THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

 

Vladimir Moss

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

Introduction: The Church and the Revolution

The Coming of the Antichrist – The Russian-Jewish Revolution – The Revolution: 1. Determinist Liberation – The Revolution: 2. Nationalist Internationalism – The Revolution: 3. Democratic Satanocracy – The Progress of the Revolution

 

1. Russia: The Killing of the King (1900-1924)

Reform versus Stability – Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) and Carpathian Rus’ – The Jewish Question – The Beilis Trial – The Name-Worshipping Heresy – The February Revolution – The Moscow Council of 1917-18 – The Murder of the Tsar – The Patriarch and the Commissars – The Requisitioning of Church Valuables – The Renovationist Coup (1) – The Russian Church in Exile – The Renovationist Coup (2) – The Church in Georgia and Ukraine – The Renovationist Council of 1923 – The Lessons of Renovationism

 

2. Greece and the Balkans: The New Calendar Schism (1900-1924)

The Balkan Wars – The Ecumenical Patriarchate looks West – The Encyclical of 1920 – The Rise of Meletius Metaxakis – Unrest in Bessarabia – The Imperialism of Metaxakis – The Second Fall of Constantinople – The “Pan-Orthodox” Council of 1923 – The Introduction of the New Calendar – The Sin against Unity

 

3. Russia: The Sovietization of the Moscow Patriarchate (1924-1939)

The Pressures on the Patriarch – The Concept of the Catacomb Church – Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa – The Dogma of Redemption – The Rise of Metropolitan Sergius – The Epistle of the Solovki Bishops – Archbishop Seraphim of Uglich – The Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius – The Birth of the Catacomb Church: Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd – Metropolitans Peter and Cyril – The Martyrdom of the Catacomb Church – The Fruits of Sergianism – The Vatican and Russia – The Catacomb Council of Ust-Kut

 

4. Greece and the Balkans: The People’s Truth (1924-1939)

The Miracle of the Cross – The Romanian Old Calendarists – The Struggle in Mount Athos – The Struggle in Greece – Not Bowing the Knee to Baal – Three Holy Priests – The Return of the Three Bishops – Signs from Heaven – Persecution in Romania – Divisions among the Greek Old Calendarists – The ROCA and the Greek Old Calendarists

 

5. Russia: From Hitler to Brezhnev (1939-1970)

The Persecution in Poland – Stalin and the Baltic Orthodox Churches – German-occupied Russia – The Stalin-Sergius Pact – “Patriarch” Alexis I – The Soviet Offensive – The Church Cult of Stalin – The Volte-Face on Ecumenism – The Church in the Catacombs – The  Passportless Movement – The ROCA Undecided – Muscovite Ecumenism and the Metropolia

 

6. Greece and the Balkans: Onslaught from the West (1939-1970)

The Genocide of the Serbian Orthodox – The Romanians Acquire a Hierarchy – The Greek Church and the Communists – Further Divisions in the Greek Church – Persecutions in Greece and Cyprus – Ecumenism Gathers Speed – Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina – The World Council of Churches – The Chrysostomites Acquire a Hierarchy – The Lifting of the Anathemas – “Patriarch” Athenagoras and “New Age Orthodoxy” – The Fall of the Serbian and Bulgarian Churches – “The Heresy of Heresies”

 

7. The Zenith of Ecumenism and the Fall of Communism (1970-1990)

A Failed Attempt at Union – “Dissident Fever” – “Metropolitan” Nicodemus of Leningrad – More Greek Divisions (1) – The Fall of Dissent – Metropolitan Philaret and the Anathema against Ecumenism – More Greek Divisions (2) – “Patriarch” Alexis II

 

8. The Return of the Exiles (1990-2000)

Liberation or Deception? – The Patriarch and Sergianism – The August Coup – The Ukrainian Schism – The ROCA Returns to Russia – KGB Agents in Cassocks – Chambésy and Balamand – The New Martyrs – The Georgian Church and “The Third Way” – Metropolitan Valentine of Suzdal – Right-Wing Catacomb Groups – The Serbian Wars – The MP at the end of the Millenium – The ROCA and the Serbs – Two Robber Councils

 

Conclusion. The Restoration of Romanity.

The Secularization of the Church – The Cross and the Crown – The Obstacles. 1. Nationalism – The Obstacles. 2. Ecumenism – The Obstacles. 3. The European Antichrist – Three Witnesses

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION: THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION

 

And unto the angel of the Church in Sardis write:

These things saith He that hath the seven spirits of God, and the seven stars:

I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.

Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain, that are ready to die.

For I have not found thy works perfect before God.

Revelation 3.1-2.

 

On this rock I shall build My Church,

 and the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.

Matthew 16.18.

 

 

The Coming of the Antichrist

 

            The One, Holy, Orthodox-Catholic and Apostolic Church entered the twentieth century in a state of external prosperity, but serious internal disorder. The Russian empire, which contained the largest local Church and in which the great majority of Orthodox Christians lived, was reaching the zenith of its political and economic power. But it was riven with strife and undermined by freethinkers and revolutionaries. In 1904-05 it was seriously shaken by defeat in the Russo-Japanese war and the first, abortive revolution; and in 1917 it fell. Most of the Greek, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Arabic Orthodox lived in the Ottoman empire. They, too, were divided: Greeks against Bulgarians, Serbs and Arabs, and Serbs against Romanians, leading to the splitting up of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the creation of several autonomous Churches. In 1912-13 two Balkan wars pitted Turk against Christian, and Christian against Christian; and in 1917, the Ottoman empire also fell. 

