IX. Chapter 1. The Second Witzraor and the World Arena

In attempting to gain insight into the Russian metahistory of the last centuries, conscious thought will surely have to come to terms with striking comparison between two historical junctures.

Elected by the nationwide assembly, blessed by the church, saluted by all the social strata, sanctioned with the gravitas of the great kin-guardians of the Times of Troubles, the Romanov dynasty set about the noble and rigorous task of restoring and aggrandizing Russia. The king was a sixteen-year-old boy who, by all appearances, was completely ungifted and, thereafter, demonstrated no exceptional qualities. Yet, everything was forgiven him, no one demanded any brilliance of him. The society’s confidence was unfailing in that this monarchy had been hard fought for in the crucible of civil unrest, foreign invasions, and anarchy, and had been guided from above. Indeed: the fatal inability to create other, more light-filled forces so as to safeguard the people from devastating onslaughts from without and ruinous skirmish from within weighed down upon the demiurge. As to the lesser of evils, that all led to the blessing of the Second Witzraor of Russia along with his human instruments – the bearers of state authority – with the providential sanction.

Three centuries passed by. Hated by all the classes, despised by all the creative minds of the nation, condemned by the highest representative body of the people, lured into the murk of mysticism through the hypnotizing gaze of a conman who dreamt of the patriarch’s headgear, the Romanov dynasty collapsed offering barely any resistance. The last emperor was almost as bleak and narrow-minded as the dynasty’s founder; yet, he was forgiven nothing. He was imputed precisely for the lack of inborn genius, for only a genius of statehood could have salvaged the old empire by bringing to it a new momentum, infusing it with a new power, and showing it a new goal. Society was totally convinced that the Romanov dynasty fell short of its historical tasks and was no longer guided by higher forces, hence forfeited the right of existence. Indeed: glimmers from the demiurge had for long not come close to the emperor’s head. Whether they be stubborn fools or tragic losers, grace had failed to descend upon their activities. It was clear to all that the solemn rite of enthronization was but an abject masquerade and illusion. Had not the catastrophe thwarted the natural course of events, it is likely that Grigori Rasputin would have had the patriarchy restored, the headgear of the saint Hermogenes (a former patriarch of the Russian Church, translator’s note) would have crowned the head of the Khlyst “Tsevaot” (Khlysts were an underground Christian sect practicing dubious rites, with Rasputin being among its members, t/n), debaucher, and former horse-stealer, and, a few years later, Alexei II (the last Russian emperor Nikolai II’s son, t/n) would have been enthroned in the Uspenski Cathedral by this demonical puppet of Gashsharva (Rasputin, t/n). The church was spared from such an indelible disgrace only thanks to the catastrophe (the Russian Revolution of 1917, t/n).

Evidently, the Second Witzraor had long been denied the demiurge’s sanction. Why so? And when exactly?

The fact that Peter the Great’s activities were suffused with the demiurge’s involtation – albeit not only his – appears to be beyond doubt. Hence, falling short of the involtation happened in one of the subsequent epochs. But when? And under whom? What was the transgression of the Witzraor, which entailed the loss? Besides, don’t we see some extraordinary personage, whose destiny is yet unintelligible to us, at this turning point of history?

The historicism of all the schools comes down to the fact that, among those at the helm of the country over the space of three centuries, Peter I had been the most prominent figure, and no one else’s significance and stature could be commeasured with his. However, this thesis needs to be revised. It does, as it leaves out certain factors and processes; another reason being that it totally disregards the spiritual underside of the historical process, that is, metahistory.

Let us see whether there is a personality no less significant than Peter I but, as it were, antipodal to him by the nature of his doings, that marked his presence on the historical plane in the wake of this great founder of the empire. Les us also find out whether the destiny of this individual has a connection to the circumstances and timeframe when the demiurge revoked his sanction from the Second Witzraor. And, finally, let us realize the true significance – not just for his contemporaries but also for us, the distant successors – of this strange, doubling, and veiled-in-legends mysterious image.

However, before we proceed head-on with the task, we cannot avoid accounting for a whole string of other problems, which, unless thoroughly understood from the metahistorical standpoint, will fail to shed light on the role of this individual. These problems come down to the overall estimation of the Second Witzraor’s activities based on the comparison between the tasks assigned to him by the demiurge and what was actually accomplished by the second demon of “greatpowerness”.

