Russians care less and less about the church

Unusual protests have taken place in recent weeks in Russia's fourth largest city, Yekaterinburg. Locals turned out in huge numbers to protest against plans to build a large new church in a park in the city centre. Although faced with intimidation, arrests and disapproval from both regional and federal politicians, and the overwhelming authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, the protesters prevailed.

Local governor Yevgeny Kuyvashev agreed at the end of May to remove the construction site after a poll showed that 74 percent of citizens opposed the plans. President Vladimir Putin said that he would respect the referendum decision, although he obviously did not expect a convincing majority to declare against the construction of the church. Critics said the church was part of a large commercial project funded by billionaires Igor Altuškin and Andrej Kozicin. The Kremlin denied this.

Some analysts interpreted the protests as the opening of a new front of local activism across the country, fueled by Russians' desire to stand up against powerful interests - the church and big companies.

"It was just another sign that the situation in Russia has suddenly changed when it comes to church and society," says Aleksandar Baunov, a senior fellow at the Moscow Carnegie Center.

He adds that a recent survey showed that 79 percent of Russians consider themselves Orthodox Christians, but that the church does not enjoy obedience. At the protests in Yekaterinburg there was much more anger, the demonstrators' attitudes were much more passionate than at the recent demonstrations in the Russian regions against the plans for the construction of landfills in the northern city of Arkhangelsk, Baunov assesses.

"The protests have once again shown that a new civil society is emerging in Russia and that it is not afraid to defend its rights," said Andrey Kolesnikov, head of the domestic politics program at the Carnegie Center.

Baunov, the editor of the Carnegie.ru portal, said that the protests show Russia as a "multifaceted" country that breaks the perception of people from outside about an exclusive template for and against Putin. "There is no need to see all such events as some sign of 1917 in Russia".

"30 years ago, at the end of the Soviet era, it would have been unthinkable and anathema for the public to protest against the construction of a church. After all, the Soviet authorities razed thousands of places of worship and sent priests to prison or killed them," says Baunov.

He points out that the change of mood in relation to the era of perestroika and the feeling of confrontation with the Communist Party are summed up in a quote at the end of one of the defining films of that time, "Repentance" by the Georgian director Tengiz Abduladze, which was shown in 1987 and won an award at the Cannes festival in the same year . An old woman asks a stranger if she went the right way to the church. The stranger answers her negatively, and she asks "How can there be a good road that does not lead to the church?".

This quote summarizes the consensus that the road to the church is the same as the road to freedom and prosperity - that when Soviet citizens wanted their country to have consumer goods, books, movies and music like Europe and the United States, open churches were were another important category on that list. In those countries, churches were open for visits, unlike in the Soviet Union, where they were destroyed, writes Baunov.

So the Soviet intelligentsia of the time, fighting against communist rule, found a common goal with traditional believers in seeking freedom of religion along with freedom of speech and assembly. It was quite normal to be both liberal and pious. The opening of the new church, if it were possible, would mean putting another nail in the coffin of Soviet power.

The protest culture of that time was imbued with religious scenes. Cultural figures revered poets from Russia's Silver Age, such as Osip Mandelshtam and Boris Pasternak, who were believers and wrote spiritual verses about the sublimity of going to church services. At the same time, the nature of church attendance in Russia has changed radically. Once almost exclusively reserved for old people, mostly women, churches opened their doors in the 1990s to a new generation of young people with non-conformist attitudes.

Baunov points out that for many young people of that era, participating in church services, fasting and praying at home was an act of generational non-conformism, a protest against the official atheism of their parents.

Slowly, however, the new romance between the church and the protests was eroded. Russian church authorities have not engaged their new parishioners in a serious conversation about the modern world. Instead, they spoke to them in an instructive tone, telling them about the formal requirements to light candles in front of church icons in a certain way, how to dress and how to properly observe all Orthodox fasts. Sunday schools, workshops and choirs are open.

However, there was no serious discussion and the big topics remained unresolved. There was no discussion about the language and meaning of the liturgy, the importance and mission of the church in the modern world or greater participation of the laity in services. The new Christians wanted the church to reject the power and wealth of the state and remain a friend of the oppressed.

Instead, the clergy were preoccupied with the reconstruction of the grandiose Church of Christ the Savior in central Moscow, which was built to commemorate Russia's victory over Napoleon but was demolished by order of Joseph Stalin in 1931. It was a joint project of the Orthodox Church and the Russian political and business elite. in the nineties, especially the ambitious mayor of Moscow at the time, Yuri Lushkov.

In the new millennium, in Russia led by Putin, the church and the state have deepened the symbiotic relationship they had in the tsarist era, and a negative reaction was inevitable, says Baunov and reminds that the largest swimming pool in the Soviet era was built on the site of the gilded Temple of Christ the Savior. Moscow. Baunov says that the current edifice evokes such mixed memories in the new generation of urban intellectuals in the city that the idea that it would be nice to bring back the Soviet swimming pool has met with serious approval on social media.

A Russian analyst says that the protest in Yekaterinburg was, on the one hand, against the way the old-fashioned Orthodox Church "merged itself with the Putin regime and took dirty money to finance itself." He adds that, however, it goes deeper and that the demonstrations are in some way a manifestation of a newly born secular cultural and political outlook reminiscent of Western Europe. "They are a rejection of the church as archaic, not only because it cooperates with the state but as archaic in itself".

For the youngest Russians accustomed to online communities and virtual communication, the stone church buildings offer very little to connect with. They hold little promise for urban progressives interested in veganism and gender equality, says the editor of the Carnegie.ru portal.

The events in Yekaterinburg show that the direct link between liberalism and spirituality dating back to Soviet times has finally been broken. From now on, most Russian liberals will be officially against the church, and Russian conservatives will support it. It could even shape party politics in the future. If Russian politics ever opens up, there could be a Social Democratic Party and a Christian Democratic Party, as in Germany, and divisions between Democrats and Republicans in the United States over abortion and same-sex marriage. The culture war of the West may have reached Russia, concludes Baunov.

It's hard to fool all the people all the time

Leonid Bershidsky, a columnist for the Bloomberg portal, says that neither the violence nor the persistence of the protests in Yekaterinburg were typical. It's not that Russians are passive - they regularly demonstrate against unpopular government decisions, but it's rare for people to continue fighting since both the private sector and the authorities show a willingness to use force against them.

After all, there was a protest against the church - a symbol of the Putin regime's appeal to Russian history and tradition. Bershidski states that two experts on Russia, Samuel Green from London's King's College and Graham Robertson from Carolina University, wrote in the recently published book "Putin Against the People" that Putin's dictatorship is not so much imposed on Russians as many of them support it, carrying out "the co-construction of authoritarianism ".

Bershidsky says that episodes like the one in Yekaterinburg show that Putin actively seeks popular support and does not rely entirely on coercion. But the goals of the regime often do not coincide with the simple interests of the people. The pillars of the regime, the wealthy willing to fund Putin's traditionalist ideology in exchange for business opportunities, the church happy to spread that ideology, the massive police force happy to use batons on those who feed them - they don't care where these people go with baby strollers.

Deception has always been an integral part of Putin's drive to gain public support. But it's hard to fool all the people all the time, and unsupport happens gradually. It's just that Russia has not yet passed the point where things will start happening quickly, the Bloomberg columnist concludes.