Russia in Global Affairs

The online session “International Relations and Memory of WWII Today”, organized by the European University in Saint Petersburg and the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, was held on November 23. The participants in the panel discussion, moderated by Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of “Russia in Global Affairs”, included Alexei Miller, Tony Brenton, Sergei Kislyak, Ulrich Brandenburg, and Philip David Zelikow.

The situation with religious minorities in many respects reflects the logic of the political process of recent decades in Turkey. The social base and the core constituency of the ruling AKP are people of conservative views or even supporters of religious nationalism. For this part of society, nationalism and Islamic identity are interrelated and complementary notions.

Historical experience has shown that the interruption of canonical communion could inflict severe wounds on the entirety of the body of the Orthodox Church, rendering it a dead body, an object to be artificially preserved since it is completely alien to the anxious questions of the modern world.

Autocephalous churches are not quasi-state autonomous religious organizations operating exclusively within the space of church relations, but an intricate complex of institutions incorporating state and civil society and operating in a common political space.

We have existed for 2000 years. We have survived, sometimes in small numbers and sometimes in great numbers, every kind of political totalitarianism that the world could throw at us: from Roman emperors to invading Huns, and, in later centuries, totalitarianism of the far right and the far left. And we Orthodox believers didn’t really change anything.

There are also good sides to the current dispute: it proves that every Orthodox Church, however big and influential it is, has limits to its influence and power. This will hopefully lead to the restoration of conciliarity, the strongest and most attractive feature of the Universal Orthodox Church.

What were relations like inside Ukraine’s Orthodox community before the moment when the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople supported the idea of a national Church? Russia in Global Affairs put this and other questions to Vladislav Petrushko, Doctor of Ecclesiastical History, and Professor at St. Tikhon Orthodox University.

Constantinople wants to get a political tool for interfering in any conflict situation and using schismatics and legitimizing them for its own purposes.

Religion is the “blind spot” of modern social science, an elephant in the center of the room that no one notices until it begins to crush the china lying everywhere around.