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Believing in Russia – Religious Policy
after Communism
This book presents a comprehensive overview of religious policy in Russia

since the end of the communist regime, exposing many of the ambiguities
and uncertainties about the position of religion in Russian life. It reveals how
religious freedom in Russia has, contrary to the widely held view, a long
tradition, and how the leading religious institutions in Russia today, including
especially the Russian Orthodox Church but also Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist
establishments, owe a great deal of their special positions to the relationship
they had with the former Soviet regime. It examines the resurgence of religious
freedom in the years immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, showing
how this was subsequently curtailed, but only partially, by the important law of
1997. It discusses the pursuit of privilege for the Russian Orthodox Church and
other ‘traditional’ beliefs under Presidents Putin and Medvedev, and assesses
how far Russian Orthodox Christianity is related to Russian national culture,
demonstrating the unresolved nature of the key question, ‘Is Russia to be an
Orthodox country with religious minorities or a multi-confessional state?’ It
concludes that Russian society’s continuing failure to reach a consensus on the
role of religion in public life is destabilising the nation.
Geraldine Fagan is Moscow correspondent for Forum 18 News Service, and has
monitored religious policy across Russia for the past decade.
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Edited by Donnacha 41 Believing in Russia – Religious
O Beachain, Vera Sheridan and Policy after Communism
Sabina Stan Geraldine Fagan
Believing in Russia – Religious
Policy after Communism
Geraldine Fagan
First published 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 Geraldine Fagan
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fagan, Geraldine.
Believing in Russia – religious policy after communism / Geraldine
Fagan.
pages : illustrations ; cm. – (Routledge contemporary
Russia and Eastern Europe series ; 41)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Religion and state – Russia (Federation) 2. Freedom of religion –
Russia (Federation) 3. Religion and politics – Russia (Federation)
4. Russia (Federation) – Religious life and customs. I. Title.
II. Series: Routledge contemporary Russia and
Eastern Europe series ; 41.
BL65.S8F34 2012
323.44’2094709051 — dc23 2012014058
ISBN: 978-0-415-49002-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-09537-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman by
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mñëräú íå õAäèòú ñú íhìè.
W ðå÷¿ êú íåì¾ Vè Uñú: íå áðàíBòå: ˜æå áî írñòü íà âº, ïî âhñú

μñòü.1
1
Luke 9:49–50: ‘And John answered and said, Master, we saw one casting out dev-
ils in thy name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us. And Jesus
said unto him, Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is for us’ (King James
Version).
Contents
List of illustrations x
Map xii
Preface and acknowledgements xiii
Note on transliteration, translation and titles xv
Introduction 1
1 Russia’s religious freedom tradition 6
2 ‘Native land protected by God’ 24
3 Rites of spring 53
4 Law unto itself 69
5 Fight thine enemy 95
6 In search of tradition 121
7 Extreme measures 155
8 Alternative scenarios 172
Conclusion 194
Notes 201
Index 283
Illustrations
Map 1 Author’s regional fieldtrips, 1999–2010 xii

Graph 1 Frequency of terminology in Russian media
(source: Integrum, June 2010) 96
Figures
Russian religious dissenters
1 Timofei Shchetinkin, elder Molokan presbyter,
with wife Matryona (Stavropol region, September 2004) 51
2 A young Old Believer demonstrates the
two-fingered sign of the cross at the Old Believer
settlement of Rogozhskoye. The 1913 Resurrection
Bell-tower is in the background (Moscow, February 2009) 51
3 Russian Buddhists demonstrate outside their
Foreign Ministry against its refusal to grant a
Russian visa to the Dalai Lama. Their placard reads
‘All religions are equal’ (Moscow, September 2002) 51
Orthodoxy’s new role
4 Near the Kremlin, a restaurant advertises
its ‘unlimited buffet’ menu for Lent
(Moscow, March 2003) 52
5 Syktyvkar’s new St Stephen of Perm Cathedral
(Komi republic, July 2003) 52
6 A parliamentary election poster courts religious
voters in the style of Bolshevik propagandist
Vladimir Mayakovsky: ‘You are risking much in
the next life if you oversleep and don’t vote!’
(Moscow, November 2007) 52
Illustrations xi
Defying ethno-religious stereotypes
7 Nikolai Dudko, Buddhist thangka (icon)
painter, in his Ulan-Ude studio
(Buryatia republic, September 1999) 93
8 A young Kalmyk Protestant displays a Kalmyk translation
of the New Testament (Kalmykia republic, April 2003) 93
9 Kryashchen Orthodox priest Fr Pavel Pavlov at his
Kazan parish church with a portrait of nineteenth-century
Orthodox missionary Nikolai Ilminsky
(Tatarstan republic, June 2002) 93
Geographical religious diversity
10 Founded at Gusinoye Ozero in 1741, Tamchinsky
Datsan is one of only three Russian Buddhist
temples to have survived Stalin’s anti-religious onslaught
(Buryatia republic, June 2010) 94
11 The White Mosque was built in the Siberian city of
Tomsk in 1914 (Tomsk region, June 2005) 94
12 In Belgorod, a former Roman Catholic chapel
‘returned’ to the Russian Orthodox Church
(Belgorod region, May 2001) 94
‘Traditional religions’
13 Orthodox and Buddhist street kiosks side-by-side
in Elista (Kalmykia republic, April 2003) 153
14 Kazan kremlin: the minarets of Kul Sharif Mosque
edge past the onion domes of the Orthodox Annunciation Cathedral
(Tatarstan, June 2002) 153
15 Mari pagans celebrate the festival of
Agavairem in a sacred grove near Yoshkar-Ola
(Mari El republic, June 2009) 153
16 A billboard reminds the Russian government
opposite of Article 14.2 of the 1993 Russian Constitution: ‘Religious
associations shall be separated from the State and shall be equal before
the law’ (Moscow, January 2011) 154
17 A public billboard in downtown Makhachkala
advertises ‘Ramadan: fasting is the path leading to heaven’
(Dagestan republic, April 2009) 154
18 St Nicholas Orthodox Chapel at Rostov-on-Don
railway station (Rostov region, April 2006) 154
Figures 1–18 are photographs by the author.

Karelia
St Petersburg
Pskov
Vologda Komi Sakhalin
Yaroslavl
Moscow Kostroma
Tula Vladimir Sverdlovsk Khabarovsk
Kursk N.Novgorod
Mari El (Yekaterinburg)
Belgorod
Voronezh Tatarstan
Tyumen
Rostov Saratov
Krasnodar
Kalmykia Buryatia
Karachay-Cherkessia Stavropol
Kabardino-Balkaria Tuva
Altai
Dagestan
Map 1 Author’s regional fieldtrips, 1999–2010

Preface and acknowledgements
This is the first book in English by a single author to examine post-communist

government policy towards all of Russia’s major faiths, as far as that author is
aware.
It is also the product of singular circumstance. I have reported on religious
policy developments in Russia from Moscow since early 1999, most recently for
Forum 18 News Service. My vantage point is that of a handful of non-Russian,
on-the-ground specialists in this sphere, and one of the longest-resident foreign
correspondents of the period.
Russia has never been more accessible to foreign journalists. Transport is still
often primitive, whether hair-raising internal flights better forgotten or a mem-
orable jaunt across Siberian fields in a homemade sidecar. But it is possible to
travel almost anywhere. Instead of crackling landlines liable to cut off at the most
crucial point in an interview, most Russians – even those dedicating their lives to
otherworldly matters – are now reachable via mobile phone or Skype. Whereas
religio-political debate was once aired only in cramped Soviet kitchens, samizdat
publications or on sarafannoe radio (the grapevine), faith communities, religious
affairs commentators and individual clerics now maintain their own websites,
news columns and even blogs.
Yet the result – an ever-shifting mass of reportage, policy proposals and con-
jecture – can be bewildering to navigate for those outside Russia. Details cited
by foreign analysts are usually accurate, but often selected with scant regard for
their relative significance. Priority is commonly given to senior religious and
secular leaders’ pronouncements and/or government legislation without fully
considering their actual status or practical impact. The academic focus is rou-
tinely restricted to Russian Orthodoxy (or a single other faith) and developments
at federal level: discarding alternative faith and regional perspectives at the out-
set inevitably skews the final picture. The risk of entering blind alleys with the
standard approaches is therefore high.
Clearly, no study can be entirely objective or exhaustive. Yet a fundamental
aim of this book is to present the first systematic history of religious policy in
Russia since the fall of the USSR. To this end, its use of classic scholarly sources –
monographs and journals – is offset by journalistic findings from my hundreds
of interviews with religious representatives, government officials, academics
xiv Preface and acknowledgements
and human rights defenders across Russia, often conducted during provincial
field trips (see Map 1, p. xii). I also draw extensively on the wealth of internet
material noted above, for this now forms the central platform of religious policy
debate. Local academic, government and media publications from my personal
archive supplement. Almost all sources are in Russian.
The inclusion criteria are simple: data must have resulted in substantial reli-
gious policy development or be widely referred to as pertinent in interviews and/
or media discourse.
Just as my approach differs, so do many of my findings, as the reader will dis-
cover. My goal is to offer a fresh and incisive view of the role of belief in today’s
Russia.
Progress in every stage of this book’s production has depended upon support
from numerous people.
I would particularly like to thank my colleagues at Forum 18, Felix Corley and
John Kinahan, as well as Larry Uzzell, and my parents, Diana and David Fagan,
for their constant encouragement.
Much enjoyment and insight has come from shared travel through Russia.
For this I would like to thank: Margherita Belgiojoso, Masha Belova, Lyubov
Bukhtoyarova, Lenka Kabrhelova, David Lewis, Mark Nash, Ellen Pfeiffer,
Martin Ritchie, Stella Rock, Sasha Shchipkov, Matt Siegel, Akhmet Yarlykapov
and Stefania Zini.
A short-term scholarship at the Kennan Institute, Washington, DC, in April
2009 allowed me to collate sections on religious legislation.
Others have also kindly offered a base from which to write: John and Ruth
Kinahan, Jussi Niemeläinen, Madeleine Reeves and Ais Randawa. Particular
thanks in this regard go to the Dugarov family in Ulan-Ude, Buryatia, as well as
for first leading me to believe in Russia.
For reading and commenting upon sections of the manuscript, I am grateful
to Alissa de Carbonnel, Fyodor Gayda, Madeleine Reeves, Stella Rock, Philip
Walters and Akhmet Yarlykapov. All authorial opinions (and errors) are my
own.
I would also like to thank Margarita Fedina for permission to use her photo-
graph, ‘The Light of Faith. Easter’, on the cover, John Pouncett for producing the
map and graph, and Matt Platts for other technical assistance.
Last but certainly not least, I am indebted to countless inhabitants of Russia.
When explaining what they believe they have shown me dedication and patience
that are as extraordinary as their country.
Moscow, January 2012

Note on transliteration, translation
and titles
In the interests of readability, Russian proper names in the main text follow their
transliteration in The New York Times, as do author interview details in endnotes.
Longer Russian phrases and more obscure titles follow the Library of Congress
transliteration system, as do the remainder of the endnotes.
For the same reason, territorial subdivisions of the Russian Federation appear
as ‘federal district’ ( federal’nyi okrug), ‘republic’ (respublika), ‘region’ (oblast’,
krai) and ‘district’ (okrug, raion).
Except for a few cases where an official English text exists, all translations
from Russian are by the author. Unless otherwise stated, documents are copies
from the author’s archive, and website links were current in January 2012.
Positions and names are contemporary with events or statements cited; the same
cleric may thus be variously titled depending upon the date of his remarks.
Dates before 1918 follow the Julian (Old Style) calendar.
Introduction
Moscow 2012. Shadowing a rail line south of the city, New York subway-style
graffiti flits through factory debris and sinking snowbanks. Though monochrome,
one unlikely slogan bulges from worn prefab slabs: Za Sviatuiu Rus’! (‘For Holy
Russia!’)
Russia’s deepest association is with faith. To Americans, the United States is
‘God’s country’; the English, after Blake’s vision, suppose the Son of God once
walked upon their nation’s verdant mountains. With perhaps only Palestine, how-
ever, Russia is graced in popular perception with more than divine protection
or visitation: she is herself holy, or imbued with the divine. ‘Russian national
thought’, wrote religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev in his 1915 essay The
Soul of Russia, ‘has been nourished by a sense of Russia’s divinely chosen and
God-bearing nature.’1
According to this view, faith directed Russia’s path towards statehood and
empire from distant origins in the early medieval proto-state of Rus. Or rather,
one particular faith: Orthodox Christianity. As famously recalled by the Slavonic
Primary Chronicle little more than a century later, in 987 Grand Prince Vladimir
of Rus chose Byzantine Christianity for his realm over Islam, Judaism and Western
Christianity. The clincher, as the chronicler would have it, was his boyars’ awe-
struck response to the splendour of church worship in Constantinople: ‘We knew
not whether we were in heaven or on earth … We know only that God dwells
there among men.’2
Orthodoxy would go on to become Russia’s defining creed, most vaunted in
Nicholas I’s ideology uniting faith, power and nation: ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy,
Nationhood’ (Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie, Narodnost’). Melding nation with
the sacred inspired veneration of Russia herself: non-rational immersion in the
transcendent, as experienced by Vladimir’s boyars, came to be seen as prereq-
uisite for an appraisal of Russia’s true essence. In the celebrated 1866 verse of
Romantic poet Fyodor Tyutchev:
Russia cannot be known by the mind

