Written by Viktoria Mariupolskaya
3-18-22 at 4:17 am

Russian spirituality you've never heard of.

Many believe that Russia is a Christian country and that Russian Orthodox Church is the key representative of Russian spirituality. It can't be farther from the truth. Since Catholic invasion into Russia and Russian Orthodox Church in the XVII century, that caused the Nikonian split, up to this very day the Russians have been subjected to persecution for faith. And even Christianity was accepted by the Russians in the X century with caution at first and with time the Russians adapted Christianity to their original true spirituality. So it wasn't like the Russians had a bulb over their heads, had become the Jesus Christ followers and began learning how to love after centuries of living in the dark like wild animals. On contrary, Russians knew very well how to love, how to live in spirit, what happens after death, what our world is like and all that way before Jesus Christ. So they sort of approved of Jesus and confirmed he was on the right path.

From the point of view of a Christian, the relation of man to man is at the forefront, and usury is unacceptable precisely as a form of deception of man by man, and the Marxist-Leninist theory is perceived exclusively as atheistic. However, in the original Russian spirituality, economic activity and the attitude of a Russian person to resources, labor and property is not only an integral part of the spiritual world, but even its support, one might say, the source of the deepest religious views. This true Russian spirituality was at the base of Stalin's economy and the success of the USSR.

From true Russian spirituality usury is not only a fraud of a thimble, which reckless people fall for, but also evil that damages the economy worse than any military intervention. Faithful Russians have always treated money as something that does not have its own value and does not need any nominal value. They also treated private property with contempt.

To protect their internal communal economy from encroachments by the authorities, the faithful Russians, firstly, kept their economic affairs secret, not allowing the Nikonian followers in the Government of the Russian Empire to penetrate into the affairs of the community and influence them, and secondly, they used a monetary circulation circuit isolated from the Nikonians and their independent currency, the scales. Naturally, no one showed any interest in the accumulation of scales in the community. In general, it was considered a bad thing to separate from the community, and leaving the community, abandoning their duties and showing ingratitude, was almost a crime. Scales were not only a barter sense for trading operations, but were also used as an element of clothing decoration. Money was not the meaning or the ultimate goal in the Russian community. It was assigned a purely technical role.

Three key beliefs of our ancestors are the basis of the old Russian economic system:

1. Land, subsoil, forests, waters and other natural resources cannot be appropriated by a person into his private property, because they are given to a person by God;
2. Private property cannot be bought for any money and certainly does not give a person any special significance in society (the right to be a role model, the right to post your photo in Forbes magazine or something like that). The only way of personal enrichment is personal mental and physical labor without using the labor of another person;
3. Community property (public, collective) has the highest priority in comparison with other forms of ownership. Public property is more important than private property.

Before you get offended by what I've just said, read a few citations from the books of Russian scientists who devoted their lives to researching true Russian spirituality. Western propaganda (including Western propaganda in Russia) does not want you to read these rare books or even know about their existence. But I want you to know about them, because that will explain a lot.

In his book "The Slavic fault. The Ukrainian-Polish yoke in Russia" Alexander Pyzhikov emphasizes the difference between the Russian Church and Christianity brought from outside: "Speaking about the Moscow Church, it is necessary to emphasize its pronounced national rootedness. It is no accident that foreign visitors of that time were convinced that the Greek faith, which spread in our open spaces, is such more in name than in fact. Philosophical and dogmatic postulates were poorly perceived by the population. Only the simplest moral truths (salvation of the soul, prayer, alms), coupled with a tendency to the ceremonial side, were assimilated. Under these conditions, there was no need to talk about any deep assimilation of Christian teaching in the Byzantine spirit. Orthodoxy has become more of a folk belief, mixed up with pagan traditions that were preserved by mental and household inertia; they were intertwined with biblical stories from church literature. Christianity, widespread at that time, was based not on dogmas, but on the primacy of the national..."

The famous historian Fyodor Buslaev argued that neither in the times of Kievan Rus, nor in the times of the Moscow Kingdom, there is no need to talk about church Christianity, that paganism is widespread among the people. He proved that Russians cannot live without faith, that the whole life of the Russian people is saturated with faith, but at the same time Christianity is not the source of this faith. Buslaev saw the source of the Russian faith in the idea of our people about life and about the world, which they drew from his people's environment, from their life activity connected with the land. No churchliness, according to the researcher, influenced the worldview, mind or culture of the Russian people. He spoke of Christianity as an outwardly planted and extremely superficial phenomenon. He insisted that the people in Russia for the most part lived in a completely different atmosphere isolated from the worldview of the ruling circles, and that with the adoption of Christianity by the small ruling circles, popular paganism has not gone anywhere.

