Window on Eurasia: Russians Uncertain about Relationship of Orthodox Faith and Russian Citizenship

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 9 – Nearly four out of five Russians – some 77 percent – are unwilling to say that Orthodoxy and Russian citizenship are either inherently connected or have nothing to do with one another, a pattern that challenges the claims of the Moscow Patriarchate and the positions of many Russian nationalists.

 

            Those responses came in the course of a poll conducted by the Sreda agency last month, which found that only 13 percent of Russians were ready to say that “the Orthodox faith and Russian citizenship were indivisible” and only 10 percent declared that the two had nothing to do with each other (sreda.org/ru/opros/pravoslavnaya-vera-i-rossiyskoe-grazhdanstvo-nerazdelimyi-ili-ne-svyazanyi).

 

            A similar poll conducted last year among parishioners of Moscow churches found that only eight percent were not prepared to declare a position on the relationship of Orthodoxy and Russian citizenship, but of those who did, 48 percent said they were linked, while 44 percent said they were not.

 

            The new survey showed that women and the elderly are more likely to connect them than men and younger people, that Muscovites and the more well off are less likely to do so than those beyond the ring road and the less well off, and that in general people in larger cities were more likely to declare their position one way or another than those in smaller cities or rural areas.

 

            Those who identified themselves as Orthodox were only slightly more likely to say their faith and citizenship were related than were those who did not, 12 percent against eight percent, according to Sreda analyst Mariya Kuzmichova. But those Orthodox who attended church regularly were far more likely than other Orthodox to make that connection.

 

            What is striking, she said, is that there is no difference in the share of those who insist on the connection between Orthodoxy and Russian citizenship and those who reject any link between them with regard to support for the  statement that they “love Russia.” The two groups were equally likely to agree with that idea.

 

            But other social characteristics clearly play a role in determining Russian attitudes toward the relationship between religion and civic identity. Those who insist the two are inalienable are more likely to watch television, while those who say they are not connected are more likely to use the Internet, a reflection of educational and income differences.