The pinnacle of his creativity was, undoubtedly, the era of Peter I. As compared with the historical prospects opened before Russia then, the old notion of the Third Rome started to seem but an idle dream, a shallow abstraction. What shall we make of this new prospect after all? That is, how could it possibly present itself to the consciousness of those living at the turn of the eighteenth century?

Obviously, it was a vague, yet compelling foretaste of the global expanses; it resembled the breathing of the ocean, a penetrating, boisterous, salty wind that, all of a sudden, has burst into a world that had been in a centuries-long isolation. The center of the statehood had moved to the shore of the sea space. The statehood was now being built by a new continent of people; for them, this atmosphere with blurred geographical boundaries, northerly chilling and demanding like a sea, seemed incomparably higher than a sultry, earthly, and viscous atmosphere of the Muscovite Rus’ saturated with the local scents.

To my mind, the historical significance of this feeling rests in the fact that Peter I’s contemporaries and their successors had realized humanity and their own place in it in a new way.

The Tatar rule and the agelong struggle aimed at creating the national state brought the Russians into contact only with peoples that did not surpass them in terms of cultural development. Nearly always, this happened on a battlefield at that. This resulted in an enormous national egocentrism, radiating in all the colors of the rainbow: from religio-mystical pride to tacky, philistine haughtiness. Moreover, having defeated the Pollacks in 1612, the Russian people felt lifted up in its own eyes as some sort of giant, as the only godly people on the Earth. It was not far from the boiling point giving rise to such explosive fumes, which, ultimately, would blast the vessel of national-state existence, as had once happened to the Jews. When reading the works of the protopope Avvakum (a major figure in Raskol, t/n) or familiarizing oneself with the eschatological recumbencies of other teachers of Raskol (a major schism within the Russian Church, t/n), this Orthodox-Russian messiahship strikes our, fortunately, now imperceptive mind so strongly that you cannot help flinching, which feels not unlike jerking back your hand from a heated steam jet. Adoring the individual heroism of schismatics is possible and needful. It is also quite natural to sympathize, in one’s own fashion, with the transphysical angst behind the emergence of Raskol. But, thanks God, this movement did not prevail in Rus’. A people that fancies itself as a messiah and sees the rest of the world as wandering about in darkness would only incur one of two fatalities: either the tragedy of the destruction of its own historical citadel (let us recall the Jewry), or fruitless seething and boiling away from the inside, within the very boundaries, which are meant to ward off great cultural and ethical temptations – Byzantium may come to mind here. There has long been realized and expressed the fact that any people bringing, as Dostoevsky put it, a new word into the world feels itself as the chosen one. Yet, this chosenness is far from singular, and any self-delusion in this regard is fraught with disaster.

The era of Peter I providentially turned around the Russians’ notion of humanity; now, it came to comprise three variables, not just two. First – the great Western culture (at the time, they did not discriminate between the Roman-Catholic and the North-Western, predominantly Germanic Protestant, cultures). This seemingly whole Western culture was magically alluring, deep, mature, versatile; this culture was remarkable, among other things, for having become democratically hard-working while remaining aristocratically arrogant. There was no other way but, in many respects, to learn from it.

Second – there was the nebulous mass of “barbarian” and “heathen” peoples wherein, due to the ignorance on the part of the Russians, were included Buddhists, Hindus, and even Muslims: these were thought to have nothing to learn from and so could be looked down upon from the aristocratic “pedestal”.

Finally, here comes the Russian suprapeople: albeit not bearing the promise of a messiah, yet, owing to great size, territory, and perceived inner power, it was apparently destined to something grandiose and thus had to hastily make up for lost time. Yet, if we were to try to discover new ideological depth under this layer of new notions, we, ruefully bewildered, would soon have to come to a halt. Indeed: what meaning was to be read into “the great future” of Russia? With what cultural or social significance was it infused?

In the eighteenth century, we will not find a more enlightening answer than Lomonosov’s (a great Russian scientist, t/n) formula: “Our own nimble-minded Newtons along with Platos, blessed by the Muses, will walk the Russian land”. That is, the Russian people would turn out to be no less gifted than others, with certain individuals of genius brought to the fore. Just that.

Yet, Lomonosov himself – perhaps, our first genius (messenger) since the time of Andrei Rublev (a renown Russian icon painter, t/n) – apparently must have been, to some degree, under the influence of Yarosvet and Navna. Should we depart from these extremely simplistic, albeit bearing the glimmer of this inspiration, formulas to the layers of the national consciousness, which were corralled by the demon of statehood, we will be astonished with the shallowness of the idea of “Russian grandeur”.

