Akathist by Mykhayl

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Battle lines are drawn between pro-Moscow camp, Kyiv nationalists

Mitch Potter, Europe Bureau, Toronto Star
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Saturday, Sep 29, 2007

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.