What matters is not an external display of… faith, but the inner state of the soul.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an interview with Mike Wallace, May 9, 2005[1]

What happens when American myths, American civil religion, and the religious rhetoric of the American president collide with the outside world?  This paper will investigate how the religion-power nexus in the United States affects U.S. relations with the Russian Federation.  I will try to show how what one scholar describes as President George W. Bush’s “fundamentalist” rhetoric, in particular, is absorbed or deflected by Russian political discourse.[2]  I will also explore what effect his language brings to bear on the Russian-American political relationship.  I will explore whether President Putin feels compelled to respond to Bush’s religious rhetoric in kind or to counter it in some way, whether the Russian news media pays attention to those themes, and if so, whether Bush’s talk of God is framed as legitimate or ridiculous.  I conclude that while Putin does not seem interested in responding to Bush’s fundamentalist speech habits, neither he nor the mainstream Russian press seem inclined to ridicule or condemn the American president for the rhetoric he tends to use.

Though never central, religion and religious rhetoric have also never been excluded from discussions of Russian power or the relationship between American and Russian power.  In the days of the czars, Moscow styled itself the “Third Rome,” charged with preserving the legacy of the true church.  This idea emerged from a host of nationalistic religious myths that never disappeared, even when imperial Russia collapsed amid socialist fervor and revolutionary chaos.  The new communist system did away with traditional religion altogether, substituting a secular faith in human progress and historical destiny.  In theory, this new ideology replaced the old beliefs, but in reality combined with the old myths and reinforced them.

As the Soviet Union came into its own as a world power and the chief threat to America’s own emerging superpower role, the resulting Cold War often seemed to take on religious overtones.  Such discourse is not particular to the Cold War or to Russia; the United States has a long history of missionary zeal when it comes to promoting America’s role as a “city on a hill” and a model for the world.  Christian peace groups in the United States eagerly followed the activities of dissident Christian groups in the USSR; evangelical preachers railed against Soviet atheism from the pulpit and from television screens.  The fear behind McCarthyism and other red scares seemed to have as much to do with fear of godlessness as the fear that Soviet agents were about to overthrow the American government. 
            Even Soviet religious leaders who gained official sanction from their government were suspected in this country of being mainly interested in furthering secular Soviet foreign policy goals (Fletcher, 1973).  An early American evangelical emphasis on the holiness of private property also contributed to the perception of communist Russia as a political system created specifically to thwart the designs of the Almighty.  During détente, seen by many U.S. officials as an unacceptable cozying-up to the Soviet Union, Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which tied trade relations with the USSR to its human rights record.  That legislation applied not to human rights in general, but to Soviet treatment of the country’s Jewish minority.  Finally, as Cold War tensions heightened under Ronald Reagan, the religious rhetoric increased accordingly; Reagan famously called the USSR the “evil empire,” playing up that label especially for evangelical and conservative religious audiences.

All of this is in the past.  However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States does not seem to have gotten out of the habit of perceiving and discussing other nations―including Russia and not excluding ourselves―through a discursive framework infused with religious metaphor.  Once again, we have a conservative president not shy to label his enemies “evil.”  Russia and the United States have acclaimed each other as allies in an ongoing war against terrorism, specifically against Islamic extremism.  Finally, and most provocatively, the American president claims to have looked into the eyes of the Russian president and “gotten a sense of his soul” after their first meeting (“Bush, Putin,” 2001).  It seems the end of the Cold War has not caused religious rhetoric to cease in American discourse with and about Russia.  If religion and religious rhetoric indeed play more than a symbolic role in U.S.-Russian relations today, what effect might that have on this important relationship?

A cursory examination shows there are significant differences between American and Russian reactions to Bush’s religious rhetoric.  To see this, it is instructive to look at Bush’s infamous “sense of his soul” comment and the reaction it met with in both countries.  Bush stands by his comment unflinchingly, as is his style in matters great and small.  American commentators were almost unanimously embarrassed by Bush’s assessment of Putin, for two reasons: first, it smacked of an uncomfortable (for them) religiosity, and second, it seemed that the American president was being far too trusting and naïve in his relationship with this ex-KGB spy (Robinson, 2003).  Richard Lowry (2001), writing for the Washington Post, exhibited the first view, explaining Bush’s religious rhetoric as “a way of looking at and dealing with the world that [Bush] has partly inherited from his father, and that partly arises from his own evangelical Christianity and his background as an ex-drinker. It places personal over philosophical considerations, and bathes them in a warm wash of religious-sentimentality.”  Lowry’s article goes on to examine more closely Bush’s discourse on hearts and souls as a strictly religiously-inspired habit.  Others agree that this type of talk has religious roots, but emphasize that it also has real political value (Domke, 2004; Williams, 2002).

