GERALDINE FAGAN

With elections looming on 31 March, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has campaigned on a platform of an independent national Orthodox Church in addition to a strong army and Ukrainian as the state language. The autocephaly (independence) of this Church is “a question of our national security,” he told crowds outside Kyiv’s St. Sophia’s Cathedral on 15 December, moments after the formation of the new “Orthodox Church in Ukraine.”1

Russia’s political leadership similarly views Orthodoxy in Ukraine as a security concern. President Vladimir Putin discussed “the situation of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine” at a session of his Security Council on 12 October.2 

These positions suggest a clear division of national loyalties, with Orthodox Christians in the newly independent Church supporting Ukraine and those under the Moscow Patriarchate supporting Russia. “If a church’s headquarters are in a foreign country that is an aggressor state, then what kind of citizen will it produce?” asked Poroshenko during his 15 December address. “Certainly not a citizen of Ukraine.”3 

Support for Russia clearly exists among Orthodox in Ukraine under the Moscow Patriarchate. While visiting Kyiv in October 2018, however, the editor of the East-West Church Report also found strong patriotic defense of Ukraine among Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox, and even sympathy for the pro-democracy aspirations of demonstrators on Maidan Square in 2014.

Importance of canonicity

Here, the crucial factor determining affiliation to the Moscow Patriarchate is the belief that it is the only canonical (legitimate) Orthodox structure in Ukraine. This is now being tested by the appearance of a second structure, recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. 

The newly independent body is largely composed of the former Kyiv Patriarchate. This was created in the early 1990s by the late Soviet-era Metropolitan of Kyiv, Filaret (Denysenko), and has been broadly rejected as schismatic by the wider Orthodox world. In October 2018, the East-West Church Report found its members’ position to be close to that of President Poroshenko. “Autocephaly means the triumph of common sense,” Tatiana Derkatch, a former charismatic Protestant who joined the Kyiv Patriarchate in 2005, maintained. “A Church from an aggressor state will not be able to influence the inhabitants of a country which that aggressor state attacked.” According to Kyiv Patriarchate military  chaplain Fr. Igor Mayak, the Moscow Patriarchate “serves Moscow, while the Kyiv Patriarchate serves Ukraine.”

In Kyiv, unreserved support within the Moscow Patriarchate for the new Orthodox Church in Ukraine appears rare. Icon-painter Oleksandr Klymenko criticizes Ecumenical Patriarchate theologians for casting their Patriarch of Constantinople as the head of the Orthodox Church, “whereas the head of the Church is Christ.” Yet, while he previously saw excessive emphasis on national identity only within the Kyiv Patriarchate, “now I don’t see any difference between Patriarch Kirill [of Russia] and Filaret.” Kirill’s theology of the Russian World, explains Klymenko, is presented as “a mystical, cultural body in addition to that of the Church of Christ” and so is “definitely heresy.” It reminds him of sophiology—belief in a unifying principle of Divine Wisdom rejected by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1935 as coming dangerously close to suggesting a fourth element of the Trinity. 

Support for autocephaly

Since 2014—when clashes with pro-Kremlin forces erupted in eastern Ukraine—Orthodox allegiance to the Moscow and Kyiv Patriarchates has see-sawed. Respectively 35 and 22 percent in 2010, by 2018 it was 19 and 43 percent.4 Concerned that thousands of people have been transferring from the Moscow to the Kyiv Patriarchate due to Russia’s backing of the separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine, Klymenko suggests that autocephaly is now “the only possibility of keeping these people within Christ’s Church.”

Moscow Patriarchate parishioner Vladislav Golovin similarly points out that, after more than two decades of existence, young Ukrainians join the Kyiv Patriarchate either unaware of or indifferent to its origins, just as he was attracted to the Moscow Patriarchate as a student in the early 2000s due to positive interaction with a particular priest. “They are just praying, asking God for His blessings,” reasons Golovin. “They do not have such sins as Filaret has, so why do they have to bear his condemnation?” 

