The Baton and the Cross (eBook)

Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin

Lucy Ash (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
Icon Books Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-83773-184-8 (ISBN)

Infos

For more than a millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church has shown astonishing survival skills - from the Mongol yoke to tsarist demagoguery and enlightenment, from Soviet atheism to the chaotic 1990s. Now again, it is at the right hand of power, sanctifying Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. In this provocative new book, Lucy Ash reveals how, under Putin, religion is being stripped of its spiritual content and used as a weapon to control the population. Orthodox clerics and their acolytes distort theology as they preach Slav Christian supremacy and drag Russia backwards into a new Middle Ages. Combining historical research with vivid present-day reportage, The Baton and the Cross explores the impact the Church is having on millions of lives - from the tower blocks of big cities to far-flung villages in Siberia. Delving into the underbelly of politics, state security and big money, Ash shows how these forces have formed an unholy alliance with Orthodoxy in the dystopia of twenty-first century Russia.

Lucy Ash is an award-winning presenter of radio and TV documentaries. An expert on Russia and post-Soviet countries, she was first sent to Moscow by the BBC in 1990 and has been covering the region's social, political and cultural issues ever since. The Baton and the Cross is her first book.

Textauszug

PROLOGUE

Christ the Saviour

The immersion ritual would fill me with dread. From the changing room, you had to edge carefully down a flight of slippery steps. Then you ducked under heavy plastic curtains, swam a few feet underwater and found yourself under the open sky. However cold it was outside, the water was the temperature of a warm bath. Such were the thick clouds of steam rising from the surface, you struggled to avoid bumping into other swimmers.

On my first visit, aged fifteen, I panicked when I lost my chaperone. Vitaly was a bespectacled professor of electrical engineering who had visited my father’s laboratory in London and was keen to repay the favour by showing me around Moscow. ‘I’ll see you inside,’ he told me at the turnstile. ‘I’ll be in a black swimming cap.’

I swam around the vast pool in the chlorinated fog for what seemed like hours; several men were wearing black rubber on their heads and there was no sign of Vitaly. Eventually, I heaved myself out and stood shivering on the side, trying to spot him. ’Get back in right now!’ shouted a lifeguard in a fur hat. ‘Are you crazy? It’s minus-fifteen degrees!’

The circular outdoor pool could accommodate 20,000 swimmers per day and at one point was four metres deep. To the left, you could see the crenelated red walls and towers of the Kremlin. If the wind was blowing in the right way, sweet smells wafted across the river from the Red October chocolate factory on the opposite bank.

I had gone to Moscow on a school trip in the late 1970s, during the ‘stagnation era’ of Leonid Brezhnev. My visit was unexpectedly extended when Viktor and Larisa, some other engineering friends of my father’s, invited me to stay in their cramped flat on the outskirts of the capital for an extra ten days. It was a formative experience. After university, in the early 1980s, I was determined to get back to Moscow and discovered that you could get a visa working as a nanny for foreign diplomats. It was the twilight of the zastoi – stagnation – period, presided over by two grey-faced, ailing leaders, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. Whenever I had time off, I went back to the open-air pool and practised my Russian, chatting to women in the showers. A decade later, back in Moscow in 1990 as a radio producer for the BBC, I grew addicted to pre-breakfast swims. In the dead of winter, I loved the surreal feeling of doing breaststroke in the clouds.

Not all Muscovites shared my affection for the Bassein Moskva with its rusty pipes and cracked floor tiles. They told me the place was unhygienic and contaminated with algae. No repairs were done, they said, because the Moscow authorities had other uses for such a potentially lucrative city centre site. Other friends warned me the pool attracted perverts who tried to grab your private parts underwater, their faces hidden in the steam. Some grandmothers gave it a wide berth for different reasons. They saw it as the scene of a monstrous crime and an ever-present reminder of the darkest hours in Russia’s spiritual past. The pool, with its plumes of steam dominating the nearby skyline, did indeed have an extraordinarily turbulent history. I had been splashing around under the phantom Byzantine dome of the largest church ever built in Russia. This site embodied the struggle for the nation’s soul after seven decades of state-imposed atheism.

