I thank all the people who helped me conduct my research on the field, in Chukotka, in particular Anastasia Yarzutkina, members of the Orthodox Church, and my friends in Anadyr and in Iul’tin district. I thank the French Polar Institute Paul-Emile Victor (IPEV) for its financial support of the project “Orthodox Christianity and Indigenous People in Contemporary Alaska and Chukotka” (OCIP). This paper benefitted from exchanges within the project “Marking the space religiously: A comparative study of the presence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia and France.” I thank Jeanna Kormina and Detelina Tocheva for including me in the project and for their insightful comments to the draft of this text. I thank John Eidson for editing and commenting on my text. I am also grateful for comments from Igor Krupnik, Patty Gray, and Dmitriy Oparin. Last, I thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of ASSR, and in particular Marion Paulhac and Yannick Fer, for work done on this paper and bearing with me. I, the author, retain full responsibility for any errors of fact or judgment.
- 1 Indigenous people of Chukotka include mostly Chukchi, Siberian Yupik, and Even. Because I did most (...)
1In 2016, Patriarch Kirill announced that the Russian Orthodox Church had commissioned more than 5,000 building projects and renovations in Russia since 2009 (Köllner, 2018: 1–2). Despite its location at the extreme northeastern tip of Russia, and despite its harsh climate and sparce population, the territory of Chukotka has been no exception to the overt policy of producing Orthodox spaces: over the last fifteen to twenty years, the Orthodox Church has marked the territory with about forty construction projects, including churches, chapels, monumental crosses, and statues (see “Prikhody,” n.d.). While such projects are not unique to Chukotka, their occurrence there may require more explanation than they do in other parts of Russia. As I shall show in the following pages, the Russian Orthodox Church had not been successfully established in the region in the pre-Soviet era, and Chukotka’s Indigenous population had no special historical attachment to the church, in contrast to some Indigenous people in other parts of Siberia (see, for example, Koester et al., 2014; Petrasheva et al., 2010 on the Itelmens of Kamchatka). Chukotka occupies a specific position within Russia, and, to state and regional authorities, it poses particular challenges linked to its unique set of characteristics. It is remote from the Russian “mainland” (called locally materik, the continent) and subject to extreme meteorological conditions. There are few roads, and the sea routes are frozen eight months of the year—which means that one travels to and within the region mostly by airplane. Consequently, the cost of construction materials and of labour is particularly high. Given these difficulties, the investment required to build churches may seem to be disproportionate to the small number of people that the Orthodox Church can reach in Chukotka: while the region is one and a half times the size of France, it is inhabited by about 48,000 people (“Predvaritel’naia otsenka…,” 2024), 30% of whom are Indigenous.1
- 2 For a preliminary sketch of some of these issues see Vaté, 2019.
- 3 In the Soviet Union and, until recently, in the Russian Federation, the whole territory of Chukotk (...)
2In this study, I examine the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Chukotka paying particular attention to political and socio-historical aspects of its presence and its post-Soviet implantation.2 My goal is to document and analyse the challenges that the Orthodox Church has encountered in Chukotka, due not only to its Arctic environment and its extreme remoteness but also to its particular history and its geopolitical location. Generally, I aim to add complexity to our understanding of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church and its objectives, which are not always self-evident. While ministering to the people is the manifest mission of the Church, in Chukotka, it is not the only one. The leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, in coordination with the leaders of the Russian state, may have a particularly good reason for attempting to overcome the difficulties involved in establishing its presence. There is, after all, one special feature that must be taken into account: Chukotka’s proximity to the United States and, hence, its strategic geopolitical significance.3
3I suggest the following: the Russian Orthodox Church has gone to great lengths to make Chukotka Orthodox; but the disparity between the necessary expenditures and the seemingly modest results leads one to reflect on its motives. By marking the land in Chukotka, the Russian Orthodox Church has at least two goals: first, ministering to inhabitants who previously had little contact with Orthodox Christianity and, second, together with the Russian state, staking a cultural and political claim on the furthest Russian territory—a territory that has had, intermittently, a history of close relations with North America and, since 1867, a maritime border with the United States.
4Despite important recent contributions (e.g. Tocheva, 2017; Kormina, 2019; Kormina and Shtyrkov, 2011; Luehrmann, 2019), the anthropology of Russian Orthodoxy is still in its early stages. This is especially true of Siberia, where attention has been directed largely toward other types of religious practices, such as shamanism. There are, however, some studies that are devoted to the encounter between Orthodoxy and Siberian Indigenous practices. For example, Jean-Luc Lambert shows how, in pre-Soviet times, Khanty-Mansi bear rituals took shape in contact with Orthodoxy and Russian colonialism (Lambert, 2010). More recently, Anne Dalles Maréchal has provided an illuminating analysis of the ways in which Nanai embroidery, with its characteristic iconography, is used to express ideas consistent with Orthodox Christianity (Dalles Maréchal, 2023). At a more institutionalized level, Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (2005) looks at the religious and political landscape of Yakutia, where the Orthodox Church and Sakha temples compete. This paper, in contrast, is closer in its approach to Alexandra Antohin’s analysis (2011) of the complexities of reinstating the Orthodox Church and parish life in Magadan.
5Elsewhere, I have written about religious practices of Indigenous people of Chukotka, with a particular emphasis on rituals of Chukchi reindeer herders (e.g. Vaté, 2005, 2011a, 2021) and on the post-Soviet conversion of some Chukchi to various forms of Protestantism (Vaté, 2009). Here, however, I shift my focus to the Orthodox Church in Chukotka. Relations of the Indigenous people of Chukotka to the Orthodox Church are part of this wider focus, but there are many other aspects as well.
