The dark heart of Russia’s faith: a review of Lucy Ash’s The Baton and the Cross

Cover of The Baton and the Cross

I met Lucy Ash, the author of The Baton and the Cross, in July 2023 on a trip to Svyatohirsk Lavra, a mountain monastery in Ukraine’s embattled east. Its shrapnel-ridden white walls overlooking the picturesque Siverskiy Donets river testified to its recent tragic history. Yet it was an episode from ten years ago that drew the accomplished reporter to this holy – or rather unholy – place.

International journalists have been flocking here since the Ukrainian army wiped out the Russian troops stationed across the river in the autumn of 2022. However, they usually did not even make it through the gates. No wonder, the lavra – as Ash points out in her book – was “the most prominent center of the Russkiy Mir ideology in the Donbas” and a “spiritual power base of the so-called Donetsk clan” (a group of politicians and oligarchs that brought Viktor Yanukovych to prominence). The Russians were stopped short of occupying it after Moscow launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and so the monastery turned into a refuge for people fleeing the war. This predicament did not change the ideological and political sentiments among its monks though. Suffice to say, the lavra’s abbot Metropolitan Arseniy not only had his Ukrainian citizenship revoked by a presidential decree in December 2022 but was arrested in April 2024 for sharing information about army checkpoints with Russians. He is now facing eight years behind bars.

I was astounded to see that Ash talked the monks into letting us in. She wanted to inquire about the visit Ihor Girkin reportedly paid to the lavra ten years ago at the onset of the so-called “Russian spring” in the Donbas. The man who credited himself with “pulling the trigger of the war” said that “all his personal bodyguards were the clergy, monks, and hieromonks of the Svyatohirsk Lavra.”  He also had backing from the Russian Oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, whose Tsargrad media group promotes ultra-conservative Christianity and supports Putin. Was the notorious Russian ultranationalist – now jailed by Putin – hosted here as it all started?

After two days, the monks figured out that it was better to ask us out. Still, we managed to have a lengthy conversation with Archimandrite Feofan, the monastery’s treasurer and a straightforward substitute for the abbot who was determined to keep his mouth shut. Over a self-grown vegetarian meal reminiscent of the food of Mount Athos, Feofan dismissed the connections between the lavra and Girkin’s militants. Instead, he presented us with some of the beliefs that turned the Moscow Patriarchate-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church into a public enemy in Ukraine after February 2022.

“Everything happens for a reason and so did this war,” he told us. He then added that “God let the violence happen to repair our nation.” The war is a “terrible trial,” he said, but it was caused by an “artificial divide” between Ukrainians and Russians and the sins of the Orthodox people such as abortions, which “kill more Ukrainians than the ongoing war”.

The Svyatohirsk Lavra visit is one of the hundreds of puzzles that make up the captivating narrative of The Baton and the Cross, which has the subtitle “Russia’s church from pagan to Putin”. The religious conflict in Ukraine – the competition between Ukraine’s two main Orthodox churches and Russia’s use of its church against Ukrainian statehood – is the last chapter of the historical journey into the heart of Russian Orthodoxy Ash guides us through. Ironically, this story starts also in Ukraine: during the baptism of Rus’.

In the first part of The Baton and the Cross, Ash presents a polemic historical survey featuring the likes of Prince Volodymyr, Patriarch Nikon, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Rasputin and Vladimir Lenin. She retells the history of Russian Orthodox Church in an insightful and thought-provoking way, focusing on its “astonishing survival skills” and “uncanny ability to integrate itself with power”. The second part of the book offers a deep dive into the post-Soviet rebirth of the Russian church; the re-emergence of the alliance between the altar and the throne in contemporary Russia; and the ultraconservative turn in Putin’s and his circle’s ideology.

Ash, who started her tenure as the BBC Moscow correspondent back in the 1990s, skilfully blends insightful historical analysis with immersive reporting based on great access and personal years-long connections. Far from one-sidedness or prejudice, she dedicates some of the most interesting parts of her book to positive trends within Russian Orthodoxy, such as the resistance of Orthodox Soviet dissidents, underground religious life in the late Soviet period, or Common Cause, a grassroots volunteer movement preserving traditional wooden architecture in Karelia and other regions. Her book is also filled with portraits of what she calls “brave and remarkable individuals” such as Father Georgy Edelstein, an Orthodox priest of Jewish descent who stood up to the Soviet Union and refused to back church approval of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Others include Zoya Krakhmalnikova, a Christian writer whose moral authority guided the next generation of Russians opposing authoritarianism and human rights abuses. Nonetheless, Ash’s final word is not something the main characters of her book would appreciate hearing.

