| The struggle initially played out between opposing Ukrainian political factions: one that advocated signing an association agreement with the EU and another that favored joining the customs union formed by Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia. The West’s continued advance is tearing apart the countries on Russia’s borders. Western leaders have consistently viewed such Russian-led efforts at regional integration as hostile moves aimed at resurrecting the Soviet Union and creating an alternative to the Western system. Most officials in the United States and Europe thought that bringing Ukraine into alignment with the EU would deliver a heavy blow to those plans, which explains why they interpreted Yanukovych’s decision to temporarily postpone the signing of the EU agreement as a Russian victory that called for a counterattack. Yet Western leaders are woefully misinformed about the idea of Eurasian integration. Neither Russia nor any of the states seeking to join a Eurasian system wants to restore the Soviet Union or openly confront the West. They do, however, believe that in a multipolar world, free nations have a right to create independent associations among themselves. In fact, the ruling elites of many former Soviet republics have long favored the idea of maintaining or re-creating some form of association among their states. In 1991, for example, they created the Commonwealth of Independent States. And of the 15 former Soviet republics, only a few of them, primarily the Baltic states, have used the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to permanently abandon all ties to the former union and join Western economic and political unions instead. The remaining countries struggled to arrive at a consensus on precisely what role the CIS should play. In some former Soviet republics, leaders have actively sought to create new forms of integration, such as the Eurasian Economic Community, whose members include Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan (Uzbekistan suspended its membership in 2008). |
| [xxiv] См.: Якунин В. Н. Русская Православная Церковь в годы Великой Отечественной войны 1941-1945 годов. С. 83. [xxv] Fletcher W.Religion and soviet foreign policy, 1945-1970. London, 1973; Его жe.Pormraim of the most praised and vilified of modern churchmen – Metropolitan Nikolai of the Russian Orthodox Church – and of the dilemma the faces as religions leader in a militantly secular soviety Nikolai. London, 1968; Lowrie D., Fletcher W.Khrushchev’s religious policy 1959-1964//Aspects of religion in the Soviet Union 1917-1967. Chicago, 1971. P. 131-155. [xxvi] Struve N.Op. cit.; Spinca M.The Church in Soviet Russia. New York, 1956; Kolarz W.Religion in the Soviet Union. London, 1961. [xxvii] Pospielovsky D.The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982. P. 425. [xxviii] Curtiss I. The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950. Boston, 1953; Grünwald С . The Churches and the Soviet Union. New York, 1962. [xxix] Поспеловский Д. В.Русская Православная Церковь в XX веке. С. 6. [xxx] Одинцов М. И. Государство и церковь в России. XX век. С. 106, 128-129. [xxxi] Алексеев В. А.Иллюзии и догмы. С. 332-346; Одинцов М. И.Путь длиною в семь десятилетий: от конфронтации к сотрудничеству. (государственно-церковные отношения в истории советского общества)//На пути к свободе совести. М., 1989. С. 57-62. [xxxii] Васильева О. Ю.Государство и деятельность Русской Православной Церкви в период Великой Отечественной войны. Дисс. ... канд. ист. наук. М., 1990; Ее же. Русская православная церковь в политике советского государства 1943-1948 гг. Дисс. ... докт. ист. наук. Москва, 1999; Ее же. Русская Православная Церковь в политике советского государства в 1943-1948 гг. М., 2001. [xxxiii] Васильева О. Ю.Русская Православная Церковь в 1927-43 годах//Вопросы истории. 1994. 4. С. 35-46; Васильева О. Ю., Кнышевский П. Н. " Тайная вечеря "http://Ленинградская панорама. 1991. 6. С. 10, 28-29, 7. С. 27-29; Васильева О. Ю.Ватикан в горниле войны//Наука и религия. 1995. 6. С. 14-16; Ее же. Кремль против Ватикана. Полковник Карпов под руководством генералиссимуса Сталина атакует папу римского//Новое время. 1993. 30. С. 38-40; Ее же. Русская Православная Церковь и Второй Ватиканский Собор. М., 2004. |
| The Russian Orthodox Synod Outside of Russia, the Karlovtsy Synod Abroad, presented the Moscow Patriarchate with its greatest opposition. As we have noted, this body united the Russian Orthodox jurisdictions in Europe, America, and the Far East in 1937. The concordat between the church in Russia and the Soviet government was not well received by most of the bishops of the Synod Abroad. Following the election of Patriarch Sergius 1943, the bishops of the Synod Abroad met in Vienna on 8–13 October 1943. Under the leadership of Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky), formerly of Kishinev, the eight bishops authored a resolution that denounced the election of the new patriarch and opposed the new relationship between the church and state in the Soviet Union. In a portion of their harshly worded statement, the bishops of the Synod Abroad said: The election of Metropolitan Sergius to the throne of Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia is an act that is not only uncanonical, not even religious, but rather political and elicited by the interests of the Soviet Communist party authorities and their leader-dictator, Stalin.... The election of a Patriarch and the convocation of the Synod is necessary to Stalin and his party as a means of political propaganda. The Patriarch is only a toy in his hands. 