In April, after an extended legal battle, Russia won control of the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas and St. Alexandra in the southern French city of Nice. This was not an unprecedented victory. In 2010, Russia took over the city’s St. Nicholas Cathedral, the second largest Orthodox church in Western Europe, using similar mechanisms in French law. After doing so, the Russian state turned both buildings over to the Moscow Patriarchate.
While over a decade separates these two decisions, they are both part of a strategy by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin to extend Russia’s soft power influence, circumvent Western sanctions, and possibly create bases for Russian intelligence operations by reclaiming the ecclesiastical property of the Russian Empire.
Both Russian churches in Nice were built in the last decades of the Russian Empire, when the city was a playground of Russia’s aristocracy. At the time of their construction, the churches belonged, like all foreign Russian church property, to the tsar. But following the Bolshevik Revolution, the new Soviet government renounced both the foreign debts and assets of the Russian Empire. This left Russia’s vast church holdings abroad in a legal limbo. In places where these properties were not seized by local authorities, Russian émigré communities—frequently made up of White Russian refugees and anti-Bolsheviks—took control though legally murky arrangements.
International law around property claims for successor states is complicated and an area of significant dispute. While today’s Russian Federation declared itself the successor of the Soviet Union, it has never formally done so with respect to the Russian Empire. Nonetheless, in the early 2000s, Russia, invoking imperial-era lease agreements, sued in French courts to reclaim the two Nice churches. After years of legal back-and forth, Moscow eventually prevailed.
These verdicts have had consequences far beyond property ownership. They also impact geopolitics at a moment when Russia is growing more aggressive in Europe.
Moscow’s efforts to reclaim foreign church property originated with the Russian historian Vladlen Sirotkin, who in the late 1990s suggested that the solution to the country’s crippling financial problems might lie in recovering all the “tsar’s gold” around the world. It was a claim that, though academically dubious, caught the attention of Russian officials, who began to pursue the idea in earnest by the early 2000s, culminating in the issuance of a 2024 decree ordering that the lost wealth of the Russian Empire be tracked down.
When Vladimir Putin became Russian president in 2000, he quickly recognized the ideological and strategic potential of recovering former imperial assets, particularly ecclesiastical ones. The religious properties had the potential to assist in the Russian president’s emerging strategy of using the Russian Orthodox Church as a soft power instrument. Part of this campaign involved efforts to situate the patriarch of Moscow as the leader of the Orthodox Christian world.
Leadership in Orthodox Christianity is more complicated than in many other religions; there is no Orthodox pope. Instead, the Orthodox Church is a voluntary federation of co-equal bishops who preside over independent churches. Historically, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople was recognized as first among equals. Yet the extent of his authority has varied over time.
During the Ottoman period, the influence of the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople declined, while the newly established Patriarchate of Moscow rose in prominence with the backing of tsarist Russia. Even after the Patriarchate of Moscow was dissolved between 1721 and 1917, the Holy Synod that replaced it retained a unique position as the only major Orthodox Church not under Ottoman rule. This allowed it to present itself as the world’s only free Orthodox Church, an identity it leveraged as a tool of Russian foreign policy.
But following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Bolshevik Revolution, the balance began to shift. Although the Patriarchate of Moscow was reestablished just as the Soviet state was preparing to persecute—and then co-opt—the church, the Ecumenical Patriarchate (newly constrained by secular Turkey), found strength through the increasingly prosperous Greek diaspora, which it formally claimed as its flock in the 1920s.
In the 1920s and 1930s, when some Russian communities in Western Europe and North America (and to a lesser extent East Asia) found themselves cut off from Moscow, they placed themselves under the canonical authority of Constantinople. The most prominent of these was the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe, known colloquially known as the Exarchate. The Exarchate allowed Russians abroad to maintain their Slavic liturgical traditions and have their own ethnically Russian bishops. As a unique, quasi-independent body in Western Europe, the Exarchate developed a progressive approach to Orthodox theology.
At the same time, other communities joined together without a historical bishop to form the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), a body explicitly opposed to the Soviet-aligned Moscow Patriarchate. With communities in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, ROCOR’s faithful often saw themselves as the remnant of holy Russia. In broad terms, ROCOR parishes (which many Orthodox authorities viewed as illegitimate owing to their lack of a historical bishop) formed a reactionary protest movement, resisting Western liberalism and modernity, while those parishes under Constantinople adopted a Western-facing attitude.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was not a given that the Russian Orthodox Church would return to the center of Russian life. But Putin recognized the church’s value and gained a powerful propaganda machine both at home and abroad. The Moscow patriarch became an important figure not only in Russia, but also around the world.
