PART II
THE RUSSIAN
PROVING GROUND
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Transition to Part II
Argonautic vs. Academic
One of Eugen’s recurring themes was that the academic mind, with its objectivity and detachment, needs to be replaced by a mind that’s engaged with the times of history and its own time. Thus, he coined the term “argonautic.” He meant this to suggest the character of the new thinking—and new action—we’ll need in the third millennium. That’s why I chose “Argo Books” for the name of the little publishing house that Freya and I founded to keep his books in print.
In Soziologie Eugen describes the two great intellectual projects of the past millennium: first, the “scholastic,” beginning with Anselm and Abelard in the eleventh century; second, the “academic,” dating from Copernicus and Galileo in the sixteenth century and from Descartes in the seventeenth. The scholastics gave us theology as “queen of the sciences”; the academics have given us natural science, with its triumphant achievements in physics.
Their needed successor, in our time, is a third great intellectual project, a truly social science which would be neither scholastic nor academic in character. Rather, it would be “argonautic.” Undoubtedly, Eugen hoped that this new discipline, his metanomics, would be founded by his students and readers, perhaps even by some defectors from academe. We latter-day Argonauts would be happy to jettison academe’s lack of passion, its cold, objective, disengaged language. Like Jason and his crew on the Argo, we’d contend with winds that change. No longer in the shelter of Plato’s grove—quietly contemplating the good, the true, and the beautiful—we’d be like scouts, taking risks. Unlike the academic, we wouldn’t equivocate, finding two sides to every question. We’d recognize that, unless we steer our ship with a sense of purpose and direction, it will crash into the rock of Scylla or be sucked into the whirlpool of Charybdis.
Synchronizing Distemporaries
Now, as I’ve said earlier, metanomics would definitely admit that it has a purpose: to establish peace between persons, groups or nations. Eugen coined a mouthful of a name for this task: “synchronizing antagonistic distemporaries.” One finds that expression at the end of what many consider his most important short essay, “In Defense of the Grammatical Method.” Here he describes the new “concrete field” of metanomics as “society (time)” by contrast with the old field of natural science which was “nature (space)” and the even older field of theology which was “values (gods).”
Why did Eugen see our new task as synchronizing distemporaries? He meant that the global society of the third millennium would have a unified economy but that it would be made up of many peoples who are estranged from each other or who are out of synch with each other. Such people can be called distemporaries because they live in civilizations which have vastly different experiences of time and history. One obvious example of such a civilizational divide is that between Russia and the West, the heirs of Eastern and Western Christianity. Another divide, so poignant today, is that between the countries of the Middle East and the West.
A project that has dealt with that first divide, US-USSR Bridges for Peace, is about to be described in Chapter 9, while a similar project that addresses the second divide, Building Bridges: Middle East-US, will be described in the Epilogue.
The Norwich Center
US-USSR Bridge for Peace was launched through the efforts of a few friends who first gathered together under the auspices of the Norwich Center. We founded this small nonprofit organization in 1977—in order to implement our vision of voluntary service dedicated to peace-building projects.
In view of our purpose, it was not surprising that our initial board included Frank Davidson of Camp William James. It also included Freya von Moltke and Eugen’s son Hans. With an office located next door to the Norwich Congregational Church, whose minister, Jim Todhunter, was quite enthusiastic about our purposes, it was easy for us to coopt members of that church to help us launch US-USSR Bridges for Peace. As that project took form, all the propositions of this book’s Part I were put to the test.
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9 Bridges for Peace
One thing is certain: we have no hope for abolishing war until we accept the framework of a universal planetary method of crossing borders between all peoples and all countries. —Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Leningrad - December 2, 1983 - There were nine of us this morning, our small group of Americans from New England, lined up facing over three thousand of them, Russians from Leningrad. Our delegation, representing eight New England churches, was standing before a golden icon screen at the front of the high nave in St. Nicholas Cathedral.
As leader of the delegation, I was standing on the right, closest to Metropolitan Anthony, who was conducting the Sunday service. Tall, bearded, and gaunt, resplendent in golden robes and wearing a bejeweled crown, he’s one of the Russian Orthodox Church’s five “princes,” ranking just below the Patriarch. Watching him, smelling sweet incense, and hearing the soaring voices, I was transported back to the St. Sergius chapel in Paris.
