RUSSIAN WORLD Russia’s “trinity of religions”

The theory of Russia uniting peoples and worlds in the “Russian world”, which has been the motivation for the war in Ukraine for more than two years and has long since inspired the rebirth of great Russia as the centre of the world, has a substantially trinitarian formulation. Starting from the late medieval ideal of “Moscow – Third Rome”, as the heir of Rome and Constantinople, the dimensions of Russian reality are expressed in a triadic version in various aspects: the geographical one, which attributes to Russia three geographical coordinates, the North, East and West, starting with the Arctic Circle together with the eastern half of Europe and the northern half of Asia; the historical one of the three capitals: kyiv, Moscow and St. Petersburg; that of the three peoples: Belarus, Russia and Ukraine (White, Great and Little Russia); and the spiritual one of Latin, Greek and Slavic Christianity.

Russia is the “third world” in relation to the great powers of the past and present, as it is again today in the confrontation between the United States and China, a “new people” compared to the ancient empires of Rome and Byzantium, and in later centuries, to Europe and the United States. It is no coincidence that the symbolically representative image of the military-spiritual mission of Russia under President Putin and Patriarch Kirill – with the participation of “third figures” such as Metropolitan Tikhon of Crimea or Commander-in-Chief Prigozhin of the global war – is the icon of the Holy Trinity of St. Andrew Rublev, the 15th-century monk who expressed the rebirth of Moscow Russia after the Tatar yoke together with his two teachers, St. Sergius of Radonezh and St. Stephen of Perm.

Religion is, in fact, the main source of inspiration for all the historical variants of Russia, including the Soviet one in the “inverted” version of state atheism. Today, Orthodoxy is the great justification for the “defense of traditional values” that mobilizes all of Russia in the war against the Western Antichrist, and it is increasingly emerging as a separate religion, preserving the formal aspect of Christianity of the Slavic-Eastern rite and, at the same time, progressively extending to other “patriotic” confessions, to the point of forming a new “spiritual trinity” that associates even Islam and Buddhism with Orthodoxy, to the point of almost indistinguishing them, in this single expression of the Trinitarian homeland.

In 1997, a decisive year for the shift towards “spiritual sovereignty” that later led to Vladimir Putin’s regime, the Moscow Duma approved a new law on religious freedom that corrected Yeltsin’s excessively “liberal” 1990 law, associated with Gorbachev’s even more permissive 1991 law, which at the end of the Soviet era allowed any religious denomination to freely disseminate its creed. The new law, inspired by the Orthodox Church of the then Patriarch Alexei II and his future successor, Metropolitan Kirill, and supported in the Duma by the revived Communist Party of Gennady Zyuganov, stated that Russia has a “historically principal” religion, namely the Orthodox one, with four other “traditional religions” being associated on a lower scale: Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity, the latter differentiated from Orthodoxy to indicate the Protestant and Catholic variants, minor but present in Russia for centuries.

The new law, which was further tightened by subsequent amendments, imposes the prevalence of Orthodoxy over all others in the “1+4” scheme, relegating religious communities not included in this scheme to the category of “non-traditional” and therefore requiring continuous controls and revisions to be allowed to exist, up to the total exclusion of those most resistant to registration and control, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals and Scientology. In any case, the four “less traditional” ones are confined, in principle, to the attendance of the “minor ethnic groups” of Caucasian Islam, Asian Buddhism and Polish-German Christianity, present to a greater or lesser extent in the territories of the Federation, while the “true Russians” are always associated with Orthodoxy, even if they have not received baptism or the other sacraments. With the warlike-religious evolution of recent years, in practice, two of the four “minor” religions are exalted and two disappear: Islam and Buddhism are increasingly aligned with orthodoxy, while Catholics/Protestants and Jews are identified with the “hostile peoples”, even though their hierarchies strive to appear loyal to the current military regime.

