There is a comfortable way to talk about the Russian Orthodox Church and the war, and it goes like this: the Church is an ancient faith, a reservoir of belief and consolation, and the regime — cynical as ever — has simply co-opted it, draping its tanks in incense the way it drapes everything else it touches. On this view the institution is a victim of the state, a sacred thing put to profane use. I want to argue that this picture is not just incomplete but backwards. The Moscow Patriarchate is not a faith that the regime co-opts. In its present form it is a creation of the state’s security organs, and in this war it has made itself something more specific and more terrible than a propaganda asset. It is the metaphysical engine of the aggression — the apparatus that takes the killing of one nation by another and returns it to the killers as holiness.
Let me be precise about what I am attacking. I am not arguing about whether God exists, or whether a person who prays before an icon is deceived. The faith of believers is their own, and it is not the subject here. The subject is an institution — the Moscow Patriarchate, the World Russian People’s Council, the hierarchy that runs them — and the claim is that this institution is not, in the ordinary sense, a church at all. It is an arm of the security state with a liturgy attached. The argument is about the machine, not about the people it was built to deceive.
A Church That Is Not a Church
Begin with origins, because they explain everything that follows. The Russian Orthodox Church in its current form does not descend in an unbroken line from Byzantium through the centuries; it was fabricated, at a specific hour, by Joseph Stalin. On the fourth of September 1943 Stalin summoned three surviving hierarchs to the Kremlin and decided, in a meeting that lasted less than two hours, to revive the patriarchate that the Bolsheviks had spent two decades crushing. The work was to be done, in his own phrase, “at Bolshevik tempo”: a council of bishops was convened within four days, a patriarch duly elected, and the whole revived structure placed under the supervision of an NKVD colonel, Georgy Karpov, who ran the new Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs from inside the secret police.
Consider what that means. The body that today blesses missiles and proclaims holy war was reconstituted not by believers but by the chief of the world’s most efficient terror apparatus, as an instrument of that apparatus, in the middle of a war he needed it to help him win. From that moment the institution carried a permanent condition built into its bones: every senior hierarch was vetted through the organs, and to rise in the Church meant being acceptable to the men of the NKVD and then the KGB. This is not a slander invented after the fact; it is the documented mechanism of how the postwar Church was assembled and staffed. The present patriarch, Kirill — Vladimir Gundyaev — rose through exactly this filter, and the ties to the security services that his elevation required never dissolved.
So the institution is not an independent spiritual body that the state leans on. It is a thing the state manufactured to lean on, in which independence was never a design feature. When people are shocked that the Church behaves like an arm of the FSB, they have the causation reversed. It behaves that way because that is what it was rebuilt to be. The miracle would be if it behaved otherwise.
Symphonia and Sobornost: The Deep Root of Servility
But the NKVD origin is only the recent layer. Underneath it sit two ancient doctrines that made the Church so easy to weaponize in the first place, and that have done deep, long damage to the peoples who profess it.
The first is symphonia — the “symphony” of church and state — which in the Russian rendering means something quite specific: the church as the servant of whatever power happens to rule. Not a counterweight to the throne, not a conscience standing outside it, but an instrument that sanctifies the sovereign of the day, be he khan, tsar, general secretary, or president. The second is sobornost, usually translated as “spiritual togetherness” but functioning as the dissolution of the autonomous individual into the collective — the doctrine that the self has no standing apart from the communal whole, and that to assert one’s own conscience against the group is a kind of sin. Put the two together and you have a theology purpose-built for submission: a church that bows to power, teaching a people that has no business standing on its own.
This is the deep structural root of Russian servility, and it has serviced every regime in turn, from the Mongol Horde through the tsars to Stalin. It is worth saying clearly that this is a historical inheritance, not a genetic one — there is no “slave gene.” The proof is comparative. The same Horde domination that, laid over Russian Orthodoxy, produced a culture of anti-institutions and submission produced something entirely different when laid over Confucian China, which under foreign conquest still generated flourishing administration, paper money, and science. The variable was not the conqueror but the cultural substrate the conquest fused with. In Russia that substrate was Orthodoxy.
And the cost is measurable. Compare the trajectories of the Christian confessions: by and large, Protestant societies have outperformed Catholic ones, and Catholic ones have outperformed Orthodox. The reason is institutional. The Catholic Church, for all its faults, was an independent power that limited the secular ruler and from whose autonomous institutions Europe’s universities and sciences grew. Orthodoxy, bound by symphony to the throne, offered no such counterweight — which is why Russia produced no scientists and no science as an institution before the eighteenth century, when Peter I broke the spine of the church, abolished the patriarchate, and reduced the Holy Synod to a second-rate ministry of the state. Chaadaev diagnosed this long ago; everything since has only confirmed the diagnosis.
