When the famous Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth for the first time in human history in the early sixties, Viktor Krasnov, from the city of Stavropol in the Russian south, had not yet landed in the world, but like all the children of his generation growing up under Soviet Russia, he was glorified. Krasnov, the historical cosmonaut, is hostile to everything religious, and circulates the famous saying attributed to Gagarin: “I went into space and did not see God there,” as one of the founding propaganda sayings of “atheist” Soviet communism. So, in his worst nightmares, Krasnov probably could not have imagined a day when he would be tried for the heart of Russia as a result of an Internet discussion in which he described the Bible as, in his view, “a collection of Jewish stories and legends that are nothing more than sheer nonsense.”
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At that time, Russian President Vladimir Putin passed a controversial law criminalizing insulting the feelings of religious people in the country, and stipulating a prison sentence of up to one year if the “insulting” act was committed outside places of worship, and up to three years if it was committed inside one of these places. The Krasnov case did not generate much controversy at the time, but Moscow was determined to move forward. In August of the same year, did not take video blogger Ruslan Tsiolkovsky, 22, from Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, TV threats in turn. His country was taken seriously, and the result was that he was placed under house arrest for 11 months before being sentenced to two years and three months in prison, and despite his petition for a commutation of the sentence, the Russian federal judiciary refused to accept him.
At the time, the world was living in the midst of a virtual revolution caused by the famous Pokemon Go game, when Russian television broadcast a warning that anyone who would chase virtual creatures inside places of worship would be punished according to the law “insulting the feelings of believers.” In a video that has more than a million and a half views, Tsiolkovsky shared his journey to hunt the colorful cartoon creatures inside the city’s cathedral by the altar as the cathedral’s priest prepares for prayer, with a sarcastic comment: “I caught all the Pokemon, but I didn’t catch the rarest Pokemon Jesus, hey. This pokemon doesn’t even exist.
These issues, and many others like them, represent an astonishing transformation in Russia’s recent history. During the first two decades of Soviet rule, more than two hundred thousand clergymen were killed, while millions of other Christians were persecuted for their faith, and this anti-religious discrimination continued even before the early Soviet fall. the nineties. But things were not like that in pre-Soviet Russia, and specifically in Tsarist Russia, where the Church was strongly present in the social and political scenes. It seems that Moscow today is returning to its relatively ancient past, transcending its close Soviet roots in some respects. It is strange that the apostasy comes at the hands of Vladimir Putin, who until not so long ago was one of the most prominent men of the Russian intelligence, and is described today in Moscow as “the Tsar”, as everyone seemed to have colluded in ignoring the apparent contradiction in giving such a title to the Moscow strongman, responsible About the management of the rules of the game in the Kremlin to this day.
During tsarists reigns in Russia, the was seen country’s ruler as God-chosen to lead the Russian nation charged with embodying values derived primarily from the principles of Russian Orthodoxy. With the end of the era of religious persecution with the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Orthodox Church began working to restore its religious role. At first, the space was open for competition for followers and influence in the Russian religious sphere, where a flood of Western missionaries, including evangelicals and Catholics, poured in, taking advantage of a “spiritual void” that accompanied the fall of the agnostic Soviet Union, causing the Russian Church to fear losing its opportunity to Reconstruction of its spiritual influence, and its transformation into just one of many religious bodies in New Russia.
These fears prompted the church to embrace the state, and in 1997 it succeeded in pushing the government to pass a law restricting the freedom of religious practice of “foreign” religions, thus placing the Orthodox Church in the seat of religious leader again. The Church has strengthened this position significantly with Putin’s rise to power again in 2012, when the Terrorism Law, issued in mid-2016, came to strengthen the church’s authority by prohibiting any missionary activity outside the scope of official institutions. Prior to that, early in Putin’s presidency, the State Duma passed a law under which all church property seized during the Soviet era was returned, turning the latter into one of Russia’s most prominent landowners, and Putin directed state-owned energy companies to contribute funds to rebuild the thousands of churches destroyed under Soviet rule. About 25,000 churches have been rebuilt since the early 1990s, most of them built during Putin’s rule. In addition, the Church was given a role in public life and religious education in schools, as well as the right to review any legislation before the State Duma.
Putin cannot be considered a religious person, and he was never an atheist communist in the literal sense, and he sees that what Russia really lost with the fall of the Soviet Union are influence and power, not communism itself. Functionally in the service of the state. this revolves function Ultimately, around consolidating cultural control and nurturing a unique national identity. After all, it does not matter whether Russia is tsarist or Soviet, religious or atheist, the important thing is that it is strong, united, and always under control.
Today Russians not very different from their president in their view of Christianity, while known vast majority of Russians themselves, by up to 90% in some estimates, as “Orthodox Christians”, almost third ratio know themselves at same time they also atheists, What makes the Russians view of Christianity is dominated by a sense of national affiliation more than spiritual or religious affiliation.
Putin and the Church therefore share a view of Orthodox Christianity as a means of consolidating their control over their respective space, the symbolic-spiritual space in the case of the Church, and the political space in the case of Putin. The social life of Russian Christians, and the state’s political and security grip on the other hand.
These were the features of Putin’s new deal: Russia lost greatly with the fall of the Soviet Union, and on top of what it lost, not having a strong ideology that united its citizens at home and preached it abroad, and the solution came in a combination of Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity, under the auspices of both the state and the church. On the one hand, the church regains its symbolic role lost under the Soviet rule, and on the other hand, Putin’s new synthesis provides a powerful, unifying ideology, at the same time submissive, and it seemed to be a smart and win-win deal for both sides.