187 While many Russian Orthodox in Western Europe and America were less critical of the developments in the Soviet Union, the Synod Abroad clung to its official position even after the subsequent election of Patriarch Alexis in 1945. The Synod Abroad refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the official church in Russia and continued to view its bishops as «pseudobishops» who were the instruments of the Communist government. Some of the members of the Synod Abroad also looked upon the Hitler regime quite differently than did the Russians in the Soviet Union. Many Russian exiles looked to German National Socialism as an adversary to Soviet Communism. In 1938, for example, Metropolitan Anastasy of the Synod Abroad wrote a letter to Adolph Hitler to thank him for assistance given for the construction of the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Berlin. A portion of the letter states: |
| The inspirer and creator of the Committee was the president of “Random House” publishing company Robert L. Bernstein, a businessman with liberal views, who had established the Fund for Free Expression a year before. In their address to the Soviet authorities the members of the Committee claimed that A. Amalrik was convicted for “free expression of his ideas”. The authors of the address appealed to Soviet authorities “to rehabilitate him in his rights including the right of free self-expression and the right to travel abroad if he needs to” . The year after the Committee stuck up for a Soviet human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky, who was locked up in a strict regime concentration camp. Among rights and freedoms the members of the Committee defended they included the rights of prisoners to have defense, meetings, to receive and send mail and the right to obtain medical aid . It was new and significant that the Committee especially marked that V.K. Bukovsky had suffered for giving publicity and for giving the West “documentary evidences of human rights violations in the USSR” . In 1976 Robert Bernstein visited academician A.D. Sakharov and several other well-known human rights activists in Moscow. Hours of conversations with them gave Robert Bernstein the idea of founding an organization in the USA providing systematic aid for human rights activists in the Soviet Union . Indeed, two years after Helsinki Groups were founded in Moscow and later in other cities of the USSR. They inspected observation of Helsinki Agreement on human rights by Soviet authorities (third basket). In New York Robert Bernstein founded a human rights organization called US Helsinki Watch Committee. Its mission was to defend groups of human rights activists in the USSR and countries of Eastern Europe and to support their activity in giving publicity facts of human right violations in these countries. The main difference among US Helsinki Watch Committee and Soviet groups of human rights activists was that Armenian, Ukrainian, Estonian and Lithuanian Helsinki Groups were engaged in human rights activities only in their republics, Moscow group – not only in Russia but over the whole Soviet Union. US Helsinki Watch proclaimed that their mission was the “monitoring” of human rights in all states – members of Helsinki Agreement, in first place in the USSR and in states which were Warsaw Treaty Organization participants. |
| During this terrible period of manhunts by Soviet agents for displaced persons and non-returnees all across Western Europe, Metropolitan Anastassy, reasserting the necessity for the continued existence of independent ROCA, writes: «The bishops, the clergy and the laymen, subordinate to the jurisdiction of the Synod of Bishops Abroad, never broke canonical, prayer, or spiritual unity with their Mother Church.» The Sobor of Bishops in its message, writes to the Patriarch of Moscow: «We trust that…on the bones of martyrs a new free Russia will arise, strong in Orthodox truth and brotherly love…then all of her scattered sons, without any pressure or force, but freely and joyfully, will strive to return from all over into her maternal embrace. Recognizing our unbroken spiritual bonds with our homeland, we sincerely pray to the Lord that he may speedily heal the wounds inflicted upon our homeland by this heavy, although victorious, war, and bless it with peace and well-being.» This message was signed by Metropolitan Anastassy, three archbishops, and ten bishops. The Sixth Guidepost, and probably the most important one in our days, is the Corporate Charter in the USA of our Church Abroad, which was signed by its most prominent Hierarchs, Metropolitan Anastassy, Archbishop Vitaly (Maximenko), Archbishop Tikhon, Archbishop Hieronim, Bishop Seraphim, and Bishop Nikon, and registered in the State of New York on April 30th, 1952. It states: «II. The principal aim and purpose of the corporation shall be to provide for the administration of dioceses, missions, monasteries, churches and parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church, which are located in the United States