Nor measured by the common mile:
Her status is unique, without kind –
Russia can only be believed in3
2 Introduction
A holy nation must have a divine purpose. ‘Since long ago a premonition exists
that Russia is destined for something great,’ observed Berdyayev, ‘that Russia
is a special country unlike any on earth.’4 This faith in Russia’s future glory
draws directly upon her earlier sanctification in Orthodoxy. As illustrated by
philosopher Ivan Ilin in his 1949 essay Why We Believe in Russia:
Believing in Russia means to perceive and recognize that her soul is rooted
in God and that her history is her growth from these roots … To be Russian
means to contemplate Russia in divine light … to believe in Russia as all
great Russians, all her geniuses and builders, believed in her. Our struggle
for her and victory can only be based on this faith.5
Russia’s orientation in the present is here held to be contingent upon Orthodoxy
specifically binding her people in a shared sense of past and future. As religious
philosopher Georgy Fedotov summarized it in 1933:
Insert any other religion – even Christian, but not Orthodox – and she will
no longer be Russia. Without religion – she is not a nation, but a jumble of
people; clay from which anything can be moulded – stone, wood or metal
that can be broken into countless splinters.6
In the popular notion of Russian national identity, therefore, symbiotic belief
in Russia and Orthodoxy is perceived as the ‘glue’ consolidating the nation’s
power.
Ironically, it was through rapid and vast territorial expansion fuelled by this
selfsame messianic zeal that Russia incorporated alternative faith cultures,
including those rejected by Grand Prince Vladimir at her inception. Their chal-
lenge to the unitary model of nationhood centred upon Orthodoxy was further
confounded by Russia becoming, rather than acquiring, an empire in the 1700s.
The solution was a protectionist religious policy that skirted the issue of inte-
gration by tying faith to ethnicity. While certain faiths – including Catholicism
and Islam – were tolerated among ‘outsider’ ethnicities (inorodtsy), imperial
law sealed the dominance of the Orthodox Church. It alone could engage in
mission, and apostasy from Orthodoxy was treated as a punishable offence
until 1905.7
By the late 1800s, however, the diverse reality of beliefs in Russia was one
patently out of step with the mystical concept of the Russian nation. Doubts
were also emerging as to whether practical realization of the Russian national
idea might actually be undermining its Christian essence. In his 1888 essay The
Russian Idea, religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyev cited a contemporary’s
horror at the plight of the national Orthodox Church, half of whose members
remain in her only due to fear of state punishment … What lack of con-
science in the forced protection of conscience; what negation in the very
Church of all the Church’s vital foundations, all her reasons for existence;
what falsehood and lack of faith where everything lives, exists and moves
by truth and faith!8
Introduction 3
Major strides towards recognition of the true multiplicity of worldviews in Russia
were taken in the early 1900s. But imposition of atheist ideology from 1917
proved a great leap backward; in spiritual terms, the enforced collective pursuit
of a bright communist future was merely a subversion of Russia’s previous sense
of messianic destiny.
With the Soviet collapse of 1987–91, the dilemma over a unitary versus plu-
ralistic religio-national identity resurfaced. The new reality leans even further
towards the latter than a century before. The Russian Federation – still covering
approximately one eighth of the globe’s land mass – is surely the world’s only
nation-state encompassing sizeable centuries-old communities of Buddhists,
Christians, Jews and Muslims. During the communist interim, extensive popula-
tion dispersal and a formal absence of religious barriers to family ties resulted in
cultural exchange and mingling on a scale barely known before 1917. Religious
communities who weathered the Soviet period – including Catholics and
Protestants – emerged into a world where spiritual enquiry is boosted by eased
travel and swiftly developing communications, a trend set only to accelerate.
Yet insistence upon a unitary Russian religious identity persists.
The crux of the debate over Orthodoxy and nationhood – as indicated by the
third element in Nicholas I’s triad, autocracy – is authority. A religious (or other)
worldview cannot be imposed without corresponding government policy; inhab-
itants of polities embracing a multiplicity of worldviews, on the other hand, enjoy
wide latitude in making their own choices. Whether Russia pursues a unitary
or pluralistic identity model therefore correlates with the degree to which her
inhabitants are afforded religious freedom.9 As established by the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, this comprises
the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes
freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in com-
munity with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief
in teaching, practice, worship and observance.10
Russia is party to international legal agreements upholding this right: as of
1976, under the auspices of the USSR, to the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights; since 1998, to the European Convention for the Protection
of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Russia’s 1993 Constitution
additionally stipulates that international treaties and agreements take precedence
over domestic law.11
The weighty historical role of belief in Russia, however, means that moni-
toring religious freedom across the Russian Federation represents more than a
bald assessment of a nation’s compliance with international human rights stan-
dards. Whether Russia’s policymakers prescribe a religious (or other) worldview
or allow her inhabitants to determine and act upon their innermost convictions
impacts upon values such as transparency in economics and tolerance in educa-
tion; it also shapes broader cultural and political discourse. Ultimately, as a gauge
of how far the citizen is subordinate to government or government subordinate to
the citizen, religious freedom points to Russia’s future direction as a society.
4 Introduction
This book charts the vectors of Russia’s religious policy over the two decades
since communism’s implosion with a view to mapping that course.
Adequate assessment of the merits of an Orthodox-centred versus pluralistic
model of Russian national identity entails dismantling a complex of common
assumptions about the role of religion in Russia: this is the task of the first two
chapters. Grounded in their observations, the remaining six chapters examine
the scope of the purported post-communist resurgence of the Orthodox-centred
model in a chronology spanning 1985–2011. The focus is on the less-examined
religious policy period since Vladimir Putin first assumed presidential office at
the end of 1999.
Debate over religious freedom in Russia is still routinely framed in the reduc-
tionist Slavophile-versus-Westerner terms underpinning the popular view of
Russian national identity outlined above. Russia being identified with Orthodoxy,
those advocating religious freedom are accordingly posited as anti-Russian, and
vice versa. Such polarity gains traction when, as is usual, commentators’ con-
sideration of religious policy in Russia is confined to relations between the state
and the Russian Orthodox Church.12 By highlighting the little-known efforts of
indigenous dissenters to secure religious freedom within Russia over the past
two centuries, Chapter 1 challenges the notion that a narrow religiosity is intrin-
sic to Russian culture. Further, by scrutinizing the alliance of faith leaders claim-
ing to embody that religiosity today, it demonstrates that their anti-pluralistic
stance in fact owes much to recent Soviet policy. Chapter 2 untangles the web of
post-Soviet interrelations between the Russian state, populace and the Russian
Orthodox Church, the dominant religious actor whose stance informs the whole
of government religious policy. It also exposes the absence of a uniform position
on the role of religion in Russia within each of these three elements, making all
manner of generalization hazardous. This variation accounts for the constant
flux in policy development characteristic of the subsequent chronology.
Chapter 3 charts how, following Russia’s heady embrace of religious freedom
from perestroika to the formal jettisoning of Soviet ideology in 1991, the anti-
pluralists’ initial reflex was to revert to the established autocratic approach of
restriction, albeit via a less familiar medium: the democratic rule of law. This
culminated in the adoption of a federal law in 1997 which rolled back many
of the rights instigated by Russia’s pro-freedom 1990 legislation on religion.
Commentators routinely assume that religious freedom violations in Russia since
1997 are due to that law; Chapter 4 counters that the law’s scant implementation
in fact moved its lobbyists to switch to alternative, more diffuse ways of restrict-
ing spiritual competition, such as the Soviet practice of ‘telephone law’.
Chapter 5 identifies a further non-legal tool utilized in the wake of the 1997
law by those advocating a narrow religio-national identity for Russia: the popu-
larization of particular concepts until they accrue the weight of legal terminology.
The progress of three terms pitched primarily against non-Orthodox Christians
is considered here: ‘totalitarian sect’, ‘spiritual security’ and ‘canonical terri-
tory’. Chapter 6 explores the most successful such term, ‘traditional religions’.
Almost universally assumed to enjoy formal status, this in fact finally secured
Introduction 5
concrete privileges for certain faiths in public education and the military only
under President Dmitri Medvedev in 2009. The attempt to define ‘traditional’
Russian religiosity remains fraught with paradoxes, however; these are dissected
here.
Underlying the quasi-legal terminology examined in Chapters 5 and 6 – and
the belief that Russian national identity hinges upon Orthodoxy exclusively – is
consignment of religious affiliation to the realm of national security. Chapter 7
documents how Russia’s counterextremism drive in response to post-2001 global
concern over Islamist terrorism has duly reverted to familiar criminalization of
religious dissent. Chapter 8 asks if the post-Soviet trajectory in religious policy
is therefore retrograde (whether Soviet or pre-Soviet), as is increasingly casually
suggested. It then turns to the sphere where insistence that Orthodox Christianity
is the sole consolidating force in Russian national identity has genuine potential
to undermine the reality of the Russian nation: the role of Islam.
1 Russia’s religious freedom tradition
On 12 July 1805 a tradesman and two peasants took the risky step of coming
before Tsar Alexander I and asking for the freedom to practise their faith. For
more than a century, the Molokans had worshipped in secret and in fear:
As soon as we would gather, the Priests would report to the Police where we
were and in whose house our gathering was taking place. Immediately peo-
ple are handcuffed, shackled, beaten without mercy, put into prison, chained
to the wall without food, put into dark cells and sentenced to hard labor with
daily punishment.1
The Molokans were pariahs because they found no injunction to pray to Orthodox
icons or saints in the Bible, ‘this great treasure, which was hidden in past ages,
and is now available in our Russia for diligent study’.2 Despite their apparent
similarity to Western Protestants, however, they rejected water baptism as an
Old Testament custom rendered obsolete by baptism in the Holy Spirit, calling
themselves simply ‘Spiritual Christians’.3 Wider society distinguished them as
Molokans – from the Russian for ‘milk’ – due to their non-observance of an
Orthodox ban on dairy products during fasts such as Lent.4 Once Molokans had
found suitable scriptural foundation for it in the New Testament exhortation to
‘love the milk of the Word’, this nickname stuck.5
Prince Mikhail Kutuzov gave the first response to the Molokans’ petition at a
15 July 1805 meeting of the imperial Committee of Ministers: ‘Is it possible to
stop anyone from reading the Word of God in the Holy Bible, whether Orthodox
Christians or anyone else?’ Amvrosy (Podobedov), St Petersburg’s Orthodox
archbishop, confirmed it to be ‘as impossible to stop the sun from traversing the
sky’. Acknowledging that the Molokans suffered harsh persecution under his
late grandmother, Catherine the Great, Alexander then proclaimed a different
course: ‘We Orthodox Christians should act with the humility of Christ … with
tolerant measures.’ His 22 July 1805 decree legitimized the Molokans, upholding
their right to read the Bible freely and prohibiting Orthodox clergy from entering
their homes.6
Two centuries later, the memory of the 1805 petitioners spurs on the council
chair of Moscow’s Molokan community in his decade-long battle for the right to
Russia’s religious freedom tradition 7
build a prayer house in the Russian capital. Through protracted correspondence
with an array of state departments, octogenarian Yakov Yevdokimov secured
municipal approval for construction three times – only for it to be successively
overturned by lower bureaucrats. Four petitions to President Vladimir Putin
ended up on the desk of the junior official responsible for obstructing the project.
Yevdokimov’s reflex, however, is to continue to demand what the 1997 law On
Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations states is his community’s
right.7 While there was nothing like that law or Russia’s 1993 Constitution in
1805, he recalls, ‘it took the tsar just ten days to sort out our problem’.8
Yevdokimov bears a family legacy of state oppression. Among Molokans exiled
to Armenia by Catherine the Great, his great-great-great-great-grandfather was
‘slaughtered like a goat’ by police on the road from Samara gubernia. His father
was arrested as a Molokan in 1938 and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in the
Gulag; he did not return. This and his own life under Soviet rule have not cowed
Yevdokimov into accepting such treatment as a given, however. Even the modern
Russian state’s ten-year disregard of the Moscow Molokans’ petition to build, he
believes, is ‘an outrageous way to deal with people’.9
Russian national identity is classically regarded as inseparable from main-
line Orthodox Christianity. As a protagonist in Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons
uncompromisingly puts it, ‘He who is not Orthodox cannot be Russian.’10
To both its supporters and sceptics, religious freedom is therefore alien to
Russian culture. Latterly, it has come to be understood as part of a Western-
inspired human rights package exported to assist an arduous post-Soviet tran-
sition from authoritarianism to democracy.11 ‘People think that there are no
Russian democratic traditions, that something in the air or climate makes us
prone to totalitarianism,’ opines Old Believer Denis Lupekin.12 In order to
assess Russia’s religious policy we must revisit the assumption that religious
freedom is a non-Russian value.
For in fact it is the Molokans and Old Believers – two quintessentially Russian
faiths traditionally at least indifferent to the West – who have taken historic
stands for religious freedom in Russia. Both still display an instinctive open-
ness towards the right of others to determine their beliefs. Elder presbyter of the
core Molokan community on the southern Russian steppe, Timofei Shchetinkin
(Figure 1, p. 51) recalls his response to an Orthodox village priest who asked his
attitude towards Jehovah’s Witnesses:
I said, ‘Well, I don’t agree with them. I don’t agree when they say that the
Kingdom of Heaven is on Earth. I don’t agree with them that Jesus Christ
isn’t Saviour but just a person or a prophet. But God hasn’t given me the right
to ban them. He hasn’t given that right.’13
In the north of modern-day Belarus, a similar view is held by Pyotr Orlov, elder
of some 30 priestless Old Believer communities whose forebears fled the Russian
heartland from the late 1600s onwards. ‘If God continues to permit everyone on
this one sinful Earth to exist’, he reasons, ‘then we can’t insist that they be all of
the same faith.’14
A thin but wiry thread running through their nation’s history, Russians’ pur-
suit of religious freedom is a tradition visible at intervals that have proved all too
brief, however. The 1805 decree forgotten, Shchetinkin’s great-great-grandfather
was among Molokans exiled to the South Caucasus from the 1830s onwards.15
Russia’s state suppression of homegrown religious dissent was even more pro-
nounced in the case of the Old Believers.
Even before their emergence in the mid-seventeenth century, Russian civiliza-
tion was widely considered guardian to the purity of Orthodox Christianity. On
founding the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589, Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople
proclaimed that, since the original Rome had fallen to Catholic heresy and the
second, Constantinople, to the Turks, ‘your great Russian kingdom, the Third
Rome, has surpassed all other kingdoms in piety’.16 By the 1650s, however, there
were two notions of Russia’s messianic role. Moscow Patriarch Nikon envisaged
his Church as the hub of a wider Orthodox empire, requiring that liturgical texts
and practices be stripped of allegedly uncanonical accretions born of isolation
from the rest of the Orthodox world. Others saw meticulous devotion to Russia’s
old beliefs and rites as essential to Orthodoxy’s preservation. As Old Believer
champion Archpriest Avvakum protested to Church hierarchs, ‘Rome fell long
ago and lies prone … and your [non-Russian] Orthodoxy has been mottled by
Turkish savagery.’17
To the Old Believers, Nikon’s numerous, now seemingly trifling reforms –
the sign of the cross made with three fingers instead of two (Figure 2, p. 51),
or a change in the spelling of ‘Jesus’ from Isus to Iisus – were thus a renegade
strike at the very body of the Church that not even a patriarch could rightfully
make.18 The 1666 Church council that branded opponents of reform ‘schismatics’
was particularly ominous, for the Book of Revelation had identified 666 with
the Antichrist, and corruption of Russian Orthodoxy, it was thought, would pre-
cipitate his coming.19 Many Old Believers continued to trust in the validity of a
church hierarchy in principle, but in Nikon’s no longer.
As the Nikonian camp gained the upper hand, its opponents were viciously
persecuted. In his epic nineteenth-century painting Boyarina Morozova, Vasily
Surikov depicts an Old Believer noblewoman defiant, her right hand aloft in the
form of a two-fingered sign of the cross as a sleigh draws her to the monastery
prison where she will be slowly starved to death. Unknown numbers of humbler
figures – including monks who held out under siege against tsarist forces for more
than seven years within their far northern island monastery of Solovki – were
tortured, hanged, drowned, hacked to pieces or beheaded; more often burnt.20
The ancient piety survived the succeeding centuries undimmed, how-
ever: Old Believers still retain a presence in the ‘Third Rome’. Now squeezed
between shimmering new office blocks, St Nicholas’ Church in downtown
Moscow shelters an apparent oasis of pre-Petrine Russia: full-bearded men in
flaxen smocks, women beneath loose shawls pinned precisely at the chin. On
the main door, a sign warns non-Old Believers not to walk into the central
part of the church during services, venerate icons, make the sign of the cross,
or bow. Such closed ritualism typically leads observers to assume that all Old
Believer attitudes are stilted. But while theologically archconservative, the
Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church 21 is unexpectedly dynamic in its eccle-
siastical organization. Women became full members of its ruling body, the Old
Believer Church Council, in the eighteenth century.22 At the 2007 Council over
a quarter of the 220 delegates directly elected by parishioners were women, or
men under 25.23
Like the Molokans, the Old Believers experienced a relaxation in state policy
under Alexander I. Persecution resumed in earnest with the accession of Nicholas
I in 1825, however. An 1827 decree banned Old Believer priests from travelling
from one region to another; transgressors were to be ‘dealt with like tramps’. The
military evicted thousands of Old Believer monks and nuns from their monaster-
ies. Tens of thousands of Old Believer icons, books and relics were confiscated
and even burnt. An 1838 decree sanctioned the separation of Old Believer chil-
dren from their parents and forced their incorporation into the dominant Russian
Orthodox Church. Old Belief ducked back underground.24
During a brief thaw under Alexander II, an 1856 decree permitted open
worship at Rogozhskoye, the Old Believer settlement then on the outskirts of
Moscow. Many of the 6,000-strong congregation wept for joy at the first open
Sunday liturgy there in January of that year. Under pressure from Metropolitan
Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow, however, officials and police sealed Rogozhskoye’s
church altars just months later.
The Old Believers’ response was to lobby for their religious freedom, sub-
mitting numerous petitions for the altars to be unsealed over subsequent
decades.25 By the late 1800s they had become a force to be reckoned with.
While a small fraction of the population, a fortuitous combination of indus-
trial progress and the staunch Old Believer work ethic meant their stake in
Russia’s trading capital was disproportionately high.26 Their ritual tradition-
alism did not exclude entrepreneurship and innovation in other spheres of
life. In 1904 Art Nouveau architect Fyodor Shekhtel incorporated a hidden
attic chapel into his bold design for a Moscow mansion commissioned by Old
Believer Stepan Ryabushinsky, a prominent banker and co-founder of Russia’s
first car factory.27
Similar magnates, steamship owner Dmitri Sirotkin and merchant Mikhail
Brilliantov, convened the first All-Russian Old Believer Congress in Moscow
on 14 September 1900, encouraged by Old Believer Bishop Arseny (Shvetsov)
of the Urals. The Congresses supplemented Councils as a form of parliament to
discuss day-to-day church affairs.28 Held almost annually until the 1917 October
Revolution, the early Congresses met in tense secrecy due to their still unlawful
status. The minutes of those first debates – reproduced clandestinely in purple-
inked copies of 100 by means of hectography – identify delegates only by their
initials.
Thus, at the Fifth All-Russian Old Believer Congress of August 1904, I. I. Kh.
presented a report detailing recent incidents of persecution of Old Believer clergy
in various parts of the Empire. Arguing ‘underground whispers and complaints
will not help us’, he called for more systematic monitoring, or
gathering of the most reliable and precise information from Old Believers
about all prominent events of persecution of Old Belief, and delivering them
to one location selected for that purpose, so that they might always be at
hand for submission to wherever might prove necessary.29
At the same Congress, delegates reported their progress in lobbying government
ministers for recognition of Old Believer communities as legal entities, for the
right to open Old Believer schools, and for equal state support for families of Old
Believer reservists mobilized in the Russo-Japanese War.30
While their early campaigning was by necessity covert, Sirotkin and Brilliantov
oversaw the collection of 49,753 signatures in support of equal worship rights for
Old Believers in the three months following the first Congress; no mean feat
considering that gathering mass petitions was also illegal at that time. Over the
next few years, Congress representatives visited almost every government min-
istry; they also lobbied senators, courtiers and members of the imperial family.
Following the 1904 Congress, its delegates presented Sergei Witte, Committee of
Ministers chair, with a comprehensive report on the Old Believers’ plight. Their
concerns formed the basis of the landmark 1905 decree On Strengthening the
Foundations of Religious Tolerance.31
‘In constant association, in accordance with ancestral oaths, with the Holy
Orthodox Church’, begins the decree, signed by Nicholas II on 17 April 1905,
‘We have always had the heartfelt aspiration to secure freedom of belief and
worship for each of our subjects in accordance with the dictates of his con-
science.’ Its key provisions decriminalize conversion from Orthodoxy to
another Christian denomination; replace the legal term ‘schismatic’ with
‘Old Believer’; legitimize the status of Old Believer and other non-Orthodox
Christian ministers; permit non-Orthodox Christians to raise adopted children
in the same faith; and order the re-opening of all houses of worship earlier
closed by the tsarist authorities.32
Quizzed by the Committee of Ministers during drafting of the 1905 decree,
Metropolitan Antoni (Vadkovsky) of St Petersburg did not object to the decrim-
inalization of apostasy:
Always grieving for those who leave her, the Church cannot at the same
time desire their retention by force. The Orthodox faith is born of the grace
of God, instruction, meekness and good example; all force is therefore alien
to the very nature of the Church of Christ, and she does not consider it nec-
essary to hold on to her irretrievably prodigal children against their will and
convictions.33
Rather, ministers’ deliberation of broader religious freedom for Old Believers
and other dissenters prompted representatives of official Orthodoxy to call
for the freedom to manage their own affairs also.34 They felt straitjacketed by
the uncanonical Synodal system of ecclesiastical administration instituted by
Peter the Great, whereby the Church was ultimately directed by state officials
rather than a local council and patriarch.35 In March 1905 the Church’s Holy
Synod petitioned Nicholas II to convene just such a local council.36 Later that
year a poll of 66 Russian Orthodox bishops found all but three in favour of
institutional reform of the Church.37
The 1905 decree prompted parliamentarians in the new State Duma to press for
even more radical religious freedom legislation, including the right not to profess
any religion.38 In May 1909 Deputy Dmitri Leonov insisted that a corresponding
draft before the house was authentic to Russian tradition:
Back in the early sixteenth century, when in Western Europe torture and
death for apostasy from the religious dogmas of the established Church
seemed something quite natural and inevitable to the popular masses
… here in Rus St Nilus of Sora called persecuted heretics martyrs and
entreated cruel Ivan III to show them mercy.… It is true that there have
been outbursts of religious persecution in Russian history, but these were
always the work of government elites … and were always alien to the peo-
ple.… Yes, what is being established by the draft law before us – the legal
provision of religious freedom in Russia – may be an innovation, but it is
an innovation pleasing to our people, to them this innovation harks back to
the holy days of old.39
The proposals – as well as those for a local council of the Russian Orthodox
Church – were not realized until the months following the Duma’s dissolution in
the 1917 February Revolution, however.40 By that time, the Church was squarely
behind public support for a new order. ‘The will of God has come to pass. Russia
has set out on the path of a new state life,’ the Holy Synod announced to its
faithful just days after the abdications of Nicholas II and his brother in favour
of the Provisional Government.41 But that path would soon be truncated by the
Bolsheviks.
A Silver Age for Russia’s creative intelligentsia, to Old Believers the period
between the 1905 decree and the 1917 October Revolution was a Golden Age in
which publishing flourished and church schools sprang up ‘like flowers of the
field in early spring’.42 Over a thousand Old Believer churches were built dur-
ing those 12 years.43 Rising some 65 metres above the Rogozhskoye churches in
Moscow, the Resurrection Bell-tower was completed in 1913 in celebration of
the unsealing of their altars. Old Believers today point out that it is Russia’s first
monument to religious freedom.44
Almost exactly a century after the 1905 decree was published, however, an
Old Believer parish in the Volga city of Samara was forbidden from holding its
Easter vigil service in a Golden Age church. ‘People prayed outside the church all
night long nevertheless, including many elderly and infirm,’ recalls parishioner
Irina Budkina. ‘Meanwhile, municipal officials, led by the mayor of Samara,
congratulated the Moscow Patriarchate archbishop in the city’s cathedral and
spoke about “the spiritual rebirth of Orthodoxy”.’ Appropriated for secular use
by the Soviet authorities in 1929, the Samara church remained closed despite
persistent appeals from local Old Believers from the 1940s onwards.45 Privatized
in the wake of perestroika, the municipal authorities bought back the building in
2004 and gestured its likely transfer to the local Moscow Patriarchate diocese.46
The Old Believers stepped up their campaign, however; the Church of the Kazan
Icon of the Mother of God was finally formally returned to them in September
2006.47
Outside the rigid demands of their piety, the Old Believers continue to embrace
innovation, not least in their pursuit of religious freedom. Sometimes they
encounter regurgitation of pre-1905 official attitudes: references to the 1760s
settlement of ‘schismatics’ near Samara in a regional studies school textbook;48
the refusal of a television station in Yaroslavl region to air an advertisement for
an Old Believer concert without approval from the local Moscow Patriarchate
bishop on the grounds that ‘Russia is an Orthodox country.’ Their defence is
through publicity on Old Believer websites such as http://cddk.ru and http://
samstar.ucoz.ru. This proved crucial to the return of the Samara church and the
protection of a village parish’s legal status in Yaroslavl region.49
Old Believers have proposed that Russia designate 30 April, the modern-
calendar date of the 1905 decree’s promulgation, Religious Freedom Day.50
They now take pride in the fact that – largely the product of their lobbying –
the decree improved the lot of other faiths.51 Two of its provisions called for a
re-examination of the legal status of Muslims, or ‘the religious way of life of
persons of the Mohammedan confession’, and Buddhists, or ‘lamaites, desist-
ing from the earlier description of them in official acts as idol-worshippers and
pagans’.52
In a leafy quarter of St Petersburg, by a tributary of the Neva, stands a three-
storey building whose dour granite mass would not invite a second look; nor, per-
haps, would the gradual inward incline of its walls. They are capped, however,
by bands of crimson, mustard and aquamarine daubed with white spots. Three
round windows peep from beneath an even more ornate portico, topped by a
golden wheel and two golden deer. It is Europe’s oldest Buddhist temple.
Buddhism may not be as uniquely Russian as the Molokan and Old Believer
faiths, but the St Petersburg Gunzechoinei Datsan, or temple, is testimony to
Russian Buddhists’ similar determination to secure religious freedom despite
their isolation from the development of human rights discourse in the West.
Mongolian and Tibetan lamas brought Buddhism to Buryatia – later Russia’s
principal centre of the faith – in the early 1700s.53 At that time the wild fron-
tier of a burgeoning Russian Empire, this Siberian region to the east of Lake
Baikal was already homeland to the Buryats, a nomadic people closely related
to the Mongolians. They adopted the Gelug, or Yellow Hat, school of Tibetan
Buddhism, historically the dominant of its four main traditions and placing the
most emphasis on monasticism. Despite local government officials’ unease at
the spread of the alien faith, Russia initially banked on a lenient policy towards
Buddhism preventing the Buryats from falling under the influence of China’s
Qing dynasty, then in control of neighbouring Buddhist Mongolia. Empress
Elizabeth’s official recognition of Buddhism in 1741 permitted 11 datsans and
150 lamas.54 Classifying Buryats as inorodtsy, or ‘outsiders’, imperial adviser
Mikhail Speransky’s legal reforms of 1822 largely freed them to conduct their
own affairs, including Buddhist worship.
Reversing this policy, Nicholas I’s 1853 statute On the Lama Clergy of Eastern
Siberia restricted monastic numbers to 251 and prohibited construction of further
datsans, by that time numbering 34.55 With the stepping up of Orthodox mission-
ary activity in the late 1800s
It was not unknown for clerics to kick in the doors of unbaptized Buryats,
drag them to missionary stations, and pressure them to accept baptism.…
Some recalcitrant Buryats were beaten, imprisoned and tortured by the
police, Cossacks, missionaries and priests until they agreed to convert; oth-
ers were simply bound hand and foot and christened by main force.56
The Buryats held fast to the Buddhist tradition, however. By the early 1900s,
