Moscow Hails Rebirth of Historic Cathedral : Soviet Union: Services return it to church use after seven decades. It’s viewed as a sign of spiritual revival.

The largest and most historic of the Kremlin’s cathedrals was reconsecrated by the Russian Orthodox Church on Sunday in a joyous celebration that Patriarch Alexei II declared marked the revival of the country’s spiritual and moral ideals.

Attended by leading Soviet officials as well as the church hierarchy, the service returned the Cathedral of the Assumption to religious use after seven decades as a state museum, concert hall and all-purpose tourist attraction with its five golden domes and ornate interior.

Rich in symbolism for a deeply troubled nation, the reconsecration of the 15th-Century cathedral was later televised with Alexei telling Russians that the cathedral’s return is an important sign of the spiritual revival that the country needs to carry it through the difficult days ahead.

A second major Russian Orthodox church, the Church of the Great Ascension, was also returned by the state on Sunday, and the patriarch led a hymn-singing procession of more than 3,000 people from the Kremlin’s Trinity Gate through central Moscow to the church for a service of thanksgiving.

“We Are Russians, and God Is With Us,” a banner carried by marchers proclaimed in a reaffirmation, increasingly common, of Russia’s 1,000 years as a Christian nation. Itself a religious service, the hourlong procession, led by Alexei and 30 other bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, was the first through the Soviet capital in 72 years. Thousands of people lined the two-mile route.

The marchers also carried a portrait of Czar Nicholas II, who was executed with his family after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Some wore the military uniforms of the old Russian aristocracy in a reflection of the renewed popularity of the old monarchy in a time of general disillusionment.

Alexei, preaching at the thanksgiving service at the Church of the Ascension, said the return of the two churches is among the first signs of the renewal of the country’s spiritual life, a revival without which he said there could be no political, economic or social resurgence.

While thanking the government for the churches’ return and their restoration, Alexei asserted that the strength of the Orthodox faith is primarily responsible.

“The churches are being revived not by their external restoration but the prayers pronounced in them,” said the white-bearded, 61-year-old patriarch, who was elected to head the church last June. “Without (these prayers) the well-treated Kremlin cathedrals stood dead in their whitewashed walls for 72 years.

“I hope you will agree with me that the Divine Liturgy in Assumption Cathedral meant more for its spiritual revival than the decades of external restoration.”

But Alexei appeared to suggest as well that the traditional compact between church and state in Russia, an understanding in which the church looks after the soul of the nation while the government attends to the economy and political order, is being re-established as the country seeks to recover from one of its most profound crises.

Without a return to Russia’s traditional Christian spirituality under the leadership of the church, Alexei argued, the political and economic reforms it is now undertaking would have little prospect of success.

“What is their moral basis?” he asked. “What is their spiritual orientation?”

In the last five years, more than 6,500 religious communities--Orthodox and Catholic churches, Islamic mosques, Jewish synagogues and other faiths--have been registered by the State Council for Religious Affairs; about one-third of them are described as new, not the reopening of old houses of worship that had been closed.

Representing the state at the liturgical service at the Cathedral of the Assumption were Anatoly I. Lukyanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, and the highest-ranking Soviet official after President Mikhail S. Gorbachev; Ivan S. Silayev, the Russian Federation prime ministe, and Gavriil Popov, the mayor of Moscow.

Other churches were returned by the state earlier in the year. In June, Alexei reconsecrated Leningrad’s St. Isaac Cathedral, which had been the main cathedral in St. Petersburg before the 1917 Revolution; it, too, had been used as a museum since the 1920s.

Boris N. Yeltsin, who attended that service but was unable to participate in the reconsecration here because of injuries he suffered in a traffic accident last week, said the return of the church buildings was “a tribute to the church’s efforts towards the moral purification of the people. The state should work side by side with the church,” Yeltsin said, “in the name of these spiritual and moral values.”

Closed for decades as part of the state’s attempt to replace the Russian Orthodox Church as the country’s spiritual beacon and moral arbiter, the two Moscow churches are among the capital’s most historic.

Assumption Cathedral, which is also known as the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, was the principal cathedral of Russia for more than four centuries.

It was used for the coronation of the czars and princes of Russia, the enthronement of the patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church and other solemn occasions, including declarations of war and services of thanksgiving at their end and thanks for deliverance from calamities. It thus was the setting for the beginning or the end of many chapters of Russian history.

Built between 1475 and 1479 by an Italian architect for Czar Ivan the Great, the cathedral became a model for Russian church builders for centuries because of its spaciousness and lightness.

Since the 1917 Revolution, the cathedral has been used only rarely for brief prayer services, such as that two years ago on the 1,000th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to Russia.

The Church of the Great Ascension was built in the 1820s on the Garden Ring Road, which runs through central Moscow, and it is now most famous as the church in which the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin married the beautiful Natalya Goncharova.

Closed after the Bolsheviks came to power, it was used as a concert hall for many years and was recently returned to the Russian Orthodox Church by the radicals who took over the Moscow city government last spring.