Putin’s holy war

MOSCOW — It was just before dawn when close to a dozen police officers wearing helmets and body armor burst into the apartment where Yevgeny Lebedev lives with his wife and children in northern Moscow.

“They forced me to lie on the floor with my face down,” Lebedev recalled of the raid in mid-November. “They wouldn’t let me look up while they searched the apartment. My children were terrified. It took my five-year-old daughter a long time to get over it. She thought they were criminals who had come to rob us.”

Despite the heavy-handed police tactics, Lebedev, 38, was not a terrorist suspect. Nor was he accused of murder, armed robbery, state treason or any other serious crime.

The officers who raided Lebedev’s home were investigating a possible violation of a controversial Russian law that makes it a criminal offense to “insult the feelings of religious believers.” Approved by President Vladimir Putin in June 2013, the law stipulates up to a year in jail for “insulting” acts that occur outside a place of worship. Those that happen inside are punishable by up to three years behind bars.

The homes of several other people were raided that same morning, in an operation that involved more than 150 police officers. Like Lebedev, they had protested plans to build a Russian Orthodox Christian church in a neighborhood park. Lebedev and other locals said its construction, part of an ambitious project to build 200 new churches across the Russian capital, would rob them of a much-loved green space. Brawls and shouting matches frequently erupted between protesters and radical Orthodox activists.

“By 2030 Russia will be like medieval Spain, where the Inquisition persecuted non-believers and heretics” — Aleksei Bushmakov, lawyer

Eventually, after months of rising tensions, the Russian Orthodox Church scrapped its construction plans. It was a rare victory for a grassroots protest in modern-day Russia — especially against such an influential adversary. But the row did not end there. Orthodox activists fenced off a section of the park and erected a wooden cross, inviting a priest to lead them in prayer sessions. Protests continued.

Patriarch Kirill, the powerful head of the Russian Orthodox Church, pitched into the dispute last October, accusing the protesters of having an “ideological hatred of the Lord’s cross.”

“The raids were clearly revenge for us stopping them from building the church,” said Lebedev. “The law on insulting religious feelings is aimed specifically at those who dare to go against the Russian Orthodox Church.”

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Russia’s law to protect religious believers was inspired, analysts say, by the high-profile trial of Pussy Riot, when the state prosecutor had been forced to scour Russia’s criminal code for appropriate charges to levy against the all-woman band.

Members of the Russian band Pussy Riot at a court hearing in Moscow in 2012. They were charged with hooloiganism for staging a “punk protest” against Vladimir Putin | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images

“Pussy Riot were charged with hooliganism and inciting hatred against Orthodox Christian believers,” said Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center in Moscow, which monitors relations between organized religion and secular society. “The latter charge was very hard to prove in court and it wasn’t so clear what hooliganism had to do with it at all. The law on insulting the feelings of religious believers was introduced in order to make it easier to prosecute people in similar cases.”

The law was greeted with horror by Russian liberals, as well as more progressive Russian Orthodox Christians, who see it as further evidence of the erosion of the separation of church and state enshrined in Russia’s constitution. Although Putin was a KGB officer in an officially atheist Soviet Union, he has forged ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in a bid to create something resembling a national ideology. Last year, he appointed ultra-conservative Orthodox believers to top education ministry and children’s rights posts.

However, like much of Russia’s recent controversial legislation — from the Kremlin’s notorious law forbidding “gay propaganda” to a legal clampdown on public protests — the law on religious belief remained untested until authorities decided the time was right to try it out in practice.

The first person to be charged was 38-year-old Viktor Krasnov from Stavropol in southern Russia, who claimed “there is no God” in a heated online dispute with two Russian Orthodox Christians in October 2014. “If I say that the collection of Jewish fairytales entitled the Bible is complete bullshit, then that is that. At least for me,” Krasnov also wrote.

During the first two decades of the Soviet era, some 200,000 members of the clergy were murdered, while millions of other Christians were persecuted for their faith.

In March 2016, Krasnov’s apartment was raided by police. A judge ordered a month-long examination in a psychiatric ward to determine if he was fit to stand trial. He was ultimately deemed fit to stand — despite the judge’s assertion that “no one in their right mind would write anything against Orthodox Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church” — and his trial is ongoing.

