This article examines the evolution of the Russian Orthodox Church’s identities and political alignments from the post-Soviet era to the present in three chronological phases. First, the author explores the church’s varied post-Soviet identities shaped by experiences of repression, collaboration, dissidence, and emigration from 1991 to approximately 2010. The author identifies key legislative and political developments between 2010 and 2021 that have aligned the Russian Orthodox Church with the autocratic state. Finally, the author analyzes the shifting stance of the Moscow Patriarchate on Ukraine from 2014 to 2022, including Patriarch Kirill’s support for Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine since 2022, which is interpreted as a continuation of the church’s historical role as a collaborator during Soviet times. The author argues that the church’s contemporary role is confined to providing ritualistic and spiritual legitimization for state ideology, perpetuating a logic of authority, control, obedience, and dichotomous friend/enemy thinking reminiscent of Soviet-era security services. Through this analysis, the author reveals how the state and church leadership of the past decades has strategically positioned the church in preparation for conflict.

The collection of liturgical objects of the Pechory Monastery close to the city of Pskov on Lake Peipus was deployed as a repository in Germany by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg during World War II. After the war, it was not subject to intergovernmental restitution but was stored away in the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point and subsequently handed over to the newly founded Icon Museum of Recklinghausen before being restituted to the monastery almost two decades later. This article gives a description of the treasure itself and its history. It traces the odyssey of the treasure in Germany until its restitution and examines the different stages of its journey. The handling of this case in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is symptomatic of the official German attitude toward National Socialist cultural loot and of the changing debates around this subject throughout the decades. These debates form a micro-history that reflects the FRG’s master narratives about World War II and its consequences, the division of Germany, and its changing, but questionable, relationship to the Soviet Union. In addition, it closely follows the political mainstream from the deep anti-Soviet attitudes of the postwar years to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s policy of détente in the 1970s, which made the restitution actually possible. The act in its entity can be seen as a typical example of Nazi Germany’s art looting in the occupied parts of Europe and of the particular conditions in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the after-war restitution policies of the Western allies and the FRG. It is nonetheless typical of the Soviet Union’s policy of denying restitutions later on, including immediate postwar restitutions as well as later acts such as the one involving the Pechory treasure, which has sometimes been repeated up to the present day.

This article analyzes the origins of the concept of symphonia, its historical development, and its utilization by the Russian Orthodox Church as a normative ideal for church-state relations. In various historical contexts, this concept has referred to different normative requirements; it relied on different paradigms in Byzantium and in medieval Russia and it acquired new meanings in Imperial Russia. The reinterpretations of this concept by the Russian Orthodox Church in order to legitimize its position in the political life of contemporary Russia take this concept far from its original meaning. Using methods from the history of concepts of, among others, Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner, the author considers how the semantic transformations of symphonia in modern contexts by the Russian Orthodox Church lead to a hollowing of this concept. This conception is hardly reconcilable with the normative logic of the actual Russian political and legal systems.

This article studies the famine of 1921–1922 and 1932–1933 in the Southern Russian regions. Famine as a socio-historical phenomenon is considered in the context of the relationship of state power, the Cossacks, and the Church. The authors reveal the general and special features of the famine emergence and analyze the differences in the state policies of 1921–1922 and 1932–1933. Considerable attention is paid to the survival strategies of the Don, Kuban and Terek populations. Slaughtering and eating draft animals, transfer from the state places of work to the private campaigns and cooperatives, moving to shores and banks, and eating river and sea food became widespread methods of overcoming famine. Asocial survival strategies included cannibalism, abuse of powers, bribery, and more. In 1921–1922, the Russian Orthodox Church fought actively against the famine. In 1932–1933, the Church was weakened and could not provide significant assistance to the starving population. The article was written based on declassified documents from the state and departmental archives, including criminal investigations and analytical materials of the Obedinjonnoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie [Joint State Political Directorate] (OGPU) recording the attitudes of minds. Also used are personal stories—namely, interviews with eyewitnesses of the famine of 1932–1933, recorded by the Kuban folklorists in the territory of the Krasnodar and Stavropol Krai.

