Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia

RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY RESURGENT

RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY RESURGENT

Faith and Power in the New Russia

John Garrard & Carol Garrard

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Garrard, John Gordon.

Russian Orthodoxy resurgent : faith and power in the new Russia / John Garrard and Carol Garrard.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.   ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-12573-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Religion and politics—Russia (Federation)—History—20th century. 2. Religion and politics—Russia (Federation)— History—21st century. 3. Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’—Influence. 4. Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’. 5. Aleksii II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, 1929– I. Garrard, Carol. II. Title.

BL65.P7G37 2008

281.9’47090511—dc22                  2008005415

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Electra

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

To the memory of

John Simmons and Sir Julian Bullard

Patriots and Scholars

The three most importantly innovative and transformative political developments of the last twenty years [have been] the rise of the Christian right in America, the explosion of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran, and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union.

James Billington, Librarian of Congress, from the 1997 Templeton Lecture

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

The official dissolution of the USSR on December 25, 1991, occasioned self-congratulation among some in the West but provoked an agony of conscience and recrimination within Russia itself. With huge sections of the country poisoned by chemicals, fresh evidence mounting of the contempt with which the Soviet government treated its own citizens, and the list of those who died in the Gulag growing by millions, Russians faced a period of disorienting turmoil as they saw their truncated country plummet from superpower status. The almost instantaneous disintegration of the Soviet system and the Communist Party that ran it left a vacuum once occupied by the official ideology of scientific atheism.

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is filling this vacuum and reconstituting a national belief system in its own image. Believers are replacing party members. The story of the Russians’ recovery of their sense of themselves as a great nation (derzhava) is still in progress; its events are being recorded in newspaper headlines and television bulletins. Whatever the outcome, the key role played by the ROC has already recast the country we once thought we knew into a power whose motivations we understand very little. Orthodox believers now constitute the largest volunteer movement inside the Russian Federation during the zero years—the Russians’ own term for the period since 2000. Two powerful trends are converging: one emanates up from the grass roots, and the other is directed down from the Moscow Patriarchate. In an important switch from the situation obtaining in the late tsarist period, those attracted to the church include not only the stereotypical kerchiefed little old ladies (babushki, grandmothers) but also the Russian military and the political, scientific, cultural, and financial elites.

We backed into this critically important topic while editing World War 2 and the Soviet People (1993) and researching and writing The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (1996). In 1992 we landed at Sheremetievo Airport laden with more than twenty crates of medical aid assembled by the congregation of Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Tucson, Arizona, and the donations of many other ecumenical groups. We intended to distribute this aid both to those Jews who wished to leave Russia and to an ROC congregation and school that we had learned about from the librarian at our daughters’ elementary school. Our two girls had also led a drive to collect toys, school supplies, and other items for the church children. Thanks to American Airlines and Lufthansa, we flew to Moscow without paying any overweight penalty. It took so long to get the enormous containers of aid through Russian customs that the cavernous waiting room was almost empty when we entered, shepherding a long line of metal trolleys lumbering unsteadily beneath their loads. In one corner waited a greeting committee from Operation Exodus—a huddle of young men in keppas from Moscow University’s newly established Hillel (a student group). They kept casting sidelong glances to the other corner of the waiting room—an equally mystified and tense circle comprised of a Russian Orthodox priest (Father Sergy Romanov) with a luxuriant black beard, several deacons, and a few young Orthodox nuns. Over the anxious and puzzled heads of both groups hung the unspoken question, Can they be waiting for the same people we are? It was a window into the stresses pulling at the substrata of the new Russia.

As we helped this Orthodox congregation restore an eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox Church building, our research began to segue from the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union to the revival of Orthodoxy. Indeed, the history of this single church and its courageous priest, Father Sergy Romanov (no relation to the tsarist family), informs the whole subject. This personal engagement led Carol Garrard to publish an article, Religion: From Official Atheism to Freedom of Choice, in an anthology Re-Emerging Russia: Search for Identity (1995), sponsored by Older Americans Service and Information System (OASIS), an innovative and imaginative organization headquartered in St. Louis. The anthology was the basis for a ten-part forum taught in dozens of cities and towns nationwide.