Officially, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Moscow has rejected Constantinople’s offer of autocephaly as “artificial, imposed from outside, and not reflecting the internal needs of the Church.”5 Statistics provided to the East-West Church Report by the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center suggest a more nuanced internal picture, however. A nationwide poll conducted by the Center in August 2018 found support for autocephaly as high as 27 percent among self-declared adherents of the Moscow Patriarchate. Forty-two percent were opposed, and a further 31 percent proved either indifferent or unable to answer. 

While he approves of autocephaly in principle—“an independent state should have its own national Church”— Golovin believes it to be dangerous in the current circumstances. His concern is that “radical nationalists will take weapons and say that we [the Moscow Patriarchate] have no right to be here anymore because of the tomos: independence [received] from the Ecumenical Patriarchate.” He further fears that the Russian government could use such developments as grounds to intervene; “for further expansion, not only in Donbass, but into other Ukrainian territory.” Golovin is confident the Poroshenko government would not support attempts by largely secular radical nationalists to drive the Moscow Patriarchate out of Ukraine. “But if he doesn’t intervene, that will be enough; that is the problem.” 

Personal relationships 

One reason repeatedly cited to the East-West Church Report for why autocephaly is unlikely to produce a swift and stark division along national identity lines is that so much depends upon personal relationships. Chair of Ukraine’s parliamentary subcommittee on freedom of conscience, Viktor Yelensky recounted how parishes typically transferred from the Moscow to Kyiv Patriarchates after 2014 “if the priest preached about the Russian World, or where they were forced to commemorate Patriarch Kirill: ‘We can’t bury soldiers one day and the next commemorate the name of Kirill, who blesses this war.’” But Yelensky also noted the example of a Moscow Patriarchate priest who prayed all night with three parishioners as their husbands fought to defend the city of Debaltseve from separatist forces in early 2015. “They didn’t transfer [to the Kyiv Patriarchate], because for them this priest was an authority figure.” 

The importance of personal relationships is also noted by Fr. Georgi Kovalenko, who recently founded the Open Orthodox University in Kyiv as a center for ecumenical and interfaith dialogue. “Many of those who support the idea of autocephaly will look at what foundations this new church is built upon, and to what extent it will not be like the Moscow Patriarchate,” he points out. “What are we swapping for what? If the relationship between bishop and priest will be the same, then what is the point of a priest transferring? Especially if he knows the current bishop, and has very negative information about the alternative one.”

The Moscow Patriarchate broke off all relations with Constantinople on 15 October, five days after the East-West Church Report met with Fr. Georgi. In the light of this decision, another of his suggestions now seems portentous. “For 25 years we have been building our identity on the basis of being part of universal Orthodoxy; that is why we are part of the Moscow Patriarchate, not because we love Moscow and it is our center of the universe,” he maintained. “But the current conflict surrounding the fact that we do not want to accept the actions of the Ecumenical Patriarchate is creating a new reality. Those priests and laypeople for whom being part of world Orthodoxy is valuable are not going to follow Moscow in breaking with world Orthodoxy. Because then they will end up in the very same situation for which they were constantly criticizing Filaret and the Kyiv Patriarchate.” 

Participation in Maidan

Even more striking—given the official position of the Moscow Patriarchate—is the degree of sympathy among its Kyiv adherents for what is known locally as the “Revolution of Dignity”: the pro-democracy demonstrations that toppled the Putin-backed regime of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Russian Patriarch Kirill of Russia publicly condemned these protests as a “revolutionary riot” reminiscent of the 1917 Bolshevik takeover.6 

By contrast, Fr. Georgy Kovalenko was actively involved in the “Revolution of Dignity” as de facto official spokesperson for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Moscow, he told the East-West Church Report, “including speaking from the Euromaidan stage.” 