The landmark case represented a startling turnaround in Russia’s history.

During the first two decades of the Soviet era, some 200,000 members of the clergy were murdered, while millions of other Christians were persecuted for their faith, according to a 1995 Kremlin committee report. Although a limited Orthodox Christian revival was permitted by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin during World War II, anti-religion propaganda and selected discrimination against believers continued up until the mid-1980s.

“Yuri Gagarin said ‘I traveled into space, and I did not see God there,’” an astonished Krasnov told me when I spoke to him last year, referring to a famous Soviet anti-religion poster. “And now I’m being charged with insulting the feelings of religious believers?”

Russian Orthodox priests take part in a procession in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg | Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

Krasnov’s “nerve-wracking” trial lasted for almost a year, before the case was closed when the statue of limitations expired this month. But the court was initially reluctant to halt proceedings until Krasnov had entered a guilty plea, which he refused to do. His lawyer, Andrei Sabinin, told POLITICO that Krasnov’s refusal to cooperate with the court means he could face further legal problems over his “No God” comments.

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Although human rights organizations criticized Krasnov’s prosecution, the case did not provoke widespread public outrage. More cases swiftly followed, the vast majority against Russians accused of insulting Orthodox Christianity.

“Charges against people accused of breaking this law allow the state to strengthen its ideological stance on ties with the church,” said Verkhovsky. “The actual people who are charged aren’t that important for the state — it’s more important for the authorities that the cases are covered by the mass media.”

One of the most high-profile cases is that of Ruslan Sokolovsky, a 22-year-old video blogger from Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth biggest city. Last August, after state television warned Russians that anyone playing Pokemon Go in a church faced prosecution under the law on offending believers, Sokolovsky set off to Yekaterinburg’s biggest cathedral to find out just how serious the authorities were.

“This is nonsense. Who can be offended by someone walking around a church with a smartphone?” he says in a video he later posted to YouTube. The video, which has now been watched over 1.5 million times, also contained footage of Sokolovsky hunting the multi-colored cartoon creatures next to the altar while a priest intoned prayers.

“I didn’t catch the rarest Pokemon of all — Jesus,” Sokolovsky says at the end of the clip. “But, hey, what can I do? They say he doesn’t even exist!”

It wasn’t long before Sokolovsky found out just how seriously the authorities would take the law. Within weeks of posting his video, armed police officers detained him at the apartment he shares with his mother, and he was charged with insulting the feelings of believers by showing “disrespect” for Jesus Christ, and inciting hatred against Orthodox Christians. A police spokesman publicly accused him of blasphemy. He was held in a pre-trial detention facility in Yekaterinburg from October until mid-February, then placed under house arrest. He is currently standing trial and the verdict is expected by the end of the year.

“Things like this should not happen in a secular society,” said Aleksei Bushmakov, the Yekaterinburg-based lawyer defending Sokolovsky. Russia’s criminal code, he pointed out, does not define exactly what it means by “feelings of believers” — giving police and judicial authorities ample scope to interpret the law as they see fit.

“No one know what this is, and so anyone, intentionally or unintentionally, can commit a crime,” Bushmakov said. “Uncertainty about the terms and broad judicial discretion means that anyone can be punished. Sokolovsky has not caused any damage to church property, nor has he harmed anyone, or urged anyone else to do so.”

If Russia continues down this road “by 2030 Russia will be like medieval Spain, where the Inquisition persecuted non-believers and heretics,” Bushmakov added. “It’s terrifying to think what will happen if people are deprived of the right to choose what to believe and what not to believe in.”

Referring to the case of the woman who lit a cigarette in church, [a church spokesman] said “the punishment should depend very much on motivation: Was the aim to desecrate the church?”

Another high-profile case involved an unnamed 21-year-old woman from Belgorod, central Russia, who was charged under the law after she posted a picture online that shows her lighting a cigarette with a church candle. Her lawyer said she may face up to three years behind bars, depending on how prosecutors proceed with the case.

Lawmakers in St. Petersburg have also called for protesters who demonstrated the handover of the city’s landmark St Isaac’s Cathedral to the Russian Orthodox Church to be charged with offending the feelings of believers. The cathedral was used as a museum of atheism in the early Soviet period, before it become an art gallery.

