Russia's ‘trinity of religions’
Today, Orthodoxy in Russia is increasingly characterised as a separate religion, which retains the formal aspect of Slavic-Eastern rite Christianity, while at the same time increasingly extending to other ‘patriotic’ confessions, to the point of also associating Islam and Buddhism in the single expression of the trinitarian homeland.
The theory that Russia unites peoples and worlds in a ‘Russian world’, which has been the underpinning motivation for the war in Ukraine for over 2 years and long before that has inspired the rebirth of Greater Russia as the centre of the world, has an essentially Trinitarian formulation.
Starting from the late-medieval ideal of ‘Moscow - Third Rome’, as the heir of Rome and Constantinople, the dimensions of Russian reality are declined in a triadic version in different aspects the geographical one, which attributes to Russia three geographical coordinates, North-East-West from the Arctic Circle, with the eastern half of Europe and the northern half of Asia; the historical one of the three capitals of Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg and the three peoples of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine (White, Great and Little Russia); and the spiritual one of Latin, Greek and Slavic Christianity.
Russia is the ‘third world’ compared to the great powers of the past and present, as it is again today in the confrontation between America and China, a ‘new people’ compared to the ancient empires of Rome and Byzantium, and those of the following centuries of Europe and America.
It is no coincidence that the symbolically decisive image of the war-spiritual mission of President Putin and Patriarch Kirill's Russia, with the participation of ‘third figures’ in turn such as Metropolitan Tikhon of Crimea or Commander Prigožin of the Global War, is the icon of the Holy Trinity by St Andrey Rublev, the 15th-century monk who interpreted the rebirth of Moscow's Russia after the Tartar Yoke together with his two masters, St Sergius of Radonež and St Stefan of Perm.
Religion is indeed the main source of inspiration for all historical variants of Russia, including the Soviet version of state atheism. Today, Orthodoxy is the great justification of the ‘defence of traditional values’ that mobilises the whole of Russia to war against the Western Antichrist, and is increasingly characterised as a separate religion, which retains the formal aspect of Slavic-Oriental rite Christianity, and at the same time extending itself more and more to other ‘patriotic’ confessions, to the point of forming a new ‘spiritual trinity’ that associates Orthodoxy with Islam and Buddhism as well, to the point of almost not distinguishing them, in the single expression of the triune homeland.
In 1997, a decisive year for the turning point of ‘spiritual sovereignty’ that later gave rise to Vladimir Putin's regime, the Moscow Duma approved a new law on religious freedom, which corrected Yeltsin's excessively ‘liberal’ 1990 law, coupled with Gorbačev's even more permissive 1991 law, which at the end of the Soviet era allowed any religious denomination to freely propagate its beliefs.
The new law, inspired by the Orthodox Church of the then Patriarch Aleksij II together with his future successor, Metropolitan Kirill, and supported in the Duma by the resurrected Communist Party of Gennadij Zjuganov, stated that Russia has a ‘historically principal’ religion, precisely the Orthodox one, with which four other ‘traditional religions’ were associated on a smaller scale: Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity, the latter distinguished from Orthodoxy to indicate the Protestant and Catholic variants, minor but present in Russia for centuries.
The new law, further tightened with subsequent amendments, imposes the prevalence of Orthodoxy over all the others in the ‘1+4’ scheme, reducing the religious communities not included in the scheme to the status of ‘non-traditional’ and therefore in need of continuous confirmation and revision to allow their existence, up to the total exclusion of those most refractory to registration and control, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, the Pentecostals and the Scientology movement.
The 4 ‘less traditional’ ones are however confined in principle to the assistance of the ‘minor ethnic groups’ of Caucasian Islam, Asian Buddhism and Polish-German Christianity, present to varying degrees on the territories of the Federation, while the ‘true Russians’ are still associated with Orthodoxy, even without baptism and the other sacraments.
With the wartime-religious development of recent years, of the four ‘minor’ groups, two are in fact exalted and two are disappearing: Islam and Buddhism are increasingly aligned with Orthodoxy, while Catholics/Protestants and Jews represent the ‘hostile peoples’, however much their hierarchies strive to appear loyal to the current military regime.
