Russian Federation Hypocrisy & Aggressive Clandestine Activity
From: Foreign Affairs Table
By Michael S. Woodson
http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/28551
The Russian Federation has apparently blocked grants to NGOs monitoring elections, advocating a free press, and promoting decentralized power in Russian government and business, according to a Wall Street Journal report of April 3, 2006, by Guy Chazan with Neil King, Jr.'s assistance. The story is referenced on pages A3 and A9 of the Journal.
The Russian Federation is set on blocking feared democratic competition with the Putin regime, and worries that outsiders would foment a Ukrainian style Orange Revolution in Rus. Meanwhile, Russia, which as the key player in the USSR did so little for Ukraine, has reasserted itself over Ukraine by pushing up Russian natural gas prices, infiltrating it, and playing a protection racket game with the Ukrainian people by marginalizing Ukraine's government.
And this is not all. The Russian Federation, and President Putin personally, would reach into the United States. Putin has schmoozed the as yet independent Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), calling them to come into communion with the church under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate in Russia. The upshot of that would be canonical control of the ROCOR by the Moscow Patriarchate.
President Putin reportedly told ROCOR's Metropolitan Laurus that he could not unite Russia until Russia's church was united. Clergy present at a clergy conference visited by Moscow Patriarchate clergy, reported to some in our parish that President Putin's spiritual father vouched for President Putin, assuring the ROCOR families, their formerly exiled and persecuted elder members, American converts, and recent Eastern immigrants that the coast was clear: Putin was a genuine Orthodox Christian and could be trusted.
Since, Putin has tolerated the erection among red flowers of a monument to the man who blew up the Russian Orthodox cathedrals and parishes that caused the ROCOR's now largely Russian American flock to flee the Soviets: the pre-KGB CHEKA founder of the Red Terror, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Under Dzerzhinsky, the USSR arrested, shot and imprisoned Orthodox Christians who refused to recant their faith, put their children in reeducation camps and taught them to hate their parents. It was another form of fascist ideology masquerading as ideal Communism, taking advantage of the attributions of corruption to religions or religous ethnicities in general, rather than the failure to keep religions from controlling state government and vice versa. And so church goers, innocent people, were imprisoned with criminals in gulags, tortured and murdered.
And President Putin has also ordered that statues of his former boss and 15 year KGB (then USSR) Chief Yuri Andropov's go up, the man who presided over the KGB as it carried out its operation to assassinate Pope John Paul II through the Turkish fop, if the Italians are correct. President Putin was then a high ranking officer with a track record serving the KGB in East Germany.
What now seems very likely, is that the Russian Federation, holding onto a nostalgia for the USSR's authoritarian glory, is planning first to soft talk a communion between its still-cowed and much FSB-infiltrated Moscow Patriarchate in Russia and the US-based ROCOR. Then, by an assertion of canon law, the Moscow Patriarchate will push for its own authority over the ROCOR in the US, likely preceded by some feint of good will toward the US government designed to keep it off-guard.
At that time, Americans, whether Russian Americans or others, and new immigrants, will be subject to visiting Moscow Patriarchate priests before whom they would confess their sins. Indeed, the visits to American parishes by clergy of the Moscow Patriarchate have already begun.
There would be little in the way of discerning whether MP clergy were members of the Russian Federation's FSB or reported to them. Of some concern also, is that some members of the ROCOR are also employees of the US government. And that could be what you call an invitation to infiltration, and worse, blackmail for agency.
Why Russians would be so easily bamboozled by the corrupt governments since the fall of the USSR that they left behind to move to the US, I can only attribute to their nostalgia for their motherland. We could blame also some of the ill-handled foreign policies of the (can't-fire-them-too-soon) Neocons. I have personally heard several Russian American friends reason, 'what's the difference' (from Putin) when they hear many press outlets accusing President Bush of being an authoritarian ruler himself.
There are those who are not easily fooled, however, and several are former KGB agents, some turned journalists, and most have fled Russia since Putin took the helm and the major Russian newspapers began self-censoring under government pressure in the late 90s. (The NGO that promotes free press is one of those whose grant has been stalled.)
Included among these are those whose writings are easily accessed on the internet: former KGB Lt. Gen. Oleg Kalugin; former KGB Chief Archivist Vasili Mitrokhin; former KGB Lt. Col. and ROCOR church member Konstantin Preobrazhensky, and others. Of former Russian civilians and long time outside observers, check out journalist and author Yevgenia Albats, the Keston Institute and Intelligence Historian of Oxford University, Prof. Christopher Andrew. Also, scholar John Dunlop, with these others, has recognized the evidence that Patriarch Alexei II, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate and many fellow bishops are and or have been former KGB agents. After the USSR crumbled, the KGB did not crumble, but changed its name to the FSB, according to these sources.
In any case, Sun Tzu's classic Art of War, required West Point reading, states that a general should consider feigning weakness before springing into action against his enemies. I'm sure KGB Lt. Col. Putin, the never-retired Judo master, has read that book many times while calculating how to use a larger opponent's weight against itself. Are provocative developments in Iran part of the calculation? Is the former Tehran mayor a long time correspondent with the former St. Petersburg mayor?
And the day that this generation of Bishops in the ROCOR opens their arms in cognitive dissonance to the spells of the Russian Federation through the Moscow Patriarchate, dismissing the lessons of the past and failing to listen to the neutral observers who aren't under the RF regime thumb, is the day that many may feel forced to attend other Orthodox Churches.
The Moscow Patriarchate organization, not the plurality of the laity and parish priests in Russia, is itself an instrument of the Russian state as evidenced by its many comments in line with Russian state expectations about the ROCOR's resistance to reunification, while saying kinder, gentler things to the ROCOR. The ROCOR, having found safe haven all of these years in the US, Europe and other lands, would do well to block any re-unification of the Moscow Patriarch with the ROCOR until the former KGB and current FSB running the Patriarchate repent of it, die, or resign, and until the Russian Federation has halted its new authoritarian experiment and become an open society. Those authoritarian experiments of Russia's past have not worked out so very well, have they?
And to those who blame the US government in its Neocon phases for Russian authoritarianism, nationalism, and a resurgence of communist party power, I simply say, what the US is doing is nowhere close to what the Putin regime is doing with the Russian Federation, and, two wrongs don't make a right.
