Divide and Conquer Among Differing Russian Orthodoxies is the Name of the Game
ICC NOTE: As the division among the Orthodox church in Ukraine has become apparent, leading to potential escalations in violence, the division among Russian Orthodox churches has not been so obvious. According to a Russian Orthodox nun the divisions in the church have been present since the Bolshevik Revolution and continue to this day. The risk in which the divisions create are a sense of vulnerability which has and continues to be abused by Putin and the Russian government. It is well known the church has been used as a political tool, but it has been very successful in maintaining a cover of unity despite the various offshoots.
8/2/2016 Moscow, Russia (Window on Eurasia) – Moscow plays up the divisions within Orthodoxy in Ukraine to weaken that country and to suggest it remains part of a Russian world, but, Russian writers have failed to acknowledge the obvious: Orthodoxy in Russia is even more divided however much the state tries to ensure the dominance of one branch by encouraging divisions in the rest.
On the portal devoted to the promotion of the non-patriarchate Orthodox in Russia, Kseniya (Mitrenina), a nun, provides a useful guide not only to the divisions within this segment of Russian Orthodoxy since 1917 but also to the fissiparous tendencies within it in recent years (ostrova.org/meteo/katalog-oskolkov/).
The Bolshevik revolution split Russian Orthodoxy into three parts, she writes, the official church which decided to cooperate with the Soviet state, the underground or “catacomb” church which refused to do so, and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad which arose in the emigration and united a large part of it.
The catacomb church and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad were “physically separated from one another by the iron curtain.” But from the end of the 1980s, the Church Abroad began to “return” to Russia, even as by that time, the numbers of followers of the Catacomb church were very small.
Thus, by 1991, there was “not one Orthodoxy” in Russia “but several” – the official Moscow Patriarchate, church groups tracing their origins to the émigré or catacomb churches who are known as the True Orthodox Churches, and “all the other Orthodox church groups” which don’t accept the one or the other, Kseniya says.
The situation has been complicated by the fact that in Soviet times, the Church Abroad viewed the Patriarchal church as “the Red Church” and did not want to have anything to do with it, but after the fall of communism, parts of it began to make their peace with the patriarchate while others remained completely hostile.