The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights

Kristina Stoeckl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415658713
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317817901
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the key 2008 publication of the Russian Orthodox Church on human dignity, freedom, and rights. It considers how the document was formed, charting the development over time of the Russian Orthodox Church's views on human rights. It analyzes the detail of the document, and assesses the practical and political impact inside the Church, at the national level and in the international arena. Overall, it shows how the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church has shifted from outright hostility towards individual human rights to the advocacy of "traditional values."

1 Four areas of encounters and friction with human rights for the Russian Orthodox Church

In this chapter, I will examine areas of encounters and frictions between the Russian Orthodox Church and the human rights regime. The conflicts described in this chapter contributed to the hardening-up of the negative standpoint of the Russian Orthodox Church vis-à-vis human rights in the period leading up to the 2000s. They form the background against which the Russian Orthodox Church set out to formulate its own understanding of human rights. I first look at ideological battles during the Cold War, and then at the post-1991 situation, focusing on post-Cold War nationalism, the confrontation between Church and liberal civil society, and international human rights legislation.

The most appropriate starting point for a discussion of the encounters and frictions between the Russian Orthodox Church and human rights is 1948, the year when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed. It is appropriate because this is when human rights as an international legal standard were born. In terms of the Russian Orthodox Church’s ideological engagement with the idea of human rights, as it emerged in the wake of the French Revolution, one could of course go back further in history, to the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the influence of French Enlightenment ideas in tsarist Russia. I will not take this path, but it is necessary to bear in mind this intellectual history and to remember that some of the Church’s ideological arguments against human rights (human rights as the fruit of the anthropocentric and anti-religious Enlightenment) are derived from the nineteenth-century intellectual struggle that the Slavophiles conducted against Westernizers (Bowring 2013).

The Russian Orthodox Church and human rights during the Cold War

The Soviet Union and its satellite states were among the countries that abstained from signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948. Twenty years later, in 1968, the Soviet Union did, however, sign two other important international human rights instruments that translated the principles pronounced in the Declaration into positive law, namely the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ratified in 1973). In 1975, it also signed the Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Helsinki Accords did not have a legal binding effect on the signatory states, but politically they nonetheless constituted a clear commitment to the values of human rights. The “principles guiding relations between participating states,” enumerated in the Helsinki Final Act, included “the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief and confirmed that member states should act “in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (CSCE 1975).¹

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR 1948) was signed by 48 members of the United Nations General Assembly with the Soviet Union abstaining, the Russian Orthodox Church was hardly in a state to react to the event or to reflect on the potential impact which this document could have on the life of the Church. In the late 1940s, it had just emerged from two decades of severe repression, which had brought its institutional structure almost to complete collapse, and was going through a gradual recovery under strict state tutelage. Since 1942, the wartime effort and concerns over the post-war geopolitical order had led Stalin to loosen his destructive grip on the Church, and Patriarch Sergii was determined to lead his Church into collaboration with the state in order to assure its institutional survival (Dickinson 2000; Miner 2003; Roccucci 2011). The historian William Fletcher speaks about an “unwritten concordat” between the Soviet state and the Church during the Cold War, the terms of which he defines as follows:

From the Church’s point of view, the advantage of continued institutional existence in Soviet society were deemed sufficient to outweigh the religious—and sometimes ethical—incongruity of subservience to an anti-religious State in political matters […] from the State’s point of view, the advantage which may accrue from the political co-operation of the Church were deemed sufficient to outweigh the ideological annoyance of a delay in the eventual disappearance of organized religion from Soviet society.

(Fletcher 1973, 5–6)

The collaboration of the Soviet government with the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious groups after 1945 was concentrated in the field of external relations, where the religious communities in the Soviet Union were expected to create a positive image of the country in the international arena. The main topic for engagement of the religious communities—not only the Russian Orthodox Church, but also the Soviet Muslim and Buddhist communities (on Islam and Buddhism in Soviet foreign politics, see Fletcher 1973, 69–91)— was peace and disarmament propaganda. Fletcher points out that the Church could make a significant contribution in this area of Soviet foreign policy:

Because the Church claimed to be above politics, and in many circles this claim was accepted, its participation could provide the peace campaign with an aura of legitimacy which would be difficult to achieve otherwise. Furthermore, the Church could expand the movement’s influence by attracting certain Western churchmen, and by mobilizing the deep and eminently legitimate stream of pacifism throughout the Christian world.

