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Unlike
most former republics of the Soviet Union, Russia still has no centralised
state body dealing with religious affairs. The most senior federal
officials who deal exclusively with religious issues are functionaries and
not policy makers. Those in the Kremlin (where, under President Vladimir
Putin, power has become increasingly concentrated) who are authorised to
take decisions impacting upon religious freedom are normally immersed in
mainstream political issues, which they no doubt consider to be far more
pressing. Religious freedom concerns are consequently resolved in an ad hoc
manner, if the Kremlin is involved at all, or are more usually left to
government departments and/or regional administrations. All of Russia's main
component regions have a state official dealing at least partially, and
often solely, with religious affairs. Of the seven federal districts
created by Putin in 2000 to form an additional tier of government between
the Kremlin and the regions, at least two - those covering central European
Russia and the Volga area - have set up
special commissions dealing exclusively with confessional relations.
As a result of this state of affairs, there is extensive scope for
variation in religious freedom policy. When decisions are made which
violate believers' rights, they are largely informed by the political
agendas and personal loyalties of persons in positions of power, who either
bring sections of legislation into play when convenient or else act without
reference to any law. A cinema owner might typically announce, under
pressure from some local state body, that he can no longer rent out his
hall to a Protestant congregation. A Muslim community might be refused
permission to build a mosque. A Catholic parish might encounter staunch
resistance in recovering its historical church building. Common perceptions
of what the federal policy on religion is supposed to be, perhaps inferred
from Putin's general ideological statements and his patriotic public image
as consistently projected by the state media, may also play a part. The
international human rights agreements to which Russia is a signatory are
typically not of core concern. It remains unclear whether the Putin regime
views this situation as ideal. It is certainly in no hurry to change it.
This piecemeal nature of the current religious freedom situation in Russia
sooner resembles the early 1990s than the years 1996-2000. During this
latter period the national legislative body, the State Duma, carried more
clout, and the Moscow Patriarchate attempted, through its allies on the
religion committee there, to secure legislation which would protect its
interests. While it potentially succeeded with the 1997 law on religion,
successively lenient official interpretations of this law at the federal
level neutralised some of its harsher provisions. Thus, following
complaints by local communities of Pentecostals and Jehovah's Witnesses in
1999, Russia's
constitutional court determined that the deprivation of various legal rights
from groups unable to prove 15 years' existence did not extend to those
affiliated to religious organisations registered at the federal level. A
host of newer Protestant organisations swiftly found protection by
enrolling into centralised Protestant unions as a result, even if for some
this meant jettisoning a principled opposition to hierarchical structures.
In response to a further complaint by the Moscow branch of the Salvation
Army in 2001, communities registered before the 1997 law came into effect
were also explicitly made exempt both from its restrictions on rights and
from being liquidated for failing to re-register, as the constitutional
court ruled that it did not have retroactive force.
A significant factor in these developments has been the largely benign
stance of Russia's
Ministry of Justice and many of the local officials responsible for
religious affairs. In an interview with the Moscow Patriarchate's weekly
newspaper in 2002, Orthodox Metropolitan Vladimir of St Petersburg and
Ladoga remarked: "Sectarians and schismatics of various stripes poured
into our country. We sometimes asked representatives of the local
authorities not to register them, but they replied that they could not do
so, as we have religious freedom according to our constitution."
This is not to say that there have not been casualties of the 1997 law.
While the Jehovah's Witnesses successfully re-registered the vast majority
of their congregations, for instance, a long-running court case initiated
by anti-cultists still seeks to ban their Moscow
community as destructive under Article 14 of the law and so set a precedent
for the denomination throughout Russia. And while registration
is not compulsory, a group without it has the right only to worship in
premises provided by its own members (that is, not held as the property of
the group in an official capacity) and teach its existing followers. The
most dramatic clashes over this provision relate to the unregistered
Baptists (Council of Churches). This body broke away from the mainstream
Russian Baptist Union in the 1960s over compromises with the Soviet regime
and has refused to register ever since on the principle of declining to
have anything to do with the state. Its communities, which have few links
with Baptists abroad, routinely report fines and property confiscation when
they stage evangelisation campaigns in provincial areas. As an unregistered
group, they are not allowed to preach in public.
Registration, however, is perhaps the only part of the 1997 law to have
been applied systematically. While its non-implementation may have been
welcomed, the drawback of a return to the sort of informal decisions
described above is that they are not open to public scrutiny or legal
challenge.
For all the fuss about sects and cults in Russia over the past decade,
the particular nature of a religious belief seems to play little role in
restrictions on religious believers in practice. Groups are far more likely
to be targeted if they are dynamic and visible, whatever they believe. For
the most part, these are evangelical Protestants, but they may also be
Catholic or alternative Orthodox communities. While suspicious of state
co-operation and having a virulent dislike for the Moscow Patriarchate, the
Old Believers, by contrast, do not appear to encounter any problems more
serious than discrimination in property restitution. In all likelihood,
this is because they are neither conspicuous nor experiencing dynamic
growth.
