In the spring of 2024, Skillbox, a Russian leader in online education, conducted a study of the latest trends on Instagram to help determine how to keep audiences and attract new subscribers. It turned out that virtually the entire arsenal of techniques that experts recommend for boosting viewership were being deployed by the wives of Russian Orthodox priests. These wives, who were operating dozens of accounts on the platform, are no prigs: they post videos “with real-life emotions,” create carousels of unedited photographs with no filters, hold interactive challenges for their subscribers, and record meme-filled “Insta Reels” (a video format as short as 15 seconds that Instagram started in 2020 in response to the popularity of TikTok and to hold onto young subscribers).
The most popular priest wives’ Instagram accounts have more than 215,000 followers.
The wives promise their subscribers a “friendly” and “elegant” Russian Orthodoxy, the breaking of stereotypes, prayers, joy, humor, recipes, parenting advice, fashion – including for plus-sized women – and “Orthodox time management” for women with housefuls of tiny tots. You can learn to “believe, pray, love,” to “overcome superstitions,” to “reconcile everyday and spiritual life” through Instagram stories. These matushki (the plural form) serve as ambassadors for fashionable Russian brands, collaborate with cosmetics companies, and offer Orthodox-friendly cooking tips: how to make kulich “just like grandma used to” and low-calorie apple desserts for Spas – the Apple Feast of the Savior (the East Slavic folk name for the Feast of the Transfiguration).
“Here’s my Easter table arrangement,” Yekaterina Muravyova, an Orthodox influencer from St. Petersburg, shows her followers vases shaped like rabbit’s heads and candles in the form of Easter eggs. She has 16,000 followers on Instagram and runs a channel on Telegram titled “It’s Marketing, Matushka!” She recommends ordering these decorations “now, while they’re on sale, because for secular Russians the holiday is already over.”
“The links to all the products are on my Telegram channel. Leave any emoji in the commentaries and I’ll forward them to you,” Matushka Yekaterina promises. In May of 2024 she launched a second, closed, Telegram channel with fashionable product assortments, custom remedies, and lists of successful purchases, so that “every woman remembers that the Lord created her to adorn this world: yourself, on the inside and outside, your husband, your children, and your home.” On Instagram, she describes the everyday life of the priest’s wife, shows footage of services in the Church of the Annunciation on Vasilevsky Island, where her husband serves, and advertises her trendy Telegram Club. She promises that for 790 rubles per month, subscribers of the closed channel will have access to more links “to the most stylish and affordable finds on Ali [the Chinese online retailer AliExpress]” – and more! “And it’s worth every penny.”
Instagram influencer Matushka Olga Levikina from Bogorodsk shows her audience how she can hold not only the text of the Akathist Hymn venerating the icon of the Holy Mother of God, communion bread, and the hand of her husband, Father Vyacheslav Levikin, but also a freshly delivered from Wildberries (Russia’s answer to Amazon) crossbody purse made of “quality eco-leather with a stylish print” or micellar cream for gentle facial cleansing. The skincare products she advertises on Instagram are produced by another priest’s wife, Anna Grigoryeva from Sevastopol, under the brand name “Grigorieva Cosmetic.” “I urge you to subscribe to her blog if only to learn how to take care of your skin,” Matushka Yelena Yesipova from Moscow recommended on social media after learning from it that you need to apply night cream at least an hour before sleep to let it sink in.
Articles devoted to strategies for promoting your social media pages identify at least 30 different types of selfies. The 10 most popular are the liftoluk (lift look – a self-portrait taken in an elevator mirror), the groupfie (group panoramic selfie), the fitness selfie from the gym, the relfie (relationship selfie with your beloved), the tualetny luk (bathroom mirror selfie) or Bath Selfie (along with the obligatory bubble bath, candles and rose petals).
Instagram is full of shoefie (shoe selfies) – shots of your own feet with your favorite footwear against a background of asphalt, the ocean, the sky, or the mountains. The pouting utkoselfie (Duckface) is being increasingly replaced by the sugly (ugly selfies, used for making faces or showing strong emotions). The Wake Up Selfie is also in fashion, “when you post a photo right after waking up.” There’s also the ever-popular felfy or farmer selfie with wild or barnyard animals. ”
All these types of selfies can be found on priests’ wives’ social media pages, but with an Orthodox twist. In one, we see a church through hands formed into a heart shape. In another, two women contort their bodies to form a human-sized heart: “Time to hurry to church with your best friend.” A woman shows off a fresh manicure as she leafs through a religious text, and icons stand in the background as some freshly baked treats are arranged on a plate. It’s her last chance to enjoy the chocolate cake with blackberries and blueberries coated with edible gold before the Nativity fast.
