Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia
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Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia
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Overview
Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent is the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image.
In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith.
Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent argues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400828999 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/25/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 900,339 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent Faith and Power in the New Russia
By John Garrard Carol Garrard Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12573-2
Chapter One The End of the Atheist Empire
Every person who raises arms against his neighbor, against unarmed civilians, will be taking upon his soul a very profound sin which will separate him from the Church and from God. -Patriarch Aleksy's address to the nation, 1:42 A.M., August 21, 1991
ON AUGUST 19, 1991, SOVIET KGB and party hard-liners returned from their dachas and summer vacations to Moscow, determined to suppress the democratic movement born when Boris Yeltsin had been elected president of the Russian Republic just two months earlier. He was the first popularly elected leader in the thousand-year history of the Russian people. Yeltsin threatened to exercise the Russian Republic's legal right under the country's constitution to withdraw from the multinational state. The Soviet system, always officially proclaimed a voluntary union, was in danger of being hoist by its own petard. The junta, led by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, seized television and radio stations and, with the majestic music of Swan Lake as background, announced on the airwaves that it had formed a "State Emergency Committee" and was "taking supreme power in the USSR." Earlier on the previous evening of August 18 just before 5:00 p.m., it had taken captive, in the governmentdacha in Yalta on the Black Sea, the president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. His chief of staff played the Judas, accompanied by Politburo member Oleg Shenin and a small clutch of party myrmidons. They demanded he either sign a decree declaring a state of emergency or resign. Courageously, Gorbachev refused to do either. Nevertheless, the traitors confiscated the codes needed to launch the Soviet nuclear arsenal and confined him and his family to house arrest. He was now nowhere to be seen. The KGB plotters made just one mistake: they missed taking prisoner Boris Yeltsin.
The CPSU and KGB hard-liners had worried about glasnost and perestroika when Gorbachev announced them as policies after he became general secretary of the CPSU in March 1985. But he first provoked a sharp reaction on March 8, 1991, when he unveiled the draft of a new, conciliatory union treaty. It proposed a new name for the country omitting the words "Socialist" and "Soviet." Even though the republics were offered much greater autonomy, allowing them to control their own economic development, sign international treaties, and establish separate diplomatic missions, only nine of the fifteen Soviet republics participated in the referendum. While Gorbachev continued to work on a draft treaty acceptable to all, the KGB and party bosses knew there could be no compromise. They recalled only too well the earlier loss of central control when Gorbachev had released a little nugget of glasnost to the Baltic States. In a radio address on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939, Gorbachev admitted that Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia had been forcibly incorporated into the USSR. Western historians knew this perfectly well, having read the pact's secret protocols, but the Soviet population had been fed the party line that the Baltic States had "volunteered" for the privilege. Backing and filling, Gorbachev had immediately argued that a "common destiny" had been forged for all republics, so everyone should still stay together. But countless numbers of protesters linked hands to form human chains spanning the borders of the three Baltic satellites.
Even worse for the party and KGB sclerotics, shortly thereafter on September 10, 1989, Austria took down twelve and a half miles of the border fence with Hungary. East German families, who were legally free to travel to Hungary, now saw a safe, though circuitous escape route to West Germany. They loaded their cars and set off. The party's East German satrap, Erich Honecker, implored Gorbachev to order the Red Army (which was still deployed in Hungary) to forcibly put the barrier back up and open fire on the caravans. He refused, and the floodgates stayed open. The last person shot trying to make it over the Berlin Wall died in February 1989. Within six months, he could have strolled across unchallenged. East Germany itself, the jewel of the Warsaw Pact crown, was no more. Honecker, once all-powerful dictator, suddenly became a fugitive, not knowing whether he would be arrested or shot on sight. After all, that was the treatment he had meted out in the past to innocent citizens.
At this critical hour, Gorbachev's passive response to Yeltsin's challenge threatened the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. Yeltsin wanted to sign a new union treaty that would loosen the bonds of the country to a far great extent than Gorbachev had proposed. The plotters very much doubted that anything acceptable to Yeltsin would preserve the party as the country's leading force, and the KGB as the party's "sword and shield." They feared that they too would soon be perestroika-ed right out of their jobs and privileges. And so it came to pass, but the decisive challenge emerged from a totally unexpected source.
