October 14, 2007 — Contents

SUNDAY OCTOBER 14 CONTENTS

(1) The Sunday Photos: Youth Edition

(2) The Sunday Mystery

(3) The Sunday Sermon

(4) The Sunday Funnies

(5) The Sunday Book Review

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The Sunday Photos

“I saw a Soviet Union propaganda documentary about ‘the bad life’ of the U.S.A.,” recalled Dima Morovkin, 38, known as Master Crab, who learned his moves in the 80s. “There was just a small fragment where black kids were dancing in the streets, and the documentary said that big American gangsters were making them dance to earn money,” he added, laughing. Anti-American sentiment may be big in Russian politics right now, a sure vote-winner for the country’s leaders, but the popular embrace of Western culture is at an all-time high, including a community of fervent break-dance disciples who live, sleep and eat the break-dance, or b-boy, life.

—The New York Times, September 30, 2007

Meanwhile, other Russian youth, from the Nashi youth cult, rallied to support the birthday of Dictator Vladimir Putin, just as Russian youth used to do in the days of Stalin:

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The Sunday Mystery

In the Russian Truth is Stranger than Fiction Department, the Moscow Times reports:

Moscow region prosecutors have asked the police to reinvestigate the death of a cat whose owners say he was catnapped and killed by rabbit-breeding neighbors at their dacha, near the town of Ruza. An official with the Moscow Region Prosecutor’s Office, who refused to give her name, said the request had been made after animal rights organization Vita had asked them to look into the death of the animal, named Motya. “We took our cat to the dacha, and our neighbors, who are very strange people, killed him,” said the cat’s owner, Yulia Ilyukhina, 29. She said the neighbors suspected the cat of attacking their rabbits. Ilyukhina said Motya was lying in the sun on Aug. 5 when the neighbors — Viktor Martynenko, his daughter Tatyana Klychnikova and her husband, Alexander Klychnikov — raced up in their Lada and snatched the cat. “He was sitting in the sun, dreaming. He was very friendly — you could just walk up and pet him,” Ilyukhina said. “They grabbed the cat and drove away. They were driving very fast.” She said the neighbors had also accused the cat of keeping their child awake. Ilyukhina said Martynenko had threatened to kill Motya with a stick. “If the rabbit is bigger than the cat, how could he attack it,” said Ilyukhina, who added that Motya was less than 2 years old. She said the cat had been kept locked indoors after the neighbors complained. Ilyukhina said the neighbors later returned and dumped the dead cat where it had been laying. When she went to the police, they failed to interview a number of people who had been witnesses and refused to take any further action, Ilyukhina said. Ruza police refused to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to reach Martynenko were unsuccessful. An autopsy performed on the cat after the police failed to take any action revealed that Motya died from five to 10 minutes after being hit with a blunt object, Ilyukhina said. Vita president Irina Novozhilovo said very few cases dealing with cruelty to animals actually made it to court. “It depends on people’s enthusiasm,” she said, adding that cases only make it to the court after people continue to complain when the police turn them down. In a high-profile case that did make it to court, the owner of an American Staffordshire terrier was sentenced last year to one year of community service after he set the dog loose on a on a group of stray puppies. His dog killed two of the puppies and the man killed another two himself.

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The Sunday Sermon: Putin’s Russia Becoming Protestant?

Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage
Where the grapes of wrath are stored
He has loosed the fateful lightening
Of his terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on!

Paul Goble reports that Russia is turning Protestant as fast as it’s turning Muslim. Way to go, St. Vladimir of Putin! Another feather in your cap!

Protestant congregations in Russia as of this year outnumber those of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches there combined. And the total number of practicing Protestants is likely to exceed the number of active Orthodox and Catholic faithful sometime before 2012, according to a new study. If those projections hold – and they may not — Russia could become a Protestant country, at least in terms of the number of practicing faithful, for a few decades until ongoing demographic developments transform it, at least in its current borders, into a Muslim majority one sometime later in the 21st century. And that possibility, two Russian writers arguethis week might be a good thing because, in the words of one, “Protestant countries are the most stable and wealthy” and in the words of the second, Western Christians are more focused on improving conditions in this life than in looking beyond the grave.

