Dunning, C. “The Rarities of Russia”, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 47 (2013) pp. 347-367)

Notwithstanding the failure of the Cromwellian-Miltonic republic, just over a decade after Milton’s death, the radical Protestant liberals definitively defeated the principle of royal absolutism in England with the Glorious Revolution and the establishment of the first Western European, nation-state, constitutional monarchy. However, the underlying dynamic of the almost unbroken Whig consensus in 18^th century, which triumphed off the back of the Glorious Revolution, surely resembled the mercenary commercial imperatives that Milton so resolutely condemned in his 1684 book rather than the spirit of international mutual intellectual enrichment that he advocated for in his earlier pseudonymous publication. And that mercenary spirit which possesses the putatively “liberal” Collective West has now reached proportions of demonic disconnect between reality and propaganda narrative with Rishi Sunak’s gushing sycophancy over Zelensky and the Ukrainian Rada as “defenders of democracy and Western values” in January 2024 in their patently futile war against Russia (which exposes all the abject moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the neo-liberal West with its sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives for public relations stunt fake news headline victories devoid of any genuine strategic military purpose) within a day of Gonzalo Lira being allowed to die in a SBU prison for the crime of exercising his free speech as a citizen journalist.

Milton’s clear respect for, and willingness to learn from, Russia gives us pause for thought in our contemporary world in which those who claim to be liberals are eaten up with Russophobic fear and loathing. Milton was an impeccable classical liberal avant la lettre in that, although he sympathised with specific elements of their views, he was not an adherent of any of the innumerable radical groups who exploded onto the socio-political stage in England due to the religious tolerance extended to them by the Cromwellian Republic in 1650s, despite himself being The Secretary of Foreign Tongues for justifying the revolutionary regicide, which furnished them with the freedom of conscience to develop their views. But however much the English revolutionary Milton condemned some of the more outlandish of these groups as indulging in “licence” rather than “liberty”, he would defend to the death the principle that these people should be allowed to interpret their English Bibles for themselves and have the freedom of speech to express whatever views emerged from their evangelical passions.

Theo Hobson, in his excellent 2008 book on Milton, argues that the poet-cum-revolutionary apologist, as a devout Christian liberal, is an invaluable intellectually authoritative guide for liberalism in 21^st century trying to navigate its way through the challenges of fundamentalism and extremism. However, I want to suggest that Milton’s, albeit brief, foray into writing about Russia (which Hobson, like many Milton scholars, ignores), is an intimation of the eventual limits of liberalism. It is very striking that a man who was deeply sceptical about the full divinity of Christ and whose Christian faith completely repudiated imagery and ritual in favour of rational interpretation of ‘the Word’, would take time out of his busy schedule defending the English Puritan Revolution to Continental Europe to promote not only England’s relationship with, but potential to learn from, a country that was the antithesis of everything he believed in. Not only was Russia politically autocratic, but its faith was highly ritualistic, iconographic and deeply devoted to its inherited Greek Orthodox tradition for interpreting the dogma of the Holy Trinity. But then again, perhaps Milton was more faithful to the true meaning of liberalism than those ideologues who claim to be its guardians in our own times. The implication of Milton’s embrace of Russia is surely that we can learn from our opposite and that it is the dialectical engagement with that which is alien to our own paradigm that really allows us to get to grips with ultimate truth.

A parallel illustration of this same principle can be inferred from the writings of one of Milton’s illustrious contemporaries from the first great European revolution which, as we often forget, took place in England. The great 17^th century jurist Edward Coke argued for ‘The Norman Yoke’ interpretation of English history. He maintained that the English Revolution restored “the ancient rights and liberties” that the Anglo-Saxons had enjoyed through the common law before the Normans imposed their own laws, which introduced the hierarchy and injustice to England that allowed them to sustain their conquest of 1066. Conversely, Slavophile-leaning thinkers in 19^th century argued for Russia’s socio-political uniqueness due to her being historically defined by what they termed ‘The Norman Theory’. What they meant was that, in contradistinction to the whole of Continental Europe but specifically England due to the Norman Conquest (hence the title of the theory), the eastern Slavs had invited their leaders to rule over them in 862 AD and thereby bring order to their nation, notably just a decade before the King of the West Saxons, Alfred the Great, started the process of pushback against Danish Vikings which culminated in the creation of the English nation state. What these Russian thinkers were referring to was the fact that the Rurikid dynasty of Russian rulers were originally Vikings (from what is now Sweden) who were travelling via the great navigable Russian river network to trade with Byzantium. Indeed, the particular Viking tribe in question were called “the Rus” and gave the country its name as well as founding its original capital of Kiev (often ignored these days to cancel the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine) to which one of their descendants, Prince Vladimir, delivered the seminal act of eastern Slav identity by introducing the Orthodox faith from Constantinople to the people who are historically now the majority of Ukrainians as well as Russians.

Thus we have a dialectical tension in the very historical foundations of England and Russia, which inevitably led to very different forms of development. Surely Milton’s open-mindedness is correct in this regard (not the alienation and cancellation promoted by the dogmatic neo-liberals of our own times) that the implication of these divergent, but intertwined, histories is that truths of dialectical synthesis can be drawn from them; that there is higher truth in the reconciliation of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of socio-political dynamism driven by historical class conflict and Russian political passivity for the purposes of religio-cultural preservation. Moreover, what Milton could not have appreciated from his vantage point in 17^th century London, but which is highly relevant to his position on Russia, was that Muscovy was also infused with a sense of religious exceptionalism, but of a very different nature. In contradistinction to England, Russia’s sense of religious exceptionalism was not driven by an imperative of global, blue water imperial competition, but a determination to preserve the heartland of Holy Mother Russia, ‘the Third Rome’ as the sole repository of religious truth after the fall of the fountainhead of Orthodoxy in Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. It was these two very different exceptionalisms that accidentally collided in 1553 (exactly one hundred years after the Fall of Constantinople) but subsequently catalysed nearly half a millennium of very fruitful dialectical encounter, which is yet to reveal all its historiosophical treasures.

Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 bestseller The End of History and the Last Man amply demonstrated that the appetite for historical eschatology in the putatively pragmatic, empirically-minded Anglo-Saxon world is not dead. Indeed, the geo-political lunacy of our times that keeps producing the same evil consequences with its unrelenting “liberal” triumphalist regime-change agenda can only really be explained as possession by a cultish ideology of the political class of the Collective West, which was given intellectual licence by Fukuyama right back at the beginning of this period in which the neo-liberals first unleashed their demented dogs of war to run amock across the world. But the end of history is a much deeper, broader truth than Fukuyama and the neo-liberals can possibly imagine and, contra all their persistent paradigmatic prejudices, lies in reconciliation with Russia rather than the cancellation, isolation and ultimate disintegration which they attempted to bring about through the Ukraine proxy war. A genuine end of history can only be a dialectical synthesis of liberal modernity with that which philosophically challenges it, and that is the product, more than any other historical tradition, the fruit of the Anglo-Russian relationship.

2024 is the 500^th anniversary of a slightly earlier, but no less historically significant journey down the River Thames to foreign parts. 1524 was the year that William Tyndale left London for Germany in order to publish his English translation of the Bible which the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, had refused to support. Whilst Tunstall’s position was undoubtedly an ultimately deeply authoritarian and futile attempt to hold back the tide of Reformation history, which was finally overwhelming the Medieval Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly on learning in Western Europe, it would be a mistake to just see this purely as a reactionary dogmatic Catholic trying to preserve the Church’s scholarly hegemony in obscurantist intellectual aspic. Tunstall was one of a group of outstanding Roman Catholic Humanists based in London who made the Reformation possible: Erasmus was only able to edit and publish his edition in the original Greek with his new, more faithful Latin translation of the New Testament, which both Martin Luther and William Tyndale used to produce their translations into their respective vernacular languages, because of the superior knowledge of Greek amongst his London friends which included Thomas More, Thomas Linacre, John Colet and Tunstall. The difference between this latter group, who never pulled their punches in using the tools of their Humanist learning to critique the Church to the select audience of their fellow Latin-speaking churchmen and scholars, and Luther and Tyndale, was that they remained ultimately loyal to the Catholic Church. Indeed, so much so, that they attempted to suppress (in the case of Thomas More, notoriously, going as far as torture and executions) the democratic dynamic of the evangelical movement. They viciously persecuted the evangelicals because they feared for the unity of Christendom if the common people were allowed to interpret the Bible for themselves without the guiding authority of the Church. Just over a hundred years later, the great tribune of freedom of conscience and speech, John Milton, would be complaining that the explosion of English radical sects, whose right to interpret and follow the Bible as they saw fit, provoked him to the despairing exclamation that what was triumphing in the English Revolution was “not liberty but licence”. Thus there was a point of agreement between the conservative Catholic Humanists and the radical Protestant liberal although, of course, Milton would have, absolutely correctly, ultimately insisted on the principle of religious and intellectual pluralism which did in fact triumph in England and was subsequently to be transmitted to the Western World, but that does not of itself invalidate the idealistic faith of Thomas More et al in the ultimate unity of Christendom.

However, it was because of the courageous actions of men like William Tyndale that the English Reformation triumphed and established a tradition of proto-liberal religious tolerance superior to anything else in Western Europe at the time in the first Protestant nation-state of England, although, tragically, Tyndale himself paid the ultimate price merely for giving the common people the possibility to read the Bible for themselves when he was burned at the stake for “heresy” (just outside Brussels!) in 1536. Thus just over 300 years later, political refugees were coming up the River Thames in the opposite direction to Tyndale, flocking from all over Europe to London for its tradition of political free speech which had grown out of the religious tolerance of the English Reformation, including one of the most important 19^th century figures wrestling with the challenge of liberal modernity to Russia, Alexander Herzen, who established the very first free Russian press in history. He had, famously, been preceded by Peter the Great in 1698, which meant that this earlier, most self-conscious period of the Russian struggle for Western European modernity was suffused with English precedents. Indeed, since it was Peter who made Russia into a major European power to rival the growing dominance of what would, shortly after, become Great Britain at the other end of Europe, some Englishmen began to regret the warm welcome and open access to London’s institutions (most notably the dockyards in Deptford, from which he absorbed the science of shipbuilding that allowed him to build the Russian Navy) that William III had extended to the Tsar. In the wake of this, Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations waxed and waned, but in 1698 England consummated its 16^th century role as the nursery of the Russian engagement with technical modernity by also being the finishing school from which Russia went on to stand on its own two feet as a major European power, and from that point onwards there was no going back to Muscovite obscurity.

