KGB, Church Find Common Ground  

One of the siloviki's most effective allies in this cultural
counterrevolution has been the Russian Orthodox Church. During the Soviet
period, the Orthodox Church and other religious groups were under the KGB's
direct control. As Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the original Soviet
secret police wrote: "Leave the church to the chekisty. Only they, with
their specific chekist methods, can control the clerics and undermine the
church from within." That decision began the strange cohabitation of the
church and the KGB, with the security agency using the church's authority
to influence believers at home and abroad and the KGB using church foreign
dioceses as fronts for operations abroad.     

After Boris Yeltsin came to power, there was some discussion of exposing
the clergymen who cooperated with the KGB, but that effort never got off
the ground and was quickly shelved.

In Putin's Russia, the church plays a major ideological role. Metropolitan
Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, who is the head of external relations
for the Moscow Patriarchate, is a close Putin loyalist (and 'former' KGB
agent). In a nationally televised sermon in 2005, Kirill said the reformers
of the 1990s did not understand "that reform does not mean Westernization."
A year later, the 10th World Congress of Russian People, an event organized
by the Moscow Patriarchate, adopted a conception of a uniquely Russian
vision of democracy and human rights, an idea that became a central tenet
of the Kremlin's ideology of sovereign democracy. Speaking at the congress,
Kirill said there are higher values than liberty and democracy and that the
church rejects the idea that "human rights prevail over the interests of
society." Patriarch Aleksy II repeated these ideas in October when he spoke
from the pulpit of Notre Dame in Paris during his first-ever visit to a
Catholic country.

Perhaps the biggest achievement of the church in the Putin era has been
its unification with the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which was marked
in Moscow in May (see video below). Putin personally played an active role
in the reconciliation talks between the churches, which split during the
Russian civil war of 1918-23.
/thespiritoftruth.blogspot.com/2010/01/kgb-church-find-common-ground.html

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