By Dr Katie Kelaidis
The former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev died yesterday at the age of 91. As the leader of the world ‘s last officially atheist superpower, Gorbachev ‘s official and personal relationship towards religion was a subject of frequent speculation.
The Russian Orthodox Church, earlier an integral part of tsarist rule, experienced periods of persecution and accommodation in the Soviet Union. Like many born during Stalin ‘s regime — and the period immediately afterwards — Gorbachev was baptised in secret by grandparents who remained faithful to their ancestral religion, but came to embrace (at least publicly) Soviet atheism.
In late April 1988, in what would be the final years of his presidency and of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev met Patriarch Pimen at the Kremlin and apologised for the intense persecution of the Stalin era and promised “a new law on the freedom of conscience … [to] reflect the interests of religious organisations”.
The US President Ronald Reagan had speculated to aides after a meeting in the 1980s that Gorbachev was “a closet believer”. In 2008, his personal faith once again became a subject of speculation when he expressed admiration for St Francis of Assisi during a private visit to Italy. As rumours of Catholicism began to circulate — rumours more damning than accusations of atheism in some eastern Christian circles, one might argue — Gorbachev felt the need to confirm his atheism.
While Gorbachev’s personal faith frequently was the subject of public debate, it will ultimately be his public position towards the Russian Orthodox Church that will have the greatest consequence.
He began, probably unintentionally, the chain of events that today finds the Russian Orthodox Church back into the heart of power. And that is a reality that will undoubtedly have significant repercussions for not only the Russian Orthodox Church and Russia, but the world and global Christianity.
It was not inevitable that we would find ourselves here. In fact, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many western Protestants, especially American evangelicals, saw Russia and other former Soviet states not as traditionally Christian society poised to reclaim its ancestral faith, but as a virgin mission field, ready to be claimed for Christ (in his proper Protestant form) for the first time.
As the Iron Curtain rose, US evangelicals were pouring into Russia seeking converts. What these missionaries failed to understand, as American missionaries so often do, was the extent to which Orthodoxy remained an integral part of Russian identity, even when Christian faith and practice per se waned. Patriarch Alexy II, the first post-Soviet Patriarch of Moscow, came to his throne almost on cue in 1990, in the final lethargic days of the Soviet Union.
Like so many churchmen of the Soviet era, Alexy was a shrewd politician and arguably outwitted the US preachers who came with their planes full of dollars. Under his episcopacy, the Orthodox Church began its intimate relationship with the religion of the American right, as it accepted its money to rebuild and refill the coffers of the Russian church.
It was under Alexy’s episcopacy that religious education material and Bibles printed by US evangelicals first made their way into the life of Russian Orthodoxy. He also, late in his tenure, began to join them as a culture warrior. In 2008, he backed the decision to ban a Pride parade in Moscow, declaring: “I am convinced that gays’ desire to organise a parade in Moscow will not help to strengthen the family as the foundation of a strong state.”
And yet, even as Patriarch Alexy accepted money and joined American evangelicals in their favourite social causes, he moved to ensure a privileged place for the Orthodox Church in Russian life.
In September 1997, at the urging of Alexy, President Boris Yelstin signed legislation protecting the Russian Orthodox Church from competition and granting it a privileged place within society. The law was condemned not only by Washington, but also by Canterbury and Rome.
Though considered at the time the least restrictive of the proposed laws, Alexy greeted the move, saying: “Today’s law is another step towards perfecting the legislation that secures and defends the rights of Russia ‘s believers.”
The Russian constitution prohibits a state religion, but the 1997 legislation signalled that this would mean something very different in Russia than it would in other nations with such restrictions. Russia is not the United States or France. Likewise, the Russian Orthodox Church has not taken on the role of largely benign state church. It is not difficult to see the difference between the Russian Orthodox Church and, say, the Church of Denmark or the Church of England.
And this difference, perhaps, lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of Orthodox history, culture, and theology. It is a misapprehension stumbled upon by Mikhail Gorbachev nearly 40 years ago and then repeated by American evangelicals immediately afterwards. It is perhaps a complete misreading of which some continue to be guilty today.
From the days of the Byzantine Empire, there has been virtually no Orthodox Christian experience with pluralism outside the diaspora. In every traditionally Orthodox land, Orthodoxy has historically been either an intimate part of the state apparatus or oppressed and marginalised. There is no historical experience of the “middle ground” we see in Protestant nations such as the UK and the Netherlands, or even, these days, in such Catholic countries as Spain or Belgium.
Orthodox Christianity even has a theological concept centered on the proper relationship between church and state. This concept, symphonia, emerged in the fourth to sixth centuries and holds that the church and the state act in concert, complementing one another, without either seeking domination. The reality of how this has played out throughout history has meant that religious pluralism is difficult to conjure in an Orthodox political theology. The church of the symphonic society must, after all, be singular and harmonious in itself.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, after centuries in which religious and ethnic identity in Orthodox-majority cultures has been shaped by opposition to both the Islamic world and the Christian West, it is difficult to imagine that there could be a post-Soviet Russian identity that was neutral towards the Orthodox Church.
Like in many Orthodox nations — for example Greece, Romania, or Serbia — to be Russian has for centuries meant to be Orthodox. And while it might have been easy for American evangelicals or Soviet officials to imagine that Communism had washed away these centuries of identity, that is simply not how identity works.
Mikhail Gorbachev was baptised in secret. He was made (at least in an official sacramental sense) an Orthodox Christian during the period of Russian history in which there was the greatest concerted effort to whip out the Russian Orthodox Church and religion writ large.
Yet even then, he did not understand fully the vast historical and cultural forces unleashed by his reintroduction of Orthodoxy into Russian life. Ultimately a product of Soviet Communist ideology, Gorbachev perhaps believed that the most basic and ancient human impulses, like faith and tribalism, could be controlled and ultimately reformed. In this, like so many things, his fundamental beliefs were proved wrong.
For a man who probably lived and died an atheist, he took one leap of faith that propelled his ancestral religion back to the heart of power.
Dr Katie Kelaidis is a historian whose work focuses on early Medieval Christianity and contemporary Orthodox identity in non-traditionally Orthodox countries
