Window on Eurasia: Soviets Left Russia with ‘Ethnic’ Faiths and ‘Nominal’ Nations

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 12 – Because of the Soviet system’s success in “destroying the mechanisms of the translation of culture” especially in urban areas, Communism bequeathed to the Russian Federation a society of “ethnic” faiths and “nominal” nations, groups whose form and content do not correspond in the way many would expect.
If the existence of “ethnic” faiths has long been recognized in discussions about Russia’s “ethnic” Muslims, members of traditionally Islamic groups who know little about the faith of their forefathers, the role or even the existence of “nominal” nations in Russia, whose borders and content are indeterminate, has attracted less attention.
Now, in “Neprikosnovenniy zapas,” Vladimir Malakhov of Moscow Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences explores the way in which “nominal” nations appeared in Soviet times, how they differ from ethnic groups in other countries, and what this means for Russia’s future (http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2007/1/ma19.html).
Forty years ago, Malakhov observes, the situation with regard to ethnic and racial minorities was fundamentally different in the United States and in the Soviet Union. In the U.S., he argues, “up until the 1970s, the cultures of these groups “were not considered as something deserving attention” from the state or attention by the broader society.
Americans were part of ethnic and religious groups only in their private capacity – and regardless of the church they attended or the languages they spoke at home, it was generally assumed, the Russian scholar says, that “in the public space they could be only Americans.”
“In Soviet Russia,” the situation was “quite different.” The authorities never ceased to stress “the multi-national quality” of the population. Official and public discourse was based not on the category of assimilation (‘the melting pot’) but on the category of variety (‘friendship of the peoples’ and ‘the flowering of national cultures’).”
Because of that, Malakhov continues, “ethnic identity was protected and generously sponsored. To be a non-Russian did not mean that one was rejected. On the contrary, for many categories of citizens, attachment to an ethnic minority served as a means for acquiring and increasing social capital.”
At the same time, however, Malakhov stresses: being “’non-Russian’ did not become prestigious. It never came into the head of anyone to declare something like “‘Udmurt (or Yakut or Chukchi) is beautiful.’” Instead, urban residents of non-Russian origin preferred to assimilate “into a supra-ethnic urban (Russian language) culture.”
That is why, Malakhov says, “the rhetoric of ‘national-cultural rebirth’ so quickly exhausted itself” in Russia. It turned out that in Russian cities at least, “there was nothing particular to be reborn.”
That points to an important reality with which Russian society is still living, he says: “the lack of correspondence of ethnic and cultural-symbolic borders” – a phenomenon that itself reflects the success the Soviet system had in disrupting or even destroying the older patterns of cultural transmission from one generation to another.
This is clear, Malakhov writes, if one compares the status of ethnic groups in Los Angeles or New York with that of supposedly equivalent ethnic groups in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
In the U.S. case, these are “groups set apart by symbolic, status, and cultural barriers from the rest of the population (and sometimes also territorially isolated because of the existence of voluntary ethnic ghettoes).” But in the Russian Federation case, none of this obtains, even though the words used are the same.
In Russian cities, members of ethnic groups are “more units of accounting than consolidated social groups. Moscow Georgians and St. Petersburg Armenians living in these cities over the course of many generations are people well-integrated into society and at the level of social practices almost not distinguished from their surroundings.”
In the Russian case, according to Malakhov, “an ‘ethnic group is more a statistical category than a characteristic of real social interaction.”
This explains, the Moscow analyst insists, not only the inability of these groups to act as units and the lack of clear lines separating them from others but also the particularism of ethnic Russians, who are more inclined to act on behalf of a particular territory or firm than they are on behalf of their supposedly firm ethno-national identity.
In making this argument, Malakhov explicitly acknowledges that he is likely describing a pattern that will pass from the scene relatively quickly. On the one hand, the percentage of people living in the Russian Federation who were not exposed directly to the Soviet system continues to rise.
And on the other, there are an increasing number of migrants into the cities whose rural experience with ethnicity was very different and who, given the collapse of the residence permit controls which allowed officials to structure environments in urban areas, may come to define urban ethnicity in the Russian Federation in the future.
But for the immediate future, he concludes, there can be “few who doubt that ‘peoples’ and ‘ethnic communities’” in Russia are “more than bureaucratic simulacra.” And consequently, Malakhov insists, it is useful to have and use the term “’nominal’ nations” to describe them.

Window on Eurasia: Is ‘Forcible Orthodoxization’ Threatening Russia?

