From urban landscape to national culture: Russia’s conspicuous religious simulacra and enduring,if fragile,secularity

Abstract

This article considers the place religion holds in post-Soviet Russian society, and most importantly, the case of the dominant Russian Orthodoxy. It shows that the gap between low everyday religiosity and high public profile of religion is the key to a specific Russian version of secularity. How religion’s spectacular appropriation of physical and social space, up to the imaginative space of the national culture as such, does not cancel the strong counterweight of deeply ingrained secular cultural arrangements – either genetically linked to some European variations or specifically related to (post)communist experience.

In this article, I will consider the place religion holds in post-Soviet Russian society, and most importantly, the case of the dominant Russian Orthodoxy, with some hints to cross-national and cross-confessional comparisons. This article does not draw upon a particular new empirical research project; instead, I use my previous research experience and address a set of significant phenomena of recent years partly covered in scholarship but still needing interpretation.

The questions of this study can be formulated as follows: what is the real, and the imagined, place of the religious in post-Soviet Russian society? To what extent does religion work as either a real force or cultural simulacra? In other words, does religion define, in a substantial way, the social processes and the habitus of major groups, including the political elite? How strong and legitimate are the claims of religious actors to possess various types of social space – from the physical space of cities to the space of national culture as a whole?

While all these questions are large enough to be treated separately, my idea here is to address them tentatively within the frame of a broad categorical binary of ‘secular vs religious’. In Russia, as elsewhere, these binary terms have been present as rhetorical, discursive categories used in public debates and by various social actors. At the same time, they remain key analytical categories in scholarship. The main questions of this article as formulated above would be most appropriate to answer within these categorical coordinates. However, to use these coordinates, we first need to look at the ways in which this secular/religious dichotomy has been thoroughly scrutinized over the last decades. There are at least three directions in which these concepts have been reinterpreted in the abundant scholarship.

The first and the main thrust of this scholarship has been the deconstruction of the religious/secular dichotomy by demonstrating the fluid, constructed nature of both terms and of their relationship (Asad, 2003; Calhoun et al., 2011, 2013; Gorski et al., 2012). Yet, the dichotomy is, in my view, to be retained as a ‘grammar of concepts’ (Asad, 2003: 25) deeply ingrained in both academic language and in the discursive and normative structure of contemporary societies. The task of this article is to show exactly how negotiations over the religious/secular boundary proceed and what are the main frames in which this boundary is being contested from various sides.

The second direction of the recent scholarship was the significant widening of the content of ‘secularity’ – beyond its conventional reduction, mostly in the field of political science or macro-sociology (institutional relations between the state and religious institutions), and beyond viewing ‘secularism’ as mostly a regime of political regulation of religions. Although this aspect remains central, secularity should to be – and is usually – understood in a much broader way, as related to various social spaces where the religious (or its traces) may be found and which may be claimed back by assertive religious actors, starting from the sphere of intellectual and artistic expressions to the broad field of social welfare, market consumer practices, private everyday life, and so on (Beaumont and Baker, 2011; Silverman, 2011; Gauthier and Martikainen, 2013; Zitzewitz, 2014).

The third direction of recent studies was a deconstruction of ‘secularity’ as a global, isomorphic phenomenon and its deep contextualization. It has been argued that secularities exist in multiple forms. The deconstruction of the universal political model of ‘church-state separation’ within its classic European/Western realm (Casanova, 2009; Martin, 2005) was accompanied by the further contextualization of secularity with the growing scholarship of non-Western areas (Burchardt et al., 2015; Casanova, 2006; Rosati and Stoeckl, 2012). The thesis of multiplicity followed S. Eisenstadt’s (2000) ‘multiple modernities’ optic and was largely informed by the postcolonial sensitivities and the search for ‘secularity otherwise’ (Mahmood, 2009).

