From one capital city to another. For a Russia you don't expect - 2018

Russia does not understand each other in hindsight
nor is it measured by the common yardstick:
It's made in its own way,
in Russia one can only believe.

These verses by the poet Fyodor Ivanovič Tyutchev (1803-1873) can rightly be taken as the motto of the journey made by 71 professors and collaborators of the UCSC, who in the space of nine days - from 23 to 31 August - were able to explore the two capitals of modern Russia (St. Petersburg and Moscow) and two ancient capitals of the medieval Russian principalities. Suzdal and Vladimir. Four cities, four different scenarios to capture some traits of that immense country that is Russia, whose surface occupies more than a ninth of the land above sea level (more than 17 million square kilometers out of a total area of almost 149 million square kilometers) extending over the two continents of Europe and Asia. This geographical datum immediately turns into a fundamental perspective key to approach Russia (a name for all much more pregnant and evocative than the official name of the Russian Federation, in force today), which consists in the union of curiosity and humility: curiosity for the inexhaustible numerical and qualitative richness of the infinite facets of this geopolitical giant; humility for the necessary willingness first of all to look and to learn, since it is immediately clear - to those who are intellectually honest and loyal to themselves and to reality - that one cannot know such human, social and historical complexity (and drama) if one is not willing to abandon prejudices and stereotypes of which, Unfortunately we are amply equipped and supplied.

Since the arrival in St. Petersburg, the weight that the recent past has played in contemporary Russian memory has been revealed in all its grandeur: the "monument to the heroic defenders of Leningrad" (named "hero city" for the resistance to 872 days of tremendous siege by the Nazis) stands in the middle of the wide avenue that leads from the airport to the city, And it is commented by the Russian guide with a participation that still reminds us that there is practically no family in St. Petersburg that does not count victims of this terrible episode of 70 years ago. But this first impression of the city was immediately mixed with other "souls": the visit to the Hermitage (ancient Winter Palace), with its museum collections of absolute splendor, allowed on the one hand to touch the modernizing imprint, the enlightened despotism and the ambition to compete - and win - with the great European capitals that animated Peter the Great and his successors, but at the same time - with the visit to the room where the Provisional Government was arrested by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution of 1917 - the lightning crumbling of an imperial narrative that had lost - precisely starting with the work of Peter and his appropriation of the government of the Russian Orthodox Church - an ideal impetus that was not the only idea of autocracy, Thus arriving at that total detachment of the imperial family from the life of the people that allowed the sudden dissolution of the Romanov dynasty.

The heavy scent of revolution and Bolshevism, combined with the desire for rebirth and redemption of the last three decades, also accompanied us in our visit to the cathedral of the Mother of God Feodorovskaya: a church built by the imperial family in 1909 and then transformed by the Bolsheviks into a milk plant, until - in 2005 - it was returned to the Orthodox Diocese. He was thus able to entrust the local community with the task of bringing back to life not only the sacred building, but also ecclesial life. The meeting with the parish priest, Father Aleksander Sorokin, was first an opportunity to admire the lower church, built in early Christian style and decorated by one of the greatest living iconographers who was inspired by the paintings of the Roman catacombs, and then merged into an open dialogue that allowed those present to understand something of the meaning of the 1991 of how the faith was transmitted thanks to the hidden work of mothers during the last decades of communism, when - after the terrible persecutions of the Stalin era - being a believer meant being considered an inferior being, with reduced intellectual capacities and incapable of facing life with the force of reason and science. In this situation, many were secretly baptized by their mothers, who kept the faith, regardless of the contempt that this entailed.

Another moment of particular intensity saw us walk through the streets and squares inhabited by the memory of the characters of Dostoevsky and Gogol, or full of the memory of Pushkin: a moment - expertly guided by Prof. Elena Freda Piredda - that allowed us to grasp, beyond the magnificence of the palaces and the main streets, the anxious, fearful and dissatisfied soul of a city marked from the beginning by the attempt - full of hubris - by man to assert himself on the It is no coincidence that it will become the place where the terrorist and revolutionary nihilism of the nineteenth century will prepare the ground for the upheaval of 1917 and its tragic consequences. The conclusion of the St. Petersburg part of the trip was marked by a visit to the cemetery of the Lavra of St. Alexander Nevsky, whose monks were exterminated shortly after the revolution, to venerate the cenotaph of Metropolitan Veniamin (sentenced to death and shot in a show trial that he faced with dignity and firmness) and the tomb of Metropolitan Nikodim. He was responsible for the international relations of the Russian Orthodox Church until 1978, when he passed away during an audience with Pope Luciani.

