This final chapter brings together themes treated earlier in the context of the distinction between centre and periphery. I attempt to treat the distinction between centre and periphery alongside the distinctions between ethno-religion (or religious nationalism) and voluntarism, between faith (or ideology) and power, between secularisation and de-secularisation – and to do so in the largest possible global context of Moscow and western Eurasia. Dealing with Moscow and Eurasia has the advantage of allowing me to discuss scientific atheism when it had its ‘Constantinian moment’ between 1917 and 1989 and had to face the problem of realising its proclaimed principles in the concrete circumstances of the here and now. Once principles became mired in the dynamics of power they underwent deformations precisely analogous to those it excoriated in the practice of religion.
To weave together the themes outlined in the previous paragraph requires a map of the terrain in historic time and geographical space, and some indication of how very different centres such as Moscow and London relate to very different peripheries such as St. Petersburg and Bombay. It is an old dictum of geopolitics that whoever controls the centre (or ‘the heartland’) controls the world. Such a dictum foregrounds power and control, and that is important because the dynamics of power and control are constants: the language of conflict may resonate with the rhetoric of ‘holy war’, as when the Muslim Turks were defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1683 by a Christian coalition; but the reality as seen by historians turns on the power plays of rival political centres like the Hapsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires. Yet for sociological analysis faith and functionally equivalent ideologies like nationalism and communism are also important. Soviet power may operate like Romanov power, and the power exercised by scientific atheism may operate like the power exercised by Russian Orthodoxy; but there remain analytically relevant differences between faiths and secular ideologies like nationalism and communism.
We need therefore to integrate physical and political geography with the changeful history of ideas and of religion. Ideologies and faiths are not static, and for the particular purposes of this analysis that means taking into account the emergence of national churches and voluntary denominations during the last three centuries of the history of the Reformation. That history includes the momentous shift from gesture and liturgical enactment to personal faith and considered assent to beliefs. Word displaces gesture and this displacement was broadly accomplished in the North and West of Europe, and even to some extent in Counter-Reformation Catholicism. But it was successfully resisted in the South and East of Europe. To this day religion in Russia remains embedded in gesture, obeisance and image rather than in discourse, personal faith and intellectual assent, and that helps account for its survival under prolonged attack and persecution on the part of scientific atheists who believed it was only necessary to dismiss faith as false cognition and mere superstition.
Once Christianity takes the form of voluntary denominations and territorial churches the dialectic of heartland and margin alters. In the early modern period North America received migrants who were attached both to territorial churches and to voluntary denominations, and as soon as denominations provided the main form of religious expression the dialectic of heartland and margin shifted accordingly. During the eighteenth century what became the USA was increasingly defined by a generalised Protestantism rather than a territorial church; and in the nineteenth century the dialectic of centre and periphery found expression in the tension between the intellectual Protestantism of the North-East and the populist Protestantism of the South.
The appearance of territorial churches and voluntary denominations also affected the way empires expanded in the early modern period. We have to link the specific geopolitical location of a nascent empire, like the British or the Russian, with the changing character of its religion. Consider first the nature of the geographical centre: for example whether it expands outwards from a large land mass through military power, as it did in the three centuries of Russian imperial expansion; or projects power from an island round the globe through naval power, as it did in the three centuries of British imperial expansion. Once that difference is grasped then we need to take into account the way the territorial church expands alongside the expansion of the empire, as it did in the Russian case, and the way rival denominations both took advantage of the opportunities offered by empire and distanced themselves from the imperial project, as in the British case.
This British mode of imperial expansion explains just why a voluntary denomination like Methodism was never likely to become the territorial faith of Britain’s Indian Empire. It also explains why a relatively weak territorial church like the Church of England with numerous rivals was never likely to take the form elsewhere that it took in England, though in parts of Africa or in Australasia it might retain a special status. This is where analysis becomes complicated because it has to take account of the geographical size and demographic weight of the centre relative to the periphery in the two contrasted cases. Russia is large relative to its periphery, though of course there was a point in its early history when it had not achieved the dominance it eventually came to possess. The island of Britain was always small relative to what became its vast and populous periphery, and was in any case divided into several nations with two or three territorial churches. Some degree of pluralism was built in from the start on account of the rivalry between territorial churches and voluntary denominations.
