The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin
Lucy Ash (Icon Books, $36, 384 pages)
Journalist Lucy Ash has written a broadside attack on the Russian Orthodox Church and its relationship with Moscow, which inevitably focuses on how the Church provides ideological backing for Vladimir Putin’s regime. Ash, who has worked as a foreign correspondent in Russia for three decades, divides The Baton and the Cross into two sections: the first examining more than 1000 years of Church history and the second narrowly focused on the relationship between Church and state since Putin came to power in 2000. As Ash argues, “to understand Putin and his Patriarch (Kirill), you have to understand the past – the repression, the bombast, the myths.”
The picture Ash paints is not very flattering. She says that Russia – meaning the state under its various (non-communist) stylings – has not been subservient to Christianity as much as the Russian Orthodox Church has willing served as handmaiden to the state. Under the Tsars, beginning in the 13th century, there was a close but hardly equal relationship between Church and State, just as there commonly was in the West. By the mid-1800s, Peter the Great, created the Most Holy Synod to effectively control the Church. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Ash reports, said that Russian history would have been infinitely “more humane and harmonious” had Peter the Great not succeeded in bringing the Orthodox Church to heel. Ash admits the relationship of subservience is not one of unbroken fidelity to the state over the centuries, especially under Ivan the Terrible, but for most of the Church’s history, the expansion of the Russian empire meant the expansion of the Orthodox Church’s frontiers. Following the communist revolution in 1917 and a brief opposition by Patriarch Tikhon, his successor Metropolitan Sergius made peace with the communist regime as “our civil motherland.” Still, the communists persecuted the Orthodox Church as the number of functioning churches under Stalin fell from 50,000 in 1917 to 100 in the 1930s as monasteries were shuttered and priests and monks were killed and imprisoned. Still, at the World Council of Churches, the Russian Orthodox Church maintained that Christianity was not under assault under communism (future Patriarch Kirill was once a Moscow-approved representative to the WCC).
Which brings the author to the present day. Ash suggests Putin’s piety is a ploy used to promote Russian nationalism for his own political ends. But Ash is ruthless in her description of Patriarch Kirill, who she reports has profited from various state-tied business ventures and the generosity of the Russian elite. The Patriarch has blessed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has dealt harshly with priests who dissented from the attack. There are religious as well as political reasons for this, namely his desire to bring the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Moscow’s Patriarchate. The books informative and a useful reminder of the schism between eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, including persecution of Catholic (and Protestants) since the fall of communism, but Ash’s relentless anti-Russian Orthodox bias is likely to turn off many readers or turn them skeptical of some of her complaints of the religious and political elite in Moscow.
