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The Russian Orthodox Church

By A. Sylazhov

Few architectural forms are as immediately recognisable — or as persistently reproduced — in game environments set in Russia as the Russian Orthodox church. Its silhouette is almost impossible to mistake: the onion-shaped domes, clustered in odd numbers of three, five, or nine, tapering to gilded or painted points above white-washed or brick-red walls; the bell tower at the western end; the crossed Orthodox cross, sometimes with its distinctive lower diagonal bar, mounted at each apex. It is a form that appears in game environments from St. Petersburg street scenes to post-apocalyptic Russian wilderness, from alternate-history RTS battlefields to stealth-action mission design. It is used to signal Russia almost as efficiently as the hammer and sickle, and with considerably less ideological weight — or so it appears at first.

The Archive's interest is not in whether game designers have correctly identified the church as a Russian symbol — they have, and the identification is accurate — but in what the church is made to mean when it appears in these environments. Is it treated as architecture, as set dressing, as spiritual space, as a site of military activity, as a ruin? Does the game engage with what an Orthodox church actually is — a functioning institution with a specific history, a specific relationship to the Soviet state that attempted to destroy it, and a specific ongoing role in Russian culture and politics — or does it use the church's exterior as convenient shorthand for Russianness without any substantive engagement with its content?

What the Russian Orthodox Church Actually Was and Is

The Russian Orthodox Church traces its institutional origins to the Christianisation of Kievan Rus' in 988, when Prince Vladimir I adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity and ordered the mass baptism of his subjects. Over the following centuries, the church's architecture developed a distinctive identity: early wooden structures gave way to stone, and the Byzantine dome — flat or hemispherical in its Constantinopolitan form — was gradually transformed into the bulbous, pointed onion dome that became the signature of Russian church architecture. The origin of the onion dome is disputed among architectural historians; one theory links it to the Khanate of Kazan, whose conquest Ivan the Terrible commemorated by commissioning St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square in 1561, itself a congregation of nine chapels each crowned with a differently coloured dome. Another attributes the form to wooden tent-like church construction in Russia's northern forests. Whatever its origin, by the sixteenth century the onion dome had become inseparable from the visual identity of Russian Orthodoxy.

The church's relationship to Russian state power was rarely simple. The Russian Orthodox Church was the official state religion of Imperial Russia, deeply embedded in the apparatus of tsarist authority — but it was also subordinated to that authority, stripped of patriarchal leadership by Peter the Great in 1721 and governed thereafter by a state-controlled Holy Synod until the restoration of the Patriarchate in 1917. The Soviet period that followed was catastrophic for the institutional church. The Bolshevik government confiscated church property, closed tens of thousands of churches, executed clergy, and pursued a sustained campaign of state atheism that converted functioning religious buildings into warehouses, factories, cinemas, sports facilities, and in one famous case — the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in Leningrad — a storehouse for potatoes, earning it the sardonic nickname "Saviour on Potatoes." The church survived the Soviet period, but substantially diminished: from over 54,000 parishes in 1914 to fewer than 7,000 by 1941.

The post-Soviet revival of the Russian Orthodox Church was rapid and, by the 2000s, politically significant. The Church allied itself closely with the Russian state under Vladimir Putin, playing a role in public life and political legitimation that its Soviet-era suppression had made impossible for seventy years. The Patriarchate's endorsement of state policy, and eventually of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, made its institutional politics a subject of international controversy. But for the purposes of the Archive's analysis of game treatments, the relevant period is primarily the 1990s and 2000s — the years when most of the games examined here were produced — during which the Russian Orthodox Church was visible in the landscape of a country undergoing rapid and disorienting change, its buildings being restored, its services being attended again, its domes being regilded after decades of neglect.

None of this history — neither the Soviet persecution nor the post-Soviet revival — appears in game treatments of the Orthodox church. What appears is the building's exterior, and specifically its most visually distinctive element: the onion dome. The game church is an architectural quotation, not a cultural institution.

The Visual Grammar of the Game Orthodox Church

The onion dome is the primary signifier. It appears in game environments as a quick-read Russian marker, fulfilling the same function as the ushanka, the Cyrillic sign, and the ZiL limousine: it tells the player, before any other information is provided, that the space they are in is Russian. This function is so reliable that game designers reach for it even when the architectural context does not strictly demand it — Red Alert 3's Soviet construction sites and map environments accumulate Orthodox domes in the background as part of a general "Russian-looking" aesthetic rather than as specifically church buildings.

