I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
This was the theme of Winston Churchill’s first wartime broadcast on the BBC. Ideological enemies Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had just signed a non-aggression pact and thus paved the way for World War II.
7 November does not explain the enigma, but it does provide some instances of mystery.
7 November has been the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution since 1918. It was particularly worked up under Stalin as a march past. On 7 November 1941, the march past was famously poignant. The regiments were marching through the Red Square to the front on the day the Nazis had scheduled their own troops to perform their own march past.
The first mystery – the reference to October – is easily met. The Julian date of the revolution – the Old Style, as it is said – was 25 October 1917. We know 7 November is the New Style because when in 1919 US Attorney General Palmer wanted to round up various anarchists, socialists and communists for deportation, 7 November was deliberately chosen as the two-year anniversary.
The second mystery, or better an odd coincidence, is that Leon Trotsky was born on 7 November 1879. Trotsky was with Lenin the central figure of the October revolution but was above all things the object of Stalinist blackguarding, famously falling to an assassin’s ice axe in Mexico in 1940.
Stalin didn’t think much of Richard Sorge either. Sorge was the enigmatic Russian spy stationed in Japan. Sorge is said to have informed Russia of the exact day Hitler would renege on his pact and Stalin is said to have retorted:
There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack… Are you suggesting I should believe him too?
Well, yes. Sorge was right. Sorge was executed by the Japanese on 7 November 1944.
While Russia itself moved to the Gregorian calendar in January 1918, the Russian Orthodox Church has not. The Church itself suffered considerably in the new Russia. With a number of bishops in voluntary exile the Patriarch of Moscow, the synod and the council issued a resolution which came to be seen as an authorisation of an independent body still known as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. The resolution issued on 7 November 1920. Whatever the doctrinal consequences, the body has achieved a religious modernity of sorts with a crisp web address that much larger churches can merely envy, “synod.com”.
Dmitry Kozak was born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on 7 November 1958. He has been close to President Putin for many years and was described on the UK government’s list of “financial sanctions targets” as “Former Deputy Prime Minister… Deputy Chief of Staff to the Presidential Executive Office and de facto chief Russian negotiator on Ukraine”. Kozak was sanctioned for his role in the Crimean crisis.
At the other end of Russian political respectability, Nadya Tolokonnikova was born on 7 November 1989. She was a member of the art group Pussy Riot and famously arrested for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” after a performance in a Moscow church in 2012. Since her release she has appeared as herself in a cameo in House of Cards. The release itself is said by some to have been a propaganda stunt as Russia prepared to host the 2014 Winter Olympics under the management of Kozak.
With more recent events, Kozak has had his Olympic Order withdrawn by the Olympic Movement due to his role in the Ukraine invasion. It may be a little rough, as very early on Kozak is reported to have got for Putin – and to have had Putin reject – Ukraine’s agreement not to opt for NATO membership. Meanwhile, Tolokonnikova helped set up Ukraine DAO, a crypto fundraiser for the country.
Whatever the intricacies and tragedies of the Russo-Ukraine war, it does cause one to reflect on Churchill’s key to the enigma being “Russian national interest”.
The west views the war as an invasion by one nation against another. That is so, but when the first nation has as one of the wartime leaders a person who was born in the second nation when it was part of the first nation, one wonders whether the key may more be the process of answering “what is the nation of Russia”.
