The Russian Orthodox Church, nationalism and anti-democratic authoritarianism?
Putin is using the Orthodox Church to build his power!
VICE News
Published on Mar 26, 2018
Vladimir Putin's victory in last week's Russian presidential elections came as no surprise. Putin has spent much of the past two decades building an enduring and loyal following in Russia, and alliances with some of the country's most powerful institutions — none, perhaps, more important that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has fully embraced his leadership. It's all part of a dramatic turnaround for the Church, which just 30 years ago was only a marginal force in Russian society. The Soviets had sought to stamp out organized faith, stripping religion from education, arresting clergymen, and ordering the destruction of many of Russia's grand cathedrals, including one, Christ the Savior, that was demolished to make room for a public pool. But under Putin, the Church has been making a comeback. More than 70% of Russians today identify as Russian Orthodox, up from 30% at the end of the Soviet Union. And huge swaths of land have been transferred back to religious ownership, with thousands of new churches being built or restored -- at a rate of almost three a day, by church figures. And Putin, by building loyalty among the leaders of a cherished institution, has arguably been the greatest beneficiary of this largesse. VICE News Tonight went to Moscow to ask Church leaders, and experts on the role of religion in society, how the church's resurrection has played into Putin's gambit for everlasting power.
Pussy Riot
Pussy Riot's gig at Christ the Saviour took place on 21 February. Five members broke into the Moscow cathedral, performing a "punk prayer" from the altar. Their song "Holy Shit" is a condemnation of the Russian Orthodox church's close ties to Putin. "Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin," they sang, "chase Putin out!" Three of them have been arrested for hooliganism and they could face up to seven years in jail.
Via Pussy Riot's lawyer Mark Feigin http://mark-feygin.livejournal.com/90...
Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest punk rock group based in Moscow. Founded in August 2011, it had a variable membership of approximately 11 women ranging in age from about 20 to 33 (as of 2012). The group staged unauthorized provocative guerrilla performances in public places, performances that were filmed as music videos and posted on the Internet. The collective’s lyrical themes included feminism, LGBT rights, and opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom the group considered to be a dictator, and his policies. These themes also encompassed Putin’s links to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The group gained global notoriety when five members of the group staged a performance inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012. The group's actions were condemned as sacrilegious by the Orthodox clergy and eventually stopped by church security officials. The women said their protest was directed at the Orthodox Church leaders’ support for Putin during his election campaign. On March 3, 2012, two of the group members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were arrested and charged with hooliganism. A third member, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was arrested on March 16.
Denied bail, they were held in custody until their trial began in late July. On August 17, 2012, the three members were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, and each was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. On October 10, following an appeal, Samutsevich was freed on probation and her sentence suspended. The sentences of the other two women were upheld.
The trial and sentence attracted considerable attention and criticism, particularly in the West.
The case was adopted by human-rights groups, including Amnesty International, which designated the women as prisoners of conscience, and by a number of prominent entertainers. Public opinion in Russia was generally less sympathetic towards them. Having served 21 months, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were released on December 23, 2013, after the State Duma approved an amnesty.
In February 2014, a statement was made anonymously on behalf of some Pussy Riot members that both Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were no longer members.
However, both were among the group that performed as Pussy Riot during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, where group members were attacked with whips and pepper spray by Cossacks who were employed as security guards. On March 6, 2014, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were assaulted and sprayed with green paint by local youths in Nizhny Novgorod.
Speaking as much to western European and North American audiences as to Russian audiences, in 2016 Pussy Riot anticipated a Trump victory and two weeks before the vote, released “Make America Great Again”, depicting a dystopian world where a President Trump enforces his values through beatings, shaming, and branding by stormtroopers. In describing the video, Rolling Stone magazine noted that “jaunty, carefree music contrasts with the brutal events depicted on screen.”
The Yarovaya law (rus. Закон Яровой), also Yarovaya package, refers to a pair of Russian federal bills, 374-FZ and 375-FZ, passed in 2016. The bills amend a pre-existing counter-terrorism law and separate laws regulating additional counter-terror and public safety measures. It is known to the public under the last name of one of its creators—Irina Yarovaya.
Among the amendments included an expansion of authority for law enforcement agencies, new requirements for data collection and mandatory deciphering in the telecommunications industry, and increased regulation of evangelism, including a ban on the performance of "missionary activities" in non-religious settings.
