In April, after an prolonged authorized battle, Russia gained management of the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas and St. Alexandra within the southern French metropolis of Good. This was not an unprecedented victory. In 2010, Russia took over town’s St. Nicholas Cathedral, the second largest Orthodox church in Western Europe, utilizing comparable mechanisms in French regulation. After doing so, the Russian state turned each buildings over to the Moscow Patriarchate.
Whereas over a decade separates these two choices, they’re each a part of a technique by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin to increase Russia’s gentle energy affect, circumvent Western sanctions, and probably create bases for Russian intelligence operations by reclaiming the ecclesiastical property of the Russian Empire.
Each Russian church buildings in Good had been constructed within the final many years of the Russian Empire, when town was a playground of Russia’s aristocracy. On the time of their development, the church buildings belonged, like all international Russian church property, to the tsar. However following the Bolshevik Revolution, the brand new Soviet authorities renounced each the international money owed and belongings of the Russian Empire. This left Russia’s huge church holdings overseas in a authorized limbo. In locations the place these properties weren’t seized by native authorities, Russian émigré communities—incessantly made up of White Russian refugees and anti-Bolsheviks—took management although legally murky preparations.
Worldwide regulation round property claims for successor states is difficult and an space of serious dispute. Whereas right this moment’s Russian Federation declared itself the successor of the Soviet Union, it has by no means formally performed so with respect to the Russian Empire. Nonetheless, within the early 2000s, Russia, invoking imperial-era lease agreements, sued in French courts to reclaim the 2 Good church buildings. After years of authorized back-and forth, Moscow ultimately prevailed.
These verdicts have had penalties far past property possession. In addition they influence geopolitics at a second when Russia is rising extra aggressive in Europe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (proper) stands subsequent to an Orthodox Church official throughout a ceremony to sanctify the restored St. Volodymyr Cathedral in Khersones, positioned close to Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Sevastopol, on July 28, 2001. Sergei Svetlitsky/AFP through Getty Photos
Moscow’s efforts to reclaim international church property originated with the Russian historian Vladlen Sirotkin, who within the late Nineteen Nineties steered that the answer to the nation’s crippling monetary issues would possibly lie in recovering all of the “tsar’s gold” all over the world. It was a declare that, although academically doubtful, caught the eye of Russian officers, who started to pursue the concept in earnest by the early 2000s, culminating within the issuance of a 2024 decree ordering that the misplaced wealth of the Russian Empire be tracked down.
When Vladimir Putin grew to become Russian president in 2000, he shortly acknowledged the ideological and strategic potential of recovering former imperial belongings, notably ecclesiastical ones. The spiritual properties had the potential to help within the Russian president’s rising technique of utilizing the Russian Orthodox Church as a gentle energy instrument. A part of this marketing campaign concerned efforts to situate the patriarch of Moscow because the chief of the Orthodox Christian world.
Management in Orthodox Christianity is extra difficult than in lots of different religions; there isn’t any Orthodox pope. As an alternative, the Orthodox Church is a voluntary federation of co-equal bishops who preside over unbiased church buildings. Traditionally, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople was acknowledged as first amongst equals. But the extent of his authority has diverse over time.
Through the Ottoman interval, the affect of the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople declined, whereas the newly established Patriarchate of Moscow rose in prominence with the backing of tsarist Russia. Even after the Patriarchate of Moscow was dissolved between 1721 and 1917, the Holy Synod that changed it retained a singular place as the one main Orthodox Church not underneath Ottoman rule. This allowed it to current itself because the world’s solely free Orthodox Church, an identification it leveraged as a device of Russian international coverage.
A portray titled “The Bolshevik,” by Boris Kustodiev, circa 1920. De Agostini through Getty Photos
However following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Bolshevik Revolution, the steadiness started to shift. Though the Patriarchate of Moscow was reestablished simply because the Soviet state was getting ready to persecute—after which co-opt—the church, the Ecumenical Patriarchate (newly constrained by secular Turkey), discovered power by way of the more and more affluent Greek diaspora, which it formally claimed as its flock within the Twenties.
Within the Twenties and Thirties, when some Russian communities in Western Europe and North America (and to a lesser extent East Asia) discovered themselves reduce off from Moscow, they positioned themselves underneath the canonical authority of Constantinople. Essentially the most outstanding of those was the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Church buildings in Western Europe, recognized colloquially referred to as the Exarchate. The Exarchate allowed Russians overseas to take care of their Slavic liturgical traditions and have their very own ethnically Russian bishops. As a singular, quasi-independent physique in Western Europe, the Exarchate developed a progressive method to Orthodox theology.
On the similar time, different communities joined collectively and not using a historic bishop to kind the Russian Orthodox Church Exterior of Russia (ROCOR), a physique explicitly against the Soviet-aligned Moscow Patriarchate. With communities in america, France, the UK, and Germany, ROCOR’s devoted usually noticed themselves because the remnant of holy Russia. In broad phrases, ROCOR parishes (which many Orthodox authorities considered as illegitimate owing to their lack of a historic bishop) shaped a reactionary protest motion, resisting Western liberalism and modernity, whereas these parishes underneath Constantinople adopted a Western-facing perspective.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was not a on condition that the Russian Orthodox Church would return to the middle of Russian life. However Putin acknowledged the church’s worth and gained a robust propaganda machine each at dwelling and overseas. The Moscow patriarch grew to become an essential determine not solely in Russia, but in addition all over the world.
