THE ENDLESS RUSSIAN PLAIN AND THE ASSAULT ON FAUSTIAN TRUTH

Lavrov, the toad in the Russian swamp

by Cemil Kerimoglu

There is a sentence Sergey Lavrov uttered in March 2022, nonchalantly as if reporting the weather. Russia has not attacked anyone. Russian armies were in Ukraine. Russia was bombing Ukrainian cities. And the foreign minister of the attacking state said, without a flicker, that no attack had taken place.

A European listener hears this and waits for the blush or the smirk – some sign that the speaker knows he is standing on the wrong side of an obvious contradiction. The sign, however, does not come. That absence is not really a trick of media training. It is the essence of the Russian soul.

In his morphology of cultures, Oswald Spengler assigns to each high culture a specific prime symbol. This symbol expresses itself concretely across the entire life cycle of a culture. It manifests in architecture, music, science, political behaviour, and in the way people of that culture experience themselves in relation to the world. The prime symbol permeates everything – from intellectual achievements to everyday instincts.

European Civilization, which Spengler names "Faustian," lives under the symbol of limitless space. The Greco-Roman world, named "Apollonian," lived under the symbol of the self-contained body. The Near East, which Spengler names "Magian," is defined by the symbol of the cavern. Russia, Spengler said, lives under another symbol still: the endless plain.

From that last image alone almost everything that follows can be deduced. The Russian soul is inherently numb to distinctions, even to those between diametrically opposed states of the matter. The plain is undifferentiated, everything along it looks the same. And so is the Russian psyche – for it, different, even opposing, states of the matter feel the same.

TWO INFINITIES

Spengler's method is morphological. He asks what form a culture is, the way a botanist asks what form a plant is. A prime symbol is the metaphor conveying the world-feeling of a culture.

For the Faustian soul that gave rise to the Western Civilization, the prime symbol is pure and limitless space. The Gothic cathedral yearns to the skies, to infinity. The nave is a vector. The organ is sound thrown into volume that has no inherent end. Western oil painting discovers depth and atmosphere; Western mathematics gives rise to infinitesimal calculus, discovers the function, the infinite series, the limit approached and never possessed. Galilean dynamics replaces Classical statics. The explorer, the astronomer, the critic, and the experimentalist are so many occupations of one and the same directedness: towards infinity, without a last station.

Not as improbable as it looks

These prime symbols carry moral and intellectual consequences that Spengler himself did not isolate into a formal "theory of truth," but which follow from them with almost mathematical necessity. Among other things, a culture’s prime symbol reveals its characteristic attitude toward truth: what truth is understood to be, where it is thought to reside, and how it may be approached or attained. Since the prime symbols differ fundamentally from one culture to another, so too do their respective conceptions of truth.

European civilization is built on a fundamental reverence for truth. It is in the European nature to dig deeper, to question, to analyse. This impulse is deeply ingrained in the European psyche. In the Faustian world-feeling, the truth exists, but it lies in the depth, and depth has no floor. Thus, the Faustian soul is animated by an ever-deepening quest, a restless drive toward inner complexity, precision, and ultimate clarity. To be European, in this civilizational sense, is to be haunted by depth. Especially the depth of truth.

The infinity in question is vertical. It is the infinity of ever approaching something, but never feeling content that one has reached it. It is the infinity of more and more distinction. A European can spend a lifetime on a single question and feel that he has only begun. Faustian culture is thus defined by the relentless pursuit of truth, however hidden, abstract, or ultimately unattainable it may be. The Faustian spirit is never satisfied with its discoveries and understanding of the world. It seeks to probe, dissect, and penetrate ever more deeply into reality. In this sense, European civilization is defined by depth. Depth is the essence of the Western psyche.

At first glance, the Russian prime symbol of the endless plain also presupposes some kind of infinity. But Russian infinity is of another kind. The infinity Russians experience is quite different, in fact diametrically opposite to the European experience. European infinity is vertical, whereas Russian infinity is horizontal. It is the infinity of sameness; it is the infinity of a lack of distinctions.

The Russian psyche is inherently indifferent; it is numb to distinctions – including distinctions between obvious truth and glaring falsehood. The endless plain is flat, wide and undifferentiated. Hence, the Russian psyche is marked not by depth, but by breadth – by boundless sameness. And this world-feeling of boundless breadth applies to their attitude towards truth as well. There is no compulsion to search for truth. Because everything is equivalent. Whereas a European digs infinitely deeper and deeper to approach the truth, to find the truth in its purest form, a Russian wanders around infinitely, along the horizontal axis, along the endless plain without being bothered even by the distinction between truth and falsehood. Because along the endless plain everything is the same.

A BRIEF LOOK SIDEWAYS: BODY AND CAVERN

Before turning fully to Russia, and its contrast to European Civilization, it is worth placing two other high cultures in view to make the Russian peculiarity visible by contrast. Faustian, Magian, and Apollonian souls do not agree about how truth is reached. But they all agree that an objective truth exists.

