The Spiritual Rebel
The Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed deep divisions inside the Russian Orthodox Church.
FEBRUARY 22, 2024
“I am not a political activist,” Father Oleg Batov, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, was explaining to me. We were having a light lunch at a café in Batumi. On a December day, ten months into the war, sunlight poured through the glass panes as we gazed out at the placid waters of the Black Sea. With his mane of white hair and a long flowing beard, Batov looked like an Orthodox priest. But he was dressed in an open-necked shirt and jeans, not in the traditional black cassock of the Orthodox clergy. On deciding to flee Moscow shortly after the war began, Batov chose Batumi for its mild climate—and also because he hoped a church there would permit him to preside over services. And for one month following his arrival, he was able to celebrate the rites. But then he received a visit from a bishop of the Georgian Orthodox Church, who told him he had to stop. The bishop, Batov explained to me, was acting out of a desire to preserve good relations with Russian Orthodox Church leaders in Moscow, whose support for Putin and the war Batov had challenged. Now Batov earned what money he could by driving a taxi and offering his services as a tour guide.
His wife, Maria—Russian Orthodox priests are permitted to marry—joined us at the café, along with the couple’s teenage son. A metal cross dangled from a loop around her neck. Maria was helping to support the family with private music lessons— vocal and piano—to adults and children and with jazz and rock gigs at Batumi restaurants. This turn in their lives was quite a comedown for both Oleg and Maria. In Moscow, Oleg had presided over the sixteenth-century Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a minute’s walk from the Kremlin. Years earlier, he had headed a Russian Orthodox church in Zurich, visited at that time by the wife of Putin’s protégé Dmitry Medvedev. Maria was an accomplished musicologist, a graduate of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory who had performed with the Boston Camerata, the renowned early-music ensemble. But the pair evinced no regrets over their decision to flee Russia. Because of the war, it was “just impossible” to remain, Oleg told me. “In our heart we are Christians,” he said, and God’s commandment was unambiguous: “Thou shalt not kill.” He was not a political activist, by his self-description, but he surely was a kind of spiritual rebel against the powers-that-be in his native land, including the leadership of his own church.
A mosaic was created for Putin, but taken down after he said it was too early to memorialize his accomplishments.
The saga of the Batovs might sound strange to the Western ear. Apart from the Kremlin, no institution in Russia was as reviled in the West as the Russian Orthodox Church. Prominent secular voices in the Russian exile community in Europe widely shared this loathing. On one level, this was understandable. The Church seemed to stand for a mystical sort of Russian imperialism. This outlook was embodied in the organization’s reigning leader: His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’. Six years older than Putin, Kirill was enthroned in 2009, nine years into the Putin era, and together the Patriarch and Russia’s Tsar-like ruler displayed a harmony of purpose and vision. In particular, they subscribed to a concept known as Russky Mir—Russian World—which held that a distinct Russian Orthodox civilization, built up over a millennium, extended seamlessly across national boundaries into places like Ukraine. The Russian-peopled lands, in that way of thinking, could be justly reclaimed by the Russian state. In this lens, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 represented no mere territorial enlargement, but the return of sacred ground: In the Russian origin story, Prince Vladimir converted to Orthodoxy with his baptism at an ancient site in Crimea and “then christened the whole of Rus’.” Following the annexation, the Russky Mir project advanced with the Kremlin-fomented military insurgency in Eastern Ukraine aimed at bringing the Donbas region, inhabited by many ethnic Russians, under effective Russian state control.
In 2020, Kirill consecrated a massive new cathedral—The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces—that symbolized the fusion of the military and religious spheres in a resurgent post-Soviet Russia under Putin’s command. Erected on the site of a military theme park on the outskirts of Moscow, the structure featured frescoes that celebrated Russian martial triumphs from medieval to present times and a floor that was fashioned from melted-down weapons seized from Nazis. A mosaic was created for Putin, but taken down after he said it was too early to memorialize his accomplishments.
Two years later, the Russian invasion of Ukraine now entering its second month, Kirill returned to the cathedral and spoke to the “faithful” on the war. “All of our people today must wake up, wake up, understand that a special time has come, on which the historical fate of our people may depend,” he said. “I do not cease to feel anxiety for all the people who live in those places where military clashes are taking place today,” he continued, speaking of Ukraine. “After all, all these are the people and peoples of Holy Rus’, all these are our brothers and sisters. But, as in the Middle Ages, wishing to weaken Rus’, various forces pushed the brothers against each other, plunging them into internecine strife, so it is happening today.” By “various forces,” the Patriarch seemed to be calling out the West, as in the US, the EU, and NATO, as the real instigator of the Ukrainian conflict. And in response to the West’s troublemaking, he concluded, “we must be faithful— when I say ‘we,’ I mean, first of all, military personnel—to our oath and readiness to ‘lay down our lives for our friends,’ as the word of God testifies.”
