Dr. Leonid Stonov
Director of UCSJ's Bureaus on Human Rights and Rule of Law in the former Soviet Union

Severely persecuted under the Soviet regime, the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate (ROC)¹ has since the fall of the Soviet Union become an increasingly influential voice in Russian politics and culture. Like many other post-Soviet institutions, the ROC is in the midst of a long and often ugly transition from the Soviet past to an uncertain future. Two aspects of the way that the ROC has reacted to this transition are relevant to this report: the role of some ROC officials in the incitement of antisemitism and the role that the ROC plays in the persecution of minority religious congregations.

Antisemitism

Although Patriarch Alexi has never publicly made antisemitic statements, under his leadership many top officials in the ROC hierarchy have formed alliances with antisemitic groups, made antisemitic statements, and published antisemitic writings without being reprimanded by the Patriarch. The late Metropolitan Ioann of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga, the leading antisemite in the ROC until his death in 1996, did not suffer any negative consequences for his blatant antisemitism and even after death, remains through his writings an influential voice within the ROC.

Many extremist parties have tried with varying degrees of success to ally themselves with the ROC. Both Metropolitan Ioann and a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad² (Varnava) allegedly collaborated in the past with Pamyat, the oldest antisemitic nationalist group in Russia. Father Dmitri Dudko has close connections with radical nationalists and writes for the influential antisemitic, pro-opposition newspaper Zavtra. As will be discussed in this report, a recently deposed bishop in Sverdlovsk Oblast openly maintained ties with the neo-Nazi organization Russian National Unity, as do the ROC diocese in Voronezh and the leadership of the Diveevo Monastery in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. In Yaroslavl and Kemerovo, ROC local newspapers run antisemitic articles and proclamations by extremist groups.

Antisemitism within the ROC is often combined with anti-Western tendencies. Thus, responsibility for the grenade attack on the U.S. embassy in Moscow during the war against Yugoslavia was claimed by the little know group Skif, which was founded in honor of Metropolitan Ioann,³ and during an interview with a Samara newspaper, the deputy head of the antisemitic Union of Christian Rebirth, Father Mikhail Rogozin, warned that NATO could attack Russia at any time. (See the Samara chapter.)

The ROC has a major role in the World Russian National Council, which was set up on the basis of several similar organizations at conventions held under the direction of Metropolitan Kiril of Smolensk and Kaliningrad in May 1993 and in February 1995. In 1995, the Council adopted a resolution stating that "monarchy is the optimal and historically feasible centuries-old form of state power in Russia."⁴ In October 1998, a convention of the World Russian National Council discussed the corrupting influence of the media and declared it the main culprit of all of Russia's troubles. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov, Speaker of the Duma Gennady Seleznyov and the Chief Rabbi of Russia Adolf Shaevich took part in the convention together with Patriarch Alexi. At present, the Council is a moderate nationalist group in opposition to the government. However, it has close ties with the antisemitic All-Russia Council Movement, which was established in 1996 by the well known sculptor Vyacheslav Klykov. In its "Appeal to the Russian People," the Council Movement calls for Russians to, "brush away the scabs of the Yid and Bolshevik leprosy off ourselves of our own accord."⁵

Religious Persecution

Antisemitism in the ROC should be viewed in the context of the ROC's attempts to stifle some minority religions in Russia. At the instigation of the ROC, in 1997 a highly discriminatory law regulating religious activity ("On the Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations") was passed by the State Duma and signed into law by President Yeltsin, despite numerous protests from Russian and international human rights and religious organizations and Western governments. The law requires that all religious organizations undergo a registration process during which they must prove that they have officially existed in Russia for 15 years in order to have full rights. Religious groups are thus required to have been officially approved by the Soviet government, which followed a state policy of persecuting all religions and which prohibited many minority congregations, including some which have existed in Russia for a century or more. By forcing religious congregations to undergo a registration process, often conducted by former KGB officials hostile to religion in general and minority religions in particular, the religion law has de-legitimized many minority congregations and inspired opponents of religious freedom within regional administrations across the country to pass local religion laws that are even more discriminatory.