The Apollonian soul of Classical antiquity took as its prime symbol the isolated, sensuous body: the statue that can be walked around, the temple that is a crystalline arrangement of loads and members, the city-state that is a visible political body among other visible bodies. Space, for Classical man, is not a boundless container. It is the sum of formed things present to the eye. What is true is what is out there – finite, plastic, local, complete in the daylight. The Olympian gods are perfected bodies. Classical mathematics is proportion among magnitudes. The corresponding attitude to truth is therefore not a quest, but recognition. What is true is the evident form. There is no pathos of the unattainable. There is the pathos of the well-made and the present.

The Apollonian vs. the Magian

The Magian soul of the Near East – Persian, Jewish, early Christian, Byzantine, Islamic – inhabits another extension entirely. Spengler called it the cavern. It represents an encompassing, meaningful cosmos, illuminated from within, in which the drama of spirit unfolds. Here the decisive truth is concealed from ordinary sight, and its disclosure is possible through revelation and the community’s participation in divine spirit. Human beings can receive and understand truth, but its ultimate authority is divine, perceived and transmitted by the elect and initiated, rather than the achievement of an autonomous individual in an infinite quest.

So, the three cultures differ in the definition of truth and the ways to attain it. The Apollonian sees what is recognizable. The Magian receives what is revealed. The Faustian pursues the infinite. But in all three, there is eventually an objective truth.

The Russian case, however, is inherently different. For the Russian soul, there is no objective truth in the first place. If the endless plain makes every stretch of ground equivalent to every other, then the difference between the true stretch and the false stretch is not a drama. That is what makes the Russian soul peculiar among the great world-feelings Spengler described. The others disagree about the source of truth. The Russian soul doesn’t even recognize the existence of truth.

NUMBNESS TO DISTINCTION AS A WORLD-FEELING

Once the Russian prime symbol is seen, the examples cease to look like a catalogue of hypocrisies and begin to look like different natural manifestations of the same psyche.

Consider first the Russian relation to the dead. The Immortal Regiment – the ritual, born in 2012, in which crowds march with portraits of relatives killed in the war of 1941–45. It reveals something deeper about the Russian realm. The portraits are not tokens of absence. They are treated as company. The dead are not commemorated across a distance; they are walked with, as if the two conditions, life and death, were adjacent rooms rather than mutually exclusive states.

Are the dead truly "alive," or are the alive simply "dead"?

The same gesture appears in a quieter and older practice: to sit at a grave with a bottle and drink "with" the buried man, speaking to him as if the conversation were two-sided. Other cultures honour the dead too. They do not, however, blur the lines between life and death as Russians do.

That numbness has a military price and a military use. A psyche that is numb to distinctions and which does not feel the contrast between living and dead with Faustian sharpness will accept death tolls that would break a Western public. It will also accept fictions about those deaths. The same psyche that can make one drink with a corpse can be told, for instance, that a massacre was committed by its victims.

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2014, they did not do what almost every previous invader in European history has done: admit the crossing. Others might dress invasion in legal formulae, but they won’t claim that no army had crossed the border of a foreign state. Russians did exactly that. They invaded Crimea, then insisted it was a "spontaneous uprising." Then they invaded Donbas but claimed it was an internal "civil war." Even as Russian operatives, weapons, and military poured into eastern Ukraine, Russia framed it as "internal discontent."

Other aggressive powers in the historical record have obfuscated details. Russia, however, went beyond ordinary euphemism or justification: it denied the character of the event itself. The peculiarity is not that an aggressor lied. Aggressors can lie. The peculiarity is the straight face with which Russians can churn out asinine lies in the face of obvious facts – like claiming that 1 + 1 = 5. The same pattern returned in 2022 at Bucha, the Mariupol Drama Theatre and other places in Ukraine: the killings Russians committed were assigned, without blush, to "Ukrainian Nazis."

Put a ribbon on it by calling it "denazification"

Katyn already contained the whole pattern. In 1940, the Soviet state shot more than twenty thousand Polish officers and officials in the forest and then spent half a century attributing the massacre to the Germans. When the attribution collapsed, it collapsed as a file is closed, not as a conscience is torn. The point is not that the lie was eventually admitted. The point is that Russians can carry a lie of that magnitude as a normal load.

That is the same psychological mechanism that defines Lavrov’s sentence at the opening of this essay. When he said that "Russia has not attacked anyone," he was not searching for a softer word. He was denying the attack outright, while the attack was underway. The sentence is a blatant lie delivered without embarrassment. It is yet another manifestation of Russian indifference to truth, which is numbness to the distinction between opposed states of affairs.

Such numbness to the contrast between obvious truth and glaring falsehood is why Russians managed to convince a sizeable portion of the Western audience of their asinine lies. Because the best way to convince others of your lies is to believe those lies yourself. For Europeans who deeply value truth, such absurd lies would create an emotional and intellectual dissonance. But Russians feel no internal recoil from even the most glaring falsehood. For them lies are equivalent to facts. In fact, this is also how Russian society operates. A Russian will lie to you not necessarily because he wants to take advantage of you, but just for the sake of it – because he feels like it. Their ability to lie nonchalantly is what makes Russians effective manipulators.