 

            The “democratic” regimes that replaced the old empires – those of Lenin and Ataturk – were unmitigated disasters for the Orthodox. Millions died, further millions were expelled from their homes or emigrated voluntarily. This set the pattern for the twentieth century, a century unparalleled in the history of Christianity for its sufferings and confusion. But also for the vast numbers of its holy martyrs and confessors…

 

            The first martyrs suffered in the very first year of the century: the Chinese Orthodox of the Russian Spiritual Mission in Peking who were killed by the Boxers.[1] This pointed to another important aspect of twentieth-century Christianity: its worldwide missionary activity. The Lord said: “This Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come” (Matthew 24.14). To many, the preaching of the Gospel in the greatest and most inaccessible of the pagan empires, China and Japan, and its first-fruits in the form of the 222 Chinese martyrs, indicated the coming of the end. And indeed, the twentieth century was the beginning of the end, not only in the sense that it witnessed the planting of Orthodox missionaries, voluntarily or involuntarily, in the furthest corners of the earth, but also in the sense that it witnessed the appearance, for the first time in concrete form, of the clearest and most terrible sign of the end: the Antichrist.

 

            The theme of the Antichrist was to dominate the twentieth century. The great hermit, St. Seraphim of Sarov, had spoken, already in the first half of the nineteenth century about the imminent arrival of the Antichrist, who would remove the crosses from the churches and kill so many people that the angels would scarcely have time to gather all the souls as they left their bodies. This theme was taken up by such holy churchmen as St. Ambrose of Optina, Bishop Theophan the Recluse and St. John of Kronstadt. In the year 1900 the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev had a vision of Christians fleeing into the caves to escape what he called “the collective Antichrist”. It was not difficult to see the fulfillment of this vision in the appearance of Soviet power and in the appearance, from the 1920s, of the Catacomb Church, True Orthodox Christians who fled into the “catacombs” from the apocalyptic red beast.

 

            In general, the pre-revolutionary period could be described as the period of preparation for the coming of the collective Antichrist. The reign of the meek and gentle Tsar Nicholas II, with its increasing economic prosperity, rapid expansion of churches and parish schools, wide missionary outreach (to Siberia, Persia, China, Japan and America), and many glorifications of saints (beginning with the prophet of the Antichrist, St. Seraphim, in 1903) gave an unparalleled opportunity to tens of millions of people both within and outside the Russian empire to come to a knowledge of the truth and be saved. But the forerunners of the Antichrist were not inactive either: revolutionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky, freethinkers and blasphemers such as the novelist Lev Tolstoy, theosophists such as Blavatsky, heretics such as the Athonite “name-worshipper” Bulatovich, and a huge army of liberals, anti-monarchists and ecumenists were busy undermining the foundations of Church and State. In the tumult two figures stood out as representing the two sides with especial clarity: Lev Tolstoy and St. John of Kronstadt. The duel between these two, like that between Arius and St. Athanasius the Great, defined the issues for the educated public.

 

            There were few who took the opportunities provided by the relatively peaceful pre-revolutionary period to repent. We could mention Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov, who repented of his time a revolutionary to became a prominent champion of the Orthodox monarchy, or Michael Alexandrovich Novoselov, who repented of his Tolstoyism to become a church publicist and later a Catacomb Church martyr. In general, however, it took the massive shock of huge political upheavals, like the First World War or the October revolution, to bring large numbers of people to their senses. In this we can see the special Providence of God, Who draws the greatest good out of the greatest evil. Thus the coming of the Antichrist to Russia was, paradoxically, the means towards the coming to Christ of many previously tepid and heretical Christians.

 

            But what was this Antichrist? And in what did his – or its – antichristianity consist? Speaking very generally, we may say that “the heresy of the twentieth-century Antichrist” consisted in a distorted understanding of the relationship between the Church and the world, whereby the Church was understood as serving the world, not as its conscience, by being the salt which preserves it from final corruption and destruction, but as its pander, by conforming herself to its fallen desires and godless world-views.

 

            This distorted understanding of the Church’s relationship with the world manifested itself in two main forms: what came to be known as “sergianism” after its leading exponent, the Russian metropolitan and later “patriarch of Moscow”, Sergius, and “ecumenism”, the world-wide movement for the reunification of the Churches. Sergianism is the teaching that the Church must work with all forms of political power, even the most antichristian, even communism; ecumenism is the teaching that the Church must compromise with all forms of religion, even the most antichristian, even paganism. The pathos of both movements is unity – unity with any power, at any price, so long as conflict is averted and peace is attained. Both propose a wholesale surrender of the Church’s truth and freedom and dignity to the dominant forces in the contemporary world: political forces in the case of sergianism, religious forces in the case of ecumenism, with the ultimate end, whether willed or not willed, of the complete secularization of the human race. Both heresies are movements of apostasy, and both attempt to justify this apostasy, “dogmatize” it, as it were – in the case of sergianism, by claiming that only such apostasy can save the Church (from destruction by communism), and in the case of ecumenism by claiming that only such apostasy can recreate the Church (from sectarian disintegration). Essentially, therefore, they are two aspects of a single ecclesiological heresy, for which the present writer has coined the term “ecucommunism”[2], a single assault on the existence and the dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

 

            Let us look a little more closely at the ecumenist and communist aspects of ecucommunism.

 

            Ecumenism attempts to destroy the notion of the Church as “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy. 3.15) by preaching that there is no one truth, and therefore no one Church which it can be the pillar of. It maintains that all Churches – and in its more extreme, contemporary forms, all religions – contain partial or relative truths which, on being reduced to their lowest common denominator, will form the dogmatic basis of a new Church or universal religion of a new, enlightened mankind. The development of this doctrine, which first appeared in the West before penetrating into the Orthodox world, is traced especially in chapters 2, 4, 6 and 7.

 

            Communism attempts to destroy the moral, social and eschatological teaching of the Church by preaching a new “revolutionary morality” whose goal is not the Kingdom of Heaven but a communist paradise on earth. In place of the Church we have the Party, in place of God – Fate. Communism, like ecumenism, was introduced into the Orthodox world from the West; and we trace its struggle with the Church in chapters 1, 3, 5, and 7.

 

            “The ideologue of ecumenism,” writes Archbishop Averky, “which is the natural consequence of the nostalgia of the Protestant world for the Church that they have lost, was the German pastor Christopher Blumhardt, whom the Protestants call for that reason ‘the great prophet of the contemporary world’. He called all the Protestants to unity for ‘the construction of the Kingdom of God on earth’, but he died before the organization of the ecumenical movement, in 1919. His fundamental idea consisted of the proposition that ‘the old world has been destroyed, and a new one is rising on its ruins’. He placed three problems before Christianity: 1) the realization of the best social structure, 2) the overcoming of confessional disagreements and 3) the working together for the education of the whole world community of nations with the complete liquidation of war.

