Searching for icons in Russia

THE KATERINA ICON by Robert Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amateur versus professional crooks.

A couple of Australian tourists in Russia rescue an old man from drowning, and in gratitude he tells them of an ancestor of his who, during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, attacked a train and stole some icons that had been stolen by the Bolsheviks from the Russian royal family. One of the Australians is of Russian ancestry, and the old man tells him that if he can find the hidden icons, he can keep them, and gives him one of his own family icons, which is said to hold the key to the secret location of the icons.

The tourists, an accountant and a dentist, return to Australia and when they believe they may have found a clue to the location of the icons, decide, after many arguments, to return to Russia and look for them. Their arguments continue throughout the book. First one is keen on the project, and the other is lukewarm, and then the one who was lukewarm becomes keen and the other is sceptical.

Their enterprise is of dubious legality and morality, and thus they need to keep it secret, but they take it in turns to boast about it and to warn against doing so. First one says too much, and the other warns him not to, and then they exchange roles. As a result of this, several others, including professional criminals, become aware of the treasure hunt, and the two amateurs find themselves in serious trouble and great danger again and again, usually because one has done something foolish that the other has warned him against.

The battle between the amateurs and the professionals goes right through the book, and I thought the theme was a little overplayed. The protagonists never seemed to learn from their mistakes, and went on making the same mistakes over and over again, and getting into similar trouble over and over again. One would take precautions that the other would get angry about, or one would neglect precautions that the other would get angry about.

View all my reviews on GoodReads 

So much for the review of this particular book, but I have more comments on the theme, since I myself have written a book on a similar theme, or at least with a similar trope -- ikons that went missing in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution (I prefer the spelling ikon with a k for the holy images. Icons with a c belong on computer screens). You can see reviews of my book The Year of the Dragon here on GoodReads.There are other and more comprehensive reviews on the Smashwords page, where you can also get a copy of the book. 

Apart from the icon/ikon trope, there are other superficial similarities. In The Katerina Icon the protagonists are two middle-aged men, a dentist and an accountant; in The Year of the Dragon the protagonists are two young men, a lawyer and an auctioneer. In both a woman dies because of the icons/ikons, though the circumstances are different.

But the differences are perhaps more more significant, and it is these that struck me most strongly. In The Katerina Icon, the protagonists are driven purely by greed. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Their only interest in the icons is the price they will fetch, nothing else counts. In the story, they are the "good" guys, the characters the reader is supposed to root for, but their values are identical with those of the "bad" guys, who are likewise motivated purely by greed. And one cannot help thinking that these are the values that triumphed at the end of the Cold War. 

The young protagonists in The Year of the Dragon start off in much the same way. The young lawyer has to wind up the estate of a murdered woman, and takes his auctioneer friend along to inspect the property and help him assess its monetary value. But as the story proceeds they gradually discover that there is more at stake, and that the value of the ikons, in particular, cannot be calculated only on the price they will fetch on the market. They come to see that there is more, and that the "more" is actually more important.

So with The Katerina Ikon I wavered between 3 and 4 stars, and put the 4 stars there to compensate for my prejudice in having written a comparable novel, which I thought went deeper than the rather superficial greed displayed by the characters in The Katerina Icon, in which there were really no good guys or bad guys, only winners and losers, and it wouldn't have mattered in the end which lot won or lost. The Neoliberal Revolution at the end of the Cold War ended up much the same as the Bolshevik Revolution as portrayed in George Orwell's Animal Farm -- the other animals looked from man to pig, and from pig to man, and could no longer tell the difference.

Is Putin's "secret weapon" going to blow up in his face?

More contrasting views from Russia and the West. According to Time the Orthodox faithful constitute Putin's new "secret weapon". Russia: Pussy Riot and Putin’s Religious Backing | World | TIME.com:

The prison sentence handed down last week against three members of Pussy Riot, a group of activists opposed to President Vladimir Putin, will restrict a lot more than the personal freedoms of the young women convicted. Judge Marina Syrova sentenced them to two years in prison for offending the faithful of the Orthodox Church by performing a crude anti-Putin song near the altar of a Moscow cathedral in February. While many were offended by the gesture, the judge’s verdict has put the state’s seal of approval on the righteous anger of one community, and that anger is proving hard to control.

But according to a Russian source something different is going down Russian Orthodox to Form Party | Russia | RIA Novosti:

Autocratic Russia and the Union of Orthodox Citizens are planning to register an “Orthodox” political party, Izvestia daily reported on Thursday.

The organization’s founders said they see Russia as a monarchy with a special role for the Russian Orthodox Church and the patriarch of Moscow and all Russia as the country’s spiritual leader.

Does that mean Putin is going to leave his own political party, and join this new one?

Olympic Ideals: Truer, Deeper, More Humble

In spite of all the commercialisation, the professionaslisation and the patriotisation, something of the true Olympic spirit survives, as these pictures show.

