Upcoming Forum Programs

The Canterbury Forum  programs are being presented online through Zoom. Watch your email for login instructions.

Orthodoxy, Nation, and State in Putin's Russia

Sunday, April 25, 2021

Dr. Konrad Sadkowski

Department of History, UNI

Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was Russia’s dominant religious institution and a central pillar of support of successive tsars and emperors—Church and state were intertwined for hundreds of years. During the Soviet period the ROC suffered the closing of tens of thousands of churches, and the persecution or killing of many priests. The Church survived through painful accommodation, such as the forced cooperation of numerous priests with the secret police. How have Church-State relations evolved since 1991 in post-Soviet Russia? Dr. Sadkowski will show that after a brief period of malaise for the Church in the 1990s, after Vladimir Putin’s ascension to power in 2000 a symbiosis developed between Church and state that has extended to the ROC’s sacralization of the Russian nation and state, and even the elevation of Vladimir Putin to a saint like status.