The story of the Batovs and their eventual flight from Russia offers a window into the messy realities of Russian Orthodoxy—a complex, layered institution that was not as homogeneous as it appeared from the outside.
Putin could not have asked for a more resounding justification for the war. Yet for all the attention that the Putin-Kirill alliance garnered in the Western press, there was a larger context that the media tended to neglect. Although Kirill was elected to his position as Patriarch in a secret ballot of an electoral body composed of clergy and laypeople, he was not the equivalent of a Roman Catholic Pope as an infallible source of divine wisdom. The world of Orthodoxy, which included other national churches, had no Pope. And the Russian Orthodox Church itself was bigger than its Patriarch and his political and cultural fixations. Russky Mir was not Church dogma and had nothing to do with the Gospels.
The story of the Batovs and their eventual flight from Russia offers a window into the messy realities of Russian Orthodoxy—a complex, layered institution that was not as homogeneous as it appeared from the outside. Inside the Church, familiar tendencies like cultural chauvinism and attachment to autocracy often prevailed but not without challenge from countervailing currents like ecumenicalism and a populist suspicion of state power. The question of what the Church was—and what it could be—was a live one, at the core of an abiding struggle deep within its ranks that dated to Soviet times and came to a head in the late 1980s as Soviet-imposed strictures on religious worship loosened. The Batovs were part of that struggle, as advocates for an outward-looking, “people’s” Church, as opposed to an institution bent on inculcating a strong sense of Russian nationhood and on aligning with the state. In exile, along with like-minded others in the Church who had fled Russia, they represented a fledgling spiritual resistance to Kirill, their pushback grounded in Christian principles. They represented, too, hope for a reformed institution that, in a post-Kirill, post-Putin society, would fulfill their vision of what the Church must stand for to engage the hearts and minds of the laity without misty appeals to imperial dreams.
Oleg was born in 1969 in Moscow. His father, an electrician, died when he was a small child, and he was raised by his mom, a kindergarten teacher. “I had a common Soviet education and upbringing,” he told me, of no religious content, apart from household rituals like making paska, the traditional Russian Easter bread. He entered into the study of physics at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and seemed bound for a career in science. But at the age of nineteen, for the first time, he opened a Bible. As unexceptionable as that act might seem, the Bible was officially banned by the state for much of the Soviet era, available only through the clandestine samizdat (self-publishing) strivings of dissidents. But now, as publishing restrictions eased in Mikhail Gorbachev’s USSR, a French publisher brought out a million copies of the New Testament in Russian, and a curious Oleg purchased one. Even as he continued with his physics studies, he hungered to know more about religion and began to attend free lectures in Moscow on the history of Christianity.
Maria came to belief even earlier than Oleg. Born in 1970 in the ancient Russia city of Novgorod, a few hundred miles northwest of Moscow, her father was a jazz pianist and her mother a journalist. At the age of sixteen, she entered a college to study as a musicologist and there on the syllabus was Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. “I think God found me through what I loved the most— music,” she told me. “Bach’s music reveals the Gospel like nothing else.” At home, her mother gave her a copy of the Gospel of Matthew in a black handwritten book—copied by her mom at the age of twenty-five, when she managed to borrow a copy of the Bible for twenty-four hours. Maria received her baptism at this time, in 1986, and on that day put on the cross I saw on her in Batumi. She wore it always.
Of inspiration to both Maria and Oleg in coming to Christianity was Alexander Men, a charismatic priest “for a new generation of believers,” as an acolyte described him. Born in 1935 to a Jewish family, Men was baptized as an infant in the Catacomb Church, a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church that spurned cooperation with Soviet officialdom. Under Stalin and his successors, the Church, such as it was permitted to exist in cramped form, was under constant watch by the KGB and many priests had reputations as KGB informers. As a threat to this collaboration between Church and State, Men suffered constant KGB harassment. Nevertheless, he persisted in his teachings, to the point of holding underground Bible classes. Possessed of a wide-ranging intellect and an encyclopedic knowledge, he situated Christ in a stream of moral instructions that ranged from Plato to Moses, Muhammad to the Buddha. And he took Marx, the high priest of Stalinist-Leninist Communism, to task for the famous aphorism that “religion is the opium of the people.” Not in the least, Men said in a lecture: “For those Christians who might be tempted to turn their faith into an easy chair, a refuge, a tranquil harbor, Marx’s formula is a warning! No, Christianity is not a security blanket.” Instead, he continued, “Authentic Christianity is, if you wish, a mountain-climbing expedition, a dangerous and difficult undertaking.”
