What Is The Russian Orthodox Church. - BBC Religion Documentary - Timeline.

Reporting from Kuala Lumpur. Reporting from Moscow. Reporting from Cape Town. Reporting from Washington. Reporting from Phnom Penh. Reporting for the BBC. Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is Moscow's salute to the new millennium. It has been built in only four years, thanks to Moscow's powerful mayor, Yuri Lushkov. It will be opened in the year 2000, when Russia goes to the polls. Lushkov is a front-runner to succeed President Yeltsin. It symbolises the new balance of power between church and state. Religion is a major electoral issue. Half the population claim to be believers. A new cathedral is said to have cost a billion dollars. Yeltsin has given another 12 million to buy icons for it. All this, while ordinary Russians are struggling for survival. This is a story of money and ambition. But who profits? The politicians? The church? Or the people? The new cathedral stands on the banks of the Moscow River, just downstream from the Kremlin. It's a replica of a 19th century cathedral that stood here before the revolution. Inside, it is not yet finished. The marble cladding and frescoes are still missing. Its grandeur will eventually reflect the nation's pride in the Orthodox tradition, which dates back over a thousand years. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour will be Russia's principal ecclesiastical space. The restoration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is of particular significance on the eve of the great anniversary. Today, it is not only a symbol of the revival of faith, of Orthodoxy on the Russian land, but also a symbol of the revival of Russia. Money for rebuilding the church was raised by Moscow's boss, Mair Lushkov. He hasn't yet formally declared he's running for president, but the press follow him as if he had. Last November, he founded a new nationalistic political party, Fatherland. He's in total control of an empire which includes 1,500 businesses and his own television station, and he's been quick to see the electoral advantage of getting close to the church. Every Saturday, he tours the city. It's a rare chance for reporters to throw questions at him. As he's not an Orthodox Christian, I asked him why he's backing the church. It's very positive, because we believe that they have taken on the main responsibility of the spiritual education, of the moral values that come from Christ, and which have been largely forgotten in recent years. If the Communist Party had taken on this responsibility before, and, as you can see, it didn't cope with this task at all, now religion and the church have taken on this responsibility. With Lushkov, when it's over, it's really over. The cathedral is only one of Lushkov's ambitious building projects. He's transformed Moscow's city centre, giving it the speed and glitz of a Western capital. While Lushkov talks finely of morality, gangsters have turned Moscow into a city of vice to rival Las Vegas. The mayor has stamped his image on Moscow as if he was Louis XIV building Versailles. He's transformed the great Manege Square below the Kremlin walls. Underneath is a multi-storey shopping mall where all the world's most expensive designer names can be found. There are now two parallel economies in Russia. The ruble economy, where bare survival is a struggle, and the dollar economy, where designer luxuries are important status symbols. The cathedral is the biggest status symbol of all. No one knows exactly what it's cost. Mr Lushkov, who is our mayor now, took some initiatives by the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch and he organised an excellent system to collect money from banks and some companies and rich people and, of course, the ordinary people collecting money also. And, like a miracle, we have now the cathedral. But was it right to spend so much on a cathedral when Russia's economy is in ruins? The old and disabled are forced to beg. State salaries aren't paid. The health service has collapsed. A respected former Member of Parliament, a priest who was thrown out of the Russian church for criticising too loudly, is fighting for justice. First of all, this is not the time to build when we rose from the knees of Russia, when people lived normally. And now we have to make sure that our believers, including atheists, don't starve. So it's unacceptable to spend a billion dollars on the construction of a cathedral when the country is in ruins. It's not a view the church accepts. The cathedrals that stand in the face of our land were also built in difficult times. And in difficult times people are more vulnerable. And, by a miracle of God, in a short period of time this cathedral was rebuilt. The Orthodox Church returned to favour in 1988 after 70 years of oblivion. The revolution of 1917 changed the world's fate and almost destroyed the church. Within weeks of seizing power, Lenin launched an intensive attack on religion. Horrendous persecution followed. Thousands died or were sent to the gulags. Revolutionary leaders encouraged the destruction of church buildings. Out of 20,000 churches, only a few hundred were left open. The original Church of Christ the Saviour had been built to celebrate Tsar Alexander I's victory over Napoleon in 1812. Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was commissioned to mark its consecration. