Alexander Boot (born 1948) is a Russian-born writer of books and articles, previously a university lecturer and an advertising and public relations executive. His work promotes traditionalist conservatism and European culture.
Born in Moscow in the days of Stalin, Boot grew up there in the years following the Second World War. He is of Jewish ancestry, and his father had spent much of the war as a prisoner of war of the Germans. However, Boot’s father survived to bribe the doctor of the Institute of Modern Languages to gain admission for his son, who was "clever but lazy".[1]
After graduating from the Moscow State University, Boot became a lecturer in English and American literature[1] and was also an art and film critic.
Boot is the father of the MSNBC and CNN contributor Max Boot,[2] who was born in Moscow in 1969. Boot and his wife divorced in 1971. A dissident who was active in samizdat, he left the Soviet Union in 1973,[3] fleeing from the unwanted attentions of the KGB,[4] and in 1976 his former wife also emigrated with their son, settling in California.[3] In 1975, Boot renounced his Soviet citizenship.[1]
Career outside Russia
In 1973, Boot settled in the United States, where he worked in advertising. He later pursued this career in the United Kingdom, where he also worked in public relations,[1][4] after moving there in 1988.[citation needed] In England he converted to high churchAnglicanism with the help of Peter Mullen, whose services he began to attend regularly.[2]
Boot's first book was How the West Was Lost (2006),[4] in which his principal theme was that the West he had fled Russia to find was disappearing. It had been confident, with a cultural excellence and creativity in art, architecture, and music, which was fundamentally spiritual. Where once there had been such a civilization, together with commitment to religion, there was now only an animalistic pursuit of "happiness" by people numbed by drugs and pop music, living self-indulgently and believing in nothing. The great institutions that had once defended political liberties had given way to the cult of the individual, philistinism, and nihilism.[6]
In 2008, Boot's essay "Political Correctness" was published in The Nation That Forgot God, a collection of essays edited by Edward Leigh, with work by Roger Scruton, Vincent Nichols, Shusha Guppy, Aidan Bellenger, and Michael Nazir-Ali. The Catholic Times noted that "The nation of the title of this book of essays is, of course, Britain. The arresting title is justified by the intellectual strength of the twelve authors."[7] Later in 2008 Boot's "Life in Putin's Russia" was published in The Chesterton Review.[8]
In 2009 came God and Man According to Tolstoy, in which Boot deals with the philosophical and moral views of Leo Tolstoy, as seen in his non-fiction.[9]
In 2011, Boot launched his own blog, alexanderboot.com.
His The Crisis Behind Our Crisis (2011) deals with the moral aspects of the European debt crisis which followed the Financial crisis of 2007–2008 and has a foreword by Theodore Dalrymple, who says in it that Boot has implacable logic and grasp of history. Reviewing the work for The American Conservative, Paul Gottfried comments that "Boot explores the metaphysical and moral origins of what are usually viewed as strictly financial questions" and notes that it is "mostly about history, philosophy, and the Christian convictions of the author."[2]
Of How the Future Worked (2013), a memoir of Boot’s years in Soviet Russia, Owen Matthews has said that the book makes sweeping generalizations and is "exuberant and chaotic, colourful, erratic… not unlike Russia itself."[1]
Boot is married to the pianist Penelope Blackie and spends much of his time at their house in rural France.[2]
Positions
A monarchist,[2] and an admirer of the unwritten British constitution, Boot finds the WhigEdmund Burke its most brilliant political mind.[10][non-primary source needed] Identifying with traditional conservatism, he has written of Ayn Rand that she "fuses the values of cutthroat capitalism with fascist philosophy and aesthetics… Just like Marx, Rand creates an imaginary economic world that has little to do with reality."[11][non-primary source needed]
Boot has called liberal democracy "nothing but a mendacious slogan of a virtual world", as it is "neither truly democratic nor particularly liberal", resting on the ever-growing power over people of a centralized state which has dictatorial power.[2] He makes no attempt to defend "real democracy", which in his view leads inevitably to centralization and bureaucratic control,[2] and instead proposes that the right to vote should be limited, with no electoral franchise for those who get more than half of their earned income from the government.[4]
Boot believes the state should be smaller, and people should be self-sufficient. He has also proposed that a return to the gold standard would restore monetary rectitude.[4]
Boot defends the Roman Catholicism of the Middle Ages and is critical of other forms of Christianity, especially the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther and John Calvin. He stresses Luther’s antisemitism, finding a direct link between Luther and the Holocaust, and considers that Protestants have pushed the West towards excessive materialism. He is also critical of the Eastern Orthodox Church.[2] Boot considers that the East–West Schism of 1054, resulting from the filioque disagreement on whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father, led to a similar split in attitudes to work, undermining the power of religion and allowing people to pursue happiness regardless of Christian morality.[4]
