Putin Putting Religion to Work

 

 

    Why would a former KGB agent turn to Orthodox Christianity to serve as a pillar of state ideology?  For seventy years, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union went from all-out war on religion to grudging and monitored tolerance.  Vladimir Putin was part of the machinery that enforced the strict limitations on religious life in the Soviet Union and its client states in the Warsaw Pact.  Did Putin have a “come to Jesus (and Mary) moment”?

 

    In the early days of his coming to power, Putin did make a few passing remarks about his grandmother and her connexion to Orthodox Christianity.   This seems to have been bait for those who wanted an explanation, because he has not mentioned that since those early years.  I think the answer to Putin’s “change of heart” is to be found not in the religion itself, but in the usefulness of the religion as a tool.

 

    During the Cold War, the USSR had a state “religion” in the ideology of Marxist-Leninism.  It was an ideology of revolution with an eschatological edge.  It claimed that, eventually, capitalism would collapse to be replaced with communism.  The Soviet Union was the leading edge of the trend, exporting the revolution wherever it could.  In the United States, actual religion (predominantly Protestantism, but other traditions as well) galvanized the American public against “creeping communism.”  The anti-communist panic reached its zenith in the 1950’s, the peak of religious affiliation among the American public.  Congress investigated “Unamerican activities”, blacklisting thousands of academics, artists, film personalities, and political activists who were derided as “Godless communists”. President Eisenhower outlawed the Communist Party.  America united under “In God We Trust.”

 

    When the Soviet Union collapsed, communist ideology and the Communist Party were finished.  It was not capitalism that had collapsed, but communism.  American religious groups began sending missionaries to Russia and the other former Soviet republics to convert especially atheists, which made up the majority of former Soviet citizens.  Vladmir Putin saw that he needed an ideology with a spiritual dimension, but it could not just be Christianity, and especially not western Christianity.  It had to be the old, spiritual pillar of the Russian Empire: the Russian Orthodox Church.  Early on, he brought in a law restricting non-Orthodox churches to “historic” ones; ones that had been in Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, such as Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Mennonite groups.

 

    But the Russian Orthodox Church was not merely useful for its symbols, teaching, and ceremony (beautiful as it may be), but also because, since the time of Stalin, it’s hierarchy and clergy were largely comprised of KGB operatives.  In other words, in the Soviet Union, it had been a tool of surveillance.  When Putin, a former KGB officer, came to power, he surrounded himself with former colleagues from the KGB.  In effect, the KGB in its new iteration as the FSB took control of the state.  In Soviet times, the KGB had been beholden to the Communist Party and its Politburo.  Now there is no such impediment.  The FSB is beholden to none, and the Russian Orthodox Church with its FSB staffed clergy is simply an extension of Putin’s FSB regime.  The Russian Orthodox Church’s purpose at home is to promote Kremlin policies as being blessed by God, and to undergird the image of Putin and his regime as Christian traditionalists.

 

    Abroad, the Russian Orthodox Church serves a similar function, but with the purpose of evoking good feelings among traditional minded people in the west.  All who decry the west’s drift toward “liberal values” and away from “traditional values” are meant to find a certain sympathy toward Putin as a defender of those traditional values.

 

    Putin’s courting and promoting of the right in the west—and especially the far right—was detected by observers already in the early 2010’s.  In Germany, for example, a television documentary ran at that time exposing the links between the Kremlin and the growing collection of far-right parties.  For many, including myself, it seemed a baffling revelation.  Why would Putin court what were then merely fringe groups?  It has now become eminently clear that that was merely an early stage of a larger plan to polarize, divide, undermine, and paralyse the west, especially NATO members.  We see the fruits of this today as Victor Orbán plays spoiler in the EU and NATO, and as the MAGA movement ensures that Ukraine loses.  The far right threatens to obstruct the EU and pull NATO apart.  The Kremlin’s propaganda, subliminal messaging, and self-alignment with "traditional values" is paying off for Vladimir Putin.