The Baton and the Cross — Putin’s cynical co-opting of Russia’s church

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Who amongst despots has not considered the best method to rule over their individuals? The extra autocratic the chief, usually the extra pressing the query — and so it was that the person hoping to maintain his grip on an unlimited territory in jap Europe was contemplating his choices. How, Vladimir thought, would he be capable of unite his individuals below one rule? He settled on faith and, in an awesome present earlier than his topics, waded into the Dnipro River in Kyiv in a public baptism, ordering everybody else to do the identical.

The Vladimir in query was not Putin. It was Vladimir the Nice. The yr was 988, a momentous date within the historical past of what was then Kievan Rus, when the paganism of the previous was solid out in favour of a brand new Jap Orthodoxy, and Russia’s church and state grew to become sure collectively.

Within the millennium since, that relationship has advanced. Managed by Peter the Nice, subjugated by Catherine the Nice, practically decimated by the Soviets, then revived by Putin, the Orthodox Church has, by means of all of it, had one major perform: to strengthen the facility of the state.

Precisely how this got here to be is the topic of The Baton and the Cross by journalist and former BBC Moscow correspondent Lucy Ash. It covers greater than a thousand years of Russian historical past to inform the story, as she quotes one theologian she interviewed, of “the alliance between the missile and the incense burner.” Ash gave the guide its title “to underline the function of the church in implementing obedience and tightening repression.”

In contrast to Catholicism, the Russian Orthodox Church rejects the authority of the Pope as Jesus Christ’s consultant on Earth, sustaining that Christ is the pinnacle of the church. Orthodox Christians additionally venerate icons of Christ and different saints, believing that their depicted figures manifest their non secular presence.

At this time’s Russian Orthodox Church is dedicated to advancing the Kremlin’s agenda. Its head, Patriarch Kirill, has presided over corruption, attacked the LGBTQ neighborhood, obstructed laws defending victims of home violence and inspired Russian troopers to struggle in Ukraine by telling them that they’ll be granted everlasting salvation. In the meantime Putin continues to publicly show his non secular observance.

“May it have been totally different?” asks Ash. Her analysis suggests not. When Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was, she writes, an expression of imperial ambitions that lengthy predated the second. It was below Catherine the Nice within the 18th century that Orthodoxy grew to become a lever of territorial enlargement. Her wars, by which the Russian Empire prolonged its borders by round 200,000 sq. kilometres (in regards to the dimension of present-day Belarus), have been partly enabled by the seizing of church lands and cash, persevering with the expropriations that started in earnest a long time earlier by Peter the Nice.

As Ash tells us, Catherine “delved into historical past to legitimise Russia’s declare to Crimea and Muslim southern borderlands, which she referred to as Novorossiya [New Russia].” That ought to sound acquainted to anybody who remembers the historic gymnastics Putin carried out to legitimise Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.

Moscow’s victimisation of Ukraine looms over the guide. It’s with horror that we learn in regards to the church’s involvement in one among Russia’s most egregious crimes in Ukraine: the compelled deportation of 16,000 Ukrainian youngsters into Russia. Within the first yr of the full-scale invasion, a Centre for Household Placement of Youngsters and Church Care of Youngsters was created by the Patriarchate’s charity division. In the meantime, a church-linked organisation referred to as Vnuki (“Grandchildren”), described on its web site as aiming to “combine youngsters from the liberated territories . . . into the Russian psychological house”, introduced youngsters from Ukraine to Moscow to fulfill Kirill and different senior clerics, together with Putin’s alleged confessor.

It’s all a good distance because the early a long time of the Soviet Union when faith, formally banned, had all however disappeared. Instead, “Lenin, the ascetic saint, self-denying monk, supplanted Christ in iconography. His framed portrait changed the shrines with icons and candles,” Ash writes. It was not till the second world struggle that Stalin, groping for any establishment that may assist safe a Soviet victory over the advancing German forces, started to resuscitate “the one organisation able to inspiring individuals to die for his or her nation”: the church. In a 2024 ballot, 62 per cent of Russians mentioned they recognized as Orthodox Christians.

The Baton and the Cross avoids changing into only a historical past guide due to Ash’s personal reporting — circumstances corresponding to the person who found mass graves of worshippers murdered below Stalin, or a cleric who believed he was the sufferer of a honeytrap laid by the FSB (a successor to the KGB). This helpfully presents a vivid image of the methods seismic moments of Russia’s non secular previous are reverberating right now. The various numerous characters Ash meets mix to present the clearest image of how the machinations of the church’s energy construction can perform the way in which it does, revealing how the system requires, not simply the ruthless and grasping to outlive, however the devoted and the misplaced too.

The Kremlin’s present claims to non secular observance could be laughable had the results of its actions dedicated below non secular cowl not been so lethal. It will likely be to Ukrainians that Russia must search forgiveness for violating, so cruelly, the second commandment: to like thy neighbour as thyself.

The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin, by Lucy Ash, Icon Books £25, 384 pages

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