Andrei Kordochkin: Russian Orthodox priests persecuted for opposing the war |

In Russia, all possibilities for peaceful resistance to the dictatorial and warlike course of its leaders have not yet been exhausted. This is the opinion of Archpriest Andrei Kordochkin, 46, who in early 2023 was suspended as parish priest at the Cathedral of Saint Mary Magdalene in Madrid due to his opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to the priest, it is time to study the example of the American Martin Luther King, the civil rights activist of the 1950s and 1960s, who led the peaceful resistance movement against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons.

By order of Kiril, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (IOR), Father Andrei had to abandon the parish that for almost two decades he had seen grow, from its embryonic form (in the premises of an old fruit shop in Madrid) to become a solid cathedral. He now resides in Germany.

From there, Kordochkin officiated at a religious ceremony for Alexei Navalny, the opponent of Vladimir Putin who died last February in an Arctic prison, whose broadcast on YouTube was followed by more than half a million people. He was one of the priests who demanded that the politician’s body be handed over to his mother.

“I think that in Russia we have not exhausted the potential for non-violent resistance,” says Kordochkin. “In the United States, during the Vietnam War, there was significant popular resistance to mobilization. From my comfortable existence in Europe I cannot give advice to Russians in Russia, but that does not mean that they should limit themselves to being spectators. We must study all forms of nonviolent resistance, including Martin Luther King,” he says, highlighting the work of Russian volunteers who help avoid mobilization or care for refugees from Ukraine.

Born in Leningrad and educated at Oxford, Archpriest Kordochkin is preparing an academic work in Germany on religious, ecclesiastical and philosophical aspects of the war in Ukraine. Among his objects of study is “the cult of death,” he explains in a telephone conversation with this newspaper.

Kordochkin has come under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Brussels and is co-founder of a website, mir-vsem.info, where Orthodox anti-war sectors express their positions and try to help priests expelled from their parishes or prosecuted. for expressing his convictions.

Father Andréi experienced Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022 as “a personal matter,” since half of his parishioners in Madrid were Ukrainians. “It was as if the Russian Government had attacked my parish and I had to defend my community,” says the archpriest, one of the almost 300 Orthodox priests who spoke out against the war in March 2022, before the Russian Federation criminalized such gesture.

Prayer for the victory of “Holy Russia”

Meanwhile, in September 2022, the increasingly belligerent Patriarch Kiril ordered the parish priests of his organization to say a prayer for the “victory” of “Holy Russia” in their liturgical services. The dissident priests modified the prayer, replacing the word “victory” with the word “peace”, or ignored this prayer that calls for the “restoration of unity in the countries of Holy Russia” and associates the concept of “Holy Russia” with a territory larger than the Russian State.

The “Prayer for Holy Russia” has had little echo in the Orthodox parishes of Europe. A joint statement from the Spanish Episcopal Assembly and the Russian Orthodox Church of Spain and Portugal underlines the “pain caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”, describes the war as “repugnant” and calls for “intensifying prayer for peace throughout the world.” world, especially in Ukraine,” to “stop the violence” and “rebuild universal brotherhood.” The contrast between this language and that of the Patriarch of Moscow is evident.

Among the latest priests punished in Russia for their anti-war attitude is Alexei Uminski, a popular archpriest, parish priest of a Moscow temple, who was expelled from the Orthodox Church by an ecclesiastical court. Uminski (like Kordochkin) has been welcomed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The theologian Andrei Kuraev also took refuge in Europe.

“It is not the first time in history that a church defends war,” emphasizes Kordochkin, who recalls that the commandment “thou shalt not kill” is subject to two interpretations: one that gives absolute value to the prohibition and one that grants it a relative value in the name of the “just war”, a concept currently under discussion that dates back to Saint Augustine.

In the Soviet Union, slogans such as “peace in the world” or “no war” were maintained even during the war in Afghanistan, explains the priest. “The official discourse was that of peace and it is incredible that those Soviet slogans are criminalized today,” he exclaims. Kordochkin sees big differences between the late Soviet era in which he grew up and today. The generations that knew war disappeared, the idea of ​​war was romanticized and identity problems linked to the disintegration of the USSR arose.

The Russian Government searched for a “new ideology” with “a sacred element that united society” and found it in “the cult of victory in World War II.” In this way, the Russian state has built a kind of “civil religion,” a “doctrine that can unite all members of society whether they are religious or not.” “They chose war, they declared themselves heirs of victory and that is the basic principle of that civil religion,” he says. The “visualization of that doctrine,” he says, is the Moscow Armed Forces Cathedral, which introduces symbols and elements of the history of the Soviet Union inside and thus sacralizes them and, in a broader sense, globalizes itself. war. The pro-Russian guerrillas from eastern Ukraine appear in the decorative mosaics of that temple inaugurated in 2020.

“So the Orthodox Church has participated in the construction of a doctrine that, like an external body, is introduced into the church, where it is artificially fertilized and then sacralized,” explains Kordochkin. This is the “Russian world”, a term from the 11th century that is identified with the idea of ​​“Holy Russia” and thus sacralizes war.

“The processes within the church are also those of society,” says Father Andrei. “If we do not hear the voices of those who do not share the official agenda, it does not mean that those voices do not exist,” explains the priest, who says he has received a video with funeral services in memory of Navalny held in a Russian province before a narrow circle. of parishioners. A new catacomb church? “It is impossible to know the number of these cases,” he says.

“War and dictatorship are synonymous,” Kordochkin continues. “If the dictatorship falls, the war ends; If the war ends, the dictatorship ends. Russian political emigrants are divided over how to act. I don’t know if there is a formula to end the dictatorship within Russian society, but those who fear the instability of the dictatorship and seek its stability must be reminded that the dictatorship is an unstable formula that can precipitate in a matter of hours. The Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaucescu felt very confident shortly before his political and physical end (in 1989) and no one thought that the USSR would disappear so quickly (in 1991). We should not judge by appearances,” he emphasizes. “I cannot call for revolution, but I can remember the words of Luther King: Those who make a peaceful revolution impossible make a violent revolution inevitable.”

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