No matter how hard we search for the content of this idea through the utterances of individuals from the eighteenth century, from Menshikov to Potemkin to Suvorov, we will find nothing beyond notions of militarism and “greatpowerness”, in sum, purely superficial strength. This ideal would be further proclaimed, now in the dry, imperative language of orders and statutes; then in the turgid lexis of manifestos; or, finally, within the sonorous rattling of poetic lyres. The theory of the Third Rome had been illumined with a glint, however sketchy, of the religio-ethical ideal. At the time, even this distant radiance died out, and the all-too-familiar wordage about “the orthodox king” degenerated into a lifeless figure of speech. Besides, it was hard to attach much importance to the orthodoxy of the one who entertained himself, along with his capital with such sightings as “the all-jest assembly”, that is, rougish escapades not unlike those antireligious processions and carnivals which the voluntary society “Bezbozhnik” (infidel, t/n) would become infamous for in the 20’s of the twentieth century. Yet, the leaders of this society would be far from proclaiming themselves as orthodox believers. On the contrary: they, sharp-tongued and blatant, would go to great lengths emphasizing their religious intolerance. What could be said then about the “orthodoxy” of their distant predecessor? Certainly, Peter I had a complex, contradictory, and ambivalent personality: now – mocking the church; the next day – earnestly praying. But the integrity of his prayers was often cast into doubt by many of those who had witnessed his sacrilegious antics just the day before.

Thus was soon revealed the ideological poverty of the second demon of statehood; his ambitions for superficial might had proven to be the only positive goal.

On the historical plane, a string of victorious military campaigns and a host of illustrious heroes of the empire were a reflection of this metahistorical yearning of the witzraor. Were those enterprises needful from the teleological vantage point of the demiurge Yarosvet?

Had the Second Witzraor been totally bereft of the demiurgical guidance – something similar to this had happened to his predecessor in the time of Ivan the Terrible – the sanction of Yarosvet would have been revoked as early as in the eighteenth century. However, the Patriotic War of 1812 with its staggering and wakeful influence upon the people pinpoints a collaboration of sorts between the demiurge and the demon of statehood as a possibility at the time. Hence, however shallow the wars of Anna, Elizabeth, and Ekaterina (Russian empresses, t/n) may seem to us, some of them pursued goals unintelligible to their implementors, yet having a metahistorical footing. Owning to them, the nineteenth century Russian state assumed those geographical contours that, by and large, coincided with the boundaries of the suprapeople. Thereby was eliminated the danger that had taken such a great toll upon the history of so many other cultures: the danger of fractioning into a few steady state units that would rip apart the body and the soul of its suprapeople with blood-letting strife and spiritual rivalry.

Yet, in the light of all the above, the Second Witzraor had not acquired a truly global outlook. Perhaps, this was only natural for the demon of a purely continental nation. Be that as it may, Peter the Great had failed to pass down to his successors, either close or distant, the ocean-like magnitude of his dream. Subsequently, this dream of his grand grandfather apparently glimmered only in the consciousness of Alexander I, who would equip world-wide expeditions one after another.

The other bearers of state authority, from Biron to Nikolai II, simply reiterated on the historical plane the very blind parochialism of the one whose enthralled eyes had been riveted to the dark-ether giants of Western Europe, as the only locale to be accounted for and the only perceived source of sought-for triumph.

This ideological poverty prompted to grab hold of the lore of the historical past thereby making up for its own creative infertility. Such is the obstinate latching of the Russian statehood onto its perceived succession to the Byzantium Empire – a wretched rudiment of the religious concept of the Third Rome. The images of the double-headed eagle on the citadel of Istanbul and the cross of Hagia Sophia (the former Greek Orthodox Christian patriarchal cathedral in Istanbul, Turkey, t/n) magnetized its gaze from century to century. All over, there emerged and collapsed states; great revolutions shattered the world; the newly discovered continents loomed at the horizon; new ideological systems, which promised to bring to naught all mythologies of the past, were being designed. Preempted with prophecies and social upheavals, the executioners of not only the monarchy, not only of the Orthodoxy were closing in… Yet, the selfsame obsessive idea of Tsargrad (the old Russian name of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantium Empire, t/n) and the “straits” hovered around the last king’s eyes as lumpishly as around Potemkin’s (a Russian statesman, t/n). The very inborn inability to think on a global scale and grow abreast of the expanding historical arena was to blame.