they had built a further three datsans, and the lama population had mushroomed
to some 16,000.57
After the Buddhist Kalmyks migrated from their west Mongolian homeland of
Dzungaria to Russia’s Caspian steppe frontier in the early 1600s, they too were
long granted a free rein as a valuable buffer against the volatile Muslim south.
But in 1741 the tsarist regime forced the autonomous Kalmyk khanate to sever
ties with its spiritual authority, Tibet. The Kalmyks’ response to growing tsarist
influence, including over their religious affairs, was blunt: in 1771 the majority –
some 30,000 nomadic households – set off back to Dzungaria; most did not sur-
vive the trek across Central Asia. Those left behind continued to defy government
restrictions on Buddhist worship. When monastic numbers were limited in 1802
to 100 per khurul, or temple, lamas promptly declared every structure within a
khurul complex to be a separate temple. Even a century later, Kalmyks serving
in an Orenburg gubernia Cossack unit and thought to have been Christianized
generations before turned out to be crypto-Buddhist. Emboldened by the 1905
decree, they petitioned their ataman for permission to practise the ‘Kalmyk faith’
and set up five Buddhist shrines.58
In their formal petition to become a Russian protectorate following the fall of
the Qing dynasty in 1912, local leaders of the southern Siberian region of Tuva
similarly emphasized their determination ‘to keep to the Buddhist religion and
… to choose our own spiritual representative’.59
Buddhist practice may have been tolerated in the three traditionally Buddhist
areas of Buryatia, Kalmykia and Tuva, but the Russian heartland was a differ-
ent matter altogether. The appearance of the St Petersburg datsan required the
determination of Agvan Dorzhiyev, a Buryat lama and political adviser to the
Thirteenth Dalai Lama. By 1906, 63 Buddhists were recorded in the imperial
capital,60 including merchants, students, soldiers and Kalmyk noblewoman Olzet
Tundutova, who hosted a salon frequented by members of high society interested
in Buddhism.61 One was Prince Esper Ukhtomsky, who accompanied Nicholas
II on an official visit to Buryatia in 1891 and introduced Dorzhiyev to the tsar.62
Encouraged by the 1905 decree, Dorzhiyev drew up a petition for a St Petersburg
temple on behalf of the Dalai Lama and secured provisional agreement from the
Foreign and Interior Ministries in 1908. In 1909 Tsar Nicholas told Dorzhiyev
that ‘Buddhists in Russia may feel as if under the wing of a mighty eagle.’
Construction began.63
As soon as the Department for the Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Creeds got
wind of the project, however, work on the datsan was halted as a violation of
the 1853 statute and at a site too remote for the state authorities ‘to exercise
surveillance’. By this stage the Buddhists had invested too much in the datsan
to relocate, so compromised by agreeing not to erect ancillary buildings and
to subdue ‘unacceptably luxurious’ exterior decoration. Construction resumed
in 1910. But over the following two years the ‘idolatrous pagoda’ was beset by
opposition from a segment of Orthodox clergy. ‘The power of Darkness and the
times of Anti-Christ are setting in, with the open worship of idols in the heart
of Russia,’ wrote one archimandrite. Dorzhiyev began to receive anonymous
death threats and warnings that the temple would be blown up if construction
continued.64
Despite persistent setbacks, the first service at the datsan celebrated the 1913
tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, with portraits of the imperial family placed
alongside a central Buddha effigy. Dorzhiyev finally consecrated the building on
10 August 1915.65
Visiting Soviet Leningrad in 1986, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet set eyes
upon the temple sponsored by his earlier incarnation for the first time.66 By 2012
he had visited Russia eight times but – except for a flying visit to Kalmykia in
2004 – not formally since 1992. Subsequently denied, the right to invite their spir-
itual leader is particularly precious to Russia’s Buddhists. Only the Dalai Lama
and the second highest teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the Panchen
Lama, are able to give the Kalachakra – ‘a blessing and high teaching’ – which
must be passed on in person and is believed to have a strong effect upon the con-
sciousness of those who receive it.67
The persistence of today’s Russian Buddhists in securing this right recalls that
witnessed by the century-old St Petersburg datsan. When Moscow refused the
Dalai Lama a transit visa for a 2001 trip to Mongolia, Russia’s Buddhist commu-
nity quickly convened the inaugural meeting of the ‘All-Russian Co-ordination
Council of Buddhist Organisations for Inviting His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Tenzin Gyatso XIV in 2002’, with representatives from Buryatia, Kalmykia,
Moscow, St Petersburg and Tuva.68 Appeals to President Putin, the Duma and
the Foreign Ministry followed.69 A senior Foreign Ministry official verbally
approved a purely religious visit slated for September 2002.70 Claiming that the
visit had political aims and taking into account China’s ‘sharply negative atti-
tude’, however, the Ministry subsequently pronounced it ‘inappropriate’.71 Again
the Buddhists’ reflex was to protest. Dozens were detained and fined during
unsanctioned demonstrations outside the Foreign Ministry during the summer
and early autumn of 2002 (Figure 3, p. 51). Buddhists held similar protests in
Buryatia and Tuva, where some went on hunger strike. By late August, 14,000
had signed a protest petition.72
For centuries of obeisance to Moscow have not weakened Russian Buddhists’
allegiance to the external Tibetan spiritual hierarchy.73 Identified by the
Fourteenth Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of a tenth-century Buddhist saint,
Kalmykia’s head Buddhist, Telo Tulku Rinpoche, enjoys popular local support
notwithstanding his Kalmyk émigré upbringing in New Jersey and a penchant
for indie rock music. Should the Dalai Lama again be refused a visa, he pointed
out in early 2003, ‘it is a fact – not a threat – that we will protest. I can click my
fingers and gather as many people as I like with no effort whatsoever. We could
leave for Moscow tomorrow.’74 Sure enough, the Foreign Ministry again rejected
a visa request for the Dalai Lama in September 2003,75 this time citing a 2001
agreement with China pledging Russia to support the Chinese stance on Tibet.76
Russia’s Buddhists continued to protest and lobby, but the Ministry reiterated its
position in response to their next visa request.77
In a modest breakthrough, the Dalai Lama was permitted to spend one full day
visiting Kalmykia on 30 November 2004, enough to dedicate the Geden Sheddup
Choikorling monastery complex on the edge of the republic’s capital, Elista.78
Russia’s Buddhists continue to press for a full pastoral visit. Their 6 July 2005
round table in Buryatia marking his seventieth birthday issued a further invita-
tion;79 a 2006 letter-writing campaign in Kalmykia protested against the Foreign
Ministry’s persistent refusal to grant the Dalai Lama visa.80 Despite Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov’s January 2009 claim that there are ‘no insurmountable
obstacles’ to such a visit, however, by 2012 it had still to take place.81
Russian non-conformists
The pursuit of religious freedom by non-Western faiths draws upon a broader
Russian tradition of non-conformity often overlooked by foreign commentators,
who are more usually attracted to local religious activism consistent with a
Western civil society paradigm, particularly that of the scarce reformist elements
within the Russian Orthodox Church.82 Dissent that is theologically conservative,
such as Old Belief, passes unnoticed. Utterly disregarded are those of its forms so
unfamiliar to outsiders that they appear absurd.
In the wake of the 1917 October Revolution many peasants in Voronezh guber-
nia refused to take part in collectivization, believing Lenin to be the Antichrist.
Following the death of Patriarch Tikhon in 1925 some also refused to recognize
his successor, believing divine grace to have departed the Russian Orthodox
Church. When one of their number, Fyodor Rybalkin, began to perform New
Testament miracles Russian-style – in one instance feeding 5,000 from a single
porridge pot – his appearance was hailed as Christ’s Second Coming.83 Dubbed
Fyodorovtsy, Rybalkin’s followers began to declare ‘Christ is risen!’ and ‘Blessed
is the man that walketh not in the counsel [soviet] of the ungodly’ on the outer
walls of their wooden huts.84 In 1929–30 the Soviet authorities arrested, tried and
imprisoned or executed dozens of Fyodorovtsy, alleging them responsible for an
arson campaign against communist sympathizers. Rybalkin is thought to have
been sent to the former Old Believer outpost of Solovki, then part of the Gulag.85
Although they still deny the charges of arson, the Fyodorovtsy admit infuri-
ating the authorities with one show of defiance: eating onions (as a sign of the
bitterness of communist rule) followed by honey (signifying the sweetness that
would follow its defeat).86 While they soon discontinued this practice, Aleksandr
Perepechonykh, elder of the surviving Fyodorovtsy community, recalls a fel-
low Rybalkin follower in a 1950s prison camp who would always demonstrably
pick out and chew the bitter peppercorns in his soup before starting on the rest.
Perepechonykh’s father was shot for his faith in 1941, while he has served Gulag
sentences totalling 16 years. The community continues to resist co-operation
with the state, such as by declining to register under the 1997 law. ‘We were
never registered and never will be. We consider it a sin. Why? There will be some
kind of control over us, but we don’t want that. Let the Lord control us.’87
The Fyodorovtsy also refused to enrol their children with the Soviet patriotic
youth organizations, the Pioneers and Komsomol.88 So did the True Orthodox,
an elusive and complex network of Russian Orthodox who similarly rejected the
official succession to Patriarch Tikhon but followed alternative hierarchs rather
than a Rybalkin figure. As their Archbishop Amvrosy (von Sievers) of the Goths
recalls:
Soviet schools presented True Orthodox Christian parents and children with
an insurmountable problem. Because of their totalitarian nature, everything
in them was unacceptable. The integration of children in communist organi-
sations … was a great problem, both psychological and religious. We all
resisted this integration and would refuse to join these organisations, but the
school authorities would resort to cunning to include us in the general sys-
tem. Once we were taken on some pretext to a schoolroom where everyone
had to go through the ceremony of joining the Pioneers, and the red ties were
tied on with very tight knots to prevent us from removing them. We were
ordered to read the oath to Lenin! Of course we refused point blank. Then
we were expected to kneel and kiss the red flag. I was the first to go up to
this thing and for all to see I blew my nose on it with all the contempt I could
muster, bringing the ritual to an abrupt end.89
There were other expressions of True Orthodox dissent. Bishop Merkury (Kotlov)
of Satka would not eat potatoes, drink tea or use lifts.90 More usually, they would
declare their opposition to the atheist authorities by refusing to carry passports,
a serious snub to Soviet police surveillance. A group of elderly True Orthodox
women in rural Tatarstan even refuses to accept compensation for their long
Gulag sentences because it comes from the state.91
With great reluctance, these women also at first refused to accept a gift of
galoshes from one visitor due to a barcode on the label.92 Their concerns are
shared by elements of the mainstream Russian Orthodox Church, who believe that
barcodes contain 666 – the Book of Revelation’s ‘number of the beast’ without
which, it is prophesied, no one will be able to buy or sell.93 Since the late 1990s,
barcode sceptics have also campaigned against state imposition of the Taxpayer’s
Identification Number, or INN (Identifikatsionnyi Nomer Nalogoplatel’shchika),
fearing that its documentation also contains 666. They similarly decline the
type of internal passport introduced in Russia in 2001 due to its ‘personal code’
section and having found 666 in an abstract pattern on its pages. Not endorsed
by the Church leadership,94 this stance is proving irksome to state bureaucrats,
who report being inundated with protest letters.95 Thousands of individuals and
a handful of parishes – including two dissolved by the courts – have rejected
the Taxpayer’s Identification Number,96 while in Moscow alone hundreds have
refused new passports.97
Fearing personal codes of Russian citizens might be entered onto a global com-
puter system controlled by Jews and Masons, or the Antichrist directly,98 such
protesters might be dismissed as a lunatic fringe. Their anti-Semitic and other
malicious views are clearly to be condemned. However, they also preserve a spirit
of non-conformity and scepticism towards state motives while often remaining
within the Moscow Patriarchate. The Russian media may ridicule as obscuran-
tist the sale near Diveyevo Orthodox monastery of prayer-inscribed leather wal-
lets purported to ‘neutralize’ the bearer from a passport’s malign effects,99 but
Western civil libertarians and anti-globalists are similarly wrapping their new
chipped passports in ‘neutralizing’ aluminium foil.100
The fact remains, however, that historical attempts to secure religious freedom
in Russia have had only modest success, and have still not led to a deep-seated
commitment from the state to guarantee that right, unlike in Western democra-
cies. Several Russia-specific contributory factors are apparent.
The strongly eschatological aspect of much Russian non-conformity means
that dissenters have been less likely to seek improvements in the here-and-now
by pursuing a strategy aimed at overhauling state policy. Instead, their goal
became the preservation of inner spiritual integrity at all costs, often through
total withdrawal from the ‘corrupt’ Church, and society. Among the priestless
Old Believers, the Nyetovtsy (from the Russian for ‘no’) rejected all traditional
hallmarks of the established Church, including icons, simply turning eastwards
to pray and confessing to the Earth. In their most radical manifestation of this
response, thousands of seventeenth-century priestless Old Believers chose to
escape the clutches of the Antichrist by self-immolation.101
A less final alternative to risky confrontation with oppressors of belief was
afforded by a more immediate outlet: Russia’s vast expanse. Until driven back
to Moscow by 1990s ethnic conflicts, exiled Molokans flourished at the edges
of the former Russian Empire in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The True Orthodox
Church was known as the ‘green faith’ in the Soviet period, as its adherents
would retreat into the forests to continue their devotions.102 Long before, as wit-
nessed by their continued presence in sparsely populated northern Belarus, this
practice was adopted by the Old Believers.
Karp Lykov went so far as to succeed in completely isolating his family from
Soviet influence. In 1978 a group of Soviet geologists stumbled across the Lykovs,
who had been living deep in the Siberian taiga for 32 years. The adult Lykov chil-
dren had never seen lemons, matches or a horse. Their father knew dimly of the
Second World War, but flatly refused to believe that people could have landed on
‘God’s lamp’, the moon. Shown a reproduction of Surikov’s Boyarina Morozova,
however, the family instantly picked out the ‘true believers’: their practice of Old
Belief was perfectly preserved.103
Instead of challenging state authority to uphold their religious rights, the
Lykovs followed their Old Believer forebears in setting out for a territory where
they would be free to worship as they wished: the mystical, utopian land of
Belovodye (‘Whitewater’). ‘In that place thievery and other illegality are unheard
of … There are no secular courts, police or prisoners, but all live according to
Christian custom. God fills that place.’104 The search for Belovodye led Old
Believers to settle as far as the mountains and lush valleys of Altai in southern
Siberia, where they determined it to lie still further, between the Bukhtarma
River and China. As one explained to Soviet researchers in 1982:
It isn’t given to everyone, Belovodye. An unworthy, unrighteous soul won’t
get there … The old folk used to say: ‘It exists, Belovodye, it exists. It’s
not easy to get there, people come close, so close, on the opposite bank
[they hear] cocks crowing, cows lowing, but then the mist, the blue mist!
Everything clouds over …’105
The quest for Belovodye has preserved even a few Nyetovtsy Old Believers in
southern Altai, from where they fled surges in persecution by fleeing to pre-
communist China along secret mountain paths. A bottle of dishwashing liquid
her only concession to the modern world, one continues to warn that, although
hidden, the Antichrist already holds sway and only a little time remains before
people are forced to accept his seal. ‘It will be impossible to buy, sell or travel if
you don’t have that number. There won’t be any money, they’ll be really cunning.
There’ll be cards.’106
Flight to the edges of the Empire rather than head-on confrontation with reli-
gious persecution also appeared a more promising option in view of the Russian
state’s long track record in the crushingly efficient suppression of dissent.
Relentless pursuit of religious freedom, on the other hand, accompanied only
the rare glimpses of its future promise. The 1904 Old Believer Congress ven-
tured full agreement with the view of contemporary religion scholar Aleksandr
Prugavin:
Of all the depressing survivals of antiquity preserved in Russia, perhaps the
worst is in the very sphere which, in its essence, in its internal nature, should
be completely free of everything which bears the hallmark of cruelty and
violence … the sphere of faith, the sphere of religious conviction.107
But this was because the Old Believers thought they were entering, as Congress
delegate I. I. Kh. suggested, ‘an age of enlightenment, an age of brotherly love,
the attainment of reasoned freedom, truth and good’; an end to past persecutions.
‘We would not like to think that such things might happen in this twentieth
century.’108
When the state turned against even the dominant Russian Orthodox Church
just decades later, many of its faithful fought back, confidently assuming that the
march of the Militant Godless would prove a short-lived aberration. As Husband
has documented, Bolshevik anti-religious policies met with a variety of grass-
roots resistance strategies from 1917–32, including open and sometimes violent
opposition, subversion of state directives and counter-propaganda against the
atheist regime.109 When a general meeting at a Leningrad factory voted to close
a church there in December 1924, petitioning, appeals and pickets by Orthodox
workers forced a meeting to review the decision.110 In rural areas, meanwhile,
God allegedly authored a letter warning that the kolkhoz [collective farm]
was the sphere of the devil: ‘Whoever is not tempted into the kolkhoz is
saved: all kolkhoz members will be annihilated in the next few days.’ A
variation of this document advised peasants ‘to exit the collective and take
up shock work (udarnichestvo) to bring about the collapse of the collective
farms’.111
In 1926 a group of Russian Orthodox bishops imprisoned on Solovki also spoke
out against religious persecution. In an open letter to the Soviet government
published abroad the following May, they set out the fundamental contradiction
between the Church and communism, which ‘precludes any internal convergence
or reconciliation, as there cannot be any between affirmation and negation’. In
view of this irreconcilable ideological divergence between Church and state, the
bishops argued,
The only way to avoid the two colliding in their everyday activities is con-
sistent implementation of the law on separation of Church and state … [The
Church] wishes to preserve fully the spiritual freedom and independence
granted to it by the Constitution and cannot become a servant of the state.112
Their plea went unheeded, however; the stakes were once again stacked on
the state’s side. Since its 1992 foundation, St Tikhon’s Orthodox Humanities
University in Moscow has collated individual data on some 30,000 Russian
Orthodox repressed due to their faith from 1917–53, of whom at least a
third were killed; it estimates the total to be half a million. Of the Church’s
approximately 350 bishops, only six were in charge of dioceses by 1939: 174
had been shot, 42 had died in prison, 29 were still in prison or exile, and the
whereabouts of dozens were unknown.113
Still others tried to adapt to the new regime. Arguing that Buddhism was ‘a
religion of atheism’ as it did not posit the existence of God, Agvan Dorzhiyev
sought to protect his fellow believers from the wrath of the Militant Godless in
the early 1920s.114 This approach proved futile, however: under Stalin, Russia’s
Buddhists suffered proportionally more than perhaps any other faith. Of 15,000
lamas exiled from Buryatia, barely 200 returned.115 Of the region’s 47 datsans, all
but three were razed (Figure 10, p. 94).116 None of Kalmykia’s approximately 100
khuruls and shrines survived.117 Repression in the independent socialist republic
of Tuva meant that only two ruined khure, or temples, were tended by a handful
of lamas when it joined the Soviet Union in August 1944. By 1960, there were
none.118
Another tactic was to conform outwardly to the new order while pursuing a
religious inner life. After their revered Zosima Hermitage was closed in 1923, its
Orthodox elders founded a network of small, clandestine communities in nearby
Moscow whose members were blessed to work in certain Soviet institutions as
their monastic obedience. This practice proved effective: the unconventional
monastic ‘cells’ continued until the natural repose of their members from the 1970s
onwards.119 Islam’s absence of sanctified space allowed Muslims to pay similar lip
service to Soviet demands. As one former religious affairs official recalls:
When they were told that a mosque had to be destroyed since it had been built
illegally, they demolished it and proceeded to construct another in its imme-
diate proximity. In other words, instead of protesting … they formally con-
curred with the authorities, but in effect persisted in doing as they pleased.120
Individual religious communities that successfully preserved their tradition
through sustained state persecution typically altered their resistance strategy to
match circumstance. When atheist commissioners came to close the Old Believer
church in Glukhovo (Yaroslavl region) and confiscate its bells in the 1920s, they
were turned back by villagers with pitchforks, axes and scythes; the church proved
to be one of a very few Old Believer churches to remain open throughout the
Soviet period. Its current young priest is the product of the less confrontational
but no less effective dissent of his father, who refused direct employment with
the Soviet authorities but still managed to raise nine children in Old Belief while
working as a bookbinder.121
A Soviet tradition
If the historical aspiration for religious freedom evident from non-conformist
narratives such as these has been overlooked, Russia’s apparently timeworn
religious establishment is taken at face value.
As the national anthem played, President Vladimir Putin surveyed the gleam-
ing gilt and marble of the cavernous assembly hall beneath Moscow’s newly
reconstructed Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on 13 December 2001. ‘Russian
territory has always united and unites Asia and Europe, a multitude of distinc-
tive cultures and the faiths of Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism,’ he
told an Orthodox conference on faith and civilization. ‘Therein lie the riches
and spiritual strength of our nation.’122 ‘Your words about how many traditional
religions co-operate and how the spiritual strength of Russia lies therein will be
inspirational to every participant,’ Patriarch Aleksy II responded. Leaders of the
three other faiths dubbed ‘traditional’ – Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin, Rabbi Adolf
Shayevich and Hambo Lama Damba Ayusheyev – addressed the conference in
similar tones. No other denominations participated.
This is the public projection of an inherently Russian faith tradition: an unshift-
ing constellation of four core confessions held in cosy coexistence by the state’s
embrace. Along with the assumption that religious freedom is alien to Russia, how-
ever, the authenticity of this constricted arrangement must also be challenged.
Even a cursory second glance reveals blatant contradictions. As shown above,
Buddhist–Orthodox relations for one – true to their substantial doctrinal discrep-
ancies – have historically been cool. For several decades in the early nineteenth
century, the authorities even permitted British and Czech Protestants to conduct
mission among the Buryats and Kalmyks, so long as any converts were baptized
into Orthodoxy.123
Far from being immutable, traditional status may also be momentarily jet-
tisoned for the sake of political expediency. Elected Chief Rabbi of the USSR in
1983, Adolf Shayevich was perturbed to find ‘representatives of a tradition of
Judaism representing no more than five per cent of Russian Jewry’ – Chabad–
Lubavitch Hasidism – invited in his stead to the 2000 presidential inaugura-
tion celebration, as he complained to Putin himself afterwards.124 Within weeks,
however, their leader Berel Lazar – an Italian-born US citizen then speaking
halting Russian – was disputedly proclaimed Chief Rabbi. Over the following
year, the Kremlin’s preference for the newcomer was pronounced: personal visits
by Putin to Chabad’s plush new synagogue in Moscow’s Marina Roshcha dis-
trict in late 2000; replacement of Shayevich by Lazar on the presidential Council
for Co-operation with Religious Organizations in March 2001. Allegiance to
out-of-favour oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky was Shayevich’s only apparent mis-
demeanour.125 Lazar’s handsome financial backing, by contrast, came from pro-
Kremlin tycoons such as Roman Abramovich.126
For the ‘traditional religions’ configuration is largely a Soviet construct.
Journalist Yevgeny Komarov suggests the blueprint for the November 2000
Interreligious Peacemaking Forum, one of its more prominent recent manifesta-
tions, was ‘thought up in the bowels of the Stalinist state apparatus’.127 Putin him-
self recalled in his address to the July 2006 Moscow Summit of World Religious
Leaders – whose honoured guests included China’s top government religious
affairs official rather than the Dalai Lama – that such a ‘broad and uniquely rep-
resentative’ forum last met 25 years earlier under Soviet auspices (The World
Conference of Religious Workers to Save the Sacred Gift of Life from Nuclear
Catastrophe).128
While the full degree to which Soviet anti-religious policy impinged upon the
mystical aspect of faith communities may never be accurately gauged, its impair-
ment of their outward institutions is measurably great. References to faith in a
common ‘Most High’ in the 2006 Summit’s concluding document rattled some
Russian Orthodox, who sensed them to be alien to Church tradition.129 Indeed,
interfaith and ecumenical initiatives were among the few activities encouraged
of the Moscow Patriarchate by the Soviet authorities. Membership of the World
Council of Churches in 1961 marked an abrupt departure from the Church’s ear-
lier stance, set out in an August 1948 statement to that international ecumen-
ical body by Metropolitan Nikolai (Yarushevich) of Krutitsy and Kolomna,
Department for External Church Relations head:
the purpose of the ecumenical movement expressed in the formation of
a ‘World Council of Churches’ with its consequent aim of organising an
‘Oecumenical Church’ is not in accord with the ideals of Christianity and
the aims of the Church of Christ as they are understood by the Orthodox
Church.130
Little questioned by Western Christians eager for closer relations with Russian
Orthodox, the Moscow Patriarchate’s decision to enter the World Council of
Churches was taken – along with the extraordinary decision to bar priests from
leading their own parishes – at its 1961 Bishops’ Council. Convened under the
watchful eyes of Soviet religious affairs officials, there could be no debate.131
Tasked with controlling religious activity in the latter Soviet era, the fourth
department within the fifth directorate of the KGB documented its use of Church
representatives through ecumenical contact abroad. During 1967, for instance:
At the time of his visit to the island of Crete for the meeting of the WCC
[World Council of Churches], agent ‘Svyatoslav’, one of the leaders of the
ROC [Russian Orthodox Church], was instructed to make a stop-over in
Rome and during meetings with highranking bureaucrats in the Vatican to
express his concern about the increase in anti-soviet propaganda on the part
of foreign religious centres.132
While such reports characteristically boast of how Church agents ‘were able to
counter hostile activity’ and ‘gathered information on a number of foreign figures
of interest to the organs of state security’, they were compiled with a view to
impressing KGB superiors. Nevertheless, founded in 1946, it is the Department
for External Church Relations – not charity, education or mission, major fields
of Orthodox activity until 1917 – which remains the Moscow Patriarchate’s most
influential department.
Following its near eradication before the Second World War, the existence of
a Buddhist community was similarly found to have propaganda uses interna-
tionally, particularly when dealing with Asian states. Also in 1946, the Soviet
authorities permitted the foundation of the Central Buddhist Board of the USSR;
a new datsan at Ivolginsk in Buryatia was completed two years later. The new
Buddhist body endorsed Soviet policies to the extent that Hambo Lama Eshi-
Derzhi Sharapov was obliged to issue a public statement expressing anger at
the ‘imperialist activities’ and ‘behaviour of reactionaries’ following communist
China’s 1959 invasion of Tibet, thus lending support to the initial stages of a
campaign that resulted in the annihilation of thousands of Buddhist monasteries
and temples.133 Echoes of this stance may still be heard today, as current Hambo
Lama Ayusheyev questions who would invite the Dalai Lama to Russia, and
proudly emphasizes his traditionally pacifist community’s location within such a
great power: ‘We are Buddhists with nuclear weapons!’134
Many Russian Orthodox raised before the 1917 October Revolution found
the institutional shift in their Church under Stalin perplexing, even disturbing.
In contrast to the hierarchs then incarcerated on Solovki, Metropolitan Sergi
(Stragorodsky), patriarchal locum tenens, sent shockwaves through the Church
by proposing accommodation with the atheist regime on 29 July 1927:
We must show in deeds as well as words that not only people who are indif-
ferent or traitors to Orthodoxy can be faithful Soviet citizens and loyal to the
Soviet authorities, but its most fervent adherents … we perceive any strike
against the [Soviet] Union … to be a strike against us.135
Reflecting upon this proclamation in late 1927, one of the signatories of the 1926
Solovki epistle, Archbishop Ilarion (Troitsky) of Vereya (d. 1929), wrote to a
friend:
Arousing varied and utterly deserved negative criticism, has the letter from
Metropolitan Sergi and his Synod not thrown the Church organization they
lead into the loathsome, adulterous embraces of the atheist, blasphemous
and Christ-hating (anti-Christ) authorities? … Take note, this letter comes
not from [schismatics and heretics] but the legal, canonical, seemingly
Orthodox hierarchy … What are we to do in these frightful moments of
new danger, encroaching by enemy instigation upon our Mother, the Holy
Orthodox Church?136
Later in his letter, Archbishop Ilarion refers incredulously to the newborn
‘Soviet Orthodox Church’.137 When Stalin recognized the Church’s boost to
national morale during the Second World War and permitted the election of
a new patriarch, his title indeed proved a delicate issue. Patriarch Tikhon had
been ‘of Moscow and All Russia’, but under communism Russia was to become
a redundant entity. During their pivotal meeting with the Soviet dictator in
September 1943, Metropolitans Sergi (Stragorodsky), Nikolai (Yarushevich) and
Aleksy (Simansky) found a solution in the antique-sounding ‘of Moscow and All
Rus’.138
Shortly afterwards, Stalin also approved the use of this term in a new Soviet
national anthem: ‘Unbreakable union of freeborn republics / Great Rus has
welded forever to stand!’ At the 2001 Faith and Civilization conference, all rose
to their feet as they heard the familiar strains of this anthem – newly reinstated by
Putin – apparently oblivious to its association with the regime that dynamited the
original of the cathedral beneath which they stood. Amid the collective amnesia
induced by the Soviet period, new habits die hard.
2 ‘Native land protected by God’
While similarly authored by Sergei Mikhalkov, the 2000 Russian national

