The Cyprus Issue Drags On

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

It’s one of those disputes that never seem to reach a resolution – especially given the role of foreign parties.

A historic effort to end the division of the partitioned island of Cyprus began in January. Since 1974, it has been divided between a Turkish north and a Greek south.

Even its capital city of Nicosia is split in two by the “green line” that divides the (Greek) Republic of Cyprus, the officially recognized state, from the de facto Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). United Nations peacekeepers oversee a buffer zone across the island.

The latest round of negotiations, sponsored by the UN, began on Jan. 12, as the foreign ministers of Great Britain, Greece and Turkey, the three countries that are designated as “guarantors” of the nation’s sovereignty under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, met in Geneva.

It prompted the new UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, to state that Cyprus could be “a symbol of hope” this year.

The commitment to a settlement shown by the leaders of the two Cypriot communities – President Nicos Anastasiades of the Republic of Cyprus and Mustafa Akinci of the TRNC -- also helped to raise expectations.

But everything on the island is fraught with symbolism. The Greek Cypriot government recently decided to introduce the commemoration of “Enosis” in its public schools.

It celebrates a 1950 referendum, when 96 per cent of Greeks voted for the island to be annexed to Greece. This made Turkish Cypriots angry, and Akinci has insisted that Anastasiades rescind the legislation.

The purpose of the talks is to create a unified, though federated, political structure, with a rotating presidency. Any agreement would have to be sanctioned by the UN and put to a referendum on both sides of the island.

It has always been understood that some of the territory controlled by the Turkish Cypriots will be ceded to Greek Cypriot control in any peace deal, to allow at least 90,000 Greek Cypriots displaced by the 1974 Turkish invasion to return to their homes.

The debate over how much land should be handed over and its location has hampered previous talks.

The last time a peace deal was close at hand, in 2004, it was accepted by the Turkish Cypriots in a referendum but rejected by the Greek Cypriots.

But two major powers might still derail the current process.

Much will depend on Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is unpredictable. It is he who will decide whether Turkey makes the concessions needed to solve the Cyprus problem.

Erdogan on Jan. 13 announced that Turkey would not withdraw from the island as long as Greek troops were also stationed there. “Full withdrawal of Turkish troops from Cyprus is not possible,” he said.

Otherwise, Turkish troops would remain on the island “forever.”

The Republic was admitted to the European Union in 2004, but the north has not been able to share in its benefits. Still, Turkey will never abandon its Cypriot ethnic kin.

Russia also is proving to be a problem. As the negotiations in Geneva got underway Russia’s ambassador to the Republic of Cyprus, Stanislav Osadchiy, attended a seminar dedicated to derailing any prospect of an agreement. This delighted hard-line rejectionist Greek Cypriot politicians in Nicosia.

Bound to Russia by a shared Orthodox Christian faith and its role as a financial and banking center for Russian business, many Greeks in the south of the island have historically looked to Moscow, as well as to Athens, as a protector.

About 40,000 Russians live on the island, and own real estate and businesses. They are also a major source of tourist revenue for Cyprus. Some 525,000 Russians visited the island in 2015; only Britain provides more tourists. Cyprus also wants to get Russian firms involved in exploiting its offshore oil and gas energy sector.

Russia seeks to weaken and divide NATO, but a settlement of the Cyprus issue could strengthen the alliance by resolving the larger conflict between Greece and Turkey, which are both members .

Moscow worries that a reunified Cyprus might even join NATO, which would also mean an end to Russia’s military use of Greek Cypriot ports for its warships, gained in 2015.

Russia has made it clear that an agreement in Cyprus can only take place if Russia supports, or at least tolerates, it.

The Black Sea Remains Volatile Area

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
For centuries the Black Sea was an historically contested borderlands region of three empires -- the Ottomans, Russians, and Habsburgs. Their demise following the First World War led to the creation of newly independent nations, and the emergence of a Communist Russian state.

After yet another world war, in 1945 the region was divided by the Iron Curtain, as either part of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc (Bulgaria and Romania) or NATO ally Turkey.