The issue of the straits merited to become a penultimate concern of the Russian statehood at best. For the passage to the Mediterranean Sea, which is as enclosed as the Black Sea, did not promise Russia anything save private trade profits and new conflicts with the neighbors. Only an incorrigibly parochial consciousness could see the passage as a real deal. By no means did it correspond either to the scale, or to the vistas of the nineteenth and, all the more so, twentieth centuries. As they set about the task of procuring a passage to the open seas, couldn’t they see that, to the south, right along the Tiflis meridian, partitioned off of Russia with the already stagnant, yet belligerent Persia, were the rolling waves of the Indian Ocean? Something that Peter I had not managed to accomplish, as the southern steppes and Georgia were yet to be incorporated – could and must have been done by the rulers at the turn or beginning of the nineteenth century. Yet, their indifference to this task was stunning. The diplomatic scheming of England sufficed for the Russian movement to lose traction there forever. Only the death of Griboedov (a Russian diplomat and man of the pen, t/n) looms black – just like a funerary monument – on this path, upon which the Russian statehood could but make a step, only to hastily retreat the next moment.

The second demon of statehood turned out to be as short-sighted when it came to the Siberian and Pacific territories. Ultimately, this amorphous and improvident politics reached its rather predictable culmination in Tsushima and Mukden (major battles, t/n). However, one may often hear the following questions: did Russia really need those wasteful expanses? Wasn’t the resultant territory too large? Was it worth of that many sacrifices?

Indeed, it has cost too many a sacrifice and still does. However, the nearly barren Siberian, Far East, and American territories, as I have already pointed out, had been occupied not under the auspices of the state but through the grassroot efforts of the people. Lamenting such a process is as strange, for instance, as finding fault with a liquid which, having been spilled over a plain surface, spreads all around through natural laws until the bonding of the particles outweighs the momentum of the spreading. But the spreading of the suprapeople across the empty lands, as legitimate as were many state interests and expansionist aspirations of the empire, however wrongly misinterpreted by the Second Witzraor, were far from natural. This totally applies as to the idea of the “straits”, so the slaughterous Balkan wars, so the conquering of Central Asia in which Russia had no need whatsoever. No one, perhaps, would have thought of incorporating it, if it were not for the cowardice of the statesmen whose worries about the occupation of Central Asia by the English – a highly surreal scenario – ultimately had outgrown into a nightmarish obsession. In sum, the witzraor, as unreceptive to the significance and pathos of the global expanse as he was, misdirected his blows. The demiurge’s attempts to involtate the demon of statehood with this pathos were a failure. At the same time, the task was precisely in filling out the whole empty continuum amid the still existing cultures with Russia. With Siberia and Alaska occupied, it was as if the people prompted the course of actions to its empire; yet, this voice was neither heard, nor understood. Both geography and history were suggestive of finding a passage to the Indian Ocean. Yet, the emperors were “deaf” – it was a voice of one crying out in the wilderness.

One may ask in perplexity: how is that possible? Does it mean that metahistorical contemplation can well justify conquests? And even regret that some conquest could not be carried out? How to square it with basic moral norms, which are as clear as day and as needful as bread?

A paramount topic – the basic principles of metahistorical ethics – is being touched upon here. It would be more pleasant, both for the author and the reader, to have it all answered in the form of some neat aphorisms. I would rather dwell on this topic than to leave the reader in puzzlement or even indignation, even at the cost of slightly elongating this chapter.

The task could be somewhat simplified with the following preliminary consideration: certain phenomena in history, as inherently evil as they are for they bring the death of and cause suffering to multitudes of people, may be and certainly are, at the same time, the lesser of evils. War is evil as it is a source of peoples’ sufferings and spiritual downfall. Yet, a greater evil is still conceivable – for example, the evil of a protracted, all-out, and emaciating enslavement. Therefore, if there is a historical choice between two forms of evil, opting for the lesser one is justifiable. The struggle with the Tatars, the coming to grips with the Polish invasion in 1612, the war with Napoleon – all these warlike activities did translate into immense suffering and sacrifice. Yet, no one doubts that it all was justifiable. From the metahistorical standpoint, the most ruinous disaster for a suprapeople is its irretrievable falling short of its metahistorical, and historical, task. Any meander in the historical path fraught with such a danger is to be avoided at all costs. When a danger like this weighs down on one of the scales, no sum of individual sufferings would outbalance it.