anthem has lyrics unthinkable for its 1943 Soviet predecessor. Its second verse
lauds Russia as ‘Native land protected by God!’ (Khranimaia Bogom rodnaia
zemlia!), echoing the Russian Orthodox liturgy’s ‘Let us pray to the Lord for
our country protected by God’ (O Bogokhranimei strane nashei, … Gospodu
pomolimsia).1 True to her mystical designation, Russia is once again routinely
regarded as Orthodox. President Putin claimed his nation to be ‘probably the
largest Orthodox power’ with a 90 per cent Orthodox population during his 2005
visit to Mount Athos.2 Initiated by the Moscow Patriarchate, the Russian public
calendar marked Baptism of Rus Day for the first time on 28 July 2010.3
The twin assumptions that religious freedom is a Western value and that
Russian religiosity is inherently narrow support a cluster of others: that Russia
has returned to Orthodoxy following seven decades of Soviet atheism; that her
political leaders are devout Orthodox; that the Russian Orthodox Church uni-
formly seeks the restoration of its exclusive privileges; that the Kremlin pursues
this agenda. These too must be contested before we can assess the merits for
Russia of an Orthodox-centred versus pluralistic religious policy.
First, how far is Russian society truly Orthodox? While recent national polls
record over 70 per cent self-identifying as Orthodox Christians, only some 40
per cent believe categorically in God.4 In their particularly wide-ranging 2005
survey, Furman and Kääriainen found only 15 per cent accepting the central
Christian tenet of resurrection from the dead, while 42 per cent trusted astrol-
ogy. Believers in God had nearly doubled since 1991, yet there was no accompa-
nying shift in moral values. In rates similar to wider society, just 30 per cent of
believers opposed abortion – only marginally more than in 1991 – while those
condemning marital infidelity had even halved.5
The goal of an Orthodox life is unity with God, or deification, made possi-
ble through the incarnation of Jesus Christ; as summarized by St Athanasius
of Alexandria, God ‘became man that we might become God’.6 The Church
is the vehicle through which this is attained, as Russian Orthodox theologian
Vladimir Lossky explained: ‘The sacraments of the Church … render us apt for
the spiritual life in which the union of our persons with God is accomplished.’7
‘Native land protected by God’ 25
Receipt of the sacraments by regular participation in Church life is thus central
to the Orthodox faith. Yet few of Russia’s majority who identify as Orthodox
conform to the Church definition. The recent surveys reveal that while some
80 per cent are baptized, over 70 per cent have never taken communion in their
lives.8
In 2007 the independent Levada Centre polled only 2 per cent attending
Orthodox liturgy weekly.9 Mitrokhin and Sibireva’s 2005 sociological study of
church attendance in Ryazan region – likely the most systematic to date – sug-
gests true figures may be even lower. Those attending Sunday liturgy in the
region’s villages, district centres and main city represent just 0.9 per cent of the
population. This, the researchers stress, is while rounding up to the nearest 10 in
case of omission, counting as attending those staying at the service for only a few
minutes, and conducting the bulk of their fieldwork in summer, when the rural
population is bolstered by city-dwellers from other areas.10 Moreover, Ryazan
region is regarded as particularly Orthodox, with 2009 police figures for Easter
worship attendance among the highest in Russia.11
Analogous Easter figures for Moscow’s approximately 250 churches wavered
around 1 per cent of the population, or from 80–125,000, in 2005–7.12 In 2009
the Patriarchate circulated a Moscow police figure of 137,000 participating
in Easter processions commencing the night service – the point of maximum
involvement – and 4.5 million attending across Russia.13 Even so, this accounts
for only some 3 per cent of a supposedly majority Orthodox population, on the
most important church festival of the year.
At 60,000, the Patriarchate criticized as too low 2008 police estimates for
Moscow church attendance at Christmas, the second most important festival.14
The 2010 figure leaped to 135,000,15 but this was still strikingly lower than the
180,000 recorded attending Christmas services at Moscow’s 39 then functioning
churches by Soviet religious affairs officials in 1965.16
A similar pattern characterizes another major aspect of Orthodox obser-
vance: fasting. A 2010 poll found only 4 per cent intending to follow fully the
main Lenten fast – involving a seven-week vegan diet – and a further 22 per cent
in part (Figure 4, p. 52).17 Even when undertaken, a popular attitude towards the
fast views it as more physical than spiritual detoxification. A March 2007 adver-
tisement for a health and beauty centre placed in a Moscow business weekly
pictured a quizzical female model on a toilet beneath the slogan: ‘Great Lent has
begun! Just the time to think about cleansing your intestine.’
The wider populace is not simply indifferent to devotional practice, however.
The Russian Orthodox Church assigns Radonitsa, the ninth day after Easter, as
the first opportunity after that festival to commemorate the dead. Yet despite
priests’ exhortations, many more visit cemeteries on Easter Day – as became
commonplace during the latter Soviet era, when church attendance was risky for
careers – than attend church services.18 In Moscow, the police figure for those
visiting cemeteries on Easter 2003 was fourfold that for church attendance; a
2009 national poll on how respondents intended to mark Easter revealed a simi-
lar discrepancy.19
Despite Patriarchate complaints about deflated official figures, even promi-
nent traditionalist clergy recognize the gulf between Orthodox allegiance
and practice. ‘It’s not one sheep that’s gone astray, but the 99,’ muses Fr Oleg
Stenyayev. ‘We’re now talking not about a lost sheep, but a lost nation.’20 The
polls also suggest that the gulf is not one of ignorance, however. Furman and
Kääriainen found respondents choosing to reckon as Orthodox those outside the
Church’s own determination: 84 per cent agreed that ‘a Russian, even if not bap-
tized or attending church, is still Orthodox in his soul’.21 While the dividing line
is blurred, we can thus increasingly speak of two Orthodoxies in Russia: one
oriented on church canons, the other on popular perception. Sociologist of reli-
gion Sergei Filatov suggests that leading hierarchs have facilitated the latter by
publicly appealing to national tradition rather than core Christianity.22 Yet this is
the Church’s only mode of engagement with wider post-Soviet society.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to view Russia as a secularized society along
the lines of Western Europe. While defying quantitative evaluation, interest in
religion is more widespread: it is hard to imagine the equivalent in a Western
European capital of a market stall-holder reading the diary of St John of Kronstadt,
or a metro cashier with the Lenten prayer of St Ephraim the Syrian taped to the
window of her booth. Observance by the small percentage of devout Orthodox is
also more intense than that of their Western Christian counterparts, with service
attendance, travel to church and fasting typically more arduous. Due to its dif-
ferent dynamic and position at odds with the political establishment for much of
the twentieth century, Orthodoxy also resonates with bohemian and other alter-
native subcultures in Russian society whose Western counterparts are suspicious
of ‘organized’ religion.
Traditional dissenter communities – the Molokans and Old Believers – are a
fraction of those before 1917; some, such as the Dukhobors, have all but vanished.
Assuming that only some 3 per cent – or 4.5 million – are practising Orthodox
Christians, Russia retains significant religious minorities, however. Mirroring
the loose identification of Russian ethnicity with Orthodoxy, Malashenko esti-
mates around 20 million of Islamic background in Russia, but acknowledges
those practising may be as low as two million.23 The latter figure tallies roughly
with Furman and Kääriainen’s and Karpov and Lisovskaya’s reckoning of around
3 per cent.24 Active followers of the other so-called traditional faiths are neg-
ligible: while the 2002 national census recorded nearly a quarter of a million
ethnic Jews, for example, those even self-identifying as religious are as low as
20,000.25
While Protestants are likely more numerous than Catholics, Furman and
Kääriainen found 1 per cent identifying as Protestant, and a 2010 national poll
recorded 2 per cent as non-Orthodox Christian.26 Very few will be nominally so,
however, which explains Patriarchate concern over heterodox competition.
Viewed differently, Orthodox hegemony is even less sweeping. The number of
registered religious organizations naturally cannot be considered in an absolute
sense, as membership may vary markedly. Nevertheless, obstacles to state reg-
istration are typically encountered by non-Patriarchate communities, whereas
functioning Patriarchate parishes are fewer than on paper.27 Federal statistics
consistently place the number of Patriarchate organizations at above half, with
the remainder mostly shared between Muslims and Protestant denominations.28
But while the Patriarchate and overall figures have risen steadily – reaching
12,727 and 23,078 respectively in 2009 – increased bureaucratic pressure has
seen Muslim and Protestant organizations drop by over a thousand since 2006.29
The 2009 total also omits at least 10,000 religious groups that have never regis-
tered; almost none are likely to be Patriarchate.30
Filatov observes considerable fluctuations in the strength of Orthodoxy as
one moves south or east across Russia, correlating with the timespan for which
Moscow has controlled a given territory.31 Soviet policy proved an exacerbat-
ing factor here: as well as being a late-colonized region, Russia’s Far Eastern
District – roughly a quarter the size of Europe – had just five functioning
Orthodox churches in 1936, down from a pre-revolutionary total of 225.32
Publicized once, in 2002, official figures for registered religious organizations
in Russia’s seven federal districts confirm this topography. In the Central and
North-Western Federal Districts – where Orthodoxy has the longest historical
presence – Patriarchate organizations held a clear majority of 5,785 and 1,802
organizations respectively, with Protestants occupying a notable second place. In
the Volga and Southern Federal Districts, just under half of 5,269 and 2,999 orga-
nizations were Patriarchate, with Protestants and now Muslims comprising the
bulk of the remainder. Beyond the Ural Mountains, the picture grew starker as
it panned eastwards: the Patriarchate accounted for markedly fewer than half of
the 1,253 and 1,876 organizations in the Ural and Siberian Federal Districts, and
barely a third of the Far Eastern Federal District’s 908, where Protestants scored
a majority 409.33 The Far East also polls far lower religiosity than nationally, with
only some 30 per cent identifying as believers.34
An Orthodox president?
Our second related assumption is that Russia’s political leadership is devout
Orthodox. Boris Yeltsin’s shock eve-of-2000 power transfer to Vladimir Putin
in the presence of Patriarch Aleksy II appeared to herald a distinctly Orthodox
presidency.35 When asked whether he wore a cross – customary for Orthodox
Christians – in a September 2000 CNN interview, Putin recounted how he had
worn one of simple aluminium ever since its apparently miraculous survival
in a fire at his St Petersburg dacha.36 In late 2001 his reputed spiritual adviser
(dukhovnik), Abbot Tikhon Shevkunov, told Greek daily I Hora that Putin ‘really
is an Orthodox Christian, and not just nominally, but a person who makes
confession, takes communion and understands his responsibility before God
for the high service entrusted to him and for his immortal soul’.37 On meeting
Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) clergy in New York in 2003,
Putin told them, ‘You are sitting with a believing president.’38
While George W. Bush may have peered into his soul, Putin’s religiosity is
known ultimately only to himself. Nevertheless, on volunteering information
about his beliefs, he has in fact appeared strikingly alien to Orthodoxy. On the
eve of a visit to India soon after the CNN interview, The Russia Journal asked
Putin what he associated with that country. Putin chose Russian artist Nikolai
Roerich, who was greatly inspired by Indian religious thought, adding that he
led ‘an amazing life, a marvel of creativity and astonishing example of spiritual
closeness that perhaps doesn’t lie on the surface, but is nevertheless the spiritual
closeness that binds all peoples’.39 The Russian Orthodox Church, however, cat-
egorically rejects Roerich’s philosophy of ‘Living Ethics’. Addressing the 1994
Bishops’ Council, Patriarch Aleksy II condemned Roerich devotees’ ‘pernicious
activity’.40 Patriarchate representatives at a 2004 Moscow anti-sectarian seminar
denounced ‘Living Ethics’ as ‘a religious sect not only incompatible with, but
directly hostile to, Christianity’.41
Putin could have conceivably been grasping for a rare India–Russia cultural
link out of diplomatic considerations. But when asked by CNN interviewer Larry
King whether he believed in a higher power, he had similarly proffered a New
Age answer:
I believe in humankind. I believe in our good intentions. I believe in the fact
that all of us have come here to do good. And if we do so, together, then
success awaits us. Both in relations with each other and between states. But
most importantly, we will in this way achieve the main goal, comfort in our
own hearts.42
If this were not enough, Putin told The Wall Street Journal in 2002 that ‘every
person must have some moral, spiritual foundation. It does not matter in this case
to what confession he belongs. All confessions are thought up by people.’43 At
least with Orthodox ultranationalists hopeful they had a new tsar, the image of a
Russian Orthodox president was thus shattered almost as soon as created. As one
of the most prominent, Konstantin Dushenov, remarked on the CNN interview:
For a bureaucrat who was educated during the epoch of ‘developed social-
ism’, such an answer is not at all unusual.… But on the lips of a man who
aspires to be Orthodox, what he said was simply amazing.… To speak about
comfort in response to a question about faith can only be done by a person
who is immeasurably distant from the Russian religious tradition.44
Yet Putin is still widely seen as pro-Orthodox. Knox argues that his ‘habitual
acknowledgment of the centrality of Orthodoxy to Russia’s historical and
future development differs little from his predecessor’s or from many other
Russian politicians’ from across the political spectrum’.45 Putin’s public
rhetoric has indeed supported Orthodoxy at times: in a typical flourish during
his summer 2001 northern monastery tour, he stressed Russia’s traditional
designation as ‘holy’ and the need to return to the nation’s Christian roots.46 But
while some early policy developments concur, Putin has mostly balked at the
point of delivery. Thus, signed two weeks after his assumption of presidential
powers, Russia’s January 2000 National Security Concept appeared to pursue
Patriarchate designs by urging ‘counteraction of the negative influence of
foreign religious organizations and missionaries’.47 Gestures such as generous
support from the presidential reserve fund for the construction of a cathedral
on the extreme eastern peninsula of Kamchatka also cast Putin as defender
of Orthodox territory.48 But this image crumbled in the face of more worldly
interests. Opposed by the seven Orthodox bishops whose dioceses lie in the
Russian Far East, Putin granted China possession of Tarabarov Island and
approximately half of Bolshoi Ussuriysk Island in the Amur River in October
2004.49 The 2000 construction of an Orthodox chapel on the latter was all that
prevented the transfer of the whole island, it seemed, as the redrawn border
reached right up to the steps of the church porch.50
The discrepancy between style and substance was even more pronounced on
the issue of Orthodox public education. Apparently supporting the Patriarchate-
backed Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture course, Putin suggested in February
2004 that young people should study ‘common human values, which are also
linked with the traditional religions’.51 As ensuing debate intensified through
2007, however, he rebuffed the course when asked to stem concern over its pos-
sible disappearance from regional curricula:
Our Constitution says that the Church is separate from the state. You know
how I feel, including towards the Russian Orthodox Church. But if anyone
thinks that we should proceed differently, that would require a change to the
Constitution. I do not believe that is what we should be doing now.52
Compounding this message, Putin’s comments were prominently televised
during state news coverage of his visit to Belgorod, the region notorious for the
introduction of compulsory Foundations of Orthodox Culture.
Even prior, Putin had proved willing to challenge Church positions openly.
Rejecting the unfounded but pervasive Russocentric view of Orthodoxy, he
upbraided Bishop Yevstafy (Yevdokimov) of Chita and Zabaikalsk for bemoan-
ing the threat of Chinese colonization of his diocese at an October 2004 Kremlin
meeting with hierarchs: ‘Have you tried converting the Chinese to Orthodoxy?
This is also a perfectly possible sphere of activity for the Russian Orthodox
Church.’53 Then, as controversy raged over Moscow’s Caution, Religion! anti-
religious art show, Putin urged those attending his April 2005 Federal Assembly
address – including the patriarch – to heed words by Russian philosopher Ivan
Ilin: ‘The state cannot demand of its citizens faith, prayer, love, kindness and
conviction. It does not have the right to regulate academic, religious or artistic
creativity.’54
Reflecting Orthodoxy’s overall lack of prominence in Kremlin political dis-
course, the pro-Patriarchate activity of the Putinist youth movements Idushchie
Vmeste (‘Walking Together’) and Nashi (‘Ours’) has correspondingly been con-
fined to occasional, quirky political promotions in downtown Moscow: the hand-
ing out of baptismal crosses under the slogan, ‘We need to be and not just call
ourselves Orthodox’,55 and ‘Nail Your Sin’, in which young people were invited
to nail a list of their sins halfway into a wooden stump, go to confession and then
hammer the list in fully.56
Moreover, while it might be tempting to link state preference for the Moscow
Patriarchate with Putin’s erosion of other constitutional principles, President
Yeltsin’s support was far more demonstrative. Amid controversy over whether
Patriarch Aleksy II would bless parliament in 2004 – ostensibly yet another
example of encroaching Church influence under Putin – it transpired that he
had already blessed the building a decade earlier.57 And while the patriarch was
one of a handful of figures standing close behind Yeltsin on the podium at the
1996 presidential inauguration,58 he was relegated to front-row guests facing the
podium at Putin’s 2000 inauguration (the 2004 ceremony followed a similar for-
mat).59 More substantially, as Mitrokhin points out, under ‘not-very-believing’
Yeltsin the Church received far more property and financial benefits than during
Putin’s first two terms as president.60 Small wonder that instead of ‘servant of
God, Boris’ – as would have been the conventional reference to the deceased at
his funeral service – ‘first president of Russia, Boris Nikolayevich’ was com-
memorated at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on 25 April 2007 – a formula
analogous to that for the tsars.61
Still, as we will see in subsequent chapters, Orthodox privilege has indeed
risen on Putin’s watch.62 Sometimes it is blatant: Saratov regional governor Dmitri
Ayatskov announced a proposal to finance ‘our Orthodox religion’ from the state
budget in 2002.63 A May 2004 local decree transferred over 12 million US dollars
in construction costs incurred by the Church-on-the-Blood – a lavish cathedral
on the 1918 Romanov martyrdom site – onto Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) region’s
public purse.64 Speculation concerning Moscow City Court’s bias against reli-
gious minorities – as in decisions against the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Salvation
Army – was fuelled by the 2004 construction of an Orthodox chapel in the court-
house grounds.65
But to view such instances as evidence of a pro-Orthodox agenda dictated by
Putin himself is to make the assumption – as Western scholars, likely influenced
by their own states, are prone66 – that the Putin state functions more or less
coherently. This is understandable given the Kremlin’s much-vaunted efforts to
re-establish a ‘power vertical’ (vertikal’ vlasti) centralized chain of government
command. As this book demonstrates, however, the dynamic of religious policy,
at least, is different. With Putin at its helm the presidential administration had
shown scant initiative either to pursue Patriarchate goals or to defend religious
freedom by 2008, and this absence of a firm central policy has afforded wide lat-
itude to lower government tiers – even individual officials – to determine their
own policy, as the examples just cited in fact indicate. This is particularly the
case at regional level, as the former head of Moscow city’s justice department
admits:
Church–state relations in this country take shape depending upon what
agreement the head of administration and local bishop have managed to
reach. If they are friends and go hunting together, Divine Law is taught in
schools, if not, the mayor is called nothing less than antichrist in local church
circles.67
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time in comparison with their importance relative to other
departments is a condition the large mournfulness of which seems
beyond all possibility of doubt to the writer. Nor should it be forgotten
that the teachers of the social sciences form but a small minority of
the whole body of university and collegiate instructors in all subjects.
Nevertheless they are subject to the rigid general standards of
accuracy, fairness, and impartiality prescribed by the profession as a
whole, and enforced severely whether the offender be a biologist, a
philologist, or an economist. Criticism is far more relentless and
constant in this sphere than laymen are wont to suspect, except on
the rare occasions when some more than ordinarily virulent
controversy is taken up by the daily papers. Under such conditions
any academic tendency either toward servility or toward demagogy
is not likely to go long unchallenged.
Considering the high cost and small profits of university
manipulation in this light it is very doubtful whether so indirect a
method of social defence would appeal to our financial pirates.
Whatever their defects or vices, men of this type have at least
received the rigorous training of the business career. They are not
philosophers of farsighted vision, nor are they easily perturbed by
fears of distant dangers. Troubles near at hand they see very clearly;
indeed, one of the chief grounds of clamour against such men is the
crass directness of the bribery to which on occasion they resort.
Interests under fire appeal rather to political hirelings, to venal
lawyers, to the courts, to legislatures, or to the press for effective
protection and defence. College doctrines are too remote, too
uncertain of manipulation to be of assistance. Although they did not
learn it from the poet, business men are certainly not unmindful that:
“was ein Professor spricht

