• 1 Two other churches in the city were destroyed in 1930: the cathedral of the Epiphany and the St Ma (...)

1The year 2023, tricentenary of the foundation of the city of Ekaterinburg, was to mark the reconstruction of Saint Catherine’s cathedral. The original cathedral was blown up with dynamite on April 6, 1930, after the president of the city’s executive committee signed the decision to destroy the building in order to use the stones as construction materials.1 However, no new cathedral has been built since. Covid-19 delayed construction; the St Catherine Foundation, created to realise the project, instead prioritised the fight against the pandemic. Then Russia declared war on Ukraine. On December 7, 2022, St Catherine’s day, celebrating the city’s protectress, Metropolitan Evgenii (Kul’berg) of Ekaterinburg and Verkhotur’e affirmed:

• 2 His intervention seems to have been due to the fear of a contagion of protest in other cities in R (...)
• 3 The population was asked “Which of the following options for the location of St Catherine’s cathed (...)

2Three successive proposals for the project, involving different construction sites, pitted one part of the city’s population against local political authorities and the eparchy. The protest movement culminated in 2019, after those in power decided to build the cathedral in a park in October Square, on the banks of the city pond, next to the Sverdlovsk State Academic Drama Theatre and steps away from the building of the Sverdlovsk regional government. In March–April, opponents, including the association Public Parks and Gardens of Ekaterinburg—a principal actor in the protests since its creation in 2017—organised flashmobs (called pereklichka). On March 2, they collected signatures against the cutting down of trees. On March 16, a concert with a dozen musical groups from the city took place at the El’tsin Centre (a social, cultural and educational space inaugurated by Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev in 2015 and considered a zenith of liberalism); signatures were collected there against the construction of the cathedral on the site chosen by the local authorities; the same day, a parody of collective prayer was organised in the public garden. On April 7, the opponents, essentially youth mobilised through social networks, “embraced” the public garden (obnimashki). As for those who supported the construction of St Catherine’s cathedral in the public garden, they gathered in numbers for a prayer service (moleben’) on March 17, and at Easter. The protest actions were amplified on May 13, 14 and 15, when fencing was installed—according to the media, the number of demonstrators, mostly youth, oscillated between 1,500 and 5,000; violent incidents broke out, incited by members of the mixed martial arts club of the Russian Copper Company (RMK), owned by the local oligarch Igor’ Altushkin, one of the two financers of the project (the other being Andrei Kozitsyn, former director of the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company (UGMK), the other big enterprise in the region). This protest movement, which was amply commented on by international media, ended after the intervention of Vladimir Putin himself and his call for a poll.2 Following the poll on October 13, 2019, in which over 100,000 people participated, it was decided to build St Catherine’s cathedral on the site of an old hardware factory.3

• 4 For an analysis of the religious situation in Ekaterinburg in 1998, see “Issledovanie religioznoi (...)

3The commentators all underlined that these protests were not of an anticlerical nature,4 even though critiques were issued against religious elites—in the same way as against other elites— and even though the protest took the form of parodies of prayer. Like in many other cities in Russia, the inhabitants of Ekaterinburg descended into the street to defend their urban space. While the Russian regime has considerably hardened since 2012, citizens did not hesitate to protest in 2019 to protect their environment. What is more, they opposed a decision made by the local authorities without any consultation with the population. These citizens wanted to be able to intervene in local issues. The demonstrations in Ekaterinburg are inscribed in a context of similar protests in other regions of Russia, recalling conflicts that developed in Moscow around Program 200, consisting of constructing churches in the peripheral neighbourhoods of the capital, among them Yasenevo and Torfianka (Argenbright, 2016). They are also situated in both a recent and more ancient history of protest in the Ural capital. Finally, the case allows us to examine battles between the religious and secular, in which urban space is often the theatre in the post-socialist world (Capelle-Pogăcean, 2008; Kormina, 2021; Darieva and Kormina, 2023). Starting from the case of St Catherine’s cathedral of Ekaterinburg, this study shows the political issues of the religious marking of urban spaces in post-Soviet Russia from the 1990s to the 2020s. The proposed reconstruction of the cathedral in the public garden and the mobilisations it provoked allow us to understand how church–state relations have evolved, at least at the local level. They underline the plural positionings, within the community of believers, as to the place the Church should hold in the public space; one finds Orthodox believers in both camps. Regarding the debates around the construction of the Romanian People’s Salvation cathedral in Bucharest, Antonela Capelle-Pogăcean has underlined the “extreme plasticity of the referent that lends itself to multiple meanings”; she adds that “Orthodoxy is therefore not at the centre, it circulates under diverse forms between different social spaces and expresses multiple aspirations” (Capelle-Pogăcean, 2008: 211). This is the same plasticity that I observe in Ekaterinburg.