Hat-tip to Red Horse Down: Post #310 - Olympic Ideals: Truer, Deeper, More Humble


And three Russian gymnasts (Afanasyeva, Komova and Mustafina) give thanks for their achievements in the Games:

Look who's defending Western Christian Civilisation now!

Back in the 1950s and 1960s the National Party government in South Africa kept passing more and more repressive laws, which it claimed were necessary to defend Western (or "White" -- the terms were interchangeable in Nat vocabulary) civilisation.

What were they defending it against?

The Communist menace, that's what.

One of the first repressive laws they passed was the Suppression of Communism Act (Act 44 of 1950).

The National Party in South Africa and the Communist Party in Russia fell from power a couple of decades ago. The National Party has since disappeared from the scene, its remnants being absorbed into the DA and the ANC, which are now the two biggest parties in the South African parliament.

The Russian Communist Party, however, still exists, and look what they're up to now:
В Госдуме создают депутатскую группу по защите христианских ценностей - говорят, что для пропаганды : Новости : Накануне.RU, which, being interpreted means

And here it is, from the horse's mouth:

We intend to develop international cooperation for the common defense of Christian values, because we believe that the future of Europe, as well as the future of a revived Russian Federation does not conclude in a plantation of permissiveness, of total consumption, dehumanization, flouting the basic norms of human common life, and a return to traditional, orthodox Christian values.

That's from Sergei Gavrilov, a Communist Party representative in the Russian Duma.

Sergei Chapnin, an Orthodox journalist in Russia, comments on Facebook:

What a disgrace for Russia! What a mockery of history! The Communists are going to defend Christian values​​, "the Communist Party Guide never took anti-Christian positions. You can not put the Communists in the current blame the sins of 20s, the acts of" militant atheists "Yaroslavl-Gubelman or the latest large-scale" Khrushchev's "persecution of the church in the early 60's" (S. Gavrilov, the Communist Party).

One doesn't know whether to laugh of cry.

A quick introduction to Russian culture

This week I scanned some photos of my first trip to Russia in 1995 into my computer, and posted some on Facebook, and thought I'd post some here too.

I flew from Johannesburg to Moscow on an Aeroflot IL62, an interesting experience. When I'd spend two years studying in the UK I returned in 1968 on a Vickers VC 10, and the two aircraft looked very similar. Both had four engines in the tail, and I was delighted to be able to fly in both.

The flight, via Togo and Malta, lasted 17 hours, and my friend Andrei Kashinski met me at the airport with his friend Maxim Zapalski, who had a car, and, since it was my first visit to Moscow, they took me straight to Red Square. Andrei had arranged accommodation for me in the guest house of the Danilov Monastery, where he was supervisor of the rebuilding programme. He insisted on feeding me, though I had just had a substantial breakfast on the plane. He phoned another contact, an online friend Sergei Chapnin, who arranged for me at attend a youth conference at a parish in Klin, about 80 km north-west of Moscow along the St Petersburg road. The priest, would be coming to Moscow, and could give me a lift to Klin.

So back in the car with Andrei and Maxim, and they took me to a flat in a block in north-west Moscow. Guests were expected, but I was the unexpected guest, and the first to arrive. The flat was tiny, but crammed with books on every wall It turned out to be a welcoming party for Alexei Kurenkov, who had just returned on the plane from New York, where he was studying at St Vladimir's seminary. And there was a fantastic feast -- my third of the day, and though I had lost track of the time it felt like mid-morning. It was July, and I'd flown from winter to summer, from short days and long nights to long days and short nights.

So my first practical lesson in Russian culture was within an a couple of hours of arriving. Russians eat a lot, and you can't visit a friend without being fed. My fellow blogger Clarissa describes this and other aspects of Russian culture in her blog Clarissa's Blog: What You Need to Know About Your Russian-Speaking Friend:

A Russian-speaking party is very different from the Anglo-Saxon party, for example. For one, nobody stands while trying to balance the plate and the glass. Everybody sits around a big table. Regardless of the economic situation of your Russian-speaking hosts, food will be abundant and will consist of several courses with many food choices. Nobody will ever ask you eat off a paper plate and drink out of plastic cups. The table will be beautifully and properly laid, there will be beautiful table linens and dinnerware.

And that's the truth. The more people you visit, the more you eat. If you visit a lot, you can end up having six or seven meals a day.

In South African culture, or should I say South African white urban culture, if you are going to drop in to see someone unexpectedly, you try to avoid doing so at meal times, so that your hosts don't feel obliged to feed you. In Russia, there is no avoiding meal times, because meal times are whenever guests arrive.

It took me a little while to get used to this. I once made the mistake of thinking I could pop in to say hello to someone before jumping on the Metro to go to a service at a Cathedral. No chance of that. Fortunately the Cathedral was full and anyway in Orthodox services people arrive late all the time.