The Baton and the Cross reveals a grim picture of contemporary Russian Orthodoxy. Its original sin was arguably what historians and theologians call “Sergianism”, a pattern of church servility towards the state. Patriarch Sergius, the de facto head of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1925 to 1943, adopted an ultra-loyalist stance towards the Soviet authorities, hollowing out the religious core of the church. The early Bolsheviks stripped religion of its spiritual content but Stalin, himself a Georgian would-be cleric, successfully turned it into a tool for the control of the population. On a practical level, this meant that all the high-ranking clerics and church leaders were also KGB agents.

As the new Russian statehood gradually emerged from the chaos of the 1990s, the Russian Orthodox Church followed through and intertwined itself with a corrupt autocracy run by secret policemen and mafiosi. The Byzantine concept of symphonia, harmony between church and state, was quickly revamped by Russia’s new ultra-conservative thinkers. No matter how natural it looks in retrospect, this effect did demand determination and work, most of which was accomplished by Patriarch Kirill and President Putin. Ash traces parallels in their biographies and argues that they both evolved from pro-western modernizers to standard-bearers of the Russian world’s revanchist and chauvinist ideology. It took time before they formed an alliance, as there were some disagreements between them. They peaked during the 2011 protests against rigged elections, when Kirill initially urged the authorities to change course but finally backed down. Soon he described Putin’s rule as “a miracle of God”. Putin later even said that he believed he was secretly baptized by Kirill’s father in his childhood.

The core prize for Kirill was what Ash describes as a “holy land grab”, a mass-scale overtaking of property and architectural undertakings usually run by the church and corrupt business elites. The revival of Orthodoxy and its alliance with the state was a great business. One great example is the bombastic Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was built with the enthusiastic support of the then Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov in place of the pre-revolutionary cathedral. This building was blown up and turned into a huge open water swimming pool during the Soviet era. Ash opens her book with a recollection of her visits to the famous Bassein Moskva. Another is the nightmarish Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, where believers can kneel on metal floors made out of melted-down Nazi trophy weapons and tanks, which Ash describes as “the castle of an evil wizard in a Disney film”.

Over time, Ash argues, the transactional relationship between Putin, the church and the FSB became highly effective. “The Church took the place of the Communist Party and provided the ideological framework for Putinism both at home and abroad,” she writes. This involved anti-gay, anti-abortion and pro-family propaganda that gradually brought back the conservative and paternalistic “Mother Russia” from its grave. The church canonized Nicholas II and his immediate family in 2000. The famous public prosecution of members of the band Pussy Riot, who performed a “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, was a litmus test for the new ideological order. “What seemed extreme in the early Putin era had gone mainstream,” Ash points out.

The church backed Kremlins global ambitions. Its leaders managed to integrate the Russian Orthodox Church with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, a church created by bishops exiled after the Russian Civil War. They also laid the ideological foundations for the Russian policy of “protecting Christians in the Middle East,” which justified Moscow’s intervention in Syria. Finally came Kirill’s blessing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The official doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church expressed in a document approved by the church at the end of March 2024, which is called “The Present and the Future of the Russian World”, states that Russia is fighting “a Holy War” to save humanity from “the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism”. These words are reiterated not only by Kirill in his wartime sermons but also by President Putin and his propagandists such as Volodymyr Solovyov, who accuses Ukraine’s Zelensky of Satanism on his TV show without blinking an eye.

Is this ideology a function of power or does the power of Russia’s current elite derive from this ideology? Are we at war with an Alexander Dugin-framed, and Ivan Ilyin-inspired, crusade, or is this all just opium for the masses sent into a meatgrinder for the sake of money and status? Ask the FSB agent or the clerk at the Moscow Patriarchate – you will get the same answer.

The Baton and the Cross by Lucy Ash. Icon Books 2024.

Aleksander Palikot is a Kyiv-based reporter and correspondent covering politics, history and culture in Central and Eastern Europe.

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Putinism, Russia, Russian history, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian orthodox Church