Saint Catherine’s Cathedral in Ekaterinburg and Disputes over the Common Good

Abstract

Studying the project to rebuild Saint Catherine’s cathedral in Ekaterinburg, originally demolished in 1930, allows us to trace the development of relations between the Russian Orthodox Church, political power, elites and the general population of the Ural capital since the early 1990s. Three successive proposals for different building sites pitted part of the city’s population against local political authorities and the eparchy. The protest movement culminated in May 2019, after the authorities decided to build the cathedral in a public garden in the city centre. The demonstrations, reminiscent of other “liminal protest practices” in Russia, were not anti-clerical. Instead, both sides defended what they considered to be the “common good,” and Orthodox believers could be found on both sides. This study, based mainly on fieldwork conducted in September 2019, shows how a public garden became a theatre of controversy fuelled by the memory of the assassination of the imperial family and religious persecution. It describes the conflictualisation of spaces within the city as a result of political radicalisation.