The collapse of the Soviet Union set Russia’s ruling elites the challenge of nation-building: while “Russians” had to be imagined as a political community on behalf of which the newly established Russian state was ruled, their national history needed to be narrated. Crucial for this enterprise was interpreting the Soviet past. Although the latter was used for political purposes by both Boris Yeltsin (who attempted to break with it) and Vladimir Putin (who established continuity with it), a politically usable interpretation of the Russian Revolutions was never found. Such is the consensus that emerged in 2017. Challenging this consensus, I argue that a specific interpretation of the Revolutions—nested within a narrative that covers Russia’s history from Kievan Rus to the contemporary Russian Federation—has been developed in Russia. Turning Russia’s politically problematic past into a politically usable one, this interpretation is (re)produced through the project Russia—My History. As Russia—My History (initially developed within the Russian Orthodox Church) is becoming a part of state-sponsored efforts to forge an “official” vision of Russian history, the interpretation of the Revolutions (re)produced through it is growing in influence in present-day Russia.

While important work has been done on what it meant to become newly “Soviet” after 1917, or during the era of “High Stalinism,” it is less clear what it meant to become Soviet for the first time after World War II. For the residents of the new Soviet Baltics, each prewar state received its own republic. In the case of the existing Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, territories that had not experienced Soviet power or the war on the same timeline were put into existing republics and thus existing Soviet structures. How did this process work? For Western Ukraine, one event in this process was the formation of the 1946 Initiative Committee, a joint project of the Central Committee and the newly formed Plenipotentiary for the Matters of the Russian Orthodox Church that presided over a forced conversion of Uniates to the Russian Orthodox Church. This paper examines how the mass religious conversion of Uniates was part of the process of making Galicians into Soviet Ukrainians, a postwar renewal of Soviet nationalities policy. Yet this decision, much like 1917 or 1939, was imagined as only the beginning. Turning “disloyal” Galicians into Soviet Ukrainians was a project of both re-writing the separate histories of Galicia and Soviet Ukrainians to emphasize their unity and teaching Galicians to imagine themselves as Ukrainian in the Soviet sense. In contrast to a new Soviet order with an emphasis on the secular, Western Ukraine's Sovietization was brought about through religious terms and an emphasis on Russian Orthodoxy.

The liberalisation of religious practice after the fall of the Soviet regime and the support by the Russian state to the Russian Orthodox Church have contributed to the enormous growth of the church economy. Controversies within and without the Church interrogate commercial and gifting practices. The relationship between the expansion of church commerce and the operation of moral boundaries, underlined by critical stances, has been determined by culture and history, with the post-Soviet transformation having played a key role in shaping popular notions of selflessness and profit-seeking. Moreover, as people participate in the church economy they mobilise perceptions of the differential moral valence of gift and commerce in order to communicate concerning the power of the Church, its controversial image, Russia’s social stratification, and to deploy ethics of equity and honesty.

The literature on church-state relations in post-Soviet Russia has been slowly but steadily expanding over the past two decades. The period since 2008, however, remains underdeveloped, as existing analysis has focused on specific issues rather than attempting an overview of the larger trends since the above-mentioned changes in the leadership of both institutions. Seeking to address this gap, this article explores the implications of the nearly coincidental changeovers in leadership in the Moscow Patriarchate and the secular state for church-state relations in Russia, both near and long-term. The first part of the article sets up the context for understanding the new church-state dynamic, by discussing in some detail the state of the relationship under Patriarch Aleksii II. The conclusions are that, under Aleksii tenure, the church could be considered a relatively weak institution, as it was unable for the most part to strengthen its position in Russia through legislative means. The second part focuses on the process whereby the new patriarch came to be elected in 2009, intending thereby to shed some light on Kirill I's leadership style and political agenda. The third part discusses concrete changes in the church-state relationship that have occurred on the federal level since 2008. The final section proposes some conclusions regarding the importance of the Russian Orthodox Church as a political actor in the contemporary Russian Federation, suggesting that despite the recent gains in the church's political fortunes, the ROC's position in society and particularly vis-à-vis the government remains vulnerable in key respects.