In her case study of the protests in St. Petersburg in the winter and spring of 2017 evoked by the authorities’ diktat to transfer St. Isaac’s Cathedral from state ownership to church ownership, Kormina, an expert on post-Soviet Russian Orthodoxy, brings into focus the tensions over the control of cultural property that can arise in the post-Soviet era within a less than “true secular state” with a decidedly “distinctive church-state nexus.”

In interviews with secularists and believers and the use of letters to the editor of the internet newspaper Fontanka, the author deftly shows the ways in which professional and white-collar guardians of the Soviet “sacralization of ‘culture'” and  redefinition of religion as “heritage” expressed a “passionate secularism,” a concept borrowed from the political theorist Albert Hirschman. These guardians did so by championing the maintenance of cultural monuments in the name of the common good as opposed to what they perceived as the particularist and “superstitious” religious claims of some Orthodox believers. Conflicted highly educated Orthodox believers could be found among the secularists.

Kormina shows how the Russian Orthodox Church (MP) had become the real enemy in the secularists’ eyes in its role as a representative of the post-Soviet authoritarian state that wished to deprive its populace of a revered public space. They viewed the church as  illegitimately claiming the right to control what had been state property and therefore public space not only in the Soviet period, but also from its inception as a consecrated church in the Imperial period. In Kormina’s superb analysis this emotional fight against the Church represented a victory for a fledgling modern public sphere in an urban setting or what some of us might term a civil society.