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Andrea Rota: Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of the IKOS Religion and Politics podcast.I am Andrea Rota and joining me today is Bojidar Kolov. Bojidar is a lecturer in Russian history at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, and he has recently defended his doctoral dissertation on the contemporary political theology of the Russian Orthodox Church at the University of Oslo. He is also a theology student at St. Ignatius College in Stockholm and holds a master's degree from the University of Tartu, where he specialized in the relationship between Russia and the European Union. Today he will help us explore the political outlook of the Russian Orthodox Church and its relationships with the Russian state, the Russian people, and the broader Orthodox world. Among other things, his insights will illuminate some religious aspects of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Bojidar, it's a pleasure to have you here.
Bojidar Kolov: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Andrea Rota: When we think about the long and complex history between the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church or ROC for short, we know that it's too big a topic to fully cover in just one podcast. In your research, you focus on the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union and mention that the end of communism brought a new beginning for the Russian Orthodox Church. So, what kind of new social position was the Church able to negotiate in the post-Soviet era?
Bojidar Kolov: Well, in order to understand what the new position was, maybe we should say a few words about the old position. And probably everybody knows that the Soviet state was a rather militantly atheistic one, but what most people don't quite grasp relationship between the Soviet government and the Church. And probably the most fitting metaphor for that kind of relationship is the golden cage in which the Russian Orthodox Church found itself in. Because obviously the religious field in the Soviet Union was rather limited, but the Russian Orthodox Church had a monopoly, at least on the Russian Christians. The Catholic Church was eradicated in Ukraine. Most of the parishes of the Greek Catholic Church were taken by the Orthodox Church. Some of them continued, obviously, in the catacombs, as they called them. But the official Christianity in the Soviet Union was kind of a monopoly of the Moscow Patriarchate. And the event that marked kind of a change of the Soviet government policy was the 1000th anniversary of the baptism of Rus in 1988, which manifested a new public visibility for the church in the Soviet Union. But just two years later, in 1990, the Soviet Union was still existing. The Kremlin adopted a new law on religious freedom, which wasn't changed until 1997. So in independent Russia as well, which emerged in 1991. So for several years in the end of the Soviet Union and in the first years of independent Russia, there was a rather pluralistic religious market with many mostly American charismatic but not only religious entrepreneurs, as we can call them, that invested heavily in Russia. And today's position of the Russian Orthodox Church, as we know it, of this institution that supports the state, that has a patriotic profile and credentials, emerged only in 1997, when the church successfully lobbied for a privileged status. So in the law of 1997, you have a recognition of the special historical role of the Russian Orthodox Church for the Russian state. So it is from the late 1990s that the church started its march towards a new symphony with the Russian state, the full fruits of which we witness today with the conservative reactionary regime of Vladimir Putin.
Andrea Rota: In your analysis, you showed that the church's new social position is tied to the development of a multifaceted political theology that speaks to both the internal situation in Russia and to Russia's role in the broader geopolitical landscape. I will ask you to dive into those aspects in a moment. But first, it may be helpful to clarify some terminology. How should we understand the concept of political theology?
Bojidar Kolov: Political theology is our way to treat questions of power from the perspective of the transcendental. Whatever transcendental means. It can relate to our values, it can relate to our understanding of what is beyond the rational and beyond the explainable. But this definition belongs to our culture, to our day. And from, say, a medieval perspective or the perspective of the early Christians in the Roman Empire, such a phrase, political theology, would be unthinkable. Because every theology is inherently political, for it relates a story, a narrative about human relations, and it implies certain norms, certain values. It prescribes ways for us to live together, and that is essentially political. And in that sense, we can't separate politics from theology, but we can separate two different fields of knowledge production since the era of secularism, let's say in the last two centuries. But essentially, when we talk about power and we talk about God, we're talking about one and the same thing. So political theology, in the way I use it, is this aspect of theological knowledge about relations of power, about state, about law, about society.
Andrea Rota: If we now apply this concept to the study of the Russian Orthodox Church, how does this political theology unfold on the internal front? By this I mean, what roles does the Russian Orthodox Church envision for itself and its members in relation to the Russian state?