An hour had passed when our Russian guide, Father Jonathan, whispered to me that the service was drawing to a close. Suddenly, without any warning, Anthony turned to me and asked, in perfectly clear English:
“Now would you like to greet the congregation?”
I was completely unprepared for this. Then I thought of that card in my pocket: it had the Russian greeting I’d planned to use at lunch with the Metropolitan and his priests after the service. “Go for it, Gardner,” I said to myself:
Dorogeeye bratya ee syostree vo Christye (Dear brothers and sisters in Christ),
(Then I continued with the following, in Russian.)
I bring you greetings from seven churches in New England. We have come on an unusual mission, and we seek your help. We invite you to join us in building bridges of understanding between the US and USSR, bridges of peace that will remove the enemy images that have arisen between us. Since our diplomats seem unable to establish a dialogue between our nations, we hope to begin a dialogue between our peoples, a sort of ‘citizen diplomacy’ that will try to end the Cold War between our countries.
Therefore, we are here today to invite members of your church, and other churches across your land, to join us in founding US-USSR Bridges for Peace. We invite you to visit our country, as we are visiting yours. We want you to meet the governors of our states and the leaders of our churches. And we want the public in both our countries to know that this citizen dialogue is taking place, that we are tearing down the walls of mutual hate and suspicion.
By such simple acts as talking with each other, as I am talking with you now, we hope to achieve our goals. In the name of our Lord, who asked us to be peacemakers. Amen.
As I looked into the eyes of the people closest to me, I could tell they’d understood. A final hymn and our group headed to lunch in the cathedral.
Seated on my right at lunch, Father Jonathan and I started chatting. A young man, perhaps thirty-five, with bright blond hair, he had a buoyant personality. He met us yesterday, when we arrived at the Hotel Moskva, all quite exhausted after an overnight train trip from Helsinki.
After some wine, our conversation became more personal. Jonathan told me he’d graduated from Leningrad University in physics, had then begun to teach it, but found his subject boring and dropped it for seminary studies. He asked what I’d done, and I told him about attending St. Sergius and how I might have become a diplomat or a Russian history professor but finally ended up in business.
“But now I’ve begun a new career,” I said, and proceeded to tell him about the Norwich Center. I explained how the center’s first project was US-USSR Bridges for Peace.
Our conversation was interrupted when Bishop Agafangel stood and asked me to tell them about our project.
“Let me start by telling you about this first bridge,” I said. “Our delegation’s visit to your cathedral today is the beginning of a two-week visit to your country. Besides Leningrad, we’ll spend several days in Volgograd and the rest of our time in Moscow. Actually, this is the second half of a two-way exchange. A ten-person delegation from the Soviet Peace Committee, including Bishop Anthony, Orthodox Bishop of Stavropol, began this exchange last April when we hosted them for two weeks in New England.”
“Yes,” Agafangel interrupted me. “Bishop Anthony told our summer meeting of bishops all about his visit and how hospitable he found New Englanders. He’s most enthusiastic about this project and extends his greetings to you.”
“Well, Bishop Anthony was a star during last spring’s visit,” I continued. “Just before your delegation arrived, New England newspapers gave us a lot of coverage. The story that ‘the Russians are coming’ attracted many letters to the editor. Even our local paper had letters saying that all the delegates would be phonies, just Soviet agents. One letter, to a Bennington, Vermont, newspaper, protested the local school board’s decision to have a school assembly at which Bishop Anthony would speak. Of course he was a fake. In the resulting controversy, the board rescinded their invitation. The New York Times picked up this fascinating tidbit, and the next thing we knew was that a national television host, Ted Koppel, with a show called ‘Night Line,’ wanted to cover the whole exchange and interview Bishop Anthony. Thus, one angry letter gave us over five minutes of national television, something that would have cost us millions to buy. Did Bishop Anthony tell you about this?”
“Indeed, he did,” Agafangel replied. “He also said that, on the television show, some ‘expert’ on the Soviet Union, actually a defector from our country, had strongly implied he was an agent dressed in priest’s clothing.”
