In August last year I delivered a sermon on the protest in Russia of a group called Pussy Riot. Subsequently two of the protesters (Maria and Nadya) are serving jail terms. Recently I heard from one of their supporters who is in contact with them. The women remain strong in their faith and beliefs. The following The Times article, 10/10/2012, by Canon Michael Bourdeaux of the Keston Institute, Oxford, provides helpful background on the protest. Let’s continue to pray for Maria and Nadya. Glynn The Pussy Riot protests in Moscow refer back 85 years, to 1927. The young women appear to many in Russia – and to some worldwide – to be a hot-blooded, irresponsible group of trouble-makers. A deeper look at the issues behind the “outrage” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on 21 February and the subsequent sentence to two years imprisonment uncovers more disturbing issues. On 29 June 1927 Metropolitan Sergi, head of what was left of the Church’s administration after a decade of persecution, caved in under torture from Stalin’s henchmen, pledging unqualified loyalty to an atheist regime: “Let us publicly express our gratitude to the Soviet Government for the interest it is showing in all the religious needs of the Orthodox… We want to be Orthodox and at the same time to recognise the Soviet Union as our fatherland, whose joys and successes are our joys and successes and whose setbacks are our setbacks.” Sergi’s reward for his desperate effort to save the Church was fifteen years of even more violent persecution, during which the scattered remnants of organised religion virtually disappeared underground. However, there was opposition to Sergi’s compromise. It came from the heart of the gulag, the Solovki Monastery, the Arctic island prison. The bishops immured there ensured their martyrdom by writing a letter, smuggled out, in which they opposed Sergi’s compromise. This has remained the paradigm for church-state relations ever since. Though free to do so for the last 20 years, the Moscow Patriarchate has not renounced this pledge of absolute loyalty to the State, nor even reviewed its compromise with communism over the next six decades. As well-educated, articulate and serious-minded young people, the Pussy Rioters were aware of this. The focus of their protest was what they see as the illegitimate symbiosis of Church and State in the Russia of 2012. Patriarch Kirill openly called on believers to vote for Vladimir Putin in the recent elections. Many viewed this as a serious mistake by such an experienced diplomat and opposition was bound to surface. The protesters are far from being alone, although it is their demonstration which took the world’s media by storm. What else links 1927 and 2012? Almost consistently after the Second World War, when the Church enjoyed a hard-earned, but only temporary, respite from persecution, the Moscow Patriarchate, established and controlled by Stalin, has gone one step beyond the call of duty in supporting state policies. In 1946 the Soviets eliminated the Ukrainian Catholic Church at gunpoint: the Russian Orthodox Church gained many church buildings and has consistently justified its complicity in this action, even opposing the re-legalisation of the Ukrainian Church under Gorbachev. When Frs Nikolai Eshliman and Gleb Yakunin wrote open letters in 1965 condemning the renewed persecution of the Church under Nikita Khrushchev, it was the Patriarch himself, Alexi I, doubtless under pressure from the atheist authorities, who banned them from office for ten years and, in effect, terminated their priesthood. When the Brezhnev regime expelled Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union in 1974, the Moscow Patriarchate joined in the chorus of condemnation against the Nobel-Prize-winning author. Even since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the stance of the Moscow Patriarchate has not changed. During the Chechen wars in the North Caucasus, bishops blessed the troops whose task was to flatten the city of Grozny and to eliminate all opposition to Moscow’s continuing rule in the area. Today the Church routinely blesses nuclear installations. The Solovki martyrs would not have understood the methods, but they would have applauded the motives, of the Pussy Rioters. The Patriarch and his spokesmen, by contrast, not to mention President Putin and his officials, justify the punishment of the young women by referring back to the decades of persecution, implying that the Church now deserves special state protection to compensate for the ills of the past. Thus the Church now justifies the use of state power to punish its critics. However, no amount of compensation can ever make up for the endless suffering and martyrdom extending over seven decades. The predecessor of the cathedral where the Pussy Riot demonstration took place was brutally blown up by Stalin in 1931. However, its rebuilding in the 1990s was controversial, because many viewed it as a grandiose over-statement of the new power of the Church, the immense costs being raised by Mayor Yuri Luzhkov as a kind of tax on the Moscow business community. It is therefore not correct to state, as has been done, that the money was raised by collecting kopecks from the poor faithful. Those who testified against the women in court were church officials, not typical babushki. From their prison conditions, movingly described as “brutal” by Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s husband in a BBC broadcast on 1 October, the women have asserted their Christian faith and repeatedly apologised for the offence they have caused. This made no difference. On 10 October the appeal court upheld the sentence on of two of the prisoners. despite their impassioned statement that this was a “political protest, not motivated by religious hatred”. The court upheld the defence of the third, Yekaterina Samutsevich, that she had been prevented from demonstrating by security guards, and and she was released. No one from the Patriarchate accepted the earlier apology and called for an end to this fiasco – for fiasco it is. Patriarch Kirill’s office is impervious to the fact that the Church has lost face worldwide by its reaction to an episode which would have been long ago forgotten if the protest had been ignored. Perhaps, after all, Pussy Riot has exposed the “simfonia” between Patriarch Kirill’s Church and President Putin’s State more starkly to the world at large than even they could have hoped, while the Internet generates more words and images every day.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:20:29 +0000
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