With Gorbachev safely tucked away at Yalta, the plotters wrestled with the problem of Yeltsin, now holed up in the Russian Parliament, a multistory office building called the "Russian White House." He and his staff still had access to fax and telephone, and later to radio and television. He summoned the ordinary citizens of Moscow to defend the democracy-that is, his election-that had just been born. He stood on one of the tanks at 1:00 p.m., August 19, audaciously defying the junta. In a few hours, a loudspeaker announced to the Muscovites forming human shields around the building that ten of the tanks had gone over to the defenders of the Russian White House.
By an extraordinary coincidence, the United States had an eyewitness and participant in these events who was also a distinguished Russian historian. James Billington, the librarian of Congress and founding director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, happened to be in Moscow for a library conference. When the conference broke up, Dr. Billington learned about the attempted takeover. He squeezed among the defenders and heard cries from the crowd: "A rhythmic chant of mo-lod-tsy, mo-lod-tsy [literally, "good guys, good guys"] was the crowd's response to this, the first of many communiqués that 'Radio White House' broadcast periodically." As Billington notes, this was a "first announcement of an unprecedented change of allegiance by a military unit," and it inspired the crowd ringing the parliament.
The unit comprised only ten tanks with their commanding officer, but the fact that Radio White House could broadcast this news at all came as a nasty shock to the plotters. In a critical move, the Russian Supreme Soviet radio service had circumvented the KGB's seizure of the radio and television stations. It began broadcasting from the Parliament Building itself on 1,500 kHz medium wave. Then the Echo of Moscow radio station, which had been forced off the air on the afternoon of August 19, resumed broadcasting on 1,206 kHz at 1:40 p.m. August 20. Now the KGB was in the unfamiliar and unpleasant position of having its opponents able to get their message across to the mass of the Russian people. The junta had decreed, "Control shall be established over the mass media, for which a specially created organ of the Emergency Committee shall be responsible." Already its orders were being flouted, a sign the junta had lost Leninist efficiency in controlling sources of information.
Yeltsin used the media to make a tough speech claiming that elements of three divisions of the troops sent to storm and occupy the Parliament had crossed over and were now supporting him. Then the elite Alpha Unit, paratroopers commanded by General Alexander Lebed, a hero of Afghanistan, refused to storm the White House. Yeltsin spoke from a podium where now Major General Kobiets stood in full uniform, acknowledging Yeltsin's pronouncement that he had been appointed the new defense minister. The defection of just ten tanks had pulled the thumb out of the KGB's dike, and the momentum was sucking others up the chain of command over to Yeltsin's side.
But the outcome was still very much in doubt. Yes, the rings of human shields around the Russian Parliament were increasing by the hour. But the defenders had ten tanks, whereas the party and the KGB commanded whole armored divisions. If they attacked, thousands would die in the carnage. Yeltsin fully expected a bloodbath and tried to get help. He first called the West. He telephoned President George Herbert Bush and also John Major, who had succeeded Mrs. Thatcher as the British prime minister in the fall of 1990. Perhaps Bush recalled that he had telephoned Gorbachev just weeks before to warn him that a coup was threatening. Apparently the general secretary never shared this foreboding with Yeltsin. Gorbachev ruefully recalled in a 1996 interview with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, "Bush phoned me and I said, 'George, you can sleep soundly. Nothing's going to happen.' That's what I said." Now Bush-like Major-could offer only sympathy to the embattled Yeltsin. Stymied by the West, Yeltsin then took a fateful step.
He appealed to the new patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the former Aleksey Ridiger, who had been elected in June the previous year by a meeting of bishops. He had taken the official name of Aleksy II. Yeltsin's words went out over the national radio, defying the junta's orders to silence him:
The tragic events that have occurred throughout the night made me turn to you, to reach the nation through you.
