Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 21 – Three
important articles this week in the Moscow media suggest that the Russian
Orthodox Church under Moscow Patriarch Kirill is ever less a religious organization
and ever more one that recalls and is best understood by drawing analogies with
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
First, in an interview in “Novaya
gazeta,” Boris Knorre, a specialist on religion at Moscow’s Higher School of
Economics, describes the way “political orthodoxy” has become “an ideology
justifying war with the entire world” and why “the temptation to feel oneself a
hero of ‘a holy war’” is so great (novayagazeta.ru/politics/71509.html).
“Politicized groups close to the
church existed throughout the 1990s,” but until 2004, they did not receive the
support of the Moscow Patriarchate. In that year, then-metropolitan Kirill
issued his “so-called doctrine of Orthodox civilization” based on the ideas of
Samuel Huntington and encouraged the political orthodox to become more active.
Kirill didn’t elaborate, but his
aides and supporters did, with some arguing that political Orthodoxy requires
that people “again learn to die and kill” and others arguing that the church
should oppose a market economy and do everything possible to promote “the unity
of the church, the people and the state.”
In Russia today, the state uses
Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy uses the state, “and each step of one intensifies the
response of the other.” One area where
that is especially true is in foreign policy. “Imperial ideas of political
Orthodoxy are quite popular in the church milieu,” Knorre says.
“The beliveers suffered greatly with
the destruction of the USSR – in their conscioiusness, the Soviet space was
sacred Russian land.” Not surprisingly, such people viewed the Kremlin’s
actions in Crimea and Ukraine as a chance to realize a return. But they couldn’t have reached the audience
they did had it not been for the state.
In many cases, the political
Orthodox “would like more radicalization from the president, for example, on
questions involving the isolation of the country from the Western world.” Such
tensions, although Knorre doesn’t speak to this issue, recall those between
committed communists and state pragmatists in Soviet times.
And Knorre’s words suggest that the
Moscow Patriarchate has become part but not the only part of the ideological
department of a new “central committee,” again in much the same way that
communist ideologues had to coexist with diplomats and statist elements in
Soviet times.
Second, in a commentary in Moscow’s “Gazeta”
newspaper, Andrey Desnitsky, a specialist on religious affairs, draws a
comparison between the way in which the Moscow Patriarchate conducts its
business and the way the CPSU did in Soviet times (gazeta.ru/comments/column/desnitsky/8030663.shtml).
“When I was a child, congresses of
the CPSU assembled int eh capital. Participants reported about successes and
denounced enemies, and sharepd a feel of deep satisfaction and sang the praises
of dear comrade Leonid Ilich personally. This was the highest, the most powerful
forum … which discussed nothing and which decided nothing.”
Everything was behind the scenes and
everything that could be seen was largely meaningless, Desnitsky says. What happened to the CPSU, of course, is well
known. But what is tragic is that “now something very similar is happening in
church life.” There are enormous
problems, but the top has made it clear that “now is not the time for
discussion.”
And in the third, Vadim Balytnikov, in
“NG-Religii,” talks about the way in which the ideological passions of some in
the church and the sense that the church is losing its sway over the laity
leads to periodic drives to “cleanse” the priesthood in the hopes of recovery
or at least in the hopes of avoiding a revolution from below (ng.ru/ng_religii/2016-01-20/4_clean.html).
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