The first of these writers, Babr.ru’s Dmitriy Tayevskiy argues that the post-Soviet upsurge in interest in Orthodoxy has begun to recede as more and more Russians see the Church’s obsequiousness toward the state and its simultaneous efforts to promote itself as the single moral instructor of the nation. Protestantism, in contrast, has won adherents in large measure because of its support from abroad and because of its commitment to helping its members with their lives and promoting the social gospel, two resources that Russian Orthodoxy does not have to the same degree. And it is Tayevskiy who wades into the controversial issue of just how many real believers there are in Russia. As the Irkutsk analyst notes, the Patriarchate routinely claims that 80 percent of all Russians are Orthodox because that is the percentage of the population baptized in the Church. But few of these people take an active part in Church life, he notes, and “more sober-minded” priests admit than only about two percent of the Russian population – some three million people – are in fact “church” people who attend regularly and maintain religious discipline.

For other faiths as well, there are gaps between the number of adherents claimed and the number of actual practitioners. Most Jews in Russia are secular rather than practicing, Tayevskiy continues. Many Russia’s Catholics are Catholic in name only. And Russia’s Buddhists have a hard time specifying just how many of them there are. The situation with regard to Islam is the classic example of this difference. There may be as many as 25 million “ethnic” Muslims in the Russian Federation, people who are members of traditionally Islamic nations. But fewer than one in five is linked to a mosque or actively lives according to the five pillars of the faith.
Protestants, in contrast, are the great exception. Given Soviet oppression in the past and Orthodox opposition to what the Patriarchate routinely refers to as extremist “sects,” few Russians declare they are Protestants if they are not practicing members of one or another denomination. Consequently, there is a far smaller difference between the number of believers Protestant leaders claim and the number of actual participants in their denominations. That makes it easier to project the number of believers, but it may in some circumstances lead to exaggerations as well. Nonetheless, Tayevskiy almost certainly is correct when he suggests that unless Moscow’s policies toward religion change dramatically or the practice of one or more of the denominations undergoes a fundamental shift, Protestant believers will outnumber the active followers of all other Christian denominations in Russia a decade from now. The implications of such a development are potentially enormous, and some of them were explored, admittedly indirectly, by Moscow literary critic Valentin Nepomnyashiy as part of a discussion of the ways the core ideas of Orthodoxy and Western Christianity affect the behavior of their followers.

In a widely disseminated Interfax interview this week, Nepomnyashiy focuses on the comparative importance of Christmas and Easter in the two church traditions. In Western Christianity, he notes, Christmas is the more important holiday, suggesting as it does that “God became man” and consequently that men must try to improve the world. Because God came to man in this way, he continued, “in the West after the Renaissance arose ‘the idea of the incompleteness of the world as the cause of all misfortunes and unhappiness of people’ and as a result in the 20th century, ‘the surrounding world was in fact conceived as construction material’” out of which man could make the world better. The Eastern tradition of Christianity, the critic suggests, sees Easter as more important than Christmas. It focuses on Christ’s sacrifice for man’s sins and invites the Orthodox to “take up the cross” and follow Christ’s example rather than try to change the world in more concrete ways. Consequently, although Nepomnyashiy does not say so in this interview, were Russia to shift from one of these paradigms to the other, that change would represent a far more revolutionary development than even the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 or the collapse of communism and the USSR in 1991.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

The Sunday Sermon: Putin’s Russia Becoming Protestant?

Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage
Where the grapes of wrath are stored
He has loosed the fateful lightening
Of his terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on!

Paul Goble reports that Russia is turning Protestant as fast as it’s turning Muslim. Way to go, St. Vladimir of Putin! Another feather in your cap!

Protestant congregations in Russia as of this year outnumber those of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches there combined. And the total number of practicing Protestants is likely to exceed the number of active Orthodox and Catholic faithful sometime before 2012, according to a new study. If those projections hold – and they may not — Russia could become a Protestant country, at least in terms of the number of practicing faithful, for a few decades until ongoing demographic developments transform it, at least in its current borders, into a Muslim majority one sometime later in the 21st century. And that possibility, two Russian writers arguethis week might be a good thing because, in the words of one, “Protestant countries are the most stable and wealthy” and in the words of the second, Western Christians are more focused on improving conditions in this life than in looking beyond the grave.

