Orthodoxy, modernization, administration

Church researcher Nikolai Mitrokhin told why the Russian Orthodox Church fared better under Yeltsin, what it borrowed from Mussolini, why it took up arms against gays, and since when “Russian” means “Orthodox.”

— The State Duma has just adopted amendments to the Criminal Code that protect the “feelings of believers” - no one hides the fact that we are talking primarily about Orthodox Christians. For “insulting” these feelings you can now get up to three years in prison. About ten years ago, the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church concerned mostly believers, but now it is everywhere. How did this happen?

The main reason is this: the Russian government feels neither strong public support nor support from institutions. After the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, Russia began to significantly more energetically support institutions that clearly demonstrated their loyalty and readiness to defend the regime. And it turned out that there are actually quite a few such institutions. The state tried to create pseudo-institutions like the Public Chamber and youth movements. Otherwise, the state could only count on all sorts of pensioner and military unions, athletes, who always demonstrate loyalty to the authorities in exchange for solving their problems, and on the church, which, firstly, always declared its loyalty and support for statist ideas, and secondly secondly, she tried to convince the state that it was an all-Russian organization that had influence on 80 percent of the country’s population .

- Does she have this influence?

It has no influence on 80 percent of the country's population. In the course of sociological studies, about 60-80 percent of respondents declare that they are Orthodox. These figures are very inaccurate - for example, according to the Levada Center, in the peak year of 2009, both 67% and 80% of respondents called themselves Orthodox during the year, and two years earlier - 56%. From the point of view of sociologists of religion, this says little: it does not mean that people go to church, listen to the patriarch, and it certainly does not guarantee that they will vote as the patriarch says. The authorities understand, of course, that they are being duped, but there is no one to work with, and there is very little sincere support.

— It turns out that the state literally asked the church to strengthen itself?

I would say there is a counter movement here. On the one hand, the church wants government support. There is an idea that the state should allocate a special TV channel for the church. Of course, this was not stated, but it was implied that it should support him financially. Back in the early 2000s, the future Patriarch Kirill formulated the ideas that the state should collect a general church tax, that the “Law of God” should be introduced, that “Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture” should be extended to all schoolchildren, and that programs in biology and natural sciences should be coordinated with the church. The state, accordingly, has its own wishes for the church, which are that the church always and everywhere expresses support and campaigns for Putin, and not against.

—What does the church itself want? What does she need influence and money for?

There are many different tasks there. For example, the introduction of the “Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture” in schools is necessary in order to attract a new generation of believers to the church. They always try to raise children in the spirit that someone needs.

— What kind of parishioner does the Russian Orthodox Church dream of? Conservative?

This is how you look at it. Over the past eight years, the initiative in the church has passed into the hands of “progressives.” The preconditions for this began to take shape even before Kirill’s arrival. The fact is that in the church around the mid-2000s the composition of believers fundamentally changed. On the one hand, those grandmothers who made up the conservative majority within the church in the 1990s have died, and now the colossal problem of the church is the emptiness of rural parishes. Previously, rural parishes were the main ones; not only were there many of them, but the bulk of the believers were in them. During the 2000s, the number of believers in rural parishes decreased by 4-5 times.

— Is this church data?

No, such information was not officially announced by the church. This is data from field research, and this can be seen, for example, from interviews with priests that are published in Orthodox newspapers. Priests describe the situation in their parishes something like this: back in the late 1990s, we had 50-70 people going to services, but now only 5-10 remain. But there was an increase in the number of believers in cities. It is not very strong, but there is growth. And most importantly, the composition of believers in the cities also changed. In the 90s, these were the same rural women who moved to the cities in the 1950s-1970s, and now they are mostly women over 45 with a secondary technical education. Relatively speaking, accountants, saleswomen. This increased the average intellectual demand, because the grandmothers did not need anything at all, but these already needed some kind of conversation. At the same time, there was a change of priests within the church. Previously, the majority, especially in administrative positions, were conservative priests, ordained in Soviet times, who preferred not to climb outside the church fence, but now administrative posts are universally given to priests aged between 35 and 47 years, who came to the church during the era of perestroika. And they have a completely different view of the world, younger, more open, they have more experience of living in modern society.

