In issues of social justice, individual dignity and distributions of power, the Church cannot be silent. The one question which, for me, bore asking in light of the Russian protests is: where does the Church stand? What is the Church saying and doing? The New York Times, though one must naturally take everything said in the self-proclaimed paper of record with several grains of salt, has a very interesting story on the role that the Russian Orthodox Church has played in the wake of the Russian elections. From the way it seems from the direct quotes in the story, the Church is taking the balanced position that non-violent protests should be allowed to occur unmolested as a legitimate outlet for free expression, and that they should have a definite voice in the political sphere, but deliberately stopped short of endorsing any particular platform. Since then, Patriarch Kirill I has been exhorting Orthodox believers to prayer and political moderation. (Neither the current Patriarch Kirill I nor the former Patriarch Aleksei II have exactly been silent on social or political issues, though; for example, both were very stoutly, along with the heads of the Roman and the English Churches, against the murderous folly in Iraq.)
It should be noted that there are two separate protest groups. The one is in favour of political reform; the other is in favour of greater political autonomy for Russia. Both of them, it should be noted, support election reform. Each of them has attracted some rather unsavoury characters (such as the Natzbols). There seems, sadly, to be some NED involvement in funding the political-reform protests. However, it strikes me as immensely interesting that the ‘anti-Orange’ protests drew a large number of scientists and intellectuals to speak for them, including philosopher and geophysicist Sergei Kurginyan, anti-globalisation activist and historian Natalya Narochnitskaya, and Valentin Lebedev, the leader of the Union of Orthodox Citizens. Interesting indeed.
In the coming months, don’t look to the radicals or to the paid operatives (whether NED or United Russia) on either side. Look to the common believers. What they do and say may be much more influential in the long run than what presently appears.
Interesting post. I am not sure what to make of the situation in Russia. It is hard to really understand what protests in other countries are all about.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I am not a fan of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Mousavi apparently had connections to the kleptocratic cliques within the Iranian clerical establishment, so I was skeptical about his image as a reformer.
I have the same feelings about Russia. Putin is far from perfect, but from what I understand, Yeltsin was much worse, as he essentially left the country open to gangsters and vulture capitalists.
Too often "reform" means brutal neoliberal reforms that make many legal/procedural gains somewhat meaningless. Caesarist populism with continue to be attractive to many people so long as the alternative threatens to impoverish them.
As for the churches, I think given the circumstances, they can certainly do a lot of good as social gadflies, constantly nipping at the heals of the powerful while trying to avoid getting directly involved in politics.
Thanks, John!
ReplyDeleteI have exactly the same reservations; the government of Iran is certainly not something to be wholeheartedly supported, and history provides some inspiration for alternatives to the current regime (the moderate Shi'ite, constitutionalist, economic-patriotic monarchism of Mohammad Mosaddegh comes to mind). Exactly the same goes for Russia; rather the envisioned radically moderate, self-critical, distributist Tsarism of Solzhenitsyn than either the resurgence of Bolshevism and Fascism, or the dictatorial neoliberal alternative presented by Yeltsin and the colour 'revolutions'.
And I agree with you that it is not difficult to understand the appeal of moderate and moderating authoritarians in post-Communist societies (Putin, Hu, Nazarbaev, Lukashenko), when the other alternatives are intrinsically unappealing, placing high-level legal reforms (to which the privileged always have first-dibs) over basic principles of common law and distributive justice.
I just find fascinating the role the Church in Russia has so far played in the wake of the elections; though it has so far stood stolidly against the sorts of 'reforms' which would lead to great suffering amongst the poor (and is therefore characterised in much of the Western news media as a pawn of the Russian state), here it is standing up to the state in defence of the principles of protest without endorsing all the demands of the protests themselves.
Well,two days ago Patriarch Kirll said that the "Putin era was a miracle of God", and those who were demonstrating for democratic change were making "ear-piercing shrieks". There is nothing subtle there. As ever, Kirill is showing himself the servile tool of Putin. And Kirill has not emitted one sound condemning the Russian Government for its complicity in the slaughter in Syria.
ReplyDeleteAquinasotic:
ReplyDeleteKirill was quite right, in point of fact, if what he meant by the statement that the Putin era is a drastic improvement for ordinary Russians and anyone who was not a thieving plutocrat, over the prior destruction and social chaos wreaked by the Yeltsin years.
And the 'slaughter' in Syria is of a notably two-sided nature; it is an exercise in self-delusion to pretend that it is anything other than a barely-suppressed civil war, between on the one hand the Islamist, virulently anti-Shia and anti-Christian (and thus enthusiastically backed by Western secularists and neocons) Free Syrian Army, and on the other the religiously moderate, semi-secular forces of Assad. It serves no one's true interests, not even those of the people of Syria, to have a fundamentalist Sunni regime take the reins of power. Russia's Security Council veto, as even much of the American civil service quietly recognises, was most timely.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete