September 24, 2009
from the Clergy, Monastics, and Laity of the Parish
of St. Olga, Grand Duchess and Equal of the Apostles,
city of Zheleznovodsk, Diocese of Suzdal,
Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church
357401, Russia, Stavropol krai, city of Zheleznovodsk,
33/67 Karl Marx Street Tel. (879-32) 4-65-24, 4-30-70
APPEAL OF THE CLERGY, MONASTICS, AND LAITY OF THE PARISH OF ST. OLGA, GRAND DUCHESS AND EQUAL OF THE APOSTLES, CITY OF ZHELEZNOVODSK, DIOCESE OF SUZDAL, RUSSIAN ORTHODOX AUTONOMOUS CHURCH.
To the World Community of the Free World
and Its Committees involved with Defending the Rights and Freedoms of People of Faith
Dear Sirs, Brothers and Sisters!
A difficult situation has developed today for the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church in the Russian Federation, which must be brought to the attention of the entire world community. Day by day, the pressure and persecution by those in power has grown stronger and become more pronounced. This alarming and unfortunate situation, into which our Orthodox Church has fallen, has forced us to turn to you for help.
We, the clergy, monastics, and laity of the Parish of St. Olga, Grand Duchess and Equal of the Apostles, in the city of Zheleznovodsk, Diocese of Suzdal of the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church (ROAC), appeal to those who are active in politics, upon whom, to a great degree, the fate of whole countries and nations depends, to those who work defending human rights, and the press, with the request that you raise your voices in defense of the guaranteed rights to freedom of conscience and religious belief for the clergy and parishioners of the ROAC.
We confess the holy Orthodox Faith, which is based upon Divine Revelation, was transmitted to us by the Apostles and our holy Fathers, sealed in the holy Gospels, in the resolutions of the holy Councils, and in the writings of the Fathers and Teachers of the Church. We confess our adherence to no other Orthodox Church than the one that has existed in Russia since the tenth century.
For almost the whole of the last century, the Orthodox Faith and Church were subjected to such terrible trials as have never before been seen in human history. The Church was almost completely destroyed. Only small individual groups of Orthodox Christians in the USSR managed to survive, mainly, underground, in the “catacombs.” We stayed in this illegal, catacomb, situation through all the years of the Soviet era, because we could not accept the way of compromise and denial of the witness of our faith, which the Moscow Patriarchate accepted when it was legalized by the Bolsheviks in 1943. We were able to return to an open and legal existence only at the end of the 1980’s and the beginning of the 1990’s, when the leadership of the USSR publicly declared an end to the persecution of our faith and Church.
Unfortunately, even after our legalization, the secular authorities periodically exerted, and still do exert, pressure on the ROAC.
Beginning in 1992, in many regions of the country, the leaders of the Moscow Patriarchate, using the help of judicial, regional, provincial, and municipal authorities, took possession of our churches, which belonged to the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church: in the city of Trubchevsk (Brianskaya oblast), in Volgograd, Belgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Ussuriysk, Kineshma (Ivanovskaya oblast), Votkinsk (Republic of Udmurdsk), Saint Petersburg, in cities of the Novosibirskaya and Moskovskaya oblasts, in Sanino (Vladimirskaya oblast), Zheleznovodsk, and Kursavka (Stavropolsky krai).
In 2009, in the city of Suzdal (Vladimirskaya oblast), Rosimushchestvo brought suit and took away 13 churches that the ROAC had restored and saved from total ruin. At the present time, the authorities of the Vladimirskaya oblast are suing “for the return of real estate that had been illegally transferred,” demanding that we hand over another six churches that are located in small towns in the surrounding region.
In September of this year, the parishioners of one of the churches belonging to the Moscow Patriarchate brought suit in the Suzdal regional court in Suzdal, with the assertion that they had formerly been parishioners of the ROAC. The gist of this case comes down to taking the holy things, church vessels and other objects of worship away from the ROAC, from its Synod of Bishops, the Diocesan Administration, its communities and regular faithful, that had been removed by the faithful of the ROAC from ten churches in Suzdal, which were taken away from them so that they could be given back to the government, by order of the Vladimir court of arbitration. In the papers filed in this case by the Moscow Patriarchate, it is also claimed that the building housing the Synod of Bishops and a chapel dedicated to the Iverskaya Icon of the Mother of God, and in which Metropolitan Valentine resides, as well as newly constructed church buildings, the buildings housing two convents of nuns belonging to the ROAC, the Sunday school, and even the private homes of priests belonging to the ROAC, have all been erected with funds collected from these parishioners. It is being demanded that all of these properties be “returned” to the Moscow Patriarchate, so that the representatives of the ROAC should be deprived not only the last remaining private premises in Suzdal where they can say their prayers, but even their places of residence.
By taking away their churches and denying them the rights that are guaranteed to them by the Constitution and legislature of the Russian Federation, the people of faith are being chased right back into the catacombs. And all of this is taking place, not in the Godless Soviet Union, but in the new Russia, where there is so much talk about freedom of choice and the rights of believers, about the return of respect for religion, the renaissance of Orthodoxy, and about democracy.
With special alarm, we notice the facts of open collaboration in these persecutions of the ROAC by representatives of the governement – officials on the municipal and regional level, employees of the District Attorney’s office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Special Forces. We have also received information concerning high-placed sponsors of these persecutions, who have been abusing the power entrusted to them, which they have seemingly received from the President’s office.
