In the Russian Federation, a new syncretistic religion has been formed.

Metropolitan Agafangel | May 12, 2025

We publish a fragment of an article by Archpriest Andrei Kordochkin, a retired cleric of the Moscow Patriarchate, who was prohibited from priestly service in 2023 for criticizing the Special Military Operation. Fr. Andrei, in our view rightly, draws attention to the fact of the formation in the Russian Federation of a new syncretistic "civil religion," which has absorbed, along with religious ritual, the communist tradition—essentially godless in nature. His full article “What Is Wrong with the ‘Immortal Regiment’?” is published here:

https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2025/05/09/chto-netak-sbessmertnim-polkom-a163017

 

“The Immortal Regiment” as a Rite of Political Religion

Along with the St. George ribbon and the “Cathedral of the Armed Forces,” the “Immortal Regiment” has become one of the most recognizable symbols of the modern Russian political religion. This is, of course, a quasi-religion, and it employs Christian images of saints and symbols solely to explain to citizens who they are, constructing their group identity in place of the Soviet one, which has long since passed away. The goal of political religion is to unite people in order to control and subjugate them. It is not a religion in the traditional sense of the word, as spiritual experience, personal faith, or adherence to religious doctrine are not necessary conditions for its adherents. Its chief dogma is the belief that the state is omnipotent and all-good, and therefore patriotism, understood as obedience to the state, is the highest form of civic and religious virtue.

Political religion requires its own calendar, and its central feast is May 9th, because no other common denominators remained after the collapse of the USSR. The main day of the civic calendar is now called the “civil Pascha.” This curious expression appears, in particular, in the article “Pascha after May Day: the Russian man is broad — and must not be narrowed,” published on the official resource “RIA Novosti.” [https://ria.ru/20240501/prazdniki-1943199960.html]

As a manifesto of political religion, the article abolishes the boundaries between the religious, the non-religious, and the anti-religious. The author rejoices that Lenin’s approval rating is rising alongside religiosity and declares: “Among believers, far from all consider Lenin to be the Antichrist, and among Lenin’s admirers there are many Orthodox.” This omnivorousness is proclaimed as “a sign of our strength.” “This may not please many Orthodox, but it is accepted by many Orthodox. And it is far better and more correct than trying to stir up confrontation, betting on the division of society into right and left, Orthodox and communists,” the author writes.

Let us recall syncretism and disregard for contradictions as one of the main characteristics of fascism according to Umberto Eco. Truth is not needed, thought is not needed, and even less so is a culture of dissent and differing opinions. Nothing at all is needed except social glue. The right to individual, non-state human existence has been abolished.

The Soviet regime and the Soviet army are being Christianized post mortem. “Just as the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, so too today’s participants in the Russian special operation in Ukraine are God’s army,” says Konstantin Malofeev, calling Victory Day the “second Pascha.” If there was no contradiction between Christianity and the Soviet regime, then there should be none now either. The best example of this is the trademark of the “Immortal Regiment,” registered with Rospatent: St. George the Trophy-Bearer slays the dragon while inside a red star. “Under this trademark, it is permitted to produce toys, works of art, tableware, clothing, accessories, as well as ammunition and cartridges,” reports TASS. [https://tass.ru/obschestvo/23851409]

Instead of opposing substitutions and manipulation, the institutional Church supported Putin's newspeak. “The Pascha of Christ and the civil Pascha always go hand in hand,” says Metropolitan Alexy of Tula and Yefremov. [https://tulaeparhia.ru/mitropolit/4266-2/] “For me now there are two main feasts — Pascha and Victory Day… Victory Day is a celebration and a unifying event for the most diverse people: when else in history has there been such unity between atheists and believers, Orthodox and Catholics, Muslims and even Buddhists,” a priest echoes him.

[https://sobor.by/page/O_Aleksey_Klimov_]

And what if we remember that the task of the Church is the preaching of the teaching of Christ, which not only unites but also divides? “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Matt. 10:34–35). Is it not obvious that the unification of people cannot in itself be a good, and that the most terrifying totalitarian societies were utterly unified by the pathos of struggle against external or internal enemies? Is it not obvious that, in the end, worship of the Antichrist may become possible only within the framework of the “consolidation” of people through the acceptance of his authority?

No, it is not obvious.

“Often our Paschal week overlaps with the celebration of Victory Day. In the West, for example, May 8 is the Day of Reconciliation. Well, they have such a perception of life, and reconciliation may be their goal. But what sense would there have been for Christ to come and reconcile with the devil, with sin? Was it for this that God came to earth? There is only one goal: to conquer,” says another priest from annexed Crimea. In other words, peaceful life has no value, and life is struggle.