This shift had direct implications in the area of this article’s interest. On one hand, there have been deep insights about specific historical types of secularity formed under communist regimes, or specifically in the Soviet Union (Buchenau, 2015; Luehrmann, 2011), and, respectively, in post-communist (post-socialist) societies, in the context of de-secularization (Hann and Pelkmans, 2009; Karpov, 2010; Pelkmans, 2009; Rousselet, 2013). On the other hand, along with discovering specific types of secularities in Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Japanese contexts (Bhargava, 2006; Cannell, 2010: 93ff; Chatterjee, 2011; Fujiwara, 2016; Kramer, 2015; Rots and Teenwen, 2017), there have been attempts to define specific secularity in societies with predominantly Eastern Orthodox heritage (Ghodsee, 2009; Knox, 2003; also discussed in the work of Jianu, 2019).

In this article, I am trying to take into account the above three shifts in understanding religion and secularity and to test these ideas on the Russian material. First, my focus will be exactly on the movable and contested boundaries between the religious and the secular and the frames in which the negotiation takes place. Second, I will be trying to include material that covers a wide range of social spaces, both within and beyond the institutional and normative arrangements. This purpose explains my strategy of choosing the cases in this study: it is a rather wide range of cases that possibly covers various sectors of public life – from visible elements of everyday life and urban places, through education, arts, public debates, law and politics. Bringing in this spectrum of so different cases and drawing upon mass media reports, statistics, and observations, I will be trying to grasp, if possible, the whole picture. Third, I will show how and why the post-Soviet (and especially Russian) type of secularity is specific, and what are the limits of such specificity. Then, in the final section, I will summarize the findings and engage with the conceptual discussion.

Unless specified otherwise, by religion and religious in this article, I will refer to the dominant Russian Orthodoxy, although the studied trends partly apply to religious/secular issues beyond confessional distinctions. When speaking of Orthodoxy, I will keep in mind a variety of meanings implied – including official hierarchy, groups with different types of belonging, and, finally, a fluctuating image associated with this tradition in the minds of wider society.

Religious physical presence in the secular: streets, shops, schools, and body

The newly perceived religious urban visibility has attracted scholarly interest (Beaumont and Baker, 2011; Molendijk et al., 2010). In Russia, the most spectacular example of this grown visibility are major religious buildings, to which I will turn in the next section. Smaller sites are also omnipresent: chapels and mosques in the hospitals, shopping centres, business centres, airports, and railway stations, – some hybrid forms, where the religious, when placed in a secular space/context, interplays with the overarching secular grammar of everyday life.

The physical presence of religion can also be performative – when religious ceremonies are publicly and temporarily displayed. Paschal processions and the local processions of the cross are common events in Russian cities and in the rural setting. In addition, there have been a significant growth in pilgrimages (mostly in-country), which has prompted the term ‘nomadic Orthodoxy’ (Kormina, 2012, 2019). Moscow and other cities have also seen displays of holy relics that attracted huge crowds – the Belt of the Mother of God (from Mt. Athos Vatopedi monastery) in 2011; or the relic (a rib) of St Nicolas (from Bari, Italy) in 2017. Pilgrimages to the sites of such displays worked as flashmobs set in motion by social media, and brought together people with a wide spectrum of social statuses and religious sensitivities – from poor to middle class, from devout practitioners to secular sympathizers.

Yet another facet of such presence is the growth of goods and services that are marketed as religious and are on sale in public places. Goods that used to be restricted to special fairs, limited in time and space, or religious buildings (like small church or mosque shops), can now be found in the streets, underpasses, trade centres, becoming part of everyday market competition. Within this globally recorded trend of commodification, religion becomes a brand in the free interaction of competing goods, and therefore, we see again the sorts of hybrids where the meanings are fluid. ¹

Another sphere in which religion becomes a source of social agency displayed in the urban space is what can be called the moral economy – engagement in charities, which can range from healing to social welfare projects (Caldwell, 2016). One of the biggest Russian examples is the Orthodox Help Service Charity Miloserdie (mercy), with its impressive activities; ² a few Muslim charity funds have become prominent as well. ³ Other parareligious services, especially in the field of healing and psychotherapy, place themselves at the crossroads between the methods of modern medicine and the methods of religiously informed healing (see Popovkina and Popovkin, 2010; Wigzell, 2009; Zorya, 2014). These cases seem to be publicly accepted within a postsecular social environment. And yet contestation is obvious and framed within an opposition of ‘religious’ as particularistic, personalized and affordable, versus ‘secular’ as universal, impersonal, alienating, and sometimes economically inaccessible (more expensive).

