Russia’s waiting reformation

Putin’s world is not the only take on Russia.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Graffiti on a wall, spells out in Russian character the name Navalny.

Anti-Putin pro-Navalny graffiti, Saint Petersburg.

Dor Shabashewitz via Wikimedia Commons.

When I presented the book I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko for purchase at the counter, my only thought was for what the bookseller would think. Was I a Putin sympathiser and apologist for the war in Ukraine? It says a lot about how we have unconsciously embraced Putin’s world as the only take on Russia. There is an indigenous saying that Russia is not Moscow and Moscow is not Russia. By the same token, Putin is not Russia, however much he would like us to think this; it is naïve and prejudiced of us to allow the largest country in the world to be defined by its dictator.

Elena Kostyuchenko, and Alexei Navalny in his posthumously published book Patriot, belong in different generations to Putin and inhabit another moral universe. Navalny has done more than anyone to call out the epic levels of corruption and dark cynicism of the Putin era. This is a Mafia state, as Luke Harding observes. Navalny believes there are twenty people who rule in Russia, with staggering levels of visible and hidden wealth, and a further one thousand who eat from their trough. The rest of the country includes those who are duped by state media, those who don’t want to know or keep their heads down or don’t care, and those who testify to the truth.

This latter cohort shows remarkable courage, because they are being silenced, one by one, through prison or murder. Navalny died in prison after previously being poisoned in Siberia; Kostyuchenko was poisoned while in Germany and has been targeted for assassination elsewhere. Before them lies a sobering roll call of journalists and politicians like Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov and Igor Domnikov whose murders are clearly attributable to what they have said about the crimes of Putin and his associates.

Elena Kostyuchenko’s journalism takes her to Russia’s abandoned people and places. Derelict and decaying hospitals where the young, the addicted and the dispossessed gather; the mothers of Beslan who are beaten up and persecuted because they want the truth about that fateful siege; psychiatric hospitals with no resources or patient care; landscapes depleted by corrupt extractive industries. She is inspired by the fearless reportage of Politkovskaya and her writing bears the imprint of Svetlana Alexievich, with its gift for listening and attention to the wonderful ordinariness of human life. Her walk down the dark parade of Russia’s casualties is a tribute to the finest traditions of journalism, which carry the echo of the voice of Christ in their attention to those who lose out in this world.

In prison, Alexei Navalny learned the Sermon on the Mount by heart; his conversion from the routine atheism of his Soviet upbringing being triggered by the birth of his and Yulia’s first child, Dasha. He is wry, sardonic, stubborn, implacable – displaying an other-worldly willpower. It is hard to compute the courage it took to return to Russia after being poisoned with Novichok, knowing it would surely lead to imprisonment, mistreatment and death:

One day I made the decision not to be afraid. I weighed everything up, understood where I stand – and let it go.

Of the pain inflicted on him in prison for speaking the truth about Putin’s Russia, he says:

I have decided that this is my own pared-down version of suffering for the faith, a moment of suffering for being a believer. Happily it does not entail being dismembered, stoned to death, or having the lions set on me.

And yet the totality of his life was not far short of this. He skates over much of the abuse, but references being woken every hour of every night for a personal roll call. When other prisoners were primed to shout at Navalny for long periods from close range, it is deeply moving to visualise him shouting back and not backing down. Over time, his bespoke prison regime became steadily more abusive and isolating, directed in his view from the Kremlin.

There is absurdity at the heart of the system and he confronts those responsible for it, rather than meekly submitting to it. In the late Soviet era, criminal law was so comprehensively drafted that anyone could be picked up for an infringement if this was politically expedient. In Putin’s Russia, we have returned to the Stalinist period where offences are simply made up in a dark Wonderland. It is rule by law, not of law.

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, uses a particular metaphor. He says that Putin and his Kremlin officials act like priests who mediate a believer’s relationship with God. They have become intermediaries for how Russians are supposed to experience their country, telling them what to think and feel about it. If so, then Russia is ready for a new reformation, where people claim their own organic relationship with a nation that means so much to them. There are already enough martyrs for this new reformation while Putin continues to speak power to truth. Those of us who care about its people and its future do not need Putin’s malign priesthood to interpret Russian life. There is a different Russia, waiting to be discovered.