One of the Russian Orthodox Church’s first efforts under Putin was to bring émigré churches back into communion with Moscow. As early as 2001, Putin publicly called for the reunion of ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate, even though ROCOR had built its identity on rejecting the Moscow church as a Soviet puppet. The proposal was initially rebuffed by ROCOR’s faithful and bishops, who were still distrustful of a Russian state they believed had betrayed them. But by 2007, the Moscow Patriarchate had won over ROCOR bishops by, among other things, canonizing Tsar Nicholas II and his family. An Act of Canonical Communion formally reunited the two bodies.
Although most church leadership presented the merger as a purely liturgical and administrative step, the act also supplied the legal and ecclesiastical basis for Moscow to assert claims over pre-revolutionary church property, especially in Western Europe. By uniting ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate, the act established the continuity between the Russian Empire and the Russian Federation that the state itself had never formally declared.
But this rapprochement did not extend to those Russian churches that had aligned with Constantinople, whose historical rivalry with Moscow would continue on a new front: Ukraine.
In January 2019, during Russia’s assault on eastern Ukraine but before its full-scale invasion, the patriarch of Constantinople invoked his medieval jurisdiction over Ukraine to grant independence to the newly formed Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The move was meant to end 500 years of Russian dominance over Ukrainian religious life. (Constantinople’s and Moscow’s competing claims to the Ukrainian church are at the heart of religious conflict in Ukraine.) Both Ukrainian leaders and the patriarch knew the decision would infuriate Russia. But for Ukraine, it was essential to cultural independence—and for Constantinople, it was an opportunity to push back against Moscow’s influence.
In what can now only be seen as a preemptive attempt to appease the Russian Church, the patriarch of Constantinople had, just a month earlier, dissolved the Exarchate and ended its independence. Parishes had to choose between joining the bishops of Constantinople or those of Moscow. Many parishes, including some of the largest and wealthiest, returned to Moscow; choosing Constantinople would have placed them under a Greek bishop and likely required them to give up Slavic traditions and possibly conduct services in Greek.
Even so, the move did not calm tensions. Almost immediately after the new Ukrainian church was established, the Moscow Patriarchate declared a formal break with Constantinople, ending priests’ ability to celebrate liturgically with one another and discouraging lay people from receiving sacraments from the other side. The schism continues today: On Sept. 15, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople met with U.S. President Donald Trump to discuss Ukraine’s plight, among other issues.
The Moscow Patriarchate’s 2007 union with ROCOR and the 2018 dissolution of the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe placed Russia in a good strategic and legal position to reclaim imperial ecclesiastical properties. This is true even in those places, such as Nice, where local communities object to the new owners.
For some of the pious, Russia’s return after a century-long absence represents an existential crisis. Alexis Obolensky, president of Nice’s Russian Orthodox Cultural Association (which ran the churches for the past century), mourned the decision to strip the group of the title to the Church of St. Nicholas and St. Alexandra while pointing to its broader implications. It’s as if they want “to erase the idea that there could be another Russia than the one we know. A Russia more tolerant, more open, and more respectful of its history,” he told Nice-Matin.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it has become increasingly clear that the Russian Orthodox Church is able and willing to act as an arm of the Kremlin. From blessing Russian missiles to delivering sermons declaring the war necessary to protect Ukraine from gay pride parades, the patriarch of Moscow is a mouthpiece of the Kremlin.
This makes Russia’s reclamation of imperial church properties particularly perilous for Western governments. It is a danger made even more acute by the fact that the Russian state and church have a legitimate legal claim to these properties, even if the local communities that have tended them for over a century have the moral high ground.
As the Nice cases demonstrate, it is possible for Russia to claim properties in the heart of Europe. There is ample reason to be nervous about what it will do with them. Bulgaria has expelled Russian clerics suspected of spying and the FBI warned in 2023 that Russia would likely attempt to recruit spies from Russian Orthodox churches in the United States. France and other Western nations, including the United States, must recognize genuine security issues with religious freedom and property rights.
Back in Nice, the descendants of the White Russians who once made the city their home are reeling. Some have remained in their churches, unwilling to be driven out by the Kremlin; others have begun attending a nearby Greek cathedral. Whatever their choice, members of France’s Russian Orthodox community have become yet more casualties of Russia’s renewed aggression, caught in a struggle that reaches far beyond the riviera.
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