Bojidar Kolov: Well, in short, the Russian Orthodox Church sees itself as a founder of the Russian state, and with it, a founder of the Russian people. And the origin of this understanding is the myth of the baptism of Ruth. So in late 10th century, when Kievan Rus adopted Christianity, this moment, this event is considered the birth of both the Russian nation and the Russian state from the point of view of the Russian Orthodox Church. So in that sense, this religious event was the genesis of both ethnic national community and of the Russian statehood. So that is the role, the original role of the Russian Orthodox Church. The contemporary role of the Church is to unify the fragmented Russian world. So since the collapse of the Soviet Union, from the point of view of the Moscow Patriarchate, the essential, fundamental elements of the Russian world, which are Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, have separated and they should come back together as part of the civilizational space that the Moscow Patriarchate calls Holy Rus'. So two main functions, the founding function and the unifying function. And to bring it to three, the main political role of the church in terms of relationship between people and state is to be the representative of the people before the state. So in the democratic theory, so to speak, of the Russian Orthodox Church, there is a popular representative in the face of the church before the authorities. So it is the church that exercises this representative role that in liberal democracies usually parliaments exercise.
Andrea Rota: Now you have mentioned several times this reference to the people and the representation of the people. Would be fair to describe the ROC as a populist church?
Bojidar Kolov: It's a good question. Probably in the everyday language we could, because we usually use populism as a synonym for demagoguery. But the way I use the concept of populism, it's a bit different. I understand populism as a practice of coalition building, essentially. And it doesn't have to be a normative concept. It's not necessarily bad or wrong. It's just the way we build coalitions. And we build coalitions by antagonism, by uniting different unsatisfied demands and unrecognized identities against a certain rule, a certain power. So populism is essentially splitting the political field into two realms, the realm of the underdog and the realm of the one in power. And any type of political movement, be it a national liberation movement, a social rights movement, or a movement for equality in any sense, is essentially populist because it brings about different disadvantaged actors as a unified subject.
Andrea Rota: But the Russian Orthodox Church supports the Russian state, does not challenge it as you would expect from a populist movement as you described it.
Bojidar Kolov: Exactly. So in that sense, I can't characterize the Russian Orthodox Church as a populist political actor. It does articulate the image, the symbol, the signifier of the people, but not from a populist perspective, but what in the theoretical literature is called institutionalist perspective or hegemonic perspective. So the church uses the figure of the people not to undermine or to subvert the system of power in Russia itself, but in order to legitimize it, in order to solidify the current power relations in Russia. And not only in Russia, but within this civilizational space that they call the Russian world or the Russian civilization or Holy Rus that is the space of common memory and common political history which includes all the territories that have been governed by any Russian capital Kyiv, Moscow, Saint Petersburg
Andrea Rota: You have now brought up this concept of Holy Rus', which is very present also in Western medias. Can you tell us more about when did this idea start appearing in the rhetoric of the Russian Orthodox Church and what role does it play?
Bojidar Kolov: The concept of Holy Rus emerged in the early 2000s and it came against the background of a rather different discourse in the 1990s. Whereas in the 1990s the Church articulated its political theology in terms of socio-economic issues, it underlined poverty, inequality, all sorts of social issues including refugees, internally displaced people, and it declared itself the church of the poor. That changed in the early 2000s and especially after 2004 when the Orange Revolution in Ukraine happened. The Orange Revolution was one of the first attempts of mass protests to emancipate Ukraine from Russia's influence. And the Russian Orthodox Church saw in the Orange Revolution a threat to the integrity of its canonical territory. At the time, in the mid-2000s, about 40% of the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church were in Ukraine. And the emancipatory movement in Kyiv and predominantly in the west of the country threatened not only the sphere of influence of Vladimir Putin's Russia, but also the integrity of the Russian Orthodox Church. Because usually in the Orthodox world you have simultaneous processes of ecclesiastical emancipation and political emancipation. The movement for independence of a Ukrainian Orthodox Church also emerged with new intensity around that time. And it was with these simultaneous processes of ecclesiastical and political emancipation that the Russian Orthodox Church reacted with the concept of Holy Rus'. And in that sense, Holy Rus emerged as an inclusive, civilizational, identitarian, pan-East Slavic and Orthodox ideology that could include in a single trans-historical fashion Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Andrea Rota: Now, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this narrative has assumed another dimension. I think in particular to the explicit support of the church hierarchy to Putin's military ambitions. To what extent can we see breaks or continuity in the church discourse after the beginning of the war?