All this is simply to indicate that the expansion of a territorial church across a contiguous land mass, as in Russia, was bound to be very different from the spread of rival churches and voluntary denominations in colonies scattered all over the globe, as in the case of Britain. Of course, there are other models of imperial expansion besides Russia and Britain. The spread of Iberian Catholicism in Latin America occurred through a combination of naval and military power projected far across the Atlantic in another continent. It reflected a prior history of eight centuries of struggle between Islam and Christianity that had ended with the suppression or expulsion of Jews, Muslims and Protestants alike to create a homogeneous state. The Spanish and Portuguese empires expanded from several weak centres within Latin America, like Mexico and Brazil that were later to evolve into the weak centres of a very partially realised nationalism. Latin America never constituted a single empire focussed on a major centre comparable to the island of Britain or the heartland of Russia. The French Empire provides yet another model of imperial expansion. Apart from Canada, which became a relic on another continent of a Catholic France that no longer existed, the expansion of France occurred after the territorial faith of Catholicism had been challenged and partly displaced by the equally territorial ideology of a nationalistic French Enlightenment. The expansion of France southward from outposts on the southern littoral of the Mediterranean occurred against the background of the anti-clericalism animating the later years of the Third Republic. French imperialism used Catholicism instrumentally, and the criteria of inclusion in ‘French civilisation’ became cultural and linguistic rather than religious.
My prime focus is on the dramatic difference between Britain and Russia. In Russia three centuries of subordination by, and resistance to, the pagan Golden Horde and its Muslim successors resulted in an attempt to impose a religious monopoly that in alliance with an autocratic Enlightenment set out to incorporate many foreign peoples and alien faiths. In due course an Orthodoxy that looked back to Byzantium fused with Great Russian nationalism. In Britain an initial expansion that united the two islands (Britain and Ireland) inaugurated another imperial expansion across the contiguous territories of North America that from 1776 onward proceeded under the auspices of the colonists. After 1776 the Second British Empire expanded in far-flung colonies in India, sub-Saharan Africa and Australasia. An empire based on sea power exercised from the Atlantic littoral projected power around the globe. Whereas the second city of Russia was St. Petersburg, the second city of the British Empire was ‘neo-gothic’ Bombay where subcontinental power was established through the University of Bombay and Bombay’s railway terminus, and Indians were remoulded as Britons.1
When you contemplate the heartlands of Eurasia you notice the vast northern plain that stretches from East Anglia in the British Isles to the Urals. That plain constitutes a 2,000-mile zone of contention, and contrasts with the numerous ecological pockets in Southern Europe created by mountain and valley all the way from the Carpathians in the south-east to the Alps in the centre and the mountains of Spain and Portugal in the west. In Northern Europe that great plain provides the backdrop first for a history of confrontation between the various centres of religious and political power around the Baltic – whether Danish or Swedish, German or Russian – and then for another superimposed history of confrontation between Berlin and Moscow. In Southern Europe a very different ecology provides a backdrop first for a confrontation between the centres of religious and political power around the Black Sea, above all the Russian and Ottoman empires, and then for another superimposed history of confrontation between the powers of the Western Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean with its European epicentre in the Balkans.
That brief sketch shows what is involved in integrating religious history with political geography and geopolitics. When we move the focus of attention to Moscow in the geopolitical heartland of western Eurasia, we encounter a vast zone of conflicting pressures: north and south, west and east. There is a pressure from the north, beginning in the tenth century with the southward movement of the Varangian tribes and concluding with the Russian defeat of the Swedes and the Russian advance along both the southern and northern littorals of the Baltic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nor was that nineteenth-century Russian advance entirely conclusive: the Baltic States gained, lost and regained their independence; and the fortunes of the cause of Finnish independence and of Greater Finland ebbed back and forth between 1918 and 1945.2
There is a pressure from the West that includes the expansion of Poland-Lithuania into Ukraine and the littoral of the Black Sea from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth,3 and concludes in struggles between Germany and Russia that ended in favour of Germany in 1917 and in favour of Russia in 1945. There is a pressure from the Islamic south that encounters the advance from the eighteenth century onward of the Russian Empire into the Balkans and the Caucasus that also incorporates Christian Armenia and Georgia. Finally, in the nineteenth century there is the eastward expansion of the Russian Empire into Muslim Central Asia that in its furthest reach includes Kamchatka and Alaska. There is even a sizeable Orthodox Church in Japan founded in the 1860s. The Russian Empire successfully incorporates the Tatars into its core, but it encounters continuous resistance at the periphery – for example Muslim peoples in the Crimea, Central Asia and the Caucasus – as well as a desire for national independence on the part of Armenia and Georgia.
