Letters to the Editor

A Window Homeward

To the Editors:

... Presently, I’m a student at college in the US. Two years ago I was one of the lucky kids who participated in the Freedom Support Act Program sponsored by the American Goverment. The program was developed by Senator Bill Bradley, and after he left the senate, Senator Murray started supervising the program. There are around two thousand high school students who come to the US through this program every year, and, as far as I know, most of them end up coming back to US to continue their education. As you can see, I am one of them.

Being so far from my family, my friends and my country, I try to find any source that connects me with Russia or Russian people. The journal Russian Life, that I discovered on one of the shelves at the library, helps me to keep up with things in my life in US ...

...It is amazing what words can do. Reading Russian Life I cry and laugh. The lines in the articles make me think very hard, or provoke [me] to fly away from everything. Turning the pages, I look deep in my heart and my mind ... I truly believe that Russia will survive and will become the Greatest Empire, as it used to be when Peter the Great and Catherine were alive. I want readers to know that we are the ones who are going to help our people and our country, but it might take some time. I want others to have hopes and believe in us, the Youth of Russia, the new Russian generation. We are not turning back to the old regime. We have many dreams and we know the ways to accomplish our goals – hard work and not giving up. All that we need is to believe in ourselves!!!

Natalia Belyaevskaya

by email

Russia’s Religions

To the Editors:

I appreciated reading Mikhail Ivanov’s fair and balanced article, Auditing the Soul of Russia (Russian Life, September 1997), but I’m afraid he missed the main problem with the new law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations.”

Lord Acton’s dictum (“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”) applies in the ecclesiastical as well as the political world. When formerly in power, the Russian Orthodox Church oppressed non-Orthodox believers – Jews, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, as well as the cults. Given a similar situation of governmental favor plus numerical superiority, there is too great a risk of history repeating itself.

(In all fairness, not only the Russian Orthodox church is vulnerable to this temptation; witness modern Islam in Saudia Arabia and Iran, Catholocism in medieval Spain, and, to a lesser extent, Calvin’s Geneva.) And please don’t ask “observers” to not warn Russians of the dangers in this law. After all, should religious persecution recur. It would be just as morally wrong for those outside Russia to keep silent as it would be for the Patriarch to keep silent were Russian Orthodox believers outside Russia to suffer for their faith.

Glen Reeves

North Bethesda, MD

To the Editors:

I have subscribed to Russian Life and its predecessors for over 15 years, and have enjoyed this window on life in Russia and the former Soviet Union. During this time I have also visited Russia, Ukraine, Kazakstan, and Uzbekistan on four occasions. One of my primary interests was contacting Baptist congregations in those areas; therefore, I was interested in your article on cults and the new law on religion which was recently vetoed by President Yeltsin.

It is unfortunate that Baptists, who recently celebrated their 100th anniversary in Russia, should he lumped together with all the opportunistic cults who have “invaded” Russia since the end of communism. While this is a short time compared to the 1,000 years of Christianity that the Orthodox Church celebrated a few years ago, it is a long time compared to cults that have only recently – in the last few years – made their appearance in Russia. Moreover, the Baptists in Russia are a self-sustaining group, and not dependent on foreign support; the Baptist Union is a full member of the World Council of Churches along with the Russian Orthodox Church, and is a partner with other Baptist bodies in the Baptist World Alliance.

During the period of communism, Baptists maintained a faithful witness in the face of severe persecution. Even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who is well known for his staunchly Orthodox views, refers to them sympathetically in his novel on life in the gulag: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It would be ironic if now they were denied the right to be a legal entity.

Dr. Dvorkin may have some basis for his statement: “All (cults) employ mind control, all engage ill deceit at the time of recruitment ... and all use violence, ranging from psychological pressure to physical harassment and manslaughter.” (Sept. 1997 issue, page 8) However, these methods are not characteristic of the Baptists, who I have found to he a sincere and Biblically based people.

Since you have given Alexander Dvorkin’s views a full presentation, I would really appreciate an article on the Baptists and how they view the proposed legislation.

Sincerely,

Charles B. Mercer

Jersey Shore, PA

To the Editors:

Despite Michael Ivanov’s closing exhortation to those outside Russia [in his September article on Auditing the Soul of Russia] about “holding their tongue” on the law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Association for the state-sponsored Russian Orthodox Church, which President Yeltsin signed on September 26th, I should like to address some of the implications of this law for others besides the “cultists” he interviews and discusses in his sanguine article...

The law provides that faiths violating the Freedom of Religious Conscience and Religious Association Act or contributing to dissension may be “liquidated” (Article 14). As the daily evening paper in St. Petersburg noted, the Russian government now recognizes only those churches that collaborated with the regime during 1917-1982. It is true, however, as the defenders of this law point out, that those not belonging to a church allowed to register by the Soviet government may still pray and worship in their own homes.