of America, the Dominion of Canada and other countries which are outside of the Soviet Union and the satellites of the Soviet Union, but including dioceses, missions, monasteries and churches which recognise the corporation as the supreme ecclesiastical authority over them. «III. The corporation in its corporate functions and operation, and all of its trustees and officers, shall maintain no relations whatever with the Russian ecclesiastical authorities and organizations within the boundaries of the Soviet Union and the satellites of the Soviet Union, so long as the said countries, or any of them, shall be subject to Communist rule.» Further on, the next paragraph of the Charter refers to Ukaz #362 of Patriarch Tikhon of November 20, 1920, and its acceptance by the Sobor of Bishops on November 24, 1936. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Moldova, Orthodoxy in SCOTT M. KENWORTHY The Orthodox Church in the post-Soviet Republic of Moldova is divided between two parallel jurisdictions belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow patriarchate) and the Romanian Orthodox Church. According to a 1989 census, 98.5 percent of Moldova’s 4.3 million citizens are nominal Orthodox Christians, though ethnically divided between Romanians (65 percent), Ukrainians (14 percent), Russians (13 percent), Gagauz, and Bulgarians. The territory of the Republic of Moldova historically formed the eastern part of the medieval principality of Moldavia which had its own metropolitanate under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople. In 1812 the Russian Empire took control over the eastern part of Moldavia between the Prut and Dnestr rivers, which came to be known as Bessarabia. In 1813 the Russian Orthodox Church established the diocese of Chisinau. The Russian state and church carried out a policy of Russification that included the imposition of Church Slavonic instead of Romanian as the liturgical language. With the collapse of the Russian Empire, Bessarabia voted in favor of unification with Romania in 1918. The diocese was then incorporated into the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1919. The diocese was raised to the status of a metropolitanate in 1928. The Romanian church and state conducted a counter-campaign of Romanianization in the interwar period, forcing Bessarabians to accept the Latin alphabet, the Gregorian calendar, and Romanian language for education and liturgy. In 1939 the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia and formed the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Russian Orthodox Church established an archdiocese of Chisinau and Moldova. Soviet authorities restricted religious life in Moldova as elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The Republic of Moldova declared its independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. The Moscow patriarchate continues to claim jurisdiction over the church in Moldova (with over 1,000 parishes), to which it granted autonomy and appointed an ethnic Romanian hierarchy, headed by Metropolitan Vladimir Cantarean. In 1992 the Romanian Orthodox Church established a jurisdiction known as the Bessarabian metropolitanate (with some 120 parishes). The Bessarabian metropolitanate justifies its existence not on territorial grounds, but by arguing that different ethnic groups have the right to separate (if parallel) church structures. Under pressure from Russia and the Russian Church, the Moldovan government refused to recognize or register the |
| Human Rights Watch as a Political Instrument of Liberal Cosmopolitan Elite of the United States of America Part Two “I feel that I’m here as a friend among friends… I know very well what you did for us, and perhaps without you, our revolution could not be” Vaclav Havel THE SAME ARE PURPOSES, BUT METHODS… By this act Soviet leaders legalized transformation of the problem of human rights observation from internal into intergovernmental. Accordingly, the status of critics of human rights violations in the USSR was principally changed, so far as these violations became not only a matter of domestic concern; criticizing such violations in the Soviet Union by western human rights activists became valid. And what is more, this criticism could not be formally considered hostile propaganda, as far as it had no concern with the defense of US national interests (or “American imperialists’ interests”) but it became subject of international law recognized by legitimate Soviet leaders who signed this Agreement. Both western and Soviet human rights activists appeared before the general (especially leftist) public as defenders of universal human rights, not interests of the ruling elite of the US. Since James Carter who proclaimed defense of human rights the central element of his foreign policy became the President of the United States, informational and ideological pressure on Soviet leaders had increased. The problem of human rights was no more a concern of “world human rights defenders” but was added to US governmental armory. This doesn’t mean that in 1970s US Helsinki Watch and Lawyers for Human Rights on the one hand, American governmental or semi-governmental organizations such as CIA, Rand Corp., or Council for Foreign Relations which professionally specialized in sovetology on the other hand arranged joint propagandist actions. Though Democratic (liberal) administration and liberal human rights activists had had similar (sometimes equal) concrete tasks - for example to create in the Soviet Union a necessary ideological base to change its political and economical structure – these groups understood the meaning of these changes differently. |
