Window on Eurasia

Russian Orthodox Official Calls for Blacklisting Church’s Enemies

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 6, 2006 – Archpriest Dmitriy Smirnov, who heads the Moscow
Patriarchate’s Department for work with the Russian military, police
and other force structures, has called for the compilation and
publication of a list of “enemies” of the Russian Orthodox Church.

At a roundtable held last month on “The Challenges of the Times and
the Paths of Development of Church Life,” Smirnov, one of the most
outspoken members of the church’s central hierarchy, said that such a
step would allow “the entire people” to know who their friends and
enemies are.

Such a list, which he said should include not only names and addresses
of offenders but also citations from writings and speeches the Church
considers offensive, should be publicized by all means, including
special Internet sites so that “millions of people” will be able to
learn the truth without leaving their apartments or dachas.

The Patriarchate apparently has already compiled such lists, although
it has not yet disseminated them in the ways Smirnov suggests. Following
the archpriest’s remarks at the June 21st meeting, Vsevolod Chaplin,
the deputy head of the Patriarchate’s External Relations Department,
exclaimed “the lists are already prepared.”

Chaplin’s intervention is especially troubling because he is deputy
to and typically spokesman for Metropolitan Kirill, the second most
powerful official in the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox
Church and a favorite to succeed Aleksii II as patriarch.

And at the same time, Yevgeniy Nikiforov, a leader of the Radonezh
Orthodox Enlightenment Society, suggested that such black lists should
be significantly expanded to include in addition to direct opponents of
the Church not only gays and lesbians but also supporters of
multi-culturalism and poly-confessionalism in Russia.

All these comments were published in an article by Mikhail Sitnikov
first carried on the CIVITAS website maintained by the pro-democracy
All-Russian Civic Congress
[http://www.civitas.ru/]and now given broader dissemination on the
Russian religious affairs site Portal-Credo.ru
[http://portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=monitor&id=8555].

Sitnikov traces the long and tragic history of such blacklists in
Russia and the Soviet Union and says that such lists, a rarity in the
aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, began to appear again in 1998,
with some analysts even then speculating about who might be on them and
subject to mistreatment in a more authoritarian Russia.

Most recent lists have been disseminated as broadsides or on Internet
sites, Sitnikov says, but he notes that “the composition of lists has
become ever more prestigious, with those who compile them quite
prepared to give their names, and the number of those who sign on in support
increasing “for example from 50 to 5,000” – a reference to the
scandalous anti-Semitic letter of a year or so ago.

The compilers of such list often urge the authorities to take action
against those who they view as enemies, but even when the authorities
do not or when they move only cuatiously against those who compile them,
the appearance of such lists almost inevitably poisons the public
atmosphere.

There is no indication that the enemies list that Archpriest Smirnov
will have any lesser or greater effect, but the fact that someone so
close to the security agencies and so senior in the hierarchy of a
Church that claims to be the defining element of the Russian people is
disturbing.

At the very least, Smirnov’s proposal represents a test for all those
who are concerned about the development of freedom and pluralism in a
country which, as Sitnikov demonstrates, has had too little of either
and where the compilation of enemies lists has often laid the
groundwork for the rise not of democracy but of dictatorship.

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