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks stripped out the ecclesiastical treasures marble, paintings, icons, sacred vessels, anything of any value. And in 1931 it was blown up on Stalin's orders. It was a shock for all Russia because the Christ Saviour Cathedral was built as a symbol of the Orthodox faith of our people and as a symbol of our victory after the Napoleon War. The Communists intended to build a magnificent symbol of their own regime in its place. In the heart of Moscow lies the huge building site of the Palace of Soviets. The palace will be 416 metres high. A statue of Lenin topping the building will tower into the air 100 metres. The arm of the figure, raised over the city, 30 metres in size. The Palace of Soviets, the most splendid structure of the Stalin epoch, a monument to the great Lenin, will be 33 metres higher than the Empire State Building in New York City. The construction of the palace never got further than its foundations and the site was eventually turned into the largest heated swimming pool in the world. The Church of Christ the Saviour stands where a generation of Muscovites learned to swim. The Patriarch, once again powerful and respected, is already using his new cathedral, the most expensive present the Church has received since imperial times. A small church beneath the main cathedral is already open. The Orthodox Church is the only institution in Russia whose hierarchy has survived the collapse of Communism wholly unchanged. Alexei II, the 70-year-old leader of the Church, was elected Patriarch in 1990, having made a brilliant career in Soviet times, which showed that the KGB approved of him. Throughout the Soviet Union, priests had to work with the KGB. It was not necessarily active collaboration, more a willingness to play along with the secular authorities. Alexei's KGB codename was Drozdov, Thrush, a singing bird. The Church in the Soviet time had relations with the government, but the style of these relations was organised not by the Church and not from the Church. The government organised the spatial system of relations between Church and State, and two government organisations took part in this process, the Council for Religion and KGB. And for the religion leaders in that time, there was only one chance, there was only one possibility, to have a dialogue with government, to have a dialogue with KGB and the Council for Religion. Metropolitan Kirill, Alexei's number two and Bishop of Smolensk, also had a KGB codename, Mikhailov. At grassroots level, some priests turned into spies, who were prepared to fabricate denunciations. But the KGB was not all bad. At the top of the tree, bishops like Kirill worked to bolster Russian interests abroad, helping to swing the World Council of Churches behind Soviet foreign policy. Kirill is a pragmatist who has learnt to work with any regime to advance his cause, the redemption of mankind through the Orthodox faith. Just as the Church was bitterly criticised for collaborating with the KGB, it can now be criticised for playing along with Russia's gangster capitalism. Maybe, however, the deep spirituality of the thousand-year-old Russian Orthodox tradition belongs to a different plane of human endeavour and is not affected by such passing political fashions. Kirill has publicly expressed his messianic belief that only a transformation based on individual redemption can save Russia, and beyond Russia, the world. The KGB and communist politicians were both using the Church for their own ends. Politicians are doing just the same today with the rebuilding of the Church of Christ the Saviour. Yeltsin uses the Church as a political symbol. Luzhkov uses the Church as a political symbol. And it's very interesting to see how Moscow mayor is balancing between the Church and the Communist Party, trying to create an alliance with both of them. And it's not a secret that Luzhkov will run during the next presidential elections. Although Yeltsin and Luzhkov both climbed to power through the brutally atheistic Communist Party, they have seen the electoral advantage of identification with the Church. But even with the cathedral full of scaffolding, they hurried to be seen attending the Patriarch's service. It took 70 years to build the original Church, but this time Luzhkov is hoping to get it done in 5. The mayor regards the project as a vast job-creation scheme. Some of the notable beneficiaries are his close associates. The massive bronze doors have been made by Luzhkov's court sculptor, Zorab Tsereteli, who is also a member of the Church's observation council. I asked him why so much money was being spent. It's not a project. It's a spiritual restoration that the people have taken from us. I think it's wise to return it. It's a wise decision. It's even funny to discuss it. But the Church is not just a spiritual object. It's also big business, as Tsereteli's lifestyle demonstrates. He has a studio and sculpture park in central Moscow, 450 assistants, the latest models of Western cars, and a team of well-armed minders. Apart from the Church, Tsereteli's bronze statue of Peter the Great was his most lavish commission from Luzhkov. The secrecy surrounding money spent on the mayor's big projects has fuelled controversy. The budget of the Church is never published and the flow of money is never published. Moscovites are pensioners. We have nothing left. We are compensated for the collapse of the ruble. It's impossible for them to live. And now it's clear that Christians can't act like that. The Church of Christ the Saviour has the strictest security. As a former deputy, I have to say that it's much easier to get military numbers in Russia than the budget of the Moscow Patriarchate, where it is located, and especially the budget of the Church of Christ the Saviour. At the Duma, Russia's lower House of Parliament, deputies are also trying to discover how much it cost. But even in the corridors of power, there are no satisfactory answers. Lack of transparency is making people fear that money has been wasted or misappropriated. I talked through an interpreter to Lev Levinson, who works for a Member of Parliament. He has combed through all the available records and has many pointers, but no definite answer. The very first transfer to the account of Christ the Saviour Cathedral was as much as 800 billion rubles in the prices of 1995. We also have a