While having a similar number of communities, moreover, the Old Believers
have long got away with having dioceses (and even a Metropolitan of Moscow
and All Rus) on the Moscow Patriarchate's "canonical territory",
whereas the Catholics have not. The turmoil suffered by the Catholic Church
in Russia in 2002 highlights a more recent method employed by the state
against disfavoured religious bodies - that of barring foreign religious
workers from participating directly in their spiritual life and
development. While this policy is more frequently applied to Protestants,
it is felt more acutely by groups such as Buddhists and Catholics. (It is
quicker to train up an indigenous Protestant leader than a Buddhist
spiritual teacher or Catholic priest, and the position is open to a broader
category of people.) So far none of the seven Catholic clergy known to have
been denied entry to Russia
since the beginning of 2001 have been able to return. A year after Polish
citizen Bishop Jerzy Mazur had his visa revoked in April 2002, the Catholic
Church ended up having to transfer Bishop Cyryl Klimowisz from Belarus to
the Irkutsk-based diocese for which he had been consecrated.
To date, there are over 30 reported cases of foreign religious workers of
various confessions who have been barred from Russia from the mid-1990s
onwards. It should be stressed, however, that these are persons about whom
full details are known and who are willing to make them public. Forum 18
continues to hear anecdotal mention of similar cases and suspects that
there are many more which have not been publicised, especially dating from
before 2000. While official grounds for expulsion are rarely given, one
occasion on which they were offered points to an apparent inconsistency
behind this policy. One government official cited state security
considerations shortly after Bishop Mazur's visa was revoked, while a year
later another implied that he had been barred for engaging in commercial
activity. It is not clear how alleged commercial activity (if illegal)
could constitute a risk to state security warranting expulsion rather than
ordinary court proceedings.
This policy of visa denials may have its origins in Putin's National
Security Concept of January 2000, which warned of the negative impact upon Russia of
foreign missionary activity. Against a general background of concern about
a lack of national consolidation, a fear persists within some quarters of
the political establishment that believers, especially young people, will
adopt foreign values and allegiances if they belong to a confession based
outside Russia. The state has sought to stem the flow of young Muslims
travelling to Middle Eastern countries to study in Islamic educational
institutions by setting up and supporting rival indigenous establishments,
such as the Russian Islamic University in Tatarstan. In 2000 a civil
service professor formally suggested to a government committee that
heightened activity by foreign missionaries in far north-eastern Siberia
was part of a US government plan to seize control of the whole of Russia's
Far East. In the same year, his religion faculty colleague publicly advised
presidential administration personnel to support the missionary activity of
the Moscow Patriarchate as a counterweight to foreign missionary
"expansion." The Communist chairman of the State Duma religion
committee continues to call for a more stringent state policy on
"spiritual security." While much more comprehensive and
restrained in tone, an October 2002 draft report on religious extremism by
a government working group co-ordinated by Minister Without Portfolio
Vladimir Zorin repeated and amplified the same ideas.
Observers sometimes maintain that Putin supports the return of a state
Orthodox Church. The current regime indeed selects and utilises symbols
from Russia's imperial (and more recent) past with which the public
mainstream identifies in order to galvanise support and enhance its own
legitimacy, an essential task for any post-Soviet political and economic
elite. The Russian Orthodox Church is thus co-opted as the only
all-national social institution to have survived both these periods in
history. During his recent annual open press conference, for example, Putin
remarked that his forbears had attended the same village church for
generations: "Now there's stability for you!" A crucial factor
here, however, is that the Kremlin is seeking to reach out to the nominal
Orthodox majority who have only a tacit support for the Church. It is with
this sizeable section of the population that Putin seeks to identify
himself when he makes an occasional public - and slightly awkward -
appearance at an Orthodox church service, and not the two per cent of the
population who regularly participate in its sacramental life and whose
values are typically very different from their nominally Orthodox
compatriots. Under the Kremlin-inspired 2002 law on extremism, for example,
Orthodox religious organisations who fervently hold the traditional view
that Russia should ideally be led by a divinely-appointed monarch could
conceivably have their activity halted if they are deemed even to be
planning "activity aimed at the undermining of the assumption of the
governing powers of the Russian Federation."
That the Putin regime merely pays lip service to a state-supported Orthodox
Church is also evident from the slow progress of attempts to establish a
legal traditional religion status which would allocate prime position to
the Moscow Patriarchate. Following on from two 2001 draft religious
policies supporting such a status and parliamentary religion committee
vice-chairman Aleksandr Chuyev's 2002 bill on traditional religious
organisations, Communist opposition deputy Sergei Glazyev publicised a
similar draft law in 2003. While none of these initiatives has come close
to succeeding, rising political star Glazyev now represents the Orthodox on
a new cross-party parliamentary association 'In Support of Traditional
Spiritual and Moral Values', which is openly supported by key religious
leaders. This may prove to be a lobby force so potent that the Kremlin will
find it difficult to block entirely some future legislation in this vein.
