Editorial: The Russian Orthodox Church and the Future of Russia

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 resulted in much more than a political crisis. It also caused the collapse of Russia's social foun dations, creating a vacuum that might be filled by any number of possi ble ideologies. The atheistic, communist worldview was essentially dead, although the trauma of replacing it with something new for a while caused many Soviet old-timers to call for a return to communism. But since the Marxist-Leninist ideology on which the state was founded in 1917 had long ceased to function as a credible belief system for most Russians, the search for an alternate belief system got underway quickly. Democracy emerged only because of the demise of commu nism, not because Russians found in it any sort of deeply rooted mean ing. Not surprisingly, Russians began to look to religion for a credible belief system. Religion offered an attractive alternative worldview, es pecially since it had been so severely repressed during the Soviet era. In the words of New York Times writer Serge Schmemann, writing in April 1992, Today the search for spiritual content is everywhere evi dent. . . . On television, for every rare program of economic reform, there are at least ten evocative commentaries on the church, the vil lage, or some other cultural heritage, in which the invariable theme is Russia's urgent need to recover its dukhovnost, its spirituality. After experimenting a few years with opening its doors to all manner of reli gions, including all varieties of Western Protestantism, even welcoming Western missionaries of a seemingly endless variety, Russians soon wearied of this endeavor and began looking to its own traditions, some thing that better fit the Russian soul. The Russians turned, not surpris ingly, to the Russian Orthodox Church. How has this strategy, this new dependence on the Russian Ortho dox Church, fared? Not all Russians, of course, agree that Orthodoxy should define Russia, and therefore wait for other more nuanced pos sibilities to emerge. Nevertheless, there is little question that Russian Orthodoxy is now the center of the emerging ideology of Russia. What does this mean for the new Russia? What specifically is the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia today? What is its political role, and how much influence does it carry in shaping the direction of