An Interview with Marrit Andrejeva and Irina Paert
In early September the editor of the East-West Church Report spoke about the impact of the war in Ukraine upon church life with several parishioners of St. John the Baptist Orthodox Church in Nõmme, a leafy suburb of the Estonian capital, Tallinn. The parish is under the Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.
Briefly, she spoke with Galina, a parishioner who hails from western Ukraine but who has lived in Estonia for many years. A Russian speaker, Galina related the shock and stress of having two brothers fighting in the Ukrainian armed forces while her Russian-speaking colleagues in Tallinn have proved divided in their response to the war.
The editor then spoke at length with Marrit Andrejeva, an Estonian interpreter and translator of English, Russian, French, and German. Irina Paert, a fellow parishioner, joined partway through the conversation. Originally from Russia, Irina is an associate professor at Estonia’s University of Tartu, where she now focuses on the history of Orthodoxy in the Baltic region. Both are active in St. John the Evangelist School, an Orthodox high school founded by the parish. The interview took place in English.
How did the invasion of Ukraine impact you and your fellow Orthodox in Estonia under the Moscow Patriarchate?
Marrit: It certainly threw us into a very deep crisis. Especially Estonians—the war broke out on 24th February, our independence day and a national holiday. Early in the morning many people go up to the Tall Herman Tower [a medieval tower in Tallinn’s Old Town]. It is usually very cold. As the sun rises, our national flag is raised and the national anthem sung. This year that day started on a very different note—it actually acquired the meaning it had initially. It resurrected some painful memories, for every [Estonian] family experienced deportation during the Soviet era, and now something similar was happening on that day in our own age.
After that we were all in shock for a while, just like everyone else in the world, but a little more so here because we are near to Russia and we could perceive ourselves in a similar situation to Ukraine. We were also holding our breath to see how our church would react. You expect the church to reflect the confusion and pain that is in your soul somehow, to bring some clarity to the situation, and to offer comfort. But the initial statement made by the Patriarch [Kirill] came like a second shock wave. Our Estonian parishioners have had a very hard time figuring out how to position themselves. None of us have come [to the Moscow Patriarchate] for political reasons, we just followed our priest and found something really deep there. For me personally, it was really the deepest crisis in my spiritual life, because I had always been able to rely upon the church to offer me stability, a safe haven. Even if it had been an attack against us—from Russia or some other country—it would not have been as hard as seeing the church hierarchy backing the killing of people in another country.
What also characterizes this period for me: I don’t know what other Orthodox parishes think or what their priests think. On the one hand, you are kind of afraid to touch these issues, thinking it might come out that they have a completely different position, one I’d consider un-Christian. But you also don’t want to cut anyone off completely either. We should try to preserve our inner peace as the most important goal, to work with our own souls no matter what is happening, because if we all just become filled with anger and opinions and arguments, this isn’t Christian either. It neither helps the Ukrainians nor brings us closer to God.
My initial reaction, actually, was to be worried for dissenting Russians. For me it is clear that the Ukrainians are victims, but Russians who do not agree with this war are made participants. I started to follow some who have been visiting us here: [Christian poet] Olga Sedakova, [Moscow priest] Fr. Aleksy Uminsky. What were they saying? Then I found [Moscow priest] Fr. Ioann Guaita—the first voice to come out of our whole church was that of an Italian priest! He gave a very short sermon on the war saying that St. John the Baptist was beheaded because he told the truth, whereas none of us is facing such a punishment. That was the whole sermon! [Editor’s note: Less than a minute, the 12 March sermon may be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im4asuvx_RQ.]
I felt I was living some sort of schizophrenia—I was just lost. If someone from the church hierarchy had said even two words, human words! Before performing the song “Gorod Zolotoi” [Russian: “Golden Town”] in concert [on 2 June], [Russian rock musician Boris] Grebenshchikov said: “I pray that during this song at least one bullet would miss the target, and that no house would be destroyed.” It is so simple! When your soul is aching this much you need something to address it. You cannot just stick to the formulas and say, “We have always had wars…”. So it has been a major crisis—and it is still ongoing.
Are you aware of any parishioners who are very supportive of the war?
Marrit: A kind of awkward situation exists where you would not really discuss it. I do not think there are any really active supporters of the war, but I know there are some parishioners who have come from eastern Ukraine and brought out their family by now, and who say, “The Ukrainians went too far,” or “It was justified to an extent,” because they have seen suffering there. Once we are talking about war, I am sure there are casualties and ugliness on both sides. Sometimes I ask local Russians such as taxi drivers, and there is a lot of the narrative that [Ukrainian] refugees are receiving privileges, taking away our jobs, and so on. Estonians, on the other hand, are very idealistic—we feel we have to help the Ukrainians, and we associate them with the Estonian refugees who had to flee [the Soviets] during and after the Second World War. We see the same situation repeating itself, whereas for the Russians there are many more shades of gray.
There are all kinds of people [among refugees], I am sure, but when you look at the bigger picture, there is nothing to justify what has happened. If we refuse to see the situation for what it is—to say black is black and white is white—then we are also failing to do our Christian duty, to follow the call of Christ. That is the main task in our Christian life, and here is a very critical situation where it is actually manifested. It is a situation that brings out the true maturity of our faith.
In our parish, the Estonian viewpoint is particularly strong. Estonians are a minority, but quite an active and committed minority. They are also pretty well known in Estonian society—we have actors, a film director, TV journalists, and Arvo Pärt [the internationally renowned Estonian composer] is also a member of our parish. Many of us actually found our way here via the Orthodox Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex, England—that is also how I found the Orthodox Church. We were all impressed at how this monastery has made it possible for different nationalities to come together in a universal Orthodoxy.
Have any Moscow Patriarchate clergy in Estonia voiced concern about the support of their leadership for Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine?
