Forced Migration and Human Security in the Eastern Orthodox World

Lucian N. Leustean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351185219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the European refugee crisis have led to a dramatic increase in forced displacement across Europe. Fleeing war and violence, millions of refugees and internally displaced people face the social and political cultures of the predominantly Christian Orthodox countries in the post-Soviet space and Southeastern Europe. This book examines the ambivalence of Orthodox churches and other religious communities, some of which have provided support to migrants and displaced populations while others have condemned their arrival. How have religious communities and state institutions engaged with forced migration? How has forced migration impacted upon religious practices, values and political structures in the region? In which ways do Orthodox churches promote human security in relation to violence and 'the other'? The book explores these questions by bringing together an international team of scholars to examine extensive material in the former Soviet states (Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Belarus), Southeastern Europe (Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania), Western Europe and the United States.

Part I

Religion, migration and human security in the former Soviet states

1 Orthodox churches, nation-building and forced migration in Ukraine

Viktor Yelensky

By the end of the Brezhnev era, Ukraine was the second-largest republic in the Soviet Union with the highest concentration of Orthodox Christian parishes (around 4,000 out of 6,000) and one of the largest religious underground communities in Europe (mainly Ukrainian Greek Catholics, but also tens of thousands of Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists and others). Confidential Communist Party reports regularly described the rising interest in religion, the growing popularity of religious programmes broadcast by ‘hostile radio stations’, an eagerness for religious literature and ritual, an increasingly respectful attitude towards the church and the rejection of ‘atheist education’. It was not uncommon for people to refuse to work on the 12 most important Orthodox Christian holidays; open clashes took place in many Western Ukrainian villages due to attempts by the authorities to prevent believers from praying in churches that had been ‘removed from registration’.¹

According to official figures, the church was christening more than a quarter of new-born infants and accompanying the majority of the deceased on their final journey; the number of baptisms among school students and adults was also rising rapidly. Officially, only 3 per cent of marriages were consecrated in a church and over 40 per cent of the dead were buried with the assistance of a church.² Interestingly, the figures on baptism and funerals performed by the Catholic Church in the Netherlands were strikingly similar to those in Ukraine.³ Generally, the Ukrainian figures were underestimated as they did not include baptisms and funerals conducted underground or by unregistered religious institutions and those conducted by clergy in private. These practices were common, especially in large cities.

Believers demanded to be allowed to reopen churches that had previously been closed; petitions arrived in Kyiv and Moscow by the hundreds. In many cities, the number of adults who were baptised by the Orthodox Church even exceeded the number of baptised new-borns. The state-sponsored atheism was caricatured and ridiculed in urban folklore, while attributes of religious culture (icons, small crosses, Bibles etc.) appeared increasingly popular. The mood of the intelligentsia was changing: the ‘people of the 1960s’, the majority of whom had been indifferent towards religion, were giving way to a generation who did not believe in the ‘Leninist ideals purified from Stalinist perversities’.⁴ A church as an institution that was not linked to the Soviet state and opposed Communist ideology explicitly had continued to gain the trust of a wide spectrum of Soviet society.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholics were a powerful force in the religious revival of the 1970s and 1980s. In parallel with the consolidation of the Greek Catholic priests, monks and nuns – who after 1946 had rejected forced unification with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) imposed by Stalin’s regime – those who had eventually switched to Orthodox Christianity carried out a ‘quiet Ukrainianisation’ of their faith. The results of this were to become fully manifest at the turn of the 1990s, when the Greek Catholics emerged from underground to discover – in a territory that before the Second World War had hardly any Orthodox Christian parishes – a large community of Orthodox Christians for whom ‘Moscow is not our mother, but neither is Rome our father’.

At the end of the 1980s, Ukraine was a tangle of religious and political contradictions, and experts were sure that waves of religiously motivated violence were unavoidable. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, upon its emergence from underground, demanded that justice be restored. At first, however, Orthodox Christians did not even wish to recognise the fact that this church had not been destroyed. Confrontations between the two confessions shook hundreds of villages and towns in Western Ukraine. The conflict between Orthodox Christians who wanted ‘their own’ autocephalous church, independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, and those who did not want to break with Moscow proved even more acute and developed into a real threat to the foundations of civic peace. Nevertheless, the tensions did not escalate into war: by the end of the 1990s, a fragile equilibrium had been established in relations among the chief actors in the country’s religious sphere. This equilibrium relied on a fine balance of forces; even in nominal terms, none of the churches that trace their history back to the Baptism of Kyivan Rus’ (the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches of the Moscow and Kyiv Patriarchates, the Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) could claim the allegiance of more than a quarter of the country’s adult population. In addition, Protestants and the religious communities formed by indigenous peoples (notably the Crimean Tatars) and ethnic minorities (Jews, Poles, Hungarians and Romanians) have traditionally held strong positions in Ukrainian society. According to the 2017 Razumkov Centre Survey, 26.5 per cent of those questioned belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC KP), 12 per cent to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP), 7.8 per cent to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), 1 per cent to Roman Catholic Church, 0.9 per cent to various Protestant denominations and 12 per cent had no religion at all. Almost a quarter (24.3 per cent) of respondents claimed they were ‘merely Orthodox without belonging to any specific Church’s jurisdiction’ while 7 per cent said they were ‘merely Christian’.⁵