An important aspect of how religious visibility is being handled are bodily practices, above all dress codes. Orthodox and Muslim conservative dress codes are relatively strictly followed within private religious space. Within the public sphere, however, the issue is predictably more relevant in the case of Muslims. In 2003, the Supreme Court revoked the ban on Muslim women wearing hijabs in their passport photos, and the explicit reason was the constitutional freedom of religion. However, in 2013 and 2015, the same Supreme Court upheld the decision of a lower court banning the hijab in public schools (Verkhovnyi sud, 2015).

Although the case of Muslim minority needs special interpretation, the above issue is instructive in how the debate is framed. For the state, the argument of secularity (with reference to both the Constitution and the Education Law) is combined with the securitization argument. For the Muslim community, the reference to the constitutional religious freedom norm is central. ‘Freedom of religion’ and ‘secularity’ may be not in the same package, and they can be separately referred by competing sides. This discrepancy, or even a structural tension, seems to me typical to, although not exclusive, to the Russian model of secularity. The norm of the freedom of religion is strong enough to approve the special dress code in mosques and in passports, but it is not strong enough to outweigh the norm of secularity in the case of public schools.

Education as a whole is yet another field of secular/religious contestation. In schools, a new subject called ‘Foundations of religious cultures and secular ethics’ was introduced since 2012. The course is relatively short, but it is mandatory, though with a choice from six ‘clusters’ including non-confessional ones (‘history of religion’ and ‘secular ethics’). Local implementation varies greatly, depending on the particular constellation of political interests, positions of religions, popular dispositions, and bureaucratic logic of the educational institutions. The contestation over the whole issue started since 1990s has been extremely heated. Critics referred to the violation of constitutional secularity – technically: by the very fact of introducing religion-related classes, even though a ‘secular’ option is present; and politically: by the perceived collusion of church and state by joint lobbying for ‘confessional’ choices in local settings. Educationalists seem to be divided (see analysis in Glanzer and Petrenko, 2007; Ozhiganova, 2017; Shnirelman, 2012; Willems, 2007).

Another example was introducing theology as academic discipline in the universities (in 2015); the first state-approved PhD in theology was assigned in 2017. The contestation in this case has been no less heated: there was a mobilization of critics coming from the academe. There was here a standard debate about the boundaries of secularity (constitutional separation principle; acceptability of state financial support; the presence of clerics in academia). Interesting that the subject was introduced as teologiia, and not its Russian equivalent bogoslovie, as it is commonly used in Church schools, this lexical shift being a way to ‘switch’ the frame of the subject from confessional to presumably secular-academic; also, the presence of theology in some European universities was a common argument of the promoters. The key debate unfolded over whether theology in general or, specifically, theology in today’s Russia can be, in principle, ‘academic’ or ‘scientific’, making critical scholars staunch defenders of both ‘the science’ and the secularity principle (see discussion in V chem nauchnost’ teologii?, 2016). The introducing of theology was a compromise based on a careful casuistry of inscribing the decision into secular legislation.

Contesting religious buildings as urban landmarks and cultural heritage

The major sign of growing visibility of the religious in the Russian physical landscape have been religious buildings. There are no exact statistics, but we can estimate that around 30,000 Russian Orthodox churches have been either reclaimed (partly restored) or newly built (in and outside Russia proper). ⁴ This growth should be viewed in terms of spatial and symbolic appropriation, when the physical presence and visibility ‘become a sign of legitimacy and social recognition, and also represent a key to interpreting power relationships exerted over and throughout a given territory’ (Saint-Blancat, 2019: 4).

