Feature Article

Unholy alliance

Former Soviet satellite countries are predictably nervous in the face of the Russia's recent sabre-rattling. More disturbing yet is the Orthodox Church's enthusiasm to align itself with Moscow's increasingly hardline foreign policy

The Cold War rhetoric heard in the run-up to last week's G8 summit at Heiligendamm, as President Vladimir Putin tried to block the planned deployment of United States missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic, may have been intended primarily for domestic Russian consumption. But many East Europeans will see it as confirming a new Russian self-assertiveness and drift to authoritarianism, which is finding echoes at all levels, from the country's trade organisations to its predominant Orthodox Church, and which alarms its neighbours.

After a decade and a half of post-Soviet weakness and division, Russians are feeling strong again on the back of their new energy wealth and strategic bargaining power in the war on terror. As Putin's would-be presidential successors begin setting out their stalls in coming months, Western governments will need clear ideas about how to handle the shifting, unpredictable power on their doorstep.

Although President Putin's threat to re-target his nuclear arsenal on Europe if the US deployment goes ahead was widely seen as an attempt to harness popular support, he has plenty of it already. At least four out of five Russians declare themselves satisfied with his leadership, often in glowing terms, concurring that Putin's seven years in office have instilled a new sense of national unity and pride.

But the other side of this coin is Russia's new aggression to its near neighbours. For the past decade, Russia has attempted to plant tensions between the countries of Eastern Europe and their Western allies, by showing they have deep-seated conflicts with Russia and should not be allowed to influence the general shape of East-West relations. The policy continued after Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary became, in March 1999, the first of 10 post-Communist countries to sign up to NATO.

With the admission of Bulgaria and Romania last January, the same 10 now also belong to the European Union. But disputes continue to flare, as they did most recently with Estonia. East Europeans remain wary of Moscow's capacity to probe and manipulate, and keep a hawkish eye on how Russian ties develop with their Western allies.

The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought very different fortunes to Russia, compared with its former satellites, and fuelled inevitable resentments and jealousies. While Russia experienced a sense of failure and rejection, the countries of Eastern Europe, once Russian-ruled, prospered in independence. Russia itself was left poor and unstable after relinquishing its super-power status.

Territories viewed as part of Russia's historic heartland - Belarus and Ukraine, Georgia and Central Asia - went their own way too, forging ties with once-hostile Western powers and leaving their large Russian minorities isolated and beleaguered. Having helped engineer the collapse of Soviet power, the West seemed bent on encircling Russia and keeping it weak, by drawing its former satellites into a hostile alliance.

East Europeans are well aware of the need to co-exist peacefully and productively with their giant erstwhile ruler. Far from harbouring hostile intent, most appreciate Russian culture and society, and would be content to see new ties of friendship and cooperation forged in the post-Communist 1990s deepen. However, when it comes to sovereignty and independence, there can be no discussion. Talk of a continuing Russian sphere of influence would be anachronistic and intolerable.

The tension was evident already two years ago, when the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day was celebrated in Moscow. Attended by more than 50 foreign leaders, from US President George Bush to German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the May 2005 Red Square festivities paid tribute to the 27 million Soviet citizens who perished during the war years, and were widely viewed as a triumph for Russia's self-image. But they were boycotted by presidents from Lithuania, Estonia and Georgia, while the lack of acknowledgement of East European sacrifices sparked protests. In surveys, more than half of Poles viewed the anniversary as a "humiliation", insisting they were still "afraid" of Russia and favoured closer ties with Germany.

Relations will continue to be marred by Russia's unwillingness to admit faults from the Soviet era, starting from the pact made by Stalin and Hitler to divide Poland and the Baltic States between them in 1939. To date, no word of regret has been offered for the mass deportations and executions which followed the region's liberation by the Red Army in 1944 and 1945, or the later decades of oppression and misrule. Even today, Moscow is still blocking investigations into the April 1940 Katyn massacres, in which 22,000 interned Polish officers were secretly slaughtered by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. Although Poland is home to 732 Soviet military cemeteries, maintained at the expense of the Polish state, Russia has created repeated obstacles to the opening of just three cemeteries for the Katyn victims.