The exterior over the interior is the defining feature of the game Orthodox church. In almost every game treatment surveyed for this article, the church is represented as an exterior surface rather than a functional space. The player may pass its walls, use its tower as a sniper position, note its domes in the background of a battlescape, or observe its silhouette from a train window — but the interior, with its iconostasis, its candles, its mosaics, its incense, its specific liturgical furniture and Orthodox spatial logic, is almost entirely absent. The rare exceptions are instructive precisely because of their rarity.

The church as a military asset is the most consistent functional role assigned to game Orthodox churches. The tower or upper storey becomes a sniper position; the walls become cover; the building becomes a control point or a mission objective. This appropriation of sacred space for military purpose is sometimes played straight (Hitman 2), sometimes deployed as environmental irony (Metro Exodus's gutted churches amid post-nuclear warfare), and sometimes left entirely unremarked upon (Red Alert 3's maps). In no case does any of the games examined for this article engage with the symbolism of putting soldiers and weapons into a church — the building's religious identity is a visual asset, not a moral one.

The ruined or abandoned church is the post-Soviet variant of the trope. Where Imperial-era games might show a church in active use or in good repair, games set in Russia's present or future — the post-apocalyptic wastelands of the Metro series, the exclusion zone of STALKER — tend to show churches as ruins or empty shells, the state atheism of the Soviet period and the chaos of the post-Soviet years compressed into a single image of structural decay. The onion dome remains recognisable even when everything else has collapsed — it is the last architectural element to surrender its legibility.

The Orthodox Church in Non-Russian Settings: Marvel's Spider-Man 2

The use of the Orthodox church as a shorthand signifier is not confined to games set exclusively in Russia or the post-Soviet space. In Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (2023, Insomniac Games), set in a recreation of New York City, the presence of distinct Orthodox structures — complete with the characteristic onion dome profile — highlights the persistence of this architectural shorthand even outside its traditional geographic or cultural context.

Church 1 featured in the NYC cityscape of Marvel's Spider-Man 2.

Church 2, demonstrating the repetition of the onion dome asset within the game's urban density.

In the context of a North American urban environment, these buildings shift from being markers of "Russia" to markers of "traditional European institutional architecture" or simply specific cultural heritage sites within a cosmopolitan setting. They demonstrate how the Orthodox architectural silhouette has become a floating signifier: the visual grammar of the Orthodox church is sufficiently distinctive that designers deploy it to create architectural variety in urban simulation, regardless of whether the specific site is intended to represent an active Russian community or merely to add aesthetic texture to the cityscape.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin — Cathedral of the Saviour, St. Petersburg

The most fully realised Orthodox church environment in the games covered by the ROMANOV Archive appears in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002, IO Interactive), in the mission "Kirov Park Meeting." The church — labelled on the mission map as "Cathedral The Saviour," a loose stand-in for the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood rather than a direct reproduction of any specific St. Petersburg building — occupies a structural role in the mission design that is unusual in the game canon: it is not merely background architecture but an active spatial resource, offering multiple approach routes, a sniper position in its tower, a soldier to subdue or avoid, and an interior accessible by lockpicking.

The Cathedral of the Saviour adjoining Kirov Park — the church's tower offers one of several sniper positions for the assassination of General Makarov and his mafia contact.

The church interior as accessible in-game — one of the few instances in the game canon where an Orthodox church's interior is a traversable space rather than a sealed backdrop.

The mission map labels the building "Cathedral The Saviour," marked with an Orthodox cross — a name that reads as a reference to the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood without directly naming or reproducing it.

The real Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood is one of St. Petersburg's most distinctive landmarks. Built between 1883 and 1907 on the site where Tsar Alexander II was fatally wounded by anarchist bombers in 1881, it was designed by Alfred Parland in a deliberate revival of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Muscovite church architecture — a conscious anachronism amid St. Petersburg's predominantly Baroque and Neoclassical skyline, its multi-coloured onion domes making it the most visually "Russian" building in a city founded by Peter the Great as a deliberately Western-facing capital. During the Soviet period it was closed in 1932, used as a morgue during the Siege of Leningrad, and later as a potato warehouse before restoration began in the 1970s. It reopened as a museum in 1997, five years before Hitman 2's release. It is a building whose history concentrates several centuries of Russian Orthodox experience into a single structure: imperial patronage, political assassination, Soviet secularisation, wartime repurposing, and post-Soviet restoration.

