Russia’s Church: A Material Calling?

Its factories are closed, its streets are pitted, and most investors go elsewhere. Just about the only people making money--and lots of it--in this shabby Volga River town are from the Russian Orthodox Church.

That’s because the entrepreneurial Bishop Alexander here has entered into a partnership with a California businessman, bottling local spring’s water and selling it under the holy-sounding name “Saint Springs.” The labels on the cupola-shaped bottles say that some of the profit goes to rebuilding Orthodox churches destroyed under communism. The combined symbolism of patriotism, rebirth and charity has made this product hugely popular.

It’s inspired marketing, as partner John King knew it would be. “Just the idea of a venture with the Orthodox Church and the concept of the purity made me very excited,” recalled the onetime plastics manufacturer from Lake Arrowhead.

But many people in Kostroma don’t believe a word of this pitch. “I’m not a big fan of Saint Springs,” said Masha Bogdanova, 26, a secretary. “It’s not that it tastes bad. It’s just that no one around here has ever heard of the money going to restore any local churches. So are they really using it to restore any churches anywhere?”

Like many Russians, she is growing as suspicious of Russia’s top priests as she is of its political leaders, who call themselves free-market capitalists but who critics say are stifling real competition in a free market to carve up the nation’s assets among a tiny oligarchy of millionaire monopolists.

While many had higher hopes for the Orthodox Church, led by Moscow Patriarch Alexi II, revelations that it has run a secretive import-export trade, worth millions of dollars, in decidedly temporal goods such as cigarettes, alcohol and oil, is fostering new mistrust.

After the church was freed from Soviet restrictions by a 1990 law, it became the focus of a nostalgic national quest for the lost spirituality of the Russian soul. And though the church never shed its KGB-tainted Soviet-era leaders, surveys show 50% of Russians became believers.

Everyone’s Sweetheart

The church’s grass-roots popularity has made it the sweetheart not only of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government but even the Communist opposition. The Kremlin has granted endless favors to the bearded leaders of Orthodoxy in hopes that politicians’ ratings will be boosted by association with the church.

But critics accuse the modern Moscow Patriarchate of re-creating the church in the image of the nation’s secular leadership: corrupt, greedy and eager to stamp out competition from other groups--religious ones, in this case--to create a profitable monopoly.

A month of daily requests by The Times for information from Patriarchate officials went unanswered.

The latest planned favor, critics say, was a plan to replace Russia’s liberal 1990 law on freedom of worship with one that restricted the rivals of the Orthodox Church. Pressured by the U.S. Senate and Pope John Paul II, Yeltsin did not sign the law in July but sent it back to parliament to be reexamined in the fall.

Foes say the measure, if passed, would carry the back-scratching between the Orthodox Church and the state to new levels. They fear it would deal a painful blow to human rights by crippling all religious activity in Russia except the Patriarchate’s Orthodoxy and the practices of small, long-established Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist minorities.

Yeltsin and Alexi already have agreed, in what a Yeltsin aide called a “kind and cordial” conversation, to alter the law just enough to appease Western and Russian liberal opponents.

“This law is first and foremost directed toward creating the best possible conditions for the Moscow Patriarchate to crush anyone that offers it any competition,” said Alexander Nezhny, a religion analyst.

Like most critics of the Orthodox Church, Nezhny says the 1990 law allowing freedom of worship sent Alexi’s Patriarchate down the wrong path. He contends that one of its lesser provisions--letting the church reclaim property confiscated in Soviet days--has become the Patriarchate’s main aim. “The property-rights provision of the 1990 law made it not an opportunity for spiritual freedom but an opportunity for self-enrichment,” he said sadly. “They only have one demand that they keep making to the authorities: ‘Give it back to us.’ They just want to control all the property.”

But a list of controversial deals confirms that church leaders are keen for cash:

* Once news leaked into the Russian press last summer that the Patriarchate had been granted the right to import 50,000 tons of tobacco--duty-free, so it could be sold at a big markup in Russia and the profit used as “humanitarian aid”--Alexi quickly distanced himself from the deal. But Alexander Gordeyev, a reporter who made a detailed study of the case, said the Patriarchate had by then imported 8 billion cigarettes duty-free. The deal had “cost the government at least $40 million” in lost revenue, he said.

* A separate deal--exporting oil via the International Economic Partnership (MES in Russian), in which the Patriarchate has a 20% stake--was perhaps worth more.

Although the church has no natural link with or expertise in the energy sector, oil is one of Russia’s most lucrative exports and a magnet for get-rich-quick investors. Members of the Patriarchate’s fund-raising staff have never publicly discussed its oil dealings, but MES, the secular partner, does not hide the church’s financial interest.

