Dmitry Medvedev, then President of Russia, and Varsonofius, then Metropolitan of Saransk, during National Unity Day in 2011. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Free for the ROC: Petersburg City Hall Allocates Two Land Plots for Church Construction
Alexei Kumachev Delovoi Peterburg
July 31,2018
Petersburg city hall [aka the Smolny] has allocated two land plots for church construction in the Primorsky and Petrograd distrists. According to documents published on the Smolny’s website, the land will be provided free of charge. It was reported previously that the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) had announced plans to build a Sunday school on Heroes Avenue and a church on Konstantinovsky Avenue.
The St. Petersburg Diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate will receive a land plot on Krestovsky Island. The total area is 2,000 square meters. A ten-year lease will be signed within a month.
Earlier, it was reported the ROC’s plans for the lot on Konstantinovsky Avenue involved construction of 254 square meter church, a 400 square meter school building, a 32 square meter belfy area, and a 28 square meter baptistery.
The proposal to transfer the land to the ROC was made by Petersburg Deputy Governor Igor Albin at a meeting of the city government.
The estimated cadastral value of the land is ₽15 million. According to Anna Sigalova, deputy director for investments at Colliers International in Petersburg, the plot could be sold for around ₽300 million [approx. €4 million]. The analyst added the price could change if the plot were rezoned for residentialhousing construction.
In addition, the ROC will receive a land plot in the Krasnoye Selo District for free. This is the previously mentioned plot on Heroes Avenue. The total area of the site is 2,200 square meters.
The ROC plans to build a two-storey Orthodox school with its own church on the site. The work will be done by the congregation of the All Saints Church in southwest Petersburg. The term of the free lease is ten years. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko signed the documents ceding the land to the ROC.
On July 18, we reported the Petersburg and Leningrad Region Arbitrage Court had agreed to hear a lawsuit filed by the city’s Property Relations Committee (KIO) against the congregration of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Church (St. Petersburg Diocese, ROC) concerning the ownership rights to the church, which was built on the former grounds of South Primorsky Park, opposite the house at 24 Valor Street.
Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Church while still under construction in September 2015. Photo courtesy of the church’s website
The 16,600 square meter plot had earlier been rezoned for construction of religious buildings and handed over to the ROC. The church building itself, however, was constructed. without the necessary permits. The first hearing of the lawsuit, which claims the city’s right of ownership to the church in the park, has been scheduled for September.
In July 2017, the Smolny transfered a nearly 5,000 square meter plot of land in the elite [sic] village of Komarovo to the ROC. The media wrote at the time the summer cottage of Varsonofius, Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga, could be built on the site. At the same time, Petersburg Legislative Assembly member Boris Vishnevsky drew attention to the fact that a nearly half-hectare land plot was transferred to the Petersburg Diocese only due to the house on it.
In 2013, the ROC leased the land until 2062. The plot’s value was estimated at ₽30 million. Later, officials explained why they had decided to transfer it to the ROC.
“The plot contains a piece of real estate, a house whose cadastral number is 78:38:0022359:29, and whose rightful owner is a religious organization [i.e., the ROC],” said Petersburg Deputy Governor Mikhail Mokretsov.
According to Mokretsov, an inspection established the plot was used for religious purposes. The Smolny leased the plot to the St. Petersburg Diocese on July 25, 2017.
The fantastic story of how a small Moscow monastery has contrived to sue the state and take over a huge wing of the Fisheries Research Institute forces us to take a closer look at at a church official who has long remained partly in the shadows, Mother Superior Ksenia (Chernega), abbess of the selfsame St. Alexius Convent that sued the state and, simulaneously, head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s legal department. Chernega is not entirely unknown to the public. She has often been quoted in official reports of restitution of large pieces of real estate to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). However, as holder of a “boring” post, she has not been particularly prominent in the public eye.