letter dated September 1994 The letter was signed by the Patriarch of Moscow, Alexei II, and the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, where they are appealing to Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin, the President of the Russian Federation, asking about funding for the building of Christ the Saviour Cathedral. And the figure that is about 80% was to be subsidized from the state budget. In the end, the government didn't pay in cash, but gave donors big tax breaks if they contributed to Luzhkov's fund. It is Levinson and Gleb who have worked out that the cost of the church is around a billion dollars. That's a thousand million. We know that over 2,000 billion rubles, roughly half a billion dollars, of the fund's money has already been used. But much of the work was done on credit, so the real cost must be higher. The names of the companies who contributed are carved in marble plaques beside the lower church. They make a gilded memorial to Luzhkov's fund for the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Different private firms were obliged to pay money for the reconstruction of the cathedral, and they were getting in exchange very nice certificates to decorate their walls. Very often when they refused to do this, they immediately had some problems with financial inspection, which started to check their registration documents or did some other things. It is characteristic of Luzhkov's style of government to personally control the smallest details of civic projects. This is why he and his advisers react angrily to the suggestion that there has been any improper pressure on Moscow companies. They are keen to present the rebuilding of the church as a populist undertaking, supported by the small donations of thousands of patriotic citizens. The fact is that people came, not only the big companies, the famous people, but ordinary people, where they were investing in this fund of reconstruction of the cathedral, their small parts of their poor salaries, even small salaries, to this cathedral. And it brought a lot of money. And the fact is that nobody convinced anyone or persuaded or pushed anyone to invest in this building. People have been encouraged to contribute through television advertising. The Patriarch is reported to have been delighted by the way this advertisement portrays the church unifying different sectors of society. Its slogan is, the church unites us all as a community. Money is reaching the church from many unconventional sources, including profits from business deals. In the mid-1990s, as the new cathedral began to rise, the church got tax breaks from President Yeltsin on the import or sale of various products such as crude oil, alcohol and cigarettes. Yeltsin hands out tax breaks to good causes rather than grants, since his government is always short of ready money. The church soon found itself handling millions of packets of tax-free cigarettes, which had entered the country as humanitarian aid and had to be passed on through secular salesmen. Critics demand to know how much money has been earned and where it's gone. Although, they say, and in most cases, the answers have always been, that it's humanitarian aid, yes, unfortunately, it's vodka, yes, we trade, and cigarettes, but we sell them through the trade network, and the money goes to the church. Well, we need the church. Again, where does the church go? But the church never sells these cigarettes or alcohol. The special government organizations and special secular organizations sell the cigarettes, or distribute the cigarettes, for example, between the army in Chechnya or in other places. But some journalists present this picture from the very wrong side. Once the churchmen had their shiny new cathedral, with lavish marble-clad museum galleries in the basement, they asked for another tax break. They wanted 12 million dollars for the best icons money could buy. The patriarch asked Yeltsin for a tax break on crude oil to buy icons from the West. But Yeltsin gave him 12 million dollars from the foreign currency reserves instead. It was 1996, another election year, and Yeltsin got re-elected. No one has ever spent that much on icons. Why was the church so keen to buy them? For the Orthodox people, the icons, it's not only subject of culture. It's the very important part of the spiritual life, the part of our cult, of our liturgy. And in new cathedral, you'll have the beautiful icons for this. In the Middle Ages, the majority of people was unliterate. The icon was like theology in colors. Icons were made for churches, and it is politics that has clasped them loose. While the icons bought for Christ the Saviour have their religious value, the story of their purchase is one of worldly financial dealings. Ironically, they first became marketable items as a result of communist zeal. Before the revolution of 1917, there were millions of icons spread round Russia's churches. But it is estimated that only 5% of them have survived. Amongst them, the icons of Moscow's Rublev Museum, where icons rescued by believers were brought in Soviet times. In the aftermath of the revolution, vast quantities of icons were wrenched from churches and destroyed. Across Russia, as the churches have begun to reopen, the memory of their desecration remains vivid. Some of the icons were sold abroad, and 26 churches have survived. One of them has survived, and two more are open now. The religious life is slowly being restored in the conditions of religious freedom. One of the world's leading dealers in Russian art started his career in the 1970s, combing the countryside around Moscow for icons. There were all sorts of different icons that could be found in that area at the time. I remember we pulled up once to a local store where a whole bunch of guys were hanging around. And so we just came over and said, Hey, guys, we'll pay you five rubles for