The Metaphysical Engine of the War
Now bring the machine to the present war, and watch what it does. It does not merely cheer the invasion. It supplies the invasion with its metaphysics — the sacred story that converts mass killing into a holy act.
Begin with the prayer. In the first days of the war, Kirill composed a wartime prayer to be read aloud in every church of the Moscow Patriarchate, on the third of March, in which Russia — the country that had launched the attack — appears not as the aggressor but as the victim, beset by “those who wage war against Holy Rus.” The inversion is total and deliberate: the arsonist prays to be saved from the fire. Days later, while the Russian army was leveling Ukrainian cities, Kirill delivered the sermon that revealed the moral logic underneath. The supreme horror of our time, he explained, the thing that justifies the whole confrontation, is the gay-pride parade — a loyalty test the godless world imposes, which the people of the Donbas, he claimed, were heroically refusing to take. Set that beside the rubble of the cities and the meaning is unmistakable: the destruction of a country is a lesser matter than a parade. This is what it looks like to give fascist aggression a religious foundation. It is no accident that this came in the days around the Bucha massacre.
Then the blessing of the sword. On the thirteenth of March, in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Kirill handed an icon to Viktor Zolotov, the head of the National Guard, to “inspire” the young conscripts being fed into the war. Zolotov accepted it, complained on the spot that the campaign was going more slowly than hoped, and expressed his confidence that the icon would help speed the victory. A general asking a relic to accelerate a slaughter, and a patriarch supplying it: there is the symphony, made flesh.
And then the doctrine that ties it together. The Church under Kirill, through the World Russian People’s Council, has declared the invasion a “holy war” — and the phrase should be heard for exactly what it is. It is functionally identical to the ghazavat, the jihad declared by extremist Islamist movements: a war sacralized, in which the enemy is not a rival state but the embodiment of sin, and in which death acquires a redemptive meaning. Kirill made that meaning explicit in a later sermon, declaring that death in the war with Ukraine washes away all sins — that the soldier who kills and dies is thereby cleansed, equated to the very sacrifice of Christ. There is no honest way to describe this except as the Orthodox manufacture of the shahid: the martyr who is promised that killing is purification and that dying is the gate to paradise. The Church has built, in Christian vocabulary, the exact engine of self-immolation it claims to abhor in its enemies.
The blood of the Ukrainians who are killed, and of the Russian soldiers sent to kill them, is on this patriarch’s hands — not as a figure of speech, but as a description of what an engine does.
The Cult of Death
Sacralizing the killing is one half of the machine. The other half is the cult of death it feeds.
A healthy civilization offers its members life as the supreme value — and asks them, in extremity, to risk death to defend it. The Russian state has inverted the order. It offers death itself as the highest thing a citizen can attain. You can hear it in Kirill’s Dormition sermon, in which Orthodox faith is praised precisely because it lets a soldier charge fearlessly toward certain death — not survive, not prevail, but die without flinching. You can hear it in the ruler’s own register, his counsel to the young to “live for what you are willing to die for,” his musing that Russians, if it came to nuclear war, would “go to heaven as martyrs.” The supreme value on offer is not living but dying for the state. And the symbol sits at the literal center of the country: an unburied corpse, venerated in a mausoleum, the founder embalmed and displayed rather than laid to rest — a civilization that keeps its dead leader on view instead of returning him to the earth has told you what it worships.
This cult does not arise spontaneously; it is scripted. The state’s propaganda is centrally directed, and its guidelines instruct the propagandists to drape the war in sacred robes — to tie the “special operation” to the Baptism of Rus, to cast the president as a latter-day Alexander Nevsky, and to brand the Ukrainians as godless Satanists committing ritual murder. This is the construction of a civil religion of war, assembled to replace a Marxism-Leninism that has long since burned out. And like every blood religion, it cannot survive on doctrine alone. It must be periodically moistened with blood — fed either with real war or, between wars, with the virtual blood of constant threat and manufactured siege. The war is not a failure of the cult. The war is the cult’s sacrament.
Toward an Orthodox Iran — and Below It
Where is this meant to lead? Toward a confessional autocracy — an “Orthodox Iran,” a theocratic state organized around an official faith. The ideologists of the regime have said as much, openly wishing for a traditionalist, Orthodox Russia purged of liberal contamination. The bitter irony is that in real internal political life Russia has already fallen below the Iran it imagines as its model. Iran, for all its clerical tyranny, retains a measure of genuine pluralism that Russia has extinguished entirely. Its parliament contains rival reformist and conservative blocs that actually contend with one another; its civil society has real friction — animal-rights activists there stalled a proposed dog-ownership ban for over a decade. Russia has nothing of the kind: no public politics, no opposition, no contest at all. And this is not a moral nicety only; it has hard consequences. A minimal internal pluralism preserves competition, and competition is the soil of capability — which is why sanctioned, isolated Iran can build effective drones while resource-rich Russia, having strangled every internal contest, must go to Tehran to beg for them. Innovation turns out to be downstream of openness, not of money.
