The Post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church

Politics, Culture and Greater Russia

Katja Richters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136296369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, the Russian Orthodox Church has become a more prominent part of post-Soviet Russia. A number of assumptions exist regarding the Church's relationship with the Russian state: that the Church has always been dominated by Russia's secular elites; that the clerics have not sufficiently fought this domination and occasionally failed to act in the Church's best interest; and that the Church was turned into a Soviet institution during the twentieth century. This book challenges these assumptions. It demonstrates that church-state relations in post-communist Russia can be seen in a much more differentiated way, and that the church is not subservient, very much having its own agenda. Yet at the same time it is sharing the state's, and Russian society's nationalist vision.

The book analyses the Russian Orthodox Church's political culture, focusing on the Putin and Medvedev eras from 2000. It examines the upper echelons of the Moscow Patriarchate in relation to the governing elite and to Russian public opinion, explores the role of the church in the formation of state religious policy, and the church's role within the Russian military. It discusses how the Moscow Patriarchate is asserting itself in former Soviet republics outside Russia, especially in Estonia, Ukraine and Belarus. It concludes by re-emphasising that, although the church often mirrors the Kremlin's political preferences, it most definitely acts independently.

1
Introduction

Since the early 1990s, scholars and other commentators started noticing the re-emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) on the political stage. Members of its governing body, the Moscow Patriarchate, attended official Russian state events and secular politicians procured funding for the reconstruction of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in central Moscow, which was meant to symbolise the end of religious persecution and the country’s spiritual rebirth.¹ In 2009, the Orthodox hierarchy was officially granted the right to preview and comment on legislation that was under consideration in the Duma.² While ample evidence exists that illustrates the Church’s importance in the new Russia, little has been said about the actual policies it advocates. This study has grown out of the idea to shed light on the Moscow Patriarchate’s political preferences and strategies and to investigate the impact these have on Russian politics.

The overarching theme is the ROC’s political culture since the fall of communism and its agreements and disagreements with the Russian state’s official agenda, especially since 2000. It is asked whether the Moscow Patriarchate has its own opinions and formulates its ideas independently of the secular authorities. Or does it deliberately mimic the political elite? Apart from this, the question regarding the past experiences that have shaped the Church’s political culture runs like a red thread through the following chapters. Special attention is paid to the way in which the ROC constructs the post-Soviet Russian national identity. Is the population defined by ethnicity, religion or other criteria? In the three chapters on foreign policy towards Estonia, Ukraine and Belarus it is also queried to what extent the Church retains its Russian character and how it relates to the secular authories in these countries.

A thorough examination of the ROC’s policies is not only worth doing as it is Russia’s largest and most influential religious body. Moreover, the political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted after the collapse of the Soviet Union that the Cold War would give way to a clash of civilisations which would run along religious lines.³ Although his theory attracted considerable criticism it provides at least a partial explanation for some of the post-1991 developments. Especially the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the USA, which terrorists committed in the name of Islam, have highlighted the continuing existence of religious faultlines that secularisation has been unable to eliminate. So, religion is a continuing factor in Russian and global politics.

This chapter starts with a brief historical overview of church–state relations in Russia. After this, a definition of political culture is drawn up and the way of its application, as well as the advantages and drawbacks of this approach, are discussed. In the following sections I spell out my hypothesis, define the polticial cultures of the USSR and Russia in the twenty-first century and explain what I mean by ‘Greater Russia’. The chapter ends with a short presentation of my methodology and an overview of the following chapters.

Church–State relations in Russia from 1721 to 1990

Since its initial creation in 1448 the Moscow Patriarchate has had a close relationship with the Russian state. In 1511 a monk at the Eleazarov Monastery in Pskov praised the Russian tsar for heading a particularly important state in which the Orthodox Church played a noteworthy role.⁴ Several decades later, the monarch supported the ROC’s request for the recognition of its autocephaly, i.e. its total canonical independence from its Mother Church in Constantinople, which was granted in 1589.⁵ Between 1721 and 1917 the Moscow Patriarchate did not exist as a leadership body and the ROC was directed by a secular official. The Church formed part of the imperial state and its priests were officially compelled to inform the relevant authorities if their parishioners’ confessions made them believe that the tsar’s powers were threatened.⁶ In return for these ‘services’ Russian rulers supported the clergy in various ways, including by giving them the almost exclusive right to minister to the Empire’s ethnically Russian population.⁷