One significant case that reveals the contested nature of religious presence in urban space was an ambitious decision, in 2010, coordinated by the Moscow city administration and the leadership of the Russian Church, to build 200 new churches so that all Muscovites could have one within walking distance. The investment came mostly from private business and was administered by a special Church Foundation; the city guaranteed free land and a no tax policy to support these works (Rassledobanie, 2015).

The ‘200 churches’ plan was an economic and financial challenge. Unexpectedly, however, it was also challenged – in some places – by the local residents. We know that about 30 land plots initially allocated were later dropped, for various reasons. A cause célèbre was the case of the so-called Torfianka park, in the far north of Moscow city, where the dispute evolved into contestation between mobilized groups of activists. The dispute started with the park protection, as in many other cases, but then went well beyond the issue of physical space or environment and developed into principled controversy over the Church’s influence and with direct political implications. Activists were mobilized on both sides. The conflict, which unfolded in 2015–2017, was widely discussed in the media and profiled in the European Parliament in November 2016 when the cause of park protection was included in the agenda of politically dissenting civic initiatives. ⁵

In spring 2019, a similar highlight case exploded in Ekaterinburg where the local citizens protested against the plans to build a cathedral of St Catherine at a landmark downtown park (the eighteenth-century church was destroyed by the Soviets in 1930). The dispute led to clashes between the protesters and private security troops of the developer, and then the police. Again, the initial protection of urban environment went along with anti-clerical and politically oppositional agendas. In these two cases, as in a few others, the construction of the churches was postponed or moved to other places. ⁶

However, in a significant majority of cases – in Moscow and elsewhere – plans for new churches were not contested, were eventually approved and churches ultimately built. This may be partly explained by a generally positive consensus towards the presence of Orthodox Christianity as an ‘ambient faith’. ⁷ The Russian Patriarch Kirill, who authored the plan of the 200 churches, appears to have had this ‘ambience’ argument in mind when he provided a demographic calculation based on child baptism statistics and the assumption that all those baptized would need a church nearby for regular attendance (Rassledobanie, 2015). The assumption of attendance seems unrealistic given the low figures of church-going recorded in all surveys. ⁸ Yet, in this case, what really matters – regardless of how accurate the statistics are – is the vision of baptized Orthodox as making up the national majority (see Verkhovsky, 2014: 72–75, on what he calls ‘Kirill’s doctrine’).

Those who opposed the construction initially framed their claims in environmental discourse (park protection), which then took on an anti-clerical tone (‘the park to people not to clergy!’). In some cases, anti-clericalism was explicitly distanced from anti-religious discourse as such: ‘we are opposed not to religion but to the ambitions of the clergy!’ – because the clergy’s claims were suspected of being ‘mundane’. ⁹ Finally, when handled by civic activists the protest evolved into an oppositional political frame, channelling that anti-clericalism onto the state (as Church and state are seen as mutually supportive). Various rhetorical frames were thus superposed upon each other, and religious/secular divide was just a facet of the picture. ¹⁰

We move to yet a different and even higher level of debate with another famous case – the issue of the transfer of St Isaac’s cathedral in St Petersburg from the state to the Church. This landmark cathedral, built in the mid-nineteenth century, has been a museum since 1928. Regular Orthodox worship was resumed in 1990 while the building continued to function as a museum. Transfer of the cathedral to ecclesiastical ownership was requested by the local bishop and declared by the local governor in January 2017; the formal reason was the 2010 federal law #327, ‘On the transfer to religious organizations of religious property in state or municipal ownership’: according to the law, many current museums are to be transferred to the Church in terms of restitution. ¹¹

The decision of transfer of building to the Church provoked heated conflict. The protesters organized meetings and, at one point, established a so-called ‘blue ring’ when they encircled the building, with the idea of protecting its museum status. Orthodox activists, in turn, held processions of the cross in support of the transfer. The opposition was so fierce that the transfer process was slowed down by both ecclesiastical and municipal authorities until the plan was abandoned.