The expansion of imperial Orthodox Russia, of its imperial atheist successor and of the reviving Orthodox imperium of the early twenty-first century has resulted in a series of cross-border relationships, some of them on a global scale. These include ethnic and ethno-religious groups within Russia: such as the Lutheran Germans, the Catholic Poles, the Orthodox Bulgarians; and the various deported peoples such as the Estonians, the Pontic Greeks, the Crimean Tatars and the Jews. The Jews were long confined within the Russian Pale, where they endured numerous pogroms, and in the twentieth century were for the most part driven out of their urban strongholds like Odessa, Vilnius and L’viv either by Russians, or by Germans or by local ethnic majorities. In the latter half of the twentieth century they mainly migrated to form a powerful minority in Israel. These groups can for the moment be set on one side since their sad and terrible histories are well known.
These cross-border relationships also include the Russian Orthodox churches and the Russian ethnic diaspora in the West: above all in France; the Russian minorities in the Baltic and the newly independent states of Muslim Central Asia; the Orthodox peoples and churches of the Balkans, notably Serbia, as well as Orthodox Christians in the Middle East, notably Syria; the ‘bloodlands’ where the European West meets the East, notably along the disputed and shifting borders of Belarus and Ukraine, especially Galicia, Volhynia and the Western Ukraine; and finally the vast rival centre of China, above all Beijing and Shanghai, at the eastern end of the Asian landmass. The most geopolitically important cross-border relationship was to have been realised by the road from Moscow to Beijing planned by Stalin to connect Russian power to what was then its Chinese satellite. Now that the relationship has been largely reversed the economic and demographic encroachments of China across Russia’s far eastern frontier are watched with increasing anxiety.
Some of these cross-border relationships are historically of very longstanding. Russian monasticism has a historic connection with Mount Athos, and has from time to time been far from at ease with the central control of the Moscow hierarchy. There are also links between Moscow and the autocephalous churches of the Balkans and the Baltic that vary between fraternal sponsorship in difficult situations and resented attempts at control and manipulation. All these relationships involve negotiations and tensions with the political centre in Moscow and with the Moscow Patriarchate as a religious centre that since 1991 has been increasingly linked with the political powers that be. Here we simply need to indicate them on a map of tensions between centre and peripheries. Russian art provides another version of the map. For example, in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, founded in the nineteenth century by an Old Believer businessman, one can observe first the transition from the medieval tradition of icons to western-style painting, the fascination with France and Italy, the loving celebration of Nature in the heartland, for example in the paintings of Levitan, and then the slow incorporation of the Russian Orient and an interest in the Middle East that parallels a similar movement in France, Britain and Germany. Russia has its own version of Orientalism.
There was nothing foreordained about the eventual supremacy of Moscow at the centre of the geopolitical heartland. The story of the struggle between St. Petersburg, created by Peter the Great (and later Catherine the Great) as a ‘New Amsterdam’ looking onto the West, and the modernity it represented, and Moscow as the focus of Orthodoxy in the Slavophil heartland, is very familiar. St. Petersburg stood for the classical and baroque style of Enlightenment autocracy up to the building of the cathedral of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood in a resolutely ‘Russian’ style reminiscent of St. Basil’s in Moscow. But there is also a somewhat less familiar story of an earlier struggle for pre-eminence in the heartland that had echoes in the struggle over the precise dates of Russian/Ukrainian Christianisation. The other contenders for pre-eminence were Kiev, in particular the cathedral of Saint Sophia, and the ancient cities of the golden ring east of Moscow – Vladimir, Suzdal and Novgorod. These older cities are now treasure houses of early Russian art and architecture, and useful resources for the tourist industry. Each of these candidates for pre-eminence drew on the inheritance of Byzantium to legitimate their claims, long before Moscow asserted its right to be the principal inheritor of the Byzantine legacy with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The migration of icons from Kiev to Vladimir and Suzdal, and the eventual migration of the artistic charisma of Rublev to Moscow, retell the story of the migration of power. Centuries later in the age of nationalism, the migration of art following conquest, and the transfer of artefacts like the Elgin Marbles to metropolitan museums, tell a parallel story. The history of art and archaeology provides rich illustrated books of the changing dispositions of political power.