In spite of lively interest from the public, most Western academics, with important exceptions, neglected the church’s resurgence. Political scientists and historians prefer to study the new Russia through the traditional secular lens of economics, politics, demography, and other social sciences. Orthodox theologians here in the West, or the memoirs of believers who suffered mistreatment, can hardly be objective. There are, however, distinguished historians in the West, led by James Billington, the librarian of Congress, who have written perceptively in this field. Billington’s The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Knopf, 1966) is essential background to any work on this subject. Further, through an amazing coincidence, he happened to be in Moscow when the August 19–21, 1991 coup by KGB and party hard-liners was attempted. His memoir, Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, is a first-person account that should not be missed. William Brumfield, professor at Tulane University, has produced a magisterial History of Russian Architecture, which contains photographs of literally thousands of Russian Orthodox churches, together with his uniquely informed commentary. The J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., supervise innovative research and organize excellent conferences on the Orthodox faith and civic life in Russia. Baylor University Professor Wallace Daniels’s The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia (2006) offers an in-depth perspective focused on individual parishes and priests as they sought to revitalize Orthodox life.

Once people had asked us, since we are not Jewish, why were we so interested in the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. Now, both the Orthodox congregation we befriended and other scholars asked why we were interested in the church’s revival since we are not members of the Russian Orthodox Church. For those who concern themselves with such things, John Garrard was baptized in the Church of England but is not a member of any organized religion; Carol Garrard is a practicing Lutheran. We do not write from the perspective of faith, and we do not belong to a particular political party. We believe that religious tolerance is what this planet needs, in the twenty-first century more than ever. Before being seconded to British Intelligence as an officer-cadet, John Garrard served as a private in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in Northern Ireland. He was posted at Omagh and saw what religious hatred can lead human beings to do to one another.

We plunge into our subject in medias res at the Feast of the Transfiguration (Preobrazhensky Post), as it was co-celebrated on August 19, 1987, by the patriarch of the Russian Church, Pimen, and the patriarch of Constantinople, Demetrios I, who was the first patriarch of Constantinople to visit Moscow in four hundred years. Though change had been bubbling beneath the surface for decades, this emotional and beautiful service was the first signal on the national stage that the president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, planned to extend glasnost and perestroika into the area of faith. The consequences of this switch in policy would be both far-reaching and unanticipated—by Gorbachev himself, by the Communist Party, by Western observers, and perhaps by the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy. They certainly were unforeseen by us at that moment, even though we were eyewitnesses to this impressive service.

The leitmotif of our book is the career of Pimen’s successor as patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the former Aleksey Ridiger, a man born and brought up in Estonia. He served as metropolitan of Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg) prior to being enthroned as Patriarch Aleksy II on June 10, 1990. It was Aleksy who intervened at the crisis of the coup by party hard-liners the following year: his address (obrashchenie) threatened excommunication for anyone who took up arms against civilians and closed with a direct plea to the Mother of God (Mater Bozhia) to help the Russians reconcile themselves to one another, to the truth, and to God. It was read over Soviet radio and television at 1:42 A.M. on August 21, 1991. The order for the tanks to advance and seize Boris Yeltsin, elected president of the Russian Republic in June, and members of the Parliament holed up in the Russian White House, was expected just eighteen minutes later; 2:00 A.M. was the KGB’s favorite zero hour for attack. Instead, at 3:00 A.M., Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB and leader of the coup, called Yeltsin to say there would be no assault that night. That night became never when the tanks turned around at dawn. Since then, Aleksy II has led the resurgence of the Orthodox faith.

This book is not, however, a hagiography, but an examination of the ways in which an institution once despised and rejected by the vast majority of the citizenry has come to reshape post-Soviet Russia. Ours is a warts and all portrait of both man and institution. Thus we have been told we will be cursed for acknowledging in print what has been known by insiders since the early 1990s—namely, that Ridiger had served in the KGB for more than thirty years prior to his enthronement as patriarch. However, we argue that his KGB experience helped him defeat the 1991 coup, outwit the extreme radicals in the church itself, make a crucial alliance with the Russian military, and reach a modus vivendi with President Putin, another KGB alumnus. The collapse of the Soviet Union was neither accompanied nor followed by large-scale neighbor-on-neighbor violence, such as the pogroms that blighted Russian life under the last two tsars, and for that, Russians can credit Patriarch Aleksy II more than any other person.

