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Abstract
Religious aspects of the problem of unrecognised states are important. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are located between the jurisdictions of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of Georgia, while the competition between the Russian and Romanian Orthodox Churches over Moldova inevitably affects Transnistria. This paper tries to elucidate the features of politics on the Black Sea rim in general, and in the unrecognised states in particular, by focusing on two kinds of transborder actors – Orthodox churches and transborder nationalities. The rules of the game in Orthodoxy determined by the seven Ecumenical Councils (held from the fourth to the eighth centuries) inevitably make Orthodox politics supra-national and relatively independent from secular politics; thus the widespread understanding of Orthodoxy as a caesaropapist religion should be questioned. Unrecognised states try to incorporate transborder nationalities – in this paper I take the examples of the Mingrelians and Moldovans – to legitimise their statehood domestically and internationally, while the transborder nationalities exploit this situation for their security and social promotion.
Notes
1 From 1990 the South Ossetian Orthodox activists constantly functioned outside relations between the ROC and the OCG. In 1993 they chose to belong to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and in 2003 shifted to the Greek Old Calendarist Church (Klutchewsky, 2008, pp. 420–27). An analysis of South Ossetian Orthodoxy would require another paper.
2 The first argument used by leaders of the OCG against accusations of nationalism is that the OCG is the only Orthodox church in the world which is named not after an ethnicity but after a geographical area.
3 In this paper I continue to regard Abkhazia and South Ossetia as unrecognised states, not only because I wrote it before the South Ossetian war, but because ‘recognition’ only by Russia, Nicaragua and possibly Belarus’ can hardly change the situation of these countries, except for their military security.
4 I would suggest that readers unfamiliar with the domestic politics of the unrecognised states consult Matsuzato (Citation2008b).
5 It is true that the ROC has historical experience of state control under the Holy Synod, which continued for almost two centuries (1721–1917), but the church reform in 1721 was motivated by Peter I's fascination with Protestant models rather than the outcome of Orthodox tradition (see Cracraft, Citation1971).
6 In 1943 Stalin forced the ROC to recognise the autocephaly of the OCG in order to mobilise the Georgians for the Second World War.
7 Unsurprisingly, comparatively monoethnic churches, such as the RomOC, would seem to have a different opinion on this matter. There are differences between the ROC and the RomOC in the interpretation of the Apostolic Canon (Canon 34) and the provision of the Third Ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431), the latter motivated by the then debate around the autocephaly of Cyprus. See Turcescu and Stan (Citation2003, pp. 456–57). On the question of the extent to which the concept of ‘ethnos’ in the ancient canons can be equated with the modern nation, see Meyendorff (Citation1981, pp. 76–77).
8 Taras Kuzio gives the total number of parishes of the UOC-KP and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) as 6000, but does not give sources for this number (Kuzio, Citation2000). Leaving aside the question of whether Kuzio underestimates the differences between these two national Orthodox churches, this number looks unrealistic. According to the RISU, the total is 3795 (RISU, n.d.). In expressing my doubts about Kuzio's calculation, I am not judging the legitimacy of the UOC-KP, but only arguing that it is much more difficult to split churches than secular states. Orthodox political arrangements constantly require canonical legitimisation and are therefore incompatible with hasty solutions.
9 Understandably, the leaders of the UOC-KP and the RomOC criticise these ‘autonomies’ as purely formal and hypocritical, and characterise the ROC as hypercentralised, as it used to be before.
10 This situation should not be regarded as a confusion, but as a phenomenon that binds the actors together across borders and limits the possibility of a coercive solution. We do not observe similar nested transnational alliances around Karabakh, for instance, and this implies a much stronger impetus for a renewed war.
11 Rachel Clogg's analysis (2008) of ethnic politics in Abkhazia leaves room for reconsideration, because she rejects the category of ‘Mingrelians’, while admitting that ‘many [Abkhazians] distinguish between the Gal/i [sic] population and official Tbilisi’ (p. 320). I am not trying here to judge to what extent this category is ‘real’, as Abkhazian leaders argue, or ‘artificial’, as Georgian leaders tend to think. The point is that it is impossible to understand ethnic politics in Abkhazia without examining the consequences of the Abkhazian authorities’ discourse and policies to distinguish what they call the Mingrelians from the Georgians.
12 In this respect Abkhazia and Transnistria are both to be distinguished from monoethnic Nagorny Karabakh.
13 According to the census of 1989, as many as 46 per cent of the population of the Abkhazian ASSR were Georgians (numbering 239,872), while Abkhazians accounted for only 18 per cent (93,267 persons). Both Armenians and Russians were about 15 per cent, and the fifth-largest ethnic group was the Greeks (3 per cent) (Statistichesky, Citation1993, p. 452). At that time more than 100 ethnicities were registered in Abkhazia, a fact which the Abkhazian population boasted of as a realisation of the principle of the ‘friendship of nations’ in the USSR. After the civil war, in 1995, the percentage of Abkhazians increased to 29 (91,162 persons), while the proportion of Georgians decreased to 29 per cent (89,928 persons). The proportions of Armenians and Russians slightly increased, to 20 and 16 per cent respectively, while most Greeks, as well as other small nationalities, left Abkhazia (Krylov, Citation1999, p. 1).
14 Edward W. Walker uses the theory of nested cleavages to explain the unexpected ‘stability of instability’ of Dagestani politics (Walker, 1999–2000). See a similar approach to Dagestani politics in Ibragimov and Matsuzato (Citation2005). An example of an absence of nested cleavages and of consequent polarisation of society is provided by Nagorny Karabakh.
