You see Russian priests blessing shells and rockets before they fly into Ukraine—and you wonder. How can this be? What happened to “Thou shalt not kill”?
And yet, Putin insists on it. He is openly religious. One of his demands is for the Russian Orthodox Church to be restored in Ukraine, as if faith itself must march alongside tanks.
So why does he need this? Why do priests in Russia support the war?
Today we’ll uncover the hidden role of religion in Russia—how it has been twisted, broken, and used as a weapon.

The Difference Between the Church in Russia and the West

If we set aside questions of faith for a moment and look only at the social role of the church, something striking appears.
In the West, the Catholic Church was an independent power. At times, even a military one. For centuries, it was immensely wealthy. Beyond preaching, it carried out social functions: it ran hospitals, schools, and orphanages. It offered not only faith but education, care, and charity.
Protestant churches were something different again: a form of self-organization. They became meeting places, centers of community, hubs of local self-government. Faith and society intertwined in a way that encourages participation and independence.
Orthodoxy in Russia took a different path. It inherited its model from Byzantium—a topic I explore in another video on how Byzantium shaped the Russian state. In that tradition, the Church was never outside the state. It was part of the state. Its job was not to stand apart, but to defend the regime, spread ideology, and help keep records and control.
Why did the Russian Church never stand on its own? Unlike Catholicism, it never had a military wing. No crusaders, no armies to protect its independence. Yes, it had money, privileges, and authority. But it lacked force. And in Russia, without force, you serve someone who has it.
So if the Church wanted to keep its privileges, it had only one path: loyalty. Absolute loyalty. It had to bind itself to the state—and serve it faithfully, century after century.

The Birth of a State Religion

We know very little about what people in ancient Rus’ believed before Christianity arrived. But one thing is clear: the adoption of Christianity was a turning point of enormous importance.
For the princes of Rus’, Christianity wasn’t just about faith. It was about power, prestige, and politics. By embracing the faith of Byzantium—the dominant empire of the early Middle Ages—they gained access to trade, legitimacy, and even dynastic marriages with Byzantine emperors. To a medieval ruler, that was priceless.
And yet, Christianity did not erase the old world overnight. Pagan traditions lived alongside the new faith for centuries. On one hand, people wanted to follow the prince and fit into his court. On the other, they couldn’t just abandon their own rituals—the magic of planting and harvest, the charms for healing, the rites for marriage and burial. Everyday life was steeped in paganism, and Christianity simply layered itself on top.
For ordinary people, Christianity also offered protection. Crusaders marched into pagan lands and sold captives into slavery—to Byzantium and to the Arab markets. That was not considered a sin, because at that time, a non-believer was not seen as fully human. So if you didn’t want to end up on a galley, or in a quarry, or castrated and sold as a household servant, the choice was simple: accept baptism.
In the Middle Ages, religion was never just about the soul. It was a way to mark who was “ours” and who was an outsider. Nations and citizenship didn’t exist yet. What mattered was whether you were a fellow believer and whether you belonged to the prince’s domain.
And Christianity became the only force strong enough to unite the countless tribes scattered across the lands we now call Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. The state itself was too poor to build a bureaucracy or pay officials. So the Church was forced to take on much of the work—administration, education, rituals of life and death. Which meant one thing: the state had to keep the Church on a short leash, making sure it remained part of the machinery of power.

The Great Schism of the 17th Century

Nothing shows how closely the Russian state and the Orthodox Church were bound together more than the great Church Schism of the mid-1600s.
Patriarch Nikon, with the backing of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, launched a set of radical reforms. His goal was to bring Moscow’s religious practices in line with the rest of the Orthodox world. Why? Because centuries had passed without any comparison, and by then, Russian rituals had drifted far from Greek, Ukrainian, or Bulgarian ones.
Part of this divergence came from isolation. After all, Kievan Rus’ and then Muscovy spent centuries under Mongol rule, cut off from Orthodox neighbors. Meanwhile, Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians were absorbed into the orbit of the Catholic Church—or, later, the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Their practices evolved in one direction, while Moscow’s evolved in another.
But as Muscovy expanded westward into lands populated by fellow Orthodox believers—Ukrainians and Belarusians—the differences became impossible to ignore. And something had to be done. Nikon chose the most radical option: scrap Moscow’s version and adopt the “Western” Orthodox standard.
The reforms seemed small on paper but enormous in meaning: the name of Jesus to be written with two “i”s instead of one. “Иисус” vs. “Исус”. The sign of the cross to be made with three fingers, not two. Dozens of corrections in liturgical books.
The reaction was explosive. A huge portion of the faithful rejected the changes. These would become the Old Believers—later branded as schismatics, heretics, and fanatics. They clung to the old ways, insisting that what their ancestors had practiced for centuries could not suddenly be declared a sin.
But the Council of Moscow in 1666 did exactly that. It condemned the old rites as heresy. Nobody blinked at the contradiction: the same rituals once performed by tsars themselves were now anathema.
Why such harshness? Because the state demanded unification. To build a functioning military, to defend borders, to levy taxes, to suppress separatism—you needed a single ideology. And in that era, there was only one ideology strong enough: a common faith.
So persecution followed. Old Believers were hunted, exiled, and burned alive. And from the 18th century onward, the pattern hardened: Orthodoxy would serve as the ideological glue of empire.
Instead of empowering the Church, the state shackled it. After Patriarch Adrian’s death in 1700, Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate entirely. In its place, he created the Holy Synod—a government office led by a secular official. For more than two centuries, until the October Revolution, the Russian Church would have no patriarch at all.
Even confession lost its sanctity. By law, priests were required to report crimes revealed in the confessional, especially if they touched the state. Imagine that: the sacrament turned into surveillance.
Religion had become not just faith—but a weapon of governance.

