Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

The boom had created a new Russia of bloggers, consumers and migrants. It was a place dizzy from change, which was trying to hold on to something. The hand it clasped was not that of Putin’s creations – be they Nashi or United Russia – but the Russian Orthodox Church. To the chagrin of its liberals, the most conservative force in the country would emerge as one of the biggest winners of a period of rapid change. As the country became less Russian ethnically, it was becoming more so culturally.

The revolutionaries who came to power during the collapse, hoping to overturn ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, failed to see their wishes for Russia come true. Except one – Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow. Yeltsin and Gaidar certainly died with regrets. Russia had not become democratic. The economy had not decoupled from a state-driven oil and gas complex. Yet as the Patriarch passed away in December 2008, he could have looked back at his revolutionary aims when he was anointed in 1989 – to bring the Russian Orthodox Church back from the margins of society into its driving force – with a feeling that he had triumphed where the democrats had failed.

In the course of his reign the Church had exploded not only in terms of adherents, but also in terms of power, wealth and infrastructure. The year before Alexy took over in 1988 there were only 22 monasteries and 6,893 priests and deacons in the country. Two years after his death there were 804 monasteries and a veritable army of 30,670 priests and deacons in Russia. 47Across the country, over a hundred Orthodox ‘brotherhoods’ had been founded. Amongst the people, over two-thirds now identified as Orthodox believers, up from less than half in the mid-nineties. 48All in all, Holy Russia was resurgent, an astonishing turnaround for a religion viciously persecuted under the Soviets.

The wealth of the Church exploded, with one tentative 2001 estimate (believed to be a vast underestimate) putting its worth at over half a billion dollars. 49Its budget is now a secret, but the Orthodox Church’s fortune is estimated at being several billion dollars at least. Since then, its property portfolio has exploded, with a 2010 law pledging to restore to the Church all lands expropriated during Lenin’s revolution. This could make it Russia’s single largest landowner. 50Its power and prestige skyrocketed, with the Patriarch living in the Kremlin, blessing the President after each inauguration, regularly broadcast alongside Putin and his ministers, with his priests integrated into the army and the religion de facto that of party and state.

The Church succeeded both by default, because Russian liberal and nationalist projects failed, but also because it knew its way politically. Alexy II and his inner circle had played the politics of the Yeltsin and Putin court perfectly. Many commented that the suspected former KGB role of Alexy II and the alleged involvement in espionage of his successor Kirill I had equipped them with the tools to co-opt and infiltrate the Kremlin into a religious agenda. Upon assuming the Patriarchy in 1989, Alexy II had done his best to support Yeltsin during the 1991 coup, urging Russians not to spill blood to force the democrats from the White House. He had offered the government support, thus legitimacy, at critical moments, endorsing Yeltsin in the 1996 election.

The Church went out of its way to infiltrate the beaten Russian Army into its sphere of influence. They began by signing treaties on cooperation with the army, the border troops and the emergency ministry to play a role promoting the faith amongst the rank and file. The military felt deeply embattled by the attacks on it from the media during the first Chechen war and embraced the Church, which was on their side of the culture war promoting Russian warrior saints. The result was that under Putin, Alexy II achieved his dream – with chapels re-established in military bases in 2005, whilst calls began to return military chaplains.

Alexy II knew how to cash in his support for Yeltsin for political favours. No sooner had he backed the ailing leader’s 1996 re-election, did the government begin drafting a new law curtailing what the Church described as ‘the invasion of the sects’. The law elevated Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism to higher levels of rights and benefits, with the implicit hint that Orthodoxy was more equal than the others.

Alexy II had known how to make money for the Church in the 1990s. With the bandit economy as the way of life, he secured the right to trade duty-free cigarettes, with the Church becoming the trader of 10 per cent of the country’s tobacco. 51When the tide turned towards nationalized conglomerates, he successfully positioned the Church as something akin to a ‘state corporation’, a spiritual version of Rosneft or the bank VTB. Nominally, it would be independent but Alexy encouraged Putin to ‘invest’ in it and think of himself as its major political and economic shareholder. Gazprom and Rosneft are believed to have made huge donations to the Church. Putin’s close St Petersburg allies Sergey Ivanov, the defence minister (2000–8), and Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railways, both came out as strong supporters of this religious revival.

The Church also thrived because, guided by prejudice alone, one survey saw 37 per cent of bishops deem democracy ‘not for Russia’; it worked out what the Putin project was and how to work with it quickly. 52By turning itself into a ‘state corporation’ of sorts it managed to amass the funds for its massive construction campaign. Yet buildings were not the only infrastructure it erected: the Patriarchy built its own mass media. By the end of 2010 it was publishing twenty journals, broadcasting on six radio stations and operating two satellite TV channels. 53Online priests formed a cluster of popular Orthodox blogs heavily linked into the large ‘nationalist cluster’ of the Runet. The Church sponsored its own talking heads, with the Patriarch’s press service constantly commenting on major talk shows.

Orthodoxy resurgent could be felt even in liberal Moscow. Gay pride demonstrations were banned. Then, over the Soviet baroque skyline, rose the gigantic gold cupola of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The cathedral had been destroyed by Stalin in order to create space for his dreamed of Palace of the Soviets, which would have towered above Moscow topped by a statue of Lenin, whose shadow would have fallen over the capital of socialism. The act of destroying the cathedral – imagine Mussolini dynamiting the Florentine Duomo, imagine Napoleon wrecking Notre Dame de Paris – symbolized the ultimate horrific assault on Orthodoxy in the eyes of Russian conservatives. The site also came to symbolize the failure of Stalin’s utopia. The marshlands underneath proved unable to sustain the foundations of the tower he dreamed of, which kept collapsing back. After the war, construction was abandoned and a gigantic open-air swimming pool opened, heated so that in the winter a tower of steam, like a ghost of a dream, hovered above Moscow.

To the faithful, the restoration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, built by the tsars to celebrate their victory over Napoleon, symbolized victory over Stalin. It was a political more than a sacred place. Believers seemed to sense this, never praying in distress or coming for solace. It attracted mostly protesters in a culture war for or against holy Russia, such as the infamous ‘Pussy Riot’. This symbol of the Church’s political victory also symbolized how it had embraced Putin too closely. With less than 7 per cent of the site said to be used for religious purposes, with an underground car park and the conference halls rented out for money, the unlovely half-a-billion dollar building stood for a byzantine symbiosis between the Patriarch and the Kremlin. 54