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Column

Culture

Migration

Politics

20 November 2025

4 min read

From MI6 to migration: the tangled legacy of empire

Britain’s security dilemmas, from LinkedIn spies to post-colonial legacies, reveal a deeper global story

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Home Office.

There’s a food chain in the British intelligence services and the government offices they serve. The Foreign Office is advised by MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or more usually simply “Six”, which, though it would deny it in favour of claims of collaboration, looks down on the national security service, MI5, which serves the Home Office.

An old acquaintance from Six used casually to call the parochial Home Office the LEO, short for Little England Office. There’s less of that now, to be sure, as they struggle to accommodate their political masters. Foreheads were rubbed wearily at MI6’s HQ by Vauxhall Bridge when Yvette Cooper, fresh from proscribing Palestine Action at the Home Office as a terrorist organisation alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, was made up to foreign secretary at the last re-shuffle.

Meanwhile, over the river, MI5 faces the challenge of a new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who may believe that the prospect of limiting leave to remain to a maximum of 20 years and confiscating their jewellery might dissuade those with ill intent against the British state from embarking on a small boat.

Taken together, these challenges make it not a good time to be an intelligence officer, or even an intelligent one. It gets worse on the canvas of large superpowers. The problems with an erratic clown of American jurisdiction are well recorded. But China is something else.

They’d be chuckling merrily at MI6, if it wasn’t so serious, at the headlines this week, suggesting that China’s principal infiltration of the British state is through agents posing as headhunters on LinkedIn. The immeasurably greater threat from Chinese intelligence has come from the global march that China has stolen in the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the network of Chinese-sourced sensors, software and chips embedded and monitored in technologies that connect and exchange data globally.

This isn’t tin-foil hat conspiracy territory; it’s real and has been called out for years. It’s significantly why the case against two alleged British spies for China was recently withdrawn. Britain has to keep China sweet for fear of what it knows of and could do with British data. That’s a massive US problem too.

To that end, trade and co-operation are the way to keep China onside, not confrontation. It’s an example that the Foreign Office might set for the Home Office. And, indeed, the two might work more closely together (just a suggestion).

The Home Office has long acknowledged that there are “Push and Pull” factors to our immigration crisis. It almost exclusively concentrates on the Pull, by trying to make the UK a less attractive destination for migrants through limits of right to remain and by nicking their jewellery. The Push factors are war, oppression and economic deprivation and these are very much more the territory of the Foreign Office.

A big problem arises when the Home Office tries to do the Foreign Office’s job, as when Mahmood threatens Trump-style visa bans for the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Namibia. Good luck with that – it betrays a neo-colonial instinct and there, perhaps, is the rub.

We pay a post-colonial price in both illegal and legal immigration. A predominantly Christian Europe and New World endeavoured to make disciples of every nation and now many of them are coming home. Christian culture as a former weapon of oppression is perhaps overstated, but there’s some truth in it. An even more stark truth is that we have to address the Push elements of migration if we are to find common ground on which we can make progress.

Our colonial oversight left Afghanistan a modern and post-modern historical mess. Syria is almost untouchable in its post-Assad dynastic horrors. The Indian subcontinent is still a wreckage that we abandoned only some 80 years ago.

Trying to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan or the former al-Qaeda breakaway al-Sharaa interim regime in Syria may not be so much a triumph of hope over experience as of naivety over history. But our current position with China may point a way forward. Tariff-free trade and economic co-development is a surer way to address migration crises than making arrivals unwelcome.

It’s admittedly more complicated than China. A US/UK post-colonial future will need to align neo-Christian western cultures with an enlightened Islam that concentrates on the Quranic instructions of co-existence, respect, fairness and the explicit injunction that there can be “no compulsion in religion”. But if it was easy everyone would be doing it.

That’s the call of the 21st century and it is, quite clearly, a global rather than nationalistic one. The US will need to recover its position in the world. And, in the UK, foreheads will need to be raised from being banged on desks to solve foreign crises before they wash up on our shores.