— The main faces of the church in the public space have now become such radical priests as Vsevolod Chaplin and Dmitry Smirnov. The moderate conservative Andrei Kuraev has been completely pushed to the periphery, and liberals like Alexei Uminsky are listened to by three and a half intellectuals. And this, of course, is not the progressive face of the church, but something exactly the opposite.

With the exception of Dmitry Smirnov, who, nevertheless, is a Moscow intellectual who grew up in a classical dissident environment, this is the youngest and most progressive part of the church. Other people, such as Fathers Alexander Borisov, Alexei Uminsky, do not represent anyone at all except two or three “intelligentsia” parishes in Moscow. Well, there are still a couple of such parishes in St. Petersburg and a total of three dozen in the province. So Vsevolod Chaplin is just a typical representative of this very “young church”, a man who participated in Orthodox “informal” activities in the late 1980s, a member of the “Ecumena” club. These are former hippies, anarchists, members of other “informal” groups who came to the church in the 1990s, made a priestly career and now make up the most progressive part of the church. In any case, these people are talking about the need to attract young people and meet the realities of the new century. From a political point of view, they are most reminiscent of semi-fascist youth organizations of the 1920s and 1930s - they are guided by the experience of the Russian Christian movement in Europe at that time, which was precisely a modernization project for Russian Orthodoxy.

— What kind of modernization is this?

This is “conservative modernization” in the spirit of Benito Mussolini. Its Russian analogue is the People's Labor Union of Russian Solidarists, the Russian Student Christian Movement. These are the ideas of Ivan Ilyin, which are popular with Putin and in church circles: a strong national leader, a corporate state where the church has great influence and where there is a place for everyone who is ready to share certain positions, in particular to advocate the preservation of the traditionalist family model.

— The State Duma Committee on Family Affairs recently presented a family concept , which almost literally coincides with various program documents of the Russian Orthodox Church - it proposes a family model that is not so much traditional as archaic. This is no longer a nuclear family (married couple with children), but a large family with a bunch of children and grandparents.

Please note that the preamble to this document talks about gender. This is generally a unique case that the documents justify the need for the revival of a certain clan, which is associated with the tribe and so on. A large family, a large family, the immutability of traditions over thousands of years - these are all ideas coming from classical fascism - not Hitler's Nazism, but classical fascism of the Mussolini type - transmitted through Russian emigrant circles of the 20-30s and finding grateful readers, here these same informal boys in the 1980s. For Russian nationalists, who have a “controlling stake” in the Russian Orthodox Church, these are completely organic ideas.

— How did the “controlling stake” pass to Russian nationalists?

Since its formation in its current form, that is, in 1944-1945, the Russian Orthodox Church has been under the control of convinced Russian nationalists. Patriarch Alexy I was the chairman of the Tula branch of the Union of Russian People, and many of the bishops and priests he recruited early in the late 1940s were former prominent members of Black Hundred organizations. Since then, the dominant Black Hundred concept within the church has never been publicly expressed, but has always existed latently. And especially many ideological Russian nationalists came to the church after the red-brown putsch of 1993.

— It was at this moment that the words “Russian” and “Orthodox” began to become synonymous?

The public association between "Russian" and "Orthodox" began in the 1990s. At first it was in the nationalist press, such as the newspapers “Den” and “Zavtra”, and gradually it developed as a general opinion of, let’s say, all the people’s patriotic forces. Subsequently, part of the state press began to use this association, especially during the Putin era. But this is partly the fault of sociologists, who with their questions like “who do you consider yourself to be?” began to “confirm” this opinion with numbers.

- Sociologists - do you mean large organizations, such as Levada Center, FOM, VTsIOM?

