What didn’t happen?

  You can spend a long time talking with Russians about what happened here. Communism happened, the revolution happened, the war happened and it happened here more than it happened anywhere else, perestroika and then Yeltsin happened and of course Putin happened, and continues to do so.

  And then it strikes you that maybe what matters as much is what didn’t happen: here’s a list and some guesses at what it might mean regarding where we are at now.

The renaissance didn’t happen.

Well, it happened a little inside the Kremlin when Ivan the not as agreeable as might have been hoped brought some Italians over to build things, but it didn’t happen much beyond that.  Not until the 17^th century can you see any of the artistic discoveries of the period emerging in Russian painting and it’s hard to find what we might call a true renaissance man in Russia till Lomonosov came to flower in the mid 18^th century.  Likewise all of the financial changes that begin in that period in Italy, Holland and England with banks emerging and the rise of a middle class of merchants and so on took a long, long time to get here, a lot of that stuff arrived here around the time I did.

The reformation

Luther and that paper nailed onto the church doors, the rejection of ecclesiastical corruption and overweening church power, then Calvinism and notions of god’s relationship to the individual, the work ethic and Puritanism and the pope’s icy fingers losing their grip on whole countries, none of it happened here. Neither did folks in black with funny hats sailing to America or beheading English kings, churches getting stripped of gold and mumbo jumbo and all the astounding political and social consequences of that angry German with his hammer and nails translating the bible into demotic languages. Which meant people reading the bible rather than having it intoned at them in a dead language and so deciding whether Jesus had really wanted us to give all of our money to the church and bow before the rich guys. Following all this the Catholic Church even woke up and had its own Counter Reformation, which, granted involved a lot of people getting burnt, but not only that.

The industrial revolution

Marx said that Communism would not work in Russia because they were still basically a feudal society. Marx said that.

The Enlightenment

This is a trickier one.  The enlightenment: the age of reason, Spinoza and Locke, Voltaire and Newton with the rejection of superstition and the notion that science and skepticism would lead men out of the darkness. And over in America they built a whole country out of this stuff, whatever Glenn Beck tells you. Some of this did reach Russia:  Catherine the really rather impressive corresponded with Voltaire and Moscow University got built, but the rejection of autocracy and superstition didn’t get far and rationalism never spread. It’s been said that in Russia the movement morphed into a quest for individual enlightenment, which is all very nice, but is hardly Paris in 1789, or even Edinburgh in the 1770s. There was 1917 of course, that started out pretty rationalistically but…

The 60s

Well it happened on the calendar but that’s about it: no Dylan or Beatles, no san Francisco or swinging London, no communes or acid trips or Woodstock, no undermining of the values of decent society, no Kent State or Paris in 68. Look at photos of Moscow in 1970 and it’s London in 1950. I’ve mention elsewhere that that Brezhnev’s Russia is essentially the imagined Eden of the daily mail editorial writers. (stagnation and cardigans)

Feminism

Nyet.

Consumer Capitalism

They are sure as hell doing their best to make up for lost time on this one, but it came desperately late. Flats in Moscow are full of badly made things, bought by people wearing badly made clothes in badly made shops where you had to queue at three different counters to buy a Czechoslovakian pencil sharpener that would break in a week or two. Consumerism may indeed be the ultimate evil but it does make for nice, shiny things.

In short almost of the stuff that made the west, well, the west didn’t occur in Russia. The web of assumptions concerning democracy and law and religion and business and freedom and so on, either never made it, or made it late, so that Russia evolved along a separate path, and some would say, many of them Russian, that it didn’t evolve at all for a long time.

As I say, this is guesswork, but unless you buy Russian souls, or them being Scythians or Dostoyevskian notion of the moral genius of the Slavic world, it seems like pretty persuasive guess work.