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Transcript of Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church
8/13/2019 Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church
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PUTIN AND THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX
CHURCH
Transcript for Rear Vision 21 October 2012
Elizabeth Jackson, Correspondents Report
(archival): More than a week after their
sentence there are still few firm answers as to
where the jailed members of the Russian punk
group Pussy Riot will be serving their sentences.
Tim Palmer, AM (archival): Since three
members of the band were sentenced to prison
for a performance at an Orthodox cathedral, the
debate over the church’s political ties to the
Kremlin has spilled into the open.
Journalist (archival): Sergei Baranov pulls nopunches: the church, he says, is filled with
hypocrites and liars and the Pussy Riot verdict
proves the church leadership and the Kremlin
are now one and the same.
Annabelle Quince: In February this year, five
members of the Pussy Riot punk group stagedan illegal performance in the Cathedral of
Christ the Saviour, one of the most significant
Russian Orthodox churches in Moscow. The
performance lasted only 40 seconds before it
was stopped by church security, and the whole
incident might have been forgotten but for the
fact that three of the group were later arrested
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and charged with hooliganism. The arrest and
the court case that followed caught the attention
of the international media and questions started
to be asked about the close relationship betweenthe Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian
state.
Hello, I’m Annabelle Quince and this is Rear
Vision on RN and via the web. In today’s
program, we take a look at the history of the
Russian Orthodox Church and its relationship
with the Russian state.
Orthodox Christianity is not home-grown in
Russia and it didn’t arrive via missionaries, as
Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and
Eastern European politics at the University of
Kent, explains.
Richard Sakwa: In the tenth century the
Russian — well, the Kievan — prince put forward
what is effectively a tender. And so four major
religions put in a bid to become the national
religion of what was the Kievan principality.First of all the Moslems turned up and made
their pitch, but then when they towards the end
said that you’re not allowed to drink alcohol in
Islam, then clearly they said, ‘That’s no good for
us.’ And the next one was Jewish and that also
made a very strong pitch and that wasn’t
accepted because of pork eating and other
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issues. And in the end a representative from
Constantinople made their pitch and that
seemed to suit everything. So Russia effectively
became a Christian country because of thedecision of the Kievan principality and officially
the date is 988.
Annabelle Quince: It’s an interesting way for a
religion to come to a country, because often it
comes through missionaries or through…
literally from the bottom up. And in Russia it
was really from the top down. And I’m
wondering what impact that had on the
relationship between the Russian Orthodox
Church as it developed.
Richard Sakwa: It’s a complicated question,
because on the one side you’re absolutely right:
it was from the top down, it was from the
monarch, and that has remained an issue to this
day, that orthodoxy — in other words, the form
of Christianity practised in Byzantium, the
eastern version or the Orthodox version — has a
different vision of the temporal and secular. I’mnot simply going to say it’s more dominated by
kings and monarchs because it’s more
complicated than that; however, it doesn’t have
that separation which was typical of the west,
which took the form of conflict between popes
and monarchs, which in Britain led to theReformation in the sixteenth century.
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Russia and the eastern world have a different
model. Now, the usual word to describe it is
‘symphonia’, the symphonia of political and
religious power. And this is still a powerful idea;however, too often it has led to the dominance of
the kings of the temporal powers, and this
certainly was the case under the Peter the Great,
who abolished the Russian patriarch,
established a synod, established almost,
effectively, a Ministry for Religion. The churchthen becomes much more of a subordinate body.
Irina Papkova: Since about 1725 the Russian
Orthodox Church functioned as a department of
state, of the Russian state.
Annabelle Quince: Irina Papkova is a fellow at
Georgetown University and the author of The
Orthodox Church and Russian Politics .
Irina Papkova: So essentially it was run by a
collegial body known as the Holy Synod, which
was supposed to be made up of… just of
bishops, but it also reported to a lay minister ofstate called the procurator, who was a layman;
he was appointed directly by the emperor. So
for about 200 years or so the Russian Orthodox
Church was run by the Russian state.
Annabelle Quince: This, however, began to
change at the beginning of the twentieth
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century, as Dr Michael Bourdeaux, canon and
founder of the Keston College in England
explains.
Michael Bourdeaux: Some cracks began to
appear in 1905, which was the year of what’s
called ‘the first revolution’, because there were
some priests in the Orthodox Church who began
to see that the situation of the close relationship
between church and state was corrupt, and they
began to object and indeed took part in
demonstrations in that first revolution. So by
the time of 1917, the big revolution, the
Orthodox Church was playing a role, actually,
for social reform — not universally, but there
were individual members of the Orthodox
Church who were quite openly calling for achange.
