Secular Right

Cross-posted on the Corner:

Here (via the Daily Telegraph) is some encouraging news on the story of those three naughtily-named girls who staged a protest in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral against Putin and, by implication, the role played by the Russian Orthodox Church in supporting his regime:

The Russian president said there was “nothing good” about the band’s protest, but added: “I hope the court will come out with the right decision, a well-founded one,” he said during a visit to the Olympics. Nonetheless, I don’t think that they should be judged so harshly for this.”

Supporters of the three women expressed hope that Mr Putin’s statement could mean they would avoid the maximum seven-year sentence for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.

If sincere (a question, obviously) Putin’s statement represents a welcome step forward, given the way that the Russian judicial authorities tend to, uh, pay attention to what the president has to say.

Cross-posted on the Corner:

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Edward Lucas launches into the Putin regime and, of course, the prosecution of those three young women with the Corner-unfriendly name (including some interesting details about what it was that they actually did: It turns out to have been rather less dramatic than is generally reported):

Now comes the prosecution of… a bunch of feminist performance artists made famous by their imprisonment and show trial. Their “crime” was to record a brief mime show at the altar of the cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They then added anti-Putin “music” (featuring scatological and blasphemous slogans) to suggest that they had actually held a concert there.

Many might find that in bad taste and would accept that police can arrest those using a holy place for political protest. But the three women on trial (who all deny involvement) have been in custody since March. They face up to seven years in prison on a charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or hostility”. It all smacks of a grotesque official over-reaction and the growing and sinister influence of the Orthodox hierarchy…

Notice the addition of thoughtcrime: the hooliganism (already punishable, and, within reason, fair enough) is deemed more serious because of the opinions that is claimed were its motivation. That sort of thing couldn’t happen in the West, of course.

But back to Lucas:

. . . The regime is dropping even the pretence of liberalisation. Instead – as [this] trial exemplifies – it appeals to ignorance, prejudice and superstition. The Russian Orthodox Church, far from offering an alternative to the greed and bullying, complements it.

Indeed it is, and one thing surely to be noted: Because of the extent to which the Russian Orthodox Church has chosen to play a political (as opposed to a national or state) role, it cannot be altogether surprised if its public premises become the site of public protest. That might not justify the nature of this particular protest, but it ought to help put some of the clerical indignation, whether genuine or generated, in context. For more on what that church has been up to check out David Satter here, and, of course, on the Corner here.

In any event, read the whole of what Lucas has to say, not least for the discussion of the failure of the “reset” and for Lucas’s explanation as to why Putin is standing by Syria’s Assad. So far as the latter is concerned, I don’t buy it all: I think that at least part of what Putin is doing is playing the great power game (in other words, it’s not just about not wanting to encourage Russian internal dissent), but, as always with Edward Lucas, there’s plenty of food for thought.

Cross-posted on the Corner:

In an attempt to counter the growing encroachment of liberalism into his realm, Czar Nicholas I (reigned 1825-55) argued for an empire based on the three pillars of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality”, an idea that came to define the thinking of Russian reactionaries for the rest of the nineteenth century.

It seems to be doing so again.

Consider this from the Economist:

One February morning, members of… a Russian feminist punk band, wearing neon-coloured balaclavas, burst into Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to sing a lewd and acerbic “punk prayer” called “Our Lady, chase Putin out”. Three of the women—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina, and Ekaterina Samutsevich—were arrested and charged with hooliganism. They have been kept in jail since March. Their trial begins on July 30th, and if found guilty they could be sentenced to as many as seven years in prison.

I have omitted the band’s name in an attempt to maintain standards around here, but also to avoid irritating the googling masses who might be lured to this respectable Corner only to leave very disappointed indeed.

Let’s be clear. The role played by the Russian Orthodox Church in bolstering Putin’s regime has brought its activities into the realm where they are a legitimate subject of political debate and, indeed, protest, but this protest was a step-many steps-too far particularly so in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a cathedral blown up on the orders of Stalin, and then rebuilt as a testimony to the notion that some sins of the Soviet past could be put right.

