The union of peoples and religions in Russia
Looking back at Russia's past and present history and reality, Patriarch Kirill condemns those who ‘call for the purity of Islam or Orthodoxy,’ because ‘we may have different cultures and traditions, but we are one people.’ Meanwhile, in the Moscow neighbourhood of Kommunalka, a multi-religious centre is being presented where an Orthodox church, a synagogue, a mosque and a Buddhist temple are to be built in a shared space.
In recent months, there have been several ethnic and religious tensions in Russia, with the growing activism of nationalists from the ‘Russian Community’ organising actions against internal migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia, with extremist tones at the ideological level, pro-Nazi, and at the religious level with expressions of ‘radical Orthodoxy’, supported by the police and blessed by the most zealous Orthodox monastic communities.
Another source of great concern is the intra-Orthodox religious controversy between the different jurisdictions of the Churches in Ukraine, where the civil authorities are putting increasing pressure on the pro-Moscow Upz: in recent days, the Ukrainian citizenship of the Metropolitan of Kiev, Onufryj (Berezovskij), has been revoked, considering it incompatible with his original Russian citizenship.
Other bishops and priests of the UOC now face the same restrictive measure, which could lead to the expulsion of Russian clergy from Ukraine.
The Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill (Gundjaev), sought to respond to these and other challenges at a reception at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour next to the Kremlin, in front of members of the Commission for Interreligious Dialogue, a structure created directly by the Russian presidency, emphasising the importance of multi-ethnic and multi-religious dialogue as a key feature of Russian society.
He reiterated that “we are fortunate to belong to different ethnic and religious communities, we may have different cultures and traditions, but we are one people”, which is summed up in the typical sobornost, the “universal communion” of the Russian world.
Kirill assures that this type of union ‘is a very rare phenomenon in the history of human civilisation,’ an eminently Russian prerogative. Recalling the ancient empires, ‘from the Roman to the Soviet,’ the patriarch observes that in these systems, peoples lived together effectively, ‘but most of the time this unity, especially in the stages of aggregation, was based solely on force.’
The strength of the main ethnic group, of the political centre of the capital, Rome, Constantinople and those that followed, were ‘state factors that imposed unification’, as was also the case in Soviet times, where the ideological factor prevailed, even if, in the opinion of the head of the Orthodox Church, ‘the ideology was fairly balanced, offering a perspective of national politics without discrimination on ethnic grounds’.
This allowed relations between people to be consolidated, but ‘now the Soviet Union is no longer there, whatever our reaction to this may be, yet our union has been preserved’.
With these words, the patriarch effectively sums up the passage of Russian history in recent decades, finding continuity between the “atheist” Soviet empire and the “Orthodox” Russian empire of Kirill and Putin. Like President Vladimir Putin, Patriarch Kirill (also born Vladimir) grew up during the Stalinist restoration under Leonid Brezhnev, who “repaired the damage” of the Khrushchev thaw, which had condemned the “cult of personality” of the supreme leader and opened a window to “Western disorder”.
It is no coincidence that at the recent congress of the Russian communists of the KPRF, Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 was declared “a mistake of judgement”, thus closing the circle also at the historical-ideological level.
Yet the patriarch insists on the more “profound and spiritual” dimension of this continuity between communism and communion, stating that “the political, geopolitical and ideological factors that brought about the absolutely exceptional union of our multi-ethnic people have now disappeared, but we are still together”.
It is therefore the superiority of religious inspiration that makes the Russian people unique, not socio-political or ideological dimensions, but “the popular wisdom forged in historical experience, which allows us to preserve a unity that is not only in words or declarations, but in lived reality”.
According to the patriarchal narrative, ‘faith in one God has always been the spiritual foundation of our multi-ethnic country,’ so that all the truths professed by Russians, ‘brotherhood, cooperation, mutual assistance, respect for all,’ are not just formal declarations or empty words in everyday rhetoric, but are ‘expressions of a mindset rooted in people, coming from the depths of their hearts.’
