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(Re)building the Third Rome: Orthodoxy in Russia

The Moscow skyline today is striking. It is hard not to be impressed by the foreboding Seven Sisters and towering figures of Lenin, clashing starkly with the cold steel and glamorous sparkle of the city’s new central business district. Yet some of the newest and most ornate structures punctuating the city’s crowded canopy hark back to a distant, prerevolutionary past.

The resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church has been one of the most visibly dramatic changes to shape Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Moscow, this has been manifested through industrial-scale church construction, with Patriarch Kirill having promised some 200 new churches by 2020. The impacts of renewed Orthodox strength on the city landscape is impressive. The implications for Russia, however, are far more complex.

To understand the importance of the reemergence of a visible religious orthodoxy, we have to consider just how new and strange it is. Until 1991, Soviet policy had nothing short of obliterated the Russian Church. Cathedrals were systematically destroyed, or converted into libraries and other secular public spaces to suit the needs of the proletariat. Among the most noteworthy of these was one of Moscow’s defining monuments, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The iconic white marble walls and gold-laden dome, which had taken over forty years to build, were blown up in 1931 under Stalin’s orders as soviet atheism was enforced. Plans were made to construct the notorious ‘Palace of Soviets’ in its place, but due to the abrupt arrival of war and economic difficulties, it was never realised. Instead, the site was curiously transformed into the world’s largest open-air swimming pool. Only in 1990, when Soviet power had begun to wane, were plans drawn up to reinstate the Cathedral. After receiving donations from over one million Muscovites and with government support, the monument was resurrected where it stands today as one of the most important central spaces in

by Joshua Robinson

Moscow.

The historic reconstruction of the iconic Cathedral set the tone for hundreds more such projects across Russia. New domes and bell towers have sprung up all over the country, and don’t just represent a renewed interest in architecture. Government-funded church building manifests a key component of President Vladimir Putin’s nation-building project - a bid to create an ‘idea’ of Russia, and forge a national identity in the vacuum left by the collapse of the USSR. After dismantling the ideologies and associated symbols of Tsarist Russia a hundred years ago, the Soviets fashioned a strictly atheist identity for the new communist super-power. Citizens were encouraged to unite around newly fashioned common values such as the importance of the collective above the individual, hatred of the bourgeoisie, and global proletarian revolution. Soviet propaganda fiercely attacked the Church’s excesses and corruption, reiterating Marx’s designation of religion as ‘the opium of the people’, and instead pushing its own ideology. This is still physically manifested in the thousands of statues of Lenin and Marx sprawled across Russia’s cities. The statues have since lost their meaning, but churches are taking their place to dominate public spaces. Russia is being rebranded as a strong religious country with traditional morals and great national pride, the escalation of right-wing nationalism and intolerance of sexual minorities being some of the more unsavoury consequences of this. Russian state media now frames events through a narrative of Holy Russia against the decadent West, a discourse that Putin is very keen to encourage. Although there is some genuine desire for the much needed restoration of old churches, whether Russians will buy into this publicly-funded identity project remains to be seen.

Photo credit: http://copticocc.org/site/wp-content/uploads/ 2015/05/ 3