von Leers: Eastern Prophecy - An analysis of the Russian Soul
[Der Weg 1951-11] An original translation of „Östliche Prophetie“
Title: Eastern Prophecy - An analysis of the Russian Soul [de: Östliche Prophetie]
Author: Johan von Leers
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 05, Issue 11 (November 1951)
Page(s): 787-795
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
Der Weg - El Sendero is a German and Spanish language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos-Aires, Argentina by Germans with connections to the defeated Third Reich.
Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.
See the von Leers Index page for more information on his life and pseudonyms.
This essay explores the profound and often misunderstood significance of Russia, a theme illuminated by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prophetic insights into a world that once seemed mad but now reflects our own, as noted in C. M. Woodhouse’s biography. The West’s historical failures to grasp Russia’s essence—from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s struggles to Napoleon’s miscalculations and Germany’s defeat in WWII—reveal a strength rooted not in mere military might but in a deep spiritual and historical mission. This mission, traced through the lens of Russian messianism from the "Third Rome" concept articulated by figures like Jurij Krishanic and Philotheus to the secular visions of thinkers like Chaadaev and the Slavophiles, casts Russia as a unique entity destined to bear a divine kingdom. The essay highlights how this belief has fueled Russia’s resilience, shaping its identity against external threats and Western misjudgments across centuries. It argues that Russia’s power transcends conventional understanding, posing it not as an enigma to be solved but as a force to be reckoned with on its own terms. Through vivid storytelling and historical critique, the piece invites readers to reconsider Russia’s role on the world stage, grounded in its enduring sense of destiny and spiritual depth.
Source Document(s):
[LINK] Scans of 1951 Der Weg Issues (archive.org)
Eastern Prophecy
An analysis of the Russian Soul
Johan von Leers
I’ve thought it out and this is what I’ve decided: if I escape, even with money and a passport, even if I get to America, I shall be reassured by the thought that I’m escaping not to find joy or happiness, but in truth to another kind of punishment, just as harsh as here! Just as harsh, I tell you honestly, Aleksei, just as harsh! I know America—to hell with it, and I hate it before I’ve even been there.
Grusha can come with me, but look at her: could she be American? She’s Russian, Russian to the core, she’ll pine for her homeland, and every hour of the day I’ll have to watch and know that it’s because of me she’s unhappy, because of me she’s taken up such a cross—what has she done to deserve it? And I’m afraid that those cowboys over there will prove to be too much for me, even though every last one of them is perhaps better than me! I hate America already! They may have the most incredible engineers, but to hell with them, they’re not my sort of people, not kindred spirits! It’s Russia I love, Aleksei, I love the Russian God, although I’m a scoundrel! Yes, I shall give up the ghost there!’ he exclaimed, his eyes suddenly flashing.
His voice shook with emotions. ‘So, this is what I’ve decided, Alyosha, listen!’ he resumed, having overcome his emotion. ‘Grusha and I will go there—and we'll plough the land, we’ll work by ourselves among the wild bears, in some distant part. There must be some deserted corner over there! They say there are still some redskins somewhere, in the back of beyond—that’s where we'll go, to the land of the last of the Mohicans. And we'll start learning the language straight away, Grusha and I. Nothing but work and grammar for at least three years. In three years we'll have learnt to speak English like real English people. And as soon as we've learnt it—that’ll be the end of America for us! We’ll come back here to Russia, as American citizens. Don’t worry, we won’t show our faces here. We’ll go into hiding somewhere in the far north or down south.
I’ll have changed by that time, and so will she; I’ll get a doctor over there in America to fix me up with a wart—they’re full of tricks over there. Or else I’ll poke out one of my eyes and grow a grey beard down to my waist (I’ll go grey from homesickness), and hope no one will recognize me. And if I’m recognized, they can send me to the salt mines—so what, it doesn’t matter! Here too we’ll plough the land somewhere in the back of beyond, and I’ll pass myself off as an American for the rest of my life. At least we’ll die in our native land. That’s my plan and I won’t change it.
The Karamazov Brothers, Epilogue 2, For A Moment A Lie Becomes The Truth
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, as translated by Ignat Avsey
In the final chapter of his biography of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, set to be published this year, the British scholar C. M. Woodhouse writes:
“People who, a generation ago in their youth, first read Dostoevsky when his works were newly translated, said of him that they found the world he depicted authentic and logical within its own logic—akin to a fairyland, yet utterly mad by ordinary standards; only now do they grasp that the world Dostoevsky portrayed is the very one we inhabit today. Herein lies a sober warning. For the very signs by which we recognize it as our own are those that, thirty years ago, seemed insane and, in Dostoevsky’s own lifetime, meaningless; much remains obscure even now, awaiting the next generation to illuminate it. Anyone eager to sense how the world of today might feel fifty years hence can do no better than to revisit those passages of Dostoevsky—especially in The Possessed—that strike them as the most mad and incomprehensible. One day, they will seem anything but. Yet no fixed date exists for when all of Dostoevsky will stand revealed.”
