The occasion for the publication was the State Duma’s decision to pass the bill on protecting the feelings of believers in its first reading. Desnitsky began by saying that he himself is a religious and thin-skinned person, and admitted that he would be glad if someone “big and strong” protected him from wounds.
He recalled that a little over a year ago he learned about the stunt in Christ the Savior Cathedral and considered it “extremely inappropriate and outrageous,” even though he had not been there and had not watched the video. According to him, in Soviet times believers were insulted and humiliated no less, but he does not recall suffering from this, because, as the Gospel teaches, it is not what comes from outside that offends, but what comes from one’s own heart.
At the time, in the heat of the moment, he wrote about sacrilege within the framework of a secular legal state and defined it as “the deliberate insult of what is dear and sacred to many, what is recognized by society as a moral, religious, cultural or historical value.” Such actions, he believed, should entail liability up to and including criminal. Laws in the United States that allow public burning of the Quran with the intent to insult Muslims he called a misinterpretation of freedom of expression. He also considered sacrilege the damaging of a painting with acid in a museum and the desecration of the eternal flame: in his opinion, this concerns universally recognized values, without respect for which society turns “into a herd of Pithecanthropes.”
What Offended More
However, according to him, what offended him far more was what began afterward: the rules of the Trullo Council in a secular court, the injured guards and the candle-stand attendant “who lost the ability to count money,” and the “two-year sentence” at the end. He asserted that here, in the name of Orthodox believers, political scores were being settled with young women whose stunt deserved at most fifteen days. Desnitsky predicted that after their release they would become “world-class stars, martyrs for a righteous cause,” and that an event that could have been forgotten by the sixteenth day would be remembered for the rest of his life.
Concerns About the Law
The new law, in his opinion, makes it possible, without the Trullo Council, on the basis of the Criminal Code alone, to hand down “five years” in similar cases. But he does not feel protected: he suspects that believers of all sorts will start taking offense “left and right.” Pagans, he wrote, will not like what the Bible and the Christian tradition that follows it say about their gods, and Jews may be offended by Orthodox services during Holy Week. From the text of the law, he argued, it does not follow that it is aimed at “completely different insults,” and he does not venture to predict its application, for example, in certain republics of the North Caucasus: local believers, he believes, are offended by everything that does not conform to their ideas of Sharia. He recalled that for a Muslim the very expression “Son of God” sounds offensive.
Desnitsky asked who could guarantee that the current stability is eternal and that “this stick” would not one day be used against those who today hope for its protection.
Who Needs the Law
In his assessment, the law is needed not by believers but by the authorities, who have learned lessons from the “velvet revolutions” in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland in the late eighties, when the intelligentsia unites with workers and the church becomes the center of attraction. He described the principle of “divide and rule”: believers should see in the security services their only defenders against atheists, and non-believers should seek salvation from the same security services against “militant obscurantists.” To play along in this game, he wrote, means to lose in advance, and the church’s reputational losses in these processes are too high.
In conclusion, he wrote that it pains him when Christian shrines are insulted, but “a hundred times more painful when, in the name of one’s understanding of Christian shrines, people begin to insult others—simply because it is done in my name.” What wounds his feelings most, he admitted, are the scandalous performances of “Orthodox activists”: when on the streets people’s clothes are torn off, they are hit in the face, books are burned in the name of Orthodoxy, and those who do this are invited not to the police station but to the State Duma. This he called “the most genuine sacrilege” and added that it should be protected against not by the police but by the church, which has people who can assess such behavior.
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