DEACON KURAEV COMPARES PUTIN'S ADDRESS WITH MUSSOLINI'S SPEECH ON RECREATION OF "ROMAN WORLD"
Religiia v Ukraine, 11 December 2014
Deacon Andrei Kuraev compared Putin's letter [to parliament] with Mussolini's speech of 9 May 1936 regarding the recreation of the "Roman World." Archdeacon Andrei Kuraev, a Russian evangelist and publicist, criticized in his blog the letter of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Federal Assembly. In particular, the clergyman expressed doubt about Putin's thesis regarding the enormous "civilizational and sacred significance" of Chersonese, the ancient Greek colony in Crimea, Religiia v Ukraine reports, referring to Slon.ru.
"History is not a pipeline. An attempt to run a historical line from Chersonese to Moscow, carefully bypassing Kiev, is just too fantastic. Considering this fragment of the president's letter presents me a choice: either it is necessary to think that the president's speechwriters were recruited from hopeless third-rate hacks or it is necessary to come to the conclusion that 'this excursion was conducted for collective farmers,'" the archdeacon writes.
Putin said: "It was here, in Crimea, in the ancient Chersonese, or, as it is called in Russian chronicles, Korsun, Prince Vladimir received baptism, and then he baptized all of Rus. And it was here on this sacred ground our ancestors for the first time and for always recognized themselves as a single people. . . . So just what the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is for those who profess Islam or Judaism is precisely how we also are going to treat this place from now on and forever," the president emphasized.
"The word 'forever' somehow immediately undermines confidence in the text. Only God from his eternity can say 'this is forever.' But in human history, borders and unions are prone to change," Fr Andrei Kuraev noted.
The archdeacon compared Putin's speech to Mussolini's speech that on 9 May 1936 proclaimed the recreation of the "Roman World," declaring that "Ethiopia from now on and forever belongs to Italy, restoring what it was in the time of Julius Caesar, Octavian Augustus, and Virgil."
In addition, the clergyman called the comparison of Crimea with the Sacred Mount dangerous, for which there have been many centuries of "most severe and irreconcilable conflict" between Muslims and Jews. In the archdeacon's opinion, giving the conflict the "image and motivation of holy war" leads to an exacerbation of the conflict.
"From a religious point of view, comparing the Chersonese font with the Jerusalem temple does not seem convincing. In Judaism, there can be only one temple," he recalled. "However for an Orthodox Christian, church charters do not prescribe any such obligations regarding Korsun. In Orthodoxy there are absolutely no obligatory places for pilgrimage. And those places that are most attractive for the Christian are much farther than Crimea: to Athos or to the Holy Land."
Pilgrims who went to Athos or the Holy Land in the 18th and 19th centuries never dropped in at Crimea, Fr Andrei Kuraev recalled. He said that within the Orthodox Russian empire itself, the Kiev caves lavra was a more revered shrine than the ruins of Chersonese. Finally, modern history scholarship maintains the view that Prince Vladimir was baptized in Kiev and not in Korsun, the archdeacon noted.
We recall that in September of this year, Andrei Kuraev was dismissed from the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy of the RPTs. (tr. by PDS, posted 15 December 2014)
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