With the collapse of the USSR, three new states emerged in its place – the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Georgia. Today the Black Sea is bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine.

These transformations, which led to the emergence of yet newer international frontiers, have led to inter-ethnic violence. In this part of Eurasia, the heightened nationalism has not subsided despite the reintegration of the region into the global economy.

On the contrary, history and cultural heritage often become sites of a fierce competition contributing to the alienation of some minority groups and feelings of cultural anxiety among the majority populations in the countries around the Black Sea.

The Crimean Peninsula is claimed in one way or another by Russia, Ukraine, and the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people once under Ottoman protection. Russia seized the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 but western countries have not recognized the annexation.

Georgia has seen Abkhazia break away and become a de facto independent nation, under Moscow’s protection, especially since the 2008 Russian-Georgian war.

As an international and strategically important body of water, and an area of contestation between Russia and the western allies, the Black Sea also remains a flashpoint which could at any time erupt into a military confrontation.

In February, ships from NATO member states, including Canada, took part in joint military exercises in the Black Sea. They were carried out in that part of the body of water which borders Russia’s coastline.

Britain’s Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told the Daily Mail that “the UK is sending a clear message that we are committed to defending democracy across the world and support Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.”

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu indicated that Moscow was monitoring the drills. “At present, we are watching and monitoring everything that is happening there.” Russia, he said, was ready to take on any challenges.

Bulgaria plays a prominent role in NATO’s plans to bolster the bloc’s military presence in the region. This year, Novo Selo, a U.S. military base there, is expected to host more American and NATO troops.

Last September, American and Bulgarian aircraft launched joint patrols in the Black Sea. The patrolling mission greatly increases the risk of an accident, especially with Russian military systems stationed in the Crimea, and Russia’s naval fleet based at Sevastopol.

Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko said on Feb. 7 that he sees no signs of NATO rolling back its eastward expansion plans. The alliance’s presence in the Black Sea “is another step towards building up confrontation with Russia,” he stressed.

On Feb. 16, at a meeting of NATO defence ministers, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that the alliance is planning an additional increase in its military presence in the Black Sea region, including more war games and training.

Might all this really lead to a wider war? According to British General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO’s second-ranking military officer from 2011 to 2014, it’s a distinct possibility.

In his recently published book War with Russia: An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command, he paints a plausible narrative of how such a war would be launched.

Nearly 70 per cent of Russians currently view NATO as a threat, according to a recent survey from Gallup. It is the highest number recorded since 2008.

On the other hand, Eastern European NATO members see the alliance as a source of protection against Russia.

Absence of Social Capital May Lead to Conflict

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, in a number of articles and books, has referred to the quality known as social capital. It’s the network of thick connections that keep citizens engaged in collective activities on behalf of all.

It rests on a set of mutual understandings about the kinds of behaviour people can expect from one another, and comes about when people all have mutually reinforcing ties across a wide spectrum of civil society institutions.

On the other hand, there is often a distinct shortage of social capital in heterogeneous states inhabited by groups that may share little in common or even distrust each other.

Altruism and community cooperation is rarer, friends across groups fewer, and detachment from and distrust of public institutions is the norm in these entities. When such empires or multi-ethnic states collapse, ethno-nationalism claims victims.

Pakistani author Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1991 novel Cracking India is written from the point of view of a young girl who is surrounded by the ethno-religious violence and dislocations that accompany the partitioning of India in 1947.

“One day everybody is themselves,” Lenny, the daughter of a Parsi family in Lahore, observes, but soon each is shrinking into his or her generalized ethnic identity. “India is going to be broken,” she realizes. “And what happens if they break it where our house is?”

The demise of the Soviet Union resulted in massive displacements of populations. In Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s 2016 book Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future, a Russian refugee from now-sovereign Tajikistan aptly summarizes her own fate:

“In Dushanbe, I worked as the deputy chief of the railway station, and there was another deputy who was Tajik. Our children grew up together.

