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Vitaly Portnikov
The Church of Greece became the first after the Patriarchate of Constantinople to recognize
the Ukrainian autocephaly. At first glance, this is not the most
important recent news – especially against the background of what is
happening today in Ukraine itself, where the patriarchal tomos granting autocephaly to the Church of Ukraine is now remembered not as often as in the times of Petro Poroshenko – but it is the most iconic.
Because the perceived minuteness confirms a tendency that cannot be
fully understood, not only by the Ukrainians who perceive their
independence as something self-sufficient, but also by the Russians,
residents of the former imperial metropole who cannot sense the
inevitability of historical processes. Neither can sense the
inevitability of the collapse of the empire, which broke apart, like an
old cup, in 1917, but was glued together by rivers of blood, and yet it
cracked again. And no “Russian world,” no Russian language, no Russian gas
can hold the cup glued together any longer. And it concerns not only
the state structures, but also the church. Because the Russian Church
has spread into new territories as part of the Russian imperial
expansion, now when the former empire has shrunk like Balzac’s shagreen skin,
the church naturally is losing these former provinces too. And this is
obvious to all except the hierarchs and parishioners of this shrinking
church. Church processes are slower, more inertial, than political
processes.
From Moscow – and possibly from Kyiv, as well as from other capitals
of the former Soviet republics – it may seem that history can be turned
backwards by electing another pro-Russian mediocrity to the presidency
or by conspiring with church hierarchs to slow down the process of
recognizing the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church. Or by militarily occupying Crimea and the Donbas as they did before with the Transnistria or with the Georgian autonomies. Yes, there is so much you can come up with! Only all this will change nothing.
Ukraine, like most other former Soviet republics, has been
permanently lost to Russia as a country, as a nation and as a
civilization. Every new day, month and year will only intensify this
split – because new generations of people who have no experience of the
Soviet past will come into adulthood, and Russia, which does not
understand why the lost imperial territories do not return, will behave
more aggressively and repel even those who are connected with it via a
common cultural past and language. Just as it happened with many
Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Ukrainian Russians after the occupation
of Crimea and the war in the Donbas.
If Russia could accept the collapse of the empire, it would
strengthen its influence in the post-Soviet space, strengthen the
Russian state itself, preserve the chances for the Russian Church, which
would not be seen as a hidden weapon of aggression. Instead, Putin’s
Russia preserves the distant past in pieces of the land seized from its
neighbors, blackmails them using its energy resources, sends saboteurs,
“pours gasoline” on internal conflicts, sends its troops over its
neighbors’ borders – and thus deprives not the Ukrainians nor the
Georgians of the future, but itself.