In the Russian Empire archaeology and Byzantinology in particular are implicated in politics. For example, those archaeologists who uncovered the trails of many peoples across territories putatively occupied for ever by Slavs paid for their discoveries with their careers, and even their lives. Neal Ascherson tells the story of successive migrations during centuries of confrontation between city states on the Black Sea set up by Greeks, Venetians and others, and the various nomadic peoples that perennially crossed the steppes, beginning with the Scythians and Sarmatians in the first millennium BC. The former congratulated themselves as representatives of civilisation, whereas the latter were cast as mere barbarians.4 Much later, as the Russian Empire moved south towards the Black Sea, ‘the people of the land’ either submitted or fled. From the point of view of Russian imperial ideology attempts to tell the story of the migrations of earlier peoples impugned the right of Russians to occupy their territory. Neal Ascherson also draws attention to groups he identifies as ‘outpost’ peoples. The Cossacks played the role of an outpost people representing the spirit of the imagined centre, as the Krajina Serbs did in the Balkans and the Protestant Irish in Northern Ireland.
The dispositions of religious and political power in the architecture of Moscow tell the story of the millennial symphonia between Church and state derived from Byzantium. As in so many other Russian cities representing the earliest manifestations of Russian power, for example Vladimir and Novgorod, the Kremlin represents the close proximity of Church and state. The Moscow Kremlin acts as a synecdoche for centralised autocracy and is both theatre and text.5 Red Square combines political, religious and economic power, with St. Basil’s cathedral at one end and at the other the recently rebuilt Kazan cathedral, close to the rebuilt Resurrection Gate, and the sometime Upper Trading Rows, now the GUM megastore, in between. The symbolic destructions and rebuildings are eloquent testimony to the violent lurches of Russian state ideology from Orthodoxy to communism and back again to Orthodoxy. The destruction and rebuilding of the cathedral of Christ the Saviour opposite the Kremlin reinforces that testimony. In 2007 it provided the venue for Yeltsin’s funeral, the first state funeral in an Orthodox church since 1894, but also in 2011 for the ‘iconic’ protest of the Pussy Riot punk group over the collusion of Church with state, and in particular the relationship of the Patriarch to Putin.
Much of nineteenth-century Moscow has been destroyed, though a handsome commercial district remains on the other side of the river from the Kremlin. The Novodevichy Convent represents another monument to the symphonia of Church and state and, through its aristocratic connections, it testifies to the relation of Orthodoxy to monarchy. It was built to commemorate the victory of Basil III over the Poles at Smolensk in 1514, and for a period provided the fortress-like walls of the city. Its cemetery rivals Père Lachaise in Paris in housing the dust of some of the most famous Russians, including Solovyov, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Chekhov. The Danilov Monastery is now the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate after decades of secularisation as a juvenile prison.
The Lenin Mausoleum remains the focal sacred site of the communist period, but there are many other architectural testimonies to the years 1917–89. Perhaps the most characteristic monuments of communist times are the apartment blocks put up in the style of Stalinist neo-baroque; but there are many other examples of the style, such the skyscrapers known as the Seven Sisters, including the Foreign Ministry and Moscow State University. Perhaps the most notorious monument of the regime is the (reconstructed) Lubianka, originally the headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company. The much advertised commitment of the regime to science is represented by the Academy of Sciences, known as the ‘Brains’ building from the sculpture on its roof, and the achievements of Soviet science are dramatically represented by the Gagarin monument. The Metro is, of course, the most famous of all the achievements of Soviet engineering and architecture. What the casual observer easily misses is the kind of ambivalence about religion and its relation to Russian memory and history signified by the Glazunov art gallery. Ilya Glazunov, born in 1930, painted Soviet politicians like Brezhnev and was also a right-wing nationalist who celebrated Christianity and ‘Eternal Russia’. He was honoured by Putin.
