‘My Father's House has Many Mansions’: Ethnic Minorities in the Russian Orthodox Church

This article describes the national mission of Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the policy of the Moscow Patriarchate towards non-Russian Orthodox. The authors analyse the ROC as a multinational church that includes Finno-Ugrians (Karelians, Komi, Udmurts, Mari, Mordovians), Ukrainians, Belarusians, Chuvash, Yakuts, Ossetians, Kryashens, a significant number of Armenians, Jews, Tatars, Buryats and others. There are already millions of non-Russian Orthodox within the church who want to express their national identity in Orthodoxy. Meanwhile the social mood in Russia today is such that people quite frequently move from one faith to another. Russians become Muslims and Buddhists, and Tatars, Bashkirs, Kabards, Azeris, Buryats become Orthodox. Ethnic multiplicity in the ROC is growing, and this increases the ‘cosmopolitan’ potential of the church. The current authoritarian/bureaucratic system of government in the ROC means however that the ethnic question remains latent. At the same time national movements in the national regions of Russia have strongly criticised the ROC for ignoring the national interests of Orthodox native people. It is not really surprising that national movements and organisations are virtually never orientated towards Orthodoxy. Even among the most ‘Orthodox’ peoples, such as the Chuvash, Komi and Mordovians, with many practising Orthodox and a significant number of Orthodox priests, and among whom there is no other living religious tradition, the national movements are distant from the ROC, and indeed often hostile to it. Since the ROC has a Russian nationalist world view, Chuvash or Ossetian or Karelian Orthodoxy, each with its own original culture, will develop outside official church structures. From time to time Orthodox priests of local ethnic origin take initiatives to develop missionary work among the local people, but no such initiative has yet gained the support of the local hierarchy. Notes 1 See the numerous speeches by Metropolitan Kirill on the theme ‘Russian civilisation’ on the website of the World Russian National Council (Vsemirny Russky Narodny Sobor) (http://www.vrns.ru/). Since 1 February 2009 Kirill, now patriarch, has been the head of the Council. 2 Since becoming patriarch Kirill has continued to talk about ‘Russian civilisation’ and the unity of the ‘Russian world’. He broadens the concepts ‘Russian’ and ‘Russian culture’ to include all nationalities living in Russia where ‘Russian civilisation’ prevails. In several speeches Kirill has included Ukraine and Belarus' in the concept ‘Russian civilisation’ (see for example Stepanov, Citation2009). 3 See for example Borodina (Citation2005), which is one of the basic textbooks on Orthodoxy used in Russian schools. The first topic addressed in this book is the connection between the Russian nation and Russian culture and Orthodoxy and between the ROC and the state, particularly in the context of military victories over enemies of the Fatherland. A separate topic is ‘Russian and Orthodox’ (‘Russky i pravoslavny’) (p. 20), which sets out to show that a Russian must be Orthodox. See also Osnovy (Citation2004), which was published under the general editorship of Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad. 4 The material in this section is based on sociological surveys and interviews with priests, officials and members of the local intelligentsia. Some of the material has been published in Russian in Burdo and Filatov (2005): on Chuvashia, pp. 350–65; on Karelia, pp. 148–69; on Komi, pp. 17–202; on Mordovia, pp. 222–37; on North Ossetia–Alania, pp. 261–77; on Mari El, pp. 203–21; on Udmurtia, pp. 322–38; on Altai, pp. 366–408. 5 On 10 October 2009, however, the Holy Synod appointed Savvati head bishop of the newly formed diocese of Ulan-Ude and Buryatia. 6 More precisely, it is the hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate within the ROC who speak most frequently about respecting ‘canonical territory’ and cooperating with ‘traditional’ religions, and the church does not in fact conduct any mission among Muslims, Buddhists and Jews.