any icon that you're going to bring. And so they brought about 100 icons that they collected from their mother-in-law, from their relatives, from their churches. One of the most common approaches to little old ladies was you knock on the door and say, Babushka, we're artists, restorers from Moscow. And so we came over here to look at your icons. Very often icons were purchased for nothing by enterprising young men. This was a cloak-and-dagger business. Men with brown paper parcels climbed the stairs of Moscow apartment blocks in constant fear of arrest. If you were caught trading in icons, it was 10 years in prison. With their exchange value in the West, icons became an alternative currency. Moscow was the schooling ground for a Dutch art dealer who has pursued a well-publicized career in art fraud. I connected with a couple of groups through contacts you made there. I mean, you went out. You had, like, restaurants where the Beaumont from that time could spend their money. You did business over the table. You did business in a hotel. You had to get drunk with these people because if you didn't get drunk with them, they wouldn't trust you because, you know, only a drunk man and a child can speak the truth. I've been buying icons that I saw them dancing on the wall, and I've been buying them with one eye closed like this. There have been export controls in Russia since 1917, and smugglers had to find ways round them. Third-world diplomats were a favourite option since their luggage had diplomatic immunity and could pass automatically through customs. African students studying in Moscow were also used as carriers. They would take icons by train to Berlin where they handed them over to local dealers. I got them out of the country by different ways. I mean, you know, if there is such a severe system as there was in Russia, you have a lot of people who are looking for possibilities. You had diplomats. But diplomats, they were not always trustworthy because, you know, you could only control them so far. So you learn. You lose a couple of shipments. There were different ways. For instance, there were the tour operatives, the bus drivers who you could bribe. Slowly, slowly, I tried, through my gallery, which I had in Amsterdam at that time, sell the more commercial pieces and select the better pieces for my collection. In the 1970s, van Rijn formed a distinguished collection of icons, which he subsequently lost as a result of a bankruptcy. And in 1996, it was this collection that the Patriarch planned to buy with Yeltsin's money. Christie's London sale room is one of the obvious places to turn in search of icons with a clean provenance, unlike van Rijn's. But the icons they sell are rarely of the exceptional quality the Patriarch was looking for. At that December auction, most prices were below the £10,000 mark. Back in the 1970s, Christie's used to sell icons for Novo Export, the Soviet government's official export agency. But the official icons were never much good. The best icons left Russia with smugglers like van Rijn. So buying icons in the West meant the Patriarch risked ending up with smuggled goods. The church's big bucks made it vulnerable. £7,000, commission bidder. All done at 7,000. Paddle 103-2. The van Rijn collection was stored in Christie's high-security warehouse, though Christie's may not have known it. Metropolitan Kirill came to view it there in 1996. His intention to buy may have been undermined by discovering van Rijn's notorious reputation as a smuggler. While he was in London, Kirill was offered another collection by the Axia Gallery. It was known as the Prince Michael collection. Then a third collection popped up. Icons gathered from various leading dealers and offered through a Swiss company, Presidio Investments. The churchmen were innocents, ripe for fleecing in the wily international art market. So the Ministry of Culture set up a commission to help them make their choice. I wasn't just a member of the commission. I was the one who set it up. If you're interested in the details, it was quite by accident. I was in charge of the Ministry. Svetlana Mikhailovna Blinova, one of the museum's responsible staff, asked me to look at the slides that were sent. We found several of the commission at Sergei Passad, an ancient monastery 50 miles from Moscow. The monastery was the headquarters of the Orthodox Church during the Soviet period. The Culture Ministry's specialists confirmed that they had been asked to choose between three possible collections. But they themselves were mystified about what icons had been bought and how they could have cost nearly $12 million. Something was allegedly accepted, but the Prince Michael collection was rejected. So they began to buy one of the Swiss collections, which, first of all, didn't meet the prices. They were much worse, although there were interesting things. A Moscow museum curator secretly showed us photographs of some of the icons offered from Switzerland. Amongst them are three we know to have been bought. The Church will only confirm that it bought a collection from Switzerland and refuses to say what it contained. It was assumed that the state would spend money on things that once belonged to Russia, but were illegally exported. And now it was assumed that they would be bought at prices that were much higher than possible, probable prices on the domestic market. You know, I can't say for sure, but I know how complicated this story is. I constantly communicate with experts from the Ministry of Culture, who have answered this question somewhere, and they still don't know where the collection, on which huge funds were spent, I don't remember the exact number, I think it was $12 million, if I'm not mistaken, to buy this collection. Nobody knows where this collection is. It was allegedly bought, but nobody saw what was bought. Nobody. Back at the Duma, the Culture