Anti-evangelism provisions
The amendments also include new restrictions on evangelism and missionary work. The amendments add a new provision to Russia's Religion Legislation, stating that "missionary activity" may only be performed "without hindrance" at churches and other religious sites designated by the chapter. It is explicitly banned from residential buildings. "Missionary activity" is defined as
The activity of a religious association, aimed at disseminating information about its beliefs among people who are not participants (members, followers) in that religious association, with the purpose of involving these people as participants (members, followers). It is carried out directly by religious associations or by citizens and/or legal entities authorised by them, publicly, with the help of the media, the internet or other lawful means".Missionary activities may not be used to pursue violations of public safety, "the motivation of citizens to refuse to fulfil their civic duties as established by law and to commit other illegal acts", suicide, or the refusal of medical treatment on religious grounds as aims.
Missionary activities may only be performed by authorized members of registered religious groups and organizations. A group becomes ineligible to perform missionary activities if they have been banned under a court order for practicing extremism or terrorism, or have been liquidated. Foreign missionaries may only perform missionary activities after registering for a permit from a recognized religious organization. Citizens are also required to report unauthorized religious activity to the government or face fines.
The rise of the Orthodox Church in Russia appears unstoppable, write filmmakers Glen Ellis and Viktoryia Kolchyna who went to investigate the close ties between the church and Putin.
The rise of the Orthodox Church in Russia appears unstoppable, write filmmakers Glen Ellis and Viktoryia Kolchyna who went to investigate the close ties between the church and Putin.
Five years ago, a notoriously profane protest by a female punk band, Pussy Riot, in Moscow's main cathedral sought to satirise the growing rapport between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church, most especially the close regard President Vladimir Putin and the church's spiritual leader Patriarch Kirill have for each other.
At the time, this was a relatively fringe concern; most Russians had other things on their minds - such as the country's economic problems, its deteriorating relationship with the West over Syria and the re-election of Putin to the top job after an interregnum as prime minister.
But now it's back on the agenda because many of Putin's opponents believe the glowing endorsements and mutual back-slaps the Kremlin and the Orthodox Church give each other these days are contributing to ever more tightly defined social and religious conservatism, intolerant nationalism and a growing personality cult around the president.
We had heard that the most obvious outward sign of this close relationship was the proliferation of religious zealotry filling the broadcast airwaves. So we set off for the offices of Tsargrad TV, close to Moscow's Red Square, to meet Alexander Dugin, editor-in-chief of Russia's most ultra-conservative Orthodox channel, which boasts the country's fastest-growing audience.
"After the fall of communism, there was a great abyss ..., a void, because everything began to fall down into the black hole. All the certainties, all the truths, all the things that were taken for granted in one moment disappeared," Dugin says.
With Putin's help, Dugin explained, the Russian Orthodox Church is filling this void. Indeed, the view as seen through Tsargrad TV eyes is of a Moscow skyline of countless domes and crosses, vying with hammers and sickles - a battlefield of symbols - and its clear which side is winning.
The channel's owner, Kremlin-connected investment banker Konstantin Malofeev, was once dubbed God's oligarch, a title he eschews, "I'm God's servant, not God's oligarch ..." he insists perched behind a large portrait of Nicholas II.
"We live now in Russia ... a delightful period, a period of triumph of Christianity."
Malofeev is clear as to who is responsible. "President Putin is our leader ... given to us by God."
Others insist that by moving the Orthodox Church to centre-stage in Russian affairs Putin is merely ensuring the church's support for his conservative and nationalist political agenda - a smart move given that between a half and two-thirds of all Russians identify themselves as Orthodox Christians.
Decriminalising domestic violence
Next morning, we are outside the Russian parliament, the Duma.
In recent years, a raft of socially regressive legislation has merged from this building, often underpinned with backing from the Russian Orthodox Church.
One of the most controversial of these laws (passed by 358 voted to two) effectively decriminalises domestic violence, which seems an odd thing for a Christian body to endorse.
According to this law, when you beat somebody, you can just pay a fee like a parking fine - the same sum even. It sounds crazy, but it's true.
Alena Popova, campaigner
Nevertheless, in a statement issued after the law was passed, the church insisted that physical punishment is "an essential right."
Campaigner Alena Popova is waiting for us and wastes no time letting us know what she thinks about this law.
"According to this law, when you beat somebody, you can just pay a fee like a parking fine - the same sum even. It sounds crazy, but it's true," Popova says.
Last year, she tells us 14,000 women in Russia died from injuries inflicted by a relationship partner - equivalent to one woman every 40 minutes.
Popova has been lobbying Duma deputies to get the legislation changed but she knows it won't be an easy task - given the amount of support the law had on its passage through parliament.
