Moscow Sees Four Places It Can Exploit to Block Realization of Autocephaly in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 31 – The Universal Patriarch has made clear that he will grant autocephaly to Ukraine’s Orthodox church, but neither the Moscow Patriarch nor the Russian state is prepared to accept that. Instead, both are considering ways that they can prevent the realization of autocephaly even if they can’t now stop Bartholemew from offering it.

            Irina Polyakova, a commentator for the Russian nationalist site Politikus, lists four things which she believes constitute “barriers on the path to the tomos” and which Moscow, religious and secular, can exploit to maintain Russia’s position in Ukraine all the talk of the inevitability of autocephaly notwithstanding (politikus.ru/articles/113314-chetyre-barera-na-puti-k-tomosu.html).

                The first of these is the rumored corruption of the Universal Patriarchate, which supposedly has received as much as 25 million US dollars from the Ukrainian authorities for the tomos.  That can be played up, Polyakova suggests, to show that “Bartholemew is not simply a splitter and a raider but corrupt as well.”

            The second is Bartholemew’s overweening pride. He believes, the Russian commentator says, that he is not just first among equals of Orthodox patriarchs but an “Eastern pope” with the right to give orders to others.  That has already generated negative reactions among many of the others, Polyakova says; it can generate more as the tomos process proceeds.

            The third, she continues, is the link between Bartholemew and the Gulen movement in Turkey. That has been well-established, Polyakova says; and the Turkish government is well aware of it. And the Turkish Orthodox Church is playing  this up. Consequently, Bartholemew may have to move to Ukraine – and that will make his universal pretensions disappear.

            And fourth and perhaps most important, the Ukrainian church assembly which must precede the tomos may not be able to unite. Indeed, “the impossibility of the Kyiv splitters to agree among themselves has frequently cut the ground under from any possibility of creating a Ukrainian church of its own.”

            None of these tactics may work, of course; but their enumeration is a reminder that just because most Ukrainians and most others around the world assume that a grant of autocephaly to Ukraine is a done deal, Moscow isn’t willing to accept that and will continue to work to make sure that it doesn’t happen or collapses be fore it can be fully realized.

Along the Tatarstan-Bashkortostan ‘Berlin Wall’ – the Closest Analogy to the Ingush-Chechen Border Dispute

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 31 – Given the current level of tensions between Ingushetia and Chechnya, many forget that both Ingush and Chechens see themselves as closely related Vaynakh peoples. The border conflict between them thus reflects in part what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”

            They are struggling over the border because any shift in that border will have the effect of leading many of those in areas transferred from one republic to another to reidentify in ethnic terms, thus adding to the size of the people that gains territory and reducing that of the nation which loses it.

            Ingushetia and Chechnya are not the only closely related nations in the Russian Federation that the Soviets divided and promoted distinctive identities to keep them from coming together – and who feature people on both sides who would like to see the republics and the nations united or at least the borders between them shifted to the benefit of one or the other.

            The closest analogy to Ingushetia and Chechnya, of course, is Bashkortostan and Tatarstan in the Middle Volga, two Turkic Muslim republics Stalin created in his first great act of ethnic engineering and worked hard to keep apart lest they unite into a more threatening Turkic republic to challenge his rule.

            But despite the fact that this division was orchestrated a century ago – both republics will mark their centenaries in the next 18 months – there are people in both who dream of unity and many more who believe that this or that portion of the other should be transferred to them as a matter of historical “ethnic” justice.

            Ilnar Garifullin, a journalist for Radio Liberty’s IdelReal portal, provides an extremely valuable description of how decisions were made to divide the two republics in 1919 and 1920 by outsiders rather than by the peoples themselves and how that division as intended left few on either side completely satisfied (idelreal.org/a/29532239.html).

                That history has been well-chronicled by Richard Pipes and others, but Garifullin calls attention to some of the later steps that Stalin and the Soviets took to keep the republics apart, steps that exacerbated tensions but did little or nothing to end the feelings among each that the border between them was anything but the right one.

                As Garifullin points out, “the division of the common space and the imposition of borders which happened almost a 100 years ago at times has led to surprising, absurd, tragic and sometimes funny developments.”

            One of the more amusing but nonetheless long-lasting has to do with Moscow’s imposition of time zones on the USSR territory and its placement of Tatarstan in one and Bashkortostan in the other.  In the first such case, the two were put in different time zones, with Bashkortostan an hour ahead of Tatarstan.

