Attachment 2772
The Spiritual Status of the Russian Federation
What should be the attitude of True Orthodox Christians to the contemporary Russian State? Is it the true successor-state to the pre-revolutionary Russian empire, requiring that its citizens – and especially those citizens who call themselves Orthodox - obey it with zeal and express loyalty to it (even if privately critical of certain of its actions or leaders)? Or is it illegitimate, requiring that its citizens adopt a confessing stance in relation to it, refusing obedience at least in certain spheres (for example, the war in East Ukraine)? To put it more bluntly: is the present-day Russian Federation a true authority established by God (
Romans 13.1)? Or is it akin to that apocalyptic beast of which the Holy Spirit says that its power is from the devil (Revelation 13.2)?
The Russian Orthodox Church was faced with this question shortly after the revolution in relation to the Soviet State, and came up with an unequivocal answer:
the Soviet State is cursed by God, and no confessing Orthodox Christian can recognize it. Already on November 11, 1917 the Local Council of the Russian Church meeting in Moscow declared that Soviet power was “descended from the Antichrist and possessed by atheism”: “Open combat is fought against the Christian Faith, in opposition to all that is sacred, arrogantly abasing all that bears the name of God (II Thessalonians 2.4)… But
no earthly kingdom founded on ungodliness can ever survive: it will perish from internal strife and party dissension. Thus, because of its frenzy of atheism, the State of Russia will fall… For those who use the sole foundation of their power in the coercion of the whole people by one class, no motherland or holy place exists. They have become traitors to the motherland and instigated an appalling betrayal of Russia and her true allies. But, to our grief, as yet no government has arisen which is sufficiently one with the people to deserve the blessing of the Orthodox Church. And such will not appear on Russian soil until we turn with agonizing prayer and tears of repentance to Him, without Whom we labour in vain to lay foundations…”
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The second, more difficult problem was: how to define the status of the new, post-Soviet Russian state, and therefore the Church’s attitude towards it. Here a sharp division emerged between the great majority of the Church’s flock inside Russia, the Catacomb or True Orthodox Church, and the majority of the flock of their brothers outside Russia, the Russian Church Abroad.
Inside Russia, the believers did not trust the changes that had taken place; for them, the leopard had not changed its spots (Jeremiah 13.23), the communists had merely assumed the mask of “democrats”, the wolves had simply put on sheep’s clothing while remaining inwardly as ravenous as before (Matthew 7.15). Outside Russia, on the other hand, most believers were displaying signs of “war weariness”; they wanted to believe that the Soviet Union had miraculously changed into a normal State overnight, that the KGB had disappeared, that the communists had repented, etc. When V.V. Putin came to power in 2000, this attitude intensified as nationalist feelings became mixed up with dogmatic and canonical issues; and in 2007 the Russian Church Abroad threw in the towel and was united with the Moscow Patriarchate, acknowledging the legitimacy of the Russian State.
Now, over twenty-five years since the beginning of
perestroika, we are in a better position to judge who were right: those inside or those outside Russia, and to what extent, and how, Russia has really been “reconstructed”.
One fact is not in dispute: Marxism-Leninism, the official ideology of the Soviet Union, has disappeared into the dustbin of history. There might still be a few “true believers” in the Russian Communist Party (or in the “Donetsk People’s Republic”). But if we are looking for convinced Marxists, we are more likely to find them in North Korea or Nepal or Zimbabwe or Venezuela - or even in Paris, New York or Glasgow - than in “the homeland of the revolution”.
But how significant is this fact? Not at all if we remember that
the essence of communism does not reside in Marxist ideology, but in the demonic spirit that tries to overthrow all God-established authorities. As the holy Elder Aristocles of Moscow and Mount Athos (+1918) said some years before the revolution to the future Abbess Barbara of the St. Mary Magdalene convent in Gethsemane: “An evil will shortly take Russia, and wherever this evil goes, rivers of blood will flow. It is not the Russian soul, but an imposition on the Russian soul. It is not an ideology, nor a philosophy, but a spirit from hell.”
A spirit from hell…
So if we are to determine the question whether the Russia of today has really been liberated from Sovietism, we have to ask: has that hellish spirit been exorcised? Is the demon-possessed body of Soviet Russia now at peace?
Spiritual diseases require spiritual treatments. So the spiritual sickness of Soviet Russia could only be cured by the spiritual cure of repentance. At the beginning of the 1990s there was a brief moment when the repentance of Russia looked possible, as thousands of people threw in their party cards in response to revelations of the shocking crimes of the Soviet period. But the stubborn spirit of rebellion quickly staged a comeback. In 1992 a “trial” of the Soviet Communist Party came up with the verdict: “Not Guilty”! In the same year, a parliamentary commission unearthed incontrovertible evidence that the leaders of the Moscow Patriarchate were KGB agents – but not a single patriarchal bishop repented or resigned!
...the truly Orthodox Church can in no way pray for a state that still remains under the anathema of the Patriarch Tikhon of 1918, which sees itself as the heir of the Soviet Union, is working openly for the restoration of that empire, and whose continued existence is the main obstacle to the only cure that will heal the ills of Russia: national repentance. If physical resistance is impossible, then spiritual resistance is both possible and obligatory. For “
friendship with the world is enmity with God” (James 4.4).