6In describing and analyzing developments regarding the Russian Orthodox Church in Chukotka, I draw on my own ethnographic data and on information about the Church’s activities that I have found online or in other primary or secondary sources. To supplement my own data, I have consulted the website of the Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka of the Russian Orthodox Church and articles published in various media. Interactions with a variety of people and exposure to diverse perspectives during fieldwork are necessary for understanding what is happening at the micro level; but information garnered from other primary and secondary sources, many of which are posted online, has enabled me to have a better understanding of what is at stake politically at a macro level.
- 4 OCIP was funded by the French Polar Institute Paul-Émile Victor (IPEV).
7Ethnographic material for this contribution was gathered during fieldwork in Anadyr, the capital of Chukotka, in March and April 2018 as part of the project “Orthodox Christianity and Indigenous People in Contemporary Alaska and Chukotka” (OCIP).4 My knowledge of the Orthodox Church in Chukotka also relies on my long-term experience in this region, including a total of more than three years of fieldwork in both urban and rural areas from 1993 to 2018. In 2018, I investigated the activities of representatives and members of the Church in places of worship, in the eparchy headquarters and in the wider community. I interviewed church officials, including the bishop, and also people whom I knew from my previous trips to Chukotka. In 2018, I recorded about twenty-five formal or semi-formal interviews, but, of course, I spoke casually or conducted informal interviews with many more people—in addition to being able to draw on fieldnotes based on research prior to 2018. Having long-term experience in the region and having an established network of acquaintances was a real asset. One person whom I knew from previous stays was instrumental in enabling me to contact the bishop, to visit the headquarters of the eparchy regularly, and to spend time in the eparchy dining room, where I could engage in conversations with clergy, lay people working for the Church and visitors.
8In this paper, I present diachronically the situation of the Orthodox Church in Chukotka, emphasizing the tremendous challenges encountered over time. I review briefly the history of relations between the Orthodox Church and the Indigenous people of Chukotka prior to the Soviet period, showing that the early Orthodox missionaries largely failed in their efforts to convert Indigenous people and to leave a significant imprint on the landscape. Second, I trace the initial steps of church representatives in Chukotka in the post-Soviet era, showing how they had to start practically from scratch. Third, I describe the concerted effort of the Russian Orthodox Church, beginning in the early 2000s, to augment its presence in Chukotka by building churches and erecting monuments throughout the region—showing how Diomid, the first bishop of the new Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka, helped initiate but then nearly derailed this project. Fourth, I outline the specific challenges that confronted the Orthodox Church in Chukotka at the end of the 2010s—and which, no doubt, continue to confront it—indicating that the Church has made some gains but still struggles to establish its presence in the life of the people. Finally, I argue that, by marking the land in this particular context, the Church not only claims the territory but also aids in asserting Russian supremacy—in the face of the nearby US.
- 5 For a comparative overview of various encounters with Christianity in Siberia, see Borjon-Privé et (...)
9The intensive construction of religious monuments and buildings in recent decades cannot be explained by the wish to reinstate a special bond that the Church had established with Indigenous people but that was later destroyed under the Soviets. Chukchi probably present one of the most radical examples of the limited degree to which the Russian Orthodox missions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries achieved their goals.5 In that sense, they present a striking contrast with other Siberian people, such as Altaians (see Znamenski, 1999b) and the Itelmens, in Kamchatka (Koester et al., 2014).
- 6 Admittedly, encounters of Indigenous people with Christianity in a colonial context do not result (...)
10In the course of early encounters with Russians entering their territories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Chukchi became famous for their resistance to Russian colonizers (Bogoras, 1904–1909: 681–682). The first Orthodox missionary arrived in the Chukchi land in 1744 but was reportedly murdered the following year (ibid.: 723). Next important missionary campaigns occurred in the 1830s and 1840s (ibid.; Znamenski, 1999b: 162). Even then, the activities of Orthodox missionaries were largely restricted to those areas where Russians lived, that is the south and the northwest of the Chukchi territory (Vdovin, 1979: 61). In the course of the nineteenth century, missionary records show a steady increase in the number of baptisms, but these conversions seem to have had little impact on Chukchi’s religious practices (Znamenski, 1999a: 29; Znamenski, 1999b: 171–172). Generally, the Chukchi were “indifferent” to Orthodox Christianity (ibid.: 139, 171), as they “saw little social or spiritual sense in adjusting Christianity to their culture” (ibid: 9).6
11In sum, the presence of missionaries in Chukotka was minimal (Bogoras, 1904-1909: 727). The historian Inna Yurganova explains this with reference to challenging geographical and climatic conditions (Yurganova, 2015: 62). According to her, a more significant impact of the Orthodox Church would have needed “constant (regular) missionary work requiring both tangible investments (travel missionaries, food, labor, interpreters, creating living conditions for missionaries) and self-sacrifice” (ibid.: 70).
12The influence of the Orthodox Church and, more generally, of Russian authorities was further weakened by competition from Americans. Beginning in the 1820s and with increasing intensity after the sale of Alaska to the US in 1867, Chukchi engaged eagerly in relation with American traders, whose products they preferred to Russian counterparts (Vdovin, 1965: 236, 239). The central position of Chukchi between Russians and Americans provided them with a degree of choice in their dealings with colonial powers.
13Consequently, there are today hardly any traces of the pre-Soviet Orthodox past in Chukotka. This is due in part to Soviet atheist policies and propaganda that led to the removal of the few existing Orthodox edifices in the region. But the general absence of the Orthodox Church in the Chukotkan religious landscape in the 1990s was not due to Soviet policies alone but to the fact that the Orthodox Church had not yet managed to establish itself in the region.
