| The last Emperor: 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union July 16, 2013 Participants of meeting and public prayer commemorating murder of Tsar’s family in Kiev, 2002. Source: Alexander Polyakov/RIA Novosti Russia has been marking the 400 th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty , whose rule ended dramatically and tragically after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. How do modern Russians view the royal legacy and what are their perceptions of the last Tsar, Nicholas II ? Public attitudes towards him have undergone several shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago, with the most recent studies showing an increase in appreciation of the monarch. A survey of 1,600 Russians by Moscow’s Levada Center polling organization found that 48 percent viewed Nicholas II positively. He still trailed Soviet-era leader Leonid Brezhnev as Russia’s most popular 20 th Century head of state, and even marginally behind Lenin and Stalin, but polled far more highly than either Boris Yeltsin , independent Russia’s first president, or Mikhail Gorbachev , the last Soviet leader, who polled 22 percent and 21 percent respectively. Nicholas also had the lowest negative rating among those questioned. President Vladimir Putin recently asked Russian historians to develop a cohesive – or as he put it “consistent” – history of Russia for use in school textbooks. How Nicholas’s rule will be judged is not yet clear. Consequently, the 400th anniversary of the House of Romanov house is being celebrated quietly this year, without a major cultural or official program. At the same time, the Kremlin has opted for prominent commemorations of another jubilee, the approaching centenary of the beginning of World War I, since military issues and the “prowess of Russian weaponry” is easier to fit into the present ideological requirements. Russia has yet to reconcile fully with its past and its history is not so much a “home” as a “battlefield”. Perceptions of the last Tsar already look different when compared with a survey in 1994 that asked which past leader could be regarded as a true Russian patriot. Only 5 percent of respondents chose Nicholas II, who did not even make the top ten. |
| Thomas E. FitzGerald 9. AN ERA OF TRANSITIONS The year 1970 marked the beginning of two major controversies that profoundly affected the development of the Orthodox Church in the United States and marked a transition to a new stage of growth. The Russian Orthodox Metropolia was granted autocephalous status by the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1970. This meant that the Metropolia, from then on, known as the Orthodox Church in America, had been given recognition to be a fully independent, self-governing local church. This dramatic decision, however, was not recognized by all. During the same period, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese became embroiled in discussions over greater use of vernacular languages in worship. While both issues created much discord lasting well over a decade, they were expressions of deeper concerns over the permanent witness and mission of Orthodox Christianity in the United States. THE AUTOCEPHALY QUESTION The position and status of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia were dramatically altered by the political and ecclesiastical developments in the Soviet Union, especially after the death of Patriarch Tikhon in 1925. The October revolution of 1917 not only affected the relationship between church and state in the Soviet Union but also dealt a profound blow to the Russian Orthodox communities in the United States and Western Europe. The loss of financial support, combined with crisis in leadership and schisms, shook the Russian Orthodox Church in America throughout the 1920s. Under the leadership of Metropolitan Platon (Rozdestvensky), the Metropolia in 1924 declared itself to be «temporally autonomous» from its mother church, the Patriarchate of Moscow. This action was taken chiefly because many in America felt that communication with the official church in the Soviet Union was unreliable. Moreover, by 1933, the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia were refusing to give any pledge of loyalty to the government in the Soviet Union. 272 When attempts to reconcile the Metropolia to its mother church failed, the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow, led by the acting locum tenens of the Patriarchate, Metropolitan Sergius, declared on January 5, 1935, that the Metropolia was schismatic. Despite this bold action, the majority of the clergy and laity of the Metropolia " s approximately 250 parishes remained faithful to the leadership of Metropolitan Platon. 273 |
| Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich dies at 80 Russians on Saturday paid tribute to Mstislav Rostropovich, the legendary Russian cellist and dissident, at a lying in state in Moscow " s musical conservatory. 28 April 2007 MOSCOW (AFP) – Russians on Saturday paid tribute to Mstislav Rostropovich, the legendary Russian cellist and dissident, at a lying in state in Moscow’s musical conservatory. A series of Moscow symphonic orchestras played musical tributes as hundreds of people, many of them young musicians, laid flowers by the open coffin of Rostropovich, who died on Friday, aged 80. His widow, celebrated opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, sat by the coffin with her head bowed, surrounded by relatives and friends of the cellist, including from his native city of Baku in Azerbaijan. “He was one of the greatest figures in modern arts…. It’s empty without him, a whole era has gone,” said Ilya Kononov, 19, a cello student at the conservatory, after paying his respects. It was from the same Moscow conservatory stage that Rostropovich bade farewell to Russia in 1974 when he was forced to flee to the United States by Soviet