This law is cruel indeed. Yet, neither demiurges, nor God the Creator are to blame. The biological and historical laws that now reign supreme in Shadanakar cannot be morally apprehended other than through the recognition of their duality, the aggravation and distortion of the original Providential principles of the universal ascent through demonic interference. But the enlightenment of the Law is a grandiose, drawn-out task, which is not going to be accomplished by some magical stroke and in the twinkling of an eye. We live within the Law, are bound by it, and have to reckon with it. The worst scenario, that is, its further corruption and aggravation, is a dream of the Antigod. This is the reason why this Law, in many cases, is to be approached as the lesser of evils.

I do not want to leave this thesis unsubstantiated with historical examples. How to approach, for instance, such a fact as the colonial expansion of the European nations in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries? From the vantage point of “absolute humanism”, it was none other than an endless string of violence perpetrated by the strong over the weak and, often, by the worse over the better. By way of this violence, the upper classes of the Western European societies amassed riches, while entire peoples from other corners of the world became impoverished or even disappeared from the historical arena. Not only in the light of some theories, but as prompted by our direct, living conscience this is horrendous. It certainly is. Yet, what about considering the metahistorical outlook?

Metahistory is named exactly this way for the fact that it sees neither individual human life, nor the existence of a whole people or even humanity as divorced from its spiritual preexistence and afterlife. The trajectory of development of any being or its group has been already traced through the layers of variomateriality, through a host of worlds, across the ladder of different forms of existence, and, having skipped our current form, will aspire – perhaps, over immeasurable periods – toward a new array of ascending and enlightenable worlds. The leg of time we are living in is to the whole as a brief train-stop at a waypoint in the dark steppe of its trip over a giant continent. Unless we inure ourselves to contemplating historical and cosmic panoramas in all their grandeur, unless we become accustomed to those proportions, scales, and regularities, our reasoning will hardly be any different from that of insects or animals that approach the phenomena of life from the angle of their own individual or small-group interests.

Our direct conscience is troubled with sightings of suffering, and in that it is right. But it discounts the possibilities of even worse sufferings, which may be averted by the present one, and so too the horizonless expanse and unfathomable complexity of the spiritual destinies of both monads and their clusterings. These are the limitations of conscience. In the same vein, all humanistic norms born out of this conscientious impulse are right yet, to the same extent, limited.

Metahistorical ethics is rooted in absolute trust. At times, what some historical and seemingly useless sacrifices were made for, and how they are going to be redeemed can be revealed to a metahistorian. At other times, his or her consciousness will not be able to contain this absolute Law. Yet at other times, it becomes obvious that certain sacrifices and the very historical circumstances, which have brought them forth, are nothing but an outcome of the Antigod’s influence, running counter to the designs of Providential Forces and thus never justifiable. In any case, the metahistorian adheres to his or her only tenet: You are benign, and so is the providence of Yours. The dark and the cruel are not of You.

So, the question arising is to be answered forthright, however many individual consciousnesses would be morally repelled by this. Indeed, the global task of the two Western peoples is to achieve such a level of civilization that would make possible the unification of the world and the realization in the majority of countries of a certain set of moral-judicial norms, not particularly high as yet but enabling a certain idea – authored and carried forward by a hierarchy other than Western demiurges – to emerge and prevail. The idea is as follows: the transformation of states into brotherhoods in parallel with their unification first into a worldwide federation and subsequently – into a monolithic humanity wherein different national and cultural ways would be knitted together with spirituality and high ethics rather than through the apparatus of state violence. This process will be led by an ever growing cohort of people nurturing new generations with the ideal of the ennobled human. However, this stage is not within the obligement of Western cultures alone.

Only the North-West culture proved to be advanced enough for elaborating and disseminating the stated set of preliminary moral-judicial norms. The colonial expansion had happened prior to that; North-West cultures were developing these norms in parallel and synchronically with enslaving and emaciating the colonized. Only by the twentieth century, had these principles been acknowledged and thus gained a foothold in the North-West societies to such an extent so as to start spreading out. Thereby, military expansion gave way to the expansion of socio-judicial ideas. It is hard to say how many centuries the peoples of the East and the South would have had to linger in their socio-judicial primitiveness hadn’t democratic, humanistic, and socio-economic notions gushed into their consciousness from the formerly subjugating and now liberating Western civilization. It was liberating, contrary to its own early colonialism, just through the logic of events; liberating not only from its own oppression but also from the millennia-long chaos of feudalism, from suffocation in ancient obsolete ideas, from fossilized forms of life and many other evils. And this is just the onset of a truly global stage when humanity would be reaping the fruits sown in the fields of all the countries by this ruthlessly murderous and highly humanistic civilization.