These privileges came to an end after the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. Inspired by Marxist ideology, Lenin made it his official mission to turn the Russian population into atheists and to eradicate all forms of organised religion. In 1918, the separation of the ROC from the state and the education system was decreed and the Church’s property was nationalised.⁸ It soon became virtually illegal for faith-based organisations to engage in any activity other than the celebration of their rites in their respective places of worship. Even this proved increasingly problematic as the Soviet authorities implemented a number of measures to prevent believers from attending the liturgy. By 1929, all monasteries and convents in the USSR were closed and Stalin had thousands of clerics and believers imprisoned or executed before he eased the repressions during World War II and allowed the recreation of the Moscow Patriarchate.⁹

Although the ROC was initially perplexed by the communists’ hostility the Orthodox leaders did not organise a vocal opposition against the atheist regime. Whilst individual cases of defiance are known, the leader of the official hierarchy, Metropolitan Sergei (Stragorodskii), declared in 1927 that the ROC would share ‘the joys and sorrows of the [Soviet] motherland’.¹⁰ This controversial declaration of loyalty provoked a schism in the Church and resulted in the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, which strongly condemned the Muscovite Church’s deals with the USSR.¹¹ Many scholars believe that the ROC became remarkably subservient to the USSR’s authorities after Metropolitan Sergei’s statement.¹²

According to Jane Ellis, an expert on religion in the Soviet Union, the number of functioning Orthodox churches dropped from approximately 80,000 in 1914 to an estimated 6,000 in the mid-1980s.¹³ Ellis details the renewed atheist persecution conducted by Nikita Khrushchev between 1959 to 1964 as well as the Moscow Patriarchate’s accession to the World Council of Churches in 1961. Regarding the latter, she reveals that the ROC has influenced the Council in the Soviet Union’s favour and systematically concealed the restrictions it was subject to in its homeland. During the Cold War, the Church was actively involved in the international peace movement, but its stances always coincided with those of the Politbureau and it used Christian concepts to justify the USSR’s use of force in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.¹⁴

It can be argued that the USSR’s anti-religious policy ended in 1988 when ROC hierarchs had a historic meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, after which the secular authorities assisted the Church in the celebration of the 1,000th anniversary of the baptism of Rus.¹⁵ In contrast to earlier practices, the state-controlled media reported on the festivities extensively and without doctrinal bias. However, General Secretary Gorbachev also made it clear that ‘Leninist principles’¹⁶ would continue to guide the Soviet Union’s approach to religion. Nevertheless, the legal restrictions placed on the Moscow Patriarchate and other faith-based organisations were officially abolished in October 1990 when both the USSR and the RSFSR adopted liberal laws that brought the polities’ religious legislation in line with ‘Western’ standards.

Political culture: definition and methodology

The term ‘political culture’ has been used since the eighteenth century¹⁷ and has attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention, including from political scientists and experts on the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. Archie Brown produced one of the most frequently quoted definitions of political culture when he wrote:

political culture will be understood as the subjective perception of history and politics, the fundamental beliefs and values, the foci of identification and loyalty and the political knowledge and expectations which are the product of the specific historical experience of nations and groups.¹⁸

These words highlight that the concept under discussion refers primarily to thoughts and mental attitudes. They emphasise that the political expectations a group has depend on its past experience of politics, its knowledge of alternative systems as well as its beliefs about how politicians should be acting and what they should be providing. Most scholars agree with him either directly or indirectly that history has influenced the formation of these variables.¹⁹ One of the few points of consensus that they have reached apart from this is that political culture changes slowly.²⁰

Although I agree with Brown that beliefs, values and ways of thinking and reasoning form an important part of political culture I find his definition somewhat misleading as he describes the perceptions of history and politics, which he includes in his definition, as subjective. This seems to suggest that different individuals can have different perceptions of history and politics and therefore have different political cultures. In my opinion, however, any culture is something that is shared by the majority of a given group. Stephen White draws more adequate attention to the concept’s communal aspect when he refers to it as ‘the political “way of life” of a nation or social group’.²¹ He defines political culture as ‘the attitudinal and behavioural matrix within which the political system is located’²² and elaborates that:

[t]he political culture [ … ] both expresses and influences the patterns of political belief and behaviour within a given political system: it informs the actions of political actors, comprehends political symbols, foci of identification and fundamental beliefs and values; and generally both reflects and influences political orientations towards the institutions and practices of government.²³