Ancient is the Eastern prophecy, and perhaps it ranks among those spiritual forces of Russia that the West has least understood and at which it has most grievously failed.
For the West has faltered against Russia time and again. From 1500 to 1795, the “Royal Republic” of Poland waged near-constant war against this Russia and its claim to a divine mission, only to be ultimately subdued by it—all the battles it won forgotten, all the lessons it gained ignored by Western Europe. Charles XII of Sweden reached Poltava; throughout the eighteenth century, the Swedes clashed repeatedly with Russia—their experiences faded from memory, the “old Swede” reduced to a jovial, bearded, hard-drinking figure in clinking ballads, until the poet Verner von Heidenstam penned a vibrant novel about these “Caroleans”—yet Sweden, too, failed to fathom the Russian strength wielded by Peter the Great. Napoleon I marshaled the might of nearly all Western Europe and seized Moscow. He failed, and the shallow claim that “General Winter” vanquished him rings hollow—lurking behind it glows Count Rostopchin’s face, ablaze with passionate fury, Kutuzov issuing his order “Stand firm and die!” while the axes of the Russian militia flash, hewing down Eugène de Beauharnais’s colorful Italian guards at Maloyaroslavets. And then came we Germans—not undone in this war by this or that, by radar or aircraft, nor by the “Atlantic Charter,” the “moral heights of democracy,” Thomas Mann’s radio addresses, nor even by communism or “Little Father Stalin,” though he stands as this era’s mightiest figure—no, we faltered at Russia itself, at our leaders’ failure to comprehend it, so that in place of divisions that swiftly surrendered emerged vast armies and partisans of a people utterly unleashed.
We stumbled over the Russian question. Russia devoured our armies and threw our psychology off its hinges.
Now others stand before the Sphinx that is Russia, poring over their Dostoevsky, approaching it with prejudices different yet surely as grotesque as ours were. We sit by history’s roadside, alongside the mustachioed nobleman of the fallen Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the blond-bearded Swedish soldier of Charles XII, and Napoleon’s grizzled grognard—all of whom faltered against Russia too. And we speak of Russia…
They all spoke of Russia.
What mysterious force stands behind this Russia?
In the days of the Orthodox Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich IV, the Terrible, a monk from what is now Yugoslavia resided in Moscow—an educated man named Jurij Križanić, amidst the grim, despotic Moscow of around 1560—and he taught that Russia was destined to rekindle the fading light of Christianity in Europe and assume the mantle of Byzantium, the last Roman Empire, lost to the Turks a century prior. Moscow would become the “Third Rome.” Tsar Ivan the Terrible exiled him—yet he embraced the doctrine of the Third Rome.
“A new and third Rome has risen in the North, illuminating the entire world like a sun. This third Rome will endure until the end of its history, for it is the final Rome. Moscow has no successor; a fourth Rome is unthinkable,”
proclaimed the monk and miracle-worker Philotheus. After the death of Ivan the Terrible—who conquered Kazan and Astrakhan and dispatched Yermak to claim the Tatar realm of Siberia—a Polish noble confederation (magnificently captured by Schiller in The False Demetrius) thrust the “False Dmitri” at the head of an army toward Moscow, even attempting to bend the Russian Church beneath Rome’s sway; yet it was not a ruler but the Russian people—led by the timber merchant Minin of Nizhny Novgorod and Prince Pozharsky—who expelled the “Latin unbelievers” from sacred Russia. In that era, amid fierce struggles against the Islamic Tatars—how often did Tatar hordes from Crimea and the Nogai Steppe torch Moscow!—and the “Latin” Poles, lies the root of Russia’s sense of mission. Russia bears, like a mother, the coming Kingdom of God; its ruler may be as cruel as he pleases—so long as he expands the hallowed ground, paving the way for the great Christian realm of peace that only Russia can birth. To oppose this is to oppose God. Such is the bedrock of Russian feeling.
