Daily Journal:

Both the manifestation of supporters of the Cossack Church, separate from the “mainstream” Russian Orthodox Church, and the response statement of the Bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Kirill, so to speak, are absolutely “textbook” and fit into a painfully familiar paradigm. Every high school graduate knows that the Cossacks were historically formed from free and fugitive people who settled along the borders of the Russian state in an effort to avoid enslavement and pressure from the growing state machine of the era of monarchical absolutism. It is not surprising that it was the Cossacks who formed the social basis and were the key ferment of popular uprisings and peasant wars in Russia in the 17th-18th centuries, which, by the way, took place under the slogans of the old faith, the restoration of which was one of the demands of the followers of Stepan Razin and Emelyan Pugachev. It was yesterday’s Razin Cossacks, who, after the defeat of the uprising, found refuge in the Solovetsky Monastery, provided its protection and for eight years held the line against the tsarist troops, who tried to forcefully impose the church reform of Patriarch Nikon on the Solovetsky people. In many Cossack regions - on the Don and in the Volga region, in the Urals and in Siberia - Old Belief was widespread, and this is no coincidence, for the protest potential of the Old Believers, directed against the religious violence of the “dominant” Nikonian church and the new state orders sanctified by it, perfectly corresponded to the love of freedom Cossacks.

Thus, the desire of the Cossacks to have a church that meets their freedom-loving aspirations is quite natural and historically justified. Considering these facts, the statement of the head of the Synodal Committee for Interaction with the Cossacks, Bishop of Stavropol and Nevinnomyssk Kirill (Pokrovsky), that allegedly throughout the history of Orthodoxy there was no separate Cossack church, but always in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus Cossacks were children of the Russian Church (read: dominant) “both when the Cossacks were border freemen, and when they became the service class, and in the difficult times of atheistic persecution of the 20th century” - simply does not correspond to reality. As for the 20th century, during the Soviet era the leaders of the White Cossacks ended up in exile and were supported by the ROCOR, and not by the ROC MP! But one can hardly hope to hear anything different from the hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose task is loyalty not to historical truth, but to his corporation, which is now striving again, as in the 18th-19th centuries, with the support of the authorities, to master the role of a monopolist in the field of spirituality, to act as a universal instrument for ideological control of social movements and organizations. Every high school student knows how this ended in 1917. And a suspicion arises that some in the leadership of the country and the Russian Orthodox Church did not study very well in high school.