The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (37 page)

The Great Schism of the 17
^th
century, which resulted from top-down efforts to reform the Orthodox Church, was another illustration of an influential bishop – the most powerful Russia would ever see – ultimately succumbing to the state. Patriarch Nikon joined forces with Tsar Alexei in an unprecedented attempt to overhaul church practices to bring them in line with contemporary Greek rituals, trying to bridge a divergence that he saw as threatening unity within the Orthodox Church. Nikon took advantage of the coercive powers of the state to unleash a wave of terror on those clergy who
refused to break with the traditions of their forefathers in favour of what to them appeared as newfangled Greek rituals, like using three fingers to cross oneself rather than two, or having parishioners kneel instead of fully prostrate themselves. But in his growing confidence, in his attempts to transform Russia into a New Jerusalem, he crossed a line: when he insisted on the title of Great Sovereign, a title borne only by the Tsar, then Alexei had him deposed. Alexei kept the reforms, however; despite the backlash from below, the Schism that would create the Old Believers, it was the only type of reform that ever succeeded in Russia: reform from above.

When Alexei’s son, Peter the Great, unleashed an unprecedented campaign of Westernization by force, a campaign that would only be rivalled by Stalin, the church resisted. Peter, in a bid to sweep away the stifling patriarchy, and the exhortations of Timofeyev and Agapetus about the divinity of the Tsar, wound up only unwittingly vindicating them. When the church resisted, Peter, by the power of his own charisma, transformed the Patriarchate into a mere government body consisting of both clergy and laymen, the Most Holy Synod.

But it would be the Bolsheviks who would achieve the ultimate apotheosis in the divinization of state power, wiping out the church entirely and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of priests. Armed with the ideology of Communism, they set out to build a New Jerusalem
par excellence
, a true vision of heaven on earth; where their predecessors had failed, they would exceed both Ivan and Peter in the terror they unleashed.

We could not do justice to the story of that dynasty here; but in the context of a review of church-state relations in Russia, it is important to stress that Soviet totalitarianism owes at least as much, and probably more, to these traditions of caesaropapism as it does to the ideology of communism.

In their closing arguments before the court in August 2012, the three young women arrested for performing a punk prayer in Christ the Saviour Cathedral and ridiculing church-state ties, insisted that they were merely acting in the traditions of the holy fool.

Caught between stifling church ritual on the one hand and the church’s subjugation by the government on the other, some members of Christian society in both 6th century Byzantium and 16th century Russia stumbled upon a curious loophole of absolute freedom.

They stripped naked or wore rags, they wandered about their communities throwing rocks at the nobility and the clergy, and casting insults at state officials. They danced naked and yelled in churches. They inverted social norms and etiquette; when offered wine by those coming to them in kindness, they would pour it on the ground; when approached by the Tsar they would curse at him; when the rest of the community fasted, they ate raw meat. By doing so, they invited unspeakable abuse. They were called the
yurodivy
, the fools for Christ, or, more simply, holy fools.

According to the Russian scholar Sergei Ivanov, one of the few experts on the phenomenon, it was no accident that holy fools – who differed from their European jester counterparts – emerged first in Byzantium and then in Tsarist Russia. By testing accepted norms and ethical standards, they demonstrated the impossibility of fathoming or predicting God; by testing the bounds of freedom, they made an irony of it. The holy fools thus served as a wedge between church and state: with the failure of the church to set any limitations on state power, they sought to act as a sort of spiritual control mechanism.
²⁵⁹
Of course, it would be wrong to speak of the success of such control mechanisms in any institutional sense, but on occasion these strange troublemakers – who were by no means necessarily opposed to the government, as we shall see in a moment – managed to achieve some curious results.

