Last fall, a retired woman strode into Afghan Square, a park in Moscow, to try to stop a bulldozer from breaking ground on a new church.
The park — which is named in honor of Soviet veterans who served in Afghanistan during the Afghan–Soviet War — has become its own sort of battlefield between Muscovites and the increasingly powerful Russian Orthodox Church.
“There are churches everywhere, we don’t need another one,” the retired local said in a video posted on Telegram.
Locals managed to stop the bulldozers, but the incident became the latest flashpoint in a modern Russia that increasingly promotes Orthodox values.
In the past decade, hundreds of new churches have been built in Russia from St. Petersburg to Siberia. But in Moscow, many Russians are opposing the construction of churches in city parks.
“We’re not anti-religious, we just want a place to walk the dog,” said a woman who lives near Afghan Square and declined to give her name because people who oppose the church have received threats.
The Soviet Union tried to create an atheist state, so many urban areas built during Soviet times lack churches. The Russian Orthodox Church maintains that the construction efforts mostly focus on old Soviet neighborhoods.
“It makes our capital beautiful and religious as it always used to be before the Revolution,” said Vakhtang Kipshidze, the vice spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church.
Kipshidze said families with small children need to be able to get to church on foot. Most Russians aren’t opposed to building churches, Kipshidze said, and those who are, usually have anti-religious views, or have been influenced by opposition politicians like Russia’s Communist Party.
“If there is real danger to reasonable and legal interests of local people, their concerns will be taken into consideration by our Church,” Kipshidze said.
The church and state
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, many places of worship were still closed or repurposed for civilian use.
“There was a period when there were not enough churches,” said Maxim Trudolubov, an editor with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center.
During his university studies in the early ‘90s, Trudolubov took drawing classes inside a beautiful, 16th-century church in Moscow that was turned into an art classroom during Soviet times.
Trudolubov said the church was completely empty. It had white walls, no murals and sculptures used as drawing props scattered throughout the interior — even in the altar space.
Back then, Trudolubov and other Russians were joining the Orthodox Church for the first time. He and some students successfully petitioned to kick the university out and turn the historic building back into a church. Suddenly, they had their own congregation.
“We were a bunch of kids, there was not even an adult in the room,” Trudolubov said.
The Russian Orthodox Church eventually gained control of many of the buildings and later reemerged as a powerful state-aligned institution.
But in that brief window between the two extremes, Trudolubov said, a group of students in their early 20s had the rare chance to experience church life starting at a grassroots level.
As the ‘90s progressed, moments like those were no longer possible.
The Orthodox Church consolidated its power and influence in post-Soviet Russia by pursuing an ideological alliance with the political elite, according to Sergei Chapnin, who formerly worked with the Church in Moscow and is now director of communications at the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University.
“Church officials were doing their best to convince the [Russian] state that the Orthodox tradition should be the basis of the new Russian society — and they succeeded, especially after [Vladimir] Putin became president,” Chapnin said.
He argued that the Church collaborated with the state to reconstruct the more conservative, Orthodox version of Russia that existed a century prior — a new empire based on traditional values — in opposition to the liberal West.
The project required building hundreds of churches.
Weakened opposition
In 2019, thousands of people protested against a proposed church in Yekaterinburg, one of Russia’s largest cities.
The project was ultimately canceled after more than half of the locals surveyed said they didn’t want the church.
Activist Aleona Smyshlyaeva, who participated in the protests, said that large movements like these have been stifled since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Lots of activists — myself included — left Russia,” she said. “Who can think about a construction project when kids are dying in Ukraine.”
Another problem for protesters is that it’s illegal in Russia to oppose the war in Ukraine.
Now, officials want the proposed church in Afghan Square to become a memorial honoring Russian veterans.
“Now, if you’re against the Church, then you’re against veterans and the government,” said the woman living near Afghan Square who spoke to The World.
Recently, bulldozers returned to the square and workers put up a fence — but this time, nobody tried to stop them.