«Did Putin’s Orthodox State Provoke a Revolt in Orthodox Georgia?»

The events in Georgia, when the visit of a delegation of Russian deputies led to a nationwide uprising against «Russian occupation», became a vivid illustration of the loss of adequacy of the political establishment of Putin’s Russia.

When a few meaningless comrades with equally meaningless behavior negate years of efforts to improve relations with the new Georgian authorities, who have replaced the uncompromising Mikhail Saakashvili and are inclined to discreetly restore cooperation with Russia, it is simply a condemnation of the entire foreign and domestic policy of the regime.

Something similar happened when, against the backdrop of the International Economic Forum organized by the Kremlin to demonstrate the liberalism and civility of Putin’s Russia to foreign investors, the security forces, having lost their limits, decided to arrest a well-known and popular journalist by planting drugs on him, which caused outrage in the country and the world media community.

In other words, the few reasonable and rational initiatives of the Kremlin are incompatible with the political class and the public climate they have created, which makes it impossible to implement them.

However, it should be noted that the cause of the blow dealt to the Russian positions in Georgia these days was not just one deputy of the State Duma from the CPRF, Sergei Gavrilov, who decided, supposedly out of the blue, to take the seat of the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament.

Those who try to present the case in such a way, placing all the blame for what happened on one deputy, inadvertently divert attention from the main reason for what happened, which led this deputy to act as he did.

This is how Gavrilov himself explains his actions: «Where the receiving side invites me to sit — there I sit. According to the protocol, this honorary seat is reserved for the President of the General Assembly, not for secretaries. And only the President of the Interparliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy chairs the General Assembly — in this case it was me».

So, the root of the problem is a certain Interparliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy, which the inexhaustible builders of the «Russian world» decided to bring to Georgia, making its representative a Russian deputy who publicly supported the occupation of about 25% of the internationally recognized Georgian territory.

And during his election as its president, he additionally attacked with his fists the deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Viktor Elenski, who protested against it.

The strongly expressed ideological underpinning of this event is evidenced by the statement of the State Secretary — Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, Grigory Karasin, who commented on the events as follows «We have been following with concern the development of the situation around the Tbilisi session of the Interparliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy. We express our indignation at the actions of representatives of radical political forces in Georgia, who used an important international forum uniting the Orthodox states of the world to vent their anti-Russian sentiments».

So, the official representative of a country that, according to its constitution, is a secular state where religion is separated from power and all religions are equal, openly calls it an «Orthodox state».

Not even a non-Orthodox state, which would be a more or less neutral statement of the fact of the historical predominance of the Orthodox population in it, but specifically an Orthodox state, which unmistakably emphasizes the political dominance of Orthodoxy in it.

With this ideology, «Orthodox deputies» — communists and others — came to Georgia, firmly believing that if it is an «Orthodox state» and so is Russia, then the former must recognize the latter’s seniority in this community of «Orthodox states of the world».

Apparently, realizing that they had failed to remain the elder brother to Georgians under the auspices of communism, they hoped to succeed under the auspices of Orthodoxy.

However, thousands of Georgians who took to the streets and stormed the parliament, demanding the expulsion of the «elder brothers» who occupied a quarter of their territory and the resignation of the local politicians who allowed them to rule in the Georgian parliament, thought otherwise.

Their indignation went far beyond ordinary protest actions, resembling rather a nationwide uprising, with dozens of injured as its victims.

This is yet another result of the policy of promoting Putin’s and Gundyaev’s Russia as an «Orthodox state» and the leader of the Orthodox world, without considering its own constitution and the opinion of the secular and non-Orthodox parts of the population, nor the opinion of other Orthodox nations who do not want to recognize as their «elder brother» a country associated with nothing but lawlessness and rudeness.

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