Red Room: The Future’s Pop Religiosity According to Arseniy Zhilyaev

Where religious practices have long been forcibly repressed, they generally return with a vengeance through the dynamic described by Montesquieu, who advocated tolerance for that very reason: “The principle is that every religion which is repressed becomes repressive itself.”1 1  - Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 25, chapter 9. Worse still, prohibitions against specific gestures (such as Montesquieu’s example of dancing on a crucifix) may suggest the idea to those who had never thought of it. The more despotic the ban, the stronger the backlash.

The oft-forgotten case of Russia goes right to the heart of the issue. The Soviet regime had banished the Orthodox religion, deemed (rightly) to be allied with the tsars: anyone who has seen the films of Sergei Eisenstein will recall the smoky and monstrously silhouetted apparitions of the popes, enveloping the people in a fog with their censers, followed by the people’s destruction of tsarist and religious symbols. Today the Church is making a comeback, and, with the state’s restitution of assets to various religious institutions in 2010,² 2 - On the role of the Orthodox Church in shaping a post-Soviet national identity, see Alexandre Verkhovski, “Religion et ‘idée nationale’ dans la Russie de Poutine,” Les cahiers Russie (Paris: CERI-Sciences-Po, 2006). On the restitution of assets to the Orthodox Church and its consequences, see Denis Babitchenko, “Quand l’État lâche ses joyaux: La Sainte Russie privatisée,” Courrier international (March 11, 2010). it is set to play both an economic and a structural role in the new Russian identity.