- 7 An institution inherited from Soviet times whose goal is to provide entertainment and cultural enl (...)
- 8 Protestant missionaries came from the United States but also Russia and Ukraine. Protestantism man (...)
14In the 1990s, in the first years of my fieldwork in Chukotka, the Orthodox presence was rather discrete. I associate it with a friend of mine, a Russian woman working in the House of Culture,7 then in her fifties, who never missed an Orthodox service. I would see her rush with enthusiasm to a small church that was built in pre-Soviet times on the outskirts of Anadyr. In the early years of the Soviet era, the building was transformed into a House of Culture, but it was later used for storage, after a new, much larger House of Culture was built in the city centre (Vaté and Diachkova, 2011: 31). In post-Soviet times, it became the Temple of the Transfiguration of the Lord (khram Preobrazheniia Gospodnia), which, according to the website of the Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka (“Khram Preobrazheniia…,” 2016), was the place where the first Orthodox services in Chukotka took place after 1991. I am not sure how many people attended the services when my friend rushed there, because, at that time, I was documenting Chukchi hunting and herding rituals, rather than the place of Orthodox Christianity in local life. Nevertheless, it was clear that Orthodoxy occupied a rather marginal position in Anadyr in the 1990s, while, in villages, it was barely present at all. To the best of my knowledge, in that first post-Soviet decade, only Protestant missionaries ventured into villages and managed to build communities of believers there.8 Representatives of the Orthodox Church did not seem to show interest in converting Indigenous people, or they were not yet in a position to do so.
15In the 1990s, the economic crisis that hit all Russia was intensified in Chukotka by the corruption of Aleksandr Nazarov, governor from 1991 to 2000 (see Gray, 2005; Thompson, 2008). The first steps of the Orthodox Church in the region, beginning in the latter years of Nazarov’s term of office, were taken under these difficult conditions.
- 9 The Chukotkan Autonomous Region (Chukotskii Avtonomnyi Okrug), or simply Chukotka, is divided in s (...)
16Father Leonid (Tsapok), a young Orthodox missionary who served in Chukotka at the beginning of the 2000s, has left testimonies about that period that have been posted online. In 2001, Father Leonid was sent to Lavrentiya, the administrative centre of the district of Chukotka (Chukotkskii raion),9 located with its 1,400 inhabitants on the eastern coast of the Chukchi Peninsula. He stayed there for eight years, travelling occasionally to other settlements in the region. In a text that was subsequently published on various websites (Tsapok, 2010) and in an interview that he gave to the Spiritual Academy BOGOSLOV (“Problemy…,” 2012), Father Leonid talks frankly about the difficulties that he encountered when trying to organize an Orthodox congregation.
17Before going to seminary, Leonid Tsapok had grown up in Anadyr; but like many residents of the regional capital, he was entirely unfamiliar with Chukotkan life beyond the city’s boundaries. When billionaire Roman Abramovich became governor of Chukotka in 2000, the regional economy was in terrible shape. Living conditions in Anadyr were poor, but in the villages the situation was much worse—something I could see for myself during fieldwork. In this context, Father Leonid had to deal with the general poverty of the region, with families suffering from malnutrition and even starvation, and with the decrepit state of infrastructure. About the building he received from the local administration, he writes:
Windows were knocked out, the roof was partially demolished, the heating system—just hopeless. (Tsapok, 2010: 2)
18Father Leonid explains that he struggled to fulfil his duties, not having been prepared at the seminary for the encounter with Indigenous perspectives and ways of life and being surprised to find that his potential parishioners had almost no knowledge of Orthodoxy. In his testimony, which is phrased in paternalistic terms, he distinguishes, on one hand, between Ukrainians and “simple Russians” (prostye russkie liudi), who “need a normal liturgy in Slavonic,” and, on the other hand, the “Chukchi/Indigenous people (mestnoe naselenie)” for whom “the service should not take more than forty minutes” and should contain as little Church Slavonic as possible (“Problemy…,” 2012). However, even members of congregations that had been formed in the absence of clergy by non-Indigenous laypersons in the 1990s or the early 2000s were woefully ignorant of Orthodox Christianity, because they grew up in Chukotka at a time when there was really no church at all:
… One could not go to the church next door to see how they did things. People would follow the magazine Science and Religion (Nauka i Religiia) or their own ideas, and not what a priest (batiushka) explained to them. And, as a matter of fact, all kinds of priests came (to Chukotka). It gave rise to an interesting cocktail in people’s head. (ibid.)
19Introducing changes to suit his purposes, Father Leonid shortened the church service, adding time for discussions and training before the liturgy and for “drinking tea and more discussions” after it. He recognized that some hierarchs might not see his services as completely Orthodox; but, he said, “actually, this is the only possible way; or at least I didn’t manage to think of anything else” (ibid.). Father Leonid justified his actions as follows:
It is not realistic to serve an All-night Vigil in such villages. All that can be done is prayer services and short requiems, the rest should be prayed in simple words. … There is no use in missionary trips, baptisms and sermons if you just go away afterwards and leave everybody at a loss. (Tsapok, 2010: 7)
20In his missionary efforts, Father Leonid attempted to take advantage of the experience that villagers had already had with the Protestant missions that had been well-settled in the 1990s (Vaté, 2009). “I think we should adopt the best of their organizational experience,” he wrote, “even more so if life itself is telling us this is the right thing to do” (ibid.: 8).