This is what makes the West so vulnerable in its engagement with Russia. Many voices still call for dialogue with Russia, for listening to the Russian perspective. But this is the worst kind of advice. A dialogue between Europeans, a people who deeply value truth, and Russians, a people indifferent to truth, is the worst kind of interaction imaginable, where the latter would easily manipulate the former. Such a constellation is essentially asymmetric warfare. It is a psychological mismatch, where the party committed to truth is left confused and disoriented, while the party indifferent to it exploits that confusion to advance its agenda. In this dynamic, truth-seekers are at a structural disadvantage. Whereas manipulators indifferent to truth thrive.

The same numbness to obvious contradictions shows itself in law. Russians are at home with legal ambiguity: what the law says, the de jure, more often than not does not describe what actually happens, the de facto. In a Faustian state that gap would be a scandal. In Russia it is ordinary. The country is called the "Russian Federation," yet, in reality, it is not a federation, or anything close to one – it is an empire ruled from Moscow. The name and the thing have lived side by side for decades. Moreover, the Soviet Union was not, in practice, a union of equal republics as proclaimed by its name and constitution, but a continuation of the Russian Empire under a different ideological guise, with the other "union republics" effectively subordinated to the Russian imperial centre. A European would feel such mismatches as a kind of nausea. Russians do not. They are not bothered by obvious contradictions, or by the manifold discrepancies between written law and practice.

The same mental mechanism manifests itself in the name of the war Russia is currently waging against Ukraine. This is the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War. Yet in official Russian discourse it is still called a "special military operation." Russians do not recoil from the glaring contradiction, and the government does not expect them to. The contradiction is not resolved; it is simply inhabited. The gap between the thing itself and the word used to define it is obvious, yet in Russian society it produces no inner necessity to make the two correspond.

Russia is the epitome of a place where the de facto contradicts the de jure. Russians are fine with that. Their consciousness does not recoil from obvious contradictions. Because correspondence between written law and its implementation would require being receptive to contradictions when the law is evaded. A cultural realm defined by the endless plain is, however, not receptive to contradictions.

George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, thought he was describing the nature of a totalitarian state. Most of his readers have followed him and treated the book as a reflection of communism. However, unbeknownst to him, what Orwell was actually describing in the book is not communism or totalitarianism per se, but the Russian psyche in its purest form. Europeans encountered communist rule through Russia, as a Russian manifestation, and assumed that its features reflect the political system itself. In reality, those features reflect not the political system, but the Russian psyche that feels at home living in contradictions – a psyche represented by the prime symbol of the endless plain.

Look at what Oceania actually does. The Ministry of Truth does not merely hide an awkward document. It nonchalantly rewrites the archive. Winston Smith’s daily work is to drop yesterday’s newspaper down the memory hole and put a new sentence in its place: the chocolate ration has been raised, though it was cut; a war hero named Comrade Ogilvy has always existed, though Winston has just invented him. A photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford at a Party function in New York – on the very day they later confessed to having been on enemy soil – is not a problem to be explained. It is a scrap to be destroyed.

One day Oceania is at war with Eurasia and is allied with Eastasia. The narrative tells this has always been the case, and that Eurasia has been Oceania’s bitter enemy since time immemorial. But then suddenly, the narrative changes. The orator is nonchalant. Mid-sentence he switches the name of the enemy, and the crowd tears down the old posters as if they had never been hung. Oceania is now allied with Eurasia against Eastasia, as has always been in the past. Now Eastasia is the eternal enemy. No one is expected to be bothered by the blatant contradiction. Doublethink is the name Orwell gave to that state of mind: holding two contradictory beliefs at once, and being untroubled by it.

Both Animal Farm and 1984 were about Russia and the Russians (and nothing else)

And here is the gist of the matter: doublethink is not a feature of the communist society (or any totalitarian system) as such, but of Russian society. It is the manifestation of a uniquely Russian mindset represented by the endless plain: a mindset numb to distinctions, a mindset that does not recoil from blatant contradictions, a mindset of radical equivalence. This is how Russian society lives. Seen through the morphology developed here, Orwell was describing something profoundly Russian.

The same world-feeling found a striking expression in a nineteenth-century phenomenon that came to be known as Russian nihilism. The word itself did not originate in Russia. It had entered modern philosophical vocabulary in Germany by the end of the eighteenth century, most notably through Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who used it polemically against the idealist philosophy of Fichte. But in Russia the word acquired something more concrete. After Turgenev gave it literary form in Bazarov, the protagonist of Fathers and Sons, the nihilist became not merely a philosophical position but a recognizable social type: the young radical who refused inherited authority, religion, metaphysics, aesthetic convention and traditional morality. Russian nihilism became a broad cultural phenomenon rather than merely an abstract doctrine.

Bazarov being a complete cunt as usual in a recent Russian movie based on Turgenev's novel

Yet even the name itself is a misnomer when applied to the Russian context. The Russian nihilists did not literally believe in nothing, as the word "nihilism" would suggest. What distinguished them was the intensity of their levelling impulse: no inherited rank, principle, institution or aesthetic value was entitled to reverence.

