Russian Reset Required in Rome

When Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’ was head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s external relations department, he would occasionally come to Washington, where the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, a distinguished historian of Russian culture, would host a small dinner for him. I was a guest on one such occasion, and the impression Kirill left that night remains in my mind: sophisticated and clever (in the British sense of the word); linguistically gifted; capable of charm; and a politician to his chromosomes. This should not have been surprising. A few months short of his 26th birthday, then-Archimandrite Kirill was posted to the World Council of Churches in Geneva; and in 1971, the only way a young Russian cleric would get that plum assignment was if he were on the leash, and perhaps the payroll, of the KGB, the Soviet security service.