Yuri Tavrovsky, MES press secretary, said that between 1992 and 1996, MES exported more than 20 million tons of oil and oil products. Its total profit in 1996 was $2 billion. But regulations governing oil exports were changed in July, and the church has now stopped trading.

* The Patriarchate also owns or partially owns several banks: Orthodoxy Bank, Bank Peresvet and Christ the Savior Cathedral Bank.

Profit from these big ventures was not included in official figures presented to the annual bishops’ council in the spring. These gave a far more modest 1996 church income of $2 million from just three sources: the sale of artifacts such as candles, profits from a hotel in Moscow’s Danilovsky Monastery and private donations.

Tracking the Money

The Patriarchate does not say where the big money went. It has not adhered to Russia’s law on noncommercial organizations and has not offered accounts of its finances. The Orthodox Church differs in practice, for example, from the Vatican, which holds news conferences twice a year in Rome detailing the Catholic leadership’s financial dealings.

Russians who ask too many nosy questions about the church have found they can get into trouble. When Vyacheslav Shestopalov, an investigator at the prosecutor’s office in Volgograd, started looking into church money-making practices, he was excommunicated by the local bishop.

What had attracted Shestopalov’s attention was a venture the church entered into with local traffic police. Officers, he said, apparently had been stopping motorists and offering them a choice: Lose your driver’s license or make a “donation” to build a church. Large sums were then said to have been deposited in the account of a building firm effectively controlled by the church.

Bishop German explained the excommunication by saying: “We were being persecuted just as we were under [Soviet dictator Josef] Stalin. I had no other way to defend myself.”

In Kostroma, neither the church nor entrepreneur King would discuss the finances of the bottled water enterprise. “We’ll have to talk around that,” was King’s only answer to questions about the operation’s balance sheet. Nor could he recall names or whereabouts of churches that water sales had helped restore.

King said his business was responsibly conducted, but he added: “I can’t speak for the church, but I’ve read about things which indicate they’ve got themselves into some things they wish they’d never got themselves into.”

In Moscow, little money from the Patriarchate seems to have gone into church reconstruction. Church and state officials insist that even the high-profile rebuilding of the showcase Christ the Savior Cathedral in central Moscow is being accomplished with local donations and labor. Priests’ quirky, individual fund-raising efforts have included blessing cars for a fee, begging in the subway and charging for religious services.

Neither are the Patriarchate’s funds going into religious education, according to Father Ioann Ekonomtsev, who runs efforts to set up religious schools and universities from his monkish, austere office in central Moscow. He says half the 22 schools he set up after 1990 have been forced to shut for lack of money or premises. But he blames greedy city officials, not the church.

In some cases, critics say, top Patriarchate officials are actively working against the spiritual interests of the Orthodox faith, plundering parishes that have resurrected themselves without help from above. Almost 300 Orthodox believers from the Siberian parish of Surgut, for example, sent an agonized plea to the patriarch in the spring. They said the local bishop, Dimitri, was trying to rob the parish that their beloved priest had built up in nine years of good works.

“The bishop never once helped the parish. . . . But now he sends special commissions with only one purpose: to strip our parish’s material assets as fully as possible,” said the emotional letter, published by the emigre newspaper Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought).

KGB Allegations

“Only this year, our Surgut parish gave the bishopric 270 million rubles [$50,000] and sent them three loads of food supplies. Can a community give more? It can. But to do so we would need to stop all good works and church restoration, turning the parish into a milk cow for the bishopric.”

Father Gleb Yakunin, a priest who was thrown out of the Patriarchate in 1993 for publishing archives detailing church leaders’ Soviet-era dealings with the KGB security police, fumed that, “This church is a religious mutant.

“It was the coupling of a KGB father and a religious mother that created this monster,” said Yakunin, whose published allegations include the contention that Alexi himself was once a KGB informer code-named Thrush.

Yakunin, who is now part of a schismatic Orthodox Church led from Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, says the Moscow Patriarchate needs to crush competition because it has never confronted its own past--years of compromise and collaboration with the KGB in the days of persecution. This has left the church in such deep spiritual crisis that it cannot compete with the many Russian and foreign religious groups proselytizing since the mid-1980s.

Instead, he and others see the church falling back on totalitarian ways to protect itself--hence the legislation passed almost unanimously by parliament and sent to Yeltsin in July. “Instead of reforming themselves so they could credibly preach the word of Christ, they decided to use their legal privileges to crush the competition,” Yakunin said.

