TWENTY years ago, any KGB officer found practising religion would have been promptly sacked. Now, according to the “committed Christian” and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, religion “has a big place” in 21st-century Russia.

That place has stretched deep into Russian Intelligence. As a former KGB foreign intelligence officer, Putin has more direct control of intelligence than any Russian leader since Joseph Stalin. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the KGB was its militant atheism. In March 2002, however, the FSB (Putin’s domestic security and intelligence service) at last found God.

The brilliant young historian of modern Russia, Julie Elkner, was the first Western academic to discover that a restored Russian Orthodox church in central Moscow has been consecrated by Patriarch Aleksei II as the FSB’s parish church in order to minister to the previously neglected spiritual needs of its staff. The FSB director, Nikolai Patrushev, and the Patriarch celebrated the mystical marriage of the Orthodox Church and the state security apparatus by a solemn exchange of gifts. Patrushev presented a symbolic golden key of the church and an icon of St Aleksei, Moscow Metropolitan, to the Patriarch, who responded by giving the FSB director icons of the Mother of God and of Patrushev’s own patron saint, St Nikolai. Though the FSB has not, of course, become the world’s first intelligence agency staffed only or mainly by Christian true believers, there have been a number of conversions to the Orthodox Church by Russian intelligence officers past and present — among them Nikolai Leonov, who half a century ago was the first to alert the KGB to the revolutionary potential of Fidel Castro.

As Elkner has shown, “spirituality” has become a common theme in FSB public relations. The past head of FSB public relations, Vasili Stavitsky, published several volumes of poetry with a strong “spiritual” emphasis, among them Secrets of the Soul and a book of “spiritual-patriotic” poems for children entitled Light a Candle Mamma.

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