Nikolay Mitrokhin: The Church Militant, The Radio Complicit

Father Vsevolod Chaplin. Photo courtesy of Realnoye Vremya and Anna Artemieva (novayagazeta.ru) — Father Vsevolod Chaplin, the Russian Orthodox priest who recently argued on Russian radio station Echo of Moscow that it was sometimes necessary and possible to “destroy” whole groups of people as “internal enemies.” Photo courtesy of *Realnoye Vremya* and Anna Artemieva (novayagazeta.ru)

“For the Church, Violence Is the Norm”
Valentin Baryshnikov
Radio Svoboda
August 16, 2016

Father Vsevolod Chaplin, long-time head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Synodal Department for Cooperation between Church and Society, made an appearance on Echo of Moscow radio in which he shocked many people by saying that some people “can and should be killed.”

Here is an excerpt of Father Chaplain’s appearance on Echo, which began with a discussion of erecting a monument to Ivan the Terrible in Oryol.

Presenter: Yes, but with that rationale you can also justify Stalin, for example. Sure, there were excesses, but he was an effective manager, they say.

Vsevolod Chaplin: He did a lot. Listen, at the end of the day what is wrong with destroying a certain number of internal enemies?

Presenter: “Destroying” people, that is what is wrong.

Vsevolod Chaplin: What is wrong with that?

Presenter: You cannot kill people!

Vsevolod Chaplin: Why not? Some people can and should be killed. That is for sure.

Presenter: “Some people”? Which ones are those?

Vsevolod Chaplin: So it is no accident that criminals are destroyed, and no accident—

Presenter: I would remind you the death penalty has been abolished in Russia.*

Vsevolod Chaplin: I am not sure that was the right decision. Look, even God, if we read the Old Testament, if we read the Apocalypse, that is, the New Testament, directly sanctioned and sanctions in the future the destruction of a huge number of people for the edification of others. For the edification of societies, it is sometimes necessary to destroy a certain number of people who deserve to be destroyed.

* In fact, capital punishment has not been abolished in the Russian Federation. President Yeltsin placed a moratorium on the death penalty in 1996 so that Russia could meet the requirements for joining the Council of Europe. The moratorium has remained in effect since then, but the death penalty is still listed in the law books as a legal punishment for certain crimes. TRR

When asked whether Chaplin’s statement was his personal opinion or a reflection of conversations within the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), Nikolay Mitrokhin, a sociologist of religion and author of the book The Russian Orthodox Church: Its Current State and Challenges, confidently replied that church insiders think this way.

Nikolay Mitrokhin: The majority of rank-and-file clergy and the bishops are quite militantly minded. They do not rule out violence. Violence is the norm in ecclesiastical practice. Bishops hit priests who do something wrong on the altar. Its is a popular subject of stories told within the Church. In turn, priests are capable of hitting sacristans and subdeacons. The Church is now also the leading social institution that has come out against so-called juvenile justice, in other words, against bans on beating children. So for the Church, violence is the norm. The Church supports militarist rhetoric. The Church supports the numerous military-patriotic clubs operating under its auspices. If you chat with a rank-and-file priest, he will surely talk like Chaplin or worse. It is another question whether it was worth putting Chaplin on the radio and giving his cannibalistic ideas a platform. However, that is the stance of Echo of Moscow, which has given various kinds of fascists the chance to speak out on its airwaves. Let us not forget that several right-wing radicals have their own programs on the station. So it all fits, in the first place, not only the mindset of the ROC but also the mindset of Echo of Moscow.

Echo of Moscow actually plans not to publish the transcript of this speech and, as far as I can tell, will not be inviting Father Chaplin on the air again.

With Chaplin’s appearance, they have reached a point where a lot of people have wondered whether the prosecutor’s office is asleep at the wheel and whether they should not file a complaint against Echo of Moscow radio station. In this case, they face quite specific criminal charges. But the reason they invited Chaplin to appear on the air is itself quite obvious. Yet again they had to rile up the liberal public with harsh statements so that a discussion would emerge around them. They are not shy about inviting someone who on several occasions has voiced his tough and, quite frankly, fascist stance. So I think this was a big mistake on the part of Echo of Moscow, which is no less liable for the statements than the person who made them.

