Paul Goble
Vienna, May 6 – In its drive to build a tight power vertical in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate has crossed another and dangerous line, employing for the first time the language it has traditionally used for religious sectarians to describe a Russian Orthodox prelate whose only “crime” is his refusal to subordinate himself and his flock to Moscow.
A press release from the Odessa bishopric of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, described the Orthodox community of the Synod led by Metropolitan Agafangel, who has broken with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia now that the latter has established ties with Moscow in truly ugly ways.
The release said that “the assembly in Odessa [under Agafangel] has the very same relationship to the Orthodox Church Abroad as darkness has to light and as the devil has to Christ.” Indeed, it added, his services recall “Woland’s satanic ball in Bulgakov’s ‘Master and Margarita’” (http://www.pravoslav.odessa.net/?id=462&pages=58&group=0&num_page=0).
In its report on this May 2nd development, the Religiopolis.org portal notes that this comment is more typical of the ways that the Moscow Patriarchate describes “cult” groups than the way it has typically described Russian Orthodox groups that have so far refused to accept its supremacy (www.religiopolis.org/news/459-tserkovnaja-deklaratsija-antikultizma.html).
Until now, the Religiopolis.org report says, “toward the activity of such groups, the Moscow Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church” which is subordinate to it “had not launched an anti-religious campaign in relation to other religious communities and even more to Orthodox organizations of other jurisdictions.”
Metropolitan Agafangel’s Russian Orthodox Church Abroad “includes the community of Orthodox believers and priests who refused in October 2006 to accept the Act on Canonical Communion with the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate as signed later by Metropolitan Lavrov.”
Agafangel said at the time that “we have not separated from the Synod led by Metropolitan Lavrov” but that he and many other Orthodox believers abroad could not accept communion with the Moscow Patriarchate. That was too much for Lavrov whose supporters accused Agafangel of links to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Metropolitan Agafangel and his supporters subsequently formed a Provisional Higher Church Administration of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which currently is supported by approximately a third of the priests and bishops of the so-called “émigré” church and which seeks to convene a fifth “all-abroad assembly” to define the future.
Agafangel has expressed concerns in messages to his flock that he may be subject to physical attack from the Moscow Patriarchate because of his leadership role in this movement. The vicious commentary from the Odessa bishopric this week suggests that his fears may be all too justified.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Window on Eurasia: Pushkin Wanted People to Study the Koran, Chechen School Children Told
Paul Goble
Vienna, May 6 – Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has done many things that one might reasonably expect would offend people of good will in Russia, but now he and his administration have taken a step certain to offend many of them: suggesting that Chechen pupils that Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin wanted everyone to study the Koran.
In an article in yesterday’s “Gazeta,” Olesya Gerasimenko notes that Chechnya is one of the 19 regions of the Russian Federation in which the foundations of religious culture and civic ethics has been introduced, with 99.64 percent of all pupils there selecting Islam as their course of study (www.gazeta.ru/social/2010/05/05/3362767.shtml).
Only 73 of the 20,000 students in the fourth class, the Moscow journalist says, have chosen to study Orthodoxy. And that tilt, she continues, is reinforced by two other developments, one that has attracted some attention and another that few Russians appear to know about.
On the one hand, Chechen leader Kadyrov has said that “in each village there must be a mosque, a hospital and a school,” hardly the commitment of a secular leader or one interested in supporting all “traditional” faiths. And on the other, pupils in the fifth through the 11th classes already study “Waynakh ethnics,” the single subject taught exclusively in Chechen.
In these classes, Gerasimenko notes, students are taught “how to interact with their parents, meet their obligations and celebration national holidays, in short about the Muslim way of life but not about the religion as such.” And the Chechen authorities have decided that “even children from Russian families must study Islamic culture” in the religious courses.
The “Gazeta” journalist visited several of these classes. In one, the teacher asked “how was Aleksandr Sergeyegich Pushkin connected with Islam?” One student responded, “He was sent to the Caucasus and then he found he liked Muslims very much, especially the idea that when you believe in God, then everything will go well.”
Another said that “Pushkin himself wanted to accept the Islamic faith, but he wasn’t able to do so!” And the teacher summed up the discussion: “However things were in fact, we hardly know will be able to find out. This means that Pushkin, like all the prophets, is calling on us to study the Koran,” hardly a message many Orthodox Russians would find comforting.