And that’s too bad. Chernega is not only one of the most influential women in the ROC (in 2013, she took fourth place in an internal church rating) but also a successful raider who skillfully manipulates clerics and laymen alike. The adjudged research institute, a huge building that incorporated part of the foundations and a wall of a demolished church, is the most striking but hardly the largest victory in her career. The 46-year-old Oksana Chernega (her name until 2009, a name she still uses in secular contexts) is probably the longest-serving staff member of the Moscow Patriarchate’s legal office. She has worked there since 1993, while also working in secular law schools, achieving professorial rank. She became a leading authority on church law in the early 2000s. Generations of politicians and MPs have come and gone, but Chernega has the whole time testified at hearings of the relevant parliamentary committees and governmental review boards, lobbying the laws the ROC has wanted passed.
Her main achievement has been the law, signed by President Medvedev in late 2010, “On the Transfer of Religious Assets in State or Municipal Ownership to Religious Organizations.” It is this law under which movable and immovable property has been transferred to the ROC the past six years. Yet the Church has behaved capriciously, taking only what looks good or has real value. The Perm Diocese is unlikely to restore to its former use the huge military institute that took over what used to be its seminary: there are catastrophically few people who want to go into the priesthood, and the poor diocese is incapable of maintaining the enormous premises. But how sweet it is to get a huge building on the river embankment in the city center as a freebie. Whatever you do with it you’re bound to make money.
But not everything has been had so smoothly. The property the ROC has set its sights on has owners, and they are capable of mounting a resistance. That is when Chernega takes the stage. When she announces the Church has set its sights on a piece of real estate, it is usually a bad sign. The day before yesterday, it was St. Isaac’s Cathedral, yesterday it was the Andronikov Monastery, today it is the Fisheries Research Institute. What will it be tomorrow? Anything whatsoever.
On the eve of March 8 [International Women’s Day] and amidst the debates on feminism in Russia, it would seem that Chernegas has pursued a successful, independent career as a woman in the Church. But it’s not as simple as all that.
It is well known in ecclesiastical circles that Chernega acts in tandem with a notable priest, Artemy Vladimirov. He is not only confessor at the St. Alexius Convent but is also well known throughout the Church. A graduate of Moscow State University’s philolology department and rector of All Saints Church (a neighbor of the convent and the reclaimed fisheries institute), Vladimirov is a glib preacher who specializes in denouncing fornication; he is, therefore, a member of the Patriarchal Council on Family and Motherhood. The council has become a haven for the Church’s choicest monarchistically inclined conservatives, including Dmitry Smirnov, who has led an aggressive campaign against Silver Rain radio station, Konstantin Malofeev, Igor Girkin‘s ex-boss and, concurrently, an expert on web-based pedophilia, and the wife of Vladimir Yakunin, former director of Russian Railways, a billionaire, and former KGB officer.
Vladimirov vigorously espouses monarchist views and has made a huge number of basically stupid public statements, such as the demand to remove a number of works by Chekhov and Bunin from the school curriculum and a call to campaign against Coca-Cola. Such radicalism is not rare in the ROC, however, Since the late 1990s and the publication of the novel Celibacy by church journalist Natalya Babasyan, Vladimirov has served as a clear example for many observant and quasi-observant Orthodox believers of where the line should be drawn in interactions between a priest and his flock, especially his young, female parishioners.
Because of this reputation, Vladimirov has remained in the background even during periods when the grouping of monarchists and Russian nationalists to which he has belonged has had the upper hand in the ROC. But if you can’t do something directly, you can do it indirectly, and Oksana Chernega has come in very handy in this case. As is typical of a young woman in the modern ROC, she is utterly dependent on her confessor. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Orthodox fundamentalists and monarchist heterosexuals developed a curious lifestyle. Young and handsome, usually university grads with the gift of gab, and often married, many of them newly arrived in the Church, they formed small “communities” consisting of young women, communities with unclear or flexible status in terms of ecclesiastical law.
In theory, a convent is established by order of a bishop, and a married or elderly priest is appointed as the convent’s confessor. He does not live on the convent’s grounds and is present there during “working hours,” when he has to serve mass and take confession from the women who inhabit the convent. As part of the so-called Orthodox revival, a monk or a young priest who had “complicated” relations with his wife would first form a group of female “adorers” in the church, later organizing them into a “sisterhood” and then a “convent community,” which he would settle in a building reclaimed from local authorities, sometimes the site of a former convent, sometimes not. He would immediately take up residence there himself in order to “revive Orthodoxy” and denounce fornicators and homosexuals in the outside world. The record holder in this respect was Archimandrite Ambrosius (Yurasov) of the Ivanovo Diocese, who built a huge convent in Ivanovo, where he officially lived in the same house as the mother superior and yet never left the apartments of the rapturous Moscow women whom he had pushed to come live with him after they had bequeathed their dwellings to the convent.