• 5 This research was completed in the context of the French-Russian project “Marquer l’espace par le (...)

5The research relies first on interviews undertaken in September 2019 in Ekaterinburg with priests and laypeople in different parishes, representatives of the eparchy and local activists from the association Public Parks and Gardens of Ekaterinburg. Research among religious authorities and parishioners favourable to the construction of the cathedral in the public garden was facilitated, and also guided, by contacts established with the public relations manager of the eparchy and with believers at the heart of my earlier fieldwork. Therefore, the people I encountered who were favourable to the construction of the cathedral belonged essentially among the venerators—to various degrees—of the imperial family, an environment with which I had become familiar during my research on the commemoration of the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II, particularly by participating in the processions that take place each year in Ekaterinburg on July 16 and 17 (Rousselet, 2011); they belong to very conservative circles. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine unfortunately prevented me from returning to the Urals. While my French origin facilitated my entry into these circles in the 2000s–2010s, this same status hinders me today. I completed my research via email with an Ekaterinburg activist, articles published in the local and national Russian media, analysis of discussion threads on social networks—particularly the discussion thread of Public Parks and Gardens of Ekaterinburg on Facebook—and films created by activists. While these different sources allow me to show the spaces of controversy and to specify the actions taken by the protagonists, interviews with other religious actors would have without doubt unveiled a plurality of social and political positionings larger than that presented in this study.5

• 6 According to the story of Father Andrei, a Russian Orthodox priest I interviewed, this happened du (...)
• 7 The president was a doctor in economics, the executive director a historian. “It was a truly coura (...)

7The recent story of St Catherine’s cathedral began on April 18, 1991, when a dozen citizens planted a wooden cross in the place where the altar of the original cathedral had stood, with the blessing of then Archbishop Melkhisedek (Lebedev) of Sverdlovsk and Kurgan.6 Over 58 metres tall, the original cathedral had been built in the baroque style in 1764 in the place currently known as Labour Square (formerly Church Square, Cathedral Square, St Catherine Square): it contained the relics of a local saint, St Simeon of Verkhotur’e. From 1960, the fountain Stone Flower, named after a fairytale by Pavel Bazhov, has stood at the same location. In 1997, the wooden cross was replaced by a metal cross: a chapel was built for the city’s 275th anniversary thanks to a charitable foundation, the Institute of History and Archaeology, created by city economists, historians and business leaders.7 The chapel was consecrated on December 7, 1998.

• 8 For all this information concerning the chapel, I rely on the interview with Father Andrei.

8In 2003, a capsule containing earth from the burial place of Vasilii Tatishchev, founder of Ekaterinburg, was placed in the chapel. For a long time, the chapel did not house a parish: “It was simply there, the people passed, lit a candle.”8 When the project emerged for the reconstruction of the cathedral, Akathists for the cathedral’s construction were organised at the request of the local archbishop, Vikentii (Morar’). Youth came from diverse parishes and organised meetings, concerts and other activities. The first liturgy took place during Easter 2014. Today, the parish numbers only around fifty people. The young have continued to come to the chapel for the Akathists but without frequenting the parish. It is without doubt a sign of the eparchy’s lesser interest in this place that the chapel was still not finished in 2019. Technical problems, such as ventilation, had still not been resolved, delaying the painting of the frescoes.

• 9 He had previously been head of the administration of the region (1991–1994) and president of the r (...)
• 10 The conflicts were partly of a personal nature, but were equally linked to budgetary questions: th (...)
• 11 For an explanation by Eduard Rossel’ of the reasons for which he supported the construction of thi (...)

9The political landscape of Ekaterinburg has been marked over the course of the past three decades by competition and conflicts between the authorities of the region—skilled in construction—and those of the city. Such conflicts existed between Eduard Rossel’, all-powerful governor of the region between 1995 and 2009,9 and Arkadii Chernetskii, mayor of Ekaterinburg from 1995 to 2010.10 The former supported the Russian Orthodox Church and conservative values; linked to the big businesses of the region, in a context of strong corruption, he built the Church on the Blood.11 The latter was more partial to the separation of church and state, and was supported by the liberal forces of the city.

