IN JULY 2014, the Russian state-owned television network Channel One aired a news story that sickened many Russians.

Speaking from a refugee camp near Rostov, a woman named Galina Pyshnyak claimed to have seen Ukrainian soldiers in the contested Donbas region torture a child while his mother watched. Pyshnyak said, “They took a 3-year-old child, a small boy in panties, in a T-shirt, and nailed him as Jesus to an advertisement board.”

The story, which independent journalists were unable to verify, was quickly called out by international watchdogs as Russian propaganda: a way for the Kremlin to rally support for its occupation of Crimea and — in time — plant the seeds for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a whole. The “crucified boy” story served as a call to arms, as cases were reported of Russians who volunteered to fight against those Ukrainians who crucify little children. Subsequent investigations showed that a version of the story had first appeared on the Facebook page of Alexander Dugin, one of the most successful propagandists of the Russkiy Mir (“Russian World”) ideology. Channel One retracted the story in December 2014.

To Netherlands-based theologian Katya Tolstaya, however, the explicit Christian imagery of Pyshnyak’s “eyewitness” account and the visceral responses it elicited throughout Russia represented something else: In Putin’s world, religion and politics were becoming narrowly intertwined.

Over the years, experts have produced various explanations for Russia’s return to totalitarianism and who should be held responsible. Some argue the development stems from the ambition and personality of Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, while others point the finger at a broader Russian culture. Assorted studies focus on the political or the historic, the economic or the religious roots of totalitarianism. Tolstaya, for her part, sees religion as both a problem and a solution. Divorcing Russian Orthodoxy from the Kremlin’s imperialist agenda, she argues, can help Russians come to terms with a dark past that they have yet to process.

The literature of dissent

TOLSTAYA’S OWN PAST is no less complicated. She was born in the Soviet Union, in St. Petersburg (back when it was still called Leningrad). Her father, a doctor, was Jewish. Her mother, also a doctor, is related to Leo Tolstoy, Christian anarchist and pacifist, author of War and Peace and The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Tolstaya’s was a family of dissidents, critical of the government even before Putin came to power, and she spent much of her youth reading Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote of his experiences in Joseph Stalin’s forced-labor prison system, called the gulag.

After giving birth to twins, Tolstaya emigrated to the Netherlands in 1990, and settled in the town of Kampen, to secure a better future for her children. While her children went to school, she decided to take classes herself, briefly considering medicine and Russian philology before settling on theology. Her decision paid off. Over the years, she has been a tenured professor, vice dean and dean of research at the Faculty of Religion and Theology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and founder of the Institute for the Academic Study of Eastern Christianity, and in 2022 she was named by the Dutch government as “Theologian of the Fatherland,” an ambassador of theology.

Although Tolstaya left Russia, Russia never left her. Her current research applies the framework of “theology after” a significant event (for example, post-Holocaust theology and theology after apartheid). Tolstaya’s “Theology after Gulag, Bucha, and Beyond” transplants post-Soviet scholarship into a theological framework by picking up a question raised in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1880 book, The Brothers Karamazov: How can a religious person make sense of the many evil things that happen in the world, from the Holocaust and Joseph Stalin’s labor camps to Putin’s ongoing war against Ukraine?

It is a difficult question to answer, not in the least because religious institutions are so often complicit in these horrors. This is no different in Russia today, where the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church — particularly Moscow Patriarch Kirill — is closely allied with Putin, imbuing his regime with the guise of divine providence. In her research, Tolstaya has noted that Patriarch Kirill’s sermons no longer make direct reference to Christ but substitute him with “the sacrality of the state, the army, and the church,” promising “forgiveness of sins to any Russian soldier who perishes in Ukraine.”

These sermons are at odds with the core tenets of Christianity. “In Orthodoxy there is a strong sense that God transcends human understanding,” Tolstaya explains. “True knowledge of God cannot be acquired in an intellectual way, nor by empirical observation or experience. Orthodox theology is very cautious in making positive statements about both the nature of God and [God’s] divine presence in the world. This is important, because it shows that even early Eastern church theology never meant to have God in a pocket. Therefore, any contemporary claim to the church fathers, which the Orthodox hierarchs like to make, is actually twisting their own theology.”

While Russian Orthodox theology can’t provide an excuse for war, it does offer an argument against it, Tolstaya says. “God, as the Orthodox liturgy puts it, is ‘everywhere present and fills all things.’ This awareness of [God’s] omnipresence, in my view, provides an antidote against the instrumentalization and misuse of religion, answering Dostoevsky’s formula, ‘Everyone is guilty for everyone, and I am the guiltiest of all.’”

This line always puzzles Tolstoya’s students who, raised in a deeply individualistic society, fail to see why anyone could be held responsible for actions not their own. Theology explains: If God is present in all things, then all things are part of a single being. And if all things are part of a single being, everyone becomes accountable for everyone and everything, including all evil in the world.

As Dostoevsky wrote in A Writer’s Diary: “Once we see that we ourselves are sometimes even worse than the criminal, we also recognize that we are half guilty of his crime. If he has broken the law which the earth laid down to him, we ourselves are also guilty that he now stands before us. After all, if we all were better, he would also have been better and would not now have stood before us.”

Leo Tolstoy also tackled this idea in his writing. It’s at the heart of War and Peace, which ends with a passionate polemic against the conventional historian’s attempt to distill an unimaginably complex reality into digestible narratives of cause and effect, falsely interpreting much of the Napoleonic War as a direct result of the French dictator’s own birth, and of Resurrection, in which a prince takes responsibility for the crimes of a woman he drove to prostitution.