In April 2012, The Independent quoted Boot as claiming that the UK Independence Party was "the only party that reflects the consensus of our population" on Europe.[12]
Also in 2012, Pink News called on its readers to complain about a "startlingly homophobic" article by Boot in The Daily Mail.[13]
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Peter Day, "Causes of the Crunch: The filioque started it, Peter Day reads The Crisis Behind Our Crisis Alexander Boot St Matthew Publishing Ltd", Church Times, 19 August 2011, p. 7
↑ "About the author" in How the West Was Lost (I. B. Tauris, 2006)
Filioque, a Latin term meaning "and from the Son", was added to the original Nicene Creed, and has been the subject of great controversy between Eastern and Western Christianity. The term refers to the Son, Jesus Christ, with the Father, as the one shared origin of the Holy Spirit. It is not in the original text of the Creed, attributed to the First Council of Constantinople (381), which says that the Holy Spirit proceeds "from the Father" without the addition "and the Son".
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012, having previously served from 2000 to 2008. Putin also served as Prime Minister of Russia from 1999 to 2000 and again from 2008 to 2012. At 24 years, 10 months and 25 days, he is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since the 30-year tenure of Joseph Stalin.
Neoconservatism is a political movement which began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party along with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international relations together with a militaristic and realist philosophy of "peace through strength". They are known for espousing opposition to communism and radical politics.
The Tolstoyan movement is a social movement based on the philosophical and religious views of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Tolstoy's views were formed by rigorous study of the ministry of Jesus, particularly the Sermon on the Mount.
Max Boot is a Russian-born naturalized American author, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for The Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. Since then, he has been the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. He has written for such publications as The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has authored books of military history. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for biography, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party", in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His newest book, released in September 2024, is Reagan: His Life and Legend.
Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, often referred to as A. K. Tolstoy, was a Russian poet, novelist, and playwright. He is considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist, primarily on account of the strength of his dramatic trilogy The Death of Ivan the Terrible (1866), Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich (1868), and Tsar Boris (1870). He also gained fame for his satirical works, published under his own name and under the collaborational pen name of Kozma Prutkov. His fictional works include the novella The Family of the Vourdalak, The Vampire (1841), and the historical novel Prince Serebrenni (1862).
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Sir Roger Vernon Scruton, was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of conservative views.
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Stephen Frand Cohen was an American scholar of Russian studies. His academic work concentrated on modern Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's relationship with the United States.
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin was a Russian jurist, religious and political philosopher, publicist, orator, and conservative monarchist. While he saw Russia's 1917 February Revolution as a "temporary disorder", the October Revolution, in his view, marked a "national catastrophe". This conviction led him to oppose the Bolshevik regime. He became a white émigré journalist, aligning himself with Slavophile beliefs and emerging as a key ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union. This organization firmly believed that force stood as the sole means through which the Soviet regime could be toppled.
Richard Sakwa is a British political scientist and a former professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, a senior research fellow at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and an honorary professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University. He has written books about Russian, Central and Eastern European communist and post-communist politics.
British neoconservatism is an ideology that is a strong proponent of foreign intervention in the Arab world and beyond, supports the role of the private sector in military contracts and is in favour of an alliance with Israel. It shares a world view with its American counterpart in regards to threats and opportunities.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909.
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"The Three Hermits" is a short story by Russian author Leo Tolstoy written in 1885 and first published in 1886 in the weekly periodical Niva (нива). It appeared in the short-story collection Twenty-Three Tales which was first translated into English for an edition released by Funk & Wagnalls in 1907. The title refers to its three central characters; unnamed simple monks living on a remote island in a life of prayer and contemplation "for the salvation of their souls."
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