• 12 “All those who fought the Church were marked by the Lord—no one having resisted God died a beautif (...)

10In 2010, with the change at the head of the region, Archbishop Vikentii, in charge of the eparchy since 1999, suggested to the new governor, Aleksandr Misharin, the reconstruction of St Catherine’s cathedral on Labour Square, facing the magnificent nineteenth-century Sevastyanov’s house. St Catherine’s cathedral would be the project of the new governor, and it would be taller than the Church on the Blood. However, the mayor, Evgenii Porunov (2010–2013), like the urban architects, politicians and the—small—part of the population aware of the project, were not in favour of the plan (“Misharin i Vikentii predlagaiut postavit’ novyi khram…,” 2010). The location, with its fountain, was considered significant for its own history and was well frequented. In terms of urban planning, the construction of a new cathedral here would disfigure Lenin Avenue, one of the city’s principal arteries. On April 10, 2010, while Archbishop Vikentii had vituperated particularly aggressively against the opponents of his project some days earlier on an Orthodox television channel,12 a gathering in Labour Square drew around 3,000 people for Antonov (2010), up to 5,000 according to Lebedev (2017), and a petition against the construction received close to 3,600 signatures (Antonov, 2010).

• 13 They had also been financing the reconstruction of St Maximilian’s church in the early 2000s.

12Under the leadership of Kuivashev and Metropolitan Kirill (Nakonechnyi), the cathedral reconstruction project was relaunched. The project was also supported by three oligarchs of the region, particularly Igor’ Altushkin and Andrei Kozitsyn, cited in the introduction.13 To explain their support for reconstructing St Catherine’s cathedral, the public relations manager of the eparchy highlighted the oligarchs’ faith:

• 14 The pond, together with its dam, date to the foundation of the city in 1723.
• 15 Let us nevertheless note the mayor Evgenii Roizman was in favour of it “as a citizen.” See the int (...)
• 16 Interview with Pavel, activist with Public Parks and Gardens of Ekaterinburg, trained in social sc (...)

14The new place chosen for the cathedral was Ekaterinburg city pond. But this project of the “church-on-the-water” was rejected like the first. On December 7, 2016, a group of around forty people—principally architects, designers, sociologists and philosophers—created the Committee of the City Pond to oppose the project. Besides the place itself—with the pond being considered one of the city’s most precious heritage sites14—the proposed style for the cathedral was also criticised: it was to resemble St Basil’s cathedral in Moscow and the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg, thus signifying Ekaterinburg as Russia’s third capital. The fact that the project was imposed by the regional authorities was equally upsetting.15 In February 2017, around two hundred people, mainly members of the intelligentsia (teachers and people working in the cultural sector),16 lined up along the pond while holding hands in a flash mob that they called “Embrace the Pond.” On April 8, 2017, their numbers reached 1,500. At Easter, the eparchy for its part organised an imposing procession with Governor Kuivashev and Metropolitan Kirill at its head; it counted 7–10,000 participants (Tronina, 2017). Without doubt the governor feared he would not be re-elected in September by the less religious population of Ekaterinburg. The project was rejected.

• 17 See the analysis of political scientist Fedor Krasheninnikov on May 23, 2019 on the opposition cha (...)

15The following months were dedicated to the World Cup which took place in Russia from June 14 to July 15, 2018 and to the commemoration of the centenary of the imperial family’s assassination. At the beginning of autumn 2018, another new project was debated, this time proposing the cathedral be built in the public garden next to the theatre. This plan resulted in the incidents of May 2019, which took place against a backdrop of conflict between the city and the region. On May 22, by order of the presidential administration, Evgenii Kuivashev referred to the results of the polling institute VTSIOM, according to which 74% of people questioned considered the choice of location to be ill-advised (“Gorod i khram: opros VTSIOM v Ekaterinburge,” 2019), declaring that the church should be constructed in a more appropriate place (“Glava Sverdlovskoi oblasti zaiavil…,” 2019). Vysokinskii, though unpopular and not having the legitimacy of the ballot boxes, opposed Kuivashev’s decision. The governor knew his position would be threatened if he did not keep the social peace in Ekaterinburg, while the city government, which had until then only applied the decisions of the governor and adopted all the necessary regulations for the construction of the church in the public garden, tried in vain to demonstrate its power in the face of regional authorities. The oligarchs for their part had abandoned the battle.17

• 18 See also Rousselet, 2022.