There are two kinds of pluralism: there are rival ethno-religions occupying adjacent or overlapping territories, as in Ukraine, especially Western Ukraine; and there is a rivalry between ethno-religions and voluntary denominations. It is always possible for migrant ethno-religions to maintain a more or less tolerated presence in the heartlands of another religion based on a distinctive contribution to the economy, for example the migrants who were invited to assist in the creation of St. Petersburg. That is why the Nevsky Prospect is dotted with their different churches. Where an ethnic group is threatened with absorption by a more powerful ethnic group the bonds of territory and kinship are vigorously reinforced to secure survival, as they were in Poland and Lithuania when those countries were threatened with absorption by Russia. In such circumstances conversion to any other religion, whether the religion of the dominating nation or the faith of a voluntary denomination, is rendered very unlikely and attracts severe sanctions amounting to expulsion. The Chechens in the Caucasus have been very resistant to any form of conversion, though they accept in some degree the presence of a Russian minority. In recent years so much Russian blood and treasure have been spent in the virtual recreation of Chechnya, including the rebuilding of the capital, Grozny, that some Russians would be only too glad to concede independence. Once the Islamic nations of Central Asia gained their independence the Russian Orthodox minorities came under very considerable pressure, and many Russians either decided to leave or were attacked and virtually extruded. At the same time large numbers of Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Chechens continued to migrate to the Russian heartlands, so that Moscow – like London, Vienna and other European capital cities – hosts a very large Muslim population of over 2 million, mostly keeping their heads down and worshipping in ‘house mosques’. The newly independent Islamic nations have as a rule been governed by autocrats in the Soviet mould and have suffered ‘cults of personality’ and associated policies of repression reminiscent of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania.
Armenia and Georgia are resistant to conversion in the same way as the Islamic Republics, though there have been some modest movements of conversion to Evangelical Christianity. The pagan population of the Mari El Republic in eastern Russia was subject to considerable pressure to conform to Orthodoxy but succeeded in maintaining enough resistance for intellectuals to stimulate a contemporary pagan revival.6 Of recent years, pagan revivals all over Europe and Eurasia seek to revive earlier religious patterns by building them into partially ‘invented traditions’ as the original faith of the ‘folk’7. Of course, sometimes Christianity itself plays the role of the religion of the folk, for example among the Turkic people of the Gagauz in southern Moldova.
Nationalism on either side of the frontier between Christianity and Islam seeks religious, linguistic and ethnic unity, and in this Russia and Turkey are alike. Turkey is of course the residual nation state that rose in the wake of the Ottoman Empire. That empire had extended deep into Europe and into what is now Russia, and had passed through a phase when religion was ‘nationalised’ under Suleiman the Magnificent (or the Law-Giver) as it was later under Peter the Great, and another phase when a ‘shy Enlightenment’ was instigated in the late nineteenth century under Sultan and Caliph Abdul Hamid the Second.8 With the Ottoman collapse, a multicultural empire within which religions and ethnic groups more (or less) coexisted rapidly morphed into a secular modern nation state that either extruded peoples of a different faith or, in the case of the Armenians, committed a still unacknowledged genocide.
The extrusion of deviant ethno-religions in secular Turkey paralleled similar extrusions in Russia and was fuelled by memories of Muslims arriving in Turkey after expulsion from Russia, south-eastern Europe and Greece.9 In contemporary Russia ethnicity, culture and religion form a united front against ethnic or religious intrusion; and a brief period of openness after the fall of communism was quickly followed by legal and other sanctions against alien religious and cultural influences. An Orthodox atheist is more acceptable than a believing but alien Christian. Jehovah’s Witnesses are subject to severe social sanctions as heretical, alien and American. In the Soviet period Witnesses in the Western Ukraine were deported en masse to Siberia in company with Uniates (Greek Catholics) who were totally repressed on account of their western affiliations and forcibly united with the Russian Orthodox Church.
Although voluntary denominations or rival ethno-religions have difficulty making converts in the heartlands, they find conversion easier at break points and cultural junctions. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Islam gained its hold in Bosnia in the borderland between the Western and Eastern traditions of Christianity where – the issue is a matter of dispute among historians and has obvious political overtones – the Bogomil heresy had already provided a substantial slipway. In the twentieth century Evangelical religion made headway in multicultural Transylvania where Catholic and Calvinist Hungarians mingle with Orthodox Romanians, in the interstices of Serbia and Croatia, in the Western Ukraine and in Belarus. Belarus is interesting because it remains a tyranny in the old Stalinist mould under the heel of an autocrat describing himself as an ‘Orthodox’ atheist. It lies at a religious border which includes Catholic Poles and a lively evangelical community that may have as many active believers as the Orthodox.
