This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
This coming weekend millions of Russians will elect their next President. I’m sure the world is on tenterhooks as to who might win this time around.
For me there’s a sense of deja-vu as I watch developments. My early career as a linguist at GCHQ meant that I read a lot of Soviet presidential speeches, observed propaganda at its worst, and sought to understand why people went along with what was so obviously corrupt. (Of course, it’s now well known that loo paper shortages were mitigated by copious Pravda newssheets bearing the golden words and photographs of the President – one way of showing political defiance.)
But, what about this week? We still occasionally hear that Vladimir Putin wants to re-create the Soviet Union. I don’t think he does. He has always had a bigger ambition than that: to re-create the Holy Rus – an empire with a single identity and a common faith. Every time Putin leaves the Kremlin he passes a statue of Vladimir the Great, who violently created Holy Russia at the end of the tenth century, following his conversion to Christianity.
But, it also seems that Putin is happy to use similar methods to Vladimir in order to consolidate power: the squashing of opposition, violence and murder of human beings who don’t agree with him, for example. Which begs questions about which parts of Christian faith are doing the driving here.
This week’s elections throw up many questions for those outside Russia – including why the West’s response to Russian aggression in Georgia and South Ossetia, then Ukraine in 2014 and the Crimea was so mild? Pragmatism or principle?
More shockingly, what theological sense can be made of the unwavering support given to Putin by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church?
These phenomena are not new. Look at the way Christians and others accommodated Hitler in the 1920s and ‘30s – hoping that violence would diminish once he got into power. His attempt to corrall the church into a Nazi mindset and theology. Today is the anniversary of the Anschluss – when many Austrians welcomed the Nazi incorporation of their country into the powerful Reich. And we know how that ended, even if we haven’t always learned the lessons from it.
Russians will take responsibility for their vote this weekend, even if they are constrained by limited access to information and free media. But, like the American presidential election late this year, the whole world will live with the consequences. And Christians everywhere must look seriously at what can be learned by churches in their own contexts as they seek to reflect the Jesus of the Gospels amid the realpolitik of international power struggles.