“Yes,” I said, “the American public is convinced that religion no longer exists in the USSR. When Bishop Anthony appeared at public meetings, he immediately shattered American stereotypes. That’s a primary goal of our ‘Bridges’ project. As a result of last April’s visit, we’re now discussing the idea of annual exchanges with the Peace Committee and the Soviet Women’s Committee. With your support, we also hope to begin such exchanges with the Russian Orthodox Church.”
“I believe our External Relations Department will be sympathetic to your proposal,” Agafangel said. “Bishop Anthony’s advocacy will be taken seriously.”
We continued talking about our plans for another half hour, as members of our delegation entered the discussion.
After lunch we got on a bus for a city tour. Father Jonathan sat next to me, and we continued our conversation between stops.
First, he wanted to know how I’d become so interested in Russia.
I told him how I’d read The Brothers Karamazov in 1940, then Berdyaev and Solovyov in 1941, and how, after the war, Eugen had encouraged me to follow up on them. My friends had begun to call me a Slavophile.
“Don’t you ever regret dropping your love for Russia, our writers, and our philosophers, in favor of going into business?” Jonathan asked.
“Actually, I never dropped those loves,” I replied. “As owner of a small business, I was master of my own time, so I’ve continued to read and write about Berdyaev and Solovyov, just as I’ve managed to write, almost daily, about Rosenstock-Huessy. Just two years ago I published a book about his work. I titled it Letters to the Third Millennium: An Experiment in East-West Communication because I thought his ideas helped to overcome the East-West ideological divide. Then I’ve also recently produced a second book, a much shorter one, entitled Between East and West: Rediscovering the Gifts of the Russian Spirit. It makes some of the same points as my Letters book but concentrates on how Russian thinkers, from Kireevsky and Khomyakov to Berdyaev, were moving in the same direction as Rosenstock-Huessy and his friend the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig.”
“And what do you mean by ‘the same direction’?” he asked.
“I mean trying to overcome today’s sense that there are two orders of reality, the worldly secular one and the other-worldly religious one,” I replied. “All my mentors challenged the idea that the only real world is the one described to us by natural science, while religion must be consigned to the realm of faith and morals. For them spirit is as real as matter—and God is not a supernatural being but a power alive in each of us. From that perspective, they all sought to reconcile science with religion. I think they’ve disclosed a ‘down-to-earth spirituality,’ one which could reach Kireevsky’s goal of tselnoye znaniye, integral knowledge.”
“Certainly all true Russian philosophers seek such knowledge,” said Jonathan. “But I thought Western thinkers had given up on that.”
He started to ask me another question when our bus arrived back at the Moskva. It was 5:30 p.m. “Wait for me in the lobby,” I told him.
Returning to the lobby, I handed him a spiral-bound notebook containing a copy of my typescript for Between East and West.
“This is that second book I told you about,” I said. “Actually, I finished the text some years ago, but only put it in this book format last year. That was because I wanted to give copies to a few members of the Peace Committee delegation this spring. For years I’ve been looking forward to sharing my thoughts with Russian friends, so I inflicted this on them. And I’ve brought some copies with me on this trip. This one’s for you. It will fill in the chinks of what I told you on the bus.”
As I handed my notebook to Jonathan, a member of our delegation interrupted us—with an emergency about her passport. Fifteen minutes later I returned to complete our goodbye. He looked at me with a quizzical smile.
“I never imagined an American might become so interested in our spiritual heritage,” he said. “I’ve just been glancing through your book, and I find it astonishing. I couldn’t agree with you more that integral knowledge, divine humanity, Trinitarian thinking, and sobornost are four of the most important things to understand in our Russian Idea. Everything else falls into place once you grasp those four. And I’m amazed that you think Kireevsky foresaw your professor’s Cross of Reality. I look forward to reading this American samizdat. Do you know what we mean by that word?”
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s an honored name for ‘self-published’ works like this. One day I’d love to see it published here.”
“Well, patience, then,” Jonathan replied, smiling again, and we agreed to meet when the bus arrived at 10 a.m. the next day.
Father Jonathan at the Moskva
December 2, 1983 – After a day spent seeing the St. Peter and Paul Fortress, then meeting various Peace Committee leaders, our delegation had a quick supper and went to the ballet. I’d arranged to leave them so that I could have a one-on-one supper with my new friend, the physics professor turned priest.
