From the editors: The Russian Orthodox Church community of the Diocese of Sourozh was set up in 1962 by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom(1914-2003). He welcomed believers of all national backgrounds and developed the principle of lay participation in the management of Cathedral affairs. In1978 the Diocese bought the church in London's Ennismore Gardens that served as their Cathedral for nearly 30 years.When repairs to the building's fabric were needed in 1999, a Russian industrialist (subsequently revealed to be Oleg Deripaska) donated themoney.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,London has become home to ever increasing numbers of New Russians. They have their own ideas as to how the Cathedral should be run. This has resulted in what Paul Vallely (Independent 11.02.09) has suggested could be a ‘Kremlin-backed crusade to reclaim Russia's spiritual outposts in the West'.  The Orthodox Community in Britain has splintered and a court case to settle the question of ownership of the Cathedral and its 5 houses and flats looms. 

The differences are between the Moscow Patriarchate's way and the British way as developed by Metropolitan Anthony. The waters have been further muddied by politics. The UK Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, recently issued a legal opinion in favour of Moscow.  Could it be that the state of British-Russian relations had something to do with this? The court case is due to continue soon.

Xenia Dennen describes the background to the conflict:

The year 2006 will be remembered in British church circles as the year of the Sourozh drama: by one of those strange historical twists the British Isles became the stage upon which a conflict within the Russian Orthodox Church was played out on foreign soil, between an "open" type of Orthodoxy, open to the culture around it, concerned with exploring the faith, unafraid of "the other", as opposed to one that is "closed", defensive, and focussed onpower and control.  Within Russia itself many Orthodox believers, in their search for Christian authenticity, push against the rigid contours of a church adapted to the current neo-Soviet period in Russian history.  This church is the direct descendent of one which, to defend itself against the greatest onslaught against the Christian faith since Roman times, had, if it was to remain above ground, to make compromises and create an authoritarian system of control from above, and leave behind the ideals of its 1917-18 Local Council.  Russian Orthodoxy in the British Isles developed in a different environment and in a different way.  It influenced quietly and nurtured an inconspicuous dialogue with Christians of all traditions; it became part of the local landscape and an example of Christian authenticity.

Many in Great Britain learnt about Russian Orthodoxy thanks to the work of the Sourozh Diocese and valued its main centre, the Cathedral of the Dormition and All Saints, known to us Londoners simply as "Ennismore Gardens", which became an oasis of prayer and devout liturgical life. So what happened at Ennismore Gardens?   Suddenly word got around that hefty young Russian men in leather jackets were elbowing their way through the crowd at the liturgy, pushing aside the serious English converts and Russian émigrés who had arrived penniless in these isles after enduring the horrors of revolution, war and a hostile Communist system.  The New Russians had arrived in town en masse!  Many were relatively new to the church, they were not well-grounded in the Christian faith and, unable to converse easily in English, needed care, teaching, and support from Russian-speaking clergy.  The solution to such a situation would seem obvious: bring in more Russian clergy.  Unfortunately, however, the machinations of a small, well-organised, and determined group within the cathedral congregation, in league with a Russian priest and with the support of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations (DECR) at the Danilovsky Monastery in Moscow, undermined all efforts to solve what was an urgent but not at root insoluble pastoral problem.

The difficulties which accompanied the influx of Russians to Great Britain during and after perestroika had become apparent long before the crisis which erupted at Ennismore Gardens at the end of 2005 and in early 2006: Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, the spirit behind the founding and growth of the Diocese of Sourozh, and beloved of Christians in these islands, whether Orthodox or not, had himself struggled with how to care for so many Russian newcomers and their needs.  Sourozh, under his leadership, had developed quite differently from dioceses within Russia; Great Britain had not, after all, had to survive within a Communist system; here there was a centuries-old tradition of tolerance and anti-authoritarianism - suitable soil for planting seeds which had not been allowed to germinate in Russia after the Revolution.  

The Sourozh Diocese was formed in 1962, and 13 years later at its first Diocesan Conference principles on lay participation in the running of the diocese began to be discussed. By 1977 a Diocesan Assembly, formed by Metropolitan Anthony, met for the first time and from this body grew a committee which began work on a new set of statutes which, on Metropolitan Anthony's insistence, were intended to reflect the principles of the 1917-18 Local Council on the governance of the church.  Thanks to these statutes the laity were able to contribute, with the clergy, at every level within the diocese to decision-making.  Such lay responsibility, based on solid theological understanding and a mature spiritual life, which supported and worked with, rather than was subservient to, the clergy, is an aspect of church life which is very often absent in Russia today where unquestioning obedience is demanded of adults rather than mature Christian commitment which, after all,involves personal decision and individual thought.