And of course that change came about in 1917,
first of all with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas
II in March ‘17 and then the proper revolution
in October of that year, the arrival of Lenin, the
overthrow of all the past, and the revolutionarymode, with the Bolsheviks playing a huge role
and trying to root out everything connected with
the past. That included not only the relics of
loyalty to the tsar but loyalty to the Orthodox
Church as well.
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Annabelle Quince: And explain that; explain
what happens to the church, its properties and
its influence post-1917.
Michael Bourdeaux: Yes, it didn’t take Lenin
long to get to grips with the Orthodox Church.
He was brought up as an atheist and hated
everything to do with religion. And it’s really
significant that the… one of the very first
decrees that he passed after he was ensconced as
the Bolshevik leader was to pass a law calling
for the separation of church and state.
Well, in theory that sounds fine. What actually
happened in practice was that the state
confiscated all church goods. It took over all
church property and abolished church schools.
The power of the church was broken at one
stroke by that new law as early as January 1918,
just a couple of months after the revolution. And
that inaugurated the first great purge against
the church, and by halfway through 1918 the
church was rocking back on its heels, with the
Bolsheviks not only taking over church propertybut destroying it, setting up the first prison
camp in the island monastery of Solovki in the
north of Russia — it was a time of devastation for
the church.
After that Stalin came into power and he
carried on the persecution in the late 1920s. And
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in 1927 the church was trying to make some sort
of compromise with the regime, which was a
very important moment in the history we’re
talking about.
(Chimes)
Journalist (archival): This wooded area of
Butovo, barely an hour’s drive from the centre
of Moscow, conceals a part of Russia’s history
many would rather forget. Around me areovergrown mass graves, holding the remains of
perhaps 70,000 people who died in the Stalin
era. Among them are bishops, priests, ordinary
church workers, who were killed for their faith.
Richard Sakwa: I think the figure is that under
the Bolsheviks over 200,000 priests, bishops andothers were killed — not just taken to camps, of
course the figure would be higher — but at least
200,000 killed, the church ultimately completely
subordinated to the state.
Annabelle Quince: So you mentioned there was
some kind of approach by the church in 1927 tofind some sort of accommodation with the
communist state. Can you explain what that
was?
Michael Bourdeaux: Yes. The acting head of the
church after the death of Patriarch Tikhon was
Metropolitan Sergius. And he was dragged in by
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the secret police, interrogated, almost certainly
tortured in prison. And on the 29th of June 1927
he signed a declaration — he may or may not
have written it himself — but it was published inhis name. I’ll read you an extract from it,
because it’s very revealing.
He said, or is purported to have said:
Let us publicly express our gratitude to the
Soviet government for the interest it’s showingin all the religious needs of the Orthodox people.
We want to be Orthodox believers and at the
same time to recognise the Soviet Union as our
fatherland, whose joys and successes are our
joys and successes, and whose setbacks are our
setbacks. Every attack directed against the
Soviet Union is resented by us as being directed
against ourselves.
That statement became the paradigm, the
model, for church-state relations from 1927.
And you could honestly say, bringing it forward
to 2012, that it’s the model even for this veryday.
Annabelle Quince: Despite the agreement in
1927, the persecution of the Russian Orthodox
Church continued throughout the Soviet period.
Yet the church did survive. But according to
Julie Fedor, historian and the author of Russia
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and the Cul t of State Secur i ty , the church paid a
high price for that survival.
Julie Fedor: The Orthodox Church really wascrippled by the kind of compromises that it
made in order to win the right to survive. The
Moscow patriarchate in its current form is
actually really very much a creation of Stalin,
who re-established this office in 1943. After
Hitler had invaded in 1941, Stalin famously
moved towards a position of greater tolerance
towards the church in an effort to use it as a
means of boosting sort of patriotic moods and
the Soviet war effort.
And he famously met with church hierarchs in
1943 and offered them various concessions, and
one of which was the right to re-establish the
office of the patriarch, which had been
abolished in the 1920s. And in the later Soviet
period you have a situation in which the
Orthodox Church was very heavily infiltrated
by the KGB — and this is especially the case
when it comes to the upper levels of thechurch — to the point where by 1991 one sort of
non-conformist priest said that it was no longer
possible actually to say where the church began
and where the KGB ended. This is one aspect of
its history that the church has not really
managed to come to terms with in the post-Soviet period — if you like, one of the ongoing
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blank spots in the Soviet history of church-state
relations.
And this in fact is something that is one of thethings that the Pussy Riot performance was
really trying to draw attention to, and arguably
one of the reasons why the response to it has
been so harsh on the part of both the Orthodox
Church and the Russian government, because
they were trying to really highlight the extent to
which the church had been compromised by the
fact that lots… so many priests were actually
forced to collaborate with the KGB, and also by
virtue of its alliance with Putin, who is of course
a former KGB officer.