Matushki do take their Wake-Up Selfies in bed, as is customary, but with a newborn baby at their side. One urges her followers to “come along to church,” but first, learn how to fashionably tie your headscarf or adopt Kate Middleton style. “Your girl therapy is getting together in church,” one matushka explains, while applying eyeliner in front of the mirror, with the trendy audio-track “Sorry, I can’t come to the phone now, I’m a little busy with girl therapy” playing in the background.
The only implicit taboo is the bifie (the Bikini Selfie), which is usually taken on a beach, and the belfie (Butt-Selfie) or poposelfie, where a girl photographs her buttocks. The most acceptable alternative would be a photograph in a skirt bathing suit, followed by one with a pregnant belly. Then again, you do see some bifies and belfies, but in the former, the Orthodox blogger is likely to snap herself surrounded by her children on a Black Sea beach, and in the latter, she’ll have a bouquet of wildflowers stuck in the back pocket of her tight jeans.
“An emoji with hands joined in prayer is specially designed for the Orthodox – it’s suitable for every occasion. Use the others with caution,” the Yekaterinburg journalist and former Orthodox radio host Ksenia Volyanskaya warns in her column, “How to Become an Orthodox InstaMatushka.” Her humor-filled writing started appearing on the Ahilla portal in 2018. This site was created in 2017 by the former Volgograd priest Alexei Pluzhnikov, who two years earlier had given up priesthood “for personal reasons” after serving for 12 years. In Ahilla’s manifesto, Pluzhnikov explained that he sees new media as a platform for an independent view of the Russian Orthodox Church. The site’s mission is to “give voice to those who have something to say and nowhere to say it.”
In her column about “InstaMatushki,” Volyanskaya pokes fun at the priests’ wives. She recommends ordering several pretty but chaste Orthodox dresses: “They may not be cheap, but don’t expect to build a reputation without them. Tell your husband that taking pictures for Instagram in cheap clothing shows bad taste and doesn’t help the cause.”
“Your husband and older children have to learn the art of the glamorous photo shoot,” Ksenia writes. “You can decorate your garden. If there are swings, paint them pink or white. Hang lacy curtains over them. The tree overhead should be flowering. Even if it’s autumn!”
To succeed on social media sites currently banned in Russia, she recommends preparing quotes from Orthodox books a couple of months in advance “for those days when you feel lazy,” and make sure you have a good supply of lofty axioms along the lines of “the father plays an important role in raising children.”
Volyanskaya admits: Instagram matushki are not all the same. There are those who don’t advertise their status and are just cheerful and sincere, but there are also those “about whom we can’t say anything, because they hide behind the image of the canonical glamorous InstaMatushka.”
“At one point this all really… not so much irritated me as made me laugh,” Ksenia Volyanskaya says. She was subscribing to five or six such accounts, but “she didn’t see anything intelligent.” Back then, she had a more idealized image of the church than today, and it struck her that the pictures she was seeing on Instagram did not fit the spirit of true Orthodoxy.
Now she identifies as agnostic. A former host of Yekaterinburg’s Sunday radio show, she quit in 2017. She moved away from Christianity and says that gradually “the rose-colored glasses fell down and broke.”
To Volyanskaya’s surprise, her column generated a big response, both on social media and Orthodox websites. “I was just writing something light and funny. But it apparently hit a nerve,” she says.
The examples she had assembled in the column, along with her sarcasm, triggered an online discussion that came to be called “the glamourous Orthodox scandal.” Writing on the Predanie (Tradition) Orthodox website, Inna Kozhina, a priest’s wife and blogger from Moscow, called the column “low-quality and mean-spirited.”
Let’s be honest: for people to want to stop and read something, their viewpoint has to have something to latch on to. And if all we do is post flowers, birdies, and butterflies, even with the most profound texts, nobody will read us. It would be those very Barbies, wild Halloweens, and the yellow press that catches their eye. And that will be what shapes people’s consciousness. Good content also takes a tremendous amount of work!
