In previous studies, the well-known sociologist Nikolai Mitrokhin examined two cornerstones of contemporary Russian Orthodox church life: its economics and its bishops. Here, he takes on a broader perspective. As the subtitle indicates, this is a study of the current state and problems of the entire Russian Orthodox Church.
Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ lives up to its aim. At nearly seven hundred pages, with nineteen tables and charts, a bibliography, an index, a glossary, and a thorough discussion of the literature, this is the most exhaustive available analysis of the Russian Orthodox Church – that is, that ecclesiastical body also known as the Moscow Patriarchate – in the years after perestroika up to March 2004. While the bulk of the book concentrates on the church’s activity in the former Soviet Union, chapters also examine its activity worldwide.
The book is organized in three broad sections. Part I covers the internal life of the church – that is, the relations among Orthodox clergy, hierarchy and the laity. Part II considers the relations of the church with the state and with secular society. Part III (this is framed particularly originally) examines the church “in competitive conditions” – that is, the relations of the Moscow Patriarchate with other religious groups and in various geographical areas, particularly when the church is not in the majority. Taken together, the three sections paint a broad and morose portrait of a church which, according to Mitrokhin, has largely failed to meet the challenge of adjusting to post-Soviet conditions.
The picture is bleak. The contemporary Russian Orthodox Church appears to be made up largely of old women and social losers. The pillars of society, middle-class families who come to church with their children, do not appear here. If the Roman Catholic church in New York City could deliver 40-60% of the Democratic vote up to the 1960s, and therefore could reasonably be regarded by the state as a “player,” the Orthodox Church in Russia now delivers between 2 and 4% at best. 53% have never been to communion. In 2003, on Easter, the holiest day of the Orthodox calendar, approximately half of one percent of the population of the city of Moscow went to church.
The social aspect of the church is even worse. There is virtually no organized charitable work, or work with youth. Bishops feed off their flocks even more extravagantly than did sixteenth-century voevodas. Laity is alienated from a privileged and distant parish clergy, which in turn is alienated from an even more privileged and distant hierarchy. Candles represent the largest source of income. Rather than engaging the mass media, the church shies away from it. The usual suspects – Roman Catholics, Baptists, Pentecostalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses – do a far better job of outreach, education, and growth, even with the joint efforts of Moscow Patriarchate, the Russian state, and Muslim communities against these “interlopers.”
In short, if there were any doubt, it is now gone. For all the attempts to reclaim its legacy, the Russian Orthodox Church in its pre-1917 form is irrevocably vanished, as is the monarchy to which it was linked. The pious peasantry that was its backbone no longer exists, neither as pious nor as peasantry. The scholarly publications, the network of imperial charity institutions, the countless chapels that dotted the countryside, the general level of Orthodox Christian literacy – just about all those features, in short, which characterized the Russian Orthodox tradition in on the eve of the First World War are history. To use Mitrokhin’s colorful metaphor, “restoring Orthodoxy” in Russia is not a matter of healing a sick and burnt tree, but of grafting a new branch onto a stump.
Mitrokhin’s comparison of Russia to other countries and regions, particularly those in the former Soviet Union, is instructive. Consider Ukraine: if one adds up its three major jurisdictions (Moscow Patriarchate, Kievan Patriarchate, and the Autocephalous Orthodox Church), at nearly fifteen thousand parishes, Ukraine – not Russia – is currently the largest Orthodox government in the world. No wonder holding on to this region is key. And Moscow’s attempt to bring the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia within its fold starts to look less domineering and more desperate.
Mitrokhin looks beneath the surface clerical structures. It is fascinating to be taken behind the scenes and to discuss the chances of each prospective candidate for the position of Patriarch – there has been little as entertaining since the recent days when bookies placed odds on the next Pope. His frank discussion of the “gay mafia” sheds welcome light on a subject usually mentioned, if at all, in meaningful whispers. And his coverage of the three main factions in the clergy – the modernists or liberals, the traditionalists or conservatives, and the fundamentalists – is a veritable who’s who of the Russian Orthodox Church today.
Despite the book’s many strengths, one might take issue with two problematic aspects. The first is the criteria Mitrokhin uses to assess the church. The second is his neglect of the historical context, which at several key moments might lead him to make more nuanced conclusions.
Mitrokhin claims that he is adopting a “purely scholarly” point of view. Let us leave aside whether such a thing exists. Instead, it is fair to say that Mitrokhin’s presentation lacks a fundamental sympathy for his subject. Mitrokhin believes that the Moscow Patriarchate had the chance in the early 1990s to shake off its shackles and, in conditions of relative freedom, to recast itself as a modern, functional religious group. In other words, Mitrokhin would have liked the Moscow Patriarchate to sever its relation to the now post-Soviet government, indeed to denounce that relation, and, with no privileged status, to join a level playing field of religious groups involved in education, catechization, and active missionary work. (These last three, in his opinion, being the essential activities of successful religious groups, which is why he so admires the Roman Catholic church and various Protestant confessions in particular. This is also why he prefers clerical liberals to conservatives.)