Rural black culture in South Africa is still a bit like that. You can drop in to say hello to someone and then when you want to go they say you must wait, because someone has gone out to catch a chicken to slaughter for a meal. The amazing thing (to me) about Russia is that that kind of attitude has persisted in urban culture, even in big cities like Moscow.

Who won the Cold War?

Who won the Cold War? In a book I read recently, Book review: A history of the English-speaking peoples | Khanya the author was in no doubt that Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan "won" the Cold War, but the author's worldview was utterly anachonistic, and can only be described as neojingoism.

Clarissa takes a somewhat different view of it in Clarissa's Blog: Who Caused the Collapse of the Soviet Union? Part I:

Nothing annoys me more than hearing people discuss completely in earnest whether the collapse of the Soviet Union was brought about by Ronald Reagan or by somebody else. Such discussions make just as much sense as trying to figure out whether world peace was achieved by this or some other politician. 'Well, there is no world peace,' you'd say. Right you are. And there was no collapse of the Soviet Union. Not in any meaningful sense, that is. As to the end of the Cold War, if you seriously think it's over, you need to stop spending so much time listening to the American media and turn to some external sources of information every once in a while. The winner of the Cold War is yet to be decided but I somehow doubt that you can win any war by pretending it isn't taking place.

I think her whole article is worth reading, though I disagree with the premiss that the Cold War is continuing.

To that extent I agree with the late Samuel Huntington, who said that the Cold War was primarily a clash of ideologies, while what we are seeing in the post-Cold War world is a clash of civilizations.

One of the relics of the Cold War is the term "Third World", which still seems to persist, though its meaning seems to have changed, or rather dissipated. The "three worlds" view of geopolitics was composed of

• First World: the capitalist world
• Second World: the communist world
• Third World: the non-aligned states

The Third World was founded by India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia was the only Third-World state in Europe, and, in a sense, its disintegration, like that of the Soviet Union, marks the end of the Cold War.

If the Cold War was a war of ideologies, as Huntington says, then one could say that Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher "won" the Cold War, because their brand of free marketism is the dominant religion in the world today. That is where Huntington got it wrong; he posits Western Christianity as the religion of Western Civilization. It isn't. Free Marketism is.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and Bolshevik rule in Russia is a somewhat different matter. By Brezhnev's time, if not before, faith in communism had grown cold. The leaders of the ruling Communist Party uttered all the old slogans, but the conviction had gone out of them. All that was left was a clinging to power, and, as Clarissa points out, the most powerful men in Russia today resemble nothing so much as the Vicar of Bray.

Russian religious revival

During the Bolshevik era the Russian government was officially atheist and actually promoted atheism through quangos like the League of Militant Atheists. The number of working Orthodox Churches had dwindled to 7000. Now there has been a quite spectacular revival. Interfax-Religion:

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia cited the statistics that 23,000 Orthodox churches have been restored in Russia over the past two decades...

Patriarch Kirill emphasized that this had been done against the backdrop of economic, political and social confrontation, rather than at a time of economic and political security and social well-being.

The religious revival actually began before the end of the Bolshevik era, and was in no small measure responsible for the collapse of Bolshevism.

Back when that was just beginning a Russian bishop and some diplomats met with some leaders of the NG Kerk in Pretoria, and it became clear that just as some people were feeling their way uncertainly into the new South Africa, so Russians were feeling their way uncertainly into a new Russia. They were uncertain because in both cases the rules had changed, and freedom was beginning to appear on the horizon, and the old certainties of a world in which whatever was not forbidden was compulsory no longer applied. Here's an excerpt from my diary for Sunday 5 July 1992:

We went to the Liturgy at Brixton. Bishop Victor of Podolsk was there. He had come to bless the offices of the Russian Federation Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He spoke briefly on the church in Russia, and said that the church buildings and monasteries were being handed back by the government, but the church had no money to maintain them. He came to tea afterwards, but had to rush off to another engagement.

In the evening went to Prof Johan Heyns's house, and bishop Victor was there, together with the ambassador, Alexei Makarov, and three others from the Russian Chamber of Commerce - the Vice President, Alexey Leonidovich Kolomeichuk, the public relations officer, Vladimir Michaelovich Korostelev, and the local representative, Vadim A. Mejnikov. Johan Heyns asked how I had become Orthodox, so I explained that I had originally been Anglican. The bishop said that the Russian Orthodox Church had had dialogue with the Anglicans for many years, and felt some theological affinity, but that they had broken off the dialogue when the Anglicans ordained women.