The first of these writers, Babr.ru’s Dmitriy Tayevskiy argues that the post-Soviet upsurge in interest in Orthodoxy has begun to recede as more and more Russians see the Church’s obsequiousness toward the state and its simultaneous efforts to promote itself as the single moral instructor of the nation. Protestantism, in contrast, has won adherents in large measure because of its support from abroad and because of its commitment to helping its members with their lives and promoting the social gospel, two resources that Russian Orthodoxy does not have to the same degree. And it is Tayevskiy who wades into the controversial issue of just how many real believers there are in Russia. As the Irkutsk analyst notes, the Patriarchate routinely claims that 80 percent of all Russians are Orthodox because that is the percentage of the population baptized in the Church. But few of these people take an active part in Church life, he notes, and “more sober-minded” priests admit than only about two percent of the Russian population – some three million people – are in fact “church” people who attend regularly and maintain religious discipline.

For other faiths as well, there are gaps between the number of adherents claimed and the number of actual practitioners. Most Jews in Russia are secular rather than practicing, Tayevskiy continues. Many Russia’s Catholics are Catholic in name only. And Russia’s Buddhists have a hard time specifying just how many of them there are. The situation with regard to Islam is the classic example of this difference. There may be as many as 25 million “ethnic” Muslims in the Russian Federation, people who are members of traditionally Islamic nations. But fewer than one in five is linked to a mosque or actively lives according to the five pillars of the faith.
Protestants, in contrast, are the great exception. Given Soviet oppression in the past and Orthodox opposition to what the Patriarchate routinely refers to as extremist “sects,” few Russians declare they are Protestants if they are not practicing members of one or another denomination. Consequently, there is a far smaller difference between the number of believers Protestant leaders claim and the number of actual participants in their denominations. That makes it easier to project the number of believers, but it may in some circumstances lead to exaggerations as well. Nonetheless, Tayevskiy almost certainly is correct when he suggests that unless Moscow’s policies toward religion change dramatically or the practice of one or more of the denominations undergoes a fundamental shift, Protestant believers will outnumber the active followers of all other Christian denominations in Russia a decade from now. The implications of such a development are potentially enormous, and some of them were explored, admittedly indirectly, by Moscow literary critic Valentin Nepomnyashiy as part of a discussion of the ways the core ideas of Orthodoxy and Western Christianity affect the behavior of their followers.

In a widely disseminated Interfax interview this week, Nepomnyashiy focuses on the comparative importance of Christmas and Easter in the two church traditions. In Western Christianity, he notes, Christmas is the more important holiday, suggesting as it does that “God became man” and consequently that men must try to improve the world. Because God came to man in this way, he continued, “in the West after the Renaissance arose ‘the idea of the incompleteness of the world as the cause of all misfortunes and unhappiness of people’ and as a result in the 20th century, ‘the surrounding world was in fact conceived as construction material’” out of which man could make the world better. The Eastern tradition of Christianity, the critic suggests, sees Easter as more important than Christmas. It focuses on Christ’s sacrifice for man’s sins and invites the Orthodox to “take up the cross” and follow Christ’s example rather than try to change the world in more concrete ways. Consequently, although Nepomnyashiy does not say so in this interview, were Russia to shift from one of these paradigms to the other, that change would represent a far more revolutionary development than even the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 or the collapse of communism and the USSR in 1991.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

The Sunday Funnies

More Putin cartoons thanks to our intrepid friend in South Africa:

And one from the Russian front:

Translation: On his birthday, Mr. Putin blew out his candles.

Source: Ellustrator.

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The Sunday Book Review: Beslan, Another Fact the Russian People Won’t Face Up To

Writing in the Moscow Times Peter Baker, a former Moscow co-bureau chief for The Washington Post, reviews Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1, by Timothy Phillips:

A few weeks after the Beslan school siege in 2004, I returned to the traumatized town in southern Russia to write about how it was faring. The town had turned eerily silent, almost as if the guts had been ripped out of it. Funerals were still being held every day as the remains of the bodies of children were identified, one by one. Like the stench at the morgue, the grief was overpowering.

One night during the trip, I went to an Internet cafe in nearby Vladikavkaz to file a story. All around the room were young children, playing one of those ubiquitous violent video games — children not much older than those who had been shot and blown up in School No. 1. They were giggling as they shot “terrorists” on the screen. As I peeked over, it dawned on me that the digital setting for this shoot-’em-up game was a burned-out building that looked just like the burned-out school in Beslan.

