An expert on Russia and the post-Soviet world, award-winning presenter Lucy Ash was first sent to Moscow by the BBC in 1990 and has been reporting on the region’s social, political and cultural fault-lines ever since. 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. Join Lucy 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.

Venue: Old Divinity School

Duration: 1 hour