Putin’s holy war

23.02.2017, 18:09
Putin’s holy war - фото 1

It was just before dawn when close to a dozen police officers wearing helmets and body armor burst into the apartment where Yevgeny Lebedev lives with his wife and children in northern Moscow.

“They forced me to lie on the floor with my face down,” Lebedev recalled of the raid in mid-November. “They wouldn’t let me look up while they searched the apartment. My children were terrified. It took my five-year-old daughter a long time to get over it. She thought they were criminals who had come to rob us.”

Despite the heavy-handed police tactics, Lebedev, 38, was not a terrorist suspect. Nor was he accused of murder, armed robbery, state treason or any other serious crime.

The officers who raided Lebedev’s home were investigating a possible violation of a controversial Russian law that makes it a criminal offense to “insult the feelings of religious believers.” Approved by President Vladimir Putin in June 2013, the law stipulates up to a year in jail for “insulting” acts that occur outside a place of worship. Those that happen inside are punishable by up to three years behind bars.

The homes of several other people were raided that same morning, in an operation that involved more than 150 police officers. Like Lebedev, they had protested plans to build a Russian Orthodox Christian church in a neighborhood park. Lebedev and other locals said its construction, part of an ambitious project to build 200 new churches across the Russian capital, would rob them of a much-loved green space. Brawls and shouting matches frequently erupted between protesters and radical Orthodox activists.

“By 2030 Russia will be like medieval Spain, where the Inquisition persecuted non-believers and heretics” — Aleksei Bushmakov, lawyer

Eventually, after months of rising tensions, the Russian Orthodox Church scrapped its construction plans. It was a rare victory for a grassroots protest in modern-day Russia — especially against such an influential adversary. But the row did not end there. Orthodox activists fenced off a section of the park and erected a wooden cross, inviting a priest to lead them in prayer sessions. Protests continued.

Patriarch Kirill, the powerful head of the Russian Orthodox Church, pitched into the dispute last October, accusing the protesters of having an “ideological hatred of the Lord’s cross.”

“The raids were clearly revenge for us stopping them from building the church,” said Lebedev. “The law on insulting religious feelings is aimed specifically at those who dare to go against the Russian Orthodox Church.”

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Russia’s law to protect religious believers was inspired, analysts say, by the high-profile trial of Pussy Riot, when the state prosecutor had been forced to scour Russia’s criminal code for appropriate charges to levy against the all-woman band.

Members of the Russian band Pussy Riot at a court hearing in Moscow in 2012. They were charged with hooloiganism for staging a

Members of the Russian band Pussy Riot at a court hearing in Moscow in 2012. They were charged with hooloiganism for staging a “punk protest” against Vladimir Putin | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

“Pussy Riot were charged with hooliganism and inciting hatred against Orthodox Christian believers,” said Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center in Moscow, which monitors relations between organized religion and secular society. “The latter charge was very hard to prove in court and it wasn’t so clear what hooliganism had to do with it at all. The law on insulting the feelings of religious believers was introduced in order to make it easier to prosecute people in similar cases.”

The law was greeted with horror by Russian liberals, as well as more progressive Russian Orthodox Christians, who see it as further evidence of the erosion of the separation of church and state enshrined in Russia’s constitution. Although Putin was a KGB officer in an officially atheist Soviet Union, he has forged ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in a bid to create something resembling a national ideology. Last year, he appointed ultra-conservative Orthodox believers to top education ministry and children’s rights posts.

However, like much of Russia’s recent controversial legislation — from the Kremlin’s notorious law forbidding “gay propaganda” to a legal clampdown on public protests — the law on religious belief remained untested until authorities decided the time was right to try it out in practice.

The first person to be charged was 38-year-old Viktor Krasnov from Stavropol in southern Russia, who claimed “there is no God” in a heated online dispute with two Russian Orthodox Christians in October 2014. “If I say that the collection of Jewish fairytales entitled the Bible is complete bullshit, then that is that. At least for me,” Krasnov also wrote.

During the first two decades of the Soviet era, some 200,000 members of the clergy were murdered, while millions of other Christians were persecuted for their faith.

In March 2016, Krasnov’s apartment was raided by police. A judge ordered a month-long examination in a psychiatric ward to determine if he was fit to stand trial. He was ultimately deemed fit to stand — despite the judge’s assertion that “no one in their right mind would write anything against Orthodox Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church” — and his trial is ongoing.

The landmark case represented a startling turnaround in Russia’s history.

During the first two decades of the Soviet era, some 200,000 members of the clergy were murdered, while millions of other Christians were persecuted for their faith, according to a 1995 Kremlin committee report. Although a limited Orthodox Christian revival was permitted by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin during World War II, anti-religion propaganda and selected discrimination against believers continued up until the mid-1980s.

“Yuri Gagarin said ‘I traveled into space, and I did not see God there,’” an astonished Krasnov told me when I spoke to him last year, referring to a famous Soviet anti-religion poster. “And now I’m being charged with insulting the feelings of religious believers?”

Russian Orthodox priests take part in a procession in front of Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg | Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

Russian Orthodox priests take part in a procession in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg | Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

Krasnov’s “nerve-wracking” trial lasted for almost a year, before the case was closed when the statue of limitations expired this month. But the court was initially reluctant to halt proceedings until Krasnov had entered a guilty plea, which he refused to do. His lawyer, Andrei Sabinin, told POLITICO that Krasnov’s refusal to cooperate with the court means he could face further legal problems over his “No God” comments.

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Although human rights organizations criticized Krasnov’s prosecution, the case did not provoke widespread public outrage. More cases swiftly followed, the vast majority against Russians accused of insulting Orthodox Christianity.

“Charges against people accused of breaking this law allow the state to strengthen its ideological stance on ties with the church,” said Verkhovsky. “The actual people who are charged aren’t that important for the state — it’s more important for the authorities that the cases are covered by the mass media.”

One of the most high-profile cases is that of Ruslan Sokolovsky, a 22-year-old video blogger from Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth biggest city. Last August, after state television warned Russians that anyone playing Pokemon Go in a church faced prosecution under the law on offending believers, Sokolovsky set off to Yekaterinburg’s biggest cathedral to find out just how serious the authorities were.

“This is nonsense. Who can be offended by someone walking around a church with a smartphone?” he says in a video he later posted to YouTube. The video, which has now been watched over 1.5 million times, also contained footage of Sokolovsky hunting the multi-colored cartoon creatures next to the altar while a priest intoned prayers.

Marc Bennetts

22 February 2017 Politico