“Russia cannot be grasped by the mind. It cannot be measured by common standards. It possesses a unique nature. One must believe in Russia,”
wrote Fyodor Mikhailovich Tyutchev years later. Even Peter the Great’s near-sacrilegious reforms, which drove millions into bitter opposition as “Old Believers” or “Schismatics,” were at last embraced by the Russian people. They adopted foreign outward forms—not unlike the Japanese with their own potent national mission—so long as the soul remained untouched. Every clash with the outside world they saw as a battle for God. Napoleon I might have been a conceivable figure to Alexander I’s court—to the Russian people, he was Satan’s son, Tsar Saul, Tsar Herod, the Tsar of Darkness, come to Latinize Russia. Whether their government bore “flaws,” whether officials took bribes, whether the knout and birch rod ruled the village, whether their landowner could sell or exploit them—these mattered not one whit to the Russian people against the existential peril that Satan might stretch his hand toward Russian soil, the cradle where the radiant Kingdom of God would one day rest, toward the dear little mother destined to bear new light for a darkened world. And so Russian armies pursued Napoleon to Paris, until he fell from his lofty perch…
And then, struck by Western Europe’s civilizational supremacy, Russia’s sense of mission turned revolutionary. In near despair, the critic Chaadaev declared in his Philosophical Letter to a Lady (1829),
“The history of other nations is a tale of their emancipation. Russian history is a progression of slavery and autocracy.”
A figure akin to Kravchenko, he “chose freedom”—yet beneath this choice lingered the sense of mission, leading him to argue that Russia’s very backwardness spared it Europe’s many errors; it could leap to the forefront of progressive nations without squandering time or paying the price of hard lessons, becoming, as he wrote in 1848,
“the true divine people of modern times […] one day, it will claim in Europe’s spiritual life the same place it holds in its political life. It has dwelt in seclusion so long because all greatness ripens in silence and solitude.”
With Chaadaev emerges the first secularized Russian sense of mission—Russia would be not merely, or not only, the God-bearing people, but the most modern and progressive people in the world.
In an entirely new form, the Slavophiles took up this notion from 1860 onward—they saw in Slavic brotherhood the foundation for a truly human solution to the social question. They indignantly spurned Western Europe’s majority democracy, where theoretically a single vote’s edge decides; Khomyakov called it
“a wretched display of the crudest material dominance,”
insisting true democracy demands unanimity—a thought echoing even in Molotov and Vyshinsky’s fight for veto rights at the UN; that genuine democracy, as it existed solely in the artel, the old Russian craft cooperative, and the mir, the village commune, always required consensus—until all agreed, no decision stood.
Material progress, true social democracy rooted in unanimity, and complete spiritual renewal and healing—these, Russia will bestow upon Europe’s decaying world. The Slavophile Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin, who penned a history for the young Tsar Alexander II, boldly stated in 1838, over a century ago:
“The era of European nations has ended; their strength wanes. They can no longer craft anything higher in religion, law, science, or art, nor guide humanity toward its spiritual aim. Now the future belongs to the Slavs, who will serve mankind. Russia, as the champion of the Slavic race, will fuse old and new civilizations, reconcile heart and mind, spread justice and peace across the world, and prove that humanity’s goal lies not merely in freedom, art, science, industry, and wealth—but in something loftier: true enlightenment through the spirit of Christ, in heeding God’s word, which alone ensures all happiness.”
From the Baltic to the Adriatic, encompassing Hungary, Romania, and Turkey, the Russian Empire will stretch. Poland must yield its eastern lands to Russia and become a link in the iron chain of friendly states shielding Russia—pushed far westward to that end.
Then, in 1871, Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky, in his renowned book Russia and Europe—carried by nearly every Russian officer in the 1877 war against the Turks—sought to demonstrate in detail that cultures sprout, bloom, and wither like plants, unstoppable in this cycle; Western Europe’s Romance-Germanic culture is already in full decline; if the Germans still enjoy some vigor, they owe it to their Slavic blood—among Latins, and especially Anglo-Saxons, hopeless spiritual barrenness has set in; yet Slavic culture is only beginning to unfurl its petals—the next epoch in Europe will be hers, resolving the social question through love and brotherhood, a feat beyond the legalistic Romans or the technical Germans.
Danilevsky, in turn, profoundly shaped Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, who now, with the might of his poetic vision, articulates Russia’s claim to leadership:
“Do you know who the sole God-bearing people is, destined to come and renew the world with the name of the new God—the only people granted the springs of life and the new word?… If a great people does not believe that truth resides in it alone, that it alone is able and called to awaken and save all others with its truth, it becomes mere ethnographic matter, not a great people. But since there is but one truth, only one people can bear the one true God. And that sole God-bearing people is us, the Russian people” (Shatov in The Possessed).
At times, God fades behind the Russian people’s mission—Shatov also says:
“I believe in Russia. I believe in her Orthodoxy. I believe in the body of Christ… I believe the new Second Coming will occur in Russia. I believe. But in God? In God? I will believe in God.”
