Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin

This event is part of the Cambridge Literary Festival.

Join Lucy Ash, shortlisted author for the 2025 British Academy Book Prize, 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,

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.

In conversation with author and Master of Trinity Hall, Mary Hockaday.

Speaker: Lucy Ash

Lucy Ash is and award-winning presenter of radio and TV documentaries.

An expert on Russia and post-Soviet countries she was first sent to Moscow by the BBC in 1990 and has been covering the region's social, political, and cultural issues ever since.

'The Baton and the Cross' is her first book.

Photo above: Greg Allen