Putin is an autocracy victim
Why did the priest try to kiss Putin’s hand?
On August 7 the video of Russia Today in which the assistant hegumen of the Valaam Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery father Mefodii tried to kiss Putin’s hand and the president jerked it away was one of the most discussed on the Internet and in the media.
“He jerked his hand away but will give his blessings soon,” “Now we can see the result of the eternal struggle between the secular authorities and the church” – these are some of the most typical commentaries placed in Russian blogs.
Interesting ideas can also be found in the commentaries of Oleh Medvedev’s blog on the website of Ukrainska Pravda: “Can you think of any tsar’s time when it did not happen? The church in Russia has always been subject to the Khan-Tsar-Emperor-Secretary General-President. Unlike the civilized world where head of the state is always under the church and God. Not without reason Nikolai Karamzin wrote: ‘In Europe God is without church and in Russia the church is without God.’” (Vladislav Bobko). And one more: “The situation might have been [similar in tsarist Russia], otherwise people would not have turned away from the church before the revolution, and Bolsheviks’ atheism would not have been so successful.” (Vladimir Afendikov).
The reaction of the church was as quick as a lightening. The resource newsru.com informed, referring to the interview with the press secretary of the vicar of the Valaam Monastery bishop father Pankratii Mikhail Shishkov taken by RIA Novosti, that father Mefodii is Macedonian and he did it to show that the “small people” of his country acknowledge “the great Russian people.” Besides, Shishkov explained that in the orthodox Christianity this gesture means obedience and, according to the clerical tradition, not only laypeople should kiss priest’s hand but a priest should kiss laypeople’s hands as well. At the same time the press secretary informed that this incident had provoked “a hailstorm of phone calls” including phone calls from media representatives. According to Shishkov, he was called and said that “they are groveling and toadying.” “I have never heard such insolence before. This person is Macedonian and he put a lot of sense in his action. There was no bootlicking, there were different reasons for this,” he remarked indignantly. In his blog on the website of the radio station Ekho Moskvy Sergei Buntman has also written that father Mefodii really kisses hands of “all his spiritual children,” “ordinary, not only high-ranking laymen.”
Probably, this story could have finished with the explanation of father Mefodii’s religious gesture. However, there are some circumstances. First of all, the trial of the Pussy Riot case, the most obscurantist since the Middle Ages. There is also patriarch’s Breguet and the story about “Kirill’s golden dust.”
The fact that Putin did not allow kissing his hand does not mean that his hands do not govern the Russian Orthodox Church. Most people started discussing the kiss because they did not know its religious background and found the kiss very reasonable. The topic of discussion is not a separate priest but the whole Russian orthodoxy, Russian autocracy and Vladimir Putin who has actually become its victim.
As if he could predict this sensation, Vladimir Nadein wrote in his article for Yezhednevny Zhurnal: “They say orthodoxy and mean Putin. The church is serving the regime with the passion of early Magdalena. The leading clerics lick the boots of the Kremlin’s boss delegating him the divine authority.”
The system created by century-long traditions of the Russian autocracy makes Christianity look groveling.
