According to preliminary statistics, 660,000 Muscovites attended Easter services at one of the churches of the Russian capital today while only about 100,000 went to May Day events, a kind of referendum on the two holidays.
Staunton, October 21 – Russian government censorship and self-censorship by editors and writers fearful of running afoul of officials are seriously restricting the coverage of religious issues and especially those involving conflicts between Russian Orthodox and others, groups not traditionally found in Russian society, and Muslims. Those are some of the conclusions that were offered […]
Staunton, February 14 – Most in Russia and many in the West are so used to thinking of fascism and especially Nazism as a phenomenon of the extreme right that they do not remember that Nazism was National Socialism and that until the Rohm Purge it was as much a movement of the left as […]
Staunton, September 20 – Pressured by the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian education ministry is preparing to dramatically expand the number of hours school children spend studying religion, a move that Nezavisimaya Gazeta says will reduce the number of hours they spend on other subjects and ultimately Russia’s ability to compete in the world. In […]
Staunton, September 10 – Even as Russians are being offered the notion that Putin is God and some are telling jokes with the punchline that the difference between Putin and God is that God doesn’t think he’s Putin, a new study by Marju Lauristin provides an important glimpse into the nature of the understanding of […]
Staunton, July 30 – This year, the Russian Orthodox ‘Day of the Baptism of Rus’ coincided with the Muslim holiday of Uraza Bayram [The Sugar Feast, when Muslims traditionally break the fast – The Interpreter]. On Monday, in what many will see as symbolic, Moscow’s churches, with the exception of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, […]
Staunton, July 24 – Bishop Grigory Lyurye, a leading specialist on Orthodoxy who is affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church, says that the Moscow Patriarchate has no future in Ukraine and that, as a result, has only a restricted one in the Russian Federation and internationally. Lyurye, an internationally recognized scholar, in an article […]
Staunton, July 5 – Russia currently is confronted by five socio-cultural crises at one and the same time, and any effort to solve them quickly by force will lead to the disintegration of society and the state, much as such efforts have done elsewhere, according to Moscow commentator Yevgeny Ikhlov. Indeed, he suggests in an […]
Staunton, June 25 – There is no question that the Moscow Patriarchate has alienated many Ukrainians because of its support for Kremlin policy, but a Kyiv analyst suggests that its decline in Ukraine and more generally also reflects the dependence its hierarchy has on state power, something it no longer can count on having in […]
Staunton, 1 June – The Moscow Patriarchate is no longer in lockstep with the Kremlin on Ukraine, the result of the reactions of other Christian groups in Ukraine, its own corporate interests, and pressure from its own congregations who have a different view of the future than do many in the hierarchy, according to Roman […]
