Russians Object to Church Building Plans Mostly Because Authorities Ignore Their Opinions

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 30 – Russians in many cities object to the construction of new Russian Orthodox churches for much the same reason that they protest the building of new highways or high rise apartments or the destruction of park land: officials rarely ask their opinion and choose instead to ignore it in favor of what the church establishment wants.

            That is the judgement of Russian journalist Anton Zakharov after examining the situation in three Siberian cities, Krasnoyarsk, Yekaterinburg, and Chelyabinsk where government-approved plans for new churches in prominent places have sparked mass protests from the population (currenttime.tv/a/29906385.html).

                To the extent that is the case, protests against church construction could feed into or be empowered by other kinds of social protest, developments that could present new challenges to the Putin system, which is based among other things on the closest possible links between the state and the Orthodox hierarchy. 

            In all three of these cities, Zakharov says, plans to build churches in prominent public parks has sparked protests, court cases, and anger. The opponents say that because these are among the most polluted cities in Russia, doing away with green space is simply a disaster.  But their opponents, who enjoy official support, denounce them as “atheists” or “Russophobes.”

            In Yekaterinburg, he continues, “supporters and opponents” of building a new cathedral in the middle of the city “compete over how can assemble the more people at meetings. Moscow stars have been brought in to support the project.”  When opponents assemble, officials send in uninvited local TV personalities “who accuse those assembled of not loving the motherland.”

            Andrey Lesnitsky, a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies, says that there is another element involved: at a time of grave poverty, the church hierarchy is living in luxury and flaunting it in public.  People don’t like that or the closeness of the church to the state and are responding where they can (currenttime.tv/a/orthodox-church-russia/29911113.html).

                The word “church” has two primary meanings, he says. It is “the official structure, that is the patriarch, the hierarchs, synod departments, and all kinds of bureaucrats. The church as a corporation.” But it is also “the people of God, absolutely all believers.” When people say the church wants to do something, they almost always mean the first of these.

            Almost no one in Russia thinks of the church in the second sense, Lesnitsky says. Even those who identify as Orthodox and go to church, because most of these visit the church in much the same way they go to museums of stores. “They do not feel themselves as the core element of this church.”

            That has given rise to most of the problems today. “If suddenly people who go to church began not to go to church but to be a church, they would understand what is most important.”  And they could then transform the world around them.  But that is clearly not something either the church hierarchy or the political one wants.