A conspiracy against truth and goodness
Edward Lucas
October 14, 2024
Active Measures
The Russian Orthodox Church has sold its soul to the Kremlin. And not for the first time, a new book by Lucy Ash argues
Vowing to rebuild Moscow’s landmark cathedral of Christ the Saviour would atone for the sins of the past, Boris Yeltsin said in 1991. The new Russian president said the project would offer Russians “the path to social harmony, the creation of goodness, and a life in which there will be less room for sin”.
The reality was different. Stalin’s demolition of the old cathedral exemplified the Communist Party’s war on religion. But the new cathedral is a gaudy, money-making eyesore. Far from helping Russians come to terms with their totalitarian past, the Russian Orthodox Church has entrenched and aggravated the trauma. Goodness and harmony are in short supply. Room for sins of all kinds abound, not least in the country’s vicious assault on its closest neighbour Ukraine, with the accompanying human, physical and moral carnage.
As Lucy Ash shows in “The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin”, the Orthodox Church was and is the Kremlin’s handmaiden. She calls the centuries-old “abusive co-dependency” between church and state a “toxin in Russian society”. For supporters of the church, this relationship is just as it should be: a “symphonia”, dating back to the Byzantine empire (an obsessive preoccupation for historically minded Russian nationalists).
Ash, a distinguished presenter of BBC radio documentaries, is not a believer herself, though she admits to being moved by the church’s aesthetics. She gives sympathetic space in this, her first book, to the “otherworldly beauty” of its buildings, icons and liturgy, the succour that believers find in their faith, and the commendable pastoral work of parishes and missions.
She highlights the church’s troubling penchant for superstition and junk science, tracing a connection with pagan folk religion. But her main message is about the Faustian bargain the church leadership has struck with the Russian state. The Church has in effect replaced the Communist Party as the source of the state’s ideology. And just as Soviet communism in practice had little to do with the ideals of brotherhood and cooperation, the Russian church’s activities have only the most tenuous connection with the Christian message.
She highlights its business dealings, with their 1990s roots in tax-free cigarettes and a best-selling brand of mineral water, to the nowadays colossal, ruthlessly run property empire. The sale of what in the medieval Catholic church would have been called indulgences is another lucrative line of trade. The Russian mafia, with its abundant need for spiritual relief, is a leading customer.
All this finances a lavish lifestyle for those at the top. (In one notorious case, image-conscious aides airbrushed away the Patriarch’s embarrassingly expensive watch—but forgot to remove its reflection from the polished table at which he was sitting). It is not just money. The celibacy that church law mandates for senior clerics is honoured in public, but not in private. Since Ash’s book went to print, new scandals have broken.
None of this is new. The KGB enjoyed compromising church leaders in the Soviet era. Though religious belief was discouraged at home, it was a useful tool for duping and influencing foreign opinion. The Russian Orthodox Church’s main role from the 1960s was to spout clichés about peace at international conferences. It helped nobble the World Council of Churches, encouraging it to support communist-backed guerilla movements and to ignore religious persecution in Russia and the Soviet-ruled captive nations. The church also helped the KGB spy on foreigners and émigré Russians.
Under Vladimir Putin, this has continued. Well-financed church diplomacy in African countries woos orthodox believers there, backing up Russia’s mercenaries and other dirty tricks. The stalwartly anti-communist exile church, a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for decades, was swiftly nobbled and brought under the Moscow patriarchate’s rule. This murky story, involving unscrupulous, well-connected financiers from the Russian diaspora, deserves a book of its own.
The war in Ukraine exemplified the overlap with the Russian state’s geopolitical ambitions. Military prayer books distributed by a Moscow university chaplain asked the Almighty to grant victory to “the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Vladimir, the courageous Archistratigus and God-Loving Ruler of Russia.” Russian priests blessed bombs and rockets — targeting fellow Orthodox believers in Ukraine — with holy water. Patriarch Kirill glorified the idea of death in combat: “an orthodox version of jihad” writes Ash, “encouraging Christians to martyr themselves in exchange for a clean conscience and a joyous afterlife.” Kirill does not pay even lip service to the human cost of the war.
At home, the Church has become the backbone of the regime’s extreme and growing social conservatism, lambasting decadence and diversity of belief or behaviour. This includes resisting any attempts to combat domestic violence: a horrific, endemic feature of Russian life. Andrei Kormukhin, leader of a group that promotes church construction, told a parliamentary committee that a proposed (and modest) legal reform amounted to “genocide of the family”. A married archpriest called Andrei Tkachev was recorded giving advice to young men about how to avoid being henpecked: “You need to break the woman over your knee, knock off her horns, bend her over, rub her face and stuff her into a washing machine.” Other tips included banning make-up.
This misogynist posturing, and much other related patriotic machismo, goes down well in some quarters in the West, particularly the United States, where arch-conservatives revere Russia as a bastion of real Christianity. Packed with scathing pen portraits and telling vignettes, Ash’s book offers a powerful counterblast to this sentimentalised caricature of a greedy, brutal and selfish organisation.
Edward Lucas is a Non-resident Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He was formerly a senior editor at The Economist. Lucas has covered Central and Eastern European affairs since 1986, writing, broadcasting, and speaking on the politics, economics, and security of the region. A graduate of the London School of Economics and long-serving foreign correspondent in Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and the Baltic states, he is an internationally recognized expert on espionage, subversion, the use and abuse of history, energy security and information warfare. He is the author of five books: The New Cold War (2008, revised and republished in 2014); Deception (2011); The Snowden Operation (2014), Cyberphobia (2015), and Spycraft Rebooted: How Technology is Changing Espionage (2018).