Seen through the Spenglerian morphology, the significant feature of Russian nihilism is that it subjected distinctions to a radical levelling. What had stood vertically – sacred above profane, noble above common, canonical above vulgar – could be pulled down onto one plane and stripped of authority. From a Spenglerian perspective, one may see in the peculiar intensity with which this impulse took hold in Russia another manifestation of the endless plain: the instinct to flatten hierarchies until nothing possesses authority.

THE FACTORY OF FAKES AND SHOW-OFFS

A culture numb to the distinctions between obvious truth and glaring falsehood will not only lie about its crimes. It will lie about its stature, and it will do so at civilizational scale.

Throughout its history, including now, Russia has been able to present itself as much stronger than it is. It can be reliably called a factory of fakes and show-offs. The important point is not only that the fakes exist. It is that Russians can make others believe them. They hide weakness and backwardness with a straight face, and a large part of the European public accepts the performance: Russia as a strong, developed country with a high culture in the Western sense.

The Potemkin village belongs to the same habit. In 1787 Catherine the Great toured the newly conquered south – Crimea and the lands then called Novorossiya (New Russia). Her favourite, Grigory Potemkin, arranged the display. The story that stuck was this: fake villages were put up along the Dnipro River, peopled for a day, then taken down and rebuilt further along the river so that the Empress would see prosperity twice. Historians argue over how much of the story is literal. That is not the point. The point is that such a thing could have become proverbial only in Russia. Only a soul with an urge to pretend, to produce fakes, to lie, and to lie convincingly, could have given the world that image. In fact, Russia itself is a Potemkin village the size of Eurasia.

Seriously, fuck these people!

Even Russian piety takes this form. The yurodivy, the fool for Christ, is one of the most distinctive figures of Muscovite-Russian religiosity. The type did not begin in Russia. Byzantine Christianity already knew the salos: a man who feigned madness as an ascetic act, walked half-naked, spoke in riddles, and provoked the city in order, so the claim went, to hide his virtue and serve God. In that older form the pretence was a veil. Sanctity was supposed to lie underneath. The crowd was not meant to take the madness itself for holiness; the elect were meant to see through it. Importantly, such type remained, in Byzantium, a vocation of the few. It never became a mass phenomenon among the Greeks, South Slavs, or Ruthenians-Ukrainians. It almost vanished later in the Greek world that had invented it.

What happened in Muscovy-Russia, however, was structurally different and much larger in scale. From the fifteenth century, the "fool for Christ" became a public institution. In Muscovy, holy fools slept on church porches, wore chains or nothing at all, begged, and insulted the powerful. Importantly, they were venerated by the crowds – not only after their death, but even while they lived. Muscovites were treating them as prophets whom even "the very highest" may not control. After their death, many of them were canonized by the church. In other words, the Muscovite-Russian "holy fool" was greater in scope than the Byzantine archetype.

"Saint" Basil. Probably drank his own piss.

The Russian Church came to number dozens of yurodivye among its saints. The most famous is Basil the Blessed of Moscow. He walked the city naked, loaded with chains, and was allowed to rebuke Ivan the Terrible. The cathedral on Red Square that foreigners take as the emblem of Russia bears his name. Initially, he was buried under an arch near the cathedral walls. Then, in 1588, during the reign of Tsar Feodor I, he was canonized, and a separate chapel was built over his grave and attached to the main cathedral building. People were going on pilgrimage to that chapel and over time started calling the whole cathedral complex after his name – "St. Basil’s."

Moreover, differently from Byzantium, the phenomenon of the "fool for Christ" in Muscovy reflects a society granting holiness to a mere performance. And performance is the point. The Muscovite yurodivy was not simply a madman whom the Church later pitied. The tradition itself insists that the madness is assumed – a pretence undertaken for God.

For the Magian (Byzantine) soul the world is a cavern. Truth is a substance hidden under a cover and visible to the elect. The Byzantine salos fits that structure almost too well: sanctity is concealed under the mask of madness; the crowd is uncertain; only those with the right inner eye see the light behind the scandal. The pretence serves as a veil that hides the virtue beneath.

For the Russian soul, however, the world is an endless plain, in which distinctions do not hold. The Muscovite yurodivy is not a veil over a secret holiness. He is a public performance that the society views as holiness. There is no veil hiding some virtue under the scandalous behaviour. The deliberately assumed performance of madness itself becomes a recognized form of ascetic holiness.

Other Christian cultures also knew ascetics, and Byzantium itself venerated holy fools. What was distinctive in Muscovy was the extraordinary prominence, persistence and cultural authority that holy foolery acquired.

The same world-feeling appears with almost theatrical clarity during the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. Within the space of only a few years, Muscovy produced not one but three successive "False Dmitrys" – three men who claimed, in one form or another, the identity of Tsarevich Dmitry, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, who had died in Uglich in 1591. Nor were they alone. More than a dozen pretenders appeared during the Time of Troubles claiming to be lost tsars or tsareviches.

The first False Dmitry was by far the most successful. Appearing publicly as the supposedly surviving son of Ivan the Terrible, he exploited the dynastic crisis surrounding Boris Godunov, attracted substantial military and popular support, entered Moscow and was crowned tsar in 1605. What is moreover noteworthy here is that after his murder in May 1606, almost immediately, rumours began circulating that the man killed in Moscow had merely been a substitute and that the true Dmitry had once again escaped death.