It took us some searching to find a booth in the hotel restaurant where we could talk. Just beyond the booths, there was a dance floor lit up with blue and red lights flashing to half reveal, half conceal practically nude dancing girls waving huge feathery fans. It seemed as if Andropov’s Russia was undergoing some sort of identity crisis!
Finally, we found a corner booth and discretely averted our eyes. We ordered supper and some wine, then resumed our running conversation. Jonathan told me he’d read my whole samizdat and liked it as much as he did at first glance.
“I’m touched by that story about how you almost met Berdyaev,” he began.
That led me to ask if there were any budding Berdyaevs in Russia today.
He thought for a bit, scowling, and then brightened up.
“Yes. There’s one that comes to mind, Sergei Averintsev,” he said. “He’s at the Gorky Institute, and his work appears as literary criticism, but it’s full of unusual religious insight. Then, of course, there’s Mikhail Bakhtin, whose understanding of language is highly spiritual. He died rather recently, in 1975. Have you heard of him, Mr. Gardner?”
“Why, no; why should I?” I asked.
“Well, he’s all the rage in academic life today,” he replied. “Not only here but in France and your country. Actually, I’m surprised you’ve missed him. His interpretation of language and dialogue is a lot like your professor’s.”
“I’m afraid I must be out of touch with the ‘latest rages’ in academia,” I said. Could you tell me more about him?”
“Yes, that’s easy,” he replied. “I’ve a cousin at the Gorky Institute who’s told me a lot about him. He was arrested and exiled in 1929—for participating in a religious discussion group, but today scholars are publishing his work quite freely.”
“Well, I’m fascinated to hear about him,” I said. “I’ll make it a point to look up his work when I get home.”
Then I asked him if there were any Western religious thinkers whose works one could get in the USSR.
“Certainly not in our bookstores,” he replied. “But last year our Leningrad Theological Seminary was able to get copies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I teach a course there on Protestant thought, and now I include that book. I like what you wrote about him in your samizdat, where you compare his understanding of God with Solovyov’s—and say that both of them were panentheistic.”
“Actually, I think Bonhoeffer may have been influenced by Solovyov and Berdyaev,” I replied. “In a biography by his friend Eberhard Bethge, I learned that Bonhoeffer had been attracted to these thinkers the same way I had—by reading Hans Ehrenberg’s Eastern Christianity.”
“And is there any interest in panentheism in the US today?”
“Actually, I think it’s just beginning to attract attention,” I replied. “I’ve recently read a great book, Original Blessing, by a Dominican scholar named Matthew Fox. He advocates what he calls a ‘panentheistic spirituality’ and cites Berdyaev in support of it.”
Jonathan nodded. “It’s heartening to think that the West may learn some things from us, though I must admit that we still need to relearn them ourselves,” he said. “But now let me ask you another question. How do you understand what Bonhoeffer meant by ‘religionless Christianity.’ That’s a difficult concept for my students.”
“Well, Father Jonathan,” I replied, “you’ll recall in my samizdat’s preface how I describe Camp William James. And how that project has been recognized as an inspiration for the American Peace Corps. Then how I say that both those projects lie behind our idea of US-USSR Bridges for Peace.”
“Yes, I can certainly see how those three projects are related,” he said.
“Then can you also see how we might call all three of them acts of ‘religionless Christianity,’ volunteers taking time out of their lives to meet the needs of our planetary society?” I asked.
“Why, yes, I can,” he replied. “I’ll try that on my students. Thank you.”
After that we closed shop. We’d demolished a bottle of wine, it was approaching 11 p.m., and the fan dancers had done their last number. As I was paying our bill, Jonathan asked me, “Did you meet much opposition in starting this project?”
“Not much, really,” I replied. “From the start we had the support of Dartmouth’s Russian Department. The only vociferous opposition was from Natalya Solzhenitsyn. She wrote a letter to our newspaper in which she said that ‘speaking for myself and my husband, you are building a bridge that will never reach the other side.’ Did you know that the Solzhenitsyns live in Vermont?”