| 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 |
| 144 Aksenov-Meerson M. The influtner of the Orthodox Church on Russian Ethnic identity//Ethnic Russia in the USSR. The Dilemma of Dominance, Edited by Edward AUworth. Pergamon Press, 1980. P. 105–115. 145 Fletcher W. Religion and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1945–1970. London: Oxford University Press, 1973; Его же. Portrait of the Most Praised and Vilified of Modern Churchmen – Metropolitan Nikolai of the Russian Orthodox Church – and of the Dilemma the Faces as Religions Leader in a Militantly Secular Soviety Nikolai. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1968; Lowrie D., Fletcher W. Khrushchev " s Religious Policy 1959–1964//Aspects of Religion in the Soviet Union 1917–1967. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971. P. 131–155. 146 Struue N. Op. cit.; Spinca M. The Church in Soviet Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; Kolarz W. Religion in the Soviet Union. London: Macmillan, 1961. 148 Curtiss I. Op. cit.; Grunwald C. The Churches and the Soviet Union. New York: Macmillan, 1962. 150 Законодательство о религиозных культах (Сборник материалов и документов). Перепечатка с советского издания «Для служебного пользования». Нью-Йорк: Chalidze Publications, 1981 и др. 151 Правда о религии в России. М.: Московская Патриархия, 1942; Русская Православная Церковь и Великая Отечественная война. Сборник церковных документов. М.: Московская Патриархия, 1943; Патриарх Сергий и его духовное наследство. М.: Московская Патриархия, 1947. 152 Акты Святейшего Тихона, Патриарха Московского и всея России, позднейшие документы и переписка о каноническом преемстве Высшей Церковной власти 1917–1943. Сборник. Ч. 1, 2. М.: Свято-Тихоновский Богословский ин-т, 1994. 154 Дело патриарха Тихона/Публ. М. И. Одинцова//Отечественные архивы, 1993, 6. С. 46–71; Крестный путь патриарха Сергия: документы, письма, свидетельства современников (к 50-летию со дня кончины)/Публ. М. И. Одинцова//Отечественные архивы, 1994, 2. С. 44–80; Письма и диалоги времен «хрущевской оттепели» (Десять лет из жизни патриарха Алексия. 1955–1964 гг.)/Публ. М. И. Одинцова//Отечественные архивы, 1994, 5. С. 25–83; Пимен (Извеков) – последний «советский» патриарх/Публ. М. И. Одинцова//Отечественные архивы, 1995, 1. С. 27–66. |
| Archive Пн Archpriest Andrei Novikov: crocodile tears of Phanar hierarch 17 December 2020 year 09:40 On the 28 th of November 2020, at his Phanar residence in Istanbul, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople delivered a sermon marking the Holodomor Remembrance Day commemorated by the Ukrainian state. In his speech, Bartholomew voiced an extremely tendentious interpretation of the dreadful 1932–33 famine as “genocide” of the Ukrainian people, which is in line with the position of the biased Ukrainian nationalistic historians: “The goal of the Great Famine in Ukraine was to kill from seven to ten millions of the pious Ukrainians during the most horrible years of the Soviet regime, from 1932 to 1933… The Ukrainian term Holodomor refers to the man-made famine which was a part of the diabolic plan of the Stalinist system aimed at carrying out genocide of a particularly devout people in order to eradicate Christian faith and the Orthodox Church, while… the Ukrainian people had been blessed by an abundant harvest of grain and other crops. As human beings were starving, the Soviet regime was exporting their grain crops, creating an illusion that Ukraine was a prosperous country.” Of course, one would find it hard to disagree with the assertion that the 1932–33 famine was a part of the Stalinist system’s plan (yet, why just Stalinist – Bolshevist in general), that the blow fell on one of the most pious social stratum, peasantry, that the Soviet regime continued, in spite of the mass mortality from starvation among the population of its own country, to export grain crops, and that the regime liked creating abroad an illusion about itself. However, having told a part of the truth, Patriarch Bartholomew blends it with a fabrication. As is clearly evidenced by widely available facts, the famine of the early 1930s, man-made and instigated by the Soviet authorities, was aimed not against the ethnic group of Ukrainians or Ukraine as a national and territorial unit within the Soviet Union, but against the country’s peasantry as a whole, which the regime considered to be the backbone of the old Orthodox Russia and the major factor of opposition to the Marxist reforms. By continuing to export grain crops the theomachist rulers did not, certainly, mean to destroy the Ukrainian nationality; what they had in mind was profit in foreign currency, so precious to them. And, needless to say, the Soviet propaganda tried to create an illusion about the whole USSR thriving, not just Ukraine. It is easy to verify by examining articles published in the Soviet press or propaganda posters of the time. |
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