Bojidar Kolov: From the late 80s, the Church has been very careful in supporting any military ambitions of the Soviet and later Russian government. Even with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in the late 70s, the current Russian patriarch, who was at the time more or less regular bishop, but a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in the World Council of Churches, dared to co-author a public letter denouncing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Later, in the early 1990s, the Russian Patriarch Alexei also challenged Russian interventions in Lithuania, for instance, the so-called January events in Vilnius. And with the war in Georgia in 2008, Patriarch Alexei also criticized Dmitry Medvedev's government for the invasion of Georgia. Patriarch Kirill, who assumed office in 2009, was very cautious to articulate the Russian Orthodox Church's position on the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It was only after the beginning of the invasion that the Moscow Patriarchate fully backed Putin's regime in its Ukraine policy of annexations of Ukrainian territory, of invasion, of regime change essentially, of removing Ukraine from the political map as an independent country. After the invasion in February 2022, the Russian Orthodox Church changed, it seems, its policy of being either cautious or critical of the Kremlin's military ambitions and fully backed Putin's regime in its endures in Ukraine. But it seems that this is not necessarily a rupture.but rather a continuity because the Russian Orthodox Church has been actively enabling the ideology behind the invasion ever since the 1990s. If you see speeches by Patriarch Kirill back when he was a metropolitan, in the early 1990s, you can see exactly the same phrases that he uses today in his pro-war rhetoric. If you see how, let's say, the Russian People's Council, one of the NGOs that supports the Russian Orthodox Church throughout the last 30 years, if you see their speeches and their documents, Russian-Ukrainian relationships. So in that sense, the current invasion is articulated not necessarily as a security issue, but as an issue of ontological importance for the future of the Russian state. Ukraine is absolutely central to the founding myths of the contemporary Russian national ideology because both the church and the state consider their political community as one that originated in Kyiv in the late 10th century and taking that part of their history away would deprive the Russian identity of its historical credentials.
Andrea Rota: If I understand your analysis correctly, you are challenging or at least complicating the narrative of a Russian Orthodox Church under the control of the Kremlin and of the Patriarch as a puppet of Putin.
Bojidar Kolov: That's right. I don't see how Yeltsin's government, for instance, in the 1990s had forced the Russian Orthodox Church to articulate these imperial ambitions that they did to conserve the Russian empire, the legacy of the Russian empire that the Soviet Union contained. And just one example, the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg. in the early 1990s was a staunch supporter of Stalin as the gatherer of Russian lands. And that was not necessarily a marginal discourse already in the 1990s. And the government had little to do with that. It was only after 2012 when the Putin's regime turned conservative, when the discourse of the state and the discourse of the church merged. So we can say that rather than being an instrument or a tool of the Russian government, The Moscow Patriarchate was an ideological entrepreneur that sold its ideas that it had developed since the 1990s to Putin's regime. And Putin's regime eagerly accepted them because they served its imperial ambitions. That is not to say that the Russian state has no instruments to control the Church. But to say that the Church is just amplifying Russian propaganda that originates in the Kremlin would be a mistake. The opposite would be more correct.
Andrea Rota: Thank you very much, Bojidar, for your insightful analysis.
Bojidar Kolov: Thank you.
Andrea Rota: So this wraps up today's episode of our podcast, where we had the pleasure of hosting Bozidar Kolov, lecturer in Russian history at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. In the episode description, you will find more information about his ongoing work within the research project Value-Based Regime Legitimation in Russia, along with links to selected publications on the politics of the Russian Orthodox Church. Thank you for listening and goodbye.