On the occasion of the 1036th anniversary of the baptism of Kievan Rus’, a forum on the “Russian World” was held in the Crimean capital of Sevastopol, and the grand museum of the “New Chersonese” was also opened, sponsored by Orthodox Metropolitan Tikhon (Ševkunov), Putin’s “spiritual father” who was sent to Crimea as a punishment by his historical enemy, Moscow Patriarch Kirill (Gundyaev). Putin’s chief ecclesiastical aide, on the other hand, took the opportunity to relaunch his image of “imperial Orthodoxy”, starting precisely with the sacred land of the peninsula on the Black Sea. The museum recalls the “three eras” of Christianity: the Apostolic, the Byzantine and the Russian, summed up precisely in the Crimea of the martyrdom of Pope Clement, the Greek Tauride and the Baptism of Rus’.
Prince Vladimir of kyiv had indeed occupied the city of Chersonese in order to threaten the Byzantine Empire, obtaining as his wife the daughter of the Emperor of Constantinople and thus accepting Eastern-rite Christianity, after some fluctuations between Latin Catholics, Jews and Muslims. Vladimir was baptised in the Crimean land at the end of the first millennium, in 988, and then immersed the entire population in the waters of the Dnieper, in kyiv. These historic celebrations are yet another reason for separation between the Ukrainians – who commemorate them in mid-July by stressing that “in those days, where Moscow is now, ferocious beasts roamed” – and the Russians, who celebrate them at the end of the month as “the origin of the tri-unity of the Russian people”.
The participants of the Sevastopol forum, starting with the organizer, Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, have indeed called for the inclusion in Russian legislation of the concept of trihedinstvo, the “tri-unity” of Belarusians, Malorossy (“Little Russians”, i.e. Ukrainians) and Velikorossy, the “Great Russians” of Moscow, with fines and punishments for those who question this fundamental Slavophile dogma. The Triedinstvo also directly recalls the Troitsa, the Trinity, the main dogma of the Christian faith and the theme of the most famous Russian icon, the Trinity by Andrei Rublev, which Patriarch Kirill tore from the Tretyakov Gallery museum (the surname of the founding prince is also symbolic, Tretyakov means “Tertiary”) to be displayed for patriotic devotion in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and in the Lavra of St. Sergius of Radonezh, the spiritual father of Moscow Russia, victorious over the Tatars and all enemies of the East and West at the end of the 14th century.
In the three persons of the Holy Trinity, the three variants of Holy Russia are actually embodied, which unites lands and peoples in universal sobornost. The proposal of the Sevastopol Forum contemplates the crime of “dishonoring” the tri-unity of the Russian World, using the formulation according to which “the Russian Federation recognizes the tri-unity historically constituted by narodnost [“popularidad”, un término que se remonta al zarismo del siglo XIX] of the founder of Ancient Rus’, who by his initiative gave rise to the historical development of a civilization, a state, a tri-unitary culture – the culture of the Russian people, which unites in itself the Great, Little and White Russians, who are indivisible in their parts.” The Trinitarian unity of the Russians is the basis that “has formed the history of the Fatherland for centuries, protected by laws expressing the traditional spiritual and moral, cultural and historical values of Russia.”
“Disgrace” provides for punishments for those who propose to interpret the triune system in “erroneous ways or publicly deny it,” an offense for which they should pay at least a fine of 1.5 million rubles (15,000 euros) or forced labor and public service, up to imprisonment in a concentration camp for five years. If such denial or false interpretation is aggravated by circumstances such as abuse of public office, media coverage, or for political, ideological and racial reasons, up to national hatred and hostility towards the state, the law proposes raising the fine from 3 to 5 million rubles and up to a sentence of 10 to 15 years in a camp. A commission on “traditional moral and spiritual values and culture” was also set up at the forum to support the proposed law with the right motivations, headed by the governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, who will coordinate future sessions of lawyers and experts to draft all the necessary texts for the new “constitution of the Russian world”, in consultation with deputies and senators of the Moscow Parliament.
Patriarch Kirill supported the initiative from Moscow, leaving the stage to his adversary Tikhon, and recommended that a remedy be found to “heal the wounds of the division between Russia and Malorossija” caused by “external forces hostile to us.” In his message for the feast of the Baptism of Vladimir and Rus’, he stated that “the main goal of those who want to divide us, incessantly sowing discord and internal strife, is to plunge us into the darkness of a new paganism, destroying our spiritual and moral foundations.” Coinciding with the celebration, the much-hyped exchange of political prisoners between Russia, Germany and the United States took place, which freed Russia from the most notorious “foreign agents” who disturbed internal peace even from the cells of concentration camps, and allowed it to recover some “heroes” of the resistance to hostile forces, murderers and spies devoted to the great Fatherland.
The highest authority of the Russian Orthodox Church invites us to pray for “the renewal of our sincere conversion and repentance before God, so that we may not renounce the great Christian vocation of our people and preserve the legacy of the great Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir and reunite Russia and Malorossia.” As the Patriarch recalls, “from the baptismal font of the Dnieper there arose a renewed and transfigured people, endowed with tremendous moral strength and the everlasting light of the Gospel of truth, which has spread to the whole of Russian culture, which is born precisely from that font.” As Kirill concludes, “if we lose our Christian identity, we will lose Russia as well, becoming easy prey for dark forces and the threatening influences of foreign cultures.”
Russia’s mission, according to Patriarch Kirill, is to “reunify the peoples of Holy Rus'” – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and “all other states and peoples who refer to ancient Rus'”. Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko has set an example by linking historical celebrations with the 30th anniversary of his presidency, becoming the “great father” of the tri-unity, or at least the bi-unity of Moscow and Minsk. As one of the leading Belarusian preachers, Protoierej Fyodor Povnykh, recalled, Lukashenko “with the first exarch of our country, Metropolitan Filaret [Vakhromeev, en el cargo desde 1978 hasta 2013 y fallecido en 2021] created a new conception of the Belarusian nation” , which led to the “unitary state” with Russia.
The “eternal president” of Belarus, who in the 1990s described himself as an “Orthodox atheist” like Russia’s Boris Yeltsin, has, according to Povnykh, “managed to establish a cooperative relationship with the Church as the foundation of the state, with an internal policy based on dialogue and peace.” The Orthodox Church in Belarus is an exarchate (an autonomous and dependent structure at the same time) of the Moscow Patriarchate, as was initially decided for Ukraine, but since 1992 it has sought full independence, to the point of today’s ambiguous status of a Church that is formally autonomous but in practice still partly tied to Russia. The successor of Exarch Filaret, the current Metropolitan of Minsk, Venjamin (Tupeko), declared that “the schism of Orthodoxy in Ukraine” with the change of the date of Christmas to December 25 according to the Western calendar “is aimed at uprooting the faithful from their spiritual foundations, in order to more easily direct them towards new, foreign directions.”
In fact, Lukashenko anticipated Putin in many aspects of his dictatorial management, questioned and reaffirmed with violence in 2020, but in reality in full continuity with the Soviet past, having assumed power in 1994. Belarus has even kept the name “KGB” for the main power structure of the past and present, which today in Russia is called “FSB”, the security service that Putin headed before taking power of the government and the presidency after the fall of the USSR. The only two structures that survived the end of the communist empire, in fact, are the KGB-FSB and the Moscow Patriarchate, the “two natures” of the ideological dogma that is intertwined with the “tri-unity” of peoples quickly renamed after a century of atheism, which perhaps now turns out to be even more respectful of human rights and spiritual values than the current Veliko-malo-Belarusian Orthodoxy.
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