The arguments of those who protested the transfer were partly framed in the same anti-clerical agenda. Also, as in the previous cases, ‘religion’ as such was distinguished from the Church’s allegedly profane interests: again, some protesters called themselves ‘believers’ – but true believers, unconnected with the allegedly discredited institution. And again, within a common political frame, the Church’s ‘mundane’ agenda was associated with the ruling regime which had become the implicit target of politically minded protesters. ¹²

However, the main framing of secular/religious contestation in the case of St Isaac cathedral was different: it reached a point of what I would call a meta-debate – the debate set within the frame of cultural heritage and the content of national cultural tradition as such. The property transfer was therefore seen as an act of privatization that could lead, eventually, to limiting public access to it. The object was presented as part of ‘cultural heritage’ – both national and, most affectively, local. This notion was, in fact, the result of a long historical process as religion, we can say, has been somehow dissolved within a secular concept of cultural heritage. Such ‘culturalization of religion’, or reframing the religious as cultural heritage, as a more or less universal modern process, has been dominant in the Soviet times and continues to proceed now. And yet, as we see here, there are strong new efforts of re-activating the religious content within the concept of national culture – an appropriation of the cultural space, as we could say. This semantic ambivalence is crucial in today’s contestations. ¹³

What is at stake here, therefore, is not just the possession of the building as an object, but also the possession of national cultural heritage. The question is this: who is the real, legitimate holder of national culture, the true Kulturträger – a secular museum or a religious institution? The museum claims to represent the entire population, the public space as such; the religious institution is seen, in this optic, as a private agency that represents only a part of the population, a minority in fact, and, therefore, after the transfer the ‘public heritage’ would cease to be universally owned.

The museum professionals themselves claim that religious objects would be better preserved, protected and displayed as secularized objects; these specialists, regardless of whether they consider themselves ‘believers’ or not, claim to possess better knowledge than the clergy about the Orthodox tradition itself: they see themselves as the true guardians of the nationally significant Orthodox heritage. This sounds like a typical pattern of a secularized culture: religion is ‘owned’ by the secular experts. ¹⁴

The Church and its supporters interpret the case quite differently: the Church claims to possess the very core of cultural heritage, ‘the sacred’, which belongs to Christian Orthodoxy; the Church and its supporters claim to represent not a part of the population, not a minority of it, but the majority, and – symbolically – the nation as a whole. The logic is similar to what we saw above in the Patriarch’s reasons for the construction of new churches. The meta-debate thus gets stuck between the conflicting definitions of cultural heritage. ¹⁵

‘National culture’ further in focus: Religion and contemporary art

Moving further on in our mapping of secular/religious negotiations, we come to another highly visible and contested space: artistic expression. This has been the most explosive field since the early 2000s, when a number of contemporary art projects – most of them conceptually provocative – led to articulated opposition and the mobilization of activists from both sides. Events ranged from an artist, Avdey Ter-Oganyan, publicly breaking into pieces reproductions of icons in 1998 at a performance called Young Godless (Iunyi bezbozhnik); to scandalous exhibits, such as ‘Beware: Religion’ in 2003; ‘Censored Art’ by Andrey Erofeev in 2006; and ‘Icons’ by Marat Gelman in 2012–2013. These iconoclastic events were called ‘offensive art’ as they triggered active protests by groups of offended religious activists. The cause célèbre in this row has been the ‘punk prayer’ by the Pussy Riot feminist band in the main Moscow cathedral in 2012. Some later cases included the staging of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser opera (director Timofei Kuliabin) in Novosibirsk in 2015, because of the ‘blasphemous’ way it rendered the person of Jesus; or the conflict over the showing, in 2017, of the movie Matilda (director Alexey Uchitel), which featured a love affair of the last Tsar (a canonized saint).