An article recently published in the Nezavisimaja Gazeta speaks, in fact, of a “tripartite” religious system in Russia. Judaism, which the Russians designate with the unkind title of judaismsuffers from the effects of the ancestral anti-Semitism of the Russians, with the numerous pogroms that drove them from Belarus to the southern lands of Novorossiya, the area of ​​the Black Sea between Odessa and Sochi from where the founders of the modern State of Israel set sail. As much as the Italian-American Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar, who has lived in Russia since 1990, tries to appear “more Russian than the Russians” and enthusiastically supports the policies of the Kremlin, today the Jews are once again marginalized and persecuted, especially in the Islamic regions of the Caucasus, but also in the rest of the Federation. Although one of the federal subjects is the “Jewish Autonomous District” of Birobidzhan in Eastern Siberia, created in Stalin’s time as a “Jewish ghetto” for the empire, today Russian Jews are actually trying as much as possible to escape from Russia – which supports the Palestinians in the conflict that began on October 7 last year – and reach Israel, the most Russian-speaking country after the former Soviet countries.

Protestants from the most historically rooted confessions in Russia, such as Baptists, Lutherans and ingermanland The Scandinavians and Finns always present themselves as great supporters of the “holy war” against the Western world, but their own Germanic, Baltic and Finnish identity links them to the regions least aligned with Moscow, and, on the other side of the border, to the least “friendly” European countries. And not to mention the Catholics, represented above all by the Poles and Lithuanians, and by the Germans themselves historically present in Russian territory. The six Catholic bishops (one Italian, three Germans, one Pole and one Russian) also profess their loyalty to Russia without condemning the war, although they call for peace, and some Russian Latin priests publicly support the war cause, but the “Roman Catholic” Church also includes several Greek-Catholic communities, very close by tradition and ethnicity to the great Ukrainian enemies, and some of which have already been suppressed/from above as “enemies of Russia”.

The article of the Nezavisimaja Gazeta The centralisation of Buddhist communities in Russia is particularly striking, after the Sangkha was divided for years into several regional centres, in Kalmykia, in the Tuva region and in Buryatia, without ever finding effective forms of unity. Now Russian Buddhism, which includes at least 6-7 million people (Protestants, Catholics and Jews together barely add up to 4 million), has a new headquarters in Moscow for everyone, and spreads its complaints about sacrilegious offences against Buddha while enthusiastically supporting the war in Ukraine, where soldiers from Buddhist regions are part of the main reserves of “cannon fodder” and have Buddhist chaplains directly enlisted as soldiers. A few days ago, the 260th anniversary of the Buryat Buddhist hierarchy Khambo-lam was celebrated, with warm congratulations from President Putin and the entire Kremlin leadership, especially from former Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, considered a semi-divine Buddhist hero in his native Tuva.

Caucasian and Asian Islam has always been a great defender of Russian Orthodoxy, beginning with traditions dating back to the conversion of the Tatar Khans to Islam when they still dominated Rus’, in harmony with the Moscow Orthodox Church which greatly benefited from friendly relations with the Golden Horde of the Volga. In a certain sense, the alliance between Orthodox and Muslims is a historical guarantee of Russian imperial domination over various peoples, keeping at bay the most radical and terrorist versions that still threaten, above all, in the territories of Central Asia. Together with Buddhism, Islam completes the “trinity of religions”, and Patriarch Kirill does not miss the opportunity to show that Russian Orthodoxy is capable of uniting peoples and religions in the great triumph of “traditional moral and spiritual values”.

However, a fourth hypostasis is increasingly appearing in the trinitarian communion, which also comes from the traditions of the peoples of Asian Russia and which President Putin himself is looking at with particular interest. This is Mongolian shamanism, recognised in Russia as an official confession although “much less traditional”, but during Vladimir Putin’s recent trip to Mongolia, via Tuva, various sources claim that a consultation was held with some local shamans on the course to follow in the war with Ukraine. Putin has travelled to these lands several times, accompanied by his faithful Shoigu, but this time the cause would have taken on a truly apocalyptic character: according to some, the president would have asked the shamans for their blessing to use nuclear weapons, and returned comforted by their assurances that such a decision would not anger the evil spirits too much. In this case, shamanism would even surpass the “traditional trinity”, imposing a cult that dissolves into the purest and most absolute spirituality: the disappearance of human beings from the face of the earth.

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