Peter’s relatively short stay in London in 1698 was not just notable for the extraordinary energy with which his magpie mind absorbed English institutional forms and systems that were then copied in his new ‘window on the West’ capital of St. Petersburg, but for the portents of the subsequent cognitive dissonance over Russia’s pursuit of Western European modernity which were already intimated on that visit. Thus the Constable of the Tower of London made a point of hiding the axe which decapitated Charles I lest the Tsar, on one of his numerous visits to the Royal Mint (then located in the western bastion of the Tower), which he studied in detail to subsequently use as the model for the reform of Russian coinage production, be tempted to throw it into the River. Whilst visiting the William III in Kensington Palace, the King persuaded the highly practical Peter (who was more interested in William’s still functioning weather vane apparatus for warning of potential favourable winds for a French naval attack than art) to have the leading society portrait artist of the day, Godfrey Kneller, do the preliminary sketches for what became the first western-style portrait of a Russian Tsar that still hangs in the Palace to this day. In a country whose cultural sensibilities were intimately bound up with a very strictly rulebound set of religious conventions for producing images, ie the tradition of icons, it was the culturally revolutionary implications symbolised by this portrait that contributed to Peter starting to be thought of by some of his compatriots as “the anti-Christ”. And it is on the same theme of the religious implications of Peter’s encounter with the newly-minted liberal Protestant rational state of the Williamite constitutional monarchy to which British historians of this Anglo-Russian history fail to give due weight. Peter was very attracted to both Anglicanism and Quakerism during his visit (in fact until quite recently the only plaque recording the visit was on an art deco building on Deptford High Street which stood on the site of the Quaker Meeting House that Peter visited whilst living nearby in John Evelyn’s house for easy access to the Deptford Dockyards, which has now been joined by a much more recent plaque placed there by the Embassy of the Russian Federation to mark the site of Evelyn’s garden). It was Peter’s attempt to bring the Russian Orthodox Church under his control through his Holy Synod, inspired by the British monarch’s role as head of the state Anglican Church, and his enthusiasm for Quaker-style repudiation of collective ritual in favour of individualistic conscience as an example for the Russian Orthodox Church that subsequently confirmed Peter’s image as “the anti-Christ” in the minds of many of his ordinary subjects, to whom it looked as though Peter was betraying Russia’s conservative exceptionalist calling as the sole repository of Christian religious truth in Europe.

Peter’s immediate legacy was to leave Russia’s elite dithering about which European socio-political model to copy throughout the 18^th century including, for the most part, during the reign of his true political heir of Catherine the Great at the end of the century. Under Catherine, whilst it is true that the unique phenomenon of the famous Russian intelligentsia started to emerge from the cognitive dissonance of a Westernised liberally-educated strata of Russian society still living under an absolutist autocracy, the prevailing identity of that intelligentsia was still slavishly wedded to Western models (not least Britain in virtue of its pioneering of the Industrial Revolution as well as its claim to the oldest tradition of liberalism amongst the great western European nations). But it was because of Peter’s slowly fermenting implicit long-term legacy of leaving his compatriots impaled on the rival horns of Western modernity and their own deep religio-cultural traditions that the extraordinary phenomenon of the 19^th century Russian intelligentsia was forged. It was the upswell of national pride at the defeat of Napoleon’s pan-European “enlightened” crusade against conservative Russia in 1812 that finally crystallised the unique identity of the Russian intelligentsia as a group of thinkers who were ‘in Europe but not of it’, and thus so fruitfully haunted by the need to reconcile their own national identity with the gifts of Western Europe and thereby metabolise the tradition of liberal modernity which had first come to them from England.

Whilst it is surprising that Milton, who the great historian of the English Revolution Christopher Hill calls “a radical Protestant heretic” determined to complete the project of Reformation liberalism in England, was open to learning from politically-autocratic, deeply religiously-conservative Russia, it reveals a very profound truth for our own times. Alexander Herzen, albeit very briefly, expressed admiration for Milton in an article he published on his free press in London reviewing a newly-published book at the time by the 19^th century tribune of liberalim, John Stuart Mill. Mill’s, On Liberty, confirms Herzen’s disillusionment with the Western liberalism he had so idolised back in Russia because, on seeing it in operation with his own eyes in London, he had come to realise that it promoted the spiritual mediocrity of acquisitive materialism which Mill also vociferously condemns in his book. Herzen contrasts the “noble and vigorous” quality of Milton’s defence of English revolutionary liberty with Mill’s pessimism about the degeneration of English liberalism into “bourgeoisiedom”. “Bourgeoisiedom” is a spiritual not a socio-economic condition for Herzen, for which the only antidote is the ascent of the self to “personality”.

It is a pity that Herzen did not write about Milton in a bit more depth because if he had done, he might have explained that there were some significant points of affinity between his own views and that of Milton’s, albeit from very different starting points. Milton’s condemnation of the London merchants for being motivated purely by material gain in financing the North-East Passage expedition absolutely resonates with Herzen’s condemnation of the degeneration liberalism into ‘bourgeois’ acquisitiveness. But there is also a more substantial theme of communality between the two writers with regard to Milton’s despairing cry that the English Revolution was becoming characterised by a slide from “liberty” into “licence”, which is echoed in Herzen’s disillusionment with the Paris Revolution of 1848 and then his experience of English liberalism that had substituted his ideal of ‘personality’ with bourgeois mediocrity. Herzen did not give up on his ideal and spent the next 12 years of his life trying to forge a consensus amongst the Russian intelligentsia through the organ of his Free Russian Press in London about the need for a Russian revolution in which personality would triumph. Despite the fact that his London press exercised a huge influence on Russian society (not least in contributing to the Abolition of Serfdom in 1861), Herzen failed to persuade his fellow intelligenty of his vision for the Russian Revolution and he would have almost certainly have been in railing against the Soviet Union through a Russian press in exile had he lived to see it. As for Milton, he did not fall into despair about the failure of the English Revolution, despite the fact that he had gone blind by that stage and was having to lie low just beyond the northern wall of London in fear for his life with the calamities of The Great Plague and The Great Fire of London shortly to come. But these experiences only distilled Milton’s faith in his vision of divine liberty and produced one of the greatest poems in the English language: Paradise Lost. The famous line at the beginning of the epic poem where he claims that he is “justifying the ways of God to men” sounds like blasphemous arrogance, but, in fact, captures the essence of the intellectual maturation he had experienced over the previous 20 years. Milton’s imaginative retelling of the story of the Biblical Fall is an allegorical literary vehicle for conveying his message that, however much man is destined to be disappointed by human revolutions, the historical process of the unfolding of God’s liberty continues. As Hobson puts it:

It is wrong to think that he has turned away from his revolutionary creed, gone quietist. For his revolutionary creed had always been bigger than politics as it is understood by the modern secular mind. It had always been rooted in faith in God’s eschatological revolution, his bringing of history’s climax (Hobson, T. Milton’s Vision: The Birth of Christian Liberty, London: 2008).