The church’s revitalization presented a blizzard of moral, intellectual, emotional, and financial problems, some the legacy of the Soviet past and others the detritus of the tsars. Each chapter takes up one of these daunting challenges and shows how Aleksy and his supporters have dealt with it. The topics are not watertight—characters and events recur, viewed from different angles. For example, the account of Nicholas and Alexandra’s insistence upon the canonization of the hermit Seraphim of Sarov in 1903 is first treated in chapter 2 as we analyze the skillful use the new patriarch made of the motif of new life for the church and rebirth for Russia in 1991, when he recovered Seraphim’s bones from the KGB’s closet of stolen relics. The Seraphim saga resurfaces in chapter 4, now intertwined with the debate over canonizing the murdered imperial family, anti-Semitism, and the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thus, the narrative does not unfold in strict chronological time. Rather, we show how, under Aleksy II, ancient symbols from Orthodoxy’s thousand-year history have become vibrantly alive in a contemporary kaleidoscope of policies, threats, and countermoves.

This focus has necessarily excluded some important topics. The other branches of the Russian Orthodox Church—the émigrés, the Old Believers, the sister churches in Eastern Orthodoxy, notably the Patriarchate of Constantinople (modern Istanbul)—are discussed only when their story intersects that of the Moscow Patriarchate. There are also interesting developments taking place outside the capital, but these are for the most part heavily influenced by decisions made in Moscow. Moscow is where the KGB and party hard-liners attempted their coup and where the defeat of that coup changed history.

This book has its heroes, but they remain profoundly human, not divine. First and foremost must be the ordinary Russian Orthodox believer—persecuted, reviled, imprisoned, exiled. These stalwarts kept their faith through the most sustained attack on religion in recorded history. Such individuals as Father Sergy Romanov and his congregation of St. Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Church are representative of such people; their courage and commitment refused to ever give way to despair. We know the history of believers under Soviet oppression chiefly thanks to the Keston Institute in Oxford, England. It was founded in 1969 by the Reverend Canon Michael Bourdeaux and maintained with funds from the Templeton Prize, which he was awarded in 1984 to study religion’s fate in the Soviet Union under the official ideology of scientific atheism.

Since the Feast of the Transfiguration celebrated on August 19, 1987, twenty years have passed. The world has changed, but twenty years of wars dotted around the globe have continued. The strife in the Balkans; the ebb and flow of the guerrilla war in Chechnya; the agony of Lebanon; the bitter struggle between the Israelis and Palestinians; the defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan by the mujaheddin; the morphing of the mujaheddin into the amoeba-like Al-Qaeda; the war between the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda; the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan; the open-ended war on terror provoked by the attack of September 11, 2001; the religious war between the Sunni and Shia of Iraq, which began in earnest in February 2006 with the blowing up of the Askariya shrine, the famous golden-domed mosque in Samarra—all these conflicts have resulted in horrific casualties. All seem to be never-ending. All have taken a toll in human suffering that is almost incalculable.

But there was one war that did not happen. The Soviet Union was born in civil war; most Russians expected it to die in a similar bloodbath. That it did not is something for which everyone on this planet must be grateful. This is where our story begins.

Finally, is there a conclusion to be drawn from this study? We believe so, but it is not one from which we in the West can take much comfort. However industrialized Russia is, however contemporary Russians appear—laden as they are with cell phones, computers, and the other paraphernalia of modernity—Russia is not Western and most likely cannot be. Russia is trying to achieve its own version of democracy, that is, free elections with more than one candidate on the ballot. But Russia is unlikely to become Western because the original East-West divide is the one that split Christianity in 1054. That fault line has contoured history ever since. During the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact laid down an artificial border, largely marking the line the Red Army had reached when Nazi Germany surrendered in Berlin on May 9, 1945. That line has been erased, and the original East-West dividing line between Western Christianity (Catholicism and its Protestant offshoots) and Orthodoxy has reappeared. Wars may draw borders; the end of wars can redraw them. The divisions of faith, because they live on in the minds of men and women, seem impervious to cartography.

