Bartholomew's Notes

Reuters reports:

Russian Orthodox religious activists festooned a Moscow museum named for Charles Darwin with banners and leaflets denouncing evolution theory in a display of disdain for secular education…

Footage released by Orthodox activist group Bozhaya Volya [????? ????], or God’s Will, showed activists unfurling a banner reading “God created the world” on the building’s facade while others threw leaflets bearing creationist slogans into the lobby of a popular destination for school trips and family outings in the capital…

The footage can be seen above. The stunt follows an attack on a Russian opposition party’s office, during which books were burnt; according to Radio Free Europe:

They later publicly burned all the Yabloko materials near a monument to Adam and Eve outside a Moscow metro station, calling Yabloko a party of satanists and perverts.

The report adds that a video of was posted on the website of a group called “For Russia, Putin, and People’s Front” (I think this is same as the All-Russian People’s Front), but that it had subsequently apologised.

Of course, with this sort of thing it’s difficult to judge to what extent an eye-catching stunt represents a significant movement; a statement from the Synodical Information Department dismisses the group’s antics as (via Google Translate) “profoundly alien to the Orthodox tradition” and, in a thinly-veiled reference to Pussy Riot, as “one of many political theatrical productions”.

Further background (and probably the source for the Reuters article) can be found at RT, which explains that

The ideologue of the museum stunt, Dmitriy Enteo, became famous on the back of several stunts directed at Pussy Riot and their supporters, and has admitted that he consciously uses the same art performance aesthetic, but for opposite aims.

…24 year-old Dmitriy Enteo… (real name Tsorionov)… was previously a Hindu, a Buddhist, and a devotee of trance music. The pseudonym Enteo was derived from entheogen, a member of a group of psychodelic plants, such as peyote, used by shamans.

The movement has a website here; Enteo himself has a social media presence on VK, Facebook, and Twitter. Google translate brings up headings that include “Science” (“the sun revolves around the earth -the centre of the universe”) and “Sodom”.

(H/T Ed Brayton)

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