How Orthodoxy can save Russia’s soul It is more than just a tool of state power

As Ash argues, Patriarch Kirill’s strident support for the war in Ukraine — and the harsh disciplinary measures applied to priests who question this line — are only the logical culmination of an ever-tightening relationship between Church and State. Church-state interconnections in the land of the eastern Slavs have taken a bewilderingly wide variety of forms, but there is a common theme. In every era of Russia’s evolution, not excluding the Soviet one, ways have been found for earthly rulers to turn the soft power of religion to their own advantage.

Ash is not, of course, alone in making that observation. The great Russian patriot Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  remarked that his country’s history would have been “incomparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries… if the church had not surrendered its independence and [had] made its voice heard among the people as it does, for example, in Poland”.

And yet, as a careful reading of her account will also make clear, Russian Orthodoxy does not — even today — begin or end with its use as a tool of state power. There is more to the story than that.

To put matters at their very broadest, any religion, passionately embraced, gives people a motive to sacrifice personal interests and even their lives; that is one reason why earthly rulers find religion’s use so attractive. But faith also gives people the courage to oppose state power, at vast personal cost, in ways that send a dazzling moral signal. As it happens, Orthodox Christianity has inspired not only the most pliant servants of Vladimir Putin but also his most doughty opponents.

Take one well-known example: during his trial in 2021, Alexei Navalny made clear that a vital part of his own personal story was evolution from the militant atheism of his youth into a morally and politically engaged understanding of his country’s historic faith. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness”, was one of the Biblical maxims which inspired the awesomely brave corruption fighter who died in an Arctic prison in February 2024.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, an equally courageous challenger of the Putin order, had good reason to anticipate a similar fate when, in a letter from prison in November 2023, he lamented Patriarch Kirill’s moral support for the invasion of Ukraine. The dissident couched his argument in spiritual terms. “As an Orthodox Christian, this brings me only pain, grief, and deep sorrow,” he wrote. At the heart of Christianity, he added, was the rejection of murder and violence: this made it all the more deplorable that Church hierarchs “had placed the authority of Caesar over the foundations of the Christian faith”. Kara-Murza was one of 16 prisoners released to the West in a prisoner swap in August; until his liberation he was preparing himself for imminent death in jail.

Looking way back through history, it turns out there are some striking examples of tsars who thought they could turn the Church into an efficient instrument of their own power but found that the results were quite unexpected. Start with Ivan the Terrible, who held sway from 1547 to 1584 and was admired by Stalin for his savage purges and persecutions. If anyone stood up to Ivan’s murderous rampages, it was a turbulent cleric, Metropolitan Philip, who was duly imprisoned and strangled. But Philip lives on in Church history as a saint and martyr while only a lunatic fringe of religious ultra-nationalists (who do exist, unfortunately) unconditionally revere his sadistic tormentor.

Then in the 18th century, modernising emperors like Peter and Catherine imagined they could curb Orthodoxy’s mystical and monastic tradition and turn the church into a Protestant-style enforcer of morals and state loyalty. But these efforts — like the vain attempt to cure Father Iosif — were unsuccessful. Instead, there was a strange countervailing reaction. In various remote outposts of the empire there was a kind of mystical resurgence, featuring saintly ascetics and monastics with prophetic gifts — a phenomenon which inspired writers like Dostoyevsky and hence gained an unlikely place in the history of world literature.

Those three tsars — Ivan, Peter and Catherine — are worth mentioning because they are the Russian rulers Putin most admires, according to his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and hence took as his lodestars when invading Ukraine. Putin may imagine those monarchs as people who successfully and seamlessly harnessed Russia’s spiritual heritage — but if so, he is misinformed.

Another unexpected twist in Russian spiritual history occurred during the death-throes of the tsarist era with the maelstrom of the Revolution and civil war. This febrile climate had an extraordinary effect on Russian religious thought, generating the so-called Silver Age whose intellectual protagonists creatively synthesised their faith with socialist atheism. That movement would, in turn, make a powerful contribution to intellectual life outside Russia.

Driven westwards by the Bolsheviks, that diaspora’s brainy, quarrelsome thinkers went on to electrify the tired worlds of French Catholicism and Anglican academia. Take the philosopher and theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Bulgakov stands out among the thinkers who on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution abandoned secular socialism and then looked for ways to link their spiritual heritage with a practical concern for human welfare. He co-founded the Anglican-Orthodox fellowship which led to a surge of overblown excitement about a possible rapprochement or even reunion between two major segments of Christendom and had a profound impact on former leader of global Anglicanism, Rowan Williams. Amidst huge controversy, Bulgakov also foreshadowed feminist theology by reflecting on “holy wisdom” as a distinctly female form of divine power, which features rather mysteriously in Orthodox iconography and liturgical poetry. And for French thinkers like Jacques Maritain, nurtured on the medieval worldview of Thomas Aquinas, the Russian sages arriving in Paris were an exciting mixture of tradition and creativity.

Of course, not all Russia’s religious philosophers managed to escape the Bolsheviks — some, like Pavel Florensky, were among the millions of souls, including tens of thousands of priests and bishops, who perished in successive waves of repression. But those victims had a posthumous moral influence on religious thought in freer places.

In the story of Bulgakov’s friend Mother Maria Skobtsova, Russian Orthodoxy can also offer an anti-Nazi morality tale. An unconventional nun, she ran a shelter and soup-kitchen for the homeless. Having experienced the civil war in southern Russia and then a series of personal tragedies, Mother Maria had an ocean of empathy for the vulnerable and suffering — and responded positively when Jews came to her Parisian shelter asking for false documents that would help them to escape Nazi round-ups. It was for these acts of compassion that she, her son and two other associates paid with their lives. She was deported to the Ravensbrück death camp where she was executed on Easter Saturday of 1945. Among her legacies was a devastatingly accurate observation of various forms of misguided piety that she observed in her compatriots — from militaristic forms of faith to excessively ascetic and other-worldly varieties.

In short, the Russian Orthodox tradition should, from its own treasure chest, be able to offer a rich and powerful critique of the compact Putin has fashioned with an apparently docile church. It is too early to tell what opposing trends might be triggered by the present cosy and calculating relationship between an ostentatiously pious war leader and his clerical cheerleaders. But history gives us plenty of reason to suggest that Patriarch Kirill’s proclamation of Vladimir Putin as “a miracle of God” will not be the last act of the current drama. If anything can heal the pathologies now afflicting Russian Orthodoxy, it might just be the spirit of Saint Philip or Mother Maria.