Laws targeting other churches and faiths
That evening, we go looking for some of those on the receiving end of another recent ruling, known as the Yarovaya Law - after one of its sponsors. In essence, a set of 2016 amendments to existing "anti-terror" and "extremist" legislation, the law is notable because of the inclusion of new restrictions on evangelism and religious missionary work.
According to its provisions, missionary work is defined as:
"The activity of a religious association, aimed at disseminating information about its beliefs among people who are not participants (members, followers) in that religious association, with the purpose of involving these people as participants (members, followers). It is carried out directly by religious associations or by citizens and/or legal entities authorised by them, publicly, with the help of the media, the internet or other lawful means."
The target of these prescriptions, said the law's detractors, are adherents of churches and faiths other than the Orthodox Church. And that's who we are meeting tonight, a group of Jehovah's Witnesses and their spokesman Mikail Panichev.
We run risks when we just talk to someone about the Bible … let alone about our teachings. Any conversation may raise suspicions - they will go and inform the police.
Mikail Panichev, spokesman, Jehovah's Witnesses
We rendezvous with our go-between at an ill-lit car park in a Moscow suburb and he leads us to nearby housing block. In the lift, our guide pretends not to know us when someone else gets in. We are ushered to a flat where a dozen or so people sit around a table reading the Bible. We are warned that at any moment the FSB (state security) could appear.
According to the those at the meeting, the Jehovah's Witnesses, a group once persecuted by the Nazis for their strict adherence to pacifism, have now been labelled a threat to society here, too; driven underground last April when the Russian Supreme Court seized all their property, declaring the group "extremist".
Since then, there have been numerous attacks against their homes and places of worship. Most of this small group have already spent time in detention, including a girl in her teens.
According to Panichev, "we run risks when we just talk to someone about the Bible … let alone about our teachings. Any conversation may raise suspicions - they will go and inform the police."
Midnight raids
As our filming continued over the days that followed, it seemed to us that the rise of Russian Orthodox Church was unstoppable. Since the fall of communism, 25,000 churches have been built or restored in Russia with state backing - if not always universal public support.
We went in search of one set of opponents who meet every week in a Moscow park. They told us that the land had been set aside for yet another church, which they objected to because it meant taking away a public amenity.
But it's risky to openly challenge such developments as Yevegeny Lebedev discovered last November. He told us that his home and those of 11 others were stormed by masked police officers in midnight raids, "They bust in shouting, 'Down on the floor!' Somebody threw me to the floor. I was like that for 20 minutes, my kids crying."
The officers were investigating a possible violation of yet another new law, which has the backing of the Orthodox Church. In this case, making it a criminal offence to "insult the feelings of religious believers".
The raids were broadcast on national TV and Patriarch Kirill denounced Lebedev and his friends as "Pagans."
This now routine use of law enforcement muscle to bolster the status and privileges of the Orthodox Church struck us as deeply ironic, given that only a few decades ago the communists used the same brutal measures to suppress organised religion.
In those days, this maxim from the founder of the Soviet state, VI Lenin, would have been at the heart of the state's view of religion:
"Religion is the opium of the people … All modern religions and churches, all and every kind of religious organisations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class."
Presumably, back when the Soviet Union still existed and Vladimir Putin was still a loyal KGB officer, he would have wholeheartedly endorsed such thinking as a matter of political expediency, if not personal conviction.
But now he's president, he clearly takes a different view - and the Russian Orthodox Church is the beneficiary.
Russia's Newest Law: No Evangelizing Outside of Church
Putin signs new restrictions that limit where and how Christians share the gospel.
Kate Shellnutt
July 08, 2016 8:00 AM
Update (July 8): This week, Russian president Vladimir Putin approved a package of anti-terrorism laws that usher in tighter restrictions on missionary activity and evangelism.
Despite prayers and protests from religious leaders and human rights advocates, the Kremlin announced Putin’s approval yesterday. The amendments, including laws against sharing faith in homes, online, or anywhere but recognized church buildings, go into effect July 20.
Though opponents to the new measures hope to eventually appeal in court or elect legislators to amend them, they have begun to prepare their communities for life under the new rules, reported Forum 18 News Service, a Christian outlet reporting on the region.
Protestants and religious minorities small enough to gather in homes fear they will be most affected. Last month, “the local police officer came to a home where a group of Pentecostals meet each Sunday," Konstantin Bendas, deputy bishop of the Pentecostal Union, told Forum 18. "With a contented expression he told them: ‘Now they're adopting the law I'll drive you all out of here.’ I reckon we should now fear such zealous enforcement.”