Others insist, most interestingly for the purposes of this essay, that Bush’s comments about his close relationship with Putin indicate that the two men really do understand each other on a personal, spiritual level.  Though the Russian evidence does not seem to support the idea that Bush and Putin enjoy any kind of religious camaraderie, there are similarities in their approach to leadership that are striking and that transcend short-term political objectives.  One commentator calls the two “political soul mates” and their administrations “eerily similar” (Feifer, 2005).  Another sees similarities in the two men’s formative experiences and value systems that help them understand each other well (Richter, 2004).

My research indicates that Vladimir Putin’s reaction to this particular comment, as well as the reaction of the Russian press, is most closely in line with the political, rather than the personal, interpretation: Putin emphasizes that the United States and Russia share similar political goals. While he does not echo Bush’s language about his soul, he does repeat quite often that their relations are “friendly,” that they trust one another, and that they have a good working relationship.  When asked about Bush’s comment, most often by the American press (who find it amusing), Putin does not give them the satisfaction of smirking at Bush along with them, nor does he reveal what it is, exactly, that Bush saw in his soul (Putin, 2001b; Putin, 2005).  If Putin does not sympathize with Bush’s pervasive religiosity, what makes him continue to take the American president seriously as a political colleague?

Method

To move away from Bush’s more sensational comments like the one described above, and to try to discern how the Russian public and President Putin react to his everyday religious rhetoric, I focus on other rhetorical devices that Bush uses extensively in his public speech and describe how they are received in Russia.  Time constraints prevented an in-depth study of the Russian press, so articles from one widely read, mainstream Russian newspaper, Izvestiia, will serve to stand in for public opinion.  Izvestiia is a long-running publication with a large distribution and readership, and is not known for any particular ideological slant.  Putin’s own public speech (press conferences, interviews, announcements) provides most of the data for this study.  Textual analysis of these sources can be expected to provide an accurate account of mainstream Russian thought about these topics, in the case of newspaper articles, and of the Russian presidential administration’s stance on the issues, in the case of Putin’s speeches and press conferences.  I have paid particular attention to joint press conferences and presentations by the two presidents, events at which Putin has the most opportunity to respond to anything that Bush says directly and publicly.  The context of key terms was more closely examined in order to determine whether each term was uttered casually or purposefully, in seriousness or in jest.

This study relies on David Domke’s recent book, referenced above, in two ways.  First, I have followed Domke’s approach of focusing on key presidential addresses and political events, taking the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as one important milestone.  I created my own list of events that were key to the development of the Russian-American relationship during Bush’s presidency and searched Russian archives for press and presidential reactions to Bush’s comments related to each event (see Table 1 for a list of events surveyed).  Second, and more importantly, I have adopted Domke’s classification of Bush’s speech as “politically fundamentalist,” and my search for Russian reactions to this type of rhetoric  focuses on specific themes that Domke identifies as characteristic of this president, namely (1) the use of binary distinctions between friend and enemy or good and evil; (2) an apocalyptic emphasis on some final battle to come at any minute, exhibited by a tendency to describe the “war on terror” as a millennialist struggle using military metaphors, and by a habit of framing that struggle in terms of the American “mission” in the world; and (3) an emphasis on “universal values,” especially freedom and liberty, in discussions of world politics.  To find instances of these themes in Putin’s public rhetoric, I ran Russian language searches for certain phrases (good and evil, war on terror, etc.) on Russian news search engines and on Putin’s official website, where his speeches and other public comments are collected.  Results of these searches are described below, organized by topic or key phrase and accompanied by my analysis of what might motivate Putin’s seeming indifference to each example of Bush’s fundamentalist speech.

Finally, in an attempt to partly explain the (surprisingly) blasé reaction to Bush’s religious rhetoric that I found in the Russian press, I will make a brief summary of the state of civil religion in Russia today and compare it to Bellah’s (1992) and Hughes’ (2004) work on American civil religion. Using this information, I will try to discern whether similarities between the two countries on these grounds might contribute to the acceptance of political fundamentalism on the part of their leaders that both populations seem more or less to embrace.

[Table 1.]