When Chaplin says this, when priests en masse within the ROC hold such positions, does this somehow link up in their minds, if I can put it is this way, with the concept of Jesus Christ, who spoke of love and non-violence?

As we know, there is no Christ in the ROC. There is Orthodoxy in the ROC, but there is no Christ in the Church in the sense in which the idea of Christ was shaped by the Russian intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. For centuries, the phrase that Jesus is love just did not make sense. It was not a subject the clergy considered. From that point of view, it is not clear why it should be considered now. The concepts that the liberal intelligentsia have been attempting to discuss are all seemingly variations on western Christianity, so-called post-Holocaust thought, which has nothing to do with what the majority of the ROC’s ordinary parishioners think and believe. They see Orthodoxy as the national religion, which provides them with spiritual strength to oppose the “godless” west, and so on. So Chaplin, who was driven from his post in the Church, deliberately shocked the audience by divulging what the conservative half of his brain thinks. The audience talked about it. Basically, though, any average Russian priest, whomever you approach, thinks exactly the same thing.

Does it come from the Church? Or does the Church trail behind its flock?

It comes from the Church, of course. Within the Church there has long existed a concept, which has been its main content, that has to do with Russian nationalism and militarism. The vast majority of the clergy espouse these ideas and communicate them to parishioners in one form or another. It is another matter to what extent the Church’s leadership controls all of this. To what extent are the clergy permitted to speak out or keep quiet about political issues? This is something that the Church’s leadership monitors. When it wanted the ROC to have a fairly decent image in Ukraine, priests were told they should not travel to Ukraine and help the separatists. A couple of people who violated the ban were banned from the ministry. The Russian clergy immediately began speaking carefully about Ukraine. The clergy can keep thinking as aggressively as it likes. The question is the things it will say in ordinary life. This is something that can be regulated both by society and the state.

Let us come back later to the question of regulation on the part of society and the sate. Let’s talk about the situation within the Church. Are there priests who follow the idea that God is love?

This is a concept common among a very narrow segment of Moscow and Petersburg intelligentsia, among university-educated intellectuals in the broad sense. The majority of clergymen have no secular education whatsoever (I mean higher education), and they have had a very average secondary education. Many of them either do not know about this concept or regard it as a bit of intellectualizing. There are individual priests (among the ROC’s 20,000 priests you might find several hundred, at best) who espouse this concept. But they are outside the mainstream of the Church and do not constitute a respected or influential minority.

Are they persecuted within the Church?

No, but these ideas are so remote from what priests really do it is impossible to say they in any way define the life of the Church. Especially because ideas of this sort are clearly articulated only by individual priests, priests who are closely associated, again, with liberal circles. One level down, in the provinces, a priest can very well tell his parishioners that Christ is love while running a military-patriotic club. It all gels perfectly in their minds depending on their personal views and the last book they read ten years ago. Nothing contradicts anything else. That is why priests with distinctly liberal views who are willing to say that God is love amount to a dozen. They are known to journalists, who turn to them all the time. Beyond the confines of this narrow circle, such concepts are not particularly popular, and they are not subjects of conversation.

The real life of the clergy and the real ideas in their minds are so diverse, so not amenable to systematization, that we can speak of a society, an ideology, that is in fact unknown to us. We can speak of their militarism. But for some priests this militarism is clearly defined—they wear camouflage all the time except during services—while other priests have these ideas in their heads, but they do not express them too publicly, because they think they should say something else to their parishes. In addition, there are the changes that come with age. When they are young, people’s blood runs hotter. As they age, they become smarter, but in old age, on the contrary, they lose their heads, senility sets in, and they can say things that completely contradict what they had said fifteen or twenty years earlier. For example, Father Dmitry Dudko became a communist in old age, although his whole life he was a harsh anti-communist. It is a dynamic environment of generally anti-liberal ideas, but certain noble notions can be found in what they think or say.

What about the natural objection that, in the twentieth century, a huge number of Russian Orthodox priests were murdered by the Bolsheviks on the same grounds that Father Chaplin cited? Does this objection just have no effect on these people? Do they not feel they are the successors to those priests, to the church that was destroyed by this massive crackdown?