Yes. All their survey activity comes from the attitudes of Valentina Chesnokova, who in the 1970s was in a narrow circle of Moscow sociologists along with Yuri Levada and Boris Grushin, translated Parsons, who was a key authority for this circle, and at the same time was so traditionally Orthodox. As a result, she was given a religious theme, and she formulated the survey principle, which is now used by all major foundations. People are asked this question: who do you consider yourself to be - Orthodox, Muslim, Buddhist, Protestant? Although, in fact, if a person called himself Orthodox, this does not mean anything, because the Orthodox are both Old Believers and followers of other Orthodox groups existing in Russia. But the most important thing is that no one asked whether the person went to church. So the idea “Russian means Orthodox,” on the one hand, was promoted by nationalist and then state media, and on the other hand, sociologists began to confirm this. So it turns out that if a person does not consider himself a supporter of some other faith or a convinced atheist, then he calls himself Orthodox.

— So in Soviet times, everyone who did not identify themselves or was not forcibly assigned to some national minority turned out to be Russian by default.

Yes. At the same time, church attendance in Russia remains approximately at the same level. At least twice a month, as studies from the mid-2000s showed , approximately half a percent of the population attend Sunday services. The same number of people regularly participate in Islamic and Protestant practices in Russia.

— That is, there are equal numbers of active Protestants and active Orthodox Christians in Russia?

Protestantism in Russia has been studied very poorly. There is good research on individual groups, but there is not a single researcher who studies the network of Protestant groups as a whole. There are also no reliable government statistics on these organizations. But I can unequivocally assert, judging by research in the regions, that even in central Russia Protestant groups and groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses are represented in total no less than Orthodox.

— What groups are included in this network?

Now the most popular groups in Russia are Baptists and Pentecostals. There are charismatics, Lutherans, the New Apostolic Church, and Seventh-day Adventists are widely represented. If you go to the Russian province, then in villages or hamlets there may very well not be any Orthodox parish, but there will be a Protestant group or a group of Jehovah's Witnesses. Or both together. Moreover, this is even in such relatively Orthodox regions as central Russia. For example, I conducted a study in 2004 in the Tula region, and there in the regional center there were about 400 Orthodox Christians who regularly went to church, and a total of about 2-2.5 thousand Protestants. In the region, individual rural Protestant communities accounted for up to 30 percent of the population. In one regional center of the Oryol region, where I was last year, a whole group of city leaders and their wives are Seventh-day Adventists. In the Russian provinces, if we dig a little, we will see Protestant communities in every locality where at least 500-1000 people live. And in the Far Eastern Federal District, in terms of the number of registered communities, they are far ahead of the Orthodox. Protestants, being non-drinking, rational people, naturally began to occupy administrative positions at the local level. This phenomenon is still poorly understood, and it is clear that Protestants who hold certain positions try not to advertise it.

“Until quite recently, the church actively fought against sects and Christian denominations, which it classified as sects, but now this fight has somehow come to naught.

The main thing that worries the church now is the issue of juvenile justice. Both ordinary priests and parishioners told me this, and this is one of the things outlined in the family concept of the State Duma committee. The family concept, among other things, includes the idea of ​​supporting Orthodox orphanages, sending children to monasteries, etc. - these are all such rosy dreams, and in practice, there are, I think, about five dozen such successful Orthodox social projects throughout Russia. Their survival rate is also an open and unexplored question. I consider giving children into the hands of the church an extremely dangerous thing. Juvenile justice is understood in the church extremely simply - that Orthodox Christians will be prohibited from beating their children. And that if they continue to do this, then they will be taken away from them.

— That is, children are perceived, in essence, not as a subject of law, but as an object of property.

Yes. The concept states that it is necessary to clearly define what child abuse is. This means that if children are beaten but not killed, it should not be classified as violence. In addition, children under Orthodox care, including in monasteries, are often poorly fed, if not starved. This is again reflected in the concept: that lack of material support and living conditions cannot be a basis for the removal of children. This is due to the fact that children in monasteries are forced to observe the same fasts as adults and are actively used in hard physical work. As they bless, that’s what they will do - carry bricks from dawn to dusk, weed the bed all day under the scorching sun.

— How many children are there in monasteries?

Nobody knows this. Social security authorities don’t allow you there.

