In a season five episode of The Simpsons titled “Deep Space Homer,” the head of America’s most famous cartoon family is selected to fly on the space shuttle as part of a NASA plan to increase public interest in launches that have become “boring.” In this episode, coverage of shuttle launches has become so unpopular that they have even been beaten out in the Nielsen ratings by “A Connie Chung Christmas.” NASA decides to send an “average shmoe” into space as a publicity stunt. During the pre-launch press conference the following exchange takes place:
Reading the Russian press this week, you would be hard pressed not to think that Homer was right to be confused about what divides the world between Hollywood and reality. Life, as it turns out, truly does imitate art at times. Those who recall the second installment of the Planet of the Apes franchise, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, know the synopsis. (If they are like me they are more likely to recall Kim Hunter in that loincloth bikini before anything else.) Another astronaut played by James Franciscus arrives in the same type of spaceship as in the first film in order to rescue Heston’s character. He encounters the same time-space distortions that sent the first mission thousands of years into the future and–unknowingly–crash lands back on earth in a post-nuclear holocaust world that is ruled by apes. Franciscus discovers an underground civilisation that represents the remnants of humanity. The humans who are survivors of a nuclear war have highly developed mental powers, but they also participate in religious ceremonies–complete with pipe organ music and dissonant versions of traditional Christian hymns–in which they worship a deadly lethal nuclear missile with a cobalt-encased, “dirty” warhead as “an instrument of their God.” PR and other press relations officials in the Russian Ministry of Defense must have never seen the film or they would have headed off this week’s event at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. It was there that the Russian Orthodox Church gave its blessing to the MoD’s 12th Main Directorate, the highly secretive agency responsible for the storage, maintenance, and safeguarding of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The occasion was the 60th anniversary of the organization’s founding by Josef Stalin. The Georgian-born dictator, frightened by America’s demonstrated use of nuclear weapons against Japan, was determined to have a nuclear capability for the USSR to threaten the West with as soon as possible and created the special unit in order to try and speed development. Last week’s religious ceremony was conducted by Bishop Amvrosy of Bronnitsy and saw some 200 uniformed members of this special service unit cross themselves in the tradition of the Orthodox Church. The bishop then ended the service by reading a congratulatory message from church’s supreme leader, Patriarch Aleksei II. “I congratulate you on this memorable anniversary,” he read from the Patriarch’s message, “and I raise prayers to God and to the venerable Serafim of Sarov that the nuclear weapons created by you and entrusted to you will always be in God’s hands, and will only be weapons of deterrence and retaliation.” The text of the Patriarch’s blessing was also printed in the Tuesday Krasnaya Zvezda, the MoD and armed forces’ official newspaper, which means it has official government–as well as church–approval. (Serafim of Sarov–a hermit and holy man who died in the nineteenth century and was canonised in 1903–is the semi-official patron saint of the 12th Directorate. The connection to the nuclear weapons directorate is that the city that used to bear his name was renamed Arzamas-16 during the Soviet years, the same city that later became the birthplace of the USSR’s atomic bomb.) “These weapons guarantee and will continue to guarantee the peaceful existence of our people, our children and our grandchildren” was the official statement by the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Yury Baluyevsky. One officer who attended the service told the Moscow Times that the 12th Directorate had been in close contact with the church in the past few years and that it was common for priests to give blessings to individual units. “But this is the first time that [a blessing] has taken place here,” said one officer. “Here” meaning the famous cathedral on the banks of the Moscow River that has come to symbolize in many people’s minds the union between the traditions of old, pre-Soviet Russia–Orthodoxy, strong centralized government rule–and the government of the new “sovereign democracy” that is Russia. Providing the troops that have the capacity to destroy life as we know it with such a very public religious commemoration seems like a strange role for a religious institution. But very little in Russia conforms to conventional wisdom these days. Perhaps we can all take solace in the fact that so far no one is yet blessing the bomb in Moscow–just the people responsible for handling them.
