08 FEBRUARY 2024, THE TABLET

Putin’s holy war

by Martin Sixsmith

Soviet politics and the Russian Orthodox Church

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow is a staunch critic of a Western-induced ‘cultural miasma’. Records have shown his links to the KGB and to Vladimir Putin.

The patriarch and the president reinforce each other’s conviction that the two-year-old war in Ukraine is necessary to prevent a decadent West imposing its depraved liberal values on Russia.

In April 1242, with the Russian lands in danger of being overrun by the advancing forces of the Teutonic Knights, Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod needed a miracle. And, as his outnumbered forces rode out to confront the invaders on the frozen waters of Lake Peipus, he got one. “In fierce battle came the crash of breaking lances and the ringing of sword on sword, until the ice turned red with the blood of men,” wrote the official chronicler of the Novgorodian princedom, “until in the sky appeared God’s hosts of heavenly troops, aiding our Prince to victory … I know this is true, for an eyewitness hath told me so.”

The chronicler’s reassurance that God must be on our side because “an eyewitness hath told me so” is a curlicue embellishment on a time-honoured theme. Princes and presidents throughout history have claimed the endorsement of Heaven to shore up their authority. Vladimir Putin is no exception.

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has generally been an ally – oftentimes, a servant – of the Russian state since the establishment of the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Rus’ in 1589. Under the ultra-conservative, antisemitic Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who served as procurator of the Holy Synod between 1880 and 1905, the ROC became part of the campaign to fight foreign influence and return Russia to its own “God-appointed” path, opposing western ideas of individualism, democracy and freedom of thought – desiderata that would be voiced again with gusto in the second half of Putin’s reign.

Despite the Bolshevik persecution of the Church, in 1927 Patriarch Sergius pledged the ROC’s loyalty to the Soviet state, triggering a schism and the declaration of a rival seat of Russian Orthodox power, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. Under Boris Yeltsin, the ROC was kept largely on the margins of power. Putin made a bigger effort. He spoke of his lifelong Orthodox faith and used it to his advantage. At his first meeting with George W. Bush, he showed him a metal cross that he said had been a gift from his mother on the occasion of his secret baptism in the 1950s. Although he didn’t wear it during his time in the KGB, Putin said he had had the cross blessed on a trip to Jerusalem in the mid 1990s at his mother’s behest and it had later miracu­lously survived a fire at the family dacha. Since then, Putin said, “I have never taken it off.” Putin returned much of the property confiscated from the Church by the Bolsheviks and showered its leaders with praise and money. In 2007, he attended the ceremony in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour that ended the 80-year-old schism within Russian Orthodoxy. “The restoration of church unity is an important condition for rediscovering the lost unity of the Russian people,” he declared.

When Putin announced in 2012 that he would return to the presidency after serving a term as prime minister, Patriarch Kirill, who had been elected in 2009, was his most vocal champion. The reign of Vladimir Putin, he assured the faithful, was “God’s miracle”. Kirill endorsed Putin’s description of the 1990s as a new Time of Troubles and blamed Russia’s “moral collapse” on western influences, ­including the excessive individualism that accompanied the liberalisation of politics and the economy. He gave thanks that the Church had remained a bastion of integrity, holding Russian society together in those difficult years, preserving the nation’s true values and ready now to aid President Putin in his crusade to put Russia back on its feet.

The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and the president of the Russian Federation were soulmates, dedicated to the same “eternal principles” of conservatism, stability and strong rule from the top. When the KGB archives were opened briefly in the 1990s, a free-thinking Orthodox priest, Fr Gleb Yakunin, trawled through the classified documents and came away convinced that the Moscow Patriarchate was “practically a subsidiary, a sister company of the KGB”. Yakunin listed all the agents within the Church who m­ade regular reports to the security services. He revealed that “agent Mikhailov”, who travelled regularly to Switzerland, was none other than “a certain Archimandrite Kirill, working in the Church’s department of external relations”.