Of course, this transcendent consolation was not available to the atheistic rationalist of 19^th century Russia, Herzen.

Herzen was all too aware that whilst the capital of liberalism in London guaranteed him the freedom to publish uncensored, Russian-language pamphlets and newspapers that would have been impossible in his native land, the world’s first urban metropolis meant social control for the masses. As a replacement for capital punishment for stealing a loaf of bread at the turn of 19^th century, just a generation before Herzen, Jeremy Bentham had attempted to get the British Government to adopt a comprehensive system of social control through psychological conditioning based on the idea of the “Panopticon” that his brother, Samuel Bentham, had developed when working for Prince Potemkin who was trying to introduce British-inspired systems of industrial production to Russia for that indefatigable apostle of Western Enlightenment (at least its technical and social aspects if not its political principles) Catherine the Great. But Herzen quickly came to the same conclusion as Marx (who had also arrived in London as a political refugee in 1850s, although there was no love lost between them) that Whig liberalism meant the freedom to starve for the masses and thus necessitated the implementation of a great system of social control by the bourgeoisie who benefited from the system. With the end of Communism, the neo-liberals have reprised this relationship with the masses but in the name of the much smaller more exclusive oligarchical class and deep state bureaucracies who, by the subtler means of propaganda and fearmongering about foreign enemies who are the latest victims of their relentless regime-change operations, hide their comprehensive control behind the smokescreen of putatively liberal political systems.

When Dostoevsky came to London 1862 (specifically to visit Herzen) and saw the latest iteration of the first World’s Fair in Kensington, he referred back to the original ‘Crystal Palace’, which Britain had pioneered in 1851 as the very first showcase of modern industrial civilisation, and saw it as a symbol of mass social control (the ultimate Panopticon) that reduced human personality to the anonymity of “the ant-heap”. This direct encounter with the West only served to consolidate the philosophical theme that pre-dated him in an amorphous form, but which he made concrete before he arrived in London by giving it a name in an article announcing the advent of his new journal Time back in 1860: “The Russian Idea”. In that article, Dostoevsky famously states that it is not Russia’s destiny “to hide behind Chinese Walls” and boldly declares himself a disciple of the Russian “Native Soil” movement which, for the first time in Russian intellectual history, really codified Russia’s longstanding intuitive calling to declare its own national cultural genius for synthesising the best of the rest, which it could then gift to the whole world as a resolution to the relentlessly conflictual nature of Western European civilisation. The fundamental truth which that synthesis is premised on is a theme that permeates the best of Russian 19^th and 20^th thought, but is, perhaps, most acutely expressed by Dostoevsky that the West is enthralled to the central fallacy of contemporary liberalism that complete human personhood is contained within the boundaries of the self. Dostoevsky is the most Russian of Russian writers in showing us the tragic consequences of that assumption and reveals that the only way for us to ultimately transcend the condition of the fatally flawed selfhood of “the Underground Man” is to embrace the Absolute ‘personality’ of “the Godman”, Christ.

However misguided their position was in the context of their own times, the conservative Catholic Humanists like Thomas More, despite the repulsive methods he was prepared to employ to enforce it, did adhere to an ideal of the unity of Christendom that should not be completely dismissed by history. Tyndale’s journey down the Thames marked the beginning of their defeat and ushered in half a millennium of pluralist liberalism that saw London become a great treasure trove of free speech, which persuaded Alexander Herzen and innumerable other outstanding figures to make the journey in the opposite direction. Now that liberal age has run its course and has nothing more historically elevating to offer us, but because it is still bloated with its own eschatological pretensions, it has degenerated into a regressive, authoritarian antithesis of its original principles in the hands of the neo-liberals. It is time for the West, whilst never losing sight of the oppressive bigotry which accompanied it, to look again at the underlying cultural-philosophical ideal of the unity of Christendom which the London Catholic Humanists were so frightened of losing back in 16^th century. The catastrophe of neo-liberalism is the revelation of the impotence of classical Anglo-Saxon liberalism to furnish us with a true, noble, to use Marx’s phrase, “resolution of the riddle of history”. There is no more qualitative historical ascent to be had from liberalism, and we need to revisit the ideal of unity of the Catholic Humanists, but of course, an ideal of unity immeasurably enriched by the half a millennium of liberal pluralism, which they would have deprived us of if they had had their way back in 16^th century.

After the period of 18^th century dithering amongst the Russian elite about which model of Western European modernity to slavishly copy and the new-found intellectual confidence in their unique national identity as a solution to Western Europe’s failings in 19^th century, finally, in 20^th century, the best of the intelligentsia exiles (just beyond the long shadow of the catastrophic false idol of modernity artificially imposed on the country by the Bolsheviks) attempted to gift the spiritual treasure of their philosophical synthesis of liberal modernity with their own traditions back to the West. The means by which this gift of metabolised Russian modernity was offered up to the West was through the worldwide Christian ecumenical movement. In practice, the philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance in exile only found a receptive environment for their ideas about reconciliation between eastern and western Christianity amongst the adherents of one Western European denomination: the Anglican Church. Notably, the enthusiasm for this informal rapprochement with Orthodoxy, which was only shared by parts of the Anglican communion, was the culmination of a long historical tradition of the Church of England reprising the old Catholic Humanist ideal of the unity of Christendom, albeit by means which explicitly avoided passing through Rome and thus looked back to roots in the “One Holy Apostolic Church” of Constantinople. Thus, in another historically resonant encounter due to a chain of happenstance (this time with Russians unexpectedly pitching up on England’s shores), it was because it was only Anglicans who were sympathetic enough to their ideas to build a movement that the Russian philosophers in exile (who were based in Berlin and then Paris for political asylum and publishing purposes after the Bolshevik takeover) founded their specifically ecumenical organisation in St. Alban’s which went on to be headquartered in London. The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius still exists (now based in Oxford), but the heyday of the involvement of the best of the Russian philosophers in exile was in 1930s when, in that continuous hallowed practice of the Russian intelligentsia started by Herzen back in 1850s, they utilised the liberal English tradition of freedom of speech to publish a Russian-language journal in London. Soon after its foundation, this Anglo-Russian ecumenical journal took as its title that directly untranslatable Russian word which, with full optimism and confidence in its eventual realisation, captures that perennial Russian ideal (shared as much by the proclaimed rationalistic atheist Herzen as the explicitly Christian philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance) of the ultimate seamless reconciliation of complete individual self-expression with absolute social harmony: “Sobornost’”.

