JOURNEYING THROUGH THE EFFORTS OF ORTHODOXY TO RETURN RUSSIA TO FAITH.

IN-CHURCHING RUSSIA

by John P. Burgess

On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Orthodox Church had 50,000 parishes, a thousand men’s and women’s monasteries, and sixty theological schools. By 1941, Stalin had nearly succeeded in eliminating the Church as a public institution. Perhaps only a hundred and fifty to two hundred churches remained active in the whole country, and every monastery and seminary had been closed. Although Hitler’s invasion of Russia caused Stalin abruptly to change course—he turned to the Church to help him mobilize the population for war—the Church nevertheless labored under severe restrictions until the Gorbachev era.

With the fall of communism in 1991, the Church began to rebuild its devastated institutional life. The number of parishes has grown from 7,000 two decades ago to 30,000 today, monasteries from twenty-two to eight hundred, and seminaries and theological schools from three to more than a hundred. Symbolic of this new era is Christ the Savior Cathedral, razed by Stalin in 1931 and reconstructed in the 1990s at the initiative of President Boris Yeltsin and the mayor of Moscow on its original site on the banks of the Moscow River, close to the Kremlin.

Over the past decade, I have traveled to Russia a dozen times, with stays for an entire year in 2004–2005 and again in 2011–2012. The Western media have reported a good deal about the new cultural and political influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Many observers believe that Russia is returning to ancient Byzantine notions of a symphonia, an approach in which Church and state closely cooperate. Critics claim that the Church is enjoying newfound wealth and social privilege in exchange for supporting the Putin regime.

There is certainly evidence for this assertion. During my stay in 2011–2012, I saw firsthand the gulf between the church hierarchy and the new anti-Putin political movement. Church leaders essentially ordered their flock to avoid the demonstrations that were spilling out onto the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Believers were supposed to stay home and pray. For their part, the protest leaders ­included no church representatives and did not appeal to the Orthodox faith to justify their stand. As far as they were concerned, the protest movement and the Church had nothing to do with each other. And the Church seemed all too willing to oblige, as when Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, declared his support for Putin in the March 2012 presidential election and condemned the feminist collective Pussy Riot for intruding into Christ the Savior Cathedral to protest the Church’s unholy alliance with Putin.

But the story of the Church’s rebirth is more complicated than Western analyses suggest. Most Russians now identify themselves as Orthodox and approve of the Church’s renewed social prominence. Since the fall of communism, Christmas and Easter have been reestablished as federal holidays, and on these days the churches cannot contain all the worshippers. Thousands of church buildings have been restored to their former glory and again dominate public space. Not only President Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev but also regional and local political officials openly profess their Orthodox faith and appear next to church officials at civic events as well as religious services. In just twenty years, the Church has become Russia’s largest and most important nongovernmental organization. Sensing its growing social influence, the Church aspires to achieve nothing less than the re-Christianization of the Russian nation.

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