When members of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” after staging a performance of their “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Kirill made the most of it. Russia and Orthodoxy were once more under threat, he warned, for the moment by “blasphemy and outrage”, but physical violence might not be far behind. “Those who would invite us all to mock our shrines, reject our faith and, if possible, destroy our churches are testing the people’s ability to protect their holy places.” For Kirill, the “holy places” that require protection extend beyond the borders of the Russian Federation: the “canonical territory” of the ROC is considered to encompass all places where Orthodox Christians follow the Russian rite, just as canon law shall be applied to Russian citizens wherever they abide. His own title, Kirill is fond of reminding people, is Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’.

Kirill’s assertion of Moscow’s authority abroad paralleled the state’s Russkiy Mir doctrine, entitling the motherland to intervene in the fate of Russians beyond its boundaries. Putin, in turn, cited Kirill’s devotion to “God’s intentions regarding [his] land and [his] people” as legitimising his own mission to reunite the Russian lands. Patriarch and president both declared themselves in favour of Russian pride and Russian patriotism; and both stated their intention to defend “trad­itional values” in the face of the “cultural miasma” seeping into Russia from the West.

Following the protests of 2011–12, Putin increasingly adopted the sort of conservative language that Kirill had long favoured, with the apparent aim of shoring up his support among traditional Orthodox believers, some of whom had taken to the streets to demonstrate against him. Kirill’s favourite themes – that Russia’s “spiritual sovereignty” was being assailed by “liberal trends emanating from the Protestant societies in the West” – appeared with regularity in Putin’s speeches. He told the Russian parliament that the West had sunk into a morass of depravity and was now trying to inflict it on Russia. “The Anglican Church is planning to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God. What can you say! Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to spiritual destruction. The [western] elites are going crazy and this cannot be cured, it seems. But our duty is to protect our children. And we will do this. We will protect our children from degradation.”

The annexation of Crimea in 2014 presented Kirill with a dilemma. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine had split, with some priests no longer accepting the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow. When masked soldiers of the Russian Federation – Putin’s “Little Green Men” – appeared in Crimea, priests of the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP) had rushed to their side, blessing their holy mission and helping to negotiate the surrender of Ukrainian troops. Fr Dimitry Vasilenkov, a priest who would receive the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship by presidential decree for “providing care in Crimea”, saw the Church’s role as the fulfilment of divine will. “What can this be, if not God’s miracle? The Lord did not allow for any bloodshed. [After all], polite people need polite chaplains.” The invading forces were invited to use religious premises as barracks and for stockpiling weapons, while Orthodox priests loyal to Ukraine who refused to help were chased out of their churches. One them, Fr Ivan Katkalo, said the clergy were acting on direct orders from Moscow. “[Their] priests carried out assignments that were set at the very top levels […] When priests allow military people carrying weapons into their church, this stops being a church and starts being an organisation that answers to the state.”

Other participants in the “Crimean Spring” also had connections to the ROC, including the banker Konstantin Malofeyev, the so-called “Orthodox oligarch” whose charitable foundation had spent tens of millions of dollars supporting the Russian Orthodox Church. In February 2014, he had warned Putin that Western Europe was on the verge of “absorbing” Ukraine “element by element”. He demanded the immediate annexation of Crimea, to be followed by the fomenting of discontent in eastern Ukraine to create “political legitimacy and moral justification” for a Russian takeover. In Malofeyev’s plan, the pro-Russian message and the call to rebellion would be disseminated by ROC priests in sermons to parishioners across Russian-speaking Ukraine. Within a matter of weeks, Crimea had been annexed and Malofeyev’s former head of PR, Alexander Borodai, was named Prime Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Malofeyev subsequently spent large sums of money financing Igor Girkin’s Sloviansk Brigade and promoting the “historic” duty of Russians to volunteer to fight to protect their Orthodox brothers abroad (the most famous literary example of this is Anna Karenina’s lover Vronsky setting off to defend the Serbs from the Ottomans in the 1870s). A unit calling itself the Russian Orthodox Army was also commanded by Girkin and financed by Malofeyev. It was, said Borodai, a “public-private partnership” with the Russian state.

