Window on Eurasia

Krasnodar Kray Shows Russian National Communism in Action

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 14, 2006 – Anyone who wonders what Russian national communism
might look like in the country as a whole need only examine the
situation in Krasnodar kray where two governors have exploited a
combnation of communism, Cossack traditions, and Orthodox Christianity
to institutionalize a highly authoritarian state within a state.

Indeed, repressive actions by the authorities there are now so intense,
Roman Lunkin reported on the religious affairs Internet portal he
edits, that members of many groups not favored by this trinity now are afraid
to complain or even to talk with journalists
[http://portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=comment&id=1019].

“In contrast to the situation in other regions of the country,”
Lunkin continues, “the persecution of those who think differently in
Krasnodar kray is not the result of arbitrary actions by an individual
official.” Instead, “it is the result of a harsh system” built by
two post-Soviet governors there.

Nikolai Kondratenko, a committed communist who was dismissed from his
post by Boris Yeltsin for supporting the August 1991 coup but who later
served as Krasnodar governor from 1996 to 2000, attracted attention for
his frequent anti-Semitic and anti-Western statements.

(In 2000, Kondratenko was elected to the Duma where he regularly showed
he has not changed his views in any way: Last year, for example, he was
among the 19 deputies who signed the notoriously and viciously
anti-Semitic appeal known as the “Letter of the 500.”)

As governor, Lunkin says, Kondratenko sought to promote “not so much
the Church’s ideas but rather a [Russian] national one. But he did
view Orthodoxy or at least the Orthodox hierarchy as an important
instrument that could “cement the nation together.”

Kondratenko’s successor, Aleksandr Tkachyov, continued “the
national communism” of his predecessor, but he added to it a greater stress on
“Russianist” elements. And from his first days in office, Lunkin
writes, Tkachyov worked to form “an Orthodox Cossack republic based
on Soviet traditions.”

Not only has he repeatedly insisted that ethnic Russians are “the
state forming” nation of the country and that the northern Caucasus
has been Russian from time immemorial, but Tkachyov has routinely
violated constitutional strictures about the separation of church and
state.

In May of this year, for example, Tkachyov justified using government
tax revenues to build Orthodox churches and cathedrals with the
following words: “At one time, the state destroyed churches. Now the
time has come to gather stones, and precisely the state should assume
the chief role in this. That is what we are doing.”

But more significant than such declarations has been Tkachyov’s
resuscitation of Soviet-era structures to control non-Orthodox
religious groups and his open reliance on the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox
Church to provide direction on which of those groups should be allowed
to operate and which should be suppressed.

He established a special department for religious affairs within his
government “in which every specialist is responsible for a definite
part of work, controlling the activities of Protestants, Muslims or new
religious movements.” On the advice of the Orthodox Church and using
the powers of the FSB, the kray government regularly blocks Protestant
groups from gaining registration.

Such actions often attract the attention of religious and human rights
groups in Moscow and the West, Lunkin notes, but many of the day-to-day
forms of repression in Krasnodar – the confiscation of religious
literature, denials of visas for missionaries, and the opening of
criminal cases against religious -- seldom get as much attention.

In his lengthy article, Lunkin provides specific details on many of
these actions, but he concedes that he is not able to document all of
the Krasnodar government’s illegal actions because the leaders of
religious groups there are afraid to talk and local officials respond
to queries with a blanket denial that that there are any problems at all.

The Russian national communist regime in Krasnodar is nonetheless
instructive, Lunkin says, of what can happen when “Soviet methods of
administration” are combined with “the nationalism of Cossack
Orthodoxy” to support the authoritarian aspirations and policies of
local officials.

But Lunkin concludes with what is the most dispiriting observation of
all: He notes that this system, one that is “extremely nationalist
and intolerant” is nonetheless popular with “the overwhelming majority
of the population” who view what Kondratenko and Tkachyov have done
and are doing as part of Russia’s national rebirth.

As a result, what is now taking place in a part of the Russian
Federation where no foreign journalists are based and to which neither
they nor their Moscow colleagues go very often may in fact represent a
trend that could spread to other regions or even to the country as a
whole in the future.

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