{"id":239,"date":"2023-09-21T22:53:21","date_gmt":"2023-09-21T19:53:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/?p=239"},"modified":"2023-12-11T23:05:26","modified_gmt":"2023-12-11T20:05:26","slug":"putins-useful-priests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/new-nobility\/putins-useful-priests\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin\u2019s Useful Priests"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin\u2019s HiddenInfluence Campaign in the West<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 23, one of Ukraine\u2019s largest churches, the Orthodox cathedral in Odessa, was seriously damaged by a Russian missile strike. The strike highlighted one ofthe lingering enigmas of Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s brutal invasion ofUkraine: Moscow has been waging war not only on a neighboring population but also on one that, like its own, is overwhelmingly made up of Orthodox Christians. In effect, theRussian government has been forced to target its own religion in its campaign to subdueUkraine. Yet despite this, members of Russia\u2019s Orthodox clergy have been among the most vocal supporters of the war, and criticism from Orthodox leaders in other countries has been comparatively muted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some ways, this should not come as a surprise, owing to the well-known ties between theRussian Orthodox Church and the Putin regime. Since the early years of Putin\u2019s tenure inpower, the church has gained growing influence in Russian society and has enjoyed astrengthening of its historical links to the Russian state and the Russian military. In theyear and a half since the invasion began, the church has also played a crucial part insupporting the war, with Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church,becoming a prominent mouthpiece for the Kremlin\u2019s military aims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But alongside this domestic support has been another, less noted phenomenon: the strong backing Putin receives from Orthodox communities abroad. Many of these are in the West:in the United States, the Orthodox Church has 2,380 parishes, along with 41 male and 38female monasteries. Although church membership remains small\u2014in the United States, according to a 2020 census, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad has close to 25,000 members and Eastern Orthodox churches as a whole have some 675,000 members\u2014the large number of parishes gives the church a broad geographic presence, including in many major Western cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an Orthodox leader in NorthAmerica called on believers around the world to support it; in Europe, one of the West\u2019s most prominent Orthodox bishops condemned the Ukrainian authorities, not the Russian army, for the atrocities that have been committed against Christians during the war. Even more striking has been an ambitious campaign to win Russian Orthodox hearts and minds\u2014including in the United States and other Western countries\u2014that has been led by an arm of the church with links to Russian intelligence and the Russian government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such is the current extent of these efforts that they have caught the attention of the U.S.government. Earlier this year, the FBI privately warned members of the Orthodox community in the United States that Russia was likely using the church to help recruit intelligence sources in the West. Members of the community gave us copies of FBI documents that had been shared among Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox parishes.The documents identify and highlight the activities of a senior member of the RussianOrthodox Church\u2019s foreign relations department whom the FBI suspects of having ties toRussian intelligence. The FBI\u2019s warning suggests that the church may be even more closely linked to the Putin regime than many observers assume, with potentially significant implications for the Kremlin\u2019s overseas influence. Given the church\u2019s well-established presence in Western countries, these links could also complicate efforts to build an effectiveRussian opposition abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RUSSIA\u2019S BULWARK, PUTIN\u2019S OPPORTUNITY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In itself, it is unsurprising that the church could play an important part in furthering Russia\u2019s strategic interests. For centuries, the church has been closely connected with the Russian state, a relationship that has spanned the eras of the Russian Empire to the SovietUnion to Putin\u2019s Russia. From the eighteenth century until the Russian Revolution, the Russian tsar was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, which in turn gave legitimacy to Russia\u2019s imperial rule; Russia\u2019s brand of orthodoxy is based on the concept that Moscow is \u201cthe Third Rome\u201d\u2014the successor to the Christian empires of ancient Rome and Byzantine Constantinople. The church\u2019s influence also buttressed (and was bolstered by) a national-imperial ideology of Russian exceptionalism, which held that the church\u2019s mission was to serve the tsar and defend the sacred motherland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, communist rule didn\u2019t change this orientation much, despite the Soviets\u2019systematic persecution of church leaders, the confiscation of church property, and thegeneral dismantling of the church\u2019s influence after the Bolshevik Revolution. During WorldWar II, when the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin asked the church to help rally the populationto the defense of the Soviet Union, church leaders responded to his call\u2014not out ofopportunism but because they recognized that the country\u2019s ideology was rapidly movingfrom a vision of proletarian rule and universal communism to