Toomas Karmo: Immediate Monastic Reclusion Advisable: An Open Letter to President V.V. Putin and His Eminence the Titular Metropolitan of Volokolamsk

Quality assessment: 

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: it is arguable that I knew enough to treat my subject adequately within the limited scope I set myself.  

Revision history:

UTC=20220327T1644000Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo uploaded base version. He then planned to continue producing, in a way not documented here, minor tweaks, over the coming 96 hours, as versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2, ... . . 

I write herewith, in the format of an Open Letter, both to Monsieur le Président Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and to a putatively solid professional theologian, Hilarion Alfeyev, Titular Metropolitan of Volokolamsk (in previous secular life Dr Grigoriy Valerievich Alfeyev). 

I turn to the titular Metropolitan as a person from my own University, although not from my own College (St John's in my case, Pembroke in his), and not quite of my own generation (we have an age difference of just over 13 years, and consistently with this he and I finished our doctoral work at university in 1995 and 1979 respectively), and not of comparable standing canonically (he, a person of high authority in the Moscow Patriarchy, and I an obscure layman under the Holy See, unconnected to any national government). Although one does not normally work the academic "Old Boy Network", working this network does become advisable in the current diplomatic emergency.  

I now solemnly ask of the Metropolitan, and I ask it in the name of Christ, daring in that Name even to bind, to the extent that a layman can in conscience bind: Your Eminence, do not leave this letter unacknowledged; have someone in your team (optimally you yourself; otherwise, some other official) acknowledge receipt, somehow, in terms that I can make publicly known, through such means

as my toomaskarmo.blogspot.com. 

Your Eminence, you may initially ask to what extent a layman can presume to bind. In answer to this I note that if I were to seek the Sacrament of Penance from you, you could not in conscience turn me away, and that here I approach you in an analogously grave pastoral context.  

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Appealing, then, to what I consider an unassailable pastoral-theology position as supplicant, I proceed boldly. 

Your Eminence, what may I respectfully and humbly I ask from you, having now gained the ear which you are in correct pastoral theology obliged to turn to me? I ask, once again in the name of Christ, that having in the first instance caused receipt of my letter to be acknowledged, you as a next step cause this Open Letter to be seen by appropriate persons, in such a way that its content becomes known over the coming hours to Monsieur le Président V.V. Putin. One possible intermediary in your work might be your canonical superior Patriarch Kirill, who I believe has in at any rate peacetime been in a position to communicate directly and personally with the President. But perhaps other possibilities exist for you also.  

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Monsieur le Président, events have evolved in ways worse than those rationally conceivable when I composed my Open Letter to you on 2022-01-24. I could not resort to deliberately inaccurate language in writing to you in Open Letter format at toomaskarmo.blogspot.com on 2022-01-24. I said, in due honesty back then, that I did not think you would be so ill-advised as to launch a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. Still less can I resort to deliberate inaccuracy in writing to you now, on the one hand (as before, on 2022-01-24) through open publication at toomaskarmo.blogspot.com and on the other hand now through the private intermediation of His Eminence the Titular Metropolitan of Volokolamsk.  

Without being exhaustive, and in particular without venturing into the details of alleged war crimes (although I do note in passing the current forensic salience of the Донецкий академический областной драматический театр in Mariupol), I set down three key points. From these you can construct the rest, as a paleontologist might reconstruct his entire dinosaur from jawbone, vertebra, and femur:

• Your communications are in disarray. I have seen an image of absurdly primitive Red Army radio gear, allegedly deployed in Ukraine, in the form of a cheap, perhaps two-band, VHF portable, lacking encryption. This is the type of gear that might have been sold 30 years ago by Radioworld in Toronto to some frugal youngster who had just passed his Industry Canada "Basic" amateur-radio exam. And in my Internet headphones, I hear what purports to be the recording of a Red Army voice conversation regarding a search for avenues of retreat. Consistently with that primitive VHF walkie-talkie image, I note that both sides in what I hear are transmitting en clair, contrary to elementary military communications discipline. 
• Your fuel and food are in disarray. Monsieur le Président, you can find, as I have, Internet material alleging the deliberate spillage of fuel by Red Army personnel, desperate for their own safety, seeking to halt an advance, or again YouTube ciné material showing Red Army personnel looting the shelves of a small grocery shop, or again an Internet still photo showing package documentation for a Red Army Meal-Ready-to-Eat ("MRE"). According to the photo, 2015 was the year of expiration. 
• Portions of your troops are already in open rebellion. Monsieur le Président, I would draw your attention to Ukrainian television-interview footage of penitent Russian soldiers, begging forgiveness as they recall their participation in what I myself would characterize as a fratricidal mission. Again, I would respectfully draw your attention to the Daily Mail allegation (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652501/Russian-commander-deliberately-run-tank-soldiers-DIED.html) that Colonel Yuri Medvedev, from the 37th Motor Rifle Brigade, died from a vehicle attack mounted by his own men. 