Richard Sakwa: On the one side, the leading
hierarchy was penetrated deeply by the secret
police; on the other, the church did actually then
work with the Soviet authorities on their own
public campaigns, what nowadays would be
called ‘soft power’— the interdenominational
church councils, for example, would always
have a Russian bishop — and they were pursuingthe state tasks for peace and in these various
Soviet councils abroad. So you’d have the
church and state, the official hierarchy, work
together.
However, there were some priests who then led
what you could call a revivalist movement from
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below. This is an attempt to — while not
challenging the political system openly, because
it certainly wouldn’t work that way— to
establish a certain type of independentspirituality and a different view of society. They
were enormously attacked, so it’s an awful
legacy.
Annabelle Quince: You’re with Rear Vision on
RN and downloadable via the internet. I’m
Annabelle Quince and today we’re tracing the
relationship between the Russian Orthodox
Church and the Russian state.
By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union was
beginning to crumble, and by the beginning of
1992 it was gone.
Journalist (archival): With the passing of 1991
the Soviet Union has officially ceased to exist.
(Chimes)
Journalist (archival): There they are the first
chimes of 1992 in what was the Soviet Union andis now, as we all know, the new commonwealth
of independent states.
Annabelle Quince: So what happens when the
Soviet Union collapses?
Michael Bourdeaux: Ah, now that’s a very, veryinteresting story. The churches began reviving
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in the 1970s and the ‘80s, not only the Orthodox
Church but the Protestant Churches, the Baptist
Church, the Catholic Church. Opposition
against communism began emerging withinchurch circles, in some other circles as well —
democratic circles outside the church. But the
church, shall we say believers in general, of
different denominations, hugely contributed to
the moral collapse followed by the physical
collapse of the Soviet Union.
And Mikhail Gorbachev encouraged this. He
didn’t encourage the collapse of the Soviet
Union of course; he wanted to strengthen it by
making it more democratic, which was
impossible. What Gorbachev did was to
encourage the church institutions to play apositive role in the wellbeing of Soviet society.
He allowed them to start welfare work and so
on, and the churches to reopen again, and
prisoners to be released. It was a time of great
turbulence, as we all know, the last few years
leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
eventually the Soviet regime collapsed in a heap
of ignominy and that was more or less the end of
Gorbachev.
But from that moment, about 1988, while
Gorbachev was still in full power, he said that
the church, the Orthodox Church, could domore or less what it liked. And in that year,
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1988, it celebrated 1000 years since the baptism
of Prince Vladimir, which led to the conversion
of Russia to Christianity. The celebration was
huge. And from 1988 onwards the OrthodoxChurch was in the ascendancy again and it’s
never looked backwards from that day to this.
Annabelle Quince: The new Russian
constitution, which came into effect in 1993,
established Russia as a secular state.
Richard Sakwa: The Russian constitution of
December 1993 makes it absolutely clear about
the separation of church and state. So Russia is
a secular state, and this is very important and
this is what a lot of the battles go on about
today, because Russia is a classical liberal… I
mean, we’re not talking about how it works in
practice, but in formal, constitutional terms
there is this separation of church and state. At
the same time, in the 1990s, huge rebirth of…
rebuilding of churches, a lot of activities, even
semi-state supported in Moscow. For example,
Mayor Lushkov in the 1990s got contributionsfrom business leaders to rebuild the Church of
Christ the Saviour; this is that great church just
opposite the Kremlin, which was built to
celebrate the victory of another invader, of
Napoleon in 1812.
(Music)
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Journalist (archival): One thing you notice when
you go into just about any church today is the
amount of restoration work that’s going on.
There are few that don’t have scaffolding upsomewhere. Icons are being rehung and again
revered, gilded panels and doors restored,
golden domes rebuilt. Babushkas and bankers
once again share in the resplendent, unhasty
rituals of Orthodox worship.
Annabelle Quince: Explain why the post-Soviet
Yeltsin government supported the return of
properties back to the Russian Orthodox
Church.
Irina Papkova: Well, there’s two versions of
this, one of which is that it was kind of a
utilitarian move and that Yeltsin saw in the
church a potential supporter of the ongoing
reforms, which of course were causing lots of
social problems for the people of the Russian
Federation, because of course the reforms were
such that, let’s say, in the… by 1993 or ‘94
about half of the Russian population had beenplunged into a state of poverty compared to
where they had been before the reforms started.
So one explanation was that Yeltsin wanted to
use the church as a kind of institution that
would help mitigate the problems between the
state and the population that arose because ofthese reform problems.
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But the other reason, which I actually think has
some credibility to it, is that Yeltsin did actually
envision the new Russia as being one that totally
rejected the old Soviet regime and that sort oflooked back more to the pre-Soviet Russian
state as a model. And for him part of rejecting
the Soviet model meant rejecting the atheist
policies and embracing the church as a serious
part of Russian identity. There was some
speculation that he actually chose to strengthenthe church because he probably felt bad about
the fact that the Soviet regime had done
everything it could to destroy it. And so in a
form of… I wouldn’t go as far as to say its
repentance, but something like it, Yeltsin was
interested in supporting the church in the post-
Soviet period.