“I’m for Ukraine,” Vladislav Golovin asserted. “I participated in Maidan, and I do believe that Crimea was an illegal annexation, and I do believe that the Donbass is an undeclared war against my state.” Countering typical claims from Russia, he also insisted that the Maidan protests were not orchestrated by the West. “You can’t pay people to stand on the streets for three months, because no one will put his life under threat for money. A hundred people were killed in two days; they were just moving with wooden shields under Kalashnikov fire. I cannot believe that they did this for money or because the Americans told them to do so. They do believe in the Ukrainian national idea; that Ukraine is a separate country from Russia.” 

In early 2014 Golovin was one of a small group of Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox, including clergy, who attempted to prevent violent clashes during the Maidan events by standing in prayer midway between demonstrators and police. “That was the behavior that I expected from Patriarch Kirill,” Golovin told the East-West Church Report.  “Maybe not here [in Kyiv], maybe in the Donbass, but to stop the war [there], the killings. If we are believers on both sides, if we believe in one God, it is an absolutely idiotic idea to kill each other. But there were only words, statements; that we are deeply disappointed, that we are praying. Okay, you are praying. But what are you doing? Will God listen to your prayers if you are doing nothing?” 

Independently of Golovin, icon-painter Oleksandr Klymenko was also among the small group that stood between the opposing sides. Acknowledging that Maidan “wasn’t always a victory of the forces of light over the forces of darkness,” he believes it revealed Russia and Ukraine as having two different political—and spiritual—cultures. “Russia is a monologic culture, from the word ‘monologue’; that is, power speaks and the people listen. Yanukovych was totally from this monologic system; ‘I speak, you listen.’ It is very close to the Old Testament tradition in which the Lord speaks through the prophets, and ‘Israel hearkens’.” 

In addition to that of the New Testament, Klymenko believes Ukraine is closer to another Old Testament tradition: “When Job argues with and makes claims upon God.” He suggests Maidan was in this way an example of Ukrainians trying to establish dialogue with power: “This attempt to build dialogue isn’t always polite, and it isn’t always successful.” Klymenko sees the same process underway in the Church. “In Ukraine we are also trying to establish dialogue between parishioners and priests; to build a society where people won’t be just ‘servants of God,’ but brothers of, and in, Christ.”

Notes: 

1. [In Ukrainian] “Vystup Prezidenta za rezul’tatami Vseukraїns’koho Pravoslavnoho Ob’ednavchoho Soboru,” 15 December 2018, https://www.president.gov.ua/news/vistupprezidenta-za-rezultatami-vseukrayinskogo-pravoslavno-52050.
2. [In Russian] “Soveshchanie s postoiannymi chlenami Soveta Bezopasnosti,” 12 October 2018, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58813?fbclid=IwAR2Hh0i2KjPCbnVAGOiuJ 59jB-J3IFub8DOf2c2sLR4m9D4H-H9dbla9kH0.
3. “Vystup Prezidenta za rezul’tatami…,” ibid.
4. [In Ukrainian] Biblioteka Tsentru Razumkova, Osoblyvosti Religiĭnoho i Tserkovno-Religiĭnoho Samovyznachennia Ukraïns’kikh Gromadian: Tendentsiï 2010-2018 rr., Kyiv, 2018, 17.
5. [In Russian] “Postanovlenie Sobora episkopov Ukrainskoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi ot 13 noiabria 2018 goda,” 13 November 2018, http://news.church.ua/2018/11/13/postanovleniesobora-episkopov-ukrainskoj-pravoslavnoj-cerkvi-ot-13-noyabrya-2018-goda/?lang=ru.
6. [In Russian] “Slovo Sviateishego Patriarkha Kirilla posle molebna u moshchei sviatitelia Tikhona, Patriarkha Vserossiiskogo, v Donskom monastyre,”
7. April 2014, http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/3621353.html.

Geraldine Fagan is editor of the East-West Church Report