The religion law has served as a tool for the ROC hierarchy, often working in conjunction with the same regional and former KGB officials who once oversaw the ROC, to limit the activity of minority congregations. As is documented in this report, this persecution takes various forms including refusals to register religious congregations (even, in some cases, regional branches of nationally registered faiths), media campaigns depicting members of minority religions as deviants or criminals, refusals to rent space to congregations, and even threats from officials. In some cases, members of local extremist groups like Russian National Unity are incited by these campaigns to harass and attack religious minorities.

Russian officials justify the need for the religion law by pointing to the dangerous activities of "sects" in Russia, some of which allegedly kidnap and brainwash children. However, since these crimes are punishable under existing criminal law, there was never any pressing need to criminalize the activities of large numbers of non-violent religious minorities in order to protect Russia's youth from a handful of dangerous groups. Rather, the motive behind the passage of the law appears to have been to suppress religious competitors of the ROC, especially Protestants. This is borne out by the way that many law enforcement and religious affairs officials use a sweeping definition of what constitutes a "sect," and classify Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses and other non-violent, world recognized religions as being equally dangerous as groups like the Unification Church and Aum Shiriko (the Japanese cult that released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway). In almost every region covered in this report, non-violent, world recognized religious groups have been subjected to persecution by local officials, often at the instigation of the local ROC hierarchy. Father Vsevolod Chaplin, a spokesman for the ROC, aptly described this strange new alliance of former victims and victimizers when he said in 1992 that many former Communists have grown long beards and are now condemning Jews, Freemasons and heretics as zealously as they once exposed imperialism and "religious obscurantism."⁶

While with the exception of a Reform synagogue in Bryansk, which was denied registration for two years, Jews have not been directly affected by the new law, the green light that it gives to enemies of religious freedom to restrict the activities of minority faiths sets an obviously negative precedent for Russia's Jewish community. In addition, although Judaism is classified (along with Russian Orthodoxy, Islam and Buddhism) as a "traditional" religion in Russia in the Preamble to the law, the Preamble is nothing more than a declaration attached to the body of the law and does not have any legal significance. Despite reports to the contrary, there is nothing within the text of the law that explicitly protects adherents of Judaism from the same discriminatory treatment now being suffered by members of other minority faiths.

In addition, the ROC has in some ways grown so close to the state that it has become a de facto state religion. The ROC has signed treaties with the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Public Health to establish parishes in military garrisons, prisons and hospitals, a privilege that other confessions are regularly denied. Patriarch Alexi has attended numerous state functions which leaders of Russia's other faiths have not been invited to and in the past, the ROC received very lucrative rights to import and export various goods (tobacco, oil), again to the exclusion of other faiths.

Tragically, rather than focusing on its own spiritual revival after decades of oppression and providing Russians with a strong moral voice to protect them against a state that regularly abuses their human rights, the ROC leadership seems to have made the decision to bring itself closer than ever to the government, which is still run by many of the same officials who tormented it in the not so distant past. Considering the ROC's growing influence, its support of official religious persecution and its role in the dissemination of antisemitic and anti-Western ideology in Russia are especially worrisome trends.

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Endnotes

¹ The Russian Orthodox Church has split several times in the 20^th Century, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, when newly independent countries like Ukraine and Moldova developed their own national Orthodox churches. The ROC, Moscow Patriarchate is the official Russian Orthodox church in Russia.

² A dissident Russian Orthodox church based outside of Russia that refused to recognize the legitimacy of Soviet rule and remains split from the ROC.

³ RFE/RL Newsline, March, 31, 1999.

⁴ Political Xenophobia, Panorama, 1999, 21 and V. Polosin National Patriots and the Russian Orthodox Church, The World Russian Council, Dialogos, 1997, 114 _ 122.

⁵ V. Polosin National Patriots and the Russian Orthodox Church, The World Russian Council, Dialogos, 1997, 22.

⁶ Intellectuals Searching for Spiritual Bearings, Moscow, 1994, 91.