Metropolitan Kirill, the odds-on favorite to succeed Aleksii II as Russian patriarch, said this week that Orthodoxy Christianity represented a "spiritual" shield against outside influence and an important defense of Orthodox Christians beyond the borders of the Russian Federation.
Kirill made these remarks on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his appointment to head the eparchy in Smolensk (kaliningrad.rfn.ru/rnews.html?id=6287&cid=7). Three months from now, he will mark a similar anniversary for the inclusion of Kaliningrad within that eparchy, an event that means he is styled as the metropolitan of the two regions.
However, Kirill's most important role both in the past and especially now as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine is challenging the position of the Moscow church there is as head of the patriarchate's powerful Office of External Relations, a position he has occupied since November 1989. In that capacity, he has been responsible not only for overseeing the patriarchate's interests abroad and participating in ecumenical activities but also for defending Russia's spiritual space against outside influences.
With regard to the former, he has played a key role in resolving the conflict over the subordination of Orthodox churches in Estonia, promoting the rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and providing a frequent public face for Moscow in international religious gatherings.
With respect to the latter, he has adopted an even higher public profile than the patriarch himself with his own television program and frequent visits around the country and has taken the lead in resuscitating and applying to the Russian Federation in the first instance the ancient Christian doctrine of "territoriality."
That teaching, ascribed to St. Cyprian of Carthage, holds, in the words of Michael Bourdeaux, a leading specialist on religious affairs in Russia, that "only one Church has the right to be active in any one territory". Kirill has used that argument not only against Protestant missionaries to post-Soviet Russia but also against Roman Catholics and the Vatican more generally.
Born in Leningrad in November 1946, Kirill rose rapidly through the ranks of the church leadership following his graduation from the Leningrad Spiritual Academy in 1970. From 1971 to 1974, he served the patriarchate's representative at the World Council of Churches. Later, he headed a religious training school, helped organize both the church's response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and its commemoration of the 1,000th anniversary of the Christianization of Rus, and served as bishop of Vyborg before assuming his current post.
Throughout his career, Kirill, like other senior Russian churchmen, has been dogged by charges that he was an officer of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, and invariably put Moscow's political interests above his own. That past continues to raise suspicions about their affiliations and motives and sometimes makes it more difficult for them to deal with churchmen in other countries.
In Soviet times, the metropolitan and his fellow hierarchs probably had no choice. If churchmen were not prepared to cooperate with the KGB, the Soviet authorities could and regularly did block their promotion within the church. The Soviet organs exercised especially tight control over religious who wanted to travel or serve abroad.
The archives on these questions -- open only briefly in the early 1990s -- confirm that Aleksii II was recruited by the KGB in Estonia in February 1958 and was regularly praised by his secret police superiors for his "willing attitude" in carrying out assignments and for providing the organs with "materials deserving attention." (On this point, see both Bourdeaux's article at religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2099 and the report of church dissident Gleb Yakunin in the May 17, 1996 "Ekspress khronika.")
It has been alleged that Metropolitan Kirill worked closely for the KGB as well. In 1992, a former KGB operative, A. Shushpanov, described in detail the KGB's work in Kirill's External Relations Department in an interview published in "Argumenty i fakty" (no. 8(1992)). According to Shushpanov, the chief task of that church department was to help the KGB in its work.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the situation has changed. Russia's security services have done everything they can to prevent the public identification of its agents within the church, sometimes accusing those who have done so of treason. (See John B. Dunlop's "KGB Subversion of the Russian Orthodox Church," RFE/RL Research Report 1:12 (March 20, 1992), 51-53))
Not surprisingly, church hierarchs like Aleksii and Kirill have not acknowledged such ties. Instead, they have spoken about the past in only the most general terms, talking about the problems they faced then and the wonderful prospects they have now. Indeed, in his message to Kirill on this week's anniversary, Patriarch Aleksii spoke in precisely those terms.
Now, Kirill faces new challenges both abroad and at home. He almost certainly will take the lead in trying to prevent Orthodox congregations in Ukraine from shifting their allegiance from the Moscow Patriarchate to one of the Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchies or to the Universal Patriarchate of Constantinople.
At the same time, the metropolitan will continue to push for an expanded public role for Orthodoxy among Russians even as he seeks to block missionary activities of non-traditional faiths there and particularly any expansion in the presence of Roman Catholicism in the Russian Federation.
These policies at the very least track with those of the Kremlin. And that pattern, of course, inevitably increases suspicions among many that his alleged past ties to the secret police somehow continue, suspicions that will make it harder for him to achieve his goals either at home or abroad.
But unless he is able to achieve some successes in both, Kirill could see his chance to succeed Aleksii slip away. Consequently, in the immediate future, he is a man to watch as he seeks to be in both the Russian Federation and in the Ukraine Moscow's spiritual sword and shield.