EVERY January 18th a million Russians make foreigners shiver and wonder. This year again, in temperatures ranging from -10°C in Moscow to -45°C in Yakutia, they plunged into a cross-shaped hole cut in the ice. The annual ritual, marking the baptism of Christ, was the top news item on Russian state television, mainly because one man taking part was President Vladimir Putin. Arriving dressed in the peasant attire of a sheepskin coat and felt boots, he stripped off, crossed himself and leapt into the icy waters of Lake Seliger.

Local officials followed suit. In the ancient city of Yaroslavl, on the Volga, the local mayor and a member of the United Russia party told district prefects to lead by example. “I ask all heads and their deputies to take part in this organised event. You are all Orthodox people, are you not?” he said in a televised statement. He seemed the spitting image of a Soviet Komsomol leader ordering public workers to take part in May Day parades or communist subbotniks, “voluntary” unpaid weekend manual work.

The mayor’s rhetoric illustrates a paradoxical similarity between Soviet and modern religious practices. The portraits of Lenin have been replaced with Orthodox icons and the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution has been swapped for a celebration of the expulsion of the (Catholic) Poles from (Orthodox) Russia in the 17th century. But the attitude still feels deeply Soviet. The Russian prosecutor regularly slaps criminal charges on bloggers for “offending the feelings of the faithful”. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church practically campaigns for Mr Putin’s re-election. The state protects religious activists and attacks artists who challenge the church. The church, in return, has become a guardian of state ideology.

Although this may elevate the official status of the church, it has bred much the same resentment as Soviet ideology did in the 1980s. Two-thirds of the Russian population, according to the Levada Centre, an independent pollster, do not wish to see the church influence decisions of the state. Whereas the number of people who identify themselves as Orthodox Christians has doubled since 1991 to 71%, only 6% visit church every week, according to the Pew Research Centre. Senior Russian clerics prefer to measure the growing role of the church by the number of parishes, rather than church attendance. “In 1988 the Russian Orthodox church had 6,000 parishes. Now we have 36,000...This means that every year we opened more than 1,000 churches,” says Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, the bishop who runs the church’s foreign relations.

The clergyman says that, as a rule, the church has always supported the state. In the 19th century, Orthodoxy was incorporated into an ideological triad of the state, along with nationalism and autocracy. Stalin flirted with it for the same reason. The KGB infiltrated the church, turning many hierarchs into its informers. Such proximity to an often corrupt and repressive state undermined the moral authority of the church.

The end of Soviet rule offered hope for spiritual revival, but the church was more focused on the restitution of its properties. The 1990s were perhaps the freest years it had ever experienced. They were also the most challenging. Cut off from the state, the church risked sliding into irrelevance. It offered its loyalty to the new state in return for various concessions, including the right to import alcohol and tobacco duty-free. “Money turned out to be more important to the church than its reputation,” says Sergei Chapnin, a commentator who was fired from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2015.

In the 2010s the newly enthroned Patriarch Kirill successfully engaged in a new trade. He presented the clergy as chaplains of the empire and principal suppliers of ideological tenets such as “traditional values” and “Russian World”, a Slavic commonwealth based in Moscow. But as Mr Chapnin wrote, “There is only one tradition that is being passed on to the next generation. It is the Soviet tradition.”

But while Soviet bishops were often forced to co-operate with the KGB, these days they volunteer their services. One of the more entrepreneurial is Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, often described as Mr Putin’s confessor. The choir of his monastery, once ransacked and occupied by Soviet secret police, recently sang at a Kremlin concert dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the state security service. Like his peers in the security services, Bishop Shevkunov peddles anti-Western conspiracy theories and pays homage to Stalin.

Yet the church is no monolith. Few have been as strong or clear on the question of the Soviet past as Bishop Hilarion. In 2009 he described Stalin as “a monster who created a terrible, anti-human system of governing the country based on lies, violence and terror”, and likened him to Hitler. “They both brought so much sorrow into the world that no military or political successes can redeem their guilt before humanity,” he said. In today’s Russia such words are an act of defiance.

The church’s attitude towards the Soviet era will soon be in the spotlight as Russia commemorates the centenary of the execution of its last tsar and his family by a Bolshevik firing squad in July 1918. As Bishop Hilarion says, “I do not believe that reconciliation can be achieved by a simple silence about the atrocities which were done by the Soviet authorities towards their own people. We still have to talk about this, because when people tend to forget history, they tend to repeat the same mistakes.” It will take more than a plunge into icy water to wash away the past.

A full transcript of the interview with Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev is available here