a renewed nationalistideology that drew on the Russian Empire\u2019s glorious past. Stalin understood thatnationalism was more inspirational to soldiers who were risking their lives in a devastatingwar with Nazi Germany, and the church readily embraced that view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the later decades of the Cold War, despite the official atheistic rhetoric of the Soviet government, the church kept close to the state. One of us (Soldatov) had a grandfather who was a high-placed Moscow military official in the early 1980s and was proud to be invited to the Orthodox Easter service at Yelokhovo Cathedral in Moscow. Back then, it was the country\u2019s main church, and the invitation was a symbol of elite status. The KGB closely monitored the church but not merely for surveillance purposes: operatives also keenly assessed clergy and laypeople as potential agents and sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In part, this was because the KGB and the church shared a belief that the country wasunder constant threat from the West and was surrounded by numerous enemies whosought to undermine Moscow. What is more, going back to the thirteenth century, theRussian Orthodox Church had been suspicious of the eastward expansion of Catholicism,which it viewed as the West\u2019s attempt to impose its own religion on Slavic civilization. Forthe KGB, the Russian church\u2019s historical preoccupation with the threat of outside influencemeant that it could be co-opted in Soviet efforts to create an ideological bulwark againstthe West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tight relationship between the church and the security apparatus did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The democratic changes of the 1990s touched many areas ofRussian society, but they left two institutions almost completely intact: the KGB, which <\/p>\n\n\n\n

church. Although democratic reformers and liberal priests called for a sweeping reform ofthe Russian Orthodox Church, their efforts came to nothing. Instead, under Putin, thechurch found a new supporter and protector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first years of Putin\u2019s administration, the FSB, the successor to the KGB, took actions to protect the Orthodox sphere of influence. In 2002, five Catholic priests were expelled from Russia by the FSB on the pretext of espionage charges. In return, the church gave theFSB its blessing: later that year, the Cathedral of Saint Sophia the Holy Wisdom of God was reopened just off Lubyanka Square, a block away from the FSB\u2019s Moscow headquarters. Patriarch Alexy II himself blessed the opening of the cathedral in a ceremony attended by Nikolai Patrushev, then the FSB chief, who today serves as the head of Putin\u2019s security council. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putin\u2019s patronage came with a price: he expected the church to contribute to the stability ofhis regime through activities in Russia and abroad. From the very beginning, he wanted tobring the Russian diaspora in the West under his control. To achieve this, he made it hispersonal project to subjugate the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formed by the remnants of the White Army in the countries where the Russian exilessettled in the 1920s, that church became known as the White Church (whereas the exilesreferred to its counterpart in Soviet Russia as the Red Church, because it was assumed tobe penetrated by the KGB). Since 1951, the White Church has had its headquarters inNew York City, at the corner of Park Avenue and East 93rd Street, and throughout theCold War, it remained completely independent from the church in Moscow. Its rival, theRed Church, also had a presence in New York at St. Nicholas Church on East 97th Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Putin came to power, he resolved to bring the Russian Orthodox Church Abroadunder the Moscow patriarchate. Putin personally supervised a years-long courtship ofWhite Church priests, at one point sending a gift to the head of the White Church\u2014an <\/p>\n\n\n\n

enormous icon of the last Russian empress, Alexandra, who was executed together withTsar Nicholas II and the rest of the imperial family in 1918 by Bolshevik revolutionaries. Insending the icon, Putin appeared to be signaling that it was time to rehabilitate thememory of the imperial order. In May 2007, the two churches signed an accord, known asthe Act of Canonical Communion, in an elaborate ceremony at Christ the SaviorCathedral in Moscow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ever since, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad has been affiliated with the church inMoscow, which has supported the foreign policy of the Kremlin and played a role in its propaganda campaigns. For instance, in 2014, the Immortal Regiment, a Kremlin-sponsored initiative in which Russians march on Victory Day holding photos of their relatives who fought in World War II, was introduced in the United States with the support of St. Nicholas Church in New York. But the overseas Orthodox community also represented a potential network of pro-Kremlin support across the West. In the years before Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, efforts to tap this community by officials inMoscow with ties to the church and to Russian intelligence began to attract the attention of Western law enforcement, including the FBI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE PATRIARCH\u2019S PLAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the spring of 2023, the FBI distributed a six-page notification within the Orthodox community in the United States titled \u201cRussian Intelligence Services Victimize Russian Orthodox Church and other Eastern Orthodox Churches.