16This history of the different projects to rebuild St Catherine’s cathedral shows not only the collusion of the political, religious and economic elites and the importance of relations between the local governor and the metropolitan, but also the fundamental role played by local oligarchs in the construction of this place of worship in the 2010s. It also allows us to nuance the political weight attributed to the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church at the local and national level.18 No governor risked disregarding the opinion of the population to the profit of the Church. Is it possible they feared that the protest would transform into a conflict against the federal authorities? One of the people interviewed had noticed on the internet, on the fourth day of the conflict, a photo of a man sporting the flag of the Ural Republic, a symbol of regional autonomy from July 1 to November 9, 1993 (Ekaterina, September 7, 2019).

• 19 He was baptised in April 2019 and is a regular practitioner.

20In many people’s opinion, opponents as much as supporters of the project, the cathedral became a pretext for manifesting their discontent. In the absence of other channels of expression, “because everything was blocked,” “everything negative that city inhabitants had accumulated at the end of spring, on all subjects, federal, local, regional, personal,” was “spilled” in the square, explained Pavel, an activist with Public Parks and Gardens of Ekaterinburg (Pavel, September 10, 2019). And according to Ivan, a manager at a production company in the field of engineering and an engaged Christian,19 this was made possible by the weakening of the Church’s authority over recent decades, especially among the youth, who were the most numerous group to mobilise in April–May 2019.

• 21 The same journalist showed how the Pussy Riot affair had had the same channelling effect as the pr (...)
• 22 In the sense of “in-between,” “transitional.”
• 23 Local collective action around urban space in Russia has already been the subject of several studi (...)
• 24 See intervention in the film Gorod besov (Ponomareva, 2019: part 1).

22The journalist Anastasia Koskello affirms that the eparchy of Ekaterinburg served as a lightning rod: according to her, “the protest concentrated on ‘greedy clergymen,’ and the blow to the oligarchs, to United Russia and to the head of state was thus considerably reduced” (Koskello, 2022).21 The opposition to the construction in the public garden could also be part of the “liminal”22 practices of protest spoken of by Christian Fröhlich and Kerstin Jacobsson— this grey zone “allows creative actors to express or practise resistance while avoiding causing the retaliation of state authorities” (Fröhlich and Jacobsson, 2019: 1147).23 The protest was moved by the sentiment, as stated by Tania, a young philosophy student supporting Public Parks and Gardens of Ekaterinburg, that the political elites were acting against the people, that the population was not heard, that those in power did “unfair things” (nespravedlivye shtuki) (Tania, September 6, 2019). The fight for the public garden became for another young woman, working in the library at the El’tsin Centre, a struggle for political rights24: “Urban citizenship relates strongly to the ‘city as a commons’” (Foster and Iaione, 2016, cited by Fröhlich and Jacobsson, 2019: 1148). As Evgenii Roizman explained to a journalist at the BBC, the demonstrators said, “‘Why would you build here? You remove the earth from the city.’ Everyone suddenly understood that it was our common good [nashe obshchee]” (Churmanova and Zotova, 2019).

• 25 Pavel said that it was “archaic” (September 10, 2019).

27Other Christians were opposed to the project, “sitting between two chairs,” to recall the expression of Petr, a practising Orthodox believer from Kazakhstan and therefore quite free compared to the local community. He explained that there were different understandings and articulations of the Orthodox ethos. In the square, while he had said to a priest that he was Orthodox, the priest had responded that he wasn’t a true one (nepravil’nyi pravoslavnyi). He had “perhaps a conception of Orthodoxy a tiny bit different” from those who wanted to impose a church in the public garden. For him, “the essential thing is that people feel good”; however, a large part of the population did not want the trees in the square to be cut down, and neither did he. He had listened to Maksim Miniailo, a priest of the Church on the Blood, whose explanations of the project had seemed to him “far-fetched”: “The first argument was that it was a symbol of the city …. And the second, that in the places where there are churches, there are fewer people who drink.” Petr tried, in vain, to talk with friends with whom he worked in the charitable association Miloserdie, but not with the priest who accompanied them (Petr, September 10, 2019). Elena, another student, baptised by her grandmother and practising since she was fourteen years old, also gave her time to Miloserdie. She had preferred to remain silent, fearing discord, “perhaps a passive position,” she added. While being in favour of the construction of new churches in general, many believers were opposed to such a building in the square, because they appreciated walking there, because it would be necessary to cut down trees planted twenty-five years previously for the 275th anniversary of the city or because they felt a new church in the town centre would not be useful. For her part, Elena found the project “old-fashioned” and reckoned that it did not correspond to Byzantine canons.25 She did not favour the project of developing the area around the church either. As for her husband, Ivan cited above, he had initially been favourable to the construction of the cathedral in the public garden, to which he was not particularly attached; although there were a significant number of churches, he considered that, given the crowds during feast days, the construction of a large cathedral was not scandalous. However, when he understood that in this affair “the sponsors were more important than faith” and when he had seen the “sportsmen” appear, he changed his opinion. For him, “a church cannot be built on contradictions, on conflicts, on blood.” The couple was not in the public garden during the events of May, since they were on vacation.

