16.04.2025, Aleksandrovskoye.
Russia must reject the consumerist society that it has built to go on to another footing, political scientist and philosopher Sergey Kurginyan wrote in his article “War and Peace” in the Essence of Time newspaper issue published on April 1.
Kurginyan noted that the consumerist society in Russia was built over a much longer period than the post-Soviet 30 years; in fact, this process began right after the victory over fascism in 1945.
According to Kurginyan, in order to describe the Soviet society after the victory in the “sacred war,” and the Great Patriotic War was exactly that kind of a war, it is correct to use the Islamic idea about a small and a great jihad, i.e. a jihad of the sword and a jihad of the spirit.
“The Soviet society was a good society of peace and still a society that was ready to go to a jihad of the sword as soon as it becomes necessary again… But it was not a society of a jihad of the spirit. This is why its existence was inevitably fading away,” the philosopher noted.
From this “fading away,” according to Kurginyan, the post-Soviet society went to an open war against “an infernal and regressive kind” of existence, which can be considered as “a negative alternative to the Soviet positive existence.”
“However, although this position was absolutely right, the Soviet society turned out to be quite vulnerable strategically and metaphysically. Because it essentially lacked metaphysics. This lack of metaphysics is still worse in the post-Soviet society,” Kurginyan writes.
According to Kurginyan, this collision was perfectly clear to the Nazis, whom the Soviet soldier defeated in 1945, who hated the USSR, and who prepared for a revenge for decades.
“It is this kind of Nazis that defeated the Soviet Union after it refused to follow a jihad of the spirit back in 1945,” the political scientist said.
Today, Russia must not stay on the footing of consumerism, regress, and anomy; “staying on this footing, we cannot hold out in the 21st century, which will be a century of wars of even greater intensity than the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war.”
“One thing remains unclear: how we can turn to the path to which even a very, very prominent leader, and Joseph Stalin certainly was that kind of a leader, failed to direct our country,” Kurginyan writes.
Kurginyan noted that his approach can look “maximalist,” but “the measure of maximalism is determined by the time.”
“If my assessment of what is coming is right, then we will have to learn maximalism again. And this learning will be very, very bitter. But its alternative is the death of our country and the world,” the leader of Essence of Time concluded.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
