Russian Orthodoxy

In a largely negative review of John and Carol Garrard’s Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent ( TNR , December 31), Leon Aron notes the importance of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russian politics: “Orthodoxy is now all the rage among the Russian elite. The formerly godless KGB and Komsomol graduates who rule the country and own much of it are suddenly gripped by religious fervor. Vladimir Putin kept a small private chapel next to his Kremlin office . . . , and undeoubtedly he now has another one in the government’s ‘White House’ building on Novy Arbat. In a series of widely published photos from Putin’s summer vacation in 2007, an Orthodox cross was featured prominently between the president’s bare and mighty pectorals, a rifle with a telescope sight firmly in his strong hands and a hunting knife dangling from his belt . . . .

“Following the ‘National Leader,’ government officials and industrial ‘oligarchs’ have been endowing religious orders, restoring churches, paying to make and install bells (which were removed and mostly smashed in the Soviet era, when ringing them was a crime), and occasionally repatriating some of the Church’s treasures, such as the eighteen brass bells returned to the St. Daniel’s Monastery in Moscow this past September from Harvard, where they had been part of the graduation carillon since the early 1930s.

“Last May, the president-dauphin Medvedev . . . effectively made the Orthodox prayer part of the presidential inauguration, afer he repaired to the oldest of the Kremlin churches and the most hallowed of Russian places of Orthodox worship, the Uspensky (Annunciation) Cathedral, immedaitely after the swearing-in. There he received blessings from Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Alexy II. Medvedev was presented with an icon of Russia’s main protectoress, the Vladimir Mother of God, and crossed himself in accepting the gift. A public prayer by the president was, of course, in direct violation of the Russian constitution, which prohibits the establishment of a state religion, as it does a ‘state ideology,’ but who cares today about Russian’s gloriously liberal constitution of 1993 – a relic of the democratic revolution that is now officially designated as a time of ‘humiliation’ and ‘chaos.’”