【英文】CSIS报告：克里姆林宫的行动手册3：保持信念（117页）

英文研究报告 2022年03月15日 07:00 管理员

In essence, an unvirtuous circle of sorts was created, strengthening Russian cultural identity, reinforcing top-down order, and galvanizing economic gains through multiple areas of alignment between the ROC under Kirill and the Kremlin, both domestically and on the international stage.59 Domestically, their alignment is strengthened by shared opposition to Western liberal thought and its focus on individual rights, which the church sees as militant secularism and believes threatens devotion to the communal good.

The Kremlin views liberalism as a direct challenge to its internal control and to Russian sovereignty despite Putin’s view of liberalism’s obsolescence.60 Te ROC has long purported to protect religious and moral traditions from the “threat” of the push for individual rights; as early as 2004, Metropolitan Hilarion (who heads the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Church Relations) called for a common front of traditional religious confessions against the West’s radical “anti-Christian and anti-religious” turn.

This agenda aligns the church with the Kremlin in support of policies that can be interpreted broadly against inconvenient civil society actors and opposition fgures. Tis alignment was ordained in the 2020 constitutional amendments, weaving these threads together. Tey placed “faith in God” in the constitution as an entirely new paragraph: “Te Russian Federation, united by a thousand-year history, preserving the memory of the ancestors who transmitted to us the ideals and faith in God [веру в Бога], as well as the continuity in the development of the Russian state, recognizes the historically established state unity.”62 “Faith in God,” alongside the unity and development of the Russian state, naturally led to the extension of Vladimir Putin’s domestic reign possibly until 2036.