Unfortunately, the paradigmatically complacent Whiggish prevailing orthodoxy of Russian Studies in the Anglo-Saxon world has tended to see Dostoevsky’s Russian Idea and its 20^th century heirs as, at best, quaint eastern exoticisms, but more often than not as expressions of a hubristic exceptionalism that only pose a security threat to the rest of the world (with the implied assumption that it was the Russians who invented historical exceptionalism and that no other country would dream of indulging in such a thing!) This Whiggish historical prejudice has also deeply coloured the perception of Alexander Herzen, who through the Oxford University doyen of the history of ideas in Russian Studies, Isaiah Berlin, and his disciple Aileen Kelly (who, in turn, established the interpretive framework by which Tom Stoppard brought Herzen to the stage in his trilogy of plays “The Coast of Utopia” premiered in London in 2000) have tacitly turned Herzen into prophet of Berlin’s own orthodox liberal political philosophy of “Negative Liberty”. Isaiah Berlin’s error was based on his misappropriation of important truth about Herzen. Namely, that Herzen did indeed reject Hegel’s pan-logism: Hegel defines the struggle for the end of history as the perfection of an epistemological process rather than one of the completion of the concrete human condition. Thus in Hegel’s system individual human beings are merely pawns to be crushed as necessary between the titanic forces of dialectical conflict on the path to the perfection of Absolute Reason, which is an end that is totally abstracted from the struggle of the individual to reconcile the fissiparous forces of the self into integrated personality. Isaiah Berlin inferred from Herzen’s critique of Hegel that he became a liberal sceptic more or less like himself about any resolution of the riddle of history. However, even more damaging for the development of Anglophone Russian Studies, Isaiah Berlin dismissed the whole tradition of the Russian Religious Renaissance in exile declaring (in a book review of a history of Russian philosophy by one of their number, Nikolai Lossky which was published abroad in the same year because it was impossible to publish anything in USSR about them) that they did not even qualify as philosophers but were, rather “a knock-kneed collection of provincial practitioners decked out to resemble an intellectual renaissance” (Berlin, I. “Thinkers or Philosophers”, Times Literary Supplement, 27^th March 1953). Moreover, when the most famous of the Russian Religious Renaissance philosophers in exile, Nikolai Berdiaev, (who had already been translated into dozens of other languages due to his compelling, accessible style of writing about his personal development of the movement’s main themes) arrived from Paris to receive an honorary doctorate for his work at Cambridge University in 1948, Berlin refused to go and meet him. This was all the more of a missed opportunity because Berdiaev (who was born and brought up in Kiev but never saw himself as anything other than a Russian philosopher) had completed a book not long before the very title of which captured the positive role of Hegel’s logic in the movement’s philosophy, and by implication, even clarified its role in the thought of the ostensibly atheistic rationalist, Herzen: The Existential Dialectic of the Divine and the Human. As the Russianist Lesley Chamberlain (who is still broadly sympathetic to Isaiah Berlin’s take on the history of Russian ideas) observes, Berlin’s attitude “persuaded…the entire anglophone world that Russia had no philosophers, only magi of the steppes” (Chamberlain, L. “Motherland”, London: 2004, p. 92). Although many of these Berlinian prejudices are shared by Russianists in other countries of the Collective West, much of the animus against a Russia which has reprised its national cultural distinctiveness as part of a reassertion of its sovereign equality since 2000 that has culminated in the fear and loathing which we see today, has its roots in these currents of Anglo-Saxon Russian Studies which long pre-date the neo-liberal hysteria of our own times.

Whilst it is absolutely true that Herzen rejected Hegel’s historical abstractionism (and by implication he would have hated the Marxist-Leninist system that reduced individual human beings to cogs in the great perfected machine of “proletarian ownership of the means of production”), he did not abandon a belief in an ideal of positive liberty which would bring about the ‘resolution of the riddle of history’. Like all the best Russian thinkers, he was haunted by the tendency of events and systems to sacrifice the concrete individual on the altar of history (most famously in the morally tormented fictional disquisitions of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov who is based on the real figure of the famous Russian literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky), and he insisted on that perennial intuition of Russian thought that the absolute value of the self had to be seamlessly reconciled with any system of collective social justice. Thus the best of the Russian philosophers retained Hegel’s dialectical logic but transferred the struggle for ultimate synthesis from the abstract forces of Absolute Reason to the soul of man (hence Berdiaev’s “existential dialectic”), consistent with their deeper, much more ancient, Russian Orthodox revelation that the resolution of history lay in the completion of the individual human condition, which contained within itself the secret of social harmony. From within the limits of his atheistic rationalism, Herzen was never able to square the circle of the seamless reconciliation of complete self-expression with perfect social justice, but he remained unshakeably committed to his intuitive conviction that no end of history was possible without this synthesis of the self which he called “personality”. It was in this latter respect that Herzen was a major influence on Dostoevsky (not least during that visit specifically to see him in London in 1862) and it was, as one recent Russian commentator said, “from under Dostoevsky’s ‘overcoat’” that the philosophers of 20^th Russian Religious Renaissance emerged and confronted this question head-on against the background of the totalitarian collectivist attempt of Stalin’s Marxist-Leninist regime to efface all individual personality in order to achieve their ideal of socially engineered egalitarian modernity.