15 At the beginning of the fourteenth century the status of the Kiev and All Russian Metropolitan See was identified as ‘seventy-second’ (Meyendorff, Citation1981, pp. 77–78).
16 This endeavour bore fruit in two excellent books published in the mid-nineteenth century: Iosselian (Citation1843) and Fomin-Tsagareli (1848). The title of the latter, in English The Georgian Church as a Witness to the Orthodoxy of the Russian Church, reveals the intention of the ROC.
17 The Apostle Andrew was the ‘first-called' by Jesus and therefore important for Orthodoxy in its rivalry with Catholicism, which relies on the authority of St Peter. The Apostle Simon is believed to have been martyred near Sukhum, and this is why the New Athos Monastery was built there in the nineteenth century. St Nino is believed to have come from Cappadocia to Iberia (Eastern Georgia) to baptise the country, and under her influence King Mirian III made Christianity the state religion in 327. Gelati Monastery and Academy were founded by King David the Builder in the twelfth century.
18 In 1894 the Vladikavkaz Diocese controlling the Ossetian Christians became independent from the Georgian Exarchate (Gedeon, Citation1992, p. 163).
19 Fr Dorofei (Dbar) compares the victory over the Arabs in the Battle of Anakop in the 730s to that of Tours-Poitiers (732). At that time, allegedly, Abkhazian was not only used in the liturgy, but was even written in a script based on Greek. The Abkhazian Church is supposed to have played an important role in the Christianisation of the Alan and Goths and to have taught church architecture to Kievan Rus'. Fr Dorofei explains the decline of the Abkhazian Church by reference to the dual yoke of the Ottomans and the Georgians, and identifies the strength of paganism in Abkhazia as a reaction on the part of the Abkhazians to the Georgianisation of the church; having lost their own priests, Abkhazians continued religious practice according to their own understanding (Dorofei, Citation2006).
20 The ROC replied that the bishop did this on his own initiative, without consulting Moscow: this seems an implausible explanation.
21 The only monastery to survive in the MSSR was the Japca Convent in Camenca (Kamenka) District, located in the north of the left bank. Until the eighteenth century the north of the left bank had belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Cemârtan argues that many nuns of this monastery were ethnically Russian or Polish and supported panslavist ideas and this is why the authorities tolerated the monastery.
22 In 1997 the ROC proposed to the RomOC that the latter downgrade the Bessarabian Metropolitan See into its representative office in Moldova, a proposal with which the RomOC understandably did not agree (Turcescu and Stan, Citation2003, p. 459). Interestingly, the ROC also proposed that the self-proclaimed ‘Alania Diocese’ in South Ossetia become a representative office (podvor'ye) of the ROC in South Ossetia (Interview, Citation2009b), in order to give it a certain canonical status and at the same time evade conflict with the OCG.
23 This article overestimates the number of parishioners of the Bessarabian Metropolitan See (‘20 percent of the Moldova's Orthodox believers belong’) and boasts that ‘religious freedom [was] only protected in Pridnestrovie’, with the result that 114 religious groups were legally registered there, ‘which is five times as many as in Moldova’.
24 The executive committee of the City Soviet, still being atheist, harassed Mikhail by providing part of the river bed of the Nistru as the construction site. Cooperation with state enterprise managers enabled Mikhail to raise the ground level by six metres and build there the first new church, Pokrovskaya.
25 For more details of the policy change in 1998 see Matsuzato (Citation2008b, pp. 109–10).
26 For details of the presidential elections in 2004 and the reasons for Bagapsh's victory, see Matsuzato (Citation2006, pp. 137–43); Matsuzato (Citation2008b, pp. 107–08); and Skakov (Citation2005).
27 Baburin then went on to try to persuade Kolesnikov to accept Bagapsh: ‘Only lazy people (lenivyye lyudi) do not know that you (Kolesnikov) and Primakov are the most pro-Georgian elements in the Russian government’ (Interview, Citation2009a). Western observers tend to assume that the Russian right wing is more expansionist than the liberal wing in terms of Russia's sphere of influence. The reverse is in fact the case: relatively liberal politicians, such as Yevgeni Primakov, tend to promote friendship with the former Soviet countries and support Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan in their struggle with the unrecognised states (a policy which can be called ‘great Eurasianism’), while right-wing politicians and analysts, such as Baburin, Konstantin Zatulin and Andranik Migranyan, soberly distinguish allies from enemies and reject sacrificing allies such as Armenia, Serbia and the unrecognised states for illusory friendship with overt or potential enemies (‘small Eurasianism’). The five years between the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia in 2003 and Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was a process of gradual bankruptcy of ‘great Eurasianism’ in Russian foreign policy.
28 The ethnonym ‘Samurzakan’ was widely used for the population in south-eastern Abkhazia in the late tsarist period. Though this name was derived from the princedom located there, it referred to the newly-formed population after the massive deportation and depopulation during and after the Caucasian war (1817–64). Georgian historiography identifies them as Abkhazianised Mingrelians, while Abkhazian historiography argues for the opposite.
29 Unfortunately I have not been able to acquaint myself with the contents of this book (Panaitescu, Citation1992). The Moldovanist historian Petr Shornikov evaluates Panaitescu as ‘sufficiently objective’‘in comparison with the present Romanianists’ (Shornikov, Citation2007, p. 9).
30 For more information on the conflict among Transnistrian historians in 2007, see Matsuzato (Citation2008b, pp. 114–16); Matsuzato (Citation2008a, pp. 216–22).
31 The absence of this factor makes the relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan extremely violent.