Another commenter, Lilia Malakhova, wrote:
If you browse the page of any “InstaMatushka,” you get the impression that you’re reading the blog of some show-business diva whose whole purpose in life is showing herself off. And the photos are the same in every blog: me, me, more me, me with a cute animal, me with children, me again, me with a candle, me next to an icon, me on my knees confessing my cute little sins – oh, excuse me, - confessing my sins, me by a cross, me by a cross with my children, me with my priest husband, my priest husband with the children, and on and on. And then there are the traditional cakes, kuliches, pancakes, cookies, ice cream, tiramisus, and other treats – you’ve got to have those. Of course, none of that has anything to do with spirituality.
As Malakhova understands it, the Ahilla article that started the whole controversy was inspired not by envy but by an aversion to “sugarcoated Orthodoxy.” This opinion was supported by another Predanie author, Sergei Nesterov. Behind Volyanskaya’s cutting tone, he sees pain, because “your faith is being turned into some pop culture phenomenon before your eyes.”
Nesterov writes: “God forbid that the Patriarchate should form some sort of commission to track down these “immodest” pages and then start calling priests and tell them to talk to their wives!” But at the same time he condemns the tastelessness and calls on the women to censor themselves.
Officially, the church itself is urging this. For example, on June 8, 2024, speaking to a gathering of Kaliningrad clergy, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus Kirill warned blogger priests against vanity and ambition. While saying he had nothing against priests blogging, the goal should be spreading the word of God rather than personal popularity.
He argued that the growing number of priests developing an internet presence often forget that they are first and foremost pastors of the church. Some “lose their head, get caught up in the number of likes, succumb to vanity,” and forget their true path, service, and goals. “As soon as you start to think about your personal popularity, better to take off your crucifix and put on street clothes,” Kirill stated in a paper published on the Russian Orthodox Church’s official site. But then, in 2018 the patriarch opened his own Instagram account, publishing “surprising and informal moments of his daily service.” The page, which is managed by His Holiness’s press service, has 175,000 subscribers.
In January 2024, the Russian Orthodox Church opened a school for priest bloggers that graduated its first 10 participants in February. The school’s roster of lecturers includes: Father Alexander Volkov, head of the Moscow eparchy’s information service; Andrei Afansyev, who has a show on the Spas [Savior] television channel; and Alexei Sokolov, executive director of the Foma Center Foundation, which supports the educational efforts of an Orthodox radio station, website, and magazine. Participants learn to maintain their individuality without straying from official church doctrine. The Church plans to make courses for Orthodox bloggers regularly available.
According to information from Russia’s Association of Bloggers and Agencies that was published by Forbes, over the course of 2023, the audience of major bloggers producing Christian content on Telegram and YouTube grew, on average, by one third. Forbes noted that during 2020 and 2021, this niche had been growing steadily, but the sharp increase in subscribers began in February and March 2022, after the start of war in Ukraine. The next wave of interest in religious bloggers came in autumn of 2022 after the mobilization was announced. According to the DIDENOK TEAM, a Russian communication agency, the growth in interest in Orthodox blogs has to do with the crisis atmosphere in Russia today: “In Russia, people are inclined to turn to Orthodoxy for answers in difficult situations.”
In January 2018, the popular Orthodox internet project Batyushka Online (batyushka being the traditional familiar/affectionate way to address a priest, based on the old Slavic word for father) was joined by Matushka Online. “Modern, talented, and unique matushki have gotten together to share the good news on a global network,” a press release announced.
Batyushka Online itself was launched in May 2011 on VKontakte, Russia’s social media platform, by Nadezhda Zemskova, a 25-year-old economics teacher at Ulyanovsk State Technical University. Patriarch Kirill gave his personal blessing to the project and asked Zemskova to “recruit the very best batyushki for the effort.” Mainstream news outlets have labeled it the Russian Orthodox Church’s most successful media undertaking.
Today, more than 200 priests from Russia and other countries are participating, giving the project international reach. The priests include doctors, lawyers, musicians, athletes, writers, journalists, bloggers, and rappers. They respond to readers’ questions around the clock via chat, instant-messaging apps, and during live broadcasts. Zemskova explains that this round-the-clock capability is made possible by geography: “By the time Moscow batyushki have gone to sleep, those in South-Sakhalin and California are already awake and ready to answer questions.” According to the project’s site, over its 13 years of operation they “have responded to more than a million questions from hundreds of thousands of subscribers.”
