The Church and politics in Russia: A case study of the 1996 presidential election

Abstract

It has become commonplace for observers of post-Soviet Russia to note the increasing role of religion in public life. Religion, and in particular the Russian Orthodox Church, appears to have political significance, and yet this significance is not easy to place in terms of its location and extent. At the most obvious level, the church has political significance through the broad-based support for Orthodoxy amongst the Russian population. Opinion polls consistently show the Russian Orthodox Church to be the most trusted public body in post-Soviet Russia. The New Russian Barometer III Survey in 1994 provided a list of 16 'public institutions' including the presidency, government, parliament, army, media, trade unions and political parties. The church outscored them all as a recipient of trust. 1 A survey conducted at the time of the summer 1996 presidential election similarly indicated that a very high proportion of respondents, some 41 per cent, 'fully trusted' the Orthodox Church, and that only 9 per cent did not trust it at alP Post-Soviet opinion polls have also regularly demonstrated widespread respect for religion in the broad sense in that around half of all Russian citizens in the 1990s identify themselves as 'believers'.3 Again, taking the summer of 1996 as our reference point, in one survey, conducted by the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion, 55 per cent of respondents identified themselves as in some form of religion, of which 51 per cent declared themselves Russian Orthodox believers This level of general approval of the church in contemporary Russian would appear to make the importance of religion in the political arena self-evident. If the population at large give such esteem to the Russian Orthodox Church, and readily identify themselves in such large numbers with religious belief, then surely religion must have a significant influence on the conduct of politics. Such a conclusion, however, remains unsafe and abstract. Unsafe in that indications of trust and support for given institutions do not automatically imbue them with political significance. Take, for example, the monarchy in the United Kingdom a widely popular and respected institution, which has little day-to-day impact on the British polity. Were the monarchy to be under threat from a politically strong republican movement, then it might become a factor in electoral politics and the daily conduct of political affairs. Otherwise it is not. Similarly, automatically to assume the political significance of the church in Russia merely on the basis of opinion polls indicating trust and respect is to draw unsafe conclusions.