There is an inherent complex of problems associated with the possibility of
a traditional religion status in Russia, however. Following the preamble of
the 1997 law, which may be regarded as the catalyst of these initiatives,
would enshrine "the special contribution of Orthodoxy" to Russia,
but this would encompass rival Orthodox groupings at odds with the Moscow
Patriarchate. The alternative criterion of a set number of years' existence
would also prove difficult to introduce, since the Lutheran presence in
Russia pre-dates the Buddhist, for instance, by as much as half a century.
There is also disagreement among generally accepted candidates for
traditional status about whether they would be on a par with one another.
Leading Orthodox churchman Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad
insists that Russia is not a multi-confessional nation, but an Orthodox
country with national and religious minorities. Leaders of the very
sizeable Muslim minority of 12 million would disagree, and the Kremlin
would hesitate to provoke their following.
While it should be emphasised that the official figures giving the numbers
of registered religious organisations in each of Russia's seven federal
districts do not indicate numbers of individual believers, they
nevertheless show a marked regional discrepancy between confessions which
is not in keeping with Metropolitan Kirill's statement. While the Orthodox
easily dominate in the Central and North-Western districts of European
Russia, for instance, they have less than half the total number of
registered organisations in the other five. In the Volga and Southern
districts the Muslims have approximately one-third of the total, while in
the Far Eastern district, which has notably fewer organisations overall,
Protestant organisations outnumber the Orthodox. Perhaps in view of this
situation, the Putin regime appears to adhere to the tried-and-tested
latter Soviet-era status quo of calling upon a multi-confessional coalition
of politically loyal leaders to represent the religious community. In a
recent explanation of the presidential administration's use of the term
"representatives of the main confessions" to describe those
invited to Putin's annual address to the federal assembly, a senior Kremlin
official cited the mention of Orthodoxy, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and
Judaism in the 1997 religion law's preamble, in accordance with which, he
maintained, Orthodox [but not other Christian], Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish
representatives had received invitations. Since the Moscow Patriarchate
must be aware that it is unlikely to attain a most favoured religion status
in law, it may prove content with continuing to circulate the idea until it
becomes common currency in practice.
Indeed, now that the 1997 law no longer poses a serious restriction to
disfavoured religious communities, those who do not find Russia's
constitutional guarantees of equality before the law to their liking have
begun to switch to this form of tactic - the pursuit of inequality without
recourse to the law. Without any change in legislation or the constitution
to provide for them, there has been a steady increase over the past seven
years in concordat-style agreements between the Russian Orthodox Church and
various organs of state, such as the Ministries of Defence, Education and
Health, which grant the Church privileged access to certain areas of public
life. One provincial official dealing with religious affairs recently cited
an analogous regional agreement to Forum 18 as the basis for collaboration
between the local Patriarchate diocese and various state organs in her
republic, including in the financing of a new Orthodox cathedral.
Here again, it is not entirely clear whether the Kremlin approves of this
practice. It may be that the lack of an overall policy on the issue
indicates that the Putin regime chooses to admit this kind of co-operation
only in contexts where it considers protection of the Moscow Patriarchate's
interests to be advantageous. Whereas previous post-Soviet political
developments in the religious sphere predominantly affected religious
organisations (and hence Russia's relatively small percentage of regularly
practising believers), however, the recent proposal for the systematic
introduction of an optional subject on Orthodox Culture into state schools
was the first time that the Moscow Patriarchate publicly laid claim to
state-assisted influence in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. Debate
on this issue consistently revealed - and continues to reveal - a deep
divide in public and professional opinion. While such a development is
unlikely to occur in the immediate future, this suggests that the Kremlin
would probably move to contain the Russian Orthodox Church if it began to
insist upon extensive influence in mainstream public life.
In the course of conversation with representatives of religious minorities
in different parts of Russia, Forum 18 has frequently found that they claim
not to encounter any particular problems from the state. On closer
questioning, however, they might volunteer a few lesser restrictions,
which, when considered together, indicate that they do not in fact enjoy
full religious freedom: obstructions in inviting a foreign preacher, in
renting or building a place of worship, in working with local state social
agencies. In Russia religious freedom is thus - currently loosely -
circumscribed. This appears to be in keeping with other spheres of public
life under Putin, where the state is not so much concerned about
controlling the legitimate activity of citizens, but in having potential
control over it. In this context, violations of religious freedom may not
appear as dramatic as in many other states in the region. Severe
persecution has the potential to spark sudden radical change, however,
while Russia's trend of low-level discrimination looks set to continue
unchallenged.
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