Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church

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PUTIN AND THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX

CHURCH

Transcript for Rear Vision 21 October 2012

Elizabeth Jackson, Correspondents Report

(archival): More than a week after their

sentence there are still few firm answers as to

where the jailed members of the Russian punk

group Pussy Riot will be serving their sentences.

Tim Palmer, AM (archival): Since three

members of the band were sentenced to prison

for a performance at an Orthodox cathedral, the

debate over the church’s political ties to the

Kremlin has spilled into the open.

Journalist (archival): Sergei Baranov pulls nopunches: the church, he says, is filled with

hypocrites and liars and the Pussy Riot verdict

proves the church leadership and the Kremlin

are now one and the same.

Annabelle Quince: In February this year, five

members of the Pussy Riot punk group stagedan illegal performance in the Cathedral of

Christ the Saviour, one of the most significant

Russian Orthodox churches in Moscow. The

performance lasted only 40 seconds before it

was stopped by church security, and the whole

incident might have been forgotten but for the

fact that three of the group were later arrested



and charged with hooliganism. The arrest and

the court case that followed caught the attention

of the international media and questions started

to be asked about the close relationship betweenthe Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian

state.

Hello, I’m Annabelle Quince and this is Rear

Vision on RN and via the web. In today’s

program, we take a look at the history of the

Russian Orthodox Church and its relationship

with the Russian state.

Orthodox Christianity is not home-grown in

Russia and it didn’t arrive via missionaries, as

Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and

Eastern European politics at the University of

Kent, explains.

Richard Sakwa: In the tenth century the

Russian — well, the Kievan — prince put forward

what is effectively a tender. And so four major

religions put in a bid to become the national

religion of what was the Kievan principality.First of all the Moslems turned up and made

their pitch, but then when they towards the end

said that you’re not allowed to drink alcohol in

Islam, then clearly they said, ‘That’s no good for

us.’ And the next one was Jewish and that also

made a very strong pitch and that wasn’t

accepted because of pork eating and other



issues. And in the end a representative from

Constantinople made their pitch and that

seemed to suit everything. So Russia effectively

became a Christian country because of thedecision of the Kievan principality and officially

the date is 988.

Annabelle Quince: It’s an interesting way for a

religion to come to a country, because often it

comes through missionaries or through…

literally from the bottom up. And in Russia it

was really from the top down. And I’m

wondering what impact that had on the

relationship between the Russian Orthodox

Church as it developed.

Richard Sakwa: It’s a complicated question,

because on the one side you’re absolutely right:

it was from the top down, it was from the

monarch, and that has remained an issue to this

day, that orthodoxy — in other words, the form

of Christianity practised in Byzantium, the

eastern version or the Orthodox version — has a

different vision of the temporal and secular. I’mnot simply going to say it’s more dominated by

kings and monarchs because it’s more

complicated than that; however, it doesn’t have

that separation which was typical of the west,

which took the form of conflict between popes

and monarchs, which in Britain led to theReformation in the sixteenth century.



Russia and the eastern world have a different

model. Now, the usual word to describe it is

‘symphonia’, the symphonia of political and

religious power. And this is still a powerful idea;however, too often it has led to the dominance of

the kings of the temporal powers, and this

certainly was the case under the Peter the Great,

who abolished the Russian patriarch,

established a synod, established almost,

effectively, a Ministry for Religion. The churchthen becomes much more of a subordinate body.

Irina Papkova: Since about 1725 the Russian

Orthodox Church functioned as a department of

state, of the Russian state.

Annabelle Quince: Irina Papkova is a fellow at

Georgetown University and the author of The

Orthodox Church and Russian Politics .

Irina Papkova: So essentially it was run by a

collegial body known as the Holy Synod, which

was supposed to be made up of… just of

bishops, but it also reported to a lay minister ofstate called the procurator, who was a layman;

he was appointed directly by the emperor. So

for about 200 years or so the Russian Orthodox

Church was run by the Russian state.

Annabelle Quince: This, however, began to

change at the beginning of the twentieth



century, as Dr Michael Bourdeaux, canon and

founder of the Keston College in England

explains.

Michael Bourdeaux: Some cracks began to

appear in 1905, which was the year of what’s

called ‘the first revolution’, because there were

some priests in the Orthodox Church who began

to see that the situation of the close relationship

between church and state was corrupt, and they

began to object and indeed took part in

demonstrations in that first revolution. So by

the time of 1917, the big revolution, the

Orthodox Church was playing a role, actually,

for social reform — not universally, but there

were individual members of the Orthodox

Church who were quite openly calling for achange.

And of course that change came about in 1917,

first of all with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas

II in March ‘17 and then the proper revolution

in October of that year, the arrival of Lenin, the

overthrow of all the past, and the revolutionarymode, with the Bolsheviks playing a huge role

and trying to root out everything connected with

the past. That included not only the relics of

loyalty to the tsar but loyalty to the Orthodox

Church as well.



