Happy Easter to those who know what it is

Thanks to a different calendar and rather peculiar calculations, Orthodox Easter comes a month and a half after ours this year. So Христос воскрес and all that to my Orthodox readers, and happy Painted-Eggs Day.

Lest you may think I’m mocking exponents of a confession different from mine, think again. I’m only referring to a poll that shows that almost 60 per cent of Russians treat Easter as strictly a sum total of traditional rituals, such as painting eggs and baking the local equivalent of panettoni.

They are aware that the day has some religious significance but aren’t quite sure exactly what it is. When asked to guess, some respondents came up with “Christ’s birthday”, “Christ’s ascension” or even “arrival of spring”. On the plus side, no one thought this was the day for offering human sacrifice, which fills my heart with hope for the country of my birth.

Only eight per cent of Russians were planning to celebrate mass last night (never mind on the other days of the Holy Week), and just a paltry 10 per cent of people identifying as Orthodox had the same intention.

That’s rather shabby for the country our illustrious columnist once described as “the most Christian in Europe”. That extra gene of spirituality ascribed to the Russians by their own propaganda seems to be very recessive indeed.

By contrast, the same sources invariably refer to Britain as a soulless, godless nation mired in rapacious acquisitiveness, drug addiction, sexual perversion and castrating urges. Still, be that as it may, roughly the same percentage of Britons celebrated mass at Easter – and that’s in the population at large.

As to the people my late father-in-law stigmatised as traitors, that is to say Anglo-Roman Catholics, 27.5 per cent of them go to mass at least once a week. I’ve been unable to find any Easter statistics but, judging by my own church, that number must be at least doubled or possibly even tripled.

As a child growing up in a communal Moscow flat, with five of us living in one room and having to share the kitchen, bathroom and loo with 20 neighbours, I liked Easter. That doesn’t make me especially precocious because my interest was purely gastronomical.

All our neighbours, good communists one and all, baked kulich, which did resemble panettoni both in taste and religious significance. While blissfully unaware of the latter, I was gluttonously attracted to the former.

Those of our neighbours who were on speaking terms with my family (which was by no means all of them) sometimes offered me slices of kulich, which I received with gratitude and a promise not to bully their children ever again. Most of our male neighbours, and some of the female ones, got drunk on that day, although, since they also did so on many other days, that didn’t single out Easter Sunday as something special.

Words like ‘God’ or ‘Jesus Christ’ never crossed their lips, certainly not within my earshot. Thinking back, I don’t know whether our neighbours would have yielded different findings from the present vintage had a similar poll been conducted. I rather doubt that: even religious people tended to hide their light under a bushel in a country where faith was, putting it mildly, discouraged.

These days it’s much worse than discouraged, worse even than persecuted. Religion in Russia has been turned into an aspect of political propaganda of a frankly Nazi sort. That extra gene of spirituality is used in a typologically similar sense as superlative Soviet identity was bandied about in the USSR.

Homo soveticus was deemed superior to decadent Westerners because of his dedication to selfless struggle for the liberation of mankind from the shackles of capitalism. Homo russicus claims the same or even greater racial superiority because of his spirituality and faith in Jesus Christ Our Saviour.

By the looks of it, this kind of faith neither teaches people what exactly happened on Easter Day nor drives them into churches nor, most important, affects their behaviour. Orthodoxy these days plays the same role in Russia as Aryanism played in Nazi Germany.

Such emetic vulgarisation of Christianity does more harm to it than the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks ever did. When Putin’s regime collapses, which it will sooner or later, the Russians will dump Christianity into what Trotsky called “the dustbin of history”.

The KGB background of the church hierarchs will be a topic of daily conversations, and people will wear atheism on the same sleeve on which they used to flaunt anti-communism in the 1990s. Today’s fascists will then have achieved what the Bolsheviks never quite managed: put paid to Russian Christianity for generations, possibly centuries, to come.

None of this should be taken to mean that genuine believers are extinct in Russia. They are not, though none can be found among the ruling elite and its hangers-on in the media. The number of real Christians is probably the same as it was in the Soviet Union, though today they don’t have to reserve their faith for private quarters. But real Christians do exist, and this is their day.

It’s the business of their own conscience to reconcile their faith with their support of the fascist, warmongering regime in Russia, if they do support it. I don’t see how such an accommodation can be possible: if the religion of love produces hate in its adherents, one may question the sincerity of their faith.

However, my Orthodox readers are real Christians and, if they were Putin supporters, they wouldn’t be guests in this space. So Happy Easter to you all! Христос воскрес!

P.S. Patriarch Kirill, KGB codename ‘Agent Mikhailov’, offered this Easter prayer: “We are especially praying today for our Russian nation that is going through a hard, perhaps in some sense fateful, ordeal. We are asking Our Lord to protect the sacred borders of our land.”

Allow me to translate: His Holiness is talking about the Russian aggression against the Ukraine, accompanied by mass murder, torture, looting and rape. Not to forget the vicious razing of Ukrainian cities.

If such are their prelates, do you ever wonder what the lay masses are like?