Spread of neo-paganism brings racism and violence [Russia]

Livna (AsiaNews/ agencies)- “Neo-paganism” has gathered such a following in the former Soviet Union that organizations, seminars and books are sprouting up throughout the country, claiming adherents. According to Viktor Shnirelman, compiler of the book “Neo-paganism on the Expanses of Euroasia”, St. Petersburg has become the main center of Russian neo-paganism, though cults and organized ‘churches’ have spread throughout every part of the country.

On May 13th there was the arrests of three suspects in two incidents of arson against the church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God in the city of Orel, Western Russia. In February of this year in Orel, vandals at the Russian Orthodox church broke windows, destroyed bookstalls, and attempted to set the iconostasis, which was under restoration, on fire. They left a slogan on the walls saying, “The Jewish God will depart, praise to the gods” and a symbol resembling a nazi swastika. Later that month, in the same church, 250 boxes of devotional candles worth 30,000 rubles were set on fire in the building’s basement.

Not far away in the same province, a worker in the Sergius Church, in the city of Livna, discovered a note in the donation box containing a threat to set the church roof on fire. The incidents at the Orel church were mentioned in the note. An investigation led by the Directorate of Internal Affairs, which specializes in monitoring radical youth and occult activity, led to the arrest of 3 young people. A 23-year old unemployed graduate of the Orel Institute of Culture and Art admitted to the crimes, stating he had recently converted to paganism, and had been drunk during the incident. Another two suspects, both 19-year-old students of the same Institute, were also arrested.

“Traditional pagan beliefs have never been forgotten. Now they are being expressed more openly,” Shnirelman writes.

In Siberia’s Omsk province this month, a provincial court ordered the liquidation of three public pagan organizations. The Ancient Russian Church of Orthodox Old Believers of Inglia, the Asgard Slavic Community, and the Slavic Community of the Temple of the Wisdom of Perun were found to be in violation of federal legislation because of “ propaganda and display of the symbolism that is similar enough to Nazi symbolism as to cause confusion, propaganda of the supremacy of the white race and disparagement of national dignity.”

Russia was a pagan country until introduced to Christianity in 988AD. Now, Russian Orthodoxy is the country’s largest religion, though many of its members claim only nominal belief (J.C.)

Russia is doing just fine these days.

Newsweek - New York,NY,USA

Watch Out, Art! A new intolerance is sweeping Russia as religious and political fundamentalists attack artists, musicians and writers whose works they view as subversive
By Frank Brown
Newsweek International

May 17 issue - It wasn't the first time critics took clubs to art they didn't appreciate. Nor was it the first time they emerged as heroes, at least to some. But when six men barged their way into a Moscow museum last year, spray-painting and bludgeoning displays from a provocative exhibit called "Watch Out: Religion," it might well have been the first instance in recent times that art vandalism has officially been deemed a public good. Sixteen months after the attacks, the unpunished perpetrators are free-while the exhibit's organizers and three contributing artists prepare to stand trial. Their crime: inciting religious hatred, punishable by up to five years in prison. "It turns out that we weren't just the victims but the criminals, too," says artist turned defendant Anna Alchuk.

Russia is in the midst of a rollback of free expression that goes far deeper than the Kremlin's well-known crackdown on independent news media. In the realm of art and literature, in fact, it's all-out war. Religious and political activists have become increasingly vocal-and sometimes violent-in attacking the work of artists, singers and writers they perceive to be offensive. Among the most vocal is the 80-million-member Russian Orthodox Church, which some say has begun to behave like the censors of the old Soviet era. "These artists are rotten, disease-carrying bacteria, and society is using antigens to fight them off," says Father Tikhon Shevkunov, a powerful church leader (and President Vladimir Putin's spiritual adviser) who backs the offensive against "Watch Out: Religion" and its "blasphemy."

The new intolerance is not limited to Moscow. Last month, in largely Muslim Dagestan, a group of imams pressured the local government into canceling a concert by Boris Moiseyev. Orthodox protesters picketed another Moiseyev concert in Siberia. Why? The popular 50-year-old singer is openly gay, and neither the Russian Orthodox Church nor Russia's Muslim clerics can abide his flaunting it.

