When I first arrived in Caux in 2012, quite quickly I realized that it was not a normal conference. The spirit of disarming openness was something you felt immediately crossing the threshold of Mountain House, even without realizing it.
It was one of the last years when cooking and serving meals in the dining room was entrusted to participants. Toiling in the kitchen with a bunch of people coming from different backgrounds made your involvement complete. As if you were building something very important for the whole world, together with Africans, Australians, Europeans, New Zealanders…
I was writing these lines and then something in them rang the bell. I started rummaging through For A New World - and there it was, the essay by Grigory Pomerants, a Russian philosopher who was one of the first from our country to experience Caux.
This is what he said, back in the 1990s: “...the spirit that reigned at Mountain House was captivating. … Buchman in fact had succeeded in creating something that required new words to describe it. It was a movement without ...written rules, an association without a bureaucracy, linked only by a life-style which strikes one at conferences, when several hundred people assemble in Caux and become ... a well organised community of several befriended 'families', bound together not by a creed but by the language of fellowship. After eight or ten days one shift departs and another arrives - white, black and coloured, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists - and again they are learning from each other and learning practical teamwork, whether cleaning vegetables or producing plays."
He was of that spirit himself – the spirit of openness and fellowship. One would wonder where a man whose whole life passed in the Soviet Union, isolated from the rest of the world, could get ideas and spirit so similar to the ones of Moral Re-Armament (MRA).
Grigory Pomerants discovered elements of his future philosophy learning to overcome fear in the battlefields of The Second World War (he fought for 4 years at the front). He expanded the theoretical foundation of his vision working as a petty clerk in a Publishing house and reading heaps of books on world culture in the Fundamental Library of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Soviet Academy of Science. He learned the lessons of human dignity serving his term as a political prisoner in Stalin’s camps. And he imbibed the spirit of fellowship and openness in the community of Soviet dissidents. He often groped in the darkness – and complete loneliness – but was steadily guided by what he called his own depth.
Pomerants gained his popularity among Russian intelligentsia after he ventured to deliver a public speech against totalitarianism and, specifically, against Stalinism. It was in 1965. Stalin had long been denounced as a dictator by Nikita Khrushchev. But Khrushchev himself had been deposed in 1964, and his successor Leonid Brezhnev was making steps towards the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin.
A shadow of Neo-stalinism was thickening. In that period, an almost 50-year old Pomerants was working in the Fundamental Library as a junior researcher. He would never get beyond this modest position as the KGB would prevent him from defending his PhD dissertation.
That was a strange time: the thaw under Khrushchev gave rise to the first attempts to build opposition groups and organize intellectual and cultural resistance to the communist ideology, but at the same time, with the growing self-awareness of democratically thinking intelligentsia, the pressure of the KGB and its repression also grew. The Institute of Philosophy where Grigory Pomerants dropped his bombshell of a report was dominated, on the one hand, by a prominent scholar Yuri Levada (famous Russian sociologist and a founder of Levada Center in post-Soviet Russia ), and, on the other, infiltrated by KGB agents.
The blow Pomerants administered was not aimed at Stalin as such – it was directed against the repression of individual freedom and will by the state, any state. His passage about Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ended with a phrase that made a lasting impression on many: “That perfect state [the Qin Empire] had only one minus: one could not live in it”.
That memorable speech contained most of his future philosophical concepts in a nutshell: the moral dimension in politics, dialogue of cultures and religions, and the voice from deep within as the source of ethics.
Pomerants’ formal career after that was hampered for ever. But, quite miraculously, no other serious consequences happened – the Soviet scientific intelligentsia shielded him from KGB attacks, and the secret police gave up. As a bonus, Pomerant became an increasingly important participant in the emerging democratic and human rights’ movement.
Public readings near the Mayakovsky monument in Moscow, first self-published journals of alternative literature and news, “The Chronicles of the Current Events” – all those activities were a result of a strengthening community of people who called themselves Soviet human rights defenders. Trying to formulate the essence of their daring movement, I can repeat the quotation from Pomerants given above: they “created something that required new words to describe it. <...> It was a movement without ...written rules, an association without a bureaucracy, ... bound together not by a creed but by the language of fellowship.” Running a daily risk of arrest, those Soviet dissidents strongly believed in openness, purity of motives, and mutual trust. They were of different views, some of them Christians, others agnostics, atheists, communists, but what all of them abode by was the value of every human life and respect for individual freedom. They supported each other based not on their common faith or roots, but on common belief in absolute honesty. Their main purpose was to change the moral atmosphere rather than ideology or institutions. As Pomerants formulated it: “Evil begins with the fury on the face of an angel, who entered a fight for a good cause.”
Neither Grigory Pomerants himself, nor his friends Alec Ginsburg, Petr Grigorenko, Tatyana Velikanova etc. had any political ambitions. However something intangible and almost elusive, yet worth giving one’s freedom for, finally did change the climate in the country. And the country was changed, - briefly as we know today, but undeniably.
Grigory Pomerants came into contact with MRA through Leif Hovelsen, a man who had served in the Norwegian Resistance during the war but later tried to build bridges with Germany—Hovelsen knew many of the Soviet dissidents. When the two of them met, they immediately sensed a common spirit between them. Independently, a Russian dissident thinker and a Norwegian freedom fighter discovered in themselves something like what Gabriel Marcel called “active presence”: “'presence' which is a gift, a light, which acts almost without the person endowed with it being aware of it.’"
As Pomerants wrote about Caux, “...I have scrubbed carrots with a Hindu, recalling passages from the Upanishads, and lunched with a priest from Zaire, comparing the problems of his country with those of Russia. I would say that this whole variegated, multi-lingual society could be called a society of spiritual encounter. And this spiritual encounter begins with the most commonplace things ...” For example, when you are not afraid to crack a joke in the presence of unfamiliar people, or splash someone’s tea on the terrace, and when you smile not because etiquette requires you to do so, but because you are full of sincere joy from seeing hundreds of friendly faces from around the globe.
Elena Shvarts, Moscow
English