Annabelle Quince: And explain that; explain

what happens to the church, its properties and

its influence post-1917.

Michael Bourdeaux: Yes, it didn’t take Lenin

long to get to grips with the Orthodox Church.

He was brought up as an atheist and hated

everything to do with religion. And it’s really

significant that the… one of the very first

decrees that he passed after he was ensconced as

the Bolshevik leader was to pass a law calling

for the separation of church and state.

Well, in theory that sounds fine. What actually

happened in practice was that the state

confiscated all church goods. It took over all

church property and abolished church schools.

The power of the church was broken at one

stroke by that new law as early as January 1918,

just a couple of months after the revolution. And

that inaugurated the first great purge against

the church, and by halfway through 1918 the

church was rocking back on its heels, with the

Bolsheviks not only taking over church propertybut destroying it, setting up the first prison

camp in the island monastery of Solovki in the

north of Russia — it was a time of devastation for

the church.

After that Stalin came into power and he

carried on the persecution in the late 1920s. And



in 1927 the church was trying to make some sort

of compromise with the regime, which was a

very important moment in the history we’re

talking about.

(Chimes)

Journalist (archival): This wooded area of

Butovo, barely an hour’s drive from the centre

of Moscow, conceals a part of Russia’s history

many would rather forget. Around me areovergrown mass graves, holding the remains of

perhaps 70,000 people who died in the Stalin

era. Among them are bishops, priests, ordinary

church workers, who were killed for their faith.

Richard Sakwa: I think the figure is that under

the Bolsheviks over 200,000 priests, bishops andothers were killed — not just taken to camps, of

course the figure would be higher — but at least

200,000 killed, the church ultimately completely

subordinated to the state.

Annabelle Quince: So you mentioned there was

some kind of approach by the church in 1927 tofind some sort of accommodation with the

communist state. Can you explain what that

was?

Michael Bourdeaux: Yes. The acting head of the

church after the death of Patriarch Tikhon was

Metropolitan Sergius. And he was dragged in by



the secret police, interrogated, almost certainly

tortured in prison. And on the 29th of June 1927

he signed a declaration — he may or may not

have written it himself — but it was published inhis name. I’ll read you an extract from it,

because it’s very revealing.

He said, or is purported to have said:

Let us publicly express our gratitude to the

Soviet government for the interest it’s showingin all the religious needs of the Orthodox people.

We want to be Orthodox believers and at the

same time to recognise the Soviet Union as our

fatherland, whose joys and successes are our

joys and successes, and whose setbacks are our

setbacks. Every attack directed against the

Soviet Union is resented by us as being directed

against ourselves.

That statement became the paradigm, the

model, for church-state relations from 1927.

And you could honestly say, bringing it forward

to 2012, that it’s the model even for this veryday.

Annabelle Quince: Despite the agreement in

1927, the persecution of the Russian Orthodox

Church continued throughout the Soviet period.

Yet the church did survive. But according to

Julie Fedor, historian and the author of Russia



and the Cul t of State Secur i ty , the church paid a

high price for that survival.

Julie Fedor: The Orthodox Church really wascrippled by the kind of compromises that it

made in order to win the right to survive. The

Moscow patriarchate in its current form is

actually really very much a creation of Stalin,

who re-established this office in 1943. After

Hitler had invaded in 1941, Stalin famously

moved towards a position of greater tolerance

towards the church in an effort to use it as a

means of boosting sort of patriotic moods and

the Soviet war effort.

And he famously met with church hierarchs in

1943 and offered them various concessions, and

one of which was the right to re-establish the

office of the patriarch, which had been

abolished in the 1920s. And in the later Soviet

period you have a situation in which the

Orthodox Church was very heavily infiltrated

by the KGB — and this is especially the case

when it comes to the upper levels of thechurch — to the point where by 1991 one sort of

non-conformist priest said that it was no longer

possible actually to say where the church began

and where the KGB ended. This is one aspect of

its history that the church has not really

managed to come to terms with in the post-Soviet period — if you like, one of the ongoing



blank spots in the Soviet history of church-state

relations.

And this in fact is something that is one of thethings that the Pussy Riot performance was

really trying to draw attention to, and arguably

one of the reasons why the response to it has

been so harsh on the part of both the Orthodox

Church and the Russian government, because

they were trying to really highlight the extent to

which the church had been compromised by the

fact that lots… so many priests were actually

forced to collaborate with the KGB, and also by

virtue of its alliance with Putin, who is of course

a former KGB officer.