Within a year another man emerged claiming to be that same Dmitry. The Second False Dmitry gathered an army, established a rival court at Tushino and acquired enough support to become a serious challenger to Tsar Vasily Shuisky. After his fall, a third False Dmitry appeared in 1611. The identity of "Dmitry" had, by then, almost ceased to belong to a particular human being. It had become a political role capable of passing from one body to another.

Royal impostors were not unknown elsewhere in Europe. England had Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck; Portugal produced pretenders claiming to be the vanished King Sebastian. What distinguishes the Muscovite case is therefore not the mere existence of an impostor, but the extraordinary proliferation of them and the repeated willingness of substantial groups of people to organize themselves around pretenders.

Putin and his doubles

Seen through the morphology developed here, this historical episode is revealing. Dmitry had died; then the first man who claimed to be Dmitry died; yet "Dmitry" remained politically alive, ready to inhabit another body. The distinction between the original and the imitation, between the dead prince and the living performer, could repeatedly be suspended when circumstances demanded it. Just as the yurodivy turned performed madness into a socially recognized form of sanctity, the Time of Troubles repeatedly transformed performed identity into political reality. In Muscovy, under the right conditions, the mask did not merely conceal the man. The mask could become the man.

This also explains why, in the present Russian state, the security organs are not simply an instrument of government, but they are the government. In Russia, the state itself has acquired the inner form of a security service: obstruction, disinformation, legend, kompromat, the cultivation of agents and controlled opposition. The security apparatus has become the state.

Seen from a Spenglerian vantage, this is not an accidental feature of Putinism. It is the gradual actualization of the Russian prime symbol at a particular stage in the historical development of the realm. Nor did it appear suddenly when Putin entered the Kremlin. Its prehistory reaches deep into the Soviet state. The Communist Party remained formally supreme throughout the Soviet period, but beneath that supremacy existed powerful institutional complexes with their own interests and cultures: the Party apparatus, the armed forces and the state-security organs. The KGB remained subordinate to the Party, yet it possessed something the Party itself increasingly lacked: an organization trained to observe the whole of society from above, accumulate hidden knowledge about individuals and institutions, and operate through deception, fabricated identities and manufactured narratives – through the deliberate creation of falsehoods capable of functioning as political reality.

The career of Yuri Andropov already hinted at what was possible. After heading the KGB for fifteen years, he ascended in 1982 to the highest office in the Soviet system, becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party. The security service had not yet conquered the Party; rather, one of its own had reached the summit by entering the Party hierarchy. But morphologically the episode was suggestive. A structure whose modus operandi is faking and lying had begun producing men capable of ruling the Russian realm.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the institution that had previously stood above all the others: the Communist Party. Yet the security apparatus survived the destruction of the ideological system that had once commanded it. It fragmented, changed names and was reorganized, but it did not disappear. The Soviet KGB’s principal domestic successor eventually became the FSB.

Then came a sequence that, viewed retrospectively, almost appears symbolic from the Spenglerian lens. Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer, became director of the FSB in July 1998. In March 1999 he also became secretary of the Security Council. In August Yeltsin appointed him prime minister. On the last day of that year, Yeltsin resigned and Putin became acting president. Within eighteen months, a man formed professionally inside the security apparatus had moved from directing Russia’s principal domestic security service to occupying the presidency itself.

What followed under Putin’s rule was telling. Men from the security services and other coercive structures – the siloviki – entered the presidential administration, government, regional administration and state corporations in large numbers. Seen morphologically, the important point is that the transformation was evolutionary and represented a natural progression. The security-service milieu moved progressively toward the centre of power. What had once been one organ of the Russian state increasingly became the state itself. One could say that, among the competing institutional forms inherited from the Soviet collapse, the security-service form proved the most congenial to the emerging Russian order.

And why should this be surprising? What, after all, is the professional world of an intelligence service? It is a world built upon deception: invented identities, fabricated narratives, disinformation, concealment, infiltration, legendirovanie and kompromat. Its métier consists precisely in manufacturing false appearances and making others act upon them as though they were real. The successful intelligence operation creates an alternative version of reality convincing enough to acquire consequences of its own. Lies cease to be occasional instruments and become an entire method of operating in the world.

In breaking news there has been an actual outbreak of bubonic plague from a real biolab in the Russian city of Irkutsk

It is difficult to imagine a political institution more congenial to the Russian world-feeling. A cultural realm whose prime symbol is the endless plain – a realm in which the distinction between truth and falsehood carries little inner weight – eventually finds its consummate political form in an institution professionally devoted to faking identities, manufacturing narratives and inhabiting falsehoods. What the security service practices deliberately as a profession corresponds, on the level of the state, to a deeper cultural disposition toward the interchangeability of the real and the fabricated.

The rise of the security apparatus can therefore be interpreted as something more than the contingent victory of one bureaucratic faction over another. It is the political form toward which the post-Petrine Russian realm had been moving as it was shedding the European pseudomorphosis. Putin's Russia continues the process initiated by the Bolshevik Revolution: the stripping away of imported Western forms and the re-emergence of older Muscovite instincts beneath them. The ideology has changed from Orthodoxy to Marxism and from Marxism to imperial revanchism; the institutions have changed from prikazy to commissariats and from the Cheka to the KGB and FSB. But beneath those changes, the direction remains recognizable.