There was a congregation of Pentecostals in Enmelen, so almost all the people who started coming [to his Orthodox services] … had been to Protestant services at least once. Some had attended those for quite a long time. Our parishioners successfully borrowed some elements of Protestant worship. Women would read akathists and canons from the prayer book, the Bible, and Lives of Saints, and drank tea. They also prayed for different needs when they could find appropriate prayers in Slavonic, and when they could not find them, they used their own words. Every time I came, we would have a Liturgy; everyone would confess and take communion. (ibid.: 7–8)
21Father Leonid’s testimony provides insight into the experiences of the first Orthodox missionaries of the post-Soviet era who came to an economically devastated region where Orthodoxy was not deeply rooted and where numerous Protestant denominations had already been established.
- 10 Abramovich is said to have spent about 2,5 billion dollars of his own fortune in the region (Jense (...)
22After suffering during the economic crisis of the 1990s, people in Chukotka benefited from the arrival of billionaire Roman Abramovich, who served as governor from 2000 to 2008. During his term of office, Abramovich ushered in a dynamic new era marked by major investments resulting in the reconstruction of housing and the infrastructure, the opening of new shops, and the arrival of people from mainland Russia.10 In the course of the 2000s, the Orthodox Church established itself progressively in the region, despite all difficulties mentioned previously. In 2000, the new Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka became independent from the Magadan Eparchy, to which it had previously belonged. But the main challenge at that time came from within, namely from Diomid, the first bishop of Anadyr and Chukotka, who confronted the Orthodox Church with another layer of problems.
23Bishop Diomid was born as Sergei Ivanovich Dziuban in Ukraine in 1961. In 1986, he entered the Russian Orthodox seminary in Moscow and was tonsured as a monk in 1987. Subsequently, he continued to rise in the church hierarchy until he was named Bishop of Anadyr and Chukotka in 2000 (“Episkop Anadyskii…,” n.d.).
24Under Bishop Diomid, the Church initiated the extensive construction of Orthodox buildings and monuments in the eparchy. At the beginning of the 2000s, the only Orthodox church in Chukotka was the little one mentioned above, located on the outskirts of the capital city. In other places, members of the first Orthodox communities would gather in private flats, in the local House of Culture, or a museum. Three projects marked the beginning of the construction of Orthodox buildings: a monumental cross on a hill overlooking the city of Anadyr, built in 2003; a statue of Saint Nicholas the Miracle-Worker in the centre of Anadyr, built in 2004; and the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Source of Life, also in Anadyr, built in 2005. The cathedral has the reputation of being the largest wooden Orthodox church built on permafrost that is still in use; while the statue of St. Nicholas, which is twenty-five metres high, is said to be one of the largest monuments of its kind.
Figure 1. Statue of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker, Anadyr (October 2004).
Credit: Virginie Vaté
Figure 2. Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Source of Life while under construction, Anadyr (October 2004).
Credit: Virginie Vaté
25After 2005, intensive construction and renovation spread to other parts of the huge territory of Chukotka. When it was not possible to build a new church, existing buildings, such as shops or military barracks that had been abandoned in the 1990s, were transformed into churches, as in the towns of Ugol’nye Kopi and in Lavrentiya. As previously noted, new Orthodox churches were built all over Russia during this same period. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that building in Chukotka is much more costly than it is in central or southern Russia or even in those parts of the Russian Arctic that are closer to Moscow or Saint-Petersburg and which, consequently, are more accessible logistically. If one considers that building materials can be transported by boat to Chukotka only during summer months and can be relayed inland only by airplane or all-terrain vehicles; and if one considers that salaries are usually three times higher in Chukotka than they are on the Russian mainland; then one may understand why the expense of building a single church there is very high, when compared with expenses in other parts of Russia.
26In promoting the reconstruction of Chukotka, Governor Abramovich is known to have dipped into his private fortune, and he seems to have contributed to the Orthodox cause as well. According to reports, the billionaire may have funded the construction of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Source of Life in Anadyr in full (“Chukotskii gubernator shchitaet…,” 2006, and Filatov, 2006). The Church also benefitted from contributions made by the regional administration, private businesses and ordinary citizens.
27All of this occurred under Bishop Diomid’s mandate. However, in 2007, he began, in very harsh terms, to criticize publicly the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Aleksii II, and the Metropolitan, Kirill (who succeeded Aleksii as patriarch in 2009). Diomid accused them (and others) of nothing less than heresy, in particular of oecumenism. At issue was their signature in 2007 of the act of canonical communion between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which had declared its independence in the early 1920s in the wake of the Russian Revolution (Richters, 2013: 3). Diomid also condemned Aleksii II for having prayed with Roman Catholics in Notre Dame Cathedral during his visit to Paris in 2007 and for having venerated the Crown of Thorns there. In response to Diomid’s attack on the Patriarch and the Metropolitan, the Holy Synod ordered him to desist, threatening to defrock him for provoking a schism. Diomid chose instead to escalate the conflict, casting an anathema on Patriarch Aleksii II and Metropolitan Kirill—an act that even the Patriarch cannot decide unilaterally, according to Russian Orthodox canonical law. In an ostentatious display of disrespect, Diomid also stopped mentioning the name of the Patriarch during the liturgy in his eparchy. Because of this, the Holy Synod defrocked Diomid in 2008, reducing him to the status of a monk until the end of his life. For his part, Diomid remained defiant and continued to exert his influence on followers all over Russia, some of whom still occupied positions of authority in the Russian Orthodox Church. Then, however, in 2021, Diomid died in a car accident, becoming thereafter the subject of conspiracy theories among some of his followers (Bochkov, 2020; Soldatov, 2021).
- 11 This is precisely what Peter the Great called the synod that he created to replace the Patriarchat (...)