There is a precise word for the direction of travel: clericalization. And it is exactly here that the present Russian fascism diverges from the classic model. In Hitler’s Reich, religion played essentially no organizing role; the regime had its own pagan-tinged civil cult and largely sidelined the churches. Russian fascism is doing the opposite — fusing itself to the Church and elevating it into an instrument of imperial policy and war. You can see the fusion advancing in concrete steps: Kirill lecturing the Federation Council, demanding legal “protection of the child in the womb” that would give fathers a veto over abortion, and demanding legal status for the military clergy who accompany the troops. You can see it in the apparatus of value-policing — a Ministry of Culture document proclaiming “traditional spiritual-moral values” uniquely native to Russia and naming the West and NATO as their enemies, and proposing a new interagency body to vet all cultural materials and personnel, reporting to the secretary of the Security Council. That organ is a direct revival of two functions at once: Pobedonostsev’s Holy Synod, which policed the empire’s soul under the last tsars, and Suslov’s ideology department, which policed it under the Soviets. The same machine, re-consecrated.
And it operates as a monopoly. The principle is “one country, one Führer, one church”: a single official faith, with every competitor liquidated as “extremist” or “undesirable,” so that the believer is left with only one product on the market. This is not a church in any pluralist sense; it is a totalitarian sect, and it behaves like one. Dissenting priests are defrocked, persecuted, and sometimes killed — the murdered Father Alexander Men, one of the most luminous spiritual minds the Russian Church produced in the twentieth century, stands as the permanent warning of what happens to a cleric who will not be assimilated. A sect that murders its own saints is the opposite of a faith. It is an enforcement structure.
It is worth recalling, too, that this machine has a confessor’s voice at the ruler’s ear. Metropolitan Tikhon Shevkunov, often called the president’s spiritual guide, has lamented in public that the ruler’s mortality is Russia’s gravest problem — naming the intelligentsia and an “infantile” society as the villains from whom this irreplaceable savior must rescue the nation. That is the inversion in pure form: the dictator sanctified, the people who might think for themselves cast as the enemy.
The Engine Is Failing
Here is the part the regime cannot script. An institution forged as the spiritual pillar of empire does not outlast the empire it was built to hold up. As the imperial project collapses, its church collapses with it — and the collapse is already well advanced.
The Moscow Patriarchate has been shedding parishes; it has lost well over a third of them. More decisively, its central claim — to be the church of a single “Russian world” binding Russia and Ukraine into one body — has been severed at the root. On the twenty-seventh of May 2022 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that had been tied to Moscow enacted what amounted to autocephaly: it began consecrating its own chrism in Kyiv, struck the references to the Russian Church from its statutes, and Metropolitan Onufriy ceased commemorating Kirill as “our father.” The largest, richest Orthodox jurisdiction in Ukraine walked away. With it went the last living thread of the “Russian world,” the proof that this imperial idea holds nothing together once force recedes; it points only backward, and backward is not a place anyone can live.
The rejection has spread outward and hardened into law. Dozens of priests signed open letters against the war; foreign parishes announced their departure from the Moscow jurisdiction. On the twentieth of August 2024 Ukraine’s Rada moved to ban all religious organizations affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church. Estonia’s parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had already branded the institution a terrorist organization and a Kremlin propaganda tool — a judgment the 2024 World Russian People’s Council confirmed for them, when it declared the war holy and proclaimed all of Ukraine’s territory Russian by right.
And there is a deeper reason the engine is brittle: a state religion imposed from above is shallow-rooted, and shallow roots can be torn up. Russia’s “surface” Orthodoxy has flipped before — within living memory it gave way to near-total official atheism, then flipped back again, which is not how an organic faith behaves but exactly how an administered one does. The same shallowness is visible in the model state, where Iranians now chant in the streets that they are Aryans who will not worship Arabs — blaming the imposed religion itself, not merely the regime that imposed it. A faith that can be installed by decree can be repudiated the same way.
So the conclusion writes itself, and I will not soften it. The Moscow Patriarchate is not a church that fell among thieves. It is a security-service instrument that was built to serve power and has spent the present war serving it in the most extreme way a religious institution can — by sanctifying slaughter, manufacturing martyrs, and offering its people death as the highest good. An institution founded, in principle, to preach mercy and the sanctity of life has made killing its sacrament and death its product. That is the inversion at the heart of it. And it is failing, as everything built on that inversion must fail, because mercy cannot be permanently counterfeited and a people cannot, in the end, be made to worship its own destruction.