Marrit: Our [Estonian] priest, Fr. Toomas Hirvoja, has certainly mentioned it. He is a man of deep prayer. While he is not a politically minded person, he has always followed the news, and he has mentioned current events in his sermons since the war started. For instance, I remember him making a link to justification of this war when the Gospel reading was the passage saying that a time would come when people would think that by killing, they would be doing a good thing in God’s eyes [John 16:2, “They will put you out of the synagogues; indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.”] When Fr. Toomas recently consecrated crosses for our new school building, he also said that the message of the cross could not be spread with tanks and weapons.
Metropolitan Yevgeny (Reshetnikov), the head of the Estonian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), added his signature to a 17 March joint statement by Estonian church leaders condemning Russia’s military activities in Ukraine.
Marrit: Yes. We were all immensely relieved—not only our parish, but also our school. Irina: But he [Metropolitan Yevgeny] also gave some very unfortunate interviews.
Marrit: First he signed the declaration from all Estonian Christian churches. Then, a couple of weeks later, he sort of backtracked. He tried to say, “Well, we actually wanted to introduce this and that [wording], but they didn’t want to take it.”
Irina: And, “We can’t know the whole truth.” Then, due to media criticism, all parishes were supposed to read a prayer against those attacking the Orthodox Church!
Marrit: It is true that there is occasionally biased coverage in the mainstream Estonian media, when they ask for comment from people who are not familiar with the situation at all. They would just say, “Yes, I know that they pray for Putin’s victory in the Moscow Patriarchate churches.” So an unsubstantiated claim like that goes into the article, then it gets picked up by the editorial, with no proof whatsoever…
At the beginning of March you both signed an open letter with 120 Orthodox laity, asking Patriarch Kirill to appeal to President Putin for an immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine and to “publicly condemn the deeds of those who support bloodshed.” Orthodox Lent had begun, and it questioned how aggressor and victim could celebrate Easter together or pray for peace without repentance, as proclaimed in Matthew 5:23-24: “If you are offering your gift at the altar… first go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.”
Marrit: It was really just a call, before Easter, to remind everyone that Easter is a time when we embrace each other, but that we must first do metanoia [repentance]. Also, we have always tried to explain ourselves to the outside world, and there was a crisis in the sense of how our school would be perceived. We could sense that families were really worried once they heard the statements from the Patriarch, knowing that our parish is part of the Moscow Patriarchate, even though the school operates independently. First we thought, “It is obvious that we have never done anything like propaganda and they know us, so what is the point explaining that you are not a Russian agent? It would be ridiculous!” But more and more people were turning to us with questions about our position, so in the end we felt that we had to publish a statement saying that we do not agree with the Patriarch’s words. When we did, we could tell that this was a huge relief to very many people.
Irina: It was a call to stop the war, basically. It also brought a little bit of moral pressure to bear because Arvo Pärt signed it, which made it appear quite high profile.
Did you receive a reply?
Irina: An official response came after a few weeks, worded very typically as a polite but quite firm account of events of eight years ago. [Editor’s note: In 2014, once protests on Kyiv’s Maidan Square led to the ousting of the then proMoscow regime, Russian-backed separatists seized territory in the largely Russianspeaking Donbass region of southeastern Ukraine. As the Ukrainian military sought to restore control, they were widely blamed by Russian state media for civilian casualties. Referring to this context, a common refrain among supporters of Putin’s 2022 military action asks: “Where have you been for the past eight years?”] Some Orthodox I know commented similarly on my social media posts, saying, “Well, what about [NATO’s 1999 bombing of] Serbia?” and “What about the children of the Donbass?” Well, if we are going to bomb the children of Mariupol, will it help the children of the Donbass? I think this is exactly what we should be thinking about when we go to church: What makes me Christian? What do I pray for? How do I formulate my prayer so that I am talking, not about this kind of retaliatory justice, but about truth?
Marrit: In hindsight, the open letter was mostly just therapy for ourselves—we were able to put into words what we were feeling. My husband sometimes says I am just getting dragged into political matters. But I feel that the church hierarchy has dragged me, because my church is doing politics, and so I have to react. I want to stick to my faith as I imagined it to be or longed for it to be. It is not as if I want all priests to go out and demonstrate or be activists.
Irina: This is also a time when people are really starting to adjust their identity. Those who identify themselves as Orthodox before everything else now have to think about what their priority is. Do they identify themselves as Christians and only then as Orthodox? Christians as citizens, and only Russian or Estonian after that—I think that is very important. Then you can really think about the Gospel: about what Christ said and whether your church really thinks that way, about what your conscience tells you. Conscience is something people find very easy to put aside. They might say, “Well, this is what the television tells me, what my Patriarch tells me.”
This is a real problem—in Russia there is so much emphasis upon the authorities, including spiritual authority; what this or that starets [Russian: spiritual elder] said. Somehow you do not see that the starets may be saying something very general, meaning that you should actually listen to your conscience first. There is a real problem of faith and ethics here. There are many pious people—and they are absolutely pious—who simply have no ability to make ethical judgments, because their ethics is totally swallowed up by rituals and piety. How is it that people have not even managed to experience this kind of schizophrenia, as Marrit describes it? For them the picture of the world is totally in unison with what Patriarch Kirill says.
The pedagogy of our school aims at teaching children to get in contact with reality. In lessons they might be shown seeds that you put into the soil. They see how they grow— “Here are the seeds of the grape, and this is a grape.” Then they read the Gospel. So they start with real things, and only then do they move onto the level of metaphor—not the other way around. You don’t start with myth and then put reality into this myth. Maybe that is exactly the problem with this kind of bad Orthodoxy—this mythological understanding of ritual. It replaces the reality of Christ.