- How do they get there? Are they orphans or children who have parents?

There are several monasteries that I saw where 30, 40, 50 children live, and they are of different origins. Mostly these are children from really low-income or disadvantaged families who are simply sent there. That is, it was probably even worse for them in their families. But there are very strange examples: so-called Orthodox families, such as a priest and his wife, who take in 50 or even more adopted children. How can we really provide them all with attention and care, not to mention food and clothing, upbringing and education? In my opinion, it is impossible. There is no convincing evidence of the success of these Orthodox experiments. Therefore, I think that we need to end them. The most interesting thing in the text of the concept is that it is written specifically about family priests with a large number of children.

— Do they serve as a role model?

If you delete from the concept everything connected with the church, delete individual lobbying initiatives such as the “Children’s Toy” program, the program for creating family children’s parks, programs to support the media that write about family values, and leave the basis, then it is striking that the concept is strong social democratic character. Its authors clearly know something about Scandinavian and German family support systems.

- At what points?

The wages of the mother, who cares for children, enrolling this as a separate work in a work experience-these are all things that were accepted in the northern and partially central Europe in the 1980-1990s under the influence of the Social Democrats. Another question is - what the authors of the concept refuse. And they refuse the entire model of social control, which is associated in Europe with the financing of family education. That is, they take from the European model only payment of family efforts on education, but all European programs to control spending, including juvenile justice, they throw out. This is the general approach of the Russian Orthodox Church to obtaining state money. Let us give us more, but do not dare to control how we spend them. However, the proposed concept is even in its basis - this story passed in Europe, and it turned out that if we encourage and finance families where three or more children and one of the parents sits all the time with them, then migrants begin to receive the main amount of money From Islamic countries. This prevents their integration and stimulates intra -family closeness. And I am absolutely sure that in Russia this model will work about the same.

- That is, the real beneficiaries of the Orthodox family concept will become large Muslim families?

Yes, and in this regard, the primary message is ridiculous that it is written in order to preserve some Russian family traditions and strengthen the role of the Church. I am absolutely sure that the authors of this concept are well aware that Muslims will not first be able to work with the real recipients of the goods. But this does not bother them, for them the main thing is to solve a very narrow problem, to ensure funding for large priests. And they prescribed this task in the concept.

- How did it happen that the issues of a family structure and sexual morality have become central to the church? The same -sex relations, for example, were not particularly interested in anyone a few years ago, but now it feels like they are the main threat to the church, the state and the Russian people.

Russia quickly makes up in terms of social structures and practices what it missed in the Soviet period. What happened in Europe in the 1970-1980s from the point of view of recognizing the rights of the LGBT community in Russia is happening now, and this causes the same resistance to the conservative part of society. From my point of view, a key story why this topic began to untwist is the idea of ​​holding a gay parade in Moscow. I spent more than 30 interviews with bishops, and the church is bishops. I asked what worries them, I was interested in how and what they were thinking about. They are in most of the working families, with 8 classes of education. These are very simple people, and they take information about life either from the TV or from the yellow newspapers that get to them. Gays that do not catch their eyes are not at all important to them. Gay parades were held in Russia, to which there was no such acute reaction, or where the diocese took part in a peculiar form. In 2005, there was a parade of gay clubs in Yekaterinburg, after which the diocese gathered priests, lined up in a column and passed after a column of gays, as if consecrating the streets of Yekaterinburg after their desecration, that is, de facto took part in the gay parade. Gay parades were held in St. Petersburg, and their diocese did not notice. True, the situation in Russia is fundamentally changing when something happens in Moscow. Now, if a gay parade takes place on the main street of Moscow, then further in the regions, not in all, but in many, it will be like this: Okay, a gay parade has passed in Moscow, then we can do it. Even if this gay parade for the first time collects 30 people, and several thousand opponents will stand against it, but if it passes under the protection of the authorities, this will mean the legalization of gay parades and gays as a public group on a scale of all of Russia.

-And yet why does the Russian Orthodox Church react so painfully to this topic? Catholics, if anything bothers, is same -sex marriages, and Western Protestants come across open gays even among pastors.