28The role that the first Bishop of Anadyr and Chukotka played in establishing Orthodoxy in the region was ambivalent, to say the least. On the one hand, he contributed to the rise of the Orthodox Church in the region, directing an active campaign of construction and also gathering and converting parishioners. On the other hand, he created a divergent and non-canonical branch of the Orthodox Church, which he called the Russian Orthodox Church – Most Holy Governing Synod (Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ – Sviateishii Pravitel’stvuiushchii Sinod11). In 2018, this non-canonical branch still had followers inside and outside of Chukotka, and it may still have followers today.
29While in Chukotka in 2018, I was told that there were still about thirty followers of Diomid who met in a flat in Anadyr. In one village (posëlok) with a population of 750, an Orthodox priest, who was recounting the various challenges that he faced in his parish, mentioned the existence of a group of Diomid’s followers (Diomidovtsy), numbering, in his estimate, fifteen to twenty-five, a group about the size of his parish.
30Some people told me that they had become Orthodox because of Diomid and that they felt lost when he left. Their enthusiasm seemed to be based on their experience with him as a person and to have little, if anything, to do with his conflict with the Patriarch. One disciple told me the following:
- 12 As explained above, Diomid’s objections pertained not to Old Believers but to reunification with t (...)
- 13 The name has been changed to protect the anonymity of the people involved.
Diomid was removed because he was against the other schism, that from abroad that came back to us, the Old Believers.12 That was his position. But he was really a good person. Very smart. He really provided warmth. After him, nobody provided such warmth. Such benevolence, coming from deep inside. Everything was from the heart. A lot of people stopped going [to the Orthodox Church]. Not only us [Chukchi], Russians too. And they go to Pavel’s [the flat of a follower of Diomid].13
31Diomidovtsy in Chukotka seem to remain marginal, in comparison to the new and intense visibility of the Russian Orthodox Church; but insidiously, their very existence still challenged the efforts of the local clergy in 2018.
32From 2008, when Diomid was discharged, to 2018, four bishops held office in Anadyr. This rather quick rate of turnover may reflect the difficulty of establishing the church in the region. Nevertheless, the program of constructing and renovating church buildings continued. When I interviewed Archbishop Matfei (Kopylov), who served in Anadyr from 2016 to 2018, he stated emphatically that he was sent to Chukotka because of his experience in supervising the construction of church building while previously serving in Kamchatka. This continuing effort to construct the church’s architectural basis is, however, only one of the current strategies for enhancing the presence of Orthodoxy in Chukotka. Other important strategies include enhancing the attractivity of church services and organizing cultural events in the public sphere. But despite extreme efforts of members of the clergy onsite results remain ambiguous.
33Were it not for his religious vestments, Archbishop Matfei might be taken for a businessman prone to vaunting the performance of the company under his management. This, at least, was my first impression of him during our exchange in April 2018. Indeed, as I could see, the Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka was abuzz with intense and varied activity.
- 14 See the website Moskovskii Patriarkhat. Anadyrskaia i Chukotskaia Eparkhiia (Moscow Patriarchate. (...)
34In 2018, when I was in Anadyr, a city of circa 12,000 inhabitants, the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Source of Life held religious services daily, and sometimes twice a day. Several new developments bore witness to recent investments serving to promote the activities of the Church. In 2012, on Lenin Street, next to the cathedral, the eparchy had commissioned the construction of an administrative building, which also included a residence for the bishop and for some members of the clergy. Then, in 2017, the eparchy had launched a new website, hiring full-time a professional photographer to supply it regularly with new pictures and information.14 Under Archbishop Matfei, the cathedral, which had been built ten years earlier, was renovated and fitted out with a high-quality lighting and sound system. The choir was composed of professional singers from mainland Russia, who were regularly shifted after fulfilling the terms of short-term contracts and benefiting from augmented salaries.
Figure 3. The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Source of Life after its renovation, Anadyr (April 2018).
Credit: Virginie Vaté
35The design of the church shop (lavka) located in the cathedral was also improved, as Archbishop Matfei explained:
We have a relatively modern equipment, and the selection we offer [in the shop] is interesting. We have approached things professionally, and we are constantly renewing the supply in order to offer the latest Orthodox publications, icons, and candles. (Interview with Archbishop Matfei, April 6, 2018)
- 15 One of the Church’s exhibitions on Russian history, called “The Twentieth Century: The lessons of (...)
36This intense activity of the church contributed to saturating local cultural life with Orthodox themes and practices. In Anadyr today, the Russian Orthodox Church plays a role similar to that of the Soviet and post-Soviet House of Culture. As Archbishop Matfei told me, the Church worked—and, no doubt, still works—hand in hand with the regional Department of Education, Culture, and Sports. During my fieldwork in 2018, church officials were organizing cultural events, such as exhibitions on Russia’s history15 that were aimed at “restoring a view of history that [they believed] was distorted during the Soviet period.” These exhibitions travelled with members of the clergy to some of the capitals of the districts. Other events organized by the Church included concerts, film viewings followed by discussions with the filmmaker, and lectures by historians. For projects such as these, the eparchy received funding from the government (pravitel’stvennyi grant). In a context where cultural institutions are rather rare, the diverse activities offered by the Church have the potential to attract and influence a great number of people.