Religious Minorities

Because Russia was an empire, it encompassed countless peoples and countless faiths—from shamanism in the far northeast, to Islam in the Volga and Caucasus, to Catholicism in Poland, to Buddhism along the Chinese frontier.
The state tolerated these religions, but always with suspicion. And there was one iron rule: you could only convert into Orthodoxy. Never out of it.
For centuries, changing faith in the “wrong” direction carried severe punishment. In the early 18th century, conversion away from Orthodoxy could bring the stake. By the time of Catherine the Great, the penalty was “softened” to prison. Still, ten years behind bars for adopting another faith was hardly mercy.
Nor could non-Orthodox preach among the Orthodox. To do so was called “seducing from Orthodoxy”—a crime that carried long prison terms.
The Russian Empire became, in effect, a confessional state. Every citizen was assigned to a religious institution: a church, synagogue, mosque, or Buddhist temple. And these institutions doubled as state record offices. They registered births, marriages, and deaths. If the priest or rabbi did not write it down, in the eyes of the state, it did not exist.
This created endless problems, especially with mixed marriages. If you were Orthodox, you could not be married in a church to a Muslim woman. And you could not go to a mosque either—you were Orthodox by law. The only solution? She had to convert. Because for you to adopt Islam meant prison.
But not everyone was willing to change faith, even on paper. And if the marriage was not recognized, then the children were considered illegitimate. That meant trouble with inheritance, with property, and with social standing.
Jews faced a different set of restrictions. They were not forced to convert—but they were confined to the Pale of Settlement: a cluster of provinces in today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland. Conversion to Orthodoxy lifted those restrictions overnight, which explains why many conversions existed only on bureaucratic paper. I have another video covering this topic. Check it out.
And this pattern was repeated across the empire. The Mari, Udmurts, Chuvash, Komi, and many other peoples were officially “Christianized,” but in practice they quietly preserved their ancestral beliefs.
Finally, in April 1905—under the pressure of the first Russian Revolution—the government issued the Decree on Strengthening Religious Toleration. It was a turning point. It granted formal equality to representatives of all faiths, while still preserving Orthodoxy’s dominance. And for the first time, it allowed conversion out of Orthodoxy.
The effect was immediate and dramatic. In the following decade, more than 400,000 people officially left the Orthodox Church.