Nicht gleich zu allen dringet.”
Given both the motive and the means, however, the task of
corrupting the college teaching of economic, political, and social
doctrines would seem almost hopelessly difficult. A given institution,
may, indeed, be endowed almost exclusively by a certain man of
great wealth. With very few exceptions knowledge of such
munificence is made public property. If then the president or
professors of such a university should endeavour to justify or palliate
the business conduct of the founder their motives will be suspected
from the start and their arguments, however artfully they might plead
the case, discounted accordingly. If discretion were thrown to the
winds (there is perhaps one case of this sort) the net effect of the
work of such apologists, instead of aiding their financial friends,
might profoundly injure and embarrass them. Those who are familiar
with the character of the American student know that he would be
the first to detect any insincerity in the discussion of public questions
by an instructor or college official. If the prosperity of the college
were due almost entirely to a single bounteous donor its venal
professors would, of course, have no direct motive to defend the
economic misconduct of any other than their particular friend among
the captains of industry. Possibly they might develop a policy similar
to that of newspapers in the same predicament,—silence or soft
speaking regarding the sins of their great and rich friend combined
with louder trumpetings against the social misconduct of other and
indifferent financial interests. In the case of all our important
institutions of learning, however, funds of very considerable size in
the aggregate have been received from many sources in the past,
and new gifts, even when they are of large amount, represent merely
fractional additions thereto. Those who know our colleges and
universities will find it hard to believe that the old academic ideals
and traditions of well supported institutions, their scientific honesty
and earnest devotion to broad public service, are to be cheaply
bought by gifts of half a million or more from the nouveau riche.
There is such a thing as loyalty to the small gifts often made with the
highest motives and the greatest sacrifices by generations long since
dead. Few institutions desire to disregard this sentiment, and no
institution can disregard it with impunity.
Finally there are the great state institutions of the country,
maintained almost wholly by taxation and hence free from any
corrupting influence that large endowments might exercise. There
can be no doubt that the possession of these two fundamentally
different kinds of economic support is a great safeguard to the
independence of university instruction in the United States. No
country is more blatant in asserting its Lehrfreiheit than Germany,
but there the exclusive reliance of universities upon state support,
coupled with the tremendous strength of government, makes
necessary very considerable modification of the Teutonic boast of
absolute academic freedom. To be sure state institutions in the
United States have been charged at times with similar subservience
to legislatures and political leaders. Whatever perversion of this sort
may have occurred it was at least not turned to the advantage of
corporate misdoing. Indeed it probably had a directly opposite and
strongly demagogic trend. Fortunately our state universities are
becoming so powerful, so well fortified by high and honest traditions,
so beloved by great and rapidly growing bodies of influential alumni
that the days of their dependence upon political favour are well nigh
over. It is now beyond all doubt that they are destined to a career of
immense usefulness to our democracy, and it seems highly probable
that they will overtake, if they do not ultimately excel, the great
endowed institutions of the country. If the latter should ever show
themselves subject to the influence of predatory wealth the
development of well supported public universities should supply the
necessary corrective. At the present time, however, a strong
presumption of the general devotion of both classes of institutions to
the public welfare is afforded by the fact that no recognisable
distinction exists between the general doctrines of economics,
political, and social science as taught in endowed schools on the one
hand and in state schools on the other.
It was unfortunately essential to the foregoing argument that the
worst motives should be assumed on the part of college benefactors.
Justice requires ample correction of this point. A conspiracy to
influence the social doctrines of our colleges, as we have seen, is
neither so inexpensive, so direct, nor so likely to succeed as to
commend itself to business men looking for immediate results. No
doubt there have been men of wealth who by large and well
advertised benefactions to colleges and universities have sought not
to influence college teaching but to rehabilitate themselves and their
business methods in popular esteem. Conspicuous giving with this
penitential purpose in view is not likely to prove very effective,
however. The sharp insight as to motives and the half humourous
cynicism peculiar to American character are sufficient safeguards
against the purchase of undeserved sympathy by rich offenders. In
spite of the enormous sums given in the United States not only to the
higher educational institutions but also for many other educational
and philanthropic purposes, it seems extremely doubtful that public
opinion has been affected thereby favourably to plutocratic interests.
Few of the great mass are directly touched and consciously
benefited by such gifts, but all are able to see (and if not they are
helped by radicals to see), the superfluity out of which the donations
were made. Benefactors, prospective and actual, must face the
certainty of much criticism and misinterpretation. So far as this
criticism is unjust it is to be regretted; so far as it is just it contributes
materially to social welfare. Investments in business are judged as to
their wisdom by the ready tests of profits and permanence;
investments in social work are not subject to tests so accurate and
so easily applied. To some extent their place is taken by the advice
and criticism of workers in the field. Still there is large possibility that
gifts for social work may be applied in useless or even in harmful
ways. A wise conception of the function of the philanthropist must
therefore include a realisation of the value of criticism by specialists,
and also a determination either to ignore misinterpretation and unjust
criticism, or to await its reversal by a better informed, if somewhat
belated public opinion.
Besides the possible but not always probable motives for making
large gifts referred to above every other conceivable influence has
affected educational benefactions. George Ade’s breezy Chicago
magnate who slaps the college president on the back and says:
“Have a laboratory on me, old fellow,” is slangy, to be sure, but not
altogether fabulous. It is a very common misconception that financial
assistance is the only thing needful in higher educational work.
President Schurman of Cornell University expressed the views of
many of his colleagues among the great university executives of the
country when he lamented that “rich men who give their money to
educational institutions cannot be induced to give also their time and
energy to the management of them.”[49] So neglectful an attitude on
their part, by the way, is hardly consistent with the theory that they
are engaged in a conspiracy to pollute the wells of knowledge. When
we consider the immense number of contributors, large and small, to
the cause of higher education it is impossible to escape the
conviction that behind many of their generous acts lay real sacrifice,
an adequate conception of the great function of university teaching,
and the purest and most humanitarian motives. Often, too, there has
been full realisation that “the gift without the giver is bare,” and
patient, unstinted, intelligent service has accompanied money
benefactions. In the same fine spirit nearly all our colleges and
universities have accepted and employed the resources so
generously placed at their disposal.
While due weight should be given to the honourable influences
ordinarily accompanying benefactions, candour also compels the
frank discussion of those cases where constraint of professorial
opinion has been attempted. There have been a few flagrant
instances of the dismissal of teachers on account of utterances
displeasing to men who have been drawn upon heavily for financial
support. One can readily understand the feeling of the latter that,
considering their large gifts, they have been most ungratefully and
unjustly abused, and also the action which they accordingly instigate,
although it is as silly in most cases as the Queen of Hearts’
peremptory command:—“Off with his head!” Men in other walks of
life frequently behave in the same way. There is, for example, the
very commonplace case of the church member who, disgruntled
because of pulpit references—no matter how impersonal—to his pet
sin, cuts down his contribution and seeks to drive the minister from
his charge. The consequences of the dismissal of a professor
because of conflict between his teachings and the outside interests
of college benefactors are so widespread and dangerous, however,
that they cannot be passed over lightly simply because occurrences
of this sort are relatively infrequent in the academic world.
In the first instance, of course, the teacher himself may seem the
chief sufferer from such controversies. Few of the clear cases of this
sort, uncomplicated by any personal defect on the part of the man
who is dismissed, have resulted, however, in the destruction of a
promising career. On the contrary, positions have been opened up in
other more liberal and often more important institutions to the
teachers who have been persecuted for truth’s sake. Indeed there is
some danger that the halo of false martyrdom, with its possible
accompanying rewards, may mislead the younger and less judicious
holders of professorships to indulge in forms of blatherskiting quite
inconsistent with their office. In the great majority of cases, however,
the effect of such individual assaults upon the tenure of academic
position is to threaten the independence of every department in the
same or related subjects the country over. Here we have the most
serious evil resulting from such unfortunate occurrences. It is
certainly great enough to justify the intervention of the national
scientific association to which the professor belongs at least to the
extent of the most searching and impartial investigation of all the
circumstances involved in his dismissal, and their subsequent
publication as widely as possible whether or not they justify the
professor concerned. A powerful and most welcome auxiliary to the
restraining influence which such investigations are bound to exercise
is likely to be supplied by the Carnegie Foundation if one may judge
from tendencies exhibited by its most recent report.[50] Thus in the
last analysis the evil consequences of attempts to interfere with
liberty of teaching are likely to fall most severely upon the institution
which is so weak as to permit such manipulation. It risks exposure
and loss of prestige, it loses men of worth and suffers in its capacity
to attract others to take their places. All things considered there is
every indication that the few institutions which have offended in this
way have learned well their lesson, and are quite in the penitent
frame of mind of the pious Helen:—
“... dies will ich nun

