Role of Religion Expands in Russia

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 
On Jan. 28 some 2,000 Russians rallied in St. Petersburg to protest plans by the city authorities to give a landmark cathedral back to the Russian Orthodox Church, amid an increasingly passionate debate over the relationship between the church and state.

St. Isaac’s Cathedral dates back to 1818, when construction began on the orders of Tsar Alexander I. It took 40 years to construct.

It has been under state control since 1931, a time when religion was under increasing attack by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Communists stripped it of its religious trappings and installed an anti-religion museum inside.

“We won’t give St. Isaac’s to the church. We want to save it as a museum,” Boris Vishnevsky, a local lawmaker, told the protesters. But he will probably lose the battle.

It’s indicative of the increasingly significant role of the church in Russian life, especially under President Vladimir Putin. In cultural and social affairs he has collaborated closely with the Church, appealing to traditional values to help tighten his grip on society.

There are some 150 million adherents to Russian Orthodoxy estimated worldwide, about half of the 300 million estimated adherents of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Russians have been Orthodox Christians for more than a millennium.

According to some accounts, in 988 Prince Vladimir of Kievan Russia, a forerunner of today’s state, was baptised. He was apparently impressed by the dazzling worship his ambassadors described seeing in the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.

As the world’s largest Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate boasts more than 30,000 parishes, but only about half of them are based in the Russian Federation itself.

And those beyond the country’s borders are part of Putin’s “soft power,” as they adhere to the teachings of Moscow and are opposed to Western liberalism.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the focus was at first on the reform or destruction of the old system, rather than on any clear vision of what Russia should become.

Russia is “an idea-centric country,” asserts Arkady Ostrovsky, a Russian-born journalist who has spent fifteen years reporting from Moscow, first for the Financial Times and then for the Economist.

His book The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War traces the battles over the country’s history. “The liberals and their hard-line opponents fought over the past as if they were fighting for natural resources,” he writes.

And after a quarter century, Russians are still confronting their cultural and religious future, and struggling to define an emerging “Russian idea.”

Hence the return to religion, welcomed by Putin as part of a broader push by the Kremlin to assert itself as both the legitimate heir to and master of “Holy Russia,” a state great and strong.

“The church has become an instrument of the Russian state. It is used to extend and legitimize the interests of the Kremlin,” according to Sergei Chapnin, who is the former editor of the official journal of the Moscow Patriarchate.

In December he was dismissed for criticizing the Patriarchate’s policies and calling it “a church of empire.”

The Orthodox “are now Russian patriots first, and everything else second,” Chapnin stated in a Jan. 5 interview with Rosbalt, a St. Petersburg-based news agency. He sees a “new hybrid religion,” a mix of Orthodox traditions, Soviet nostalgia, and “the dream for a strong empire,” emerging.

“This fusion leads to the formation of a post-Soviet civil religion, which exploits Orthodox tradition but in fact is not Orthodoxy.”

Chapnin places much of the blame on Patriarch Kirill, who became head of the church eight years ago. He endorsed Putin’s election in 2012, stating his presidency was like “a miracle of God.”

Speaking to the State Duma, Russia’s parliament, on Jan. 26, Kirill called on Russians “not to forget about our common national hero, Prince Vladimir, equal to the apostles, whose spiritual children we all remain, no matter what happens on the international scene.”

The patriarch’s voice “resonates across the public space,” Chapnin writes, while “all others are mostly silent, not daring to go beyond brief comments.”