by ANAIS LLOBET
PHOTO/Fine Art Images/Hermitage Images/Getty
Putin and his government have built a mutually beneficial relationship with the resurgent Orthodox Church, a key element of the country’s new nationalism.
When Kirill, patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, consecrated the new church of the Sretensky monastery last May, President Vladimir Putin was there. Afterwards he presented the patriarch with a 400-year-old icon of John the Baptist, which had hung in his office at the Kremlin; it now graces the altar of the church. This would have seemed odd a few decades ago: the church is not far from the Lubyanka, headquarters of the FSB and a symbol of the heavy repression of the 1930s, and is dedicated to the memory of the martyrs of anti-religious persecution.
The decision to consecrate it in the centennial year of the February and October revolutions was ‘deeply symbolic,’ Putin said after the ceremony. ‘We know how fragile civil peace is [and] we must not forget how hard it is to heal the wounds born of schisms. Therefore it is our common duty to do all that we can to preserve the unity of the Russian nation.’
The Orthodox Church did not disappear entirely during the Communist era, but it was a difficult time: the Bolsheviks violently persecuted the clergy, who had close links to the autocracy they were fighting, and by the second world war only 250 parishes remained active, compared with 54,000 in 1914. When Nazi Germany invaded, Stalin rehabilitated the Church to support mobilisation, in the long tradition of Russian holy wars against barbarian invaders.
The reinstatement of the clergy in 1943 was under the close supervision of the secret police and the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, and though discreet worship was tolerated, the Church was prohibited from taking any part in public life. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, more Russians have turned to God: in 1991, only a third described themselves as Orthodox, but by 2012 that figure was almost three-quarters; Muslims were just a small minority (7%).
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