An article these days in Nezavisimaja Gazeta actually speaks of a ‘tripartite’ religious system in Russia. Judaism, which the Russians determine by the inherently unkind title of iudaizm, suffers from the effects of an ancestral anti-Semitism of the Russians, with the many pogroms that drove them from Belarus to the southern lands of Novorossija, the Black Sea area between Odessa and Soči from where the founders of the modern State of Israel set sail.
As much as Italian-American Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar, in Russia since 1990, strives to appear ‘more Russian than the Russians’, enthusiastically supporting the Kremlin's policies, Jews today are once again marginalised and persecuted, especially in the Caucasian Islamic regions, but also in the rest of the Federation.
Although one of the federal subjects is the ‘Jewish Autonomous District’ of Birobidžan in eastern Siberia, created in Stalin's time as the empire's ‘Jewish ghetto’, Russian Jews today are trying as much as possible to escape from Russia, which has been supporting the Palestinians in the ongoing conflict since 7 October last year, by trying to reach Israel, the most Russian-speaking country after the former Soviet countries.
Even the Protestants of the most historically rooted confessions in Russia, such as the Baptists, Lutherans and Ingermanladtsy (Scandinavians and Finns), present themselves at every opportunity as great supporters of the ‘holy war’ against the Western world, but their very Germanic, Baltic and Finnish identity connects them with the regions less aligned with Moscow, and across the borders with the less ‘friendly’ European nations.
Not to mention the Catholics, prominently represented by Poles and Lithuanians, and the Germans themselves historically present on Russian territory. Even the six Catholic bishops (one Italian, three Germans, one Pole and one Russian) profess their loyalty to Russia without condemning the war while calling for peace, and some Russian Latin priests publicly support the war cause, but the ‘Roman Catholic’ Church is also flanked by several Greek Catholic communities, very close in tradition and ethnicity to the great Ukrainian enemies, and some have already been suppressed from above as ‘enemies of Russia’.
The Nezavisimaja Gazeta article rather emphasises the centralisation of Buddhist communities in Russia, after the Sangkha had been divided for years into several regional centres, that of Kalmykia, the Tuva region and Buryatia, without ever finding effective forms of unity.
Now Russian Buddhism, which represents at least 6-7 million people (Protestants, Catholics and Jews barely gather 4 million all together), has a new headquarters in Moscow for all of them, and spreads its complaints about sacrilegious offences against Buddha, while enthusiastically supporting the war in Ukraine, in which soldiers from Buddhist regions are among the main reserves of ‘cannon fodder’, with Buddhist chaplains enlisted directly as soldiers.
In recent days, the 260th anniversary of the Buriata Khambo-lam Buddhist hierarchy was celebrated, with great congratulations from President Putin and the entire Kremlin leadership, especially from former Defence Minister Sergei Šojgu, considered a semi-divine Buddhist hero in his native Tuva.
Caucasian and Asian Islam has always been a great supporter of Russian Orthodoxy, from traditions dating back to the Mohammedan conversion of the Tatar Khans when they still ruled Rus', in tune with the Moscow Orthodox Church that benefited greatly from friendly relations with the Volga Golden Horde.
In a way, the alliance between the Orthodox and Muslims is a historical guarantee of Russian imperial domination over the various peoples, keeping at bay the more radical and terrorist versions, still threatening from the territories of Central Asia.
With Buddhism, Islam completes the ‘trinity of religions’, and Patriarch Kirill does not miss an opportunity to show how Russian Orthodoxy is able to unite peoples and confessions in the great triumph of ‘traditional moral and spiritual values’.
The Trinitarian communion, however, seems to be increasingly being joined by a fourth hypostasis, also descended from the traditions of the peoples of Asian Russia, to which President Putin himself looks with particular interest.
This is Mongolian shamanism, recognised in Russia as an official confession, albeit ‘even less traditional’, but on Vladimir Putin's recent trip to Mongolia, via Tuva, there seems to have been a consultation with some local shamans regarding the course to be taken in the war with Ukraine, as various sources claim.
Putin had travelled to these lands several times, accompanied by his trusty Šojgu, but this time the cause is said to have taken on a truly apocalyptic character: according to some, the president asked the shamans for their blessing on the use of nuclear weapons, and returned heartened by their assurances that such a choice would not anger the evil spirits too much. In this case, shamanism would surpass even the ‘traditional trinity’, imposing a cult that dissolves into the purest and most absolute spirituality, that of the disappearance of human beings from the earth.
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