Acknowledgments

We have incurred many debts in the course of our research for this book. First and foremost is to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., for offering John the opportunity to be a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 2004–5. The incomparable resources of the Wilson Center, ably directed by Lee Hamilton, a true statesman, provided a perfect setting. Janet Spikes, the center’s librarian, and her colleagues were invariably helpful. The center provided two remarkably gifted research assistants, Jennifer Murray and Nana Tchibuchian. The Kennan Institute, under its director Blair Ruble, assisted by Margaret Paxson, supported our research in many ways. We thank them all.

The essential source for work on the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church is the Keston Archive of the Keston Institute. During the years of our research, Keston Institute was affiliated with Oxford University in Oxford, England. Canon Michael Bourdeaux, founder and president of Keston Institute, and Malcolm Walker, the archive librarian, were indispensable.

This book would never have happened without the support and encouragement from John’s colleagues at the University of Arizona, chiefly Terry Polowy, head of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, and Charles Tatum, dean of the College of Humanities. They provided a generous research leave and much needed travel grants. The International Studies Office further supplemented the dean’s and department’s grants.

Carol Garrard thanks the OASIS Institute (Older Americans Service & Information System) for sponsoring an anthology, Re-Emerging Russia: Search for Identity, edited by Max J. Okenfuss and Cheryl D. Roberts (Needham Heights, Mass.: Simon & Schuster, 1995), to which she contributed the article Religion from Official Atheism to Freedom of Choice. The OASIS Institute in headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, and has satellites in many cities and towns. The Tucson Campus, directed by Prindle Gorman-Oomens, has allowed Carol to teach on this subject for more than ten years.

We are also indebted to many colleagues on the other side of the pond. St. Antony’s College, Oxford, gave John a most-welcome Senior Associate Member status for the Trinity Term of 2005. We especially thank Archie Brown, Alex Pravda, and Robert Service, all Fellows of the College, for sharing their knowledge and expertise. We are also grateful to Vanessa Hack, Antonian network and public relations officer, and to Kärin Leighton-Barrett, accommodation co-ordinator, for their kind assistance.

Many other people have contributed their time and expertise to this endeavor. We thank Sir Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to the Soviet Union and subsequently the Russian Federation from 1988 to 1992, for allowing us to quote from his personal diary. Dr. William Miller, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and Dr. Igor Glazin, former member of the Russian Parliament and subsequently member of the Parliament of Estonia, also provided in-depth and personal information about world-changing events. All three men were Fellows of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars during John’s tenure there.

Research opportunities at Oxford University also were invaluable. Bishop Kallistos, the former Timothy Ware, shared with us his encyclopedic personal and professional knowledge of the Orthodox faith; his seminar on the Russian Orthodox Church at All Souls College, Oxford University, was extremely helpful. Dr. Ann Shukman shared her remarkable knowledge of the St. Seraphim cult and the issue of the church’s relationship with Soviet power. The manciple of All Souls College, Paul Gardner, made each of our stays comfortable. The Fellows and warden of Merton College, Dame Jessica Rawson, welcomed John (an old Mertonian from the class of ’54) warmly, and the college librarian, Dr. Julia Walworth, helped us with rare items.

We thank the Sourozh Diocese, which acknowledges the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, for allowing us to attend its Diocesan Conference held at Headington, Oxford, May 28–31, 2004. Many Orthodox theologians and priests, most especially Matthew Steenburg of Oxford University and Father Stephen Platt, answered our questions with limitless patience.

Research trips to the British Library in London were made much more pleasurable by the opportunity to stay at John’s club, the Athenaeum, where the hospitality of the club secretary, Jonathan Ford, made our many visits memorable. The wonderful library of the Athenaeum and its helpful staff assisted as well.

England lost one of its finest diplomats, Sir Julian Bullard, Fellow of All Souls, formerly of the British Foreign Office, in 2006. We met Sir Julian and his gracious wife, Margaret, Lady Bullard, as we began work on this book. Another Fellow of All Souls College, the former Slavonic librarian of the Codrington Library, the late John Simmons, also gave of his time and unparalleled knowledge. We were honored to know both Sir Julian and John Simmons as scholars and friends, and their loss will be deeply felt by anyone interested in Russia.

