Fr. Cyril Hovorun,
Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in the City of New York
This is a presentation at the conference of the British
Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) - Cambridge,
2-4 April 2016
Published by Principium, A Christian Journal of Public Life
The Hungarian translation of the paper is available here
Ukraine has been riven by civil strife. Winter 2014 witnessed a
three-month anti-government demonstration in the square of Kyiv known as
the Maidan, which forced the resignation of Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych, who had been in office for four years.
That was followed by
the Russian annexation of Crimea and the de facto war in eastern Ukraine, which continues as I write.
These are more than political events. They touch upon the most
fundamental experiences of conscience and dignity. They reflect an
awakening of civil society—and a reaction that seeks a return to
state-dominated public life. The future of the country hangs in the
balance: both the political survival of my nation and the moral and
spiritual character of my people. What is needed today, not only in
Ukraine but in every post-Soviet country, is church leadership that is
clear-minded about the perils of an excessively close relationship
between Christian witness and state power, a relationship which results
in the substitution of theology with ideology. The single greatest
imperative is to encourage and engage civil society.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church in communion with the Patriarchate of
Moscow (UOC–MP) is the largest church in the country, and the only one
recognized by the fellowship of the Orthodox churches worldwide. The
second largest is the Patriarchate of Kyiv (UOC–KP), which was founded
in 1992. The smallest is the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church
(UAOC), founded in 1918 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
Finally, there is the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, a church in union
with the bishop of Rome that follows the Eastern rite.
Since the end of the Soviet Union, none of these churches has done
much to encourage civil society. In recent years all of them have, to
one extent or another, been collaborating with the Yanukovych regime.
None has strayed very far from the pattern of church-state relations
common to a post-imperial Orthodoxy that still pursues the dream of a
Byzantine symphony, the ideal of church and state working together.
This pattern sees the power of the state as indispensable if church
leaders are to influence society. It encourages a deal-making mentality
that operates over the heads of the people: we’ll support your political
ambitions if you’ll support our church-building projects and other
spiritual ambitions for the nation. Some of the churches, like the
UOC–MP, have been more aligned with the state; some, like the UOC–KP,
less so. Even the Greek-Catholic Church—more advanced in both its social
teaching and action—has not disturbed the state with its moral
teachings. In short, Ukrainian Christianity has for the most part
preserved a traditional Orthodox presupposition that the state is the
only partner suitable for the Church. Civil society has been effectively
ignored.
The Maidan, however, forced all churches to reconsider this approach.
As large numbers of people from different sectors of society gathered
to express their identity as citizens over and against the state
apparatus dominated by Yanukovych and his cronies, a new mode of social
identity came into being. The Maidan demonstrators constituted
themselves as a social body capable of acting against the state for the
sake of every human being’s aspiration for dignity. In doing this, they
were giving birth to an independent civil society that had to be engaged
on its own terms. Faced with an emerging civil society, the churches
could no longer assume that they could find their place in society by
dealing only with government officials.
The church most active in support of the social awakening was the
Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. The Patriarchate of Kyiv (UOC–KP) was
more reluctant to align itself with the protesters but eventually
supported them firmly, offering them its St. Michael’s Monastery as a
hospital and shelter for protesters seeking refuge from the riot police.
The Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate tried to maintain
neutrality, but some of its priests came to stand with the Maidan.
Eventually, with the fall of the regime, the UOC–MP changed its position
and supported the interim government.
The slow response of the UOC–MP, my own church, reflects the fact
that it is the largest and most established branch of Orthodoxy in
Ukraine. It has benefited from a position of social influence since the
collapse of the Soviet Union and has grown comfortable with a close
relationship to the state. This paradigm is common in post-Soviet
societies, but it is a perilous one. When society emancipates itself
from the state—as is happening in Ukraine—the Church risks being
isolated. As a close partner of the regime, the Church becomes
associated with its crimes. When the regime falls, the Church and its
Christian witness are discredited.
This is what happened to the Orthodox Church of Greece after the
military junta of 1967–1974. The regimes of Yanukovych and the Greek
colonels were different, but their methods of establishing a
dictatorship were similar. Both usurped power, changed the constitution,
corrupted the courts, and relied on the police to suppress dissent. The
junta in Greece forced the resignation of the old and ailing archbishop
of Athens, Chrysostomos II Hatzistaurou, promoting in his place a
young archimandrite, Hieronymos Kotsonas; replaced the canonical synod
of the Church with the uncanonical “Aristindin” synod; and replaced the
bishops it disliked with others it preferred.
The parallels with Ukraine are striking. The Greek junta ended after
the student insurgency in the Polytechnic University of Athens in
November 1973, and the Maidan became active after the students of Kyiv
were beaten on the night of November 30, 2013, exactly forty years
later. Both the Greek junta and the government of Yanukovych declared
themselves to be close to the Church and protective of its interests,
yet both violated its basic teachings.
In the course of his first presidential campaign in 2004, Yanukovych
relied heavily on the support of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow
Patriarchate. He lost that election because of the Orange Revolution,
the social uprising that forced the nullification of results produced by
corruption and electoral fraud. In 2009, Yanukovych won and declared
his support for the UOC–MP. But by 2012, while angling for reelection,
he began to intervene in the Church’s affairs. He decided to replace the
primate, Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabodan, with someone he believed more
loyal to him. The primate, however, did not yield and remained in his
position. Frustrated but determined, Yanukovych appointed a crony to
serve as “supervisor” of the UOC–MP. This was part of a larger pattern
of installing unofficial observers to monitor all areas of Ukrainian
society. It was a “mafia model” that allowed a businessman loyal to
Yanukovych to meddle freely in church affairs.
Other churches, particularly the Greek Catholic Church, suffered the
same fate. As early as May 2010, pressure was applied to the Ukrainian
Catholic University in Lviv. In January 2014, the Ministry of Culture
sent a letter to Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk warning him that the
Greek Catholic Church was in danger of losing its state registration. As
Yanukovych established his control over society, making it an extension
of the state apparatus, the churches that once saw themselves as
partners became victims of the regime—and all of them came to have
reasons to condemn it.
Not all of them did so promptly, however. For a long time, the
Ukrainian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate showed little
dissatisfaction with the regime. This was true even when Yanukovych’s
minions began to crack down on the protests.
Sadly, this behavior echoes the earlier example of the Greek Church,
which turned a blind eye to numerous violations of the laws and of human
rights, thinking it more prudent to support the junta. As a result,
after the collapse of the government, the Greek Church lost its
credibility in Greek society. Even after forty years, it is still being
accused of collaboration with the dictatorship. I fear the UOC–MP may
suffer the same fate in Ukraine in the years ahead. That outcome,
however, is not inevitable. A more positive future is possible if the
UOC–MP takes inspiration from the Maidan and transforms the traditional
church-state partnership into a vision of the Church relating primarily
to civil society, and through that relationship influencing the state.
Today, however, the UOC–MP is making the situation worse. Its
parishes and monasteries are supporting the rebel militias in the east
of Ukraine, sometimes openly, sometimes in covert, coded ways.
Officially, my church stands for the integrity of the country and
condemns any sort of violence. It does not, however, exercise meaningful
discipline over priests and others who condone and even encourage
separatism and terrorism.
There is more at stake here than moral principles, important as they
certainly are. The “Russian spring” in the east is a revolution of
paternalism. Its ideal, often unarticulated, is for a comprehensive,
state-directed system of social organization that protects individuals
from the risks of freedom. It reflects nostalgia for a time when the
state assumed responsibility for all aspects of life, a time when the
state was the society. It would be wrong to interpret this
nostalgia as simply a desire to restore the old Soviet system. The
neo-Soviet ideology is quite different from the old communist ideology
that espoused an official atheism. The nostalgia for a safe, stable past
borrows also from a long-gone Russian imperial ideology.
This is evident in the ongoing rebellion, sponsored by the Russian
state, which expresses itself with symbols and keywords of Orthodox
Christianity. The ideology of the “Russian world” has become a
mobilizing force for the separatists to kill and torture. There is a
video clip on YouTube, for instance, in which a monk teaches the newly
recruited soldiers of the “Russian Orthodox Army” why and how to use
their weapons: “Antichrist is coming to the Holy Rus. What we’re seeing
now—it’s primarily a spiritual war, because the Antichrist comes to Holy
Russia, against Orthodoxy.” Then the monk passes to the practical
lesson of how to win the war against the Antichrist, whom he apparently
associates both with the West and with Ukrainian Orthodox Christians
seeking to maintain their country’s territorial integrity: “I will teach
you how you should properly load cartridges—to make bullets flowing
into the goal, to destroy the enemy.” He continues, “So the Holy Fathers
teach us that when you take the cartridge and load your weapon you
should utter the following words of prayer: Blessed Mother of God, save
us. Holy Father Nicholas, pray for us. Holy Tsar Nicholas, pray for us .