Kirill proclaims himself deeply convinced that ‘not only dialogue, but simple daily coexistence and cooperation between Orthodox Christians and Muslims’ in Russia, which ‘by God's grace is not overshadowed by any kind of conflict,’ is one of the unifying forces of ‘believers’ and of the solidarity of the entire multi-ethnic people.
Russian Islam is a legacy of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, with the conversion of the khanates of the Golden Horde to the Muslim faith at the end of the 14th century, shortly before the “rebirth of Holy Russia” in the battles against the invaders who had dominated the country for a couple of centuries and who were then integrated by the victorious tsars.
With these reinterpretations of Russian history and reality, past and present, the patriarch claims the decisive role of the Church in the foundation of the Russian state and warns religious leaders not to “place obstacles in the way of the consolidation process”, recalling that “there are forces on all sides that oppose the development of these relations”.
He condemns those who ‘make appeals in defence of what they consider to be the purity of Islam or Orthodoxy’, forgetting that good relations between Russia's traditional confessions are "achievements of our theologians and ministers of worship, based on the real progress of the history of our multi-ethnic homeland, on the communion that has been formed in the experience of the people, not in university lecture halls or theological academies, or in some intellectual circle," nodding to objections from various parts of the Russian academic world.
In this interpretation, "Orthodox Christians and Muslims are fighting side by side for our homeland, and we can list many examples of those who, despite their different faiths, are united in their goal of developing our great country, and this cooperation must continue first and foremost between Orthodox Christians and Muslims, the main monotheistic religions," effectively blessing the comparison of militant Orthodoxy to Islam defending sacred laws.
The other traditional religions according to Russian law are Buddhism, widespread mainly among the descendants of the Tatar-Mongol ethnic groups, and Judaism, present in the Caucasus since the ancient Rus' of Kiev, and then spread throughout 19th-century Russia following the wanderings of various European countries.
The patriarchal thesis was supported by the Chief Rabbi of Russia, Berl Lazar (born in Milan, raised in America and a Russian “by adoption” for over thirty years), who confirmed that “we Russians have one Father who unites us”, speaking at the presentation of a multi-religious centre in the Moscow district of Kommunalka, where an Orthodox church, a synagogue, a mosque and a Buddhist temple are to be built in a shared space.
He congratulated the leaders of traditional Russian religions at all federal and regional levels for their cooperation, recalling his recent visit to the city of Derbent, the southernmost point of the Russian Federation on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where a complex representing Orthodoxy, Islam and Judaism with places of worship, museum rooms and a library, all financed by the entrepreneur and oligarch Sulejman Kerimov, an ultra-Putinist senator for the Republic of Dagestan, who is subject to all kinds of international sanctions.
The rabbi praised him for his understanding of “how important it is that traditional Russian religions do not just live side by side, but show the ability to cooperate and find common languages, to demonstrate that what unites us is much more than what divides us”, a circumstance that is particularly necessary in the North Caucasus, where the “Abrahamic religions” have been at war with each other for over a millennium.
Lazar acknowledges that ‘not everything is smooth between us’, as many ‘middle and lower-level’ ministers of religion are often infected by extremist movements that rekindle inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflicts, but according to the chief rabbi, ‘these are marginal expressions within their own communities’. without dwelling on the anti-Semitic pogroms of recent years in the Caucasus, but emphasising the need to ‘fight together against these provocations’.
When asked how friendly relations between the various faiths can be maintained in times of ongoing interreligious conflict at the international level, Lazar's response is typically rabbinical: ‘It is a test of our relationship with the eternal, and we must maintain a balanced approach, remembering that the commandment to love one's neighbour applies to all religions... It would be too easy to love only those with whom we get along.’
Russia is made up of those who also love those who would never want to submit to its suffocating ‘universal communion’.
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