(Fletcher 1973, 30)

In the name of the campaign for peace, the Russian Orthodox Church initiated a series of ecumenical activities. These activities targeted, on the one hand, the other Orthodox churches among which the Russian Orthodox Church sought to confirm its role as leader, and, on the other hand, Christian churches worldwide with whom the Russian Orthodox Church entered into dialogue. The Prague Christian Peace Conference, founded in 1961, constituted one such undertaking. It is described by the historian Fletcher as an institution whose primary function was propaganda for peace as an adjunct to the implementation of Soviet interests (Fletcher 1973, 40). Besides the Christian Peace Conference, the Russian Orthodox Church also became a member of the World Council of Churches in 1961. In these institutions, it became, as Webster points out, a “prime mover of moral statements,” which frequently included harsh criticism of US military aggression, but kept silent on the military actions of the Soviet Union or its client states (Webster 1993, 216). The Russian Orthodox Church also conducted a regular dialogue with Protestant churches in East and West Germany (Overmeyer 2005).

During the late 1970s and the 1980s, the Church engaged actively in debates about nuclear disarmament. Webster, whose perspective on the Russian Orthodox Church’s external relations during the Cold War is decidedly critical, offers a long list of actions in the field of nuclear disarmament propaganda undertaken by the Moscow Patriarchate in those years. What stands out is the sheer number of conferences and statements dedicated to a subject which fell clearly outside the close range of ecclesiastical competence and theological reasoning; for example, a deliberation on the neutron bomb in the World Council of Churches in 1977 (Webster 1993, 274), an inter-religious conference “on nuclear catastrophe” in 1982 (Webster 1993, 253), and a “Message of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church on War and Peace in a Nuclear Age” in 1986. To Western observers it was clear that the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in the realm of external church relations and peace and disarmament propaganda were dictated by the Soviet government. Where the state expressed a commitment to social justice and peace, the Church could find a genuine confluence of goals, but the price for the Church’s high international profile was silence when the Soviet state violated these very same principles back home (Fletcher 1973, 6).

There are two remarkable features about the Russian Orthodox Church’s activities in the field of external relations and its collaboration with Soviet foreign policy. The first is ideological: it is noteworthy that throughout the Cold War the Church remained almost completely silent on the question of human rights, despite the fact that the Soviet Union signed three international human rights treaties, and notwithstanding the incessant violation of believers’ rights in the Soviet Union. The second remarkable feature is institutional: during the decades of the Cold War, the Church built up an efficient corps of clergy in its Department for External Church Relations that could engage in the international promotion of peace and disarmament. It is precisely this institution which was eventually to promote the human rights debate in the Russian Orthodox Church after 1991, and for this reason it is important to look at the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate in its own right. In order to “zoom in” on the human rights debate in the Russian Orthodox Church during the Cold War and after, I will therefore now look more closely at these two, ideological and institutional, aspects.

The deal between Stalin and the Church consisted of an agreement that the Church would be spared repression in exchange for unconditional loyalty to the Soviet state. This pledge of loyalty included the Church’s silence on human rights violations by the government, in particular on religious persecution. As an illustration of this, it is worth recalling how, already during the 1930s, at a time when publics in the West were openly concerned about the violation of religious freedom in the Soviet Union, the patriarchal locum tenens Sergii denied Western charges that the Russian Orthodox Church was the victim of religious persecution. Fletcher reproduces an interview that Sergii was allowed to give to foreign journalists in Moscow in February 1930, and which expresses clearly his determination to barter loyalty for survival. When the interviewer asked “Does persecution of religion really exist in the USSR and what forms does it take?”, Sergii answered “Persecution of religion never did and does not exist in the USSR” (Fletcher 1973, 13).

From the perspective of the Church in the late 1940s, article 18 of the Universal Declaration, which states “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes the freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance,” should have seemed an unrealizable dream. The Soviet leadership, to which the Church had pledged loyalty, was dismissive of article 18 both on religious and on ideological grounds. Apart from religion per se being considered a false type of consciousness, the right to individual religious freedom was also condemned as “bourgeois” by the Soviet delegates to the United Nations, who proposed qualifying the rights contained in column III of the Universal Declaration (articles 18 through 21) to the effect that they “must be exercised in conformity with the interests of working people and used to strengthen the socialist system” (Glendon 2001, 184). The Patriarch’s repeated denial that the Church was suffering from persecution echoed, in fact, Soviet misgivings about the right to religious freedom: he blamed “bourgeois” Russian émigrés for spreading a false image of the religious situation in Russia.

But there was also an internal, ecclesiological aspect to the denial that religious freedom was being violated in the Soviet Union: before and during the Second World War, different parts of the Russian Orthodox Church had declared themselves independent from the Moscow Patriarchate, in particular the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (Miner 2003, 101) and the Russian Church in Western Europe. Sergii accused “schismatic” forces of trying to weaken the Church, and his successor after 1945, Patriarch Alexii I, made every effort, supported by the Soviet government, to bring these groups back under the jurisdiction of Moscow.

