What We’re Reading: Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy

Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy
By Dmitry Adamsky
Stanford University Press, 2019

Debate about the renewed threat of nuclear war – even around family dinner tables – usually takes as its starting point the belief that nuclear war is a very bad idea. And, whether advocating disarmament or deterrence, we take it as a given that the Church opposes war and works for peace. Indeed, Pope Francis maintains that even the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral.

The Russian Orthodox Church begs to differ.

In Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy, Dmitry Adamsky, professor in the School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the IDC Herzliya, Israel, explains why. Beginning with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Adamsky tells the story of the Russian Orthodox Church’s changing relationship with the Russian government and military. In 1991 the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was barely tolerated and faithful Orthodox Christians had been persecuted for decades under the USSR’s atheistic ideology. Today the ROC and the Russian government work in tandem on many fronts—not least of which is the nuclear arm of the Russian military.

Adamsky divides the book into three parts, each corresponding to one decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the “Genesis Decade,” 1991-2000, members of the nuclear military establishment found themselves in an unfamiliar position. Given the seismic changes in their nation, including loss of both respect and funding for the nuclear industry, their future was uncertain. That uncertainty resulted in a search for new meaning. The ROC stepped into the void and began to provide priests and churches for dispirited nuclear personnel.

In the “Conversion Decade,” 2000-2010, Adamsky traces the ways the ROC continued to integrate itself into the government and military. During these years Vladimir Putin and other leaders began to publicly voice an openness toward religion.

Finally, Adamsky describes 2010-2020 as the “Operationalization Decade” in which personal religious desire and public approval came together to give the ROC an official militaristic role.

Each of these three main sections further divides into three parts. “State-Church Relations” describes the general relationship between the government and the church. In “Faith-Nuclear Nexus,” Adamsky explains how the ROC participates specifically in the nuclear weapons complex. Third, “Strategic Mythmaking” recounts the ways religious norms and stories are used to validate the nexus.

One example illustrates why the ROC and the Russian nuclear military have become so intertwined: the connection between St. Seraphim of Sarov and the closed nuclear city of Arzamos-16. St. Seraphim was the most popular starets (elder monk) in 19th-century Russia. Revered throughout Russian society by everyone from peasants to Tsar Nikolai II’s family, St. Seraphim was canonized in the city of Sarov in 1903. After the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution, however, Soviets removed his relics, executed many of the monks in Sarov, turned the monastery into a prison, and then in 1946, renamed the city Arzamos-16 and chose it as the place where the first Soviet nuclear bomb would be produced.

As the USSR fell, St. Seraphim’s relics were discovered in the Museum of Atheism — formerly the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. The return of the relics to Sarov necessitated an unheard-of level of cooperation between the government and the ROC: the minister of atomic energy agreed to welcome the Patriarch of Moscow; a nuclear industry construction team renovated the monastery; and the regional head of the government provided his own car to transport the Patriarch for the ceremonies.

And so it began – with a town inextricably linked to both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian nuclear industry. Now, thirty years later, mobile churches are deployed so that priests can participate in field maneuvers, Russian nuclear submarines are consecrated, and many pilots bring icons into their cockpits. The re-emergence of the ROC in post-Soviet Russia has resulted not only in reinvigorated faith throughout the nation, but in a new phenomenon, captured in the book’s title: Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy. Adamsky’s story is compelling. Readers interested in the history of post-Soviet Russia or of the Orthodox Church will find it captivating. For those concerned about the nexus of religion and government worldwide, the book provides a case study in a context unfamiliar enough to prompt critical reflection.