Orthodox activists accused the Central Bank of extremism over the new 1,000 rubles

Activists of the “Forty Forties” movement demanded that the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Investigative Committee conduct an inspection of the Bank of Russia in connection with the issue of a new banknote with a face value of 1,000 rubles. The reason was that in the design of the bill, the emphasis, according to activists, was “placed on Muslim symbols while simultaneously disparaging the symbols of Russian statehood and the Orthodox faith.”

Previously, the clergyman of the Russian Orthodox Church Pavel Ostrovsky in his blog statedthat the banknote depicts an Orthodox church without a cross, and next to it there is a “minaret” with a crescent. A similar position was expressed by the ultra-patriotic publication Readovka, which described the design of the banknote as “the destruction of Russian meanings.”

In fact, the designers of the banknote depicted a former temple, part of the ensemble of the Kazan Kremlin, which now belongs to the museum and on which the cross has been missing since the advent of Soviet power at the beginning of the last century. After the revolution, the said Palace Church was used as a warehouse and for other needs; the building was not transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church after the collapse of the USSR and is not a functioning church.

However, activists were not convinced by the historical argument; they saw the banknote as an insult to statehood. Thus, they write that “the same applies to the Nikolskaya Tower of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin,” the top of which “is not crowned with either a cross or a double-headed eagle.” Activists believe that there was “an intention by the authors of the sketch of the banknote to humiliate the symbols of Orthodoxy and Russian statehood in relation to the symbols of Islam.”

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