Church v. State

Handover of St. Isaac’s Cathedral sparks protests

A long-mulled decision to hand over St. Isaac’s, St. Petersburg largest cathedral, to the Russian Orthodox Church has inspired an unprecedented protest campaign. Many locals are accusing the church of disregarding the wishes of the community and trying to seize control of prestigious landmarks at all costs.

Despite the impediments to demonstrations in Russia today, in January two rallies were held to protest the decision by St. Petersburg’s governor to return the cathedral to the Church. Governor Grigory Poltavchenko claimed that refusing to hand it over would be unconstitutional, because it would violate a law passed in 2010 (in the spirit of a decision made back in the 1990s by then President Boris Yeltsin), granting the Russian Orthodox Church the right to petition for the return of religious buildings as compensation for the harm done by Soviet era anti-religion policies.

According to official statistics, some 146,000 people visited St. Isaac’s over the winter holidays (between December 15 and January 8). Given the R250 admission fee, annual income from ticket sales must be substantial, and something that may be at the center of the dispute between the church and the community.

Those opposing the handover of the imposing eighteenth century basilica, a prominent symbol of the city, include the respected director of the Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky. “What is happening is the incredible provincialization of St. Petersburg,” he said. Closing the museum would also leave dozens of people without jobs, while the exhibits inside the cavernous structure have no place to go – no other building has been allocated to house them.

St. Isaac’s was spared by the Bolsheviks during the early years of the Revolution, a time when many other churches were demolished. Instead, it became a symbol of the atheist government: in 1931 it was transformed into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. That same year, the world’s largest Foucault’s Pendulum was installed there. Today the building is open to both tourists and to worshipers, who come for twice-daily services free of charge.

Historians argue that St. Isaac’s never belonged to the church in the first place. Built in 1858 and designed by Auguste de Montferrand, the basilica was first managed by the Ministry of Railroads. After the Church petitioned for full control, Tsar Alexander II issued a decree placing it under the Interior Ministry. The thinking behind rejection of the Church’s petition was that the building would be too difficult for anyone but the government to maintain.

In 2015, the Church once again petitioned to receive the cathedral. This request was denied, for largely the same reason. Yet just over a year later the same governor who had denied the 2015 petition had an abrupt change of heart.

Many of the signs at the January protest rallies expressed frustration with the Church’s efforts to acquire iconic buildings that are popular with tourists, while neglecting hundreds of country churches in need of care. A 2015 poll by the local online newspaper Fontanka.Ru found that over 90 percent of readers (out of 15,000 respondents) support keeping the cathedral under city management.

Piotrovsky has asked Patriarch Kirill to delay the transfer in order to find a compromise that would calm tensions in St. Petersburg. While the details of his letter and Kirill’s response have not been made public, the Petersburg Eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church has issued a statement saying that Piotrovsky “would do better to concern himself with the historic traditions of the Hermitage,” if he does not understand the “symbolism” of St. Isaac’s, and that leaving the structure as a “museum and then a little bit a church” is akin to Soviet-era state atheism.