After we had supper the bishop explained the position of the church, and said there had been a spiritual hunger in Russia in recent years, and millions of people were
flocking to the church, but the church did not have resources to minister to them. They were ignorant of the rudiments of the faith - they were seeking God, but did not know why they were seeking, or in many cases they did not know what they were seeking. Henno Cronje asked why this spiritual hunger had appeared so suddenly now - had political changes caused it. The bishop replied that it might have been partly responsible for the political changes, and Dr Makarov said something similar. Henno Cronje also asked if the bishops had been appointed by the government under the communist regime, and bishop Victor said he had only been a bishop for two years, so he could not speak from personal experience, but he knew the government had had the power of veto on the election of bishops.

The DRC people said that they thought there were a lot of affinities between South Africa and Russia - but the ones they gave, even Piet Meiring, were different from what I expected. I thought the most obvious similarity was that both were beginning to emerge from decades of oppression under totalitarian governments, and that they were both discovering that freedom is not without its problems. But they spoke of the mystical identification of the church with the soul of the people, the patriotism, and the love that Russians and South Africans had for their country.

Henno Cronje asked about the meaning of ikons, and the bishop explained how they differed from Western religious painting - that they were not representations of physical objects, but that they had a spiritual meaning. Vadim Mejnikov translated, but obviously had some difficulty with theological terms. At the end all the
Russians, except the bishop, said they were not members of the church, but it seemed that even as the bishop spoke, some kind of spiritual hunger was being awakened in them. As the bishop spoke about the longing for God, it seemed that they were hearing new things, and responding.

One thing that amused me, though I didn't record it at the time, was that all the solemn DRC dominees giggled like naughty schoolboys whenever the Russians said "kak", which means "how" in Russian but "shit" in Afrikaans.

The Russian Ambassador, Makrelov, was quite emphatic about the religious revival leading to people's disillusionment with Bolshevism and contributing to its fall.

It is rather sad to think that both Alexei Makrelov and Prof Johan Heyns died in tragic circumstances not long afterwards. Alexei Makrelov died in a domestic accident, when his wife, who was carrying a tub of hot water, slipped and spilt it on him. Johan Heyns was murdered by an unknown assassin on 5 November 1994.

The Orange Revolution, Peeled

The Orange Revolution, Peeled by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com:

To recall the media hype that accompanied Ukraine’s 'Orange Revolution' of 2004, which propelled Viktor Yushchenko, a former central banker and alleged liberal democrat, into power, is like remembering a fever-dream in the morning: the memory of the details are blurred, and all that really remains is the sense that something strenuous, and ultimately unreal, has been passed through. The disputed election of 2004 – eventually decided in Yushchenko’s favor on account of mass street protests – ended with the defeat of Viktor Yanukovich, the candidate of the Russian-speaking eastern section of the country – the man whose comeback in Sunday’s election represented a stunning repudiation of the Orange Revolution and the regime that was born in its wake. How that 'revolution' came to be, and what it really represented, is about to undergo a major revision, one in striking contrast to the instant narrative provided by the Western media six years ago.

Hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace

And now it appears that Yanukovich, the candidate the Western media wanted us all to hate, has won the election. Is it just that I'm getting more cynical as I'm getting older, or is the media hype getting worse?

Ukraine seems to exist as a case-study for Samuel Huntington's Clash of civilizations thesis, with the fault line between Western and Orthodox civilisations running right through the country. If anything can confirm Huntington's thesis, the Western media spin does.

Another commentator comments on the spin in this article: News Analysis - For Kremlin, Ukraine Election Cuts Two Ways - NYTimes.com

On Monday, for example, European election monitors praised the election that was held Sunday, calling it an impressive display of democracy. Ukraines election, in other words, did not follow the Kremlin blueprint...

What a bizarre statement. A Russian-favored candidate wins in a fair election, and somehow that is supposed to be evidence that Russia is in favor of unfair elections. In fact, their candidate winning in a fair election is the best possible blueprint for Russia.
Imagine what the NY Times would be saying if the election had been unfair!

In the short term, the Kremlin may have benefited from the election. Relations were tense under the incumbent president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, an Orange leader who wanted to pull Ukraine away from Moscows orbit by joining NATO.

Mr. Yanukovich does not support NATO membership and has indicated that he will abandon some other initiatives opposed by Russia. This is the only real news in the whole NY Times story. This was a major geopolitical / energy-politics victory for Russia. Once again a CIA-engineered Colored Revolution has been turned back. The NY Times does its best to bury this news near the bottom of their story, and even then they downplay it by saying the Kremlin 'may' have benefitted, but only in the 'short term'.

What is lost in all this rhetoric about whether "the West" or "the Kremlin" benefited is what is surely more important: whether the people of Ukraine benefited.

Independent report blames Georgia for South Ossetia war

A year after the war in South Ossetia the politicians are still bickering, while church leaders are trying to promote peace (Hat-tip to ROCOR UNITED: Independent report blames Georgia for South Ossetia war.

Independent report blames Georgia for South Ossetia war | Deutsche Welle:

A new report commissioned by the EU said that Georgia started the South Ossetia conflict last summer, but also found Russia's response illegal. Both Georgia and Russia have claimed the report supports their version.


