I. FOREWORD BY THE TRANSLATOR - The Putin Doctrine as a Consequence of the Failure of Rudolf Steiner’s Memoranda to be Heeded

This publication is an update of my essay entitled “Rudolf Steiner’s Idea of Social Organics – A New Constitutional Principle of Civilization”[1], which formed the basis for a lecture given at a closed social-scientific conference "After the End of the Revolution: Constitutional Order Amid the Crisis of Democracy" co-organized by the New York Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the National Research University/ Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow held there from September 1 and 2 in 2017. In this essay, the idea was presented that Rudolf Steiner, beginning with the two Memoranda, inaugurated and developed the idea of the threefold order of the social organism, in short, social organics, as a new constitutional principle of civilization in four phases from 1917 to 1923.

       One of the participants of this conference whom I met there was Prof. Sergey Karaganov from the Faculty of the HSE, who served as a presidential advisor in the Kremlin both under Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin and is still considered close to Russia’s president and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. Recently he sent me an interview given to an Italian newspaper on April 8, 2022, entitled «We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate». [2] Prof. Karaganov is introduced in this interview with the following words: “His recent proposals on Russian-speaking minorities in the ‘near abroad’ are known as ‘Putin doctrine’ and Professor Karaganov, who is honorary chair of the Moscow think tank the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, was first to come out publicly about an all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2019”.

              This publication attempts firstly to show that Putin’s declared goal to protect the suppressed Russian minorities in the states of the former USSR and to restore its former glory can only be achieved peacefully on the basis of what Rudolf Steiner attempted to remind the world already more than a 100 years ago. For the underlying, still unresolved structural causes of not only the outbreak of the tragic conflict in Ukraine, but of all previous conflicts of this sort originate of necessity in centralized states from the suppression, ethnic cleansing or even downright murder of their minorities clamoring for freedom. As World War I was prompted by the unresolved so-called Serbian question on the southern border of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, this is now the case, e.g. with the ethnic Russians living in the eastern part of Ukraine that were deprived of their cultural and human rights, for if this border conflict is not contained and does not remain limited to the actual combatants. it could escalate and lead to WW III.

            Secondly, the task of this publication is to show how calamities of this sort can be prevented in the near future by the orientation on and guidance of the new constitutional principle of civilization or social organics inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner in the first quarter of the previous century, which however he, unfortunately, was not able to develop further due to his premature death on March 30, 1925, due to poisoning. One of his greatest students, who did carry his work further, is the German philosopher, poet and writer Herbert Witzenmann, who served from 1963 until his death in 1988 as the head of the Sections of Social Sciences and that of Young People at the Goetheanum, Free School of Spiritual Science, instituted by Rudolf Steiner as the R &D center of the General Anthroposophical Society. The various texts and links to his writing in this publication may serve to support this statement. 

            After having read this essay, the attentive and unbiased reader should be in a position to lend credence to the thought that the fateful absence of this new principle of civilization is the greatest threat to world peace, and more specifically that the tragic failure of the Central Powers to adopt the peace proposal offered by Rudolf Steiner in the form of his two Memoranda to end World War I, and instead to embrace the so-called 14 points by the American president Wilson with its abstract principle of national self-determination, has not led only to the self-destruction of Central Europe and the destruction of Europe (Herbert Witzenmann), but also directly to the Putin doctrine.

            It is thus to be hoped for the good and even survival of humanity and the earth that at least now Europe, especially Germany, will not make the same mistake again and adopt and develop the new constitutional principle of civilization as the basis for a just negotiated peace settlement not only between Russia and Ukraine, but for the sake of all places on our planet Earth where ethnic minorities continue to be suppressed and deprived of their cultural and human rights. Since the chances this will happen in the near future are slight, an alternative in the form of the founding of "oases of humanity", start-ups for a new society also suggested by Rudolf Steiner and further developed by Herbert Witzenmann, has been added at the conclusion of this publication.

                                                                                                                                       May 25, 2022

Robert J. Kelder [3]

Dir. Willehalm Institute for Anthroposophy as

Grail Research, Royal Art and Social Organics

Kerkstraat 386A, 1017 JB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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[1] The Appendix includes a list of the speaker and topics. One of the speakers was Alexander Shchipkov (Moscow Patriarchate), who spoke on “Image of the Future and Social Tradition” as a policy for Russia which was also the title of a book presented to all participants.

[2] The interview by Federico Fubini was published by “Corriere della Sera” in both English and Italian. The English version is available here

[3] The author, born in The Hague in 1939, is a senior member of the Dutch branch of the Social Science Section of the Goetheanum. He is the founding director of the Willehalm Institute Press Foundation in Amsterdam, which aims to further the work of Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy and that of his students (a.o.) Herbert Witzenmann, Valentin Tomberg and Werner Greub.