            Then in 1931, Moscow shifted Tatarstan into the second “’Moscow’” zone and the time difference between the two republics increased to two hours.  That difference was hardly justified by geography, Garifullin says.  Instead, it was clearly intended to block any chance of integration between the two republics.

            Not only did it lead people to joke that the bridge over the Ik between the two republics was “the longest bridge in the world” because it took more than two hours to go from one side to the other, but the time difference meant that Bashkirs would travel to Tatarstan to drink after the stores were closed in their own republic.

            Such efforts to keep the two republics separate continued throughout the Soviet period, but now it has broken down with Bashkirs going to Tatarstan with great regularity. Nonetheless, the situation has not completely changed, and the impact of the borders imposed in the 1920s remains great.

                Given that these were set for political reasons and without full regard for ethnic or economic interests, “they became a permanent source of national problems for the residents of both republics, a kind of Berlin Wall between Kazan and Ufa and between the Volga and the Urals,” Garifullin says.

            But as the Germans showed in 1989 and the Ingush and Chechens are showing now, no wall, however strong it looks, remains in place forever, perhaps especially when it divides people who don’t feel themselves very different from those on the other side and who thus view borders as a source of discord, just as those who imposed the borders intended.

Putin, Seeing Europe as Threat to His Power, Making Russia a Chinese Colony, Shlosberg Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 31 – Although he comes from Petersburg, Vladimir Putin is above all “not a European politician but rather an anti-European one” because he views the democratic values of Europe as a threat to his power. Lev Shlosberg says. As a result, he prefers to cooperate with authoritarian China and “is gradually converting Russia into a Chinese colony.”

            Despite all his talk about “’sovereignty,’” the Pskov opposition politician says, Putin is in fact renting out “gigantic Siberian territories” to China and “re-orienting” Russian production toward China away from the West.  That presents “an extremely dangerous” specter for the future (afterempire.info/2018/10/31/shlosberg/).

            This trend, Shlosberg says, reflects the fact that Putin is anything but a contemporary leader. He is a person of the past, and his preferred model for Russia and its rule is drawn from that past, with its hyper-centralized empire ruled by diktat from the center. That antiquated approach is leaving Russia ever further behind the rest of the world.

            Nowhere is this more obvious that in his approach to the regions. Under Putin, “the Russian Federation is not a federation. De fact we have a unitary and centralist state where all resources and authority are concentrated in the federal center” and where everywhere else, including even Petersburg is “a rightless ‘province.’”

            This pattern reflects “the traditional, centuries-old desire of the Kremlin ‘to run everything,’” but it has more recent causes as well, Shlosberg says. Economically, this imperial rebirth was put in place by Aleksey Kudrin who, despite his reputation as a liberal, shifted resources away from the regions to the center and deprive the former of any independence.

            When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a brief moment when the regions mattered and Moscow had to deal with them. But “one should not idealize the 1990s. In reality, the Russian elite of those years did not understand what a federation is.” They acted as they did only because they had to and constantly took steps to recentralize the country.

            Politically, this drive took off under Putin who has sought to deprive the regions of any independence whatsoever.  For him, “regional political parties are really unacceptable and dangerous. They are capable of destroying the system of current federal parties which are completely controlled by the Presidential Administration and the special services.”

            Were such parties to be legalized, many in local elites would desert the federal parties and move to them; and the regional parties would defeat the latter because they would know the local situation better and have greater trust and support in the population. That would undermine the entire current system, but there is no real chance for that until there are real elections.

            Moreover, before such parties can emerge, Russia must “restore the economic and legal bases of federalisms, in tax sharing, budgetary policy, the distribution of authority and so on.” At present, regional assemblies spend “no less than two thirds” of their time “bringing regional laws into correspondence with federal ones” rather than taking needed decisions.

            According to Shlosberg, “the protests in Ingushetia are a sign that the people can rise up in defense of its land” even in the current situation and despite Kremlin control over the appointment of governors.  “Evens of this kind can certainly take place in any Russian region,” and so there is hope.

            “But the misfortune is that today we are ruled by profoundly backward people,” he continues.  The Kremlin operates according to categories that were failing in the 20^th century. “For them, the 21^st century has not yet arrived: they are yesterday’s people.”