Patriarch Kirill speaks of offer to head opposition in 1990s (Interfax)

Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church since 2009, revealed that in the early 1990s, he was asked “to lead the [political] struggle against the hated regime.” He declined because it would compromise the Church’s mission to be “the house and spiritual mother to everyone if it identified itself with a specific political force and became a factor of political struggle.”