 

            “It was in these three points that the aims of ecumenism were formulated by the present general secretary of the Council of the ecumenical movement, Visser-t-Hooft, who saw the means for their realization in the Church’s pursuit of social aims. For this it is first of all necessary to overcome confessional differences and create one church. The renewed one church will have the possibility of preparing the way for the triumph of Socialism, which will lead to the creation of one world State as the Kingdom of God on earth…”[3]

 

            As we have noted, the struggle between ecucommunism and the Church was clearly foreshadowed, at the beginning of the century, by the struggle between the novelist Lev Tolstoy, who stood for a Christianity reduced to “pure” morality without the Church, the sacraments or any other other-worldly element, and St.. John of Kronstadt, who demonstrated by his wonderful life abounding in good works and extraordinary miracles, that Christianity “does not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God” (I Corinthians 2.5). 

 

            The Church anathematised Tolstoy on February 20-23, 1901 as follows: “In his writings Count Lev Tolstoy has blasphemed against the holy sacraments, denying their grace-filled character, has not venerated the Orthodox Church as his Church, has spoken evil of the clergy, has said that he considers that to venerate Christ and worship Him as God is blasphemy, while saying of himself, by contrast: ‘I am in God, and God in me’. It is not the Church that has rejected him, casting him off from herself, but he himself has rejected the Church: Lev himself has of his own will fallen away from the Church and is no longer a son of the Church, but is hostile to her. All attempts of the clergy to admonish the prodigal have failed to produce the desired fruits: in his pride he has considered himself cleverer than all, less fallible than all and the judge of all, and the Church has made a declaration about the falling away of Count Lev Tolstoy from the Russian Orthodox Church”.[4]

 

            But the confrontation between Tolstoy and St. John of Kronstadt was only a prelude to the titanic struggle, involving hundreds of millions of people on several continents, which has still not come to an end today. Although the blood and suffering caused by this conflict has been incalculable, it has, like previous such struggles in the history of the Church, had the good consequence of providing the opportunity, through the necessity of struggling with heresy, of clarifying the Church’s teaching – in this case, the Church’s teaching on herself. Thus the following questions have been posed: Is the Church One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, as the Nicene Creed defines her? Is she truly of Divine origin and nature, or is she a purely human organization? Does she evolve in her teachings and practice, or does she remain the same? Does she embrace all the vast multitudes who call themselves Christian today, or is she the gathering of a small faithful remnant on earth? Is she truly the only ark of salvation, or only one of many roads leading to God?

 

            However, in order to understand this struggle in its full depth, it is necessary to understand that the attack on the dogma of the Church has been only a part of a still wider attack on the concept of Tradition as the source of truth not only in the Church, but in all branches of knowledge. This wider movement, which I will call, quite simply, the Revolution, has been through several historical stages, of which the revolution in the Church accomplished by Pope Gregory VII was the first. Papism led to Scholasticism and Humanism, then Protestantism, Scientism, Deism, Materialism, Romanticism, Hegelianism, Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, Ecumenism and, most recently, New-Ageism.

 

            It is beyond the scope of this work to show how all these “isms” are interconnected and take their origin from the primal rebellion against the Church which we call “schism”. Suffice it to say for the present that underlying the revolution in all its stages is a single antichristian, antitheist, man-centred philosophy.

 

            This philosophy can be summarized as follows: Man is his own master. If there is a God, then he is a God in man’s own image, perhaps even of man’s own making; and man does not depend on Him to learn the truth, for his own unaided mind is capable of that. The wisdom of the ages is a myth; tradition is a brake on progress. As man is a product of evolution from the lower animals, so his social and religious and political institutions are in a process of constant upward evolution. Therefore there is no such thing as absolute truth, no sacred, unchanging, God-given authority. Everything is in flux, therefore everyone must change. The only unchanging, ineluctable fact is the fact of the revolution – the social revolution, the political revolution, the religious revolution, and above all the scientific revolution upon which all the other revolutions are based. Therefore the only unforgivable sin (if it is not simply a kind of illness, which can be treated by drug-therapy in a psychiatric hospital) is the sin of counter-revolution, the sin of being bigoted, intolerant of change, out-of-date. Everything is permitted – the craziest of beliefs, the most deviant of life-styles – so long as it does not stand in the way of the revolution, that revolution which is making man master of himself and of his environment. But for those who stand in the way of “progress”, there will be no mercy; they will be cast onto the rubbish heap of history like the extinct species of Darwinian pre-history. For nothing must stand in the way of man’s ascent to godlike status. Just as in physics the anthropic principle “seems to be on the verge of substituting man for God, by hinting that consciousness, unbound by time’s arrow, causes creation”[5], so in life based on the scientific revolution man must substitute himself for God, removing all those constraints associated with the Divine Creator…

 

            After a couple of “trial runs” in the English and French revolutions, the revolution received its most complete incarnation in the Russian revolution of 1917, which at the same time overthrew the primary stronghold of traditional thinking in the world. Just as all the apostate trends of European history from the eleventh century onwards lead up to, and find their culmination in, the Russian revolution, so all world history since 1917 has evolved from it and under its shadow.

 

            Now it is commonly thought that the anti-communist coups of 1989-91 brought this phase of history to a close. But this is a mistake. If some of the economic ideas of the revolution have been discredited, its fundamental concepts – the replacement of the Church by the State, God by the people, Tradition by science, Spirit by matter – remain as firmly entrenched as ever. The Russian revolution was like a nuclear explosion, splitting the elements not only of religious, but also of all cultural and social life; it attempted to destroy the faith, the family, the nation and the individual.[6] And just as the fall-out from a nuclear explosion is felt over a wide area and over a long period of time, so has it been with the fall-out from the Russian revolution.