Richard Sakwa: On the one side, the leading

hierarchy was penetrated deeply by the secret

police; on the other, the church did actually then

work with the Soviet authorities on their own

public campaigns, what nowadays would be

called ‘soft power’— the interdenominational

church councils, for example, would always

have a Russian bishop — and they were pursuingthe state tasks for peace and in these various

Soviet councils abroad. So you’d have the

church and state, the official hierarchy, work

together.

However, there were some priests who then led

what you could call a revivalist movement from



below. This is an attempt to — while not

challenging the political system openly, because

it certainly wouldn’t work that way— to

establish a certain type of independentspirituality and a different view of society. They

were enormously attacked, so it’s an awful

legacy.

Annabelle Quince: You’re with Rear Vision on

RN and downloadable via the internet. I’m

Annabelle Quince and today we’re tracing the

relationship between the Russian Orthodox

Church and the Russian state.

By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union was

beginning to crumble, and by the beginning of

1992 it was gone.

Journalist (archival): With the passing of 1991

the Soviet Union has officially ceased to exist.

(Chimes)

Journalist (archival): There they are the first

chimes of 1992 in what was the Soviet Union andis now, as we all know, the new commonwealth

of independent states.

Annabelle Quince: So what happens when the

Soviet Union collapses?

Michael Bourdeaux: Ah, now that’s a very, veryinteresting story. The churches began reviving



in the 1970s and the ‘80s, not only the Orthodox

Church but the Protestant Churches, the Baptist

Church, the Catholic Church. Opposition

against communism began emerging withinchurch circles, in some other circles as well —

democratic circles outside the church. But the

church, shall we say believers in general, of

different denominations, hugely contributed to

the moral collapse followed by the physical

collapse of the Soviet Union.

And Mikhail Gorbachev encouraged this. He

didn’t encourage the collapse of the Soviet

Union of course; he wanted to strengthen it by

making it more democratic, which was

impossible. What Gorbachev did was to

encourage the church institutions to play apositive role in the wellbeing of Soviet society.

He allowed them to start welfare work and so

on, and the churches to reopen again, and

prisoners to be released. It was a time of great

turbulence, as we all know, the last few years

leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and

eventually the Soviet regime collapsed in a heap

of ignominy and that was more or less the end of

Gorbachev.

But from that moment, about 1988, while

Gorbachev was still in full power, he said that

the church, the Orthodox Church, could domore or less what it liked. And in that year,



1988, it celebrated 1000 years since the baptism

of Prince Vladimir, which led to the conversion

of Russia to Christianity. The celebration was

huge. And from 1988 onwards the OrthodoxChurch was in the ascendancy again and it’s

never looked backwards from that day to this.

Annabelle Quince: The new Russian

constitution, which came into effect in 1993,

established Russia as a secular state.

Richard Sakwa: The Russian constitution of

December 1993 makes it absolutely clear about

the separation of church and state. So Russia is

a secular state, and this is very important and

this is what a lot of the battles go on about

today, because Russia is a classical liberal… I

mean, we’re not talking about how it works in

practice, but in formal, constitutional terms

there is this separation of church and state. At

the same time, in the 1990s, huge rebirth of…

rebuilding of churches, a lot of activities, even

semi-state supported in Moscow. For example,

Mayor Lushkov in the 1990s got contributionsfrom business leaders to rebuild the Church of

Christ the Saviour; this is that great church just

opposite the Kremlin, which was built to

celebrate the victory of another invader, of

Napoleon in 1812.

(Music)



Journalist (archival): One thing you notice when

you go into just about any church today is the

amount of restoration work that’s going on.

There are few that don’t have scaffolding upsomewhere. Icons are being rehung and again

revered, gilded panels and doors restored,

golden domes rebuilt. Babushkas and bankers

once again share in the resplendent, unhasty

rituals of Orthodox worship.

Annabelle Quince: Explain why the post-Soviet

Yeltsin government supported the return of

properties back to the Russian Orthodox

Church.

Irina Papkova: Well, there’s two versions of

this, one of which is that it was kind of a

utilitarian move and that Yeltsin saw in the

church a potential supporter of the ongoing

reforms, which of course were causing lots of

social problems for the people of the Russian

Federation, because of course the reforms were

such that, let’s say, in the… by 1993 or ‘94

about half of the Russian population had beenplunged into a state of poverty compared to

where they had been before the reforms started.

So one explanation was that Yeltsin wanted to

use the church as a kind of institution that

would help mitigate the problems between the

state and the population that arose because ofthese reform problems.



But the other reason, which I actually think has

some credibility to it, is that Yeltsin did actually

envision the new Russia as being one that totally

rejected the old Soviet regime and that sort oflooked back more to the pre-Soviet Russian

state as a model. And for him part of rejecting

the Soviet model meant rejecting the atheist

policies and embracing the church as a serious

part of Russian identity. There was some

speculation that he actually chose to strengthenthe church because he probably felt bad about

the fact that the Soviet regime had done

everything it could to destroy it. And so in a

form of… I wouldn’t go as far as to say its

repentance, but something like it, Yeltsin was

interested in supporting the church in the post-

Soviet period.