They feel like this when it suits them. When they have to argue with the former collective farm chair and current local council head that the church needs paint, they remember the new martyrs. Generally, a person who is willing to remember the new martyrs was probably a Party or Communist Youth League member or even a political officer in the Soviet Army (that is a quite common case) or a local university graduate who wrote pro-Soviet articles. The fact is that there are very few people directly associated with the new martyrs in Russia, and there are fewer of them as the years go by. The bulk of the Church consists of former Soviet people who until 1991 believed in socialist ideas of some kind, were card-carrying Party members, were involved in political organizations, and did not give a second thought to anything religious. Ideas about the regime’s responsibility, ideas about the memory of the mass repressions, all had some importance in the late 1980s, but then quickly came to naught. In this case, what is urgent for the ROC is the question of so-called post-Holocaust thought that the intelligentsia has proposed, meaning the awareness of guilt and the needlessness of so many victims, but the Church has consistently rejected all this now. It believes you can kill, but you have to pick the right group to kill, as Chaplin said. This is the basis of the current ROC’s ideology.

Nikolay Mitrokhin is a research fellow at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. He is the author of important books on the current state of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian nationalist movements in the postwar Soviet Union. Read his previous reflection on the fascization of the Russian Orthodox Church, “Right-Wing Saints.” Translated by the Russian Reader

Victoria Lomasko: Drawing Lessons at a Juvenile Prison

Victoria Lomasko
Drawing Lessons at a Juvenile Prison

In August 2010, I visited the Mozhaysk Juvenile Prison for the first time as a volunteer for the Center for Prison Reform and gave a drawing lesson to inmates. I have continued working with the Center, teaching master classes on drawing at the girl’s penitentiaries in Novy Oskol and Ryazan, and the boy’s penitentiary in Aleksin, but Mozhaysk is the only place which I have visited more or less regularly.

Victoria Lomasko with students at Mozhaysk Juvenile Prison

There is almost no funding for the trips. We travel by commuter train, carrying everything we need for classes in our backpacks, so with rare exceptions we use the simplest materials—paper and black pens—during the lessons.

The Center organizes the trips once a month on particular days. If you miss a trip, you have to wait for the next time round.

The rotation of inmates at the penitentiary is constant. Some are released on parole, while others are transferred to adult prisons. New inmates show up all the time. Over a six-month period, the roster of my drawing group changes completely.

Some teens are well educated, while everything is completely new to others. Many of them have psychological problems.

In short, teaching classes at a penitentiary is a tricky task: you have to experiment and develop your own lesson plan. At the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge you can look over two lessons from my program, “Form and Counterform” and “Ceramics Painting,” as well as the outcome of a creative exchange between the Mozhaysk Prison and prisons in Buenos Aires, which my friend the translator Anna Voronkova helped organize. After returning from Argentina, Anna became one of the main volunteers at the Center for Prison Reform.

Why do we travel to the prisons? The Center’s staff and volunteers bring clothing to inmates about to be released on parole, and hygiene items, birthday presents, and treats to the other inmates. Staff and volunteers also provide psychological assistance and collect material for preventive publications aimed at troubled teens. Another of the Center’s missions is to recruit creative people willing to work regularly with the teens, who need to interact with people from the outside world no less than they need shampoo and socks.

I realize I cannot teach someone to draw when lessons are so infrequent. My emphasis is on developing analytical thinking (the structure of the drawing) and empathy (working on the image). It is also vital to help the kids gain self-confidence, so all the pictures are shown at exhibitions. We photograph these exhibitions and bring the photos back to the prison to show the kids.

The kids find out about the drawing lessons from their minders, but more often they hear about them by word of mouth. Around five to ten students come to my classes. There is often a self-taught artist among them who really wants to learn to draw.

Oleg: “There are swastikas encrypted in Raphael’s drawings.”

Oleg draws a lot. He has his own views of Renaissance masterpieces.

A drawing by Oleg. “Look over there—wogs!” “Where?” “Right there!”

