The Real Russia. Today. Eastern Orthodoxy's schism, Navalny's new troubles, and Amnesty International's mock-executed observer in Ingushetia

Monday, October 15, 2018

This day in history. On October 15, 1967, “The Motherland Calls” monument was unveiled in Volgograd. At a height of nearly 280 feet, it remains the tallest freestanding, non-religious statue in the world. It commemorates the heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad.

• The Russian Orthodox Church has broken ties with Orthodoxy's leader. Here's what that's all about.
• After 50 days in jail, Navalny is summoned for questioning in yet another criminal case
• Kremlin spokesman says, ‘linguistically speaking,’ Trump didn't actually tell ‘60 Minutes’ that Putin poisoned anyone
• An Amnesty International observer says Ingush police beat and tortured him
• Democracy à la russe in Khakassia 
• NPR talks to the researchers behind Bellingcat about how they're trying to be a new and improved Wikileaks

Orthodoxy's schism ☦️

The Russian Orthodox Church has suspended Eucharistic communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The decision was made at a meeting of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church on October 15 in Minsk. The stated reason for the suspension is the “anti-canonical actions of the Constantinople Patriarchate, which opened communication channels to schismatics in Ukraine and thereby encroached on the Russian Orthodox Church’s canonical territory.”

The Constantinople Patriarchate is the “first among equals” among the heads of the several autocephalous churches that make up the Eastern Orthodox Church. The official title of Patriarch Bartholomew is Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch. Sergey Chaplin, a church publicist and former executive editor of Moscow Patriarchate Magazine, told Meduza that all local Orthodox churches recognize the primacy of the Constantinople Patriarchate, including his right to overrule decisions by the heads of other local churches and to grant independence to new branches. “The only serious competition and appeals not to recognize Constantinople’s special status come from Moscow,” Chaplin says.

Breaking Eucharistic communion is nearly the last resort in inter-church relations. The split means that Russian Orthodox Church clergy will no longer be able to worship or perform ceremonies together with the the hierarchs and clerics of the Constantinople Patriarchate. Russian Orthodox Christians will no longer be able to take communion or participate in other sacraments at churches within the Constantinople Patriarchate’s jurisdiction. When Eucharistic communion is suspended, the patriarchs from the quarreling churches typically stop mentioning each other in prayer, though the Russian Orthodox Church implemented this measure before the final split: Patriarch Kirill already hasn’t mentioned Patriarch Bartholomew for a month. (Memorial prayer at Russian Orthodox churches has started with Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa Theodore II.)

The Russian Orthodox Church has drafted a list for tourists of all the churches where they can no longer pray. Moscow Patriarchate spokesman Archpriest Igor Yakimchuk has noted that Constantinople Patriarchate churches are located, in part, in Istanbul, Antalya, Crete, and on Rhodes. Yakimchuk also said that clergy will face disciplinary punishment for failing to observe the new prohibitions, and laypeople will be asked to confess and repent to disobeying the church.

The Russian Orthodox Church says Mount Athos is also now closed to Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia. Patriarch Kirill’s press secretary, priest Alexander Volkov, has pointed out that Mount Athos is in the Moscow Patriarchate’s jurisdiction “with all the same consequences.” Mount Athos is a self-governing territory within Greece that includes 20 monasteries. The mountain is one of the holiest shrines in Christian Orthodoxy, which many pilgrims, including Christians from Russia, try to reach every year. The region is also a popular place for pilgrimages by Russian politicians, bureaucrats, and business people. Vladimir Putin has also visited twice: once in 2005 and again in 2016.

The Russian Orthodox Church has won support from the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the Moscow-dependent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. A spokesman for the church said Metropolitan Onufriy (the current head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church) “participated today in the meeting from start to finish, and — like all members of the Synod — supported its decision,” and its decision to align with the Belarusian Orthodox Church. In response, the Kyiv Patriarchate’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church called the Russian Orthodox Church’s move “self-isolation in retaliation for legal decisions by the world community.”

This isn’t the first time the Russian Orthodox Church has suspended relations with the Constantinople Patriarchate. In February 1999, the same Patriarch Bartholomew serving now announced that the Constantinople Patriarchate was adding the Estonian Orthodox Church to its jurisdiction. Three days later, the Russian Orthodox Church suspended Eucharistic communion with the Constantinople Patriarchate, but ties were reestablished after a few months, when everything was restored. Today there are two Estonian Orthodox churches, one controlled from Constantinople and the other from Moscow.