The law has proven to be a boon to Orthodox Christians in their ongoing battle to reshape social attitudes in Russia.

Natalya Poklonskaya, a prominent lawmaker from Putin’s United Russia party, recently asked the state prosecutor to ban “Mathilda,” a film about a love affair between Nicholas II, Russia’s last czar, and a ballerina, Mathilda Kschessinska. Nicholas II, who was executed along with his entire family by Communist revolutionaries in 1918, was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. According to Poklonskaya, the film offends the feelings of believers because it depicts the late czar in erotic scenes — something she called sacrilegious. A radical Orthodox movement called Christian State Holy Russia has predicted that “cinemas will burn” if the government does not ban the film.

Ruslan Sokolovsky, a 22-year-old video blogger, was charged with insulting the feelings of believers by showing “disrespect” for Jesus Christ and inciting hatred against Orthodox Christians. He posted a video to YouTube playing Pokemon Go in a church | Vladimir Zhabrikov/AP

Although “Mathilda,” which was financed by the culture ministry, looks likely to make it to the big screen, Orthodox activists have successfully closed down a number of “offensive” exhibitions in Moscow in recent months, as well as a performance of “Jesus Christ Superstar” in Omsk, Siberia. While Putin has condemned threats of violence, he has also said that artists should not provoke society by producing work that could upset believers.

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While the Russian Orthodox Church has rarely pressed charges on the back of the law on religious belief, it has also declined to issue pleas for clemency.

“Forgiveness is a very tricky thing,” said Vakhtang Kipshidze, a church spokesman, in an interview at Moscow’s 16th-century Andreevsky monastery. “Of course, we should follow Christ’s examples. However, in all societies, laws are applicable.”

Referring to the case of the woman who lit a cigarette in church, he said “the punishment should depend very much on motivation: Was the aim to desecrate the church?”

Kipshidze also argued that religious persecution in the Soviet era has made today’s Russian Orthodox Christians extremely sensitive to perceived insults against their religion. “What Pussy Riot did, for example, might have been tolerated in a country where they didn’t have an anti-Christian regime that killed thousands [sic] of people for being Christian,” he said.

Around 80 percent of Russia’s population say they back the law on religious belief.

Radical Orthodox Christian activists say the law is part of a struggle that will determine Russia’s future. “Right now in Russia, we are going through a critical stage in our development,” said Alexander Kormukhin, the leader of the high-profile 40×40 Orthodox Christian movement.

“We still haven’t decided as a society who created the world. Was it the big bang? Did we evolve from monkeys? Or did God create the world? Laws, social norms, education, all of these things have to be founded on some kind of values.”

Kormukhin, who has been honored by Russian Orthodox leader Kirill, said he wants Russia to avoid the fate of Europe, which he believes has been plunged into a nightmarish world of violent migrants and pedophilia legalized by a liberal European elite that “worships Satan.”

Around 80 percent of Russia’s population say they back the law on religious belief, according to the VTsIom state pollster. But not all Russian Orthodox Christians are happy with it. Last month in St. Petersburg, a handful of Orthodox priests carried out a public protest against the controversial legislation. Other believers told POLITICO the law itself was an insult to their beliefs.

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulates Patriarch Kirill on his 70th birthday in Moscow in November 2016 | Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP via Getty Images

Even Vitaly Milonov, the ultra-conservative lawmaker behind Russia’s “anti-gay propaganda law,” has spoken out against the law. “It was thought up by anti-Christian forces with the aim of discrediting Orthodoxy,” he told Russian media, without giving further details.

Karina Chernyak, who runs an Orthodox Christian youth club in Moscow and often comments on religious matters, believes the law is a result of the rapid changes that have taken place in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many Russians, she said, simply transferred loyalties from one dominant belief system, communism, to another, Orthodox Christianity, without fully understanding the essence of Christian belief.

“There are lots of people in the Russian Orthodox Church who only came to the church after the split up of the Soviet system,” she said. “Some two-and-a-half decades ago, these people were in the Communist Party or the Komsomol [Communist youth movement.] They still haven’t let go of their authoritarian attitudes. They are extremely confused.”

Marc Bennetts is a Moscow-based journalist and author of “I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives: Inside Putin’s War on Russia’s Opposition” (Oneworld Publications, 2016).