The Russian Genius for Suffering

Part I

During the Eastern Front War of WWII, Stalin dropped his honorifics, and called his people to defend "Holy Mother Russia". This is difficult for us to grasp in the West, but it has to do with Eastern Orthodoxy. The faith of Orthodoxy teaches that man is born to suffer physically and emotionally, in order to achieve spiritual comfort and peace, oftentimes not till the next life or the death agonies, when the soul achieves a vision of God. Some are "vouchsafed" this vision during their crucifixion, which Orthodoxy teaches is very difficult outside of monasticism.
It is very difficult to imagine, for us, the extent to which Communism is really only possible in such a cultural environment. This is emphatically not to say that Orthodoxy leads to Communism. That would be as unfair as to imply that Protestantism leads to secularism (which of course the Orthodox do believe). All it proves is that the worst type of culture is an apostate Christianity, which, although with greater possibilities for good, must necessarily imply greater possibilities for evil. Merely recall that most good movie villains are more intelligent, more charismatic, and stronger than (many times) even the good guy. The collapse of Christian culture of whatever variety leaves huge holes which create much greater evil than the mere collapse of another minor pagan civilization. The World Wars and the Religious Wars prove this.
All of this is to say that Orthodoxy regards man's body as needing very little in the way of care, and that this spiritual discipline inclined the Russians towards the creative possibilities of suffering, made evident in the novels of Dostoyevsky. Fyodor took this one step further than even the Orthodox. He believed that the hellfire of unregenerate man in his heart could be used for good, to build up a society, if it were harnessed like dynamite and also embraced by the source of the evil himself. The titles of his books tell the story - The Idiot, The Possessed, etc. The Soviets secularized this hybrid theology and treated man as a brick in the wall, calculating his spiritual energy much the way we would calculate our electric bill. They then proceeded to accomplish a prodigious and astounding amount of self-destruction, followed by rigorous discipline, in the building up of a colossus that might have destroyed Europe, had Hitler and Stalin not bled each other dry at Stalingrad.

In Part II - Relating these salient "Russian" facts to literature and theology