Another important aspect of the Diocese of Sourozh was its identification with the culture of the country in which it developed; it had not tried to use the Russian Orthodox Church as a vehicle for preserving Russian national identity.  This principle of acculturation was by implication condemned by the then Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk (now the Patriarch of Moscow) when, in a statement on 24 October 2006, he said that the Russian Orthodox Church should, on the contrary, seek to prevent assimilation and to preserve a separate cultural and religious identity for Russians abroad.  Acculturation was also attacked in January 2004 by Mikhail Sarni, then a member of the Ennismore Gardens congregation, and Mikhail Peregudov. The latter two argued that Russians abroad needed their church to be a contact point with their country, language and culture; Sarni and Peregudov dismissed the Sourozh statutes with the words "so-called" as they had not been formally passed by the Holy Synod, and proceeded to suggest that the governance of the diocese be completely changed, with the removal of lay involvement and a return to what they considered to be the traditions of the Russian Church, that is clerical control along national lines, with only Russian clergy appointed at a senior level to care for the Russians. Such attitudes towards some of the founding principles of the diocese were bound to foment conflict.

And indeed they did. Despite efforts to satisfy the pastoral requirements of the many new arrivals from Russia - and plans were being worked out in the autumn of 2005 -the Russian priest, Fr Andrei Teterin, who had come to London in 2004 at the invitation of the diocese to help care for them, proceeded to foment a shocking and unchristian attack on Bishop Basil Osborne, the person to whom Metropolitan Anthony had entrusted his diocese. On 3 December 2005 he publicly attacked Bishop Basil and the diocese; on 10 December he sent a letter criticising his bishop's leadership to Patriarch Alexi in Moscow, Metropolitan Kirill (head of the DECR), Archbishop Innokenty of Korsun based in Paris, and even the Russian Ambassador in London, which he then circulated to the cathedral's parish council on 12 December leading to his banishment from the cathedral by Bishop Basil the next day.  It had become clear that Fr Andrei felt no obligation to observe the usual rules of obedience to his bishop and acted confidently in a way that revealed he had protection and support from on high for his actions.  Immediately on 13 December a small group of Teterin supporters gathered a total of 209 signatures and wrote to Patriarch Alexi and Metropolitan Kirill claiming that Fr Andrei was the only priest who had been educated in a Russian theological college and preached "strict canonical traditions".  Evidence of his protection from on high came when on 13 January 2006 Bishop Basil received a telephone call from the DECR asking him to reinstate Fr Andrei.  After expressing repentance Fr Andrei was allowed to return to his duties; on Sunday 15 January 2006 he took the microphone at the end of the liturgy and thanked those in the congregation who had supported him and who were later heard to exclaim triumphantly "We have won!" Unfortunately his reinstatement did not bring to an end his disruptive activity.  Thus disciplinary procedures in conformity with British employment law were instituted until on 22 February 2006 Fr Andrei was given a "final warning" and dismissed on 3 March.

Meanwhile Fr Andrei's supporters within the parish council continued campaigning against Bishop Basil, gathering signatures for petitions and writing messages on the Internet (Fr Andrei Kurayev's website provided a rich feast of discussion between many a "humble servant of God" whose pious phrases masked a viper's tongue) until the troublemakers on the parish council were expelled by an Episcopal decree on 20 March 2006.  By 25 March Fr Andrei, in a letter published on the Internet, was emitting wild accusations of "schismatics and sectarians" against Bishop Basil and his "team": they were leading an anti-Russian campaign and attacking the Russian Orthodox Church; it was time to form a "real diocese" in the British Isles in the place of a "fictitious"one.   Three days later on 28 March Fr Andrei's supporters, calling themselves  "the Initiative Group", were circulating a petition on the web "defending the norms of church life and the true legacy of Metropolitan Anthony".  What on earth had such behaviour to do with the life to which Christ called his followers and about which Metropolitan Anthony preached? 

