Paul Goble
Staunton, February 4 – The religious mix of the Russian military has not changed over the last decade, according to a new poll, but the same study found that while more soldiers than ever before are prepared to declare a religious affiliation, they overwhelmingly know little or nothing about the faith they supposedly have.
Given that the ethnic mix of the military has changed, such findings by sociologists from Moscow State University suggests that some of the declarations may be politically motivated rather than a reflection of personal reality, a pattern that resembles, albeit with a minus sign, the kind of statements soldiers made about religion in Soviet times.
Nonetheless, the study, some results of which were discussed 10 days ago at a Moscow roundtable on “The Spiritual-Moral Values of Contemporary Russian Society” provide a detailed picture into what Russian soldiers believe – or at least feel they should declare (ruskline.ru/analitika/2011/02/04/religioznost_voennosluzhawih_vooruzhennyh_sil_rossii_duhovnye_cennosti_i_normy_povedeniya/).
Yevgeny Dubogray, one of the sociologists involved in the survey, said that it was taken on the occasion of the third year of the process of introducing chaplains into the Russian armed services and that it involved interviews with 599 people serving in “various categories” of the military.
According to the sociologist, the team of which he was a part reached six basic conclusions. First, he said, “three quarters of those in uniform consider themselves religious believers to a greater or lesser extent,” with 85 percent identifying with Orthodox Christianity and nine percent with Islam.
Second, “the trend of the last few years has shown a growth in the number of religious military personal and a reduction in the share of non-believers.” But the distribution among faiths “continues to remain unchanged.” Third, alongside the growth in religiosity has been an increase in the amount of superstition.
Fourth, “the religious consciousness of the believing soldiers is characterized by a low level of knowledge about the content and structure of the holy books of their religion but altruistic attitudes predominate among the motives for religiosity.”
Fifth, those who declare themselves religious believers nonetheless do not participate in most cases in religious life on a regular basis. And sixth, at present, “the overwhelming majority of believing soldiers do not encounter cases when their religious feelings are offended during their army service,” although “10 percent declared that they were aware of such cases.”
Beyond these broad conclusions are many interesting details. While 57 percent of the sample said that they were “more believers than not,” only 18 percent declared that they “firmly believe in God and attempt to observe all the requirements of their faith,” only slightly more than the total of those who declared they were atheists or “more non-believers than believers.”
In his report as posted on “Russkaya narodnaya liniya,” Dubogray provides a graph showing the change in religious self-identification among uniformed personnel in Russia over the last 20 years. In 1992, 40 percent said they were non-believers, while 25 percent said they were believers. In 2000, those figures were 30 and 26; and in 2010, 75 and 13.
Intriguingly, the sociologists found that Russian soldiers are increasingly superstitious or at least prepared to admit they are. In 2009, only 10 percent said they were superstitious, but last year when this survey was conducted, 17 percent of all soldiers declared that they were superstitious.
Such attitudes carried over into the soldier’s religious practice, the sociologists found. Many soldiers wore crosses or amulets of one kind or another, but most did not pray regularly or at all and many had little knowledge of either the basic doctrines of their faiths or its practices and demands.
One general conclusion which this pattern of the data suggests – but it is not one Dubrogay chooses to draw at least in this report – is that ever more Russian soldiers are prepared to report that they are believers but that such declarations appear to be more a reflection of social conformism than actual belief.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Window on Eurasia: Will Priests and Mullahs Compete for Office in Russian Elections?
Paul Goble
Staunton, February 4 – Suggestions by Russian Orthodox hierarchs that priests might under certain circumstances run for office have sparked a counter-suggestion by one Muslim leader there that mullahs and muftis should do the same, setting the stage for a new confrontation between the two faiths that both officials and some religious leaders may want to avoid.
That election campaigns can be the occasion for heightened ethnic tensions in the Russian Federation is an old observation, and the danger that this could be so in the upcoming votes there have already sparked efforts to secure pledges from potential candidates that they won’t “ethnicize” politics. (See, for example, www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/180569/.)
But if the Russian authorities may succeed to some degree in reducing the amount of attention to the nationality question in these elections – and past experience suggests they may not be able to achieve as much as they hope -- they may face an even more difficult challenge if religious leaders get directly involved.
On Wednesday, the Moscow Patriarchate posted on its official site the following document. Patriarch Kirill, it said, believes that “at the current historical moment, hierarchs and priests cannot put forward their candidacies for elections in any organs of representative power of any countries and any levels.”