Gerasimenko notes that “in the 30 lessons of the textbook about Islamic culture, there is nothing about Shiites and Sunnis and not a word about Wahhabism.” In general, she says, teachers are to avoid the subject of Wahhabism, although if asked about it, the teachers can say that a Wahhabi is not a Muslim.
Whatever impact these messages have on Muslim children, the way they affect non-Muslims is at a minimum problematic. One Armenian Christian noted that her baptized son was nonetheless being told about Islam and that in his classes, he had been careful not to talk about his own faith.
A local Russian Orthodox priest expressed his concerns about Christian children in Muslim classes. He said many Orthodox believers in Chechnya are asked “why they do not accept Islam and so on.” That represents, he suggests, the actions of what can only be called “a concealed Islamization.”
“You must understand,” he told the Moscow journalist, “that it is one thing to say ‘I’m Orthodox in Ryazan, and [quite] another to say the same thing in Grozny.” That is clearly a reality, but it may not be one that many elsewhere will be happy with and may even lead to a decline in the number of people who support the very idea of religious courses in schools.
Vienna, May 6 – Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has done many things that one might reasonably expect would offend people of good will in Russia, but now he and his administration have taken a step certain to offend many of them: suggesting that Chechen pupils that Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin wanted everyone to study the Koran.
In an article in yesterday’s “Gazeta,” Olesya Gerasimenko notes that Chechnya is one of the 19 regions of the Russian Federation in which the foundations of religious culture and civic ethics has been introduced, with 99.64 percent of all pupils there selecting Islam as their course of study (www.gazeta.ru/social/2010/05/05/3362767.shtml).
Only 73 of the 20,000 students in the fourth class, the Moscow journalist says, have chosen to study Orthodoxy. And that tilt, she continues, is reinforced by two other developments, one that has attracted some attention and another that few Russians appear to know about.
On the one hand, Chechen leader Kadyrov has said that “in each village there must be a mosque, a hospital and a school,” hardly the commitment of a secular leader or one interested in supporting all “traditional” faiths. And on the other, pupils in the fifth through the 11th classes already study “Waynakh ethnics,” the single subject taught exclusively in Chechen.
In these classes, Gerasimenko notes, students are taught “how to interact with their parents, meet their obligations and celebration national holidays, in short about the Muslim way of life but not about the religion as such.” And the Chechen authorities have decided that “even children from Russian families must study Islamic culture” in the religious courses.
The “Gazeta” journalist visited several of these classes. In one, the teacher asked “how was Aleksandr Sergeyegich Pushkin connected with Islam?” One student responded, “He was sent to the Caucasus and then he found he liked Muslims very much, especially the idea that when you believe in God, then everything will go well.”
Another said that “Pushkin himself wanted to accept the Islamic faith, but he wasn’t able to do so!” And the teacher summed up the discussion: “However things were in fact, we hardly know will be able to find out. This means that Pushkin, like all the prophets, is calling on us to study the Koran,” hardly a message many Orthodox Russians would find comforting.
Gerasimenko notes that “in the 30 lessons of the textbook about Islamic culture, there is nothing about Shiites and Sunnis and not a word about Wahhabism.” In general, she says, teachers are to avoid the subject of Wahhabism, although if asked about it, the teachers can say that a Wahhabi is not a Muslim.
Whatever impact these messages have on Muslim children, the way they affect non-Muslims is at a minimum problematic. One Armenian Christian noted that her baptized son was nonetheless being told about Islam and that in his classes, he had been careful not to talk about his own faith.
A local Russian Orthodox priest expressed his concerns about Christian children in Muslim classes. He said many Orthodox believers in Chechnya are asked “why they do not accept Islam and so on.” That represents, he suggests, the actions of what can only be called “a concealed Islamization.”
“You must understand,” he told the Moscow journalist, “that it is one thing to say ‘I’m Orthodox in Ryazan, and [quite] another to say the same thing in Grozny.” That is clearly a reality, but it may not be one that many elsewhere will be happy with and may even lead to a decline in the number of people who support the very idea of religious courses in schools.