More ominously, the Orthodox Church has increasingly drawn support from the nationwide pro-Kremlin youth organization, Moving Together, a group that notoriously piled copies of Vladimir Sorokin's novel "Blue Lard" in the square outside Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre two years ago-then dumped them in a huge makeshift toilet as pornography. (The book features Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev having sex.) A criminal case filed by the Moscow prosecutor's office against Sorokin fizzled in court, but Moving Together didn't disappear. The group has since gone on to attack Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists, favorite bugaboos of the church.

Russian courts seem to be colluding in the crackdown. In April a Moscow court banned "The Book of Monotheism," an 18th-century Muslim tract, on the ground that it promotes fundamentalist Wahhabism. The book falls on the wrong side of the "need to find a balance between freedom of speech and national security," says one Kremlin adviser on religious affairs. Yet as Criminal Case No. 4616, as it's officially called, heads to the courtroom in the next month or so, religious activists are calling for even more judicial intervention. One leading Orthodox parliamentarian, Alexander Chuev of the nationalist Rodina party, has pledged to push through a law that would make it a crime to defame or dishonor Russia's "traditional religions." (snip here)

Perhaps Russian liberals expected too much in the way of free expression after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After all, ordinary Russians generally weren't ready for the onslaught of pornography, television violence and inflammatory literature that emerged after communism. Most were raised in a closed and puritanical Soviet society that regarded such things as public kissing (not to mention radical art) as shameful. Exhibitions like "Watch Out: Religion" are the polar opposite, designed to confront, expose and provoke. It's no surprise, perhaps, that last year's attack has since been duplicated elsewhere. In one disconcerting echo, vandals wearing camouflage and black masks burst into a St. Petersburg gallery in February and destroyed 30 works of art, including a near-naked Arnold Schwarzenegger painted as a religious icon. "This challenges the entire Orthodox Church and its centuries of culture," wrote one objector in the gallery's guest book, before smashing up the place. Perhaps the good news is that the artist, so far at least, has not been charged. (another snip here)

LOL, EAT OUR DUST while RUSSIA SWINGS WAY, WAY TO THE RIGHT. And which direction did you say your church was headed?

Had to do it, had to do it. I love these words so much.

LET HOLY RUS' ARISE!
The Paschal Epistle Of the Most-Blessed Metropolitan Anastasii, the First-Hierarch Of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad
1940

CHRIST IS RISEN!

Dear brothers and sisters, near and far, abiding both in the Diaspora and in our Fatherland.
Pascha, this festival of life, of light, of love and of brotherhood unites us anew into one family of Christ, enlivening the hope within us of the soon-resurrection of Russia. When the sun rises, it first of all gilds the tops of the hills, and of the trees, and of other tall objects; then it illumines the entire surface of the earth, penetrating even into the chasms of the earth, into mountain gorges, and into the clefts of rocky cliffs.

The same can be said of the quickening rays of the feast of Christ's Resurrection -- they fall first of all upon those whose hearts are always directed fixedly towards the heavens -- towards those spiritual peaks of Christian humanity; after which they embrace all other people with their gleam, not excluding even such as have generally become accustomed to slithering about in moral quagmires, without lifting up their eyes to heaven. And everywhere, wheresover the light of Pascha might extend, it gives rise to life and joy.

We -- wanderers and newcomers amidst other peoples that we are -- are fortunate indeed in having brought with us this precious pledge from our Native Land, which from of old so came to love and so profoundly to assimilate the grace-endowed suspiration of this festival. From the moment that Rus' came forth from out of her baptismal fount, she began to burn brightly with the light of Pascha, which ceased not to illumine the whole of her thousand-year-long history. Nowhere in the world does Pascha so obviously manifest its royal merit as the holiday of holidays and the triumph of triumphs as in the Russian Land. The latter truly was transfigured in those bright days; and, as the Bride of Christ, she did gleam then with joy and spiritual beauty.

