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Russia and its
history: A Byzantine sermon
“WHEN Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia's federal
security service (FSB), spoke to his staff to mark the 90th anniversary of the
Soviet secret service last year, he made an odd historic diversion. “Those who
study history know that security existed before. Sophia Paleologue married Ivan
III, and being a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, paid close attention to
questions of security.” Few understood what he was talking about.
The mystery was cleared up a few weeks later, when
Russia's state television channel aired an hour-long film, “The Destruction of
the Empire: a Byzantine Lesson”. It proved so popular that the channel repeated
it and added a 45-minute discussion concluding that Russia could exist only as
an Orthodox empire. The author and narrator of the film is Father Tikhon
Shevkunov, reputedly the confessor of Vladimir Putin. In recent weeks the film
has become one of the most talked-about in Moscow...
...In the minds and language of the ex-spooks who
dominate Russia, history is a powerful tool. The television film seems to be in
that genre. In it, Father Tikhon is transported in full attire from a
snow-swept church to Istanbul and Venice, where he exposes the West as a
“genetic” hater of both Byzantium and its spiritual heir: Russia. The Byzantine
empire's rich and cultured capital, Constantinople, was the envy of dark and
aggressive barbarians from the West, who looted it during the fourth crusade in
1204. Modern Western capitalism, argues Father Tikhon, is built on Byzantine
loot and Jewish usury....
...The film's usage of modern words and imagery is so
conspicuous that the moral cannot escape a Russian viewer. Instead of sticking
to its traditions, Byzantium tried to reform and modernise, as the West
demanded, and it paid the price. Worst of all, the West infiltrated Byzantium
with harmful, individualistic ideas, which destroyed the core values of the
empire—so the people lost faith in their rulers.
Sergei Ivanov, Russia's leading scholar on Byzantium,
says all this lumps together a 1,000-year history of Byzantium and crudely
extrapolates the result to today's Russia. In fact, the film has little to do
with the true history of Byzantium. But neither history nor the values of the
Orthodox faith are its real object. In the absence of any new ideology, it
manipulates a story of Byzantium to justify Russia's anti-Westernism and
xenophobia in a 1,000-year history. The film also carries an implicit message
to Mr Putin: do not listen to the West, stay in power, close off the country.
It is of little concern to Father Tikhon, or to Russian
state television, that the Russian empire gained most when it opened up to the
West, not when it fenced itself off. Byzantium was always the source of
Orthodox faith for Russia, but few Russian tsars looked to Byzantium as a
political model. It was for good reason that they called Moscow a third Rome,
not a second Constantinople. It fell to Stalin to revive Byzantine studies,
along with the idea of imperialism, says Father Tikhon, approvingly. “He knew
whom to learn from.” But the danger of manipulating history in this way is that
its tragedies may recur.”
See our comments on the significance of the Third Rome:
http://www.biblenews.org/ThirdRome/Comments/
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