The Church and Soviet Power

Before October 1917, the Bolsheviks thought religion would wither away naturally. As society moved toward communism, they assumed, the masses would “awaken” and leave faith behind on their own.
In 1918, the new government issued the Decree on the Separation of Church from State and School. Officially, it was meant to strip the Orthodox Church of its privileges. But the result was something the Bolsheviks had not expected. In a paradox, the atheist-communists became initiators of the first real religious emancipation in Russian history.
Now, for the first time, sectarians, Muslims, Jews—everyone—stood equal before the law. Equal before a hostile, often brutal law, yes, but equal nonetheless.
The outcome was surprising. In the 1920s, villages across Soviet Russia saw a boom in religious life. The Old Believers grew in numbers. So did Protestants, especially Baptists and Pentecostals. For them, the fall of the Orthodox monopoly opened doors.
On the ground, however, chaos reigned. Anything could happen: churches or mosques smashed by mobs one week, a priest or imam elected head of a village soviet the next—simply because he was the only literate man for miles around. But many believers, of course, could not reconcile themselves with living under the rule of militant atheists.
For religious minorities, the 1920s were, strangely, a window of opportunity. But for the former “state church,” Orthodoxy, it was a time of crisis.
In 1917, after two centuries without one, the Russian Church finally elected a patriarch. But soon after, it fractured into three rival camps. By parliamentary logic, you could call them left, right, and center.
On the “left” were the Renovationists—priests who wanted to democratize the church, modernize worship, even translate liturgy from Church Slavonic into Russian. They were open to dialogue with Soviet officials. For decades, historians dismissed them as opportunists, nicknaming them “Red Priests.” But recent research shows that many were sincere: they truly believed socialism and Orthodoxy could be reconciled.
On the “right” was the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. These were émigré clergy tied to the White movement. They broke away completely, first settling in Yugoslavia, then later in America.
And in the “center” remained the official patriarchal church, led by Patriarch Tikhon. His relationship with the Soviet state was deeply hostile, and the strain broke his health. He died in 1925, too early. His successor was arrested, then executed.
It was Metropolitan Sergius who finally stepped in. In 1927, he issued a declaration to the faithful: We wish to remain Orthodox, and at the same time, we recognize the Soviet Union as our civil homeland. Its joys and successes are our joys and successes; its misfortunes are our misfortunes. Any blow against the Union, whether war, boycott, or disaster, is a blow against us.
It was loyalty, written in black and white.
But not everyone agreed. Those unwilling to pledge allegiance to the Soviet state broke away, forming the underground “catacomb” churches. The name itself pointed back to the first Christians hiding in Roman catacombs. Some communities operated semi-openly, like the parish of the Savior-on-the-Blood in Leningrad. Others went fully underground. By day, parishioners worked in factories. At night, they returned to tiny “cells” hidden in communal apartments.
But when Stalin replaced the chaos of the 1920s with systematic terror, believers were among the first targets. And underground monasteries made the perfect case for repression: ready-made “anti-Soviet organizations,” whose members often confessed proudly in interrogation that they despised the regime.
Faith, once more, had become a crime.

The Church in the Soviet Union

At the start of the 20th century, religion was central to self-identity for millions of subjects of the Russian Empire. But the Soviet state did everything it could to destroy that bond. Why? Because the Church was a competitor. It offered its own ideology, its own way of uniting people. And the Bolsheviks would not tolerate rivals.
By the late 1920s, the campaign began: churches were demolished en masse. Any excuse would do—“the building interferes with parades”—and the walls were brought down with dynamite. Priests were targeted with fabricated charges of “anti-Soviet activity.” Children who wore crosses were humiliated in school, pressured to renounce not just their faith but even their religious parents.
At the heart of the conflict was one contradiction: the Church gave citizens a way to gather, to solve problems together, even to form political solidarity. The Soviet system allowed only one center of power: the state. Citizens were not supposed to unite on their own—unless the Party permitted it.
And yet, repression did not kill faith. On the contrary, in times of terror, people often turned more strongly to religion. In 1937, at the very height of Stalin’s Great Terror, the regime conducted a census. It included a question on religious belief. The results were shocking: over 56% of the population declared themselves believers, and another 20% refused to answer at all. The full data were never published, and the census organizers were themselves executed. Two years later, the next census had no question about religion. Problem solved.
Then came World War II, and what historians call Stalin’s “turn to the Church.” The state loosened its grip. In 1943, with Stalin’s approval, the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate was re-established. Islam also regained official religious centers, and even some Old Believer communities were legalized. All of them operated under strict state oversight—watched, distrusted, but allowed to exist.
During perestroika, the religious landscape exploded into color. Foreign missionaries poured into the Soviet collapse like pioneers into a frontier. Protestants—Mormons, Adventists, Baptists—appeared. Arab Islamic preachers arrived. So did American Hare Krishnas and Scientologists. New local sects sprang up too, ranging from harmless blends of Christianity and New Age mysticism to darker cults like the White Brotherhood, which prophesied the end of the world in November 1993.
In 1997, the state tried to impose order again. A federal law on “freedom of conscience and religious associations” declared equal rights for all—believers and atheists alike. But at the same time, it gave Orthodoxy a special status as Russia’s “traditional faith.” The law also honored Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism as religions forming part of Russia’s historical heritage.
From that moment, Russia settled into a system of “traditional religions.” Official institutions—the Moscow Patriarchate, the Muslim Spiritual Board, the Federation of Jewish Communities—enjoyed state support and protection. Everyone outside those structures? Their existence became precarious, uncertain, sometimes even dangerous.