37In my encounters with the archbishop and with other members of the clergy, my interlocutors emphasized three important goals of the Church: to take action against drug consumption (anti-narkoticheskaia rabota), against alcohol abuse (anti-al’kogol’naia rabota), and “against sects” (anti-sektantskaia rabota)—the last of which means attempting to prevent the spread of Protestantism. This is reminiscent of the historian Anne White’s analysis of the intentions underlying the project of “cultural enlightenment” in the Soviet Union. The house of culture, she writes, had a “preventative and supervisory role … intended to ward off social problems” and to “guide people into officially accepted leisure pursuits, prevent the formation of alternative or counter-cultures and contribute to the elimination of social evils such as crime, drunkenness, and drug addiction” (White, 1990: 1–3). Paraphrasing official Soviet policy, White writes that “the party can and must control the nature of the culture” (ibid.: 1). Today, the same might be said of the Russian Orthodox Church, at least in Chukotka. The commitment of church officials to the promotion of “cultural enlightenment” provides a clear illustration of the “ethical continuity” from Soviet to post-Soviet times, described by Tocheva (2014) and documented in a number of other studies (Agadjanian, 2011; Kormina and Shtyrkov, 2011; Rousselet, 2013). The most recent example is the Centre for Spiritual Enlightenment (dukhovno-prosvetitel’skii tsentr), which was built by the Russian Orthodox Church in the heart of Anadyr and opened to the public in October 2023.
38During my fieldwork in 2018, the Orthodox Church was also establishing its presence in other sectors of public life. Members of the Orthodox clergy regularly visited hospitals, schools, government offices, and police and fire stations in accordance with both the civil and the liturgical calendar. For instance, they took part in all work-related celebrations, remnants of the Soviet period, such as the Day of the Fire Fighters. In particular, they attended all celebrations linked to military activities, such as the Day of the Protectors of the Fatherland (den’ zashchitnika otechestva) and the Day of Victory (Den’ Pobedy) – May 9, commemorating the end of the Second World War in Europe. As in all of Russia, the Orthodox clergy of Chukotka lays special emphasis on everything linked to Russian patriotism. They even bless military equipment. The Orthodox Church also has a highly visible area at the airport with icons, a candelabrum, and pens and paper for those who want to write down prayers.
Figure 4. At Anadyr airport (2018).
Credit: Virginie Vaté
39In the 2010s, the Church was active in implanting itself more concretely in the Chukotkan social and physical landscape. Nonetheless, the Church struggled with two major difficulties: recruiting priests and establishing a stable community of parishioners.
40For the churches that have been constructed or renovated in Chukotka in the post-Soviet era, and for the activities reviewed in the preceding section, the bishop of the Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka currently relies (according to the eparchy’s website) on a staff of eight priests. In April 2018, Archbishop Matfei mentioned eleven priests and a deacon, in addition to which I counted a nun, someone who wanted to become a nun (poslushnitsa), a helper at the eparchy (trudnik), and about three or four young volunteers—not all of whom were members of the permanent staff. This situation reflects the eparchy’s difficulty in recruiting clergymen and women willing to come to Chukotka.
- 16 This includes severnye nadbavki (northern allowances) and raionnyj koeffitsient (district coeffici (...)
- 17 With the exception of the archbishop, clergy members are not mentioned by name or function.
41Attracting workers is an issue in all sectors of the regional economy. This is why, as a general principle, people in Chukotka receive the highest level of “hardship pay.”16 While salaries are higher than those in Western and Southern Russia, prices in Chukotka are also the highest in Russia since most foodstuffs and nearly all manufactured goods are imported. Members of the clergy, however, feel that they are underpaid, and, in my conversations with them, their salaries and the difficulties of life in Chukotka came up several times.17
- 18 At the 2018 exchange rate, the equivalent of about 2,860 euros.
Not every priest can serve here. Many leave the region … To live normally … a priest should earn 200,000 roubles a month18 to support his family.
- 19 At the 2018 exchange rate, the equivalent of about 570 euros.
- 20 At the 2018 exchange rate, the equivalent of under 150 euros.
A priest receives 40,000 roubles19 as much as a cleaning lady. And a volunteer gets 10,000.20
42Indeed, the Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka cannot afford to pay members of the clergy sufficiently. The church does help the wife of each priest to find a job, as her salary usually constitutes an important contribution to the household income. And clergymen in Chukotka receive at least some special benefits: under Archbishop Matfei, they and their families became entitled to one trip to mainland Russia per year, paid by the eparchy. Usually, people working in other sectors in Chukotka are entitled to funding for such a trip once every two years.
- 21 For a discussion on the organization of Orthodox parishes in Russia, see Tocheva, 2017.
43In most Russian localities, the priest is paid by the parish21; but, given the continuing difficulties in establishing parishes in Chukotka, which I review presently, this source of funding is largely unavailable. In fact, the Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka has the status of a mission (missionerskaia), which means that it relies on support (dotatsionnaia) from the Russian Orthodox Church. However, such funding seems to be more readily available for building churches and organizing events than for paying adequate salaries for the clergy.
44To continue functioning, the Eparchy of Anadyr and Chukotka must rely on volunteers, who come to work there for a fixed period, and on priests with short-term contracts, who come to support the clergy with permanent contracts. Many of the volunteers are young priests or monks who come to the region after completing their studies at the seminary. This is now a rule, introduced by the Patriarch Kirill: a newly trained priest should serve two years in those parts of Russia that the Church has categorized as missions. Not all priests are happy to be sent to Chukotka. During my fieldwork, my interlocutors in the church spoke repeatedly about being exhausted, both physically and morally. Being unaccustomed to the harsh climate, to the winter darkness, to the local food, and to working overtime because of understaffing, several members of the clergy, even relatively young ones, complained of health problems.
45In short, the Orthodox Church is able to maintain only a minimal number of clergymen in the region, both in Anadyr and in some district hubs across Chukotka. As a result, not all Orthodox buildings have an officiant, and some of the buildings that were built over the last two decades probably remain largely unused. Like the region as a whole, the eparchy is led continually to manage the shortage of manpower and to operate thanks to a permanent movement of personnel—a feature that is not exclusive to the church.