Casual observers may suppose that the Church acting virtually as a department of state under the Tsars from the time of Peter the Great on was merely supine. However, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows that there were numerous signs of dissent and spiritual vitality prior to the revolution of 1905 led by the Orthodox priest Gapon and the revolution of 1917.10 The story of the spoliation and persecution of the Church hardly needs further rehearsal here beyond the partial relaxation that occurred in ‘the Great Patriotic War’ and the return to repression under Khrushchev. Repression had destroyed the infrastructure of the Church, and developments in industrialisation, urbanisation, media and education had reduced the active members of the Church to a smallish minority dominated by babushki who often saw the Church as a private club for the practice of ‘folk Orthodoxy’ and had scant regard for priestly authority. Oddly enough some of these elderly women had in their youth been involved in young communist associations and had imbibed something of their ethos.
However, a change was signalled by a decision in 1984 to turn the 1,000th anniversary of the Christianisation of Russia into a national celebration. Partly this was because the central government preferred the historic Russian Church as a religious partner rather than Catholics, Baptists, Evangelicals, Adventists and Pentecostals who were rapidly expanding and whose administration might lie outside its control. From the point of view of a government concerned to maintain state oversight of religion it made sense to license new Orthodox parishes in border areas with substantial Russian populations along the Chinese borders in the far east and Kaliningrad in the far west. Evangelical and Pentecostal populations were emerging in places as remote as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Thereafter in the years of perestroika and glasnost under Gorbachev the Church emerged from the shadows. Nikolai Mitrokhin summarises the situation in 1990 as one that set the agenda for a decade and a half. The Church finally had a measure of independence and could elect its own leader. However, the murder of the archpriest Aleksandr Men – a brilliant Jew who appealed to the intelligentsia as well as more widely – maybe by extreme nationalist agents, split the intelligentsia into two camps: one with a wider outlook which included developments in the Orthodox diaspora; and another which consciously assimilated itself to the spirit of ‘the folk’ as embodying a higher wisdom.
1990 was also the year when the schism in Ukraine led to major changes in the policy of the Moscow Patriarchate towards the Church in what soon was to be an independent country. Though the historic heartlands of the Church might be seen as centred on Moscow, the liveliest sectors during and after the Soviet period lay in ‘peripheral’ regions that escaped two waves of murder and anti-religious militancy. These included Moldova, Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, areas that contained a large proportion of functioning churches and provided both revenue and clergy. Moreover, from the 1990s on in the Baltic States, in Transcaucasia, Moldova and Western Ukraine, national democrats saw ethnic and religious factors as closely related and instituted the full-scale restitution of Church property.
Mitrokhin writes: ‘A considerable proportion of the priests ordained in the 1960s–1980s had grown up in the villages of Transcarpathia, Volhynia, Galicia and Polesye.’11 These priests were influential all over Russia. From a low base line the number of monasteries and registered parishes in the Russian Church as a whole rose rapidly from 1987 to 1989. They existed alongside unofficial groups and secret monasteries that had long maintained themselves outside the controlled sphere of the Patriarchate as well as secretly ordained nuns, communities of monks and hermits in the remote mountains of Abkhazia and ‘elders’ dispensing solace and spiritual direction. A rapid increase in the number of parishes and a surge in support for religion, especially perhaps among intellectuals, over the years from 1988 to 1994 revealed a drastic shortage of clergy and inaugurated a period in which the Church opened new schools and theological colleges. Tractor drivers of modest education became priests without giving up their day-jobs, and some bishops became weary of non-canonical miracles. At the same time Christian socio-political groups, brotherhoods and associations emerged, though with a quite modest scope and influence compared with Democratic Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.