According to the report, carried out by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini and presented to the European Union on Wednesday, there is no evidence to support Georgia's claim that Russia had already sent troops to annex South Ossetia before Georgia began its attack on the region's capital Tskhinvali on the night of August 7/8 2008.

'There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation,' the report said. 'There is the question of whether the use of force by Georgia in South Ossetia ... was justifiable under international law. It was not.'

And while the politicians are still trying to score points off each other, church leaders have been trying to bring peace. Directions to Orthodoxy - Russian, Georgian patriarchs plea for peace year after Ossetia war:

Orthodox church leaders from Russia and Georgia called for peace while their political counterparts lobbed charges of aggression in marking the one year anniversary of the South Ossetia war.

The Russian and Georgian patriarchs also commemorated the victims of the short, brutal war over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church stressed the common spiritual heritage of the warring sides, continuing the line taken last year by Ilia and the late Patriarch Aleksei II of the Russian Orthodox Church, who had sought reconciliation as the conflict raged.

At a panikhida, or memorial service, at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on 8 August, a year after Georgia is said to have begun shelling the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, Patriarch Kirill said that the war, which he called the result of 'aggression set off by evil political will', was 'a tragedy of three fraternal Orthodox peoples'.

The past as it was: rare color photos of Czarist Russia

Most of us have, or at least have seen, photos taken about 100 years ago: ourgrandparents and great grandparents in stiff poses, the women wearing enormous Edwardian hats, the children looking like miniature adults. The photos are black and white or sepia, and it is hard to imagine that our ancestors lived in a colourful world.

Hat tip to Ad Orientem: Rare Color Photographs of Czarist Russia:

The Library of Congress has a display of photographs taken by the royal photographer of Czar St. Nicholas II online. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was given special funding and transportation by the Czar, including a private train, with the commission to create a photographic record of his vast empire.

But when we see them in colour, kids look like real kids:



Back in those days colour photographs were taken only by professionals, and were expensive. They were only used rarely, for book illustrations and things like that, because of the cost. A special camera was used, which took three negatives either simultaneously or in quick succession, through red, green and blue filters. These could then be projected on a screen through filters (rather like early video projectors, which had separate red, green and blue lenses), but were usually used for making colour plates for books.

It was only after the First World War that colour film became available for amateur use. At first there were many different processes. Some were additive (red+green+blue), like Dufaycolor (one can see a lot of them in 1930s National Geographic magazines). These had the filters built into the film -- OK for large format negatives, but the pattern of the filters was intrusive in 35mm film, rather like an enlarged 0.5 megapixel photo today. So subtractive processes, like Kodachrome and Kodacolor, were developed in the 1930s and 1940s, where the silver in the image was replaced by coloured dyes in the development process. The problem with this is that dyes fade, so a lot of old colour negatives and slides have faded and lost much of their original colour.

But Prokudin-Gorskii used a camara that made colour-separations with three negatives, using silver, not dyes, and, by using digital techniques, the colour is as fresh as the day the pictures were taken. And so we can see Edwardian (well, actually Nikolaivian) pictures showing what the people really looked like a century ago.

It's a fascinating collection, and you can see more here.

Reviving the Russian Soul

One of the most popular recent films in Russia is Ostrov (The Island) which indicates that despite the dominance of the communist and capitalist visions of materialism, interest in spiritual life continues to grow. As the authors of this review point out, "Ostrov’s story of repentance and faith in God hardly seems to be the stuff that blockbusters are made of" -- at least not in the West. I noted my own response to the film here, but this article describes the effect on Russian culture, and the response of the actor who played the protagonist is also interesting, since he is apparently a hermit in real life.

Reviving the Russian Soul, by Mike Kauschke and Elizabeth Debold.:

The story of the film’s principal actor Pyotr Mamonov may offer some explanation. Back in the eighties and nineties, Mamonov was the lead singer in an avant garde Russian rock band that reached cult status. But these days, he lives as a religious hermit near Moscow, and apparently it took a great deal of effort to get him to commit to make the film. Ostrov director Pavel Lungin says: “In a certain sense, this is also a movie about Mamonov’s life. He transformed from being a rock star embroiled in scandals into a deeply religious man.” Lungin realizes that both Mamonov’s life and the life of the monk he plays are resonant for Russians today. “The times of perestroika are over and we need to think about things like eternity, sin, and conscience,” he observes. “These have disappeared from our lives in the rat race for success and money. But people can’t just live for material things alone.”

Ain't that the truth!

Hat-tip to Notes from a commonplace book for this response from Pravda to Barack Obama's election as US president.