In addition to the official site, the project has verified accounts on VKontakte, Instagram, Odnoclassniki, Telegram, and accounts on TikTok and YouTube. The Batyushki have 293,000 subscribers on Instagram and 126,000 on VKontakte.
Describing the project’s female counterpart, Zemskova says that the women of “Matushki Online keep active blogs and chats, travel, know foreign languages, are brilliantly educated, fashion savvy, interested in art, and feel comfortable not only at church but in the media space.” She reports that initial applications to take part in the project were submitted by more than one hundred priests’ wives from different countries. Today, there are approximately 30, including designers, doctors, athletes, journalists, and teachers. The roster also includes experts in sex education, Gestalt psychologists, florists, lawyers, Orthodox financial advisors, content managers, holders of advanced degrees in pedagogy and history, as well as artists and powerlifters.
In six years, the matushki have built a pool of 18,000 subscribers on VKontakte and 80,000 followers on Instagram. They can all consult the priests’ wives on so-called “women’s” questions relating to Orthodoxy.
Discussions cover the topics of sex, stress, abortion, marital relations, conflict with children, and the dress code for church. Among the questions asked are whether or not they can give a cross to a prisoner, take contraceptives, and dye their hair. Subscribers also want to know how they can forgive adultery, deal with depression, what to do if a grandson smells of beer, how to conceive after six years of unsuccessful attempts, whether women can practice martial arts, take doctor-prescribed hormones, sit in the lotus position while wearing a crucifix, what to do if your husband wants to be intimate during a religious fast, and whether scripture includes a direct prohibition against oral sex.
The advice is generally the same: pray, reconcile yourself, read the Bible, go to church, follow the commandments, and rely on the will of God. Zemskova’s own social media is a hodgepodge of secular news, church calendar items, motivational phrases, and nuggets of wisdom such as “Your dream will come true!” “Hardships will turn you into a masterpiece!” “A miracle will come soon!” songs by the Kremlin-friendly crooner Grigory Leps and rapper Basta, letters of gratitude from the authorities, and the hidden treasures inside her purse, which always contains “the New Testament, a prayer book, and prayer beads.” Prayers are intermingled with emojis and selfies “in the clouds.” Reports on visits to the mayor are followed by an advertisement for cosmetics; a visit to a shooting range is followed by thoughts about nuns’ hairdos. The story of how she got her economics degree is followed by advice: “Girls, you can only find a faithful husband in church, because with God, a man isn’t just with a capital letter, but with CapsLock!”
“Orthodox glamour has been a topic for more than twenty years. The artificial side of church life will find an outlet regardless, and over the past decades that outlet has increasingly been the internet,” says Larisa Astakhova, who began studying religion after 17 years of marriage to a priest, Father Kirill Bukharayev. She is now 47. After divorcing her husband, she left her native Kazan for Moscow, while Bukharayev left the church and now renovates apartments for a living.
Broadly speaking, according to Astakhova, matushka blogs fall into two categories. The first shows the beauty of religion, its aesthetic, and can serve a missionary purpose. The second flaunts conspicuous consumption, privilege, and makes religion look like a sort of business. There is a fine line between the two types, and only the character, education and taste of the blogger can save her from crossing that line. In Astakhova’s assessment, “there is a lot more glamour, mimicry, and fantasy in the blogs than dignity and sincerity.”
She also characterizes such blogs as “capitalizing on children,” who are often used as “an advertisement for Orthodoxy.” “Children are the leitmotif for many such blogs, and everything is picture perfect. They are never yelled at or spanked; their mother is sweet to them 24 hours a day. But this is not the church’s true face. Most people aren’t stupid, and they don’t buy it and realize someone is trying to manipulate them through a blog. Whoever this inspires to come to church will experience something different and be disappointed, and that will have the opposite effect.”
“A blog should show life in all its colors: from white to black,” Astakhova believes. “Such blogs exist, but there are fewer of them. There, religion isn’t grotesque, Orthodoxy is not the only subject, and faith is harmoniously integrated into everyday life.” One example is a blog by Krasnodar’s Yulia Kretova.
What sets the 33-year-old Matushka Yulia Kretova apart is her ability to combine the seemingly incongruous. Up to ten colors – from chartreuse to fuchsia – in one image, lace gloves and a simple string shopping bag, a hat with a veil and sneakers, and all that with Orthodoxy.