The religion bill’s avowed aim was to protect Russian believers from “totalitarian sects,” meaning extremist foreign groups that preach violence--such as the Japanese Aum Supreme Truth cult, which was involved in a deadly subway attack in Tokyo.

But public lobbying for the measure included furious blasts of anti-foreign propaganda, including a claim in the press by Alexi that foreign sects expanding into Russia were as threatening as the eastward military expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The religion bill sought to strip “nontraditional” groups--all those registered in Moscow for fewer than 15 years--of their rights to organize, buy or rent property and publish religious material. Those terms would put the state on the side of the few groups that compromised enough with the atheist Communist regime to be allowed to register in 1982--meaning the sanitized, truncated Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist organizations that Soviet rulers could tolerate.

The law would penalize not only foreign sects working in Russia since the late 1980s but also Russian religious groups that refused to deal with the Soviet state, said Lawrence Uzzell, Moscow representative of Britain’s Keston Institute, which monitors religious practices in Eastern Europe.

One victim would be Russia’s Pentecostalists, a church with 120,000 faithful by its own estimates. Among the most harshly persecuted of believers in Soviet times, they were not allowed to register independently but pressured instead to join the officially recognized, Baptist-dominated “Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists.”

The Pentecostalists registered independently just eight years ago, meaning that, under the bill, they would have to wait seven more years until they could qualify as a full “traditional” religious organization and operate openly. “We will have to gather for worship in the forests again, just as we did in the 1960s,” said Bishop Vladimir Murza of the largest Pentecostalist organization, the Union of Christians of the Evangelical Faith in Russia.

The Orthodox Church, meantime, has reason to worry for its future. Respect for Orthodoxy, based on a fuzzy perception of it as the guardian of eternal Russian values, led to huge numbers of baptisms in the early 1990s.

But steady church attendance after baptism has not become a regular part of life since, as visits to almost any church show. Services are usually attended by a handful of devotees, often women and the elderly. Conversations with many recently christened Russians confirm that they want to think of themselves as Orthodox like their forefathers but seldom actually go to church. Yakunin also says donations have dropped, though he offers no figures.

Interest remains high, though. A recent debate on the church’s future in the mass-market newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets provoked replies ranging from patriotic enthusiasm for the Patriarchate to the whimsical musings of Alexander Kot, 34, a freight handler from the northern port of Murmansk.

“Modern priests and modern ‘democrats’ all came from the Soviet Union. Now modern priests have also become the ‘new Russian rich,’ ” he wrote. “While half the country vegetates in poverty, they drive around in limousines, festooned with golden crosses. And why do we have to pay money to be baptized in an Orthodox Church? Surely John the Baptist didn’t behave like that? Can the Orthodox Church really be trading in people’s beliefs? After all, wasn’t it Jesus who cast the traders out of the temple?”

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Russia’s Orthodox Church

What it is

The Russian Orthodox Church has been for centuries one of the largest orthodox churches. Its separate history dates from the 15th century.

* 1453: The Russian Orthodox Church is established after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.

* 1589: A new patriarchate is set up under the czar; the first Russian patriarch is sworn in.

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What Its Adherents Believe

Members of a Christian denomination, the faithful accept as ecumenical the first seven councils of the early church but reject jurisdiction of the pope.

The Head of the Church

Patriarch Alexi II

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The Church’s Place in Russian History

* 1721: More than 250 years after the establishment of the church, Peter the Great abolishes the patriarchate, replacing it with a synod, which he controls through a lay procurator.

* 1917: The patriarchate is revived. During the course of the Bolshevik Revolution, priests and bishops are killed, churches plundered and seminaries shut.

* 1941: During World War II, the Soviet government allows churches to reopen and the election of the first patriarch since 1925. He is a Communist loyalist. In post-1939 Soviet land annexations, Orthodox churches disappear.

* 1980s: Mikhail S. Gorbachev oversees period of improved relations, granting church legal status, returning relics seized by the state in 1920 and lifting restrictions on worship.

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Today’s Believers

In a land where a Communist dictatorship long cracked down on the practice of religion, precise figures on religious membership are difficult to obtain. But experts at the Moscow-based Institute of Religion and Law offer this rough statistical breakdown on Russia’s religious:

Russian Orthodox: 20 million

Muslim: 12 million

Protestant: 1.5 million

Buddhist: 500,000

Jewish: 150,000

Catholic: 50,000

Hare Krishna: 10,000

Others: 100,000

Sources: Columbia and Random House encyclopedias

Compiled by SERGEI L. LOIKO / Times Moscow Bureau