One spring day in the late 1980s, my mother took me for an interview to my future elementary school in Moscow. A few standard questions later, a teacher and the principal, active Party members, inquired whether I knew what great national holiday the country was celebrating at that time.
My family had spent the entire weekend coloring eggs and baking paschal cake. That holiday was Easter, of course!
The women's hair pulled into sleek conservative buns got even tighter.
"Little girl, on April 22nd, we celebrate Lenin's birthday. Do you know who Lenin was?"
"He made the Revolution". I was six years old.
A single raised eyebrow. "No, little girl. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the leader of global proletariat".
The country was in flux. It celebrated the millennial anniversary of Christianity in Russia soon afterward.
The way in which Europeans idiomatically describe their homeland - the national ideal -- is rather telling. For the French, this ideal is la belle France. Germans take pride in die deutsche Treue. Englishmen praise merrie olde England.
Russians believe in Sviataia Rus' - Holy Russia. This concept already circulated in writing around the mid-16th century, just after Ivan Gorzny -- the Formidable, not the "Terrible" -- purged the last vestiges of the Golden Horde. He modified Church ceremonies in order to overtly mimic those of Byzantium: when Constantinople fell to the Turks a century earlier, Moscow became the Third Rome. As a spiritual heir of the vanquished Second Rome, united Muscovy principalities adopted the dual-headed Byzantine eagle.
For me, Orthodox Christianity, national tradition, and family history are synonymous.
The memory of one's own baptism is a very strange thing. While the Church was not outright forbidden in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, it was not condoned -- certainly not in the Third Rome. My mother had my baby brother and me baptized in secret. I remember getting onto the subway escalator, my God-mother's hand, the smell of incense, decorative gold flickering in the dark, and what seemed like a giant copper baptismal font.
This mystical atmosphere of an ancient ritual is alive inside an Orthodox church, and is most evident during the Easter Cross Procession. Servants of God, clad in white and gold, carry icons and flags like medieval Slavic warriors, and sing hymns a capella in Old Slavonic. The faithful are not far behind, lighting the streets of cities at home and abroad with hundreds of tiny wax fireflies.
I descend from the clerical class of the Russian empire. My great-great grandfather Gavriil was a priest, and so was my great grandfather Ioann. Orthodox Christianity has two types of clergy - white and black. White priests are limited in Church hierarchy, but are permitted to marry.
If the millennial celebrations of 1988 were an official return to Orthodoxy, then 1938 marked its lowest point through violent repressions. Clerical affiliation was much like the scarlet letter under early Bolshevik regime. Ioann was a proto-presbyter of the largest Russian Orthodox church in Tbilisi, Georgia. His son -- my grandfather -- was only allowed to attend evening school: he was a relative of a "socially harmful element" in the 1920s and that of the "enemy of the people" in the 1930s. An "enemy of the people", my great grandfather challenged the Godless state, refused to recant the Christian teaching, and paid for it with his life.
Not every member of the clergy had that level of integrity - this religious institution was infiltrated by the secret police until the Soviet collapse - but many did. Contemporary Russian Church officially recognizes religious victims of Soviet repressions. I don't know how Ioann was murdered and where. He is certainly not canonized, but I think of his heroism every time I hear the mention of "new holy martyrs" during evening prayers.
By surviving under Communism and reuniting with the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia after decades of separation, the Russian Orthodox Church became a renewed source of moral and spiritual authority for its followers. I don't question the motivation of our politicians attending the services, many of whom had traded the red star for the candle. Their presence reinforces Russian Orthodox Christianity as the dominant culture, while the sincerity of their faith is between them and God.
After a rebirth of its own, the Russian Orthodox Church is staunch, conservative, exclusive, ceremonial, and that's just how I like it.
