Window on Eurasia

‘Religious Rebirth’ Programs Seen Threatening Russia’s Unity, Modernization

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 13, 2006 – A turn to religious belief is playing a positive role in helping individual Russians recover from the Soviet period, but calls by the leaders of the country’s traditional faiths for the government to promote a national “religious rebirth” threaten Russia’s unity and modernization, according to a leading Moscow analyst.

Both because of the positive impact of religious belief on individuals
and because of a feeling of guilt about what the communists did to
religions and belivers in the past, Sergei Markedonov writes in an
essay published this week, most of the country’s leaders underestimate the
challenges that “religious rebirth” programs pose.

Indeed, the specialist on ethnic and religious issues says, most
Russian leaders now consider the following propositions to be self-evident
truths: “religiosity is better than atheism and faith is better than
a lack of faith,” religion is “equivalent to culture,” and it is
“the best means of consolidating society and achieving stability.”

And at the present time, he continues, most of them do not question the
assertions of religious leaders that “religion is peace,” that
“religious values are the best ideological choice under conditions of
an ideological vacuum,” and that “religion is a means for warding
off conflicts”
[http://www.politcom.ru/print.php?=3053].

At the individual level in terms of action and at the most general
ideological one, such assertions might be true, Markedonov says. But
current calls, most often from the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian
Orthodox Church and from the leaders of the Muslim community of the
Russian Federation, do not provide evidence for that.

Instead, these calls -- something that Markedonov argues are
“political” programs rather than statements of religious principles
-- not only divide the population of the multi-ethnic and
poly-confessional population of the Russian Federation but also promote
values directly opposed to the modernization of the country.

At least some members of the Russian elite have been sensitized to
these dangers because of the rise of “Islamic nationalism” among some of
the non-Russian communities of the country. Its rise has simultaneously
divided these communities but set them as a group against the larger
non-Islamic portion of the Russian population.

But far fewer of these leaders recognize that the challenge presented
by Muslim calls for government support of a “religious rebirth” in
Russia is far less significant and dangerous than parallel calls by
many in the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Not only do such calls set the Orthodox against other faiths, including
Islam, but according to Markedonov, the political and ideological goals
of the Patriarchate are not only “not contemporary but do not
correspond to the tasks of the modernization of Russian society.”

Senior clerics in the Church increasingly talk about a spiritual
“rebirth” of the country and nation and about the need for the
government making a contribution to that effort, but their statements
are always couched in language specifying that they would like to
return the country to “’a golden age,’ ‘the Russian which we have
lost.’”

For them, Markedonov continues, it is clear that “contemporary
post-Soviet and post-communist Russia is hardly the ideal.” Indeed,
much of what the Patriarchate’s leaders say suggests that they do not
even view the country in which they currently live as fundamentally
legitimate.

That raises a fateful question, Markedonov points out: just which
Russia would they like to see reborn? “Is the ideal of Orthodox Rus’ that
of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Nicholas II or, perhaps
Stalin?”

But if the Patriarchate’s leaders are not clear on that point, they
are very specific on another: they equate “Russian” with
“Orthodox” and insist that the state do likewise, something that is
extraordinarily dangerous as a principle of state construction in a
country which contains millions of people who are neither.

The statements and actions of these religious groups, Islamic or
Orthodox, are not terribly troubling as long as they are the actions of
groups independent of the Russian state, Markedonov says. But they
become problematic, even dangerous, if the state agrees to try to
implement them.

And thus avoiding the problems of these political programs of
“religious reibrth” is very simple for the government, even if it
does not appear to be so to many of the current leaders of the Russian
Federation.

“Essentially,” Markedonov argues, “very little is required of the
state beyond observing the Constitution, guaranteeing the secular character of the state and education and not allowing itself to be
converted ito a “roof’ satisfying the aspirations of the
confessional elites.”

Unfortunately, he concludes, far too many members of the current
Russian government do not understand these dangers, have not learned these
lessons, and thus appear likely to plunge the Russian Federation into
more internal conflicts and to generate additional problems for the
country’s modernization.

Latest Window on Eurasia stories | Religion Archive | Islam in Russia and CIS Archive | Orthodox Church in Russia and CIS Archive | All Window on Eurasia Stories Archive |