Journalist (archival): When the communists fell,
religions of every kind mushroomed — but not
for long. Though Russia adopted a policy of
religious freedom, all denominations have
bowed to the Orthodox Church backed by the
power of the state.
Irina Papkova: The Religious Freedom Law of
1990 had not just given full freedom to the
Russian Orthodox Church; it also gave religious
freedom to every other religious organisation on
Russian territory in a way that wasunprecedented not just in Russia but I would
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Irina Papkova: By 1997 the Russian media was
full of stories of new missionary groups coming
in and behaving in ways that was sort of
perceived as anti-social. So on the one handthere was a social basis for the Russian
government to look and say, ‘Hey, this is
becoming a little bit too much. We should curb
it.’ And on the other hand, the Russian church
itself obviously felt the competition, so they
lobbied the Russian state for a law that wouldlimit missionary activity.
And in 1997 Yeltsin had just come off a very
contentious election where he almost lost to the
communists. And one of the things he did during
the election was that he asked the Russian
Orthodox Church to support him and to call onRussians to vote for Yeltsin and parties that
supported him. And the church did that. The
patriarch came out and said that if you’re a
Russian voter you should vote against the
communists because if you vote for the
communists obviously they’ll come back in with
the same policies that they had for 70 years, so
you should vote for Yeltsin. And the 1997 law
was a sort of thank you present from Yeltsin.
Annabelle Quince: Vladimir Putin gained the
presidency in 1999 and I’m wondering how we
should understand his relationship with the
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Russian Orthodox Church and whether that has
changed over the last 13-odd years.
Michael Bourdeaux: It’s changed in so far as it’sbecome stronger. But from the very beginning,
President Putin described himself as being a
baptised believer. And what Putin wants to see
is a strong Russia. Many Russians — most
Russians — bewail the fact that when the Soviet
Union collapsed, Russia lost its status as a world
power. Well, Putin is well on the way to re-
establishing that status. One of the tools that he
has used for the re-establishment of that status
is the Orthodox Church — strong church in a
strong Russia. The Orthodox Church
contributes to the image of the Russian state.
As I said earlier on, from 1927 up to the present
day, even during the worst years of the
persecution in the ‘20s and ‘30s, when the
persecution was bad, the church even then could
not stand out and say, ‘We as believers oppose
the prosecution of an atheist state.’ That was the
situation under communism and under statecapitalism, or whatever you call the present
Russian system: the church is there holding the
hand of the Russian state; quite often the
Russian state gets justification for its actions
from moral support of the Orthodox Church.
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Julie Fedor: This is something that we could see
especially clearly over the past year, when you
have also had this wave of protests that have
followed the announcement in September lastyear of the so-called castling move that Putin
and Medvedev made, whereby Putin announced
that they were simply going to swap roles and he
would become president again in 2012. The
church has very much been lending its support
to Putin throughout these protests.
In February, just before the presidential
elections, the patriarch came out and publicly
supported Putin’s re-election campaign. The
patriarch has also come out with various
statements asserting that true Orthodox
believers do not take part in street protests,basically, that this is a non-Orthodox and thus a
non-Russian thing to do. So you can see ways in
which religion is very much being used for the
purposes of demonising and delegitimising the
idea of political opposition in Russia.
Annabelle Quince: So how many people withinRussia would identify themselves as being part
of the Russian Orthodox Church?
Julie Fedor: I guess one of the most important
things to note about Russian Orthodoxy is the
really strong linkage that exists between Russian
Orthodoxy and cultural and national
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identification, such that nowadays, for example,
I think it’s roughly 75 per cent of Russians
identify as Orthodox, but this is very much, as I
say, largely a cultural identification. So if youlook at the figures for the number of Russians
who attend church, then it’s famously much,
much lower than that.
(Music)
Journalist (archival): On the day three membersof Pussy Riot were sentenced, the band showed
its defiance by releasing its new single, ‘Putin
Lights Up the Fires’. One of the lines in the
chorus says, ‘Seven years isn’t enough.’ Another
goes, ‘Putin is going to say goodbye like a
sheep.’
Michael Bourdeaux: The Pussy Riot group in
Moscow were protesting against the very thing
that we’ve been talking about during the whole
of this program: the too cosy relationship
between the church and the state, the fact that
Patriarch Kirill called for Christians to supportPutin in the recent election as president. They
considered that illegitimate; a lot of other people
consider it illegitimate. That is why the
Orthodox Church politically has been divided
over this issue. The church at the top level — and
Putin — have shown huge vulnerability in their
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