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Keston Comment
YELTSIN - A DEMOCRAT, BUT NOT FOR THE CHURCH by Michael Boudeaux
Boris Yeltsin lay in state in an Orthodox cathedral, where he had lit an occasional candle, before being buried in the cemetery of the Novodevichi Monastery. While he was in power, thousands of churches were restored, Christian literature was printed, religious education began in earnest, denominations and sects of all sorts flourished. Was he responsible for all this? Not in any essential sense: this was the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, who smashed the shackles with which Lenin and Stalin had bound religion.
Watching the TV broadcasts of last Monday and reading some twenty pages of Yeltsin's obituaries on Tuesday, I have been astonished at some of the misleading evaluations (best was the superb article by Edward Lucas, Central and Eastern European correspondent of The Economist writing in the Daily Mail). Not a single writer mentioned Yeltsin's religious policy, let alone evaluated it.
It was Gorbachev, who in 1988 promised a new law which guaranteed freedom of religion, and in September 1990 he delivered it. It was Yeltsin, no less, who in 1997 abolished this law, replacing it by a new, restrictive and entirely unsatisfactory one. This gave primacy to the Russian Orthodox Church and shone a green light to local authorities, among whom the old guard was still strong in many of Russia's 89 regions, to discriminate against Protestants and Catholics (while having to guarantee freedom to the 'older-established' Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim faiths). It was a blot on what was, in the main, a democratic programme which Yelstsin promoted (though the Chechens, victims of his attempted suppression, would disagree).
The process of passing the new law, admittedly, was not as simple as the above paragraph implies. Gorbachev's law had been astonishingly liberal. It was, in some respects, modelled on the example of the USA, which accorded complete equality to all religions, denominations and cults. The rigour of the registration system, which had provided the fundamental tool of state control since Stalin's law of 1929, was shattered at one stroke. Indeed, there was one respect in which religion became more free in Russia than in America: teaching it was permitted in state schools.
Less desirably, Russia became a "market place" (in the crude expression of the time) where every religion competed, some much more than others backed by foreign money and the incursion of missionaries from outside. It was easy to denigrate these, though often this was unfair, as some had a true vision for a better Russia. The free-for-all of the early 1990s was part of a larger picture. By 1997 ex-Soviet bureaucrats saw their chance of a comeback and took it, with the strong backing of the Moscow Patriarchate, which judged that there was unfair competition against it and favoured the imposition of restrictions on its rivals. Yeltsin, under pressure initially from Pope John Paul II and President Clinton, refused to sign the first draft of the law, but later caved in and approved a more rigorous version.
The existence of this law has long since passed from the field of public debate, but the death of Yeltsin should have triggered a re-examination of his poor record here. The only saving grace in this debacle is that Russia's law administration is too weak to impose many of the restrictions (e.g. sanctions against groups who refuse to register under the new provisions), so the country enjoys a degree of religious liberty far greater than a reading of Yeltsin's law might imply. President Putin's open allegiance to the Russian Orthodox Church has not persuaded him to throw his weight behind further favouring of the Moscow Patriarchate over against other religious institutions, so his growing and disastrous restrictions on democratic freedoms have not been mirrored in the sphere of religion.
However, reflecting on developments over the last two decades since the advent of Gorbachev leads one to conclude that great opportunities for a leap forward in Anglican-Orthodox relations have been missed. We had no strategy to convert Russia to Anglicanism! Conversely, our traditional sympathy for the Orthodox Church opened a wide gate through which support for its own institutions, long devastated by communism, could have poured. Some responded with true dedication - but they were too few and too scattered. There was no national plan or inspirational call, despite Archbishop Runcie's personal sympathy with Orthodoxy. In the final chapter of my book, Gorbachev, Glasnost and the Gospel, published in 1990, while Gorbachev was still in power, I set out a blueprint for how the church worldwide might create a new agenda for Russian beleivers in the spirit of glasnost then pervading the Soviet Union. Few read it, Gorbachev fell from power and the moment passed.
24 April 2007
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