The subject in question appears to be so vital that I would dare to have the reader dwell on another example, one more particular but not the least complex. We are outraged and appalled with the Spanish conquistadors’ nefarious extermination of the Peruvian culture and kingdom. There can be no justification for their crimes; the afterlife fate of each and every one of them is, by all appearances, gruesome. But this is just one side of the catastrophe that swept across South America in 1532. Grasping the other side is incomparably more difficult. It is hard to admit that, for metahistorical contemplation, the fascinating and idiosyncratic empire of the Incas (for a historian, it yet remains no more than a curious local rarity) appears to be a phenomenon of an altogether different scale, an embryo of unmaterialized formation, grandiose and formidable, which is fraught with the downfall of countless human multitudes from treacherously hidden spiritual inclines.

The advent of the Spaniards saw the Incan empire to have already spread across nearly a quarter of the South American continent that queer spiritual, economical, and socio-political (some researchers define it as theocratic socialism) model, which is characterized with material affluence at the cost of the utter subjection of individuality, of the utter loss of the “I” in the perfectly docile and faceless throng. There is nothing more dreadful than such a political system honed to perfection, that is, the well-tuned devilish mechanism of mass spiritual killings – the dream of Gagtungr embodied inasmuch as it concerns us humans. He dreams on a planetary scale at that, but one has to start with some humble beginnings... Had the empire of the Incas garnered strength for fending off the Spaniards, for incorporating their technical and military advancements, and for its further independent development as, for instance, was the case with Japan, over time humanity would have been faced with such a centralized, all-out, powerful, and imperturbable tyranny that one’s gaze becomes lost in the glares of the all-human cataclysms, which were prevented owing to the Spaniards and only to them.

Do these further benign consequences justify those who brutalized emperor Atahualpa, along with all other individuals who comprised the Peruvian people? All in all, can anyone who commits evil be justified with further, unforeseen positive outcomes from his or her doings? What strange reasoning this is. Certainly not! Indirect, distant, unintentional ripples of a deed, however benign or malign, cannot be credited or imputed to the one who committed it. One is to be vindicated or blamed only for the immediate effects within his or her eye span and, more importantly, the intentions that were informing the one at the time. This is what personal karma is all about.

What then does one reap from his or her sufferings and death when falling prey to a national calamity? In part, one reaps the fruits of his or her personal karma. If one does not bear responsibility for any evil deeds, he or she suffers and dies not as an individual as such but as a member of the national collective, thereby contributing – through his or her throes – to the untying of this karmic knot for good. This is the collective karma, in this particular case – national, cultural, and political. As for the sum of the individuals that comprised the Peruvian people in the second quarter of the sixteenth century and untied, through its demise, this horrible knot of national karma – did they thus become liberated so as to ascend in variomaterial worlds and establish therein their enlightened metacultural sphere? Definitely. Such a sphere is now being created in a host of zatomises; it is called Intil, and all those who once made up the people of ancient Peru are ascending or, sooner or later, will have ascended there.

Now, should the overall fact of the extermination of the Peruvian empire – not of some individual malefactions of Conquistadores – be ethically reevaluated in such a way so that the evildoers would still be flashed out as such by our conscience; so that none of the incurred implacable karmic consequences in the afterlife, down to the agelong suffering in Fukabirn or Propulk, would evade them; but, at the same time, so that a certain justification of this evil could still be made: not in terms of individual moral responsibility, but in terms of the peoples’ and the entire humanity’s becoming under the auspices of demiurges? Yes, it should.

Precisely this kind of evaluation, as applied to our case study, would be proper for metahistorical ethics. This is the second ethical layer of sorts spreading over our purely humanistic ethics which our consciousness and conscience are accustomed to.

This major digression on certain principles of metahistorical ethics was necessary in order to answer the question which was posed a few pages before.

Yes: in certain cases, metahistorical contemplation can somewhat justify – only in terms of the development of humanity, not of individual karmic responsibility – expansionist enterprises. It may even make one bemoan that such and such enterprise could not be carried out. And it should be possible to reconcile this with basic moral norms, which are “as clear as day and as needful as bread” – I have revealed how.

