Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 29 – All sorts
of aggressive sects are ready to fill any “gap” in Russia’s public space left
open by the inaction of the powers that be, but that does not mean that the
state is dying, Mikhail Pozharsky says, because such groups “do not want to
occupy a place INSTEAD of the state but rather to be TOGETHER with it.”
In this, although the Moscow
commentator does not say so, radical nationalist and xenophobic groups, many
linked to Russian Orthodoxy, strongly resemble the Black Hundreds movement at
the end of the tsarist period, one that also believed its actions were in
support of the state but that ultimately helped destroy the state’s
credibility.
The actions of some radicals in
closing a photography exhibit in Moscow last week, Pozharsky says, have led
some Russian writers to argue that these groups are illegitimately taking the place
of the state by violating the government’s monopoly on the use of force and
thus threatening the state’s existence (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=57EB7F9EEED58).
Such arguments are inappropriate for
three reasons, he suggests. First of
all, what happened last week isn’t new. Radical groups have been doing such things
for some time. Indeed, they stand ready to fill “any gap in the social space”
which the state, by its failure in their view to act, has not filled.
Second, Pozharsky continues, it is
absurd to talk in either/or terms about the state’s monopoly on the use of
force, especially about a state like the one in Russia which is run by bandits
who are in no way controlled by social institutions like elections and the rule
of law. The bandits of the state and the bandits of the radical sects thus
exist along a continuum.
“To make distinctions among these
bandits may be worthwhile as far as certain practical goals are concerned,” the
commentator says, but there is no reason to do so “in theory.”
And third, there is another reason
to avoid seeing the bandits in the state and the bandits in the streets as at
loggerheads. In fact, the latter are “semi-state organizations which receive
grants and have protectors among the deputies and the bureaucrats. They thus
are the state” and not its enemies, at least as the bandits in the state
understand things.
Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the head of
the SOVA analytic center, provides an additional comment about the closure of
the photography exhibit by the Officers organization, noting that this
represents one significant change. In the past, he says, such actions to
enforce morality were taken largely by groups near the church. Now, they are
taken by others as well.
“In large measure,” he writes, “the
state has taken over ideas and also methods of activists near the church. The
moral theme for a long time remained in fact the monopoly of the Church. Now,
people closer to the state than to the church are seeking to make use of it” (sova-center.ru/religion/publications/2016/09/d35496/).
Verkhovsky says that he is unsure
whether this “trend will continue, but if it does, then it will turn out that
the Church on this issue as well will be reduced to a secondary role as an
assistant. Now, the patriarch has spoken out on the issue of abortions,
although no one prevented him from doing so in the past because the theme is
eternal.”
“I have the impression,” the SOVA
analyst says, “that by doing so, he is trying to catch up” with the direction
in which things are moving.
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