The lay of the land concerning institutions among the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine at the beginning of 2018 was as follows: the UOC MP had 12,348 communities, more than 10,000 priests, more than 200 monasteries and convents and 18 theological training institutions; the UOC KP had 5,167 communities, 3,600 priests, 60 monasteries and convents and 18 theological training institutions; and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC), which is a confederation of dioceses rather than a centralised church, had 1,167 communities, 693 priests, 12 monasteries and convents and eight theological schools.⁶

Given that the UOC MP had almost two-and-a-half times as many communities as the UOC KP, it is surprising to note that more than 14 per cent of the respondents to the aforementioned survey identified as adherents to the UOC KP. In fact – and this is not a uniquely Ukrainian phenomenon – the majority of those who identified themselves with Orthodox Christianity indicated their affiliation to a quite specific cultural and historical space and not to a religious confession or institution. In its most extreme form, this type of identity is embodied in the phenomenon of the ‘Orthodox atheist’, a figure ridiculed by journalists but understandable to sociologists and students of culture. By stating that they belong to the Kyiv and not the Moscow Patriarchate, these people, part of whom have rather weak ties to any specific parish, are displaying their ethnic–cultural and political identity. Throughout the second half of the 1990s and most of the 2000s, all sociological surveys without exception registered a substantial predominance of ‘Kyivans’ over ‘Muscovites’; only towards the end of the 2000s did their shares of the subsample of Orthodox Christian respondents converge. This was a time when the UOC, in union with the Moscow Patriarchate, began to be perceived as ‘our own Church’, even by Orthodox Christians with a marked Ukrainian identity. They believed that in this church, recognised by the ‘Fullness of Orthodoxy’, they would be able to stay inside the ‘fence of salvation’ and also remain Ukrainian. It is not by chance that the convergence in the proportions of believers saying that they belong to the UOC MP and to the UOC KP coincided in time with the development within the UOC MP of a special path of Ukrainian Orthodoxy rooted in a theological, cultural and even civilisational tradition distinct from that of Russian Orthodoxy. The people around the Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine Volodymyr (Sabodan) (1992–2014) and the Primate himself emphasised the special role played by the Kyivan metropolitans in the Russian Church and the special status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), insisting that it existed in union with and not in administrative subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate. The Metropolitan himself declared that the UOC was the sole heir to the Baptism of Prince Volodymyr and sole successor to the ancient Kyivan Church. In granting the UOC administrative independence, the Moscow Patriarchate did not there introduce anything new, but merely ‘restored the age-old tradition of the canonical existence of the Church of Kyivan Rus’.⁷ However, the outbreak of Russian aggression against Ukraine quickly started to change things for the worse for the UOC MP. Additionally, in July 2014, Metropolitan Volodymyr died⁸ and Metropolitan Onufryi (Berezovskyi) of Chernivtsi and Bukovyna was subsequently elected by the Council of Bishops as the new Primate. Known as a rather conservative hierarch and obstinate antagonist to the very idea of independence for the Ukrainian Church, Metropolitan Onufryi started diminishing the role of pro-Ukrainian clerics in the UOC MP’s governing bodies and eliminated even the hint of Ukrainian autocephaly from the agenda. Simultaneously, he opened possibilities for the Moscow Patriarchate to strengthen its control over the UOC MP. Accordingly, marrying Ukrainian identity to allegiance to the UOC MP became increasingly difficult.

In spite of the above, the competing churches managed to gain support on a comparable scale both in society and within the political establishment in just under two decades. They also learned how to compensate for the lack of one kind of resource by mobilising another: public support thus compensated for meagre material resources; if the central authorities were unsympathetic, they could reach agreements with local authorities. This too helped to establish a stable balance of forces. Declarations by one of the sides concerning the need to abolish the equilibrium were perceived as rhetorical formulas; no side was strong enough to do this, and the state recognised the importance of maintaining the status quo for the preservation of civic peace. A comb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Eastern Orthodoxy, forced migration and human security; concepts and policy perspectives
• PART I: Religion, migration and human security in the former Soviet states
• PART II: Religion, migration and human security in Southeastern Europe
• PART III: Eastern Orthodoxy and migration in Western Europe and the United States
• Index