The Kremlin philosopher Alexander Dugin states clearly that war is the highest manifestation of human existence, importing the ideas of the German jurist Carl Schmitt and other philosophers of the Third Reich into contemporary Russia. To the question, “Do the Russians want war?” — one is inclined to respond in the spirit of the times: “It’s not so straightforward.”

The Church and the “Immortal Regiment”

Back in 2017, the head of the department for work with public organizations of the Synodal Department for Church Relations with Society and the Media, Archpriest Dimitry Roshchin, proposed to “expand the ‘Immortal Regiment’ in a historical perspective, so that along with photographs of participants in the Great Patriotic War, portraits of heroes of the First World War, Russian heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812, and so on, could also be carried.”

[https://www.mskagency.ru/materials/2632168]

The reaction was extremely sharp: “Blagodatny Ogon’” published an article titled “An Anti-State Provocation,” [https://blagogon.ru/digest/756/] Fr. Dimitry was forced to apologize for having been misunderstood [https://politsovet.ru/54349-rpc-otreklas-ot-kritiki-bessmertnogo-polka.html] and “Pravoslavie.ru” [https://www.pravoslavie.ru/100599.html] declared the Church’s full support for the “Immortal Regiment.”

That same year, Patriarch Kirill called for making the participation of clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church in the “Immortal Regiment” more visible, [https://tass.ru/obschestvo/4244209] so as not to remain on the sidelines of the mass “consolidation,” “although, of course, this is a voluntary matter.” Over time, the word “voluntary,” as often happens, was lost. And in 2024, the head of the Ulan-Ude and Buryatia diocese issued a circular according to which each parish must:

1) Independently produce placards of heroes and participants of the Great Patriotic War and the Special Military Operation, received from the diocesan secretary in electronic form;

2) By April 26, hold a lesson in courage in youth Orthodox clubs and organizations, among young Cossacks and students of Sunday schools, and submit a news item for the Diocese’s website;

3) Each rector must provide participants from his parish with two carnations.

[https://pravoslavnaya-buryatiya.ru/2024/04/10/czirkulyar-%E2%84%96-87-ot-9-aprelya-2024-g-ob-uchastii-v-tradiczionnoj-akczii-bessmertnyj-polk-2024/]

But involving the clergy proved to be insufficient.

In Soviet times, the Church lived in a parallel reality with respect to the state, especially at the grassroots level. It is difficult to imagine a space where an icon could appear alongside a red flag. This worked neither doctrinally nor stylistically. From within that era, Vladimir Voinovich brilliantly foresaw the fusion of Orthodoxy and Sovietism as the basis of state ideology in the figure of Father Zvezdoniy in his novel 2042, but even he lacked the imagination to envision a procession with crosses under red flags.

Now there is nothing unusual about it. “In a procession, the sisters and guests of the monastery, with icons and banners, as well as portraits of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers—defenders of our Motherland—walked through the monastery grounds, paying their debt of remembrance to the Heavenly ‘Immortal Regiment.’ After this, a commemorative meal was held with favorite songs from the war years, and poems and prose dedicated to the Heroes of the war were recited,” reports the website of the Petropavlovsky Monastery in the Khabarovsk Diocese.

[https://петропавловский-монастырь.рф/?p=4773]

In 2023, the nuns of the Minsk St. Elisabeth Convent, known for their support of the war, went out in a procession to the singing of “Katyusha.” [https://t.me/christianvision/3256] The “Immortal Regiment,” originally conceived as a completely secular project, mutated into a religious procession, into a form of worship. [https://www.svoboda.org/a/29245602.html]

Meanwhile, we still have 17 years to wait for 2042.

In the film Victory — Our Civil Pascha, [https://spastv.ru/pobeda-nasha-grazhdanskaya-pasha-svyashhennik-veteran-ioann-mironov-velikaya-vojna-glazami-detej/] produced by the channel Spas, it is said that the idea of the “Immortal Regiment” came to the pensioner Gennady Ivanov in a dream. If this is an allusion to the words of Holy Scripture — “I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh… and your old men shall dream dreams” (Joel 2:28 [LXX: Dan. 2:17]) — then the conclusion is clear: the “Immortal Regiment” was invented by the Holy Spirit, and not at all by Tomsk journalists or even by the pensioner Ivanov.

