Window on Eurasia: Sochi Officials Resumed Killing Homeless Animals after Olympic Journalists Left, Activist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – In a classic example of how international attention can restrain Russian officials and how the end of such attention frees them to resume what they were doing, an animal rights activist reports that Sochi officials have restarted their campaign to kill homeless animals since Western journalists left following the Olympiad.

            Tatyana Leshchenko, one of the leaders of the animal rights movement in the North Caucasus, says that international outrage in the run-up to the Olympiad forced Sochi officials to suspend the killing but “when all the journalists left,” they resumed it and on an even greater scale (rosbalt.ru/federal/2014/05/31/1274056.html).

            Her comments come as the Russian Federal Assembly is discussing a bill that would provide some additional protections for animals.  Leshchenko says that the new law must focus on promoting sterilization of pets. Otherwise, however often officials wipe out homeless animals, new ones will appear. The problem won’t go away.

            And these programs are by their nature cruel, she continues.  In Sochi since the Olympics, a private firm has been killing 300 to 500 homeless animals each month and collecting a bounty of “about a thousand rubles” (30 US dollars) for each paid for out of taxes collected from the population.

            “What is happening now, especially in the private sector is unbearable,” Leshchenko continues.  Those who are engaged in the killings are making profits, and the animals are suffering.  And the authorities are not promoting sterilization or punishing those who toss animals into the streets.

            Russian laws against animal cruelty “do not work at all,” she says.  People get a dog or cat and then throw it in the street when they get tired of it “like an old coat.”  And nothing happens. Equally unfortunately, these laws allow anyone to declare an animal aggressive and dangerous, something that opens the way to abuse and mistreatment.

            Shelters help but they are not by themselves the answer, Leshchenko insists.  In Sochi during the Olympics, one was set up with the help of a private foundation. It soon filled up because people kept “disposing” of cats and dogs.  Sterilization is only way, she says, to end this vicious cycle.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Patriarchate Giving Awards to Stalinists and Anti-Semites, Eggert Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – The Moscow Patriarchate is sending a dangerous message about its own views and about what Russians should think by presenting awards to individuals who are openly Stalinist and anti-Semitic in their views, according to Konstantin Eggert, an independent Moscow journalist.

            In a comment to “Kommersant-FM” on Friday, Eggert said he was shocked by the decision of the Russian church hierarchy to present the Patriarchal Prize in Literature to Valery Ganichev, the head of the Union of Writers of Russia and deputy chairman of the Russian Popular Assembly (kommersant.ru/doc/2482345).

            Ganichev is notorious for his pro-Stalin and anti-Jewish comments, but disturbingly, Eggert says, this is hardly the first such action by the Patriarchate.  Patriarch Kirill has presented awards to Aleksandr Prokhanov who has called Stalin “a new Russian saint” and to Stanislav Kunyayev, the openly anti-Semitic editor of “Nash Sovremennik.”

            To be sure, neither was given the prize for these specific statements or works, but the Church had to know about them, Eggert says. The same is true about Ganichev who “from the 1970s has been one of the recognized leaders of the nationalist direction in Russian literature” and whose works are infused with an anti-Semitic spirit.

            There can be no doubt about the trend here, the journalist says. “Too many of the nominees and laureates of the Patriarchal Prize, with only a few worthy exceptions are united by a fervent love of Stalin and just as strong hatred of the Jews, America and the West in general, of democracy and the intelligentsia.”

            Moreover, these honorees are given to conspiracy thinking and to support of horrific foreign leaders like the bestial “Saddam Hussein and Milosevic in the past and the cannibalistic dynasty of the Kims in North Korea today.”  If anyone doubts that, he or she should watch Prokhanov’s televised panegyric to “the grotesque North Korean dictator.”

            Prokhanov, Kunyayev and Ganichev “have every right to their views and the dissemination” of them, Eggert says.  “Let the, if they want, to long for the Stalinist boot [and] to deny the Holocaust.” But that doesn’t mean that the Russian Orthodox Church has any justification for giving them prizes.

             There is no way to combine the expressed values of the Church with the expressed views of Prokhanov and his like, Eggert says. “You must choose either the one or the other. The jury of the Patriarchal Prize has made its choice. And Patriarch Kirill alas has in essence supported it.” Orthodox Christians and all others of good will can only be appalled and ashamed.

Window on Eurasia: Putin’s Moves in Ukraine Pushing Russia toward Disintegrtion, Portnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – By his actions in Ukraine and elsewhere, Vladimir Putin is pushing Russia toward disintegration, Vladimir Portnikov says. Indeed, he argues, the Kremlin leader has “already taken all the decisions necessary” for that to happen and to happen far more quickly than anyone expects.

