Paul Goble
Vienna, April 4 – A small Finno-Ugric community in the Transbaikal is reviving its national culture by relying on the description of its culture in a book prepared by its co-ethnics in St. Petersburg, an indication of the continuing importance of ethnicity in the Russian Federation and of the unusual means groups have adopted to sustain it.
There are only a few hundred Vepsy in four villages of Irkutsk oblast, most of whom arrived there voluntarily or otherwise during the Soviet period from what had been their homeland in the northwestern portion of the USSR, “Vostochnaya Siberskiya Pravda” reported last week (http://www.vsp.ru/show_article.php?id=39562).
Because of their small numbers and isolated location, the Vepsy in the Transbaikal seldom received much notice or support from either academic experts or government officials, something that has contributed to the departure of most younger Vepsy to the cities and the russianization of their language and culture.
But now that may be beginning to change. On the one hand, the Vepsy in St. Petersburg have launched a website and publishing program that is providing their co-ethnics across the Russian Federation with information about the remarkable past of this small group (see http://vepsy.spb.ru).
And on the other, Irkutsk officials have launched a program to develop what they are calling an “Ethnographic Ring” including not only the Vepsy villages but also Dutch and Belarusian sites in the oblast as well. These officials hope to gain both foreign investments and tourism money, something the region has been short of up to now.
For both of these reasons and perhaps because of the uncertainties of their lives since the collapse of the Soviet system, the Vepsy of Irkutsk have become more interested in their past, turning to the publications of the St. Petersburg Veps Cultural Society for information about it (http://www.etnosite/ru/obsh/96/11708).
Although they number only an estimated 13,000 in the Russian Federation today, the Vepsy have had fascinating if troubled history. They came to the attention of the tsars for their role in building St. Petersburg, and in the 1930s, the Soviet government provided them with a written language, native language schools and other institutions.
But at the end of the 1930s, Stalin closed the Veps schools, burned Veps language textbooks, imprisoned Veps teachers, and executed most Veps intellectuals. He also abolished the Veps national soviets and divided the community between the Karelian ASSR and Leningrad and Vologda oblasts.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, some Vepsy took advantage of the Winter War between the USSR and Finland and formed the so-called Kindred Battalion to fight on the side of the Finns. At the end of the war, Moscow demanded that all the surviving members of this unit be handed over to the Soviets. Apparently most were shot or put in the Gulag.
After World War II, neither Soviet officials nor ethnographers paid much attention to the Vepsy. Moscow did not restore Vepsy institutions; and while the Vepsy were enumerated in both the 1959 and 1970 all-union censuses, academics did not conduct any serious studies of this Finno-Ugric community until 1983.
In that year, a scholarly study found that these two censuses had significantly understated the number of Vepsy and that there were at that time almost 13,000 Vepsy in the USSR, most of whom lived in Karelia or the Leningrad region with smaller communities scattered in Vologda and Siberia.
Fewer than half of the Vepsy spoke their native language by that time, an indication of the power of ethnic identity rather than its weakness. (When ethnic identity is strong, the loss of native language has little effect on the group’s numbers; when ethnic identity is weak, the loss of language generally translates into the loss of identity as well.)
Under Gorbachev, the Vepsy began to revive, with the community in Russia’s northern capital forming a cultural society in 1989. After the collapse of Soviet power, that body became increasingly active receiving funds not only from St. Petersburg officials but also from George Soros’ Open Society Institute.
Now, in a place more than seven time zones removed from the northern Russian capital, that activity is promoting a kind of national rebirth, something that neither the Vepsy of St. Petersburg, their co-ethnics in the Transbaikal, or anyone else would have anticipated only a few years ago.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Russian Bishops from the Periphery Increasingly Outspoken
Paul Goble
Vienna, April 4 – Despite the Moscow Patriarchate’s well-deserved reputation for tight central control over its hierarchy, three Russian Orthodox bishops from the periphery of the Russian Federation are attracting attention across the country for their outspoken views.
“Bishop Dynamite” For the last five weeks, an open letter signed by Bishop Diomid of Anadyr and Chukotka opposing ecumenism and calling for a church council, has attracted the attention of many inside the Church and beyond. (For the text of the bishop’s letter, see http://www.newsru.com/religy/01mar2007/chukotka_print.html and for reactions to it, see http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=topic&id=499.)
