The Cold War rhetoric heard in the run-up to last week’s G8 summit at Heiligendamm, as President Vladimir Putin tried to block the planned deployment of United States missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic, may have been intended primarily for domestic Russian consumption. But many East Europeans will see it as confirming a new Russian self-assertiveness and drift to authoritarianism, which is finding echoes at all levels, from the country’s trade organisations to its predominant Orthodox Church, and which alarms its neighbours.
After a decade and a half of post-Soviet weakness and division, Russians are feeling strong again on the back of their new energy wealth and strategic bargaining power in the war on terror. As Putin’s would-be presidential successors begin setting out their stalls in coming months, Western governments will need clear ideas about how to handle the shifting, unpredictable power on their doorstep.
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The Church has made the defence of "Slavic fraternity" a key theme since the Soviet Union’s collapse, handing its annual award for strengthening the unity of Orthodox nations this January to the state-owned Gazprom conglomerate. Today, well endowed by a grateful state, the Church has endorsed Putin’s revisionist view of history and backed Russian foreign policy objectives to the letter in areas from Kosovo to Ukraine.
When the Estonian ambassador was roughed up and her embassy attacked by the Kremlin-backed Nasi youth movement, in a gross violation of diplomatic conventions, Patriarch Alexei II responded by blaming Estonians for failing to show respect for "those who defended our one motherland". "The feat performed by our people in war and labour during the Great Patriotic War was the height of Russia’s military glory," the Patriarch added. "They defended the whole world from a lethal threat that hovered over it, when a strong and cruel enemy armed with the anti-Christian ideology of Naziism waged a war for world dominion."
Moscow Patriarchate spokesmen such as Archpriests Vsevolod Chaplin and Mikhail Dudko have remained silent on Russian misdeeds in areas from the Caucasus to Central Asia. No complaint has been aired about extra-judicial abuses, the harassment of opposition parties, the contract killing of journalists, or the hostility repeatedly experienced by minorities from Catholics to gay activists.
Far from standing up for human rights, the Church has dismissed criticisms from international observers, including an annual Report on Religious Freedom by the US State Department. One explanation for the reticence was provided in April 2006, when a Church-backed "Declaration on Human Rights and Dignity" was published at the World Russian People’s Council, setting out a different "non-Western" understanding of human rights – something not even the Soviet regime at the height of its power had attempted.
The Moscow Patriarchate’s foreign relations director, Metropolitan Kirill, whose working group drafted the document, said the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights had reflected the "historical and cultural experiences of Western Europe and the US" while failing to consider the "values of the Orthodox East". The new Russian declaration, he added, reflected the "moral imperative" found in the work of Immanuel Kant. From now on, his Church would foster a conception of human rights "proceeding from our history", reflecting "the views and values of the majority of our nation".
"Human rights and liberties are effective in as much as they help the individual grow in goodness, defending him from evil within and without, and promoting his positive role in society," the Declaration noted. "It is unacceptable, in pursuit of human rights, to oppress faith and moral tradition, insult religious and national feelings, cause harm to revered holy objects and sites, and jeopardise the motherland. Likewise we see as dangerous the invention of such rights to legitimise behaviour condemned by both traditional morality and historical religions."
Critics are profoundly distrustful. What Russia is witnessing, they argue, is a rebirth of the historic concept of sobornost, in which Church and State work in harmony to assert and achieve common goals and interests. Once in place, this will require minorities to conform, and civil liberties to take second place behind the general will of the Russian people
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