You must understand that it is the Borgonzian's proud tribal culture that requires him to strenuously object when you punch him in the nose and steal his stuff
As for the rest of Russia, if the buzz about Putin's mysterious absence doesn't make it on the television screen, it didn't happen: for 90 percent of the Russian population, TV is the main source of news. And, even if they knew, for a majority of Russians this event would be like most other political events--that is, above their pay grade. When it comes to the intricacies of politics, the prevailing attitude outside Moscow's liberal circles is a semi-religious one, and it comes from Byzantine culture. Just as the Eucharist is prepared behind the wall of icons that separates the altar from the eyes of the laity, so it is with political maneuvers: We are but mere mortals, unable to understand such mysteries. Let the professionals handle it.The author, Julia Ioffe, is billed as "a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine" who was, before that, "the Moscow correspondent for Foreign Policy and The New Yorker." And yet despite this evidence of real expertise, one has to wonder. Let's assume that it's correct to say that the typical Russian response to evidence of secret high-level political manuevering is to shrug it off as something one can't affect. Is this, in fact, so specifically a Russian response that it needs to be explained as a result of "Byzantine culture," with specific reference to the Orthodox form of the Mass? Or is it, in fact, an attitude taken by people all over the world toward high-level political events over which they feel they have no control?
I'm betting that it's the second, and that this digression in what looks like an otherwise unexceptionable piece is a good example of a brain virus that chronically affects American writing about the rest of the world: the portrayal of perfectly normal behavior by foreigners as evidence of their irreducible exoticism. (Probably not coincidentally, an irreducible exoticism that requires complex explanations by credentialed experts.)
(For that matter, as Teresa remarked when I showed her the passage in question, if the Orthodox Mass really had such power to make people politically passive, recent events in Greece would have gone rather differently.)
This kind of thing has been well-parodied over the last couple of years in Slate's "If It Happened There" series, in which current US events are described with the tone and tropes frequently used by US media to describe scary foreigners. ("EAST RUTHERFORD, United States--This Sunday, the eyes of millions of Americans will turn to a fetid marsh in the industrial hinterlands of New York City for the country's most important sporting event--and, some would say, the key to understanding its proud but violent culture.") But as usual, it was the Onion that truly nailed it, all the way back in 2007, with "Study: Iraqis May Experience Sadness When Friends, Relatives Die."