Abstract
The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces emerged against the background of growing cooperation between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. A key aspect of that re-energised relationship has been the intensified engagement of State and Church leaders in practices of mutual legitimation. This study examines the case of the new church of the Russian Armed Forces as an illustration of how the Patriarchate and the Russian Government make sense of each other’s power and positions in Russian society. Analysis of the official discourses indicates three key developments. First, both Church and State, in their own right, construct a statist and nationalist normative framework where the well-being and the greatness of “the Fatherland” is of utmost value. The two institutions legitimise each other by representing the other party as acting on behalf of this shared value. Second, the dedication of cathedral to the “Victory in the Great Patriotic War” integrates the Church into this key national narrative and simultaneously incorporates elements of the Soviet past into Russia’s “sacred memory”. Third, the involvement of the Patriarchate and the Kremlin in mutual legitimation constructs a relatively independent Church–State legitimating nexus, making popular support less necessary.
Highlights
Before moving to the analysis of legitimating discourses, I present the theoretical premises of the study together with the underlying conceptual framework, beginning with my understanding of legitimation
For a dislocated structure to overcome the visibility of its incompleteness, for it to acquire meaning anew, it has to be linked to new representations of reality, new norms, and identities which can stabilise its overall edifice. This relationship between structural and subjective power I refer to as subjective legitimation
The statements produced by State officials are much more succinct and condensed, but no less significant with regard to making sense of the place and role of the Church in Russian society
Summary
Before moving to the analysis of legitimating discourses, I present the theoretical premises of the study together with the underlying conceptual framework, beginning with my understanding of legitimation. Such overcoming constitutes another kind of power: subjective power This is defined by the subject’s capacity to expose the incompleteness of the existing structures and to articulate new meanings. For a dislocated structure to overcome the visibility of its incompleteness, for it to acquire meaning anew, it has to be linked to new representations of reality, new norms, and identities which can stabilise its overall edifice This relationship between structural and subjective power I refer to as subjective legitimation. Having outlined the general framework, I can define mutual legitimation as a process of maintaining/producing entangled meanings between several agents, who make sense of and enable each other’s power. Legitimating the other is the power to empower This power is defined, as argued above, by the construction of coincidence between concrete agential representations, on the one hand, and structural commonplaces and patterns of cognition, on the other. I see both the “strategies” and their analyses as embedded in structural power—be it a “strategic culture”
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