Biography

A Personal Essay

I was born in 1968 on the Arbat, in the very heart of Moscow—a city I have never quite left. I came to the Church late, and by my own decision: I was baptized in the autumn of 1989, while the Soviet system that had spent seventy years trying to erase the Church was itself beginning to end.

I studied journalism at Moscow University in the late 1980s and was conscripted into the army, with a real chance of being sent to Afghanistan—a fate that, by good fortune, never came. Afterwards, I began writing for the samizdat press, half-legal by then, and then for the news agency Postfactum and the newspaper Kommersant. Independent journalism was my first love; it always mattered to me more than any official position.

Conversion and the Church after Communism

But alongside my profession stood the parish community. With a brotherhood of young people, most of us only recently baptized, I helped restore a church near Klin, seventy-five kilometers from Moscow, abandoned and all but destroyed in the Soviet years. It was the first church in Russia dedicated to Patriarch Tikhon, and we took his name for the brotherhood. I could not have guessed that Tikhon’s blessing would carry me, more than thirty years later, to America—the country where he himself had once served the Church before Russia called him home. Our brotherhood soon became part of a large and vibrant lay movement of the early 1990s, one the bishops would move to suppress only a few years later.

In the autumn of 1990, at twenty-two, I stood at the funeral of Father Alexander Men in Novaya Derevnya. I have never forgotten what I understood there: the price paid by those who preach the Gospel without fear. Decades later, I was drawn back to Semkhoz, where Men had lived and was killed, and into a long friendship with his nephew, Father Viktor Grigorenko, who died in 2022.

Essex and a Wider Church

That November, two months after Men’s murder, an errand carried me to the small monastery of Father Sophrony Sakharov in Essex, England. The old man was ninety-four, and he embraced me like a father. For three years, I lived between Moscow and Essex, and the monastery became my second home. There, I first understood that the Church I loved was wider than any nation: Orthodoxy could be at home in England, and holiness could speak in more than one tongue.

What Father Sophrony opened has stayed beneath everything I have done since. He gave me a way of prayer, private and liturgical; twentieth-century Orthodox theology; and a form of spiritual fatherhood shaped by Mount Athos and little known in the Russia I had encountered at the time. From him I learned to see the Church first as a communion of persons, held together by love and prayer before it is held together by anything else.

That experience gave me a measure by which I would later recognize, with growing pain, what the Church loses when communion is replaced by ideology.

In 1998, I walked through waist-deep snow towards Ganina Yama, outside Ekaterinburg, drawn into the recovery of the relics of the Royal Family. I was wary then of the politics of their canonization, and I am still. But something reached me on that road. Such holiness, I understood, is lived not only by mind and heart but by every cell of a tired, wet, sweating body. What I revered was the family’s transformation before death, not the monarchy others wanted to build upon it.

When the family was canonized in 2000, I watched a large part of the Church turn away from the very thing that had reached me on that road. Their holiness lay in how they met an inevitable death, in the humility with which they accepted it. That, it turned out, was of little interest. In much of the public language that grew around their canonization, I began to hear less about the family’s humility before death than about the restoration of an imperial imagination. The substitution felt quiet and enormous, and it happened in front of me. That is how I came to know, by sight rather than by argument, what a political canonization is.

I think of it now, in America, as interest in the canonization of Seraphim Rose gathers pace. I sometimes fear a similar confusion: that spiritual hunger may be joined to a longing for cultural certainty and religious power. I would be glad to be proven wrong.

Journalism, Church, and Empire

Through the 1990s, I remained in independent journalism. Its brightest chapter was NG-Religii, the religion supplement I edited for Nezavisimaya Gazeta, without question the most vivid religious-journalism project of those years. In 1998, I founded Sobornost, the first religious internet journal in Russia. We wrote about everything, and we criticized the episcopate plainly but in good faith. It did not stop the Patriarchate’s own officials from inviting me, in 2001, to come and work for the Church.

Independent journalism was dearer to me than any official post, and I hesitated when the invitation came. What decided it was the personal blessing of Patriarch Alexy II, with whom I had a warm relationship. I stayed for fifteen years, editing Tserkovny Vestnik and then the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, and teaching my own course, the theology of communication, at St Tikhon’s Orthodox University. I tried to smuggle real life back onto official pages, to show that a living Church existed behind the strict facade. In 2004, I founded the Orthodox media festival Vera i Slovo (“Faith and Word”), which brought church and secular journalists together as equals and came to be counted among the brightest events in post-Soviet religious journalism.

I had known Metropolitan Kirill since the mid-1990s, and I watched the final stage of his rise up close. By 2012, I could no longer keep from criticizing where it led, as he consciously traded faith for ideology and freedom for an unconditional, personal loyalty to himself. For me, it ended in the winter of 2015, in a scandal I never planned, after I said aloud that Russian Orthodoxy was being remade into a state ideology and would soon give war and violence its public blessing. What I could not accept was the bargain being struck: the Church’s freedom, her calling to be a sign of the Kingdom rather than a servant of empire, bartered for the security of the state.

Beauty, Witness, and the Present Work

Still, the work I have loved most was editorial after all, though of the independent kind: the almanac Dary (The Gifts), where we gathered the best of what contemporary Christian culture was making. Around it grew exhibitions, conferences, and other projects in the same spirit, made with friends from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Italy, and France. Their culmination was Saints of the Undivided Church, an exhibition that travelled from country to country before Covid, to a response none of us had expected, and the Laboratory of Church Arts and Architecture, which we built with Italian colleagues. These stay closest to me.

Beauty, for me, is where sincere prayer meets a visual language. I love the contemporary icon that refuses to copy the past and will not hide an absence of inspiration or gift behind “the canon”: an icon in bold search that never loses its hold on the liturgical tradition. I would say the same of church architecture. I am proud of my friendships with some of the leading iconographers, designers, and architects working today.

For the past two years, unexpectedly and against every plan I had, I have been working on religious persecution in Russia. This is the very thing Sophrony Sakharov fled a hundred years ago, the thing that seemed gone for good. It is not gone. The same story returns, and the world would rather not hear it. Many find it comfortable to think of Russia as a Christian country. Russia has become something else. So it has to be said, if only to stand by the few Christian communities that still hold on there.

And this is the work I mean to keep doing: to say, and to go on saying, that Russian Orthodoxy is alive, and beautiful, even now, when the revival I once served has ended once more in catastrophe. I write about a Church I know from the inside, in its depth and in its wrong turns, not against her but out of love, and with a joy that no power can confiscate.