Russia’s main TV news is censored. Democrats fail to make parliament and the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s oppositionists are too kooky to resonate with ordinary Russians. But there is one NGO too powerful to crush. It survived the Soviet era, it spans the entire country and it enjoys broad public support: the Russian Orthodox Church.

On Tuesday it chooses a new leader. The first post-Soviet election of a Russian Orthodox patriarch was always going to be a historic event whenever it came. But in the current climate, it is of particular concern to the Kremlin. The rouble’s slide against the dollar is accelerating, and thousands are being made redundant as demand for Russian commodities plummets. Financial disaster has already sparked unrest in Latvia and Lithuania, where the sight of demonstrators tearing through their chocolate-box capitals will have sent shivers up the Medvedev-Putin spine. The Russian fuse may be famously longer than the Baltic one, but it could be about to blow.

An already paranoid Kremlin would then be sure to fear the galvanising potential of the Russian Orthodox Church. True, its recent track record as an opposition force is not impressive. The late Patriarch Aleksi II was accused, along with other leading churchmen, of having collaborated with the KGB, and his comments on the war in Chechnya were consistently muted. But when push comes to shove, the Russian Orthodox Church has stubbornly refused to toe the official line. When Russia invaded Georgia’s separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August, the Kremlin would have loved to have had a pliant patriarch proclaim that Russia had God on her side. It didn’t get one. “The Russian Orthodox Church appeals to politicians and the military: Do not allow the spread of fratricide. Stop firing. Have pity on innocent people,” Aleksi announced instead.

Next week’s choice of patriarch is therefore crucial. Easily the strongest contender is Metropolitan Kirill, the sharp-eyed chairman of the Department for External Church Relations and the Church’s interim leader. An accomplished diplomat, his ambitious nature recalls Archbishop Makarios III, who galled the British in the 1960s and 1970s as head of the Cypriot Orthodox Church and Cyprus’s President.

Kirill’s statesmanlike skills should make him a dead cert. But from the Kremlin’s standpoint, there is a snag: he is independent-minded and unpredictable. Forever devising some new project, he was the architect of the Church’s 2000 Social Doctrine, which declared that Russian Orthodox have the right to disobey the State if forced to act against their faith. “You can interpret that in any way you like,” a top Kremlin aide said then. “They could demand all pre-revolutionary church property and we could resist, to which they could respond that we are applying an anti-church policy and cite that part of the Social Doctrine.” As a patriarchal candidate, the aide mused, Kirill was a “difficult passenger” and “too complicated”.

The state could maintain leverage over a Patriarch Kirill with kompromat (compromising information): in the mid-1990s he was nicknamed the “tobacco metropolitan” after reports that his department circumvented tariffs by importing cigarettes as humanitarian aid. But the Kremlin would be loath to undermine public confidence in the Church, one of the few stable pillars of Russian society.

When the Russian Old Believer Orthodox Church — the product of a 17th-century schism — met to elect a new leader in 2004, the former KGB made known to delegates the State’s preferred candidate. With more than 700 participants, next week’s General Church Council will be too large and complex for the Government to orchestrate, and hints for a candidate more to the Kremlin’s palate — Metropolitan Kliment is touted — are likely to backfire.

Even should the Kremlin succeed in sidelining Kirill in favour of Kliment, it would still have to contend with an Orthodox opposition force that the church itself has been struggling to tame. Diomid, until recently bishop of the remote Chukotka diocese, was defrocked after becoming the most senior church figure yet to take up its anti-democratic and anti-globalist banner. In 2007 he voiced the grievances of many by publicly condemning “the anti-popular policies of the current regime”.

Barring upsets Kirill will be the first patriarch to be installed in Moscow’s triumphant new Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on February 1. For the Kremlin opposite, relations with the Russian Orthodox Church may be about to get tricky.

Geraldine Fagan is Moscow correspondent of Forum 18 News Service; www.forum18.org