In all these cases, again, there was a fight for a contested space. The Pussy Riot case clearly stands out as a special one: the performance was made not within an artistic facility or even a free public space but at the very core sacred space – not just Russia’s main Orthodox cathedral, but also on the soleas, right in front of the iconostasis and altar. Here the secular/religious conflict was obvious; moreover, the Pussy Riot performance was a pointed political provocation, directly critical of Putin’s regime (Tolstaya, 2014; Uzlaner, 2013).

In other listed cases, the ‘offensive’ content was contested within the space of professional artistic expression – theatres and galleries. Yet the debate went far beyond the issue of legal definition of space. It was framed by both religious activists and the artists within a classical frame of a structural tension between the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech. Both camps framed their claims within a secular rhetoric of rights, testing a fluid boundary where the word/image/sign becomes an ‘offense’. In legal terms, the question was: when exactly free speech becomes hate speech? In a religiously informed framing, hate speech becomes blasphemy. Thus, blasphemy is referred to by religious protesters as an argument in protecting the freedom of religion. ¹⁶

Finally, again, we have the clear political connotations of the debate: the conservative quest is increasingly associated with the ruling regime, while the liberal art performances manifest an ideological opposition – even despite the fact that the political and ecclesiastical authorities are not always explicitly on the side of the ‘offended’ conservatives. ¹⁷ We see here, therefore, the intersection of several conflict-driven discourses – artistic/expressive, religious, cultural, legal, and political.

Final stop: Religion in political imaginary and practice

An important facet of what I call the meta-frame of the secular/religious divide – the one about the fundamentals of national cultural tradition – is the contestation over history. There are public and academic groups that represent Russia’s history in conflicting ways. The politically promoted mainstream vogue is stressing the cross-cutting impact of Christian roots and religious continuity; constructing an idealized post-memory of pre-secularized (pre-revolutionary) Russia while downplaying or demonizing secularization; the promotion of a so-called ‘traditional morality’ (‘values’) which is often related to religious norms (Agadjanian, 2017; Stepanova, 2019). These ideas find a certain reflection in some important politics-related events.

Without dealing with the interaction of religion and politics as such, the field which had been well documented in extensive scholarship (Knox, 2005; Pankhurst and Kilp, 2013; Papkova, 2011; Richters, 2014). I will, for my purpose here, only refer to some marked ideological projects.

The 2017 documentary Valaam (director Andrey Kondrashov) created an idealized narrative about the Valaam Spaso-Preobrazhensky monastery, in the Russian North-West, as a symbol of Russian Orthodoxy. The monastery was destroyed after the area was taken from Finland in 1940; it then remained in ruins until it was returned to the Church in 1989 and subsequently restored and repopulated by monks (by 2018, the entire population of the monastery was about 200 people). The film features Vladimir Putin, who hails Valaam as a symbol of national continuity. As Putin and film director speak, and the film moves, we learn that Valaam’s destiny is closely linked to the destiny of the ‘Russian national state’: the monastery perished when the state was in ruins, and it was restored again with the state; but even in times of disruption, ‘the seeds of unity have always been with us – in the first place, thanks to the Russian Church’. ¹⁸

A similar case was the celebration of the mythologized figure of tenth-century Prince Vladimir. According to legend, he was baptized in Crimea, and this was referred by Putin as a way of legitimizing the annexation of the peninsula in 2014; Prince Vladimir is known as the baptizer of Russia – an event celebrated by a huge monument installed next to the Kremlin in 2016 (see Kozelsky, 2014; Obrashchenie, 2014).

