Paul Goble
Vienna, September 26 – Protestant congregations in Russia as of this year outnumber those of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches there combined. And the total number of practicing Protestants is likely to exceed the number of active Orthodox and Catholic faithful sometime before 2012, according to a new study.
If those projections hold – and they may not -- Russia could become a Protestant country, at least in terms of the number of practicing faithful, for a few decades until ongoing demographic developments transform it, at least in its current borders, into a Muslim majority one sometime later in the 21st century.
And that possibility, two Russian writers argue this week might be a good thing because in the words of one, “Protestant countries are the most stable and wealthy” (http://babr.ru/?pt=news&event=v1&IDE=40017), and in the words of the second, Western Christians are more focused on improving conditions in this life than in looking beyond the grave (http://www.regions.ru/news/2099239/).
The first of these writers, Babr.ru’s Dmitriy Tayevskiy argues that the post-Soviet upsurge in interest in Orthodoxy has begun to recede as more and more Russians see the Church’s obsequiousness toward the state and its simultaneous efforts to promote itself as the single moral instructor of the nation.
Protestantism, in contrast, has won adherents in large measure because of its support from abroad and because of its commitment to helping its members with their lives and promoting the social gospel, two resources that Russian Orthodoxy does not have to the same degree.
And it is Tayevskiy who wades into the controversial issue of just how many real believers there are in Russia. As the Irkutsk analyst notes, the Patriarchate routinely claims that 80 percent of all Russians are Orthodox because that is the percentage of the population baptized in the Church.
But few of these people take an active part in Church life, he notes, and “more sober-minded” priests admit than only about two percent of the Russian population – some three million people – are in fact “church” people who attend regularly and maintain religious discipline.
For other faiths as well, there are gaps between the number of adherents claimed and the number of actual practitioners. Most Jews in Russia are secular rather than practicing, Tayevskiy continues. Many Russia’s Catholics are Catholic in name only. And Russia’s Buddhists have a hard time specifying just how many of them there are.
The situation with regard to Islam is the classic example of this difference. There may be as many as 25 million “ethnic” Muslims in the Russian Federation, people who are members of traditionally Islamic nations. But fewer than one in five is linked to a mosque or actively lives according to the five pillars of the faith.
Protestants, in contrast, are the great exception. Given Soviet oppression in the past and Orthodox opposition to what the Patriarchate routinely refers to as extremist “sects,” few Russians declare they are Protestants if they are not practicing members of one or another denomination.
Consequently, there is a far smaller difference between the number of believers Protestant leaders claim and the number of actual participants in their denominations. That makes it easier to project the number of believers, but it may in some circumstances lead to exaggerations as well.
Nonetheless, Tayevskiy almost certainly is correct when he suggests that unless Moscow’s policies toward religion change dramatically or the practice of one or more of the denominations undergoes a fundamental shift, Protestant believers will outnumber the active followers of all other Christian denominations in Russia a decade from now.
The implications of such a development are potentially enormous, and some of them were explored, admittedly indirectly, by Moscow literary critic Valentin Nepomnyashiy as part of a discussion of the ways the core ideas of Orthodoxy and Western Christianity affect the behavior of their followers.
In a widely disseminated Interfax interview this week, Nepomnyashiy focuses on the comparative importance of Christmas and Easter in the two church traditions. In Western Christianity, he notes, Christmas is the more important holiday, suggesting as it does that “God became man” and consequently that men must try to improve the world.
Because God came to man in this way, he continued, “in the West after the Renaissance arose ‘the idea of the incompleteness of the world as the cause of all misfortunes and unhappiness of people’ and as a result in the 20th century, ‘the surrounding world was in fact conceived as construction material’” out of which man could make the world better.
The Eastern tradition of Christianity, the critic suggests, sees Easter as more important than Christmas. It focuses on Christ’s sacrifice for man’s sins and invites the Orthodox to “take up the cross” and follow Christ’s example rather than try to change the world in more concrete ways.
Consequently, although Nepomnyashiy does not say so in this interview, were Russia to shift from one of these paradigms to the other, that change would represent a far more revolutionary development than even the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 or the collapse of communism and the USSR in 1991.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Transport System Failing to Fulfill Strategic Tasks
Paul Goble
Vienna, September 26 – Almost a century ago, tsarist Prime Minister Sergei Vitte observed that “Russian roads must support that country’s strategic, political and commercial requirements.” But now, according to one analyst, Moscow’s focus on money from the export of raw materials has caused the Kremlin to forget these words.
As a result, Anna Loginova writes in an essay posted online yesterday, not only are other countries taking advantage of Russia’s shortcomings in its transportation system, but there is a real danger that its existing transport network will not prevent the country’s disintegration (http://rpmonitor.ru/ru/detail_m.php?ID=5975).
The notoriously poor quality of Russia’s highways and its failure to develop mixed transportation corridors so slows the movement of goods and services over them that this factor alone is costing the country two percent of its GDP – or some 700 billion rubles a year (28 billion US dollars), she says.