            In an interview at the end of last week, the Ukrainian commentator says that it isn’t so much that Putin has miscalculated, although he has not made the best decisions he might have, but that the Russian president was “chosen by history itself to liquidate the state” he heads (obozrevatel.com/interview/19627-portnikov-rossiya-raspadetsya--putin-vse-neobhodimyie-resheniya-uzhe-prinyal.htm).

            In that respect, Portnikov continues, Putin’s elevation was “not the most successful choice because he is not a very educated man.  It is possible that this process would have gone better if Russia had a leader who had greater intellectual potential ... and an understanding of strategic consequences, was not so greedy for money, and who was not so tied to his entourage.”

            But however that may be, he continues, Putin faces a problem that no one could have solved: “The Russian Federation is not a state, it is a fragment of the former Soviet Union which unlike other former Soviet republics never had real statehood, never had its own communit party, with the exception of he last two years of the existence of the Union and to a large extent was the nucleus of the empire itself.”

             Russia’s statehood after 1991 “did not undero any changes,” Portnikov says. "Up to now, it exists as a quite strange conglomerate consisting of republics, oblasts, krays, and national districts ... and unresolved national, religious and territorial issues connected with the existence of the regions.”

            “Everything has remained Soviet. And the main thing for the preservation of this territory was to avoid setting precedents which would allow its disintegration.” Boris Yeltsin and his advisors understood this, but Vladimir Putin does not.  The first Russian president backed the independence of the RSFSR so that autonomies inside it would have nowhere to go.

            That was “the correct decision,” Portnikov says, “because then in fact Tatarstan was at the point of leaving the Russian Federation as was Chechnya.” Indeed, “the entire existence of the Russian Federation [since then has been] based on the Soviet status quo of the inviolability of borders.”

            Indeed, “the harshness of Russia in the Chechen war was to a large extent justified by the necessity of observing this status quo and not taking any legal changes which would allow the borders of Russia to be changed.”

            “Having recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Osetia and even more having carried out the annexation of Crimea, Putin has violated this order of things,” Portnikov continues, because he knows very well that “if Crimea can liberally in the course of a week change its jurisdiction then nothing will prevent declaratons of independence or a change in jurisdiction by Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, Yakutia, Buryatiya, [and] Kabardinia-Balkaria.

Still more fatefully, by what he is doing in Donetsk and Luhansk, Putin is opening the door for such actions by predominantly Russian territories as well. Crimea could at least be presented as ethnically different, but the others and even more  “Novorossiya” cannot possibly be described that way.

They thus open “a direct path to a Urals Republic,” like the one Yeltsin worked so hard to suppress, “to a Siberian Republic” and to all other similar arrangements.

            Given Putin’s incautious actions, the disintegration of Russia will proceed, triggered by an economic crisis. “Russia is a territory which is held together exclusively by the common striving of the population to make use of energy resources.”  If that becomes less profitable and possible, then the end will be near.

            Sanctions may bring that day closer, but other factors are at work, including massive corruption and diversion of earnings by Putin and his entourage into their own pockets, the Ukrainian analyst says.

            And once this process starts, it will move quickly, so quickly that those like Putin who believe that his deal with China will stop it miss an important detail: the Moscow-Beijing accord goes into effet only in 2018. And “today is still 2014.”  Between then and now is four years, and much can and will happen.

            History is accelerating. In the 19^th century, people looked forward “approximately a hundred years.  In the early 20^th, “in 50-year categories.” “Somewhere at the start of the 1970s, many experts came to the understanding that the Soviet Union would not last out the net 20-25 years.” Now, events are moving faster, and people need to think about four or five years out.

            Look how fast things have moved in Ukraine, he says. The same thing is going to be true of Russia.  “To talk about the Chinese contrat which will go into effet only four years from now is simply funny. Five years from now, we will lie in a completely different world in which the Russian Federation in its current form won’t exist.”

            Moreover, the Russian Federation’s demise will have enormous consequences for its neighbors because “Russia is the main generator of instability” both for itself and for them. According to Portnikov, Moscow will focus on Kazakhstan. It won’t be able to do much while Nursultan Nazarbayev is in office, “but no one knows what will be the situation there after his departure.”

            If Russia does not become “a civilized state which respects its neighbors and the norms of international law” before Nazarbayev’s departure, Portnikov says, then Russian “aggression in Kazakhstan isinevitable.” And it will involve far larger forces, far more instability, “and this will lead to serious ethnic clashes in Russia’s Middle Volga.”

            Asked when Moscow will leave Ukraine in peace, Portnikovsays that will happen “only if the Ukrainian leadership together with that of the US and the European Union agree to the following Russian conditions:” recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, the federalization of Ukraine, state status for the Russian language, and Russian control of the gas pipeline network.

