Orthodoxy as semi-official religion of Russia
RUSSIA'S
WELL-CONNECTED PATRIARCH
As Church Enjoys Revival of
Influence, It’s Past Remains Clouded
by Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service, 23 May 2002
Beneath
the stone arches of the Church of St. Sofia of God's Wisdom, in the courtyard
of the former KGB headquarters in central Moscow's Lubyanka Square, the
patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church joined the hierarchy of the Federal Security Service in early March
for a prayer.
There, in what served during Soviet times as a warehouse, Patriarch Alexy II
asked God's blessing for the leaders of what was once the KGB's dreaded
internal security arm. He asked the church to help ensure Russia's safety
"in the face of external and internal ill-wishers, if not enemies"
and prayed that the little chapel be spared further "storms and
ordeals."
For the man who has run Russia's dominant church for the past decade, it was a
classic patriarchal performance: steeped in patriotism, tinged with mistrust of
the wider world and remarkable for what was left unsaid. Nowhere in his
blessing did Alexy note that it was from the same Lubyanka address that
Stalin's KGB ordered the imprisonment and execution of millions of innocent
people branded enemies of the state -- including much of the clergy of the
Russian Orthodox Church.
Skeptics say Alexy's remarks mirror the greater
irony of his 1,000-year-old church. After being subverted, penetrated and
virtually remade as an arm of the Soviet state during seven decades of
communism, the Russian Orthodox Church has been reborn under the leadership of
its strong-willed, 73-year-old patriarch. Alexy has created 12,000 new Orthodox
parishes, rebuilt hundreds of majestic onion-domed churches once used as Soviet
animal pens and garages, and parlayed a religious revival in free Russia into a
dramatic renewal of the church's public authority and political influence.
But at the same time, Alexy's many critics say, the newly empowered church has
found it difficult to shed or even admit key aspects of its communist legacy.
Under Alexy's leadership, they say, the church has continued to walk in near
lockstep with the secular Russian state, parroting the Kremlin line on issues
as diverse as the war in Chechnya, NATO relations, poultry imports and the
conduct of this winter's Olympic Games.
The critics describe the church as fiercely nationalistic and deeply suspicious
of outsiders, and they say it uses its political clout to throw up barriers to
other faiths, from the Jehovah's Witnesses to the Roman Catholic Church, with
which it split in 1054. It has retained its penchant for secrecy, they say,
refusing to disclose its income from such activities as tax-free cigarette
sales, which amount to government subsidies.
Most painfully, they say, it has balked at publicly expiating its own Soviet
past, including compelling evidence that Alexy was for decades an important
asset of the KGB.
Church-State Ties
Many Orthodox priests were forced by the Communists into
relationships with the Soviet police, often under threat of execution.
Researchers say that evidence indicates that Alexy rose to power in part as a
reward for his service as a KGB informant, and that he was decorated for that
work as recently as 1988, two years before church leaders elected him
patriarch.
Alexy declined repeated requests for an interview for this article. But the
Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy head of the church's foreign relations
department, said in an interview in March that clergymen had no choice but to
report to Soviet authorities. As long as they did not turn in fellow believers
and priests, he said, they did no moral wrong.
"To reject Soviet power as something totally bad, and to blame someone
just for being in good touch with Soviet authorities, I think is a highly
politicized approach," he said. Many Russians share the church's attitude
that to explore the Soviet Union's grisly past would be useless and painful.
In an interview 18 months ago with the Britain-based Keston Institute, which
monitors religious freedom in Russia and other countries, Chaplin said that the
church and the state continue to have common concerns, such as Russia's
greatness and the church's role in the world. "We don't consider that
everything which was done in that [Soviet] period was incorrect," he said.
There is no doubt that the Russian Orthodox Church and its believers suffered
grievously under Soviet rule, and that some of those wounds, such as the loss
of the church's assets and some of its flock, could take years or decades to
heal. Still, some religious activists and critics say the church remains in
many ways influenced by the Soviet experience.
"In a very real sense, the patriarchate of Moscow is the most Soviet
institution in Russia today," said the Keston Institute's director,
Lawrence Uzzell. "It is the only institution whose top leadership has not
changed since the fall of Soviet Union."
Alexander Nezhny, who frequently writes about religion, said Alexy represents
the Soviet-era bishops who want "to make religion subordinate to state
ideology" and to sound a message of "national and religious
superiority."
Others say Alexy is captive to far more conservative bishops whose power he
cannot challenge. Unlike the Catholic Church's pope, the Russian Orthodox
patriarch serves at the pleasure of a council of bishops. Some contend that
Alexy is not as hard-line as some of the church's bishops, but reflects their
views.
"He conducts the line of the majority of the bishops, and today the
majority of bishops are people of yesterday," said Anatoly Krasikov,
director of the Center for Social and Religious Studies, funded by the Russian
Academy of Sciences. "Inside and outside the church, there are people who
want the church to take the place of the former Communist Party as the keeper
of ideological unity, ideological purity in Russia."
The Russian Orthodox Church has never represented itself as a solely religious
institution. It has long been lashed to the state, with its moral power used to
legitimize czars and justify state policies.
Those ties are much less pronounced now, with the Russian constitution and a
comprehensive religion law guaranteeing freedom of worship. Still, the church
sees itself as Russia's semi-official religion and, to a certain extent, is
treated as such by the state.
Roughly half of Russia's 144 million citizens now call themselves Orthodox
Christians, as do millions more in such former Soviet states as Ukraine and
Belarus -- although only a small percentage of those in Russia attend church
services.