The violent riots that erupted this April, when the Estonian Government relocated a statue of a Russian soldier from Tallinn's city centre to a nearby military cemetery, were a reminder to East Europeans that Moscow still expects its smaller neighbours to acknowledge a measure of Russian hegemony. It is a cause of shame that Russia's Orthodox Church, far from challenging such thinking, has accepted it and made no effort to ensure that other moral perspectives are considered.

The Church has made the defence of "Slavic fraternity" a key theme since the Soviet Union's collapse, handing its annual award for strengthening the unity of Orthodox nations this January to the state-owned Gazprom conglomerate. Today, well endowed by a grateful state, the Church has endorsed Putin's revisionist view of history and backed Russian foreign policy objectives to the letter in areas from Kosovo to Ukraine.

When the Estonian ambassador was roughed up and her embassy attacked by the Kremlin-backed Nasi youth movement, in a gross violation of diplomatic conventions, Patriarch Alexei II responded by blaming Estonians for failing to show respect for "those who defended our one motherland". "The feat performed by our people in war and labour during the Great Patriotic War was the height of Russia's military glory," the Patriarch added. "They defended the whole world from a lethal threat that hovered over it, when a strong and cruel enemy armed with the anti-Christian ideology of Naziism waged a war for world dominion."

Moscow Patriarchate spokesmen such as Archpriests Vsevolod Chaplin and Mikhail Dudko have remained silent on Russian misdeeds in areas from the Caucasus to Central Asia. No complaint has been aired about extra-judicial abuses, the harassment of opposition parties, the contract killing of journalists, or the hostility repeatedly experienced by minorities from Catholics to gay activists.

Far from standing up for human rights, the Church has dismissed criticisms from international observers, including an annual Report on Religious Freedom by the US State Department. One explanation for the reticence was provided in April 2006, when a Church-backed "Declaration on Human Rights and Dignity" was published at the World Russian People's Council, setting out a different "non-Western" understanding of human rights - something not even the Soviet regime at the height of its power had attempted.

The Moscow Patriarchate's foreign relations director, Metropolitan Kirill, whose working group drafted the document, said the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights had reflected the "historical and cultural experiences of Western Europe and the US" while failing to consider the "values of the Orthodox East". The new Russian declaration, he added, reflected the "moral imperative" found in the work of Immanuel Kant. From now on, his Church would foster a conception of human rights "proceeding from our history", reflecting "the views and values of the majority of our nation".

"Human rights and liberties are effective in as much as they help the individual grow in goodness, defending him from evil within and without, and promoting his positive role in society," the Declaration noted. "It is unacceptable, in pursuit of human rights, to oppress faith and moral tradition, insult religious and national feelings, cause harm to revered holy objects and sites, and jeopardise the motherland. Likewise we see as dangerous the invention of such rights to legitimise behaviour condemned by both traditional morality and historical religions."

Critics are profoundly distrustful. What Russia is witnessing, they argue, is a rebirth of the historic concept of sobornost, in which Church and State work in harmony to assert and achieve common goals and interests. Once in place, this will require minorities to conform, and civil liberties to take second place behind the general will of the Russian people.

In a world of geopolitical competition and covert threats to security, powerful governments may feel intrusive foreign and domestic policies are justified. But if predominant Churches allow themselves to be coopted as tools of such policies, there will be no chance of counterbalancing this with stable democracy, or of allowing respected institutions to modify the control of the state.

It was therefore predictable that the Russian Orthodox Church condemned President George Bush's planned missile defence system last week, but said nothing about President Putin's threat to target Russian missiles against Europe and pull out of existing force reduction treaties. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the planned deployment, Polish and Czech politicians see it as a test of their sovereignty and insist that Russia should not be accorded a new right to veto their decisions and dictate how they manage their affairs.

The fact that Bush began and ended the G8 summit with visits to both countries has provided some reassurance. The right way to handle a new aggressive Russia, they insist, will not be with accommodation and appeasement, but by standing firm, arguing back, and naming and shaming practices that infringe civilised norms and principles. These are lessons from history which all East Europeans are familiar with.