Indeed, the response to his words – hostility from the Patriarchate itself and support by various Orthodox organizations – has been so strong that one priest, Father Gleb Yakunin, has given the leader of Orthodoxy’s most distant see within the country the sobriquet “Bishop Dynamite” (http://grani.ru/Politics/Russia/p.118758.html).
Although Yakunin acknowledged that it remains unclear just how powerful Diomid’s explosive potential will be, the leader of the Russian Committee on Freedom of Conscience said that the bishop’s letter was important because it was the first time in decades that a bishop had openly criticized the leadership of the Church.
And while it is likely that the Patriarchate will succeed in keeping Diomid a marginal figure, his appeal and the issues it raises have created a situation where “Chukotka is a center of Church thought,” in the words of a religare.ru commentator (http://www.religare.ru/article39825.htm).
A New Controversy in Beslan Meanwhile, in Beslan, the site of a September 2001 hostage-taking disaster in which 331 children died, the local bishop has adopted a position which threatens inter-religious and hence inter-ethnic peace there, according to an “NG-Religii” writer (http://www.religare.ru/article40001.htm).
Unlike both his predecessor as bishop of Stavropol and Vladikavkaz and Patriarch Aleksii II himself, Bishop Feofan wants to build an Orthodox shrine on the sight of the school and thus seeks to freeze out Muslims from any role in a memorial for the victims of the tragedy – even though more than half the victims were Muslims.
Bishop Feofan argues that the parents of the victims have voted for a church and it is not right to insult their feelings by erecting a mosque as well. But some of the parents told “NG-Religii” that they had been pressured by the bishopric to take that position, reports that if true call into question the results Feofan cites.
Local Muslim leaders say that unlike his predecessor Gedeon, who sought to promote inter-religious peace and dialogue, Bishop Feofan has been “extremely aggressive” in his interactions with them and with representatives of Moscow Muslim groups such as Ravil’ Gainutdin of the Union of Russian Muftis.
Indeed, the “NG-Religii” writer concludes sadly, Feofan’s behavior – together with the Patriarchate’s failure to call him into line -- represents “salt in the still fresh wounds of people who suffered a tragedy,” something that makes the reaction of Muslims understandable if not in fact welcome.
If the Americans Had Occupied the Russian Far East… But perhaps the most remarkable if not necessarily the most significant comments came this week in an interview Bishop Zosima of Yakutsk and Lena gave to the Religion and Mass Media site (http://www.religare.ru/article39961.htm).
First of all, Zosima argues – and this goes very much against what officials in the Moscow Patriarchate currently claim – that “religion does not play a decisive role in the unification of the peoples” of the Russian Federation although he says “the rebirth of Russia is impossible without the rebirth of its historical roots” including the Church.
Second, the bishop says, this goal can best be promoted by having the state limit the activities of foreign missionaries in Russia, by introducing religious instruction in the public schools, and by creating Komsomol-type groups for young people albeit with the values of Orthodoxy and Russianness rather than communism.
And third, Zosima makes a comment that recalls the Soviet era in another way: he says that “if America had come to Yakutia” at some point in the past, “the Yakuts would then live in specially created reservations and the basic territory would be freedom up for so-called ‘new settlers.’”
These three bishops are relatively young and reflect many of the religious and nationalist values percolating among the lay activists of the Church at the end of the 1980s and during the first half of the 1990s, ideas that disturbed many in the hierarchy but which continue to resonate.
At the end of the Yeltsin era, the Patriarchate attempted to silence this group by isolating some of its members and co-opting others, but the actions of these three bishops suggest that that policy has not worked as intended and may even be backfiring on its authors.
(For a thorough discussion of this process and why it may be failing, see Nikolai Mitrokhin’s detailed study, “The Church after the Crisis” in “Neprikosnovenniy zapas,” no. 6 (2006) which is available online at http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2006/50/mi22-pr.html.)
Vienna, April 4 – Despite the Moscow Patriarchate’s well-deserved reputation for tight central control over its hierarchy, three Russian Orthodox bishops from the periphery of the Russian Federation are attracting attention across the country for their outspoken views.
