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Edited by: A. N., 2016/01/22, Εuromaidan Press
Three important articles this week in the Moscow media suggest that
the Russian Orthodox Church under Moscow Patriarch Kirill is ever less a
religious organization and ever more one that recalls and is best
understood by drawing analogies with the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union.
First, in an interview in “Novaya gazeta,” Boris Knorre, a specialist on religion at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics,
describes the way “political orthodoxy” has become “an ideology
justifying war with the entire world” and why “the temptation to feel
oneself a hero of ‘a holy war’” is so great.
“Politicized groups close to the church existed throughout the
1990s,” but until 2004, they did not receive the support of the Moscow
Patriarchate. In that year, then-metropolitan Kirill issued his
“so-called doctrine of Orthodox civilization” based on the ideas of
Samuel Huntington and encouraged the political orthodox to become more
active.
Kirill didn’t elaborate, but his aides and supporters did, with some
arguing that political Orthodoxy requires that people “again learn to
die and kill” and others arguing that the church should oppose a market
economy and do everything possible to promote “the unity of the church,
the people and the state.”
In Russia today, the state uses Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy uses the
state, “and each step of one intensifies the response of the other.” One
area where that is especially true is in foreign policy. “Imperial
ideas of political Orthodoxy are quite popular in the church milieu,”
Knorre says.
“The believers suffered greatly with the destruction of the USSR – in
their consciousness, the Soviet space was sacred Russian land.” Not
surprisingly, such people viewed the Kremlin’s actions in Crimea
and Ukraine as a chance to realize a return. But they couldn’t have
reached the audience they did had it not been for the state.
In many cases, the political Orthodox “would like more radicalization
from the president, for example, on questions involving the isolation
of the country from the Western world.” Such tensions, although Knorre
doesn’t speak to this issue, recall those between committed communists
and state pragmatists in Soviet times.
And Knorre’s words suggest that the Moscow Patriarchate has become
part but not the only part of the ideological department of a new
“central committee,” again in much the same way that communist
ideologues had to coexist with diplomats and statist elements in Soviet
times.
Second, in a commentary in Moscow’s “Gazeta”
newspaper, Andrey Desnitsky, a specialist on religious affairs, draws a
comparison between the way in which the Moscow Patriarchate conducts
its business and the way the CPSU did in Soviet times.
“When I was a child, congresses of the CPSU assembled in the capital.
Participants reported about successes and denounced enemies, and shared
a feel of deep satisfaction and sang the praises of dear comrade Leonid
Ilich personally. This was the highest, the most powerful forum … which
discussed nothing and which decided nothing.”
Everything was behind the scenes and everything that could be seen
was largely meaningless, Desnitsky says. What happened to the CPSU, of
course, is well known. But what is tragic is that “now something very
similar is happening in church life.” There are enormous problems, but
the top has made it clear that “now is not the time for discussion.”
And in the third, Vadim Balytnikov, in “NG-Religii,” talks
about the way in which the ideological passions of some in the church
and the sense that the church is losing its sway over the laity leads to
periodic drives to “cleanse” the priesthood in the hopes of recovery or
at least in the hopes of avoiding a revolution from below.
