Bishop Tikhon, Licensed CC- BY-SA 4.0
Author Александр Филиппов, courtesy of Wikimedia

Ben Ryan considers Putin’s unusual symbiotic relationship with the Orthodox Church, at Theos:

Excerpt:

For many years Putin has certainly had a close relationship with Archimandrite Tikhon, the Father Superior of Sretensky monastery. So close, in fact, is this relationship that there are those who would paint Tikhon as an éminence grise. Certainly Tikhon, a former film student, with a reputation as a spiritual healer seems to have served for some years as confessor to Putin. One biographer speculates that Tikhon probably knows more about Putin’s life than anyone else. He is also a priest with some rather remarkable political views, having publicly criticised democracy as a force that weakens a country and its spiritual basis, spoken out in favour of censorship as a necessary instrument and worked as a well–known public media figure. He has certainly seemed to profit from the relationship with Putin and other prominent political figures securing a string of new offices and promotions in recent years. However, he himself has always been keen to be clear that Putin is very much his own man, and certainly for all the closeness in their relationship Putin has stopped short (at least so far) of fully endorsing Tikhon’s model of Church–state relations. They did, however, work closely together in 2007 in the process of re–unifying the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, and speculation over the extent of their influence on one another has continued for years.

Tikhon has reported in the past that Putin prays daily in a small chapel next to the presidential office. Putin’s mother and ex–wife were both certainly religious and the claim that Putin prays regularly is not implausible. As an overall picture of Putin’s personal faith then, while recognising the usual problems when it comes to unpicking truth from myth and managed public image, we can at the very least see that Putin wants to portray an image as a man with a committed personal faith.

Politics and Faith in the service of the State

The debate about the relationship between the Orthodox Church and political power is nothing new. Indeed, it goes all the way back beyond the Great Schism in 1054 and even to the working out of Christianity’s relationship with power with Constantine, the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire. The Russian state, and its predecessors in the Tsarist Empire, Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Kiev, adopted a trajectory of religion and power that did not follow that of Catholic or Protestant Europe. The Church, even more than established churches of Western Europe, was fully part of the structure of the government. It was in part this intimate relationship with the ruling system of the State that prevented the Orthodox Church in Russia (as opposed to other European churches) from acting as a critical or independent voice, and which explained in part the Bolshevik revolution.

Under Communism, the Church was a threat to the state as a body closely associated with power structures, a rival ideology and capable of inspiring the affection and support of a large proportion of the Russian population. Putin, however, is on record as seeing that attitude as a mistake on the part of the USSR. The Church, for Putin, has a significant and powerful value in forging a strong Russian state. Under Putin, the Church and nationalism are increasingly closely united. The Church serves a powerful role in supporting Putin’s true political ideology – his identity as a gosudarstvennik or ‘Statist’. The “Russian Idea” as described by Putin in his so–called ‘Millennium Message’, delivered in 1999 and still seen as the core of his political model, includes patriotism, collectivism, solidarity and derzhavnost (destiny to be a great power). Religion, even were Putin not religious himself, has a very clear and obvious instrumental value in meeting those goals.

This instrumental use of the Church has been seen on a number of occasions both internally and, increasingly, externally.

Glory to Ukraine!