The Church as Policy-maker
From the crisis of national identity since the Soviet Union disintegrated, Russia finally succeeded in building a new national identity by the 2010s, in which the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is crucially embedded. The ROC and a nuclear arsenal are now seen by Russian elite and a majority of people alike as the guardian of Russia’s spiritual and national security.
This book traces the evolution of Russia’s search for a new identity with a focus on the nexus between the ROC and the state in general, and its nuclear complex in particular, since the Soviet collapse.
Dmitry Adamsky, professor at the IDC Herzliya, Israel, splits the three decades since into three periods in terms of the ROC’S rise in Russian state and society. In the 1990s, Orthodox Christianity spread widely; in the 2000s, the ROC began saturating its religious messages with nationalistic-ideological content, while the ruling elite found in Orthodoxy a “critical ingredient” in forming “a cohesive national identity.” The 2010s saw these bottom-up and top-down tendencies converge, hitting a peak of clericalization in state-church relations and eventually establishing a new Russian identity. The Kremlin’s narrative of Russia as a great power became “a combination of Soviet nostalgia, yearning for revenge, and historical mysticism based on Byzantine and Orthodox heritage,” Adamsky says, reflected in Moscow’s current geopolitical aspirations.
The ROC and a nuclear arsenal are seen as the guardian of Russia’s spiritual and national security.