Auch ganz gewiss nicht wieder thun.”
Amid the manifold influences that environ university teaching it is

impossible for any one writer to set down all the guiding professional
ideals. That they are easily corruptible and frequently corrupted is,
as we have seen, absurd. Of both the press and higher education it
may be said that they are in the grip of forces greater than
themselves, of forces mighty to restrain any tendency to be unfaithful
to their own better ideals. The rapidly growing attendance and
influence of universities and colleges would appear to constitute a
vote of confidence on the part of the public which may be interpreted
as a general denial of the charges made against them. In the great
majority of institutions the writer believes that the teaching of the
social sciences is dominated by the ideals of scientific honesty,
thoroughness, and impartiality. No instructor is worthy of university or
college position who deliberately seeks to make converts to any
party or cause, however free his motives may be from the taint of
personal advantage. Rather is it his duty to present systematically all
moot questions in all their aspects. Like the judge summing up a
case he should attempt further to supply a basis for the critical
weighing of testimony by the class,—his jury. He is by no means to
be inhibited from expressing an opinion, indeed he should be
strongly encouraged to express it, stating it however as opinion
together with the reasons that have led him to form it. But active
proselyting should be rigorously barred. It is certainly no part of the
duties of a professor of political science, for example, to attempt to
make voters for either the Democratic or Republican ticket in a given
campaign. If he attempts to do so he will certainly and deservedly
fail, and in addition cripple his own influence and that of the
institution which he represents. The higher duty is his of presenting
all the evidence and the opinions on the points at issue and of
exhibiting in his procedure the methods which will enable his
students to investigate and decide for themselves not merely the
political questions of the day but also the political questions they will
have to meet unaided throughout their later active lives. Not voters
for one campaign or recruits for one cause, but intelligent citizenship
for all time and every issue,—such as is the ideal which the teacher
should pursue.
Naturally this attitude does not please everybody. All sorts of
interests, not only corrupting but reforming in character, are
constantly endeavouring to secure academic approval in order to
exploit it in their own propaganda. When this is denied, recourse to
the charge of corruption by an adverse interest lies very close to a
hand already habituated to mudslinging. Although the prevailing
opinions of college teachers on labour legislation, to cite a specific
example, are certainly not those of the manufacturer’s office, just as
certainly they are broader and more progressive than the opinions of
the man in the street. Of course radical labour leaders will take up
still more advanced positions. In the partisanship natural to men in
their situation they may even regard academic suggestions for the
solution of the question as mere palliatives. It is difficult for them to
appreciate the motives or the value to the cause of labour of the
tempered advocacy of disinterested persons who are able to appeal
to the great neutral public which in the end must pass on all labour
reforms and all labour legislation. And the socialists are accustomed
to go much farther than labour leaders, insinuating that capitalistic
influence lurks behind every university chair in economics. Mr. W. J.
Ghent puts their view of the situation as follows:
“Teachers, economists, in their search for truth, too often find it only
within the narrow limits which are prescribed by endowments.”
“The economic, and, consequently, the moral, pressure exerted
upon this class [i.e., “social servants,” including college teachers] by
the dominant class is constant and severe; and the tendency of all
moral weaklings within it is to conform to what is expected from
above.”
“Educators and writers have a normal function of social service.
Many of these, however, are retainers of a degraded type, whose
greatest activity lies in serving as reflexes of trading-class sentiment
and disseminators of trading-class views of life.”
“Rightly, it may be said that it is to his [the minister, writer, or
teacher’s] economic interest to preach and teach the special ethics of
the traders; that the good jobs go to those who are most eloquent,
insistent, and thoroughgoing in expounding such ethics, while the poor
jobs or no jobs at all go to those who are most backward or slow-
witted in such exposition.”
“It may even be said that the net result of many of their [i.e., trading-
class] benefactions is nothing less than the prostitution of the
recipients—in particular of writers, preachers, and educators.”[51]
By way of contrast with this thoroughgoing arraignment, the
opinion of Mr. Paul Elmer More may be quoted:
“Of all the substitutes for the classical discipline there is none more
popular and, when applied to immature minds, more pernicious than
economics. To a very considerable degree the present peril of
socialism and other eccentricities of political creed is due to the fact
that so many young men are crammed with economical theory
(whether orthodox or not) when their minds have not been weighted
with the study of human nature in its larger aspects. From this lack of
balance they fall an easy prey to the fallacy that history is wholly
determined by economical conditions, or to the sophism of Rousseau
that the evil in society is essentially the result of property. The very
thoroughness of this training in economics is thus a danger.”[52]
The positions both of Mr. Ghent and of Mr. More are extreme. As
for the special ethics of the trading class, of which the former makes
so much, it is doubtful if anything exists more foreign to current
academic ideals. So marked is this aversion that it is distinctly
difficult for the ordinary professor to estimate correctly the real value
to the community of the service of the business man. That equal
difficulty exists on the other side is apparent from the openly
expressed conviction of many business men that the college teacher
is a thoroughly unpractical sort of person. The latter attitude, by the
way, is a most remarkable one for a client to assume toward his
social apologist,—taking Mr. Ghent’s view of the situation. A prisoner
at the bar who should rail at the abilities of his counsel is certainly
not putting himself in the way of acquittal. As for “moral weaklings,”
no profession can honestly deny the existence of some examples of
this pestiferous species in its ranks. If academic promotion
depended upon moral weakness, however, the bankruptcy of the
profession would have been announced long ago. As a matter of
fact, the system of selection and advancement employed by colleges
is admirably adapted to their requirements. In spite of the
machinations of occasional cliques, chiefly of a personal or churchly
character, it usually succeeds in placing the best prepared and most
capable men in desirable and influential positions. Certainly college
administration as a whole deserves the reputation of success which
it enjoys, a reputation, by the way, much superior to that of most of
our governmental machinery. If, for example, an equally effective
system could be employed in the selection of the administrative
heads of American city governments it is safe to say that many of
our municipal problems would find a speedy solution.
As between Mr. Ghent and Mr. More, the latter is much nearer the
truth in his main contention. It is hardly the case, however, as Mr.
More would seem to imply, that thorough training in economics is
more likely to produce half-baked agitators than is a mere smattering
of the subject. Here as elsewhere “a little knowledge is a dangerous
thing,” and the students who afterwards run amuck in radicalism are
drawn to a very slight extent from the ranks of those who acquire a
really thorough knowledge of economics or the other social sciences.
Without recourse to the old classical discipline, as proposed by Mr.
More, the study of history and of the theory of evolution should
furnish an excellent corrective to the excessively a priori processes
employed in some fields of economics. Apart from these exceptions
Mr. More is clearly right in maintaining that the net result of college
instruction in this subject is radical rather than reactionary. However,
the impress finally given to the overwhelming majority of college
students is not that of radicalism but rather that of willingness to work
patiently, constructively, and progressively for social betterment. In
either event the sweeping assertion that college teachers are the
hirelings of capitalistic conspirators finds little ground for support.
One who attempts a survey of the whole field of corruption is apt