 

            For as the hierarchs of the Russian Church Abroad have written: “If the results of the Chernobyl catastrophe are still making themselves known in the bodies of the children of the surrounding region, the spiritual catastrophe of all Russia will show its effects for a far longer period of time. Just as Chernobyl’s radiation will continue for many years to annihilate the lives of the children of our land with its sinister, invisible fire, it is clear that the consequences of the spiritual catastrophe will not quickly depart from us.”[7]

 

 

The Russian-Jewish Revolution

 

            In order to understand the Russian revolution, it is necessary to understand its roots, not only in the European revolutions of the past one thousand years, but also in the Jewish revolution that took place one thousand years before that. This perception is not a manifestation of “anti-semitism”, as the West would have it; for how can a Christian historian who worships a Jewish God, and is a member of the Church founded by exclusively Jewish apostles seriously maintain anti-semitic ideas? It is the product of the simple but basic and incontrovertible fact that the Russian revolution in its initial phase was the work mainly of Jews inspired by a philosophy of history that is in essence Jewish; and that even when the leaders of the revolution were no longer Jews, they continued to be motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by essentially Jewish ideas. The writer of this work is not anti-semitic, but he is anti-Judaist in the sense that he is against the religion which is founded upon the Talmud and which is fiercely and explicitly anti-Christian in its fundamental beliefs. In this sense all the apostles and fathers and martyrs were, and every consciously believing Orthodox Christian must be – anti-Judaist.

 

            Now when Abraham left his earthly homeland in search of a promised land in which God alone would be King, world history began a series of violent oscillations between the two poles: Zion and Babylon, the God-Man and the man-god, theocracy and satanocracy.

 

            Two thousand years later, the God-Man Himself visited His Kingdom, and a second series of violent oscillations took place. First, the kings of the East came to worship Him – Babylon bowed down before Zion. Then the veil of the temple was rent in twain, the temple itself was destroyed and the people of God were scattered over the face of the earth – Zion became spiritually Babylon, and in the Babylonian Talmud the Jews worked out the apostate creed of Zionism.

 

            But then the new Israel, “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6.16), the Church of Christ, was born in Zion, and the former children of wrath from the Babylon of the West, the pagan Greeks and Romans, came to bow down at her feet. And when Constantine became king of Old Rome, even the pivot and crown of the Babylonian system, the worship of the god-man-emperor, was transformed into its opposite and the God-fighting satanocracy of Old Rome became the God-loving theocracy of the New Rome.

 

            Now, nearly two thousands years after Christ, we are in the middle of the third great series of violent oscillations in world history. In 1917 the God-loving theocracy of the Third Rome, Russia, was transformed into the God-hating satanocracy of the Babylon of the North, the Soviet Union. And the apostate Jews took revenge on the Third Rome for the destruction of their State by the First, Old Rome.

 

            That this was indeed the significance of the Russian revolution was demonstrated by an extraordinary “coincidence” that has been little noted. On November 9, 1917, the London Times reported two events in the same column of newsprint: above, the Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd, and immediately below it, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour’s promise of a homeland to the Jews in Palestine. To the unbeliever, the two events seem to have no relation to each other; the fact that they happened at exactly the same time, and under the leadership of men from the same race and class and locality – the Jewish intelligentsia of Western Russia and Poland – seems purely coincidental. To the believing eye, however, they are two aspects, in two geographical areas, of one and the same event – the event called in the Gospel “the beginning of sorrows” (Matthew 24.8), in the epistles of St. Paul – “the removal of him that restraineth” (II Thessalonians 2.7), and in the Apocalypse of St. John – “the releasing of the beast from the abyss” (Revelation 20.3).

 

            Now if we look at the event from its Jewish aspect, it looks like the triumph of a purely national movement – Zionism. From the Russian aspect, on the other hand, it looks like a purely political-social coup motivated by a purely secular vision of world history – Marxism-Leninism. In truth, however, Zionism and Marxism-Leninism are two aspects of a movement which is neither purely nationalist nor political in essence, but religious – or rather, demonic.

 

            This is most clearly seen in the killing of the Tsar on July 4/17, 1918. On the wall of his death-chamber was found an inscription which fittingly sums up the deed from the point of view of the Jewish revolution. It was a quotation from the German Jewish poet Heine, slightly altered to bring out the word “tsar” and identifying the tsar with Belshazzar:

 

            Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht          On the same night Belshazzar

            Von seinen knechten umgebracht.                  Was killed by his own slaves.[8]

 

            But the truth was quite the opposite. Belshazzar hated the people of God, and his removal opened the way for the rebuilding of the Temple of God in Zion by Zerubbabel (which means “alien to Babylon, or confusion”). The killing of Tsar Nicholas, on the other hand, opened the way to the destruction of Orthodox Russia and its transformation into Babylon.

 

            Such a view is not confined to Orthodox Christians or “anti-Semites”. Thus Winston Churchill wrote: “It would almost seem as if the Gospel of Christ and the gospel of anti-Christ were designed to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the Divine and the diabolical… From the days of ‘Spartacus’ Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.”[9]

 

            Douglas Reed writes: “The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin[10]) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprised 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People’s Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919 were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly ‘Socialist’ or other non-Communist parties… were 55 Jews and 6 others.”[11]

 

            Even the “pro-Semite” historian Richard Pipes admits: “Jews undeniably played in the Bolshevik Party and the early Soviet apparatus a role disproportionate to their share of the population. The number of Jews active in Communism in Russia and abroad was striking: in Hungary, for example, they furnished 95 percent of the leading figures in Bela Kun’s dictatorship. They also were disproportionately represented among Communists in Germany and Austria during the revolutionary upheavals there in 1918-23, and in the apparatus of the Communist International.”[12]

 

            Of course, the Jewish Bolsheviks were not religious Jews, and were in fact as opposed to Talmudic Judaism as any other segment of the population. Moreover, as Pipes points out, “the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly indicate that Bolshevik support came not from the region of Jewish concentration, the old Pale of Settlement, but from the armed forces and the cities of Great Russia, which had hardly any Jews”.[13] So blame for the Russian revolution must fall on Russians as well as Jews; and in fact hardly any of the constituent nations of the Russian empire can claim to have played no part in the catastrophe.

