A Byzantine sermon
Mar. 4th, 2008 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mon_kassia...Russian rulers often appeal to history to justify their actions. Mr Putin revealed his interest in history from the start of his presidency, when he restored Stalin's anthem as a national hymn. Last year he promoted a school textbook justifying Stalin's brutal rule as a necessary evil. When other ex-Soviet republics commemorate Soviet brutalities, Russia treats this as a distortion of history. This week the foreign ministry held a meeting behind closed doors on the subject of “Counteracting the falsification of history aimed against Russia: a task of national importance”.
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Sergei Ivanov, Russia's leading scholar on Byzantium, says all this lumps together a 1,000-year history of Byzantium and crudely extrapolates the result to today's Russia. In fact, the film has little to do with the true history of Byzantium. But neither history nor the values of the Orthodox faith are its real object. In the absence of any new ideology, it manipulates a story of Byzantium to justify Russia's anti-Westernism and xenophobia in a 1,000-year history. The film also carries an implicit message to Mr Putin: do not listen to the West, stay in power, close off the country.
It is of little concern to Father Tikhon, or to Russian state television, that the Russian empire gained most when it opened up to the West, not when it fenced itself off. Byzantium was always the source of Orthodox faith for Russia, but few Russian tsars looked to Byzantium as a political model. It was for good reason that they called Moscow a third Rome, not a second Constantinople. It fell to Stalin to revive Byzantine studies, along with the idea of imperialism, says Father Tikhon, approvingly. “He knew whom to learn from.” But the danger of manipulating history in this way is that its tragedies may recur.
(полностью статья тут)
А здесь ее русский "обзор".
...
Sergei Ivanov, Russia's leading scholar on Byzantium, says all this lumps together a 1,000-year history of Byzantium and crudely extrapolates the result to today's Russia. In fact, the film has little to do with the true history of Byzantium. But neither history nor the values of the Orthodox faith are its real object. In the absence of any new ideology, it manipulates a story of Byzantium to justify Russia's anti-Westernism and xenophobia in a 1,000-year history. The film also carries an implicit message to Mr Putin: do not listen to the West, stay in power, close off the country.
It is of little concern to Father Tikhon, or to Russian state television, that the Russian empire gained most when it opened up to the West, not when it fenced itself off. Byzantium was always the source of Orthodox faith for Russia, but few Russian tsars looked to Byzantium as a political model. It was for good reason that they called Moscow a third Rome, not a second Constantinople. It fell to Stalin to revive Byzantine studies, along with the idea of imperialism, says Father Tikhon, approvingly. “He knew whom to learn from.” But the danger of manipulating history in this way is that its tragedies may recur.
(полностью статья тут)
А здесь ее русский "обзор".