Oleg is a skinhead. It all started when, aged eight, he witnessed the murder of a friend: teenagers from the Caucasus killed him to get hold of his telephone. At fourteen, Oleg organized a “fight club,” in which he was the youngest member. The fighters “staged flash mobs at Caucasian markets.” Oleg said that in his small provincial town, the population was divided into skinheads, people from the Caucasus, and suckers. He was convicted of a gang killing. He expected to be rewarded for his patriotism, not punished. Oleg had kept up his spirits at the penitentiary: he had been studying foreign languages, philosophy, and economics. He dreams of becoming a politician: “Yanukovych’s priors hadn’t stopped him from becoming president.”

In the autumn, he was transferred to an adult prison.

Andrei: “On the outside, lots of things keep a guy from wising up.”

Andrei is a prison artist. He makes “bands” (drawings on handkerchiefs). He wants to draw beautifully and with feeling, but despises formal exercises. But he did like the lecture on concentration camp drawings. He reads Solzhenitsyn and has been teaching himself to draw by copying illustrations in books from the local library. Andrei’s sentence ended before the New Year, but no one is waiting for him on the outside.

A drawing by Andrei

Yevgeny had been a gambler. He was sent to the colony for busting open a slot machine. He did not know how to draw and did not want to learn: he came to class to get things off his chest.

Yevgeny: “I take out my anger on the world by drawing. Each drop is a grievance: it’s like rain.”

Yevgeny always looked tense. He hated his surroundings and once said he wanted to murder people.

“Shut up. You don’t know what murder is,” the skinhead Oleg said to Yevgeny, taking him down a peg.

Alexei: “On the outside, I drew cartoon characters.”

Alexei is a tall, handsome teenager. He is well read and has a good memory. What he liked most of all during the lessons was explanations of the abstract foundations of composition, which either irritated or dumfounded the other inmates.

A drawing by Alexei

It was obvious the other boys avoided Alexei, and one of them half-jokingly called him a maniac. It turned out that once on New Year’s Eve, Alexei had committed a double murder while intoxicated: he had stabbed one of his victims around fifty times with a knife. Before the New Year, Alexei was transferred to an adult prison in Tambov, while the skinheads were sent to a prison in the Moscow Region.

Natalia Dzyadko: “Why does no one come here to play football with the boys?”

Human rights activist Natalia Dzyadko has worked with the penitentiary for eight years. Along with staff members at the Center for Prison Reform, she brings candy and presents for the inmates’ birthdays, and invites people willing to work with the boys to the prison. It is difficult to gain entry to the prison without outside help. There are exceptions: the famous actor and musician Pyotr Mamonov has been granted the right to visit at any time, without a pass. True, he does not come that often, once or twice a year, but the inmates who have caught his concerts at the penitentiary still remember Mamonov.

The inmates have almost no time for themselves: their lives are organized on a strict schedule. But when they do have free time, what they like doing most of all is playing football.

Singer: “We’re fighting a plague, we’re fighting the entire Russian narcomafia.”

Activists sometimes visit the penitentiary, for example, a band made up of former alcoholics and drug addicts, from the organization Transfiguring Russia. The musicians performed for the boys songs they had written about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle.

The boys said the concert was cool, but that it was odd the musicians were wearing slippers and torn socks.

Father Andrei: “I’m going to sing you songs from the ‘80s.”

Father Andrei from Descent of the Holy Spirit Church also visited the inmates. The church is famous for its prior, ex-rocker Sergei Rybko. The priest performed several songs at a concert in the prison.

Father Andrei: “God definitely needs all of us.”

As in adult prisons, many inmates at the juvenile penitentiary turn to religion. There is a tiny wooden church on the premises. There are lots of icons in every residential unit, and even the TV in the common room is ringed with icons. Orthodox priests frequently come on the weekends to receive confession, chat, and show films about Russian Orthodoxy. No one comes to see the Muslim boys.

“They have put us up a crooked New Year’s tree with crooked decorations.”

As New Year’s approached, they were few boys left at the penitentiary. Some had been released, while others had been transferred to adult prisons.

Victoria Lomasko’s project Drawing Lessons at a Juvenile Prison is on display until February 9, 2015, at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid as part of the group show Really Useful Knowledge.