LUCY ASH, a former BBC producer of documentaries, has written her first book, The Baton and the Cross, a brave attempt to explain the historical background and current position of church-state relations in Russia.
She scampers through Russian history from the earliest written sources to the 20th century in part one, and then in part two focuses on Russia today and the Russian Orthodox Church’s relationship with the Putin regime. Although in her introduction she distinguishes between “a self-serving hierarchy and the clergy and nuns who look after the flock”, she proceeds to condemn the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as a whole rather than distinguish it clearly from the Moscow Patriarchate’s upper echelons and its leader Patriarch Kirill, who both fully deserve her biting criticism.
The image that she conveys of the ROC is blisteringly negative and too one-sided: today, there are many well-educated clergy who are very unhappy about their Church’s support for the Ukraine war; the ROC as a whole since the fall of Communism has evolved in a positive direction, with a new focus on biblical study and an emphasis on concern for the ills of society; most parish churches now have groups who care for the poor, the sick, and the socially deprived.
Nevertheless, the author analyses well Patriarch Kirill’s volte-face, from being open to new ideas and possible reform to being someone who is abjectly subservient to President Putin’s regime, and pronounces in his sermons in relation to the Ukraine war what can only be termed Christian heresy.
Ash writes well with many an enjoyable metaphor: the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces is likened to “the castle of an evil wizard in a Disney film”, and an unusual Russian Orthodox nun is described as “an abbess with Oprah Winfrey-like business skills”.
Ash is not, however, a professional historian: her text contains inaccuracies, and many footnotes do not give sufficient details for a source. Her claim that the ROC has “space for Old Believers” is not true (they are schismatics in the eyes of the ROC); her oft-repeated description of Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov as President Putin’s confessor has no basis in fact; not just priests can go behind an iconostasis — any man can, but no women; and the ROC does not ban statues, as evidenced by the churches in the Perm area (Urals), which contain many.
Some bits of her scamper through Russian history could be challenged. Was the Decembrist rebellion of 1825 really the beginning of the Russian revolutionary movement? The first revolutionary group, Land and Freedom, was founded only in 1861, and the revolutionary party, the People’s Will, emerged only in 1879.
One of the most interesting aspects of Soviet history, the dissident movement from the 1960s to Gorbachev’s reforms, is not mentioned, apart from the activity of the Orthodox priest Fr Gleb Yakunin. What a chance that would have given to show how involved Russian Christians, including members of the ROC, were in the fight for intellectual liberty and a democratic government.
Xenia Dennen is a Russian specialist, and chairman of Keston Institute, Oxford.
The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from pagans to Putin
Lucy Ash
Icon Books £25
(978-1-83773-183-1)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50