West’s Russophobia Will be the Salvation of Russia, Orthodox Priest Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 6 – Now that Vladimir Putin has accused the West of “racist Russohobia,” Father Aleksandr Shumsky says, the Kremlin leader is close to a clear recognition of the need to destroy “the Russophobic part of the Russian ruling elite.”  And if he does, the West’s Russophobia will prove the salvation of Russia.

            In a Russkaya liniya commentary entitled “Thank the West for Russophobia!” the priest who is also an active member of the Russian Writers’ Union argues that Putin has approached this problem much in the same way that detective Columbo does in the television series by that name (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/06/06/spasibo_zapadu_za_rusofobiyu/).

            Like Columbo, Putin sometimes appears not to be fully cognizant of what is going on around him but then he focuses in a mistake by his opponents and gives an absolutely correct diagnosis and then takes action, Shumsy says.  That is especially the case with the issue of Russophobia.

            Not long ago, the priest continues, “the very word ‘Russian’ was under an unwritten ban and the use of the term ‘Russophobia’ in general was considered a criminal act.” Indeed, he suggests, “if the prime minister even uttered the words ‘Russian culture,’ this generated sincere surprise” and predictions by liberals of the imminent return of Stalinism and the GULAG.

            Patriotic Russians in contrast were encouraged by any such references, Shumsky says, but for a long time, their hopes that any such words would be followed by action were routinely dashed. But in fact, even this silence showed that “everyone understood that ‘the Russian question’ is the main issue not only of all Russian life but also of all world politics.”

            Things might have continued this way for a long time, Shumsky suggests, had it not been for the rise in the West “not simply” of Russophobia but of a bestial variant of that “in no way less than Nazi racism.  And it is precisely in this that the main mistake of the representatives of the criminal Western elite lies.”

            “And our president,” Shumsky says, “just like Columbo, immediately ‘got’ them. Vladimir Vladimirovich precisely and clearly declared to the entire world that racist Russophobia from now on is the leitmotif of all Western policy toward Russia” and that the West has “crossed a line” which makes a return even to tense relations of the recent past impossible.

            “Never before this” had Putin or his predecessors been “bold enough to say such things at a high level in public,” Shumsky says.  “What then does this mean?” According to this Russian priest, it means that “our relations with the West have reached their end, one that points to an inevitable global military clash.”

              “Putin no longer wants to conceal that the main goal of the Russophobic West is the complete destruction and ‘cleansing’ of Russia. And that is very valuable: the last illusions regarding the ‘peace-loving’ West have finally been cast aside by Russia’s supreme power,” the priest says.

            It took a long time to get to this point, Shumsky continues. One would have wished for it to come sooner, “but the main thing is that it has come.” And that in turn means that Putin must now move to eliminate “the Russophobic part of the Russian ruling elite,” which forms an “enormous” part of the upper reaches of his regime.

            Without the elimination of such people, the priest says, “resistance to the Russophobic West will be impossible, a West which is unleashing a war against us.”  That war cannot be fought successfully “with such a quantity of traitors in power.” Putin has now shown that he understands this, and “we with impatience will await when he begins to solve it in a real way.”

            “Thanks to the West for Russophobia!” Father Aleksandr concludes.