Window on Eurasia

Russian Democracy Must Reflect National Traditions, Metropolitan Kirill Insists

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 2, 2006 – Russian democracy, understood “in the first
instance as the harmonization of interests,” must reflect the
specific features of the country’s history and culture or it will be rejected by the Russian people, according to one of the most senior hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In a wide-ranging interview in yesterday’s “Komsomol’skaya
pravda,” Metropolitan Kirill, the influential head of the
Patriarchate’s External Relations Department, said that “everything
else is secondary” to the need of each country to develop a system of
harmonizing interests that corresponds to its “specific features.”

Unfortunately, he said, many in the West say to the Russian people that
“no, there is no need for you to consider these special features; you
must copy a model” from elsewhere – and it would be a good thing if
that were that of “the United States of America.”

Russians have responded, Kirill continued, by insisting that “we have
a different history, culture and tranditions.” But unfortunately,
“they tell us that [we] most strictly follow universal parameters,”
something neither the Russians nor any other community proud of its own
history should in fact be forced to do.

Indeed, the West’s insistence on a single model of democracy is
“driving [Russians] away” from that system. “Ask an average
Russian how he feels about democracy,” Kirill continued, and he will
say: badly,” because for him “democracy is partially associated
with a certain ideological invasion of the West.”

To say this, Kirill insisted, is not to reject the idea of democracy.
That idea, he said, is “remarkable,” but if it is to work in any
particular locale, people have to “combine” that system with their
own traditions and way of life in order that “democracy will thus
gain a moral dimension.”

In commenting about the introduction of courses on religion in the
public schools and a chaplaincy corps in the army – two of the most
controversail questions of inter-faith dialogue in the Russian
Federation -- Kirill provided some additional details on what he
understands to be a democratic “harmonization of interests.”

With regard to the introduction of courses on religion, the
metropolitan said, they must be voluntary. “There must be an alternative” that
students who choose not to take “Foundations of Orthodox Culture”
can select. “If there are Muslims in a class, then for them could be
introduced a class on Foundations of Islamic Culture,” he explained.

But there are real limits to the possibility of providing such
alternatives, he insisted. If 98 percent of the students are Orthodox,
one is a Muslim and one an atheist, then I do not think that for the
instruction of these individuals, the state should have to pay for
those who might teach them.”

The same calculation, he implied, should apply to the issue of the
introduction of chaplains in the Russian armed forces, where the
government should pay for representatives of the largest faith – his
own – but other denominations should have to supply and pay for their
chaplains because the number of soldiers they serve is smaller..

Kirill’s majoritarian impulse, one that would in some cases undermine
not only the Constitutional principle of the separation of church and
state but also put severe pressure on those who are members of
religious minorities and on those who have no faith whatsoever, probably enjoys
broad support.

But Kirill’s longstanding views that ethnic Russians by definition
are Orthodox and his statement in this interview that “many more than 60
percent” of the citizens of the Russian Federation are Orthodox
Christians suggest that his approach almost certainly would lead Moscow
to ignore the claims of the Cosntitution and those of other faiths.

Indeed, in an indication of just how likely that is, Kirill said that
when he asks people at Moscow meetings to raise their hands if “they
consider themselves to be Orthodox, 95 percent of them do so” – a
share vastly greater than even pro-Orthodox students of the subject
believe to be the case, let alone more neutral academic specialists.

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