RUSSIA 1917. The broken dream of an “undiscovered world”
Curated by the Russia Cristiana Foundation – Marta Carletti, Adriano Dell’Asta, Giovanna Parravicini (texts). Angelo Bonaguro (images). Francesco Braschi (coordination). With the collaborat

 

The 100th year anniversary of the October Revolution calls us to reconsider the origins, sense, and the continuation today of a truly epochal event.

The novelty of our revisitation consists in guiding us by the judgement that some contemporary Russian intellectuals gave from a gaze integrally human and Christian, capable of understanding immediately its profound nature. These Christian intellectuals are those that proposed the same question of Thomas Eliot twenty years earlier: is it the Church that has abandoned the people or have the people abandoned the Church?

Their judgement is that the tragedy of the Revolution was rendered possible by the emptiness of both politics and Christian society, by the betrayal of the Church and by the delegitimization of every civil authority; on this terrain took root the nihilism of a political utopia animated by an overturned religiosity, radically immanent.

What does this historical drama say to us today?Could it be a repeal to responsibility, to creativity, to rediscover the infinite role of the individual, and to support the light of reason in the impersonal flux of events?

The course of the exhibit will be developed across the historical reconstruction of this epochal event with images, videos, and quotes.

• At the threshold of the 20th century, Russia was a normal country, in full economic development, with an unparalleled culture and a Church powerful and omnipresent.
• However, the political situation was impeded: the reforms were made poorly or not at all, the refusal to concede a constitution continued, the monarchy was calling itself Christian, but in reality, it was continually betraying its vocation.
• The Church abandoned the world and the culture, dedicating itself to a spiritual formation without relationship to life and contributing to create an empty coward that was becoming fulfilled by a violent utopia.
• Terrorism and the delegitimazion of every authority completed the picture.
• When World War I follows, the country collapses suddenly, bringing to light its emptiness.
• Here Lenin intervenes, that with his ideology that wants to build a new world and a new man in the place of the world created by God: it will be the most accomplished effort ever seen to organize itself definitively without God.
• The fruit of the revolution and its newness is the birth of totalitarianism as the substitution of reality with an idea.
• The totalitarianism does not explain itself without the emptiness; the emptiness does not explain itself without the flight of Christianity from the world. Both have as their true roots nihilism.