c. 1999 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ This Sunday’s (Dec. 19) parliamentary elections are unlikely to result in any fundamental changes in religious freedom issues and the balance of power among Russia’s faiths, observers here say.”In principle, I don’t think that the landscape will look that much different after the elections,”said Anatoly Pchelintsev, director of Moscow’s Institute of Religion and Law, an independent advocacy and monitoring group. While religious imagery and language are used by parties across the political spectrum, the dominant Russian Orthodox Church as well as leaders of minority denominations have avoided endorsing parties or candidates. But that did not prevent the 80-million-member Russian Orthodox Church from flexing its political muscle earlier this month at the All-Russian People’s Assembly. The church-organized event drew top candidates to a one-day forum entitled”Faith, People and Power,”where speaker after speaker praised the role of the church in Russian society as a guarantor of morality, unity and stability. In his address to the assembly, Russian Orthodox leader Patriarch Alexii II called for an end to the sometimes vicious mudslinging that has marked the campaign.”I dare say it is nothing less than a sin disagreeable to God and condemned by the people. … If the election campaign passes all moral bounds, the people will never trust the present politicians in full measure, even if they win,”he told the gathering. Although the Orthodox church has a legislative agenda, including greater restrictions on foreign missionaries, clergy are banned from serving in elected office. A prominent priest and critic of the patriarch’s Soviet-era cooperation with the KGB, Father Gleb Yakunin, was defrocked for serving in the State Duma. That has not stopped at least one other priest from making a run this year for one of the 450 Duma seats. Father Alexander Nemchenko, a 49-year-old parish priest in Moscow, was a candidate from the small nationalist party Front for National Salvation until it was denied registration by the Central Election Commission for irregularities in its campaign declaration. Nemchenko said the church has a duty to enter politics, saying”Now is a time when only the church can help Russia get out of the situation it is in.” He defended his decision to enter politics, referring to Alexii’s membership in a Gorbachev-era legislative body.”Excuse me, but the patriarch himself was a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies,”Nemchenko said. A spokesman for the church, Viktor Malukhin, defended Alexii’s flirtation with politics, explaining there had been tremendous pressure for the church to assume a political role.”Society was looking for an authority that had existed on its own, been independent,”said Malukhin.”There was so much of a demand that we could have ended up with an Orthodox religious state along the lines of Iran. The government would have been full of priests. The church rejected this role.” The Communist Party, which consistently tops opinion polls, was once responsible for the execution of tens of thousands of clergy, the wholesale destruction of churches and the forceful promotion of the doctrine of scientific atheism. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, communists have dropped their atheist ideology and leader Gennady Zyuganov frequently speaks of Jesus as the”first communist.” Of the leading political blocs, Pchelintsev said the Communists are staunchest supporters of the Russian Orthodox Church and the most willing to erode the rights of minority faiths, especially those, like Roman Catholics and Protestants, perceived as foreign. Those political leaders calling for radical change along religious lines are largely relegated to the very edge of the nations’ political scene. In fact, all the fringe political groups calling for a restoration of a Russian Orthodox monarchy or a czarist-style curtailment of Jews’ rights failed to win registration from the Central Election Commission on procedural grounds. The one exception is the oddly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a charismatic orator known for his outrageous behavior and anti-Semitism. His party is expected to get slightly more than 5 percent of the vote nationwide and thus pass the hurdle necessary for a presence in the Duma. From the point of view of religious freedom, Pchelintsev identified Zhirinovsky’s party as the most threatening.”They have several crazy Duma deputies who constantly want to make Russian Orthodoxy the government religion,”Pchelintsev said. DEA END BROWN