• 26 Words that resemble those of a believer interviewed by Jeanne Kormina during the conflict around S (...)

30He seemed nevertheless to regret that Orthodox Christians are not active on the political level, that there are not, like in Poland, a country he knows well, Christians engaged in politics at the local level. He argues that this retreat from politics is caused by the sentiment of believers, in the provinces at least, of “belonging to a ghetto,” of “fearing to speak freely of their faith.” The believer who comes to church every Sunday for confession and communion would be considered, in Ekaterinburg, a bit like a “sick person,”26 a fanatic: “People have the idea of a believer who does not eat, does not drink, does not breathe, I don’t know what else.” He added also that “what counts for them, it is their situation, their house, their work, their church.”

• 27 See also Kormina, 2023.

32Among the believers favourable to the construction of the cathedral, one equally hears another discourse: they are marginalised in a society that is again today secularised, even anticlerical, recalling the dark days of Sovietism. It is this anticlericalism, finding its origins in the 1920s–1930s, that explains, according to representatives of the eparchy, the motivations of opponents to building the church in the square. And it is the memory of the Bolshevik and Stalinist persecutions that nourishes the activism of engaged Orthodox Christians like Oksana Ivanova (Oksana Ivanova, September 13, 2019).27 This mother of a large family wants to be able to resist where her ancestors could not, getting a sort of revenge: and she wants to work so that her children will not be afraid to testify to their faith. Very active on social networks, Oksana has for several years headed mobilisation against all forms of attack against the feelings of believers in Ekaterinburg. In February 2015, she opened a small museum of twentieth-century saints and confessors of the Urals. In May 2019, she was at the barricades on the side of the eparchy. In June 2019, she said she did not want to capitulate in order to return the Church to the place it deserves in public space.

• 28 He would define the “Russian dream” precisely in 2022 (Prokhanov, 2022).

37Parallel to these imaginaries, on social networks and in newspapers, ultra-nationalist Russians did not hesitate to take up the conflict of 2019 and to conflictualise the emblematic spaces of Ekaterinburg. Political metaphors paradoxically circulated between the two camps, charged with opposite meanings. The conflict around the cathedral was notably reappropriated, in a mystico-political style, by the writer, publicist and politician Aleksandr Prokhanov, president and co-founder in 2014 of the Izborskii Club, a think-tank that called for the invasion of Ukraine (Faure, 2021, 2022). One finds in one of his articles appearing on May 22, 2019 in the magazine Zavtra, of which he is editor-in-chief, all the themes that oppose so-called patriots against liberals. It presents St Catherine’s cathedral not only as the symbol of Ekaterinburg, but even more as that of the Urals, incarnating for him technological modernity, which, allied to Orthodoxy and to conservatism of values, will bring salvation to Russia. In a lyrical spirit, which for him is customary, he gives a national dimension to the cathedral which he sees as the church of “the Russian dream,” namely “the aspiration for ideal existence.”28

• 29 Opponents to the project, like Anna Baltina, also used the metaphor of the civil war (Shlykov, 201 (...)

38This publicist, like others, brandished the spectre of the civil war,29 recalling the putsch of 1991, the conflict around the White House in 1993 and the protest meeting against rigged elections in Bolotnaia Square in December 2011. He situated the events in the memory of the revolution and the assassination of the imperial family:

• 30 “Skvernyi” is word play: “skver” (square, the place where the conflict of 2017 took place) is comb (...)
• 31 See, for example, Steshin, 2019.
• 32 He also called to overthrow the “roizmanshchina,” a neologism to designate the opposition around t (...)
• 33 “In other terms, the ‘city of demons’ seems offensive, … but when we transpose it in an artistic c (...)