By 30 March the situation had become intolerable: Bishop Basil wrote to the DECR asking Metropolitan Kirill to confirm that those writing petitions did not have the department's support.  He did not receive such confirmation. At the beginning of April a gentleman called Viktor Nikiforov claimed that his "democratic rights had been infringed" because members of the parish council had been expelled.  He announced that he would begin a strike, inviting others to demonstrate their "position as citizens" by joining the strike, while on the Internet bewildered parishioners wondered whether by singing in the choir they would be failing to stand up for their own "democratic rights". 

Rather than firmly supporting Bishop Basil's authority, the DECR chose simply to investigate the situation at Ennismore Gardens: it sent over Fr Mikhail Dudko during Lent. The latter did not speak to those members of the parish recommended by Bishop Basil and made clear that headquarters considered it was time to bring the Sourozh Diocese to heel and turn it into an ordinary Russian diocese.   Thus towards the end of April, Bishop Basil decided that if the diocese was to continue to develop along the lines instituted by Metropolitan Anthony, it was time to deliver it from imprisonment within an authoritarian system: on 24 April he wrote to Patriarch Alexi asking to be released from the Moscow Patriarchate as he proposed to approach the Ecumenical Patriarchate.  This he did on 2 May with the request that he and all those clergy and lay members of the Sourozh Diocese who wished to do so should be received into the Archdiocese of Orthodox Parishes of Russian Tradition in Western Europe (within the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate).  Patriarch Alexi did not accede to Bishop Basil's request and instead on 9 May issued a decree retiring him. The latter only learned of this decree on 14 May when the text reached London and was publicly read out by Archbishop Innokenty of Korsun whom the Moscow Patriarchate appointed as temporary administrator of the Sourozh Diocese.  On 8 June Bishop Basil was accepted into the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and accorded the title of Bishop of Amphipolis as head of the Episcopal Vicariate of Orthodox Parishes of Russian Tradition in Great Britain and Ireland.

These events have divided the clergy of the Sourozh Diocese (most of whom are English converts to Orthodoxy)  - some have remained in the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, others have supported Bishop Basil.  A list of each side's clergy can be found on the relevant website so it is not difficult to establish that the split on this level has been about equal.  Two Russian priests and one Russian deacon have stayed with the Moscow Patriarchate whereas four deacons of Russian descent (two of them recently arrived in the Britain) have sided with Bishop Basil.  The division among the laity is not so clear, however. There were many who, unlike the small campaigning "Initiative Group" at Ennismore Gardens, stood on neutral ground, not wishing to take sides, and indeed deeply regretting the divisions which had developed.  Many of the pre-perestroika Russian émigrés, and many of the English who were converted to Russian Orthodoxy by Metropolitan Anthony, followed Bishop Basil, but not all.  The situation in different parishes has varied enormously: some followed Bishop Basil, and others, like the Russian Orthodox parish in Oxford, split into two separate groups, yet not along ethnic lines.

British secular and church circles have not shown any great interest in the Sourozh split, although among Anglican clergy and bishops Bishop Basil has many friends and is deeply respected.  Some Anglican bishops and clergy have felt much sympathy for his position and indeed have tried to help him.  But for Lambeth good relations with the Moscow Patriarchate are too important and not worth damaging for the sake of friendship with Bishop Basil.  The official position of both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Church is a strictly neutral one.  Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, is prepared to maintain good relations with whomever the Moscow Patriarchate chooses to appoint as head of the Sourozh Diocese despite his friendship with Bishop Basil.  Bishop Elisei of Bogorodsk, recently sent to London by Moscow in order to help Archbishop Innokenty of Korsun, has been officially received by both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Church.

The Sourozh Diocese was different from other Russian Orthodox dioceses and had become "an embarrassment" for the Moscow Patriarchate, according to Protodeacon Peter Scorer in a Radio Liberty interview given on 13 June 2006:

"Thanks to the labours of Metropolitan Anthony, Sourozh was a diocese unique in the entire Moscow Patriarchate. [...] Now this free, sobornaya (communal) diocese, unlike any other within the Russian context, has become an embarrassment for Russia.  They would like to see them ‘all of a kind', so that the churches abroad, which are being built in many countries, would be something like the embassy churches before the revolution.  They are representations of Moscow abroad, and are controlled not by their local bishops, but by the DECR."

The Moscow Patriarchate would like Ennismore Gardens to become a Russian enclave, an outpost of Moscow in London within a diocese ruled firmly by headquarters (DECR). The principle of lay participation in decision-making, which was central to the way the Sourozh Diocese was run, will not sit easily with the Moscow Patriarchate's authoritarian culture which prefers obedience to mature lay-clerical cooperation.