Eternal life — in the regiment or in Christ?

From within the Russian Orthodox Church, there has been virtually no theological reflection on the “Immortal Regiment” as a phenomenon of political religion.

When it was just beginning to be synthesized with religious processions, a classmate of mine recalled the Day of the Dead in Mexico, when a home altar is decorated with photographs of deceased relatives. He wrote to me: “Archaic ritual and the collective unconscious, which for centuries tried to bury Christianity, and which the Soviet regime then spent decades trying to uproot, have prevailed and sprouted in an unexpected place.”

If this is so, then the “Immortal Regiment,” among other things, is the state’s attempt to respond to the religious longing of a mostly non-religious populace by creating a totemic cult in which the ancestors are the gods, and society is formed through veneration of them. Children performing in front of portraits of veterans is a quite characteristic illustration of this new old cult.

A few days ago, one of the beneficiaries of our foundation Peace to All, [https://www.mir-vsem.info/]  Fr. Iakov Vorontsov from Kazakhstan, described in some detail how, in the “Immortal Regiment,” spiritual meanings are replaced by state-driven ones:

The very name “Immortal Regiment” implies that a person attains immortality not through Christ, not through the Resurrection, not in the Church — but through participation in war and in state memory…

The “Immortal Regiment” has become part of a new state pseudo-religion founded on the cult of war. An important attribute of this religion is the myth of the “eternal struggle against fascism,” of the “greatness of the nation,” of Russia’s special destiny as a power opposing evil. For a Christian, the substitution is clear: the worship of God is replaced with the worship of the state and its heroes. The war hero here takes the place of a saint, and at times — even the place of Christ: he “suffers for the people,” “dies for the sake of peace,” “rises again in memory.” In parades, songs, and speeches, the hero is commemorated in a manner almost liturgical. His suffering becomes the source of national “atonement.” Such is the substitution of Christian eschatology with political messianism.

[https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02VgAtiuFhidSetC8Gwefds32rqJ95svhNJptmpc6He96NQkJkE2GsWbyUm49K4vMQl&id=100011220767459]

There is little to add to this. Indeed, the theme of memory is important. In Christianity, “eternal memory” is not the memory of men, which is brief and limited. To say of a person “God remembers him” means to say that he is alive in God. Here, however, the guardian of eternal life is declared to be not God — the Creator — but the state. It is no longer the Church, but the state that unites the living and the dead into one body. “The state must lay claim to the whole person, to the idea that it can provide him with everything necessary from cradle to grave, and even into the afterlife… the moment it ceases to claim all this, it will immediately begin to disintegrate,” wrote Egor Kholmogorov in his programmatic report Atomic Orthodoxy.

Through the “Immortal Regiment,” the state proclaims its right of possession over a person not only during their lifetime but also after death.

In political religion, the task of the institutional Church is to present secular meanings as sacred, and thus to sacralize both the political regime and the decisions it makes as manifestations of the will of God. Today, political religion presents the “Special Military Operation” as a “holy war,” as is clearly stated in the “mandate” of the “World Russian People’s Council.”

[https://vrns.ru/news/nakaz-xxv-vsemirnogo-russkogo-narodnogo-sobora-nastoyashchee-i-budushchee-russkogo-mira/]

However, there is no Orthodox theology of “holy war”; the image is borrowed from the song Arise, Vast Country. The monstrous synthesis of the “Katechon” doctrine [ὁ κατέχων = "the restrainer"], [https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2024/06/10/bog-voiny-i-demony] church banners, red flags, blurred boundaries between heroism and holiness, and fabricated stories about airborne processions with icons during the Great Patriotic War makes it possible to present the USSR as an instrument in the hands of God and its history as sacred history.

By declaring itself the “descendants of the victors,” the Putin regime proclaims itself not merely as legitimate but as a sacred institution. “Russia is the kind of country that is directly governed by God,” says the man who sees himself as synonymous with the word “directly.” If he has said that “it was the Lord’s will” to begin the invasion of Ukraine, there is no reason to think he does not believe it. He has come to believe that God can be summoned at will and put in the service of his own power. Today, the “Immortal Regiment” is his method of putting our memory — of the victims of fascism and of those who fought against it — at the service of himself and the war he has unleashed.

Fr. Andrei Kordochkin

 

Russian source:

http://internetsobor.org/index.php/novosti/mirovoe-pravoslavie/moskovskaya-patriarkhiya/v-rf-sformirovana-novaya-sinkreticheskaya-religiya