12 December 2016
Russia's Communist Party turns to the Orthodox Church
After decades of militant atheism, Russian Communists turn to religious establishment to gain supporters.
Communist supporters carry Lenin's portrait in a rally marking the anniversary of
the 1917 Bolshevik revolution [Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters]
Mansur Mirovalev is a Moscow-based writer and video journalist who covers wars and peace in the former Soviet
Union.
Moscow, Russia -
Jesus Christ was the world's first Communist, Tamara Lavrischeva announced cheerfully.
"Jesus
said, 'Don't collect earthly wealth, you won't take it with you after
death,'" the 78-year-old pensioner
and Orthodox Christian told Al Jazeera as she trudged through the
snow-covered streets of central Moscow with thousands of other
Communists during the November 7 rally that commemorated the
almost-centennial anniversary of the
1917 Bolshevik revolution.
"And Communists thought the same," she added, her voice drowned by the crowd chanting Soviet-era songs under
red banners with hammers and sickles and portraits of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.
|
It is a holy duty of Communists and the Orthodox Church to unite
Gennady Zuyganov, chairman, Russia's Communist Party
|
With a dismissive shrug and a condescending smile, Lavrischeva rejected the killings, imprisonment and persecution
of millions of Orthodox Christian clerics and believers at the hand of Communists.
What
she said was not just an opinion of an elderly woman who wants to
reconcile her faith with the ideals
of her youth in the officially atheist USSR. Her selective amnesia about
the persecution of believers - well-documented and brandished by Soviet
authorities - reflects a seemingly paradoxical trend in the recent
policies of
Russia's
Communist Party.
"It
is a holy duty of Communists and the Orthodox Church to unite,"
Zuyganov wrote in 2012 in his party's
first lengthy document on religion, because both institutions shared
"common goals and enemies". The goals included censorship of "debauchery
and violence" in mass media, eradication of Western liberalism and "its
conception of human rights", e-government
and sexual education in schools.
A populist move
Russia's
Orthodox Church considers
two-thirds of the nation's population of 143 million as its flock. Even
though most of them are only nominally religious, as
polls show, they still form a demographic group no political force can
ignore - even if it is the biggest rival of United Russia, the ruling
Kremlin behemoth.
The
Communist Party easily fields tens of thousands of supporters for
rallies. Zyuganov has run for president
four times, always coming second, and the party he has headed since 1993
holds almost a tenth of seats in the State Duma, Russia's lower house
of parliament,
forming its second-largest fraction.
But in reality, the Communist Party is a colossus on feet of clay.
Its
support has been waning for years; its loyalists are simply dying out.
The age of an average party member
is 56, and the number of members has fallen to about 155,000 - a trivial
number in comparison with the 19.5 million Soviet Communists in 1989.
The speeches of Zyuganov - balding, pudgy and famously uncharismatic -
hardly attract millennials or middle-class
urbanites, the main antagonists of the Kremlin.
The Communist Party needed to widen its ranks - and secure the support of its core base.
It has
whitewashed the image of Stalin,
whose name
the Politburo condemned and made taboo in 1956. It boosted its online
presence and recruited a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a cosmonaut and a
retired admiral to top its federal ticket
at the September parliamentary election.
And it turned to religion - something sociologists call a populist move.
"The most devout churchgoers are mostly elderly women, pensioners, in a certain sense the CP's electoral
base," Denis Volkov of the Levada Centre, Russia's last independent pollster, told Al Jazeera.
A symbiosis after persecution
The Church's response to the party's overtures has been polite and positive.
"All
political forces should be together when it comes to the values of
faith, morals, culture and our nation's
unity," Russian Patriarch Kirill was quoted by the Interfax news agency
as saying in 2014 when he handed Zyuganov a medal of Glory and Honour,
his Church's top award, on his 70th birthday.
In February, Zyuganov congratulated Kirill on the five-year anniversary of his enthronement. "One of the
most serious mistakes of my predecessors was that they fell out with the Church," he told the patriarch.
But, it wasn't just a matter of falling out.
Each Soviet leader before Mikhail Gorbachev sought to root out religion - be it Abrahamic faiths, Buddhism,
Siberian shamanism
or endemic
pagan cults. Sacred texts and relics were destroyed, religious buildings
blown up, desecrated and converted to stables, schools or storehouses.
Lenin
laconically set the number of Orthodox priests to be executed: "The
more, the better." The Politburo
supported the policy of "militant atheism" that replaced religion with a
rigid ideology that prophesied the worldwide triumph of Communism, and
developed an elaborate cult of Lenin and lesser Communist "saints" and
"martyrs".
This ideology was imposed through a propaganda machine designed to regulate all walks of Soviet life and
indoctrinate children since pre-school. One of the first Soviet youth organisations was called "Little Red Devils".
Although religion was not banned outright, authorities tried to control religious institutions by enlisting
some clerics as KGB agents.
In the early 1990s, a parliamentary commission led by politician and Orthodox priest Gleb Yakunin published
KGB documents purportedly proving that top Orthodox hierarchs, including future Patriarch Kirill, were KBG
informers.
The Orthodox Church denied the claims and defrocked and excommunicated Yakunin. The frail priest joined a
splinter Orthodox sect and was severely beaten several times by unknown assailants.
Ideological shift
But these days, Communists even blame their own godlessness on the USSR's collapse.
"Atheism destroyed the Soviet Union," Vadim Potomsky, a Communist governor of the western Oryol region, reportedly
said in mid-July.
Zyuganov also occasionally mentions Islam and Buddhism, whose adherents form sizeable minorities in Russia.
"If
Jesus Christ, Muhammad and Buddha had not been prophets, they would
have been 100 percent Communists,"
Zuyganov told the Kommersant daily in December 2015. The U-turn towards
religion also reflects a tectonic transformation in the Communist
Party's ideology.
Zyuganov still pledges to nationalise Russia's oil and gas industry, restore a socialist welfare state, and
stand up to the "rotting Western capitalism".
But, instead of messianic strife for a worldwide "proletarian unity", today's Communist Party endorses nationalism
and exploits a widespread nostalgia for the Soviet past.
It is "a party of imperialistic nostalgia and Russian nationalism, and there's no imperialism or nationalism
without Russian Orthodoxy," Andrei Kolesnikov of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, a think-tank, told Al Jazeera.
Another
thing that undermines the party's popularity is its conformism.
Splinter Communist groups and critics
accuse Zyuganov of becoming part of the "systemic opposition", a term
used to describe three parties nominally opposed to United Russia.
These
parties have Duma seats, vocally criticise the Kremlin - and quietly
vote in most of the bills. For
years, the Communist Party has backed some of Kremlin's most
controversial initiatives - Crimea's annexation, air strikes in Syria
and unpopular domestic reforms such as dramatic cuts in welfare
payments.
Source: Al Jazeera News
No comments:
Post a Comment
Guest comments MAYBE can be made by email.
joannahigginbotham@runbox.com
Anonymous comments will not be published. Daniel will not see unpublished comments. If you have a message for him, you need to contact him directly.
oregdan@hotmail.com