The Actions of Our Leaders Speak Volumes
TELLING images. First, Russian Orthodox leader Patriarch Alexy II coming to the support of Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Second, Pope John Paul II, at almost the exact same time, apologizing to 300,000 Ukrainians in their native tongue. And these images give us insight into what went wrong in Russia and the majority of the former Soviet republics, compared to their longtime "friends in misfortune" - the former communist nations of central Europe The difference between Alexei Ridiger and Karol Wojtyla is the same as that between the first Russian post-communist president and the former regional Communist Party boss, Boris Yeltsin and, say, the first post-communist Czech president and former political dissident, Vaclav Havel. It is just by the nature of their jobs that Ridiger and Wojtyla have become known as Patriarch Alexy II and Pope John Paul II, whereas Yeltsin and Havel will go down in history under their given names. However, the tasks imposed on these men by history were the same: to help their nations confront their pasts, to acknowledge past sins in order to begin the long journey into some brighter future. But to complete this task, the two Russian leaders, one secular and the other spiritual, first had to acknowledge and repent of their own personal sins. Both had the chance to do so, and both failed. In the early 1990s, many religious leaders in post-Soviet Russia were accused by their own colleagues and by the press of making pacts with devil - the KGB - during Soviet times. The accusations ranged from betraying confessions given in church to state organs, to "bringing in line" dissident monks. One of those who was exposed by the KGB archives as an agent named "Drozdov," who was awarded an honorary citation by the KGB chairman, was said to be Alexei Ridiger, shortly thereafter promoted to the position of the Patriarch. The initial response of the Church hierarchy was to propose its own investigation. But the follow-up was not quite so hopeful. All the investigations into this area were stopped by the patriarch himself. The same happened with Boris Yeltsin, who was once tempted by his democratic allies to disclose in full the crimes of the Soviet regime, including those of which he was a part. But he quickly reclassified the files once they had been declared open. By contrast, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla never became entangled in any deals with totalitarian state in Poland. Nonetheless, after he became pope, John Paul II took upon himself the burden of acknowledging and condemning centuries of past mistakes by the Catholic Church. By doing so, he forced the leaders of Poland, including those with communist backgrounds, to recognize their own sins. And this, I think, is what has made Pope John Paul II one of the greatest politicians of his age Corrupted leaders corrupt nations, a truth that can be statistically measured. According to research by the World Bank, corruption in Russia and most other former Soviet republics is at least eight times higher than in countries like the Czech Republic and Poland. So it is no surprise that while these central European countries are clearly moving toward becoming the part of civilized world, Russia is heading in the opposite direction. The message of intolerance and confrontation delivered over the weekend by the patriarch is just one more sign of that. Yevgenia Albats is an independent, Moscow-based journalist.
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