Binaries

Domke (2004) notes that Bush relies heavily on a binary worldview that divides people, ideas and nations into two camps with no gray area between them: good versus evil, friends and enemies, those with us and those against us.  A few unscientific searches for combinations of the terms “good and evil” and “America” or “Bush” in the news section of Russian-language search engine Yandex (http://www.yandex.ru) yielded few results, most citing Bush’s use of the phrases neutrally or somewhat ironically.

A search of President Putin’s official website (http://www.kremlin.ru) showed that the Russian president does not copy Bush’s phraseology when it comes to binary conceptions of current events, especially the “war on terror.”  “Evil” occurs almost never in Putin’s description of terrorism (in one interview he called terrorism “an evil,” but does not describe it as evil in and of itself; Putin, 2001b).  Putin reserves “evil” for describing Nazis and Nazi Germany, which were responsible for far more death and destruction on Russian territory than terrorists likely ever will be (Putin, 2005).  Putin frequently referred to those rather old-fashioned evildoers in 2005, especially at events commemorating the end of World War II.  While speaking less of good and evil in reference to current events, Putin does have his own cherished binary system, which shows up clearly in his own public speech.  Putin sees the main division in the world as one of civilization versus barbarism, and this is how he tends to explain the two sides in the war on terror (Bush, 2002a; Putin, 2001a, 2001b, 2002b, and 2004).[3]  Bush sometimes uses these terms, but not nearly as often as Putin.  The press finds that notation appealing; one Western commentator even takes on Putin’s terminology, urging the United States and Russia to team up to defend the “civilized world” (Worthington, 2004).

One of the clearest manifestations of Bush’s tendency to divide the world into good and evil, especially in the context of his war on terror, is his introduction of the phrase “axis of evil” shortly after the September 11 attacks.  In this case, Putin did feel compelled to respond, perhaps because some traditional Russian allies were on that list.  He told the Wall Street Journal and the BBC in separate interviews that he considered it incorrect, even unjustified, to make a “blacklist” of enemy nations.  Though Bush remains characteristically unabashed by the boldness of his nomenclature, Putin prefers to label those countries that seem determined to resist “civilization” an “arch of instability,” a much more geopolitically realist and less religiously evocative phrase (Putin, 2002a and 2003).

Millennialism

After binary constructions, the second general category of Bush’s fundamentalist rhetoric falls under the heading of millennialism.  Hughes (2004), Tuveson (1968) and others have identified a clear millennial streak in American political history; Domke (2004) finds the same tendency to be quite prevalent in Bush’s public speech.  Bush’s “war on terror” clearly fits into this pattern, starting with the name he invented to describe a new struggle against something that is, after all, an age-old phenomenon (disaffected zealots killing or threatening to kill innocent people in hopes of gaining attention and sympathy for their own political cause).  Calling the combination of rhetoric, legislation, diplomacy and military action that Bush has initiated in response to this abstract threat, a “war” immediately brings a vague struggle into very sharp relief by using language everyone can understand.  War, not coincidentally, is also the activity that will usher in the millennium and Christ’s reign on earth, according to the Book of Revelations.  Bush arguably considers it his “mission” to put a final “end to evil” (Frum, 2003) through this particular “war,” a metaphorically millennialist project.  Putin, not surprisingly, disagrees.

The first difference lies in how the two presidents describe the “war on terror.”  Putin’s preferred term, coined before the September 11 attacks, is “bor’ba s terrorom,” best translated as the “struggle with terror.”  The Russian bor’ba has a long history of use in bureaucratic jargon. In Soviet times it was used to describe every centralized political campaign, whether against alcoholism or illiteracy, or for a better harvest or faster industrialization.  The United States, of course, has waged “war” on poverty and drugs, but the Russian bor’ba has been used more commonly in Soviet and Russian politics than has the American “war.”  The familiarity of this term means it has less resonance.  The Russian word for war is usually reserved for actual, physical wars between countries, with the Cold War (called the Cold War in Russian, too) being a notable exception.  Furthermore, the word bor’ba carries no Biblical connotations.  When Putin has resorted to metaphor in the context of terrorism, he prefers to describe terrorism itself (he called it “the plague of the 21st century” in his announcement about the 9/11 attacks) rather than to wax poetic about Russia or America’s response to it (Putin, 2001).  With Putin, practicality wins out over religious metaphor and symbolism.

