The November murder of a missionary Orthodox priest in Moscow highlighted the threats to Russia’s stability from extremist groups, including Muslim terrorists and the far right.  The priest, Daniil Sysoyev, and his aide, Vladimir Strelbitsky, were shot down in a church in Moscow’s Southern Administrative Okrug on November 19.  The gunman, whom some sources described as North Caucasian in appearance, entered the church and asked, “Who here is Sysoyev?” before opening fire.  Other sources report that the killer likely called the church first by cellphone to verify Sysoyev’s presence before entering to commit the murder.

Sysoyev, an ethnic Tatar and the author of a number of books (including The Orthodox Answer to Islam), had directed his missionary work primarily at Muslims and had taken part in a long-standing religious debate with the country’s Muslim intelligentsia.  He had also been the target of a lawsuit by Nafigulla Ashirov of the Council of Muftis of Russia.  Ashirov had claimed that one of the priest’s missionary brochures for Muslims violated “anti-extremist” legislation; similar complaints from Muslim groups were made in 2008.  Meanwhile, Russian nationalists claimed that Ashirov’s complaint amounted to a death sentence for Sysoyev.

Sysoyev had, in fact, been the target of a number of death threats, the latest coming in calls to his church from a self-proclaimed “defender of Islam.”  Sysoyev had reported such threats to the authorities on a number of occasions.  The killing took place even as the Russian North Caucasus, which includes the Muslim republics Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan, continued to be the scene of violence.  In recent months, an insurgency against the authorities led by Muslim militants has intensified, with attacks on state officials and law-enforcement/security personnel occurring daily.  Recently, the attacks have been spearheaded by a rash of suicide bombings on military personnel and police officers.

But there are other versions of the murder being considered.  Some investigators suspect far-right Russian nationalists called rodnovery, who have been held responsible for an explosion at a Moscow church, of being behind the killings.  Rod is the root of many Russian words denoting lineage, including rodina (“motherland”), and vera means “faith.”  The rodnovery are part of a far-right subculture that includes neopagans, many of whom preach a nationalist faith that incorporates elements of paganism, supposedly emulating the pre-Christian Slavs, as well as elements drawn from Orthodox Christianity.  In the 1990’s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the search for an “authentic” source for a postcommunist identity was the cause of much debate among Russian intellectuals.  On the extreme end of the nationalist right the search for identity included neo-Nazi “Orthodox paganism,” ersatz Slavic warriors in armor making sacrifices to ancient gods, and Russian skinheads eschewing political or racial-purity programs for “direct action.”  Such “action” has continued to this day, with murders of ethnic minorities and foreigners being a favored method of self-expression.  In the Russian case, borrowing heavily from their European predecessors of the 20th century, the neopagan farce quickly, and predictably, turned to nihilism and deadly violence.

Particularly since Daniil Sysoyev was an ethnic Tatar, it is not difficult to imagine the rodnovery, who preach a pure faith of their own making as a defining element in Russianness, targeting a man who preached minority conversion to Orthodoxy (traditionally a means of joining the Russian nation) or attacking Orthodox churches.  But this being postcommunist Russia, where the kontrolny vystrel (the “control shot,” the coup de grâce in a contract murder) is the ultimate means of settling a political or business dispute, there is always the possibility that the killing had a material motive, one that was suggested by Moscow “political technologist” Stanislav Belkovsky.  Bel­kovsky has claimed that the killing had a common (for Moscow) motivation—Sysoyev’s church sits on valuable Moscow real estate that could be profitable for certain businesses, and the priest would not give it up.