By: Nadia Beard / The Financial Times (original title: The Baton and the Cross – Putin's cynical co-opting of Russia's church)
Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com
Which despot has not thought of the most effective way to rule over his people? The more autocratic the leader, the more pressing the issue becomes - and so one man considered the options by which he hoped to control a vast territory in Eastern Europe. How is it possible, thought Vladimir, to unite his people under one rule? He was determined on religion and, in a great display before the subjects, plunged into the Dnipro River in Kiev in a public baptism, ordering all others to do the same.
The Vladimir in question was not Putin. It was Vladimir the Great. It was the year 988, an important date in the history of the then Kievan Rus, when the paganism of the past was rejected in favor of a new Eastern Orthodoxy and thus the church and state of Russia were bound together.
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A thousand years later, this relationship has evolved. Controlled by Peter the Great, subdued by Catherine the Great, nearly destroyed by the Soviets, and then revived by Putin, the Orthodox Church has had one primary function above all: to strengthen the power of the state.
Exactly how this was achieved is the subject of Scepter and Cross [Baton and the Cross] by journalist and former BBC Moscow correspondent Lucy Ash. The book covers more than a thousand years of Russian history to tell the story, as she quotes one theologian she interviewed, of "the alliance between rocket and incense." Ash gave the book its title "to highlight the role of the church in enforcing obedience and strengthening oppression."
Unlike Catholicism, the Russian Orthodox Church rejects the authority of the Pope as the representative of Jesus Christ on Earth, affirming that Christ is the head of the church. Orthodox Christians also venerate icons of Christ and other saints, believing that their depicted figures manifest their spiritual presence.
Today's Russian Orthodox Church is dedicated to advancing the Kremlin's agenda. Its head, Patriarch Kirill, has presided over corruption, attacked the LGBTQ community, blocked legislation protecting victims of domestic violence and encouraged Russian soldiers to fight in Ukraine, telling them they would be granted eternal salvation. Meanwhile, Putin continues to publicly demonstrate his respect for religion.
"Could it be otherwise?" Ash asks. Her research suggests not. When Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was, she writes, an expression of old imperial ambitions. Under Catherine the Great in the 200th century, Orthodoxy became a means of territorial expansion. Its wars, in which the Russian Empire expanded its borders by some XNUMX square kilometers (almost the size of present-day Belarus), were made possible in part by the seizure of church lands and property, continuing expropriations that had begun decades earlier by Peter the Great.
As Ash tells us, Catherine "went into history to legitimize Russia's claim to Crimea and the southern Muslim borderlands, which she called Novorusia [New Russia]." This should sound familiar to anyone who remembers the historic justification made by Putin to legitimize Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
The victimization of Ukraine by Moscow is noted in the book. We read with dismay about the church's involvement in one of Russia's most serious crimes in Ukraine: the forced deportation of 16 Ukrainian children to Russia. In the first year of full-scale occupation, a center for family placement of children and their care was established in the church, by the charity department of the Patriarchate. Meanwhile, a church-affiliated organization called Vnuki ("grandchildren"), which describes on its website its goal of "integrating children from the liberated territories ... into the Russian mental space," brought children from Ukraine to Moscow to meet Kirill and other senior clerics, including the pious Putin.
Much time has passed since the first decades of the Soviet Union, when religion, officially banned, almost disappeared. Instead of the church, “Lenin, the ascetic saint, the selfless monk, replaced Christ in the iconography. His framed portrait replaced shrines with icons and candles," writes Ash. It was only during World War II that Stalin, looking for any institution that could help ensure Soviet victory over the advancing German forces, began to revive "the only organism that could inspire people to die for their country": the church. In a 2024 poll, 62 percent of Russians said they identified as Orthodox Christians.
Scepter and Cross avoids being merely a history book thanks to Ash's own reporting – such as the cases of a man discovering mass graves of believers killed under Stalin, or a cleric who believed he was the victim of a woman recruited by the FSB ( successor to the KGB). This provides a clear picture of the ways in which the seismic moments of Russia's religious past are echoing today. The many characters Ash meets combine to give a clearer picture of how the church's power structure works, revealing how the system requires not only the ruthless and greedy to survive, but also the devoted and the lost
The Kremlin's current pretensions to spiritual devotion would be laughable if the consequences of its actions carried out under the guise of religion were not so deadly. It will be up to Ukrainians whether Russia will be forced to apologize for so cruelly violating the second commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. /Telegraph/
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