Chelsea Paige

More than perhaps any other social or political force outside of Communism, Russian Orthodoxy has profoundly shaped the collective identity of the Russian people. Ever since Prince Vladimir "baptized" Kievan Rus, the predecessor of the modern Russian state, by accepting Christianity in 988, the Russian Orthodox Church has, in countless ways, determined the nature of the Russian state and the self-conception of the Russian people. Russians owe their language to the Church: monks Cyril and Methodius developed the Cyrillic alphabet, which Russian uses, as well as an embryonic form of the language's grammatical structures. Russians also partially owe their state to the organizational powers of the Church; the institution acted as a vehicle for catalyzing economic and political recovery after the devastating Mongol attacks of the 13th and 14th Centuries, which threatened the very existence of what would become the Russian state.

The confluence of religion, politics and society serves as a useful lens through which to examine and understand a core aspect of mode of operation. The complex relationship among these three concepts proved a fascinating, but ironic phenomenon during the Soviet Union. The Soviet government’s official policy endorsing atheism meant that precisely the absence of a policy endorsing a specific religion in the government’s political agenda rendered the role of religion in society that much more salient and, ultimately, significant as a subject for scholarly analysis. Indeed, the absence of an explicated policy towards religion – in this case, Judaism in particular – in the political agenda of Vladimir Putin’s government has again rendered religion a significant aspect of Russian politics. In the case of Putin’s policy towards Judaism, religion serves as a vehicle through which to explicate the extent to which Putin, though utilizing several Soviet-esque policies, ultimately seems to shape his policies with regard to power maximization rather than to adhering to a specific ideology.