East-West conflict arises from many factors, but one set shapes all the rest: the three revolutions triggered by the young German theologian Martin Luther (following John Wycliffe and Jan Hus before him and John Comenius later) when he argued in the 16th century that each person must read and interpret the Bible for him/herself and that each person is equal before God.
For the first time, many religious and political leaders began to endorse universal literacy, free thought, and the dignity of the individual. Most countries in the West have absorbed and acted on these principles, but — with a few exceptions in Asia — not in Russia or any other country without a heritage of Western Christianity.
How have these principles affected society? They virtually predict how each country now ranks on the UN Human Development Index, despite an enormous slump in church attendance since World War II.
They also help explain the divergent orientations of Western democrats and the autocrats of Russia and elsewhere. Russia has long had its Westernizers, such as Vasily Malinovsky, founder of the Lyceum attached to the imperial palace, where Aleksandr Pushkin studied Latin and English poetry and anti-mercantile economics.
But Western influences have been pushed back or even repressed by Russian chauvinist Slavophiles and Eurasianists. Caught between these conflicting tides, Ukrainians have struggled to do their own thing — to be themselves and use their own language.
Only Western Christian societies (plus Jewish communities in their midst) welcomed the advent of printed Bibles translated into their vernaculars. Protestants did so before Catholics, but the competitive pressures of the Counter-Reformation soon compelled Catholic societies to publish their own translations.
Most Protestant and Catholic countries had vernacular Bibles by 1700. Missionaries from Sweden brought translated Bibles to today’s Estonia and Latvia; Protestants in Vienna delivered Bibles in Slovene to the Balkans. A “Bucharest Bible” was published in 1688 but Romania’s Orthodox Church continued to use only Greek or Old Slavic in its services.
No Orthodox country used a printed Bible in its vernacular until the 19th or 20th century. In no Orthodox country was there religious pressure to read scripture and capture its meaning for oneself. Jews in northern Italy promptly exploited the printing press to publish the Torah, but there was no similar effort in Orthodox, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, or Hindu societies for their sacred scriptures. None championed mass literacy or free thought. None preached the equality of all humans.
Ukraine — the “borderland” — was shaped by Western values as well as Eastern Orthodoxy. Many Ukrainians have long valued learning and self-rule, but most were shielded from the three revolutions in the West by the hegemony of the Orthodox Church, usually controlled by the metropolitan in Moscow and by the recurrent efforts of Tsarist and Soviet leaders to ban and suffocate the Ukrainian language.
Parts of the Bible were translated into vernacular Ukrainian in the mid-16th century “for the greater enlightenment of the common Christian people,” but the Orthodox Church in Ukraine was allowed to use only Old Church Slavonic translations with the Russian pronunciation.
Ukraine had high literacy in the 17th and 18th centuries and the Zaporizhian Cossacks had a rough notion of equality. In the late 17th century, the cosmopolitan Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa opened Ukraine to Western influences and fostered a cultural Renaissance.
In 1703 he even arranged to have the Bible published in Arabic in Aleppo. Ukrainians living close to Catholic Austria, Hungary, and Poland were exposed to the three revolutions, though their liberating effects were muffled by the compulsions of Budapest to control its subjects.
The Rome-oriented Uniate church had a very large presence in parts of Ukraine until banned by Russia in the 1830s. The frequent rebellions of Poles against Russian control also shaped Ukrainian views on freedom. In the 1840s, some two-fifths of Kyiv University students were Poles.
Except for highly Westernized places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, no non-Christian heritage society places among the top 20 countries as ranked on the UN Human Development Index. (Israel places 22nd, just below Japan, South Korea, and the USA.) None except Taiwan and Mongolia are judged “free” by the non-partisan Freedom House. (India and Indonesia are “partly free,” as are Armenia and Georgia.)
Most communist and formerly communist states are judged “not free”. None has denounced Vladimir Putin’s aggression, and none is helping Ukraine.
For their part, India and Turkey join with China as major purchasers of Russian oil, Putin’s major external source of revenue.
Failure to live by the three revolutions has its costs. Russia ranks 52nd on the Human Development Index; Belarus, 60th ; Ukraine, 77th ; China, 79th ; and Moldova, 80th. For most of the 21st century, across the planet, democracy and free thought have been losing to authoritarianism and mind control.
The examples of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and various developing world tyrants are clear, but the rise of populism in the West, including Donald Trump in the US, Marine Le Pen in France, and various Brexit parties in the UK, suggest this no one is immune from these trends.
Former Soviet subjects — not only in the Baltic states, but also in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia — now strive to absorb and maintain versions of the three revolutions. To free themselves from a great power that has exploited and oppressed them for centuries, they need persistent moral and material support from the West.
Walter Clemens is an Associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, at Boston University His most recent book is Blood Debts: ‘What Do Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims? (Washington DC: Westphalia Press, 2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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