In contrast to Brown, White’s understanding of political culture includes both a mental and a behavioural component. His work is useful in that it draws attention to the mutually reinforcing relationship between political culture and political actors, i.e. the latter are both the product as well as the producers of political culture. This explains why political cultures change slowly. White’s definition also suggests that political actions, e.g. policies, are inspired by a political culture, but are not synonymous with it. One could argue that policies can change rather quickly, i.e. after a crisis or the election of a new leadership, whereas political cultures tend to remain more constant. The general terms, which White uses in his explanation, underline that this concept is reasonably vague and can therefore be stretched to include several variables.

It is therefore very difficult to define political culture precisely, which in turn suggests that policies are more precise, less complex and more easily discernible than political culture. This concept also differs from ideology in that the latter never includes behaviour and in that it does not need to be something shared by many members of a national group. The most fundamental difference between political culture and ideology is, however, that the latter is a set of beliefs which results from conscious reflection and that it is usually spelt out explicitly and in writing. It is therefore more rational and intellectual than political culture, which can be characterised as more mundane and organic.

Political culture is also not the same as a world view, although both share the less intellectual aspects which distinguish them from an ideology. The key characteristic which sets world views apart from political cultures is that the former are more personal and less political than the latter. Due to this greater attachment to private individuals, world views tend to be transmitted to a far narrower circle of people than political cultures and involve issues that might be considered outside the realm of politics. They are also less resistant to change than political cultures, as one person’s experience can encourage them to change at least a part of their world view whereas the same cannot be said about political culture.

Regarding the application of this concept to Russia, White suggested in 1984 that researchers should first identify the main features of the pre-revolutionary political culture and then those of the contemporary one. These should subsequently be compared to find out if any influence of the former on the latter can be seen. Finally, White recommends that this analysis be used to examine to what extent a given political culture might give rise to future political developments and changes.²⁴ This methodology remains appropriate for today, but it needs updating. Since the USSR’s collapse, political culturalists have had to trace the similarities and differences between Russia’s contemporary political culture and that of both the tsarist and the Soviet eras.

Despite its merits, White’s contribution to this theoretical discussion is not without its problems and has attracted some criticism. Brown took issue with the inclusion of behaviour in political culture and argued that this could lead to circular arguments, i.e. when behaviour is used to infer values and norms, which in turn are employed to explain behaviour.²⁵ This has apparently not convinced White, who left his above-mentioned definition unchanged. To an extent, this disagreement rests on an artificially constructed dichotomy. If we understand behaviour as a set of actions then verbal or written expressions of beliefs and norms should also be classed as behaviour. It is impossible to exclude these kinds of actions from political culture studies, as a researcher can only decipher another person’s ideas by analysing the way in which they are expressed. This is why I believe that behaviour cannot be excluded from political culture. I therefore follow White’s definition of this concept although I accept that care must be taken to avoid the construction of circular arguments.

While Mary McAuley agrees with White on the need to seek out the main features of a political culture,²⁶ she challenges the idea that similarities in two eras’ political cultures automatically indicate an influence of the earlier period on the later, which is implicit in White’s proposed methodology. While McAuley accepts that history will feature in an explanation of how a particular culture developed, she wants the ways in which past norms and standards influence contemporary ones spelt out. To prove that previous experiences and standards influence what comes in their aftermath McAuley recommends to examine and reject ‘explanations of today’s culture which do not include past culture as a variable’.²⁷ In addition to this, she argues that the past should be clearly defined.²⁸

Although McAuley points out a significant gap in the literature, her proposed method of filling it is more suitable for tracing continuities between periods of history that are separated by long stretches of time. However, when investigating post-revolutionary eras it can be safely assumed that there are certain continuities with the pre-revolutionary period as ‘in no instance of a revolution is the brea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• A note on translations, transliteration and place names
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Bases of the Social Conception and political culture: Theory and practice
• 3 The ROC’s approach to other religious associations: From tradition and national identity to ‘Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture’
• 4 The Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Army: Sharing a nationalist vision
• 5 Political and religious challenges to the Moscow Patriarchate in Estonia
• 6 The Moscow Patriarchate’s defence of its canonical territory in Ukraine
• 7 Church–State relations in post-Soviet Belarus
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index