Does the split in the Sourozh Diocese sound the death-knell for Russian Orthodoxy in the British Isles?   Time will tell. These events may, however, represent the growing pains of a Christian tradition in this country which will now develop towards greater maturity:  let us hope that the Vicariate under Bishop Basil of Amphipolis can continue the mission of Metropolitan Anthony,opening up the riches of Orthodoxy to people in this country and nurturing mature Christians who can contribute at parish level to inter-denominational and inter-faith dialogue which is so essential if our world is not to disintegrate.

This article first appeared in 2007 in the journal"Humanitas" (Journal of George Bell Institute)

Between forty and ninety thousand believers paid their respects to the late Patriarch Aleksii II, who died on the morning of 5 December 2008, as he lay in state in the massive Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. It seems fitting that they should make their farewells to him in a church that has become a controversial and multivalent symbol of the ‘Orthodox Russia' he worked to rebuild. The patriarch is buried at the Epiphany Cathedral, however, at his own request. He lies near the relics of his patron saint, the medieval Metropolitan Aleksii of Moscow, who served a Church still dominated by the Golden Horde and engaged in fraternal strife with the neighbouring Orthodox Metropolitan of Lithuania. He lies, too, near Patriarch Sergii (Stragorodskii), whose 1927 ‘Declaration of Loyalty' to the Soviet state contributed to the schism between the Moscow Patriarchate and the émigré Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Both churchmen would no doubt recognise the immense moral, political and spiritual challenges Patriarch Aleksii faced as he shepherded his flock into the post-Soviet era; both, no doubt, would appreciate the delicate balancing act he sought to maintain in his eighteen years of office.

Patriarch Aleksii's clerical career spanned cycles of Church repression and revival, and myriad problems within and without the Church. Born in Estonia in 1929, Alexei Ridiger was inspired by pilgrimages with his parents to follow the religious life. The son of an Estonian priest of German descent and a Russian mother, by the time Alexei reached sixteen he had lived through the annexation of his country by the Soviet Union, its invasion by Nazi Germany, and its liberation. As a teenage subdeacon, Alexei participated in the 1945 reopening of Tallinn's Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky, before studying at Leningrad Theological Seminary. He was ordained as a priest in 1950, during a period of relative calm for the Russian Orthodox Church. Shorn as a monk in 1961, at the height of Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign, Aleksii began a rapid rise through the ‘black' clerical ranks only open to monastics - Bishop of Tallinn and Archimandrite in 1961, Archbishop in 1964, Metropolitan in 1968.

During this period, Aleksii also became a member of the Synodal Commission on Christian Unity and Inter-Church Relations, and in 1964 was elected president of the Conference of European Churches. Khrushchev - while shutting churches, banning pilgrimages and incarcerating monks in psychiatric units - was acutely aware of the propaganda value of the Church, and ensured Orthodox participation in the World Council of Churches and various peace movements. The ritual dance of Soviet clerics denying problems at home whilst lobbying about problems abroad may have frustrated Western Christians, but it was one of many compromises that senior clerics made to ensure the continued functioning of the institutional church. The suggestion that Aleksii himself collaborated with the Soviet regime - in acting as a KGB informant codenamed ‘Drozdov' - has always been denied by the Patriarchate. Although some inside and outside of the Russian Orthodox Church have regretted a lack of transparency about and public repentance for collaboration on the part of senior hierarchs, in 1991 Aleksii publicly asked for the forgiveness and understanding of those hurt by the compromises the Church made during the Soviet period.

Aleksii was elected to the Patriarchal throne in June 1990, as the Church was emerging from the moral quagmire of the Soviet period into a minefield of new and re-emerging problems. Thousands of buildings were returned to the faithful in a state of disrepair. Parish churches reopened faster than priests could be trained to serve in them. Nationalist aspirations threatened schisms amongst Orthodox faithful in Ukraine and the Baltic states, while nationalists amongst Orthodox faithful in Russia raised the ugly flags of antisemitism and xenophobia. The Patriarch's moving address to rabbis in New York in November 1991 - which acknowledged a shared religious heritage and lamented antisemitism - unleashed a furious response from militant right-wing groups within the Church. Further threats to unity came from the ‘True Orthodox Church' and Moscow Patriarchate parishes re-aligning themselves with the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. The unity of the Church looked very fragile in these early years of freedom.