But….a possible seven years?

The Economist continues:

The case could hardly have gone so far without direction from the Kremlin. In recent months, as Vladimir Putin, the president, has faced unprecedented opposition from the more modern and Westernised of Russia’s citizens, he has set out to marginalise that constituency while building up the forces of conservatism and xenophobia.

The Russian Orthodox church, which has long found itself in a symbiotic embrace with Mr Putin, has become a central pillar of legitimacy in this political struggle. Svetlana Solodovnik, who studies the Orthodox church, says that religious leaders work “to nurture a paternalistic mood” among the population and “to teach people to rely on the state and to be grateful for its care”. The trial…provides an opportunity to use the language of moral outrage to paint those opposed to Mr Putin and the Russian government as louche and untrustworthy, the embodiments of exactly the sort of outside forces that seek to defile Russia and its traditions.

Religious and bureaucratic tongues have become blurred. Vsevolod Chaplin, a spokesman for the church, said that [the] unsanctioned performance in the cathedral is “a sin that will be punished in this life and the next”. The official text of the indictment from the prosecutor’s office speaks of the trio’s “blasphemous acts” that inflicted “weighty suffering on those persons who find their spiritual home in the service of Orthodox ideals”.

It has even been claimed that Satan may be some sort of co-conspirator.

In prison since March. Enough is enough. Free the three.

Via the New York Times:

MOSCOW — When four young women in balaclavas performed a crude anti-Putin song on the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February, it seemed like just one more episode in a season of audacious, absurdist and occasionally offensive protest.

Instead, the case of the young punk rockers, whose group is called Pussy Riot, is becoming a bellwether event in the Russian capital, signaling an end to the chilly tolerance the Kremlin displayed in response to the winter’s large demonstrations.
The three women arrested after the performance have been held in custody for more than four months, a term that was extended on Friday by six months, through next January. They could be sent to prison for seven years.

Preliminary hearings in the case offered some of the most striking courtroom images since the trial of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, which took place in the same building. While that case tested Russians’ feelings toward a billionaire businessman, this one picks as its targets slender young women with hooded sweatshirts and Twitter accounts — avatars of the protest movement itself.

Stupid form of protest, but sledgehammers and nuts come to mind.

And then there’s this:

The criminal prosecution of the three women — Maria Alyokhina, 24; Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23; and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29 — rests on the notion that their performance incited religious hatred. That argument is supported by Orthodox activists who say the women are Satanists. Ten witnesses have said they suffered “moral damage” as a result and are considered victims in the court proceeding, as is standard in Russia. One, a cathedral security guard, “had trouble sleeping after the crime in the cathedral,” said his lawyer, Mikhail Kuznetsov, in an interview with the newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti.

The band, Mr. Kuznetsov said, “is only a tiny visible tip of the iceberg of extremists who are trying to destroy the thousand-year-old basis of the Russian Orthodox Church, provoking a schism, and using lies to lead the flock not to God but to Satan.”
…A poll released on Friday by the independent Levada Center found that a substantial proportion of Muscovites, 37 percent, took a positive view of the prosecution, and 50 percent had a negative view.

“When it began to turn into this fantastic biblical story, social attitudes toward the girls changed radically,” said Marat Guelman, a former political consultant and gallery owner whose projects have been denounced by religious activists.

“Most of the population now are not so much talking about what Pussy Riot did as much as their fear that these people who want to introduce some kind of Orthodox Taliban to Russia, that they will take power,” Mr. Guelman said. “So now I think the authorities are making a big mistake, taking revenge in this way. Society will not support this.”

Whether he is right will become clear only gradually, as state-controlled television reports on the prosecution of the three women, two of them mothers of small children. So far, the case has aroused intense interest only on the extremes of the political spectrum, a fact reflected on Friday outside the courthouse, where protesters wearing white ribbons tried to shout down Orthodox activists carrying Bibles…