The same pattern applies when the two presidents discuss the obligation of their countries to fight terrorism.  As Domke (2004) points out, Bush’s rhetoric on this topic is also religious and millennialist: he talks of the American “mission” and “moment.”  Putin’s term is zadacha, which can be translated as “mission” or “assignment,” but has a military or academic, rather than a religious connotation (Putin, 2004).  When Bush uses the term mission, following in a long tradition of American foreign-policy activism, he seems to be referring to a mission from God at least as much as he is referring to a secular task designed to achieve a practical military objective.  Again, Putin’s rhetoric describes serious, but secular activities, whereas Bush’s language evokes images of divine calling.

The religious aspects of Bush’s personal confrontation with terrorism are also evident in his response to specific terrorist acts.  Here I will take as an example the events of early September 2004, in Beslan, Russia.  Terrorists seized an elementary school, holding teachers, students and parents hostage for days until the standoff ended in tragedy.  Bush marked the occasion by continuing an established tradition between the two presidents, calling Putin to express his condolences and solidarity with the Russian people in their struggle against terrorism.  Putin started this tradition on September 11, 2001, when he became the first leader of a foreign country to phone Bush; Bush refers to that phone call constantly when describing his friendship with Putin and its basis in compassion and sympathy (Robinson, 2003).

What Bush said privately to Putin remains known only to them. But in Bush’s public statements to the American press and to Russian diplomats about Beslan, he invoked religion unhesitatingly, saying that he was praying for the victims (Bush, 2004a) and asking God’s blessing for the people of Russia (Bush, 2004b).  Izvestiia did not report the news of the American president’s prayers, nor does Putin ever claim he or his countrymen are praying for Americans.  Instead, the newspaper emphasized what Putin would also demonstrate: firmness, unity and Russian-American cooperation in the war on (or struggle with) terrorism.

This is not to say that the Russian press has consistently rejected religious, even millennialist, rhetoric in the discussion of terrorism.  Izvestiia’s front page on September 12, 2001 featured the word “ARMAGEDDON” in huge bold type, pictures of Bush and of the first of the twin towers smoldering as the second airplane approached, and a boxed quote from the Book of Revelation (“And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. … And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth… And the great city was divided into three parts…” [Rev 16:16-19]) (Yusin, 2001).

Universal Values

The final religious metaphor that I will examine here has to do with Bush’s frequent mention of “universal values,” freedom and liberty chief among them.  The problem with calling these values universal, especially in a diplomatic setting, is that it presupposes an agreed-upon definition of terms, the absence of which is quite consistent in Bush’s case.  This lack of clarity is buttressed by his references to God (see his well-publicized “liberty is God’s gift to the world” comment, for example); after all, if a value comes straight from God, who needs to define it?  Bush’s talk of universal values and of bringing them to fruition around the world also has an apocalyptic and missionary flavor to it, making this another aspect of the millennialism discussed above.

In this regard, Bush’s habits are no different when the topic is Russia or the audience includes the Russian president.  He mentions “freedom” and “values” constantly (Bush, 2002a; Bush, 2002b).  He explained to a Russian audience that the Declaration of Independence refers to “a Creator, a universal Creator” (Bush, 2002a [emphasis added]).  Putin prefers to skip talk of freedom and put an emphasis on stability and security as unquestionable, self-defining, universal values, though the word “values” does not appear in his usual speech.

Even when off the topic of freedom and liberty, Bush likes to cite “universal values” when talking with or about Putin, often as a way of describing their friendship.  On his visit to St. Petersburg in May 2002 he said, “The thing that impressed me most about [Putin] and his wife was how much they loved their daughters.  That’s a universal value.  It’s an impressive value” (Bush, 200b).  Finally, the American president seems to have hit on a truly, perhaps biologically, universal value: love for one’s kin.  If Bush can only find similarities as mundane as that with the Russian president, it is a wonder Putin deigns to be friendly with Bush at all — yet he does.  The next section will attempt to shed some light on that remarkable fact.

Civil Religion in Russia?

One way to interpret Bush’s persistent use of religious rhetoric and metaphor is to link it to the long history of civil religion in America (Bellah, 1992; Hughes, 2004).  It would be reasonable to expect that the degree of acceptance of religious rhetoric that can be heard in the Russian press and in Putin’s own public speech may also have a connection with some kind of national religious culture in Russia.  Certainly, Russia has a history of concrete connections between politics, culture and religion, dating from the days of the “third Rome,” but finding a new footing today with religion’s new legitimacy in the post-Soviet era.[4]

Historically, ties between the state religion, Russian Orthodoxy, and Russian political power, in the person of the tsar, were closely intertwined.  As both church and state struggled to find their feet in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, some predicted that Russia would return to old autocratic traditions, with a monarch exercising absolute power derived from a shared authority with the Church (Sivertsev, 1995).  Though no formal autocracy has emerged in Russia yet (varying opinions about Putin’s intentions aside), questions about the role of politics in religion are far from settled.  Article 14.2 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation explicitly guarantees formal separation of church and state (Holmes, 1998), but as Putin has commented, there are indelible ties between the Russian state and Russian culture, as well as between Russian culture and the Russian Church.  Putin has cautioned against building what he calls “artificial barriers” between church and state in modern Russia, and says that culture and religion cannot be separated in the minds of the people (“Russia’s Putin,” 2004).