“He used to call me ‘little sister, my Russian sister.’ And suddenly he walks over – we shared an office – stops in front of my desk and shouts: ‘When are you going back home to Russia? This is our land!’ ”

An article by Dexter Filkins, “Before the Food,” in the January 2, 2017 New Yorker magazine, describes some of the ethnic enmity in the chaos of post-2003 Iraq.

In Wanke, a small farming community he finds Mohammed Nazir, a Kurdish farmer, irrigating his field. For years, Nazir told Filkins, Wanke was a mixed Arab-Kurdish community.

But when Islamic State fighters swept in, during the summer of 2014, many of his Arab neighbours stepped forward to help the invaders. “They told us, ‘This is not a Kurdish town anymore,’ ” he said.

“It was humiliating. They started ordering us around. I knew their children. I went to their weddings. They betrayed everything in life.”

Nazir and his family escaped to a nearby village, where they lived with relatives for a year and a half before the insurgents were expelled from Wanke.

When the family moves back, Nazir finds that his Arab neighbors had fled with the retreating invaders. “They are not welcome back here,” he declares.

Such forms of ethnic cleansing, whether informal or forced, are typical in situations of conflict across the globe, especially in the case of partitions, among them 1974 Cyprus, 1922 Ireland, and 1948 Palestine.

Trust between rival groups was virtually non-existent, and social capital was in short supply, leading to massive violence.

Social Capital Makes Japan Strong State

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

What allows members of a polity to be willing enough to trust each other in order to engage in collective endeavors for the common good?

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, in a number of articles and books, has referred to this quality as social capital. It’s the network of thick connections that keep citizens engaged in collective activities on behalf of all.

Social capital rests on a set of mutual understandings about the kinds of behaviour people can expect from one another, and comes about when people all have mutually reinforcing ties across a wide spectrum of civil society institutions.

The single largest factor used to quantify social capital is the level of social trust, he has argued.

The greater the amount of social capital, the likelier it is that members of society will be able to cooperate in the public realm – something of immense importance for the proper functioning of a democracy. 

So, as Putnam suggested in his 1993 book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, a strong and free government depends on a virtuous and public-spirited citizenry.

Japan provides an excellent example of this. Its culture and its homogeneity may be its greatest strengths. The nation’s deeply rooted shared political and cultural principles allow for a level of social peace, harmony and unity found in few other countries.

Some social scientists posit that this gives the Japanese a sense of meaning and purpose and hence the desire to accomplish tasks to the best of their ability. There is a deep personal investment that people make in their work. Perhaps you work harder when you are all part of one “extended family.”

In an article in the New York Times Magazine of Dec. 18, “What the West Can Learn From Japan About the Cultural Value of Work,” John Lanchester tells us that the word shokunin sums it up: It means something like “master or mastery of one’s profession,” and it captures the way Japanese workers spend every day trying to be better at what they do.

There is also a different approach to business relationships; there is much more of a sense of social responsibility than there is elsewhere.

While company profits are important, so is their corporate social duty to keep their workers employed as much as possible. The relationship is one of mutual responsibility going back to samurai times.

Employees are expected to work hard and demonstrate loyalty to the firm, in exchange for some degree of job security and benefits. Executives and workers look out for each other and not just for the bottom line. So unemployment, at about three per cent, is almost nonexistent.

Companies thus take on a heavy amount of responsibility for ensuring social stability, the latter being a paramount value in Japanese culture.

All of this can sometimes be carried too far. An article by Amanda Erickson in the Jan.14 Washington Post, “Japan’s Employees Are Literally Working Themselves to Death,” observes that the Japanese “might be the hardest working people in the world.”

Even taking a vacation is seen as selfish. The culture is so rigorous that there is a word for literally working yourself to death: karoshi. 

The Japanese have gone through many decades of turmoil, be they economic, political or military, over the past century. They continue to face challenges, especially in their relations with China, South Korea and the United States. But they will see them through as a united country.

What Led to Trump's Attempted Ban?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
President Donald Trump’s executive order regarding the entry of various people into the United States, which initially came into effect Jan. 27, has been front-page news ever since.