It was all too haunting. How could this be a game just down the road from the place where terror had intruded on real life in such a horrific way? How could they look at those screens and not find the images too chilling to confront? How could they not be crushed by the same sort of relentless misery that afflicted their fellow Ossetians? And, by extension, how could Russia move on so quickly?

Timothy Phillips grapples with these questions in his gripping account of the siege, “Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1.” As a translator with the BBC, he came to Russia after the standoff to help put together a documentary on the world’s worst terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001, and expected to see a country coming to terms with its own 9/11. “But this was not what I found,” he writes. “As I traveled between Moscow and Beslan, most of those I met had no opinions about the event at all, as if they had hardly thought about it either at the time or since. It was strange to them that I was asking; some even seemed to resent it.”

Maybe it tells us something about the value of life in a country that has seen so much violent death over the centuries. Maybe it tells us something about survival: walling yourself off against the horrors so as to go on with life as if all is normal. Maybe it tells us something about the country President Vladimir Putin has built. Phillips doesn’t have the answers, and perhaps no one does, but at least he’s raising some of the right questions. “Death, which is feared everywhere, is more preoccupying in Russia than in the rest of Europe,” he writes, “because it comes so much sooner.”

“Beslan” traces the events of the first three days of September 2004 through powerful narrative, stitching together the individual horror stories we’ve heard before into a compelling, comprehensive, almost cinematic account. Phillips does justice to the moment, paying tribute to the victims of Beslan by not letting them be forgotten so easily. There’s almost no way to read it without weeping for Beslan and for Russia.

Phillips puts the unfathomable events into historical context, tracing the complex and deeply dysfunctional relationships between Russians, Chechens, Ossetians and Ingush over the centuries and explaining how the deaths of more than 300 men, women and children fit into a pattern of anger and atrocity. What is missing from this rendition, as the author admits at one point, is the current context: what Beslan means in terms of the country Putin has built.

“There is one person whose name is seldom mentioned in Beslan, but whose part in the siege was key,” Phillips writes. “President Putin has remained distant from the events. Indeed, on the basis of what is publicly known, it is hard to justify mentioning him in this book at all.” Phillips notes that Putin appeared only briefly on television and made his post-siege visit in the middle of the night, disappearing again before anyone awoke to realize he was there. “But just the fact of his immense and unrivaled power in Russia means that President Putin must have been involved.”

Alas, the two paragraphs devoted to the president belie the greater connection between Putin and Beslan. Although Phillips does place Beslan in the context of Putin’s war in Chechnya, the rules Putin has imposed on a society trying to find itself in the post-Soviet era are left unexplored. One of the things that made Beslan such a singular event in modern Russian history is that it exposed the broader reality of Putin’s rule — television stations that aired a Brazilian soap opera or a film about a parrot rather than cover the deadly denouement live, a newspaper editor fired for coverage that angered the Kremlin, a radio station that had to rely on CNN to tell its Russian listeners what was happening, investigations that covered up more questions than they answered.

Especially revealing was Putin’s own response. Even as the smoke was clearing to the south, the president invited Western scholars and journalists to his dacha and angrily denounced Europe and the United States for their long insistence that Moscow talk with Chechen leaders to seek an end to the war. “Why don’t you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House, engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?” Putin fumed. He dismissed Western criticism as Cold War mentality and said that the West wants to “pull the strings so that Russia won’t raise its head.”

A little more than a week later, Putin announced that because of the Beslan siege, he was eliminating the election of governors in Russia’s 89 regions in favor of Kremlin appointment, a move he had sworn repeatedly never to take, as well as eliminating the election of State Duma members by single-mandate districts in favor of easily controlled party lists. How terrorism in the Caucasus required the elimination of gubernatorial elections in, say, Siberia was never clear. But people close to the Kremlin indicated that Putin had long been planning such a move and simply took advantage of the moment to enact it.

Still, Phillips has offered us a worthy history of these three days, giving voice to the anguish of a small town buffeted by forces beyond its ken. And he ably points out the holes in the story that future authors will hopefully answer. “The absence of convincing or honest answers to important questions has caused many survivors to fall back on conspiracy theories,” he writes. “These are a tried and tested solution to many mysteries in a country with a pathological aversion to honesty and openness.”

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