I have been accused of hating America and loving Russia. I find this amusing. My normal template on government is that the government is bad, but people are good. So my view is that the Russian and American governments are bad. All governments fight it out over geopolitical issues. Not all governments are 100% evil all of the time. Russia has perfectly reasonable motives for their policy in Syria mixed together with the normal trash; but today I will talk about Russia's religious reason for supporting Syria.
While I would not describe Russia as a religious country, this has been changing. The city that we visit in Russia, Murom, Russia, is a center for the Orthodox faith. Murom has an old church made of wood, maybe the oldest wood church anywhere. It is a monastery center. Why am I talking about this in reference to Syria? The faith of most Russians is the same faith as most Christians in the Middle East—Orthodox. Russian Orthodox leaders have seen what happens when Islamists gain the upper hand, or even when they are an uncontrolled minority—Christians suffer.
As a result of this fact the Russian Orthodox leadership supports Assad in Syria. They see him as a necessary evil to protect Christian minorities in Syria. The Christian refugees from Iraq are in Syria as well, and they have nowhere else to go.
While this aspect has not received wide attention it is a very important reason why Russia continues to support Syria. From the NY Times:
It is clear by now that Russia’s government has dug in against outside intervention in Syria, its longtime partner and last firm foothold in the Middle East. Less well known is the position taken by the Russian Orthodox Church, which fears that Christian minorities, many of them Orthodox, will be swept away by a wave of Islamic fundamentalism unleashed by the Arab Spring.
Patriarch Kirill IIn his warnings, Patriarch Kirill I invokes Bolshevik persecution still fresh in the Russian imagination, writing of “the carcasses of defiled churches still remaining in our country.”
This argument for supporting sitting leaders has reached a peak around Syria, whose minority population of Christians, about 10 percent, has been reluctant to join the Sunni Muslim opposition against Mr. Assad, fearing persecution at those same hands if he were to fall. If the church’s advocacy cannot be said to guide Russia’s policy, it is one of the factors that make compromise with the West so elusive, especially at a time of domestic political uncertainty for the Kremlin.
Russia has very legitimate concerns for their co-religionists. Read the whole article if you want to know more about Russian internal politics.
But as the article from the NY times I quoted makes clear, this is probably not Russia's primary concern. On Monday I will talk about Russia's geopolitical reasons for supporting Syria.