It targeted three groups: refugees in general, who are blocked from entering the U.S. for the next 120 days; refugees from Syria, who may be barred indefinitely; and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, who are barred from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days.

This is technically not actually a Muslim ban: It affects citizens, regardless of faith, of several Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa but not to persons of Islamic faith who carry the passports of almost 200 other countries.

Still, most observers see an anti-Muslim animus informing the decision. The result has been intense fury from Democrats and discomfort among many Republicans.

Meanwhile, a federal district court judge in Seattle on Feb. 3 temporarily blocked the ban.

The administration continues to challenge that ruling and it may be up to the U.S. Supreme Court to render a final decision.

It should also be noted that most of the reaction has ignored the dismal foreign policy failures of former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama which preceded this draconian move.

It has also, for partisan reasons, overlooked Obama’s own previous restrictions on the intake of refugees. (The countries affected by the edict were initially selected by the Obama administration.)

Two recent articles posted on line have helped place the issue in context: “The Refugee Ban and the Holocaust,” by Walter Russell Mead and Nicholas M. Gallagher, in the American Interest periodical of Jan. 28, 2017; and “The Self-righteous Backlash to Trump’s Immigration Ban Could Play into his Hands,” by Tom Gross, in the Spectator magazine, Jan. 31, 2017.

Mead, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, a New York liberal arts institution, and Gallagher, who graduated from Oxford University in 2011, assert that “Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has an American President done anything so cruel and bigoted.”

However, they argue that the failures of the Bush and Obama years “are father to Trump’s callous treatment of refugees.”

The best way to deal with refugee flows is to prevent them from happening, contend the authors. But, they conclude, Obama never took responsibility for his own repeated errors of judgment regarding the Syrian catastrophe, now entering its sixth year.

Gross, a journalist, international affairs commentator, and human rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East, also castigates Obama.

He, too, maintains that Trump’s executive order “is morally unacceptable (it amounts to collective punishment), strategically dubious (since many terrorists are home-grown or came from countries other than those seven),” and “has caused distress and uncertainty.” It sets an anti-immigrant tone, when immigrants can hugely benefit their new countries.

But Gross, like Mead and Gallagher, maintains that “the war in Syria descended into barbarity in part because President Obama encouraged the rebels, and the Sunni majority population of Syria who supported them, promising them arms and protection, and then abandoned them.”

As well, Obama went on to release billions of dollars in funds to the Iranian regime, whose forces and Shia militia in Syria have done much, if not most, of the killing there these past six years, leading many Syrians to seek sanctuary in Europe and beyond.

Why, Gross asks, were today’s critics largely silent when, during his time in office, Obama deported more immigrants than any other president in history, or when in 2011, Obama stopped admitting Iraqi refugees for six months while the vetting process was re-evaluated?

Obama also signed a 2015 law imposing tighter visa restrictions on foreigners who had traveled to Iran, Iraq, Syria and Sudan within the previous five years. Donald Trump is a latecomer to a tragedy which has been unfolding since 2011.

Vietnam War Changed a Traumatized America

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

At the beginning of 1967, the U.S. State Department announced that 5,008 Americans had been killed in Vietnam in 1966, fueling nationwide protests. But President Lyndon Johnson saw America’s credibility on the line and determined to press on.

The president had escalated the war in Vietnam in 1965 with broad but very shallow popular support. By the summer of 1967, the United States had 448,800 troops in Vietnam, draft calls exceeded 30,000 a month and some 13,000 Americans had been killed.

Yet the people in government, so sure they were, as the title of the 1972 book by David Halberstam indicates, “the best and the brightest,” refused to take heed.

Robert McNamara, a president of Ford Motor Company who became secretary of defence, “knew nothing about Asia, about poverty, about people, about American domestic politics,” wrote Halberstam.

The war had become a bloody stalemate and opposition to this senseless conflict was gathering steam.

At the start of that year, Muhammad Ali, perhaps the most prominent athlete in the world, fought induction into the U.S. Army on religious grounds and condemned the war. The antiwar movement was growing and now attracted highly visible new supporters like Martin Luther King Jr.