. .”
This perverse use of prayer illustrates how the ideology of the
“Russian world” adopts the powerful traditions of Orthodox Christianity,
but in a way essentially antithetical to their Christian genius. It
demonstrates how faith has been instrumentalized and politicized. The
long Orthodox tradition of criticism of Western theology, some aspects
of which are legitimate, others exaggerated, has been transformed into a
simple-minded anti-Western agenda. This ideology of East versus West
encourages the sacrifice of human lives for the sake of a geopolitical
agenda. Unfortunately, many church hierarchs in Ukraine and elsewhere
share this agenda and hesitate to articulate a proper moral evaluation
of the war in the east of my country.
The consequences have been deadly. There have been numerous
kidnappings and killings of non-Orthodox Christians in the eastern
Ukrainian region of Donbass, where armed conflict continues. The Greek
Catholic priest Fr. Tikhon Kulbaka, a secretary of the regional council
of churches, was kidnapped and then tortured by the “Russian Orthodox
Army” before he was set free after a popular campaign in his support.
Less fortunate were four members of a Protestant church, the
Transfiguration of the Lord, who were kidnapped on June 8 and murdered
the next day. In a remarkable revelation, the senior counselor of the
so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic,” Igor Druz, told the BBC that
rebel forces had executed unarmed people, stating that this atrocity
would help to build a new “social state” based on “Christian values.”
This rhetoric sadly resembles recently promulgated official church
statements.
The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
represents the typical ruler of a neo-Soviet state. He lifts the burden
of freedom from his subjects. So far, the majority of people in
post-Soviet societies seem happy to remain under the heavy-handed
paternal direction of the state. The churches often bless the coercive
practices of the post-Soviet “Grand Inquisitors.” They teach that
freedom is usually abused. To limit the abuses of freedom, they teach
that freedom itself should be discouraged. This strengthens
authoritarianism and sacralizes the unaccountable culture of government
control that has allowed a kleptocracy to flourish. After the Maidan,
however, the churches in Ukraine must return to the teaching of the
Gospel, or at least of Dostoevsky, about freedom. They need to declare
that the refusal of freedom is a sin. It destroys our relationship with
God and our neighbors. It also leads to numerous violations of rights
and dignity. The post-Soviet churches must become “schools of freedom”
that teach citizens how to exercise their freedom in a responsible way
that leads to trust and common purpose in civil society.
On January 3, 2014, The Guardian published a letter, signed
by many of the world’s leading intellectuals. “Today the Ukrainian
Maidan represents Europe at its best—what many thinkers in the past and
present assume to be fundamental European values.” It goes on to suggest
that “Ukraine needs a European Marshall-like plan that would ensure its
transformation into a full democracy and society with guaranteed civil
rights.” It is important to remember that the original Marshall Plan was
about more than financial aid. It presupposed condemnation of the
ideologies that led to fascism and Nazism. Ukraine today needs a similar
condemnation of the kleptocratic practices of neo-Sovietism and its
ideology of state-controlled civil society.
This will not be easy to accomplish in a country first degraded by
communism and then demoralized by two decades of corruption, cronyism,
and neo-Soviet ideology. In her bookAufbrüche zu neuen Ufern (A Breakthrough into a New Dimension),
Heike Springhart points the way forward within a social context
profoundly compromised by the past. She describes the role that
Christian churches played in reeducating postwar German society.
Although the majority of the German churches collaborated with the Nazi
party, at the war’s end they were the only institution in the country
that had the potential to heal the wounds inflicted by Nazism. They
represented whatever “clear spaces” were left in the German soul. In
Ukraine, the churches can play the same role. They can serve as “clear
spaces” in the Ukrainian psyche where a new future can be imagined. The
question is whether or not they will.