authorities. In 1970 the cellist wrote an open letter to the newspaper Pravda defending dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had become the target of official abuse after receiving the Nobel Prize for literature. The letter earned him abuse and pressure from Soviet authorities. He made a dramatic return to Russia in 1991 to support the country’s first president Boris Yeltsin in defying a Soviet military coup — just months before the final fall of the Soviet Union. Rostropovich was hospitalised in February for an operation on a liver tumour and appeared tired in television footage of his grandiose 80th birthday celebrations in Moscow. His funeral service will be held on Sunday in the country’s largest cathedral, Christ the Saviour, which only earlier this week staged a grandiose ceremony for the late Yeltsin. The current edifice, a replica of the original destroyed in Soviet times, was erected in the 1990s with funds that Rostropovich helped raise. |
| Accept The site uses cookies to help show you the most up-to-date information. By continuing to use the site, you consent to the use of your Metadata and cookies. Cookie policy Patriarch Kirill meets with Primate of Malankara Church On September 3, 2019, His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, met with the Catholicos of the East and Metropolitan of Malankara, His Holiness Baselios Mar Thoma Paulose II, at the patriarchal and synodal residence in the St. Daniel Monastery in Moscow. Among those who accompanied the high guest were Metropolitan Zachariah Mar Nikolovos, head of the Malankara Church department for external church relations; Metropolitan Yuhanon Mar Diascoros, secretary of the Malankara Church Holy Synod; Rev. Abraham Thomas, secretary of the Malankara Church department for external church relations; and Rev. Aswin Zefrin Fernandis, head of the Malankara Catholicos’s protocol service; Rev. Jiss Jonson, personal secretary to His Holiness the Catholicos; Mr. Jacob Mathew, member of the Malankara Church Council; Mr. Kevin George Koshi, head of the communication service of the Malankara Church department for external church relations; and Dr Cherian Eapen, a representative of the Malankara diaspora in Russia. Taking part in the meeting from the Russian Orthodox Church were Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Moscow Patriarchate department for external church relations (DECR); Bishop Dionisy of Voskresensk, deputy chancellor of the Moscow Patriarchate; Archimandrite Philaret (Bulekov), DECR vice-chairman; Hieromonk Stephan Igumnov, DECR secretary for inter-Christian relations; and R. Akhtamkhanov, DECR secretariat for inter-Christian relations. Patriarch Kirill warmly welcome Catholicos Baselios Mar Thoma Paulose II, noting that His Holiness had already been in Moscow in 1988, when he was the youngest bishop of the Malankara Church. He came for the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus’. ‘That event was really a turning point in the life of our Church’, Patriarch Kirill said, ‘With that celebration the era of persecution and oppression by the Soviet power came to an end and new opportunities opened up for us to engage ourselves in the enlightenment of our people and to bear the message of Christ in the vast lands of the then Soviet Union’. The Russian Church has very much changed, in particular in that 30 thousand churches have been restored and built since that time. ‘That is to say, the restoration of church life took place in the territory of the then Soviet Union and was continued in such states as Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Azerbaijan, and the republics of Central Asia and the Baltics’. |
| More than 20,000 people were executed at the site in a little more than a year — an average of about 50 people per day. On May 10, the Russian Orthodox Church will hold its annual special service in the Church of New Martyrs and Confessors in Butovo, a little-known site that is home to Russia " s largest collection of holy relics. In the forest near old Butovo, about 5 kilometers south of the Moscow Ring Road, lies the largest burial place for victims of Stalin’s purges in the whole Moscow region, a site of mass executions. At the small plot of land known as the Butovsky Shooting Range or “Butovsky Poligon,” about 20,760 people were executed between August 1937 and October 1938. Among this were men and women, the old and the young, people from 70 different nationalities and many faiths and social classes. Seventy-seven years ago, in August 1937, the head of the NKVD ordered a high fence be erected around a remote five-hectare patch of oak forest glade. The construction was largely ignored by locals, who were told the site would be a shooting range, a rumor that frequent gunfire seemed to verify. More than 20,000 people were executed at the site in a little more than a year — an average of about 50 people per day. The diversity of those executed was stunning, including South African communists, Polish nationalists, Germans, Hindus, Chinese, Tatars and Jews. However, the site “specialized” in executions of Orthodox Christian clergy, targeted by the Soviet Union as supposedly counter-revolutionary elements in their atheist state. About 1,000 of the victims were clergy from the Russian Orthodox Church, and about 300 people from that number have since been beatified as saints. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church began commemorating the site, establishing a small wooden church on the site in 1996 and a larger church that has been active since 2007. Since the year 2000, the patriarch has led an annual service in the church of the martyrs to commemorate those killed in Butovo. |
