by Stefano Caprio

The Duma is discussing marriage with war dead, to whom it wishes to attribute civil value even if it was not possible to make it official before they left for the front, raising the question of “moral relativism” based on war as a civil and religious value at the same time. This debate calls into question the Orthodox Church's role in indicating the level of ‘traditionalism’ of the values to be defended, as in a Russian version of medieval scholastic ‘casuistry’.

The new laws and draft amendments that are being rushed through the State Duma of the Russian Federation in an increasingly frantic manner, in an attempt to legally define Russia in the most correct and ‘patriotic’ way possible, are increasingly seeking to apply the ‘moral filter’ of traditional values, which are mostly filtered through the assessments of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow.

One of the issues concerns the religious justification of marriage to the fallen and wounded of war, to whom civil value is to be attributed even if it was not possible to make it official before departure for the front, raising the question of “moral relativism” based on war as both a civil and religious value. Some believe that the concept of “traditional values” can also include murder in military actions, if this is really necessary for the state, while others find this justification rather dubious.

The chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Social Affairs, Senator Andrei Klishas, has published an appeal on his Telegram channel to Patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev) of Moscow, asking for his blessing for “de facto marital relationships” in wartime circumstances.

In this sense, women who are living together or in a civil marriage with fallen or wounded soldiers should be considered on the same level as wives united in holy matrimony, which would allow them to be included in categories with greater social guarantees. The patriarch responded directly to the speaker of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, stating that the project “deserves support.”

In reality, however, the two deputy speakers, Anna Kuznetsova, wife of a priest and mother of seven children, and Irina Jarovaja, author of the most restrictive laws on religious freedom, spoke out against the proposal, considering it a “violation of traditional values” and asserting themselves as more orthodox than the patriarch himself. Volodin himself was forced to support the version of the two “traditional” ladies, and the bill was postponed indefinitely.

Behind this ideological conflict lies the friendship between the powerful protoierej Vsevolod Čaplin, the “traditionalist” advisor to the patriarchate, who died in 2020 during Covid, and the then simple senator Klišas, who was in conflict with speaker Volodin.

In assessing the canonical status of marriages, it seems that Patriarch Kirill has not forgotten the balance of sympathies and antipathies between politicians and ecclesiastical institutions, despite the fact that he himself had previously defenestrated Čaplin in an attempt to remain more ideologically balanced.

The protoierej, who had been in the circle of religious power since the end of the Soviet period, often recalled that “Patriarch Kirill is a collective project,” placing him alongside the presidency of the new tsar Vladimir Putin.

Not all bills, at least for now, require patriarchal blessing, but the question of the level of “traditionalism” of the values to be defended is nevertheless clearly raised. Without a pronouncement from the top of the Orthodox Church, these values remain in a suspended and implausible state.

The issue of “war marriages,” beyond the specifics of each situation, is raising a rather thorny contrast between different conceptions of these “values,” of which the population itself has a rather vague and variable understanding, considering the Russians' lack of inclination towards stable long-term family ties, as is the case with President Putin himself and the circle of the regime's top leaders, who are still very attached to the Soviet tradition rather than the Orthodox one.

The divorce law was proclaimed by Lenin in March 1918, a month after the dissolution of the constitutional assembly that had established his absolute power, allowing the unilateral annulment of marriage by one of the spouses with a simple notification to the registry office, without even informing the husband or wife.

At the time of Brezhnev, when the young Putin and Kirill were growing up, the Soviet authorities tried to revive the image of marriage by celebrating civil ceremonies that mimicked church rites, but with very little success.

The ‘tradition of values’ thus presented itself as a strange alternative between ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘ikonomia’, using the Orthodox term for ‘canonicity’, considering that in the traditions of the Russian Church, second and even third marriages are permitted as ‘reparation’ for the failure of the sacramental marriage.

The “indissoluble” marriage is in fact mainly propagated by “super-conservative” lay people, such as the Orthodox oligarch and Putin ideologue Konstantin Malofeev, who, incidentally, left his first wife to marry the ex-wife of an Orthodox priest. Following the advice of the most fervent startsy of the monasteries, Malofeev and his followers of the “Russian Orthodox Universal Council” propagate the importance of canonical marriage, except when it comes to obtaining ecclesiastical dispensations for themselves.

Russian Orthodox traditionalists are, moreover, partly influenced by the campaigns of the most conservative American Protestants, who had a considerable influence in Russia in the 1990s, in a short circuit of influences and negations that is now taking its toll at the global ideological level.

The ban on abortion and opposition to divorce are also key issues for the most fervent Russians, who nevertheless have to contend with the habits of a people whose abortion and divorce rates are among the highest in the world.

Malofeev and his supporter Ekaterina Muzilina, director of the “Children's Aid Center,” had very close ties to the “World Congress of Families” linked to American neoconservatives, which were obviously suspended in 2014 with the start of the conflict in Ukraine, but now seem to be gaining strength again with the new Donald Trump administration. This connection had been described as the “moralistic turn of the Kremlin” in recent years.

Patriarch Kirill has therefore sought to reestablish the Orthodox principle of ikonomia, a more flexible version of the application of canonical norms, according to which different circumstances and factors must be evaluated in each individual case, as in the “casuistry” of medieval scholasticism also adopted by Russian theological academies.

The Russian interpretation of this approach considers primarily the “usefulness for the life of the state” before the needs of individual believers: if the state is generally in favor of “traditional values,” then there is no need to split hairs over individual issues.

The needs of the state are the “source of redemption” for various infringements of moral laws, and are capable of “sacralizing” even the most disorderly marriages, from that of the president to those of soldiers in the field.

“Civil widows” can therefore hold their heads high and receive the material benefits of their status, which is considered honorable, thereby ensuring further support for the war with gratitude to the loving state and the merciful Church.

The administrator of the patriarchate, Igumena Ksenia Chernega, has made it clear that the Church supports the bill not only out of sympathy, but to support the president's intentions in confirming the values of the heroes and veterans of the “holy war.”

To support these principles, “family parades” have been taking place throughout Russia since the beginning of July in preparation for the solemn feast of the Baptism of Rus' on July 28, with hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered in various generations of families, from Kamchatka to Kaliningrad, grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren, regardless of their canonical status, to exalt the slogan that “Russia is the family of families.”

After all, until the day before the Baptism of 988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev himself was famous for his large number of wives and concubines (mostly minors), which ancient chronicles counted at over eight hundred, and even his twelve official sons, the future leaders of the tribes of the “new chosen people,” were fathered by different wives.

Only one of them, the eldest prince Svjatopolk, known as “the Damned,” was the son of a foreigner, the Byzantine princess Irina, for whom Vladimir had accepted Christian baptism, partly because of economic agreements with Constantinople.

It was he, the first “foreign agent” in Russian history, who started the war with all his other brothers, killing the youngest, Boris and Gleb, the first saints canonized in Russian history in 1025, when the schism with the Catholics had not yet taken place. Fortunately, Vladimir's successors, starting with his other son Yaroslav the Wise, put everything back in order with the successful war in the territories of present-day Ukraine, reestablishing the “traditional values” of Russian Christianity and its victories against all the temptations of the world.

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• Russia
• War
• Kirill
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• Orthodox