RELIGIONS NEWS AGENCY (REDNA) – I arrived in Soviet Russia in 1989, as perestroika and glasnost were in full swing, to help rebuild the Jewish community destroyed by 70 years of Communist rule.
One winter day in 2003, the Federal Security Service (FSB) official who was assigned to the Moscow Choral Synagogue at the time—a man I’ll call Oleg (his name has been changed purposely)—invited me to come to a police station at 40 Sadovnichevskaya Street. Oleg and his colleague started saying that I, a Swiss citizen, had been using a business multiple entry visa to stay in Russia, which is illegal since I was a religious worker; however, they were ready to overlook this issue if I started reporting to them. They pressed me to sign something, yet I refused categorically, saying that it is against Jewish law to inform on others.
After badgering me for over an hour, they finally let me go. I was shaken to the core of my being. Oleg came back twice to try to convince me. Once he even stopped my car in the street—from that moment on, I understood that the driver might be working for the FSB as well. Two years later, in 2005, I was expelled from Russia—possibly related to my refusal to cooperate with the intelligence agencies. I was eventually able to return only after the intervention of then-Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi.
In the years after, I know of multiple attempts to recruit my colleagues in the Jewish community. In addition, FSB operatives regularly monitored, visited, and intimidated heads of religious organizations, making sure that everyone was aware of their presence. Some Jewish student leaders were invited to the offices of the FSB on Lubyanka Square.
Perhaps most notably, in 2000 the Kremlin allied with the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FEOR)—a partnership that served several purposes. First, it was an alibi for Putin not being an antisemite as he destroyed the oligarchs—many of them being of Jewish descent (Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky)—as a class.
The second task of FEOR was for the Western world: As Putin became more authoritarian and Western powers became apprehensive, the heads of FEOR were dispatched to the West to convey one message: As bad as Putin is, any alternative would be worse, and Jews would be persecuted. As protests grew in Moscow after Putin announced his return to power in 2012, FEOR rabbis were quick to demand that their Moscow congregants desist and not take part in the protests, upholding the general government effort of depoliticizing civil society.
Later, as Russia conquered the Crimea, FEOR leaders were at the forefront of pushing the line on social media as protests erupted from Russian Jews: Jews, don’t get involved; this is not our fight.
Within the context of the Russian propaganda narrative of fighting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, the Museum of Tolerance, built by FEOR and centering on the narrative of World War II, was used again and again to push the line that the war against Ukraine was a war against the resurgence of Nazism. This was the line used by Rabbi Alexander Boroda, the president of FEOR, in his support of the war. FEOR’s sister organizations outside of Russia, such as Chabad, barely said a word.
Even though the Kremlin partly succeeded in controlling and instrumentalizing the Jewish community of Russia, the FSB continued with its war of attrition against the rabbis, mainly of foreign origin, exiling more than 11 communal rabbis during the last decade—namely, those who did not follow the party line established by the FSB and modeled by the Russian Orthodox Church.
Indeed, the Russian Orthodox Church has played an essential part in the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine, and as the world marks the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion, we must examine the way religion has been weaponized—and perverted—to justify crimes against humanity.
“But how many divisions does the Pope have?”
This was a question Soviet leader Joseph Stalin posed to U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Moscow Conference in 1944, when the British leader proposed involving the Pope in some decisions.
Political conflicts and wars are more often than not tied to political, economic, and territorial disagreements—but the factor of religion in these conflicts should not be ignored.
The Russian Orthodox Church, decimated and almost destroyed after seventy years of Communist rule, finally found its voice with the creation of the Russian Federation in 1991, but experienced a real renaissance only with the ascent of Vladimir Putin to power in 2000. By 2020, the Church had built as many churches and monasteries (roughly 10,000) in Russia as before the 1917 revolution.
James Billington, the librarian of the U.S. Library of Congress and expert on the Russian Orthodox Church, wrote in the early 1990s that the Church had two options. It could choose to become a vehicle of democratization as the Catholic and Protestant churches were in Western Europe, supporting their constituencies in their struggle for a better life; or it could side with the authoritarian strains of the government and reap the benefits coming with it, such as the building of magnificent churches all over the country.A new map displayed at a book store in Moscow shows several regions of eastern and southern Ukraine as part of Russia, on Feb. 8.
