c. 2000 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ Vladimir Putin’s slender win Sunday (March 26) of a four-year term as Russia’s second president is unlikely to mean any immediate changes in the religious landscape of the world’s largest country, analysts and religious leaders here say.

Although Putin is a practicing member of the dominant Russian Orthodox Church and speaks about his faith with an ease rarely found among Soviet-bred leaders, the former KGB colonel has devoted little attention to religious affairs.

“To date, Putin hasn’t shown at all how he will treat religious minorities. Either he is afraid or he just hasn’t had the occasion to do so. There is no base for making a judgment about him,” said Sergei Filatov, a sociologist of religion and member of the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences.

Putin, 47, was elected Russia’s second president with 52.6 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff with the second-place finisher, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who garnered 29.3 percent _ a larger-than- expected showing suggesting all are not happy with Putin.

Neither religious sentiment nor spiritual leaders played a noticeable role in the battle for the presidency by 11 candidates. But there is a religious component to the wave of Russian nationalism fed by the war in Chechnya and largely credited with sweeping Putin into power.

“Respect of the church is a principal part of the nationalist mood,” Filatov said. “There is no such thing as an Orthodox vote. It seems to me that there is not such a serious group of believers here, like in the U.S. with Pat Robertson.”

In keeping with church rules, hierarchs of the 80-million-member Russian Orthodox Church did not publicly endorse any of the candidates. However, the church’s leader, Patriarch Alexii II, made several televised appeals urging Orthodox believers to vote. Political analysts said a high voter turnout was key to Putin winning in the first round.

The church also stands staunchly behind the Putin government’s bloody effort to retake control of the breakaway Muslim republic of Chechnya. The largely successful war in Chechnya is popular among Russians, who credit Putin with firmly dealing with Muslim extremists.

Among leaders of minority faiths, there is a hope that Putin will maintain the relatively benign policies toward religious minorities of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. This despite Putin’s career in the KGB, one of the institutions most responsible for religious persecution during 70 years of communism.

Rabbi Berl Lazar, head of Russia’s sprawling, dynamic Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement, said he met with then-prime minister Putin for one hour in mid-December, shortly before Yeltsin stepped down.

“At the meeting he showed himself to be a close friend of the Jews,” said Lazar of the meeting between four Jewish leaders and Putin. “He said he grew up in a communal apartment in St. Petersburg with a (religious) Jewish family. To this day, he remembers the strength and harmony of that family.”

Lazar said he is confident that President Putin will help Lubavitch organizations open 21 secondary schools across Russia that have been planned and win the return of synagogue buildings seized in Soviet times. Estimates vary dramatically, but perhaps 500,000 Jews currently live in Russia.

“He really wants Jews to feel at home here,” Lazar said.

Explicit anti-Semitism, a staple of past national elections in Russia, was virtually absent from candidates’ rhetoric, including that of nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who polled fifth, and achieved a notoriety in the West for his frequent verbal attacks on Jews in past contests.

One of Russia’s largest religious minorities, Roman Catholics, have little to fear from a Putin administration, according to the Rev. Stanislav Opiela, the general secretary for the Russian Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops.

Opiela predicted that respect for Russia’s constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion and concern for international public opinion will keep Putin from tinkering too much with the existing structure.

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Even if the government were to become more interventionist, Opiela said Catholics since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union had managed to build the institutions necessary for continued survival.

“The fundamental structure of the Catholic church has been accomplished. The administration is there. The parishes are there,”said Opiela, a Polish-born Jesuit. “They could make things difficult for us by, for example, nationalizing the hierarchy so that everyone is Russian. But it would not be that threatening because the foundation is already there.”

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Russia is home to an estimated 1.3 million people of Catholic background. In Soviet times, two churches functioned on Russian territory. Now there are about 200, staffed by an almost entirely foreign-born clergy.

Although ultra-nationalists and conservative Orthodox leaders have called for a clampdown on foreign-based faiths, the issue does not seem to have much resonance in either the executive or legislative branches of Russian government.

Legislatively, Lev Levinson, secretary of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights and an expert on religious freedom issues, said Russia’s newly elected parliament is unlikely to take any drastic steps soon.

“With the new Duma (parliament), I don’t think there will be any big changes. There are no plans to introduce legislation,” Levinson said, referring to the body elected in December. “Religious matters generally won’t be very high profile in this Duma.”

DEA END BROWN