The Patriarch had to contend, too, with the revival of the Ukrainian Eastern-rite Catholic Church, anxious to reclaim property allotted to the Orthodox under Stalin. That, and the influx of foreign missionaries and clerics reclaiming pre-revolutionary territories or simply preaching to the ‘godless', no doubt contributed to his continued refusal to meet the Pope, and his support for the 1997 legislation which privileged Russia's ‘traditional religions'. Westerners, in particular, have judged him harshly for this, but the insensitive behaviour of missionaries (and, one might add, of politicians and entrepreneurs) in the immediate aftermath of Soviet collapse is at least partly responsible. ‘Would you like to know Jesus?' enthusiastic American teenagers would call out to Muscovites in the nineties. The assumption - that Russians did not know Christ, or at least didn't know Him as well as these adolescent interlocutors - must surely have irritated those whose Orthodoxy had survived persecution for longer than their would-be saviours had been alive.

Under Patriarch Aleksii's leadership, the Church formulated a document on the ‘Social Concept of the Orthodox Church' to articulate the basic teachings of the Church on social problems and church-state relations in a secular world. It also embarked on the massive task of researching, recording and canonizing the Orthodox victims of Soviet repression - including, controversially, the Romanov family. This latter process, painful and fraught with theological and moral problems, resulted in the elevation of Nicholas, his wife and four children (but not their servants) to the ranks of ‘passion-bearers', and removed one of the barriers to the reunification of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad with the Moscow Patriarchate. This reunification, which eventually took place in 2007, will no doubt be remembered as the pinnacle of Patriarch Aleksii's achievements. The reunion agreement was signed at a ceremony in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a double emblem of Bolshevism overturned.

To construct the original Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (completed in 1882) in commemoration of Russia's victory over Napoleon, the seventeenth century Convent of Aleksii the Man of God was destroyed. Legend has it that one of the convent's nuns cursed the site, so that nothing built thereafter would last. The pre-revolutionary Cathedral was demolished in 1931, Stalin's grandiose plans for a Palace of the Soviets came to nought, and Krushchev's open air swimming pool was eventually replaced by Luzhkov's monument to Russia's renaissance. Buildings come and go, but somehow or other, the body of the Church endures. Russia is paying its respects to a man who has helped to keep that body whole.

Some time after the war, in the 1950s probably, our factories made an unbelievable amount of plush jackets lined with cotton wadding. They were brown or black and shone with a sort of olive reddishness in the winter sun. The young people didn't wear them. It was the grannies who wore them. Kerchief on their heads, plush jacket, long satin skirt and galoshes with knitted socks - that's how I see the grannies in my child's memory...

I remember well our village in the steppes, exposed to the wind from all sides, a collection of mud brick or wooden houses (when the first real brick houses appeared they seemed palaces to us). There were blackened old fences and trees stuck up here and there. The little pond swelled in the spring and seemed to us like a whole sea.

There we were, my grandmother and I (she never wore a plush jacket), standing on the banks of our spring sea, looking across at the little mud brick house reddish on the other shore, and there went the plush-clad grannies in twos and threes, one after the other, all off to a meeting or something? My own grandmother, she was born around the same time as they were, in 1903, and figured out what it was all about, explained to me that today was a religious festival, the Annunciation it was called, and the grannies were all so stupid and ignorant that they were still celebrating the event.

My grandmother recounted as best she could what she remembered from her schoolroom lessons in religious instruction. She sounded like Leo Taksil at first, but as she talked her tone changed of its own accord, grew warm and even took on a sort of significant note. You can't ever scrub someone free of their childhood. But I was amazed nonetheless, wondered how anyone could ever believe such fairytales.

There was never any Orthodox church in our village or even in our whole district. We lived in what had been the Volga German Autonomous District. After Stalin deported the Germans and abolished the autonomous district others moved into the emptied lands. First it was the war evacuees who came, and then just people hoping to find a better lot here beyond the Volga. There were also those who, like my grandfather, were sent to the steppe by the Party's iron hand. Practically none of the original population remained, just a few scattered here and there, but the grannies in their black plush jackets clearly had something that bound them all together.

A few days later, my grandmother came home from beyond the pond, that is, came back from bread shop, with the news that the grannies held a ceremony the day before, took out the Shroud of Christ. She told me what the Shroud of Christ was and went on in tut-tutting tone to say that some of the grannies even dragged their grandchildren along to the event, and where are the parents when all this was going on, and surely the school should react somehow...

