Arrival of martyr's head in Moscow stirs Russian soul

In the old days, which ended nine years ago this month, religion was to say the least, unpopular. It was, in the view of Karl Marx, the "sight of a distressed creature . . . the spirit of spiritless conditions" and most popularly, "the opiate of the masses".

Marx's monumental statue remains on Moscow's Theatre Square and, in certain quarters, his spirit lives on. The Communist Party is, after all, still Russia's largest and most popular political organisation. It no longer commands a "monopoly of power" - in fact, it is almost completely powerless - but more people vote for it than for any other political grouping.

Despite all this, Russians remain an extremely spiritual people. The celebrated Russkiy Dukh, the Russian Soul, lives eternally. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in Moscow over the past few days following the arrival in town of the head of the Orthodox martyr, Saint Panteleimon, encased in a golden reliquary. The head was severed from the body on the orders of the Emperor Maximian after a period of torture, which was perfectly normal in the late third and early fourth centuries. It had earlier been, without ostentation, on display in monasteries in the Moscow region. Its arrival in the vast Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow, however, caused a real stir.

The cathedral, by the way, was originally built during a period of military and religious triumphalism to commemorate the victory of Imperial Russia over the Corsican upstart, Napoleon Bonaparte. Another little man of five feet four inches or so determined in the 1930s that the entire edifice should be brought down. Stalin's plan was to build a great phallic edifice, taller than any skyscraper in Chicago, with a triumphant statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on top.

The plan did not work out. The terrain simply would not support such a monstrosity. Instead, the hole in the ground left by the cathedral was turned into an open air swimming pool called the Bassein Moskva.

Enter another man of restricted height, Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, who determined after the end of communist rule in the 1990s that the cathedral should be rebuilt. He had this done in record time. Over the weekend, Orthodox believers, in their tens of thousands, queued around the reconstructed edifice to a length which exceeded even that which formed in the old days at the mausoleum of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on Red Square. It should be noted here that Marx wanted communism to become "the functional equivalent of religion". Although no-one in the long line would admit it, I had the distinct impression that many who queued for St Panteleimon had previously queued for Lenin. New times, as the Russian saying goes, demand new songs.

Many of those in the vast queue were infirm. Some were obviously so, in wheelchairs and with crutches, for in the Orthodox tradition, St Panteleimon has been noted for curing all sorts of illnesses. Women were in a very large majority and this presented a certain irony. In the Greek monastery at Mount Athos, the usual home of the holy relic, the presence of women and female animals has been anathema, following a sacred decree in 1060. In this manner, the holy monks have been protected from temptations which, in this family newspaper, are better left undescribed.

For all this, the faith of those who presented themselves before St Panteleimon's head over the past few days was simple and moving. One felt that that an emotional gap was being filled and it is significant that opinion polls have shown that almost half of Russian respondents would describe themselves as Orthodox Christians.

On the other side of town, a spirit of a different, but equally Russian, kind was the focus of attention. The Kristall distillery, which produces the internationally renowned Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya vodkas, was literally under siege. A group of 40 armed interlopers, who supported one set of company directors, occupied the premises and held four rival directors hostage. In this case, all those present were male and were unlikely ever to have willingly stood in line to see either Lenin's body or St Panteleimon's head.

This is the manner in which some business disputes are solved in today's Russia. Nevertheless, despite decades of official atheism and years of unbridled capitalist materialism, the old Russia endures.