That's true, but there's a need to put that information in the proper context. First, there's nothing new or surprising about it, as the official Russian Orthodox church has historically been under the state's control. This goes back to middle ages and Tsars. It would not be reasonable to expect any opposition from them. And second, most of their faithful agree with them on the Ukraine issues.
It goes back even further, actually, all the way to the Byzantines. Eastern Orthodoxy has this concept called the "symphony of powers": https://orthochristian.com/93823.html, which in practice means a church strictly subservient to the government under which it operates. Russia is quite possibly the pinnacle of that, seeing how the Russian Orthodox Church managed to apply it even to the Bolsheviks eventually.
This has led to some interesting quirks historically. For example, in Japan, the local Orthodox Church is the offshoot of the Russian one, and at the time of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, it had a Russian archbishop heading it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Japan. Upon hearing of the declaration of war, the Japanese clerics under him asked him what they are supposed to do. He told them to pray for the Emperor of Japan and the victory of his hosts, since, as Orthodox, it was their duty to pray for their country's ruler and army during a war. He himself, being a Russian subject, could not do so, but also could not openly pray for the victory of Russia in the war while remaining in his position as the head of the Church of Japan; and he believed that it would be inappropriate for him to abscond from that duty and to flee to Russia. So he gave his bishops the blessing to pray according to the canon, and excused himself from public services for the duration of the war.
> which in practice means a church strictly subservient to the government under which it operates.
partly so - in this world, among the worldly ways, the temporal ruler has authority. However, the bargain is.. at birth, at death, in times of great peril, or any day when there are hungry, poor, afflicted, ill or outcast citizens (every day in other words) the temporal ruler has agreed to acknowledge One God (not the person ruling) and implement the words of the Christian canon .. to attend to those who are needy, sanctify marriage, watch over the helpless and bring food and medicine to those that need it.
In the modern times of post-industrial plenty, these crucial agreements are often overlooked. Yet this is how civilization grew from the barbarian times in the Western world.
They were equally overlooked back at the times that doctrine was promulgated. Byzantine emperors did a lot of nasty stuff, much of it with the approval of sycophant patriarchs.
The agreement of "regular Russians" is a very curious thing. From talking with Russians they weren't expecting or supporting a war with Ukraine even a week before it started.
It was a western lie that Putin wants to invade Ukraine up to the second it happened, and then it became obviously the only possible choice overnight.
The most important thing to understand about Russians is that they were trained for centuries to be passive cynical conformists. It mostly worked. There are some actual nationalists who want the war. But most Russians view them as madmen who are "sticking out" and will suffer for it eventually. It's as stupid to be openly unpatriotic as it is to be too patriotic. See girkin.
Most Russians just subconsciously detect the safest position and orient themselves accordingly. Not because of conscious fear, simply by default. If Navalny became Russian president - the next day 80% of Russians would be completely persuaded they were always against the war. Orthodox church doesn't have much influence, IMHO, it's just aligned like everything else.
> If Navalny became Russian president - the next day 80% of Russians would be completely persuaded they were always against the war.
I'm not sure Navalny is against the occupation on Crimea and Ukraine, there's nuance there, he has said he's against the Russian Military interventions, but he is still a Russian nationalist and has (to my knowledge) been against the conduct of the war and wants a diplomatic solution but it's not clear to me that he would have ever "given" Crimea back.
Well he's murdered now. He was trying to position himself as "reasonable" during "Crimea is ours" euphoria, I'm not sure but I'd expect him to return all the annexed territories if he got in power after the full scale invasion. Russia would need to do it anyway to get sanctions removed.
> I'm not sure but I'd expect him to return all the annexed territories if he got in power
We'll never know, but I "feel" like that would have damaged him politically had he been in power in Russia and therefore doubt he would have. But again, we'll never know. And it's purely theoretical, even if he wasn't dead, there is no scenario that I can realistically think where Putin would have allowed Navalny to replace him, absent the FSB/oligarchs assassinating Putin. But even there, I suspect Navalny would still have been murdered and we'd still just get "Putin-lite"
He was a Russian nationalist. And yes, he did say that Crimea "is not a sandwich to just give it back", back in 2014. But things have changed a lot since then.
I have lots of respect to the guy, but realistically the only scenario where he would become Russian president would be if the vote for the Russian presidency was conducted in the West. He would win a landslide victory. In Russia though, if you go outside Moscow and St.Petersburg, it's not that people are against him — they simply never heard of him.