 

            Nevertheless, the extraordinary prominence of Jews in the revolution is a fact that must be related, at least in part, to the traditionally anti-Russian and anti-Christian attitude of Jewish culture, which is reflected in both of its major political offspring – Bolshevism and Zionism. For, as Chaim Weitzmann, the first president of Israel, showed in his Autobiography, the atheist Bolshevik Jews and the theist Zionist Jews came from the same milieu, often the very same families; so that his mother was able to witness her sons’ triumph both in Bolshevik Moscow and Zionist Jerusalem…[14]

 

            Moreover, so complete was the Jewish domination of Russia as a result of the revolution that it is really a misnomer to speak about the “Russian” revolution; it should more accurately be called the anti-Russian, or Russian-Jewish revolution. Indeed, the Russian revolution may be regarded as one branch of that general triumph of Jewish power which we observe in the twentieth century in both East and West, in both Russia and America and Israel. It is as if, by God’s permission and for the chastisement of the sins of many nations, there arose in the Pale of Settlement an avenging horde that swept away the last major restraining power and ushered in the era of the Apocalypse.

 

 

The Revolution: 1. Deterministic Liberation

 

            If we turn to the philosophical basis of the revolution, we find the same Jewish element seemingly inextricably entwined with it – and this not only because so many of the theorists of the revolution were Jews.

 

            As Bertrand Russell pointed out, many elements of the Marxist system are reminiscent of Judaism: the same striving for the promised land on earth and in time (communism and the withering away of the state); the same division of the peoples of the world into the chosen people (the proletariat) and the goyim (the exploiting classes), and the hatred incited against the latter; and the same cult of the false Messiah (the infallible leader or party).[15]

 

            Utopianism is certainly at the heart of the philosophical system of Marxism-Leninism. Igor Shafarevich has traced examples of utopian thought and statehood in many epochs and geographical regions. He has concluded that it is always (a) totalitarian, leading to the abolition of private property, the family and religion, and (b) guided by a kind of death-wish which results in the physical and spiritual death of the people.[16]

 

            Under the name of “chiliasm” or “millenarianism”, utopianism was one of the earliest Christian heresies (with, as we might now expect, a strongly Jewish colouring). It is possible that the addition of the phrase: “Whose Kingdom shall have no end” to the Nicene Creed at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 381 was aimed against this heresy.[17] For chiliasm essentially amounted to the belief that Christ Himself will come to earth before the Last Judgement in order to install His Kingdom physically for a period of a thousand years, this Kingdom being characterised, according to the heretics, by the triumph of the Jewish race and the Jewish law.

 

            But the Church rejected this, teaching that the true Kingdom of Christ will come only after the Judgement, and that it will then be a spiritual Kingdom that is “not of this world” and “has no end”. We can enter the Kingdom of God partially before the Judgement, but only in and through the Church, which is not, and can never be, a sensually apprehended, temporal kingdom.

 

            Utopianism is based not only on a heretical eschatology, but also on a false anthropology that denies the fall of man. For utopia on earth is possible only on the assumption that the men who live in the utopia are sinless and passionless, being governed only by perfect love and humility. To suppose that any class of men, once delivered from injustice and poverty, will automatically behave like angels, is a myth. Still more mythical is the idea that the kingdom of love and brotherhood can be ushered in by hatred and fratricidal war. The means do not justify the ends; and the employment of evil means leads unfailingly to evil ends.

 

            As Solzhenitsyn has said, the line between good and evil passes, not between classes or nations, but down the middle of each human heart. Therefore the final triumph of good over evil is possible only through the purification of the human heart, every human heart. And that is a spiritual task which is accomplished by spiritual, not material or political means, by confession of the faith and repentance of sin, not by rebellion against the king and the redistribution of property.

 

            This brings us to a still deeper flaw of utopianism – its materialism. For while the heresy of chiliasm at any rate recognized the existence of God and the spiritual nature of man, utopianism reduces everything to the blind determinism of insensate matter. For the ancient heretics, utopia could only be introduced by God, and was awarded to the righteous in response to the right use of their freewill. For the moderns, there is neither God nor freewill – but utopia will come in any case, as the result of the iron laws of necessity. And this fatalistic faith both gives the revolution its frightening power – for men acquire extraordinary self-confidence when they know that they must win in the end – and guarantees its terrifying cruelty – for without freewill there is no responsibility, and, as Dostoyevsky said, “if there is no God, everything is permitted”.

 

            “Cosmic possession,” writes Fr. George Florovsky, “ – that is how we can define the utopian experience. The feelings of unqualified dependence, of complete determination from without and full immersion and inclusion into the universal order define utopianism’s estimate of itself and the world. Man feels himself to be an ‘organic pin’, a link in some all-embracing chain – he feels that he is unambiguously, irretrievably forged into one whole with the cosmos…

 

            “From an actor and creator, consciously willing and choosing, and for that reason bearing the risk of responsibility for his self-definition, man is turned into a thing, into a needle, by which someone sews something. In the organic all-unity there is no place for action – here only movement is possible… There is no place for the act, no place for the exploit (podvig).”[18]

 

 

The Revolution: 2. Nationalist Internationalism

 

            If chiliasm-utopianism is one of the earliest Jewish Christian heresies, the division of the world into “clean” and “unclean” classes or nations is the earliest, being the subject of the very first Church Council held at Jerusalem under the presidency of the Apostle James. And if even the great Apostle of the circumcision, St. Peter, fell, albeit temporarily into it, then it is small wonder that apostate Jewry and the Marxist-Leninists should have perpetuated it. Nor is such a temptation confined to the Jews: nationalism, the exaltation of one’s own nation or class as being essentially superior to all others, is a perennial temptation for all nations, and never more so than among certain Orthodox nations now.