Journalist (archival): When the communists fell,

religions of every kind mushroomed — but not

for long. Though Russia adopted a policy of

religious freedom, all denominations have

bowed to the Orthodox Church backed by the

power of the state.

Irina Papkova: The Religious Freedom Law of

1990 had not just given full freedom to the

Russian Orthodox Church; it also gave religious

freedom to every other religious organisation on

Russian territory in a way that wasunprecedented not just in Russia but I would





Irina Papkova: By 1997 the Russian media was

full of stories of new missionary groups coming

in and behaving in ways that was sort of

perceived as anti-social. So on the one handthere was a social basis for the Russian

government to look and say, ‘Hey, this is

becoming a little bit too much. We should curb

it.’ And on the other hand, the Russian church

itself obviously felt the competition, so they

lobbied the Russian state for a law that wouldlimit missionary activity.

And in 1997 Yeltsin had just come off a very

contentious election where he almost lost to the

communists. And one of the things he did during

the election was that he asked the Russian

Orthodox Church to support him and to call onRussians to vote for Yeltsin and parties that

supported him. And the church did that. The

patriarch came out and said that if you’re a

Russian voter you should vote against the

communists because if you vote for the

communists obviously they’ll come back in with

the same policies that they had for 70 years, so

you should vote for Yeltsin. And the 1997 law

was a sort of thank you present from Yeltsin.

Annabelle Quince: Vladimir Putin gained the

presidency in 1999 and I’m wondering how we

should understand his relationship with the



Russian Orthodox Church and whether that has

changed over the last 13-odd years.

Michael Bourdeaux: It’s changed in so far as it’sbecome stronger. But from the very beginning,

President Putin described himself as being a

baptised believer. And what Putin wants to see

is a strong Russia. Many Russians — most

Russians — bewail the fact that when the Soviet

Union collapsed, Russia lost its status as a world

power. Well, Putin is well on the way to re-

establishing that status. One of the tools that he

has used for the re-establishment of that status

is the Orthodox Church — strong church in a

strong Russia. The Orthodox Church

contributes to the image of the Russian state.

As I said earlier on, from 1927 up to the present

day, even during the worst years of the

persecution in the ‘20s and ‘30s, when the

persecution was bad, the church even then could

not stand out and say, ‘We as believers oppose

the prosecution of an atheist state.’ That was the

situation under communism and under statecapitalism, or whatever you call the present

Russian system: the church is there holding the

hand of the Russian state; quite often the

Russian state gets justification for its actions

from moral support of the Orthodox Church.



Julie Fedor: This is something that we could see

especially clearly over the past year, when you

have also had this wave of protests that have

followed the announcement in September lastyear of the so-called castling move that Putin

and Medvedev made, whereby Putin announced

that they were simply going to swap roles and he

would become president again in 2012. The

church has very much been lending its support

to Putin throughout these protests.

In February, just before the presidential

elections, the patriarch came out and publicly

supported Putin’s re-election campaign. The

patriarch has also come out with various

statements asserting that true Orthodox

believers do not take part in street protests,basically, that this is a non-Orthodox and thus a

non-Russian thing to do. So you can see ways in

which religion is very much being used for the

purposes of demonising and delegitimising the

idea of political opposition in Russia.

Annabelle Quince: So how many people withinRussia would identify themselves as being part

of the Russian Orthodox Church?

Julie Fedor: I guess one of the most important

things to note about Russian Orthodoxy is the

really strong linkage that exists between Russian

Orthodoxy and cultural and national



identification, such that nowadays, for example,

I think it’s roughly 75 per cent of Russians

identify as Orthodox, but this is very much, as I

say, largely a cultural identification. So if youlook at the figures for the number of Russians

who attend church, then it’s famously much,

much lower than that.

(Music)

Journalist (archival): On the day three membersof Pussy Riot were sentenced, the band showed

its defiance by releasing its new single, ‘Putin

Lights Up the Fires’. One of the lines in the

chorus says, ‘Seven years isn’t enough.’ Another

goes, ‘Putin is going to say goodbye like a

sheep.’

Michael Bourdeaux: The Pussy Riot group in

Moscow were protesting against the very thing

that we’ve been talking about during the whole

of this program: the too cosy relationship

between the church and the state, the fact that

Patriarch Kirill called for Christians to supportPutin in the recent election as president. They

considered that illegitimate; a lot of other people

consider it illegitimate. That is why the

Orthodox Church politically has been divided

over this issue. The church at the top level — and

Putin — have shown huge vulnerability in their





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Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church