In Russia, silence is never just silence. Under the crust of official speeches and patriotic liturgies, a living embers continues to smoulder: the faith that does not surrender to the rhetoric of victory and does not confuse the Gospel with geopolitics.

It is an often anonymous faith: priests suspended, women praying in the kitchen, young people risking sanctions just for saying ‘peace’ aloud. It is the underground Russia that resists while the ecclesiastical apparatus, welded to political power, speaks with a voice of thunder and blesses weapons.

That embers were seen with almost unbearable clarity on the day of Aleksej Navalny’s funeral. Thousands of people, flowers and candles, no slogan: silence as a form of freedom.
In the midst of that crowd, a priest made a gesture that seemed impossible: to celebrate the funeral of the man whom the powers-that-be pointed out as a ‘traitor’.
His name was Father Dmitry Safronov.
A month later, Patriarch Kirill punished him: suspension and ‘penance’ for three years, with the bureaucratic formula of ‘violation of liturgical rules’.

But the real guilt was something else: having returned to Russian Christianity a gesture of compassion in a time of propaganda. In parallel, archpriest Aleksej Uminsky was removed and prosecuted for refusing to read the ‘prayer for Holy Rus’ and victory’, which had become de facto obligatory.

Within Russian Orthodoxy, two irreconcilable theologies coexist today.
The first is the official one: it speaks of ‘Holy Rus’, of ‘holy war’, of historical mission; it turns liturgy into identity choreography and martyrdom into communication.
The second is that of the underground Church: it has no stages, prays in private homes, lights candles in front of unframed icons, quotes prophets instead of generals.
It is the theology of conscience, of non-violence, of mercy.
“Two Russias face each other within the same liturgy”: the phrase is not rhetoric, it is daily news.

The cult of power now also has its public rites, which are increasingly grandiose.
The September procession to Aleksandr Nevsky in St Petersburg (icons, tricolours, Cossacks, regiments, choirs) has become the manifesto of a patriotic religion; in 2025, according to the chronicles, Nevsky Prospekt was traversed by a huge crowd, an image designed to say: ‘God is with the State’.
And while a theology of obedience is being constructed, new symbols are also taking shape: in Pushkin, near St Petersburg, a temple ‘in honour of the defenders of the homeland’ has been approved , linked to the ‘special military operation’.

But here lies the decisive detail: some Russian citizens protested by calling it a ‘temple of war’ and ‘blasphemy’.
It is not a diaspora speaking from abroad: it is the conscience resurfacing within Russia itself.

In this scenario, religious dissidence is not only moral: it is also material, organised, concrete.
In March 2022, 294 priests signed a public letter against war (‘Every people is a brother to another people. One cannot defend truth with violence’); from that line, the ‘Mir vsèm‘ (‘Peace to All’) fund was also born, which supports suspended clerics and their families, and makes visible the growing list of ‘priests of silence’.

And the repression does not stop at symbols: reports and monitoring show how a part of the anti-war clergy has been desecrated, persecuted or forced into exile, finding in some cases a welcome in Europe (also through the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople).

From 21 December to 2 January, however, something has changed in the general ‘climate’, and it does not only concern the Church: it concerns the very air of the country.

“The air is getting heavier not only in the streets, but also in the cables”: the Russian Internet, increasingly ‘sovereign’, is being restricted, interrupted, reduced to authorised corridors. Calls on Telegram and WhatsApp had already been ‘throttled’; now the threat is more explicit, to the point of almost total blockade.
In parallel, the state pushes MAX as a ‘national’ alternative, and even condominium life is addressed: building chats, breakdowns, expenses, daily solidarity, all pushed towards more traceable channels.

This picture, by the end of 2025, has also become news outside Russia: Roskomnadzor is implementing a complete shutdown of WhatsApp, and the stranglehold on foreign platforms (with blocks and restrictions, including calling services) is being recounted as part of a strategy to control private communication, while MAX is being promoted as an in-house replacement.

And here the ’embers of faith’ connect to a point that is truer today than yesterday: hiding is not only physical, it is digital.
In the main temple of the Armed Forces, on the outskirts of Moscow, iconography itself becomes ideology (mosaics, power, sword, victory): it is the monumental form of state religion.
But outside that temple, in the provinces and prisons, another liturgy is born, almost without walls: ‘I light a candle in front of the telephone screen and pray for those who can no longer do so’.
The underground faith does not ask for permission, and that is precisely why it is scary.

The regime, after all, fears two things: memory and prayer.
Memory because it restores voice to the dead and dignity to the living; prayer because it breaks fear, and a people that prays freely is a people that stops obeying automatically. A single logic attempts to govern society and the liturgy: it is not enough to control what one does, one must control what one remembers and what one names.

Yet, just where power tries to close the air, embers continue to breathe.
It moves to the side, inventing minimal forms: kitchens, courtyards, libraries, small groups praying for peace, words spoken without a megaphone and therefore more evangelical. In the same digital space where access is restricted, dissidence builds maps of survival: channels and projects, guides and ‘stratagems’ to avoid falling into the fence; and even the names of sources(Sirena, Govorit NeMoskva, Vërstka, Važnye istorii, ASTRA, Pepel’ Belgorod) become a moral geography before being informative.

The embers of faith do not promise political miracles. It is not enough to change history, but it can save it from cynicism.
And while official Christianity risks becoming a flag, submerged Russia continues to remind us that the most Christian word today is often the simplest and the most dangerous: No. No to war, no to lies, no to the cult of power. And precisely for this reason, even if trembling, the embers speak to Europe: because they remind us that freedom is not born of clamour, but of conscience.