\u201d The warning, which bears the seal of the FBI, names and shows a photograph of a senior official in Russia\u2019s Department for External Church Relations\u2014the foreign service of the Russian Orthodox Church\u2014and states that there are reasons to suspect that the man is a \u201cRussian Intelligence Officer operating under non-official cover.\u201d His objective in the United States, according to the warning, was to recruit the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and other Orthodox churches. The FBI\u2019s national press office declined to comment on the notification and the information it contains, but noted that the bureau \u201cregularly meets and interacts with members of the community . . . to enlist the cooperation of the public to fight criminal activity\u201d and encourages \u201cmembers of the public who observe threatening or suspicious activity to report it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to publicly available information, the Russian national in question was trained inMoscow and worked for the Department for External Church Relations for more than two decades. This work frequently took him abroad, including to the United States. According to the FBI notification, in May 2021, when he arrived on a visit to the United States, the church official was briefly stopped and searched by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. Although the official does not appear to have been detained or formally charged, a subsequent FBI review of materials found during the search revealed that he had been carrying what the FBI notification describes as \u201cintelligence documents,\u201d including documents concerning both Russia\u2019s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and its military intelligence agency, the GRU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the documents was a memorandum marked \u201cconfidential\u201d that outlined the establishment of a \u201csystem of cooperation\u201d between the church and several Russian spy agencies, including the SVR, the GRU, and the FSB. In a list of \u201careas of interaction\u201dbetween the church and the spy agencies, the memorandum calls for the \u201cpreparation of the staff\u201d of both the church and the SVR and suggests that church staff be brought into the\u201coperational activities\u201d of the SVR, stipulating that this would happen \u201cexclusively at the direct approval from the Patriarch.\u201d It also states that the GRU is \u201cready to expand the cooperation\u201d with the church, which could \u201cvery gradually\u201d come to include \u201creal field activity.\u201d For the FSB, the church is deemed of interest on such counterintelligence matters as \u201copposition to sects, and development of parity actions toward foreign organizations.\u201d (A full copy of the memorandum was appended to the FBI warning.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the FBI notification, the Russian national was also carrying \u201cfiles regarding the source\/agent recruitment process\u201d as well as dossiers on church employees, including detailed biographical information about them and members of their families\u2014information that the warning suggests could be used to blackmail employees of the church into participating in spy operations. These files were not included in the warning, and the claims could not be independently verified. But members of the Orthodox community confirmed that the Russian official had many meetings with church officials in the United States and had been traveling to the country since the 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attempts to reach the Russian national were unsuccessful. The Russian embassy inWashington and the Department for External Church Relations in Moscow did not reply to requests for comment about the FBI\u2019s findings and the activities of the official in theUnited States. But in an email, a spokesman for the department wrote that the person was\u201cno longer an employee of the Department for External Church Relations\u201d and that he hadbeen\u201cfired\u201d in June 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of special significance may be the date of the memorandum outlining the new relationship between the church and Russian intelligence. Russian sources who are close to the patriarchate in Moscow and who have seen the document date it to the spring or summer of 2009, shortly after Patriarch Kirill took office in February. This would match the FBI\u2019s metadata analysis, which dates its creation to late March 2009. The Russian sources also suggest that the document was likely drafted by the church administration at the direct request of Patriarch Kirill. If that is correct, it would provide further evidence that Kirill almost immediately set out to establish a new level of cooperation between the church andRussia\u2019s security services, a relationship that appears to have grown in the decade leading up to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the years after 2009, as Kirill consolidated his leadership of the Russian OrthodoxChurch, the church\u2019s growing presence in Russia\u2019s state administration expanded to includethe military. By 2010, the Russian Orthodox Church had taken on a new role inside theRussian army with the introduction of military priests, or chaplains. And in 2020, Putinand his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, joined Patriarch Kirill to inaugurate the Cathedralof the Armed Forces, a vast new military-themed complex near Moscow that is designed tosymbolize the church\u2019s central place in Russia\u2019s military history. The 2022 invasion broughtthis involvement to a new level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the war began, images of religious icons have flooded Russian social media, along with prayers for the victory of the Russian army and calls to pray for soldiers on the battlefield. Kirill has become a leading voice for the \u201cspecial military operation,\u201d as it is officially known. Following the announcement of Putin\u2019s partial mobilization in September2022, for example, Kirill declared that \u201csacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins.