Paul Goble
Staunton,
November 5 – In his recent speeches, Moscow Patriarch Kirill has articulated a
kind of Orthodox Fundamentalism that not only resembles the more familiar
Islamist variant but like it will
encourage those who want to attack modernity in the name of traditional rural
values to engage in violence, Yevgeny Ikhlov argues.
“If
in Kirill’s speeches, one replaces his references to the Mother of God with
Allah .. Russian civilization with the umma … the Orthodox Tsar with the Khalif
of the Faithful, we obtain a ready-made manifesto of some Islamist
fundamentalists, the Moscow commentator says (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=563AEF21DEEE7).
Of
course, Ikhlov continues, the Moscow Patriarch’s version of fundamentalism is
more “cowardly,” almost certainly because “the term ‘Orthodox progromist’ is
much more well-known than ‘Orthodox shahid,’ although for example, the world
has seen in excess socialist and communist ‘shahids.”
Were these words simply the
churchman’s opinion, they might safely be dismissed as wrong-headed, but the
coming together of two trends, Ikhlov continues, means that they are anything
but a marginal view and almost certainly will have deleterious consequences for
Russia and Russians.
On the one hand, for the third time
in modern Russian history, the powers that be have turned away from European
values such as the supremacy of law and civic freedoms in the name of
protecting Russia’s supposed “special path.” The first time was in 1848; the
second was at the end of Stalin’s reign; and now Putin is doing the same as
these values threaten his power.
And on the other, Russia’s new
turning away from the West is drawing is energy from traditionalist even
archaic rural culture whose bearers are prepared once again to use violence
against those mostly modern urban people whom they view as threatening their
values, their way of life, and the nation as they define it.
This conjunction has allowed Kirill
and the church hierarchy to aspire to become the Putin-era analogue of the
Ideological Department of the CPSU Central Committee, Ikhlov argues.
The patriarch in his recent remarks
have pushed three “basic” theses: First, in his view, “Russia has a special
civilizational path and is under the invisible rule of the Mother of God” and
one that can realize itself only by preserving its identity from attempts to
impose Western values on it.
Second, “the essence of this
identity is in the preservation of ‘popular morality’ from fornication and
pseudo-freedom.” And third, in the defense of these values, “the Moscow
Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox church is the avant-garde of Russian
society and is leading it to a bright past,” a notion that is “not simple a
comic inversion” of the CPSU’s claims but an affirmation of the church’s
increasing influence in the regime.
There is no doubt, Ikhlov says, that
“local Russian civilization has its own specific character,” just like “all the
other ‘daughters’ of European civilization do.”
It specific features include “cyclical-catastrophic development,” with
each stage of its development divided from its predecessor by a time of
troubles and “its essence being the overthrow of its predecessor.”
Its efforts at modernization have
always been incomplete and superficial. It has seen “the preservation of
enormous influence of traditionalist (feudal) and even traditional (archaic and
pre-state) periods.” And it has been
engaged in a Manichean struggle “between models of a messianic continental
empire and a nation state of a European type.”
But what is “most important” in the
current context, Ikhlov argues, is this: Russia has been the arena for a
struggle between those who celebrate the village and the past and those who
believe that the future can and must be defined by urban civilization rather
than by the patriarchal village.
Conflicts in the former Yugoslavia,
“genocidal pogroms in East Africa and South East Asia and India very clearly
have shown to what horrific cruelty are capable in ordinary life simple, honest
and good villagers” when they are confronted by changes in the cities and
mobilized by elites against urban civilization.
“The cruelty of the traditional
individual is explicable,” Ikhlov suggests, “because he lives in fear” of those
who bring change and is thus prepared to attack witches, Jews, heretics,
“wreckers” and more recently “fifth columns.” As long as the tradition of which
he is a part is strong, he is a picturesque figure. But when tradition weakens,
he is unleashed.
And that is true, the Moscow
commentator suggests, whether the villager is a Shiite in Iran or an Orthodox
believer in rural Russia. Both have seen their formerly strong traditions
weaken in the last century; and now they both want to take revenge on those
they blame for this development.
If the Russian Orthodox Church were
prepared to condemn such attacks, Russia might get through its current time of
troubles without violence. But Patriarch Kirill is making clear, Ikhlov says,
that he has no intention to rein in such traditionalist emotions and thus will,
along with the Kremlin, likely exacerbate them still further.
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