Window on Eurasia: Closing Soviet-Era Archives, Yanukovich Aide Insists ‘Ukrainians Know All They Need to Know about Their Past’
Paul Goble
Vienna, May 6 – The decision of new Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich to declare that the terror famine was a mass murder in which Ukrainian peasants suffered alongside Russian and Belarusian ones rather than a Moscow-orchestrated genocide directed against the Ukrainian nation has attracted a great deal of attention in Ukraine, Russia and the West.
But a far more serious development is the decision of one of the Ukrainian leader’s aides to re-close Soviet-era archives because in his words, “that truth which it was necessary to bring to the Ukrainian people has already been brought to its attention,” a policy and a statement with much more far-reaching consequences (www.polit.ru/institutes/2010/05/06/memory.html).
In a comment posted online today, Roman Kabachiy, the editor of the history section of Kyiv’s “Ukrains’kiy tizhden’,” says that this action by Valery Khoroshkovsky, the new head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), means that “the memory [of the Ukrainian people has been again] stolen.”
According to Kabachiy, “Soviet archives again are returning to their customary status – closed to outsiders. One can understand the new head of the SBU: the popularization of history cannot be the basic direction of the work of that organization. But if earlier there existed a small chance of state enlightenment in the historical sphere, now it will be blocked.”
“More than that,” the historian says, “the de-sovietization [of the history of Ukraine] will be changed in the direction of the so-called ‘fatherland’ one, that is, the Soviet vision of history,” yet another example of the way in which Ukraine like many other post-Soviet states shifts direction after each change in power rather than continuing to develop as a national school.
The internal contradictions of that approach, Kabachiy continues, can be seen in the names of streets and squares in Kyiv itself. Thus, a half-kilometer from the monument to Mikhail Hrushevsky is a monument to Vladimir Lenin who wanted to destroy the state Hrushevsky sought to build.
Moreover, a street named for Simon Petlyura, the ataman of that state, “ends at a monument to Nikolay Shchors,” the Soviet commander of that time who fought against him. And while a large central square in the Ukrainian capital is named for Russian writer Lev Tolstoy, the small one named for Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko is on the northern edge of the city.
Thus it can be seen, he says, that “the Ukrainian powers that be have sought to support a compromise not wishing to appear especially radical as has been the case in Latvia and Estonia.” But “the paradox is that even such small steps in the direction of the de-Sovietization of the history [of Ukraine] has infuriated Moscow and its fifth column in Ukraine.”
As a result, Kabachiy says, “now, when Viktor Yanukovich and his command achieve power, those small achievements which Ukraine’s humanitarian policy had achieved will be liquidated in rapid fashion.” Indeed, the historian says, the current and future disasters themselves reflect the mistakes of Viktor Yushchenko and Yuliya Timoshenko.”
That can be seen in the history of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, a body that took its name from the Polish analogue but that was fundamentally different. The Polish institution took possession of and processed thousands of feet of archival materials; the Ukrainian one remained dependent on the SBU and did not secure a law to protect itself.
Consequently, immediately after Yanukovich’s election, the new vice prime minister for humanitarian questions, Vladimir Seminozhenko called for defining new rules for “the future function” of this institution and its subordination to the State Archives Committee, which was headed by a representative of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
Volodymyr Vyatrovich, who headed the archive of the institute under Yushchenko, says that he and his colleagues backed the idea of the creation by the Council of Ministers of an Archive of National Memory. But that did not happen because then-Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko decided not to offend the communists in the parliament.
Another historian, Roman Krutsik, points out that politics has dominated archival policy in Ukraine. The former head of the Ukrainian Memorial and founder of the Ukrainian Museum of the Soviet Occupation, Krutsik warns that it is possible that his museum won’t survive under Yanukovich. Reportedly, he says, “Putin [earlier] called Yushchenko and asked to close [it].”
Closing the archives and closing such institutions will do far more damage to Ukraine and its future than even Yanukovich’s declarations about the events of 1932-33. After all, the new Ukrainian leader does concede that a Moscow-sponsored mass murder took place then, even if that horror does not meet the definition of genocide.
But if Ukrainians cannot research their history in directions the current powers that be in Moscow do not like, then the future of that country is truly bleak -- all the more so if Western scholars and governments do not denounce this transparent effort to push the tragic twentieth century history of Ukraine down an Orwellian memory hole.
