In mid-August, a radical Orthodox gang called God’s Will attacked an exhibition of Soviet-era art in central Moscow. They brought down their clubs especially hard on art they deemed blasphemous; items depicting icons, for example, or Orthodox saints. Condemnation from Russia’s cultural elite was swift. Viktor Shenderovich, an independent journalist, wrote that if the state did not move to isolate the leader of God’s Will “either…the state itself is criminal and shares his political beliefs, or that there is no state any more.”

The group’s leader Dmitry Enteo — a pudgy, bearded man who goes around in jeans and a T-shirt — was taken in for questioning, but quickly released. He received similar treatment after being arrested while at a protest the previous year. Russian state authorities are clearly not in the business of imprisoning Orthodox activists.

In fact, Vladimir Putin is closely allied to Orthodox hardliners. The most famous indicator of this has been the state’s treatment of the punk group Pussy Riot, who were put on trial after they screamed and smashed their guitars in Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral in 2012, and whipped through the streets by Cossacks when they protested anti-LGBT discrimination in the run up to the Winter Olympics in 2014.

The discourse of Orthodox activists and the conservative Orthodox priesthood mostly echoes the official line of the Kremlin, a convergence starting at the top with Patriarch Kirill, who recently blessed the Kremlin’s bombing campaign in Syria as a necessary “holy war.”