Paul Goble
Staunton,
February 12 – When Stalin restored the Moscow Patriarchate during World War II,
he did so primarily for foreign policy reasons, to impress the West with his
supposed respect for the religious feelings of the Soviet population. And for
the remainder of the Soviet period, the Moscow Patriarchate was far more active
abroad than at home.
Sometimes
this took the form of high-profile participation in ecumenical meetings at
which the official church could promote whatever was the Kremlin’s current
line; and sometimes it involved the use of church institutions abroad in
Jerusalem and Western Europe in particular as covers for Soviet espionage and
diversionary activity.
At
the end of the Soviet period and especially in the early 1990s, the Patriarchate
shifted its focus away from foreign affairs to domestic ones, seeking to expand
its influence and network within the country and attract to its parishes many
who had either fallen away from religion altogether or who had joined unrecognized
and underground groups.
Now,
Valery Yemelyanov, the director of the Vremya i mir information portal, tells
Aleksandr Soldatov of the Credo.ru site that “the political activity of the ROC
MP has shifted from domestic policy to foreign affairs” once again (credo.press/222806/).
On the one hand, this reflects the
Church’s failure at home win support among young people, the religious affairs
observer says. The Pussy Riot case showed that the Patriarchate could not hope
to become what the Kremlin wanted – the chief articulator of a new national
ideology. And on the other, it is the product of changes in the church itself
under Patriarch Kirill.
The current patriarch had been the
longtime head of the church’s foreign policy arm before assuming the top job
and sees activity abroad as more natural and more profitable than spreading the
faith at home. In particular, he has sought to win points in the Kremlin by
being openly Islamophobic.
Some hope that Kirill will now focus more on
domestic affairs given his debacle in Ukraine. But Yemelyanov says that is unlikely.
Instead, the patriarch will try to win back his position in the Kremlin by
becoming even more active politically abroad, largely limiting himself to opposing
“sects” like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their missionary work at home.
Exactly what form that will take is
uncertain: The Moscow church does not have the influence to structure events
but will only be able to take advantage of new possibilities others may
present. But among the most likely forms will be an expansion in ecumenical
contacts with Roman Catholics in general and Catholic conservatives in
particular.
At the same time, the ROC MP seems
on course to resume or at least expand what was never completely absent its
role as a cover for Russian intelligence and political activists abroad. That role which attracted a great deal of
attention during the Cold War is now so obvious that it is getting more
coverage now.
The most recent case involves the
way in which the ROC MP operates as “a Trojan horse” agency in the Czech
Republic promoting the Kremlin’s position in Czech politics and engaging in
espionage and subversion. This has been
documented in a new article by Czech journalist Stanislav Mateyev.
The original appeared in Prague’s Denik N on February 9 (denikn.cz/69878/kreml-ma-v-cesku-trojskeho-kone-pravoslavnou-cirkev-jeji-mistni-hodnostari-se-tim-ani-moc-netaji/). It has now been translated into Russian at inosmi.ru/social/20190211/244546521.html.
What is
disturbing about this article is that it shows that the ROC MP abroad is
operating now exactly as it operated in Soviet times, with only two
differences. On the one hand, it is targeting countries it didn’t have to
earlier. And on the other, it may be even more effective because people in the
West do not suspect what it is doing.
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