(OPINION) Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church has defended Russia’s actions and blamed the conflict on the West. Patriarch Kirill’s support for the invasion of a country where millions of people belong to his own church has led critics to conclude that Orthodox leadership has become little more than an arm of the state – and that this is the role it usually plays.
The reality is much more complicated. The relationship between Russian church and state has undergone profound historical transformations, not least in the past century – a focus of my work as a scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy. The church’s current support for the Kremlin is not inevitable or predestined, but a deliberate decision that needs to be understood.
For centuries, leaders in Byzantium and Russia prized the idea of church and state working harmoniously together in “symphony” – unlike their more competitive relationships in some Western countries. In the early 1700s, however, Czar Peter the Great instituted reforms for greater control of the church – part of his attempts to make Russia more like Protestant Europe.
Churchmen grew to resent the state’s interference. They did not defend the monarchy in its final hour during the February Revolution of 1917, hoping it would lead to a “free church in a free state.”
The Bolsheviks who seized power, however, embraced a militant atheism that sought to secularize society completely. They regarded the church as a threat because of its ties to the old regime. Attacks on the church proceeded from legal measures like confiscating property to executing clergy suspected of supporting the counterrevolution. READ MORE