After St. Petersburg, the itinerary developed in a totally different scenario: that of two capitals of the medieval Russian principalities - Vladimir and Suzdal' - rich in testimonies of that ancient Russia that was the target of Peter the Great's modernizing action. In these cities we were able to get to know the "soul" of ancient Russia, with the characteristic architecture with "onion" domes - rich in a symbolism that sees in the sacred building at the same time the depiction of the cosmos and the divine humanity of Christ - but also with the surprising discovery that the very beginnings of Russian artistic and architectural taste are marked by the presence of artists and master sculptors who came from the West, thanks to the ties of the Russian princes with Frederick Barbarossa. Thus, the church of the Protection of the Virgin located on the river Nerl, on the edge of an immense prairie and which we reached - immersed in a splendid sunset - only after half an hour's walk in a boundless space, surprises the visitor with a wealth of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic depictions that underline the upward momentum of an architecture with clearly Romanesque forms, on which the Russian genius was grafted, capable of profoundly reworking the Byzantine architectural space and inserting it into the natural space of the vastness of that land.

The stop in Vladimir also saw a precious meeting, which took place in the local Catholic parish: with the parish priest, Father Sergej, who told us about a small but lively reality, in excellent relations with the Orthodox Church, and with Svetlana Martianova, professor of Literature at the local University and promoter of various initiatives aimed at allowing Russian students to learn about Italian culture and language, as part of a whole-person education, and not just aimed at acquiring skills and notions. A meeting that already promises developments in which Università Cattolica could be involved.

The last part of the journey saw us arrive in Moscow, certainly - after the stops in Petersburg and Vladimir - more "equipped" to read this impressive metropolis (over 14 million inhabitants) with unique characteristics in terms of history, urban planning, architecture and cultural and social climate. In this megalopolis, in fact, the testimonies of the late Middle Ages and Russian Renaissance (so linked to Italy, as shown by the architecture of Aristotele Fioravanti and Pietro Solari) are intertwined with the seven skyscrapers of the Stalin era, to which are added the noble and bourgeois baroque and rococo palaces and the "chruščëvke", or the prefabricated social houses wanted by Khrushchev as a temporary  solution to the serious housing crisis, but still (sic!) inhabited.

The visit to the Kremlin, the heart of Moscow where all the souls and contradictions of the city converge, ranged from the icy palace of the Congress of Delegates, also commissioned by Khrushchev in 1961, to the ancient cathedrals that marked the life and death of the Tsars until the time of Peter I, to the government buildings and the impressive bell tower of Ivan III the Great. But - as if to counterbalance this glorious side of Russian history, the last day took us to the outer belt of Moscow, for a visit to the Butovo shooting range, where in the years of Stalin's purges tens of thousands of people were shot, buried in mass graves long hidden and which one would have liked to erase from memory. Now this place has become a memorial, enriched by a mausoleum and a splendid church in honor of the "new martyrs" of the Russian Orthodox Church, that is, the victims of the repressions perpetrated by the Bolshevik regime. Also in Moscow, there was no lack of time for meetings of great importance: the one at St. Tikhon's Orthodox Humanistic University, with which Università Cattolica recently celebrated ten years of collaboration, where we were welcomed by the Vice-Rector for International Relations - Father Georgij Orekhanov - and we were able to learn about the richness of the activities in progress. But very important was - after a stop at the Cultural Center "Library of the Spirit", the only one in Moscow for having been established together by Catholics and Orthodox, following an intuition of Father Romano Scalfi, founder of Christian Russia - the meeting with His Excellency Paolo Pezzi, Archbishop of the Mother of God, at the head of one of the four Catholic dioceses into which the Russian Federation is divided. Msgr. Pezzi concelebrated the Eucharist with the General Assistant, H.E. Msgr. Claudio Giuliodori, and then made himself available for a truly cordial and prolonged meeting with the participants in the trip, during which, also through numerous and interested questions, he was able to outline the life and role of the Catholic Church in Russia.

It is unlikely that the intensity of the journey and the density of the experiences lived and the emotions shared will have been adequately rendered by these pages: it would already be a success to have at least overshadowed it. The trip to Russia turned out to be a journey that really introduced the participants to a fascinating world, so "other" and so intertwined with ours as Western Europeans, making them mature the conviction that without this "eastern lung" our own life really risks remaining asphyxiated and incapable of a vital and deep breath.