For those who did not want to leave the capital even nominally, historical buildings in the city center were found. That, for example, was the story of the ultra-fundamentalist Abbot Kirill (Sakharov), who took over St. Nicholas Church on Bersenevka opposite the Kremlin. There, according to a correspondent of mine, “the Old Believer girls creatively accessorized their robes with manicures.” In Petersburg, the so-called Leushinskaya community, led by the main local monarchist Archpriest Gennady Belobolov, has been “restoring” a church townhouse for twenty years. However, the archpriest himself lives on site, while his wife raises their children somewhere else in town. It is a good arrangement for a young man from the provinces: come to the capital, occupy a large building in the city center under a plausible pretext, and shack up there with attractive and spiritually congenial sisters in the faith while putting on shows at press conferences stacked with selected reporters and confessing pious female sponsors who are thrilled by their pastor’s superficial strictness and inaccessibility.
So in this system of interwoven personal and political interests how could one not help out a dear friend? The affairs of the alliance between Vladimirov and Chernega, especially when it comes to dispensing other people’s property, are so broad and varied that observers sometimes wonder whether it isn’t time for police investigators to have a crack at them.
Where do you think the part of the church community sympathetic to Belovolov’s plight would want to transfer such a managerially gifted and cultured pastor, a pastor capable of creating a little museum and one who knows a thing or two about restoration? To St. Isaac’s Cathedral, of course, and the post of sexton, the chief steward of the church and its property. What would Chernega, who is coordinating the legal aspects of transferring such a huge chunk of public property, have to do with this? Formally, of course, nothing, and it isn’t a sure bet that the appointment will take place, just as it’s not a sure bet the ROC will get its hands on the entire cathedral.
Father Vsevolod Chaplin, the Russian Orthodox priest who recently argued on Russian radio station Echo of Moscow that it was sometimes necessary and possible to “destroy” whole groups of people as “internal enemies.” Photo courtesy of Realnoye Vremya and Anna Artemieva (novayagazeta.ru)
“For the Church, Violence Is the Norm”
Valentin Baryshnikov Radio Svoboda
August 16, 2016
Father Vsevolod Chaplin, long-time head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Synodal Department for Cooperation between Church and Society, made an appearance on Echo of Moscow radio in which he shocked many people by saying that some people “can and should be killed.”
Here is an excerpt of Father Chaplain’s appearance on Echo, which began with a discussion of erecting a monument to Ivan the Terrible in Oryol.
Presenter: Yes, but with that rationale you can also justify Stalin, for example. Sure, there were excesses, but he was an effective manager, they say.
Vsevolod Chaplin: He did a lot. Listen, at the end of the day what is wrong with destroying a certain number of internal enemies?
Presenter: “Destroying” people, that is what is wrong.
Vsevolod Chaplin: What is wrong with that?
Presenter: You cannot kill people!
Vsevolod Chaplin: Why not? Some people can and should be killed. That is for sure.
Presenter: “Some people”? Which ones are those?
Vsevolod Chaplin: So it is no accident that criminals are destroyed, and no accident—
Presenter: I would remind you the death penalty has been abolished in Russia.*
Vsevolod Chaplin: I am not sure that was the right decision. Look, even God, if we read the Old Testament, if we read the Apocalypse, that is, the New Testament, directly sanctioned and sanctions in the future the destruction of a huge number of people for the edification of others. For the edification of societies, it is sometimes necessary to destroy a certain number of people who deserve to be destroyed.
* In fact, capital punishment has not been abolished in the Russian Federation. President Yeltsin placed a moratorium on the death penalty in 1996 so that Russia could meet the requirements for joining the Council of Europe. The moratorium has remained in effect since then, but the death penalty is still listed in the law books as a legal punishment for certain crimes. TRR
When asked whether Chaplin’s statement was his personal opinion or a reflection of conversations within the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), Nikolay Mitrokhin, a sociologist of religion and author of the book The Russian Orthodox Church: Its Current State and Challenges, confidently replied that church insiders think this way.
