Religious Communities Under Pressure: Documenting Religious Persecution in Russia 2022–2026

Since February 2022, Orthodox priests and deacons have been defrocked for praying for peace. A non-denominational preacher who walked out holding a sign that read "No to War" was later found dead in a penal colony. Across Russia, Christians who refused to bless the war have been silenced, stripped of their orders, imprisoned—and not only by the state, but by their own Church.This is the most systematic campaign of religious persecution in twenty-first-century Europe, and most of it has remained within the reach of Russian-language media and a narrow circle of researchers. Religious Communities Under Pressure brings that record to English-language readers for the first time.The book documents more than 115 believers—clergy and laypeople, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Buddhist—and traces the machinery behind their persecution: a system more intricate, and in some ways more insidious, than anything the Soviet state devised. The great majority of those targeted are Orthodox Christians, the only ones who face this pressure from two directions at once. What emerges is a portrait few outside Russia have been allowed to see—of a Church that has surrendered its freedom to the state, and of the faithful who would not follow it there.Sergei Chapnin writes from within that Church, and as one of its own. For fifteen years he shaped the media policy of the Moscow Patriarchate from senior editorial positions. In 2015 he warned publicly that Russia was remaking Orthodoxy into a state ideology, and that a future war against Ukraine would be given a religious justification. Patriarch Kirill dismissed him within days. Seven years later, the warning proved exact.This is a work of documentation and of conscience: a record of what happens when a church trades its moral independence for the favor of the state, and a testimony to those who refused.Foreword by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.Endorsements“The Orwellian reality that grips Putin’s Russia has not spared the Orthodox Church whose priests are being banned from ministry, defrocked, and otherwise punished by their own bishops for staying true to biblical commandments and opposing the war in Ukraine. In this must-read volume, Sergei Chapnin draws a clear line between the Russian Orthodox Church as an official institution that has blessed the war and Russian Orthodox Christians who have refused to accept this. The testimony gathered in this book is the moral answer to the gravest temptation the Russian Church has faced in a century, since its hierarchy’s ‘Sergian’ collaboration with the Soviet state.”— Vladimir Kara-Murza, Russian opposition politician, former political prisoner“Christian nationalism manifests in diverse forms, yet it consistently operates as an instrument of constraint and not as a force of liberation. Rather than fostering spiritual freedom, it imposes structures of control and subjection. In this important contribution, Sergei V. Chapnin analyzes the mechanisms of religious repression, persecution, and discrimination in Russia within the context of the war in Ukraine. This multifaceted yet unknown phenomenon extends beyond the regulation of religious life, reshaping the lived experience of religious liberty and freedom of expression, particularly in times of conflict. Chapnin ultimately recalls the essential vocation of faith as a moral compass and not a tool in the service of political power.”— Elpidophoros, Archbishop of America Read more