Modern Russian leaders, from former president Boris Yeltsin to Moscow Mayor
Yuri Luzhkov, have treated the patriarchy with special deference. Only Alexy is
called upon to bless august state occasions, such as Yeltsin's transfer of a
briefcase containing secret nuclear codes to Vladimir Putin on Dec. 31, 1999.
Chaplin, the church spokesman, said that Putin regularly consults Alexy on
domestic issues and that church leaders talk almost daily with Putin's aides.
The patriarch "has managed to elevate the status of the church within the
state. He is a politician," said Maxim Shevchenko, a journalist here who
has written about religion for years.
Cigarettes, Bottled Water
The relationship Alexy has built with the government appears to have worked to
both sides' political benefit -- and for the church, financial gain. But that
has not come without controversy.
The church emerged from communism a pauper, stripped of riches it had
accumulated over a millennium. While the Kremlin has since returned many
Orthodox churches, it has held on to other assets, including land and schools,
arguing that such property always belonged to the state.
Partly as compensation, the Kremlin allowed the church in the mid-1990s to
import between $75 million and $100 million worth of cigarettes duty-free.
About the same time, the church acquired 40 percent of MES, an oil-export firm
whose quotas on foreign oil sales, like all such allowances, were set by the
government. The company estimated its revenue in 1996 at $2 billion.
The government canceled the cigarette concession in late 1996. The church lost
oil as a source of income about four years ago when MES went out of business.
"Of course the church was in a tough position financially after the
disintegration of the Soviet Union. But people saw that the church was
tarnishing its reputation by that sort of activity," said Krasikov, of the
Center for Social and Religious Studies.
Now, the church survives partly on a bottled water business and contributions
from wealthy enterprises, including the state-controlled natural gas monopoly,
Gazprom, and Lukoil, an oil company that is partly owned by the state. At
Lukoil's behest, Alexy expressed his gratitude to the firm for its patronage in
a television commercial that aired in November.
While there is no indication that government favors have shaped church policy,
Alexy is unquestionably a strong and reliable supporter of the Kremlin. After
Yeltsin decried NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, also a predominately
Orthodox country, Alexy condemned the air war as a "criminal act" and
a challenge to God.
Yet he is unflinchingly behind Russia's war in the rebellious southern region
of Chechnya. Two years ago, he denounced a vote by Council of Europe's
parliamentary assembly to suspend Russia's voting rights because of widespread
human rights violations in Chechnya. Alexy said biased Western delegates had
blackened the reputation of Russian troops while ignoring terrorist acts by
Chechen rebels.
Sergei Ivanenko, a Russian board member of the International Association for
Religious Freedom, argues that Alexy is no Kremlin puppet, especially on issues
of how to deal with the West or other religions. "The church is trying to
resist the expansion of Western ideals," Ivanenko said. "Our
president is much more liberal."
Still, the church's support of the Kremlin has earned it a degree of state
protection against competition from other religions. Prodded by the church,
Yeltsin signed legislation in 1997 that raised a daunting series of
bureaucratic hurdles for other faiths that have come to Russia seeking
adherents.
Since then, the Mormon Church, the Salvation Army and others have had to fight
for the legal status to rent space for worship and hand out literature. The
Orthodox Church has linked arms with hard-line local officials, warning against
the danger of religious sects.
Catholicism is still regarded as a threat, almost 1,000 years after the 1054
schism that severed the Orthodox and Catholic churches over issues of doctrine
and authority. Although Pope John Paul II has begun to mend fences with other
estranged faiths, he has yet to be allowed to visit Russia, largely due to
Alexy's objections. After the pope delivered a short prayer via satellite to a
Moscow cathedral in February, Alexy denounced it as a "spiritual
invasion."
More recently, Orthodox groups have mounted what Catholics call an organized
campaign against them. One of Russia's four Catholic bishops was stripped of
his visa last month. A group linked to the Orthodox Church recently organized a
nationwide protest after the Vatican upgraded its Russian bureaucracy, creating
dioceses like those in almost all other nations. Orthodox leaders have a ready
explanation for their close ties to the state: The church needs the
government's protection and its support to recover from more than 70 years of
Communist persecution.
Critics agree that the state owes the church at least an apology for the wrongs
of the past. But they argue just as strongly that the church owes its flock an
explanation of its own complicity in the Communists' persecution of believers.
The church set up a commission in 1992 to investigate its ties to the KGB, but
no report was published.
A
Questioned Past
The
questions begin with Alexy himself. A wealth of recent research strongly
indicates that he was recruited by the KGB in 1958 when he was a 28-year-old
priest in his homeland of Estonia and served as an agent for 30 years.
Documents unearthed in Estonia's capital, Tallinn, describe how the KGB planned
to reward a priest code-named "Drozdov" by making him bishop there;
Alexy received the post in 1961. Although the priest's real name is not given,
Alexy was the only priest in the Estonian diocese who matches the KGB's
description, according to the Keston Institute, which reviewed and published
the records.
Alexy said in a 1991 newspaper interview that he was "sometimes forced to
give way" to Soviet authorities. He apologized for "such concessions,
the failure to speak out, the forced passivity and expressions of loyalty of
the church leadership."
Chaplin, the church spokesman, said in March, "Nobody has ever seen a
single real document that would confirm the patriarch used his contacts with
Soviet authorities to make harm to the church or to any people in the
church."
That doesn't satisfy Vera Afanasyeva, 56, a former cultural center director.
She paused to discuss her faith one recent Saturday as she sat in Moscow's
Catholic cathedral, contemplating whether to convert.
"I think Orthodoxy has tainted itself. And it won't change until Orthodox
priests repent before people and prove they are totally different from the
past," she said. "They are all former KGB. They need to renounce the
Soviet ideology."
(copyright The
Washington Post Company, posted 23 May 2002)