| The question many people ask: How come hundreds of West Europeans came to fight for the self-proclaimed republics in Eastern Ukraine? In fact, the defense of Donbass became the first major volunteer war in Europe since the Spanish Civil War. Then the internationalist brigades (briogadistas) composed of the British, French and Polish leftists, coupled with military professionals from the Soviet Union, fought against the onslaught of the Nazi-supported Franco regime on the legitimate leftist government in Madrid. This time, however, the volunteers face the main problems at home: unlike the communists of the 1930s, they are often blacklisted or even arrested upon their return to the ‘zone of prosperity, democracy and rule of law’ in Spain or Germany. The usual explanation of the mainstream media: these people were just looking for danger. But is this argument valid? There were plenty of opportunities to tickle one's nerves for Europeans after the collapse of the Soviet Union: ethnic wars in Yugoslavia, the Caucuses and even the Middle East were for everyone to visit. So, why did the German or Spanish volunteers choose Donbass? Because it is the first ideological war, in which one can fight against the evil, which is untouchable in Western Europe: aggressive expansionism of the US, NATO and the EU. This can be made clear by an interview with Margarita Seidler – the only Western woman volunteer from Igor Strelkov's battalion. In Russia, Margarita Seidler has become known since the summer, when the Russian television aired her first interviews. This young German woman, a native of Lutherstadt-Wittenberg (a prosperous German city, the birth place of Martin Luther) was in the battalion of Igor Strelkov, the former defense minister of the Donetsk People's Republic. Together with her commanders, she defended the town of Slavyansk and took part in Strelkov's famous breakthrough from the encircled Slavyansk to Donetsk. At the time, in summer 2014, people all over the world saw her face on television screens: a tired frail woman in military fatigues, she told in a quiet voice (with only a slight German accent) about the suffering of the civilian population in Slavyansk and about the horrible scenes she was a witness to during the Maidan revolution in Kiev. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Georgia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of TAMARA GRDZELIDZE The Church of Georgia has historically existed on territory situated between modern Turkey in the West, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Southeast, and small Caucasian ethnic groups of the Russian Federation in the North. It is a church of a small nation and its land has long known hardship, yet also benefits from fellow Christians across its borders. Neighboring Byzantium once guaranteed its security, though not unconditionally nor unfailingly. Georgia was Byzantium’s old ally in consolidating Christian forces against Islam in the East, and at certain moments of history it served beneficially in Georgian ecclesiastical and political matters. Georgia’s relations with the Church of Armenia became problematic in the light of the theological tension in the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon (451), and in spite of a significant attempt to find a compromise solution at the Council of Dvin (506) a lasting ecclesiastical division resulted after 609. Georgia’s immediate neighbor, the Christian state of Russia, actively began seeking influence over the Caucasus after the fall of Constantinople (1453) and spread out powerfully, resulting in the gradual annexation of the Georgian kingdoms after 1801, and in the abolition of the longstanding autocephaly of the Church of Georgia in 1811. In 1921 Georgia was made one of the republics of the Soviet Union and the Orthodox Church of Georgia exercised a form of quasi-independence visa-vis other Orthodox churches, as well as within the ecumenical movement, but it was also seriously challenged and threatened by the Soviet ideology and anti-church repressions. It has been exercising its independence once more since 1991. LANGUAGE AND ALPHABET The 5th-century Georgian language (Kartuli) preserved in the oldest manuscripts is not entirely alien to contemporary Georgians. Together with Megrelian, Svan, and Laz, it forms part of the Kartvelian group of southern Caucasian languages. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Russia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of KONSTANTIN GAVRILKIN The Russian Orthodox Church (hereafter, ROC), also known as the Moscow patriarchate, is ranked fifth in the listing of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches (after Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem). The largest multinational church in the world, it has jurisdiction over most of the Orthodox parishes in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other territories of the former Soviet Union (except for Georgia, which has its own autocephalous church), as well as a number of parishes in various regions of the world, organized in dioceses or under the direct authority of the patriarch of Moscow. There are also a number of ecclesiastical entities that emerged after the breakdown of the ROC caused by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and incessant persecution of the church by the Soviet government (Tsypin 2006). Some were part of the massive Russian diaspora, others emerged from the Catacomb movement (Beglov 2008). An outline of the history of the ROC helps to understand the difficulties ncountered when dealing with the complex phenomenon of Russian Orthodoxy. EVAN RUS LATE 9TH-EARLY 13TH CENTURIES In 988, Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kiev (980–1015), ordered the inhabitants of the capital to be baptized in the Dnieper river, following his own baptism in Chersonesus earlier that year. There were, however, Christians in Kiev already by the mid-10th century, and their numbers grew after the conversion of Vladimir’s grandmother Olga, who ruled in Kiev from 945 to 963 and was baptized in Constantinople in 954 (Golubinskii 1901). The missionary work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, and especially their disciples in Bulgaria, who translated the basic corpus of Christian texts, including the liturgy, into Slavonic in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, were factors that eased the Christianization of the region. The mission was sponsored by the patriarchate of Constantinople, which exercised control over the ecclesiastical life of Ancient Rus and appointed all the Metropolitans “of Kiev and All Rus” until the mid-15th century (on the profound Byzantine legacy in Ancient Rus, see Thomson 1999). |
| Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one of the best-known Soviet dissidents, so much so that he earned the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. His Gulag Archipelago , written in the 1950s-60s, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich from 1962—both about the Stalin-era labor-camp system—are his most famous works outside of Russia. Yet after the collapse of the USSR, it became increasingly clear that much of his foreign support was not inspired by the Western ideal of ‘human rights’ or concern for average Russians, but served as a tool of geopolitics instead. His statements about resurgent Russia, particularly in the last years before his death in 2008–well into the era of Putin’s leadership–did not suit those that would rather have the country in the permanently weak state of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ of the 1990s, so that its resources could continue being plundered by domestic oligarchs and foreigners alike, while its culture–transformed into the soft authoritarianism of neo-Liberal Postmodernity. In contrast, one of the most attractive aspects of Putin’s Russia for Solzhenitsyn was the revival that Orthodox Christianity continues to experience. In the eyes of Western mainstream opinion-makers—that is, in the Anglosphere, specifically—at best, Solzhenitsyn’s support for Putin made him a “puzzle.” At worst, his patriotism, referred to as “nationalism” with a derogatory connotation, is said to be “off-putting,” “bizarre,” and an “irony.” Newsweek even presented a ‘psychological evaluation’ of Solzhenitsyn, concluding that he suffers from the “Gulag of the Russian mind.” Indeed, it has become increasingly difficult to use his scathing criticism of certain Soviet policies in light of his advocacy for Russia’s own organic path that includes a set of geopolitical interests. The latter was dubbed as anti-Western. The final straw seems to have arrived following Ukraine’s coup d’état in 2014 that was backed by Washington and Brussels, when several Russian-language publications decided to revisit Solzhenitsyn’s statements about the two neighboring countries made throughout his life. A number of his comments has been translated into English, and are well worth examining. Solzhenitsyn felt greatly attached to this subject because “Ukraine and Russia are merged in my blood,” he wrote. I provide another translation of excerpts from a book called Russia in Collapse ( Rossiia v obvale , 1998) below. Unsurprisingly, Western officialdom found his goal of returning to a historic union of Russia and Ukraine highly problematic. Others simply criticized his statements for being uninformed, suggesting that writers should stay away from international relations. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Old Believers IRINA PAERT Old Believers (starovery), also known as staroobriadtsy (“old ritualists”), is a generic term for the religious dissidents who split from the Russian Orthodox Church in and after the second half of the 17th century. Church reforms carried out in the 1660s under the leadership of Patriarch Nikon created a formal reason for the dissent. The changes introduced by the reformers in accordance with the contemporary Greek practice (concerning primarily language and ritual forms) alienated a large number of Russian Orthodox who adhered to the traditional Russian ritual practice, including baptism by immersion, the sign of the cross made by two fingers (rather than three), the spelling of the name of Jesus with one “I” (Isus) rather than two, double rather than triple Alleluias, the clockwise (rather than anticlockwise) order of liturgical processions in church, the use of seven rather than five prosphoras for the Eucharist, to name just a few. Moreover, the violent state-advocated methods that characterized the reformist behavior stimulated intense apocalyptic sentiment. Mass self-immolations took place among dissenters and continued until religious toleration was declared in the 1760s. The important centers of Old Believers in Tsarist Russia were in the northern Trans-Volga regions, the border between Russia and the Polish Commonwealth, the Baltic provinces, Bessarabia, Moscow, the Urals, and Siberia. According to official data, 190,944 men and women registered as Old Believers under Tsar Peter I. However, the numerical strength of the Old Believers could not be determined precisely as many of them also formally belonged to the Orthodox Church. In 1912 there were 1,807,056 Old Believers, which made less than 2.5 percent of the population in the Russian Empire. Their geographical distribution was very uneven: while some regions had a high proportion, others had a more or less homogenous Orthodox population. However, the strength of the Old Believers lay not in their numbers but rather in their literacy, their economic power, and strong communal identity. With the exception of the period of enlightened toleration between 1763 and 1814, the Imperial government did not recognize the legal rights of the Old Believers and tried to assimilate them into the Orthodox population. It was only in 1905 that they received equal legal rights with the members of the Orthodox Church. In the Soviet Union the number of Old |
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