46 Europe The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018
E
VERY January 18th a million Russians
make foreigners shiver and wonder.
This year again, in temperatures ranging
from -10°C in Moscow to -45°C in Yakutia,
they plunged into a cross-shaped hole cut
in the ice. The annual ritual, marking the
baptism of Christ, was the top news item
on Russian state television, mainly be-
cause one man taking part was President
Vladimir Putin. Arriving dressed in the
peasant attire of a sheepskin coat and felt
boots, he stripped off, crossed himself and
leapt into the icy waters of Lake Seliger.
Local officials followed suit. In the an-
cient city of Yaroslavl, on the Volga, the lo-
cal mayor and a member of the United
Russia party told district prefects to lead by
example. “I ask all heads and their depu-
ties to take part in this organised event. You
are all Orthodox people, are you not?” he
said in a televised statement. He seemed
the spitting image of a Soviet Komsomol
leader orderingpublic workers to take part
in May Day parades or communistsubbot-
niks, “voluntary” unpaid weekend man-
ual work.
The mayor’s rhetoric illustrates a para-
doxical similarity between Soviet and
modern religious practices. The portraits
of Lenin have been replaced with Ortho-
dox icons and the anniversary of the Bol-
shevik revolution has been swapped for a
celebration of the expulsion of the (Catho-
lic) Poles from (Orthodox) Russia in the 17th
century. But the attitude still feels deeply
Soviet. The Russian prosecutor regularly
slaps criminal charges on bloggers for “of-
fending the feelings of the faithful”. The Pa-
triarch ofthe Russian Orthodox church
practically campaigns for Mr Putin’s re-
election. The state protects religious activ-
ists and attacks artistswho challenge the
church. The church, in return, has become
a guardian of state ideology.
Although this may elevate the official
status of the church, it has bred much the
same resentment as Soviet ideology did in
the 1980s. Two-thirds ofthe Russian popu-
lation, according to the Levada Centre, an
independent pollster, do not wish to see
the church influence decisions of the state.
Whereas the number of people who iden-
tify themselves as Orthodox Christians
has doubled since 1991to 71%, only 6% visit
church every week, according to the Pew
Research Centre. Senior Russian clerics
prefer to measure the growing role of the
church by the number of parishes, rather
than church attendance. “In 1988 the Rus-sian Orthodox church had 6,000 parishes.
Now we have 36,000...This means that ev-
ery year we opened more than 1,000
churches,” says Metropolitan Hilarion Al-
feyev, the bishop who runs the church’s
foreign relations.
The clergyman saysthat, asa rule, the
church has always supported the state. In
the 19th century, Orthodoxy was incorpo-
rated into an ideological triad of the state,
along with nationalism and autocracy. Sta-
lin flirted with it for the same reason. The
KGB infiltrated the church, turning many
hierarchs into its informers. Such proxim-
ity to an often corrupt and repressive state
undermined the moral authority of the
church.
The end of Soviet rule offered hope for
spiritual revival, but the church was more
focused on the restitution of its properties.
The 1990s were perhaps the freest years it
had ever experienced. They were also the
most challenging. Cut off from the state,
the church risked sliding into irrelevance. It
offered its loyalty to the new state in return
for various concessions, including the right
to import alcohol and tobacco duty-free.
“Money turned out to be more important
to the church than its reputation,” says
Sergei Chapnin, a commentator who was
fired from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2015.
In the 2010s the newly enthroned Patri-
arch Kirill successfully engaged in a new
trade. He presented the clergy as chaplains
of the empire and principal suppliers ofideological tenets such as “traditional val-
ues” and “Russian World”, a Slavic com-
monwealth based in Moscow. But as Mr
Chapnin wrote, “There is only one tradi-
tion that is being passed on to the next gen-
eration. It is the Soviet tradition.”
But while Soviet bishops were often
forced to co-operate with the KGB, these
days they volunteer their services. One of
the more entrepreneurial is Bishop Tikhon
Shevkunov, often described as Mr Putin’s
confessor. The choirof his monastery, once
ransacked and occupied by Soviet secret
police, recently sang at a Kremlin concert
dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the
state security service. Like his peers in the
security services, Bishop Shevkunov ped-
dles anti-Western conspiracytheories and
pays homage to Stalin.
Yet the church is no monolith. Few have
been as strong or clear on the question of
the Soviet past asBishop Hilarion. In 2009
he described Stalin as“a monster who
created a terrible, anti-human system of
governing the country based on lies, vio-
lence and terror”, and likened him to Hit-
ler. “They both brought so much sorrow
into the world that no military or political
successes can redeem their guilt before hu-
manity,” he said. In today’s Russia such
words are an act of defiance.
The church’s attitude towards the Sovi-
et era will soon be in the spotlight as Russia
commemorates the centenary of the exe-
cution ofits last tsar and his family by a
Bolshevik firing squad in July 1918. As Bish-
op Hilarion says, “I do not believe that rec-
onciliation can be achieved by a simple si-
lence about the atrocities which were done
by the Soviet authorities towards their
own people. We still have to talk about
this, because when people tend to forget
history, they tend to repeat the same mis-
takes.” It will take more than a plunge into
icy water to wash away the past. 7Russia’s churchOrthodox business
MOSCOW
The Russian church is getting too close to the KremlinThe Russian establishment