But, the document continued, “exceptions to this rule can be made only on the basis of extreme church necessity” by the Holy Synod or the Synod of a self-administering church” on an individual basis, a negative statement that nonetheless in the minds of many opens the way for priests to run for office.
In a report on this declaration yesterday, the “Osobaya bukhva” site stressed this possibility, entitling its article “In Power with God” and beginning it with the declaration thast “representatives of the clergy will be able to advance their candidates in elections to organs of representative power” (www.specletter.com/elections/2011-02-03/s-bogom-vo-vlast.html).
Nikolay Mitrokhin, a specialist on Orthodoxy at Bremen University, said that in his view, the church probably will not want to take that step: The church, he said, “as a religious organization in European countries has lost popularity and prefers not to connect itself with politics in order not to be drawn into this or that political scandal.”
And he pointed to another reason the Russian Orthodox Church might refrain from doing so: If it takes this step, “one can predict” that “representatives of other confessions – Islam and Judaism – will do the same,” something that could create serious problems under current conditions in the Russian Federation.
As the “Osobaya bukhva” article pointed out, however, there is a tradition of having religious officials serve in parliament in Russia. “In the last stages of the existence of the Soviet state, there were priests in the USSR Supreme Soviet,” although they were more a decoration than a real political forced.
But the most important reason for restraint, the portal continued, is that many Russians, especially in the blogosphere, are “already angry about the excessively close ties of higher government bureaucrats and church hierarchs,” ties that make it unclear whether the church would be using the powers or the powers the church.
Father Andrey Kurayev, the outspoken Orthodox deacon, tried to play down the possibility that the Patriarchate would permit any priests to run in Russian elections. He noted that the Russian Orthodox Church has representatives in many countries and that this decision has more to do with their situation than with that in Russia.
“In Russia today, there is no need to have priests in the parliament,” he said. But he said that if one “imagined a situation 20 years from now where a party appeared in our country declaring that if it came to power, it would impose on Russia all the package of defense of homosexual rights which have been adopted in the West.”
In that case, Kurayev said, there might be good reason for Orthodox priests and hierarchs to run for office.
Roman Silantyev, a specialist on Islam with close ties to the Moscow Patriarchate, agreed. “The Church today is successfully cooperating with the state in many sectors.” Consequently, there is “no basis” for priests to run for office. Indeed, he said, in Church language, “the term ‘exceptional case’ in fact means ‘never.’”
But the genie is already out of the bottle. Abdulla Ishmukhametov, the head of the Muslim community of the Far Eastern Federal District who is subordinate to the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of the Asiatic Part of Russia, told the media that mullahs may decide to run for office in Russia soon (www.islam.ru/rus/2011-02-03/#35538).
The declaration of the Russian Orthodox Church thus serves as a model for why Muslims might take that step, he continued. “We attempt to advance our ideas, but the representative powers that be rarely listen to us.” Running mullahs for office is one way the Islamic leaders could attract attention.
And he added that “it is completely possible” that Muslim religious leaders “will run in elections for the Legislative Assembly of Primorsky kray already in this year.” If that in fact happens, the Russian Orthodox Church would likely respond in kind, setting the stage for religious competition in yet another sphere of Russian life.
Staunton, February 4 – Suggestions by Russian Orthodox hierarchs that priests might under certain circumstances run for office have sparked a counter-suggestion by one Muslim leader there that mullahs and muftis should do the same, setting the stage for a new confrontation between the two faiths that both officials and some religious leaders may want to avoid.
That election campaigns can be the occasion for heightened ethnic tensions in the Russian Federation is an old observation, and the danger that this could be so in the upcoming votes there have already sparked efforts to secure pledges from potential candidates that they won’t “ethnicize” politics. (See, for example, www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/180569/.)
But if the Russian authorities may succeed to some degree in reducing the amount of attention to the nationality question in these elections – and past experience suggests they may not be able to achieve as much as they hope -- they may face an even more difficult challenge if religious leaders get directly involved.
On Wednesday, the Moscow Patriarchate posted on its official site the following document. Patriarch Kirill, it said, believes that “at the current historical moment, hierarchs and priests cannot put forward their candidacies for elections in any organs of representative power of any countries and any levels.”
But, the document continued, “exceptions to this rule can be made only on the basis of extreme church necessity” by the Holy Synod or the Synod of a self-administering church” on an individual basis, a negative statement that nonetheless in the minds of many opens the way for priests to run for office.