Committee has taken up the issue of the missing icons without success. They are concerned that there may have been a huge waste of public money. To buy the icon collection for the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the money would have been allocated from the state budget. This is a rare case, because, as you know, according to the laws of the Constitution, the Church is separated from the state, and therefore, with today's very complex budget, with the extremely weak financing of the Culture, as you understand, the Culture is not only connected with the Church, it is a broader phenomenon, and the allocation of such a large amount, $12 million, is natural that this money is state-owned, and for me, as a deputy, their fate is not indifferent. In response to Gudima's inquiries, the Finance Ministry sent her a letter explaining that the Church had been allocated $11.8 million out of the nation's foreign currency reserves, of which $10.5 had already been spent. The Patriarch had signed a contract for the purchase with the Swiss company Presidio Investments, and the works of art were now in storage at the Patriarchate. It was in New York that we next pursued our inquiries. Not surprisingly, we found more information there than in Moscow. We met an émigré Russian who recently had an audience with the Patriarch. The subject of decorating Christ the Saviour came into conversation, and bringing back the icons, Russian icons that were sold in the 20s or in the 30s by communists abroad, and that are now in private collections or in museums or whatever, and some of them are offered for sale and being bought by patriarchy. In particular, one icon, the icon of Holy Trinity of 15th century, and the Patriarch said that that icon was offered to them at the unbelievable price of $550,000. And I knew that icon because a friend of mine, Heidi Betts, owned it actually. Tanya called to tell me that she'd had her audience with the Patriarch, and in conversation about Christ the Saviour Church, the Patriarch told her that they were going to be buying icons, and one of the icons specifically that came up in conversation was a Trinity. I was being offered at this same time $150,000 for the same icon through a London colleague. And who was the colleague? My colleague prefers to remain anonymous. There was a discrepancy of $400,000. At the same meeting, Tanya was shown a photograph of a pair of 18th century Greek royal doors for which the Patriarch was also being asked $550,000. Heidi had them for sale at only $100,000. I only know one thing, that the prices that were offered to the patriarchy, not through us but through other people, whoever they are, are exorbitant. Has the Church been overcharged? Their determination not to show the icons and obsession with secrecy has given rise to suspicion and rumours of skullduggery. We have asked several times for permission to film the icons but without success. We were always told they were being studied or restored but could find no art historians who were studying them or restorers who were restoring. What had been bought and why was the whole transaction surrounded by so much secrecy? Finally, I went to the Danilov Monastery, the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church, to try and discover what had been going on. Why had they made the purchase? The official spokesman was polite but uninformative. I didn't participate in the process and I think it's quite normal that such processes are not always revealed to the public. I'm not very much sure the Church is obliged to reveal every aspect of its activities or the activities of the state or any of the commercial structures or any of the experts related to this collection of icons but of course everything which is normal to reveal will be presented when the exhibition is opened. Meanwhile, the Church has secretly bought a collection of icons which may or may not be worth the nearly 12 million dollars that was paid for it. A multi-million dollar cathedral has been built but no one knows exactly where the money came from or precisely why the donations were made. In the new Russia, just as in Soviet times, institutions don't expect to tell the public what they're doing. There has been one miraculous change, however. The voters return to spirituality. After 70 years of hiding their faith from the political authorities, half the population now publicly claim they're believers. It's brought Church and state back together in a pragmatic embrace. The whole political system now working for democracy and for the deep changing of the situation in the country. And the relations between Church and state are only the part of this policy. I hope that the future will be better than now and that the next generation of politicians will be more dynamic than present politicians. And I hope that the future of my country will be better. Lushkov belongs to the next generation and it is apparently Lushkov that Kirill is backing for the presidency even though the race hasn't officially started. He still won't tell the media whether he's standing but his support for the Church could help him realise his ambitions. The reason why Yeltsin and the government are giving so much is not religious respect for the Church. It's a straight-forward political attitude, a desire to get support from the electorate, from ordinary believers in the next elections. At the end of the millennium, the Patriarch and the politicians are back in business. But rather than helping the poor, they prefer to squander their profits on glittering symbols. Displaying expensive old icons in a brand new cathedral is a visual expression of the Russian Orthodox Church's return to power and political favour. The Church's quest for icons for their new cathedral may have been undertaken by devout churchmen, but the motivation belonged to the material world, above all, the world of politics.