The Anglo-Russian ecumenical project failed. Although The Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius still exists, for the minority of mainstream Anglicans who even know about it, it is a quaintly eccentric exoticism which is tolerated at the margins of their very broad church but hardly commands any influential role. Moreover, amongst mainstream members of the Russian Orthodox Church, if it is mentioned at all, it is often in very negative terms because it looks, to many, like a foreign-influenced heresy. But this failure within institutional religious forms is irrelevant because the truths that it touches on are much deeper and broader than any organised religion could cope with, and its true significance lies in its brief golden age period in 1930s when the leading philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance in exile were writing in its journal, “Sobornost’”. And one of the committed supporters of the Anglo-Orthodox ecumenical movement at that time who contributed to the journal and whose philosophy came out of the heart of this theme of sobornost’, was an overlooked member of this neglected movement: Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev.

In the aftermath of World War Two, the enthusiasm for the Anglo-Orthodox ecumenical movement amongst the best of the philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance inevitably waned due to lack of interest from both established churches, but that, of course, did not stop them continuing to produce books on the theme of the reconciliation of Russia and the West. In fact, four hundred years after English proto-liberal modernity burst into the Russian consciousness with the arrival of Richard Chancellor in Moscow, Vysheslavtsev published a book that lays out the philosophical foundation for the Russian metabolisation of modernity. In 1953 Vysheslavtsev published his final work and political testament to the world, The Crisis of Industrial Culture in New York (in Russian and still untranslated). Vysheslavtsev starts by exploding the Marxist myth that the revolutionary expropriation of private ownership of the means of production will set the workers free by bringing the principle of extraction of surplus wealth to an end. As Vysheslavtsev argues, and the history of the Soviet Union all too tragically demonstrates, no society can function without some degree of extraction of surplus wealth (you cannot even pay for the tea ladies in any industrial enterprise, let alone the R&D and the sales managers without using some of the wealth generated on the factory floor!). So what inevitably happens is that the socialist administration becomes the extractor of surplus wealth in order to pay for the huge unwieldy bureaucracy which inevitably emerges to run the “workers’ state” whilst everyone waits around for the moment that the political-economic mythology tells them must ensue when the state magically withers away and the workers’ communist heaven emerges without any reason beyond pure secular ideological blind faith that it will come to pass. The difference between this centralised state capitalism and the pluralist capitalism of private enterprise is that the state has no limits to the degree to which it can extract that surplus wealth because it has the ideological licence of the promised secular workers’ heaven to justify all its actions. As Dostoevsky, with his breathtaking gift of prophetic historical perception, warned when reflecting on the nature of the embryonic revolutionary movement emerging in his native land as far back as the 1860s, for these men, “all would be permitted”. Just as he so evocatively portrayed how the individual degenerates in the absence of any sense of dependence on the transcendent Absolute through his character of Raskolnikov, so he gives us a breathtaking prophecy of how whole societies could degenerate into murderous ideological madness for the same reason in his later novel, The Possessed. And his prophecies all came to pass in the Soviet Union where, in the name of the workers’ stateless society which never materialised, the Soviet system did not just extract surplus wealth to the degree that the workers and peasants starved, but on the basis of their mythology of the end of history, they arrogated the right to extract the “surplus lives” of the Soviet people in their millions. But in our own times the hubristic liberalism of the West has also come to believe that it is an end in itself that has no need of any principle outside of itself and therefore has degenerated into the megalomaniacal madness of the bid for neo-liberal global hegemony.

Whilst Vysheslavtsev accepts that the only starting point for industrial civilisation is liberal capitalism, as the title of his book indicates, the Marxist charge against liberal capitalism that it denies workers social justice is absolutely valid even if its solutions are worse than the original malaise. Vyshelslavtsev’s critique of liberal capitalism hinges on the premise that the injustice that it inflicts on workers is not based on the expropriation of the surplus wealth they generate, but rather the denial of creativity in their labour. Echoing Dostoevsky’s condemnation of Britain’s showcase of its new industrial civilisation in the first World’s Fair of the Great Exhibition of 1851 as “an ant-heap”, Vysheslavtsev complains that the industrial world of the mid-20^th century had reduced workers to cogs in a machine. Whilst it is not possible to run any kind of society without extracting surplus wealth from its enterprises, a genuinely civilised society would give all workers a spiritual stake in their enterprises by guaranteeing them a degree of self-expression through a sense of creativity in their work. But it is essential to understand that Vysheslavtsev’s argument is not just for some William Morris-style (to quote the inimitable Alexei Sayle) “yoghurt-weaving” Arts and Crafts utopia motivated by an aesthetic repulsion towards industrial civilisation, or any of the other impotent variations of secular redemption preached by the Left who chronically retain their deluded blind faith that perfect social harmony can ever be built through purely external material means. What Vysheslavtsev and the best of the other philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance in exile were confronting head-on was how to build a just, harmonious society out of human beings characterised by prevailing spirit of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, I am an unattractive man, which did not deny his recalcitrant, rebellious individual spirit. Vysheslavtsev concluded that the only way to elevate the ‘underground’ spirit of man into that Herzonian ideal of ‘personality’ was through the sublimation of the self to its potential divine condition of “Godmanhood”. Vysheslavtsev was known by his contemporaries as “a religious freethinker”, and I see him as the 20^th century ‘incarnation’ of Herzen in his insistence on personality as the seamless reconciliation of autonomous selfhood with social harmony, but having had this Herzonian ideal distilled in the crucible of war, revolution and exile into a mystical Christian vision of the sublimation of the self which Herzen could not have conceived of from the comfortably complacent intellectual context of his 19^th century atheistic rationalism.