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 12 – The Russian Orthodox Church, by exploiting its links with Russian security agencies and the United Russia Party, is working to monopolize Russia’s public space not only by putting its own representatives in key positions but also by blocking efforts of other religious groups to engage in public service activities.
In some cases, the Patriarchate and its allies are making a genuinely positive contribution. Last week, for example, churchmen and officials celebrated that the Church has opened 1,000 facilities in the country’s 1052 penal institutions, something no other faith could match (http://www.blagovest-info.ru/iindex.php?ss=3&id=14016&print=1).
Orthodox efforts there are especially welcome: There are now more than 800,000 prisoners in Russia, a number that is going up by 6,000 a month. Half are ill, and because conditions in these facilities are so bad, mortality among those incarcerated rose 12 percent over the past year alone (http://www.pobed.ru/content/view/5952/131/).
Indeed, Yuriy Kalinin, the head of the Federal Penal System, said “we cannot cope” with the problems of society in general and prisoners in particular “without the help of the Church. He added that he would back giving state salaries to priests working in the country’s penal institutions (http://www.pobeda.ru/content/view/5960/131/).
But in other cases, the Church’s intervention is far less benign and appears more concerned about defending either the interests of the Patriarchal hierarchy or the interests of the state than in carrying out its responsibilities as a religious organization responsible not only for saving souls but helping people in difficulty.
One example of this involves the Church’s effort to close down a series of institutions helping drug addicts, alcoholics and the homeless not because these are ineffective but because in almost all cases, they are run by “non-traditional” Protestant groups that, some Orthodox feel, will lead Russians away from the true Orthodox faith.
In a commentary posted on the Portal-Credo.ru website last week, Roman Lunkin documents a series of cases in which the Church has shown itself more concerned with maintaining its unchallenged position and working with the authorities than carrying out its Christian mission (http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=comment&id=1230).
In Lunkin’s view, the Church’s actions in this regard are especially unfortunate because they are motivated by religion but by politics: “For activists of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, for xenophobically inclined priests, ‘Orthodox” bureaucrats and politicians [another] motivation is important.”
All of these people are convinced that they “are ‘saving the state,’ that is their comfortably corrupt system from believers in other faiths.” Only the Orthodox Church and its supporters in the political system and society should be allowed “’to save’ this country, that is, again, this system.”
“Thousands of drug addicts, homeless people, alcoholics and unsupervised children, living in abject poverty, belong to Orthodox culture. They are [in the view of the Church] ‘Orthodox by birth.’ The Russian Orthodox Church will pray about them. Why then should the Protestants want to change their lives or push off their deaths?”
On a somewhat less fundamental note, one Moscow commentator reported last week that the Orthodox Church, working with United Russia and the security agencies, had succeeded in preventing the Baptists from organizing a Christian song festival in the Urals (http://www.razgovor.org/news/news128/).
The local government gave permission for the Baptist function but then reversed themselves because of pressure from the Church and the organs. As a result, local officials sent in the militia who were told to break up any actions by “’the incorrect Christians.’”
It is not surprising that this happened, the Moscow commentator continued. After all, the FSB director recently said that “it is necessary to struggle with competition on the religious marketplace and to support the domestic product by suppressing the foreign one.”
That is the way “the wind is blowing” in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the pro-Kremlin United Russia Party has fallen in line. Its Urals office also insisted that the authorities there block the Baptist-organized song festival.
As the Razgovor.org writer put it, a program of “forced Orthodoxization has begun in the country. And things have gone so far that one cannot know in advance whether under the cassock of a priest are the epaulettes of a KGB officer – or under the leader jacket of a KGB officer, the cassock of a priest.”
Numerous human rights activists have complained about this trend, but in general, both the Church and the Russian government have ignored what these groups have had to say. Now, however, the Church faces two new challenges that it may find it more difficult to dismiss and whose consequences are far from clear.
On the one hand, Orthodox laymen are becoming ever more organized and could pass out from under the control of the Church, possibly acting for the Patriarchate by allowing it plausible deniability or possibly acting in ways beyond the intentions or control of the hierarchy.
Last week, Sedmitza.ru reported, a group of Orthodox laymen organized an umbrella group to coordinate the efforts of those who want to introduce “Foundations of Orthodox Culture” into the schools and to prevent alternative faiths from having equal time (http://sedmitza.ru, June 5).
In a declaration following this organizational meeting, the new “staff” warned that “the children and youth of our country by the efforts of the enemies of Christianity and those who do not wish Russia well can be blocked from obtaining the knowledge of [our] great spiritual culture.”
And the leaders of this new group added, in words that some in the Patriarchate and many in the Russian government may find worrisome, that “our state is again moving toward times of militant godlessness.”
More serious -- at least from the view of the Church -- is the resurfacing of Bishop Diomid of Anadyr and Chukotka. As he did at the end of January, Diomid has issued a new appeal and open letter to the Patriarchate calling for the convention of a new Church council to overcome the divisions between the hierarchy and the laiety.
Diomid’s appeal and letter were published in Friday’s edition of the Moscow newspaper “Segodnya” (http://segodnia.ru/index.php?pgid=2&partid=41&newsid=4079). And the coming weeks will show whether the writings of this unrepetent bishop will shake up the Church as did his earlier missive.
(For a survey of Diomid’s impact on the Orthodox Church and the Russian government earlier this year and assessments of why, unpunished and unbowed, he may have an even greater one now, see the collection of articles at http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=topic&id=499).