Senior Religious Leaders Back Kremlin against Navalny Protests but Many Lower-Ranking Ones Take Opposite Line, Lunkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 2 – Religious communities in the Russian Federation are splitting over the Navalny protests along generational and institutional lines, with the senior leaders of Russian Orthodoxy, Islam and Protestantism backing the Kremlin in opposition to the protests but many more local clerics and even more religious backing them, Roman Lunkin says.

            The leading Russian specialist on religious affairs at the Moscow Institute of Europe says that the diversity of Russian society is well reflected in religious life, with those in the most senior positions closely tied to the Kremlin but many priests and mullahs opposed to its position and willing to take part in the protests (ng.ru/ng_religii/2021-02-02/9_501_protest.html).

            Indeed, Lunkin continues, there is some evidence to suggest that religious Russians may be more inclined to protest than Russians as a whole, although within all the major denominations there are many lower-ranking religious figures, commentators and ordinary believers who oppose the demonstrations and back the regime. 

            He suggests that in part this reflects a generational divide. Most of the top leaders of the religious world in Russia are older and more conservative by nature, while the priests and mullahs in local communities are younger and more in tune with their generation than with the religious hierarchies.

            In many ways, this should come as no surprise because something similar has already happened in Belarus, where lower-ranking clergy and even some of those in the second tier of the hierarchy have broken with the Orthodox Church and gone over openly and enthusiastically to the anti-Lukashenka demonstrators.

            A debate has broken out about how useful the support of the religious hierarchs in Russia in fact now is to the senior political leadership and how dangerous to the church structures this divide is becoming.

Andrey Melnikov, editor of NG-Religii, says that religious leaders by their slavish but generally incompetent statements aren’t helping the regime to keep people from going into the streets but only making themselves look irrelevant (ng.ru/kartblansh/2021-02-01/3_8071_kartblansh.html).

Konstantin Eggert, in a commentary for Deutsche Welle, goes further and declares that what the hierarchs are doing, especially when their subordinates are doing the opposite, means that “the church will sooner or later have to pay a high price for cooperating with the powers that be against the demonstrators and the population (dw.com/ru/kommentarij-patriarh-kirill-zagonjaet-rpc-v-tupik/a-56413790).

A major reason that the Moscow Patriarchate is lining up so closely with the Kremlin is that its denizens “fear that if the Putin regime falls, anti-church atheistic attitudes of part of society will be expressed in a new anti-religious campaign” or at the very least the church will lose government financial and bureaucratic support.

That could certainly take place, Eggert says, but “if it does, the present church leadership, including the patriarch and hundreds of those he has chosen on the basis of loyalty and obedience in recent years will be responsible above all.” They are driving the Russian people away from them just as the church did at the end of the imperial period.

Then, the Russian Orthodox Church chose to ally itself so closely with the Imperial government that when that regime was overthrown by the 1917 revolutions, it was no accident that the new Bolshevik regime turned on the church and even garnered significant popular support against what many viewed this handmaiden of the former state.

“The appearance of the autocephalous church in Ukraine, the speaking out of part of the Belarusian priesthood against the Lukashenka dictatorship plus the growth of anti-clerical attitudes in Russia show that the present model of relations in the triangle ‘church-state-society’ will not remain what it has been,” Eggert says.

And he warns that “the Russian church is going to suffer a great crisis in order that it be built anew and, possible, acquire real authority” rather than remaining what it has become, an appendage of the Putinist state.