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Church in Putin’s Russia, chose the second option. In a country devoid of ideology, the Church paired with the state to provide a new ideology for the regime’s anti-Western propaganda and, to some extent, replaced the Communist party in its creation of culture and values. The Church’s mandate evolved to provide ideological backing for the regime’s lack of support for human rights, democracy, and free elections, directing it to attack the West’s support for gay rights and sexual permissiveness.
The Church’s alignment with the state did not go unnoticed by the Russian public. In 2012, the music group Pussy Riot organized a punk concert in Moscow’s main cathedral, only to be arrested minutes later by the police. Using the law against blasphemy, the group’s members were arrested, and a great exodus of young people started from the Church. It was, for many free-thinking Russians, a defining moment for the Church completely identifying itself with the state, as it did during tsarist times.
However, the Church’s main task became clearer when Putin changed course and called the dissolution of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. In a series of wars and conquests, Putin set himself to recreate the Soviet Union, albeit without Marxism.
The Patriarch gave his blessing starting in 2012, and the clergy was mobilized to use its religious structures to influence its flock to support the return of the lost territories to Mother Russia. (As the Kremlin’s interference increased, the interference of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukrainian politics became unbearable for the Ukrainian government, leading to the eventual autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, granted in January 2019 by the Ecunemical Patriarch Bartholomew II of Constantinople.)
For Kirill, the return of the lost churches and believers became a personal issue—and therefore, he became the loudest supporter of the invasion of Ukraine, actually giving the invasion (or “special operation”) the status of a holy war and promising absolution and a place in heaven for all fallen soldiers. The voices in the Church that did not support the invasion were immediately silenced—Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of external relations and essentially the number two in the Moscow Patriarchate, was exiled to the Orthodox backwater of Budapest, Hungary, over his refusal to support the war.
Two weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, I too decided to leave Russia—where I had served my community as rabbi for three decades—for Europe and then Israel. I realized that I would be pressured to support the war, and to express any dissent would be dangerous. Since my departure, I am often asked, wherever I go in the world: Why have there been no more voices of dissent and protest from the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as other religious groups?
The answer is simple, and often shocks Westerners—yet it is a well-known reality for those who lived in the Eastern bloc.
In Soviet times, the KGB controlled religious life and recruited a large number of clergy to work for state security. It was almost impossible to reach a higher post in any religious hierarchy without being an active agent of the KGB.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia never went through a repentance process like the truth and reconciliation commissions of post-apartheid South Africa or the denazification process in postwar Germany. In Russia, the old functionaries stayed in place, just shifting their language slightly, but keeping intact much of the communist-style behavior and political culture.
And while the practice of KGB recruiting clergy did abate somewhat in the Yeltsin years, with the new FSB secret service—with the ascent of Putin the old tactics returned in full force, and the FSB once again started to hire clergy representatives from every religion, using threats, blackmail, and manipulation to control all religious groups.
It has not stopped at securing the subservience of the Russian Orthodox Church and infiltrating of the Jewish community. The FSB has also made sure to plant its representatives within Muslim religious leadership. (More than 10 percent of Russian citizens identify as Muslim.)
Chechen Republic ruler Ramzan Kadyrov—considered a religious leader in some ways—is a hawkish supporter of the Kremlin, calling for more extreme measures against Ukraine. Several prominent Muslim religious leaders, including the Grand Mufti of Russia, Talgat Tadzhuddin, supported the war, sending a large number of conscripts to the front lines.
Over the last years, I have wondered why the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church have chosen to forget the heavy price paid by their church for being completely subservient to the state at the moment of the 1917 revolution: The victorious Bolsheviks arrested thousands of priests and sent them to the gulag. I don’t expect the same to happen if a new democratic regime one day comes to power in Russia, but the exodus of millions from the Russian Orthodox Church’s constituency, to other religious structures not tainted by their subservience to a secular government, might be inevitable.
All religious leaders should remember one fundamental principle: Their main asset is the people, not the cathedrals. And there is a heavy price to pay for a total merger with the state. Once the state and the church become one, one of them emerges as dangerously, ominously, superfluous.
Source: FP