Our personal interest in this topic first came about in 1992 when we led a mission of mercy carrying medical supplies and other aid to St. Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Church. The congregation of Carol’s church, Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church of Tucson, Arizona, sponsored them, but many other people outside the church contributed. Joyce and Roger Stewart, Tucson philanthropists, donated much needed medical supplies, as well as packing the crates at their company, AGM Controls. Many hospitals, especially Kino Community Hospital and its head cardiologist, Dr. Brendan Phibbs, were amazingly charitable. The children of Sunrise Elementary School, led by their energetic librarian Mimi Crowley, conducted their own drive to garner toys, school supplies, and personal items.

Our debts to Russians are of a special kind. Father Sergy Romanov of St. Vladimir’s Church in Moscow and his parishioners, most notably Olga Lugovaya and Tatiana Kiselyova, are people for whom we have unbounded admiration. We have known this congregation for more than fifteen years; its phenomenal energy and faith in the face of countless difficulties are truly amazing. It must be noted that none of the conclusions we draw in this book are from them. Father Sergy and his entire congregation remain completely and unquestioningly devoted to the Moscow Patriarchate. We also thank Liudmila Kiselyova, head of the Rare Book Division of the Academy of Sciences’ library in St. Petersburg, who shared with us her photographs and helped us locate hard-to-obtain items.

We also thank Fred Appel, our editor at Princeton University Press, for his perceptive support. The two anonymous outside readers of our initial draft made a great many incisive criticisms, all of which were constructive in the best sense of the word. Any errors that remain are our own responsibility.

Finally a special debt of gratitude is due to Rose Hamersen, Carol’s mother. She died a few days after we arrived in Oxford for our final trip to the Keston Archive. She left a last message with Carol’s father, Clarence, that we were not to return until our research was finished. Her selflessness allowed us to complete this book; the Keston Archive was in the process of being packed as we worked. As this book goes to press, it is now awaiting reopening at its new home, the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies of Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Carol Garrard, Tucson, Arizona and John Garrard, Professor of Russian Studies,

University of Arizona (November 7, 2007)

Note on Transliteration

Translating Russian letters into English (chiefly for names or special terms) presents an unavoidable problem because the Russian or Cyrillic alphabet contains thirty-two letters and our own alphabet only twenty-six. In addition, the letters stand for sounds that are occasionally unique to each language. Therefore, our chief concern has been readability for the English-speaking audience rather than systematic letter-to-letter equivalence. Anyone who knows Russian should have no problem in restoring the original Russian, or in discerning the exceptions we have employed. All transliterations and translations, unless otherwise noted, are by John Garrard.

RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY RESURGENT

PROLOGUE

Sergiev Posad: Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain [Mount Tabor] apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.

—Matthew 17:1–2

ON AUGUST 19, 1987, Pimen, the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, and Demetrios I, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, jointly celebrated the Divine Liturgy for the Feast of the Transfiguration at the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery, which is located a few miles northeast of Moscow (see figure P.1). It was the first visit of a patriarch of Constantinople to Russia in almost four hundred years. In January 1589 Patriarch Jeremias II visited Moscow to elevate the status of the Moscow metropolitan to patriarch. No longer the daughter, the Church of Russia would be the sister to the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, which was obviously hoping for support from the rising power of Orthodox Russia.¹ On the way back to his see, Jeremias II died. His death symbolized Constantinople’s declining influence, which had been shrinking since 1453 when the Ottoman Turks captured the city and renamed it Istanbul. The Orthodox congregation of the premier patriarchate dwindled further over the ensuing centuries. By 1987 the patriarch of Constantinople, a courtesy title permitted by the Turks, was shepherd to only about two thousand souls. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), which Jeremias had officially raised to patriarchal status, continued to grow in power and prestige until it suffered its own hostile takeover by militantly atheist Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917.

The 1987 co-celebration, in ways unanticipated by anyone, including the celebrants themselves, also heralded fundamental change for the church. It signaled a perestroika in faith a full four years before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991.

