THE RETURN OF HOLY RUSSIA: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World

Russia has had a long and at many times, a tumultuous history, of which few in the Christian West are aware. Gary Lachman provides us with a detailed history spanning centuries of this vast, often misunderstood nation. For many of us in Europe and North America, Russia has been both friend and foe over the past 100 years. Lachman’s book explores the “mystical history of Russia, its obsession with apocalypse, and what that might mean for us today.”

Vladimir, son of Prince Svyatoslav I, survived wars to rule a pagan Russia. However, it was his grandmother, Olga, who realised “a single faith would be the best way to fuse the different tribes of the Rus together and end the squabbling and bickering that had kept them divided and weak. Like many early civilisations, people of the Rus were pagans. Lachman tells the story of the Christianisation of Russia with its various rulers believing that a single religion would unite Russia, creating a holy Russia with its religious centre in Kiev in which lay the hope for a city as great as Constantinople. Russia was one of the last pagan countries to convert its people to Christianity, Lachman tells us. Unity was an overarching aim for the early Rus rulers, and efforts continued through the centuries to create a unified Russia – united in nationality, religion, language, and culture, which meant the “Russification of Russia.”

However, Lachman points out that the “real Russian religion” is the Russian Man’s mission to liberate the world from the contagion of the Late West,” quoting German philosopher Walter Schubart.

The West’s interest in the enigma that is Russia has lingered in the minds of many. Few in the West really know the long and sometimes tortured history of Russia, which has perhaps made it easy to view her as an enemy. In 1932 the seer Edgar Cayce, when asked the question of what the West’s attitude toward Russia should be responded: “On Russia’s religious development will come the great hope of the world.”

The Russian mind and indeed, the “Russian Man,” as Lachman calls him, are not easy to understand. Perhaps that is because Russia as a country is not only a geographic expanse that stretches nearly halfway across the northern hemisphere, but wide-ranging cultural and religious traditions from early tribal paganism to European Christianity, and eastward to Buddhism, a philosophy embraced by many Russians thanks to the well-known Russians Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, and artist Nicholas Roerich whose travels throughout the Himalayas in Tibet and into Northern India brought art and Buddhist philosophy to Russia. “In the 1920s Roerich “approached the Soviets with a plan to establish a Pan-Buddhist nation in in inner Asia under the protection of Russia – the great ‘Northern Shambhala.’” Buddhism is today considered one of Russia’s traditional religions and is legally a part of Russian historical heritage.

Lachman’s history reveals that the path was an arduous evolution from the Russian Man to what he calls the New Man. Most of the twentieth century left Russia in tatters under Lenin and Stalin, dictators who perhaps believed that it would be under Communism that Russia would truly be united. Tragically, “Lenin ensured the death of orthodoxy – the church” and ended Holy Russia. As Lachman reminds us, “Revolutions are not creative, only destructive,” and religion had to be destroyed to “capture the souls of the people.”

However, Lachman encourages us in the next to the last chapter that Russia is not lost. In that section, The Return of Holy Russia?, Lachman provides a view into the Russia we are engaging today under Putin, in which the “need for a strong, renewed Russian identity is more pressing” to revitalise Russia, including the importance of religion, something about which Putin feels strongly.

In the final chapter Lachman provides us with the path on which Holy Russia returns with the dissolution of Communism and the arising of a third way – a middle way perhaps “between Western materialism and Eastern mysticism – “a radically different way of knowing providing a very different king of knowledge than that with which the West is familiar.”

The exiled Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, believed that conservatism was not progressivism, but rather a “safeguard against a movement ‘backward and downward into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state,’” Lachman asks: “who knows more about ‘chaotic darkness and a return to primitive state’ than Russian Man?” concluding that “whatever we may think of it, at least from Putin’s perspective, Holy Russia is making a comeback.”