Paul Goble
Vienna, October 17 – Angered by Muslim criticism of the Moscow oblast governor earlier this month, four Russian Orthodox lay groups known for their Russian nationalist views have urged the most politically compliant Russian mufti to take control of Islamic communities now subordinate to another Muslim spiritual directorate (MSD).
In doing so, they are speaking to the choir: Talgat Tadzhuddin, the head of the Ufa-based Central MSD who sometimes styles himself as the Supreme Mufti of Holy Russia, has long sought to secure control over all Muslim communities in the Russian Federation.
And they are reflecting a significant trend of opinion within the Russian government, many of whose officials would like to see a single Muslim leader in Russian play a role like the one the patriarch plays in the Russian Orthodox Church, even though many have acknowledged that achieving this goal will be difficult if not impossible.
But at the same time, their letter, posted online yesterday, is certain to infuriate many Muslims as unwarranted interference in the religious affairs of their community and as yet another indication that the Orthodox Church is doing the Kremlin’s bidding, something that raises the stakes in the relationship between the two faiths.
A week ago, Muslim activists in Moscow oblast sent an open letter to that region’s Governor Boris Gromov to complain that his administration was blocking the construction of mosques there and warning that they would not vote for him and United Russia if this continued.
In their letter, the Muslims referred not only to specific instances of bureaucratic obfuscation but also to a variety of other issues, including what they called the “unjust” Soviet war in Afghanistan, where Gromov served as the last Soviet commanding general at the time of the USSR’s withdrawal.
That comment clearly infuriated the Orthodox Christian activists as somehow anti-patriotic, and their letter, posted on a website of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church expressed first their rage and then their desire to subordinate Russia’s Muslims to a single power vertical (http://www.radonezh.ru/news/?ID=6507).
The letter, addressed to Mufti Tadzhuddin in his capacity as a Muslim leader, was signed not by individual members of the Russian Orthodox Church but rather by the Union of Orthodox Citizens, the National Assembly, the Radonezh Society, and the Union for Christian Rebirth.
Having noted their “indignation” at the complaints of Muslims in Moscow oblast and their suggestions that the war in Afghanistan was “unjust,” the authors of this letter then attacked some of the signatories of the earlier missive for various crimes punished and unpunished that the letter writers said undermined their authority.
And while suggesting that the Orthodox have “nothing against traditional Muslims and their mosques,” the authors of yesterday’s letter said that behind the Moscow oblast Muslims were the leaders of two other MSDs not subordinate to Tadzhuddin – the MSD for the European Portion of Russia and that for the Asiatic Part.
Both these are subordinate to the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR), which is headed by Ravil Gainutdin, who has often been at odds with Tadzhuddin because of his greater willingness to speak out on behalf of the Muslim communities that are part of his organization even if that offends the Russian government.
According to Orthodox letter, wherever Gainutdin is involved, there are “scandals” that have a negative impact on the reputation of the Muslim community and its relationship to the Orthodox Church and to the people of the Russian Federation more generally.
The four organizations say that they “warmly greet the transfer of the Muslim communities of Vladimir oblast into the jurisdiction of the Central MSD and ask [him] to finally take the remaining communities of Central Russia away from [SMR head} Gainutdin.’
“Otherwise,” the Orthodox authors of this letter to the Islamic leader conclude, “the authority of Muslims here will fall to a catastrophically low level.”
Tadzhuddin, who rose to his current position in Soviet times and who has a reputation not only for close ties with the Kremlin but also for behavior – including the very public consumption of alcohol – which offends many Muslims in Russia, would be all too happy to oblige.
But Gainutdin has proven himself to be a far more skillful political infighter than other MSD heads, and Tadzhuddin may discover that this latest public support from Russian nationalist groups among the Orthodox Christian laiety may hurt him more than help him and the Russian state in his desire to become “the Muslim patriarch.”
In addition to laying the groundwork for yet another conflict between the Russian Orthodox Church and the various MSD leaders of the Russian Federation, this letter calls attention to a phenomenon described in two major essays posted online this week – the willingness of Orthodox nationalists to do what Kremlin leaders want no matter what.
In one, entitled “Orthodox Stalinism: Why do the Orthodox so Love Those in Power?” Pavel Urnov calls attention to the view among many Russian Orthodox nationalists that all leaders, including dictator Joseph Stalin, perform a “sacral” function and thus must be supported and obeyed regardless of what they do.
Such an attitude, he adds, helps explain why so many Russian Orthodox today can view Stalin as a superior leader despite his crimes and attacks on the church and despite the fact that Christianity is “not a political or state ideology” but a source of moral guidance for all (http://www.russ.ru//politics/reakcii/pravoslavnyi_stalnizm).
And in the other, a commentary by Orthodox journalist Sergei Putilov points to the increasing willingness of the Moscow Patriarchate and its laiety to put themselves “at the service of the state” up to and including support for anti-Christian and even anti-Church goals (http://www.baznica.info/index.php?name=Pages&op=page&id=4491).
According to Putilov, many in the Russian Church have forgotten in their rush to support whatever the state does or its leaders want have forgotten that “when the Church acts as one with the state, it inevitably becomes a participant in the crimes and misdeeds carried out by the civil authorities.”