Figure P.1 Russians stream toward the entrance of the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Monastery to witness co-celebration of the Feast of Transfiguration by Patriarch Pimen and Patriarch of Constantinople, Demetrios I, August 19, 1987. (Photo credit: John Garrard)

Although the invitation had been issued in the name of Patriarch Pimen, everyone knew that Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union and general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) since March 1985, made the decision. Gorbachev thought the church might become an ally in his campaign to modernize the country, to make it work more efficiently, and to raise the moral tone, thus bringing about a decline in the widespread corruption that characterized Soviet society. According to the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, the ROC hoped that Demetrios’s visit would promote inter-Christian dialogues, participation in the World Council of Churches and the ecumenical movement as a whole, and closer cooperation between the two churches in their efforts to establish on Earth a just and lasting peace.² Neither Gorbachev nor the ROC achieved hoped-for objectives. In fact, even after accepting an invitation, Demetrios I failed to attend the 1988 celebration to mark the thousand-year anniversary of the Christianization of the Eastern Slavs, or, as the Russians call it, the Baptism of Rus (Kreshchenie Rusi).

The 1987 service conducted jointly by the two patriarchs took place in what is known as Sergiev Posad, literally Sergy’s Abode. During Soviet times, the monastery complex disappeared from the map; it was simply renamed Zagorsk. Sergy of Radonezh (1314–92), the future St. Sergius (canonized 1422) founded it in 1337 while still a young man. In a great explosion of monastic expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it hived off other communities organized according to his standards and rules. The mother house itself became the seat of icon painting and the spiritual heart of Russia.

In 1380 Sergiev Posad witnessed one of the great turning points of Russian history. The account written by monks in the medieval Chronicles retains its emotional impact to this day:

A rumor spread that Khan Mamay was raising a large army as a punishment for our sins and that with all his heathen Tatar hordes he would invade Russian soil…. The puissant and reigning prince, who held the scepter of all Russia, great Dmitri [Prince Dmitry Ivanovich Donskoy, 1350–89], having a great faith in the saint [Sergius], came to ask him if he counseled him to go against the heathen. The saint, bestowing on him his blessing, and strengthened by prayer, said to him:

It behooveth you, lord, to have a care for the lives of the flock committed to you by God. Go forth against the heathen; and upheld by the strong arm of God, conquer; and return to your country sound in health, and glorify God with loud praise.

Dmitri and all his armies were filled with a spirit of temerity and went into battle against the pagans. They fought; many fell; but God was with them, and helped the great and invincible Dmitri, who vanquished the ungodly Tatars…. The Grand Duke Dmitri returned to his country with great joy in his heart, and hastened to visit holy, venerable Sergius. Rendering thanks for the prayers of the saint and of the brotherhood, he gave a rich offering to the monastery.³

Russians credit Donskoy’s 1380 victory at Kulikovo over Khan Mamay as a watershed in Russian history, marking the beginning of their release from the long years of the Tatar yoke (Tatarskoe igo). The victory gave rise to the proverbial saying that separate forces from principalities northeast of Rus (the ancient name for Russia) came to the battlefield of Kulikovo, but they left a united Russian people (yediny russky narod). Kulikovo took on the same associations as the Battle of Gettysburg did for the United States, sacred ground whose memory, in the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, should not perish from the earth.

Grand Prince Dmitry’s victory at Kulikovo also marks the beginning of the rise to dominance of Muscovy. For his crucial role in encouraging the grand prince (he even sent two monks into the battle), Sergius would become known as the godfather of Muscovy. So deeply embedded was this story in the Russian memory that Stalin resurrected it during the darkest days of World War II. With the Wehrmacht literally at the gates of Moscow, he allowed the metropolitan of Leningrad to stir the deep patriotism of his audience by retelling the tale. Once the Germans were defeated, however, the Soviet authorities once again erased Orthodoxy from Russia’s history. Donskoy’s triumph over Mamay remained part of the state curriculum but was taught without its religious frame of reference. By 1987 the churches within the monastery gates were occupied by the Theological Academy of Orthodoxy, and the Cathedral of the Dormition had not seen the liturgy performed for decades.

