Humanitarian Integration of Belarus by Russia Most Dangerous Kind, Yeliseyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 29 – The integration of Belarusian government, military and economic institutions by Moscow in the latter’s pursuit of the deepening of ties between the two countries has attracted more attention, but humanitarian integration, Andrey Yeliseyev says, is far more dangerous and insidious because it “reduces to nothing all our national distinctiveness.”

            The political scientist at the EAST-Center, says many, by focusing on what might be called “hard” integration Alyaksandr Lukashenka has resisted, are missing Moscow’s increasing efforts to promote the “soft” kind about which the Belarusian leader doesn’t appear to care (thinktanks.by/publication/2019/07/29/andrey-eliseev-gumanitarnaya-integratsiya-svedet-na-nol-vse-nashe-natsionalnoe.html).

            Lukashenka, Yeliseyev says, isn’t prepared to make many concessions about political sovereignty but is prepared to allow Russians to make further inroads in the humanitarian sphere in order to get Moscow to provide oil, gas, and favorable loans.  For him, the analyst says, “Belarussianness is of no value.” 

            But if the Belarusian language and Belarusian culture are marginalized or even destroyed, the political scientist says, the country will lose the basis for its independent existence in the future even if for the time being it can keep at least partial control of its economy and political institutions.

            According to Yeliseyev, talk about “soft Belarusianization” is misplaced.  “It hasn’t even begun” at least by the government. “The average Belarus hasn’t noted such phenomena as I am sure any poll would confirm.” Some private initiatives are taking place, but they act on their own in spite of the government rather than with its assistance. 

            In the key areas of the media and education, he continues, Minsk has been “a complete zero.”  Indeed, it has even taken steps that make the situation with regard to the Belarusian language even worse, precisely what Moscow wants and far more dangerous in the long run than any concessions on the economy or even the military.

A New Russian Revolution has Begun in the Streets of Moscow, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 29 – The protest in Moscow from a superficial perspective “do not appear to have any particular change to go down in history” as something special, Vladimir Pastukhov says. They weren’t especially large, and they weren’t suppressed in blood. But “appearances are deceptive,” and the protest marks a fundamental change in relations between people and power.

            The London-based Russian analyst argues that the country is now at the beginning of a constitutional crisis, whose resolution will directly and immediately lead Russia to a revolution,” not necessarily tomorrow but at some point in the future because the conflict has become a zero-sum game (mbk-news.appspot.com/sences/vsem-stoyat-rabotaet-revolyuciya/).

                Pastukhov suggests that his conclusions are driven by Richard Pipes’ argument in his History of the Russian Revolution that the events of 1905 and 1917 began not on Bloody Sunday in January 1905 but in the student uprisings in Petersburg in February 1899.  Although these were suppressed, they showed that both people and power saw that one or the other had to win.

            Pipes suggests that at that time “as often happens with revolutionaries, in this initial moment there was a large share of accident and the occasion for the protests was trivial.”  Pastukhov argues that the same thing is true of the latest Moscow protests and thus they must be seen as the start of a new revolution.

            As in February 1899 so now in July 2019 what matters is “the changed nature of the protests,” from being simply clashes between the police and demonstrators and being about the emergence “in the most open and uncompromised form” of a struggle over a constitutional principle between the powers that be and the Russian people.

                That principle is whether elections will be the source of legitimacy of the government.  While the Putin regime has gutted the meaning of elections over the last 20 years, it has not openly done away with the meaning. And now it has moved to destroy the form as well. As a result, “the era of ‘sovereign democracy’ in Russia ended” in the streets of Moscow.

            “It is one thing,” Pastukhov says, “when officials at the Kremlin’s direction falsify documents and quite another when … the entire constitutional system in general and the election system in particular is organized in such a way that all the players, except those in power, will always be deceived.”

            And what this means is this, the analyst says. “The real trigger of the July protests became not the particular case, the falsification by specific people of specific documents but the constitutional dead end which gave rise to this particular case” and the fact that the population now recognizes what is going on.

            “Step by step,” he says, the Putin regime has constructed “a system which excludes any unsanctioned political participation. And namely this has become the main indeed the only constitutional principle” for that regime. As a result, today, “not a single principle or norm of the Constitution still works.”

