The "Party of the Ten Commandments" was created in Russia. One of the leaders of Russian Baptists, Sergei Mezentsev, became its head. Kommersant FM columnist Konstantin Eggert regrets that the new public association is unlikely to achieve immediate success.

As a citizen and voter, I have long been missing two parties in Russian politics - a right-wing party, like the American Republicans or the Polish Law and Justice, for which I would vote myself, and a sane modern left-wing party, with which one could argue about the level taxes and gay marriage.

Thanks, of course, to Russian Protestants for trying to satisfy my political needs. It’s good that they invited followers of other monotheistic religions – Islam and Judaism – to join the party. They really have a lot in common in their attitude towards the modern world - rejection of the cult of consumerism, abortion, euthanasia and the immorality of mass culture.

And yet, even if the party was created without the sanction of the presidential administration (which I strongly doubt), it is unlikely to succeed. A negligible number of citizens in our country know the Ten Commandments of the Prophet Moses.

Despite the attempts of some representatives of the Russian Orthodox community to present the Soviet period as a series of good and bad rulers for believers, and especially Christians (Lenin and Khrushchev, they say, destroyed religion, and Stalin and Brezhnev treated it well), the truth of history is inexorable: the USSR was officially an atheist state in which any preaching was prohibited. We are reaping the terrible fruits of this today.

Russia, alas, is a country that is still waiting for real missionary work, and not the rattling propaganda of reckless love for power and an almost pagan “obsession” with ritual to the detriment of life with God.

I think that citizens are unlikely to be attracted to a party with a strange name that doesn’t mean anything to them. Political parties (and not only in Russia) must offer a broad program for the organization of society, without limiting themselves to religious boundaries. For social conservatives, the main thing is self-reliance, limiting the power of the bureaucracy, and self-government. This is the most democratic program there is. It is difficult for me to imagine the gentlemen from the “Ten Commandments Party” promoting these ideas. If they start doing this seriously, they will immediately become familiar with the fire, tax, sanitary and all other inspections existing in Russia. If they persist, then they will deal with the prosecutor’s office. Most likely, they won't even try.

I would be glad to be wrong, but the new party will apparently take a modest place in the second rank of those tasked with imitating pluralism and democracy in Russia. So that you can say to a visiting John Kerry or Angela Merkel: “Look, we have conservatives in Russia too!”

“Russian citizens are unlikely to be attracted to a party with a strange name that means nothing to them.”