Paul Goble
Vienna, December 12 – Because of their church’s caesaropapist traditions, the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church routinely pray for the health and well being of President Vladimir Putin. But now a new sect has emerged that takes this devotion to a whole new level: it urges its followers to pray to him as the reincarnation of St. Paul.
The sect, which is based in the village of Bol’shaya Yel’nya in Nizhniy Novgorod oblast and led by a self-styled Mother Superior who earlier served time for fraud, maintains that in one of his past lives – and the sect’s leaders are sure he has had more than one – Putin was St. Paul.
According to a very skeptical Moskovskiy komsomolets reporter who visited the town and interviewed both the sect’s members and other more doubtful members of the community, the Putin sect does not have a positive view of either Putin’s predecessor as Russian president or the current Russian Orthodox patriarch.
Its leaders hold that “Yeltsin was a destroyer and the Lord God replaced him with a creator” and that Aleksii II in a past live was Pontius Pilate. The self-styled Mother Fotinya argues that this time Aleksii-Pontius Pilate must “make the correct choice and save Putin!” (http://www.mk.ru/blogs/MK/2007/12/11/society/328171/).
According to the “Moskovskiy komsomolets” journalist, the Putin sect not only features a wonder-working icon of Putin – a picture of the icon and the sect’s leader is available on line – but also issues its own newspaper, “The Shrine of Light,” a publication that features reportage not found elsewhere.
In its pages, the Moscow journalist says, are to be found “exclusive interviews” with the Apostle Paul, the Blessed Serafim of Sarov and even the Virgin Mary. And it also includes both spiritual appeals by the sect to Putin and Aleksii II and, what is especially striking “the [supposed] answers of these highly placed persons.”
The appearance of such leader cults has been a longtime feature of Russian peasant society, and it is one that Moscow media outlets love to report on with a certain amount of glee. (See, for example, not only the “Moskovskiy komsomolets” account but also the article about the Putin sect at http://www.nr2.ru/society/154550.html).
Most Russians, especially the more educated, dismiss the rise and fall of such cults as charlatanry or worse, but their existence in 21st century Russia says a great deal about the nature of popular views about the intimate interrelationship between civil authority and divine power.
And thus it represents, albeit in an extreme form, one of the frequently commented upon aspects of Russian political life: the willingness or even the desperate desire to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the supreme leader not only for the advancement of one’s interests but also for the affirmation of one’s own identity.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Armenia's Kurds Get in the Way of Any Karabakh Resolution
Paul Goble
Vienna, December 12 -- Twenty years ago, an Armenian samizdat author suggested that restoring Kurdish autonomous districts in the southern Caucasus could help resolve the Karabakh dispute, but now Armenia's 60,000-strong Kurdish community has taken a step likely to make finding a solution to that conflict even more difficult.
Last week, the leaders of that community endorsed Serzh Sarkisyan for president of Armenia in the hopes that the latter would work to re-establish the Kurdish autonomous district in the Lachin corridor of Azerbaijan, where in 1992, the Kurds played a key roe in breaking through Baku's military encirclement of Karabakh.
Sarkizyan, for his part, did nothing to encourage or discourage the Kurds in this regard, saying only that he was "proud that national minorities living in Armenia support [his] candidacy." But if he said nothing about the restoration of a Kurdish district, other Armenians and Kurds were outspoken about that possibility.
According to a Russian analyst, Kurds in Iraq support the restoration of a Kurdish district in the Lachin corridor, viewing it as analogous to and a precedent for a Kurdish region in Iraq. And Armenians across the Middle East have spoken in support of Kurds in both places (http://www.rpmonitor.ru/ru/detail_m.php?ID=7242).
Among the Armenian activists doing so, Aleksei Baliyev says, are members of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), the successor to the Dashnaksutyun, which conducted terrorist attacks against Turkish officials, and whose anti-Turkish actions Ankara has routinely blamed Yerevan for fomenting.
Kurdish officials, including Farkhad Mardin, the representative of the Kurdistan Societies in Russia and the CIS, dismiss Turkish complaints on this score as an effort to derail efforts in the U.S. Congress to declare the massive deaths of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 a genocide.
