Moscow Patriarchate’s Stress on Russian Martyrdom Protecting Kremlin Against Questions about Combat Losses, Klimenko Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 27 – Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church not only support the Kremlin in its aggressive war but by their stress on the role of martyrdom in Russian history play an essential role in defending Vladimir Putin and the Russian political elite from troubling questions about the scale of losses war involves. Yekatrina Klimenko says.

            The Russian and Polish-trained specialist on Russian culture argues that this role of the church helps to explain both why the Kremlin relies on the Moscow Patriarchate and why Russia’s political leaders so often talk about martyrdom (ridl.io/ru/voenno-patrioticheskoe-muchenichestvo-rpts-i-pamyat-o-velikoj-otechestvennoj-vojne/).

            This special role of the ROC MP emerged from a somewhat unexpected source: the church’s focus in the 1990s on the memory of Soviet repressions, a focus it shared with Memorial. But Klimenko says, the ROC’s “interpretation of the repressions was strikingly different than Memorial’s.”

            Initially, the Moscow Patriarchate paid primary attention to clergy and lay people who suffered for their faith; but over time, the church and Patriarch Kirill in particular expanded the category of martyrdom to include all those who had suffered for the country in war and peace and thus set the stage for the revival of Russia as a great state.

            “While martyrdom is essentially a religious concept, it was secularized in the 20^th century” in many places. As a result, many came to believe that “very much like religions, nations too have their martyrs,” Klimenko continues. And that is extremely useful for political elites.

            Such an expansion of martyrdom is extremely powerful tool because “it converts defedat into victory and trauma intro triumph and renders stories of national disasters and catastrophes into ones of deliverance and empowerment … [with even the worst losses becoming] something to be respected if not admired and invested with sense.”

            In Russia’s case, “the 1917 revolution and the 1945 victory are tied together, with the revolution standing for since, the war, the atonement for this since, and victory manifesting the glory of salvation.” Such a tale, she says, “requires martyrs which is precisely who those who die in war are, according to this interpretation.”

            Klimenko continues: “The differences between religious martyrdom and death in war are numerous … but Patriarch Kirill plays down these differences in his sermons by portraying those who died in the Great Patriotic War quite literally as martyrs, albeit martyrs of patriotism rather than of Orthodox Christianity,” something the church leader has extended to the war in Ukraine.

            “In his sermons, the cultural specialist says, “Patriarch Kirill does not gloss over the suffering” in war. Instead, “he emphasizes it, almost voluptuously because the suffering pays. To martyrs, suffering bring salvation; to soldiers, it brings victory. Hence, the more suffering, the grander the triumph.”

            By making any deaths and losses in war a question of martyrdom, Klimenko concludes, the ROC MP protects the Kremlin from unwelcome questions about how much a conflict is costing because its approach “resolves the contradiction between trauma and triumph by transforming the former into the latter.”