Russian World Larger than Space Controlled by Russian Army ‘No Longer Exists,’ Desnitsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 12 – Patriarch Kirill long dreamed of a Russian world that included all those who follow Russian Orthodoxy regardless of where they live and thus identify with the Russian world that this faith epitomizes, but that version of the Russian world no longer exists, according to Andrey Desnitsky.

            The Russian Academy of Sciences specialist on the Bible says this version of the Russian world died when Kirill and his church became spokesman for Vladimir Putin’s idea of the Russian world which is based on language and support for Moscow rather than any faith at all (moscowtimes.ru/2023/04/12/pochemu-russkii-mir-patriarha-kirilla-ischez-navsegda-a39834).

            The Russian world Kirill promoted “has disappeared forever,” Desnitsky says. “Today, this unity can be seriously spoken about only as existing on the territory that is reliably controlled by the Russian Federation Armed Forces.” That change “makes the participation of the patriarch and in general of the church completely superfluous.”

            But the bigger question is “what will happen when the regime to which the Moscow Patriarchate has now chained itself shifts or collapses.” Some thing everything will go on as before but others expect a new religious competition in Russia, one that the Patriarchate cannot be sure of winning.

            Desnitsky says he is “sure of one thing: the ‘Spiritual Revival’ project Gorbachev opened 35 years ago in advance of the millennium of the baptism of Rus is now over. Once upon a time, it began with the Russian letters XB [for Khristos Voskres] which appeared on the streets of Russian cities at Easter.”

            Now, these have “been replaced by two other letters, from the end of the Latin alphabet” [ZZ which have become the symbols of Putin’s expanded invasion of Ukraine.]