The game's "Cathedral The Saviour" borrows the name and the general visual register — onion domes, Orthodox architecture, a St. Petersburg park setting — without engaging with any of this history. What the building provides in mission terms is a vertical dimension: its tower gives 47 a sniping elevation over the park where the generals are meeting, and the soldier posted there, memorably noted in the Hitman Wiki for humming a song while on duty, is both an obstacle and a disguise opportunity. The church is militarised at the level of game design even as it is aesthetically Orthodox — a site of prayer repurposed, without comment, as a firing position.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 — The Church as Backdrop and Map Furniture

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008, EA Los Angeles) treats the Orthodox church as persistent environmental furniture in its Russian-coded maps and mission environments. Churches appear in the backgrounds of Soviet base areas, in the urban maps of Leningrad and Odessa, and in the general visual grammar of "Soviet Russia" that the game assembles from recognisable architectural elements.

General Orthodox church structures as environmental furniture in Red Alert 3.

A representation of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour within the Red Alert 3 engine.

They are not mission objectives; they are not destructible landmarks with specific narrative weight; they are not named or historicised. They are background architecture performing the function that the game's broader visual vocabulary requires of them: confirming, through the presence of onion domes, that the player is in Russian territory. This is the trope at its most stripped-down. The church in Red Alert 3 exists as a silhouette reference, a shorthand Russia-marker deployed with the same logic as the hammer-and-sickle propaganda poster and the Ural truck: it belongs to the catalogue of "things that look Russian," and its presence requires no further justification than that.

Metro Exodus — The Gutted Church as Landscape of Aftermath

Metro Exodus (2019, 4A Games) offers a third and qualitatively distinct treatment of the Orthodox church in game environments. In the game's vast, non-linear open-world sections — particularly along the Volga riverbanks that constitute the game's first major outdoor environment — the ruins of Orthodox churches appear repeatedly in the landscape, alongside crumbling tower blocks and rusted industrial infrastructure, as part of the visual grammar of post-nuclear Russian desolation. A contemporary review of the game specifically noted that "gutted Orthodox churches and crumbling tower blocks dot the landscape," treating the church's ruined state as equivalent to the tower block's ruined state — both are remnants of a Russia that no longer exists, their former functions equally suspended by catastrophe.

This is a more historically aware treatment than either Hitman 2 or Red Alert 3, even if its awareness is implicit rather than articulated. The abandoned Orthodox church in Metro Exodus is not merely a generic ruin; it is a specific kind of ruin, one that carries with it the accumulated weight of the Soviet anti-religious campaign, the wartime repurposing of church buildings, and the post-Soviet restoration that the nuclear catastrophe of the game's timeline has now permanently interrupted. The church was already a survivor — of the Revolution, of the Soviet period — and it has not survived this.

The STALKER series, developed by the Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, similarly deploys abandoned or damaged church structures as landscape elements in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Community-created mods for Shadow of Chernobyl include dedicated "abandoned church in the swamps" environments that use the Orthodox church's ruined silhouette as a marker of the Zone's desolate atmosphere. The base game's village environments contain the skeletal remains of church structures as part of the general imagery of Soviet rural abandonment — places where people once lived, worshipped, and then were evacuated or scattered, leaving their buildings to the Zone's slow reclamation.

What the Game Church Is Not Allowed to Be

The Russian Orthodox church in games is almost never a place of worship. In the entire survey of games examined for this article, not one depicts an Orthodox liturgy in progress, a congregation, a priest, or any of the internal life of the institution. The church's ritual dimension — the incense, the chanted prayers, the candlelight, the iconostasis at the east end, the specific Orthodox spatial organisation that separates nave from sanctuary — is absent from game treatments with a completeness that suggests not ignorance but a structural disinterest.

The church's relationship to Russian national identity is equally absent from game treatments. The Russian Orthodox Church has been, at various moments in Russian history, an instrument of state power, a target of state persecution, a site of popular resistance, and a vehicle of nationalist ideology. Its post-Soviet revival coincided with and contributed to the reconstruction of Russian national identity in the 1990s and 2000s. None of this is visible in game environments, where the church is a building type rather than an institution.

The Exception: Indika — The Church as Institutional and Psychological Subject

If the broader game canon refuses to engage with the church's interior life, Indika (2024, Odd Meter) stands as the profound exception. Released by a 14-person Russian development studio that relocated to Kazakhstan following the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, the artful third-person adventure places the Orthodox institution, its theology, and its psychological weight squarely at the center of its narrative.