            But while the powers that be have been moving in that direction, the Russian people have been moving in quite another. “People have begun to want what the powers that be cannot under any circumstances give them: a share of control over the situation.” And the divergence of these paths has now come to the breaking point.

            The fight now is a matter of principle and it is “a zero-sum game, in which there cannot be any compromise.” The Moscow city council elections are the trigger for this clash but they are not the cause. And “from this moment on, both sides will unceasingly view the other” as a threat to themselves.

            That doesn’t mean that the new revolution any more than the one that began in 1899 will proceed in a direct line to its conclusion. It will ebb and flow, there may be concessions and failures on both sides. But when Putin came up from his ride on a submarine, he returned to a different country, one in the midst of a revolution rather than the stability he likes to talk about.

North Ossetia Orthodox Say Leaders of Traditional Ossetian Faith Attacking Christians

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 29 – Even though roughly half of the population of North Ossetia identifies as Russian Orthodox, parishioners of that denomination’s churches there say followers of the traditional pagan faith in the republic there are now attacking them, a complaint that they have made to the local archbishop who has forwarded it to Patriarch Kirill.

            The parishioners made their appeal after Roman Gabarayev, a member of the republic’s youth parliament, posted on line a call to drive Christians out of the republic. He later denied he did so, but an investigation concluded he had and Gabarayev was subsequently excluded from the youth parliament.

            According to materials contained in the parishioners’ appeal – which is available on line at   zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5b5d931ff8c46b00a93258c2/obrascenie-k-arhiepiskopu – this is not the first instance in which followers of the traditional Ossetian religion have attacked Russian Orthodoxy.

            They assert that “attacks on Orthodox clergy and believers are increasing in frequency in recent years” and that the republic authorities have observed this “with silent approval” and thus contributed to the growth of such sentiments. And they say things are likely to get worse as the republic approaches the 1100^th anniversary of the baptism of Alania.

            What might seem to be a small controversy promises to become a large one extending far beyond the borders of that North Caucasus republic now that Moscow’s Kommersant has published a story about what is going on there, implicitly suggesting that such attacks on Orthodoxy are common elsewhere too (kommersant.ru/doc/4045783).

            “In the official republic media,” the parishioners say and Kommersant reports, “adepts of ‘the true faith in their materials methodically draw a line between ‘their own’ and ‘not their own’ faiths” with some articles even declaring that “’he who accepts Christianity ceases to be an Ossetian.’”

            At present, the paper notes, the republic is actively preparing for the celebrating of the 1100^th anniversary of the Christianization of the Ossetians, an occasion that as the Orthodox archbishop there notes is bring religious tensions to a head. According to the churchman, these tensions not only undermine stability in the republic but relations between it and Russia.

            Archbishop Leonid says that he is enlisting not only the patriarchate but also local law enforcement agencies to crack down on these attacks on Orthodoxy, suggesting, again according to Kommersant, that what is happening in Ossetia today has precedents in Ukraine and thus must be nipped in the bud. 

            Roman Lunkin, head of the Center for the Study of Problems of Religion and Society at Moscow’s Institute of Europe, tells the Moscow paper that conflicts between Orthodox and pagan Ossetians have been going on for a long time because each has its own rules of behavior that the other is seen as violating, especially with regard to women.

            The republic authorities have called for a roundtable discussion about this issue, and the Orthodox Church also has been cautious in going further. The church and law enforcement agencies, Lunkin says, do not want to “go into conflict with the powerful Ossetian national movement” as that “contradicts the current national mission of the ROC MP and the nationality policy of the center in the regions.”

            But the expert says, “the Ossetian powers that be in fact have no choice: they must support the national paganism and search for a compromise with the Russian Orthodox Church.” 

            This story is gaining legs in Russia and that may play a role as to what happens next. For an example of additional coverage of the clash between Orthodoxy and Ossetian paganism, see znak.com/2019-07-29/pravoslavnye_severnoy_osetii_pozhalovalis_na_diskriminaciyu_v_otnoshenii_hristian.