But this underestimates several things. One is the real impact of the Soviet period on the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia. Another is the historical context of Orthodox Christianity. The last two legacies make it very difficult for the Moscow Patriarchate to become the ideal, progressive religious organization Mitrokhin would like it to be.
It is, in fact, the absence of historical context that makes it difficult to ascertain how much of the Russian Orthodox Church’s problems now are specific to the post-Soviet situation and how much they are endemic or systematic. One might argue that to diagnose a problem now, it does not matter whether that problem has a history of eight years, eighty, or eight hundred. But that begs an important distinction. If a problem can be attributed to the years under Soviet rule, or from 1927, 1937, or 1943, then for the present-day church to distance itself from it and to correct it is of a very different order than to address something that has been chronic or is built-in – or if it predates, say, 1666.
Where Mitrokhin does mention the pre-revolutionary context, it is invariably informative. He is absolutely right, for example, to point to the Local Council of 1917–1918 and its proposed reforms as a potential turning point – and what it meant for church culture in 1943 when metropolitans Sergii (Stragorodskii), Aleksii (Simanskii), and Nikolai (Iarushevich) implicitly ignored those reforms, instead agreeing with Stalin’s suggestions. Admittedly, the metropolitans did not exactly have a choice (and some mention of what transpired between 1918 and 1943 might have helped). But by their rejection, the metropolitans did indeed de facto create a new religious organization. If contemporary bishops, then, were moved to clean house, they would have both a ready example within their own recent tradition to which to turn and a handy villain. But an institution that devotes an entire section of its leading seminary’s museum (that of the Trinity Sergius Lavra) to a celebratory portrayal of Patriarch Aleksii I’s collaboration with Stalin has chosen otherwise.
How else might the pre-revolutionary context usefully inform Mitrokhin’s work? Any discussion of popular piety would be far richer if it incorporated the early twentieth-century debates and ethnographic research (and a comparative context), not to mention that of recent scholars.^[1] The veneration of relics as a source of monastic income is hardly unique to the present, for example; it has been a staple since relics (and monasteries) existed, in Western and Eastern churches alike. Before bemoaning that churches in such state institutions as hospitals, prisons, and the military are considered state property and can be shut down whenever the state desires, one might consider their status before 1917.^[2] It makes little sense to claim that the 1993 ban on clerical participation in political parties is based on contemporary politics and not canon law (P. 257): when church fathers drew up the canons, political parties did not exist. On the other hand, alluding to clerical participation in early twentieth-century Russian political life, especially that of the St. Petersburg clergy, would have been most illuminating.^[3]
Some of Mitrokhin’s statements are misleading. It is not entirely true that in pre-revolutionary Russia only informal spiritual fathers (dukhovniki) were regarded as “true” priests, “while the church hierarchy did not inspire confidence” (P. 96). This is to diminish the real charisma and authority of such archbishops as Antonii (Khrapovitskii), Antonii (Vvedenskii), and Tikhon (Bellavin). The most popular pre-revolutionary priest in Russia, Father Ioann of Kronstadt, combined both personal charisma and official status.^[4]
Similarly, it is not “the shortage of monasteries in the Soviet period and the difficulty of access to them” that “formed the myth of the special holiness of monasticism” (P. 106). Monks and nuns enjoyed higher valuation than parish priests in pre-revolutionary Russia, too, and there was no shortage of monasteries then; in fact convent enrollment, as the work of William Wagner shows, exhibited an unprecedented boom in the last thirty years before 1917, with no corresponding loss of status. Finally, as Gregory Freeze and other scholars have established, Peter I’s reforms (which do not, of course, date to the early seventeenth century) did not “place the Church under the complete control of the government” (P. 275).^[5]
More seriously, it is not exactly fair to blame the Moscow Patriarchate for neglecting “outreach” in their seminary students in favor of the “beautiful execution of ritual” and the restoration of churches. Since the days when Vladimir sent his emissaries to Byzantium, descendants of the Rus’ have cherished the beauty of Russian Orthodox services. It would be asking a lot of an institution to sacrifice one of its foundational myths.
Having said all of that, one might still draw some important “working” conclusions from this important book. Despite Mitrokhin’s pessimism, the Russian Orthodox Church may still be able to creatively engage the realities of the post-imperial early twenty-first century. Not every aspect of religious life can be quantified. The children of pious professionals (and they do exist) in ten or twenty years’ time may well have an impact on church life far beyond their present numbers. The quality and quantity of publications on religion (Mitrokhin analyzes only those published directly by the Church) is greater than he suggests. And, depending on how it is handled, re-establishing communion with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia may bring a breath of freer air to Moscow.
Whichever course the Russian Orthodox Church chooses to follow, however, it should take a long look at the problems Mitrokhin describes. And anyone interested in the present and future of the Russian Orthodox Church should do the same.