Faith & Spirit Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Kapuscinski is doing two things at once: explaining a political reflex and quietly warning you how durable that reflex can be. The line has the plainspoken cadence of reportage, but it carries a sharper thesis underneath: in Russia, legitimacy is often felt before it is argued. If authority is imagined as God-sent, the state doesn’t need to earn consent in the liberal-democratic sense; it needs to embody a kind of cosmic order. Oppression can be rebranded as “discipline,” obedience as “humility,” endurance as moral strength.

The move is provocative because it shifts the conversation away from policy failures and toward cultural infrastructure. Kapuscinski isn’t claiming Russians enjoy suffering; he’s suggesting that, historically, the state’s heaviness can read as a familiar architecture of meaning. In places where institutions have repeatedly collapsed or been captured, a stern center can feel like stability. Religion becomes less a Sunday practice than a grammar for interpreting power: hierarchy is not merely tolerated, it is intelligible.

The subtext is also about Western misunderstanding. Outsiders often reach for a simple villain narrative - propaganda, fear, “brainwashing.” Kapuscinski implies a more uncomfortable possibility: even without coercion, many people may still prefer the known shape of authority to the chaos of uncertain freedom.

Context matters: as a Polish journalist reporting through the late Soviet era and its aftermath, he’s writing from a borderland vantage point - close enough to recognize the logic, distant enough to distrust it. That tension gives the quote its bite: an ethnographic observation that doubles as a critique of how easily sanctified power becomes unaccountable power.