to be impressed at first with its hopeless complexity and
heterogeneity. There are many petty forms of evil, the shady moral
character of which is as yet hardly perceived. The spirit thus
revealed is, however, identical with that which expresses itself in the
major forms of corruption which are so obvious and threatening that
they have become subject to public criticism. It cannot be denied that
some abuses of a grave character make their appearance in the
learned professions, journalism, and higher education. In all such
cases, however, vigorous reform work is in progress. A very
gratifying feature of the situation is that the most effective and
sincere efforts for improvement are being made from the inside. Our
“men of light and leading” are sound at heart. It is not necessary to
prove to them, as unfortunately it sometimes is to those in other
walks of life, that corruption does not pay. Rehabilitated by some of
its more recent forms journalism exercises an alert and resourceful
influence upon the opinion of the day. More hopeful still is the fact
that our institutions of higher learning are moulding both the men and
the measures of to-morrow into nobler forms.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] Corruption in the professions might also be dealt with as a
subdivision of economic corruption. All professional services, it
could be argued, must be remunerated, and the abuses which
have grown up in connection with them are the outgrowth of a
commercial spirit antagonistic to professional ideals. While this is
doubtless true, the persistence of the older ideals and the efforts
to rehabilitate and extend them are facts of sufficient importance,
in the opinion of the writer, to justify the separate treatment of
corruption in the professions. Even if this distinction did not exist
convenience would make a division of the fields for the purpose of
discussion highly desirable.
[41] Cf. G. W. Alger’s “Generosity and Corruption,” Atlantic, vol.
xcv (1905), p. 781.
[42] Even if it be sneered at in certain quarters as a mere
counsel of perfection, the following statement of the principles
underlying “the lawyer’s duty in its last analysis” is of great
significance:—“No client, corporate or individual, however
powerful, nor any cause, civil or political, however important, is
entitled to receive, nor should any lawyer render, any service or
advice involving disloyalty to the law whose ministers we are, or
disrespect of the judicial office, which we are bound to uphold, or
corruption of any person or persons exercising a public office or
private trust, or deception or betrayal of the public. When
rendering any such improper service or advice, the lawyer invites
and merits stern and just condemnation. Correspondingly, he
advances the honour of his profession and the best interests of
his client when he renders service or gives advice tending to
impress upon the client and his undertaking exact compliance
with the strictest principles of moral law.” The “Canons of
Professional Ethics,” adopted by the American Bar Association at
its thirty-first annual meeting at Seattle, August 27, 1908, are
conceived in the spirit of the foregoing, taken from Canon 32.
Canons 2, 3, 6, 26, 29, and 31 also declare specifically and
unqualifiedly against various forms of corruption.
[43] Quoted in Lester F. Ward’s “Pure Sociology,” p. 487.
Professor Ward himself says: “The newspaper is simply an organ
of deception. Every prominent newspaper is the defender of some
interest and everything it says is directly or indirectly (and most
effective when indirect) in support of that interest. There is no
such thing at the present time as a newspaper that defends a
principle.”
[44] Cf. “Is an Honest Newspaper Possible,” by “A New York
Editor,” in the Atlantic, vol. cii (1908), p. 441.
[45] “Orations and Addresses,” vol. i, p. 303.
[46] “Journalism, Politics, and the University,” North American
Review, vol. clxxxvii (1908), p. 598.
[47] It is perhaps worth noting that the debatable subjects of to-
day are not those of a generation or so ago. Geology and biology
were then the dangerous chairs, the occupants of which
frequently found themselves in conflict with straight-laced
followers of various religious sects. Occasionally professors of
philosophy and ethics became involved in similar controversies.
At the present time conflicts of this character are much less
frequent and are confined for the most part to theological
seminaries and those smaller colleges which are still dominated
by narrow denominational influences. Nearly all our leading
universities have so far emancipated themselves from sectarian
control that controversies with their professors on this basis are
virtually impossible. In such institutions the chairs which present
difficulties nowadays are those in economics, political science,
and sociology, although, as we shall see, these difficulties are
greatly exaggerated in popular estimation. It is hardly necessary
to add that (with the exception in some small measure of
sociology) the area of friction in these subjects is not at all in their
contact with religious, but almost exclusively in their contact with
business and political activities outside university walls.
[48] “Leviathan,” pt. ii, ch. xxx.
[49] Cf. his annual report for 1904-05, pp. 19-20, for a brief but
very interesting reference to the “tainted money” charge.
[50] “The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, Third Annual Report,” 1908, pp. 82-91.
[51] “Mass and Class,” pp. 14, 82, 83, 105, 243.
[52] Bookman, p. 652, August, 1906.
CORRUPTION IN BUSINESS AND POLITICS
V
CORRUPTION IN BUSINESS AND POLITICS
No form of corruption can exist without reacting upon the life of the
state. Pollution of the sources of public instruction defiles individuals
and all the manifold non-sovereign social organisations, but it
culminates in an infection of public opinion which directly
contaminates the body politic. Even more immediately corrupt
business practices lead to corrupt political practices. This is so
conspicuously the case that separate discussion of the two subjects
is virtually impossible. It is feasible, however, and should prove
profitable, to distinguish the various subdivisions of economic and
political corruption and to point out certain lines of the development
which have bound the two so closely together in our modern life.
Pre-eminent among the forms of business corruption are the
vicious practices which have grown up in the general relation of
buyer and seller. Purveyors of adulterated, infected, or diseased
consumption goods, such as food stuffs, and particularly meat and
milk; dealers in sweatshop clothing; vendors of patent medicines;
owners and builders of unsanitary tenement houses, of unsafe
theatres, and excursion steamers; managers of railroad and trolley
companies who neglect to install devices to protect their passengers
may serve as illustrations. A further branch of this form of corruption,
the importance of which would perhaps justify separate
classification, occurs in connection with the dealers in vice,—the dive
keepers, policy kings, gamblers, and procurers. The relation of
master and servant furnishes a second subdivision of the primarily
economic forms of corruption. Transportation companies, mine
owners, manufacturers, and others who neglect the installation of
safety devices to protect labourers; the employers of child labour; the
labour leaders who extort blackmail by threatening strikes are cases
in point. Still another subdivision of economic corruption centres
about the fiduciary business relations such as occur particularly in
connection with savings banks, trust companies, corporate
directorships in general, and with the work of the promoter.
Underlying nearly all these kinds of economic corruption, and
emerging in the corruption of public instruction and political
corruption as well, is competition,—itself a force or
method rather than a form. Some species of corruption belonging
logically under one or another of the preceding heads exhibit the
effects of competition more plainly than others. Thus many practices
common to those periods of forced competition which so frequently
precede the formation of trusts have come to be looked upon as
essentially corrupt and deserving of legal restraint. Corruption does
not disappear when competition is practically eliminated, however.
Some of the most difficult problems involved in dealing with it
notoriously result from the existence of monopolies which have
outstripped if they have not exterminated their rivals.
To attempt the adequate discussion of all the forms of economic
corruption would require extended treatises on the labour problem,
the trust problem, banking, transportation, insurance, and many
other special subjects. The limitations of the present study exclude
anything beyond a few general observations. It may first be noted
that many of the abuses which are now undergoing the process of
sanitation were the result not so much of corrupt intention as of
ignorance and the relatively unlimited character of the competitive
struggle to which reference has already been made. They emerged
long before the era of consolidation, and are therefore not to be
attributed solely to big business. For many years prior to the Chicago
slaughter house exposures of 1906, for example, unclean meat was
sold both by large packers and by country butchers. Small producers
were and are largely responsible for impure milk and sweatshop
clothing. Petty landlords as well as extensive holders of real estate
have built unsanitary tenement houses and overcrowded them with
renters. The neglect of transportation companies to install safety
devices for the protection of passengers and employees has in the
very nature of the case been a corporation offence. On the other
hand small as well as large mining operators have sinned in this
way, and small as well as large manufacturers have exploited child
labour. Betrayal of fiduciary relationships has naturally occurred most
frequently and most disastrously in enterprises of large capital,
although by no means confined exclusively to them. Indeed there
would seem to be reason for believing that in certain ways
consolidation has aided in bringing about the correction of some of
these evils. It centres them in a few large establishments, often in a
single district of no great size, where by their very magnitude abuses
force themselves upon a sluggish public attention. Consolidation
also makes it appear that the interests of a few selfish owners are
being pursued at the cost of the general welfare. This at once enlists
popular support for attacks upon abuses, and is a factor well worth
comparison with the defensive strength of massed capital. For these
reasons the cleaning up of the meat industry probably proceeded far
more rapidly after the Chicago exposures than would have been the
case if the effort had been made some years earlier during the
period of many scattered local abattoirs.
So many factors co-operated in bringing about the business evils
under consideration that the quality of corruption cannot always be
ascribed to them directly. Under a policy of laisser faire, of unlimited
competition, of public indifference and apathy, it is not easy to fix
moral responsibility. Even the twentieth mean man at any given time
may be only a little meaner than several of his nineteen competitors.
His offences are dictated by self-interest, of course, but they are
offences against a vague set of business customs or moral
principles. Public interest suffers, it is true, but the public is apathetic;
it has not laid down definite norms of business conduct. On the part
of the offender there is often lacking that conscious and purposeful
subordination of public to private interest which constitutes full
fledged corruption. Whatever degree of extenuation is afforded by
these considerations vanishes, however, when definite regulation is
undertaken by the state. Now that we are fairly launched upon an
era of legislative and administrative control, business offences of the
kind under consideration are frankly corrupt. Public apathy has
vanished, the interest of the public has been sharply defined, and he
who in contravention of these norms places his private gain above
the general welfare does so with full intent, and cannot evade or shift
the accusation of corruption.
A further consequence of the effort to regulate business practice
by law is not only intrinsically important but also serves as the great
connecting link between primarily economic and political corruption
proper. As soon as regulation is undertaken by the state a motive is
supplied to the still unterrified twentieth mean man to break the law
or to bribe its executors. In either case, by the way, the profits are
directly conditioned by the thoroughness with which his competitors
are restrained from following his own malpractices. The scales
employed by tariff officials may be tampered with in the interests of
large importers whose profits are thereby enormously increased. Or
inspectors may be bribed to pass infected carcasses, to approve
impure milk, to permit get-rich-quick concerns to use the mails, to
wink at lead weighted life preservers, to ignore the fact that the exits
of a theatre are entirely inadequate. With cases where state
regulation supplied the motive for the direct commission of fraud we
are not directly concerned here, but in all the cases where the
collusion of inspectors is involved we have to note that government
regulation of business has made easy the transmutation of what
before was merely corrupt and morally offensive into direct bribery.
And from the point of view of a venal official or political machine the
extension of state control means the widening of the opportunities for
levying tribute. Thus a form of corruption which began among, and
for a time was limited to, business relations becomes under
regulation a menace to political integrity. In other words, it takes on
the form of political corruption as well, and must, therefore, become
the subject of discussion in that connection.
However disheartening in other ways, a consideration of the forms
of business corruption yields the comforting reflection that all the
major forms of evil in this field are clearly recognised and severely
criticised. One must guard oneself against too cheerful optimism in
the premises, however. Reform forces armed cap-a-pie do not spring
like unheralded knight errants of old into every breach at which
social integrity is being assailed. Instead they can be developed only
by persistent individual and associated effort and sacrifice. Moreover
the problem of corruption, as we have seen, is a persistent one, the
forms of which are ever changing and ever requiring new ingenuity
and resourcefulness in the methods of social sanitation. Back of
reform effort, also, there remains much that the individual can affect
simply by clearer habits of moral reflection and action even in the
small affairs of life. Public sentiment is built of such individual
fragments. Low opinion, low action in everyday affairs become a part
of the psychological atmosphere befogged by which the outlines
even of the larger evils of the present régime grow indistinct.
Professor Ross has performed a valuable service by exposing the
fallacy that “sinners should be chastised only by their betters.”[53]
Social life, indeed, would be inconceivable if the judgment of
disinterested parties were not superior to that of parties in interest.
This is true even if the former are themselves far from moral
perfection. But it is further true that the judgment of the disinterested
will be more worthy and helpful if in the conduct of their own affairs
the disinterested have habituated themselves to scrupulous honesty
of thought and action. Till this is more generally the case social
ostracism, public contempt, and loathing of the corruptionist,
regardless of his looted wealth, will not prove such effective
measures of restraint as one might hope. “The simplest reform,” said
Mr. James B. Dill, “the hardest, but it must be the first, is to make up
our minds not to do those things which the other man may be doing,
but which we know to be wrong.”[54] Of course the universal
acceptance of such higher individual standards would solve not only
the problems of corruption but all our other social and moral
difficulties. We may not hope for the early arrival of the millennium in
this way, but neither may we hope for any large movement toward
better conditions without improvement of personal character. Under
our present circumstances much may be accomplished by
institutional reform, by legislation and the application of the power of
the state, although none of these is possible without the application
of the good will, the clearer intelligence and honesty of individuals. If
not the first or only reform, then, still it is clear that no movement
against corruption is complete which does not demand frank
recognition by the individual that he must deliberately choose to get
along less rapidly at times when the cost of advancement is personal
dishonour.
Corrupt practices may begin in, and at first be limited to, the
business world, but, as we have just seen, they are likely to overstep
economic boundaries and become a menace to the integrity of the
state. As such they must also be recognised and discussed as
derivative forms of political corruption. But in addition to evils of this
kind which originate, as it were, in other fields, various subdivisions
of the forms of corruption which immediately involve government
may be marked out tentatively for subsequent illustration and
discussion.
To gain means for its support the state is obliged to impose taxes
and other burdens upon its citizens. The self-interest of the latter
leads them into many evasive practices of a more or less corrupt
character. The state is also a great buyer of materials and services
of all sorts, and hence subject to fraud in innumerable forms. It is
further a great seller and provider of various services, and is equally
exposed to danger in this capacity. Efforts by the state to regulate or
suppress vice and crime necessarily lead to attempts on the part of
the vicious and criminal to protect themselves by corrupt means.
Without outside collusion public officials may endeavour to exploit in
their private interest the powers which were conferred upon them
solely for the public benefit, and the result is auto-corruption, as
defined in an earlier study.[55] Preyed upon by corruption the state
also at times instigates corruption in the pursuit of its own ends,
particularly where international rivalries are concerned.[56] Finally the
control of government by political parties may lead to the purchase
or stealing of elections and the perversion of the functions of all the
organs of government in the interests of the machine. The
fundamental importance of the practices which fall under the last
head is apparent. Upon them ultimately depends the ability to
maintain and profit by all the other forms of political corruption.
Regulation of business by the state is an established fact, the

