http://www.thestar.com/News/article/261764TheStar.com - News - Ukraine vote fuels religious tensions
Battle lines are drawn between pro-Moscow camp, Kyiv nationalists
September 29, 2007
Mitch Potter
EUROPE BUREAU
KYIV�Religion may seem well beneath the radar
this time around, but followers of Eastern
European politics say a festering spiritual Cold
War remains a significant factor as Ukraine goes to the polls this weekend.
Schisms older than Ukraine itself permeate the
country's multi-confessional religious jumble,
each fault line a legacy of the former empires
that once jockeyed for control of its rich black-soil steppes.
Now, fears of new empire-building run through the
dominant Eastern Orthodox Christian faithful,
where the battle lines between pro-Russian
loyalists and Western-leaning Ukrainian
nationalists can be found parish by parish.
Though almost identical in terms of liturgy, the
two Orthodox streams answer to decidedly
different masters, with the Ukrainian branch of
the Russian Orthodox Church and its more than
9,000 communities under the canonical authority
of leaders in Moscow. The rival Ukrainian
Orthodox Church, by contrast, answers to its own
self-declared Kyiv Patriarchate, a breakaway
entity created in June 1992 upon the collapse of
the Soviet Union and consisting today of nearly 3,000 communities.
Many Moscow church loyalists see the dreaded hand
of Western imperialism in the growth of the Kyiv
camp, whose expansion accounts for a
corresponding shrinkage in the power and
influence of the Russian Patriarchate. They argue
passionately for Moscow as the natural centre of
gravity for Eastern Slavs, which they
characterize as Christian Ukrainians, Russians and Belarussians.
Conversely, many Kyiv church loyalists fear
Russian empire-building lies behind the staunch
resistance of the Moscow Patriarchate to allow
Ukraine the spiritual independence to match its
political independence. They point to the
tightening bonds between the Russian Orthodox
Church and President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin as
evidence that the dream of Moscow as "a third Rome" is awakening again.
(The religious revival is based on the concept
that Moscow is the successor to Rome and
Constantinople as the last bastion of Christian civilization.)
"Unfortunately, Moscow has not forsaken the idea
of `the third Rome' and recently these ideas have
been activated," said Father Konstantin Lozinsky,
a scholar loyal to the Kyiv Patriarchate at St. Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv.
Lozinsky said the natural trajectory of Ukrainian
independence suggests that eventually the church
will unite under a framework independent from Moscow.
It is "fear of the inevitable," he said, that is
driving Moscow church loyalists to extremes.
"The fight for Kyiv has some political
underpinnings and levers are being used,"
Lozinsky said. "If the Ukrainian Orthodox unites
under one church it will be the largest Orthodox
Church in the world. And that means the dream of
Moscow as a third Rome will fail. When this
happens, Moscow will lose 500 years of its history."
Father Olek Sircee, a Moscow Patriarchate priest
from Ukraine's Ternopil province, rejected such
predictions. For the past two years Sircee has
been encamped at a protest site in the Ukrainian
capital with a small band of like-minded
followers who accuse the Kyiv church of forcing
him out of his parish in Ternopil against the wishes of his parishioners.
"We put our faith in God that justice will
prevail," said Sircee. "There is a natural
connection between all Slavic peoples. We must be
confident that this holy land will unite as a Slavic brotherhood under God."
Such Orthodox tensions are nothing new. But they
metastasized three years ago during the run-up to
the Orange revolution, when Ukraine's religious
camps brazenly abandoned neutrality to take an
active role in partisan politics. For the
pro-Moscow camp, presidential candidate Viktor
Yushchenko became "the enemy of Orthodoxy." The
Kyiv camp, meanwhile, found common cause with
many Ukrainian Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic
minorities in backing Yushchenko's Orange
coalition, drawn by the promise of closer ties
with Europe � and by extension, greater distance from Russia.
Now, as Ukraine readies to vote tomorrow in what
counts as the fourth national election in three
years, Orange fatigue is biting deep into the
dispirited electorate. Voters once again find
themselves choosing among the very same
candidates who failed to deliver the change promised in 2004.
A statement published earlier this month by the
Orthodox Choice Association cautioned voters that
an Orange victory will bring reprisals for the pro-Moscow church.
"The question stands this way," it read. "Are we
to cast our votes in support of those who will
assist the canonical Orthodox church or are we to
vote for those who will destroy it?"
Western diplomats and political analysts in Kyiv
say the Orthodox tensions provide Russia's
leadership with another handy lever over Ukrainian affairs.
"Think of it as spiritual Gazprom," said one
Kyiv-based Western diplomat. "Just as Ukraine is
dependent on Russian gas, which Moscow has shown
can be switched on or off at will, Ukraine is
also susceptible to Russian church influence.
"Does that extend to actually telling
parishioners how they should vote? It has been
known to happen. But the majority of the election
problems involve issues other than religion."
Kost Bondarenko, chief political analyst with the
Horshenin Institute of Management, places the
Orthodox religious schism in the context of all
the other links binding Ukraine to Russia. Even
16 years after independence, he notes, the
dominant language of Kyiv remains Russian, while
Russian television, music and literature flows
freely � and is consumed in enormous volumes � throughout Ukraine.
"All these are levers for Putin's Russia � the
levers of energy, economics, culture and, yes, religion," said Bondarenko.
