The Church succeeded both by default, because Russian liberal and nationalist projects failed, but also because it knew its way politically. Alexy II and his inner circle had played the politics of the Yeltsin and Putin court perfectly. Many commented that the suspected former KGB role of Alexy II and the alleged involvement in espionage of his successor Kirill I had equipped them with the tools to co-opt and infiltrate the Kremlin into a religious agenda. Upon assuming the Patriarchy in 1989, Alexy II had done his best to support Yeltsin during the 1991 coup, urging Russians not to spill blood to force the democrats from the White House. He had offered the government support, thus legitimacy, at critical moments, endorsing Yeltsin in the 1996 election.
The Church went out of its way to infiltrate the beaten Russian Army into its sphere of influence. They began by signing treaties on cooperation with the army, the border troops and the emergency ministry to play a role promoting the faith amongst the rank and file. The military felt deeply embattled by the attacks on it from the media during the first Chechen war and embraced the Church, which was on their side of the culture war promoting Russian warrior saints. The result was that under Putin, Alexy II achieved his dream – with chapels re-established in military bases in 2005, whilst calls began to return military chaplains.
Alexy II knew how to cash in his support for Yeltsin for political favours. No sooner had he backed the ailing leader’s 1996 re-election, did the government begin drafting a new law curtailing what the Church described as ‘the invasion of the sects’. The law elevated Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism to higher levels of rights and benefits, with the implicit hint that Orthodoxy was more equal than the others.
Alexy II had known how to make money for the Church in the 1990s. With the bandit economy as the way of life, he secured the right to trade duty-free cigarettes, with the Church becoming the trader of 10 per cent of the country’s tobacco.51 When the tide turned towards nationalized conglomerates, he successfully positioned the Church as something akin to a ‘state corporation’, a spiritual version of Rosneft or the bank VTB. Nominally, it would be independent but Alexy encouraged Putin to ‘invest’ in it and think of himself as its major political and economic shareholder. Gazprom and Rosneft are believed to have made huge donations to the Church. Putin’s close St Petersburg allies Sergey Ivanov, the defence minister (2000–8), and Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railways, both came out as strong supporters of this religious revival.
The Church also thrived because, guided by prejudice alone, one survey saw 37 per cent of bishops deem democracy ‘not for Russia’; it worked out what the Putin project was and how to work with it quickly.52 By turning itself into a ‘state corporation’ of sorts it managed to amass the funds for its massive construction campaign. Yet buildings were not the only infrastructure it erected: the Patriarchy built its own mass media. By the end of 2010 it was publishing twenty journals, broadcasting on six radio stations and operating two satellite TV channels.53 Online priests formed a cluster of popular Orthodox blogs heavily linked into the large ‘nationalist cluster’ of the Runet. The Church sponsored its own talking heads, with the Patriarch’s press service constantly commenting on major talk shows.
Orthodoxy resurgent could be felt even in liberal Moscow. Gay pride demonstrations were banned. Then, over the Soviet baroque skyline, rose the gigantic gold cupola of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The cathedral had been destroyed by Stalin in order to create space for his dreamed of Palace of the Soviets, which would have towered above Moscow topped by a statue of Lenin, whose shadow would have fallen over the capital of socialism. The act of destroying the cathedral – imagine Mussolini dynamiting the Florentine Duomo, imagine Napoleon wrecking Notre Dame de Paris – symbolized the ultimate horrific assault on Orthodoxy in the eyes of Russian conservatives. The site also came to symbolize the failure of Stalin’s utopia. The marshlands underneath proved unable to sustain the foundations of the tower he dreamed of, which kept collapsing back. After the war, construction was abandoned and a gigantic open-air swimming pool opened, heated so that in the winter a tower of steam, like a ghost of a dream, hovered above Moscow.
To the faithful, the restoration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, built by the tsars to celebrate their victory over Napoleon, symbolized victory over Stalin. It was a political more than a sacred place. Believers seemed to sense this, never praying in distress or coming for solace. It attracted mostly protesters in a culture war for or against holy Russia, such as the infamous ‘Pussy Riot’. This symbol of the Church’s political victory also symbolized how it had embraced Putin too closely. With less than 7 per cent of the site said to be used for religious purposes, with an underground car park and the conference halls rented out for money, the unlovely half-a-billion dollar building stood for a byzantine symbiosis between the Patriarch and the Kremlin.54
In Moscow, the new Patriarch Kirill, escorted by bodyguards and the owner of a $30,000 gold Breguet wristwatch, drove around the capital in luxury cars with a blue-bucket alarm to break traffic.55 The fringe beards of perestroika were now national politicians. Yet for normal Russians, the flamboyance of restored power was not their daily experience of the Church. In every provincial city, from Abakan to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, locals puffed with pride at the new golden-domed church built as their post-Soviet landmark. In a country in disarray, sickened by the breakdown of the welfare state and the rule of law, a new army of priests and monks offered a compass, charity and a helping hand to those desperately needing someone to fight off the moral vacuum that underlay the epidemic of heroin, alcoholism, murder, corruption and prostitution. The Church set up drugs clinics, soup kitchens and orphanages – and the people in Siberia and the Urals felt that the Patriarch’s men were doing something for them.
The Moscow intelligentsia first mocked the Church as something medieval, then denounced it as something medievaclass="underline" yet in contrast to the historic failure of Russian liberalism, it was running the most successful social project in the whole country. In a hundred small ways, the country was culturally being rewired. By the end of Putin’s first presidency, the vast majority of Russian homes had icons again, the majority of Russian cars had icons on the dashboard: tiny gold baptismal crosses, rare in the USSR, were now so common they no longer stood out, with regular church attendance (if still below 10 per cent of the population) higher than it had been in almost eighty years.56
The infiltration of the Church into the political routine of the country had become so common that it was no longer noticed. Endless TV clips would show the Patriarch inviting Putin, or Medvedev, to attend a mass, with the President graciously accepting. Invented traditions, such as the President after his inauguration being blessed by the Patriarch in the Kremlin Cathedral of the Annunciation, in an act eerily reminiscent of the enthronement of the tsar, were shrugged off as the new normal. The triumph of the Church was visible in the size of the crowds it could draw. In 2011 – outdoing the numbers present at any of the protests surrounding contested elections – over 285,000 gathered to kiss a relic of the Virgin Mary’s belt as it was paraded through Moscow.57 In its journey across Russia, over 2 million had pushed their way to touch its holiness.58
The rise of the Russian Orthodox Church both aided Putin and eventually subtly undermined him. It blew into society a sense that Russia needed to be Russian, not a ‘reproduction of the Western model’, to quote Patriarch Kirill.59 It reinforced in its sermons that Russia was the centre of an Orthodox-Slavic civilization that sooner or later would be not just the third Rome but the ‘second Brussels’ reuniting the lost lands. All of this was helpful to Surkov and ‘Sovereign Democracy’. Yet the Church was also injecting into the national bloodstream an overwhelming sense that all was not morally right, that Russia was disorientated, that Russia was sick, that it needed to cleanse itself, to be less corrupt and above all to be holy.