The most difficult situation for the Russian Orthodox Church lay in Ukraine where the Greek Catholic Church, long banned and forcibly incorporated in Russian Orthodoxy, successfully reclaimed many of its faithful and its churches, alongside a move to establish an anti-Moscow, pro-Ukrainian Orthodoxy. The Western Ukraine in particular experienced a ferment of national feeling. The details of the resulting disputes do not matter here, but the underlying forces at work reflected a classic tension between the politics of the centre and the politics of what had been the periphery. Of recent years the Moscow Patriarchate has become increasingly politicised, and has worked in alliance with the Russian state to support the Russian-speaking populations of the Eastern Ukraine. Inevitably the Russian Church itself splits into rival clerical clans under different Metropolitans, and those who lose easily find themselves exiled to the periphery. The Russian Church abroad also feels the pull of the centre; and in the sphere of ecumenical contacts there are currently moves to form an alliance with conservative elements within the Catholic Church.12
The South and East push back against the influence of the North and West, Eurasia against the Euro-Atlantic. Writing in The Tablet, Mary Dejevsky concluded: ‘After toppling Soviet Communism, Russia has fallen back on an inner conservatism. Russian Orthodoxy is part of this, and one whose imprint on the national character will not be dislodged.’13 Moreover, the relation of Orthodoxy to autocracy in Russia represents another persistent trait that emerges to a greater or lesser degree from Ivan the Terrible and the Romanovs to Stalin and Putin. The present regime is a milder version of something familiar over several centuries. It may take the form of religion or nationalism or political ideology, and it may define dissidence as heresy or treason or political deviation, but the structure of power exercised from the centre remains familiar. The present regime rests on the declining economic power given by Gazprom, and the Church has to be careful that it does not become implicated in its eventual downfall. For the moment Eisenstadt’s notion of ‘multiple modernities’, designed to suggest a variety of ways of being modern, serves the ideological purpose in Russia, or Belarus, of legitimating its less attractive features as just part of the rich variety of global alternatives.
Clearly these changes amount to de-secularisation, though when seen as a partial recovery from forced secularisation they do not necessarily refute the secularisation thesis. All over the sometime Eastern bloc the revival of religion has been strongly correlated with a revival of national identity wherever religion and nationalism have been aligned. Andrew Greeley has provided an analysis of the rapid upward shifts in identification with Orthodoxy in Russia, now standing at between 70 per cent and 80 per cent, belief in God, monthly worship and above all the celebration of Easter. Religion is deeply embedded in gesture and obeisance rather than assent to propositions of belief: that embedded character distinguishes it from religion in Protestant Europe and even from Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Greeley comments that the changes beginning in the 1980s exhibit some traditional traits of Holy Russia, including pan-Slavism, imperialism and anti-Semitism.14 At the same time, a large component of the population continues to regard religion as derived from the weaknesses of human nature, as opposed to science, and as more interested in power than in spirituality. Confidence in the organisation of the Church has not survived the initial enthusiasm of the post-Soviet period. Corruption is taken for granted even though Church and army are regarded more positively than other institutions. Atheistic positivism and an almost instinctive materialism still influence a significant section of the educated middle class. As late as 1988 the agents of scientific atheism used the days before Easter to prove experimentally to pupils in Russian schools that water cannot be turned into wine. It is hardly surprising that Richard Dawkins has an enthusiastic following in Russia, even though home-grown atheists wonder how he presumes to instruct people who in the name of state ideology propagated his principles long before he was born.
Whether these changes amount to what Jürgen Habermas has defined as the post-secular condition is a different matter. Religion in the Russian public sphere was privatised in a way very different from Western Europe, and the remarkable return of the traditional symphonia of Church and state can be seen as a form of post-secularity understood in Habermasian terms as admission of the Church under certain conditions as a partner in the debates of the public sphere. The sequence in Russia and Eastern Europe from dramatic and forced secularisation to de-secularisation and post-secularity is an historically quite specific sequence and not part of some universal trend. Religion never retired from the public sphere in Western Europe during the time of Christian Democracy; and the separation of the religious and secular, the Church and the state, in the USA is arguably a Christian project rooted in the Baptist and Anabaptist traditions.
Two recent scenarios from the ‘bloodlands’ of Eurasia illustrate key themes in this chapter and some of the fundamental arguments of this book. The first scenario relates once again to the Pussy Riot. Once one puts analytic pressure on the Pussy Riot case it emerges as rich in ambiguities. It could be interpreted as a religious protest within an understood Orthodox ritual frame, appealing to the Blessed Virgin for aid in the struggle against tyranny and the collusion of Church and state, or alternatively as a typical Western-style art-protest happening. The reactions to the riot covered the whole range from those who placed the protest within the radical tradition of the Gospels concerning what pertains to Caesar and what to God, to those who invoked the Durkheimian sacred and agitated for condign punishment.