There are also many gays in the Russian Orthodox Church, many gays come to services, many gays among priests, in the episcopate and monasticism of the Russian Orthodox Church.

“But these are only guesses - no one says officially.”

The number of gay scandals inside the episcopate and monasticism is such that perhaps the homophobic position of the Church is a reflection of the internal collective trauma of the Church itself. It is difficult for her to explain, including herself, as it turns out that many clergy are gays, and moreover, some of them are actively entertaining with children. In order not to be unfounded, I can say that two years ago an employee of the Kostroma diocese, abbot, was planted behind the pedophilia . Prior to this, Orthodox newspapers accused of pedophilia a senior employee of the Nizhny Novgorod diocese, Archpriest Valentin Sazanov. He was arrested and condemned, and then released by amnesty the rector of the Chelyabinsk temple in the name of the icon of the Virgin "Unexpected Joy" bygumen Sevastian. In general, such stories, even with judicial precedents and publications in the press, are enough.

-Does the church somehow counteract this?

A couple of years ago, the former Yekaterinburg Bishop Nikon (Mironov), who became the hero of the most famous gay scandal, received a reward from the patriarch .

-Did it go to his dioceses with a procession for a gay parade?

Yes, but already with another bishop. There are generally funny people. Nikon came up with organizing "Dmitriev Day" - like, there are women's beauty contests, it is wrong, it is necessary to promote "traditional male culture" among the boys. And the diocese annually organized bodybuilding competitions, fights walls on the wall, game on gusls and other male sports. All this, of course, looked very strange. This same Nikon (Mironov) at the last meeting of the Holy Synod last week was appointed by the bishop again. That is, he left the illness, was in the monastery, then he headed the parish in Moscow, and now he became a vicar bishop, but already in the Perm Diocese. We can recall Moscow "gobblers", bearded men in black and leather, also awarded the patriarchal awards, which last year hung posters with gay porn on the fence and shot them from crossbows. Well, and so on. That is, an active struggle against homosexuality is an attempt to overcome ourselves without changing anything in oneself. Or a way to get off from the inevitable exposure. I think that Russia expects the same revelations as the States in 2010-2011, when a significant number of Catholic episcopate and clergy were exposed as pedophiles.

- You mentioned the church tax. Is this a really discussed issue?

Yes, Cyril performed several times about this. This idea is German, and Cyril, who is well acquainted with Germany, tried to advance it in Russia: it is necessary that all citizens pay tax, who does not want, he will refuse. But it was understood that by default many will pay. After several such performances, there was a rather strict statement by the Minister of Taxes and fees that this will not happen. In general, for the church, the best times were under Yeltsin, although now official church representatives condemn them. Under Yeltsin, the church received to the maximum of what was possible.

- And now where did the church come from?

The bulk of church finance is the income from candles. Candles are made from paraffin, which is a residual product from oil refining, it costs a penny, the production of candles costs a penny, is already sold for full -fledged rubles. There are several thousand percent of the income with each candle sold. This is about 70 percent of the church budget. The rest consists of income from the runs, that is, services that are performed inside the temple, memorial notes, different prayers and so on, and sales of all products in a church shop. The church receives funds for the reconstruction of temples or the construction of new ones from sponsors - now mainly from state or related to the state. The income of the church is very small. I think it is comparable to the budget of the Russian Football Union.

- Contrary to widespread opinion, is the Church poor? What amounts are we talking about?

She is not rich. The state prevented the danger that was in the early 2000s, that the church would turn into an internal Russian offshore. And so the income, perhaps, is several hundred million dollars a year, maybe a billion - this is 19 thousand nominally existing parishes. Another question is that priests, bishops drive on expensive cars. These cars are sometimes bought by a tie from the parishes, sometimes they are given a large sponsor.

- Who are these sponsors, what drives them?