There is lawlessness inside the country-a group of corrupt Party members has organized an anti-constitutional revolution. Essentially, a state of emergency has been declared inside the country due to the extreme gravity of the situation, and the laws and constitution of the USSR and of the sovereign republics of the Union have been grossly violated.
It is no coincidence that these events have taken place on the eve of the signing of a new Union Treaty, which would have paved the way to freedom, democracy, and progress and a resolution of the recent crisis.
Our State has been violated and along with it the newly emerging democracy, and freedom of choice for the electorate. There is once again the shadow of disorder and chaos hanging over our country.
At this moment of tragedy for our Fatherland I turn to you, calling on your authority among all religious confessions and believers. The influence of the Church in our society is too great for the Church to stand aside during these events. This duty is directly related to the Church's mission, to which you have dedicated your life: serving people, caring for their hearts and souls. The Church, which has suffered through the times of totalitarianism, may once again experience disorder and lawlessness.
All believers, the Russian nation, and all Russia await your word!
They did not have long to wait. Within hours of this appeal, the patriarch demonstrated that he would not remain a bystander but would throw the full weight of his position as patriarch against the coup.
On August 19, as the tanks moved ominously into their staging area in Red Square, Aleksy was physically only yards away (see figure 1.1). Inside the redbrick walls of the Kremlin, he was presiding at the liturgy of the Feast of the Transfiguration in the Cathedral of the Assumption (Uspensky Sobor), not only the oldest cathedral within the Kremlin but also the most important Orthodox church in Russia, having been begun in 1326-28 at the behest of Metropolitan Peter, whose move of the Orthodox see from Kiev to Moscow ended Kiev's status as the center of the faith. Still unfinished, it collapsed in 1472. As with other Kremin cathedrals, architects imported from Italy, in part from the Ticino (an area in northern Italy and southern Switzerland), rebuilt it in its present form.
During the service Aleksy said nothing about the outside events but made an interesting change in the closing litany. Instead of remembering the "authorities" and "the army" as was customary, he prayed "for our country protected by God and its people." Then he took a momentous decision. On August 20, only a day after Yeltsin's appeal to him, Aleksy faxed to the country and to selected sites around the world an "announcement" (zayavlenie), which challenged the junta's legality. Aleksy had already identified this as the key weakness of the coup:
This situation [i.e., the departure of Gorbachev from power, and his disappearance] is troubling the consciences of millions of our fellow citizens, who are concerned about the legality of the newly formed State Emergency Committee.... In this connection we declare that it is essential that we hear without delay the voice of President Gorbachev and learn his attitude toward the events that have just taken place.
Notably, the patriarch made no mention of Yeltsin. Instead, he referred to Gorbachev, a reformer with whom he believed the church could do business, the same attitude once expressed by Margaret Thatcher. Now Aleksy repaid the ROC's debts to Gorbachev's reforms by calling for Gorbachev to be allowed to speak to the country. But this would not be the limit of his help.
The remainder of Aleksy's "announcement" demonstrated his political savvy: "We hope that the Supreme Soviet of the USSR will give careful consideration to what has taken place and will take decisive measures to bring about the stabilization of the situation in the country." That is, he called politely for action from the top government body in the country, notably not the party apparatus.
Next, he sought to isolate the plotters from two other national institutions, the church and the army:
We call upon all parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, the whole of our people, and particularly our army at this critical moment for our nation to show support and not to permit the shedding of fraternal blood. We raise the heartfelt prayer to our Lord and summon all true believers in our Church to join this prayer begging Him to dispense peace to the peoples of our land so that they can in future build their homeland in accordance with freedom of choice and the accepted norms of morality and law.
Again, the patriarch touched delicately on the Achilles' heel of the coup, as he alluded to the "accepted norms of morality and law." Yeltsin had begun his radio appeal to the patriarch by referring to "lawlessness." Now the patriarch was reiterating the same idea to the nation, but associating legality with a "heartfelt prayer to our Lord" studded with the familiar language of the peace campaign-"peace" and "freedom"-turned back on the KGB.