“Yes, I did,” Jonathan replied. “And I hope you do ‘reach the other side.’ But you must admit, with the current rhetoric between our governments, the outlook isn’t promising. Do you really think that this ‘citizen diplomacy’ you’re proposing could make a difference?”
“Let me quote a distinguished American on that,” I said. “The anthropologist Margaret Meade put it very well. She said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
“I suppose she’s right,” the priest said, smiling. “Thank you for the dinner. I’ll meet you at 9 a.m. in the lobby.”
Yuri Zamoshkin at the Institute
Moscow – December 13, 1983 – We got back from Volgograd two days ago. Then yesterday we had a meeting at the Office for External Relations of the Orthodox Church. There, as Agafangel had predicted, we were able to make plans for exchange visits between Russian and American clergy. At the same time, some of the women in our group met with the head of the Soviet Women’s Committee and made plans for exchange visits that would bring Soviet women writers, educators, and other professionals into contact with their American counterparts.
With that productive morning behind us, this afternoon we had what I think was the best meeting of our whole visit. We were the guests of Yuri Zamoshkin at his Institute for the Study of the US and Canada. When Yuri had led the Russians to New England last April, on the first leg of this exchange, I’d found him the perfect man for that role. Trained as a sociologist, he’s head of the section on US politics at this institute, a think tank whose thought gets respectful attention in the Kremlin.
In his late-fifties, with graying hair and a white moustache, Yuri’s alert and handsome. Add his tweed jacket, and he could easily have defected to the Dartmouth Sociology Department on that morning when its head, Elise Boulding, had welcomed him for a faculty discussion.
At 2 p.m. this afternoon we entered Yuri’s lair. Our group filed into a large meeting room in the Institute’s 18th century building. Since Georgy Arbatov, who heads the organization, was not in town, Yuri welcomed us and introduced the several scholars who’d be joining us in the afternoon’s “workshop” discussions. Just as I’d requested, we then broke into small groups which met in different corners of the room.
I joined a group led by Sergei Filatov, who heads an Institute section that studies religion in the US. We considered how the American psyche is formed, to a high degree, by Protestant individualism, while the Russian psyche is formed more by Orthodox sobornost. The illness of the American psyche, we all agreed, is an excessive preoccupation with one’s self, the almighty I, while the illness of the Russian psyche is a too centralized and authoritarian version of sobornost. Tsarism, of course, offered the Russians no real sobornost, and Communism provided even less. It put all the emphasis on “the glorious future” of all and gave only lip-service to the genuine freely formed community of we.
Groups in the other corners of the room discussed environmental issues, arms control and cultural questions. After the first hour, we all circulated to another group. I chose the one on arms control, where a young man named Andrei Kokoshin was the Russian discussant. As we got going, we became less interested in the details of various treaties than in the ideological dynamics behind the military confrontation. I said that the US idealogues are essentially “monological”; they shun dialogue as if it were a sign of weakness. In both countries, we and Kokoshin agreed, there are plenty of such people: hawks who drive the arms race. In the US détente has been in trouble since 1977 when Paul Nitze and his Committee on the Present Danger led a most successful effort to revive the Cold War. With hard-line ideologues, like Richard Perle, feeding their propaganda, their superhawk line was that the Soviet Union was about to launch and “win” a nuclear war.
“Yes, we believe that the Nitze committee played an important role in leading to the brinkmanship we experience today,” Kokoshin commented. “You can be sure they’ve awakened an equally ideological constituency here.”
At that point I brought up the American Committee on US-Soviet Relations. I’d learned a lot about that organization since my old friend Arthur Cox now serves as its Secretary. Its honorary chairman is George Kennan and its leadership is made up of distinguished like-minded figures. I said that this committee provides an effective counter to the Nitze group’s hard line; it regularly engages in dialogue with prominent Soviet visitors and sends its members to the USSR for similar discussions. I then quoted a clipping I had with me, an article by Kennan in the New York Times. There he writes: “I object to people who talk about war as though it were perfectly natural that if you could go to war, you would. Normally, people have gone to war for a purpose, and if they didn’t have a purpose, they wouldn’t do it. And I don’t see the purpose from the point of view of the Soviet government.”