In a report on this declaration yesterday, the “Osobaya bukhva” site stressed this possibility, entitling its article “In Power with God” and beginning it with the declaration thast “representatives of the clergy will be able to advance their candidates in elections to organs of representative power” (www.specletter.com/elections/2011-02-03/s-bogom-vo-vlast.html).
Nikolay Mitrokhin, a specialist on Orthodoxy at Bremen University, said that in his view, the church probably will not want to take that step: The church, he said, “as a religious organization in European countries has lost popularity and prefers not to connect itself with politics in order not to be drawn into this or that political scandal.”
And he pointed to another reason the Russian Orthodox Church might refrain from doing so: If it takes this step, “one can predict” that “representatives of other confessions – Islam and Judaism – will do the same,” something that could create serious problems under current conditions in the Russian Federation.
As the “Osobaya bukhva” article pointed out, however, there is a tradition of having religious officials serve in parliament in Russia. “In the last stages of the existence of the Soviet state, there were priests in the USSR Supreme Soviet,” although they were more a decoration than a real political forced.
But the most important reason for restraint, the portal continued, is that many Russians, especially in the blogosphere, are “already angry about the excessively close ties of higher government bureaucrats and church hierarchs,” ties that make it unclear whether the church would be using the powers or the powers the church.
Father Andrey Kurayev, the outspoken Orthodox deacon, tried to play down the possibility that the Patriarchate would permit any priests to run in Russian elections. He noted that the Russian Orthodox Church has representatives in many countries and that this decision has more to do with their situation than with that in Russia.
“In Russia today, there is no need to have priests in the parliament,” he said. But he said that if one “imagined a situation 20 years from now where a party appeared in our country declaring that if it came to power, it would impose on Russia all the package of defense of homosexual rights which have been adopted in the West.”
In that case, Kurayev said, there might be good reason for Orthodox priests and hierarchs to run for office.
Roman Silantyev, a specialist on Islam with close ties to the Moscow Patriarchate, agreed. “The Church today is successfully cooperating with the state in many sectors.” Consequently, there is “no basis” for priests to run for office. Indeed, he said, in Church language, “the term ‘exceptional case’ in fact means ‘never.’”
But the genie is already out of the bottle. Abdulla Ishmukhametov, the head of the Muslim community of the Far Eastern Federal District who is subordinate to the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of the Asiatic Part of Russia, told the media that mullahs may decide to run for office in Russia soon (www.islam.ru/rus/2011-02-03/#35538).
The declaration of the Russian Orthodox Church thus serves as a model for why Muslims might take that step, he continued. “We attempt to advance our ideas, but the representative powers that be rarely listen to us.” Running mullahs for office is one way the Islamic leaders could attract attention.
And he added that “it is completely possible” that Muslim religious leaders “will run in elections for the Legislative Assembly of Primorsky kray already in this year.” If that in fact happens, the Russian Orthodox Church would likely respond in kind, setting the stage for religious competition in yet another sphere of Russian life.
Window on Eurasia: Hoping to Counter Militants, Moscow Turns to Ultra-Traditionalists in North Caucasus
Paul Goble
Staunton, February 4 – Moscow plans to revive and integrate into government structures elders’ councils across the North Caucasus in the hope that the traditional deference to the older generation there will help it isolate and defeat the militants, but social changes in that region over the last two decades may not have the effect that the Russian authorities hope for.
On Wednesday, Aleksandr Khloponin, the presidential plenipotentiary for the North Caucasus called for the revival of the elders’ councils in the republics and kray of that region and to include them in the Social Council of the Federal district to connect his office with the population “by-passing the power vertical” (www.regnum.ru/news/society/1371320.html).
“Precisely such wise and authoritative people who will join them will give advice and recommendations to the first persons of the subjects,” Khloponin said, stressing that they will play a major role in “the moral-patriotic upbringing of the young,” thus keeping them from joining militant groups.
Alla Vlazneva, the deputy head of the internal policy department of the North Caucasus Federal District, said that Khloponin’s proposal represented a development of an idea President Dmitry Medvedev had offered last May and that the elders’ councils will be integrated in the Social Council but will not be paid by the government (svpressa.ru/society/article/38385/).
“This is an analogue to the federal Social Chamber,” she continued, but it is even more important in some ways because “to say that that there is a strong civil society in the Caucasus is to strongly exaggerate the situation.” Rather there, people “always attend to the word of the older and always this is valuable,” a “good tradition which is why it is being revived.”