Putin himself does not seem particularly prone to Orthodox fervor, though he does appear regularly on television speaking with Church leaders, attending holiday services, and so on.  This pattern of behavior is common across Eastern Europe, where national churches enjoy a new legitimacy arising from their history as opponents of discredited Communist regimes and as uniquely national institutions at a time when so much political and cultural influence seems to be exerted on these states from the outside, particularly from the West (Holmes, 1998). The distrust and hostility that Western, particularly American, missionary groups often meet within Russia may be linked to this pattern, especially when those groups act as though they are there to fill a void in Russian culture (religious Russians feel they have a perfectly good church already, thank you very much).  Still, Russian religion today cannot help being influenced by foreign religiosity, not least that of the American president and of America in general.  American missionaries still come to Russia by the planeload, mostly from Protestant evangelical churches, despite mixed reviews and dubious success.  In the realm of popular culture, Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ reportedly reduced Russian theatergoers to tears of appreciation (Lewis, 2000; Korolyov, 2004).
The American president, not surprisingly, has not been silent on the question of religion in Russia.  Nor is American politics in general indifferent to religious issues in Russia; the legacy of Jackson-Vanik still lingers.  On his May 2002 visit to the country, Bush spoke at a synagogue in St. Petersburg and emphasized that it was important that religious tolerance flourish in Russia (Wines, 2002).  Two days earlier, speaking with a group of Russian university students, he had laid out his theory of the September 11 conspirators’ motivations: “These people hate freedom.  They hate multiethnic societies. They can't stand religion. And it's a threat to America, and this is a threat to Russia” (Deans, 2002; Bush, 2002b).  On the same visit, Bush made a point of meeting with religious leaders in Spaso House, the American ambassador’s residence in Moscow, which was itself a center for meetings of political and religious dissidents during Soviet times (Bush, 2002a).

Conclusions

Putin does not seem to mind Bush’s religious rhetoric; he never publicly decries it or mocks it.  At the same time, he does not propagate it in public, giving the impression that despite his restraint, he finds it a little bit silly.  Though Putin rarely speaks publicly about his American counterpart’s faith, he has hinted that it ought not be a matter for public consumption, telling Mike Wallace that “external displays of faith” do not matter (Putin, 2005).  There are three conceivable reasons for Putin’s reticence. The first occurs on the personal level: because Putin has his own absolutist view of the world, including his own binary systems (order versus instability, civilization versus barbarism), he may find Bush’s particular set of binaries not too awkward to grasp.  Secondly, on the level of domestic politics and culture, religious and nationalistic currents are linked strongly enough in Russia that it would be impolitic for the Russian president to dismiss the same phenomenon in the United States.  Orthodoxy is making gains in Russian politics and political culture today, building on the history of the church’s political involvement in that country.  Finally, not discussed here, reasons exist on the international level.  From a simple political point of view, Putin recognizes mutual interests with Bush, and he is not about to let some funny language stand in the way of the cooperation they might achieve.

This means that Bush’s language alone so far has not undermined the personal and political relationship between himself and Putin, and that a host of personal, domestic, and international factors determine how Putin reacts to – or ignores – his American counterpart’s speech habits.  No matter how much Putin ignores Bush’s political fundamentalism, though, neither he nor any other world leader can escape it for long.  Any change for the worse in the Russian or the international political situation could lead the Russian president to reevaluate his friend George’s vocabulary and reevaluate their short history of cooperation in the process.

References

Bordeaux, M. (Ed.). (1995). The Politics of religion in Russia and the new states of Eurasia.  London: M. E. Sharpe.