That has specific resonance for today, he says: Given the current direction of the Russian government at home and abroad, “the close proximity of the Church to those in power means that the hierarchs” and the laiety should stop and reflect on what the real meaning of their faith before simply continuing to do the bidding of the state.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Growth Slowing in Last ‘Relatively Free’ Sector of Russian Media – the Internet
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 17 – Growth in the number of Russians going online has slowed overall this year and may even have been reversed in some places, developments that casts doubt on the hopes of some that the relatively free Internet could serve to counterbalance the Kremlin’s increasingly tight control over other media outlets.
Yefim Galitskiy, a specialist at the Public Opinion Foundation in Moscow, said yesterday that his organization’s regular surveys since 2002 about Russian Internet use had documented rapid rises until this summer, when the rate of growth slowed or even stopped altogether (http://www.dp.ru/msk/news/adveritsing/2007/10/15/241725/print/).
And he predicted on the basis of his company’s latest findings that the total number of Russians using the Internet would top out at about one-third of the population, up from approximately a quarter now, far fewer than other experts have suggested, albeit on the basis of more limited data sets.
Ruslan Tagiyev, who studies the Internet for TNS Gallup Media, said that he believes that ever more Russians will turn to the Internet until perhaps 75 percent of them go on line – although he acknowledged that this projection was based only on findings from the city of Moscow and not the provinces, places he has yet studied.
That Internet connectivity is less in Russia’s regions than it is in the capital is common ground, of course, but a new study of how the Internet is used in the various regions and republics of the Southern Federal District (FD) shows just how much further behind the center all of them are – and why they may not catch up.
That FD as a whole ranks second from the bottom of all federal districts in terms of Internet use. (Only the Far Eastern FD is lower.) Although it contains 15 percent of the country’s population, the Southern FD has only three percent of the Internet domains and 4.9 percent of the IP addresses.
But even within it, there are significant variations among the constituent federal subjects in the Southern FD, journalist Nikita Mendkovich reports in an article posted earlier this week on the Regions of Russia website, differences that he argues justify classifying them in three groups (http://www.regrus.info/anounces/3/110.html).
Those living in the first of these groups, which includes Rostov oblast, Volgograd oblast and Krasnodar kray, currently have more than 80 percent of the registered domain names in the Southern FD and also lead the region with 614,000 IP addresses, despite the fact that they form a far smaller fraction of the Southern FD’s total population.
The second group, whose constituent parts each have from 10,000 to 100,000 addresses, is made up of the populations of Stavropol kray, North Osetia, Astrakhan oblast, Daghestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachai-Cherkessia. That figure, about six percent of the Southern FD total, is also dramatically less than proportionate.
And the third group, which includes Adygeia, Kalmykia, Ingushetia and Chechnya, Mendkovich says, is the least well served by the Internet. None of these non-Russian republics have more than 10,000 IP addresses, and most of them have fewer than that.
Moreover -- and this is the more significant point here -- those living in the predominantly ethnic Russian regions are continuing to experience dramatic growth in the number of users because their areas have the communications infrastructure and political interest to promote it.
In Rostov oblast, for example, there are now 56 Internet teleconferencing centers, one at the center and one in each of the 55 municipalities, something that not only allows the authorities to speak with one another but also helps condition them to using the Internet more generally.
But the situation in most of the non-Russian areas is very different. Far fewer people have gone online, and both geography and violence have meant that neither the governments nor private investors are willing to put in the kind of resources needed to jump start interest in the World Wide Web.
As a result, Mendkovich concludes, there is not yet the critical mass in most of them needed for the Internet to take off, and as a result, their populations remain mired in a pre-Internet communications world, one that over the last decade has become less and less useful as a source of balanced and accurate information.
That the other channels of the Russian media are now likely to be less useful to those who consume them was underlined this week by the extraordinarily low ranking Reporters without Borders (RWB) gave to Russia in its annual report on media freedom around the world (http://www.ann.ru, October 17).
According to RWB, Russia now ranks 144th out of the 169 countries the media watchdog group evaluated, just below Yemen (143) and just above Tunisia (145), Rwanda (147) and Saudi Arabia (148), and below most of the other post-Soviet states, including, for example, Estonia (3), Ukraine (92), Tajikistan (115) and Azerbaijan (139).
Reacting to these figures, Anatoliy Baranov, a Moscow commentator who specializes on Russian media policies, suggested that the Russian Federation not only fully deserved this low ranking but also is likely to find itself even lower down next year (http://forum.msk.ru/print.html?id=394042).
He argues that Russian television has never been fully independent, that newspapers and journals are ever less so, and that the Internet, the new media in which so many have placed so much hope, is now at risk of being silenced or absorbed by the authorities as well. His remarks on the last point are especially worthy of note.
“Internet media do represent the real zone of relative freedom in Russia, but even there,” he points out, the authorities are working to take them “under control.” But most of the “free” sites attract only a few hundred visitors a day, too small a number to “set the weather” for the Internet or affect that of the Russian media as a whole.