LIVING IN A METAVERSE

This striking capacity to blur the line between truth and falsehood, to treat them as equivalent and interchangeable states of matter, also enables Russians to disengage from daily reality into an imagined world – or a world provided to them by propaganda.

What they imagine does feel very real for them, even though it might starkly contradict the facts on the ground. For radical egalitarians, like Russians, the separating line between physical reality and inner fantasy grows thin. They can easily substitute their imagination for the physical reality in a way Europeans cannot.

Many Russians live without indoor plumbing, without proper roads, under conditions that would feel intolerable to others, and still believe that their country is envied, respected and feared. They sincerely believe that the West longs to destroy Russia and seize its resources, though the record points the other way. The West, especially America, has repeatedly helped keep the Russian state from collapsing, and even now prefers its stability to its chaos. Russians inhabit something close to a metaverse. If that technology ever became widespread, they would adopt it first, and they would be its most loyal users.

That is why so many of them support the current war against Ukraine even as their own lives get worse. They live the fake "victory" vicariously and are uplifted by it. For a people who do not keep reality and imagination sharply apart, the imagined greatness of the country is enough to cover daily misery. The belief that Russia is mighty and feared – a nuclear power facing a hostile world – supplies a personal pride that the realities of daily life cannot. As long as the wars Moscow wages appear to move forward, even by one village taken (or retaken), many Russians feel fulfilled. The "success" feels like their own. A small military gain gives them a sense of accomplishment that their circumstances do not.

Russian war dead envisaged as a meat cube next to Saint Basil's cathedral

Vicarious glory thus becomes a substitute for personal success. Misery that would otherwise accumulate is reduced. Millions can accept hardship and still feel raised, even fulfilled. The propaganda offers another reality, and Russians can easily substitute that alternative reality for the one that is in their own homes and outside the door. The psyche defined by the prime symbol of the endless plain does not recoil from the blatant contradictions between the imagined world and the real one.

The same mechanism, however, also works in reverse. If Russia begins to lose in a way that cannot be denied, Russians will feel like losers more deeply than even their abysmal material conditions alone would justify. The 1990s made the pattern clear. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian self-esteem collapsed with it. Many came to see themselves as the worst people on earth, the greatest losers among nations. The emotional fall went below even the economic wreckage of those years.

THE ENDLESS PLAIN ENTERS THE GOTHIC CATHEDRAL

Spengler regarded Petrine Russia as one of the great examples of historical pseudomorphosis: a young culture prevented from developing its own forms because the forms of an older, foreign civilization had been imposed upon it. St Petersburg was the supreme symbol of this condition: a European city deliberately planted on Russian soil, facing westward, built as though Russia could be remade by decree into another Europe. Spengler explicitly describes the foundation of St Petersburg as the beginning of the Russian pseudomorphosis, through which the still-young Russian soul was forced successively into the alien forms of the Baroque, the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century Europe.

The process, however, had begun before Peter. One can already discern its preliminary stages in the seventeenth century, under Peter’s father, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, and especially in the reforms of Patriarch Nikon. Beginning in the 1650s, Nikon sought to bring Russian Orthodox ritual into conformity with contemporary Greek practice. The resulting changes – in liturgy, ritual gestures and religious texts – provoked the great schism of the Old Believers, precisely because many Russians experienced them not as harmless corrections but as an assault upon inherited Muscovite-Russian sacred forms. What Peter later accomplished on the scale of the state had thus been foreshadowed in the Church: the native form was declared defective because it failed to correspond to an external standard.

Spengler saw another, even greater pseudomorphosis in the Middle East. The young Middle-Eastern (Magian) culture developed beneath the immense weight of an already mature Greco-Roman civilization. From Alexander’s conquests onward, and still more under Roman rule, a new soul was forced to express itself through alien Classical forms. Greek philosophical vocabulary, Roman political institutions and the artistic forms of Hellenism remained standing like an enormous shell within which an entirely different world-feeling was coming to life. This is almost the textbook case of what Spengler meant by pseudomorphosis.

Islam, within this interpretation, represents the violent act of liberation. It was the moment at which the Magian world finally acquired an outward form adequate to its inward soul. Spengler himself writes that with Islam, the Magian soul at last found its proper expression and was finally released from the pseudomorphosis under which it had lived for centuries. The old Greco-Roman shell shattered. What had previously been compelled to appear in borrowed forms now appeared openly as itself.

Something comparable happened in Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution, although Spengler regarded Bolshevism as the final consequence of Petrinism (i.e., Western pseudomorphosis) rather than its negation. Marxism itself was Western, rationalistic, urban and social, and therefore, for him, another foreign form imposed upon Russia. But the historical function of Bolshevism should nevertheless be interpreted differently. An imported form can be appropriated by a foreign soul and made to serve purposes radically different from those for which it was created.

That is what happened in Russia. Communism supplied the vocabulary, but the Russian realm supplied the meaning.

