Church Extends Kremlin’s Power
PARIS — While tanks and artillery have been Russia’s weapons of choice to project its power into neighboring Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin has also mobilized faith to expand the country’s reach and influence.
A new Russian Orthodox cathedral is under construction on the banks of the Seine beside a 19th- century palace that has been used to conceal some of the French presidency’s most closely guarded secrets.
When Moscow first proposed a $100 million “spiritual and cultural center” there, France’s security services fretted that Russia’s president, Mr. Putin, a former K.G. B. officer, might have more than just religious outreach in mind.
But the cathedral’s more intrusive role is to serve as an outsize display in Paris of how Russia is not only a military power but a religious one.
A fervent foe of homosexuality and attempts to put individual rights above family, community or nation, the Russian Orthodox Church has proved a particularly powerful tool in former Soviet lands like Moldova, where senior priests loyal to the Moscow church hierarchy have campaigned tirelessly to block their country’s integration with the West.
Priests in Montenegro, meanwhile, have spearheaded efforts to derail their country’s plans to join NATO.
The most visible sign of Mr. Putin’s efforts to amplify Russia’s voice farther west is the new Kremlin-financed spiritual center here near the Eiffel Tower, now so closely associated with Mr. Putin that France’s former culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand, suggested that it be called “St. Vladimir’s.”
“They are advancing pawns here and everywhere; they want to show that there is only one Russia, the Russia of Putin,” said Alexis Obolensky, vice president of the Association Culturelle Orthodoxe Russe de Nice, a group of French believers, many of them descendants of White Russians who fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. They want nothing to do with a Moscow-based church leadership headed by Kirill, patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, a close ally of the Russian president.
The French Orthodox association is instead loyal to the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, a rival church leadership in Istanbul that has provided a haven for many of Mr. Putin’s churchgoing foes.
After a long legal battle with Mos- cow, Mr. Obolensky’s association in 2013 lost control of Nice’s Orthodox cathedral, St. Nicholas, to the Moscow Patriarchate, which installed its own priests and rallied the faithful behind projects to improve France’s relations with Russia.
To mark the completion of Moscow-funded renovation work at St. Nicholas in January, Russia’s ambassador in Paris, Aleksandr Orlov, joined the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, for a ceremony at the cathedral and hailed the refurbishment as “a message for the whole world: Russia is sacred and eternal!”
Vladimir Yakunin, a longtime ally of Mr. Putin who is subject to United States, but not European, sanctions imposed after Russia seized Crimea, declared the cathedral a “corner of the Russian world,” a concept that Moscow used to justify its military intervention in eastern Ukraine.
After the July 14 terrorist attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice by a man driving a truck into a crowd, which killed 84 people — among them were four Russians, including an officer at St. Nicholas — Eric Ciotti, the president of the Nice region, demanded France seek closer relations with Moscow so as to defeat the so- called Islamic State.
Andrei Eliseev, the Nice cathedral’s Moscow- educated senior priest, denied accusations that he works for Russia’s security agency and blamed hostility against him and Moscow on the feuds of old aristocratic families. But he said he nonetheless has a duty to serve the state.
Mr. Obolensky said jokingly: “They will not stop until they control everything. One day the Promenade des Anglais will be called the Promenade des Russes.”