A change for the better - Pravda.Ru:

Only Satan would have been worse than the Bush regime. Therefore it could be argued that the new administration in the USA could never be worse than the one which divorced the hearts and minds of Americans from their brothers in the international community, which appalled the rest of the world with shock and awe tactics that included concentration camps, torture, mass murder and utter disrespect for international law. Yet in choosing Obama, the people of America have opted to come back into the international fold. Welcome back, friends!

Barack Obama is one man who has a mission and a dream. He will not change the world, as he claims and he might not even change the USA, in the near future at least. Powerful lobbies control the strings which control the puppets in Washington – indeed, it is not Washington that needs to be changed, but the invisible barons dictating its policies.

Clash of civilizations redux

A new book on the role of the Orthodox Church in the new Russia seems to confirm Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis.

Garrard, J. and Garrard, C.: Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia.:

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.

Thus far, however, all the glowing comments and reviews seem to be from Western scholars. It would be interesting to see what Orthodox scholars have to say about it.

Hat tip to Eastern Orthodox Librarian.

Western re-think on Caucasian war?

Are Western countries beginning to doubt the wisdom of their rush to support Georgia in last months Caucasian conflict?

Did Saakashvili Lie?: The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International:

But now the volume is being turned down on the anti-Moscow rhetoric. Last week German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier publicly called for clarification on the question of who is to blame for the Caucasus war. 'We do need to know more about who bears what portion of the responsibility for the military escalation and to what extent,' Steinmeier told a meeting of Germany's more than 200 ambassadors in Berlin. The European Union, he said, must now 'define our relations with the parties to the conflict for the medium and long term,' and that the time has come to have concrete information.

If there is a re-think going on, however, the signs are very faint -- "nuanced" as they like to say in academia.

Der Spiegel reports

But now, five weeks after the end of the war in the Caucasus, the winds have shifted in America. Even Washington is beginning to suspect that Saakashvili, a friend and ally, could in fact be a gambler -- someone who triggered the bloody five-day war and then told the West bold-faced lies. "The concerns about Russia have remained," says Paul Sanders, an expert on Russia and the director of the conservative Nixon Center in Washington. His words reflect the continuing Western assessment that Russia's military act of revenge against the tiny Caucasus nation Georgia was disproportionate, that Moscow violated international law by recognizing the separatist republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and, finally, that it used Georgia as a vehicle to showcase its imperial renaissance.

But there's no sign of any acknowledgement that Russia's response was no more "disproportionate" that Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006, the US attacks on Iraq in 2003 and Yugoslavia in 1999, or the British attack on Argentina in 1982.

If Western hypocrisy is cracking, the cracks are still painted over.

Do Americans live in an alternative reality?

Perhaps I should have got used to it by now, but I am still sometimes astonished by American arrogance and ignorance.

An apparently serious article, in an apparently serious publication, has the heading "Russia is still Third World". How can one take seriously anything written by anyone who displays such appalling ignorance?

Today in Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news:

In Long Run, Russia Is Still Third World

BY RICHARD EBELING

Posted 9/5/2008

I was in Moscow just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and spent most of three days at the Russian Parliament building, watching as Boris Yeltsin, standing atop a tank, rallied thousands of fellow Russians to defend their emerging democracy against a then-in-progress coup attempt by Soviet hard-liners.

One can only assume that the writer arrived in Russia from another planet, from another galaxy, another universe, or an alternative reality.

Russia was never a Third World country.

The author witnessed one of the events that marked the end of the Cold War, but seems to be unaware of what the Cold War was all about.

The Cold War was between the West (First World) on the one side, and the East (Second World) on the other.

The "Third World" comprised those countries that were neutral in the Cold War. They refused to take sides, and were prepared to do business with both sides (sometimes playing one against the other to gain the advantage). The Third World, also known as the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) or the Afro-Asian Bloc, was founded by India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia.

Russia, on the other hand, was at that time part of the USSR, and was in fact the dominant country in the USSR, which was the leader of the Second World.

Now it seems that the media in both Russia and the USA are determined to fan the embers of the Cold War into a flame again, and so perhaps people like Ebeling are not so much ignorant as disingenuous, and are simply writing to confuse people about recent history in order to pave the way for another nuclear stand-off.

So perhaps it is time to recall the Cold War. Do we really want to return to those days?

The day God gave thee, man, is ending
The darkness falls at thy behest
Who spent thy little life defending
From conquest by the East, the West.

The sun that bids us live is waking
Behind the cloud that bids us die
And in the murk fresh minds are making
New plans to blow us all sky-high.

Putin picks a church?

Another example of the truism that the media just don't "get" religion!