“If you believe that something or someone has inherent, divine value,” Tolstaya says, “you cannot at the same time use them for an external purpose without compromising this value.” In dealing with the memory of historical atrocities, she exchanges the concept of “collective guilt,” as defined by Hannah Arendt and others, with something called “metaphysical guilt,” which Tolstaya calls “an inherent responsibility every individual carries for all injustice and evil in the world, resonating deeply with the complexities of human interconnectedness.”

Coming to terms with the past

MUCH OF RUSSIA’S current behavior on the world stage, according to Tolstaya, can be explained by the fact that the nation has not had (or taken) the opportunity to process its totalitarian past. This contrasts with a country such as Germany, whose journey toward Vergangenheitsbewältigung (its coming to terms with its Nazi history or, literally, the “work of coping with the past”) was “neither straightforward nor swift,” but nonetheless effective thanks to a “robust network of museums, memorial sites, educational initiatives, and media support,” which turned “critical engagement with the past into a societal norm.”

“This approach goes beyond merely acknowledging Nazi crimes,” Tolstaya says of Germany. “It actively incorporates the memory of these atrocities into the country’s collective identity. By ensuring these memories are preserved and integrated into its cultural fabric, Germans not only guard against the resurgence of totalitarian ideologies, but also reinforce their commitment to democracy and human rights.”

Russia, led today by an ex-KGB officer who keeps the secret security organization’s incriminating archives under lock and key, presents a different story.

“The perception of the Soviet past is significantly fragmented. Polls show a considerable portion of the population either denies the occurrence of mass repressions under Stalin or remains uncertain of their stance, indicating not just a division of opinion, but a divergence in the perception of reality itself,” Tolstaya explains. She adds that this divergence results “from the state’s capture of an ‘emotional agenda,’ manipulating public sentiment and historical memory and fostering a sense of nostalgia for the USSR while deflecting blame for its collapse on external and internal adversaries.”

An unprocessed past enables leaders like Putin to shape the future in their image. “The state’s control over the historical narrative and the rewriting of history, especially evident from 2000 onward,” Tolstaya says, “has hindered the development of a collective understanding and acceptance of the past. This involves the effective use of sophisticated propaganda techniques, including the ideology of the ‘Russian world,’ which has become one of Russia’s main ideological tools in the conflict with Ukraine.”

Healing souls through ‘active love’

ONE WAY THEOLOGY might help Russians process their past is by reintroducing contradiction and complexity to a worldview that has been simplified through decades of indoctrination. Whereas political ideology views reality in terms of binaries — us vs. them, friend vs. foe — Orthodox theology can break down these boundaries, transforming the universe back into an indivisible ecosystem.

Another is that serious engagement with religion can heal the soul, restoring the humanity that was lost during the oppression of Soviet times. Tolstaya refers to Russian society as “post-traumatic,” and for good reason. Research into the gulag prison system found that prolonged exposure to dehumanizing conditions caused victims and perpetrators alike to lose positive qualities such as friendliness, solidarity, and creativity, leaving them with hate and jealousy.

These effects outlive the Soviet system. Tolstaya recalls meeting a young Russian involved in petty crime. “He was proud of his work and did not feel any shame,” she said in an interview with a Dutch newspaper last year. “He was a nice kid, soft-spoken, but without a moral compass. The war in Ukraine did not interest him, and the Russian soldiers who did not return never crossed his mind. Where can we begin to help these people, turn them back to normal?”

Tolstaya did not grow up in a religious environment. She hardly ever went to church and did not see a Bible until she was around 10 years old when her father received a copy from one of his patients at the Orthodox Seminary. She devoured it like an avid reader devours every other book — but found this one spoke to her on a deeper, indescribable level. She was particularly struck by a passage from Exodus where Moses encounters God who, in the form of a burning bush, tells him to take off his sandals, “for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

“An encounter with the divine is strictly individual,” she later recounted in an interview with the Dutch news publication NieuwWij. “We cannot easily translate something like this into human language.” Like her famous relative Leo Tolstoy, who after being excommunicated from the Orthodox Church created his own Christian commune, Tolstaya’s relation to religion is more personal than institutional. Similarly reminiscent of Tolstoy is her belief in the centrality of Christian love.

“More and more I have come to understand the meaning of kenotic, sacrificial love — agape,” she said. “It’s a love where, instead of putting yourself first, you make room for the other.” It’s a concept she encountered again in her studies of Dostoevsky, whose call for “active love” through small deeds she took to heart.

She does have her gripes with organized religion. For one, she thinks that in trying times Christians are too quick to turn for answers to Christ and the belief that his crucifixion absolved the sins of all humankind. Instead of jumping directly to Christ’s resurrection, she thinks we should instead look at the worldly suffering that his death on the cross reflects, recognition of which is itself an expression of faith.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Tolstaya and her husband welcomed 20 Ukrainian refugees into their home in the Netherlands — most of whom were relatives of her husband who has Ukrainian roots. It’s an experience that has led to many eye-opening conversations. Last Easter, one of these refugees, who had lost nearly everything, asked her to explain the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection. “This raised a question,” Tolstaya said. “Was the crucifixion, which lasted only a couple hours, as terrible as the suffering of the inmates of the gulag, who had to endure decades of exhaustion and hardship?”

She does not know. Perhaps, though, asking this question is more important than finding an answer.