The third appropriate example is the ‘Russia – My History multimedia park’ – a costly monumental project started in 2011 with an exhibition about the Russian Church and followed with a few thematic exhibitions covering consecutively all major periods of national history started with prince Vladimir’s Baptism of Russia. Each exhibition was temporarily held in Manezh exhibition hall, in downtown Moscow, before it was set permanently at a large pavilion of the All-Russian Exhibition Centre. By 2019, drawn upon private money and state support, about 20 replicas have been opened in major Russian cities. Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov, an influential Orthodox hierarch, has been author and promoter of the entire project, and the overall message seems to be the same – a spiritual continuity that fastens together all rifts and breaks of the tumultuous history into one millennial narrative. ¹⁹

The Valaam movie, the Prince Vladimir monument, and the Russia – My History project may be seen as straightforward propaganda works, but they also reflect, within the realm of state ideology, a space of uncertainty with no clear separation of secular and religious agendas. This uncertain space of a contested ‘national culture’ (‘national history’) has been strongly appropriated by the religious actors. The ruling regime seems not to oppose such symbolic appropriation as it is a part of the system of political legitimation and because such presence of religious symbolism fits the central ideological pillar of the regime – the idea of a rooted continuity. This idea was clearly manifested in a symbolic God-reference in the constitution amended in spring 2020. ²⁰

Discussion: Powerful religious simulacra and the limits of de-secularization

This overview of a movable secular/religious divide in various social spaces makes an impression of a continuous and even growing vulnerability of the Russian secularity (Agadjanian, 2015; Rousselet, 2008). The trend in cultural sphere may be corroborated by a number of political arrangements, ²¹ newly adopted legal provisions, ²² and an overall strong corporate positions of the Moscow Patriarchate in terms of its economic, political, and social standing.

The significant public profile of religion cannot be denied, and it is in line with a global trend first highlighted by Casanova (1994) who convincingly de-linked this trend from the overall level of mass religiosity. This public religion vs private religion gap was repeatedly addressed in scholarship of Russia, sometimes with suggested ways to go beyond this very dichotomy (see a recent research by Zabaev et al., 2018). Obviously, the phenomenon of conspicuous public religion in our case is framed quite differently than, for instance, the debates about the ‘naked public square’ (the public square allegedly devoid of religion because of the strict secularist norms) in the United States, or the Habermasian discussion of postsecularism in Europe; or the secular/religious contestation in the Arab Muslim world (Calhoun et al., 2015; Kramer, 2015; The naked public sphere?, 2012).

What makes the Russian case different? How strong is this trend of de-secularization, and what is a specific pattern of it? Before all, the overall degree of religious impact in Russia should not be exaggerated as there are a few important limits to it.

The first major limit, in general terms, is strongly embedded secularist norms and habitus. It is true, that some separationist provisions, ingrained in legislation, tend to be at times ignored or tacitly circumvented. It is also true that at the local level, the principles of secularity seem to be even more fluid and depend on specific local conditions and particular people involved. However, the skeleton of the legal system and the normative habitus in Russia remains deeply ingrained in secular arrangements (see, e.g. Rousselet, 2008: 180–182). The clear secularity norm in Article 14 of the 1993 Constitution is still a working ultimate reference point. Even though the 2020 constitutional amendment to include the God-reference to the Constitution was widely supported and legally approved, the formula of the God-reference had a largely symbolic meaning that could by no means overrule the separation norm.

The background foundation of this secular habitus is a very low level of religious practices and knowledge, inherited from the Soviet times by elder population cohorts and not regenerated by the younger ones (see footnote 8). Russia’s level of irreligion is no different from the European median. The type of ‘minimal’ (Epstein, 1999), or largely declarative religiosity, is shared by the political elites (Malakhov and Letnyakov, 2020).

Of course, Russian secularity is nationally and historically specific. The muted freedom of religion norm I have referred to is one example. On the other hand, ‘deeply felt public horror of displaying religious affiliation’ found in France to which Cannell refers (Cannell, 2010: 92, with ref. to Bowen, 2008) is far from being typical in Russia (as in some other European societies); and yet we can observe an unspoken consensus that religious militancy (and sometimes even any ‘religious effervescence’) – whichever religion it comes from – has a destabilizing effect. ²³ Also, we will never find in Russia anything close to the Ukrainian situation where religion is a strong legitimation instrument, ‘casting the righteousness of state leaders and state power’ (Wanner, 2015).

