The ‘triunity’ of the Russian people
In Sevastopol, celebrations for the feast of the Baptism of Kievan Rus' have provided an opportunity to cover the unity between Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia with a Trinitarian aura. Likewise, the date has allowed Moscow to pull off a sensational exchange of political prisoners with Germany and the United States to rid Russia of its most notorious "foreign agents" who "disturbed internal peace" even from their prison cells.
The forum on the Russian World (Russkij Mir) was held In the city of Sevastopol, capital of Crimea, on the 1,036th anniversary of the Baptism of Kievan Rus', marking the opening of the grandiose museum of the "New Chersonesus", commissioned by the Orthodox Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), Putin's "spiritual father" sent to Crimea as punishment by his historical enemy, the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill (Gundyayev).
Putin's main ecclesiastical aide took advantage of this opportunity to refurbish his image of "imperial orthodoxy", starting with the sacred land of the peninsula on the Black Sea.
The museum commemorates the "three eras" of Christianity: the apostolic, the Byzantine, and the Russian, brought together in Crimea by the martyrdom of Pope Clement, Greek Tauris, and the Baptism of Rus'.
Prince Vladimir of Kyiv seized the city of Chersonesus threatening the Byzantine Empire. This led the emperor of Constantinople to give his daughter in marriage to the prince, who for this reason accepted Eastern Christianity, after wavering between Latin Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam. He was baptised in Crimea at the end of the first millennium, in the year 988, and then had his entire people immerse in the waters of the Dnieper in Kyiv.
These historic celebrations are far different from those by Ukrainians – who remember those events in mid-July pointing out that "in those days, where Moscow now lies, wild beasts roamed,” while Russians acclaim them at the end of the month as "the origin of the tri-unity of the Russian people".
Participants at the Sevastopol forum, starting with the organiser, the Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, have asked that the concept of "triunity" (triyedinstvo) of Belarusians, Little Russians (malorossy, i.e. the Ukrainians) and the Great Russians (velikorossy) of Moscow, be included in Russian law, with fines and punishments for those who challenge this fundamental Slavophile dogma.
The triedinstvo moreover directly refers to the Troitsa, the Trinity, the main dogma of the Christian faith and is the subject of the most famous Russian icon, the Trinity by Andrei Rublev, which Patriarch Kirill took from the Tretyakov Gallery (named after its founder, Tretyakov, which means tertiary) to showcase it to patriotic devotion in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and in Radonezh’s Lavra of Saint Sergey, the spiritual father of Muscovite Russia, victorious against the Tatars and every other enemy in the East and the West at the end of the 14th century.
In fact, the three persons of the Holy Trinity incarnate the three variants of Holy Russia, which unites lands and peoples in a universal spiritual community (sobornost).
The Sevastopol forum proposed criminalising actions that “discredit” the tri-unity of the Russian World, since “the Russian Federation recognises the tri-unity historically formed by the nationality (narodnost) of the founder of ancient Rus', who by his own deed created a process of historical development that produced a civilisation, a state, a tri-unitary culture, that of the Russian people that brings together Great, Little and White Russians, who are indivisible in their parts.”
The trinitarian unity of Russians is the basis that “for centuries has shaped the history of the homeland, protected by laws that express the traditional spiritual and moral, cultural and historical values of Russia.”
The offence of “discrediting” entails sanctions for those who propose to interpret the tri-unity in “erroneous ways, or publicly denying it,” with a fine of at least 1.5 million rubles (US$ 17,500), forced labour and community service, or up to five years in prison camp.
The law raises the fine from three to five million rubles, and the sentence to 10 to 15 years if denying or false interpretation is aggravated by abuse of public office, spreading the information in the media or doing so for political, ideological, and racial reasons, up to national hatred and hostility against the state.
A commission on "culture and traditional moral and spiritual values" was also set up at the forum, to add the right motivations to the draft law, led by the governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhayev, who will coordinate future sessions of jurists and experts to draft all the necessary texts for the new "constitution” of the Russian world, in consultation with the Members of the State Duma and Senate.
In Moscow Patriarch Kirill expressed his support for the initiative, letting his opponent Tikhon take the lead, recommending that remedy be found to "heal the wounds of the division between Russia and Little Russia” caused by the “hostile outside forces”.
In his message for the feast of the Baptism of Vladimir and Rus', the patriarch states that "those who want to divide us, incessantly sowing discord and internal strife, have as primary purpose plunging us into the darkness of a new paganism, destroying our spiritual and moral foundations.”
The sensational exchange of political prisoners between Russia, Germany, and the United States took place on the same occurrence, freeing Russia from its most notorious "foreign agents" who undermined domestic peace even from Russian prison camps, while repatriating some "heroes" of the resistance to hostile forces, including killers and spies devoted to the great homeland.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church called on the faithful to pray that "our sincere conversion and repentance before God may be renewed, so as not to renounce the great Christian vocation of our people and to preserve the legacy of the great Prince Vladimir, equal to the apostles, and to reunite Russia and Little Russia".
As the patriarch noted, “from the baptismal font of the Dnieper arose a renewed and transfigured people, possessing enormous moral strength and the timeless light of the Gospel of truth, which has spread over the whole of Russian culture, which flows precisely from that source.”
In concluding, Kirill warned: “If we lose our Christian identity, we will also lose Russia, becoming an easy prey for dark forces and the threatening influences of foreign cultures.” Russia's mission, according to Patriarch Kirill, is to "reunite the peoples of Holy Rus", Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and "all other states and peoples that refer to ancient Rus.”
The President of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, has set a good example, combining the historic celebrations with the 30th jubilee of his presidency, showing himself as the "Great Father" of tri-unity, or at least of the bi-unity of Moscow and Minsk.
As one of the leading Belarusian preachers, archpriest (protoiyerey) Fyodor Povnyy, put it, Lukashenko "created together with the first exarch of our country, Metropolitan Filaret (Vakhromeyev)[*], a new conception of the Belarusian nation", which led to the "unitary state" with Russia.
According to Povnyy, Belarus’s "eternal president", who in the 1990s described himself as an "Orthodox atheist”, like Russia’s Boris Yeltsin, “has been able to develop collaborative relations with the Church as the foundation of the state, with a domestic policy based on dialogue and peace.”
The Orthodox Church in Belarus is an exarchate (autonomous and dependent at the same time) of the Patriarchate of Moscow. So was Ukraine, but since 1992, the latter has sought full independence, up to the current ambiguity of a formally autonomous Church, but still partly linked to Russia.
The successor of Exarch Philaret, the current Metropolitan of Minsk Vienijamin[†] (Tupieka), said that "the schism of Orthodoxy in Ukraine," complete with the change of the date of Christmas to December 25 according to the Western calendar, "is intended to uproot the faithful from their spiritual foundations, in order to more easily direct them to new foreign orientations.”
Lukashenko was way ahead of Putin in terms of dictatorial governance, challenged but violently upheld in 2020, but in full continuity with the Soviet past, since he took office in 1994.
Belarus has even retained the name State Security Committee (KGB) for its national intelligence service, which is called the Federal Security Service (FSB) in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union, with Putin serving as its director before taking power as prime minister and then president.
The only two institutions that survived the end of the communist empire are the KGB-FSB and the Moscow Patriarchate, the "two natures" of the ideological dogma that is linked with the "tri-unity" of the peoples hastily renamed after decades of atheistic rule, which perhaps now seem more respectful of human rights and spiritual values than the existing Great-Little-White Russian Orthodoxy.
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[*] In office from 1978 to 2013, died in 2021.
[†] Benjamin.
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23/12/2020 09:06
03/11/2020 13:29
