Russian Orthodox priests persecuted for opposing war

In Russia, all possibilities for peaceful resistance to the dictatorial and warlike course of its leaders have not yet been exhausted. This is the opinion of Archpriest Andrei Kordochkin, 46, who in early 2023 was suspended as parish priest of the Cathedral of Saint Mary Magdalene in Madrid, Spain for his opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to Kordochkin, it is time to study the example of Martin Luther King, the civil rights activist of the 1950s and 1960s who led the peaceful resistance movement against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons.

By order of Kiril, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kordochkin had to abandon the parish that he had watched grow for almost two decades, from its embryonic form (in the premises of an old fruit shop in the Spanish capital) and all the way to a solid cathedral. He now resides in Germany.

From there, Kordochkin officiated at a religious ceremony for Alexei Navalny, the opponent of Vladimir Putin who died in February in an Arctic prison. The service was broadcast on YouTube and followed by more than half a million people. He was one of the priests who demanded that the politician’s body be returned to his mother.

“I think that in Russia we have not yet exhausted the potential for non-violent resistance,” says Kordochkin. “In the United States, during the Vietnam War, there was significant popular resistance to mobilization. From my comfortable existence in Europe, I cannot give advice to Russians in Russia, but that does not mean that they should limit themselves to being spectators. We must study all forms of non-violent resistance, including Martin Luther King,” he says, highlighting the work of Russian volunteers who are helping people avoid the draft or who are caring for refugees from Ukraine.

Born in Leningrad and educated at Oxford, Archpriest Kordochkin is preparing an academic work in Germany on religious, ecclesiastical and philosophical aspects of the war in Ukraine. One of his objects of study is “the cult of death,” he explains in a telephone conversation.

Kordochkin has come under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Brussels, and is the co-founder of a website, mir-vsem.info, where Orthodox anti-war sectors express their positions and try to help priests expelled from their parishes or prosecuted for expressing their convictions.

Father Andrei experienced Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022 as “a personal matter,” since half of his parishioners in Madrid were Ukrainians. “It was as if the Russian government had attacked my parish and I had to defend my community,” says Kordochkin, one of the nearly 300 Orthodox priests who spoke out against the war in March 2022, before the Russian Federation criminalized such gestures.

Prayer for the victory of “Holy Russia”

In September 2022, an increasingly belligerent Patriarch Kiril ordered the parish priests of his organization to say a prayer for the “victory of Holy Russia” in their liturgical services. The dissident priests modified the prayer, replacing the word “victory” with the word “peace,” or else completely ignored this prayer that calls for the “restoration of unity in the countries of Holy Russia” and associates the concept of “Holy Russia” with a territory larger than the Russian state.

The “Prayer for Holy Russia” has had little impact in the Orthodox parishes of Europe. A joint statement from the Spanish Episcopal Assembly and the Russian Orthodox Church of Spain and Portugal underlined the “pain caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” described the war as “repugnant” and called for “intensifying prayer for peace throughout the world,” especially in Ukraine, to “stop the violence” and “rebuild universal brotherhood.” The contrast between this language and that of the Patriarch of Moscow is evident.

One of the latest priests to be punished in Russia for their anti-war attitude is Alexei Uminski, a popular archpriest and parish priest of a Moscow church who was expelled from the Orthodox Church by an ecclesiastical court. Uminski (like Kordochkin) has been welcomed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The theologian Andrei Kuraev has also taken refuge in Europe.

“It is not the first time in history that a church defends war,” emphasizes Kordochkin, who recalls that the commandment “thou shalt not kill” is subject to two interpretations: one that gives absolute value to the prohibition and one that grants it a relative value in the name of a “just war,” a concept currently under discussion that dates back to Saint Augustine.

In the Soviet Union, slogans such as “peace in the world” or “no war” were maintained even during the war in Afghanistan, explains the priest. “The official rhetoric was one of peace, and it is incredible that those Soviet slogans are being criminalized today,” he exclaims. Kordochkin sees big differences between the late Soviet era in which he grew up and today. The generations that experienced war have disappeared, the idea of war has been romanticized, and identity problems linked to the disintegration of the USSR have arisen.

The Russian government searched for a “new ideology” with “a sacred element that could unite society” and found it in “the cult of victory in World War II.” In this way, the Russian state has built a kind of “civil religion,” a “doctrine that can unite all members of society whether they are religious or not.” “They chose war, they declared themselves heirs of victory, and that is the basic principle of that civil religion,” he says. The “visualization of that doctrine” is the Moscow Armed Forces Cathedral, which introduces symbols and elements of the history of the Soviet Union inside a place of prayer, and thus bestows a sacred sense to them and, in a broader sense, globalizes war itself. The pro-Russian guerrillas from eastern Ukraine appear in the decorative mosaics of that temple, which was inaugurated in 2020.

“So the Orthodox Church has participated in the construction of a doctrine that, like an external body, is then introduced into the church, where it is artificially fertilized and then consecrated,” explains Kordochkin. This is the “Russian world,” a term from the 11th century that is identified with the idea of “Holy Russia” and consecrates war.

“The processes within the church are also those of society. If we do not listen to the voices of those who do not share the official agenda, it does not mean that those voices do not exist,” explains the priest, who says he has received a video with funeral services in memory of Navalny held in a Russian province before a narrow circle of parishioners. A new underground church? “It is impossible to know the number of these cases.”

“War and dictatorship are synonymous,” Kordochkin continues. “If the dictatorship falls, the war ends; if the war ends, the dictatorship ends. Russian political emigrants are divided over how to act. I don’t know if there is a formula to end the dictatorship within Russian society, but those who fear the instability of the dictatorship and seek its stability must be reminded that the dictatorship is an unstable formula that can collapse in a matter of hours. The Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu felt very safe shortly before his political and physical end [in 1989], and nobody thought that the USSR would disappear so quickly [in 1991]. We should not judge by appearances,” he says. “I cannot call for revolution, but I can remember the words of Luther King [citing John F. Kennedy]: Those who make a peaceful revolution impossible make a violent revolution inevitable.”

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