Those losses in turn are further compounded by incredibly slow processing of freight at Russia’s land and sea borders, all factors that are prompting both domestic Russian firms and foreign countries to explore every possible way to ship their goods around rather than through Russia.
Unfortunately, given Moscow’s focus on exporting raw materials (mainly oil and gas), the antiquated nature of Russia’s legislation regulating transportation, and a bureaucratic culture in which responsibility is divided and no one wants to rock the boat by criticizing others at the same level, there is no immediate way out.
But Loginova suggests, the country would earn immense returns from creating a super-agency or ministry that would oversee the transportation ministry – which she suggests has been especially neglectful about planning – the customs service, and the economic development ministry.
Were that to happen, even for a short time, she argues, it would be possible for Moscow to take five steps that would put the country on track to becoming a transit power in its own right between Europe and Asia rather than simply an exporter of raw materials to both.
First, she says, it would allow the rapid development of a planning document concerning mixed mode transit corridors for the next seven years. Second, it would allow for the revision of the country’s aging legal infrastructure – some laws governing transportation date to the 1950s and make no reference to airfreight.
Third, such an agency would help promote the coordination of public and private institutions to ensure that these corridors would be built according to the most modern standards. Fourth, it could create a standing annual order for the construction of such corridors.
And fifth, Loginova says, it could create special operational institutions to oversee the operation of these corridors while attracting private capital to help pay and maintain them, something that the private sector could not do on its own, the economic specialist suggests.
At the conclusion of her article and perhaps as a reflection of her sense that few in the upper reaches of the Putin regime will be inclined to listen to such arguments, at least as long as the oil and gas money continues to flow in, she advances another one more likely to get the Kremlin’s attention.
“It is obvious,” she says, that “the development of Siberia and the Far East cannot be realized as it is being done today,” only as export channels. Instead, she continues, “sooner or later, the current course will lead to a strengthening of the centrifugal tendencies and create the preconditions for the destruction of the state.”
Developing better highways and investing in modern and fast intermodal transport corridors can help prevent that, Loginova insists, and thus developing the transportation system must come to be recognized as an important, even vital component of the country’s national security strategy.
Vienna, September 26 – Almost a century ago, tsarist Prime Minister Sergei Vitte observed that “Russian roads must support that country’s strategic, political and commercial requirements.” But now, according to one analyst, Moscow’s focus on money from the export of raw materials has caused the Kremlin to forget these words.
As a result, Anna Loginova writes in an essay posted online yesterday, not only are other countries taking advantage of Russia’s shortcomings in its transportation system, but there is a real danger that its existing transport network will not prevent the country’s disintegration (http://rpmonitor.ru/ru/detail_m.php?ID=5975).
The notoriously poor quality of Russia’s highways and its failure to develop mixed transportation corridors so slows the movement of goods and services over them that this factor alone is costing the country two percent of its GDP – or some 700 billion rubles a year (28 billion US dollars), she says.
Those losses in turn are further compounded by incredibly slow processing of freight at Russia’s land and sea borders, all factors that are prompting both domestic Russian firms and foreign countries to explore every possible way to ship their goods around rather than through Russia.
Unfortunately, given Moscow’s focus on exporting raw materials (mainly oil and gas), the antiquated nature of Russia’s legislation regulating transportation, and a bureaucratic culture in which responsibility is divided and no one wants to rock the boat by criticizing others at the same level, there is no immediate way out.
But Loginova suggests, the country would earn immense returns from creating a super-agency or ministry that would oversee the transportation ministry – which she suggests has been especially neglectful about planning – the customs service, and the economic development ministry.
Were that to happen, even for a short time, she argues, it would be possible for Moscow to take five steps that would put the country on track to becoming a transit power in its own right between Europe and Asia rather than simply an exporter of raw materials to both.
First, she says, it would allow the rapid development of a planning document concerning mixed mode transit corridors for the next seven years. Second, it would allow for the revision of the country’s aging legal infrastructure – some laws governing transportation date to the 1950s and make no reference to airfreight.
Third, such an agency would help promote the coordination of public and private institutions to ensure that these corridors would be built according to the most modern standards. Fourth, it could create a standing annual order for the construction of such corridors.
And fifth, Loginova says, it could create special operational institutions to oversee the operation of these corridors while attracting private capital to help pay and maintain them, something that the private sector could not do on its own, the economic specialist suggests.
At the conclusion of her article and perhaps as a reflection of her sense that few in the upper reaches of the Putin regime will be inclined to listen to such arguments, at least as long as the oil and gas money continues to flow in, she advances another one more likely to get the Kremlin’s attention.
“It is obvious,” she says, that “the development of Siberia and the Far East cannot be realized as it is being done today,” only as export channels. Instead, she continues, “sooner or later, the current course will lead to a strengthening of the centrifugal tendencies and create the preconditions for the destruction of the state.”
Developing better highways and investing in modern and fast intermodal transport corridors can help prevent that, Loginova insists, and thus developing the transportation system must come to be recognized as an important, even vital component of the country’s national security strategy.
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