Posted on 02/23/2008 4:42:20 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Russia's Orthodox Church, despite decades of brutal repression under Soviet rule, is putting its trust in the KGB to ensure that a remarkable religious revival does not fade with the departure of President Vladimir Putin.
In an unusual move, Alexei II, the Church's patriarch, has endorsed deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev ahead of next week's presidential election.
The influence of his support on Russia's estimated 100 million Orthodox worshippers is immense.
It also illustrates the unholy alliance the Church has forged with the Kremlin since Mr Putin came to power eight years ago.
The president, a proud adherent, has allowed the Orthodox Church to regain much of its Tsarist-era lustre and has won the enthusiastic support of religious leaders in return.
With his hand-picked successor almost guaranteed victory in the March 2 poll, Mr Putin is determined to maintain the arrangement by holding on to the reins of power as prime minister.
The relationship might seem odd. It was the KGB, after all, that led persecution of the Church in Soviet times, when priests were regularly jailed, tortured and executed. Neither this nor accusations that Mr Putin is restoring many of the attributes of Soviet rule seem to bother Alexei.
Although he has never confirmed it, the patriarch, like the president, is a former KGB agent codenamed Drozdov, according to Soviet archives opened to experts in the 1990s.
Many in the Orthodox hierarchy are also accused of working as KGB informers, a fact that critics say the Church has never fully acknowledged.
"Essentially, the Orthodox Church is one of the only Soviet institutions that has never been reformed," said one priest, who declined to be identified for fear that he could be defrocked. That fate already befell another colleague, Gleb Yakunin, in the 1990s when he called on Church leaders with KGB links to repent.
Yet it is not just the KGB that binds the Church and the Kremlin. In the Tsarist era, the Church was a committed supporter of the imperial rallying cry "orthodoxy, autocracy and nationhood." Critics say that Mr Putin, who draws as much of inspiration from imperial Russia as he does from the Soviet Union, has adopted the same mantra - making the president and the Church ideal bedfellows.
Both have blossomed from the relationship. The number of Russians who identify themselves as Orthodox has doubled in the past decade, with two-thirds of the 140 million population proclaiming the faith - quite a feat after seven decades of official atheism.
Yet most Russians say they follow Orthodoxy for national rather than moral reasons. Deeply patriotic and with a declared intention of making Russia great again, the Church has milked the sentiment.
Priests are regularly seen on television sprinkling holy water on bombers and even nuclear missiles, a blessing that reinforces Mr Putin's own militaristic philosophy.
The Church has even supported Mr Putin's repression of democracy, with a senior bishop last year comparing human rights activists to traitors.
When a prison chaplain suggested that the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a personal enemy of the president, was a political prisoner, he was promptly defrocked.
Late last year, Sergei Taratukhin - who served five years in a Soviet gulag for defying the authorities - recanted, falling to his knees in front of television cameras and won a partial reprieve. He is now employed as a rubbish collector at the cathedral in the far-eastern city of Chita, near where Khodorkovsky is jailed.
In return, Mr Putin has worn his religious credentials very publicly and is regularly shown on state television kissing icons at Church services.
Given his popularity, Mr Putin's example has been emulated by many Russians. The business and political elite have assiduously followed instructions to fund the rebuilding of churches destroyed by the Soviets across the country.
Last year the magnificent Assumption cathedral in the Siberian city of Omsk, blown up by the Bolsheviks in 1935, was rebuilt with donations from the city mandarins.
The result is that Russia, at least in religious terms, is beginning to take on a Tsarist-era hue - and not just in terms of architecture.
Sister Varvara, who lived under a tree for many years before locals helped her to build a wooden church, is Omsk's local prophetess, healer and mind reader - a throwback to the wandering mystics such as Rasputin, who dominated religious rural life at the turn of the 19th century.
Dignitaries from across Siberia visit her to hear their fortune or just get advice. Sometimes, she gives Mr Putin a helping hand. A few years ago she told Tatyana Chertova, a retired actress with a shock of red hair, that she would become famous by writing a play about the president.
