MOSCOW -- Severe and sumptuous, rigidly authoritarian and intensely mystical, the richly contradictory Russian Orthodox Church has obscured and illuminated the mysteries of the Russian soul for a thousand years.
Today, as it has for centuries, the church provides a landscape against which the larger national conflicts are felt in microcosm. Once again, as it has through history, the struggle for Russia's future reverberates in the church, where nationalists and Westernizers have begun an open fight over souls and influence.
This battle has already drawn blood in the secular world. In October 1993, President Boris N. Yeltsin, reviled by the right as a Westernizer, fought off what amounted to a holy war against him in the nationalistic Parliament by calling in the army and bombarding the Russian White House.
That engagement called kindred spirits in the church to arms. And in the last year it has produced a potentially disastrous split just as the Russian Orthodox Church is trying to assert the moral authority it has begun to regain after 70 years of Communist siege.
Whether the church can withstand such tremors may hinge on the world outside its doors.
"Everything now depends on political, social and economic development in Russia," said Alexander Kirlezhev, a former seminarian who writes on church affairs.
"If the Western influences prevail, the church will be forced to change," he said. "If not, it will be left as it is now -- a national symbol, a sacred institution, and a marginal phenomenon within the society."
The struggle has many parallels to the Roman Catholic Church, which has fought the battle over Latin and vernacular, liberal and conservative.
Two quite different men personify the countervailing forces within the Russian Orthodox church. One is the Rev. Georgy Kochetkov, a 44-year-old priest who wears black plastic glasses with lenses so thick they give his eyes a gentle blur. He has a soft perpetual smile.
The other is Brother Tikhon Shevkunov, a 36-year-old monk who is thin, intense and ascetic, wearing his long brown hair pulled back with a purple terrycloth stretchband.
Last February, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexei II, bowed to right-wing pressure and tossed Father Georgy out of the historic Sretensky Monastery Cathedral in central Moscow, where he ministered to one of Moscow's fastest-growing flocks.
The patriarch replaced him with Brother Tikhon, sent to re-establish a monastery at the cathedral.
For Father Georgy, it seemed a disturbing case of deja vu. In 1983, the KGB prevented the priest's ordination because he was attracting too many people to church.
In the Communist days, the KGB scrutinized all clerical appointments -- many priests were KGB agents.
Brother Tikhon says that he was brought up an atheist. He jokes that he studied religion through required courses on scientific atheism.
When he graduated from college, he said, "I was grasped by faith."
The church was able to tolerate a broad range of experience and belief, its critics say, until the same conservative backlash that produced Vladimir Zhirinovsky emboldened the conservatives in the church hierarchy.
"Until October [1993], the church was democratic," Mr. Kirlezhev said. "After October, the influence moved to the right. It was the end of democratic euphoria."
How it is resolved may depend as much on the success of Russia's democratic politicians in transforming society as it does on the strength of arguments over church doctrine. In this case, Mr. Yeltsin's standing may prove more important than the patriarch's.
Father Georgy tells his story sitting on a slightly unsteady wooden bench in the small church where he was banished, the Church of the Assumption in Pechatniki, built in 1695. Church seems a grand word for the building, which until the beginning of the year had been used as a naval museum.
The walls are gray, broken by patches of blue paint. Holes pock the surfaces, and two rows of ugly fluorescent lights arch over head. All signs of church life, the frescoes and chandeliers, were destroyed in Communist times.
But a simple altar has been built, and the church women relentlessly scrub the torn brown linoleum floor. There are candles to be lit, and a few icons propped against the walls.
Father Georgy deeply upset traditionalists by leading his services in Russian instead of Old Slavonic, the traditional language of the church, which is little understood today.
He also formed his parishioners into close personal groups to study religion outside the church, contrary to tradition where church life is conducted almost entirely in the service. His parish became suspiciously Western-like, developing into a community where people met in homes to study the Bible together.
And Father Georgy dared to conduct the service out in the open, in front of churchgoers, instead of hidden behind the iconostasis, the large screen laden with religious pictures.
"I firmly believe the language of the church is the language of life," Father Georgy said, "and we have to speak this language. It was a real collision between two forces in the church."
In general, the Russian Orthodox Church has rigid expectations of its adherents. There are frequent, rigorous fasts. Church services often run for four hours, and worshipers stand throughout on hard stone floors. There are no seats, except an occasional one for the exceptionally infirm. "We stand straight like a candle, turning our faces to God," said a believer named Tatyana Nikolayevna.
