Yekaterinburg Part of Larger Fight between Moscow Patriarchate and Urban Russians, Soldatov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 14 – Clashes between Yekaterinburg residents who don’t want to lose a public park and thugs enlisted by local Orthodox church leaders and the city authorities are only the tip of the iceberg of a broader fight between an increasingly secular Russian urban population and the Moscow Patriarchate, Aleksandr Soldatov says.

            The church apparently decided to make a stand in the Urals city both because of the Moscow Patriarchate’s losses in Ukraine, the Moscow commentator says, and because of its recent losses in the two capitals where the authorities forced the church to change its plans for new buildings (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2019/05/14/80513-peredovye-otryady-hramostroya).

            In Moscow then as in Yekaterinburg now, the church recruited paramilitary groups incuding Donbass veterans and various pseudo-cossack organizations to fight to it, but the city authorities compelled the church to agree to move to an alternative construction site. In St. Petersburg, the same thing happened, but the Kremlin intervened with the same result.

            These problems have their roots in a program adopted by Patriarch Kirill in 2009. At that time, he called for the construction of as many new churches in cities as possible and the location of cathedrals in the most prominent places. Regional hierarchs were told that they would be evaluated by the Patriarchate on the basis of how many of these they erected.

            Shortly thereafter, Soldatov says, Kirill visited the Urals in order to press this cause. He has gone back repeatedly and demanded action. Last year, for example, he even hosted a session of the church’s ruling body, the Synod, in Yekaterinburg to stress its symbolic importance as “the place of the mystical sacrifice of Tsar Nicholas II.”

            “Such monarchist attitudes,” Soldatov continues, “enjoy understanding and sympathy from the ideologues of the current Russian regime which sees this as one of the ‘spiritual bindings’” holding the country together. But they do not enjoy similar support from urbanized and secularized Russians.

            According to the Moscow commentator, there is another factor at work as well – the financial. Enormous sums of money have flowed into the cathedral project in Yekaterinburg from companies that seek preferment or have been given no choice but to back what the Patriarch and the Kremlin want.

            “In the Yekaterinburg bishopric, this is a real ‘project of the century,’ on the realization of which depends the earthly wellbeing of hundreds of people. More than that, part of this money has already been received and spent; therefore, there is no room for retreat” even though it is obvious that few Russians would attend that or other churches if they are built.

            Everyone can see that the ROC MP is attracting ever fewer parishioners. At Easter this year, only half as many Russians attended services as did Ukrainians in Ukraine, despite the fact that the Russian population is more than three times as large. That means the rate of attendance in Russia is only one-sixth of what it is in Ukraine.

            While political slogans have sounded at these protests against church construction, most of the animus of those who do not want new churches to take over their parks and other public spaces is not directed against the regime, Soldatov says; but if the president gets in bed with the patriarch, that could change – and change quickly.