Nikolay Mitrokhin: The majority of rank-and-file clergy and the bishops are quite militantly minded. They do not rule out violence. Violence is the norm in ecclesiastical practice. Bishops hit priests who do something wrong on the altar. Its is a popular subject of stories told within the Church. In turn, priests are capable of hitting sacristans and subdeacons. The Church is now also the leading social institution that has come out against so-called juvenile justice, in other words, against bans on beating children. So for the Church, violence is the norm. The Church supports militarist rhetoric. The Church supports the numerous military-patriotic clubs operating under its auspices. If you chat with a rank-and-file priest, he will surely talk like Chaplin or worse. It is another question whether it was worth putting Chaplin on the radio and giving his cannibalistic ideas a platform. However, that is the stance of Echo of Moscow, which has given various kinds of fascists the chance to speak out on its airwaves. Let us not forget that several right-wing radicals have their own programs on the station. So it all fits, in the first place, not only the mindset of the ROC but also the mindset of Echo of Moscow.
Echo of Moscow actually plans not to publish the transcript of this speech and, as far as I can tell, will not be inviting Father Chaplin on the air again.
With Chaplin’s appearance, they have reached a point where a lot of people have wondered whether the prosecutor’s office is asleep at the wheel and whether they should not file a complaint against Echo of Moscow radio station. In this case, they face quite specific criminal charges. But the reason they invited Chaplin to appear on the air is itself quite obvious. Yet again they had to rile up the liberal public with harsh statements so that a discussion would emerge around them. They are not shy about inviting someone who on several occasions has voiced his tough and, quite frankly, fascist stance. So I think this was a big mistake on the part of Echo of Moscow, which is no less liable for the statements than the person who made them.
When Chaplin says this, when priests en masse within the ROC hold such positions, does this somehow link up in their minds, if I can put it is this way, with the concept of Jesus Christ, who spoke of love and non-violence?
As we know, there is no Christ in the ROC. There is Orthodoxy in the ROC, but there is no Christ in the Church in the sense in which the idea of Christ was shaped by the Russian intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. For centuries, the phrase that Jesus is love just did not make sense. It was not a subject the clergy considered. From that point of view, it is not clear why it should be considered now. The concepts that the liberal intelligentsia have been attempting to discuss are all seemingly variations on western Christianity, so-called post-Holocaust thought, which has nothing to do with what the majority of the ROC’s ordinary parishioners think and believe. They see Orthodoxy as the national religion, which provides them with spiritual strength to oppose the “godless” west, and so on. So Chaplin, who was driven from his post in the Church, deliberately shocked the audience by divulging what the conservative half of his brain thinks. The audience talked about it. Basically, though, any average Russian priest, whomever you approach, thinks exactly the same thing.
Does it come from the Church? Or does the Church trail behind its flock?
It comes from the Church, of course. Within the Church there has long existed a concept, which has been its main content, that has to do with Russian nationalism and militarism. The vast majority of the clergy espouse these ideas and communicate them to parishioners in one form or another. It is another matter to what extent the Church’s leadership controls all of this. To what extent are the clergy permitted to speak out or keep quiet about political issues? This is something that the Church’s leadership monitors. When it wanted the ROC to have a fairly decent image in Ukraine, priests were told they should not travel to Ukraine and help the separatists. A couple of people who violated the ban were banned from the ministry. The Russian clergy immediately began speaking carefully about Ukraine. The clergy can keep thinking as aggressively as it likes. The question is the things it will say in ordinary life. This is something that can be regulated both by society and the state.
Let us come back later to the question of regulation on the part of society and the sate. Let’s talk about the situation within the Church. Are there priests who follow the idea that God is love?
This is a concept common among a very narrow segment of Moscow and Petersburg intelligentsia, among university-educated intellectuals in the broad sense. The majority of clergymen have no secular education whatsoever (I mean higher education), and they have had a very average secondary education. Many of them either do not know about this concept or regard it as a bit of intellectualizing. There are individual priests (among the ROC’s 20,000 priests you might find several hundred, at best) who espouse this concept. But they are outside the mainstream of the Church and do not constitute a respected or influential minority.