The ideology was European; the historical energy that seized it was not. Through Bolshevism, Russia destroyed the Petrine social order, annihilated the old Westernized aristocracy and bourgeois intelligentsia, detached culturally from Europe, and created a cultural realm that, despite its Marxist vocabulary, increasingly bore recognizably Russian forms. The Bolshevik Revolution was therefore simultaneously Western in doctrine and anti-Western in historical effect.

Putin’s Russia represents a further stage of the same process. Marxism has been discarded while the deeper historical movement continues. What remains is the progressive stripping away of the Westernizing forms that accumulated from Peter onward and the re-emergence of older Muscovite instincts.

Yet cultural pressure does not operate only in one direction. Strictly speaking, Spengler reserves the term pseudomorphosis for a particular situation: a young culture trapped beneath the forms of an older one. But his own account of Late Antiquity contains something remarkably close to a reverse movement. Once the Greco-Roman (Apollonian) soul had begun to exhaust itself and the Magian soul had become stronger, the relation between them changed. The younger culture no longer merely endured Greco-Roman forms. It began transforming those forms from within.

Spengler explicitly describes this reversal. At first, the religions of the East were forced to assume the form of Apollonian cults. Mithraism, Christianity, the Syrian cults and even Judaism appeared in the Greco-Roman world as though they were simply additional cults alongside the innumerable cults of the ancient city. Each had its temples, rites and local communities. The form remained Apollonian even when the religious feeling contained within it was already Magian.

But as the Classical soul weakened, something extraordinary happened. The direction of assimilation reversed. The old Greco-Roman cults themselves began assuming Magian characteristics. Instead of merely practicing a cult, one increasingly belonged to a religious community. Ritual acquired doctrine. Religious participation acquired the character of belief. A plurality of local cults increasingly came to be understood through the categories of adherence, orthodoxy and community. In Spengler’s formulation, the sum of individual cults began turning into a community of believers.

Historical paganism remained extraordinarily diverse, composed of numerous local cults, inherited rites and religious traditions rather than a single unified creed. Yet the rise of Christianity increasingly compelled these disparate traditions to understand themselves in relation to a universal community of faith that claimed exclusive possession of religious truth. Practices that had never before conceived of themselves as parts of one religious system were gradually drawn into a common opposition to Christianity and, in that very confrontation, began to acquire something resembling a collective identity. From a Spenglerian perspective, this development is itself revealing: the Magian form of religion – the community of believers defined by doctrine and truth – was beginning to reshape even the way the older Greco-Roman religious world understood itself.

Morphologically, the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire therefore represented the victory of an entirely different conception of what religion is. The Apollonian cult belonged to a place, a city, or an inherited rite. The Magian Church belonged to a community of believers united by possession of the truth.

Even the Roman emperor was gradually drawn into this transformation. Spengler interprets the late Roman state itself in Magian terms. He attributes Magian characteristics to Diocletian and calls him the first caliph – the sacred ruler of the community of believers. Constantine nevertheless carries the development further: in Spengler’s reading, his conversion effectively changes which community represents the true faith of the empire. The emperor is no longer merely the political ruler of subjects practicing various cults; political sovereignty increasingly acquires the character of guardianship over a community defined by religious truth. In other words, in Late Antiquity, the shell had begun to take the shape of what once lived trapped inside it.

RUSSIFICATION OF THE FAUSTIAN WEST

Something analogous is now happening between the Faustian West and Russia. For centuries the dominant direction of influence was obvious. Russia borrowed from Europe. European philosophy, science, technology, military organization, political vocabulary, literature and social manners poured eastward. Even Russian revolutionary thought clothed itself in Western concepts. But cultural influence need not remain permanently asymmetric. An older civilization can eventually begin absorbing the psychological habits of the younger world that once borrowed from it.

Viewed through a Spenglerian lens, several tendencies that increasingly permeate modern Western society bear a recognizably Russian stamp. The suspicion that no source can ultimately be trusted; the reflexive insistence that conflicts rarely contain any meaningful distinction between right and wrong; the reluctance to rank competing interpretations of reality; even the elevation of perpetual experimentation in life into an end in itself – trying one thing after another simply because no path possesses an inherently higher claim than another – all reflect the same movement toward horizontality. What once appeared in the Faustian world as scepticism, openness and freedom of thought increasingly risks being transformed into something quite different: the dissolution of distinctions themselves.

In this sense, Russian influence does not necessarily arrive in recognizably Russian forms. It enters through familiar Faustian concepts and quietly alters their inner direction.

The clearest example is the transformation of the Western understanding of scepticism. Scepticism is profoundly compatible with the Faustian soul. Indeed, properly understood, it is one of its characteristic instruments. In line with the prime symbol of the infinite space, the Faustian mind distrusts his findings continuously. Because the truth may be located one layer deeper; and deeper and deeper, till infinity. It questions authorities because authorities may be wrong. It tests propositions, compares explanations, challenges inherited assumptions and devises experiments in his infinite quest to unravel the truth deeper and deeper.

