‘Renegade priests’

But our delegation was church-oriented, a group from United Church of Christ congregations in Northern California, and we were focused on how this rapprochement would affect the freedom to practice religion in this Communist state. Churches had been shuttered, priests exiled (or worse) and any participation in religion was cause for political and social ostracism. We wanted to visit the remaining churches and talk to the priests.

Our hosts trotted out some tame clergy for us to meet, but we found our way to two priests in backwater villages whom, I will forever remember, as renegade priests. Both these men were relatively young and somehow unbent by the burden of their calling in such an oppressive political system.

These men were soldiers in a two-fronted war, fighting against the state — and against the church hierarchy that seemed intent on getting along and getting good with the Kremlin. These renegade priests had been sidelined because of their eagerness to be priests and to behave like priests in service to the needs of the elderly villagers who knelt on the cold stone floors of their churches.

Now, 35 years later, I’m confronted with another generation of renegade priests and their spokesman in exile, thanks to the Moscow Times (which incidentally reports on Russia from Riga, Latvia, these days — but that’s another story for another time).

Now the renegades have organized themselves into a resistance front, thanks to social media. It started in March 2022, right after the invasion of Ukraine, with an open letter to the Kremlin calling for an end to the war in Ukraine and peace between the two nations. More than 300 signed the letter, and the backlash was immediate. Most were defrocked, and many left to serve Orthodox churches outside Russia. Many more were caught in Russia’s far-reaching crackdown on dissent against the war in any form.

So how did we get from total repression of religion in the Soviet Union to Vladimir Putin’s enthusiastic embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church and its head, Patriarch Kirill? The celebration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus had a lot to do with it.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of perestroika and glasnost (openness) allowed the 1988 celebration to go on and even opened a few churches in recognition of the event. The Russian people, even those who hadn’t been in a church in decades, approved, and the church reciprocated by silencing the renegade priests, extending an iron hand over any dissent.

By the time Putin took power in 2000, the church was a willing pawn, ready to ignore government oversteps that the world might expect the church to condemn. And the Kremlin found a willing partner in the church, which benefited from the new “bromance” on many levels. Elaborate new cathedrals were built with public funds, and church properties that had been absorbed by the government were returned, refurbished and reopened.

The church had become a useful tool, and Putin called in his bets after the invasion of Ukraine. Church leadership lauded the attack as a holy war, and The Times reports that Patriarch Kirill said in the early days of the war that “sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins.”

And it didn’t hurt that the church was quick to affirm that the Baptism of Rus in Kiev, long considered the birth of the Russian nation, added fuel to Putin’s argument that the Russian people were just reclaiming what was rightfully theirs.

Putin seeks to re-create the Soviet state with all the power and glory that he believes it once held, and the new repressive state he’s constructing has a willing and enthusiastic partner that the Soviet Union never had — the church.

Michelle Carter, the author of “From Under the Russian Snow” (Bedazzled Ink, 2017) and “Children of Chernobyl: Raising Hope From the Ashes” (Augsburg, 1993), is the former managing editor of the San Mateo Times.