 

            When God commanded Noah to lead pairs both of “clean” and of “unclean” animals into the ark, and when He commanded the Apostle Peter to eat of both “clean” and “unclean” foods, He demonstrated that there is no essentially clean nation. “For there is no difference; for all have sinned, all have fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans. 3.22-23). All outside the ark, the Church of Christ, are unclean; and all inside the Church are, if not completely clean, at any rate in the process of being cleansed. And all, regardless of nationality, can enter the Church. For “is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since there is one God Who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith”  (Romans. 3.29-30). Of course, nationalism is not always a pathological phenomenon, and has often contributed to the saving of a nation and the buttressing of the true faith; so perhaps we should reserve the term “nationalism” for the pathological phenomenon, while using another term – “patriotism”, perhaps – for the positive phenomenon to which we now wish to draw attention.

 

            Thus when, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian Emperor Nicholas I approved of the Slavophile slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Narodnost”, he was referring by “narodnost” to the positive virtue of patriotism or love of country. Narodnost was linked to Orthodoxy, in the minds of Nicholas and the Slavophiles, because it was subject to Orthodoxy and exalted the nation, not for its own sake and not in opposition to other nations, but as the bearer of one aspect of the Divine idea of nationhood. Thus the aim of national self-consciousness, according to this conception, is “the attainment in the destiny and spirit of the people of that ‘which God thinks of it in eternity’, as Vladimir Solovyov put it.”[19]

 

            Now the revolution strives to destroy “the Divine idea of nationhood”, the collective personality of each nation, just as it strives to destroy the Divine image of manhood, the individual personality of each man. Thus Lenin said that the aim of socialism was not only the drawing together of the nations, but also their fusion – i.e. their destruction. For, as Dostoyevsky wrote, “socialism deprives the national principle of its individuality, undermining the very foundations of nationality.”[20] Of course, Lenin was not averse to approving of and stirring up the nationalisms of the smaller nations of the Russian empire in order to destroy the God-bearing nation that he hated and feared the most. But having stirred up nationalist feeling, he then tried to destroy it again, subordinating the nations to the only nation and caste of which he approved – the nation of Jewish internationalism, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[21]

 

            The paradox that socialism both incites nationalism and destroys the nation is one aspect of the general paradox of the socialist revolution, that while preaching freedom it practises slavery, while proclaiming equality it creates inequality, and while dreaming of brotherhood it incites fratricidal war. In the same way, the French revolution proclaimed the freedom and equality of all nations; but its first appearance on the international arena was in the form of Napoleonic imperialism, which strove to destroy the freedom of all the nations of Europe. And paradoxically, it was autocratic Russia, the conqueror of Napoleon, which guaranteed the survival of the nations of the West, and their freedom from totalitarianism, for at least another century.

 

            For the truth is that the revolution, while inciting the passions for personal and national freedom in order to destroy the old church and state structures, was aimed at the destruction of all freedom and individuality, both personal and national. And while hypocritically invoking those ecumenical ideals which Christianity gave to the world – “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female,” – it actually aimed at their complete destruction by destroying the pivot upon which they all rest – “for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3.18). Thus like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it promised life, but delivered death…

 

 

The Revolution: 3. Democratic Satanocracy

 

            However, even more than its anti-personal and anti-national passion, the deepest, most characteristic longing of the Jewish-Russian revolution is its worship of the false Messiah. Through its utopianism, the revolution merges the personalities of its adherents into an elemental, all-embracing process to which they surrender their freedom and personality. And through its class-warfare and anti-patriotism, it destroys those last strongholds of personal and collective freedom that stand in the way of its final victory. But what is such a “victory”, if there is no supreme victor to whom to give the spoils, no personal cause and leader of the victory of the proletariat? That is why the revolution is incomplete until it has found its god, why the personal “modesty” of Lenin had to be “corrected” by the “all-wise” Stalin, and why the collective Antichrist of Sovietism must one day reach its apotheosis in the personal Antichrist of Judaism…

 

            In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky saw this need for universal worship that lies at the heart of the revolution. He traced its origin to the worship of the infallible Pope of heretical Rome and, still further back, to the worship of the imperator-pontifex maximus of pagan Rome. Deep in the soul of man, as Blessed Augustine pointed out, there is a God-shaped hole; and if that hole is not filled by the worship of the true God, it will be filled by the worship of a false god; and to that god, man will give himself totally. Thus recently, after the funeral of the dictator of the Ivory Coast (who built the world’s largest church on the model of St. Peter’s in Rome), a young man, beside himself with grief, threw himself into the crocodile-infested waters of the moat round the dictator’s palace. This shows how the need for worship and total self-sacrifice is as alive now, in our materialist age, as it has ever been.

 

            Now the West has ascribed the emergence of totalitarianism in Russia to the weakness of her democratic institutions in 1917 and to her long history of autocratic rule. The satanocracy of Bolshevism, according to this conception, is closely akin to the theocracy of Holy Russia, both being opposed to the “true godliness” of western democracy. Indeed, the very institution of kingship is evil in western eyes.

 

            In truth, however, the very basis of society is hierarchically ordered. Thus, as Tuskarev writes: “The cell of the State is the family. In the family the father is the head by nature, while the son is subject to him; the authority of the father is not the result of elections in the family, but is entrusted to him naturally by the law of God (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow). Just as from the extended family of the tribe there arises the people, so out of the family headed by one man there arises tsarist autocracy. Both the familial and the monarchical organization are established by God for the earthly existence of the sinful, fallen man. The first-created man, living in living communion with God, was not subject to anyone besides God, and was the lord of irrational creation. But when man sinned, destroying the Divine hierarchy of submission and falling away from God, he became the servant of sin and the devil, and as a consequence of this became subject to a man like himself. The sinful will of man requires submission for the restraint of his destructive activity. This Divine ordinance has in view only the good of man – the limitation of the spread of evil. And history itself shows that whatever the inadequacies of monarchies, they bear no comparison with that evil that revolutions and anarchies have brought to the peoples.