“There are potentially very wide-sweeping ramifications to this law,” Joel Griffith of the Slavic Gospel Association said in a Mission Network News report. “It just depends on, again, how it is going to be enforced, and that is a very huge question mark.”
Earlier reporting (June 29): Christians in Russia won’t be allowed to email their friends an invitation to church or to evangelize in their own homes if Russia’s newest set of surveillance and anti-terrorism laws are enacted.
The proposed laws, considered the country’s most restrictive measures in post-Soviet history, place broad limitations on missionary work, including preaching, teaching, and engaging in any activity designed to recruit people into a religious group.
To share their faith, citizens must secure a government permit through a registered religious organization, and they cannot evangelize anywhere besides churches and other religious sites. The restrictions even apply to activity in private residences and online.
This week, Russia’s Protestant minority—estimated around 1 percent of the population—prayed, fasted, and sent petitions to President Vladimir Putin, who will have to approve the measures before they become official.
“Most evangelicals—leaders from all seven denominations—have expressed concerns,” Sergey Rakhuba, president of Mission Eurasia and a former Moscow church-planter, told CT. “They’re calling on the global Christian community to pray that Putin can intervene and God can miraculously work in this process.”
Following a wave of Russian nationalist propaganda, the laws passed almost unanimously in the Duma, the upper house, on Friday and in the Federation Council, the lower house, today.
“If this legislation is approved, the religious situation in the country will grow considerably more complicated and many believers will find themselves in exile and subjected to reprisals because of our faith,” wrote Oleg Goncharov, spokesman for the Seventh-day Adventists’ Euro-Asia division, in an open letter.
Proposed by United Russia party lawmaker Irina Yarovaya, the law appears to target religious groups outside the Russian Orthodox church. Because it defines missionary activities as religious practices to spread a faith beyond its members, “if that is interpreted as the Moscow Patriarchate is likely to, it will mean the Orthodox Church can go after ethnic Russians but that no other church will be allowed to,” according to Frank Goble, an expert on religious and ethnic issues in the region.
Russian nationalist identity remains tied up with the Russian Orthodox church.
“The Russian Orthodox church is part of a bulwark of Russian nationalism stirred up by Vladimir Putin,” David Aikman, history professor and foreign affairs expert, told CT. “Everything that undermines that action is a real threat, whether that’s evangelical Protestant missionaries or anything else.”
Sergei Ryakhovsky, head of the Protestant Churches of Russia, and several other evangelical leaders called the law a violation of religious freedom and personal conscience in a letter to Putin posted on the Russian site Portal-Credo. The letter reads, in part:
The obligation on every believer to have a special permit to spread his or her beliefs, as well as hand out religious literature and material outside of places of worship and used structures is not only absurd and offensive, but also creates the basis for mass persecution of believers for violating these provisions.
Soviet history shows us how many people of different faiths have been persecuted for spreading the Word of God. This law brings us back to a shameful past."
Stalin-era religious restrictions—including outlawing religious activity outside of Sunday services in registered churches and banning parents from teaching faith to their kids—remained on the books until the collapse of the Soviet Union, though the government enforced them only selectively.
Some have questioned whether the government could or would monitor religious activity in private Christian homes.
“I don’t think you can overestimate the Russian government’s willingess to exert control,” Aikman told CT. If history is any indication, the proposed regulations reveal a pattern of “creeping totalitarianism” in the country, he said.
The so-called Big Brother laws also introduce widespread surveillance of online activity, including requiring encrypted apps to give the government the power to decode them, and assigning stronger punishments for extremism and terrorism.
The proposal is an “attack on freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, and the right to privacy that gives law enforcement unreasonably broad powers,” the humanitarian group Human Rights Watch told The Guardian.
If passed, the anti-evangelism law carries fines up to US $780 for an individual and $15,500 for an organization. Foreign visitors who violate the law face deportation.
Russia has already moved to contain foreign missionaries. The “foreign agent” law, adopted in 2012, requires groups from abroad to file detailed paperwork and be subject to government audits and raids. Since then, the NGO sector has shrunk by a third, according to government statistics.
“In Moscow, we shared an office with 24 organizations. Not a single foreign expatriate mission is there now,” Rakhuba previously told CT. “They could not re-register. Missionaries could not return to Russia because they could not renew their visas. It is next to impossible to get registration as a foreign organization today.”
While Russia’s evangelicals pray that the proposed regulations are amended or vetoed, they have gone underground before, and they’ll be willing to do it again, Rakhuba said.
“They say, ‘If it will come to it, it’s not going to stop us from worshiping and sharing our faith,’” he wrote. “The Great Commission isn’t just for a time of freedom.”
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