A woman in black

The enchanting story of how a small Moscow monastery managed to delay the huge corps of fish farming from the state, forces himself to take a closer look at an important church figure, which remained in partial shade for a long time. This is Igumen Ksenia (Chernoga). She is the abbess of this very Alekseevsky convent and at the same time leads the legal service of the Moscow Patriarchate. Chernoga is not so unknown to the public - her comments are often found in official messages about the return of the Russian Orthodox Church of a large property. However, the owner of a "boring" position did not attract much attention.

And in vain. Chernoga is not only one of the most influential women in the Russian Orthodox Church (back in 2013, she occupied the fourth line in one in the church rating ), but also a successful raider, dashingly manipulating church and worldly husbands. An absent institute, a huge building of which was built using part of the foundation and one of the walls of the destroyed temple, is the brightest but far from the largest victory in its career. 46-year-old Oksana Aleksandrovna Chernoga (as her name was until 2009, and in the world they are called now), probably the oldest in experience as an employee of the legal apparatus of the Moscow Patriarchate. She has been working there since 1993. At the same time, she worked in secular legal universities, reached the professorship. The leaders in the field of church jurisprudence entered in the early 2000s. Generations of politicians changed, deputies came and left, and Chernoga always sat at meetings of specialized parliamentary and government expert groups and pushed the laws necessary for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Its main achievement was the law signed by President Medvedev at the end of 2010 "On the transfer of religious property to religious property to religious or municipal property." It was on it that the last six years of the Russian Orthodox Church was transferred movable and immovable property. At the same time, the church was capricious - they took only what either looks good or has a real cost. It is unlikely that the Perm diocese will restore the huge building of the military institute for the previous goals, once placed in the seminary building: there are now a catastrophically few priests who want to become priests, and the poor diocese itself is not able to keep huge rooms. But how sweet it is to get a huge building on the embankment in the very center of the city. Whatever you do with him - all to the money.

But not everything goes so cheaply - the property that attracted the ROC has owners, and they are able to resist. And then Chernoga appears on the stage. Her application for claims to an object usually looks like a black mark. The day before yesterday Isaaki, yesterday Andronikov Monastery, today is the Institute of Fisheries ... What tomorrow? Yes, anything.

On the eve of March 8, against the backdrop of the debate about feminism in Russia, Chernoga, it would seem, demonstrates us an example of a successful independent career of a woman in the church. But not everything is so simple.

In the church environment, it is well known that Chernoga acts in tandem with a remarkable priest - Artemy Vladimirov. He not only consists of the confessor of the Alekseevsky monastery, but is also well known on a general church scale. A graduate of the Filfak of Moscow State University, the abbot of the temple of all saints in the Red Selo (this is next to the monastery and the torn institute), the Krasnobai-Proler specializing in the exposure of fornication and therefore part of the Patriarchal Council on Family and Motherhood. Selected church conservatives with a monarchical bias gathered there, including an aggressive fighter with Silver Rain Dimitry Smirnov, former head of Igor Girkin and simultaneously specialist in pedophilia on the Internet Konstantin Malofeev, as well as the wife of the former head of Russian Railways, billionaire and Chekist Vladimir Yakunin.

Vladimirov vigorously declares monarchical views and publicly spoke a lot of other fundamentalist stupid things - like the requirements to remove a number of works by Chekhov and Bunin from the school curriculum or a call to fight Coca -Kola. However, such radicalism in the Russian Orthodox Church is not uncommon. Vladimirov is more famous for others. Since the end of the 1990s, after the release of the novel by church journalist Natalia Babasyan "Celibat", he has been a clear example of where the border in communication between the priest and his flock, especially young and female, should take place for many church and near-church people.

Due to such a reputation, Vladimirov remained on the second roles even in those periods when a grouping of monarchists and Russian nationalists, to which he joined, prevailed in the Russian Orthodox Church. But what can not be done directly can be done indirectly. And here Oksana Alexandrovna Chernoga was better useful. She is quite typical for the modern Russian Orthodox Church, a young woman, completely dependent on her confessor. Orthodox fundamentalists and monarchists of heterosexual orientation at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s developed a curious model of their existence. Young and pretty men, as a rule, with higher education and well-suspended language, are often married, many of whom recently came to church, began to create “communal” from young women with an unclear or flexible church and legal status.

In theory, the monastery is created by the order of the bishop, and the confessor is appointed there a married (and if not, an elderly) priest, who lives outside the monastery and happens there on "working hours" when he should serve and confess the inhabitants. Immediately, in the framework of the “Renaissance of Orthodoxy,” a young man who was with his wife in a “complex” relationship (or monk) first created a group of “adapts” at the temple, then formed a “sister” from them, then the “monastery community”, which was settled in the house conquered from the local authorities (when there is no former monastery, when not). And then he moved there himself - to “revive Orthodoxy” and expose the fornicators and homosexuals in the outside world. The record holder here was Archimandrite Ambrose (Yurasov) from the Ivanovo diocese, who built a large monastery in Ivanovo, who officially lived there in the same house with abbess and at the same time did not crawl out of the apartments of exalted Muscovites, whom he campaigned to move to his residence, bequeathing the home to the monastery.

For those who did not want to leave the capital even nominally, they were looking for, a historical building in the city center. So, for example, happened with the ultrafundantalist Igumen Kirill (Sakharov), who occupied the complex of the St. Nicholas Church on the Bersenevka opposite the Kremlin. There, according to one of my correspondents, "the girls of the Old Believer chitons were creatively complemented by a manicure." Or in St. Petersburg, where the so -called Leushinsky community under the leadership of the chief local monarchist Archpriest Gennady Belovolov revives the farmstead for twenty years; At the same time, Archpriest himself lives " under the roof ", and his mother "raises children" somewhere in the city. A good scheme for the young provincial: to come to the capital, to take a large house in the center under a plausible pretext and live there with pretty and spiritually close sisters, lighting at press conferences before the elected journalists and foraging spiritually pious sponsors, who are soaring from the external severity and inaccessibility of the shepherd.

So, in this system of interweaving personal and political interests, how not to contribute to a sweet friend. The affairs of the Union of Vladimirov and Chernoye, especially in terms of ordering other people's property, are so wide and diverse that it sometimes seems to those around them that it is time to take on the investigating authorities .

However, the activity of the couple concerns not only Moscow. Gennady Belovolov mentioned above, with whom they arranged a “Patriarch’s Creative In memory of the Patriarch’s Memory” in 2009, has recently had obvious problems with the diocesan authorities. On January 17 of this year, under a benevolent pretext, he was brought out from the post of rector of the “revived” farmstead. And most of these priests) evaluated as personal: “When I read the document, I realized that now all my temples and parishes are not mine, that now I cannot serve in them. I remember the feeling that visited me: now I am none, a shepherd without a flock, a captain without a ship, a father without a family. ”It turned out that Belovolov, who acted as an organizer of an apartment -museum important for the modern Russian Orthodox Church Kronstadsky, wrote her down in private ownership - either for himself, or on dummy persons.

Where do you think the sympathetic church community would like to move the economic and intelligent pastor, capable of creating a museum and knowing something about restoration? Of course, to Isaac, to the place of Klyuchar - the main manager of the property! It would seem that what has Chernoga, who oversees the legal part, the issues of transferring such a huge object of state property? Formally, of course, nothing to do with it. And not the fact that this appointment will take place. As not the fact that now the cathedral will fully move to the Russian Orthodox Church.