On Tuesday, September 22, 2009, in Moscow, in the Trade-Industrial Palace, there was a meeting of the clergy of the ROAC with an “official,” – an employee of the “Foundation for the Revitalization of the Vladimir-Suzdal Region” acting, according to him, on behalf of the President’s Administration. At this meeting, he was accompanied by three so-called “heavies” from the “T” (for terrorism) and “E” (for extremism) Division of the Ministry for Internal Affairs of Russia. They made the threat that they were starting the “dismantling” of the ROAC, not just according to the “anti-extremism” clause of the law, but within the framework of the “counter-terrorism” measures of the law.
The Chief Hierarch of the ROAC, Metropolitan Valentine, had already been informed that he was to meet with representatives of the “T” and “E” Division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, since the representatives of the Russian government have suspicions that the ROAC is engaging in “terrorism and extremism.”
The faithful of the ROAC are law-abiding citizens, who respect the political choices of the majority of the population of Russia, who have never engaged, and do not intend to engage, in “civil disobedience,” who always and everywhere strive to keep the laws of God and man, and who preach obedience to the law of the land as an obligatory Christian virtue. It is incomprehensible to us why a position like ours would ever be considered dangerous and harmful to the Russian government by anyone. And the fact that some of the most influential political leaders of Russia do consider it to be so, makes their persecution against the ROAC abundantly apparent.
In our opinion, all of this is being done with the “blessing,” and by the direction, of one “traditional” organization – the Moscow Patriarchate – for which, in order to be “closer” to it, one may sacrifice the “less traditional” population of the country, applying the infamous Articles № 282 of the UK RF № 114 of July 25, 2002 “Against Extremist Activity,” and FZ № 35 of March 6, 2006, “Against Terrorism” to it.
Can this be anything else other than the complete obliteration of all difference of opinion, freedom of conscience, freedom of religious expression, and equality of rights and human freedoms for the citizens of the Russian Federation?
Contemporary morality, while condemning violence, nevertheless makes peace with it, as with an unavoidable evil, in those cases when we are talking about those who represent a threat to society. But what threat to society can there be here, when we are talking about people who maintain and have restored monuments of historical and cultural significance, which were destroyed, and even now are being allowed to fall into ruin, by the endorsement of the government? What is violence, is what is being perpetrated right now upon the ROAC in today’s Russian Federation, upon Her people, who are guilty of absolutely nothing, who are being made the victims of criminal and lawless behavior merely for belonging to another jurisdiction other than the Moscow Patriarchate, and which may be called, in a word – GENOCIDE.
Genocide is the most serious crime in the form of discrimination.
Article 357 UK RF. Genocide is any activity, directed towards the full or partial destruction of any national, ethnic, racial or religious group, by way of killing the members of the group, causing serious harm to their health, forced birth control, the forced abduction of their children, their forced resettlement or the arrangement of other living conditions designed to physically destroy the members of the group.
Article 2, P.s). Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide December 9, 1948, “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;…”
Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.”
Article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights affirms: “Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
Article 14 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation: “1. The Russian Federation is a secular state. No religion may be established as a state or obligatory one. 2. Religious associations shall be separated from the State and shall be equal before the law.”
Article 28 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation: “Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of conscience, the freedom of religion, including the right to profess individually or together with other any religion or to profess no religion at all, to freely choose, possess and disseminate religious and other views and act according to them.”
The quoted statutes are further reinforced by:
Article 26 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of December 16, 1966.
Article 9 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, of November 4, 1950, and its protocols.
Articles 18 & 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations dated December 10, 1948.
We have already exhausted almost all of the the legal options that we have available to us for dealing with the persecutions that have been raised against us. Before, in the days of the Godless Soviet Union, people were first removed to work on forced labor farms, then they were moved to concentration camps. Today, in the Russian Federation, which arrogantly calls itself “Russia,” they are trying to herd us into an organization known by the name of the “Moscow Patriarchate.” What are people supposed to do who do not want to join with the administrative and religious concentration camp of the Moscow Patriarchate? Where are they to go, and to whom should they appeal in order to be heard, understood, and protected?
We have already appealed, many times, to the offices of different government officials on various levels, including the office of the guarantor of the Constitution of the Russian Federation – the President of the Russian Federation – to various committees dealing with Human Rights, and other organizations that work to defend peoples’ rights. Some of them don’t want to hear us; others can’t.
How long shall this lawless behavior continue to exist in Russia? Can it be that the Constitution and the laws of the Russian Federation, the European Conventions and International Covenants, Declarations, Ukases and Resolutions do not exist for people harmed by the might of government authority? How is it that the representatives of government authority consider it possible for themselves to take part in new persecutions against the Church, and against the citizens of their own country?
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!… Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers… how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” (Matt. 23:29-33).
We protest against the blatant and open persecution of our Church and our faithful by the officials of the government, and we call upon all who have a conscience and an ounce of bravery, for whom freedom and the idea of a democratic Russia is dear, to come to the defense of the persecuted Orthodox Christians belonging to the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church.
Be not silent. Remember, the day will come when they will come to you as well, to take away one of the most basic human rights that there can be – the right to freedom of conscience, and after that, the rights to the TRUTH!
“Christians should not be puzzled when they are attacked: to be subject to persecution is an indespensible characteristic of the truth.” St. Makarios the Great.
Rector of the Parish of St. Olga, Grand Duchess and Equal of the Apostles, Zheleznovodsk, Archpriest Roman Novakovsky (signature)
Dean of the Stavropol deanery and clergyman of the Parish of St. Olga, Grand Duchess and Equal of the Apostles, Zheleznovodsk,
Archpriest George Novakovsky (signature)Clergyman of the Parish of St. Olga, Grand Duchess and Equal of the Apostles, Zheleznovodsk,
Archpriest Anastasy Skalsky (signature)
Nun Antonia Skalsky (signature)
Here follow the signatures of 44 parishioners.
