Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 17 – Orthodox
Fundamentalism has become “respectable” in Russia, according to Boris Knorre of
Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, thus completing what then-Vice President
Aleksandr Rutskoy hoped for when he helped set up the World Russian Popular
Assembly in 1993.
Thus, the scholar is quoted by
“Ogonyek” journalists Olga Filina and Sergey Meshcheryakov, “political religion
is [Russia’s] new reality,” one in which “the church is being converted into a
transmission belt of the state machine,” a game that is “very dangerous” for
the country as a whole (kommersant.ru/doc/2841512).
The article is devoted to last week’s
19th World Russian Popular Assembly, which as the two journalists
point out, “enriched [Russian] political language with new terms” and mixed “a
cocktail of ideological and behavioral principles whose basic components” are
that Russia should be “not a civil but a ‘solidarist society,’” that current
divisions between the left and right can be overcome by “’social monarchism,’”
and that the movement seeks to be built on “immemorial” Russian values rather
than on those borrowed from Europe.
Summing up, speakers at the meeting
said that “social monarchism” should replace “’sovereign democracy’” as the
guiding principle for Russia’s future.
Not surprisingly, that provoked some strong reactions, including the one
by religious affairs specialist Knorre already mentioned.
Aleksey Malashenko of the Moscow
Carnegie Center said that this trend was intended to “turn away from everything
foreign” and to use “without selection” everything that could be found at hand
in Russian culture. “Thus Berdyaev suddenly turns up alongside Ilin, socialism
becomes a synonym of monarchism, and so on.”
“In a paradoxical way,” the
specialist on religious issues says, “for the construing of this ‘specialness,’
the nuances and wealth of one’s own culture are to be sacrificed” in order to
support the current regime.
Irina Sadomirskaya, a professor at
Sweden’s Center for Baltic and East European Research, agreed and pointed out
that the main thrust of this new ideological approach is something that has
been seen before, one that asserts that Russia’s “’specialness’” is threatened
by the West and that “the Fatherland is ‘always in danger.’”
Already in the early 19th
century, Russian writers were taking this position, including Aleksandr
Shishkov who “loved Europe” but called for opposing it, and Count Urarov who
came up with the much cited slogan,, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality,”
even though he was an atheist, a liberal, and didn’t read books in Russian.
Today, the “Ogonyek” journalists
suggest, last week’s conference offers the latest update of this idea, calling
for “’social monarchism,’” something that combines the tsar and the CPSU and as
well as only “combinations of the uncombinable” like concern for the tsarist
remains with praise for Stalin.
Aleksandr Rubtsov, the head of the
Center for Research on Ideological Processes at Moscow’s Institute of
Philosophy, said that the problem has its roots in the fact that spiritual
leaders increasingly act “as if they were candidates for degrees in political
science” and as if there were any final choices between East and West.
In fact, “the balance changes,” and
therefore it is absurd to act otherwise.
Those who talk about Russian “’specialness,’” he continued, forget that
and they also forget that the words they use for that quality “in Russian mean “the
possibility of ‘being oneself,’ a mark of freedom and not the imposition of any
ideological doctrine about ‘how we are in fact.’”
The worst aspect of this situation,
Rubtsov continued, lies elsewhere: “No one seriously believes in monarchism but
many want to please the bosses. So we may not have a tsar but on the other hand
we will feed on this spirit and look at the current leadership as if it were God-given,
infallible, and what is most important, irreplaceable.”
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