My Russian Orthodox Easter Confusion

By Elina Sarkisova
Program officer, U.S. State Department

Saturday night, April 18, will look like any other Saturday night in my 540 sq. ft. studio apartment - music on, make-up ready, outfits laid out across my bed as I prepare for a night out with friends. But on this Saturday night I might have a different destination in mind.

Each year around this time, I persuade myself to skip the bars and make a middle-of-the-night pilgrimage to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. I take my seat on the bus and brace myself to spend the next three to four hours standing outside, cold and clueless. My attention will focus on protecting my lit candle from blowing out against the spring chill, lip-singing Old Russian hymns, and following my lavishly robed batushka, or priest, in a midnight procession around the Cathedral. As I make my rounds, I study the entranced faces of the people surrounding me. I struggle to find meaning behind their expressions - to understand the riddle that connects us all.

Like many others who fled the chaos and ethnic strife surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union, I arrived to the U.S. in 1991 more than a little confused about my religious identity. A 1,000-year-old tradition, Russian Orthodox Christianity - like other religions in Russia - took a heavy beating under Soviet rule. Targeted discrimination, harassment, confiscation of property - not to mention torture, forced labor, and execution - stripped the Russian Orthodox Church of its age-old rituals, its textual substance, and its spiritual intensity, reducing it to a wistful recollection of the powers that were. For seventy years, communism was to be the people's primary religion.

The bastard child of these two clashing legacies - a religious tradition dating back to the 10th century and a communist era intent on uprooting it - is a country and people brimming with historical irony and spiritual awkwardness, a people rendered ignorant of their own religious history, yet lured, in the absence of a state-driven ideology, by its call for national and cultural unity. In fact, roughly 75% of today's Russians consider themselves Russian Orthodox, up from roughly 25% in 1990. However, only a fraction of that number actually believes in God or attends church on a regular basis. While this trend may not be unique to Russia, the statistics are striking given similar figures in other countries big on religion (like the U.S.) where no anti-religious crusade ever took place.

The confusion surrounding my religious identity was planted early in my childhood and extended well into my early teens. Because religion didn't figure prominently into Soviet identity, I was not surprised to learn that my father, an ethnic Armenian, married a Molokan Russian whose "heretic" ancestors broke with the Russian Orthodox Church in the 16th century, and that I was baptized by a Mountain Jew in an Orthodox Church in a predominantly Muslim area of the Soviet Union.

It was even less unusual for my parents, upon arrival to their new home in Hartford, Conn., to enroll me in St. Augustine's School, 99.9% Catholic plus me (0.1%). It seemed like a good alternative to the hiked-up skirts, graffiti décor, and high probation rate at St. Augustine's public school equivalent.

So in an effort to make friends in a new country whose laws, traditions and language we had yet to learn, we welcomed church groups that came knocking at our door, lending a much-needed hand. As a young girl, I remember singing hymns in a Catholic Church choir, frequenting after-school programs at an Armenian Orthodox Church, playing soccer at the Jewish Family Center and "observing" Protestant services followed by free picnic lunches. By age 14, I had mastered the ritualistic traditions of five different religions, yet I had no religion to call my own.

Today, my unaccented English, wrinkle-free suit, and PB&J lunch would throw off even the most discerning of Russian ex-pats. Yet despite the façade, I find myself looking back to a 1,000 year-old tradition still picking up the pieces to its own fractured identity but, in the process, helping others like me to forge their own.

This weekend, millions of Russian Orthodox Christians, warm gloves in hand, will make their annual pilgrimage to Church to celebrate the most important religious holiday in their calendar - Holy Pascha. Others will be content huddling their families around a flat-screen TV to watch Russia's newly elected Patriarch, accompanied by Russia's political leadership, deliver his first Easter ceremony from Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

Still others, unpersuaded, will hit the bars as usual, and - at best - devote a passing thought to this age-old ritual. For one reason or another, I save my decision until the last minute, as if it's open for debate. I have yet to miss a ceremony.

Elina Sarkisova is a program officer for the U.S. State Department and a graduate of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

By Elina Sarkisova |  April 15, 2009; 2:10 AM ET
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