But this article from the New York Times is more than that. It illustrates some of the huge cultural barriers to understanding between Christians of different understandings and traditions, especially when they are filtered through nationalistic spectacles.

clipped from www.nytimes.com There was a time after the fall of Communism when small Protestant congregations blossomed here in southwestern Russia, when a church was almost as easy to set up as a general store. Today, this industrial region has become emblematic of the suppression of religious freedom under President Vladimir V. Putin. Just as the government has tightened control over political life, so, too, has it intruded in matters of faith. The Kremlin’s surrogates in many areas have turned the Russian Orthodox Church into a de facto official religion, warding off other Christian denominations that seem to offer the most significant competition for worshipers. Mr. Putin makes frequent appearances with the church’s leader, Patriarch Aleksei II, on the Kremlin-controlled national television networks. Last week, Mr. Putin was shown prominently accepting an invitation from Aleksei II to attend services for Russian Orthodox Easter, which is this Sunday.

There is an excellent cultural deconstruction of this article from an American Orthodox Christian, who has had some experience of both religious cultures (Orthodox and Protestant) and both national cultures (Russian and American) -- Notes from a Common-place Book: "Putin Picks a Church":

There are several problems with the story, however. For starters, the title itself is ludicrous: 'At Expense of Others, Putin Picks a Church.' I find this image of Putin choosing among churches as an American would shop between denominations to be amusing. Can you really imagine Vladimir Putin trying to decide between, say, the Freewill Baptists, or Missouri Synod Lutherans, or say the New Life Covenant Believers Outreach Center (or is it the New Covenant Believers Outreach Life Center?), rather than say, the Orthodox church which has been the faith of his nation and forebears for over 1,000 years now?

Another quote:

Others complain that some government bureaucrats and Orthodox priests do not show proper respect to Protestants, labeling them "sects" and "heretics." We are accustomed to making distinctions between the term "denomination" (which is acceptable) and "sect" (which is unacceptable). Many Americans assume our situation to be normative, and one that should be a model for less enlightened lands. We are too deep in the forest to see the truth behind the shopping mall this is American religiosity. Our situation is nothing short of bizarre. Russians see little substantive differences between denomination and sect. Why should we expect them to play our silly word games?

And of course the word games also work the other way:

Many Russians perceive it as alien to their culture. This suspicion was not helped when Western missionaries rushed in after the fall of communism. Eager evangelicals viewed the society as completely atheistic. To the extent that they were aware of Russian Orthodox Christians, they were dismissed as superstitious quasi-Catholics, who were not really Christian at all. I know, for I was an evangelical in those days. The Russian Orthodox Church, which had to begin rebuilding, retraining and teaching at that same time, was obviously frustrated by the crush of Western missionaries. But the situation is changing. The Church is resurgent in Russia today. Recent polls find that 71% of the nation considers themselves Orthodox. Studies also point out that there is something of a "baby boom" underway, and that with such, Russia may be slowing turning from the path of demographic suicide.

Lest it be thought that this is simply Orthodox prejudice, back in 1995 Prof Willem Saayman, the head of the Missiology Department at the University of South Africa and a Protestant, visited Russia in 1995, and on his return he said very emphatically that he thought Protestant missionaries from the West should be banned from Russia because of their cultural insensitivity and blatant cultural imperialism.

The Russian Church was like the man going from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell among thieves, and Western Christians came but, unlike the priest and the Levite in the story, they did not pass by on the other side, but rifled the victim's pockets while he was still unconscious to see what the robbers had left.

And it was not only Orthodox Christians who suffered from this process, Russian Protestants did as well. The story was told of one Protestant church where the congregation had not heard their own pastor preach for more than a year, because there were so many American visitors who were absolutely convinced that the Lord had laid a message on their hearts that they simply had to give that congregation.

For a Russian Protestant viewpoint on this process, see Mission in post-perestroika Russia by Johannes Reimer. Though the article is somewhat dated, it does give the background against which the present Russian suspicion of foreign Protestant mission groups needs to be seen.

One of the interesting thing about the rush of Western Protestant missionaries to the former Second World in the early 1990s is that quite a surprising number of them have become Orthodox. Something that impressed them was the faith of Orthodox Christians who had lived under atheist hegemony.

Back in the 1970s, when atheistic communism seemed well entrenched in the Second World, I met a Croatian Catholic priest at a Catholic charismatic prayer meeting in Durban. He remarked that everywhere he went in the West, Christians prayed for those behind the iron curtain, that they would have faith. "They may lack many things," he said, "but one thing they do not lack is faith. Their faith is far stronger than that of most of the Western Christians I have met."

Night of the living dead

With Vladimir Putin apparently being cast in the role of an evil vampire by so many, I thought that this was a good and succinct explanation:

Notes from a Common-place Book: "Vladimir Putin. His only crime, that I can see, is putting his own country's interests ahead of the Bush administration, and of course, being right about so many things he warned against in the lead-up to our invasion of Iraq."

Al-Jazeera TV news network

My wife was feeling ill and stayed home from work today. She was channel hopping on the TV, and came across the Al Jazeera TV news network, and was quite impressed, and called me to have a look.

