Only the depth of human contacthere can carry them through
now.
I shared a train compartment with Mongolian Black Marketeers,
shared a room on Lake Baikal with a young Russian woman living in Siberia
whose family had been "successful" communists in the "businessman" sense,
and shared a day or so of the four-day train ride to Moscow with an older
Russian woman living in Paris whose father had been exiled to Siberia in
1937 by Stalin because he was a real communist." All this is before I
even arrived in Moscow, where I was to meet with Russian
psychotherapists, but it certainly added depth to my picture of what
people from that part of the world are like.
One point jumped out at me immediately: Russia is in no position
not to be pragmatic. The collapse of the Russian economy in the wake of
the overnight switch to a market economy colors everything and deeply
impacts everybody.
All psychology in Russia should be - must be - viewed with three
factors in mind: The nature of the Russian soul, the current state of the
Russian economy, and the incredible number of losses in Russian families
due to Stalin's purges. There is unresolved bereavement on a massive
scale.
I wish I could find a way to talk about the Russian soul: I almost
think it is better not to even try. It is very difficult for an American
who has not experienced Russians in Russia to understand. You almost have
to be there; maybe you do have to be there.
The Nature of the Russian Soul
It is something that just does not exist in this country on the
scale it exists there. I am not as articulate nor as clear on this
subject as I would like. I am not sure the world has much of a language
for it anyway - or, at least, the English-speaking world. I find that the
clarity of my own sense of that soul fades when I get back home, where I
am drowned in our familiar market mentality, consumer crush, the
measuring of everything in dollars and cents - "is it cost effective"
-and our starkly contrasting individualism. To try to talk about soul
here in the United States makes me feel like it might just get people
looking at me like I am a displaced sixties hippie or solipsistic,
latter-day New Ager.
This much is for sure. There is a consensus among all the Americans
we have brought to Russia for these three years of conferences: Being
there is a deeply nurturing experience; we feel that which "Russians have
to offer Americans." It is a depth of human contact in the ordinary
course of life's events that they maintain.
The Russians have a sense of connectedness to themselves and to
other human beings that is just not a part of American reality. It isn't
that competitiveness does not exist; it is just that there always seems
to be more consideration and respect for others in any given situation.
And it may be that feeling of connectedness that will bring them through
these terrible economic trials they have now entered.
Elena, the Russian economist who is part of our meeting group,
thinks it will. The Russians seem not to make the divorce between "hard"
science and heart and soul that we do in the United States. Elena is
probably a classic example. In her position as a part of the Academy of
National Economy, a division of the Academy of Science, she works in
facts and statistics all day long; when you ask her how (how in the
world!) she thinks they will make it, she gives you a metaphysical
answer. The scientist part of her gave a presentation that showed us how
it was absolutely impossible for the economy to begin to work. Yet, she
says, "I am not pessimistic."
None of the known resources of the modern world are in place.
Pushed to the wall of reality, the economic structure of their country
collapsing around them - nothing in anybody's theory of economics to
provide any basis for hope, let alone comfort - still they hope. For
what, I had asked.
What she hopes in is the Russian people's resilience and will to
save themselves. Her own 67-year-old mother laughs at her when she talks
of her anxiety about the coming winter. These new hardships are nothing
compared to the hardships endured in the Russia of her memory - after
all, there are no wholesale murders going on, armies are not marching on
Moscow, people are not starving in the streets. It is such endurance that
gives Elena hope. That endurance coupled with faith in the very
generative force of Life itself to sweep her people up into cooperative
ventures with one another at the grass-roots level. Even though she, as
an expert in economics, sees no objective hope, in her heart she bears
the faith of her forefathers and foremothers who had literally given
their lives to see freedom for the people of Russia.
The Russians used a word, sovest, which seemed not easily
translated, but may correspond roughly to the Jungian concept of a higher
self. It is on the sovest in each of the people of Russia that Elena pins
her hope for the future of her country.
In these people, who have been so bludgeoned by czars and dictators
and KGB for a 1,000 years, that faith is more than inspirational; it is
awe-inspiring. No family was left untouched by the bloody hand of Stalin.
Forced into an existential position of feeling like it is useless to make
plans, they rely on the now - the new possibility in each new moment and
in the awareness that they can address themselves to being responsible
and "making the right choices" as the moment reveals a time for choice.
It seems to be like trusting in the Tao, although they did not use those
words.
Tags:
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market economy,
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mentality,
psychology,
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Russia,
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russian families,
russian soul,
russian woman,
siberia,
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