By Mark Tooley
Inhis widely analyzed March 18 speech to the Russian Parliament, Putin
cited the baptism of Vladimir the Great over 1000 years ago in Crimea as
the seminal event binding Ukraine and Russia. That baptism is
considered the birth of Russian Orthodoxy. Orthodox faith has been key
to Moscow’s historic self conceived role as defender of all Russians, of
Slavs, and of Orthodox, wherever they are.
Putin has formed a close association with Russian Orthodoxy, as
Russian rulers typically have across centuries. He is smart to do so, as
Russia has experienced somewhat of a spiritual revival. Although
regular church goers remain a small minority, strong majorities of
Russians now identify as Orthodox. Orthodoxy is widely and
understandably seen as the spiritual remedy to the cavernous spiritual
vacuum left by over 70 disastrous, often murderous years of Bolshevism.
Resurgent religious traditionalism has fueled Russia’s new law
against sexual orientation proselytism to minors and its new
anti-abortion law. Both laws also respond to Russia’s demographic
struggle with plunging birth rates and monstrously high abortion rates
that date to Soviet rule. Some American religious conservatives have
looked to Russian religious leaders as allies in international
cooperation on pro-family causes.
It remains to be seen whether geopolitical tensions over Putin’s
moves in Russia temper this alliance. A few liberal commentators have
predictably denounced it as toxic. A few conservative commentators have
cautioned against saber rattling against Russia, whose religious revival
they hope might counter Western secularism. A realistic perspective
should welcome Christian vitality in Russia while recognizing it won’t
necessarily mitigate and may in fact reinforce Russia as a strategic
competitor with the West. East-West rivalry predates Soviet Communism by
a millennium.
Historically Moscow politically and religiously has understood itself
as the “third Rome” and the natural successor to Constantinople as
protector of Orthodox civilization. The formal schism between Eastern
and Western churches a thousand years ago created an unhealed
civilizational divide. Western powers have periodically sought Russian
alliance against common foes. But just as often Western powers have
warred with or at least sought to contain Russia.
The “great game” of which Rudyard Kipling wrote described Britain’s
ongoing designs to keep Czarist Russia away from South Asia and warm
water ports. Britain’s one major hot war with Russia was ironically in
Crimea. In countering Russia, Britain sometimes sided with the Turks
against Slavic people’s struggling against Ottoman rule. Gladstone the
arch Anglican famously urged British help instead for East European
Christians resisting oppressive Muslim rule, while the arch realist
Disraeli shrewdly focused instead on British interests in containing
Russia.
Britain and France of course, 100 years ago this year, aligned with
Russia against Germany, Austria and the Ottomans. World War I, among
its other horrors, replaced Czarist Christian Russia with Bolshevik
atheism, mass murder and gulags. Excepting World War II, Russia and the
West were again adversaries for 70 years. The Yeltsin era after the
Soviet collapse briefly, perhaps superficially brought Russia into
political commonality with the West. Putin’s more assertive and
authoritarian understanding of Russian nationhood, which he sometimes
frosts with religious rhetoric, which might even be sincere, has once
again returned Russia into a strategic adversary for the West.
Among Putin’s political emoluments are renewed claims of Moscow as
protector for Russian, Slavic and Orthodox people wherever. Hence, Putin
sided with the Serbs over Kosovo, putatively with Syria’s Christians
and their purported Alawite protectors, with dissident regions in
Georgia and Ukraine. His self-identity as counterweight to the West also
has aligned him with Iran’s Shiite regime.
In his adopted role as Great Russian Nationalist Putin is not a
Stalin or a Hitler but a modern czar resuming old understandings and
habits. The “great game” of the 19th century has resumed, with no fewer
chess pieces on the board. This game seems archaic, and Secretary Kerry
has mocked Putin as a 19th Century figure retro in our own time.
The other once great imperial game players have long since dissolved
their empires and exchanged territorial acquisition for democratic
market economics. They have also subsumed themselves under the American
economic and military umbrella, a subordinate role that does not
interest Putin.
Putin’s church, in keeping with its history, is largely supportive of
his version of a revived Russia. The Patriarch in Moscow, unlike many
pseudo pacifist Western church prelates, does not recoil from blessing
even Russia’s nuclear arsenal as instrumental to his nation’s security.
Such nationalist loyalties by a bishop seem retrograde and even scary to
many Western elites, who dream of a post nation state world.
One shrill liberal religion columnist has bewailed Russian religious
and nationalist revival as commensurate with America’s Tea Party, which
is the worst kind of insult for a leftist. Some religiously conservative
Americans are tempted to minimize Russian authoritarianism and
expansionism in homage to renewed Russian religiosity, in contrast with
the West’s accelerating Kulturkampf against traditional Christianity.
The challenge is to view an increasingly religious Russia on several
interlocking levels that range from ennobling to pernicious to banal.
Americans of all ideological stripes more typically prefer clear
villains and heroes. Churchill famously proposed that Russia is a
“riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a
key. That key is Russian national interest.”
Religious moralists, especially American, cringe from acknowledging
the intrinsic, pervasive nature of self interest much less national
interest. But they will need to try, as it relates to Russia, and to
America.
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