Away win

Emigrants of recent decades have erased the differences between Russian Orthodox churches

The territorial division of Orthodox churches, recorded in their names, has long no longer accurately reflected the differences between them. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad has long been active not only abroad; it also has several parishes in Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is also not an internal matter of Russia. After the Russian world was split into pieces by new state borders in 1991, many Orthodox parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church remained in Ukraine, Belarus, and other post-Soviet republics. But even without this, there are plenty of churches abroad that belong to the Moscow Patriarchate.

There are parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church on all inhabited continents (even in Antarctica, at our polar station “Bellingshausen” an Orthodox church was erected). In Germany, for example, in the Berlin and German diocese there are fifty parishes, four dozen churches and several chapels. The ROCOR, which also has extensive representation in this country, boasts “only” 37 parishes. The Russian Orthodox Church has not only several large and small foreign dioceses (such as Vienna, Hague-Netherlands, Argentine and South American, etc.), but also very exotic subordinate organizations like the Japanese Autonomous Orthodox Church with one and a half hundred parishes and its own seminary. Moreover, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Belarusian Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate enjoy very large autonomy, even if this word is not formally in their names. So which organization is now more present “abroad” is still a big question.

However, the church is not only and not so much temples, cathedrals and chapels, but people. And Russian people abroad today are far from the same as they were twenty or thirty years ago. Once upon a time, the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church consisted of white emigrants and members of their families. Then those few who went to the West during the Second World War were added there, and those who escaped from behind the Iron Curtain in the post-Stalin decades also arrived. With such a small flock, the traditions of the ROCOR (in particular, the condemnation of the Moscow Patriarchate, which tried to make peace with the atheistic government) were preserved quite reliably. But after the fall of the USSR, only a few years were enough for the old emigrants to find themselves in the minority.

There are a huge number of immigrants from Russia and other former Soviet republics in the West. The Orthodox part of those who “freshly departed” in their homeland went to the churches of the Russian Orthodox Church and in the last fifteen years have not been too worried about the “atheistic” government (fortunately, the current rulers are not at all seen in atheism). And the notorious question of ecumenism, which infuriated the strict ROCOR, apparently was not so pressing for the new emigrants. Even if those who left for a foreign land in the 1990s and 2000s began to go to the temple of the “abroad”, they were not always able to accept the traditional opposition of churches for those. As a result, the Russian Church abroad and Russians abroad became increasingly divergent.

The situation—at least outwardly—looks in such a way that the Russian Orthodox Church won not only in Russia, surviving to the end of the anti-church Soviet rule, but also abroad. The number of believers loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate outside the historically Russian lands has become comparable to the number of the flock of “foreigners.” And the existence of two unfriendly Russian Orthodox churches has finally lost its meaning.

Vladimir DZAGUTO