 

            “Monarchical administration has been established by God in accordance with His likeness. ‘God being One established the authority of one person; as Almighty – autocratic authority; as Eternal – hereditary authority’ (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow). Such is monarchy in general, independent of its spiritual content; being established in accordance with the likeness of God, it already has an educational religious significance. Christian monarchy was formed and developed under the immediate leadership and grace-filled sanctification of the Church of Christ, and for that reason has a special spiritual content.”[22]

 

            The revolution strove to overthrow this natural order, not out of a love of democracy and the people, but in order that one people – not the Russian people, but the Jewish – should rule over all; for, as the Talmud says, “the Messiah is, without metaphor, the Jewish people”[23] This was clear already in the French revolution, when, having won, by dint of bribery, personal influence and violence, the emancipation of their race, the Jews so abused their newly won privileges that in 1806, on returning from Austerlitz, Napoleon was forced to convene a special meeting of the Sanhedrin in order to ask them the straight question: are you loyal to the French State and its laws? He received the answer he wanted; but the Jews continued to abuse their freedom to dominate others to such an extent that he had to withdraw some of their privileges.

 

            In any case, even as the nineteenth-century democratic revolutions in Europe led to the emancipation of the Jews almost everywhere, the Rabbis, fearing the dissolution of the Jewish identity among the Gentiles, created the Zionist movement in order to recreate the Jewish ghettoes in Palestine. So democracy for the Jewish revolution was only a means towards the dictatorship of the Jewish “proletariat” – ultimately, of the Antichrist. As the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion put it: “From liberalism were born the constitutional states, which took the place of Autocracy which was saving for the goys [Gentiles]. And a constitution, as you well know, is nothing other than a school for scandals, quarrels, arguments, disagreements, fruitless party agitation and party tendencies – in a word, a school for everything that will depersonalise the activity of the state… By such measures we will acquire the possibility of abolishing, little by little, step by step, everything that, at the beginning when we entered into our rights, we were forced to introduce into state constitutions, for the transfer to the unnoticed removal of every constitution, when the time will come to transform every government into our autocracy…”[24]

 

            “Depersonalised” states are always weak states; the people cannot express their victory fully without having a focus for it in the veneration of a leader. So the overthrow of personal autocracy by depersonalised democracy cannot stop there, but must go on to its ultimate consequence – satanocracy, the enthronement of the personal Antichrist. Thus in modern times we see an ever-quickening descent from autocracy to democracy to satanocracy. Democracy cannot be more than a transitional phase because the rule of the people by the people is a contradiction in terms. For “rule” means the imposition of one will on the will of the people, while the will of the people, at least in its fallen state, is always multiple.

 

            That is why the great saints of the nineteenth and early twentieth century insisted on the necessity – the religious necessity – of faithfulness to the Tsar. Thus St. Seraphim of Sarov said that after Orthodoxy, faithfulness to the Tsar was “our first Russian duty and the chief foundation of true Christian piety”. Again, St. John of Kronstadt said: “The autocracy is the sole condition of the piety of Russia; if there is no autocracy, there will be no Russia; power will be taken by the Jews, who greatly hate us…” And Metropolitan Macarius, the apostle to the Altai, said: “You don’t want your own Russian authority, so you will have a foreign power over you.” [25]

 

 

The Progress of the Revolution

 

            Thus, to summarize: world history is a perennial struggle between two irreconcilable religio-political principles: theocracy and satanocracy. Theocracy denotes the type of society in which the whole of the life of the people, including politics, is devoted primarily to the service of God, Who is seen as the true King of kings and Lord of lords. Strictly speaking, a true theocracy can only be the Kingdom of God on earth, which is the Church. However, in view of the fall of man, and the consequent necessity of fighting wars and indulging in other such unspiritual activities, theocratic societies from the time of the kings of Israel have created a kind of division of labour between the Church, on the one hand, which occupies itself more or less exclusively with spiritual matters, and the Crown, on the other, which occupies itself with more material matters – although Church and Crown, like soul and body, both serve the same end, in a kind of symbiotic symphony of powers.[26] Satanocracy, by contrast, abolishes the distinction between Church and State and subordinates society in all its spheres to the will of the earthly ruler, who is recognized to be the incarnation of a god (as in Ancient Babylonia and Egypt) or of an impersonal heavenly order (as in Ancient China and the Platonic, Aristotlean and Hegelian philosophies) or, more dynamically, of the March of History (as in Marxism-Leninism). “Pure” satanocracies have been rare since Christ, largely because of the power of the Orthodox Christian theocratic ideal. But that ideal has come to be undermined by, on the one hand, pseudo-theocracies such as Papism and Islam, and on the other, by anti-theocratic theories which have deceitfully pretended to be compatible with true theism, such as Protestant democracy and Jewish nationalism. Finally, after a “trial run” in the French revolution, a “pure” satanocracy came to power in 1917 on the ruins of the Russian theocracy. This satanocracy combined elements of all the previous satanocracies and pseudo- and anti-theocracies: the totalitarianism and individualist man-worship of the ancient pagan monarchies and Papism; the fatalist determinism of Islam; the collectivist people-worship of the Protestant democracies; and the Jewish and other kinds of nationalism.

 

            While, until 1917, the revolution had made only partial inroads into the life of the Orthodox Churches, in the next ten years it penetrated into the very heart of her external organization, removing the last of her pious autocrats, and eventually leading all the Local Autocephalous Churches, with the possible exception of the Mother of the Churches, Jerusalem, to fall away from the Truth. This has led to the arising of movements of resistance to the official, fallen Churches, which have come to be known as “True Orthodox” or “Old Calendar” or “Catacomb” Orthodox Churches in opposition to their pseudo-Orthodox or new-style or above-ground official counterparts. The most important of these have been the True Orthodox or Catacomb Church of Russia, the True Orthodox or Old Calendar Churches of Greece and Romania, and the Russian Church Abroad. Thus by contrast with the externally united, wealthy and numerically large Churches of Orthodox Christendom in 1914, the picture presented today is one of a small, persecuted and externally divided remnant.

 

            The main purpose of this book is to show how this change took place, how the Orthodox Church before the revolution became the Orthodox Church in modern times, and what are the prospects for her recovery now, at the end of the twentieth century.