In the short time since President Yeltsin has signed this law (though it has still not taken effect), already on October 2nd a small Lutheran congregation in the Russian region of Khakassia has had its registration revoked, though Lutheranism has existed in Russia for over 420 years. Earlier, on September 29th, three days after the law was signed, the largest pro-Kiev Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Russia, in Noginsk (near Moscow), was seized by the militia and turned over to representatives of the official Russian Orthodox Church. This heavy-handed response, and the provision of the law that expressly prohibits any religious organization that did not exist legally fifty years ago, under Stalin, to use the terms “Russia” or “Russian” in its name, suggests that the new State supervision of religion in Russia is directed as much at internal as external enemies of the patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church. These include the Russian Old Believers, who practice an Orthodox rite that pre-dates Peter the Great; the Catacomb Church, which has its origin in the Russian Orthodox clergy that went underground when the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church declared loyalty to Stalin’s regime; and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which traces its lineage to those Russian Orthodox clergy who escaped abroad. The many hundred independent churches belonging to these traditional Russian Orthodox confessions that refused to endorse the communist State are now illegal and subject to expropriation by the police on instructions from the patriarchal authorities.

Here again, sadly, there is little that is new. For this law, enacted by communists and ultra-nationalists at the behest of the Russian Orthodox Church, who embarrassed Yeltsin into signing it by attacking the President for kowtowing to foreign pressure, retroactively legitimates the practice of the official church over the past several years of destroying or confiscating independent Orthodox churches, at home and abroad...

This new law bringing Orthodoxy under government control in Russia is also not new in a larger sense. Mikhail Ivanov is wrong to suggest that this law reflects a conflict between Russia and the West, that it is appropriate to curb the arrogance of Western denominations who send missionaries to convert a country that has been Christian for over a thousand years. It represents unabashed etatism, the continued capitulation of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Russian State. As Lawrence Uzzell, the Moscow correspondent for Keston News Service, whom your article quotes, has observed, “the patriarchate is Russia’s most Soviet major institution - the only one with the same leaders today as before the demise of the Soviet Union.” It is an unrepentant offspring of the Soviet regime, which blew up churches, converted monasteries to concentration camps, martyred countless priests and monks, created a hierarchy strictly controlled by the secret police, and conducted the most devastating campaign of persecution against Christians since Diocletian in the first years of the fourth century. The communist-nationalists who maneuvered Yeltsin into signing this law are concerned not about the Russian Orthodox faith but about its function as a symbol and set of rituals for something distinctly Russian, an ideology that can carry enough national conviction to replace the bankrupt ideology of communism, which in its earliest stages was itself a materialist inversion of Orthodox asceticism and messianism.

Is it necessary to add that central to Orthodoxy is the doctrine of freedom of the will and that faith cannot be sustained through coercion or ignorance, but only through a free and gladsome choice?

Gleb Glinka

Cabot, Vermont

Whither Saratov?

To the Editors:

As recent subscribers of Russian Life, my family really appreciates your magazine. It is refreshing to see an apolitical, non-phobic format. Unlike other media, which intentionally or not, seem to focus on unpleasant facts in the span of a soundbite, your magazine is a class act which brings news along with education.

We have not known Russian Life very long. If you have had any articles about Saratov, we would like to order reprints. Saratov, both oblast and city, is a jewel on the bank of the Volga river. Her artisans and engineers have made many contributions to Russian life and history. However, she seems unjustly missing from many historical and travel-related books...

Randall Stephens

Lewisville, TX

Dear Randall:

We share your interest in the Volga city of Saratov. You will be interested to know, as will other readers, we are sure, that we have a slot for Saratov on our editorial calendar in the coming months. You should expect to see a nice feature on the city before next summer rolls around.

— The Editors

Where to Sleep Cheap?

To the Editors:

The Practical Traveler section of the September issue had a fine article about little known hotels in Moscow. If I were traveling there on an expense account and needed to plug in my modern, arrange meetings in the business center and entenain other business people, these hotels would be most useful and desirable to me.

However, not all visitors to Moscow (and readers of your magazine) are business people on an expense account. Many of us are simply tourists who love the city and would like accommodations that are not so expensive. Sometime soon can you please feature an article about hotels in Moscow that are clean, safe, reasonably convenient in location and above all reasonable in price?

Glenn Davenport

by email

Dear Glenn:

Thank you for the suggestion. Consider it added to our editorial calendar!

– The Editors

Lost in the Translation

To the Editors:

Since my Russian dates back to 1936, I find Mikhail Ivanov’s column on the newest Russian interesting and helpful. In the September issue, however, I believe the translation of Úfl ÂÎÓ ‚ Û˜Â̸ – ΄ÍÓ ‚ ·Ó˛ as “training is tough, battle is easy” misses the point of what Suvorov meant. “If training is tough, then battle is easy” (or maybe, to make it sound old English, “training be tough, battle be easy”) befits the Field Marshal much better than a simple statement of fact that “training is tough,” as opposed to the dubious statement that “battle is easy”!

Lyber Katz

Bronx, NY

p.s. Not only this column, but the whole magazine is interesting!