If you've been following the Pussy Riot story in Russia, you have by now read any number of pieces decrying the chummy relationship between church and state, amid new fears that Russia is going back to the dark ages. But to interpret the imprisonment of political activists at the church's behest as a regression is to miss the point. For Russia is not a nation looking backwards but resolutely moving forward, on a course set out for her long ago at the very founding of the Russian Orthodox church.
The Russian church was born out of the byzantine system of Caesaropapism – literally, Caesar before pope – which from the get-go empowered Russia's leaders not just to rule over the church but also to use it for political gain. "The duty of the clergy," Orlando Figes explained in Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, "was to uphold and enforce the tsar's authority, to read out state decrees from the pulpit, to carry out administrative duties for the state, and inform the police about all dissent and criminality".
Fast forward several very dark centuries (most notably the one belonging to Ivan the Terrible), and decades of brutal Bolshevik persecution, to Joseph Stalin who, in the face of Teutonic invasion, resurrected the Orthodox church and co-opted its emaciated remains into the state apparatus to fight in the war against Russia's internal and external enemies. The church justified its consent as the only way to ensure its survival but in the intervening decades, the clergy's vociferous support of the Kremlin made it difficult to say where state ambition ended, and the church's began.
For a brief blink after Soviet collapse, the co-dependency between church and state appeared to have imploded, much like the country itself. Boris Yeltsin bowed in mosques, sang in synagogues and struggled to keep upright during mass but, much like the women of Pussy Riot, he did not cross himself correctly, nor did he demonstrate a particular desire to promote the Orthodox cause. For Patriarchate Yeltsin was a "podsvechnik", or candleholder, meaning he did as much for the church as an inanimate object dripping with wax.
Enter Vladimir Putin, the man whose cold, grey eyes revealed to George W Bush "a sense of his soul". That was after Putin told the former US president a story about a fire that had burned down his dacha outside St Petersburg: Putin had dashed into the inferno to rescue his two sleeping daughters from death. When an aluminium cross given to young Vladimir by his devout mother was later found among the ashes, the Russian leader said he had a "revelation". In other words Putin, like Bush, claimed to be born again.
It is easy to dismiss this story as a classic example of an apparatchik having cased and turned his target. Only the Putin era tells many such stories: the president taking sacrament on state-run television. The president travelling on holy pilgrimages and surrounding himself with other "Orthodox Chekists", men like Georgy Poltavchenko, an old KGB hand who in 2002 told a university audience that Russia was "God's chosen country".
The church has mostly played the role of enthusiastic accomplice: Orthodox priests sprinkled holy water on nuclear warheads and blessed military factories, navy vessels and army aeroplanes while mugging for cameras. "Orthodox culture classes" were introduced in public schools. The president's enemies were steadily condemned (the young women of Pussy Riot were officially denounced as "anti-Russian forces"). The dissident Gleb Yakunin excavated evidence from the KGB archives in the 1990s that fingered high-ranking priests as KGB agents, including the former head of the church, Aleksei II, and the current, Patriarch Kirill I. When we met in Moscow a few years ago, Father Gleb put it this way: "Having spent so many years being psychologically coerced by the KGB, the church is readily adaptable."
The Pussy Riot women were locked up for protesting against a meeting between Putin and Patriarch Kirill one month before Putin's re-election. The politician had asked the priest for his blessing. The old priest did one better, pronouncing the Putin era "a miracle of God". "We must move away from the primitive notion of separation between church and state," Putin said in response. "On the contrary, we must devote ourselves to the totally different idea of co-operation." He then pledged $120m to build more churches.
And so Russia moves forward. No, this is not a return to the ancien regime; not a Byzantine or imperial or Soviet homecoming, as the Putin presidency has been described. It is the evolution of all of these things, the next act, the latest triumph by Russia's rulers over enemies real and imagined in the long and sorrowful history of a nation determined to be the centre of the world.
