German Expansionism and Nazism in the Writings of Russian Spiritual Publicists During the Two World Wars: A Retrospective View

Throughout the twentieth century, the Russian Church was compelled on two occasions to deliver a spiritual and political response to the challenge of German expansionism, Nazism, and fascism — during the First and Second World Wars. These assessments were expressed primarily through ecclesiastical public discourse. During the First World War, such publicistic writings were quite common for the periodical press and were grounded in religious and philosophical thought. In contrast, during the Great Patriotic War, ecclesiastical journalism found itself in a markedly different position. Publicists of the First World War traced the roots of German expansionism above all to German Protestantism, German spiritual ideas, and German philosophy as a whole. They spoke of the rationalistic, mechanical, superficial, and material nature of German culture and civilization, and of Germany’s aspiration to overcome the chaos of the surrounding reality and to restructure the world according to its own vision and mode of thought. The deeply harmful historical dependence of Russian life, culture, and education on German principles and ideas was also emphasized. It was anticipated that Russia’s victory and the overcoming of “Germanism” would bring about the country’s internal revival and renewal. During the Great Patriotic War, however, German philosophy as a whole, as well as materialism and rationalism, could not be subject to open criticism due to the dominance of Marxism in the USSR, which itself had German origins. Ecclesiastical publicists instead focused on the anti-Christian nature of fascism, highlighting the Nazis’ attempts to replace Christ with Hitler and to substitute Christianity with a new paganism, symbolically crowned with the swastika. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Übermensch (Overman), seen as one of the principal ideological sources of Nazism, came under critical scrutiny. Criticism of Protestantism, once viewed as the environment that fostered German expansionism, was largely absent, owing to the allied relations with the United States and Great Britain. As a counterpoint to Nazism, ecclesiastical publications offered an idealized image of the Soviet social system as an example of overcoming anti-Christian national and class divisions, and of establishing universal humanistic equality. However, given the profound transformation in worldview that has occurred since the Second World War, this ideal is no longer viable in the present day. It is therefore necessary to analyze the Church’s polemic with German expansionism, Nazism, and fascism in the twentieth century and to propose new ideas and a new antifascist societal ideal.