As the cultural lecturers for the 1987 University of Arizona Alumni tour, we expected to shepherd our charges around virtually empty grounds of Sergiev Posad, dotted by the occasional elderly babushka communing alone. Instead, the buses parked not far from a row of black Chaika (Seagull) limousines. This meant that the occupant was very important indeed. A huge crowd of Russians streamed toward the entrance of the Cathedral of the Dormition. A continuous torrent of people—old, young, middle-aged—swept toward the double doors. Inside, the cathedral was packed to the rafters. The atmosphere was electric, akin to the charged emotion of a Billy Graham Crusade for Christ in a Texas convention center. The cathedral itself glowed. Orthodoxy’s message is that it is the light of the world, and light was the immaterial substance disposed through the sanctuary. To squeeze into the space was effectively to walk into and through light refracting all around. The effect was both immediate and physiological. As the eye adjusted, it began to play tricks. The walls of the cathedral gleamed a warm gold as the light reflected off the painted frescoes. The gold began to take on a rosy tint, as if it had been overlaid with a luminous pink. And the sky, which could just be glimpsed through the tiny windows, became suffused with a purplish glow. The windows had not been treated; it was the phenomenon of complementary retinal adjustment, for the sky was still blue. These optical effects were evanescent, mutable, though the eye needed time to adjust in order to see clearly. To be forced in this way to confront one’s physicality and by extension, one’s mortality, heightened the sense of being in an otherworldly space (see figure P.2).

Figure P.2 Russians pack the Cathedral of the Dormition as Patriarch Pimen of the Russian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Demetrios of the Church of Constantinople co-celebrate the liturgy August 19, 1987, for the first time in 398 years. (Photo credit: John Garrard)

The iconostasis (the screen inset with icons that separates the altar from the nave and blocks the congregation’s view of the altar) shone in the flickering tapers held by the audience, and a gold, red, and blue rainbow refracted throughout the sanctuary. The original builders of the cathedral had carefully placed the slit windows for maximum light, and sickles of brightness curved through the air illuminating individual icons. The Slavic school of icon painting had perfected the technique of applying layers of translucent washes, one on top of the other, each composed of a mixture of egg yolk and water or vinegar, which served as the medium to bind the pigments. Light passing through these glazes would reflect from the background gesso. The iconostasis must have recently been restored; the once murky panels of brown figures on dark backgrounds shone in their original subtle, luminous colors, and the brush strokes of pure white flashed out.

To the believer, icons (from the Greek, image) are more than art; they are portals into the spiritual world. The Orthodox hold that as they look at the icon, the icon gazes back. Believers talk to them, and the icons answer. Indeed, Orthodox believers pray with their eyes open, and they need an icon to focus their gaze as they do so. They are not praying to the icon, but through it to the divine world it depicts in gesso and tempura. Such communication is both intimate and interactive. The cleft between the celestial and the terrestrial dissolves, and the believer participates in an image of heaven itself. With the atmosphere inside the Cathedral of the Dormition altered to pink, satiny indigo, and warm gold, the air itself seemed charged. All around were standing Russians (there are no pews), moving in regular rapid rhythm, bowing and crossing themselves, with an expression on their faces difficult to describe. Russians cross themselves using two fingers and a thumb pressed against the third and fourth finger, not just two fingers, and from right shoulder to left, not left to right, as do Catholics. Some people were on their knees, bowing and kissing the floor, alternating between adoration and penitence.

For seventy years the official ideology of the USSR was scientific atheism, carefully termed Marxism-Leninism for Western consumption. Lenin and Stalin were equal opportunity haters of all religions, but Russian Orthodoxy, state faith of the tsarist empire, was their special target. Khrushchev, who passed as a reformer in the West, confidently predicted that the last remaining priest would be exhibited at a museum twenty years hence.⁴ He did not specify if this cleric would be stuffed or live, but his point was clear. Though Khrushchev fell from power October 1964, the anti-Orthodox campaign did not let up. And yet, on this August afternoon in 1987, it looked as if the sun shone over a service that had been running continually since 1917. The packed cathedral, the icons, the ecstatic believers, the beautiful liturgy, and the exquisite robes of the two patriarchs seemed as if nothing had changed. Only the artificial bright lights of the Soviet television crew and its huge black boom and cameras betrayed the date.