causes and origin of which need no further discussion in this place.
Once established it is subject to attack and evasion along various

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Ebook Believing in Russia Religious Policy After Communism 1St Edition Geraldine Fagan Online PDF All Chapter

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Believing in Russia Religious Policy

after Communism 1st Edition Geraldine

Culture Ethnicity and Migration After Communism The

Between Heaven and Russia Religious Conversion and

Believing in Dante Truth in Fiction Alison Cornish

The Marx Of Communism: Setting Limits In The Realm Of

Communism in India Gene D. Overstreet

Germany’s Role in European Russia Policy : A New German

Russia s Foreign Policy Change and Continuity in

Epistemic Stance in Dialogue Knowing Unknowing

This book presents a comprehensive overview of religious policy in Russia

1 Liberal Nationalism in Central 8 The Development of Capitalism

3 The Extreme Nationalist Threat 10 The Rebuilding of Greater

4 Economic Development in 11 A Russian Factory Enters the

W ðå÷¿ êú íåì¾ Vè Uñú: íå áðàíBòå: ˜æå áî írñòü íà âº, ïî âhñú

1 Russia’s religious freedom tradition 6

2 ‘Native land protected by God’ 24

4 Law unto itself 69

5 Fight thine enemy 95

6 In search of tradition 121

7 Extreme measures 155

8 Alternative scenarios 172

Map 1 Author’s regional fieldtrips, 1999–2010 xii

Figures 1–18 are photographs by the author.

Map 1 Author’s regional fieldtrips, 1999–2010

This is the first book in English by a single author to examine post-communist

Moscow, January 2012

Russia cannot be known by the mind

While similarly authored by Sergei Mikhalkov, the 2000 Russian national

“was ein Professor spricht

“... dies will ich nun

Amid the manifold influences that environ university teaching it is

One who attempts a survey of the whole field of corruption is apt

Regulation of business by the state is an established fact, the

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