Staunton, April 12 – According to the Russian Interior Ministry, 1.15 million Muscovites – approximately ten percent of the Russian capital’s population — attended Easter services today. According to the Russian Orthodox Church, the actual figure was 1.5 million. But both agreed that the number this year, a record, is far higher than it was […]
Staunton, April 11 -“The further ideology spreads through the country, the weaker the institution of political leadership becomes,” according to Tatyana Stanovaya, who argues that “first the leader becomes dependent on ideological positions, then the personality factor dissolves and finally it becomes unimportant for the system who stands at the head.” Consequently, the senior analyst […]
Staunton, March 28 — In a democracy, it is sometimes said, anything that isn’t prohibited is permitted; in an authoritarian country, anything that isn’t permitted is prohibited; but in a totalitarian country, anything that is permitted is compulsory. By that standard, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is moving rapidly from the second to the third category. Fresh […]
Staunton, March 2 — The Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, having offended many Russian liberals by its obscurantism and slavish subordination to the Kremlin and having angered many of Russia’s Muslims by its backing for missionary work among them, now appears set to offend a group it had hitherto largely ignored: Russia’s Buddhists. […]
Staunton, February 23 — In a short story written under the pseudonym Aron Shemaier, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, a close advisor to Patriarch Kirill, describes the end of Moscow in 2043 when “the Moscow Confederation” is attacked by “fascists from ‘Free Russia,’ Islamists from the Caucasus, and rightwing figures from Ukraine” at one and the same […]
At the beginning of this week, President Barack Obama explained that Russia, hit hard by Western sanctions, is losing in its confrontation with the West and NATO caused by Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. In his State of the Union address, Obama displayed similar swag and bluster against both the Kremlin and Congressional Republicans, seemingly […]
Staunton, January 21 – After declaring in December that they felt diminished by the fact that Belarusian believers felt insulted by the fact that the Orthodox Church in their country did not have self-administering status, the leadership of the Belarusian exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has shelved the issue for the next 25 to […]
Staunton, January 7 – Despite Vladimir Putin’s very public invocation of religion and his tight embrace of Patriarch Kirill, the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church has fallen over the last year, the result of government policies which could be called “covert secularization” and the spread of the notion of “Orthodox atheism,” according to Boris […]
Yesterday Russia announced a revised military doctrine, signed by President Vladimir Putin, that names NATO as the Kremlin’s main adversary and clarifies that Russia’s military reserves the right to respond to conventional threats with both nuclear and conventional weapons. This is no big change, since it only amplifies existing doctrine, but its explicit emphasis on […]
Staunton, December 15 – Many have seen the statements of the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church and the official hierarchies of that country’s Muslim community as an indication that they are moving toward greater mutual understanding and cooperation, according to Nezavisimaya Gazeta. But that is to misread the situation, the paper suggests in a […]