Faustian scepticism therefore has a direction. It is animated by depth. It doubts in order to find the truth – or rather to approach it till infinity. The scientist who refuses to take an established theory on faith does not conclude that every theory is equally valid. He demands better evidence. The historian who distrusts a source does not conclude that every account of the past is merely a "narrative." He searches for another source, compares testimony, reconstructs chronology and attempts to move closer to what actually happened. The philosopher who dismantles an argument does not deny the possibility of truth. He clears the ground because he wants to penetrate further.

The direction is vertical. This is the same Faustian verticality that appears in the Gothic cathedral, in perspective painting, in infinitesimal calculus, in the telescope and microscope, and in the endless Western compulsion to ask one question after another. There is always another layer beneath the previous one. Every answer opens another depth.

Truth may never be possessed completely. But it exists as the pole toward which inquiry is directed. That distinction is decisive. For when scepticism is detached from this vertical orientation, it changes its nature entirely. Doubt ceases to be a method and becomes a destination. Distrust ceases to mean "do not believe this until you have investigated it" and comes to mean "nothing can ultimately be believed." Pluralism ceases to mean that competing explanations must be tested against one another to find out which one helps approach the truth more closely and begins to mean that no explanation may legitimately claim superiority over another. The existence of many perspectives is transformed from a problem to be overcome into proof that there is no reality beyond perspective.

And here is where the encounter with the Russian world-feeling manifests itself in the Faustian civilization. The Russian world-feeling is horizontal rather than vertical. Its characteristic movement is not toward an objective truth and ever finer distinction, but toward the dissolution of distinctions upon the endless plain. Applied to the Faustian quest for knowledge, this produces a very different kind of scepticism. It distorts and abuses the Faustian soul.

Squatting reflects the horizontal instincts and de-verticalization of the Russian nature

The question is no longer: Which source is reliable? It becomes: Can any source be reliable?

The question is no longer: Which side is telling the truth? It becomes: Surely everyone is lying.

The question is no longer: Which interpretation corresponds most closely to reality? It becomes: There is no objective reality, there are only interpretations.

At that moment scepticism has ceased to serve truth. It has begun to abolish the category. This is the crucial mutation. The Faustian soul doubts because truth matters so much that it cannot tolerate a premature answer. The Russian soul doubts because no answer possesses an inherently higher status than another. Faustian vertical scepticism aims to approach the truth and produces discrimination: finer distinctions, better instruments, more exact measurements, more rigorous standards of evidence. Russian horizontal scepticism produces equivalence: one source against another, one narrative against another, one alleged fact against another, until the exhausted observer concludes that everything is propaganda and that attempting to determine what happened is itself naïve.

Russian nihilism offers an instructive historical precursor (see above). The word was not born in Russia, and nihilism was certainly not exclusively Russian; its European intellectual genealogy is much broader. But it was in nineteenth-century Russia that the nihilist became an especially powerful social type, and Turgenev’s Bazarov made that Russian type famous throughout Europe. An imported intellectual possibility had acquired a distinctly Russian intensity and could then travel outward again. Ideas do not merely move from one culture to another unchanged. They are absorbed, transformed by the receiving culture, and sometimes returned in altered form.

Something comparable is happening to scepticism in the Western world. The West treats doubt as an instrument of inquiry, as a means of approaching truth more closely. The Russian world-feeling transforms doubt into radical equivalence, and transmits this transformation to the West.

The resulting form wears familiar Western clothes: anti-authoritarianism, critical thinking, pluralism, suspicion of official narratives. The vocabulary remains Faustian, but the essence becomes heavily Russified. The Faustian sceptic says: I do not yet know what is true. The Russian, or Russified, sceptic says: there is no reason to believe that truth can be distinguished from falsehood at all. The sentences may sound superficially similar. Spiritually, they are opposites.

In the Faustian world, to question authority once meant that authority must justify itself before truth. Increasingly, in its distorted form as a result of Russian cultural penetration, it came to mean that there is no authoritative source at all. To consider multiple explanations once meant comparing them in order to determine which survived scrutiny. Increasingly it means refusing to rank them at all. To keep an open mind once meant postponing judgment until sufficient evidence had been gathered. Increasingly it becomes a permanent refusal to judge.

The forms remain Faustian. The soul animating them becomes Russian. This is precisely what makes a reverse cultural penetration so powerful – be it penetration of the Magian soul into the Greco-Roman world in Late Antiquity or the ongoing penetration of the Russian soul into the Faustian world since at least the Bolshevik Revolution. The foreign influence does not arrive announcing itself as foreign. It occupies familiar concepts and gradually alters their inner direction and substance. The vocabulary survives: scepticism, freedom of thought, pluralism, criticism, distrust of power. Yet their purpose changes. What once existed to discriminate more accurately between true and false begins to erode the legitimacy of making that distinction in the first place.

In its infinite quest for truth, the Faustian soul is disoriented by the Russian influence. It is being persuaded that the quest itself is meaningless. Depth is replaced by the typically Russian lateral movement – one opinion, another opinion, another source, another narrative, another possibility, endlessly juxtaposed and never ranked. The restless Faustian drive survives, but becomes deprived of direction. It moves incessantly and arrives nowhere.

In modern Western society, the endless plain has entered the Gothic cathedral.

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