\u201d He also attacked the West, claiming that unidentified forces were trying to turn the Ukrainians from being \u201cpart of the holy united Rus into a state hostile to this Rus, hostile to Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The church has also deployed firebrand clerics to drum up support for the war, such as Andrei Tkachev, a Ukrainian-born priest and TV personality who left Ukraine in 2014 and has become one of the most aggressive pro-war voices in the church. Since the start of the invasion, his videos on YouTube have been widely shared among Russian special forces.Meanwhile, Russia\u2019s most professional military units, including the special forces, have embraced religious symbols in an appeal for divine protection. And Russian battalions are being named after Russian saints such as Alexander Nevsky, a thirteenth-century Russian prince who was canonized for his military victories over Swedish and German crusaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even more striking, however, may be the church\u2019s effort to stir support for the war outsideRussia, including in the West. Despite the reality that Russia is at war with anotherOrthodox country, noted overseas church leaders have remained loyal to Moscow. In an <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Archbishop Gabriel of Montreal and Canada, a bishop of the Russian Orthodox ChurchAbroad, justified the invasion in language that closely follows official Russian propaganda.\u201cRussia was forced to take steps to protect itself from the neo-Nazis who were shellingcivilians in Donbas for eight years, and continue to this day,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In London in March 2023, Bishop Irenei, the head of the Diocese of Great Britain andWestern Europe and one of the most influential bishops in the Russian Orthodox ChurchAbroad, issued an \u201cOpen Letter on the Persecution of Christians in Ukraine\u201d in which he cited \u201cthe tragedy of the most extraordinary and heartless persecution of Christians taking place in many parts of the country.\u201d The letter puts the blame for this persecution onUkrainian authorities, not the Russian army: Bishop Irenei was referring to Ukrainiancharges against clerics of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church who have supported theKremlin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Significantly, these two prominent Orthodox officials were born and raised in the West.They are not commissars sent from Moscow, and their views do not appear to be enforcedby the Russian government. Rather, they largely reflect the orientation of RussianOrthodox communities overseas: although many Ukrainians have defected from theMoscow patriarchate since the invasion, many churches and parishioners in other countrieshave chosen to stay within the Russian Orthodox Church. \u201cWhen the war started, somepriests in Russia took an antiwar stand and were subjected to punishments, both by theChurch and the state. But most priests, including those abroad, suppressed any discussionof the war out of fear of losing their flock, which by and large supported the war,\u201d onemember of the Russian Orthodox community in New York told us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reasons for these pro-Russian views are ideological: many descendants of the first waveof Russian exiles to the West\u2014people who left in the 1920s after the Bolshevik Revolution and even those who left in the 1940s after World War II\u2014remain stuck in the memories of the glorious imperial past. This part of the Russian diaspora is naturally drawn to the nineteenth-century nationalist ideologies that Putin has embraced. \u201cFor them, Ukraine has never been a country,\u201d our contact said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, church leaders saw an opportunity to turnthe country into a full-fledged fundamentalist regime in which Russian Orthodoxy wouldreturn to its historical role as an anchor for the Russian state. The embrace of this approachsuggests that there will be ever-closer cooperation among the church, the military, and theintelligence services, with the result that the church will significantly enhance the Russiangovernment\u2019s disinformation campaigns abroad and efforts to infiltrate the West,particularly through its relations with the Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the current constraints on Russian espionage, it seems likely that the person identified by the FBI is not the only church official working side by side with Russian intelligence. With so many Russian diplomats expelled from Europe, traditional options forRussian spies, who have often operated under diplomatic cover, are rapidly shrinking. For the Kremlin, the church, with its broad network of parishes, can provide a palatable alternative. In turn, Putin\u2019s backing\u2014and the war in Ukraine\u2014has given the RussianOrthodox Church a crucial new mission after decades of stagnation and decline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Russian government\u2019s growing focus on traditional values, empire, and militarism hasprovided a dramatic boost to the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliates abroad. Thisreligious resurgence not only enhances the legitimacy and durability of the Putin regime; italso poses a growing security threat with which the West will have to contend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published in Foreign Affairs<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2023<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin\u2019s HiddenInfluence Campaign in the West.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility","category-political-migration"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/241"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}