Putin the Great? 

Putin the Great?

I posted a long time ago on Putin as an ally of the U.S. Putin is anti-terrorist insofar as he has cracked down mercilessly on the Chechens. I don't know the whole story, but it is possible that the Chechen resistance to Russia took a new and nasty turn in August 1999, under the leadership of Shamel Basayev. The taking of 1200 hostages in September 2004 was some kind of new low, and many people sympathize with Putin for taking tough measures in that case.

Putin is a democrat--up to a point. He says quite reasonably that "democracy" without central control, in the post-Communist era, in some cases meant complete freedom for pirates. As law has become more established, some of these pirates wish to gain the respectability of the law without changing their ways. Better to have an autocrat who is seeking very little for himself--and that may be Putin.

The Atlantic for March confirms that Putin identifies with the best of the old czars, and this is fine with a lot of Russians. He wants to develop and draw on patriotism. He has a confessor--apparently someone who remained in the "official" Orthodox church under Communism, and who therefore accepted or even signed on to various persecutions of Christians, blasphemies and heresies. The defence of such people (as with the Grand Inquisitor, defending the Catholic Church in Dostoyevsky) is that the Church must survive somehow if it is to do any good. Russia was by quite a ways the largest Orthodox community in the world before the Russian Revolution; the slaughter of people simply because of their Christian confession may have been the largest ever.

(In my little reading on the Orthodox, it seems they have had unbelievably bad luck. The oldest and biggest Christian countries were conquered by Moslems beginning around 800 AD, and were never really converted back. By contrast, Rome was sacked by barbarians about 400, a hundred years after becoming Christian, and very shortly converted these barbarians to Christianity. Somehow the fulcrum shifted to Rome, away from Constantinople (partly an attempt to have a Christian capital different from the old pagan one. Then in the 20th century the Orthodox were killed by Communists.)

I repeated to my friend Alex, a Ukrainian Catholic whose heart, in some ways, is with the Orthodox, that Putin is apparently Orthodox. "Yes," he said, "and I'm a Buddhist." Well, I said, he has a Confessor. "Yes, another KGB thug, just like himself."

I asked Alex about this incident:

Putin is trying to increase his prestige by repairing a fracture in the Orthodox Church that occurred eight decades ago, when a group of anti-Soviet exiles established their own wing, the Orthodox Church Abroad. Putin and Father Tikhon have met with leaders of this group in New York, and a deal is pending that would reunite the church under the umbrella of the Moscow patriarchate, which already ministers to believers in former Soviet republics such as Latvia and Ukraine.