"Here you can see the curve of a wing, the tread of an animal, the plexus of roots, the windings of a river, the contours of two twins - the sun and the heart. These letters sing, chirp, emit an animal roar, fly, jump, speak in a human voice. They have not yet become book printing serial signs. Each letter is individual, unique, as every leaf on the tree of life is unique ..." F. Buslaev about the medieval manuscript.

In the XX century the work of F. Buslaev was continued by ethnographer, religious scholar, folklorist Nikolai Matorin. He was also interested in the beliefs of the Russian people. The fact that ecclesiasticism was not taken seriously in the lower ranks of the people became obvious in 1917. Matorin saw the symbiosis of Old Belief with paganism, which determined the worldview of the people. Paganism as the defining religion he found among the Muslims of Russia as well. Matorin was struck by the sacred attitude of the people to the tree as the source of human life: no religious procession could be even compared to that. In the subconscious of the Russian person, a person's life depends on plants, and a person parasitizes plants and, first of all, trees that give us the oxygen we need. The religiosity of the Russian man was expressed in the desire to plant as many trees as possible, in a sense of the rhythm of nature, in harmony with the natural human environment. The church offered to look at this nature as wildness, completely ignored mother nature and offered instead organized processions and rituals, so the Russian Orthodox Church itself looked wild in the eyes of the Russian people.

N. Matorin in the book "Orthodox Cult and production" (1931) writes: "The USSR has entered the period of socialism. A gigantic construction is going on all over the country... A cultural revolution is unfolding, accelerating the process of the withering away of religion... The mask of adaptability has been torn off, and representatives of all religious trends act as outright class enemies, as direct counter-revolutionaries and wreckers of socialist construction. Religious ideology has received a new serious blow. But does this take the study of all the various religious remnants off the agenda?.. this analysis is important because in general many facts of religious life receive a materialistic explanation; in turn, the analysis of superstructure phenomena facilitates understanding of the entire process of social development, the various sides of which (process) are closely related to each other ...

Comrade Em.Yaroslavsky... wrote: "We will continue this work of studying religion, and we advise our anti-religious comrades: do not be afraid of the names and names of the disappeared gods and goddesses, look for the social system that put them forward, the social relations that put forward faith in these gods."… Like any religion, Christianity... must be studied in connection with everyday life, with production, with the immediate interests and needs of certain social groups at different times... It would be quite in the hands of the priests if, analyzing the various stages of the Orthodox cult and its pre-Christian elements, we opposed them with some "pure" Christianity, the "religion of the elect", free from all "impurities". There is no such Christianity and there has never been…

Byzantine Orthodoxy, which had already come to the Slavs, was a syncretic cult through and through. Developing under the conditions of the feudal and then capitalist system, becoming more complicated in its content and at the same time adapting to the changing situation, Christianity continued to remain and remains now in the most "enlightened" bourgeois countries a religion that goes back to primitive "savage", in the true sense of the word, thinking. Therefore, in our approach to Christianity, there can be no prejudices of the old science, which regarded it as a "higher" religion.…

Orthodoxy on Russian or Finnish soil is no longer what it was under the Greek sky. But the ancient folk beliefs have not disappeared completely. Magical and animistic representations of old paganism merged, amalgamated with similar elements of the Christian worldview. In the millennial struggle of the cross with the old gods and deities, becoming more complicated and differentiated, what we conventionally called "Orthodox paganism" was created..."

Orthodoxy on Russian or Finnish soil is no longer what it was under the Greek sky. But the ancient folk beliefs have not disappeared completely. Magical and animistic representations of old paganism merged, amalgamated with similar elements of the Christian worldview. In the millennial struggle of the cross with the old gods and deities, becoming more complicated and differentiated, what we conventionally called "Orthodox paganism" was created..."

And in conclusion: "... it is obvious that the religious-syncretic complex, which is everyday Orthodoxy, grew up on the basis of the material and economic process, that it reflected the needs of various class groupings, even industries and professions. Along with the so-called "primitive" religions, "Orthodox paganism" is the property of ethnographic science, there is a religion that is quite amenable to materialistic explanation." Another confirmation of the connection of the spirituality of our ancestors with economic activity can be the fact that, according to Matorin, in Russia in the old days, the word "cattle" was synonymous with wealth, and "cowgirl" meant "treasury" (the ancient Romans had about the same thing: pecus - cattle, pecunia - money).

And here's the position of A. Pyzhikov, expressed in the book "Secrets of our past": "The peasant worldview, thought out, tested for centuries, really different from the church, is a worldview that can rightfully be called Orthodox. What is Orthodoxy? Let's start with this. Orthodoxy is not a religious trend. Orthodoxy is spirituality. Spirituality, tied to everyday life, and not to a priest who has collected some fragments [of the worldview] and winds his whole life around him."