Mrs Chertova's play, Putin's Holiday, premiered last year.
-———— True, true! But we were discussing Russian Orthodox Church as an institution. BUT! No matter how good or bad some churche is, it all comes down to you and me- are WE good Christians. Also, it is a questionable is it a abortion issue a stance are we good or bad Christians. Per example, almost all communist states prohibited abortion, like Romania, and that brought thousands and thousands of rejected children that are looming the country even today. In communist Serbia I believe that question of abortion was regulated in acceptable manner: it was prohibited with only two exceptions if a pregnancy posess a danger to mothrer, or if a pregnancy was result of a rape. Than communism fell and Liberal Pro-westren govt. stepped in, allowing completely a abortion declaring “Woman have all right to do what she wants to her own body” Paradox, isn’t it?
“Pretty much all of us view the Mormons that way”
I remember when I first converted to Orthodoxy in college. I remember learning about who I could/couldn’t marry. Apparently, all Christians are fair game, except Mormons.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
You wrote:
“The first Christian Roman Emperor was head of the Church and this pattern continued in the Eastern Empire until its fall and later in Tzarist Russia.”
If - for the first Christian emperor - Constantine then we have another problem. Constantine never was head of the Church nor could he be. He tried to be its head, but failed.
“The State and Church are the same body, unlike in the West, where the secular and temporal powers have always been separate.”
Again, there’s a problem there: the state and church were never one body even in the East. This is shown by the fact that you do not have laymen performing sacraments EVER. Each body had its own hierarchy. They sometimes overlapped, but had distinct powers. They were not one body, but one body over another (the state dominating the state).
Vlad’s right, gsg.
That said, there has been a major difference between Church/State relations in the East and the West. I suggest that the difference lies in the concepts of the Oecoumene and the Omogenia neither of which have any real meaning in the West, though the “Holy Roman Empire” was an attempt to create a sense of the former.
You wrote:
“...though the “Holy Roman Empire” was an attempt to create a sense of the former.”
Or a sense of humor! How’s that saying go? The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire.
LOL....funny stuff. Are you from Comedy Central?
You might think the communist slaughter of millions at the hands of Moscow is funny stuff, but not me.
But Communist ideology and Putin's Russia are not the same.
More like 987 AD: Vladimir and the baptism of the Rus’.
Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest catastrophe of the twentieth century. Bigger than the creation of the Soviet Union? Putin said that anyone who does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Putin refuses to bury Lenin’s body, because he views Lenin as the George Washington of Russia. Putin has defended Stalin’s purges, saying the USA was worse in Viet Nam. Putin is an unrepentant Chekist and Stalin apologist, proud of his lifetime of loyal service to the EVIL EMPIRE, which he never betrayed.
Sorry, but words for public consumption need to be measured against action. And when I look at Putin's actions, I see a man very far removed from Marxist ideology, and quite far from Lenin and Stalin.
Putin's lament about the collapse of the Soviet Union is not out of some adherence to Marxist ideology, but rather a lament of Russia's declining power in the world. One musn't confuse ideology and state power in Russia's case, and that seems to be what you're doing here.
I can't remember the name of the dissident offhand right now, but there was a dissident who defected to the USA and surprised his handlers by informing them that the KGB of Andropov's era was by far the most liberalizing (meaning anti-communist) institution in the USSR and was far, far removed from the Chekists under Dzerzhinsky, the NKVD under Yezhov and Yagoda and the OGPU under Beria. They were also the most nationalist force, which led them into a position in which they sought to preserve the international power of Russia but at the same time reform the state since they worried about its collapse. They however, were outmanoeuvered by Gorbachev.
I look at Putin's 15% flat tax, his restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church (amongst other things) and I see a Russian patriot, not a Marxist ideologue.
I see a commie following Deng Xiao-Peng’s “Chinese model,” or Lenin’s “New Economic Plan.” When the commie dictator Raul Castro in Cuba adopts the China model we’ll have to hear about how he’s also a great guy and true patriot. No sale.
Okay, keep your head your in the sand. Your choice.
bttt
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