Moscow's conflict with Constantinople is thanks entirely to Ukraine. The biggest canonical Orthodox church in Ukraine is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. The other two major Orthodox churches — the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church — are independent, unrecognized by the Constantinople Patriarchate, and non-canonical. After the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and the war in eastern Ukraine, officials in Kyiv started talking more actively about the creation of a new canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church that would be autocephalous (independent). The Constantinople Patriarchate then agreed to grant autocephaly to the new church, which will be created on the foundation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and the joined parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which categorically opposes this initiative because it doesn’t want to lose its influence in Ukraine.

They can't get enough of him 👮

Almost immediately after going free from 50 days in jail, anti-corruption activist and opposition politician Alexey Navalny says he was summoned by police on October 15 to be interrogated for two-year-old defamation charges brought by Interior Ministry investigator Pavel Karpov, who accuses Navalny of sharing hyperlinks to the documentary film “Russian Untouchables,” which ties Karpov to the torture and murder of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergey Magnitsky.

“As far as I understand it,” Navalny wrote on his website, “they can't arrest me on these exact charges today — it's only about major fines right now, but who the hell knows how the wild and creative legal machine works in Putin's head.”

In the end, Navalny's “interrogation” lasted just three minutes. He says he was asked to sign a standard form and then told that the authorities would be in touch. Navalny credits the news media's attention with alerting the Kremlin that the Interior Ministry had supposedly misinterpreted its “instructions.”

• In June 2015, a Moscow court awarded Karpov 8 million rubles ($122,000) from Hermitage Capital, CEO Bill Browder, and Firestone Duncan founder Jamison Firestone in damages caused by the “Untouchables” film. Karpov has won several other defamation suits in Russia related to the Magnitsky case, including one against former State Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov for 100,000 rubles ($1,525).

Explaining Trump away ⚗️

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov is unfazed by U.S. President Donald Trump telling “60 Minutes” in a new interview that Vladimir Putin is “probably, yeah” involved in assassinations and poisonings, in response to a question from journalist Lesley Stahl.

“I wouldn’t make the assessment that Trump allowed that possibility and so on, as we’re reading in many media reports. Here you’ve got to be very flexible with how you read the linguistic properties. It’s clear that there couldn’t have been a different answer,” Peskov said.

Moscow has denied allegations that it is responsible for a March 2018 nerve-agent attack on a double agent living in Salisbury, England, despite mounting evidence that Russian military intelligence agents delivered the poison.

Beaten and threatened in a mock execution 🚨

Opposition activist and Amnesty International monitor Oleg Kozlovsky revealed on Twitter on October 15 that he was abducted by Ingush anti-extremist police officers, undressed, beaten, blackmailed, threatened with rape if he refused to cooperate, and subjected to a “mock execution” in a field. Before dumping him at the airport, the officers allegedly even warned that they would kill Kozlovsky's children, if he didn't “forget” his interrogation. Kozlovsky says he's left Russia for the time being, but he hopes to return soon and resume his work. He was in Ingushetia to monitor protests against a controversial border agreement with Chechnya.

Read it elsewhere 📰

🗳️ Panicking in Khakassia 

Andrew Roth visited Khakassia last week and reported from Abakan, where “Communist wunderkind Valentin Konovalov should already be Siberia’s youngest governor, but the elections he’s supposed to win are cancelled every other week.” Read the story here at The Guardian. (After this article was published, the effort to remove Konovalov from the runoff race was abandoned, and his Growth Party challenger dropped out, meaning that Konovalov must now win more than 50 percent of the electorate on November 11 to take the governor's office, or else entirely new elections will be called.)

🎭 Meet the unmaskers

NPR's “All Things Considered” spoke to several members of the open-source intelligence research group Bellingcat, which has unearthed evidence of Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine's armed conflict and the poisoning of Sergey Skripal, as well as war crimes in Syria and elsewhere. Bellingcat's researchers say they were inspired by Wikileaks, before that organization “gained notoriety as a conduit for hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.” Bellingcat staff say the challenge they face is unearthing valuable information without “whitewashing” planted intelligence. Read the story here at NPR.