Vienna, May 6 – The decision of new Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich to declare that the terror famine was a mass murder in which Ukrainian peasants suffered alongside Russian and Belarusian ones rather than a Moscow-orchestrated genocide directed against the Ukrainian nation has attracted a great deal of attention in Ukraine, Russia and the West.
But a far more serious development is the decision of one of the Ukrainian leader’s aides to re-close Soviet-era archives because in his words, “that truth which it was necessary to bring to the Ukrainian people has already been brought to its attention,” a policy and a statement with much more far-reaching consequences (www.polit.ru/institutes/2010/05/06/memory.html).
In a comment posted online today, Roman Kabachiy, the editor of the history section of Kyiv’s “Ukrains’kiy tizhden’,” says that this action by Valery Khoroshkovsky, the new head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), means that “the memory [of the Ukrainian people has been again] stolen.”
According to Kabachiy, “Soviet archives again are returning to their customary status – closed to outsiders. One can understand the new head of the SBU: the popularization of history cannot be the basic direction of the work of that organization. But if earlier there existed a small chance of state enlightenment in the historical sphere, now it will be blocked.”
“More than that,” the historian says, “the de-sovietization [of the history of Ukraine] will be changed in the direction of the so-called ‘fatherland’ one, that is, the Soviet vision of history,” yet another example of the way in which Ukraine like many other post-Soviet states shifts direction after each change in power rather than continuing to develop as a national school.
The internal contradictions of that approach, Kabachiy continues, can be seen in the names of streets and squares in Kyiv itself. Thus, a half-kilometer from the monument to Mikhail Hrushevsky is a monument to Vladimir Lenin who wanted to destroy the state Hrushevsky sought to build.
Moreover, a street named for Simon Petlyura, the ataman of that state, “ends at a monument to Nikolay Shchors,” the Soviet commander of that time who fought against him. And while a large central square in the Ukrainian capital is named for Russian writer Lev Tolstoy, the small one named for Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko is on the northern edge of the city.
Thus it can be seen, he says, that “the Ukrainian powers that be have sought to support a compromise not wishing to appear especially radical as has been the case in Latvia and Estonia.” But “the paradox is that even such small steps in the direction of the de-Sovietization of the history [of Ukraine] has infuriated Moscow and its fifth column in Ukraine.”
As a result, Kabachiy says, “now, when Viktor Yanukovich and his command achieve power, those small achievements which Ukraine’s humanitarian policy had achieved will be liquidated in rapid fashion.” Indeed, the historian says, the current and future disasters themselves reflect the mistakes of Viktor Yushchenko and Yuliya Timoshenko.”
That can be seen in the history of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, a body that took its name from the Polish analogue but that was fundamentally different. The Polish institution took possession of and processed thousands of feet of archival materials; the Ukrainian one remained dependent on the SBU and did not secure a law to protect itself.
Consequently, immediately after Yanukovich’s election, the new vice prime minister for humanitarian questions, Vladimir Seminozhenko called for defining new rules for “the future function” of this institution and its subordination to the State Archives Committee, which was headed by a representative of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
Volodymyr Vyatrovich, who headed the archive of the institute under Yushchenko, says that he and his colleagues backed the idea of the creation by the Council of Ministers of an Archive of National Memory. But that did not happen because then-Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko decided not to offend the communists in the parliament.
Another historian, Roman Krutsik, points out that politics has dominated archival policy in Ukraine. The former head of the Ukrainian Memorial and founder of the Ukrainian Museum of the Soviet Occupation, Krutsik warns that it is possible that his museum won’t survive under Yanukovich. Reportedly, he says, “Putin [earlier] called Yushchenko and asked to close [it].”
Closing the archives and closing such institutions will do far more damage to Ukraine and its future than even Yanukovich’s declarations about the events of 1932-33. After all, the new Ukrainian leader does concede that a Moscow-sponsored mass murder took place then, even if that horror does not meet the definition of genocide.
But if Ukrainians cannot research their history in directions the current powers that be in Moscow do not like, then the future of that country is truly bleak -- all the more so if Western scholars and governments do not denounce this transparent effort to push the tragic twentieth century history of Ukraine down an Orwellian memory hole.
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