On the persistence of yearning for an origin.

Russians are exacting when it comes to concepts that are particularly important to them. They have as many as three words denoting ‘native land’, for example. Otchizna, the one word that suggests fatherland and motherland together – a word that cleverly combines the root-word for ‘father’ [otets] with a female ending – is actually the least used. Like otechestvo [‘fatherland’], it sounds high-flown and official to Russian ears and is mostly used in poetry. By contrast, rodina [‘motherland’] is used by every section of the population and its associations are far more intimate. If otchizna and otechestvo relate to the country in which one is a citizen and are words most often deployed by governments for political ends, rodina is the place where one is born, a familiar place that has always been there. It is the place where one feels a sense of belonging – a warm hearth to which one longs always to return. Rodina is identified with the nation’s soul and the endless desire Russians have for a mother-figure.

Rodina may be the most emotive word in the Russian language. The fact that it is also impossible to translate adequately says something about its close relationship to questions of national destiny, the Russian sense of self, and to the enduring belief in the country’s messianic future. “Every nation has a motherland,” wrote the religious philosopher Georgy Fedotov in 1915, “but only we have Russia.” The deepest source of patriotism in Russia accordingly lies not in pride in national achievements or military glory, but in love for the motherland, whose most visible expression is the extraordinary, almost physical attachment Russians have for their native landscape – an attachment which they are often at a loss to fathom. What Lermontov declared that he loved about his native country in his poem Motherland was the ‘cold silence’ of her steppes, the swaying of her ‘endless forests’ and ‘her overflowing rivers, as large as seas,’ but he could not explain why. If the essence of the Russian motherland is to be found in her boundless open spaces and huge skies, it is certainly also located in her more humble, meditative landscapes – clusters of spindly birch trees under cloudy skies, village churches next to modest ponds, and houses surrounded by snow. It is therefore not surprising to find that Russians are prone to experience homesickness very intensely. The great Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, who never returned to Russia from exile, even made a film about toska po rodine, which he described as “the fatal attachment of Russians to their national roots, their past, their culture, their native places, their families and friends; an attachment which they carry with them all their lives, regardless of where destiny may fling them.”

Russian idealisation of their rodina has much to do with the associations stimulated by the root-word rod, which has to do with birth. The other words it gives rise to, such as priroda [‘nature’], rodnoi [‘native’], and rodstvennik [‘relation’], are all suggested subliminally by rodina. The fundamental association, however, is with motherhood. Rodina literally means ‘birth place’ rather than the more generic-sounding and impersonal English motherland – hence Mother Russia, Mother Volga and Mother Moscow. The relationship Russians have with their mother earth is a deeply visceral one.

Personifying the nation as a woman is nothing new, and certainly not exclusive to Russia, but worship of female divinities traditionally lay at the heart of its popular religion. So pronounced was the matriarchal nature of early pagan Russian society indeed that the veneration of mother earth was simply transferred to the Virgin Mary once Christianity arrived at the end of the 10th century and her protection sought instead. The link between the Church and the motherland was further strengthened after the fall of Constantinople in the mid-15th century. Called upon to liberate the Orthodox East and convinced of her special destiny, both the land and the people now became known as ‘Holy Russia’, represented by a newly powerful state. But it was at this time that the state’s increasingly masculine face began to show itself.

The replacement in the 17th century of the icon of St. George, traditional protector of Holy Mother Russia, by a secular portrait of the tsar, initiated a process which culminated in Peter I declaring himself Emperor of an absolutist secular state and asserting the pre-eminence of the fatherland. The submissive motherland had passively to watch as Matushka Moskva was supplanted by the distant foreign-looking and foreign-sounding city of Sankt-Peterburg, centre of a new fatherland whose persona was equally contrived. Over the course of the 19th century, educated Russians became gradually aware of the gulf separating them from both their oppressive rulers and the country’s enslaved, suffering people, with whom they by now had little in common. They were exiles in their own country. The growth of nationalism, however, stimulated them to re-discover their connection to the beleaguered motherland, and consequently reject the myth of the fatherland, together with the official patriotism it projected.

After 1917, the concept of the motherland was co-opted cynically into Communist propaganda for political ends, but Stalin knew that he was touching the nation’s heartstrings when he appealed to Russians to defend her when Hitler invaded. The Second World War may have been called the Great Patriotic or Fatherland War, as had been the war of 1812, but the Soviet Union needed the rodina to call her sons to sacrifice themselves, as testified by posters depicting a stern-looking, darkly clad mother underneath the slogan ‘Your Rodina-Mother Summons You!’. And Rodina was the name given to the fifty-two metre high statue of a mother-figure in flowing robes erected to commemorate the battle of Stalingrad. It is a concept which has not yet lost its currency even in post-Soviet Russia. “Rodina is a mother you don’t choose,” said one respondent in a recent survey, “but take it away from me and I’ll die.”