by Stefano Caprio

The educational conferences which have marked the end of the Christmas season in Moscow since the end of the Soviet Union are the primary ideological review of the new Orthodox Russia. Kirill underscores the mnogočadie, the ‘multi-family’ as an indispensable way of life: ‘We are the largest country in terms of geographical area, but we are too few for all this space’.

The ‘International Formative Christmas Readings’ organised by the Moscow Patriarchate, now in its XXXIII edition, were held in Moscow from 26 to 30 January.

The event was conceived immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, after the first celebration of the Christmas of Christ on 7 January 1992 in a context of definitive liberation from the atheist ideology that had dominated for seventy years, even though in fact already in the years of Gorbačev's perestroika people lived in conditions of religious freedom that were increasingly evident and confirmed by laws.

For several years, the Christmas Readings were a meeting place for Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants, Russian and foreign intellectuals of different philosophical and cultural orientations, attracting many people in a general movement of religious revival in Russia.

In the Putin era, after the jubilee and presidential celebrations in 2000, the Readings have become the de facto primary ideological review of the new Orthodox Russia, expressing the fundamental categories of the Russian World and the ‘traditional values’ that politics must succeed in imposing on the population and all those who wish to have political, cultural and economic relations with the Russian Federation.

This year's event was in fact dedicated to the theme already proposed by President Vladimir Putin himself, ‘80th anniversary of the Great Victory: memory and spiritual experience of the generations’, the most decisive and ‘mystical’ sense of Stalinist and Soviet military greatness, from which today's militant and apocalyptic Russia is reborn in its deepest nature.

In imitation of the Patriarchal Readings, the Moscow Duma also began in 2012 to hold parallel ‘Parliamentary Christmas Meetings’, to which the Patriarch or Metropolitans and various personalities from the Orthodox world are invited.

Given the importance of the war-spiritual theme, Patriarch Kirill addressed the Duma with a wide-ranging speech, confirming the ‘great importance of a dialogue on these issues between the Church and the representatives of the legislative power, at a time when the moral foundations of being, family life and relations between the sexes and generations are being destroyed in countries that consider themselves more advanced’. In the face of this world crisis, ‘Russia is heading for an alternative and particular path of civilising development’.

The Patriarch warns that ‘when norms and laws contradict the divine commandments and destroy the moral, spiritual and even physical nature of the human person, this is a sign of the inability to express a true living civilisation’, and thus any political and social progress is prevented.

He assures that ‘although we are often not understood outside, a very significant part of the citizens of the countries where these dangerous processes take place are actually on our side, although unfortunately they do not always have the opportunity to express their opinion’.

This seems to be in fact the real purpose of the proclamations and propaganda of State and Church in Russia: not so much to convince their subjects, who in any case do not have the opportunity to contradict their political and religious leaders, but to appeal to the part of the rest of the world that is most sensitive to the ideas of ‘ethical sovereignty’, subject to censorship by the powerful who want to ‘erase human nature’.

‘Those like us are the majority,’ insists Kirill from his throne as universal patriarch, and Russia's task is to give this oppressed people a voice.

The efforts and legislative initiatives of the Russian parliament are of great importance for this reason as they seek by all possible means to ‘strengthen the traditional, moral and spiritual foundations of the life of society’, such as the ban on adopting children for those from ‘degenerate’ countries, restrictions on the content disseminated on the internet, so important for the younger generations, and support for an ideal of maximum generative fertility.

‘We are the largest country in terms of geographical area, but there are too few of us for all that space, only a normal family life with many children can guarantee the survival of our civilisation and the development of our homeland,’ the patriarch insists, using a neologism derived from Slavic-ecclesiastical expressions, mnogočadie, the “multi-childhood” as an indispensable way of life.

The Russian Church also wholeheartedly supports the many laws passed to control the sphere of migration, and the new strategy outlined at the end of the year by President Putin for ‘countering extremism in all spheres, including that of migration’, pointing to illegal migration as the cause of the rise in crime in Russia.

He glosses over the violence of soldiers returning from the front, who are after all often heinous and serial offenders, who thanks to the army have obtained reduced sentences and social rehabilitation.

Thanking the deputies also for the many measures to protect Church property, for the tax exemptions and the special attention paid to the Church's presence in the health sector, the patriarch then went on to extol the mystique of Victory.

Kirill emphasised that ‘Victory in the Great Patriotic War was not only the greatest military achievement of the entire country, but also the great moral enterprise of our people’, using the term podvig, which expresses the pinnacle of ascetic exercise and monastic sacrifice.

That is why today ‘our sacred duty is to preserve in our hearts the truth about the wars of the past and about these historical events, actively opposing the cynical and continuous attempts to belittle the role of the Soviet people in the defeat of Nazism’.

The great Victory was the result of a ‘grandiose service of self-giving, in the unity of the people and the Russian people’, to be extolled as ‘in the face of contemporary challenges these qualities take on an even greater value’.

As the Patriarch explains, ‘the unity of the people is not only a political or social dimension, but a spiritual reality that is based on common values, on the awareness of the goals to be achieved, on the common responsibility for the country's destiny’.

Faced with the threat of globalisation and information wars, which attempt to impose ‘foreign ideologies’, we must close ranks and give no room to the ‘foreign agents’ that infiltrate the veins of the healthy body to poison it.

Attention to traditional values, especially those of the family, have been insistently proposed and at the highest level in recent years, such as in the 2023 proclaimed ‘Year of the Family’; but Kirill wonders ‘how much have these values become part of the real life of our fellow citizens, how much do they really reflect the mentality of Russians?’, expressing a fund of inevitable scepticism, given also the increasingly poor attendance at Orthodox liturgies, which at Christmas failed to gather more than two million faithful across Russia.

‘Often our brothers do not really understand what traditional values are,’ admits the patriarch, based also on the experience of priests who are concerned because “in people's conscience there remains a considerable tolerance towards abortion, betrayals and family break-ups, immoral cohabitation and many other vices and bad behaviour”, inherited from a society that for decades has tried to wipe out traditions, which are difficult to revive only with proclamations and impositions from above.

The Patriarch's admonitions were supported by the many speeches at the Christmas readings, starting with that of the representative of the Orthodox Synod for relations with the Armed Forces, protoierej Dimitrij Vasilenkov, according to whom ‘war is a test of exceptional importance for human beings, and the army that shows the greatest spiritual strength wins... our adversaries are guided by a neo-pagan ideology and know only the instinct to kill, like beasts, while we must be the light that overcomes the darkness. The believing man does not fear death, because it has already been defeated, and he fights out of love'.

The calls for ‘spiritual combat’ were joined by the speakers on ‘Ancient monastic traditions in the conditions of the contemporary world’, such as the young Belarusian bishop Porfirij (Prednjuk) who extolled the great significance of the eighty years since the Victory for the union of the peoples of Russia and Belarus, in which the true ideal of monasticism, mirnoe i bezmolvnoe žitje, the ‘peaceful and silent life’, is realised.

With this invocation taken from the Orthodox liturgy, the bishop perhaps wished to hint at the devout submission of the Belarusian people to their great batka (godfather), President Aleksandr Lukašenko, who has just been reconfirmed after more than thirty years of rule, which in these parts is considered the closest thing to authentic spiritual paternity.

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