Indika before the snow-covered monastery grounds, with distinctive onion domes towering in the background.

A stark view of the monastery's architecture, including a belltower, shadowed by the harsh winter environment.

The game follows the titular Indika, a young nun with a rebellious streak navigating a labyrinthine, eerily photorealist religious environment. Creative director and writer Dmitry Svetlov drew heavily on his own religious upbringing and subsequent renunciation of faith—an arduous process he likened to "grabbing a shovel and putting it into your brain." Through Indika's philosophical soul-searching and debates over the nature of free will with an escaped convict, the game critiques the institutional church. Svetlov has explicitly stated that the modern Russian church has become a "weapon of propaganda," and the game explores the resulting themes of submission, self-loathing, and the exhaustion of living in fear.

The belltower and background domes emerge through the thick snow and fog as Indika navigates the desolate settlement.

The imposing walled architecture of the monastery against the bleak, snowy backdrop, isolating the young nun from the outside world.

Most crucially, Indika treats the church as a site of profound psychological and spiritual conflict rather than a mere architectural prop. As Indika wrestles with her monastic life and muttered prayers against the torment of the Devil himself, the environment physically splinters. The player must navigate spatial puzzles that crack across two different planes—reality and a fantastical realm—reflecting the fracturing of her own mind. In Indika, the Orthodox setting is finally allowed to be what other games deny it: a fully functional, oppressive, and emotionally charged spiritual space.

Notable Video Game Examples

Game	Developer	How the Church Appears	Register
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002)	IO Interactive	"Cathedral The Saviour" in the Kirov Park Meeting mission. The building is navigable: the tower is a sniper position, the interior is accessible by lockpicking.	The most structurally engaged treatment in the game canon. The church is a three-dimensional space with mechanical affordances rather than a background element.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (2023)	Insomniac Games	Orthodox church structures with characteristic onion domes appear within the New York City landscape.	Use of the church as an architectural asset in a non-Russian setting, highlighting its role as a generic signifier of traditional European or religious architecture in dense urban design.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008)	EA Los Angeles	Orthodox church structures appear as environmental furniture in Russian-coded maps and bases.	The trope at its most reduced: the church as a silhouette marker, deployed alongside the hammer-and-sickle banner as part of a general "Russian-looking" environment.
Metro Exodus (2019)	4A Games	Ruined Orthodox churches appear as recurring environmental elements in the Volga riverbank open-world section.	The most historically resonant treatment: the gutted church as a survivor of the Soviet anti-religious campaign that has not survived the nuclear catastrophe.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (2007–2024)	GSC Game World	Abandoned village church structures appear in the Zone's landscape as part of the imagery of Soviet rural evacuation.	Part of the STALKER series' broader engagement with the specific landscape of the Ukrainian exclusion zone, where Soviet-era structures are present as evidence of interrupted ordinary life.
Indika (2024)	Odd Meter	The entire game centers on a young nun navigating a labyrinthine, photorealist 19th-century Russian nunnery. The architecture actively splinters and fractures across realities during puzzles to reflect her psychological unraveling.	A rare, deep engagement with the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution. Instead of using the church as a mere backdrop, the game critiques its doctrine, exploring themes of submission, institutional propaganda, and personal rebellion against inherited faith.

References

1. IO Interactive. (2002). Hitman 2: Silent Assassin [Video game]. Eidos Interactive.
2. EA Los Angeles. (2008). Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 [Video game]. Electronic Arts.
3. 4A Games. (2019). Metro Exodus [Video game]. Deep Silver.
4. GSC Game World. (2007). S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl [Video game]. THQ.
5. Insomniac Games. (2023). Marvel's Spider-Man 2 [Video game]. Sony Interactive Entertainment.
6. Odd Meter. (2024). Indika [Video game]. 11 bit studios.
7. Hitman Wiki. (n.d.). Kirov Park Meeting. https://hitman.fandom.com/wiki/Kirov_Park_Meeting
8. Wikipedia. (n.d.). Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Savior_on_Spilled_Blood
9. Wikipedia. (n.d.). Russian church architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_church_architecture
10. PC Gamer. (2019, February 15). Metro Exodus's miserable landscapes put other modern open worlds to shame. https://www.pcgamer.com
11. Gordon, L. (2024, May 2). 'Like taking a shovel to your brain': dark fairytale game Indika takes aim at the Russian Orthodox church. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/may/02/indika-russian-orthodox-church-fairytale-game-dmitry-svetlov-interview