Spectator's Journal: The Old Orthodoxy
Aikman, David
"Spectator's Journal: The Old Orthodoxy" by David Airman The Old Orthodoxy Moscow Democratic-minded Russians are anxious these days as they observe the parliamentary—and perhaps extra-parliamentary—maneuverings of...
...I find this a hit propagandistic," grumbles an older woman who sells official cathedral postcards at the other end of the museum...
...Its history of compromises and retreats during the Communist years and infiltration by the KGB notwithstanding, Orthodoxy has somehow survived as the one unsullied emblem of the Russian national spirit and identity...
...Russia's Orthodox Christians, whatever their sometimes glaring faults, have at least tried to stay close to something transcendental...
...But whatever dark reversals to Russia's reforms the dreaded "red-brown coalition" may have dreamed up, there is one Russian institution unlikely to blink at all the latest political developments: the Russian Orthodox Church...
...About twenty mostly middle-aged visitors gather round to listen in rapt attention as she speaks to a visitor...
...Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov are clearly exploiting what poll after poll confirms: The Orthodox Church is the only Russian institution still respected by a majority of the population...
...Yet the Communist Zyuganov, who in the late 1980's was a hardline critic of Mikhail Gorbachev, publicly visited a church last summer to light a candle, and has gone so far as to proclaim Jesus Christ the first Communist "because He wanted justice in this earthly life and sacrificed His life on the altar of lawlessness...
...Overlooking the actual construction site is a small museum that reverently documents the six-decade-long construction of the church in the nineteenth century, and indeed the role of the Christian faith in Russia...
...The combination of Christian piety and historical seriousness punctuates almost magically a late fall day in the Russian capital...
...Last October he even tried to crash a solemn procession in Moscow to open the magnificently restored Mother of Iversk chapel at the newly reconstructed Assumption Gate north of Red Square...
...Nowhere is this sense of identity more palpable than in the reconstruction of the massive Cathedral of Christ the Savior just blocks from the Kremlin...
...One woman has tears in her eyes...
...The sympathy of Russian democrats for Orthodoxy is hardly surprising...
...It remained one of the largest structures in Moscow until Stalin ordered it blown up in 1931...
...Our troubles began when the government tried to destroy the church, which is the mystical body of believers on earth...
...released report last November by the government-appointed Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Repression, Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev obliterated 41,000 of the 48,000 churches that existed in Russia before 1917...
...According to a hastily DAVID AIKMAN is a former senior correspondent for Time...
...There is a need for Russia to ask Christ to be Lord," explains Galina Kukhtenkova, a thirtyish woman who seems to know every single detail of both the church that was and the church that is to be...
...In one of the oddest cultural and political peregrinations of post-Communist Russia, not just democrats but also Russian fascists and Communists have been courting the Orthodox with a flattery verging on sycophancy...
...The American Spectator • February 1 9 9 6 53...
...It certainly needs punctuation...
...But no one else seems to...
...In the process they murdered hundreds of thousands of priests, some by actual crucifixion, others by tortures described in the report as "bestial...
...After all, not a single Russian body suffered more during the seven decades of Communist oppression than the church...
...Church bells are ringing left and right in Russia...
...The still unrevealed costs are likely to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, knowledgeable Muscovites estimate —all miraculously, as it were, conjured up by Moscow's well-connected mayor, Yuri Luzhkov...
...Communist courting of the church is even more cynical...
...Afterwards Galina invites all present to view the museum's 3o-minute video of graphic and rare Stalin-era footage of churches being blown up and skeletal corpses of Stalin's starvation campaigns...
...Was it Oscar Wilde, or Lenin, or Hitler who said that hypocrisy was the respect paid by vice to virtue...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by David Airman The Old Orthodoxy Moscow Democratic-minded Russians are anxious these days as they observe the parliamentary—and perhaps extra-parliamentary—maneuverings of the winners in December's Duma elections, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party and Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation...
...A century ago, the magnificent Soo-foot-high building was the largest functioning Orthodox church in theworld...
...In their rush to offer fawning public respect to Russian Orthodoxy, today's ultranationalists and Communists seem intuitively to recognize how mistrustful Russians have become of all political groups, no matter where they are located on the ideological spectrum...
...Work crews clang and hammer away in multiple shifts to complete it in time for Moscow's 85oth anniversary celebrations in 1997...
...As for Zhirinovsky, he first signaled his brazen pro-Orthodox sentimentalism in his 1993 campaign manifesto, The Last Dash South, fantasizing that Russian church hells would ring out over the Indian Ocean, in which the conquering Russian army, once he was in power, would wash its boots...
Vol. 29 • February 1996 • No. 2