But what we got instead with the inevitable collapse of the traditional Left in the post-Cold War world was the rise of neo-liberalism, the elitist spirit of which is unashamedly on display in the World Economic Forum’s annual exclusive voluntary political indoctrination and re-education camp at Davos. This annual jamboree of world oligarchy and putatively nationally-based deep states aims for a global, ideological “ant-heap” beyond even Dostoevsky’s worst nightmares. They want to reduce the rest of the World’s population to neo-feudal cogs in their machine of globalised power, which is not even based on industrial production as they attempt to gain complete control people’s whole lives through their post-industrial, green agendas which have almost nothing to do with preservation of the planet and everything to do with their vanguardist monopolisation of political and economic authority using the new global ‘electronic opticon’ of the worldwide web. This is the consequence of elevating liberalism to a historical end in itself whereby it degenerates to such a degree that it combines all the amoral ideological dogma of the Bolsheviks (without even the pretence of the higher historical principles which Marxist-Leninists used to justify their unfettered vanguardism of achieving an egalitarian society and defeating Western imperialism) with the most obscene capitalist polarisation of wealth the world has ever witnessed. The acolytes of the WEF, who pervade all the political elites of the Collective West now, certainly have no interest in any principles of social justice but not even in the ‘green’ ideals which they pontificate about after they have collectively travelled thousands of miles in their fossil-fuelled Lear Jets and limousines to arrive in Davos. What they are creating is the ultimate socio-political profanation in that they are the proponents of an end of history as the absolute triumph of the universal principle of their own pathological sense of entitlement elevated to a permanent world power system.

What the philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance in exile meant by ‘personality’ was man’s calling to achieve his potentially divine nature, as encapsulated by the Greek-speaking Church Father Athanasius’ famous maxim: “God became man, so that man might become divine”. In fact, this emphasis on the ‘sublimation’ of the self comes from these philosophers’ Greco-Russian Orthodox heritage which preserved the insistence of the Church Fathers of Hellenistic Cappadocia on the understanding of the Trinitarian God as distinct Persons in perfect Unity rather than the Roman Catholic tradition, derived from Saint Augustine, of a fundamental Unity from which the Three Persons of the Trinity emerge. This distinction is, perhaps, best illustrated by contrasting the most famous Orthodox image of the Holy Trinity, the Russian 14^th century icon by Andrei Rublev, with the classic depictions in the Roman Catholic tradition. There are pictures and carvings in Catholic homes across the world reproducing the Italian Renaissance artist Masaccio’s famous image of the Holy Trinity as a hierarchical unity for the remission of sin with a patriarchal God the Father transmitting His grace through the sacrificial suffering of His Son on the cross that is then delivered by the dove of the Holy Spirit to a humanity, which, by theological implication, is mired in Original Sin. However, in Rublev’s image we find a complete equality of encounter of distinct Persons in perfect reciprocity as the sublimatory ideal for humanity of the ultimate harmony of inter-personal Unity. The philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance in exile were the heirs of this tradition made theologically explicit by the leading 19^th century Slavophile thinker, Alexei Khomiakov, who, in reaction to an earlier generation of Russian ecumenical contact with Anglicanism, critically contrasted his own Orthodox conception of man’s relationship with Christ and that of the Western Christian denominations by arguing that the latter were defined by the pagan, legalistic rationalism of the Empire in Rome (including the Protestant churches in terms of their Trinitarian Christology) as opposed to the Greek philosophical influences derived from Constantinople.

Vysheslavtsev was a passionate advocate for a system of political economy which guaranteed everyone a degree of creativity because it is a necessary condition for the beginning of the process by which the human condition can ascend to his Christian-philosophical ideal of personality. The Crisis of Industrial Culture is thin on practical detail about how this system could ever be implemented and his sociological starting point is surely something of an anachronism now anyway in our post-industrial, climate-change tormented world. However, his philosophical theology is still absolutely relevant and the change of socio-economic circumstances merely implies different means for us to find our way back to one another (beyond the walls of any institutional church) from the necessary Western starting point of historically developed, but ultimately disfunctional, liberal individualism. And surely the threat of catastrophic climate change makes the necessity of finding a human ethos that starts to move us to an end of history under human creative control all the more acute with the looming possibility that without it, either nature (or the apocalyptic power of our own weapons) will end history for us.

The end of the Cold War should have been a great opportunity for a reconciliation with Russia which facilitated the maturation of Anglo-Saxon liberty into Anglo-Russian personality. Instead of metabolised Russian modernity, we got metastasised Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism because our political elites and intellectual classes, encouraged by the ideological licence that Francis Fukuyama gave them were, and still are (consciously or unconsciously), bewitched by the historical reductive fallacy that liberal capitalist individualism is the end of history. This profound philosophical error is based on the fact that they were making an absolute out of that which is relative, and thus the catastrophe of neo-liberalism inevitably ensued because the elevation of a relative truth to Absolute status cannot but produce a path of historical profanation as opposed to sublimation. And that profanation has gone beyond what even the most trenchant critic could have imagined back in 1992 such that the Collective West, led by the Anglo-Saxon nations which gave the world the original historical treasure of liberal individualism, has replaced sublimatory synthesis with the profane mongrel of unfettered acquisitive capitalism led by arms contractors in a diabolical alliance with deep state bureaucracies both of whom parasitically sustain themselves by ‘forever wars’ at the expense of societies which they have no interest in genuinely representing. The most extraordinary irony is that this diabolical alliance of oligarchs and deep states have adopted Soviet-style amoral vanguardism to preserve their power; whereas even the worst of Soviet leadership criminals genuinely believed that they were ultimately building a workers’ paradise, the neo-liberals have no such ideal: they justify the rapacious neo-imperialist control of the world and installation of corrupt oligarchies facilitating obscene polarisation of wealth in the countries they control as ends in themselves. Neo-liberalism is the ultimate historical profanation because it is not even premised on the principle that noble ends justify ignoble means, it is that ignoble means are the ignoble ends. And as we have seen in President Assad’s Syria, when they do not get their way, they will keep on punishing a country that does not overthrow a government they do not like in a twisted inversion of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution whereby regime change operations keep being imposed on a people until they are beaten into embracing a government that facilitates the Collective West’s unhindered neo-imperialist exploitation of that country under the smokescreen of “the rules-based order”. Post-Cold War liberalism succumbed to the sin that Milton hinted at all those years ago at the beginning of the march of Anglo-Saxon liberalism to global dominance: it let its noble calling to promote autonomous individual liberty throughout the world to be eclipsed by mercenary motivation for profit and came to see the countries of the world as objects of its rapacious empire rather than sources of cross-cultural enrichment and thereby overcome “the schism in the world”.

