Russia in Global Affairs

The desire to replay the Cold War is an attempt to reverse the wheel of history.

Perestroika inherited a difficult situation in terms of interethnic and federal relations. I have to admit that when we started perestroika, my colleagues and I did not see the full extent of that problem.

Attempts to define fascism mostly through ideology, so trendy these days, do not work, precisely because in most fascist movements and in all fascist regimes ideology plays primarily a manipulative role.

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.