Word: russian
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...becoming a New Year's tradition in Europe to wake up on Jan. 1 with a big Russian headache. At the beginning of 2006 and 2009, Russia cut off energy supplies to Ukraine after disagreements over natural-gas prices, which subsequently caused fuel shortages in the European Union in the dead of winter. This January, all eyes are trained on Belarus, which has been having its own quarrel with Moscow over oil prices, threatening European energy supplies once again. But three weeks into the current standoff, there's been a twist: Kazakhstan, another former Soviet republic, stepped in last week...
...tradition that goes back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, in which political leaders used symbols of Russian grandeur - including an entirely submissive church - to create greater support for the regime," says Jean Gueit, rector of the Nice cathedral. "Russian society has been so disoriented and adrift following the changes of the past 20 years that Putin is playing the old nationalist game to snap people out of it by responding to simplistic messages and emotions. Part of that is rebuilding the equally shattered Russian Orthodox Church and help it snatch up all these parishes abroad...
Indeed, the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas is not the only prize catching Moscow's eye. Last year Italy agreed to cede ownership of a similarly spectacular cathedral in Bari to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the year before that, Paris did the same with a cathedral there. And last October, Israel agreed to turn over a building in Jerusalem known as "Sergei's Courtyard" that was constructed in 1890 to accommodate Russian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Moscow is also currently in a legal battle over control of London's St. Andrews Cathedral, home to a large Orthodox congregation...
...Moscow's drive isn't just about real estate and nationalism. Critics say the government is also trying to bring back into the fold the congregations that broke with the Russian Orthodox Church during the Soviet era to join a rival Orthodox branch, the Patriarchate of Constantinople - as the faithful in Nice did in 1931. Many of these overseas congregations have started to restore their ties to the Russian Orthodox Church in recent years, though Gueit says this is only in response to the government's putting the squeeze on their churches...
...Nice congregation isn't planning to rejoin the Russian church anytime soon. In fact, Gueit says the congregation wants to stake out an independent, pan-Orthodox position by breaking with the Constantinople Patriarchate too. He hopes to then attract other congregations to his nonaligned movement - whether he has a cathedral to use as his base...