Monsieur le Président, if this situation is allowed to continue, you face something more radical than the already-commenced destruction of your economy. You face something more radical than the already-commenced ruin of Russia's standing within the United Nations. You face, if not today then in 2023 or 2024 or 2025 or so, the situation V.I. Ulyanov (operationally "V.I.Lenin") faced after 1917 - the descent, namely,  of Russia from mere disorder into civil war.

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In my "Open Letter" of 2022-01-24, I noted to you that politics is the art of the possible and the second-best. Today I address you not in terms of Realpolitik, but in ethical and theological terms, with the duly skilled assistance of His Eminence the Metropolitan of Volokolamsk. Your life has not been fully safe for years. Now, however, every day and hour counts. To extract good from your disintegrating situation now, you must use what time remains to make yourself the instrument, however weak and damaged, of God. Your position has deteriorated to a point requiring your monastic reclusion not in the near-term future, but today. 

Let others grab the levers of government, perhaps initially under your own guidance from behind monastery gates. How much power is left to you now? Surely there is some residual power, which you can exercise even from religious reclusion, should you succeed - as I conjecture you can succeed - in arranging robust, persistent, encrypted Internet communications for yourself. You retain that power through a sheer volume of administrative knowledge, amassed over two or three or four decades. Your residual power can be used to guide some events for some modest span of time, as you steer your successors away from the 2023 or 2024 or 2025 precipice of Russian civil war. 

In the monastery, you will be what you cannot hope to be outside it, namely a living refutation of the Marxist-Leninist conception of historical developments as determined and inevitable. On that dark conception, individuals are depicted as the hapless captives of overwhelming, ultimately politico-economic, "dialectical" materialist forces. You are  Christian, and His Eminence the Titular Metropolitan of Volokolamsk is a Christian, and I am a Christian; I know in the light of Easter that this dark conception is mistaken, and so does His Eminence, and so do you. 

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Having disclaimed the intention to write in Realpolitische terms, I nevertheless do append a single Realpolitische point. With every passing hour, not only the safety of Russia at large, but your own personal safety in your alleged three principal bunkers-of-refuge, with their allegedly identical television broadcasting studios, becomes progressively less assured. From a monastery, you will be placing some physical distance between yourself and at least some of those whom I presume to be now seeking your liquidation. This is particularly the case if, working the back-channels of Holy See diplomacy, you succeed in securing refuge in some monastery outside Russia,  perhaps under the canonical jurisdiction of Rome rather than of Patriarch Kirill. 

Suppose, to take an extreme example, that you were to obtain refuge not even at some monastic foundation in Estonia or Sweden or Switzerland or the like (helpful though that would already be), but in Vatican City itself. You would in that case have abundant specialist personnel, in the form of the trained and prayerful Cohors Pedestris Helvetiorum a Sacra Custodia Pontificis, to protect you from plutonium tea, from Новичок, from treacherous doctors, and from other such hazards.  

Admittedly, if you were to take refuge in some foreign monastery or other, you might eventually - depending, perhaps, on your concrete choice of host nation - face extradition either to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or to some ad hoc war-crimes tribunal. Here, again, however, things are not quite black for you. God is merciful. Upon successful extradition from your selected monastery into civil custody, for instance at The Hague, your level of personal protection would not decline. On the contrary, it would rise still farther. No ICC panel, not even any ad hoc tribunal in the style of 1946 Nürnberg, could want its proceedings perturbed by the ill health of the individual under trial. 

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How now to proceed? 

Monsieur le Président, you may find it helpful to meet your Metropolitan quietly, perhaps even with me present. Should I seem to your staff to be a potentially helpful facilitator - I stress that although you and I are culturally somewhat distanced, His Eminence the Metropolitan and I would meet as academic peers, both of us of course communicating in impeccable English from backgrounds of humanistic erudition, and with his Eminence additionally helping the three of us overcome the hurdle which is my scanty Russian - do please have your people make rapid contact with me. 

Setting personal caution aside, I respectfully suggest, Monsieur le Président, that when your people communicate, under duly convincing authentication (three-minute personal interview in your Tallinn Embassy, with your Head of Mission, with my camera running?) the wish to conduct a one-hour three-way meeting, I will boldly strive to overrule the conceivable objections of my Foreign Ministry, will cross from Estonia into Russia at some such convenient point as Koidula or Narva with my Estonian passport (being an excellent hiker, I can easily walk the final few kilometres on foot), and will pay my own economy-class fare from your frontier to Moscow by suitable buses or trains. I would seek the operational assistance of your team only in the matter of securing simple, low-cost, no-frills accommodation for one or two or so nights in Moscow, optimally in some monastery. 

E-mail obviously works (Toomas[dot]Karmo[at]gmail[dot]com). But so also does voice telephone and basic SMS text message (in both cases, as three-seven-two five-eight-six-four-six-five-four-zero). 

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Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, pray for us; Saint Franz Jägerstätter, pray for us; Servant of God Екатерина Фёдоровна де Гук-Дохерти, урождённая Колышкина, witness to the spiritual mission of Russia in the family of nations, intercede for us now. 

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