Bellah, R. N. (1992). The broken covenant: American civil religion in a time of trial (2nd ed.).  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bush, G. W. (2002a, May).  Remarks by the President to community and religious leaders.  Moscow, May 24, 2002.  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www.whitehouse.gov/

Bush, G.W. (2002b, May).  President Bush, President Putin discuss free market economy.  St. Petersburg, May 25, 2002.  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www.whitehouse.gov/ 

Bush, G.W. (2004a, September).  Remarks by the President and Mrs. Bush at West Allis, Wisconsin Rally.  West Allis, September 3, 2004.  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www .whitehouse.gov/

Bush, G.W. (2004b, September).  President condemns terrorism in Russia.  Washington, D.C., September 12, 2004.  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www.whitehouse.gov/

Bush, Putin News Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 16, 2001. (2001, June). Retrieved May 21, 2005, from http://archives.cnn.com/

Deans, B. (2002, May 26). Bush in Russia: Presidents turn to high culture. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, p. 8A.

Domke, D. (2004). God willing?  Political fundamentalism in the White House, the “war on terror,” and the echoing press.  Ann Arbor: Pluto Press.

Feifer, G. (2005). Summit soul mates in Slovakia. Retrieved May 21, 2005, from Johnson’s Russia List archives: http://www.cdi.org/

Fletcher, W. C. (1973). Religion and Soviet foreign policy, 1945-1970.  London: Oxford University Press.

Frum, D. & Perle, R. (2003). An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. New York: Random House.

Holmes, S. (1998). Church and state in Eastern Europe: Introduction [Electronic version]. East European Constitutional Review, 7(2) [n.p.].

Hughes, R. T. (2004). Myths America lives by.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Inozemstev, P. (2004, September 3). Bush calls Putin and expresses support. [In Russian.]  Izvestiia, p. 2.

Korolyov, A. (2004, April 20). Russia weeps watching Mel Gibson’s Christ film. Retrieved May 21, 2005, from Johnson’s Russia List archives: http://www.cdi.org/

Lewis, D. C. (2000). After atheism: Religion and ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia.  New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Lowry, R. (2001, July 1). It’s not personal, Mr. Bush. The Washington Post, p. B1.

Putin, V. (2001a, September).  Announcement about acts of terrorism in the US.  Moscow, September 11, 2001.  [In Russian.]  Retrieved May 21, 2005, from http://www.kremlin.ru/

Putin, V. (2001b, November).  Interview with American television station ABC.  Moscow, November 5, 2001.  [In Russian.]  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www.kremlin.ru/text/appears/2001/11/28692.shtml

Putin, V. (2002a, February).  Interview with Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2002.  [In Russian.]  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www.kremlin.ru/text/appears/2002/02/28800.shtml

Putin, V. (2002b, May).  Address and questions and answers at a meeting with US President George Bush and students of St. Petersburg State University. Saint Petersburg, May 25, 2002.  [In Russian].  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www.kremlin.ru/

Putin, V. (2003, June).  Interview with BBC, June 22, 2003.  [In Russian.]  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www.kremlin.ru/

Putin, V. (2004, September).  Answers to questions at a press conference at the end of a meeting
of CIS heads of government.  Astana, September 16, 2004.  [In Russian.]  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://www.kremlin.ru/

Putin, V. (2005, May).  Interview to CBS anchor Mike Wallace.  May 9, 2005. [In English.]  Retrieved May 20, 2005 from http://president.kremlin.ru/

Richter, J. (2004).  A sense of his soul: The relation between Presidents Putin and Bush.  Retrieved April 22, 2005, from The Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS) website: http://www.csis.org/

Robinson, O. (2003, November 7). Road to modernization. Retrieved May 21, 2005, from http://www.salzburgseminar.org/

Russia’s Putin stresses church-state separation on Orthodox Christmas. (2004, January 7). Retrieved June 3, 2005 from ISI Emerging Markets Russian News Search: http://www.securities.com

Sivertsev, M. (1995). Civil society and religion in traditional political culture: The case of Russia. In Bordeaux, M. (Ed.), The Politics of Religion in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (pp. 75-94). London: M. E. Sharpe.

Tuveson, E. L. (1968). Redeemer nation: The idea of America’s millennial role. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wines, M. (2002). Visiting synagogue, Bush praises Russian religious tolerance. The New York Times (Late Edition), p. A4.

Williams, M. (2001, July 5). The heart-full dodger: President Bush may be sincere when he gushes, but it does help him avoid real answers. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,  p. A15.

Worthington, P. (2004, September 7). Plea for alliance: Peter Worthington believes Russia, U.S. must join forces against threat to civilization.  Toronto Sun, p. 29.

Yusin, M. (2001, September 12). Armageddon. [In Russian.]  Izvestiia, p. 1.

---