In short, at the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the situation of the Russian Orthodox Church was deeply paradoxical: at the very moment when an important international body enshrined religious freedom as a fundamental value of the post-war order, certainly also moved by the undeniable religious persecution in the areas of communist domination, the Russian Orthodox Church, which was itself suffering severe limitations at the hands of the Soviet government, made every effort possible to deny that there was religious persecution in the Soviet Union. The motives for this denial were twofold: on the one hand side, the Church kept silent out of fear of repression, but on the other hand there was a genuine convergence of interests between the Church and the state in denying religious freedom to those parts of the Russian Orthodox Church that sought to detach themselves from the Moscow Patriarchate. The individual right to religious freedom was not something that the Russian Orthodox Church could wholeheartedly support in 1948, for political-pragmatic as well as internal-ecclesiastical reasons.

This paradoxical situation continued throughout the Cold War, and became the first ground for an open clash between the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church and those Russian Orthodox believers who demanded religious freedom on the grounds of human rights. The most famous example is the case of the priest Gleb Yakunin. In 1975, Yakunin and Lev Regelson wrote a letter to the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches gathered in Nairobi that year. In their letter, they denounced the persecution of religious believers in the Soviet Union and accused the Church of inactivity in the defense of believers and collaboration with the state. Not surprisingly, the official delegation of the Russian Orthodox Church tried to silence the protest and condemned the statement, but the Assembly of the World Council of Churches nonetheless discussed the issue and tabled a resolution in which it requested “that the question of religious liberty be the subject of intense consultations with the member Churches of the signatory States of the Helsinki Agreement” (Kelly 1976, 5).

The incident is important because it was the first time the Russian Orthodox Church found itself confronted explicitly with the human right of religious freedom as an international legal standard. The Soviet Union had signed the Helsinki Agreement, thus subscribing to the Universal Declaration and the European Convention. Pushed by the letter by Yakunin and Regelson, the World Council of Churches insisted on measuring the signatory states of the Helsinki Agreement by their own agreed standards. Yakunin and Regelson were not the only religious protesters who challenged their church and the Soviet Union on these grounds; other figures included Vladimir Rusak, Zoya Krakhmal’nikova, Felix Svetov, and Gleb Eshliman (cf. Webster 1993, 57; Valliere 1997). In all of these cases, religious freedom as a human right stood out as an international legal standard against which the politics of the Soviet Union (and the behavior of the Russian Orthodox Church, which regularly failed to support the dissidents) could be measured.

During the Cold War, the Church remained largely silent with regard to the human rights regime that was being consolidated as an independent international legal standard. With the exception of one statement by Metropolitan Nikodim in 1963 and one article in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate entitled “Theological Aspects of Human Rights” by Alexei Osipov in 1984 (both cited in Webster 1993), there is little evidence of programmatic or official statements by members of the Moscow Patriarchate that dealt explicitly with human rights prior to 1991. However, both the statement by Nikodim and the article by Osipov are quite instructive, as I show below.

In his first speech at a regional meeting of the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference in 1963, Metropolitan Nikodim said: ‘“Every civil right … is of genuine value only if it is used for the good of society, of one’s country, of all mankind” instead of “to protect the interests of a selfish individual or of a privileged class” (Webster 1993, 51). Webster, who cites this speech in his book, defines Nikodim’s statement as a “socialist version of human rights.” In fact, Nikodim’s Marxist premise surfaced clearly in his assessment of the human right to own property: “Is it possible, from a Christian standpoint, to consider true liberty the legal protection of a right for individuals to hold undisputed ownership over means of production which should belong to society as a whole?” (Webster 1993, 52). The fact that the representative of the Church singled out in his speech article 17 of the Universal Declaration (the right to own property) is clearly indicative of Nikodim’s acceptance of communist ideological exigencies with regard to the Russian Orthodox Church’s voice in the world. However, in the light of the massive requisition of Church property by the Bolsheviks, legitimized with the argument that the Church represented a selfish and privileged class, the last rhetorical question of the Metropolitan appears bitter and cynical. At a time when property rights were emerging as an international legal human rights standard, and against the background of massive expropriation of Church property, i.e. at a time when the Russian Orthodox Church’s own situation was a clear case of violation of article 17, the representative of the Church stood up in support of collective ownership. Needless to say, this denial was just one more sign of the deeply paradoxical situation of the Russian Orthodox Church under Soviet rule. However, the motives for Nikodim’s attack on human rights were most probably, again, twofold: on the one hand, he could hardly have argued otherwise as an official representative of his church at the mercy of the Soviet government, but on the other hand there was also a genuine convergence of positions between the Church and the socialist state in denouncing the risk that individual rights would further human selfishness.

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Note on transliteration, translation and names
• Introduction
• 1 Four areas of encounters and friction with human rights for the Russian Orthodox Church
• 2 The human rights debate inside the Russian Orthodox Church (2000–2008)
• 3 The Russian Orthodox Churc’s basic teaching on human dignity, liberty, and rights: analysis and interpretation
• 4 The domestic and international human rights agenda of the Russian Orthodox Church
• 5 Religion and human rights in postsecular society
• Bibliography
• Index