Strange stories made the rounds in Moscow, as in a top Putin aide vetting candidates for appointments to federal office for Orthodox belief and even asking if they would mind being baptized. Putin himself said his mother had him secretly baptized; some experts in Orthodox rituals said his body language in church passed their test for a genuine believer.
Men’s was a Gospel of direct action, of engagement with the world beyond the walls of a formal house of worship, and he brought his ministry directly to the poor and the sick. With the arrival of glasnost, with Soviet dogma at last exposed as bankrupt, his time seemed to have come. Word of mouth swelled his following. Captivated by his ideas and example, Maria arranged for a lecture by Men at her musical college. Yet, as she well knew, “many were against Men within the Church,” opposed to his “open,” outward-looking viewpoint, as she recalled in our conversation in Batumi. On a Sunday in September 1990, as he made his way from his home along a path to the train station to get to his parish church in a town outside of Moscow, he was attacked from behind, a blow to his head from an axe draining his blood and ending his life. The axe, the traditional tool of the Russian peasant, suggested, perhaps, a symbolic message, that the killing was by the hands of Russia. Was this the work of right-wing nationalists? The KGB? It looked in any event like a professional operation by a team that had closely observed Men’s routine and carefully plotted the assault; no culprit was ever brought to justice.
Now Men was a martyr, a body of writings and a committed circle of followers left behind. Unlike Maria, Oleg did not have a chance to meet Men before the priest was murdered, but he had read his works and attended talks offered by Men’s associates. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Men’s central lesson, that “the Church should serve people, not the authorities,” as Oleg took it, had a chance for enactment. For this “new generation of believers,” projects like the restoration of long-abandoned churches nourished the hope that Russian Orthodoxy could be rebuilt on a new foundation, close to the laypeople, separate and apart from the state. On graduating from his physics institute, Oleg enrolled, one year later, in a theological institute. He met Maria in 1993 at a small Gospel reading and prayer group in Moscow, in the tradition of such groups founded by Men in his lifetime, when preaching was not permitted in churches. They were married that year.
In the post-Soviet 1990s, Orthodoxy enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among laypeople and became a badge of fashion in certain political and business circles. Boris Yeltsin announced that he was now a believer after his many years as a “sincere atheist” in Soviet times. Church leaders doubted Yeltsin’s vow of faith and saw him as a weak, undisciplined ruler. No matter: Patriarch Alexei II, the predecessor of Kirill, enthroned in 1990, forged a pact with the Russian Armed Forces that revived Tsarist-era practices like religious instruction to teach fresh recruits to serve “God and Fatherland” and ecclesiastical awards for generals. In the ebb and flow within the Church, the stalwart conservative faction, seeking a close bond with the State, was ascending over the populist, ecumenical camp stirred by the teachings of Alexander Men. And on Putin becoming president, “patriotic Orthodoxy” blossomed into a kind of state ideology, a replacement for the “scientific atheism” that the KGB itself had once embraced. The Kremlin started a pro-Putin Orthodox youth movement, known as Walking Together. Strange stories made the rounds in Moscow, as in a top Putin aide vetting candidates for appointments to federal office for Orthodox belief and even asking if they would mind being baptized. Putin himself said his mother had him secretly baptized; some experts in Orthodox rituals said his body language in church passed their test for a genuine believer. Five years into Putin’s reign, I met in Moscow with the priest said to be Putin’s personal confessor. He lavished praised on Putin as the first true Christian head of state since the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and as the protector of the national soul—the pervoye litso (first face)—of Russia, as tradition assigned this role.