46There is no doubt that the activities of the Orthodox Church in Chukotka have made people more familiar with the institution and its values. However, the eparchy struggles with stabilizing a community of parishioners. While statistics regarding church attendance may be of limited value in evaluating the situation of Orthodoxy in Russia today (Tocheva, 2017), they remain an important indicator for local clergymen. Bishop Matfei explained that, in the year preceding our interview, he saw a significant rise in church attendance, which he attributed to the efforts of his team to improve the material conditions of the service. But, outside of Anadyr, church attendance was still low, according to members of the clergy, especially in parishes where there was no priest or where the turnover rate was high and each new priest had to try to revive his congregation. Even in Anadyr, some members of the clergy raised questions about the actual rise in the number of active parishioners. It remains difficult to ascertain the number of people that the Orthodox Church manages to touch.
47To evaluate church attendance in Chukotka one must take two specificities of the population into consideration. First, about 30% of the population is Indigenous; and, in villages, Indigenous people are more numerous than non-Indigenous. Second, non-Indigenous residents—including, especially, Russian citizens from other regions—usually come to Chukotka only temporarily. Different actors develop various relations to Orthodoxy, which, of course, affects church attendance, as I show in the following paragraphs.
48In the 1990s, when some Indigenous people of Chukotka started to convert to Christianity, they usually turned to one of the Protestant denominations that had just been introduced to the region. However, in the course of the 2000s, Indigenous people became more familiar with the Orthodox Church. During fieldwork in 2006, I could observe that some of my Chukchi friends had started to buy kulich, traditional Easter cake, and coloured Easter eggs—things that were not available during my previous visits to the region. Such practices may express changes in consumption rather than faith; nevertheless, it was evident that Orthodoxy had begun to have an impact on people’s lives, even if only in small or subtle ways.
49Orthodoxy tends to be more successful in establishing itself among members of the urban Indigenous intelligentsia. In contrast to Protestantism, which has spread in rural communities (Vaté, 2009), Orthodoxy is perceived to be “Russian,” which means that becoming Orthodox may be interpreted as a way of finding one’s place in Russian society. Hence, one of my friends explained to me that her son was not a “good Chukchi” because he did not speak the language and “he had never seen a live reindeer.” Therefore, she wanted him to receive an Orthodox baptism so that, at least, he could be a “good Russian.” Like conversion to Protestantism, conversion to Orthodoxy is often viewed as a way of coping with acute social problems such as alcoholism. Conversion to Christianity sometimes occurs when the person in question makes a trip to Anadyr or to mainland Russia for health reasons. However, being widely criticized in the public sphere, Evangelical Christianity tends to marginalize converts in the wider society, whereas becoming Orthodox today may be a way of achieving at least a degree of social integration in a Russian-dominated environment.
50While attendance of Orthodox church services is low among Indigenous people, overreliance on this indicator may be misleading. Indigenous converts often develop their own way of being Orthodox. For instance, they tend to avoid the crowd in the church, preferring to be undisturbed while praying and revering the icons. Be that as it may, in 2018, after visiting two well-attended Protestant churches where I had done fieldwork in the past, I could not help but conclude that the Orthodox Church in Chukotka lags far behind Protestant denominations in terms of native participation.
51In general, non-Indigenous people settle only temporarily in the region. They come to take advantage of business opportunities, or the augmented hardship pay that allows them to earn well and eventually to buy property in the Russian mainland. How long this temporary residence in Chukotka lasts depends on family histories: it may range from just a few years to twenty years or more. The people in question may also belong to various social strata, from plumbers to successful entrepreneurs. But they all know that, one day, they are going to leave. This has consequences for the life of the Orthodox Church in Chukotka, as explained by a local priest:
People come to Chukotka to earn money. They have two or three jobs … in order to be able to buy a flat in mainland Russia. That’s why they won’t always come [to church]. … There is no population that lives here permanently. People arrive, earn money, and leave, and it goes on like this endlessly. In mainland Russia, one can establish a parish; people live there. But here it is difficult … [Here] you just see someone in the church, you just teach the person to live with God, and, there you go, he or she leaves.
52This point was also made clearly by Father Leonid in his statements regarding his time as a priest in Chukotka in the early years of the current millennium:
Every five years the parish renews itself by half. That is, parishioners who are already in the church (votserkovlennye), into whom you put effort, part of your soul, those who go to church and are engaged in the church and who are ready to work fruitfully and who actively start to help you—they leave. And then, new people come, and everything starts all over again.
53Father Leonid mentioned a related phenomenon:
In Chukotka there are almost no Russian pensioners …. Someone who has worked all his or her life in Chukotka, he or she leaves for the Russian mainland.… That is why people are not ready to put their soul in the [parish] church.… Many of them make donations to a church in the Russian mainland, where they have bought a place for their retirement, but not in Chukotka.
54We see, then, that, in Chukotka, the demand for the Orthodox Church is generally low among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Nevertheless, the Church has invested a tremendous amount of money and energy in the region. Evidently, choices have been made at a certain level in the Russian Orthodox hierarchy that favour the construction of buildings and the staging of cultural events over the sufficient remuneration of the clergy. Why is marking the land in Chukotka such an issue?
55The political scientist Alicja Curanović (2019: 204–205) has shown that both the Russian State and the Russian Orthodox Church turned their attention to the Arctic regions of Russia, starting in the 2010s, with the conviction that the Arctic would play a key role in efforts to strengthen Russia’s position internationally. In this light, the huge investment made by the State and the Church to saturate the physical and cultural landscape of Chukotka with Orthodox buildings and events serves not just to promote a religious mission but also to create and mark a Russian territory in the part of the Russian Arctic that borders the United States most closely.