In September 2023, the hosts of the Skeptic and Blonde podcast invited Yulia to chat with them on what turned out to be their most “obscenity-free” episode ever. They introduced her as a “Reels-maker, social-media marketing specialist, curator of courses on making Reels, blogging mentor, and overall super-open girl who undermines stereotypes about Orthodoxy.” The hosts laughed at her sketches, quoted her jokes, and praised her colorful, original style.
In January 2024 she showed up for an interview on the Soyuz television channel pregnant with her fifth child in red tights, a pink headband, lace choker, jacket with multicolored flounces by a local Krasnodar brand, and with a bright-orange manicure. Yulia agreed with the host that there are many interesting, colorful Orthodox bloggers but that she was, indeed, “probably the most colorful.”
“Thanks to the fact that people notice me because of the pictures, they change their attitude toward Orthodoxy.” Yulia says that people come up to her on the street and ask to take a picture with her for Instagram. “I don’t show all my cards right away,” she says. “People are surprised when they find out that I’m a priest’s wife. Aren’t we all supposed to be in dresses all the time, drab, uninteresting, and shouldn’t we be spending all our time in church?”
Yulia is one of the first bloggers to openly present herself as a priest’s wife. In 2013, when she started her Instagram page while working as a manager at a metallurgical company, she only had about 10 social-media-matushka “colleagues.” “And back then, people felt quite hesitant about it, and we matushki were very careful to not distort the Word of God,” Yulia says.
In 2014, when the Kretovs had a daughter, Yulia began to photograph and post pictures more often. Subscribers watched the family grow: Yulia has had five children in ten years.
She recalls how her husband, who serves at Krasnodar’s Holy Trinity Cathedral and teaches at the local seminary, warned her that she might be asked to delete the account and that she shouldn’t get upset. But nothing of the sort happened. “The secretary of our eparchy even subscribed, and then they began to invite me to conferences on Orthodox blogging.” Since she started her blog, Krasnodar has had four different metropolitans: “And you never know what the new metropolitan will think of your blog, since not everyone understands video trends, or our jokes and Reels. But I can see that for people it is important that it be done the way I do it. You’d think everything’s been said a hundred times over, but the same questions keep coming up. Is it alright to sleep with your husband during a fast? Can I wear pants to church?”
She dismantles stereotypes that all priests have lots of money, lots of children, and lots of troubles on their shoulders. She explains that a religious fast isn’t a diet and says that women experiencing postpartum depression should see a therapist. And she’s open about the fact that she sometimes loses her temper with her children and has fights with her husband. She has no desire to “prove the righteousness of Orthodoxy” or impose a set of principles: “We demonstrate by our actions, our life, that Orthodoxy is not in the headscarves, not in the skirts, not in the gray faces. That it is full of joy, color, taste. We’re not as dreary as people think!”
She now has 7,700 subscribers on Instagram. Yulia also has accounts on VKontakte and Yandex Zen, as well as a Telegram channel. “I don’t measure success just by the number of subscribers. For me, it matters who these people are. Although I also want the numbers.” Yulia aspires to an audience of 100,000, but “made up of people who are really interested.”
“You can make money on a blog if you devote enough time and energy to it,” Kretova emphasizes, and these are resources most mothers with large families lack. Her main source of income is from teaching: she has learned to produce videos and now she’s giving lessons on video production and running social media accounts. She promotes these services through Instagram.
Blogging does help to supplement her income, but it is not her main source. She says that over the past half year her income “dropped to zero” after she gave birth to her fifth child. Before her most recent pregnancy, she was averaging 20,000-30,000 rubles ($200-$300) a month from her blog.
Kretova says that she has been studying the blogs of some of the very young female Orthodox bloggers that have appeared over the past year – both priests’ wives and simply women involved in Orthodoxy. These internet newcomers have made some problematic posts. “Sometimes a matushka will express herself inappropriately. She has no ‘internal editor,’ and she could be misunderstood.” Yulia herself always shows her posts to her husband before publishing for her “own peace of mind.”
“Sometimes a blog is too cutesy, saccharine, corny,” she says. “It’s all sanitized, excessively positive. The children are obedient, the husband is always happy, she herself prays around the clock, and you wonder, are these people or robots? People are already reluctant to go to church with all their sins, worried they won’t be accepted – and on top of that you have these veritable saints.”
Vladimir Razumov, a professor at Omsk State University’s School of Theology, notes that, throughout Russian history and literature, the idea of the popadya [priest’s wife] has always had negative connotations: “You won’t find a single positive image of a popadya in fairy tales or epics.”