Yet as Putin increasingly took on the cast of the Tsars of old, with approval from Church “statists,” voices of dissent within its ranks arose. In 2012, a dozen years into Putin’s reign, amid the street protests in Moscow over election fraud, I spoke with a young seminarian who professed sympathy for the demonstrators. “Power has to be based on moral values that serve the people. It shouldn’t be a power that dominates people,” he said. And in this regard, he continued, the “more often the young generation stands up for its rights, the more often the government will take into account the opinion of the young people and of the country.” An anti-Putin opposition gradually took shape inside the Church. In 2019, as political protesters again took to the streets, ninety-four priests signed an open letter calling on the government to halt criminal prosecutions of protesters. Father Batov was the top name on the list. In a piece published by the Moscow Times, a photograph of him in his church placed at the top of the article, he declared that, as St. Augustine taught, “a state devoid of justice is no better than a band of robbers.” Two years later, Oleg tried in vain to convince Russian legal authorities not to shut down the Memorial group, the nonprofit devoted to chronicling the crimes of the Soviet Gulag. He was becoming dangerously close to being seen as an enemy of the state by Putin’s Kremlin. Nonetheless, six days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he joined with nearly three hundred Orthodox priests in signing an open letter calling for an “immediate ceasefire” and saying the Ukrainian people should be permitted a free choice, “not at gunpoint,” to determine their relationship with Russia. Furious at this breach, security service operatives summoned some of the signatories to the Lubyanka, in Soviet times the fearsome headquarters of the KGB, now occupied by its principal successor agency. The rebellious priests were pressured to remove their names from the letter. Oleg was not among those summoned, but he understood how carefully he had to watch his words. In a sermon at his church, he awkwardly refrained from calling the war a war. Meanwhile, the director of Maria’s musical conservatory signed a letter in support of the invasion. It was in these untenable circumstances that Oleg and Maria concluded that they had no alternative but to flee the country. Oleg wrote a letter to his parishioners explaining that as he could no longer keep silent on the war, he felt he had to go into exile. The missive was read aloud in his church. “Most understood, some were saddened, some were hurt,” he told me. Maria notified her conservatory of her resignation on arriving in Batumi. She rejected, categorically, the idea that Putin was a sincere believer: He has yet to perform “any Christian deeds befitting a president,” she told me.
“Remember that after the October revolution, dozens of bishops left Russia and established Russian churches outside Russia, and now not a single one of you has done the same.”
Oleg was among a fairly small number of Russian Orthodox priests who went into exile after the Ukraine invasion. But many more clerics pined to leave Russia, I was told by Sergei Chapnin, a fellow priest and a friend of Oleg’s, in exile in America. The two met in the mid-1990s as colleagues in the Office of the Moscow Patriarch. Chapnin, who rose to become the editor of the main publications of the Church, was now the leading point of contact for disaffected priests inside and outside of Russia. He was the one who directed me to Oleg. Alexander Men, too, was an inspiration for Chapnin, and a “people’s Church” perspective could be seen in the criticisms of Kirill’s tenure that Chapnin regularly published on a website, Public Orthodoxy, sponsored by Fordham University in the US. He spoke to me on Zoom from a friend’s house on Long Island. On the wall behind him was a print of the famous Andrei Rublev icon of the Holy Trinity. Chapnin told me that “frightened” priests in Russia, privately unaccepting of Kirill’s embrace of the war, called him “quite often” to speak of their desire to go into exile. The problem, Chapnin said, was that the Church leadership could suspend or even defrock them—and thus make it impossible to be accepted by Orthodox churches outside of Russia. They would have to reinvent their lives and they faced dim prospects, unlike the readily employable IT workers who had fled Russia.
Chapnin well understood the predicament—he faced it himself, as did Oleg Batov, halted from preaching in Batumi— but his patience was running out. He was especially exasperated with the bishops of the Church for parroting Kirill’s line, and not only that, for refusing to let the parish priests under their domain to voice opposition to the war. With the war nearing its one-year anniversary, he posted on Public Orthodoxy an accusatory letter addressed to the bishops, titled “Why Have You Forgotten the Truth of God?” The years of Kirill’s rule, he told them, “are dark pages in the Church’s history. The Church’s renaissance broke down, and now it is not sinners being saved by divine grace who are its members, but embittered castle-builders swilling the cocktail of imperial myth, resentment, and unbelievably primitive eschatology.” You are the drinkers of this foul cocktail concocted by Kirill, Chapnin told the bishops, and what’s more, “in a great many photos you are there, next to the patriarch, smiling, receiving his blessing, offering him flowers and expensive gifts. Once again: You stand by a man who justifies war crimes and has betrayed the Church. You repeat his words, retell his criminal arguments.”
