Cossacks Want Religious as Well as Political Independence from Moscow, Dyomin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 4 – “The Cossack people wants to achieve not only national-state independence from Moscow but religious independence as well,” Vyacheslav Dyomin says; “and that is why ever more voices have been raised about the establishment of an autocephalous Cossack Church, capable of uniting the True Orthodox” on Cossack lands in Russia.

            This religious dimension of the Cossack national movement, the émigré Cossack leader says, reflects the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s decision to grant autocephaly to Ukraine, the continued oppression of True Orthodox communities in Russia, and anger among Cossacks and others about the way in which the Moscow Patriarchate has become a servant of the Kremlin.

            To that end, Dyomin has begun to outline how the Cossacks and the True Orthodox may come together and achieve international recognition of their status as a separate church, something that would provide them with a potentially powerful defense against Moscow’s continuing oppression of both (facebook.com/demin.nimed/posts/1136118916571118).

            The émigré activist has been a powerful voice on behalf of the True Orthodox, some of whose followers have been imprisoned or forced into exile while others have continued to function as an undergound “catacomb church” of the kind that existed in Soviet times  (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/11/another-tragic-soviet-continuity-in.html).

            Now, he is pointing to the way in which the energy of these believers and that of independent Cossacks can come together, a development that could represent a threat to the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian state behind it at least as fateful as the recognition of Ukrainian autocephaly by the Ecumenical Patriarchate has been.

            Reflecting both its own concerns and those of the Kremlin, the Moscow Patriarchate has long been concerned about the possibility of religious dissent by the Cossacks. Not only does it maintain a special synodical department for Cossack affairs, but it has issued strong denunciations of any effort by the Cossacks to seek autocephaly for themselves.

            ROC MP Bishop Kirill, the head of that department and someone who claims Cossack ancestry, has issued stinging denunciations of efforts by Cossacks to set up a separate church and to seek autocephaly from Constantinople on the basis of the mistaken idea that they and not he Moscow Patriarchate are the True Orthodox of Russia (patriarchia.ru/db/text/1552330.html).

                Moscow appears to be growing increasingly worried about that possibility, especially in the wake of Ukrainian autocephaly and growing Western attention to Moscow’s repressive policies toward the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other Christian groups in Russia, including the True Orthodox. 

            Just how serious the Cossack interest in having that nation’s own church and how worried Moscow, religious and secular, is about that prospect was signaled at the end of last year by an article in NG-Religii entitled “The Cossacks have Founded Their Own Church” and await autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarch (ng.ru/ng_religii/2018-12-18/11_456_kazaki.html).

            Its author, Artur Priymak, who covers religious affairs for Moscow’s Nezavisimaya gazeta, details the efforts by the All-Cossack Center, which is independent of and at odds with Putin’s “registered” Cossacks, to revive the Cossack Orthodox Apostolic Church as a first step toward autocephaly. 

            Although Priymak cannot conceal his hostility to the whole idea and his desire to link the Cossacks to Ukrainian “splitters,”  he quotes with apparent acceptance the statement of a Cossack religious leader who says that “the process of the rebirth of the Cossack Church started on the territory of the Russian Federation,” no in Ukraine.

            In Russia, he notes, the All-Cossack Center and its religious arm are in “harsh opposition” to the ROC MP and current Russian powers that be. The Cossack Church is beginning to recruit clergy from the Truly Orthodox faithful, the Cossacks say; and Priymak says that the first Cossack church is likely to go up in Podolsk near Moscow in 2019.

            The Moscow commentator does not discuss the ways in which True Orthodoxy and the ROC MP are at odds, but he does mention one thing that may matter than he suspects. While the Moscow Patriarchate refers to its followers as “slaves of God,” the Cossack True Orthodox don’t because “a Cossack has never been a slave to anyone.”