He goes on to say that “the wives of clergymen are living beings, and free ones. Nowhere is it written that they should be saintly or anything like that. The aphorism ‘nothing human is alien’ fully applies to these women. But I still believe in noblesse oblige – their position comes with obligations, and if you are married to a spiritual figure, then, as the saying goes, you have to know your limits.”
In 2019, Oxana Zotova, a 32-year-old priest’s wife from Magnitogorsk, took part in a local beauty contest, won the title of “Miss Sensuality,” and wrote about it on social media. A cosmetologist and make-up artist at the time, after coming onstage in feathers and a bare belly, Zotova was immediately christened “the glamorous popadya” and accused of inappropriate behavior. Her husband, Father Sergei, was charged with violating church rules: the contest was held during Lent. He was transferred from Magnitogorsk’s Church of the Ascension of Christ to a small rural church a two-hour commute from home.
Eparchy officials learned of Oxana Zotova’s beauty pageant exploit from an anonymous message from a fake account. Father Sergei was called before a disciplinary committee. “Other priests talked to him,” recounts then eparchy secretary Lev Baklitsky. “His wife was wrong to publish the photographs on Instagram. I understand this was important and necessary for her. But it was a mistake. Understandably, if a clergyman were to go to a bathhouse or a resort, he wouldn’t go swimming in his cassock. But he also wouldn’t post pictures on social media.”
“A priest’s wife should be setting an example for parishioners. It’s unbefitting for her to walk down a catwalk in underwear during Lent,” says Baklitsky. Archpriest Fyodor Saprykin, chairman of the eparchy court, called Zotova’s action “a great sin” and said she would have to repent before her husband could be restored to his post.
Father Sergei’s “exile” was meant to make a point, but it only lasted two weeks. He was back at the Church of the Ascension in time for Easter services. Today he is the rector of one of the eparchy’s youngest churches, the Church of the Icon of the Savior Not Made by Human Hands in the village of Spassky. He is also deputy head of the youth department for the Magnitogorsk Eparchy.
Oxana Zotova refuses to be interviewed and now says that the whole “witch hunt” (travlya) “was a long time ago and is no longer relevant. She’s still working as a cosmetologist in a beauty salon performing diamond peels, injecting botox, and “doing lips,” while raising two children and keeping up her personal pages for her 4,000 “friends” on Vkontakte and her 11,000 Instagram followers.
There, Zotova posts what she describes as “beautiful little photos” in the style of “glamour, chic, splendor, luxury, and fine dining.” She shares with her followers her stilettos and diamonds, bikinis and miniskirts, her evening skincare rituals, and luxury brands. On the food side, there are photos of figs with brie, fresh strawberry tarts, baked mussels, and lacy pancakes with red caviar. On her travels, Zotova can be seen on the beaches of Egypt with her new Prada glasses, riding a Dubai hotel’s 53-stories-high glass slide, “falling into a pink cloud” at a Barbie beach in Thailand, and sipping Moët & Chandon from a champagne flute in the Dominican Republic. Back home in Magnitogorsk Oxana is taking bubble baths with a martini or floating in a hammock in an aerostretching class. “The plan for today is to shine!” she writes.
But the haters keep a vigilant eye on Zotova. Before you know it someone is asking where the matushka’s cross is (even though in most pictures you can see it nicely set off against her suntanned décolleté). “It’s there, where you can’t see it,” Zotova responds with a kiss and a heart emoji.
“Welcome to my dirty and immoral blog. Only sinners allowed!” is how Alina Babkina introduces one of her TikTok videos. Her husband is priest of the Church of St. Nicholas of Myra in Moscow Oblast. She is responding to a comment that “a priest and matushka should bring purity and morality into the world.”
Babkina is currently one of the most popular Orthodox matushka bloggers, with an audience ten times greater than the others, who have from 5,000 to 20,000 subscribers.
Alina is 33 and has four children. She met her husband when 20-year-old Nikolai Babkin was a seminary student and 19-year-old Alina was studying to be an English teacher. They met on VKontakte in a members-only club for Orthodox Christians and married two years later.
Both she and her husband (who is also one of the most popular priest bloggers on the Russian internet, according to the Association of Bloggers and Agencies) have been talking about Orthodoxy on social media since 2015. Alina still has an Instagram page with 215, 000 subscribers, but in 2021 she recognized TikTok’s promise, since “that’s where all the young people are,” and she started her own account.
