by Stefano Caprio

The death of the patriarch who had led the Georgian Orthodox Church since 1977 and the fiftieth anniversary of the episcopal consecration of the patriarch of Moscow: two stories celebrated in the ‘Russian world’ as ‘heroism of faith resisting heresy’. Yet they also reveal the continuity between present-day Russia and the Stalinist era.

These days mark the remembrance of two figures who were highly characteristic of the last half-century of history, during the transition from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation and from state atheism to religious revival.

On 17 March, the Patriarch of Georgia, Ilia II, passed away; he had occupied the ecclesiastical throne in Tbilisi since 1977, when he was 43 years old, and on 14 March, the fiftieth anniversary of the episcopal ordination of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow was celebrated in Moscow; he became an auxiliary bishop in Leningrad in 1976, at the age of just 29, before ascending to the patriarchal see next to the Kremlin in 2009.

From collaboration with Leonid Brezhnev’s totalitarian regime to Vladimir Putin’s traditionalist sovereignty, from the legacy of the Georgian dictator Joseph Stalin to the current pro-Russian government of Georgian Dream, the two patriarchs have embodied the Church’s close relationship with the state, whatever the political landscape of these two former neo-Soviet Eurasian countries.

The body of the late Georgian Orthodox Patriarch Ilia II has been laid in state in the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Tbilisi, and the Synod, convened under the leadership of Patriarchal Locum Tenens Šio Mudžiri, has decided that the funeral service will be held on 22 March in the ancient Sioni Cathedral in Tbilisi. Whilst condolences are also arriving from abroad, the theologian Mirian Gamrekelašvili explains how the Catholicos “managed to reconcile personal authority with the institutional strength of the Church, creating a cult of his own personality”.

In the Russian Synod’s message of condolence to Kirill, it is stated that “in the difficult circumstances of our times, when the enemy of mankind sows division and mutual hatred, when with a darkened mind and a hardened heart the enemy tears the robe of Christ [a phrase from the prayer for the victory of Holy Rus’ in war], faithfulness to episcopal and patriarchal vows is a true testimony to the heroism of faith”.

Kirill’s ministry is extolled as resistance to schisms, superstition and heresy, another quotation taken from the Russian rite of episcopal consecration, which echoes the prophecies of the Third Rome saving the world, composed for the great celebrations in the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

The liturgy for the patriarchal anniversary also coincided with the proclamation of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, the Sunday of Orthodox Lent commemorating the victory of icon veneration over the ‘iconoclastic’ heretics in the 9th century, one of the greatest moments of Orthodox triumph over all enemies.

Like last Sunday, this was the liturgical feast commemorating the day when the young hieromonk Kirill (Vladimir Gundjaev) was consecrated Bishop of Vyborg at the Lavra of Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky in Leningrad, the final destination of the grand Nevsky Prospekt, the spectacular central avenue of the northern capital with its grand noble palaces and the spectacular churches of St Petersburg’s Russian Baroque.

Gundjaev was the son of one of Stalin’s bodyguards, and shortly after his ordination as a priest he became rector of the Theological Academy, which had been reopened by the dictator himself immediately after the victory in the Great Patriotic War.

As a young monk in the 1960s, he accompanied Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) on his trips abroad; Nikodim was the key figure in the Vatican’s Ostpolitik regarding relations with Soviet Russia, having participated in the Second Vatican Council, where the condemnation of communism was avoided and an intense ecumenical dialogue between Rome and Moscow was initiated.

Nikodim and Kirill regularly stayed at the Collegio Russicum in Rome, opened in 1931 to launch a ‘Russian mission’ by Catholics to save Christianity from atheist persecution, and as bishop and metropolitan, Kirill continued to frequent the Jesuit college until the final period of Soviet history, when relations were severed due to the Greek Catholic uprisings in Ukraine, condemned by Kirill but supported instead by the Polish Pope John Paul II.

The most pro-Western and pro-Catholic metropolitan in Russian history went on to become the first patriarch to meet and embrace Pope Francis of Rome in Havana in 2016, yet at the same time he was the primary inspiration behind Tsar Putin’s religious sovereignty, supporting him in his aggressive and apocalyptic interpretation of the past two decades.

Ecumenical dialogue had officially broken down in 1997, precisely at the instigation of the late Georgian patriarch, who, at the Assembly of European Churches convened in Graz, declared that the Church of Tbilisi regarded ecumenism as “heresy”, a position subsequently adopted by the Russians as well.