Among the KGB generals directing the coup, a frisson of fear and righteous indignation must have taken hold. How dare Aleksey Ridiger, the very man they had put into power, speak out against them! The position of patriarch was on the KGB's nomenklatura list, meaning that the generals had the privilege of signing off on the occupant. And by 1991, Ridiger had been their man for thirty-three years. According to researchers at the Keston Institute in Oxford, who looked at all available documents, Ridiger had been "recruited by the Estonian KGB on 28 February 1958, just days after his 29th birthday." In February 1988, "exactly thirty years after his recruitment as an agent, Aleksy was given an award (gramota) by the KGB in recognition of his long service to them." After handing him their equivalent of a thirty-year pin, surely they had a right to expect some gratitude. And if just now their drozd ("thrush" was his code name) did not want to sing the right tune from his gilded cage, then all he had to do was say nothing and go about his business of presiding at liturgies and other harmless religious services. His silence would give consent.
But Aleksy would not keep silent. Shortly after midnight on August 21, 1991, a column of tanks approached the barricades around the White House. Two young men were shot dead. Tank treads crushed another youth. Crowds swarmed the vehicles and set an armored personnel carrier on fire. Aleksy learned of this within moments, and now took a daring, virtually inconceivable step. At 1:30 a.m., only an hour after this carnage, and minutes before the order was expected for the general assault to storm the White House and seize Boris Yeltsin and the parliamentarians, he sent an extraordinary "address" (obrashchenie) to all "fellow-citizens." It was broadcast at 1:42 a.m. on national television and radio.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent by John Garrard Carol Garrard
Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations viiiPreface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Note on Transliteration xix
PROLOGUE Sergiev Posad: Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent 1
Chapter One: The End of the Atheist Empire 14
Chapter Two: A New Hope 36
Chapter Three: Rebuilding Holy Moscow 70
Chapter Four: Accursed Questions: Who Is to Blame? 101
Chapter Five: Irreconcilable Differences: Orthodoxy and the West 141
Chapter Six: The Babylonian Legacy: Exiles, Martyrs, and Collaborators 181
Chapter Seven: A Faith-Based Army 207
EPILOGUE: Twenty Years After: From Party to Patriarch 242
Appendix A: Translated Documents 255
Appendix B: Authors’ Letter to the New York Times, May 27, 1990 261
Notes 263
Select Bibliography 309
Index 315
What People are Saying About This
In this rewarding book, the Garrards humanize and deliver with great learning the epic story of the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church. They illuminate a lost experience by studying the church through the prism of its spectacular civic rebirth. The Garrards give a meticulously detailed account of the rise of Patriarch Aleksy and his successful use of the faith to implant the church and its teachings once again deep into the hearts of Russian people.
— Richard Stites, Georgetown University
This book contains much rich information, colorful detail, and valuable insights. The Garrards know the Russian background intimately. They are dedicated, scrupulous, and immensely hardworking scholars. It is worth reading this book for the footnotes alone.
— Rodric Braithwaite, author of "Moscow 1941"
"In this rewarding book, the Garrards humanize and deliver with great learning the epic story of the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church. They illuminate a lost experience by studying the church through the prism of its spectacular civic rebirth. The Garrards give a meticulously detailed account of the rise of Patriarch Aleksy and his successful use of the faith to implant the church and its teachings once again deep into the hearts of Russian people."—Richard Stites, Georgetown University"This book contains much rich information, colorful detail, and valuable insights. The Garrards know the Russian background intimately. They are dedicated, scrupulous, and immensely hardworking scholars. It is worth reading this book for the footnotes alone."—Rodric Braithwaite, author of Moscow 1941"A splendid book—scholarly, deeply researched but with the tone of a personal memoir, delivered in a riveting style, and original in its contribution to our reconstruction of Russia's transition out of Communism. The Garrards are marvelous storytellers. Their story will frighten some and reassure others—but either way, this is a book for our times."—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
A splendid book—scholarly, deeply researched but with the tone of a personal memoir, delivered in a riveting style, and original in its contribution to our reconstruction of Russia's transition out of Communism. The Garrards are marvelous storytellers. Their story will frighten some and reassure others—but either way, this is a book for our times.
— Caryl Emerson, Princeton University