Col. Stanislav Lunev
Wednesday, March 14, 2001

On March 13, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov drew a catastrophic picture of skyrocketing drug use in Russia and said this trend puts the country's future in jeopardy. Drug addiction has been spreading the fastest among young people and has brought deadly diseases such as AIDS in its wake, he said. Kasyanov also recognized that "Russia is no longer a transit point for drug trafficking but a consumption market."

According to Moscow officials, the number of drug addicts in Russia has increased 20-fold over the last 10 years, and there may be as many as 5 million people now on drugs in Russia. They also said that up to 60 percent of the drug users are between the ages of 18 and 30, with pre-college teenagers accounting for another 20 percent.

Corruption in this country is so widespread that it influences practically all areas of activity of ordinary Russians. Russian Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov said on January 12: "The bureaucratic system is riddled with bribe-taking as never before. Almost everywhere, federal and regional elites have become closely associated with financial-industrial and criminal groups."

One of the many reasons for this situation is the existence of a kind of spiritual vacuum in Russian society, where ordinary people have no idea of what to believe. Communist ideology, no longer a state policy in Russia since 1991, influences the minds of only about 15 to 18 percent of the people – those who consider themselves die-hard Communists.

Principles and ideas of real democracy haven't replaced this ideology, because they have had a very short existence in Russia and because they have been completely discredited by the corrupt Russian political elite.

Instead of ideology, the Kremlin leadership tried to instill religious influence over the minds of the people, but failed to succeed because historically Russians have a strange attitude about religion as an institution.

While practically all religions exist in Russia, a 1997 special law approved only Judaism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity as Russia's traditional religions and forced faiths without a long history of Russian activity to undergo a complicated registration process.

There are also numerous different religious cults in Russia. For example, the infamous Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which planted gas bombs in Tokyo's subway, until recently had several times more cult members in Russia than in Japan.

But traditionally, the Russian Orthodox Church has been the dominating factor in Russia. Its leaders put pressure on other religions and, with the support of the government establishment, placed numerous bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of registration and legal existence for non-Orthodox organizations.

This church has existed for about 1,000 years, but in its past was less a spiritual institution than a tool of the state. It's well known in Russia that since the time of Peter the Great (end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century) the Russian Orthodox Church was to an extreme degree dependent on the state. The clergy were duty-bound to report to the authorities any information about conspiracies against the emperor or the government, including that obtained during confessions. They also had to report all suspicious strangers and activity in their parishes.

Although the church was persecuted under Lenin and Stalin, its leaders began to play a role as an active ally of the Soviet government after the arrest of Metropolitan Sergii, the Patriarch, in 1926. On his release in March 1927, he published a declaration of submission to the Kremlin regime.

Cooperation between the church leaders and the government was in place from the time of World War II, when the Kremlin leaders tried to consolidate Russian society and needed public support for the war, including help from the church.

Reconciliation came on September 4, 1943, when Stalin met with the church leaders and placed them on the same footing as high state and party officials. In exchange for the church' support during wartime, churchmen were among the first to receive military decorations after the war.

Control over the church took the form of control over the clergy, from patriarch to the humblest lay brother. Local Communist Party organizations and secret police strictly controlled admission to the only three seminaries and the single church academy. Each candidate was selected and very carefully screened by local offices of the KGB. Seminarians had to listen to lectures on Marxist-Leninist philosophy and study works of Lenin and other official leaders of Communism and international socialism.

It isn't very likely that, since the USSR disintegrated in 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church has become independent from the government, which considers religion a powerful tool for keeping the minds of people favorable to the Kremlin and for keeping strong control over the population.

It was and is very common that the former KGB and its successors recruit the churchmen as agents who then have to report to the special security services any information about alleged conspiracies against authorities. It may be that for this reason the church leaders have been a strong supporters of President Putin, himself a KGB agent for 15 years.

The churchmen have publicly defended Putin's conduct of the bloody war in Chechnya, the consolidation of maximum state power in his hands, and such criticized behavior as Putin's in the aftermath of the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk.

In return Putin has supported the position of the church leaders, who have adamantly opposed any visits by Pope John Paul II to the Russian Federation. No reigning pope has visited Moscow since the Great Schism of 1054 split the eastern and western branches of Christianity. In the middle of February, Putin also granted high government awards to the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church for, as it was said officially, their "contribution to the spiritual revival of the Russian people."

Moreover, during last eight years many Russian Orthodox Church officials have fond themselves deeply involved in corruption cases. As the Russian press has reported, the Church is a "gigantic corporation" tainted with the vices of the country's shadow economy, from bribery and corruption to money laundering and tax evasion.

"Exploiting its privileged status in the new Russia, the church has developed huge business interests with an annual turnover of millions and possibly billions of dollars, but priests in rural parishes are languishing in poverty," says the press, quoting a special study made by Moscow's Center for Research on Extralegal Economic Systems.

The researchers from Moscow University say that the church is "a grandiose offshore zone with its own independent financial and manufacturing activity and huge potential for money laundering by the economy's shadow and criminal sector."

Its impenetrable finances and exemptions from many taxes and duties encourage corruption inside the church and attract criminals from outside. Criminal money can be laundered simply by being donated to a monastery, which then hands it back after taking a cut for itself.

In this situation it would be very difficult to expect the Russian Orthodox Church to become a spiritual leader for ordinary Russians trying but unable to find a light in the end of the tunnel of their life. And while all this is going on, many ordinary Russian boys are dreaming of becoming gangsters and Russian girls are considering professional hard-currency prostitution as the best choices for their future careers.

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