The Social Teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Geopolitical Idea of the Russian World

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On 22 December at 18:00, the next meeting of the Political Sphere Institute research seminar will take place at the CSI premises. The topic of the presentation is: “The Social Teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Geopolitical Idea of the Russian World”.

Speaker: political scientist, editor of the website “Church”, director of the Ecumena Centre, Natalia Vasilevich.

All interested persons are invited to take part in the seminar. Registration is by email: [email protected]

Brief information about the presentation:

At the origins of the geopolitical idea of the Russian world stands a circle of Orthodox religious and public figures grouped around Patriarch Kirill.
The “Russian world” as a geopolitical paradigm replaces “Western-Russism” and only at first glance appears to be its modification. Although the concept is based on the historical idealisation of “Holy Rus”, it now refers not to an ethnos — the triune Russian people — or to “nationality” from the triad “Orthodoxy-autocracy-nationality”, but to nations and states: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.
The geopolitical idea of the Russian world draws its historical legitimation from Holy Rus, but methodologically its source lies in Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilisations. In this methodology, “Orthodox civilisation” equals the “Russian world” and stands against “Western civilisation”; ideally, this civilisation expands its influence among the countries of the former socialist bloc.
The social teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church, expressed in a number of church documents and in a more popular and radical form in the documents of the World Russian People’s Council, is a proposal for a new state ideology for the countries of the Russian world. For Russia itself, as the core country of Orthodox civilisation, this ideology remains unclaimed in the form in which it is proposed by the Russian Orthodox Church. In essence, at present this geopolitical idea exists as the corporate interest of a religious organisation.