Here, Christ’s spirit has slipped behind the mystical body of the “coming Christ,” behind the Russian people. Bound to this is a towering sense of superiority over Europe—Ivan Karamazov tells Alyosha:
“I want to travel to Europe, straight there from here. I know I’m heading to a graveyard, but the dearest, the very dearest graveyard—I know that too. Dear dead lie buried there; every stone above them speaks of such fervent past life, such passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, and their wisdom, that I—I know it beforehand—will fall to the ground, kiss those stones, and weep over them.”
Yet contempt often mingles with this. Dostoevsky wrote from Geneva on January 12, 1868, to A. N. Maikov about the Swiss:
“If you only knew what a stupid, dull, trivial, and coarse people they are… bourgeois life in this pitiful republic has reached its utmost extreme… nothing but factions and endless quarrels, poverty, ghastly mediocrity in all things. A worker here isn’t worth the little finger of one of ours. Their manners are crude… this low state of development: the drunkenness, the thievery, the petty frauds that rule business life here…”
And suddenly, with Dostoevsky, the vision of revolutionary dictatorship takes shape. Shigalov sketches it in The Possessed: The smaller portion, roughly a tenth, gains full personal freedom and unchecked authority over the remaining nine-tenths. But those nine-tenths must wholly shed their individuality, becoming a herd, to reclaim—through boundless obedience and a series of rebirths—primal innocence, akin to the old paradise, even as they, by the way, must toil.
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, a gifted poet and diplomat, foretold Europe’s inner dissolution as early as 1849:
“The West is rotting. The West is dying. All perishes in a general collapse and dissolves—the Europe of Charlemagne, the Europe of 1815, the Roman Pope’s dominion, all Western thrones, Catholicism, Protestantism, faith long lost, and reason warped into delusion. A colossal shipwreck looms—but above it will float, vast as a federal ark, the Russian Empire—greater than ever.”
With uncanny foresight, he adds:
“Yet it will be a Russia fundamentally unlike today’s. It will have become itself, yet melded with many other elements that complement and transform it, so that it will even bear another name. No longer an empire—it will be a world unto itself.”
Written in 1849 - poeta propheta…
Tellingly, Tyutchev scoffs at democracy—Russian autocracy need only be wholly, nationally Russian, making the people’s cause the throne’s own; then the people will see the one ruler’s autocracy as the expression of all. European absolutism may have been immoral, drunk on the Renaissance and classical paganism—but Russian absolutism will grow ever holier as it embodies Russia’s social and spiritual mission.
Leontiev states outright that the Russian people cherish authority over law, deeming a military leader more exemplary and trustworthy than a legal code. Leontiev—diplomat, aesthete, and poet—wrote around 1890:
“Our people are right. Only a robust monarchical authority, guided solely by its conscience and sanctified by faith, can resolve the seemingly insoluble dilemma of our time: reconciling capital and labor. We Russians must outstrip Europe in the labor question and erect the great model. What the West calls our genius for destruction must turn to creative work. Our people need far more affirming faith and material security than ‘rights’ or ‘true science.’”
Yes, Leontiev, a Parisian with a Byzantine heart, even then envisioned a new ‘Little Father’ Tsar organizing international socialism:
“At times I see a Russian Tsar heading revolutionary socialism, organizing it as Emperor Constantine organized Christianity. But what does such organization mean? Nothing less than coercion, enlightened despotism, the legitimized, measured application of constant force to subdue the citizen’s will.”
This tsarist diplomat foresaw “Little Father” Stalin.
With Russia’s great anarchists—Prince Peter Kropotkin and, above all, Mikhail Bakunin—the old idea of Russia’s mission flowed into revolutionary thought.
Bakunin, who mocks Western ideals, for whom “the revolver is the ballot of the convinced,” who openly declares “The love of destruction is a creative joy,” stated:
“Russia needs a strong dictatorial power, free of bias and spiritually unbound, without parliamentary form… a power surrounded, advised, and upheld by the free collaboration of like-minded souls, yet constrained by no one and nothing.”
