Russia: Land Reform & Spirituality

"Your work in the fields of both theology and human ecology make you eminently qualified to offer, if not a blueprint for cultural renewal, at least a vision of how the leaders of Russia could purposefully set about identifying the themes on which they ought to be working" - Dr Dmitry Lvov, Head of the Department of Economics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

This English text was translated into Russian for seminars in February 2000 with the Russian Academy of Sciences Economics Department and the Russian Orthodox Church at the Holy Trinity Sergyev Monastery.

The remaining material on this page comprises background and commentary by Fred Harrison, Ian Fraser and Bashir Maan as appeared in Healing Nationhood.

In May 1999 I attended a bizarre hearing in Stirling Sheriff Court to write a report for the journal, Land and Liberty. Alastair McIntosh was helping to defend low-income evicted tenants - the “Carbeth Hutters” – on the grounds that God theoretically owns the land under Scots feudal law, therefore it should be used for community benefit. As a consultant on land reform to the Natural Resources Committee of the Russian parliament - the Duma - and as co-chair of the Duma Parliamentary Hearings on Land

Policy in 1999, I was struck by the relevance of Alastair’s insights to Russia.

I drew the matter to the attention of Dr Dmitry Lvov, Academician-Secretary of the Department of Economics at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Lvov is one of Russia’s most respected economists. He had come to acknowledge that the integration of land, spirituality and community empowerment was a precondition for re-building national identity. In recognition of this, he was helping to launch a new movement called Science & Religion. He urged me to invite Alastair to prepare a document for discussion by senior academic, religious and political figures.[ii]

Within two weeks (to meet a tight translator’s deadline), Alastair had produced Land, Power and National Identity – a text which, he says, “is not polished, but represents ‘doing theology’ in the real world.” In February 2000 I accompanied him to seminars at Lvov’s office at the Academy of Sciences, in the Holy Trinity Sergyev Monastery, and at the Duma with Sergei Glasyev, a Deputy who chairs the powerful parliamentary Economics Committee.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. Dr Sergei Shirokov, a leading Orthodox theologian, and Professor Eduard Afanaslev, dean of economics at the Russian Orthodox University both called it “divine providence.” Dr Mikhail Gelvanovsky, director of the National Institute for Development, said: “Man alone cannot save this country, but with God's help maybe we can.”

Foundation, St Petersburg, spoke for many in concluding: “This text penetrates deeply into the Biblical economic principle that ‘The profit of the Earth is for all.’ As such, it draws on the wealth of our own spiritual traditions. It suggests a third way between communism and capitalism - one where land ownership and the benefits from rent are vested substantially in the community.”

Fred Harrison

(The following is adapted as a general introduction for Healing Nationhood but it was originally drafted for Land, Power & National Identity).

This is a unique collection of writings on liberation theology and social activism as applied, broadly, to nation-building. The main piece of work, published here in English for the first time, was instigated by some of Russia’s most senior economists and theologians. Other articles range from the address that launched land reform on the Isle of Eigg to essays in national newspapers and work commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme. Common to all is the question of how we can create a three-way sense of community – with place and nature, with one another in society, and with those aspects of inner life that we might relate to in terms of “God.”

As an executive of the World Council of Churches I was responsible for one of the five programmes decided on at the Uppsala Assembly in 1968, Participation in Change. I directed my work to the grassroots, starting in Asia, living, eating, sleeping in the homes of the poor to find how they were coping with the vast changes of our century. There I made vivid contact with small Christian communities – “born from below,” not fashioned “from above.” I concluded that the most commanding theological issue worldwide concerned the ownership and use of land.

For me, theology is the faith-basis for changing history in the direction of the Kingdom of God. Scholarship can be done behind desks and within walls. Not theology. Theology demands engagement, in which scholarship forms an ingredient.

Theology that underpins the fight for justice has a compelling quality which abstract theology of the past has lacked. For the celebration of the first anniversary of the success of the revolution in Nicaragua, I stayed with Xabier Gorostiaga in the Jesuit centre in Managua. Fidel Castro had come to participate. He sent a messenger to ask Xabier to provide a list of theological books he should be reading. Xabier did so. Next day the messenger was back. Fidel had already read all these. What else should he be reading?

It is in this kind of company that I would place Alastair McIntosh. He has the qualities of a liberation theologian. He does careful research – his use of the Bible is particularly sensitive. He is engaged where it matters – with rural land use, with the urban poor and in advancing democratic process.

Dr Bashir Maan is a distinguished British Muslim of Pakistani origin. He is the Scottish Representative on the Executive of the Muslim Council of Great Britain and Spokesperson for the Glasgow Islamic Centre. For 8 years he was Chairman of the Glasgow Central Mosque Committee. As an elected city councillor, he chairs the Strathclyde Joint Police Board - Britain’s second-largest police force. Since 1991 he has worked informally with Alastair McIntosh on Islam-Christian relations. In this Afterword he briefly sets land economics in an Islamic context.

It is a cause of both hope and pleasure to me that in presenting a Christian appraisal of “Land, Power and National Identity,” Alastair McIntosh has shown respect for all faiths that understand love to be central to the nature of God.

Christianity and Islam have a lot in common and yet they have been locked in hostility to each other for over a milennium. Indeed, Islam is the continuation of Judaism and Christianity. The Qur’an contains a vast number of events, stories and injunctions from the New and Old Testaments.

To cite just one example to emphasise this close relationship, the Qur’an says, “Say: we believe in God almighty and that which is revealed to us and that which was revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus and to all other Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and to Him we submit (Surah 3:84).

The time has come when these two largest religions of the world should forget the past and join hands to work for the preservation and freedom of practice of their respective faiths and for the good of God’s creation at large, otherwise they are both in danger of being engulfed by the fast-rising tide of secularism and materialism.

The Islamic economic position is very akin to the Biblical one. It puts great emphasis on the distribution of wealth in a way that is fair as well as practical and productive. According to the Qur’an, land and wealth in all its forms is a thing created by Allah and is His property. The right of ownership over something that accrues to a person is delegated to him by Allah.

A person, therefore, has the right to own land and property and to produce more wealth with it, but contrary to the capitalistic and materialistic economic system, Islamic economics requires that this wealth must be shared also by others: that is, by the poor and the needy, the sick and disabled, the orphans and widows, the destitute and all other creatures of this earth.

With such common humane ideals Islam and Christianity can give hope to the impoverished and deprived amongst humanity. I therefore commend this work by Alastair McIntosh. It suggests that the points around which people of faith can unite may be closer to the will of God than those issues which, too often, have been used to divide us.

[ii] The Academicians focussed discussion around five points: 1) Moral and spiritual elements of economic relations of the modern world, 2) Christian understandings of economy and public welfare, 3) Relationship between law and religion as it might affect state economic policy, 4) The modern financial economy from a Christian point of view, and 5) The problem of “sustainable development” from a Christian point of view.

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