In the most innocent version, these are people who build temples, especially in large enterprises, because it is a social object. At the metallurgical plant, at the entrance, a beautiful church was built, but we do not have? It was a common trick in the 1990s. Now there are three main motives. One motive is to just boast of wealth before fellow countrymen. Relatively speaking, I or my parents were born in such a village, we must somehow note this, well, let me build a church. They told me that there are villages where 2-3 of such churches were built, in which, of course, no one goes, they just stand under the castle. The second motive-something is built somewhere at the request of the church authorities. Relatively speaking, the bishop comes to the governor or the mayor of the city and says: we have many believers in such and such, they are uncomfortable to ride, the elections are ahead, do you want to build a church there? The mayor calls the market owner and says: this month you don’t transfer me to Cyprus, but you will build a church. Here they build the foundation of the church, after which nothing further is done until the next elections. The next elections are built by walls. And sometimes at such a pace-in 10-12 years-the church is being completed. The third, perhaps the most common option-the next visitor comes to the official to solve the issue, but he says: you know, you do not stick in the envelope, we now have a new vice-governor in security issues, a beast-star, but I have conceived the church in the here Build your native village. Well, the construction of this church begins in the native village. The cost of work for each temple is individual, no general standards exist, but for the temple there are a lot of individual types of work, not only walls and a dome, but also decoration, decoration, summing up the road, fence, etc.. To list on all these occasions of a construction company or arrival, if there is a “understanding” priest, you can many, and some part of this will go to the construction of the temple.

- That is, the construction of churches is a way of pumping corruption money?

Yes. Moreover, as far as I can judge, very common.

- You do not admit that a very religious person goes and builds the temple, because he believes that this is good and right?

There are such, but there are very few of them. And where there is religiosity, and where vanity is not always clear. There are enthusiasts, but, as a rule, Orthodox enthusiasts are poor people. If there were some more or less significant mass of Orthodox businessmen, then these businessmen, as is customary in Russian history, would become ctitors of temples, chairmen of parish councils. The temples would have developed, there would be some other people besides them, and as a result, a strong community of believers would be formed.

- It seems logical. Why not spend money on some kind of work or build a goddess, which, unlike temples, are very few.

There are few of them, because people spend some fixed amount on the temple, and that’s all. There is a lot of non -inexperienced temple - there was not enough money. And if you start an almshouse, people are constantly working there, you have to pay for the light, that is, you need to create some kind of enduum. No one is ready for this.

-What are the prospects of the current church-state alliance? What really can be accepted and done? How much does this have a big folk support? And how can the situation develop?

This is the situation. Putin, in principle, is not a religious person, and he is not inclined to scatter resources just like that. Under him, the church received much less than under Yeltsin. Moreover, outwardly, on the level of the TV or at the level of public rhetoric, it seems to be large signs of respect. The church will not argue with this, because it is better to get signs of respect than nothing at all or, moreover, to experience direct state pressure. And Putin can crush, take the church for some kind of tender place so that she does the same, but already under duress. There was a good moment for the church under Medvedev, which was not even so much connected with his own position as with the position of his wife. Under Medvedev, the church received advancement in school education (when, in a very weakened form, by the choice of students, but nevertheless, the defense industry was introduced massively, this is not what the churches wanted, but it is more than nothing) and in the army (the Institute of Military Priests (the Institute of Military Priests , the experiment was a fault failed). After Putin’s return, the church has not yet received anything tangible. There is Orthodox propaganda on TV. There is an antihean law that has support from the presidential administration, since it distracts the population from real problems. At the same time, irritation of the population against the church is growing rapidly. The city public, still quite benevolent to the church-that is, we don’t go to the church, but well, when the golden domes shine somewhere, sometimes you can even go to church, put a candle and go out immediately-the anti-church position is increasingly tough. In the event of a change in the political climate, this can lead the church to large unpleasant consequences. Last year, in the Oryol diocese, the priests asked me: "What will happen to us after the revolution?" That is, they draw direct analogies with 1917. I am absolutely sure that the case will not come to the forced closure of the temples, but the church marginalization is possible, if the winners reduce its presence in state media by 90 percent, they will turn the introduction of the defense industry or, for example, the church will pay taxes.