56In the 1990s, military bases in Chukotka were gradually abandoned. Departing soldiers left behind them a ghostly landscape characterized by empty buildings and a decaying infrastructure. Even the formerly secret base of Gudym, containing until 1986 nuclear missiles pointed in the direction of American military bases near Seattle, was progressively demilitarized and finally closed in the beginning of the 2000s. But, in the 2010s, this policy was reversed. Since then, new bases have been established, and the active remilitarization of Chukotka continues until today (Bermudez, Conley and Melino, 2020). In this sense, it is not the Russian Orthodox Church alone that has had a renewed interest in the region over the last fifteen years.
57The reestablishment of military bases is not specific to Chukotka but pertains especially to the entire Russian Arctic coastline. Nevertheless, this particular part of the Russian Far North has received special attention. New military bases are being spread along the coast, in Pevek, on Wrangel Island, on Cape Schmidt, in Provideniya, in Anadyr, and in nearby Ugolny (Busch, 2017). This attests to Russia’s effort to enforce its supremacy over its coastlines and maritime spaces in the context of global competition.
58Curanović (2019: 204) argues convincingly that Russia’s “Arctic policy is a tool of status signalling not only for the Kremlin but also for the ROC,” i.e., the Russian Orthodox Church. By way of illustration, she describes the project called Russkaia Arktika (Russian Arctic), developed by the Moscow Patriarchate, beginning in 2010, with the explicit goal “to strengthen Russian civilisational sovereignty in the region” (Curanović, 2019: 204). Curanović also clearly links the installation of chapels in northern regions to the delimitation of the Arctic border. Even beyond the border, the Church engages in “spectacular acts of symbolic meaning” such as “baptising the North Pole” (2012) and the Northern Sea Route (2013) (Curanović, 2019: 204; Jones and Parfitt, 2012). As Patriarch Kirill himself declared in 2014, “the development of the Arctic is one of Russia’s highest priorities” (“Patriarkh Kirill shchitaet…,” 2014). This declaration was followed by a cycle of visits to several regions of Siberia and the Far North, including Chukotka.
59On September 6, 2016, Kirill, the first Russian Patriarch ever to visit Chukotka, arrived in Pevek, “the northernmost town of Russia” (“Sviateishii Patriarkh Kirill…,” 2016). He travelled to various recently built churches in the region and to sites where churches would be built in the future, giving them his blessing. He also met with “non-baptized Chukchi reindeer herders” (“Patriarkh Kirill posetil…,” 2016) in the Kanchalan tundra and continued his tour by visiting several towns on the coast. Most remarkably, he flew to the island of Ratmanov, which is located in the middle of the Bering Strait separating Asia from North America and which is now uninhabited except for military and security forces. Also known as Big Diomede, Ratmanov is four kilometres away from the island of Little Diomede, which belongs to the United States. On Ratmanov, at the foot of a monumental cross facing the US border, Patriarch Kirill pronounced a moleben, a prayer of supplication, symbolically marking the limit of the territory (“Sostoialas’ vstrecha…,” 2016). Chukotka is, he declared, the place where “the fatherland begins” (ibid.).
60In Chukotka, the Russian Orthodox Church has evidently pursued goals that are simultaneously missionary and political. By weighing together the costs that the Church has absorbed in implanting itself in Chukotka, the limited degree of success that it has had in attracting parishioners, and the strategic significance of the region for both the Church and the Russian State, I have tried to show that the political goal is of paramount importance.
61Sociologist of religion Danièle Hervieu-Léger (2002) identifies the “geopolitics of the religious” as one of the three “registers” of “religious territoriality.” She understands the “geopolitics of the religious” as the way in which “concrete forms of ‘pastorizing’ are implemented in territories gained (or remaining to be gained)” (Hervieu-Léger, 2002: 99). In the case of Chukotka, this “pastorizing” expresses itself predominantly in marking the land through the construction of Orthodox buildings, but also in organizing cultural events. We have also seen that Patriarch Kirill gave a particularly demonstrative service on Ratmanov Island, facing the US. In what Hervieu-Léger describes as “the model of parish civilization” (referring, in her discussion, to Catholicism), “gain[ing] a hold over territory … anticipates the eschatological achievement of the Kingdom of Heaven” (Hervieu-Léger, 2002: 101). In the Chukotkan case, the “gain” consists less in spreading eschatological conceptions than in expressing national ownership over the region. Orthodoxy’s presence is meant to be a sign of Russianness, not in the sense of being ethnic Russian (russkii) but of belonging to the Russian State (rossiiskoe gosudarstvo).
62Rather than being directly inherited from the Tsarist era, this close association between being Russian (rossiiskii) and the Russian Orthodox Church, understood less in the sense of religious engagement than of national belonging, results from the heritagization of architecture, both secular and sacred, that emerged during the Soviet period. According to historian Victoria Donovan (2019: 3), “the Soviet State exploited the architectural heritage of the Russian Northwest, and specifically the towns of Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda, to craft visions of Russified Sovietness that could stimulate popular patriotic consciousness.” In a similar way, Russian nationhood in Chukotka finds expression in Orthodox buildings, whose architecture reflects the influence of the architectural style of the historical Russian Northwest. In this sense, building Orthodox monuments in Chukotka not only marks the land in the present but also creates an architectural legacy that stems from the nation’s past and extends into its future. It fabricates an Orthodox heritage that from now on becomes part of Chukotka’s history, a heritage required by the political and religious authorities who affirm that this land, on the border, is indeed Russian and Orthodox.