And even television – which in the U.S. at the time was basically limited to three major networks – finally began to take notice.

When “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” made its premiere on CBS Feb. 5, 1967, and grew in popularity, it demonstrated that mainstream American has begun to question the war.

Tom and Dick Smothers, until then two fairly unknown comedians and folk singers, began to challenge Johnson’s administration and its rationale for continuing the conflict.

The brothers even got CBS to break the 17-year-old network TV blacklisting of folk singer Pete Seeger, who had been a supporter of the Soviet Union, on Sept. 10, 1967.

The war became ever more destructive and American casualties kept increasing. Much of the American intelligentsia and literary community now opposed the conflict.

At the beginning of 1968, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Baez, Susan Sontag, Thomas Pynchon and James Baldwin joined more than 400 others in signing the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war.

For most other Americans, realization that it could not be won came with the Tet offensive.

On Jan. 31, 1968, some 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam, planned the offensive in an attempt both to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the U.S. to scale back its support of the Saigon regime.

Though American and South Vietnamese forces managed to hold off the Communist attacks, news coverage of the offensive (including the lengthy Battle of Huế) shocked and dismayed the American public and further eroded support for the war effort.

The attacks marked a turning point in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the slow American withdrawal.

On March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. That November, his vice-president Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate in the presidential election, lost to Republican Richard Nixon, who promised to end the war – though it would drag on for another seven years.

Meanwhile, on April 4, 1969 CBS fired the Smothers brothers, whose show had become ever more “radical.” In a very small way, I know how they felt.

In 1967-68 I was an MA student political science at McGill University in Montreal, and one of a number of teaching assistants in the Introduction to Political Science course.

Following Johnson’s resignation, I told the professor teaching the course that “the ruling class” had “fired” Johnson. She was so angry that she fired me!

Maybe my statement smacked of hyperbole, but I still think that, in a sense, I was right.
Today, one would find few defenders of that war.

Does NATO Need to be Restructured?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

After British Prime Minister Theresa May met newly-elected American President Donald Trump Jan. 27, she said she felt assured that both countries retain an “unshakable commitment” to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But is it really that certain? After all, during the recent presidential campaign, Trump had suggested that the military alliance is “obsolete” and that the United States might not come to the aid of countries that don’t meet targets for their own defence spending.

In response to a question about potential Russian aggression towards the Baltic states, Trump told the New York Times in an interview last July that if Moscow attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”

He accused European allies of bring free riders and taking advantage of what he called an era of American largess.

NATO was founded in 1949 as a way for American troops to protect a war-shattered Europe from aggression by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was also designed to prevent a potentially resurgent Germany from engaging in future assaults against its neighbours.

As one cynic suggested, it was designed to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Today Europe is quite capable of shaping and paying for its own security, but NATO’s structure remains unchanged. The United States still pays nearly three-quarters of its budget. The European members, on the other hand, have always been leery about heavy conventional defence expenditures.

According to NATO statistics, the U.S. spent an estimated $664 billion on defence in 2016, more than double the amount all the other 27 NATO countries spent between them, even though their combined gross domestic product (GDP) tops that of the U.S.

Only five of NATO’s 28 members -- the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and Great Britain -- meet the alliance’s target of spending at least two per cent of GDP on defence. Washington spends the highest proportion of its GDP on defense, at 3.61 per cent.

Canada spends less than one per cent annually and would need to spend an extra $20 billion per year to make the two per cent target.

Why has Washington gone along with this for half a century? It’s because the U.S. did not want to surrender control over the continent’s security, fearing that Europeans might otherwise seek conciliation with Russia.

Russia may be seen as a destabilizing force in Europe or as simply defending its border regions. Either way, it is more of a challenge for Europeans than North Americans.

The international order is now in a state of flux. Starting with China and Russia, many countries resent America’s leadership role.

 For that matter, many Americans have also tired of it and are questioning the nature and extent of their nation’s involvement in the world. They wonder why they need to play such an outsize role on the world stage.