Are they persecuted within the Church?
No, but these ideas are so remote from what priests really do it is impossible to say they in any way define the life of the Church. Especially because ideas of this sort are clearly articulated only by individual priests, priests who are closely associated, again, with liberal circles. One level down, in the provinces, a priest can very well tell his parishioners that Christ is love while running a military-patriotic club. It all gels perfectly in their minds depending on their personal views and the last book they read ten years ago. Nothing contradicts anything else. That is why priests with distinctly liberal views who are willing to say that God is love amount to a dozen. They are known to journalists, who turn to them all the time. Beyond the confines of this narrow circle, such concepts are not particularly popular, and they are not subjects of conversation.
The real life of the clergy and the real ideas in their minds are so diverse, so not amenable to systematization, that we can speak of a society, an ideology, that is in fact unknown to us. We can speak of their militarism. But for some priests this militarism is clearly defined—they wear camouflage all the time except during services—while other priests have these ideas in their heads, but they do not express them too publicly, because they think they should say something else to their parishes. In addition, there are the changes that come with age. When they are young, people’s blood runs hotter. As they age, they become smarter, but in old age, on the contrary, they lose their heads, senility sets in, and they can say things that completely contradict what they had said fifteen or twenty years earlier. For example, Father Dmitry Dudko became a communist in old age, although his whole life he was a harsh anti-communist. It is a dynamic environment of generally anti-liberal ideas, but certain noble notions can be found in what they think or say.
What about the natural objection that, in the twentieth century, a huge number of Russian Orthodox priests were murdered by the Bolsheviks on the same grounds that Father Chaplin cited? Does this objection just have no effect on these people? Do they not feel they are the successors to those priests, to the church that was destroyed by this massive crackdown?
They feel like this when it suits them. When they have to argue with the former collective farm chair and current local council head that the church needs paint, they remember the new martyrs. Generally, a person who is willing to remember the new martyrs was probably a Party or Communist Youth League member or even a political officer in the Soviet Army (that is a quite common case) or a local university graduate who wrote pro-Soviet articles. The fact is that there are very few people directly associated with the new martyrs in Russia, and there are fewer of them as the years go by. The bulk of the Church consists of former Soviet people who until 1991 believed in socialist ideas of some kind, were card-carrying Party members, were involved in political organizations, and did not give a second thought to anything religious. Ideas about the regime’s responsibility, ideas about the memory of the mass repressions, all had some importance in the late 1980s, but then quickly came to naught. In this case, what is urgent for the ROC is the question of so-called post-Holocaust thought that the intelligentsia has proposed, meaning the awareness of guilt and the needlessness of so many victims, but the Church has consistently rejected all this now. It believes you can kill, but you have to pick the right group to kill, as Chaplin said. This is the basis of the current ROC’s ideology.
Alexander Mikhailovich (center), a co-founder of Sorok sorokov (“Multitude”), a militant Russian Orthodox organization that Patriarch Kirill has identified as his personal “guard”
Right-Wing Saints
Nikolay Mitrokhin
October 26, 2015 Grani.ru
Last week at a meeting of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), three decisions were adopted that illustrate the further transformation of church leadership into a fascist-type extreme right-wing organization.
The rank of bishop was awarded to Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), abbot of the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow, who is closely linked to Black Hundreds-like organizations. For the last fifteen years, at least, his public and political reputation had prevented him from moving up into the ranks of the church’s “generals,” despite his successes in advocacy (the Sretensky Monastery’s publishing house is the largest in the ROC) and close ties to the Russian state establishment. Now decency has been cast to the wind, and the path to a big church career has been opened to him.
In another decision, the Synod formed a joint commission of the Russian and Bulgarian Orthodox Churches on the issue of canonizing Archbishop Serafim (Sobolev) of Bogucharsk. It has been emphasized that the commission was created at the personal behest of Patriarch Kirill, who on May 5 sent a formal request to the head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. An émigré from Russia and, subsequently, one of the leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Serafim is known not only as the man who practically founded modern Bulgarian monasticism. He also penned many xenophobic essays (just like Putin and Nikita Mikhalkov’s favorite philosopher Ivan Ilyin) that mixed the Russian nationalism of his day with a hatred of other faiths. In the 1930s, he vigorously campaigned against the theologians of the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, insisting on rejecting all forms of ecumenical cooperation. And of course, like the other so-called Karlovites, the European bishops of the ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia), he actively collaborated with the Nazis. This did not stop him, as a Russian patriot, from collaborating just as successfully with the Stalinist regime after the war.