Kokoshin nodded his agreement. “We can only hope that your Kennans—and ours—will prevail over our ideologues.”
When we ended the workshops at 4, I thanked Yuri and his colleagues for providing the most meaningful discussions we’d had on our visit. Then I arranged to stay on with Yuri in his office, while the others returned to our hotel.
Over tea Yuri told me that his institute would be glad to cooperate with us on “Bridges” future exchanges. And I told him that this morning we’d confirmed plans to begin annual exchanges with both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet Women’s Committee.
“You must be pleased to see all this happening,” Yuri said. “Arbatov was impressed when I told him that William Sloane Coffin had addressed our group in Russian. And he was interested in that book you gave me in the States, your Letters to the Third Millennium. I’ve shown it to other colleagues because I rather like the social model you present, that Cross of Reality, and the “dialogical method” you derive from it. In fact I was quite struck by the way you described that cross as codifying common sense. It seems evident to me that one should tackle any question from the four viewpoints you present.”
“Well, this is a milestone,” I said. “I had to come all the way to the USSR to find an academic who appreciated the Cross of Reality!”
“I’ve given your book to a sociologist colleague at Moscow State University. I think he’ll be interested in your presentation of metanomics. Then I especially liked your closing chapter—about the need for projects like Bridges for Peace. I see you’ve been nourishing this idea of citizen dialogue for years. And I was interested to learn how you became so enthusiastic about Solovyov and Berdyaev.”
“Yes. Remember our talks about them in my Saab—while you and I drove to speaking events last April? How I confessed I’d been a Slavophile since the 1940s?”
“I certainly do. But I must say Russian philosophy is not—how do you say?—‘my bag.’ Still, I have close friends at our Institute of Philosophy, and I passed on to one of them that second book you gave me, in typescript, Between East and West. I can’t say that I got beyond its preface. I think the subtitle was something about rediscovering the gifts of the Russian spirit.”
“Yes, that was it.”
“I hope you won’t take this in the wrong way, Clint, but I question whether Russia could ever ‘reconnect with her Silver Age,’ as you wrote in your preface. Like Western Europe, our culture today is quite secular. Only a small minority of our population are believers, hardly ten percent. We’re like Western Europe, nowhere near as religious as the US. We’re no longer the country of Dostoevsky and Solovyov. They’re essentially premodern.”
“And I hope you won’t take this in the wrong way, either, Yuri. But I think both of those ‘has-beens’ belong to the future. You still recite Pushkin’s ‘Prophet’ in school, I’m told. Somehow, I believe Dostoevsky and Solovyov will remain your prophets.”
Yuri must have been expecting my determined reply. He smiled somewhat grimly.
“Well, I have colleagues who agree with you,” he said. “I just wanted to give you my honest opinion.”
“I’m glad you did. Tomorrow our group is going to Zagorsk, to the Trinity-St. Sergius monastery. That’s about as pre-modern as you can get!”
“Have a good trip,” my sociologist friend replied. “I’ve never been there, but I’m sure you’ll find it fascinating. I look forward to your next visit here.”
At the Trinity Cathedral
Moscow – December 14, 1983 - As I’d expected, today’s trip to the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery, forty-three miles northeast of Moscow, turned out to be the high point of our trip. Within those great crenellated fourteenth-century walls one could feel the heartbeat of Russia—and of the Eastern Church.
From listening to sonorous chant, to viewing golden onion domes, to praying before an icon screen, to smelling incense, to hearing the seminary dean tell us of their program here, to sitting at lunch with the priests—our ears and eyes, lips and noses, minds, mouths and stomachs, hands and feet—had made our bodies full participants in the mystery of that place.
At lunch I told the dean I hoped he’d come to the US on one of the yearly exchange visits we’d now agreed to begin with the Russian Orthodox Church.
At the end of our visit, as the others in our group took the path back to our bus, I lingered at the entrance to Trinity Cathedral. Then I stepped inside once more, went quickly to St. Sergius’s sarcophagus in the dimly lit interior, crossed myself, and knelt.
