No Other God Besides Me
The first commandment the Lord gave to Moses is to have no other gods besides Him. But as the article "Perun, Slavic God of the Sky and Universe" explains, the slavic god Perun is for many Russians "the supreme god, the god of thunder and lightning, who owned the sky and acted as the patron saint of ruling army units. He is one of the few Slavic gods for which evidence exists at least as long ago as the 6th century CE."
Both ancient and many modern Russians believe that Perun is "god" ("bog" in Russian) or the top "dog" spelled backward, equivalent to the Greek Zeus or the Norse Thor gods of war. His consort is said to be Mokosh, goddess of the sun. "As the liberator of atmospheric water... he was worshipped as a god of agriculture, and bulls and a few humans were sacrificed to him."
Not a few Russians still worship and emulate this pagan warrior god Perun. When we lived in Mari El, one of the republics of central Russia, a close friend told us how thousands of Russians gather yearly to reinact pagan battles that include the god Perun. Newspapers are full of ads about non-Christian beliefs and the occult. Even some Orthodox churches in Moscow had booklets about paganism on their literature racks. When seeing this, I realized how deeply entrenched warlike paganism is in the Russian psyche. Mari El, by the way, is the only government in modern Europe that has paganism as its official state religion.
The 2018 article "Russian Soldiers, Athletes Are Turning to Paganism, Top Church Leader Says" tells of a growing trend of soldiers turning to paganism. It also mentions Mari El where we lived. When we moved to its capital city Ioshkar-Ola ("red city") in 2016, I took a walk to explore the downtown area and saw a little souvenir shop. As I entered, I experienced an extremely creepy feeling of evil and saw a pagan idol on display, so I immediately left the shop.
A common feature of both Mari El and the Udmurt republics where we lived is a "dual belief" system: people will baptize their children, marry them off and bury them in the Orthodox Church, while at the same time in their daily lives practicing paganism. Another article, "More Russian than Orthodox Christianity: Russian Paganism as Nationalist Politics," explains this phenomenon:
"The collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe enabled the few small pagan movements in the region to surface in the public sphere. At the beginning of the 1990s, they gained momentum in virtually all ex-socialist countries. The majority of these groups subscribed to nationalist politics, but naturally the nature of this nationalism varies between countries. Whereas in Central and Eastern Europe native paganism is often seen as an inherently anti-Soviet and anti-Communist force, Russian pagans' relationship with their past is more complex. Despite this, pagans from Slavic countries have cooperated, especially in a yearly assembly, Veche, in advocating a pan-Slavic nationalist ideology." (emphases mine)
So you can see the connection between a rebirth of paganism in Russia and the trend toward an aggressive form of pan-Slavic nationalism. The article also includes a link the free PDF of the 297-page book The Geopolitics of Faith in the Twenty-First Century (Creative Commons license).
The Moscow Times recently published "How Russia's FSB Embraced Religion in the Face of a Baffling War" that details how the FSB (formerly the KGB) that earlier enforced atheism is now using the Russian Orthodox Church to support Putin's "special military operation" – a euphemism for his invasion and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. It cites a Russian Orthodox priest, Fr. Andrei Tkachev, who stated: "it is much better to wipe out some equipment rather than 40,000 alongside it. We are waging war according to Christian principles because we are destroying transformers, not people who have an immortal soul." But Russia is doing both: destroying tens of thousands of people as well as transformers.
A Christian friend in Russia once told me – "There's a big difference between Russian Orthodoxy and Orthodox Christianity." But to be fair, I must add that we have known many Orthodox people in Russia who are deeply Christian, although the "dual belief" system is deeply engrained in Russian mentality. Thus it pains me greatly to watch and read the news about Russia's aggression and genocidal acts in Ukraine.
Fr. Gregory Jensen writes in "Russian War Crimes and Orthodox Moral Education" –
"Accusing the Russian military of committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine is not the same as accusing all Russians of war crimes. Much less is it to accuse individual Russians. At the same time, concerns about not giving offense to Russian[s] or of being misunderstood by those outside the Church should not prevent us from making these allegations when the evidence warrants:
Evidence continues to mount of Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity, including but not limited to:
* Massacres in occupied Bucha and Izyum.
* Deliberate air strikes against civilians, including apartment blocks and clearly marked shelters.
* The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia, including the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory.
* An ongoing effort to erase Ukrainian culture and cultural heritage from Russian-occupied territory.
These atrocities shouldn't come as a surprise given Moscow's horrific track record in Syria and elsewhere, but they nonetheless remain shocking and appalling in both scope and scale. No wonder high-level U.S. government officials ... have publicly and formally accused the Kremlin of committing crimes against humanity – crimes for which Putin and his cronies must be held accountable, unlike the pass Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria has received.
I've spoken to many Orthodox Christians – clergy and laity – whose thinking about Russia's Invasion of Ukraine is confused. This confusion, I would ask you to consider, is symptomatic of the poverty of moral education both in our schools and especially in the Church. Many Orthodox Christians – like many American Christians – have never been exposed to the Church's moral tradition beyond a rather bare list of 'do's and don't's.'"
The disinformation campaign by Russia's government and church is designed to sow doubt and confusion in the West by claiming that the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) is uncanonical because Ecumenical Patriarch has no right to grant it autonomy. Yet it is the Moscow Patriarch who has no right to grant autonomy to the old Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP) or to the Orthodox Church of America. This is the old "divide and conquer" disinformation warfare technique, projecting one's own errors onto others. We must pray for a deep repentance and restoration of true Christianity in Russia!
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