Sobolev’s most prominent Russian disciple and protégé was the young émigré priest known to us as Archpriest Vsevolod Spiller. To a large extent swayed by the ideas of his teacher, he returned in 1949 from Bulgaria to Moscow, where as deputy head of the Department of External Church Relations he was an influential church official. But then his ideas came into conflict with the political reality and, maintaining his post as prior of the Church of St. Nicholas in Kuznetsy, he became an equally influential figure in unofficial church life. In particular, he vigorously supported resistance groups within the church, which attempted to reconcile right-wing views with human rights rhetoric in order to gain greater autonomy for the clergy and the ROC as a whole.
A group of young disciples from the Moscow intelligentsia formed around Spiller. In the early 1980s, they were ordained as priests, and by the middle of the decade they had begun to confront their own former comrades who had chosen a more liberal vision of the church’s future. During perestroika, they founded the most successful ecclesiastical education project of the new era, St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Institute, and in the early 2000s, as a result of a large and successful intrigue, they became the leading ideological faction within the ROC. Members of this faction have held a variety of leadership positions in the church and still control at least two posts at the overall church level. One of these clerics is Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov, head of the Patriarchal Commission on Family and Youth Affairs. Smirnov is known for his aggressive xenophobic and extremist rhetoric (and his involvement in at least one major violent protest action), and he virtually acts as the church’s liaison with the extremist group God’s Will.
There is no doubt that the prospect of Archbishop Serafim’s canonization and, therefore, the church’s blessing to republish and promote his works is the handiwork of St. Tikhon’s Institute, now known as St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University of [the] Humanities, especially since the university’s rector, Archpriest Vladimir Vorobyov, one of Spiller’s principal disciples, is on the canonization commission.
Finally, the third ideologically significant accomplishment of the Synod was the resolution it adopted in connection with the report made by Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, chair of the Synodal Department on Church and Society Relations, on “proposals for countering neopaganism.”
“[We] consider concerns about the increasing spread of neo-paganism in countries for which the Moscow Patriarchate is canonically responsible, including the cultural and information sectors, reasonable. [We] emphasize the need to work more vigorously on the overall church and diocesan levels in order to refute the neo-pagan errors. This works must be conducted primarily with young people, with communities of athletes and sports fans, members of military-patriotic clubs, law enforcement officers, and persons in places of incarceration,” wrote the Synod in its resolution.
This is a response to the clear failure in recent years of the Moscow Patriarchate’s efforts vis-à-vis “socially congenial” categories of young people. Despite the patriarchate’s desire to harness the energy of right-wing extremists and militarists in the youth subcultures to its own advantage by implementing the concept of military sports clubs in the parishes (there are definitely two or three such clubs in every region), it has become more and more obvious that the ROC’s “sluggish” stance did not satisfy its “flock” of extremists. Emblematic in this regard was the sensational renunciation, in 2013, of Russian Orthodoxy by Alexander Povetkin, a boxer popular among Russian nationalists, and his virtual conversion to neo-paganism as publicly demonstrated by the tattoos and amulets on his body.
Obviously, the ROC’s balanced position the Ukrainian conflict and its rejection of public anti-Ukrainian rhetoric has also caused dissatisfaction among patriotically minded right-wing radicals and facilitated their rejection of the church’s leadership. No wonder that Vsevolod Chaplin, whom the neo-Nazi gang BORN had considered as a candidate for assassination “for betraying the interests of the Russian people,” is now so worried about the religiosity of football hooligans, policemen, and convicts.
