http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/16/europe/16russ.php
Russian Orthodox Church is set to mend a bitter schism By Sophia Kishkovsky Wednesday, May 16, 2007 MOSCOW: The atmosphere was tense, laced with nearly a century of mistrust and bitter feelings, when President Vladimir Putin met in New York with leaders of an émigré church that had broken with the Russian Orthodox Church after the Bolshevik Revolution. The breakaway church had vowed never to return as long as the "godless regime" was in power. "I want to assure all of you," Putin said at the 2003 meeting, "that this godless regime is no longer there." Then, recalled the Reverend Serafim Gan, a senior priest of the breakaway church, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, Putin added: "You are sitting with a believing President." That meeting set in motion years of difficult negotiations that on Thursday are expected to be capped by the signing of a canonical union at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was dynamited by Stalin in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s. Church members are calling the signing - which coincides with the feast of Ascension - the symbolic end of Russia's civil war and confirmation of the Russian Orthodox Church's central role in post-Soviet society. Joint services will also be held this weekend at Butovo, a Stalinist killing field outside Moscow that is now an Orthodox shrine to the Soviet dictator's victims, and at the Kremlin's Dormition Cathedral. "This was a place of much sorrow, temptation, suffering, and the death of martyrs," said Father Gan about Butovo. "Now this place serves revival. I think that's what was deeply touching for all of us." In an interview broadcast Monday on Vesti-24, a state-run news channel, Patriarch Aleksei II of the Russian Orthodox Church said "the Lord is helping us in this time, this time of spiritual revival, to gather up the stones that were so thoughtlessly scattered in the past." The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, known informally as the Russian Church Abroad, will retain its name and administrative autonomy, said Father Gan. But Moscow will exercise ultimate authority in appointments and other church matters. Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst, highlighted the political dividends of impending reunion and suggested that May 17, the day of reunion, be declared a national holiday. "In the modern world, politics is not separated from religion," he wrote last month in Tribuna, a Moscow newspaper. "Russia should not be an exception to this rule." Putin's quest to reunite the churches is consistent with his effort to consolidate the power and legitimacy of the current Russian state, said Nikolai Mitrokhin, a scholar who studies the Russian Orthodox Church and its relations with the Kremlin. "The role of Putin is indeed great in this respect since Putin is striving to demonstrate himself and today's Russian power as the legal heirs of both the Soviet and the White period of history," he said, referring to the anti-Communist side in the Russian civil war. Boris Jordan, a Russian-American businessman who came to Moscow in 1991 and played a prominent role in the 1990s privatization of state assets and television management shakeups after Putin came to power, recalled a private meeting with the Russian president in 2001. "He said, 'I understand that you're involved with the church, that you're a religious person,' " said Jordan, who grew up in Sea Cliff, New York, in a staunch Russian Church Abroad family but became a vocal advocate for union after living in Russia. He said Putin told him: "I believe that the reunion of the churches is a very, very important thing. I am certainly absolutely for it. One of the most important things you can do as a re-pat is to help in the reunification of the churches, much more so than anything you're doing in television or business. This is the probably the most important thing you can do in terms of your legacy." To a great extent, the reunion on Thursday helps close a chapter in Russian history that began with the 1917 revolution, church elders said. "The division of the churches was one of the last remnants of the sad history of the revolution," said the Reverand Alexander Lebedeff, the Los Angeles-based chief representative of the Russian Church Abroad, in the negotiations. "By overcoming this division, we are closing the book, or at least a chapter of one of the most difficult times in Russian and Russian church history." The Russian Church Abroad was created in the 1920s by émigrés who fled Russia with the White Army, remaining staunchly anti-Communist and monarchist in exile. Its headquarters are in New York and nearly half of its 400 parishes were in the United States - a Cold War association that made the church doubly dangerous in Soviet eyes. The core of the churches' differences lay in the Russian Orthodox Church's fealty to the Soviet state, a policy known as sergianstvo, after Metropolitan Sergius. Sergius was the acting head of the church who signed a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet regime, which brutally exterminated roughly 80,000 Orthodox clerics, monks and nuns and destroyed churches in the 1930s. Overtures towards reconciliation in the 1990s made little headway in the general chaos of the time and with the Russian church preoccupied with rebuilding itself after the fall of Communism. A major obstacle fell in 2000, when a large church council, or sobor, of the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Czar Nicholas II and his family and hundreds of victims of Stalinist terror as new martyrs, something the church abroad had done in 1981. More important, perhaps, it declared the church's right to oppose sinful actions by the state, which was widely interpreted as a symbolic renunciation of sergianstvo. Some members of the Russian Church Abroad remain adamantly opposed to reunion - with some suggesting that Moscow's real goal is to grab the church's headquarters, a mansion on East 93rd Street in Manhattan. Others oppose any form of Moscow's membership in the World Council of Churches, the Geneva-based forum of Protestant and Orthodox churches, arguing that the group promotes an ecumenism that is at odds with the Russian Orthodox Church's exceptionalism. Some are still leery of Soviet vestiges in the church. The Reverand Nikolai Balashov, the Moscow Patriarchate's secretary for inter-Orthodox relations has a family history that encapsulates Russia's tortured 20th century history - one grandfather fought in the White Army, the other was in the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, and was shot in one of Stalin's purges. He said the decades of distrust between the two churches were palpable at early encounters. "At first it seemed like there was an solid block of ice between us," he said. "But gradually, meeting after meeting, we came to understand each other and approach each other fully as brothers." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