Only now does it truly become possible for us to come back to and entirely clarify the matter in question, that is, the stance of the Second Witzraor toward the world arena.

So, why should we consider erroneous – from the metahistorical standpoint – the loss of such a godforsaken, remote, and hard-kept territory as the Russian America? And why has so much importance been attached to the might-have-been access to the Indian Ocean?

We have twice mentioned the momentous task that the Russian statehood was entrusted with: filling out the space among all existent cultures. Filling out means a very close interaction with all of them, a mutual exchange of spiritual emanations, hence not only coming closer together outwardly but also providing spiritual enrichment.

Rapid development of the Russian America, carried on with a dogged resolve and with whatever cost it took, could not but result in very close and immensely important cultural ties between Russia and the ascending, lavishly endowed with potential young culture of the United States. It is quite possible that, possessing the gold extracted from its depths and taking advantage of its remoteness from the metropole, the Russian America would have separated and founded another Russia – incomparably smaller, but forward-looking, venturesome, and, most importantly, more democratic. Its reciprocal cultural and ideological influence upon the autocratic metropole would have energized the liberation movement in the empire, imparting to it a totally different coloration. Thereby, by the middle of the twentieth century, instead of languishing under the tyrannical power of the Third Zhrugr, the Russians would have built a much more harmonious political regime and seen to a more moral, gentle, and just way of life.

Having access to the Indian Ocean, interaction with the Arabic-Muslim culture not on its outskirts, that is, in Middle Asia and Azerbaijan, but at its very cradle, and, more importantly, close proximity to the inexhaustible spiritual riches of the highly developed Indian and Indomalayan cultures – all this would have certainly led first to commercial, then close cultural ties with all the countries of the Indo-Oceanic basin. Familiarity with the already accumulated and still developing values of these cultures, with the versatility and splendor of their psychological, social, religious, and artistic facets, with their historical and spiritual experience which all these cultures preserved in their literature and daily rounds of life, philosophy and religion, art and morality – all this would have expanded the horizons of the thinking strata of the Russian suprapeople to such an extent that its continental, half-European parochialism would have vanished without a ripple.

For two hundred years, we had been on a cultural pilgrimage to the West. It was needful, unavoidable, deeply thought-out, and justified. However, the fixation of the Russian gaze on Western Europe alone barred the Russians from an opportunity to cross-compare the faces and values of different, yet equipollent cultures. The platitude and utilitarianism of the latter-day European civilization were embraced by a wide swath of the population as a philosophy of life of sorts, as a world outlook, and the dire consequences thereof are still far from fading away. Cultural pilgrimage to the East, toward millennia-old hotbeds of spirituality would have diluted the influence of this Klingsor side of the Western spirit, balanced it out with idealism and contemplativeness, without which the energy of people becomes heavily sidetracked into the acquisition of material goods, and the mind dwells in rationally explicable truths alone. Russians are good at assimilating. Into the assimilated forms, they pour a new content; as a result, there emerge totally idiosyncratic progenies of culture and civilization. There are numerous examples of that.

Let us recall Russian literature, one of the deepest on the planet, of which we are rightfully proud; all the genres it abode and still abides in have been borrowed from the West. Moreover, Russian literature was given birth to precisely after having assimilated them. Had what I am taking about come to pass, Russian literature would have been enriched with new themes, genres, techniques, and plotlines, and these would have been commeasurable to the ideas and imagery of the masterpieces which, in fact, have remained unmaterialized. Russian visual art would have been enriched with new ways of looking at the world unlike just being stuck in the realistic primitivity of the Wanderers (a group of realist artists, t/n) for an entire century. It would have glistened with such colors, compositions, feelings, and themes which are now impossible to imagine. Russian architecture, in essence the borrowed and adapted Western classicism, had for long wore thin; whereas it could have gained such an inflow of ideas from the undrainable architectural trove of the East that the second half of the nineteenth and, perhaps, the whole twentieth century would have been its golden age, rather than a deep decline. Russia – it is time to admit this – has not created a philosophy. The kind of philosophy that had been developed by antiquity and the West could not meet the innermost needs of and, by and large, impregnate Russian generalizing thought. Would it have happened exactly the same way if, a century ago, a broad strata of Russian intelligentsia had been exposed in full measure to the philosophies and mythologies of the East? The conservative parochialism of the Russian Orthodoxy was neither perturbed, nor refreshed with the influx of Europeanism. Yet, would it have remained as amorphous and torpid if an instream of ideas from the East and the South had gushed, the ideas developed over millennia of spiritual life in Asia, this cradle of all the religions?

