Last month, one of our current students, Oliver Fisk, had a long-read article published in Vlast.kz, exploring one priest’s mission to build an Eastern Orthodox church in Kazakhstan free from the Kremlin’s influence.

Oliver is currently doing his internship at Vlast.kz, one of Kazakhstan’s only independent news sources. Vlast’s English language-service is run by Dr. Paolo Sorbello, himself a graduate of an earlier iteration of CEERES and a PhD from the UofG — which Oliver says was a happy coincidence they discovered when they met.

You can read the full article at the following link: Father Iakov and Eastern Orthodoxy in Kazakhstan Amid the War in Ukraine

On his internship experience, Oliver said:

“I started working with Vlast.kz during the Autumn, and now I’m taking advantage of the greater freedom afforded during the Spring semester of the second year of the CEERES program to continue my internship as I work on my thesis. My thesis focuses on identity narratives towards Central Asia present in Russian opposition-affiliated media, so it’s a way of combining my language skills, professional experience, and academic interests all into one topic.

Vlast has Kazakh- and Russian-language teams, and it’s been a really wonderful experience for me to spend time working together with them in a newsroom. There aren’t many places these days where one can work in a junior foreign correspondent-type position, so I feel really grateful for the opportunity, especially as it’s allowed me to improve my Russian to a more professional level.

For those that don’t know, the Russian Orthodox Church is the largest Orthodox church in the world, with an estimated 3.2 million believers in Kazakhstan alone. Its leader, Patriarch Kirill, is notoriously close to the Kremlin, and has been a long-time ally and supporter of Vladimir Putin.

Enter Father Iakov, a Russian-speaking Kazakhstani citizen, who spent years working in the Russian Orthodox Church as a priest until he decided in Spring 2022 to speak out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Church’s subsequent support for the war.”