Open Christianity
Leningrad - September 19, 1990 - This is my ninth visit to Peter’s city on the marsh. When Natalya Solzhenitsyn said that our bridges would “never reach the other side,” she must have thought we’d never get beyond the facades of the Potemkin villages the Soviet system would erect. Perhaps she’d have been right if we hadn’t learned the language and didn’t know the history. When “Bridges” hired an Executive Director in 1985, Richard Hough-Ross, who’d been pastor of the UCC church in Peacham, Vermont, he soon became more fluent in Russian than I.
I think I should write Natalya when I get back. I’ve gotten to know her, since she’s a regular customer in Shopping International’s Norwich store. I’m sure she’d be surprised to learn about the progress that “Bridges” has made over the past seven years. I’d tell her how we’ve had regular exchanges with the Orthodox Church, the Peace Committee, the Women’s Committee, and several academic institutes. And how we’ve established offices in all the New England states, with their governors often welcoming Soviet delegations.
I’d explain that our greatest achievement was to serve as a sort of catalyst and model for many similar groups. In fact, our idea of ‘citizen diplomacy’ has spread like wildfire—so that now there is a national network of over a hundred cooperating groups, some in almost every state. That network’s sent over fifty thousand Americans to the USSR and brought similar thousands of “Soviets” to the US. Since all our exchanges seek television and press coverage, millions in each country have learned about what we’re doing. In the USSR we’ve found many groups glad to participate, not only in Moscow but in at least twenty other cities, from Tallinn to Baku.
We’ve even been invited to meet Gorbachev in the Kremlin! In February 1987, Mikhail invited seven hundred persons who had close ties with the USSR to come to a three-day conference in Moscow, one that ended with a Kremlin reception to meet him and the rest of the Politburo. Incredibly, Andrei Sakharov—the physicist who’d built their hydrogen bomb, and later become their most famous dissident—was at this “coming out party.” Even more incredibly, I was able to have a long conversation with him about our “Bridges” project—which he heartily approved.
I know that Natalya has heard some of this progress, but I think that she and Alexander would be especially interested in the story of the project that we’ve begun this week. For the last three days I’ve been meeting with Konstantin Ivanov, president of a new organization called Open Christianity. Their ambitious goal is to start a school and college which will make Christian education a core part of their curriculum. Tony Ugolnik, a “Bridges” activist, had put me in touch with them, thinking that we might be able to help them. The first step in their plans is to acquire a two-story block-long building at one end of Nevsky Prospekt.
Yesterday Konstantin and I toured that large but decrepit building, and then discussed their plans over lunch.
Before we began on the building, Konstantin said he’d heard from Tony that I’d had a lifelong interest in Solovyov and Berdyaev—and noted that the college would be teaching their work, along with that of other Silver Age thinkers.
I said I was delighted to hear that, and how these Russians had always been like beacons for me. Then Konstantin asked how I’d become so interested in Russia.
I told him about reading Dostoevsky in 1940, then Solovyov and his successors from 1941 onward—and about meeting those 4,000 Russian prisoners at Buchenwald. Then I said I had an even better answer to his question. I reached into my briefcase and presented him with a copy of my little spiral-bound book Between East and West.
Konstantin thanked me, started looking through it, then explained that his English was too primitive to read it. However, he had an associate in Open Christianity who’d be able to translate some of it for them.
He then went on to describe how the Leningrad City Council had received their request to acquire the building—and had indicated they might make a positive response. However, they were concerned that Open Christianity might not have the funds to make even the minimum repairs necessary. Konstantin said that, if Bridges for Peace could give him a letter indicating that we’d help them secure financing, he thought that would swing the deal.
I replied that we had no cash reserves and that we survived only because volunteers gave us their time. Still, I’d consider writing such a letter if it were understood that there was no firm commitment. It would say that “Bridges” would make every effort to raise $50,000 toward repairs of the building. I’d have the Peace Committee office type it up on our impressive letterhead, which showed distinguished academics on our Advisory Council. And I’d have it for him the next day, when we’d meet for lunch again.
Konstantin thought that would be perfect. I left him and went back to the second part of my agenda here: leading a group of New England businessmen who plan to teach business management to budding Soviet entrepreneurs next spring. Among them is Tony Neidecker, an old friend from Exeter days. “Bridges” is launching that program under the name “The Transnational Institute,” and we have a prominent Soviet economist, Nikolai Shmelev as our Russian president.