Although the secularity principle is, indeed, vulnerable, the legal system and cultural habits as a whole resist the trend of growing religious publicity. In many cases, religious lobbying can be unsuccessful – for example, in the case of the anti-abortion agenda which has been pushed for decades (the Church openly declared this a failure referring to ‘a lack of understanding in government bodies’: Postanovlenie, 2017). Legislators of all levels, even if personally or pragmatically sympathetic to religion, try to avoid blatant violations of the separation principle. The Council of Interaction with Religious Associations, under President’s office, is only a consultative body, and there is nothing similar to the Synod of Russia in the old Romanov Empire or a Dyanet office directly promoting religion, as in Erdoğan’s Turkey.

I find irrelevant attempts to catch some Orthodox specificity in essentialist, anachronistic terms of a symphonia model – for example, referring to terms like ‘symphonic secularism’ or to allegedly enduring Byzantine legacy (Ghodsee, 2009; Jianu, 2019; Knox, 2003). Instead, I suggest focussing upon a structural disproportion between the low levels of religious commitment and the high profile of public religion intensely involved in the meta-debate about national culture, where the ideas of symphonia and millennial continuity function not as an institutional principle, but as ideological simulacra.

I would agree that Russian secularity, speaking in normative and political terms, can be imagined, to put it metaphorically, as flowing within a complex frame of ‘three models of church-state relations’ found elsewhere in Europe, namely, the model of the state church; the model of partial cooperation; and the disestablishment model (Stoeckl, 2018). These models can be only used as ideal-types; or, rather, they function in Russia as discursive images, equally admissible by the public even though they differ in their public visibility. Russian Orthodoxy may be felt, in the social imaginary at many levels (and not only by assertive Orthodox activists) as intertwined with ‘national cultural tradition’; and, at the same time, the ‘separation’ is a widely accepted public cliché.

On a broader societal level, this corresponds to what was called the ‘parallel paths’ (of church and state. (Ładykowska, 2019: 113ff). The Russian pattern of secularity was also aptly characterized as based upon ‘entangled authorities’ showing how religious and secular actors can both cooperate and still stay in conflict framed in personal, ideological, or institutional contradictions (Köllner, 2016, 2019: 8–9).

To this deep, structural counterweight against de-secularization, I would also add another phenomenon – the growing articulation and mobilization of anti-clerical actors – not the ‘passively secular’, who are generally loyal to the situation of uncertain secularity; but rather those whose anti-clericalism is both a cultural programme and an expression of political dissent (I referred to some of such groups in this article). In this case, religion becomes, among other things, an indication, a fault line of political cleavages (Uzlaner, 2018).

We should also highlight another significant factor that holds back the de-secularizing trend – the country’s religious diversity, and most importantly, the significant factor of Russian Islam. Islam, with its spontaneous, uncontrolled engagement with the public sphere – unlike many state-sponsored forms of ‘de-secularization from above’ (Karpov, 2010) – is, similar to European scenery, a natural agent of religious revival; yet this very fact makes it a reason of consolidating state secularism. Islam is approached primarily in terms of security, disguised under the rhetoric of multi-religious (multi-confessional) and multi-ethnic demographics (on this discourse, see more in the study of Malakhov and Letnyakov, 2018). The principle of multi-confessionalism is an imperial legacy and is very far from the principle of religious pluralism. However, multi-confessionalism can be and is a recurrent rhetorical frame of secular neutrality.

To conclude, the dramatic gap between everyday religiosity and the manifest forms of religion’s public visibility is a well-established phenomenon. This gap is the utmost explanatory key to a specific Russian version of secularity. Religion’s spectacular appropriation of physical and social space, up to the imaginative space of the national culture as such, does not cancel the strong counterweight of deeply ingrained secular cultural arrangements – either genetically linked to some European variations or specifically related to (post)communist experience. Public religion does add some potential fragility to Russian secularity but it works, to a much extent, as simulacrum unable to overturn the secular regime.