On a crisp December morning in 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was destroyed in a series of explosions. It took just an hour to bring down the mighty structure which had taken more than 40 years to build and was commissioned by Tsar Alexander I to immortalise Russia’s 1812 victory over Napoleon. Some believed the cathedral was cursed from the outset. It involved the demolition of the ancient Alekseevsky Convent, built in honour of Metropolitan Alexius, a prominent fourteenth-century bishop. The nuns protested for five years but were eventually forced out. Legend has it that their abbess cursed the ground on which the cathedral was built. ‘The feeling of mortal failure or perhaps even tragedy hung over the Cathedral of Christ like the sword of Damocles,’ wrote one architectural historian.1

It took half a century to build and decorate the cathedral at a cost of 15 million roubles. In comparison, Russia sold Alaska to the US in 1867 for 7 million roubles, less than half that price. Christ the Saviour was eventually consecrated as part of Alexander III’s coronation ceremony in May 1883. After the liturgy, in a tent outside the cathedral, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, specially written for the occasion, was played for the first time. Alexander, a man whose party trick was bending iron pokers, adored the bellowing brass, church bells and multiple cannon shots. To him, Tchaikovsky’s long descending scale symbolising the retreat of the invading French army followed by the hymn ‘God Save the Tsar’ was stirring and patriotic. The composer hated the piece. He confessed in a letter to his patroness that it was ‘very loud and noisy, but [without] artistic merit, because I wrote it without warmth and without love’.2

Many artists were similarly scathing about the cathedral. It was ‘ugly, bulky, and cumbersome’, sniffed one art historian.3 Alexander Herzen, the revolutionary writer, said all the churches built by the architect Konstantin Ton were ‘full of hypocrisy, anachronism, and looked like five-headed cruet stands with onion domes instead of stoppers’. Ordinary people loved it. The Ukrainian art historian Konstantin Akinsha calls it probably the most successful mass-culture project of pre-revolutionary Russia. Its colourful murals provided an encyclopaedia of the Russian Orthodox world accessible to every illiterate peasant.4

Christ the Saviour carried on as a place of worship for several years after the October Revolution, although it was barely heated in winter and some of the murals began to go mouldy with the damp. Vasily Bellavin, a bishop, was elected Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917. As is the custom, he changed his name, taking the moniker Tikhon. He founded the Brotherhood of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in order to prevent it from being closed. He wanted to ‘unite believers around this great historical monument and assist the clergy in providing for the continued spiritual evolution of Orthodox Russia’. However, its days were numbered. The Communists disliked the way the cathedral dominated the Moscow skyline – to them it was out of place in the modern age of atheism. Waves of propaganda preceded its destruction. This was ‘a poisonous mushroom on the face of Moscow’, a place where landlords and merchants, gendarmes and prostitutes gathered in ‘the old vile world of tsarist times’.

Thousands of churches were badly damaged or destroyed in the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of Stalin’s purges; but the size and prominence of Christ the Saviour gave its martyrdom a special resonance. When the decision to demolish it became public, one parishioner was moved to write a long lament which began: ‘Farewell, curator of Russian glory Magnificent Cathedral of Christ, Our gold-domed Titan. Your grandeur was plain; over Moscow your gigantic crown Burned like a sun.’ The poem circulated in handwritten form among Muscovites who still held it up as a shrine.5

The destruction began in the autumn of 1931. Specialists removed the artwork, gold, bronze, copper, mosaics of porphyry, labradorite and other precious stones. They yanked off the gold crosses from the domes with steel cables hooked to tractors. Army battalions and brigades from the Komsomol, the Communist Party youth movement, followed. A cameraman hired to film the demolition recalled paramilitary units swarming over the ‘pitiful Cathedral’ like a ‘swarm of ants’.6 An impatient Stalin ordered the engineers to use dynamite. It mattered little to him that the cathedral was situated in a densely populated area in the heart of Moscow.

Alexander Pasternak, brother of novelist Boris Pasternak, who lived across the road in Volkhonka Street, had a rude awakening on the morning of 5 December 1931. ‘Everything suddenly trembled and shook,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘as if the bed wanted to jump out from under me – it felt like an earthquake.’ Looking out of his window he saw ‘a great red-black cloud of dust, gas, and fine rubble, which covered everything like an enormous umbrella’.7

The man in charge of the demolition was Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Stalin who built the Moscow metro. He later used some of the cathedral’s Italian marble to decorate three of the city’s underground stations. As the smoke cleared, Kaganovich climbed on the rubble and declared: ‘Mother Russia is cast down. We have ripped away her skirts.’ Kaganovich later tried to shift the blame for the decision to Vyacheslav Molotov and others, but it is clear from his account that the decision, which was backed by Stalin, was not open to debate. The cathedral was doomed.8 It was demolished to make way for a new home for the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, supposedly a parliament but nothing more than a rubber-stamping body. With a statue of Lenin on top, the Palace of Soviets was designed to dwarf the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building.9 Lenin’s head was to be bigger than a five-storey house. His index finger, pointing towards a shining future, would have been six metres long.

The temple to the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.10.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Schlagworte: Bill Browder • Catherine Belton • John Sweeney • Killer n the Kremlin • kleptopia • Masha Gessen • nothing is true and everything is possible • Orthodoxy • Peter Pomerantsev • Putin's People • Red Notice • Russian church • Tom Burgis
• ISBN-10: 1-83773-184-5 / 1837731845
• ISBN-13: 978-1-83773-184-8 / 9781837731848