“People were beginning to get sick of Instagram with its endless demonstration of ‘successful success’ and happiness, often fake, sham. On TikTok it’s much easier to be yourself, to freely talk about your fears and troubles; it’s where new memes and trends are being born,” says Alina, who today is known as “the TikToker in the kokoshnik.”
The kokoshnik – a Russian headdress worn by married women that dates back centuries – has become the trademark of this “Orthodox comedian.” Some see the kokoshnik as the standard adornment of a priest’s wife and others denounce it as blasphemous because it resembles a halo. “Folks – it’s just a headband,” Alina quips.
“What happens if you light a memorial candle for al living person?” Babkina looks stone-faced into the camera before delivering her punchline: “Nothing!”
“What does it mean if a candle goes out during a wedding?” The answer: “The presence of impurities in the wax or a draft – stop making things up!”
“Should the poor wife live in a chronic state of pregnancy right up to menopause?” The answer: “No, they should definitely still keep having children after menopause!”
She sets her short videos to popular music, from rock to pop, and promises “religious shock content” and pokes fun at herself with the help of Disney cartoon clips. “I’m the village crazy lady. That’s my job.”
Alina’s audience includes Orthodox churchgoers, people disillusioned with the church, Muslims, neopagans, Buddhists, and Jews. “To my surprise, even some Satanists have shown an interest,” she says. “For some, this is just exotic. But many write to me that my videos give them a sense of calm.”
The Yekaterinburg journalist Ksenia Volyanskaya admits that for the past two years she’s hardly looked at any Orthodox accounts because she “really doesn’t care what all those people think and say, since it has nothing to do with reality, unfortunately.” She adds: “What may have looked funny before can look repulsive against the backdrop of what’s happening now.” Ksenia feels that whatever might be nice about pictures of food and church fashions is canceled out by “the weaving of camouflage nets and humanitarian aid for the troops.”
For the most part, however, priest’s wives keep a delicate silence and generally ignore the subject of the war between Russia and Ukraine. Patriotic photographs – a photograph of a daughter in a military cap or a video of the Kuban Cossack Choir performing “Holy War” – are only posted on the May 9 Victory Day.
February 24, 2022 goes unmentioned on most of these accounts. In the war’s first days, they continued to show pictures of children, kittens, baked goods, and tulips, as a symbol of long-awaited spring. Only a few of the matushki has publicly posted about the war, but they have remained as neutral as possible. For example, Yulia Uzun from Sergiev Posad, who grew up in Ukraine, posted a video showing the hometown where her path toward involvement in the church began. “I want this video to stay here. Our last trip to Ukraine. Our relatives, we love you. Be safe!” she wrote. In response to commentaries that Kharkiv was on fire, she replied with crying and prayer emojis and to calls for peace with heart emojis.
In the early morning hours of the day of the invasion, the Magnitogorsk cosmetologist Oxana Zotova posted a photo on Instagram of her and her husband drinking wine in a restaurant with the caption: “Even if the whole world goes crazy, I have you and you have me. Even if everything burns to ashes, only you and I will still be the same.” Two days later she wrote encouragement to women thinking of undergoing lip augmentation for the first time, and on March 1 she wrote: “No matter how many springs you live through, they are all one-of-a-kind.”
In 2022, the Ahilla site changed its orientation from “anti-church” to “antiwar.” Not much is being published there about the Russian Orthodox Church. Today most content is made up of quotes from Vladimir Voinovich, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Vasil Bykov and others who have written about war, repression, and totalitarianism. The site’s editor-in-chief, the former priest Andrei Pluzhnikov, is working as a courier. The journalist Ksenia Volyanskaya has finished a course on being a birdwatching guide and leads excursions through the city telling people about its owls, finches, and woodpeckers.
In mid-March 2022, after Russia banned and blocked Instagram, some Orthodox matushki “just in case” said good bye to their subscribers and promised to switch to new social media platforms. But after a few days they were back on the banned sites posting pious selfies, photos of altars, potato zrazies with mushrooms, and advice on how to apply a mud mask to the T-zone “so as not to appear before the Lord with mud on your face.” And so they continue to the present day, sharing secrets of “a lifestyle with God” and promising in their taglines “after reading my blog, you’ll definitely go to church.”
This article originally appeared in Vyorstka.
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