President Putin was asked at one of his marathon Q&A sessions at the end of 2023 by a member of the Russian public whether the ‘window on the West’ opened by Peter the Great 300 years ago “should now be closed”. Putin said that it should be “partially closed” at least because “there is a draft coming from the West” and “the weather in Russia”, referring to its booming economy that has (with the most exquisite geo-political irony of our times!) emerged from the backfiring of the West’s own sanctions, “is a lot warmer anyway”. On another occasion towards the end of 2023, when asked about anything he would do differently if he had the time of his past presidency again, he said that he “would not trust the West”. The latter statement would seem to indicate that Putin’s patience with the West has finally snapped, which would be totally justified and long overdue. However, his first statement seems to suggest that he still retains some residual affection for Europe that he clearly has always had because he sees Europe as Russia’s natural cultural-historical counterpart in the world and even now sometimes describes it as “our western partner”. Thus despite the deep freeze into which Britain’s post-Cold War attitudes towards Russia have plunged it, the Anglo-Russian relationship that facilitated the beginning of Muscovy’s long struggle to metabolise modernity nearly 500 years ago still has the potential to achieve a spring thaw that would be welcomed in Russia. The delusion of the age of neo-liberalism as the end of history has run its course. Those prepared to look beyond the prevailing paradigmatic orthodoxy can see that Western pluralism has become what Hegel called “a bad infinity” of consumerism now measured by the same mindset which insists on the consumer choice of 30 different breakfast cereal brands available in every major supermarket. But out of the ashes of their endless regime-change wars, perhaps we can learn to embrace Dostoevsky’s ‘Native Soil’ ideal of a synthesised national identity as a model for the whole world.

Many commentators who reject the prevailing Russophobic orthodoxy of the Western establishment assume that Russia’s turn away from the West towards the East will ultimately force the West to reflect on itself and, at some unspecified point in the future, will be welcomed in Russia when it extends a chastened hand of classical liberal democratic friendship that has learned to do global free-trade and security without the hegemonic ambitions. Not only is this not an adequate reading of Russia’s history of ambivalence towards western Europe since 19^th century, but it inadvertently still falls into the Berlinian-Fukuyaman paradigm for understanding Russia, which was the root cause of the problem in the first place. Russia’s long overdue turn away from the West is possible because it has metabolised modernity sufficiently to build global relationships which facilitate its further prosperity without the West. But the ultimate significance of this is what Putin was hinting at with his phrase about “partially closing ‘the window on the West’ ”: Russia will leave the West just enough space at the bottom of that elegant neo-classical sash window that it initially opened 500 years ago (and has had its gaze transfixed on for the last 300 years) so that Europe, once it has been cured of its hubris and have the humility to bow down and squeeze through the gap left by the Russian state, will be able to pass from the West to the East and finally embrace that unfamiliar non-palladian world in fruitful, dialectical synthesis.

Milton, as a highly principled, early intellectual father of liberalism, stated in the quotation above that Russia is an outbuilding in the many-roomed house of God that is the world and, as such, we have a duty to acquaint ourselves with all its rooms. But now we have hit the brickwall of the limits of that Anglo-Saxon liberalism. However, the philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance have allowed us to understand that the meaning of liberalism is that it is a necessary but not a sufficient truth for the end of history in a way that is much deeper and broader than even Milton could have understood. The age of Russia gazing with a complex mixture of admiration and ambivalence at Western Europe through the Pushkin-Peter window is over and the West, led by the original branch of the Anglo-Saxon world which catalysed Russia’s search for modernity, has to pass through that philosophical-spiritual window to enter the great, main house which is now in firmly located Russia in order to complete the remit of its own great English contribution to history for it is time for liberty to mature into personality.

The completion of the Anglo-Russian relationship implies the perfection of personality which is also the real end of history. Whilst it is clear that we are moving into an economically Chinese-dominated world, it is Russia that has been in the frontline of geo-political resistance to Collective West hegemony. It feels as though the second quarter of 21^st century could potentially be the culmination of that half a millennium long process of metabolising English liberal modernity with Russia having the opportunity to convert its role of geo-political tribune against Collective West hegemony into a philosophical-spiritual leadership of the world. Both President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have referenced some of the philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance in exile in various formal speeches and Valdai discussions over recent years. Off the back of their newly found healthy scepticism of the contemporary Political West, it would surely be logical for them to embrace the idea that it is the best of their own national philosophical tradition which is the true heir of the Judaeo-Christian heritage of the West to facilitate the maturation of the world from the limits of liberty to the perfection of personality. A definitive victory over the neo-liberal jackals of the Collective West is now a necessity because in their foreign policy they have gone beyond the fanaticism of ideology and demonstrated that they are possessed by a cult of power whose chief rite is the relentless escalation of ‘forever wars’. With Russia’s definitive triumph, perhaps we can finally start to move beyond, to use John Milton’s own highly evocative term, the “pandemonium” that the elites of the Collective West created in the first quarter of the 21^st century and ascend to the ‘sunlit uplands’ of international relations as we finally learn from the Russians that the meaning of our liberal democratic systems always was that the triumph of pluralistic liberty was only ever the springboard for the sublimatory ascent of the individual human condition to the state of personalistic ‘Godmanhood’ in all of us.