Indeed, he continues, “one can count on one’s fingers” the sites that are both entirely independent of the regime and attract large number of visitors. Some operators hope to survive by registering with IP providers abroad, but that may not be enough. And “six months from now,” these islands of “relative” freedom may disappear as well.
Vienna, October 17 – Growth in the number of Russians going online has slowed overall this year and may even have been reversed in some places, developments that casts doubt on the hopes of some that the relatively free Internet could serve to counterbalance the Kremlin’s increasingly tight control over other media outlets.
Yefim Galitskiy, a specialist at the Public Opinion Foundation in Moscow, said yesterday that his organization’s regular surveys since 2002 about Russian Internet use had documented rapid rises until this summer, when the rate of growth slowed or even stopped altogether (http://www.dp.ru/msk/news/adveritsing/2007/10/15/241725/print/).
And he predicted on the basis of his company’s latest findings that the total number of Russians using the Internet would top out at about one-third of the population, up from approximately a quarter now, far fewer than other experts have suggested, albeit on the basis of more limited data sets.
Ruslan Tagiyev, who studies the Internet for TNS Gallup Media, said that he believes that ever more Russians will turn to the Internet until perhaps 75 percent of them go on line – although he acknowledged that this projection was based only on findings from the city of Moscow and not the provinces, places he has yet studied.
That Internet connectivity is less in Russia’s regions than it is in the capital is common ground, of course, but a new study of how the Internet is used in the various regions and republics of the Southern Federal District (FD) shows just how much further behind the center all of them are – and why they may not catch up.
That FD as a whole ranks second from the bottom of all federal districts in terms of Internet use. (Only the Far Eastern FD is lower.) Although it contains 15 percent of the country’s population, the Southern FD has only three percent of the Internet domains and 4.9 percent of the IP addresses.
But even within it, there are significant variations among the constituent federal subjects in the Southern FD, journalist Nikita Mendkovich reports in an article posted earlier this week on the Regions of Russia website, differences that he argues justify classifying them in three groups (http://www.regrus.info/anounces/3/110.html).
Those living in the first of these groups, which includes Rostov oblast, Volgograd oblast and Krasnodar kray, currently have more than 80 percent of the registered domain names in the Southern FD and also lead the region with 614,000 IP addresses, despite the fact that they form a far smaller fraction of the Southern FD’s total population.
The second group, whose constituent parts each have from 10,000 to 100,000 addresses, is made up of the populations of Stavropol kray, North Osetia, Astrakhan oblast, Daghestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachai-Cherkessia. That figure, about six percent of the Southern FD total, is also dramatically less than proportionate.
And the third group, which includes Adygeia, Kalmykia, Ingushetia and Chechnya, Mendkovich says, is the least well served by the Internet. None of these non-Russian republics have more than 10,000 IP addresses, and most of them have fewer than that.
Moreover -- and this is the more significant point here -- those living in the predominantly ethnic Russian regions are continuing to experience dramatic growth in the number of users because their areas have the communications infrastructure and political interest to promote it.
In Rostov oblast, for example, there are now 56 Internet teleconferencing centers, one at the center and one in each of the 55 municipalities, something that not only allows the authorities to speak with one another but also helps condition them to using the Internet more generally.
But the situation in most of the non-Russian areas is very different. Far fewer people have gone online, and both geography and violence have meant that neither the governments nor private investors are willing to put in the kind of resources needed to jump start interest in the World Wide Web.
As a result, Mendkovich concludes, there is not yet the critical mass in most of them needed for the Internet to take off, and as a result, their populations remain mired in a pre-Internet communications world, one that over the last decade has become less and less useful as a source of balanced and accurate information.
That the other channels of the Russian media are now likely to be less useful to those who consume them was underlined this week by the extraordinarily low ranking Reporters without Borders (RWB) gave to Russia in its annual report on media freedom around the world (http://www.ann.ru, October 17).
According to RWB, Russia now ranks 144th out of the 169 countries the media watchdog group evaluated, just below Yemen (143) and just above Tunisia (145), Rwanda (147) and Saudi Arabia (148), and below most of the other post-Soviet states, including, for example, Estonia (3), Ukraine (92), Tajikistan (115) and Azerbaijan (139).
Reacting to these figures, Anatoliy Baranov, a Moscow commentator who specializes on Russian media policies, suggested that the Russian Federation not only fully deserved this low ranking but also is likely to find itself even lower down next year (http://forum.msk.ru/print.html?id=394042).
He argues that Russian television has never been fully independent, that newspapers and journals are ever less so, and that the Internet, the new media in which so many have placed so much hope, is now at risk of being silenced or absorbed by the authorities as well. His remarks on the last point are especially worthy of note.
“Internet media do represent the real zone of relative freedom in Russia, but even there,” he points out, the authorities are working to take them “under control.” But most of the “free” sites attract only a few hundred visitors a day, too small a number to “set the weather” for the Internet or affect that of the Russian media as a whole.
Indeed, he continues, “one can count on one’s fingers” the sites that are both entirely independent of the regime and attract large number of visitors. Some operators hope to survive by registering with IP providers abroad, but that may not be enough. And “six months from now,” these islands of “relative” freedom may disappear as well.
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