As it once "was good" for the Apostles who found themselves in the rays of the Lord's Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, in like manner did the heart of the Russian people take sweet delight in glorifying the risen Savior, and burned, as it were, with a radiance; and when the Bright festival would finally draw to a close and the triumphant paschal peal of bells -- of that wondrous heavenly music which had poured forth upon the unencompassable expanses of our Native Land -- would finally fall mute, then would our Russian folk return to their daily round of life, feeling a reluctance -- and even, as it were, some degree of sadness -- not unlike what the Apostles experienced in their descent from Tabor after the Transfiguration of their Divine Teacher.

It was in the light of Paschal radiance that there came into being that entire philosophy of life of the Russian nation which had become accustomed to seeing the entire world from the point-of-view of the eternal victory procured for us by the Risen Savior, Who had vanquished the power of hell and death. From hence sprung its (the Russian people's - ed.) moral fortitude; its exclusive serenity in enduring the blows of fate; the inner harmony of its heart; its peaceful resigned attitude to death; its unwavering faith in the final triumph of righteousness -- however much it might sometimes be scorned and abused on earth; this enlightened love of nature and of all men, whom [the Russian] considered to be his brothers, even though they might be alien to him by blood. It is here that one should seek the main key to the solution of all the mysteries of the Russian soul, which has not ceased from arousing the curiosity of the western world. However much the temptations of the world might delude and seduce him, the Russian believes unwaveringly that Christ alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that outside Him, and without Him, there is no true happiness; and life itself loses its meaning, becoming an oppressive burden to its bearers.

Humanity can live only to the degree to which it is capable of renewing itself and being reborn in Christ, Who constantly repeats the miracle of resurrection over it.

The experience of these present times convinces us of this truth with especial clarity; although, unfortunately, in the main, it does so in a negative way. Observing world events around us, as they rush along in such a mad headlong dash, we see that the farther people depart from Christ, the farther they depart from the sources of life, and the more quickly do they draw near to death; or, to re-phrase it in a better way: they themselves draw her to them. We have examples of this before our eyes.

Turn your attention to those monstrous weapons which belch forth a thousand deaths; to those frightful explosives and poisonous gases capable of destroying multitudes upon multitudes of people, like insignificant insects, and of turning an entire region into a desert; is not all this the enlargement of the domain of death and hell -- poised, at present, to consume the entire world, which had been redeemed by means of the death and resurrection of Christ, the Giver of Life.

If the time has not yet come "to turn swords into plough-shares, and spears into sickles" -- for war is frequently inevitable as a restraining principle against the spread of evil, violence and injustice on earth -- then, in any event, Christian nations should hasten to soften its horrors, rather than multiplying for it its means of destruction and widening the very sphere of its murderous action, adding a so-called total character to it. These manifold underground shelters, with the construction of which states so occupy themselves during a war -- do they not speak clearly of the fact that people, by their cruelty, have deprived themselves of any right to live freely in the world, to take delight in the sun's radiance; and that they must, instead, hide themselves away in underground warrens from pursuing foes, in the manner of lizards and other creeping things?

Thus, departing away from Christ as the Source of Light, we again immerse ourselves into the chaos and darkness of barbarism. The very conquest of the elements: of the sea and air -- wherewith our age so prides itself -- by no means makes of man a true king over nature; rather, it makes him the victim of the latter. Having become accustomed to following her mechanistic, mortifying norms, he is prepared to surrender his whole life and culture to those selfsame laws of soulless mechanics, and not only that aspect thereof which is external and material, but even that which is internal and spiritual, sacrificing toward that end the royal freedom of his person and the autocracy of his creative reason. He desires to create not only a governable household, but governable thought, as well; and even conscience, applying to them that very same principle of compulsion which he applies to other spheres of life.