Ivanov identifies the reign of Ivan the Terrible as the peak of the phenomenon of the holy fool. It is no wonder, he writes, that Ivan himself practiced such traits: watch him weep and debase himself when facing adversaries, such as monks he suspected of treason, or in his letters to the exiled Prince Kurbksy. Ivan would in all honesty refer to himself as a “foul-smelling dog” one moment, only to strike a mercilessly regal tone in finally indicting his audience. Isn’t he contradicting himself by debasing himself one moment, and then chastising his foes the next? Not in the least, Ivanov argues: “[The debasement] by no means lowers the dignity of the Tsar; on the contrary, it proves his superhuman essence, which allows him to
transcend earthly laws and norms.”
²⁶⁰

Enter a real holy fool. In 1570, after Ivan’s oprichniki slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians and clergy during the sacking of Novgorod, eyewitness accounts by at least one oprichnik and later recollections recall an extraordinary incident: a certain Nikolai, a recluse who lived alone on an estate that he did not tend, where animals roamed in their own excrement and yet continued to thrive, called out to Ivan. There are several accounts of what Nikolai said, but they all came down to this: “Ivashka [the diminutive, almost derogatory term for Ivan], why don’t you get out of here and stop spilling Christian blood?”
²⁶¹

And Ivan, who had killed higher men for lesser things than that, turned around and left.

Not only would Ivan not harm the holy fools who harassed him – by sending him pieces of raw meat during Lent, for instance, in a clear reference to his butchery – he fuelled their cults, eventually leading to the canonization of the most famous holy fool, St. Basil. The most easily recognizable tourist attraction in Russia, the St. Basil Cathedral on Red Square, is named after him.

According to Ivanov, there is a reason for this tolerance and respect – Ivan saw holy fools as the only human beings absolute enough to converse with. Like him, they went beyond human norms and laws. And on some level, society in general, which accepted the sacredness of the holy fool, went along with this state of affairs: Ivanov cites a legend circulating around the time that had a holy fool choose Ivan to rule as Tsar.

By 1667, the church turned on the holy fools, condemning most of their antics. The decision started a wave of persecutions; needless to say, holy fools were banned from churches.

Today, the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the most respected institutions in Russia. It would be fair to say that amid the general distrust of most institutions, there are only two with consistently high trust ratings: the person of the president (51 percent) and the church (50 percent).
²⁶²

In February 2012, at the peak of Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign, he was shown on state television meeting with Patriarch Kirill, who publicly labelled the last twelve years of Putin’s rule as a “gift from God.” Although clerics from all major denominations
were also present (Russia is, after all, formally a secular state with a Constitution that separates the government from religion), the public meeting, where the future president and the Patriarch greeted each other with the customary kiss on the cheek, was interpreted as a bid by Putin to use the church to bolster his legitimacy.

Amid the protests and plummeting trust ratings, amid a failing anti-corruption drive, and most of all, amid mounting criticism that Putin lacked an ideology or “anything holy” at all, it was only natural that he would lean on the church, drawing a mandate from its blessing in a way that had something in common with Ivan insisting on a blessing from the Patriarch of Constantinople.

But in this secular state, where church and religion were formally separate, the Russian Orthodox Church was still eerily intertwined with the state. That month, Kremlin courtiers began to talk openly of church-state harmony.

The Moscow Patriarchate, which hadn’t existed in any real sense since Peter the Great replaced it with a Holy Synod, was formally reinstated by Joseph Stalin in 1943. There was even an apocryphal account of his meetings with clergy at that time, who showed up in plainclothes, without their church garb. This, apparently, provoked a question from Stalin: “What, you fear me but don’t fear Him?”
²⁶³

After that, the KGB would maintain a close watch on leading clergy, grooming the most promising to move ahead in the church hierarchy. This was the path of Patriarch Alexis II, who, as Alexei Ridiger, was recruited into the KGB sometime after 1950, propelling his career. In fact, the close cooperation between the KGB and leading clergy like Alexei Ridiger demonstrated the very essence of the kind of church-state harmony extolled in past centuries. Patriarch Alexis II would go on, by some accounts, to play a pivotal role in taking a stand against the hardliner coup in 1991, helping bring down what at least on paper was an atheist dynasty.
²⁶⁴