In the USSR in the 80s there was a lot of talk of one Angela Davis. She was presented as "the only opposition leader" or something. There's no doubt that if the election for POTUS was conducted in the USSR, she'd win over Reagan by a huge margin. In the USA though not many people knew who she was. So Navalny is the Angela Davis in reverse — the media across the border makes him look like punching in the weight category he does not really belong to.
Regarding Russian political landscape, you can look in any corner, from Gorbachev to Solzhenytsin and anything in between. There are not many points that these people could all agree on. But not a single Russian politician was comfortable with the thought of Ukraine joining NATO. And this includes Navalny too.
Putin will die one way or another and Russia will have to exit the war and try to return to normal economy. Nawalny or another similar leader is their best shot at that. They created nadiezdin for a reason, they kept nawalny for a reason, they will create somebody new like that eventually. It's internal struggle in Kremlin that will determine which of them will succeed Putin and when, but Ukrainian war has a huge influence on that.
Every time Russia lost a war they had a temporary liberalization. Usually orchestrated by the government because there's no civil society in Russia.
As for what Russians thought about Nawalny - doesn't matter, never did. Nobody knew who Putin was, yet fsb made him a president no sweat.
And don't get me started about NATO. Russians will almost all immediately flip from "Ukraine in NATO is an existential threat" to "nobody cares" the moment the narration in tv switches.
The russian trick of presenting their dictators as the reasonable forces keeping the even worse tendencies of Russian people contained is obvious bullshit. In reality Russians will just go along with almost anything.
> Most Russians just subconsciously detect the safest position and orient themselves accordingly. Not because of conscious fear, simply by default.
Most Americans do exactly the same. Look at the reaction to 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The vast majority of Americans couldn't identify either of those countries on a map let alone understand their history and culture yet it was "safe" to go along with it lest you be called unpatriotic.
I don't think it's the same at all. Attitudes towards the Iraq war changed massively during the presidency of George W Bush [1]. They didn't suddenly flip when Obama came into office.
Also, looking at America today from the outside, what I see is a very polarised country with very entrenched opinions that I don't see changing much regardless of who wins the next election.
Attitudes towards the Iraq war changed massively during the presidency of George W Bush [1].
Sure it changed once they saw the (wholly predictable) actual reality of the war. But the fact that a solid majority supported the debacle at the outset, despite Bush's lies at the time being roughly on par with Putin's lies about Ukraine today (in terms of being transparently BS) -- does tend to support the point the above commenter is making.
It didn't take years of little progress for the US public to become pessimistic about the Iraq War. The war had less than 50% approval only a year after starting. Also, contrary to what is commonly passed around as fact today, it was not abundantly clear that the Iraqi chemical weapons program no longer existed, as the US was never actually supplied with evidence that the Iraqi Biological Weapons program was done away with after the Gulf War, which is why it wasn't just the possible existence of WMDs that was given as justification, but the non-cooperation with inspectors also. In the early 2000s, soldiers were given multiple rounds of anthrax vaccine shots due to this lack of clarity. This is not to say that this justification a good reason, but it wasn't a clear lie at the time either, despite being repeated commonly as such on the internet these days.
Not at all. A majority of Americans changed their minds in opposition to the sitting president who had started the war. This directly contradicts the point the above commenter was making.
Speaking as someone who grew up in Russia and lived for 12 years in US, your average American might be just as gullible as your average Russian, but they are certainly a lot less conformist when it comes to government policies.
This is only one political party. When the government changes hands, republicans will openly change their entire worldview about, for example, the economy, despite it being impossible anything actually changed, while democrats largely don't.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-pessimistic... I mean christ, look at that graph. Republican opinion changed overnight. There are even more examples for this exact effect. Seems when republican voters say "economy", they might mean something else.
People constantly paint America with a single brush. What you see on CNN, MSNBC, FOX etc isn't America. We get shit on constantly for doing that to other countries so it's always annoying when others do exactly that to us.
Now imagine 9/11 hadn't happened and USA invades Iraq after denying it for months. What would be the response of the opposition voters? :)
In USA it's about 50/50 on almost every issue. It's nothing like Russia. In USA a significant percentage of population openly protested Obama on the point that he isn't American. Try that with Putin :)
It sounds like what you are saying is that like Russia the US invades when it serves whatever happens to be the interest of the establishment clique but unlike Russia the US ignores ineffective protests.
> Not because of conscious fear, simply by default. If Navalny became Russian president - the next day 80% of Russians would be completely persuaded they were always against the war.
This seems similar to how the people in Germany reacted after the Nazis lost WW2.