Even for those who were not Orthodox, the sheer beauty of the experience was overwhelming. The sound of the melodious voices singing with no musical instrument as accompaniment, the gaze of the icons, the crackle of the tapers, the continual bowing and crossing, which energizes the breathing—all of these elements synthesized into a total mind-body experience powerfully communicating an ineffable sense of the divine. When both patriarchs censed the congregation (from a theological point of view, they were recognizing the divine spark in every human), an indescribable fragrance wafted through the air. Non-Orthodox who had not fasted could not partake of the consecrated bread and wine, but all were invited to come forward for a piece of the prosfora, the leavened bread blessed but not consecrated by the priest.

Men shape buildings as the embodiment of their spiritual vision. Russian Orthodox Church interiors synthesize this truth, for they are coded as visible texts of its liturgy, as Archpriest Lev Lebedev explained early in the run up to the millennial celebration of the Baptism of Rus: A Russian Orthodox Church is not merely a place for prayer, it above all is the image of the Kingdom of Heaven in everything from the symbols of the architectural forms and its inner tripartite division, to the decoration of the icons, especially the iconostasis.⁵ Here Lebedev puts his finger on a crucial feature of the faith: In Russian Orthodoxy the personal spiritual life of the faithful, domestic life, family relations, economic and all other activity consciously aspire to the ‘embodiment,’ the reflection of the Heavenly in the earthly, which is the chief means of transforming the earthly, of spiritualizing and bringing it closer to the Heavenly. Thus Russian Orthodox architecture proclaims that the image of paradise is visible in the sanctuary’s structure. Orthodoxy does not pretend that the believer has been magically transported into the empyrean. Rather, the liturgy as text and the coded space of the sanctuary as context together give a mystical foretaste of the eternal heaven. Each part of the church is a form of worship itself, synchronous with specific elements of the liturgy.

Soviet officials commonly referred to churches as prayer buildings. Indeed, Soviet law, based on Lenin’s decree of January 20, 1918, misleadingly titled On the Separation of Church and State, made performing church rites the sole function permitted the ROC. Furthermore, it was a crime to perform the liturgy outside a licensed prayer building. Theologians defined the Russian Orthodox Church as more than a building and a service; rather, it was the people of God who make up the Body of Christ active in the world today. Lenin had forestalled that; his decree of 1918 stated that religious congregations (obshchiny) did not enjoy the rights of a legal entity. According to the Soviet legal code, outside the performance of the liturgy the church did not legally exist. Seizing churches would prevent the liturgy from being performed. No liturgy—ergo, no faith.

But, however small the number of churches, however dilapidated and desecrated their interior, the liturgy itself survived. The Soviet authorities never insisted that it be changed. The liturgy was performed in OCS—Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language derived from the alphabet invented by Cyril and Methodius, two monks sent in the ninth century from Constantinople to Moravia (the modern Czech Republic and Slovak Republic) to Christianize the Slavs.⁶ Perhaps the party, thoroughly secularized in its worldview, thought the archaic nature of the language would drain the liturgy of its power. Unwittingly, they allowed the ROC to continue the most compelling element of its confession. For however antiquated the words, no other liturgy in all Christianity is more elaborate or more awe-inspiring. St. Nicholas Cabasilas, a fourteenth-century theologian, in The Life of Christ called the liturgy of the Orthodox Church the final and greatest of the mysteries since it is not possible to go beyond it or add anything to it. After the liturgy there is nowhere to go. There all must stand, and try to examine the means by which we may preserve the treasure to the end. For in it we obtain God himself, and God is united with us in the most perfect union.⁷ Judaism can be carried in the arms of a single man: the Torah scrolls transported the faith during the two thousand years of the Diaspora to every continent. Similarly, Protestantism is Bible-based; a Bible in the vernacular can function as a miniature church, enabling a missionary to take the Gospel anywhere, or a believer to stay connected to his faith. But to a great extent, Russian Orthodoxy exists for its believers in its liturgy, the power of whose beauty the party