Trump has tapped into this feeling. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” he has proclaimed.

A neo-isolationist, in his inaugural address the new president contended that the U.S. has for too long “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.”

Trump promised to put “America first.” So he is not averse to making deals with Russia should that benefit the country.

In a joint interview with the Times of London and the German publication Bild shortly before taking office, he suggested a bargain that would ease sanctions on Russia in exchange for nuclear arms cuts and cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State.

Trump also restated his doubts about NATO, “because it was designed many, many years ago.” From Moscow’s point of view, a reduction of NATO’s military presence near Russia’s borders would be welcomed. Stay tuned.

Role of Religion Expands in Russia

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 
On Jan. 28 some 2,000 Russians rallied in St. Petersburg to protest plans by the city authorities to give a landmark cathedral back to the Russian Orthodox Church, amid an increasingly passionate debate over the relationship between the church and state.

St. Isaac’s Cathedral dates back to 1818, when construction began on the orders of Tsar Alexander I. It took 40 years to construct.

It has been under state control since 1931, a time when religion was under increasing attack by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Communists stripped it of its religious trappings and installed an anti-religion museum inside.

“We won’t give St. Isaac’s to the church. We want to save it as a museum,” Boris Vishnevsky, a local lawmaker, told the protesters. But he will probably lose the battle.

It’s indicative of the increasingly significant role of the church in Russian life, especially under President Vladimir Putin. In cultural and social affairs he has collaborated closely with the Church, appealing to traditional values to help tighten his grip on society.

There are some 150 million adherents to Russian Orthodoxy estimated worldwide, about half of the 300 million estimated adherents of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Russians have been Orthodox Christians for more than a millennium.

According to some accounts, in 988 Prince Vladimir of Kievan Russia, a forerunner of today’s state, was baptised. He was apparently impressed by the dazzling worship his ambassadors described seeing in the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.

As the world’s largest Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate boasts more than 30,000 parishes, but only about half of them are based in the Russian Federation itself.

And those beyond the country’s borders are part of Putin’s “soft power,” as they adhere to the teachings of Moscow and are opposed to Western liberalism.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the focus was at first on the reform or destruction of the old system, rather than on any clear vision of what Russia should become.

Russia is “an idea-centric country,” asserts Arkady Ostrovsky, a Russian-born journalist who has spent fifteen years reporting from Moscow, first for the Financial Times and then for the Economist.

His book The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War traces the battles over the country’s history. “The liberals and their hard-line opponents fought over the past as if they were fighting for natural resources,” he writes.

And after a quarter century, Russians are still confronting their cultural and religious future, and struggling to define an emerging “Russian idea.”

Hence the return to religion, welcomed by Putin as part of a broader push by the Kremlin to assert itself as both the legitimate heir to and master of “Holy Russia,” a state great and strong.

“The church has become an instrument of the Russian state. It is used to extend and legitimize the interests of the Kremlin,” according to Sergei Chapnin, who is the former editor of the official journal of the Moscow Patriarchate.

In December he was dismissed for criticizing the Patriarchate’s policies and calling it “a church of empire.”

The Orthodox “are now Russian patriots first, and everything else second,” Chapnin stated in a Jan. 5 interview with Rosbalt, a St. Petersburg-based news agency. He sees a “new hybrid religion,” a mix of Orthodox traditions, Soviet nostalgia, and “the dream for a strong empire,” emerging.

“This fusion leads to the formation of a post-Soviet civil religion, which exploits Orthodox tradition but in fact is not Orthodoxy.”

Chapnin places much of the blame on Patriarch Kirill, who became head of the church eight years ago. He endorsed Putin’s election in 2012, stating his presidency was like “a miracle of God.”

Speaking to the State Duma, Russia’s parliament, on Jan. 26, Kirill called on Russians “not to forget about our common national hero, Prince Vladimir, equal to the apostles, whose spiritual children we all remain, no matter what happens on the international scene.”

The patriarch’s voice “resonates across the public space,” Chapnin writes, while “all others are mostly silent, not daring to go beyond brief comments.”