Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent

Faith and Power in the New Russia

John Garrard, Carol Garrard

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780691165905, 9780691125732
• eBook ISBN: 9781400828999
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Russian History

Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent is the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image.


In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith.



Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent argues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.

Index

Across the Moscow River (Braithwaite), 267n19

Act of Canonical Communion, 200–201

Acts of the Apostles. See Apostol

Afghanistan, Soviet defeat in, 50–51, 208

Aleksy I (metropolitan), 2, 193, 221; address (obrashchenie) of to his fellow-citizens, 22–24, 25, 49

Aleksy II (patriarch), 12, 17, 20–21, 26, 30, 31, 32–33, 34, 139–40, 181, 253–54, 304n2; address (obrashchenie) of of August 21, 1991, 21–22, 25–26, 28–29; address (obrashchenie) of of August 30, 1991, 182–83, 187; agenda of, 69; announcement (zayavlenie) of of August 20, 1991, 18, 20; approach of to ROC anti-Semitism, 135–36, 283n55, 284n57, 285n65; awarded the Order for Services to the Fatherland, 1st degree, 242–43; and the building and restoration of churches, 77–78, 82, 86–93; and concept of sobornost (togetherness), 174; conflict of with monarchists’ demands to canonize the Romanovs, 116–30; conflict of with ROC anti-Semites, 103–6, 115–16; conflict of with the ROCOR and ROCA, 183–84; criticism of, 205; influence of on the Conference of European Churches, 44; and Islam, 239; keynote address of at the “All Russian Scientific and Theological Conference,” 132–36; and mastery of the art of adaptation, 245; and prison ministry, 77; public stand of against the KGB, 27; and rediscoveries of relics, 52–66, 68, 251–52; refusal of to reconcile with the Roman Catholic Church, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 199–200; relationship of with the military, 51, 208–9, 217, 220–41; relationship of with Putin, 196, 197, 198, 199–200, 201, 249, 250; role of in the attempts at rapprochement between ROCOR and ROCA and the ROC, 196–99, 200–202; and selective reading of the Chronicles, 300–301n47; and view of other forms of Christianity, 174

Alexander I (tsar), 83, 252

Alexander II (tsar), 129, 146

Alexander III (tsar), 68

Alexander Nevsky (film), 246

Alexander the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Prologue: Sergiev Posad: Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent
• One: The End of the Atheist Empire
• Two: A New Hope
• Three: Rebuilding Holy Moscow
• Four: Accursed Questions: Who Is to Blame?
• Five: Irreconcilable Differences: Orthodoxy and the West
• Six: The Babylonian Legacy: Exiles, Martyrs, and Collaborators
• Seven: A Faith-Based Army
• Epilogue: Twenty Years After: From Party to Patriarch
• Appendix A: Translated Documents
• Appendix B: Authors’ Letter to the New York Times, May 27, 1990
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index