Earlier this month, Vladimir Putin visited North Korea seeking friends and influence. The visit set off alarm bells around the globe, particularly in South Korea and Japan, where the danger of deepening military ties between Russia and North Korea is most acutely felt. The visit was a reminder that Putin’s vision of the “Russian world” extends far beyond the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe.
One aspect of Putin’s visit, nonetheless, flew under the radar.
When he was in North Korea, Putin stopped by the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity, where divine offices were held in his honor. He is one in every of the few to worship there, as, predictably, only a few locals do. It was a bit of political theater from the old Soviet days, with the entire cooperation of the Patriarch of Moscow.
Why do Putin and the Patriarch of Moscow care about this tiny congregation?
It may not make sense that anyone, particularly the Russian president and the top of the Russian Orthodox Church, would care a couple of tiny congregation, locked inside an isolated Stalinist state. But to think that is to disregard the massive importance that the Russian Orthodox Church has as an instrument of Russian soft power around the globe.
While many are dismayed on the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s refusal to sentence nearly any aspect of Putin’s political project, the reality is that this line of behavior from Kirill has been nothing wanting inevitable since becoming primate in 2009. From the start, he and Putin forged an alliance that tied the ascendancy of the Russian state to its church and vice versa. The Church of the Life-Giving Trinity, founded before Patriarch Kirill’s episcopacy, has now grow to be a part of this partnership.
To understand the importance of Putin’s visit, it helps to learn a little bit of history.
Orthodox Christianity within the Korean peninsula began within the last days of imperial Russia. In 1900, on the behest of the Russian state, a small group of clerics became the primary Russian Orthodox missionaries to enter Korea.
For 20 years Russia nurtured a small Orthodox community in Korea. But following the Russian Revolution, the besieged Holy Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate terminated its support of the Orthodox Church of Korea. It is a testament to the religion of the small group of converts, regardless of the initial reasons for in search of them out, that following the Holy Synod’s decision, Orthodox Christians in Korea remained with none outside support or canonical structures through the whole brutal period of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War.
Then, in 1953, a military chaplain with the Greek forces sent to fight on the peninsula became aware of Korea’s small Orthodox Christian community and offered to assist reestablish a parish in Seoul. By the subsequent yr, the Metropolis of Korea was an element of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.Â
No one questioned this established order, until Kim Jong il, the second supreme leader of North Korea, visited Russia in 2002. Upon his return, he ordered the establishment of the Korean Orthodox Committee, the apparatus through which sanctioned religious bodies operate in North Korea. The next yr 4 seminarians were sent to Moscow to review. In 2006, the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity was consecrated, with members of the Russian church present.
For nearly 22 years, the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity, in Rangrang District in Pyongyang, has served because the country’s only Orthodox church — and one in every of the few Christian churches within the country.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, the Metropolis of Korea had grow to be a sort of success story of what Orthodox Christianity might appear to be outside its traditional lands. While the top of the church was an ethnic Greek, many of the clergy and the faithful were Koreans. Expat Greeks, Russians and Romanians worshipped together in a way that is essentially out of reach in North America and Western Europe. And for essentially the most part, Russia seemed content to permit the Patriarch of Constantinople to maintain the south because it ran the strange church within the north.
That was until 2019, when the Patriarch of Constantinople granted independence to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It is difficult for those outside to grasp fully the implications of what followed, as an incensed Patriarchate of Moscow now had plausible deniability to maneuver into territories like South Korea, Africa and parts of Western Europe, where Constantinople had long held power. The Patriarchate of Moscow quickly established its own diocese in South Korea, threatening the unity of Orthodox Christianity within the peninsula.
Despite predictable protests, the Patriarchate of Moscow’s decision to determine its own churches in South Korea was a geopolitical move, an motion on behalf of the Russian state. Abroad the Putin-Kirill alliance is most visible through the Russian Orthodox Church’s missionary efforts. Converts to Russian Orthodoxy are seen to be allies of the Russian state’s agenda. South Korea, Asia’s most Christian nation and a strategic Western ally, is simply too wealthy a prize to pass up.
And what about North Korea? Why did Putin visit the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity? The answer is so simple as the deal he has struck with Kirill. The presence of a Russian Orthodox Church in Pyongyang is supposed to send a robust message about Russia’s sphere of influence. This influence will not be just economic or martial, but cultural as well. For a person like Vladimir Putin, just as for his friend, Kirill, the mission will not be nearly power, but a selected sort of power — one which restores the perceived lost dignity of Russia. As Putin prayed within the wall of a church built by one in every of the world’s last remaining Stalinist dictatorships, he was sending a message about how far and deep Russian influence can go. A message not only for the people of Russia or North Korea, but for the entire world.
© Religion News Service
