The New Emperors? Post-Soviet Presidents and Church-State Relations in Ukraine and Russia

Abstract

Twenty years ago, the theme of this conference, “Power and Authority in Eastern Christian Experience” would have been considered by many to be of interest primarily to historians and theologians, but not particularly relevant to the political discourse underway in many of the countries which traditionally formed part of the Eastern Christian world. As the Soviet Union began to collapse, its own constituent republics and the countries of the Eastern Bloc, comprising the historic core of the Eastern Christian world, began looking to the West, and particularly the United States, for their political models. 1 The last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, attempted to emulate Western “economic and political practices” 2 rather than turning to pre-Communist traditions and models. However, it was highly unrealistic that the majority-Orthodox nations of the formerly Communist world would automatically “meekly restructure their culture, society, politics and economy along the norms provided to them from the West.” 3 Almost immediately there began the search for what S. Frederick Starr has labeled the “usable past” 4 —those traditions and elements rooted in the past that could help buttress new political and economic structures. In his study of how reform efforts were successful in Novgorod and other Russian regions, Nicolai N. Petro has concluded that it was when elites embraced a “positive political myth rooted in [the] past” that they successfully “eased the shock of cultural discontinuity, broadened the social constituency in favor of reforms, and