"Fraternity or death" -- this fearsome slogan of the French revolution, this "brotherhood of Cain" -- as one of the activists of the latter so accurately defined it, is being reborn anew in the XXth century, finding its reflection -- especially so -- in the theory and practice of communism, which attempts to inject this pernicious principle into the universal human consciousness. Having quenched in itself the luminary of the eternal commandments of Christ, contemporary cultured humanity has lost the measure of absolute truth and righteousness, having replaced them with conditional human truth, and sometimes even with outright falsehood.

It is not surprising that the world, having lost a firm moral foundation beneath its feet, is teetering to every side and submitting itself to the chance dictates of the moment: to considerations of benefit and advantage, first of all, which currently dominate all the loftier motives of human actions. Russian bolshevism brought the entirety of this sorry wisdom of the present age to the most extreme and crude degrees of its development; hence, our soul, as before, is repulsed by it, sensing the breath of hell and corruption in it.

However much we might thirst for the sooner rebirth of our Native Land, we would not want to see the kingdom of a Ching'his-khan or of a Tamerlane established there in place of Holy Rus' -- although each of these, to a certain degree, was more sublime and more humane than the merciless and corrupting ruling-organization of the Soviets; nor would we want to see an ant-hill of labor come into being there, descending deep into the earth and, as it were, become as one with it.

We desire to see our renewed Native Land as none other than free, radiant, joyful, peaceful, spirit-bearing, strong with the righteousness and love of Christ, rising aloft, like Jacob's ladder, from the earth to And we know that the risen Savior has the power to re-establish her as such, even were she to stink as badly as Lazarus, four days in his tomb. Although, to our consolation, she has not yet reached a state of total corruption, which usually bears witness to the onset of death.

Those who had the opportunity, in the newly-united Russian regions in Poland or in Finland, to meet face to face with the red-army boys who had come from simple peasant surroundings, bear witness with one heart and with one soul to the fact that the venom of communism has not yet had a chance to penetrate into the depths of the folk-organism and to poison its governing nerve-centers. Today's Russian has not yet forgotten the faith of his fathers, although he is forced to conceal it from the zealous gaze of the godless authorities. The Russian Orthodox soul yet lives in our people, and can easily put forth the shoots of new life, if the grace of resurrection but breathes upon it.

Arise, then, O Lord, our God; may Thine hand be lifted up. Forget not Thy wretched, miserable ones to the end. Let God also arise in the hearts of all the other nations of the present day, that they might extend to one another a mutual, brotherly embrace, having forgiven everything by the resurrection, and having ceased from the bloody fray; and that they might again acquire their spiritual strength, their happiness, and their true life in Christ, the Victor over hell and death.

April 1940. Belgrade.

MOSCOW :
The list of Russia's largest fortunes released this month by Forbes magazine confirms the unique nature of the nation's booming post-communist economy, analysts say.

Russia's 36 billionaires boast 100 billion dollars -- 24 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), according to the list of Russia's 100 largest fortunes published by Forbes this week.

"This shows that no other country has developed its capitalism as fast as Russia," Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, told reporters.

By comparison, the 277 US billionaires listed by Forbes control no more than six percent of their country's GDP.

The concentration of wealth in Russia sets it apart from other developping markets like China, which has only one billionaire, Klebnikov said.

In China, "there are lots of small and medium enterprises and large groups" controlled by numerous shareholders, Klebnikov said.

"In Russia, businessmen think that they have to keep control over at least 25 percent" of their enterprises, he said. "This shows the youth of capitalism in Russia."

Moreover, most of the Russian wealth was concentrated in the country's abundant natural resource enterprises left over from Soviet times, the survey showed.

"In total, two thirds of Russia's 100 largest fortunes were made in export of raw materials," and only 30 percent arose from companies set up in other sectors of the economy, Klebnikov said.

Russia's tycoons do not bear an easy resemblance to the US robber barrons of the 19th century. "I think that comparing Russian businessmen with people like (John) Rockefeller is a bad comparison because they created their industrial empires from zero," Klebnikov said.

In Russia, by comparison, the so-called oligarchs made their fortunes by scooping up industrial assets during the privatizations that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

SNIP.