Russia’s Christian Dissidents

Putin’s use of the Russian Orthodox Church as a potent repository of cultural identity has won him the loyalty of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which has a longstanding tradition of being coopted by and cooperating with the state—but he is a staunch opponent of religious liberty for any non-Orthodox Christians, especially evangelicals. Inconveniently for those who weirdly wish to view Putin as a defender of Christianity, many of the dissidents he persecutes are Christian. Indeed, Navalny spoke of his own Christianity in the closing statement of his 2021 trial, explaining that his beliefs are at the heart of his political commitments—comments which, the Moscow Times noted at the time, were sure to irritate his many secular admirers. “If you want, I’ll talk to you about God and salvation,” Navalny told the judge. “I’ll turn up the volume of heartbreak to the maximum, so to speak. The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually rather sets me up as an example for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself.” Navalny’s courtroom speech, which detailed how his Christian beliefs informed his actions, unsurprisingly received little coverage in the West—but in it, Navalny spoke in the tradition of great Christian dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the gulag himself.