Ukrainians clear away particles after a Russian missile struck the historic Holy Transfiguration Cathedral in central Odesa, Ukraine, on July 23, 2023. The church is a part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with official hyperlinks to the Moscow Patriarchate. Scott Peterson/Getty Photos
One of many Russian Orthodox Church’s first efforts underneath Putin was to convey émigré church buildings again into communion with Moscow. As early as 2001, Putin publicly known as for the reunion of ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate, though ROCOR had constructed its identification on rejecting the Moscow church as a Soviet puppet. The proposal was initially rebuffed by ROCOR’s devoted and bishops, who had been nonetheless distrustful of a Russian state they believed had betrayed them. However by 2007, the Moscow Patriarchate had gained over ROCOR bishops by, amongst different issues, canonizing Tsar Nicholas II and his household. An Act of Canonical Communion formally reunited the 2 our bodies.
Though most church management offered the merger as a purely liturgical and administrative step, the act additionally provided the authorized and ecclesiastical foundation for Moscow to claim claims over pre-revolutionary church property, particularly in Western Europe. By uniting ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate, the act established the continuity between the Russian Empire and the Russian Federation that the state itself had by no means formally declared.
However this rapprochement didn’t prolong to these Russian church buildings that had aligned with Constantinople, whose historic rivalry with Moscow would proceed on a brand new entrance: Ukraine.
The collapsed onion domes of the Orthodox Church of the Holy Mom and convent are seen within the village of Bohorodychne, Ukraine, on April 23, 2023. Scott Peterson/Getty Photos
In January 2019, throughout Russia’s assault on jap Ukraine however earlier than its full-scale invasion, the patriarch of Constantinople invoked his medieval jurisdiction over Ukraine to grant independence to the newly shaped Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The transfer was meant to finish 500 years of Russian dominance over Ukrainian spiritual life. (Constantinople’s and Moscow’s competing claims to the Ukrainian church are on the coronary heart of spiritual battle in Ukraine.) Each Ukrainian leaders and the patriarch knew the choice would infuriate Russia. However for Ukraine, it was important to cultural independence—and for Constantinople, it was a possibility to push again in opposition to Moscow’s affect.
In what can now solely be seen as a preemptive try to appease the Russian Church, the patriarch of Constantinople had, only a month earlier, dissolved the Exarchate and ended its independence. Parishes had to decide on between becoming a member of the bishops of Constantinople or these of Moscow. Many parishes, together with a few of the largest and wealthiest, returned to Moscow; selecting Constantinople would have positioned them underneath a Greek bishop and sure required them to surrender Slavic traditions and probably conduct companies in Greek.
Even so, the transfer didn’t calm tensions. Nearly instantly after the brand new Ukrainian church was established, the Moscow Patriarchate declared a proper break with Constantinople, ending monks’ capacity to have fun liturgically with each other and discouraging lay individuals from receiving sacraments from the opposite aspect. The schism continues right this moment: On Sept. 15, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople met with U.S. President Donald Trump to debate Ukraine’s plight, amongst different points.
Putin holds a candle in the course of the Easter service on the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow on Could 5, 2024. Getty Photos
The Moscow Patriarchate’s 2007 union with ROCOR and the 2018 dissolution of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Church buildings in Western Europe positioned Russia in a great strategic and authorized place to reclaim imperial ecclesiastical properties. That is true even in these locations, corresponding to Good, the place native communities object to the brand new homeowners.
For a few of the pious, Russia’s return after a century-long absence represents an existential disaster. Alexis Obolensky, president of Good’s Russian Orthodox Cultural Affiliation (which ran the church buildings for the previous century), mourned the choice to strip the group of the title to the Church of St. Nicholas and St. Alexandra whereas pointing to its broader implications. It’s as if they need “to erase the concept that there may very well be one other Russia than the one we all know. A Russia extra tolerant, extra open, and extra respectful of its historical past,” he advised Good-Matin.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it has change into more and more clear that the Russian Orthodox Church is in a position and prepared to behave as an arm of the Kremlin. From blessing Russian missiles to delivering sermons declaring the struggle mandatory to guard Ukraine from homosexual delight parades, the patriarch of Moscow is a mouthpiece of the Kremlin.
This makes Russia’s reclamation of imperial church properties notably perilous for Western governments. It’s a hazard made much more acute by the truth that the Russian state and church have a reliable authorized declare to those properties, even when the native communities which have tended them for over a century have the ethical excessive floor.
Because the Good instances display, it’s potential for Russia to say properties within the coronary heart of Europe. There’s ample motive to be nervous about what it would do with them. Bulgaria has expelled Russian clerics suspected of spying and the FBI warned in 2023 that Russia would doubtless try to recruit spies from Russian Orthodox church buildings in america. France and different Western nations, together with america, should acknowledge real safety points with spiritual freedom and property rights.
Again in Good, the descendants of the White Russians who as soon as made town their dwelling are reeling. Some have remained of their church buildings, unwilling to be pushed out by the Kremlin; others have begun attending a close-by Greek cathedral. No matter their alternative, members of France’s Russian Orthodox neighborhood have change into but extra casualties of Russia’s renewed aggression, caught in a battle that reaches far past the riviera.