Most importantly: the Russian suprapeople was destined, sooner or later, to take the lead in creating an interreligion and interculture.

Perhaps, the leading roles in this process would later have been assumed by other peoples, but laying its foundations, in all likelihood, would be shouldered by the Russians. Such a people, more than anyone else, needs not only the knowledge but also the psychological understanding of other mentalities, an ability to synthetically materialize and to love other mindsets, cultural forms, life ideals, other racial and national expressions of spirit. What else could be more instrumental in this than a mutual penetration, a friendly one, between a wide swath of the populace, not just a few individuals at that, and the historical reality of other cultures? What else could spare one from pushing onto other peoples one’s own socio-political system, one’s own world outlook that reigns supreme in one’s country at the moment? In our history, there should have been the cultural pilgrimage to the East and to the South. Yet, unfortunately for us and the whole world, this never happened

Unless we rid ourselves of our national-cultural conceit, unless we stop thinking of Russia as the best country in the whole wide world, our giant massif would present nothing but a threat of despotism to humanity.

Perhaps, some of my readers have not been convinced by my arguments, and they are left wondering how it is possible to regret the Russian expansion to have missed out on Iran a century and a half ago. Don’t my arguments come down to enumerating the benefits of this expansion for Russia while completely leaving Iran out of the picture?

No. My arguments meant something else. In fact, I was talking about the benefits of this expansion not for the Russian suprapeople as such but for the bearer of a certain mission. Taken alone, the peoples of Russia have been existing these hundred and fifty years without the annexation of Iran and showing no signs of perishing or fading at that. Had the national egotism informed my thinking, it would have found its expression anywhere but on the pages of “The Rose of the World”. The changes in the Russian culture, history, psychology, temperament, and world outlook, which could have resulted from this expansion, would have affected what Russia is spreading over the world in the middle of the twentieth century and will have spread by the end it. What is being spread would have been different: broader, freer, more humane, more tolerant, gentle, and kind, more spiritual. All peoples are essentially interested in this, Iranians included. The historical losses of the Iranian people, if conquered by the Russians a century and a half ago, would have hardly made it more miserable than spending the same years under its own shahs (rulers, t/n), at least, no more miserable than Middle Asia after its incorporation into Russia.

Some would say something along these lines: “The passage to the Indian Ocean did not materialize. Why rant about something nonexistent?”

The reason is: first of all, we are talking here about the Second Witzraor of Russia and his stance toward the world arena, about what he did right and also his wrongdoings. Secondly, as is known, we learn based on past mistakes and omissions. Having finally realized what exactly we have missed out on, how exactly we have encumbered the implementation of the suprapeople’s mission, under new conditions and in a new epoch, we will try to make up for lost ground. What I mean to say is not attempting to reclaim the Russian America or to grab hold of Iran, of course. Now Russia, and so too the whole world, is going through a completely different stage. It is clear to everyone that such designs would be a ludicrous and detrimental anachronism now, reminding us of that odd fellow who danced away at the funeral only because he had missed such an opportunity at the wedding. I mean to say something totally different: nurturing in oneself, in our nation, in its broadest strata such an attitude toward other cultures, other psychologies, ways of life, and mindsets that would be affable, sensitive, full of understanding, filled with love, patience, and concern; such an attitude of which the essence would be the desire to enrich oneself spiritually while spiritually enriching others.

So, the Second Witzraor, almost out of breath from the dreaming of his physical, that is, military greatness, not only did not prove consonant with the global tasks of the suprapeople (no witzraor could ascend to this level due to the demonic in his nature), not only did not fill the idea of superficial might with some inner content, he also could not measure up to those epochal tasks which were set for the statehood of the empire. He remained deeply parochial. For any nationalism, if by this term we understand preferring one’s nation to any other and pursuing its interests at the expense of all others, is nothing by way of parochialism, absolutized and espoused as a worldview.

Thereby, with regards to the world arena, the Second Witzraor proved his inadequacy. How about now fulfilling his obligation toward the homeland?

to the next part: 9.2 The Second Witzraor and the Homeland Space
to the previous part: 8.4. Kin-guardian Peter and the Demonic Distortion of his Mission
to the beginning: «The Rose of the World». Table of contents