Unholy crusade

The purge of Russia’s Defence Ministry has reached Patriot Park, Moscow’s military Disneyland

After a slew of arrests in the Russian Defence Ministry leadership, the cover has now also been blown on the true spiritual bond between the army and the Russian Orthodox Church. It turns out — would you believe! — that the most ambitious project of former Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu — the Russian Armed Forces Cathedral in Patriot Park near Moscow — was a giant get-rich-quick scheme for some generals after all.

The campaign to demythologise the cathedral, whose very construction was presented as a sign of God’s blessing of future Russian victories, was launched on 5 August by the well-known Russian military correspondent Alexander Sladkov. He demanded an investigation into “money being collected from Russian officers to construct the cathedral” on his Telegram channel, which has over 900,000 subscribers.

Colonel Vyacheslav Akhmedov, the director of Patriot Park, where the sinister khaki cathedral now stands, and the head of the Defence Ministry’s Main Directorate for Innovative Development, Major General Vladimir Shesterov, were arrested on fraud charges on 5 August, with both men seeing their assets and property seized. They were the latest in a long line of arrestees from the team of the former defence minister, a list headed by his former deputies Timur Ivanov and Dmitry Bulgakov.

Akhmedov faces charges for embezzlement to the tune of over 40 million rubles (€403,000) for purchases made for Patriot Park, but this is clearly just the tip of the iceberg. Several other managers from the country’s main military propaganda complex, whose work is now on hold, have also been arrested. Military investigators say they have been monitoring the suspicious activity of Akhmedov and his team since 2021.

Cannon law

The cathedral, like the park itself, was the byproduct of the resurgent patriotism that sprang up in Russian society following the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. With the overwhelming majority of Russians supporting the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula, according to opinion polls at the time, Shoigu signed an order for Patriot Park to be built near Moscow, on a site covering some 3,500 hectares. Dubbed Russia’s “military Disneyland” by some, the park features interactive displays of Russian and Soviet military equipment, as well as captured Western military vehicles and artillery, and pitches its ultranationalist and militaristic propaganda narratives to visiting families.

As Shoigu and his associates were keen to point out, the cathedral isn’t just the conceptual and mystical centre of the park but of the armed forces as a whole, which, in turn, are the core of Russian society. The Russian Armed Forces Museum and Cathedral Complex, which forms an administrative subsection of the park, is on the Defence Ministry’s books, meaning that every candle and every waft of incense comes out of Russia’s military budget.

All of which is a gross violation of the Russian constitution. The country is a secular state, and its armed forces should have no religious connotation. Christians of various denominations, Muslims, Buddhists and non-believers all serve in the Russian army, yet we hear nothing about Russian Armed Forces mosques, Buddhist monasteries or atheist clubs being built. But as Patriarch Kirill noted at one of his last meetings with Shoigu, the army and the Russian Orthodox Church are kindred spirits within Russian society.

Where God meets Stalin

One can best see this kindred spirit in a figurative row of frescoes due to appear in the cathedral which must have had traditional Orthodox believers gasping in horror. They refer neither to the Gospels nor to the lives of the saints, but to the new cult of Russia’s Great Victory in World War II, born under Putin, and to the veneration of the state’s military power. The focal point of such a cult was, unsurprisingly, due to be “consecrated” on its main holiday — 9 May, Victory Day, but a furore over frescoes of Stalin, Putin, other Soviet and modern “leaders” and political slogans such as “Crimea is ours” arose in April 2020.

The frescoes were removed, but Archpriest Leonid Kalinin, the chairman both of the artistic council and of the construction of the cathedral, reassured adherents: “The mosaic has been preserved and will be in the museum.”

But no sooner had Putin been made an exhibit of than the next scandal occurred, with the then-powerful Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev and the liberal wing of the church opposing the “canonisation” of Stalin in a Victory Parade mosaic. Andrey Kartapolov, then head of the Defence Ministry’s Main Military-Political Directorate, tried to defend the sacred image of Stalin. The battle for Stalin in the church dragged on and it took until 16 May for Kalinin to say that Putin and Stalin would both be museum pieces, and in the accompanying museum it would be possible to worship his immortal image, which had previously been associated with the tragedy of the complete destruction of the church and the martyrdom of millions of persecuted Orthodox Christians. Consecration was postponed to beyond 9 May.

But even if Stalin was removed, many interesting and unusual things have remained on the walls of the church. The imagery in the cathedral seems either to turn the Red Army into an Orthodox army or to present Orthodoxy as an organic part of Soviet-Bolshevik ideology. Both are equally anti-historical and anti-Orthodox, but both aim to create the founding myth of a new religion, established under Putin on the ruins of both Orthodoxy and communist atheism.

The price is right

More than 600 people earned state and military awards for the construction and decoration of the cathedral in 2020, just a tiny number of whom have been subjected to investigation. The Voskresenie Foundation, which was meant to collect donations nationwide — those same donations Sladkov complained about — reported bringing in about 3 billion rubles (€29.4 million), and the same amount came from the combined Moscow city and Moscow region budgets shortly before construction was complete.

The federal budget allocated only 318 million rubles (€3.1 million) for “religious items”, according to the state procurement website, while the Defence Ministry budget is classified. The site mentioned 128 state contracts relating to the cathedral, and some experts estimate total expenditure at 9 billion rubles (€90.7 million). Corruption is plain to see in there being a single supplier for most items and a sharp increase in prices during the tendering process, such as in the “system for fastening decorative elements”, which increased from an initial 13.5 million rubles (€136,000) to 1.1 billion rubles (€11 million).

The Russian Armed Forces Museum and Temple Complex is still earning money from the cathedral too. Its website offers visits to the observation decks for 9,000 rubles (€90), visits to the bell tower for 6,000 rubles (€60) and sightseeing tours for 4,500 rubles (€45).

The khaki cathedral may have been built to instil fear and convey the power and invincibility of the Russian Armed Forces, and while it looks like there is indeed much to be afraid of, it would appear to be for completely different reasons than one might think.