Georgiy
Trubnikov
RUSSIAN
CHRISTIAN-DEMOCRAT
MANIFESTO
Translated
from Russian by
Anthony
de Meeus
St-Petersburg
1996
CONTENTS
I.
Russia, an ailing nation
II.
Christian Russia
Russia's Christian predestination
Not a restoration, but a renaissance
Religion and politics
The Christian attitude
-
towards human beings
-
towards the family
-
towards property
-
towards pluralism
-
towards the State
The intelligentsia and Christianity
State and Christianity
III.
Democratic Russia
Recognising the achievements of the past decade
-
within the space of a year
-
within a 10-year period
Eschewing democratic dogmatism
Overcoming pseudo-patriotism
Towards the social market economy
IV.
An age of enlightenment
A culture for a culture-less society
Elitism in the education system
Atheism in the education system
Culture and development of the personality
V.
Openness of Christian Democracy
I.
RUSSIA, AN AILING NATION
A
population with an inadequate conception of God
shall
also have an inadequate State,
An
inadequate Government, inadequate laws
Hegel
"We are living in a sick society", "Russia is an ailing nation" - these assertions are being heard more and more often.
However, hardly anyone has sought to make an diagnosis of the condition,
as this would mean facing up to the fact that it is affecting not only, and not
so much, the State and the economy, but the Russian people themselves. The
adoration of the people as a form of idolatry is the key impediment to an honest
and bold process of self-assessment.
The pace of reforms, the performance of the new economic and political
models and the progress achieved on the road to development - all of these
factors are determined to a great extent by the state of the population itself,
its mentality, its conscience. Neither the German model, nor the Swedish model,
nor the Latin American model can be organically and integrally transposed into
Russia. An honest assessment reveals a series of unattractive sides to the
Russian character:
- self-delusion and a refusal to repent
- a tendency to blame outside forces for one's own misfortunes
- a tendency to both kowtow to and despise authority
- irrationalism as an alternative to culture
- envy of the wealthy and equality proclaimed in poverty.
By perpetrating for decades a veritable genocide of the people: through
the physical destruction of the representatives of culture (the nobility), of
spirituality (the priests), of the entrepreneurial spirit (the middle classes),
of the work ethic (the well-to-do peasant
farmer) and of the intellectual spirit (scholars, writers), the contribution of
the communist dictatorship to the construction of this mentality has been
fundamental.
However, the causes of all the ills suffered by Russia have much deeper
roots. The people destroyed
religion by their own hands, and by the hands of their descendants, forgetful of
their own roots, and this means the people's faith was fragile.
Russian
society, and particularly the intelligentsia, began to reject religious belief
already in the 19th century. Both the Revolution and the events it spawned were
but a result of a spiritual crisis. As a result, all reform programs are doomed
to failure unless they address the fundamental factor: the spiritual basis of
society. As far as we are concerned, this basis is Christianity in all its moral
and cultural dimensions and its religious depth.
Today, at a time when Christianity has only just begun its process of
renewal and democracy is only beginning to emerge,
we,
Christian Democrats of Russia,
see
our country in the Third millenium, as
Christian
Russia and democratic Russia.
You can take the full text of the MANIFESTO in .zip =43 KB