It was Kirill himself who halted the negotiations that were to have brought about the first meeting between the Pope and the Patriarch in Vienna following the ecumenical assembly, thereby avoiding being pre-empted by the then Patriarch Alexy II, whom he himself had had elected in 1990 in place of the Metropolitan of Kiev, Filaret (Denisenko), thus initiating the schism with Ukraine that has inspired the current war.

Kirill’s ecclesiastical policy choices, shaped by his training in the KGB during the Brezhnev era and as a contemporary of Vladimir Putin, have spanned the various phases of the regime from Brezhnevian stagnation to Gorbachev’s perestroika, before he became the ‘oligarchic metropolitan’ during the Boris Yeltsin years, trafficking in alcohol and cigarettes, and finally one of the great ideologues of Putin’s imperial restoration.

Fifty years of political, economic, technological and social upheavals in Russia and across the globe, yet Kirill remains firmly in the saddle of the patriarchal-imperial horse, a living embodiment of a ‘Russian world’ that is constantly transforming itself whilst remaining ever true to itself, suspended between East and West.

And indeed, today’s Russia is becoming increasingly similar to the Soviet Russia of Stalin and Brezhnev, with its endless repressive measures taking the form not only of the arrest and detention of dissidents, the censorship of all artistic and cultural expression, but also, in recent days, the most odious and unbearable form of imposition on generations now dependent on digital connections and applications.

For months now, mobile internet has been suspended across all regions of Russia, and the measure now applies even in the capitals of Moscow and St Petersburg and in major cities ‘for security reasons’. Even more shocking for the population is the decision to block the Telegram messenger, the only ‘window of free communication’ still available to ordinary users and, in particular, to soldiers on the Ukrainian front, who are voicing their complaints with increasing irritation.

As Evgenij Dobrenko, a columnist for Radio Svoboda, comments, “historians will debate at length how it was possible for Russia to have reached its current state”, after experiencing the great changes and rapid development of the post-Soviet years, buoyed by hopes of a life of freedom and prosperity unlike anything seen before in Russian history, “or perhaps we merely dreamt it”, the political scientist wonders.

Now, however, “we have found ourselves back in the usual quagmire of squalid servitude, official loyalty, self-censorship and oppressive fear”. Recalling various events, he states that “some will point to the 1993 parliamentary shooting as the point of no return, others to the super-presidential constitution, others still to the rigged elections, and yet others to the fatal error in the choice of successor... It seems to me, however, that the fateful decision which determined the entire course of modern Russian history was taken precisely at the moment of the new country’s birth, when the Russian Federation declared itself the legitimate heir to the Soviet Union”.

The choice to perpetuate Russia’s historical image was precisely that of preserving the image of an imperial superpower, inspired by the Jubilee Council of 2000, at which the then-Metropolitan Kirill secured the approval of the document on the ‘Social Doctrine of the Russian Church’, the true political programme of the new President Putin. Putin’s “vertical of power” has thus eliminated all forms of social and political autonomy, subjugating even the oligarchs to loyalty to state policy, and imprisoning or exiling those who did not submit. Russia has been entrusted to the security and law enforcement agencies, heirs to the Soviet KGB, the only structure to survive the collapse of the empire alongside the Orthodox Church.

Today’s Russia brings to mind an old Soviet-era joke: whatever you try to build, you always end up with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. If a historian of the USSR were to draw up a list of the various legislative, prohibitive, political, ideological, educational and cultural initiatives adopted in Russia over the last decade, and especially in the last four years, and compare them point by point with Soviet practices, they would be astounded by the similarities.

In essence, consciously or unconsciously, the current system is recreating the Soviet model of government, education, culture and so on, almost as if starting from stem cells. This process “is now irreversible”, comments Dobrenko, since “the country has resumed a path already trodden and predictable”. Drawing on the Soviet mythology of imperial grandeur, ‘social justice’ and a ‘sense of profound popular satisfaction’, people barely remember how things once were, and it no longer makes any sense to recall where that path led.

Another anniversary was marked in recent days: seventy years ago, on 25 February 1956, Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev presented the report ‘On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences’ at a secret session of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, denouncing Stalin’s crimes.

Kirill was 10 years old at the time, and Putin only 4, though he would later devote his entire life to restoring the cult of Russia. To mark that event, the Supreme Military-Historical Council, chaired by the ultra-Putinist ideologue Vladimir Medinsky, convened in recent days, asserting that Stalin’s repressions were “necessary to defeat the traitors and fifth columns on the eve of the war”, which then culminated in the Great Victory, thereby rehabilitating Stalin, the Georgian patriarch of the Russian Empire.

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