But maybe, in this case, the Moscow Patriarchate really is concerned about the morality of young people? This could be admitted as a possibility if the patriarchate and the patriarch personally had not hired those very same right-wing football hooligans and neo-Nazis as their personal bodyguard. Nor in the text of the Synod’s decision is there a single word of condemnation of “sports fans.” After all, they create idols and worship them, which is a direction violation of the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”
Alexander Mikhailovich (center) and his comrades from Sorok sorokov (“Multitude”)
In my opinion, these decisions by the Synod, which hammer away at the same point, are symptoms of the fascization of the church’s leadership. In this case, “fascization” is an academic term describing the process by which a subject of public space is indoctrinated with a certain set of ideas and practices. When it was under the authority of the communist regime, the ROC was frozen in terms of its ideological evolution for seven decades and is now going through the same stages that the major Christian churches of Europe went through during the twentieth century. If the “pre-modern” mystical obscurantism of the Black Hundreds had dominated under Alexy II, Kirill’s ROC has shifted into the phase of modernist fascist experiments, typical of Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Statements by church leaders about the role of the “national leader,” the desired “unity of the people,” the sacred duty of war, and the special rights of collective subjects, which are more important than individual rights, and even the particular focus on young people are all phenomena from that earlier era and its rhetoric, just like militarized youth organizations in ecclesiastical communities.
Everything having to do with the Russian profession of fascism and other versions of right-wing radicalism, which was quite popular in the Russian émigré community of the 1920s and 1930s, is thus only welcomed in the church at the moment. The Synod’s recent decisions testify to this fact.
While it is a big problem for the church, “fascization” is not of paramount importance to society. The church is too small in terms of numbers [of parishioners] and too fragmented in terms of organization and ideology for these processes, which primarily affect the church’s administrative apparatus, to have a real impact on Russian politics on the federal and even local levels. However much some in the church leadership would enjoy commanding strictly serried ranks of militants, there are fewer and fewer people who would want to join the ranks of these militants, especially just for the heck of it. Therefore, there are many more generals in this army than soldiers.
Meanwhile, the process of fascization, despite its unacceptability to modern society, has a variety of consequences. By itself, fascism was for its time a revolutionary movement, a form of catch-up modernization. It brought with it not only anti-democratic and xenophobic impulses but also the destruction of obsolete social institutions and barriers. It paved the way for new technologies, and provided means of social mobility and opportunities for young people.
In this regard, the work of Patriarch Kirill and his team does not appear so straightforward. The ideological component of Kirill’s reign and his blunders in the realm of information policy have overshadowed to outside observers the efforts made by the patriarch and his supporters within the church over the past five years. Reform of the ROC’s administrative apparatus (the establishment of the Supreme Church Council, changes to the number and function of departments), the creation of quasi-democratic institutions (the Interconciliar Assembly, ecclesiastical courts, congresses of various categories of clergymen), the unification of church law, a significant increase in the number of bishops, and, finally, the retreat from old-fashioned ways of confessing the faith (i.e., the fight against eldership, mysticism, superstition, and flagrant ethnic and confessional xenophobia) and a policy of actively recruiting educated young people all have laid the foundations for the ROC’s further transformation into a more modern church.
For an enormous number of rank-and-file (and not so rank-and-file) priests and lay people, it is not that all the games with black-shirted militants and the flagrant Russian nationalist rhetoric are completely unacceptable, but rather that they are absolutely trivial compared with other truths and values they associate with Russian Orthodoxy. Daily concerns about Sunday school, soup kitchens for the homeless, and, finally, their own wallets are much more important to them than the ideological “deviations” of the Moscow Patriarchate’s leadership. Especially because, even within the church, the leadership has been incapable of ensuring that brains are being washed in the right direction, much less clearly signaling its wishes.
Thus, the real needs and concerns of these people in a modern, post-industrial society make it possible to express very different priorities in the work of Russian Orthodox communities than as seen by the higher-ups. Sooner or later (it is a matter, here, not of years but of “five-year plans”), these priorities will obviously come to be at odds with the church’s ruling elite and its small groups of radical supporters on the ground. And then the ROC will have its own version of the Second Vatican Council, “post-Gulag theology,” priests organizing pancake feeds for aggressive congregants, and all the other things modern Russian society expects from the ROC.
Dmitry Medvedev, then President of Russia, and Varsonofius, then Metropolitan of Saransk, during National Unity Day in 2011. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Church while still under construction in September 2015. Photo courtesy of the church’s website
The Russian Reader 