Mardin suggested that the Turks believe that any such declaration by Washington would lead to a reopening the question of the future status of Western Armenia, a region within Turkey that both Armenians and Kurds are interested in raising the question of national self-determination.
But by taking such a stance while assuming a higher profile in Armenian politics, the Kurds have simultaneously reinforced this view and made it more difficult for Turkey and its ally Azerbaijan to take the kind of steps that might be necessary to defuse rising tensions over the status of Karabakh and move toward an agreement.
Moreover, by implicitly linking the restoration of Kurdish districts in the Lachin corridor to the possible establishment of broader Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, the Kurds of Armenia m made iay also have made it more difficult for the United States to help structure an accord between Yerevan and Baku over Karabakh.
And a suggestion by Yuri Nabiyev, the advisor to the representative of the government of Iraqi Kurdistan to the CIS, to Baliyev only exacerbates this problem. He said that there were possibilities for an enormous expansion in economic and humanitarian cooperation between Armenia and Iraqi Kurdistan.
At a moment when some officials are expressing hope about a breakthrough via the Minsk Group and others, including the International Crisis Group, are suggesting that there is a threat of renewed fighting, the Kurdish initiative in Armenia provides those opposed to any settlement with yet another means to block it.
Vienna, December 12 -- Twenty years ago, an Armenian samizdat author suggested that restoring Kurdish autonomous districts in the southern Caucasus could help resolve the Karabakh dispute, but now Armenia's 60,000-strong Kurdish community has taken a step likely to make finding a solution to that conflict even more difficult.
Last week, the leaders of that community endorsed Serzh Sarkisyan for president of Armenia in the hopes that the latter would work to re-establish the Kurdish autonomous district in the Lachin corridor of Azerbaijan, where in 1992, the Kurds played a key roe in breaking through Baku's military encirclement of Karabakh.
Sarkizyan, for his part, did nothing to encourage or discourage the Kurds in this regard, saying only that he was "proud that national minorities living in Armenia support [his] candidacy." But if he said nothing about the restoration of a Kurdish district, other Armenians and Kurds were outspoken about that possibility.
According to a Russian analyst, Kurds in Iraq support the restoration of a Kurdish district in the Lachin corridor, viewing it as analogous to and a precedent for a Kurdish region in Iraq. And Armenians across the Middle East have spoken in support of Kurds in both places (http://www.rpmonitor.ru/ru/detail_m.php?ID=7242).
Among the Armenian activists doing so, Aleksei Baliyev says, are members of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), the successor to the Dashnaksutyun, which conducted terrorist attacks against Turkish officials, and whose anti-Turkish actions Ankara has routinely blamed Yerevan for fomenting.
Kurdish officials, including Farkhad Mardin, the representative of the Kurdistan Societies in Russia and the CIS, dismiss Turkish complaints on this score as an effort to derail efforts in the U.S. Congress to declare the massive deaths of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 a genocide.
Mardin suggested that the Turks believe that any such declaration by Washington would lead to a reopening the question of the future status of Western Armenia, a region within Turkey that both Armenians and Kurds are interested in raising the question of national self-determination.
But by taking such a stance while assuming a higher profile in Armenian politics, the Kurds have simultaneously reinforced this view and made it more difficult for Turkey and its ally Azerbaijan to take the kind of steps that might be necessary to defuse rising tensions over the status of Karabakh and move toward an agreement.
Moreover, by implicitly linking the restoration of Kurdish districts in the Lachin corridor to the possible establishment of broader Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, the Kurds of Armenia m made iay also have made it more difficult for the United States to help structure an accord between Yerevan and Baku over Karabakh.
And a suggestion by Yuri Nabiyev, the advisor to the representative of the government of Iraqi Kurdistan to the CIS, to Baliyev only exacerbates this problem. He said that there were possibilities for an enormous expansion in economic and humanitarian cooperation between Armenia and Iraqi Kurdistan.
At a moment when some officials are expressing hope about a breakthrough via the Minsk Group and others, including the International Crisis Group, are suggesting that there is a threat of renewed fighting, the Kurdish initiative in Armenia provides those opposed to any settlement with yet another means to block it.
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