I drafted the protocol last night, took it to the Peace Committee this morning, then delivered it to Konstantin at noon at the Moskva. He was immediately captivated. The fact that the money was by no means in hand was irrelevant. The old myth that US streets are paved with gold gave the document its clout.
With the building behind us, over lunch I told Konstantin how “Bridges” was seeking Russian partners to launch a program which would be concerned with the renewal of Russian spiritual life. We were thinking of kicking the program off with a fall 1991 conference, hopefully with its first sessions for three days in Leningrad and its concluding sessions for three days in Moscow. I explained that we’d already found Moscow partners in the Institute of Philosophy and a little organization called Put, and asked him if Open Christianity might be the sponsor of the Leningrad sessions.
“Why, yes,” said Konstantin confidently. “We’ve got active members in Leningrad University and also in the theological academy. I’m sure we could sponsor the Leningrad sessions. And which Americans would you invite?”
“There aren’t many specialists on Russian philosophy,” but a friend of mine at Dartmouth, Lev Loseff, has suggested we try to get George Kline from Bryn Mawr, James Scanlan from Ohio State, Bernice Rosenthal from Fordham, Andrzej Walicki from Notre Dame, and Caryl Emerson from Princeton. If some of those scholars agree to come, their colleagues would take our conference seriously.”
I then went on to explain that we weren’t planning to launch this project under the name “Bridges for Peace.” We hoped that the initial conference sponsors—Open Christianity and the Institute of Philosophy—would also want to help us form a new and more appropriate sponsoring organization.”
“And what would that be?”
“We’re thinking about reconstituting the Vladimir Solovyov Society.”
“You mean the one founded by Sergei Bulgakov?”
“Yes, the one he started in Moscow in 1905. As you know, Berdyaev was active in it, and it continued, through the war and revolution, until 1922. We hope you’ll help us refound that society next year in Moscow. We’re thinking of it as a transnational organization, with secretariats in Moscow, Leningrad, the US, and other countries.”
“Why, certainly, Mr. Gardner. The timing is perfect. Our countrymen are reading a lot of Berdyaev and Solovyov today—since Gorbachev’s glasnost. Such a society would certainly find support.”
We ended on that note, since I had to rejoin our group for our second meeting at the bank, and then get ready for our train trip to Moscow tonight. Out in the Moskva lobby, Konstantin and I shook hands, promised ongoing cooperation, and said goodbye.
“The timing is perfect.” I certainly hope so. For over forty years I’ve been dreaming of this moment. What will the 1990s bring? A normal Russia? One interested in recovering her pre-communist heritage?
Almost a year ago, November 9, 1989, Gorbachev let the Berlin wall be torn down, thereby ending the Cold War. Libby and I were soldiers in Berlin when that war began. Others are already claiming they ended it. The Reaganites say their star wars forced the Reds to throw in the towel. We citizen diplomats say we certainly helped to end it: by dissipating the mutual enemy images.
Maybe Reagan and we did play a role, but I still think Mikhail deserves more of the credit. He did not so much capitulate to superior military power as acknowledge the rot within. It was the challenge of Sakharov, and the millions who agreed with him, that brought the system to collapse. Russians were simply no longer willing to live for an empty ideal.
I wonder what my Open Christianity friends will think of my samizdat when they learn more about its contents. Will they share my enthusiasm for Eugen, Bonhoeffer, and religionless Christianity? Will they understand why I found the Russian philosophers to be allies? After all, the name “Open Christianity” suggests Christianity beyond the church. Perhaps my little book will make sense to them.
Norwich, Vermont – December 11th, 1990 – This morning, out of the blue, I received a fax from Open Christianity. They plan to publish my samizdat; indeed, they’ve already translated it! Amazed and delighted, I’ve faxed them back to give them my OK.
February 5, 1991 – Nikolai Shmelev faxed me a copy of the letter he’s just sent to his friend Mayor Sobchak, endorsing Open Christianity and supporting its application to the Leningrad City Council.
March 26, 1991 – Another fax from Open Christianity. My letter plus Shmelev’s did the trick. They’ve finally got their building!
To continue, click: Chapter 10 The Solovyov Society