But the ties between church and state would continue; Alexis’ successor, Patriarch Kirill (Vladimir Gundyayev) was also known to have KGB ties. But if the late Alexis was widely respected for his integrity, Patriarch Kirill – whether due to sheer timing or, indeed, because of the cynicism that many Russian observers ascribe to him – was less fortunate. By winter of 2012, all sorts of allegations against him were being leaked to the press. Aside from a successful tobacco
importing business he and other church leaders were allegedly involved in (which was not illegal), Gundyayev was implicated in an embarrassing apartment scandal, where he was accused of pressuring the courts to allow him to annex the upstairs apartment of a former health minister. The pretext was that the neighbour’s reconstruction had ruined Gundyayev’s rare book collection – damages that a court estimated as being worth over a million dollars.
²⁶⁵

The scandal quickly coincided with mounting reports of hit and run incidents by priests driving fancy cars – either the public was genuinely getting fed up with clerical hypocrisy, or someone was trying to discredit the church. Patriarch Kirill, who never really commented on the apartment scandal allegations – and particularly his hardliner spokesman, Vsevolod Chaplin – insisted someone was deliberately attacking the church.

It was in this environment of Orthodoxy apparently under siege that Pussy Riot, in their stated bid to drive a wedge between church and state, danced in Christ the Saviour Cathedral.

As the church, and the particularly outspoken Chaplin, lashed out at the punk group, singling them out for committing what they described as a deadly sin, it was the government’s decision to prosecute them that exposed the church-state harmony Pussy Riot had merely poked fun at.

If there indeed was a meeting in which Patriarch Kirill directly asked Putin for retribution, as some allege, then it wasn’t just Putin leaning on the church. It was also evidence of a subordinate church seeking protection from the state. The pact seemed to have worked spectacularly. In a society where a majority condemned what Pussy Riot did, by using their stunt to accuse the opposition of unleashing “Satanic rage” against the church, in the words of Vsevolod Chaplin, the government may have succeeded in driving a wedge into the opposition. In the eyes of many Russians who were indifferent to the protesters but dissatisfied with Putin, the Pussy Riot scandal functioned as a sort of deal breaker: this government may be corrupt and illegitimate, but are those hooligans any better? Finally, Chaplin would go on and publicly state that that “the religious neutrality of the state is a fiction.”
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But there is, perhaps, also another, somewhat esoteric explanation, in the light of the history of the centuries we have
rather haphazardly explored in this chapter: The Tsar can’t just ignore the ire of a holy fool – as the one force that can compete in its absoluteness, the Tsar is as dependent on the holy fool as the holy fool is on the Tsar. And so, if the holy fool bids the Tsar to go away, the Tsar must respond by either complying or unleashing all his wrath; ignoring him is not an option, for by ignoring the holy fool the Tsar would be belittling his own status before his people. But in punishing him, he acts at his own peril – for the holy fool is sacred. The challenge, thus, becomes a self-fulfilling curse.

“I know that stare. And I know of no other more terrifying than that hopeless, metallic stare.”

-
Alexander Hertzen
, 1856, describing a meeting with Nicholas I

“I drove up to them, sat up, and one of the fishermen turned, looked at me, and began to cross himself. I asked: ‘Why are you crossing yourself?’ When he realized that it was really me he said: ‘We drank a little bit yesterday and I thought I was seeing things.’”

-
Vladimir Putin
, recalling an incident when fishermen allegedly took him for Christ walking on the water. 2012

“Everything is so complicated, so tangled, brother. But there is no time to sort it out. Our madhouse is voting for Putin. Our madhouse will be glad.”

-
Alexander Yelin
, songwriter. Author of the lyrics to “A man like Putin,” performed by the girl group Singing Together. 2011

“…When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure,
and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
-
Abraham Lincoln
. 1855

IT WAS A matter of time before he looked at me; when he did, his eyes did not linger on my face, but slid down and stopped on my boots. I realized nervously that despite the sludge of early spring, I had not cleaned my boots in days.