            “If all these conditions were to be fulfilled, that is, if Ukraine, the US and the EU capitulate before Russia, then [Moscow] will leave us in peace,” he says. Otherwise, “it will continue its destabilizing actions” in Ukraine, and those in turn will destabilize the entire region and Russia itself.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Patriarchate Not Marching in Lockstep with Kremlin on Ukraine, Lunkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – The Moscow Patriarchate is no longer in lockstep with the Kremlin on Ukraine, the result of the reactions of other Christian groups in Ukraine, its own corporate interests, and pressure from its own congregations who have a different view of the future than do many in the hierarchy, according to Roman Lunkin.

            In an analysis for RISU.org.ua, Lunkin, a leading specialist on Orthodoxy at the Moscow Institute of Religion, says that “the Ukrainian revolution has become a test for many Churches which have been drawn into the whirlpool of political arguments and a local civil war” (risu.org.ua/ru/index/expert_thought/open_theme/56574/).

                “If for the Ukrainian Churches the moment of truth were the revolutions of 2004-2005 and 2013-2014,” Lunkin says, “the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate has been subject to an unending historical examination” concerning its views on democracy, freedom, and human rights more generally.

                Both because Kirill was the original source for many of Vladimir Putin’s ideas about “the Russian world” and because of the Moscow Patriarchate’s caesaro-papist approach, most commentators have continued to view the Church as “always and in everything loyal to the authorities.”

            But a more careful examination of the developments of the last two years, Lunkin insists, shows that “the opinion of the Patariarchate has not always corresponded with that of President Putin,” the Moscow scholar says. And over the last three months, that divergence has if anything broadened and deepened.

            Since February, the Moscow Patriarchate has regularly made declarations about its recognition of the right of the Ukrainian people to make their own choices and its support for the various sides there to respect one another and come to an agreement. Such positions are very different than those taken by Putin and his regime.

            Perhaps most significantly, on March 14, Lunkin says, Patriarch Kirill “in fact revised his own idea of the Russian world,” as originally laid out by the church leader in the 1990s, “when he declared that this is not an empire and not the Soviet Union.”

            For those not close to Russian events, it may be difficult to understand that these words are a form of “radical dissonance with the general patriotic euphoria which is to be found in the media, the political milieu and the Kremlin,” Lunkin continues. One result of this evolution of the Patriarchate’s views is the almost complete disappearance of them in the official media.

            According to the Moscow scholar, “the positions of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate” were either left out altogether or presented in “microscopically small” portions in media surveys, likely because these positions “should be assessed as the most democratic” of those on offer in Moscow.

            “If one abstracts from personal sympathies or antipathies to the Russian Orthodox Church and from conspiracy theories about the relations of Kirill and Putin and the imaginary ‘cowardice’ of the ROC, then one should recognize the following” three developments as critically important, Lunkin argues.

                First, it is clear that at least for the moment the Moscow Patriarchate wants to do everything it can to remain in the closest communism with the hierarchs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, who are supporting the right of Ukraine to its own path.

            Second, certainly fearful of losing control over the12,000 Moscow Patriarchate parishes in Ukraine – for comparison, there are 15,000 in the Russian Federation – Patriarch Kirill has “restrained and one would like to believe consciously the wave of imperial-great power celebration and xenophobia against the West.”

            Indeed, “we see,” Lunkin says, “that in the milieu near the church at least publically, anti-Ukrainian hysteria is weak.”

            And third, the Moscow Patriarchate has “distanced itself from the model of the ‘Russian world’ in Putin’s understanding.” Despite the view that Kirill is inherently imperialistic himself, the Moscow scholar continues, the Patriarch did not speak once while in Ukraine “about some sort of Russian civilization or repeat one of his ideas of the 1990s” about the evils of the West.

            In the context of current Russian realities, that is quite remarkable and reflects Kirill’s understanding of how much his church has to lose in Ukraine and also the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church is “step by step becoming democratic from below,” Lunkin argues.

            At the congregational level and among the laity and young clergy, the Moscow expert says, “the authoritarian Soviet ‘Russian world’ has already yielded to a Russian view about human dignity and freedom and respect for the personality.”  That shift “from below” is triggering a struggle within the hierarchy.

            Lunkin concludes with a powerful image.“Russian public consciousness,” he says, “is like an old Shakespearean theater” where the stage sets for different scenes are present all at the same time and where “each new troop of actors is forced to play” in front of both the ones for previous scenes and the ones for their own.

            Russian share “a Third Rome and a Soviet Union and a Russian world and a rumbling mix of the soviet, the zemstvo, and ‘Russian Orthodox civilization,’ of Komsomol songs and lyrical expressions,” he says.  That makes it difficult but not impossible to guess which stage design matters most to whom.

           

            But it also means that one should pay close attention to the ways in which leaders like Patriarch Kirill are attempting to walk among those stage designs rather than always assuming that his position is fixed, that he will always be on the side of whatever the Kremlin wants, or that he won’t change where he is standing on the stage yet again.