Orthodoxy in England... a battleground?

11 February 2009 (The Independent) - Eight years ago, Oleg Deripaska stepped in to save a crumbling Orthodox church in Manchester. Was his generosity the start of a Kremlin-backed crusade to reclaim Russia's spiritual outposts in the West? Special report by Paul Vallely

English Orthodox worshippers at St Andrew's church in Holborn. Bishop Basil Osborne takes the service as his several hundred strong congregation look on. Many of the congregation are Russian refugees, over the past six decades, a small but vibrant branch of the Russian Orthodox Church has grown in the UK.

It is a restrained, well-proportioned interior, as befits a church by Sir Christopher Wren. There is an Augustan austerity to its oak panelling and large, arched windows of plain glass. Its barrel-vaulted ceiling is painted in a tasteful Anglican sage-green, discreetly picked out with cream and gold.

But hanging above the altar is something huge and exotic. It is an overwhelmingly massive Byzantine icon in the shape of a jet-black cross. On it hangs a gigantic crucified figure with bright red blood streaming from his hands and feet. The image is surrounded in an edging of the brightest gold clearly designed to turn darkness into glory.

Beneath it is something else alien to the aesthetic of the building. A figure in a golden robe wearing a golden, onion-domed crown is waving two bundles of lighted candles over the altar. Around him stand half a dozen priests, deacons and altar servers in faded burgundy silk robes and copes.

This is St Andrew's church in Holborn, on the first Sunday of the month. The congregation, several hundred strong, are refugees, some for the second time in their lives. Over six decades, a small but vibrant branch of the Russian Orthodox Church has grown in the UK. Its members were a miscellany of elderly émigrés, and their descendents, who had fled their homeland in the Communist era, and who had arrived via long sojourns in Finland, Switzerland, Italy and France, along with a collection of aristocratic and upper-class English converts. What united them was the charismatic personality of the holy man who led them for 50 years, the late Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.

But now, this community is again in exile. This Anglican church, where they gather twice a month, is a temporary home. They are no longer welcome in Bloom's cathedral.

This is more than just a story of schism, much like the others that have dogged Christianity for 2,000 years. For these curiously anomalous English Orthodox Christians claim they have been pushed out of their own cathedral by a large influx of Russians who arrived in the UK in recent times, some of whom have launched a Moscow-inspired takeover of the church.

It's all part of a much bigger story in which Oleg Deripaska is a key figure. He is Russia's richest man, the aluminium tsar who is a friend of the British cabinet minister Lord Mandelson, and on whose yacht the hapless Tory shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, entangled himself in the rigging of the oligarch's lavish hospitality and allegations of illicit soliciting of political donations.

What has stirred the pot is that another government minister, the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, has issued a crucial legal opinion in advance of a court case next week between the two warring Orthodox factions – and has come down on the side of Moscow, which has just elected a new Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk, a man widely regarded as an ex-KGB agent.

The whole saga comes to a head on Monday when the two factions meet in the Chancery Division of the High Court to contest ownership of the £15m cathedral in Kensington, along with five houses and flats. But there is more than property at stake; the battle is for the soul of Orthodoxy.

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The Cathedral of The Dormition of the Mother of God and All Saints in Ennismore Gardens, down the road from the Royal Albert Hall, is a very different kind of building from the church in Holborn. Italianate in style, the Church of England decided in 1978 that it was redundant. Inside, vast electric candelabra dangle from the ceiling. The walls are hung with icons in hues of gold. Candle stands illumine icons and relics. Across the nave is a high screen, the "iconostasis", which hides the church's inner sanctum from the profane eye of the ordinary worshipper.

There is a lot that is impenetrable about this place. At the side of the nave is a portrait of the cathedral's founder, Metropolitan Anthony. Yet those who insist they have been driven from the church say that his memory is more honoured in the breach than the observance.

Anthony Bloom was born in Switzerland of Russian émigré stock and raised in France. He was a medical doctor and a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War, before being ordained and sent to London as chaplain to the community of white Russians there.

His Orthodoxy was cosmopolitan in its character. After his arrival in Britain in 1948, he made it a principle that his church should meet the needs of people of all national backgrounds. He refused to accept any money from the church in Moscow, which under Stalin had been revived as an organ of the state. Indeed throughout the Cold War, Bloom broadcast to Russia as the free voice of its Church when its entire hierarchy was tainted by collaboration with the Communist authorities. When perestroika came, he welcomed it, and he welcomed too the flood of Russians who migrated from their homeland to the UK.

What he had not anticipated was that the incomers would try to change the distinctly open-minded brand of Orthodoxy his community had developed over the previous 40 years. "Huge numbers arrived," says one of the parishioners, Ruth Nares, a teacher who converted from Anglicanism two decades before because of what she describes as Orthodoxy's extraordinary sense of sacredness. "We were a community of white Russians, Finns, French, Italians and English converts. But the incomers had a different mentality. To many, it was just a place to meet fellow Russians. They would come in halfway through service, talking loudly at the back, and started making lunch there." Karin Greenhead, a musician, says: "There was a lot of unpleasantness and elbowing and pushing. It was noisy and unprayerful. There was even a fight outside the church."

But it was not just the congregation that changed. Extra priests sent over by Moscow during the past six years imported an unwelcome world view, too. "Nearly every Sunday we were bombarded with Soviet-style propaganda and warnings that 'the Devil is among us'," says Nicholas Tuckett, the founder of Ikon Records, which markets recordings of Orthodox music. "I was finding it impossible to pray."

The points at issue largely concerned the minutiae of church life. There were disputes about whether marriages could take place on a Saturday, how frequent communion should be, how strictly fasting rules were to be observed, whether women were obliged to wear headscarves in church or forbidden from wearing trousers.

But what lay behind all the nit-picking was a fundamental struggle for power. The Russo faction began to petition Moscow for reform to press the original community to become more Russian. Metropolitan Anthony's anointed successor, Bishop Basil, asked Moscow to disassociate itself from what he saw as troublemakers. But in Moscow, Metropolitan Kirill, who was last month elected head of the entire Russian Orthodox Church, declined to reply.

At that point, Archbishop Kirill was head of the Church's Department of External Relations, a post which his critics point out was created by Stalin when he revived the Church to boost civilian morale during the Second World War. The Moscow Patriarchate became an organ of the Russian state. In the years that followed, those who rose through Russian Orthodoxy's hierarchy were either collaborators or active KGB agents.