41The metaphor of the Maidan Revolution (also known as the Revolution of Dignity) circulated on social networks and in the media, being used to describe the protest in the public garden (Maidan or “ural’skii Maidan” or “skvernyi30 Maidan”).31 Observers noted that the events involved the same means of protest. This spatial metaphor, Maidan referring to the square in a city or village, charged by Ukrainian protestors with the meaning of revolt against elite leaders of their country and of the aspiration for rapprochement with Europe, was reappropriated by those who condemned the Revolution of Dignity and saw in it, among others, a population under the influence of the United States. This metaphor was also used to condemn the opposition in Torfianka park (Kozenko, 2015). The eparchy reappropriated it in a memorandum addressed to then mayor Aleksandr Vysokinskii on May 23, 2019; it presented “Maidan” as a minority that if it were to take power would bring “catastrophes and total chaos” (Memorandum, 2019). In 2019, the polemic journalist Vladimir Solov’ev also addressed the opposition of the “atheist population” of Ekaterinburg to the construction of the cathedral and described the Ural capital, “where Nicholas Romanov and his family were murdered” as a “city of demons.” In July 2020, he declared on his blog Solov’ev Live that Ekaterinburg would remain a “city of demons” as long as it did not have a cathedral. In May 2022, he called the citizens of Ekaterinburg “Satanists” (Krylova, 2022) and on October 25 the same year, referred to them as “Satanic degenerates” (“Solov’ev nazval zhitelei Ekaterinburga…,” 2022).32 This grotesque designation of the “city of demons” was reappropriated and turned around by opponents of the cathedral project, many of whom belong to the art world, thus losing all possible political efficacy.33 An unknown street artist installed a signboard at the city gate in May 2019 carrying the inscription “City of Demons.” T-shirts and stickers were printed with the same inscription and a film was made using it as a title.

• 34 See, for example, “Mitropolit Evgenii rasskazal o global’nykh vyzovakh…,” 2022.

43Since 2019, the El’tsin Centre has not ceased to be critiqued by these ultra-nationalist currents and the eparchy. Metropolitan Evgenii of Ekaterinburg and Verkhotur’e took advantage of an act of vandalism on a painting there of a disciple of Kazimir Malevich in 2021 to denounce the lack of professionalism of the centre’s personnel (“Mitropolit Evgenii podderzhal okhrannika…,” 2022). Several months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the nationalist film director Nikita Mikhalkov asked that the centre to be considered a “foreign agent.” And it is as a continuation of all these ultra-patriotic statements that the commentary of Metropolitan Evgenii, quoted in the introduction, is situated: fiercely opposed to the West and global modernity,34 he affirmed in December 2022 that St Catherine’s cathedral would be “the church of the victory of good over evil.”

• 35 Religious practice has fallen with the arrival of Patriarch Kirill in 2009, the Church being perce (...)

46One part of Ekaterinburg’s population defended the public garden because it saw the park as its “common good.” But the church was not, contrary to what engaged Orthodox Christians, who imagined themselves to be a large majority, believed. The public garden thus became a theatre of controversy regarding the place of Orthodoxy in the identity of the city and its citizens. In the foreword of a work that Élise Boillet co-edited on the visibility of the religious in the urban space of modern Europe, she underlines that “the question of its visibility poses the problem, on the one hand, of the management of the religious presence in the public space and, on the other hand, of the articulation between lived religion in the public space and lived religion in private space” (2021: 7). The study of the protests around rebuilding St Catherine’s cathedral also implicitly raises the question of the privatisation of the religious, the development of a religion that is always more detached from an institution, one that is more and more visible in public space while being less and less frequented. Applying to Grace Davie’s concept (Davie, 2007), Milena Benovska speaks of Russian Orthodoxy as a “vicarious religion” performed by the most devoted believers, the “little flock” (Benovska, 2020). The situation has hardly evolved over these last years. According to data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, on January 6, 2024, 1,3 million people went to the Christmas liturgy, almost two times fewer than in 2020 (2,3 million). The pandemic could have played a role in this decline. According to a survey undertaken by the Levada Centre in August 2022, 51% of the population claimed to have confidence in the Russian Orthodox Church (“Doverie obshchestvennym institutam,” 2022). While climbing to the same level as in 2014, this percentage does not imply any religious practice.35