My school friend Tanya was among the grandchildren ‘dragged off to the event'. She turned unusually serious as she described to me what she saw there. Four grannies emerged from a room, carrying a large icon, holding onto its corners (they did not really have a Shroud of Christ of course) and laid it on a stool. They covered it with a white towel and placed flowers on top (the cheap plastic flowers sold in our village shop). A beautiful melody the grannies sang, many of them crying, and Granny Raya read something from a very old book.

I reminded my friend vigorously that we were members of the Young Octobrists, getting ready to join the Pioneers, and should not be going to these kinds of meetings. But my friend's unusual seriousness troubled me. I soon heard for myself just how those grannies could sing.

My grandfather's sister, who lived nearby, died. Serafima, Granny Sima I called her. On the night before her funeral, my mother, who had been helping to prepare the food for the wake, came home and said, "The grannies are reading there. They've brought an old book and they're reading in Church Slavonic. They say they're going to read all night. Do you want to go and see?"

"Whatever next!" my grandmother was disapproving. "There's nothing for her to see there".

The next morning, they carried Serafima in her coffin into the yard. The men raised the coffin to their shoulders and the grannies began to sing.

How was it they could sing this way, and where did their voices come from? How many years had it been since any of them could have heard a real church choir?

But the beauty of their melody amazed me. It more than amazed me. I was a faithful little Young Octobrist but I felt immediately that this religion denied and rejected by our entire Soviet life had an inexplicable attraction and even some strange power.

It would be a great exaggeration to say that from that moment I began to think seriously about religious faith. I'd need a couple more decades, great change in the country and big personal upheavals before I began to think about religious faith. But when I did finally turn my thoughts in this direction I recalled our miserable little yard, the grey sky, wet snow (it was winter then it seems), the coffin covered in something black, and the singing of the grannies in their brown plush jackets.

Each of them had their own road of trials behind them. Their fates were woven through with the common thread of revolution, the civil war, collectivisation, the famine of 1933, the arrests and terror of 1937, and the war. Many of them were war widows. The authorities had given up on them and let them live out their days unchanged, stay what they'd always been. The authorities were convinced that the grannies would die and take their religion with them, and it would all soon be over. The grannies' behaviour seemed on the outside to go along with that idea. "We'll live out our days as we've always lived", they'd say when the party enthusiasts thought to try indoctrinating them in the new ways. But they did more than just live out their days. Those grannies, they baptised half of Russia!

Propaganda was one thing, but when it came to the test it turned out that in our class, for example, only a handful of children weren't christened, the children of the state farm and railroad bosses and the schoolteachers' children, that is, those who had the Party's eye on them. The more ordinary families had their children christened. Usually it was the grannies who insisted, and who still had authority as the elders of the family in those days. The nearest working church was in Saratov. The train went there and the grannies would gather all their grandchildren of various ages and take them there in secret ceremony. They did not christen the children themselves, without a priest. They probably knew that this was possible only in the most extreme event. And there was already so much they had to do themselves as it was.

Now, many years later, I realise that what those old Russian grannies did was indeed a true feat of loyalty and faith. They stayed faithful to He whom all around had rejected. They continued to perform the holy rites in spite of everything. Like the sisters of Galilee they were truer than the men. Throughout all the post-war Soviet years the word ‘church' was always associated in our minds with the word ‘granny' but never with the word ‘grandpa'. It was always ‘old women' who came to mind, and never ‘old men'.

Barely any of our forty heroines lived to see the first glimmers of what is now called the Second Baptism of Russia. They could not see the future of course, but I think they believed that religion would return. One of them, Granny Raya maybe, Granny Nyura perhaps, said, "Whatever happens, faith will return". I have only a fuzzy memory now, a vague recollection of one of them making this assertion as we queued at the bread shop.

My own grandmother, who never wore a plush jacket or kerchief on her head, outlived them all. She entered her tenth decade and grew indignant watching perestroika-era TV.

"What is Gorbachev doing bringing the priests back?" she exclaimed naively.

But when she died, we found under her pillow a page from a notebook with something scrawled on it in pencil. Her hand had grown weak with age and it was hard to make out the letters: "Our Father who art in Heaven..." It was the only prayer she still remembered by heart from the religious instruction lessons of her distant schooldays.

Marina Biryukova is a poet and journalist who lives in the Volga city of Saratov.