“Bishop Dynamite” For the last five weeks, an open letter signed by Bishop Diomid of Anadyr and Chukotka opposing ecumenism and calling for a church council, has attracted the attention of many inside the Church and beyond. (For the text of the bishop’s letter, see http://www.newsru.com/religy/01mar2007/chukotka_print.html and for reactions to it, see http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=topic&id=499.)
Indeed, the response to his words – hostility from the Patriarchate itself and support by various Orthodox organizations – has been so strong that one priest, Father Gleb Yakunin, has given the leader of Orthodoxy’s most distant see within the country the sobriquet “Bishop Dynamite” (http://grani.ru/Politics/Russia/p.118758.html).
Although Yakunin acknowledged that it remains unclear just how powerful Diomid’s explosive potential will be, the leader of the Russian Committee on Freedom of Conscience said that the bishop’s letter was important because it was the first time in decades that a bishop had openly criticized the leadership of the Church.
And while it is likely that the Patriarchate will succeed in keeping Diomid a marginal figure, his appeal and the issues it raises have created a situation where “Chukotka is a center of Church thought,” in the words of a religare.ru commentator (http://www.religare.ru/article39825.htm).
A New Controversy in Beslan Meanwhile, in Beslan, the site of a September 2001 hostage-taking disaster in which 331 children died, the local bishop has adopted a position which threatens inter-religious and hence inter-ethnic peace there, according to an “NG-Religii” writer (http://www.religare.ru/article40001.htm).
Unlike both his predecessor as bishop of Stavropol and Vladikavkaz and Patriarch Aleksii II himself, Bishop Feofan wants to build an Orthodox shrine on the sight of the school and thus seeks to freeze out Muslims from any role in a memorial for the victims of the tragedy – even though more than half the victims were Muslims.
Bishop Feofan argues that the parents of the victims have voted for a church and it is not right to insult their feelings by erecting a mosque as well. But some of the parents told “NG-Religii” that they had been pressured by the bishopric to take that position, reports that if true call into question the results Feofan cites.
Local Muslim leaders say that unlike his predecessor Gedeon, who sought to promote inter-religious peace and dialogue, Bishop Feofan has been “extremely aggressive” in his interactions with them and with representatives of Moscow Muslim groups such as Ravil’ Gainutdin of the Union of Russian Muftis.
Indeed, the “NG-Religii” writer concludes sadly, Feofan’s behavior – together with the Patriarchate’s failure to call him into line -- represents “salt in the still fresh wounds of people who suffered a tragedy,” something that makes the reaction of Muslims understandable if not in fact welcome.
If the Americans Had Occupied the Russian Far East… But perhaps the most remarkable if not necessarily the most significant comments came this week in an interview Bishop Zosima of Yakutsk and Lena gave to the Religion and Mass Media site (http://www.religare.ru/article39961.htm).
First of all, Zosima argues – and this goes very much against what officials in the Moscow Patriarchate currently claim – that “religion does not play a decisive role in the unification of the peoples” of the Russian Federation although he says “the rebirth of Russia is impossible without the rebirth of its historical roots” including the Church.
Second, the bishop says, this goal can best be promoted by having the state limit the activities of foreign missionaries in Russia, by introducing religious instruction in the public schools, and by creating Komsomol-type groups for young people albeit with the values of Orthodoxy and Russianness rather than communism.
And third, Zosima makes a comment that recalls the Soviet era in another way: he says that “if America had come to Yakutia” at some point in the past, “the Yakuts would then live in specially created reservations and the basic territory would be freedom up for so-called ‘new settlers.’”
These three bishops are relatively young and reflect many of the religious and nationalist values percolating among the lay activists of the Church at the end of the 1980s and during the first half of the 1990s, ideas that disturbed many in the hierarchy but which continue to resonate.
At the end of the Yeltsin era, the Patriarchate attempted to silence this group by isolating some of its members and co-opting others, but the actions of these three bishops suggest that that policy has not worked as intended and may even be backfiring on its authors.
(For a thorough discussion of this process and why it may be failing, see Nikolai Mitrokhin’s detailed study, “The Church after the Crisis” in “Neprikosnovenniy zapas,” no. 6 (2006) which is available online at http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2006/50/mi22-pr.html.)
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