The Church and Putinism

The diversity of the 1990s did not last long. As Russia slid back into authoritarianism, religious policy followed the same path.
Vladimir Putin is a believer—sincerely, perhaps—but his version of Christianity is peculiar. It is a faith that pays little attention to commandments like “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness.”
Under his watch, the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate once again fused with the state. It gained extraordinary privileges: tax exemptions, direct state subsidies, and public land. And just as Putin displayed his religiosity, so did every official who wanted to remain in fashion.
Today, it is hard to find an office of a Russian bureaucrat that does not feature both an icon and a portrait of Putin. Across the country, churches have risen—some rebuilt, others newly constructed. Monasteries once again attract pilgrims.
But here lies the contradiction: Russian society is not religious. Four generations lived under Soviet rule. They simply grew up without the habit of church, prayer, or ritual.
Instead, superstition filled the void. Horoscopes, tarot cards, folk magic, shamans, and healers became part of daily life. According to a 2021 poll, 66% of Russians identified as Orthodox. But in practice, for most this means little more than wearing a cross, baptizing children, or holding a church wedding—because it looks beautiful. Only a small fraction actually read the Bible or participate regularly in church life. The core of true parishioners are the elderly.
When people call themselves “Orthodox,” often it simply means “I am Russian.” Or it is a gesture of loyalty to the state. Many say they believe in God—but they don’t need the Church as an intermediary. Can this be called religion? Probably not. It is more a vague hope in some higher force that will protect them, if necessary.
That is why the Russian Orthodox Church has become not a people’s church, but an officials’ church. Its main mission is not faith—it is loyalty. And because huge sums flow through it, it works to please the authorities. That is why priests sprinkle holy water on missiles, bless mercenaries, and sanctify wars in foreign lands.
For the ruling class, religion is a convenient justification. How else can they explain their sudden right to vast riches and their right to sacrifice lives in war? They say it is God’s will. They have a mission: to make Russia great again.
And so the Church and the state found each other. Officials crave the belief in their divine chosenness, while the Church eagerly feeds it—because it pays well.
This is why, in 2000, the Church canonized the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, and his family. Let us remember who Nicholas was: the man who dragged Russia into the First World War, sending millions to die. His failures opened the path to revolution, civil war, and all the catastrophes that followed.
But for those who lobbied for his sainthood, Nicholas redeemed all of this with his death. They claimed he atoned for the sins of Bolshevism. How exactly this logic works—better not to ask. At its core lies not theology but the imperial instinct: the urge to glorify any ruler, simply because he ruled.

The War on Dissent

As the Orthodox Church gained strength under Putin, it turned to suppressing independence and dissent.
Scroll through Russian social media, and you will find priests proclaiming that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, or that Jews are to blame for the world’s misfortunes.
And the Church’s allies do not stop at sermons. They show up in courtrooms as “victims,” claiming their religious feelings have been offended by teenage girls dancing in front of the church or that a film about a ballerina—once Nicholas II’s mistress—somehow insults the faith. Others cry “terrorist propaganda” at plays about women who fall in love online with ISIS fighters.
These are not harmless debates about worldviews. People go to prison for “offending believers’ feelings.” They go to prison for fabricated charges of “justifying terrorism.”
And even loyal priests are not safe. Take Father Sergius. He spent years promoting conservative, authoritarian values—reviving monasteries, preaching “family values,” railing against liberal art. He believed the regime was on his side.
But when the pandemic struck and he criticized the authorities for lockdown measures, he crossed an invisible line. As long as you attack abstract enemies—liberals, masons, globalists, even reptilians—the system applauds. But criticize a concrete official, a church hierarch, or God forbid the president himself—and suddenly your cassock is exchanged for a prison uniform. Those are the rules.

In Place of a Conclusion

There is no civilization without religion. Which means religion fulfills some profound human need. But there is also no single religion—because different times, different people, require different answers.
In good hands, faith is a powerful tool. It can unite, inspire, create art and meaning. But modern Russia has lost this possibility. Because that tool has been seized by people who themselves ignore the very commandments they are supposed to uphold.
And it is nearly impossible to revive a tradition after it has been broken for generations. If you did not grow up with a children’s Bible, if you never knew the warmth of a church community, how can you suddenly embrace Orthodoxy as if it were yours?
I have my own theory of God and religion. It is not mystical—it is grounded in facts and does not contradict science. I sometimes share it with family and friends. But I am not a preacher, and I have no desire to found a new church. It is simply a framework that, for me, feels reasonable—and even a little witty.
I know that for many Americans, religion is intimate, sacred, untouchable. That is why I hesitate to share these thoughts openly. I want no quarrels. But I do want to reach those who, like me, see value in the tools of religion—community, reflection, hope—yet want to reconcile them with rational, scientific knowledge.

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