Words words words

“None of us should be shocked by the use of the term “Russian”. I am deeply convinced that the term “Russian” is a politically correct term, artificially introduced into our lives in the 1990s,” said Metropolitan of Smolensk, head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate and Kaliningrad Kirill at a meeting with activists of the Young Guard movement and students of MSTU. Bauman in Moscow.

According to the bishop, when we say “Russian,” “we don’t mean ethnic purity—what kind of ethnic purity can we talk about in Russia!—we are talking about the Russian world.” “And when we express the same reality in English, we use one word, but in Russia for some reason we use two words, so as not to offend anyone,” noted Metropolitan Kirill.

He emphasized that the word “Russian” should not offend ethnically non-Russian people, “because this means that we all belong to a single cultural world, a single Russia.”

The Metropolitan is mistaken (or disingenuous). The word “Russian” is by no means a politically correct innovation. “What have we come to, O Russians? What do we see, what do we do? - asked Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop and vice-president of the Synod in the 18th century. And the church before the revolution was called the Russian Orthodox Church, and not at all “Russian”, as it is now.