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"OKHOTNY RYAD DOES NOT LEAD TO THE TEMPLE" |
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Written by New Times (Russian)
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Saturday, 23 October 2004 10:00 |
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"OKHOTNY RYAD DOES NOT LEAD TO THE TEMPLE" "The third Rome is a dubious description. The first, real, Rome existed for 14 centuries as an ancient city, and from the fourth century B.C. was megapolis and the center of Oikumena; then, from around the twelfth century it firmly established itself as the capital of the Christian world and has been comfortably existing in that capacity for the ninth century in a row.
The Second Rome, despite all its ambitiousness, extended its rule only to countries of Christianity of the eastern rite. From around the eighth century when the crescent, instead of the cross, started ruling over the Bosporus, Constantinople became the capital of the Ottoman Empire, not the Byzantine, and later on got a different name. The biggest part of the Christian world could not care less for Byzantium even at the times of its efflorescence, and even "gothic" Kievan Rus, in its young years, by its inroads on Constantinople cut considerable breaches in the city’s defences and prestige.
The third Rome came into being for lack of anything better. Only the brave Russian warriors were ready to accept the flattery of homeless and hungry monks. Even in the times of Ivan III Moscow did not carry much weight with Europe and was regarded as an attachment to the Golden Horde... Now the third Rome has ultimately receded into the Third World. Moscow of the times of Yeltsin and Luzhkov was regarded by the “first”, Western world as the capital of a "developing country", and Moscow set the trends for Russia..... Moscow remains the bulwark of chauvinism and the ideology of Okhotny Ryad, hostile to European values, gloomy, drab and backward. Okhotny Ryad is Moscow’s main street. And it leads to a temple, a cathedral, where the Russian Orthodox Church is reinforcing and polishing Byzantine despotism. But it is not the sort of the temple to which the old woman asked the way in the final sequence of Tengiz Abuladze’s film Repentance. "
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