Ella Pamfilova, the human rights activist who proposed this idea to Medvedev in the first place, agreed, saying that if Khloponin is able to set up “a really working structure and not [another] bureaucratic” exercise, the elders’ councils “could resolve many problems of the region” and “at the very least,” ensure that the powers are given accurate reports “from below.”
Of course, such structures are not without precedent. There have been elders’ councils in several republics of the North Caucasus and even in the Middle Volga and central Rsusian regions as well. But this is the most formal post-Soviet recognition of them, and consequently, Khloponin and the others are placing great hopes in it.
Those hopes may be somewhat misplaced, however. Yesterday, Khloponin himself noted that the average age of the anti-government militants has fallen to 18, a trend that underscores both the ability of the underground to renew itself and the breakdown in traditional control mechanisms of deference to the elderly (www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=20752).
And on the other, as “Svobodnaya pressa” commentator Vladimir Treshchanin points out, this action has the effect of underscoring the reality that “the Caucasus is already not entirely Russia.” Rather it has “a special administration, a special way of taking and implementing decisions.” And that means it is not entirely in the common Russian legal space.
Moreover, Treshchanin continues, if the Caucasus is to restore its traditions, “why should not Pskov and Novgorod be allowed to reestablish the Veche?” Or other regions, Russian and non-Russian alike, be allowed to restore their administrative arrangements from the past, arrangements that in many cases encourage public activism.
Consequently, what Khloponin has done in the North Caucasus may have an even larger impact outside that region than inside it, something Treshchanin suggests Moscow might want to reflect upon before plunging ahead and setting in train something that it may not be able to control.
Staunton, February 4 – Moscow plans to revive and integrate into government structures elders’ councils across the North Caucasus in the hope that the traditional deference to the older generation there will help it isolate and defeat the militants, but social changes in that region over the last two decades may not have the effect that the Russian authorities hope for.
On Wednesday, Aleksandr Khloponin, the presidential plenipotentiary for the North Caucasus called for the revival of the elders’ councils in the republics and kray of that region and to include them in the Social Council of the Federal district to connect his office with the population “by-passing the power vertical” (www.regnum.ru/news/society/1371320.html).
“Precisely such wise and authoritative people who will join them will give advice and recommendations to the first persons of the subjects,” Khloponin said, stressing that they will play a major role in “the moral-patriotic upbringing of the young,” thus keeping them from joining militant groups.
Alla Vlazneva, the deputy head of the internal policy department of the North Caucasus Federal District, said that Khloponin’s proposal represented a development of an idea President Dmitry Medvedev had offered last May and that the elders’ councils will be integrated in the Social Council but will not be paid by the government (svpressa.ru/society/article/38385/).
“This is an analogue to the federal Social Chamber,” she continued, but it is even more important in some ways because “to say that that there is a strong civil society in the Caucasus is to strongly exaggerate the situation.” Rather there, people “always attend to the word of the older and always this is valuable,” a “good tradition which is why it is being revived.”
Ella Pamfilova, the human rights activist who proposed this idea to Medvedev in the first place, agreed, saying that if Khloponin is able to set up “a really working structure and not [another] bureaucratic” exercise, the elders’ councils “could resolve many problems of the region” and “at the very least,” ensure that the powers are given accurate reports “from below.”
Of course, such structures are not without precedent. There have been elders’ councils in several republics of the North Caucasus and even in the Middle Volga and central Rsusian regions as well. But this is the most formal post-Soviet recognition of them, and consequently, Khloponin and the others are placing great hopes in it.
Those hopes may be somewhat misplaced, however. Yesterday, Khloponin himself noted that the average age of the anti-government militants has fallen to 18, a trend that underscores both the ability of the underground to renew itself and the breakdown in traditional control mechanisms of deference to the elderly (www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=20752).
And on the other, as “Svobodnaya pressa” commentator Vladimir Treshchanin points out, this action has the effect of underscoring the reality that “the Caucasus is already not entirely Russia.” Rather it has “a special administration, a special way of taking and implementing decisions.” And that means it is not entirely in the common Russian legal space.
Moreover, Treshchanin continues, if the Caucasus is to restore its traditions, “why should not Pskov and Novgorod be allowed to reestablish the Veche?” Or other regions, Russian and non-Russian alike, be allowed to restore their administrative arrangements from the past, arrangements that in many cases encourage public activism.
Consequently, what Khloponin has done in the North Caucasus may have an even larger impact outside that region than inside it, something Treshchanin suggests Moscow might want to reflect upon before plunging ahead and setting in train something that it may not be able to control.
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