One of the benefits the restoration of Christianity has brought Russia
since 1991 is that almost all Russian politicians can publicly say that God is
on their side against the devil.
The church hasn't been especially helpful, however, in inculcating the lesson
that, for more than a thousand years of European history, the real fight isn't
between God and the devil, but between those on earth, crusaders or infidels,
who wield the bigger guns. Looking retrospectively back over the history of
countless crusades, it should be obvious that the spoils of victory have also
determined how the historians would describe the outcome. In history, God never
backed the losers, nor the devil the winners.
It was Raymond VI, the count of Toulouse against whom Pope Innocent III
declared the Albigensian Crusade of 1209, who saw the personal downside of this
problem more succinctly than most. Among the heretical beliefs, which the
crusaders were inspired to root out that year in what was really a civil war
between impoverished northern France and the prosperous south, there was the
idea that if the world is full of evil, the devil must have created it.
And so, according to what was called the dualist or Cathar heresy of the time,
the devil must be working through the church and other institutions which
claimed to be on God's side. Raymond's contribution to the heresy was the
complaint that all politicians have harbored ever since - the devil must have created
the world, he said, "because nothing that ever happens in it goes my
way".
When President Vladimir Putin issued the first of his national election
campaign speeches last week, you can believe that God was on the side of all
the things the president and his men are standing for. They are for doubling
Russia's Gross Domestic Product in 10 years (that's annual growth of 10 percent
per annum, roughly twice the current rate). They are also for more competition
in the marketplace; for less bureaucracy in administration; more flexible and
predictable taxation; more effective ministers of state; and greater
parliamentary influence over government.
It doesn't require much religion to understand that nowhere in the president's
call to arms was there the old-fashioned attack on the devil. In the days of
president Boris Yeltsin, that was invariably the Communist Party and their
fellow-travellers in parliament who formed the obstructive majority in the
state Duma.
Facing growing electoral support for left-of-center critics of the government,
Putin chose to position himself closer to them than to their targets, with just
the slightest of objections to "unclear ideological positions and
insincerity" in politics. "Those who are not afraid to call businessmen
robbers and bloodsuckers", Putin added, "are not ashamed to lobby the
interests of big companies". If this is the toughest Putin intends to be
on the Communist Party for the elections due in December, it is also a hint
that the devil (read the donations of the Yukos oil company) might have
corrupted the communist leadership, and that Putin is already on the path they
should return to.
In the days of Raymond vs Innocent, it was sometimes possible to avoid a fight
by arranging a disputation between the advocates of God and advocates of
heresy, to allow the logic of the arguments to prevail. Since the Russian media
are virtually closed to the left, and it has been reduced to an ineffectual
minority in the Duma, the only serious disputation of this kind that takes place
in Russia is the concealed faction-fighting behind the walls of the Kremlin. It
is therefore from Putin's speech-making that the keys to the disputation must
be sought. And from last week's address to parliament, there is the notable
fact that Putin not only omitted mentioning the Yeltsinite devil, he also
omitted to identify any other.
When he proclaimed himself for the god of GDP growth, he could have warned
against the scourge of oil-exporting economies known to economists as the Dutch
Disease, when concentration of revenues in the oil sector cripples
diversification of industry and growth of employment. All Putin said was that
unemployment in Russia is on the rise again, and that the proportion of
Russians in poverty remains unchanged since the crash of 1998.
When the president spoke for the god of competitiveness, he could have railed
against the increasing concentration of Russian corporate capital. But then how
might he explain the fact that he himself encouraged the sale of the state
shareholding of Slavneft oil company to Sibneft and Tyumen Oil Company (TNK);
then approved TNK's sale to British Petroleum; and finally encouraged Sibneft's
merger with Yukos. With his artful advisors, perhaps Putin believes that the
fewer devils there are in the world, the easier time God and the faithful will
have to resist and control them.
But that's an argument he would have a hard time persuading Russian voters to
accept. The two touchstone words for the devil which Russian voters all
understand were missing from the president's speech - oligarch and corruption.
Back in France in 1209, when Raymond VI realized he had no chance of winning a
disputation with the Pope's men; when he calculated that what the crusaders
were really after was his castles, his tax revenues, his wealthy towns and
industries, the count contrived the idea of accepting all of Innocent's
demands, and renouncing the heresies of which he was accused.
He then proposed joining the crusade himself, ensuring that its target would be
the dominions of his neighbor and cousin, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, viscount of
Beziers. This was a temporary success, at least for the count of Toulouse. When
Beziers fell, Arnauld-Amaury, the Pope's legate and commander of the crusaders,
ordered everyone in the town to be slaughtered. Asked how the crusaders should
decide whether to spare the faithful catholics from the heretics, Arnauld
issued one of the most famous pronouncements in the history of fanaticism -
"Kill them all," he said. "God will recognize his own."
In the Russian crusade since 1991, Arnauld's policy has been that of the
so-called reformers, now grouped in the small parliamentary party called the
Union of Right Forces. Ex-prime minister Yegor Gaidar, ex-Yeltsin favorite
Boris Nemtsov, Anatoly Chubais, chief executive of the electricity monopoly,
and their henchmen still favor that approach, ideologically speaking. Several
of the oligarchs who have financed them continue to use these tactics as they
raid those sectors of the Russian economy that are not yet under their control
- paper and pulp, electricity, agribusiness. Before last week's speech, the
president was lobbied by some members of the Duma to pronounce himself against
such tactics, and the banners under which they fly. He refused to do so.
Was this because the president accepts that election campaigns are always pacts
with the devil? If so, there is plenty of time still, along with the example of
Raymond VI's tale, to judge which side God will end up on, and at what price.
Bear in mind, though, what the medieval politicians understood better than the
theologians. The price is paid on earth now, not in heaven later.