All the mystery and power of the church is held behind the screen by the priests.
"I believe we have to step toward people," Father Georgy said. "People come to church spiritually destroyed. We have to approach them with compassion."
The church, he said, has a rare opportunity to fill a deep vacuum for millions of Russians who are searching for answers to replace the destroyed communist ideology. He contends they need emotional support as much as prayer.
Indeed, thousands of Russians have been attracted to American preachers, such as the Reverends Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell. The Orthodox Church has tried to fight back by getting a law passed forbidding them, but President Yeltsin has refused to sign it. Father Georgy thinks his church is missing a huge opportunity by failing to liberalize itself.
He says the spiritually bereft people beckoned by the gleaming gold onion domes find only sacred obligations instead of the moral guidance they are desperately seeking.
Oleg Skorobogato, 27, an aviation engineer, was one of many young Russians who has been part of a huge upsurge in religious belief -- after years of official atheism, about 30 percent of Russians now say they believe in God.
"The average person needs the kind of preparation Father Georgy offers," Mr. Skorobogato said. "He needs to find answers to his questions. It is very difficult to learn to live with God and the Church."
When the hierarchy insisted on disciplining Father Georgy by ordering him out of the cathedral, the priest said gangs of Cossacks with whips showed up at the cathedral and forced him out. "They threw down icons and books," Father Georgy said. "It was a real pogrom."
Father Georgy had run up against the conservative vision of Russia as a nation that is doomed if it strays from the hallowed path of Holy Russia, with its own distinct and superior culture, symbolized by the Orthodox Church, that separates it from the rest of the world.
Brother Tikhon tells his story sitting on a bench amid the quiet splendor of frescoes painted in 1707. The Sretensky Cathedral was built in 1679 to commemorate a victory over the Muslim Tatars.
Only three years ago, it was still used as an art restoration workshop by the Ministry of Culture. A refrigerator occupied the altar, and the sanctuary was partitioned into workshops.
Brother Tikhon said he was not surprised that the conservative-liberal conflicts that caused such turmoil in the secular world have reached here into his serene Cathedral.
"Of course," he said, chuckling at finding himself quoting Lenin, "It is not possible to live in society and be free of society."
Evolution, not revolution
Father Georgy, he said, wants to revolutionize the church at a time when it can only sustain evolution.
"Now the church is emerging from the catacombs, from the periphery of life," Brother Tikhon said. "It's very important how stable it is, that we keep it natural for Russians, organic."
He said many people are seduced by the excitement of revolution.
"Initially the fruits of a revolutionary approach are colorful and bright and impress people," he said. "But we need a healthy conservatism and love for tradition, not just for the sake of tradition but as an expression of love for our family and forebears."
He said Father Georgy's reforms bear the same pitfalls as perestroika, which he said destroyed the old system before new structures were ready to replace it.
"The goal was the bright fruits of capitalism," he said. "But they didn't build anything like America has, and now Russia is under destruction."
The old Slavonic is essential, he said. "Listen to the beauty of the service, and try within your soul to climb to God," he said. "God can't be grasped by the mind. Try to face him, and listen."
Brother Tikhon said Cossacks with whips came into the church because Father Georgy's parish refused to recognize the order to leave the cathedral. Father Georgy and his followers protested by conducting a long service outside, in weather 10 degrees below zero.
'It's very sad'
"By morning what had happened was known to all of Orthodox Moscow, including the Cossacks," he said. "It's very sad, and I regret it."
Brother Tikhon said reformers like Father Georgy have devised outward, superficial changes that deeply threaten the church. "This can bring about another schism, and the results will be terrible," he warned.
Today, the church remains divided over what it became during the Communist years. The Rev. Gleb Yakunin, who was imprisoned for documenting religious persecution during the Soviet years, has called on priests who collaborated with the KGB to admit their mistakes and ask forgiveness.
The church hierarchy has resisted such soul-searching. Instead, the patriarch defrocked Father Gleb, a leader of the democratic and Westernizing reform movement, for taking a seat in Parliament.
The patriarch has been silent on the subject of the right-wing Metropolitan Ioann of St. Petersburg, who routinely and very publicly makes anti-Semitic comments.
Once, before they were swept into conflicting positions, Brother Tikhon happened to tell Father Georgy about how he decided on his 33rd birthday to become a monk. "Father Georgy said that at the very same age, he chose not to be a monk," Brother Tikhon said. "We gazed deeply into each other's eyes."
They looked into each other's hearts and for a moment found understanding. And then it was gone.