I don't watch much TV, but the programme I saw was quite impressively presented. It was about Russian journalists by didn't follow the Putin line on Chechnya being assassinated. And I found it interesting that in showing the funeral of one of them, the camera lingered on the priest, and on the cross on a nearby grave. It impressed me, because Western secular journalism tends to ignore such religious symbolism, unless, of course, it is the domes of St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, but for the average Westerner that is as much a symbol of communism as of Christianity.

In establishing shots, too, they showed street scenes as seen by the average Russian, with trams and trolleybuses, rather than shots of the Kremlin.

It may be misleading, of course, that was just one programme, but I found the different approach was quite striking. I think I'll be watching it some more.

Christian martyrs of the 20th century

There were probably more Christian martyrs during the 20th century than in all the previous centuries in which there were Christians in the world. In terms of the numbers killed, the persecutions of Decius and Diocletian were minor and shortlived.

Some years ago I visited the St Tikhon's Institute in Moscow and saw how they were collecting in a database information about all those who had been killed because of their Christian faith during the Bolshevik period. The process is quite a lot further advanced than it was then, and the database has been used to add martyrs to the calendar of the church.

The article The blood of martyrs is the life-giving seed of Christianity! gives information about the progress of the project. So far 1596 new martyrs have been canonised, but there are many more whose details are being recorded. Professor Nikolai Evgenievich Emelianov gives details of the project:

the database of Saint Tikhon’s Theological University collects information about ALL sufferers for Christ, including the ones who are not proposed for canonization. In short, one can say that it is a database or repressions against the Russian Orthodox Church in the 20th century. A monograph with more than 4000 biographical entries has been published on the basis of the database. As of January 1st 2007, there are 29 000 biographies on the University website.

One of the strange things I have noticed, in the light of this, is that I frequently see statements to the effect that "religion is the greatest cause of human suffering". If that were true, then one expect there to be far less of such suffering when the irreligious are in power. But instead, the record shows that when the irreligious are in power there is, if anything, more such suffering, and certainly not less. Atheists seem to be just as capable of cruelty as anyone else, and so the rather smug assertion that "religion is the greatest cause of human suffering" is not only untrue, but a dangerous delusion. I mention this because this delusion seems to be gaining ground in our day.

This is not to say that religious people are not also capable of great cruelty; events like the genocide in Rwanda show this clearly. But the notion that atheists are somehow exempt from this kind of behaviour needs to be shown to be false.

Fr Alexander Schmemann in Russia

Father Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) was probably the most influential Orthodox theologian in the English-speaking world, at least in the 20th century. His writings certainly changed my life, and probably many others.

What is less known, in the English-speaking world, is how influential his writings were in Russia, and Bishop Seraphim Sigrist has shared in his LiveJournal a review of Father Schmemann's journals by Gregory Yavlinsky.

Father Alexander Schmemann has never been to Russia but his presence was felt during the most important moments of our life. By the end of the Eighties many people, among whom were my friends, began to seek a way to faith. Temples were opened, thousands were baptized. There was enthusiastic talk about Russia’s religious revival. This quest was perhaps, truly strong and pure, in many respects an intuitive internal movement toward truth by people which felt it impossible after so many years to remain under a bushel of lies. This thirst for the truth spilled over into the country’s political life briefly perhaps, with a powerful moral momentum.

Today it is difficult to imagine how scarce such books were and how difficult they were to come by and with what passion they were read! For many, Christianity had its beginning with the words of Father Alexander. His books were passed from hand to hand, they were discussed, and when priests saw a serious interest towards faith they advised: “read Father Alexander Schmemann’s books.”

Today such a source as Father Alexander is simply indispensable. Father Alexander’s “Diaries”, published by “Russkiy Put’”, are his most timely words for today. These words are not addressed to servants but to friends (Jn 15:15). Today people who, ten or fifteen years ago, felt that they were coming to Christ find themselves inside a complicated structure of Church life. Many things there are not customary for them nor are they understandable. They may be confusing and lead them to a search for answers and they, more than anyone else, are in need of pastoral counsel to explain what is what, to clarify doubts, strengthen their faith, establish a line between the search for Christ and those manifestations of Church life which can not only disturb but even destroy the beginnings of faith.

I first read Father Alexander Schmemann's The world as sacament at a time when Western theology was split into warring factions of pietists and secularists (today often called "conservatives" and "liberals"), neither of which appealed to me very much. But if one did not fully support one side, one was immediately taken by its champions to be a supporter of the other, and therefore the Enemy. There was no middle ground. Reading Fr Alexander's book was like a breath of fresh air: this is what I've been trying to say!

I've continued to read that book, and to recommend it to friends. It is now published as For the life of the world, with two extra chapters. And his Journals, too, make very good reading.

But it was something of a surprise to find that he had been equally influential in Russia, where very different conditions prevailed. That makes his writing more universal, and more universally significant.