Lucy Ash | Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin

An expert on Russia and the post-Soviet world, award-winning presenter Lucy Ash was first sent to Moscow by the BBC in 1990 and has been reporting on the region’s social, political and cultural fault-lines ever since. In her provocative and prize-shortlisted book The Baton and the Cross, Lucy reveals how, under Vladimir Putin, religion has been stripped of its spiritual content and repurposed as a weapon of state control.

Tracing more than a millennium of the Russian Orthodox Church’s astonishing survival skills – from tsarist rule and Soviet atheism to the chaos of the 1990s – Ash shows how the Church has once again moved to the right hand of power, sanctifying Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Combining historical research with vivid, on-the-ground reportage, she explores how Orthodox clerics preach a dangerous ideology of supremacy, dragging Russia towards a new Middle Ages. Revisit Lucy’s conversation with author Mary Hockaday as she exposes the underbelly of politics, state security and big money, and their unholy alliance with Orthodoxy in the dystopia of twenty-first-century Russia.