‘The church should know its place': The passions and the interests of urban struggle in post-atheist Russia

ABSTRACT

Urban space is a familiar place of religious-secular struggles in postsocialist world today, foremost due to the deprivatization of religion followed by attempts of religious organizations and new non-secular publics to find an acceptable public space in the post-secular world. At the same time, secular publics tend to be highly sensitive to interventions of religious ‘Others’ into the public sphere. In some cases, these struggles between secular and non-secular publics resemble ‘right to the city’ movements, when secularist activists claim the city as a space where presence of religion should be limited, separated and controlled by secular onlookers. The essay introduces the notion of ‘passionate secularism’ in order to stress the centrality of the passions, understood as sincere movements of the heart, in the rhetoric of the secularists which help them to articulate their high cultural status and moral superiority. It analyses a controversial 2016 proposal by authorities in St. Petersburg, Russia to transfer ownership of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a powerful symbol of local identity and a sort of an urban sacred place, from state to church and the protests unfolded in Winter and Spring 2017. They essay focuses on the ways how participants in the urban struggle historicized the lines and borders which were seen to divide inhabitants of the city as political or cultural descendants of the creators of the Soviet state, and discusses various historical loops they experience – as traps, burden or heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• secularism
• public space
• Russia
• museums
• cultural heritage

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers of this article and editor of History and Anthropology David Henig for their valuable comments on this essay. I want to express my words of gratitude to Vlad Naumescu and Dominic Martin who read earlier versions of this text, to Sergei Shtyrkov for participation in the fieldwork and to Bruce Grant for his intellectual generosity and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to museum statistics, in 2016 it had 3.8 million visitors. The same year, there were 640 church services in the Cathedral with 18,400 attendants. From an interview with the director of the St. Isaac’s Museum, Nikolai Burov, to the newspaper Znak. January 25, 2017. https://www.znak.com/2017-01-25/gendirektor_muzeya_isaakievskiy_sobor_o_peredache_pamyatnika_rpc. Accessed June 2020.

2 Tatiana Mai, post on her Facebook page, January 11, 2017. The post received 167 comments and 106 shares and was cited by many newspapers.

3 Vopros o peredache Isaakievskogo sobora reshen. January 10, 2017. https://tass.ru/obschestvo/3930570. Accessed June 2020.

4 Three other departments were ‘Socialist construction and sabotage of religious organizations’, ‘Religion and atheism in the West’ and natural science department (Putevoditel’ 1934, 297).

5 On the 24th of January 2017 all main mass-media in Russia critically cited the words of the Vice-Speaker of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, Petr Tolstoi, who had said that the ‘defenders’ of Isakii are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who ‘jumped out’ of the Jewish Pale in 1917 with guns and ‘destroyed our churches’.

6 See Sergei Shnurov reciting his poem on YouTube on February 17, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82YYzDlRePk. Accessed June 2020.

7 Diana Kachanova’s post on her Facebook page. February 12, 2017.

8 Commentary of official legal adviser of the ROC MP Sister Xenia (Chernega) on the Federal Law on Restitution of Religious Property in State or Municipal Ownership to Religious Organizations signed in November 2010 by then President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev. Russian Orthodox Church. Official site of the Moscow Patriarchate. January 24, 2011 http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/1416129.html. Accessed June 2020.

9 Elena Zelinskaya, "Khorovod vokrug Isakia" [Ring-around-the-rosy over St. Isaac's]. February 12, 2017. https://www.pravmir.ru/horovod-vokrug-isaakiya/. Accessed June 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Российский Фонд Фундаментальных Исследований (РФФИ )[Grant Number 19-59-22006].