All these voices precede Lenin. They run like a grand leitmotif through the Russian people’s history: a religious mission, at times secularized or now cast materialistically; the conviction that “the West rots,” yet Russia bears salvation, destined to speak—spiritually, materially, socially—the “new word” (novoe slovo, a near-millenarian term) to humanity; but this can succeed only if all forces are unreservedly surrendered to the guiding “Little Father”; any attempt from without to thwart Russia from birthing the Kingdom of God it carries is blasphemous desecration; the redemption of the world’s “insulted and injured” can come only through Russia (and if Russia oppresses them thereafter, these are sacrifices they must bear without complaint, serving the better world that can emerge only from Russia). Because of this unique mission, Russia must remain apart—misunderstood, threatened, compelled to defend itself. Messianism, autocracy, isolationism, and, as the deepest impulse, the knowledge of a human mission only Russia can fulfill—these are the roots of this great, gifted people’s extraordinary capacity for suffering and sacrifice, their readiness to die even for a flawed government, so long as it is Russian.
Yet alongside this, even today, the Russian masses harbor an inner certainty that the fundamentally atheistic Soviet Union is a “pseudomorphosis” of their true mission—that, at its core, Russia must first be the “God-bearing people.” Russia seeks not democracy but holiness in its finest exemplars—and the communists are not that.
This explains why, in 1941, Stalin’s soldiers surrendered to the Germans by divisions, so long as the Russian people still hoped the invading Germans might bring an Orthodox Tsar, a Russia truer than the Soviet Union—until, through the unforgivable blunders in Russia, born of the Baltic resentment of the ill-fated Rosenberg clique and a total misreading of the Russian soul, they realized the aim was mere conquest and colonization; then they chose the native tyrant over foreign oppressors.
Whenever Stalin can convince his people that outsiders seek to violate Russia, to sow alien seed in the womb of “Little Mother”—whence the shining Kingdom of God must one day be born—he will rouse them to unimaginable feats.
All the technical marvels of the Americans may awe a Russian, but only as a spur to surpass and someday overtake them. Yet the Russian’s judgment of the USA remains unshaken. He sets the soulful sweep of Russian music against the soulless wail of bebop bands, the Russian dance against the repellent writhings of “hot” dances, with disdain. At heart, his conviction echoes Alexander Herzen’s:
“America offers no new element. It is a further unfolding of Protestant Europe, freed from its historical past and shaped by different conditions.”
Thus, it too is gnily zapad, “rotting West”—but Russia is another world, called to outstrip this spiritually spent West materially as well. On this, all agree, from the monk Philotheus through the Slavophiles to the last Komsomol youth—they merely voice it in terms suited to their time.
Only if the Russian people, from their religious instinct, recognized that the very detour into a secularized mission, into materialistic communism, bars their true fulfillment might they overcome communism from within and live out the best of their essence. The Russian question remains, even now, a religious one.
It is striking that the USA and Western Europe scarcely perceive this. To the extent that the USA beams spiritual propaganda into Russia, one can only savor it with wry amusement. American radio broadcasts treat Russians as if they were Anglo-Saxons or aspired to be. They dangle “freedom”—as though “freedom” were ever a Russian’s foremost value! From the poor, small Grand Duchy of Moscow, where the people were wholly consumed by “tsarist service,” through Nicholas I’s uniformed schools and universities, the revolutionaries’ self-sacrifice, to today’s vast barracks and termite state, runs a mighty current of individual surrender to the collective soul. Some have always broken free—boyars favored the Polish nobility’s “golden liberty” over Moscow’s grand-ducal service, like Ivan the Terrible’s foe Prince Kurbsky; others in the nineteenth century chose exile; Kravchenko opted for freedom—but the mass of Russians shielded even the worst native regime, gladly forgoing “freedom” if it defended Russia’s messianic calling… And what else does the USA offer Russia’s soul? Does it entice Russians to fill out American questionnaires, vote for sanctioned parties, watch their generals hanged by foreigners, or have the likes of Kerensky—Western specters, shadows of a malformed interlude—foisted upon them? Hardly—then they surely prefer Stalin.
“Russia borders no country—Russia borders God”—only through the religious (not the Pharisaic—manuals for American saints) can the Russian problem be resolved. We did not solve it. We might have held the key, had love stood beside force when we grappled with this question, and great camaraderie replaced petty greed. Too late…
Let others now see how they fare.
We sit by history’s wayside, where so many have sat before—like that old hunter in Rudyard Kipling’s ballad, who rests at Peshawar’s gate, his face bandaged, torn by a bear’s claw, murmuring only,
"Over and over the story, ending as he began:— 'There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man!'"
And the old hunter hears the tread of new, young hunters heading into the mountains, bound to meet “Adam-zad,” the “Son of Man,” unable in the decisive hour to speak the “new word” that might turn him from bear to man and friend. The blind man hears only the tramp of their factory-fresh boots, their clueless, callow laughter, and mutters:
“Truly, see, whom Allah misleads—you will never find a helper for him.”
[LINK] Surah 17, Verse 97