Far from condemning Russian military aggression, Patriarch Kirill seemed to condone it. As early as 2011, he had commended the willingness of the “[Russian] Christian believer to sacrifice his life more easily than the non-believer, as he knows that his exist­ence is not going to end with the end of this life”, and declared that the Church had always blessed those who fought in a “just war”. Christians, he said, had an obligation to defend their homeland and, given that the Russian Orthodox lands encompassed the entire territory of Holy Rus’, it was right and proper to continue the fight for Russia’s “spiritual sovereignty” in Ukraine. When hostilities escalated in Donbas in 2014, Kirill claimed that “the conflict has an unambiguous religious underpinning”. “Catholics and schismatics”, he said, were moving from “preaching hatred for the Orthodox Church [to] carrying out direct aggression … under the guise of an anti-terrorist operation”. He instructed priests to bless the Russian troops departing for battle, as well as the tanks, rockets and shells that would be used to kill the Christians over the border. The head of the Church’s department for cooperation with the army, Bishop Stefan of Klin, explained that “our armed forces have sacred help from above, from God and from the heavenly saints”.

When Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Patriarch Kirill supported his contention that it had been made necessary by the actions of “groups who view Russia as a thorn in their flesh [and] wish to wipe Orthodox Rus’ from the face of the earth”. In a sermon at the Cathedral of Cyril and Methodius in Kaliningrad, he assured the congregation that the war was the fault of the West: “Our Fatherland has committed no crime. People are against us not because we are bad, but because we are different.”

When in September 2022 Putin announced the mobilisation of young Russians to fight in Ukraine, Kirill assured them it was their Orthodox duty to go. In a speech that could have been made by Islamist jihadis, he promised eternal joy to those willing to sacrifice themselves in the cause of holy war. An international group of Orthodox scholars and clergy made the case for expelling the Russian Orthodox Church from the World Council of Churches. “Just as Russia has invaded Ukraine,” they declared, “so too the Moscow Patriarchate of Patriarch Kirill has invaded the Orthodox Church.”

Instead of bringing the faithful back to the Russian fold, Kirill has seen millions of them depart. Fr Nicolay Pluzhnik, a Russophone priest in the Kharkiv region, had previously been loyal to Moscow, but could not accept the patriarch’s authority. “When I hear them say they are protecting us and fighting some ‘Holy War’, I think they are either blind, or they are not serving God but the devil. We were living peacefully until they came. But far from protecting us, they bombed and tortured and killed. Before the war, parishioners were completely free to choose what church they went to […] For many of them it was not even a significant difference to go to a church that followed Moscow or not, they just wanted to pray to God. Now all of that has changed.”

Some formerly pro-Moscow priests joined the autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church; others, including the monks of the historic Pecherskaya Lavra in central Kyiv, faced searches and evictions as the Kyiv authorities became convinced they were sheltering Russian personnel and equipment. According to a 2023 Royal United Services Institute report, “the one body of ideologically committed agents supporting the invasion was the Russian Orthodox Church. Beyond its efforts to support Russian information operations, its priests were widely recruited and run by the Russian special services and their monasteries and churches used as safe houses […] The use of religion as cover is not only a widely established method of the Russian special services but also creates its own protection mechanism because of the political sensitivities of state targeting of religious institutions.”

When the desired rapid victory in Ukraine did not materialise, religion provided another useful prop. Putin’s long-time adviser and sabre rattler, Sergey Karaganov, declared it was time to go nuclear, with a pre-emptive strike on a Nato city such as Poznan. It would be a hard choice, Karaganov admitted, but – just as he did with Prince Alexander Nevsky and the Teutonic Knights – God would support Russia’s cause. “The creation of nuclear weapons was the result of divine intervention. God handed a weapon of Armageddon to humanity to remind those who have lost the fear of hell that it exists,” he said. “We will use God’s weapon, thus dooming ourselves to grave losses. But if we do not do this, Russia will die and most likely the whole of human civilisation will cease to exist.” By using God’s nukes, Russia “will not only save ourselves and finally free the world from the five-century-long western yoke, but we will also save humanity”, Karaganov declared. “In the end, the winners are not judged. And the saviours are thanked.”

Martin Sixsmith is an author, television and radio presenter and journalist. Adapted from Putin and the Return of History: How the Kremlin Rekindled the Cold War by Martin Sixsmith with Daniel Sixsmith (Bloomsbury Continuum, £25; Tablet price £22.50).