In his missive, Chapnin acknowledged that “I myself am in a weak and vulnerable position. The reproach that may be thrown at me is obvious: ‘You left Russia, you are now safe, do you have a moral right to utter these reproaches?’” Still, he asked the bishops, “Who prevents you from leaving, too?” If any of you inwardly disagree with Kirill, Chapnin wrote, but “see the risks and threats connected with the free manifestation of your position,” then “leave, just as hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens have left. Many of them are Orthodox; they need priests and bishops. They wait for free preaching, for spiritual support. Remember that after the October revolution, dozens of bishops left Russia and established Russian churches outside Russia, and now not a single one of you has done the same.”
It was a remarkable screed—to what effect, it was hard to say. Fordham’s Public Orthodoxy website was blocked in Russia by state authorities, but an in-Russia site, ahilla.ru, published Chapnin’s letter, and translated versions were published in Polish, Bulgarian, French, and German. “As far as I know,” Chapnin told me, “quite a few” bishops read it. His project for the long term, he said, was nothing less than the reformation of the Church. It needed to be “radically reorganized,” he said. And the “first thing” was that “the Church would be clearly, totally separated from the State.” Second, the parishes, “now totally in the hands of the bishops,” would need to have “much greater autonomy.” In this decentralized setup, “the parish should be recognized as the main entity of the church.” And to sever altogether the ancient bond between the Church and political autocracy, Chapnin favored turning Russia into a parliamentary republic, shorn of a separately elected president. His dream was that “Christian democrats” could be a “political force” in this Russia.
There was no chance, of course, of a reformation of the Church under Kirill, seventy-six years old and apparently in good health, notwithstanding a bout with COVID. And there was no historical precedent for a radical reorganization of the Russian Orthodox Church. But these were not the only obstacles facing embattled reformers like Chapnin. Another was that voices like his were just about alone in the wider Russian exile community. The discussion of Russia’s future was almost entirely a secular one. “True Russia,” a group composed of prominent exiles belonging to the “Russian cultural world,” promoted a secular, European-oriented conception of Russia that would survive Putin. The group’s website featured high-profile writers like Boris Akunin, a founder, and accomplished musicians like the conductor Vladimir Jurowski, but so far as I could see, no religious figures of any affiliation. “We are humanists,” True Russia’s managing director, Oleg Radzinsky, told me in a Zoom call from London. Radzinsky was a writer and financier who had spent more than three years in a maximum-security prison in Soviet times on conviction of charges of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” True Russia, he said, stood for “the Russia of Pushkin, not the Russia of Putin.”
The ubiquitous Guriev was also a founder of “True Russia.” He was not engaged with religious issues, he told me from Paris, and in any case, he suggested, “Russia is not a very religious country.” Yet while fewer than 10 percent of Russians attended church regularly, the share of Russians identifying as Orthodox Christian surged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from 31 percent in 1991 to 72 percent in 2008, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from social scientists. Another Pew survey, conducted from 2015 to 2017 in thirty-four countries, found that 75 percent of Russians believed in God, compared to 36 percent of Swedes. A 2021 survey by a Russian research outfit and the University of Oslo found that 47 percent of Russians supported “mandatory study of Orthodox culture” in primary schools.
These findings suggested that religious belief and institutions were also part of a true Russia. Indeed, the spiritual resistance mounted by Church clerics like Chapnin and Oleg Batov to the Putin-Kirill alliance was of the same character as the anti-Putin resistance in secular exile circles, even as that shared perspective went generally unacknowledged by secular leaders. The believers in the diaspora had defied the Kremlin, just like the nonbelievers, in refusing to embrace Russia’s war. On top of that, the believers had disobeyed the Patriarch of their Church, in rejecting his framing of the war as an existential struggle on which the “historical fate” of Russia depended. All of those who fled were equally “scum and traitors” in Putin’s eye. In this context, the apparent absence of coordination between the secular political and spiritual resistance to Putin and the war struck me as a missed opportunity.
On taking leave of Maria and Oleg Bartov in Batumi, I asked Oleg whether he could see himself returning to Russia and resuming his activities as a priest. “I would love to,” he told me—on the condition that Putin was no longer in power. A people’s Church, he felt, could yet be built, “without golden steeples and gilded icons.” Even in these dark times he refused to succumb to despair: “My knowledge is pessimistic. My faith is optimistic.” That saying, he noted with a smile, came from Alexander Men.
This article is excerpted from Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia, published by Columbia Global Reports in January 2024.
✺ Published in “Issue 13: Order” of The Dial