The second scenario illustrates a malign continuity of response, whatever the ideological or religious colouring, and shows that when history repeats itself it does so not as farce, (as Marx famously asserted), but as tragedy all over again. After the Enlightened autocrat, Catherine the Great, annexed Crimea the Muslim Tatars, as the ‘people of the land’, found themselves expropriated and thereafter subject to various kinds of harassment that resulted in a decimation of the Tatar communities and a massive diaspora.
This is not to portray Tatars as collectively ‘innocent victims’ since all groups with access to power, and subject to the dynamics of pre-emptive attack as the best form of defence, have abused that power. There are, in terms of the long durance of history, no collective innocents.15 There are only innocent people who at a particular time suffer unjustly. That is what makes collective apology, particularly over an extended time-scale, so dubious. Those who have not committed crimes apologise to those who have not suffered them, and the putative innocence of the victim or guilt of the oppressor is transmitted to new generations by the automatic taint of ethnicity or the mere possession of a passport.
The notion of our shared implication as humans, alike in moral ruination and moral grandeur, is very different from the notion of ethnic taint and effectively undergirds a moral perspective according to which we are, in our specific memberships, short of our common humanity, accounted neither inherently guilty nor inherently innocent. It must be clear to anyone with the slightest sensitivity to the nature and implications of language that the presence in sociological discourse of words like innocence and guilt, let alone words carrying the semantic aura of corruption and blood, speaks volumes about the character of the human sciences. Sociology is a discipline that cannot escape either moral saturation or the theological dimension. They are quite literally written in. My point here relates to what is also written in: the dynamics associated with perceived difference, with differential access to power, and to different ratios of majorities to minorities, often also associated with concentrations of the mistrusted minorities in particular areas or occupational niches.
Under Stalin’s regime of scientific atheism precisely these dynamics came once more into play. Crosses were marked on the doors of Tatars before they were attacked and expelled under various, mostly fabricated, pretexts. They were to some extent allowed back from exile with perestroika. Now under the regime of Vladimir Putin Crimea appears effectively once more annexed to Russia. And in March 2014 the crosses have appeared again.
1 Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities (New York: Norton, 2013).
2 The Finns derived their sense of being a new Israel from the Swedes, as the Americans derived their sense of being a new Israel from England. Karelia in particular focussed dreams of the providential destiny of Greater Finland that were powerfully evoked in the wars of 1940–45.
3 Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (London: Penguin, 2011).
4 Neal Ascherson, The Black Sea: The Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
5 Catherine Merridale, Red Fortress – The Secret Heart of Russia’s History. London: Allen Lane 2013.
6 Sonia Luehrmann, ‘A Dual Quarrel of Images on the Middle Volga: Icon Veneration in the Face of Protestant and Pagan Critique’, in Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz (eds), Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, pp. 56–78).
7 Mariya Lesiv, The Return of the Ancestral gods: Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press 2013.
8 In the sixteenth century, following her excommunication by the Pope, Queen Elizabeth, as head of a ‘nationalised’ Protestant Church, made overtures to Suleiman concerning an anti-Catholic alliance. Geopolitical interests also coincided in the nineteenth century on account of British fears about Russian advance to the Mediterranean until disrupted by popular revulsion over ‘the Bulgarian atrocities’.
9 Cf. Ildiko Beller-Hann and Chris Hann, Turkish Region: Culture and Civilization on the East Black Sea Coast (Oxford: James Currey, 2001).
10 Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
11 Nikolai Mitrokhin, in Irina Prokhorova (ed.), 1990: Russians Remember a Turning Point (London: Maclehose, 2013, p. 338).
12 Hilarion Alfeyev, Orthodox Witness Today (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2006).
13 Mary Dejevsky, ‘Holy Russia’s Bleeding Heart’, The Tablet (28 September 2013).
14 Andrew Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2003, p. 103).
15 David Martin, ‘Collective National Guilt: A Socio-Theological Critique’, in Lawrence Osborne and Andrew Walker (eds.), Harmful Religion: An Exploration of Religious Abuse. London: SPCK 1997: 144-62.