In April this year, a sombre looking Vladimir Putin attended a midnight Orthodox Easter Service in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral. Holding a lit red candle, the Russian President crossed himself several times during the ceremony, known as the Divine Liturgy. When Father Kirill declared ‘Christ has risen’, Putin duly responded with the congregation: ‘Truly he is risen’.
It was a year after the brutal invasion of Ukraine, but the Russian leader and Father Kirill showed no remorse or compassion for the suffering caused by the war. In fact, Putin and the Kremlin has exploited the support of the Orthodox Church in an attempt to give his actions a spurious philosophical and cultural ‘justification’.
Long before the war, Russian Orthodox priests would call during prayers for the Kremlin to restore ‘Holy Rus’ – the name for the cradle of the ancient Russian empire founded centuries before in Kiev which united Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. They articulated Putin’s aspirations to revive Russia’s ‘rightful place’ and destiny as the world’s one true power.
It is a measure of the power of Russian Orthodoxy that Putin regards the Church as an integral tenet of his philosophy and the governance of the state (the others being autocracy and nationalism).
For the Kremlin, Orthodox priests are valued as a counterpoint to western liberal values. They perform a crucial cultural role in preaching Putin’s authoritarian ideology which contrasts with Western tolerance, transparency, and freedom. After all, Russian Orthodoxy regards itself as the one true faith with all other religions deemed as heresy. Individual rights must be subordinate to the state and traditional values and western behaviour like homosexuality is a sin.
The Orthodox defence of ‘family values’ against the ‘decadent’ West has been a powerful weapon in Putin’s nationalist xenophobic foreign policy. It provides an ideological rationale for the drive to revive the Russian empire that resonates with ordinary Russians left behind by the inequalities of globalisation and the corruption of the Oligarchs.
Despite spending most of their career defending the atheist Soviet state, former KGB officers like Putin immediately embraced Orthodoxy when entering the Kremlin. Next to the FSB (successor to the KGB) building in Lubyanka Square stands the 17th century church of the Holy Wisdom restored in 2001 with zealous help from the FSB. Inside, freshly painted icons gleam with gold funded by the Kremlin. During one service Father Alexander proclaimed: ‘Thank God there is the FSB. All power is from God and so is theirs’. In response Russian spies rationalised their covert operations as sanctioned by God’s will.
Despite his father being a Communist party member who disapproved of religion, Putin has been a fervent disciple of the Orthodox Church since childhood. He was secretly baptised by his mother in their communal Leningrad apartment. But his father never knew. In the early 1990s, while deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin’s mother gave him his baptismal cross so he could have it blessed it at Jesus’s tomb during a visit to Israel. Later, during a meeting with George W. Bush in 2001, he impressed the US President with the story of how he had saved his cross from a fire that destroyed his dacha. ‘I looked the man in the eye’, said Bush at the time. ‘I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. I was able to get a sense of his soul’.
As President, Putin was soon touring Orthodox churches. He brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh from monasteries during visits to Ukraine. But some priests believed this tour of the holy relics was a smokescreen and cover for a reconnaissance intelligence mission in preparation for future operations in Ukraine. ‘The gifts were brought to the Crimea to prepare the ground and collect intelligence’, claimed Valery Otstavnykh, who resigned from the Church because he believed it was used as an arm of the Kremlin.
When Patriarch Kirill was elected in 2009 and enthroned during liturgy at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, it was noticeable that Putin attended. The next day the Grand Kremlin Palace held a reception for the Bishops where Kirill advocated a close and complementary relationship between church and state as embodied in the Byzantine empire.
This was not just a philosophical alliance. Kirill did not disguise his political allegiances. In 2012, during a meeting of religious leaders in Moscow, he contrasted the economic and social chaos of the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin with Putin’s rule during the 2000s. ‘What were the 2000s then’, he declared. ‘Through a miracle of God and with the active participation of Russia’s leadership, we managed to exit this horrible, systematic crisis’. He then likened anti-government protesters to ‘ear piercing shrieks’ who represented a minority of the people.
The Patriarch has since backed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and referred to opponents of the war as ‘evil forces… we must not allow dark and hostile external forces to laugh at us’.
For the priests, Putin may have been a ruthless former KGB officer for 16 years when atheism was the prevailing orthodoxy. But now he was defending traditional Christian values against the secular West. ‘Most of this newfound religious zeal was in fact no more than a cover’, stated Catherine Belton in her groundbreaking book Putin’s People. ‘Inside Russia, the joining of Church and State was just another element of the erosion of democracy; the swerve to Orthodoxy by the ruling elite enabled them to crack down further on anyone operating outside their system’. She quoted the widow of Putin’s former Anatoly Sobchak who said: ‘I call them the Orthodox Taliban. It is a return to the Middle Ages. They are using religion to undermine the constitution, and the rights of Russian citizens’.
However, for Putin the Orthodox church provides a powerful unifying creed that can be traced back hundreds of years to Russia’s imperialist past and speaks to the sacrifices and suffering of the people. This is embodied in a communal ascetic lifestyle of the East in contrast to the individualism of the western Enlightenment. For Putin, promoting the mystical belief that Russia is the Third Rome, the next ruling empire of the earth, has been part of his appeal to the masses.
In Putin’s People, the author describes how the President and Sergei Pugachev, a former Oligarch friend, attended a service on Forgiveness Sunday, the last Sunday before Orthodox Lent. Pugachev told Putin he should prostrate himself in front of the priest, as was the custom, and ask for forgiveness. ‘Why should I?’, he replied in astonishment. ‘I am the President of Russia. Why should I ask for forgiveness?’
This article previously appeared in New Directions, published by Forward in Faith.
Comments