 

            Of course, it is easy to exaggerate the difference between then and now. Church life on the eve of the catastrophe was, as might be expected, at a low spiritual ebb, in spite of the external pomp.[27] Ecumenism and socialism had already sown their pernicious seeds, especially in the educated classes; and nationalism had already produced at least one formal Church schism – that between the Greek and Bulgarian Churches.[28] The catastrophe was to a large extent simply a reaping of the bad fruits which had already been sown. Moreover, the present divisions between the True Orthodox Churches, damaging though they are, conceal a perhaps greater unity with regard to the main questions of the age than existed at the beginning of the century.

 

            The Apostle Paul said: “There must be heresies among you, that those who are approved may be made manifest among you” (I Corinthians 11.19). Nowhere has the truth of these words been revealed more clearly than in our century, when the martyrs against the heresies of ecumenism and communism have numbered in the millions. A secondary purpose of this book, therefore, is to celebrate the glory of this century, its new martyrs and confessors. For to chart the triumphs of Satan while ignoring the feats of those who have conquered his power in the most difficult of circumstances would be to distort the truth. Christ Himself came “for the rise and fall of many in Israel” (Luke 2.34), and it is in studying the rise of some and fall of others in the Church of the twentieth century that we ourselves come to a fuller knowledge of the truth.

 

            And what is that truth which, it is hoped, this humble work will help to establish? The truth of the Church. The truth that, contrary to the teachings of the heretics, the Church is truly One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. The truth that this unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity have been preserved to our day exclusively in the remnant of the Orthodox Church known as the True Orthodox Church. The truth, finally, that in our days of “the triumph of Satan and the power of the Antichrist”, as the Martyr-Patriarch Tikhon said[29], “the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church”, which is and always will be the only ark of salvation.

 

            Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us!

 

March 20 / April 2, 2003.

Week of the Holy Cross.

St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne.

East House, Beech Hill, Mayford, Woking, Surrey, England.

 

 

 

1. RUSSIA: THE KILLING OF THE KING (1900-1924)

 

We have no king, because we feared not the Lord.

Hosea 10.3.

 

The mystery of iniquity is already at work, only it will not be perfected until he who now restrains is taken from the midst.

II Thessalonians 2.7.

 

Reform versus Stability

 

            At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Orthodox Church in both the major States in which she lived – the Russian and Ottoman empires – found herself in a position of subservience to the civil government, a position that had certain external advantages but which was contrary to the holy canons of the Church and therefore greatly debilitated her strength in the long run.

 

            In the Ottoman empire, the Muslim State forbade conversions to Orthodoxy on pain of death, restricted the Church in various other ways, and made the post of the patriarch himself subject to the highest bidder in a way that both drained the financial resources of the Orthodox community and made the man who was eventually “elected” patriarch in effect a simoniac. At the same time, this position of the patriarchate had hidden blessings which became clearer only after the collapse of the empire. First, the Ottoman rulers provided a certain protection from the depradations of western missionaries, who, if allowed free access into the Orthodox lands, might well have torn a large part of the largely uneducated flock from Orthodoxy (as happened in Transylvania, where Ottoman power was weaker). And secondly, the millet system of administering the empire according to religious confessions forced the Orthodox nations together in a way which countered the centrifugal tendencies that had already led to wars between Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia before the Turkish conquest. The tragedy of Greek and Balkan Orthodoxy in the twentieth century consisted in the fact that, while overthrowing the admittedly uncanonical system of dependence on the Ottoman rulers, the Orthodox subjected themselves to the still more destructive forces of nationalism, on the one hand, and westernism, on the other.[30]

 

            In Russia, Peter the Great’s reglament of 1721 had abolished the patriarchate and made the Church in effect a department of the State under the direction of a Procurator appointed by the Tsar. Again, there were hidden blessings in this uncanonical situation: the State supported the Church financially, encouraging her missionary and educational work, and State legislation muzzled the activities of sectarians and uniates on the borders of the empire. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century these advantages were seen by many in the Church, from the president of the council of ministers and the Holy Synod to the Church intelligentsia and the white clergy, to be largely outweighed by the disadvantages, which included: the impotence of the bishops, whose administrative functions were in many cases superseded by diocesan consistories answerable to the Procurator; the invidious position of priests who were required by law to report on seditious activities by their parishioners, even if this involved breaking the seal of confession; and the identification of preachers among the heterodox as government agents, which greatly hindered the task of converting the Muslims, Old Believers, Protestants and Uniates.

 

            Since the Russian Church was by far the largest and strongest Church in Orthodoxy, and the main bulwark of the empire on which the prosperity of the other Orthodox Churches around the world depended, the reform of her relations with the State and of her internal administration was a most pressing necessity. And this was recognized by the Tsar himself, who from 1903 openly suggested both the restoration of the patriarchate and the convocation of a Local Council. He even proposed that he take monastic vows and become the patriarch himself – to which the Holy Synod replied only with an astonished silence.[31]

 

            However, the disastrous Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, followed by the revolution of 1905-6, arrested the reform process just as it was getting under way; for at a time when the foundations of the State were being shaken to the core, it was felt that to allow radical change in the Church would encourage further destabilisation – especially when the revolutionary spirit had penetrated deep into the Church herself. And yet the Tsar’s Toleration decree of April, 1905, which allowed all the non-Orthodox confessions in the empire to organize themselves autonomously and to accept converts, while keeping the Orthodox Church chained to the State, made reform even more pressing. For only a reformed and revitalized Church which was in harmony or “symphony” with the State, but did not have one hand tied behind her back by a State determined to use her for political ends, could hope to withstand the sudden resurgence of the non-Orthodox religions, especially the uniates in the south-western regions of the empire.

 

            However, in balancing the need for reform against the necessity for stability the Tsar came down on the side of stability, and his order to convene the Council never came. There followed a decade in which the wounds of the Church continued to fester, and the authority of both Church and State continued to decline. And in the end the much needed Local Council was convened, in accordance with Divine Providence, only when the Tsar himself had been swept away…[32]

 

            And yet there had been spiritual gains in the pre-revolutionary period. The pre-conciliar commission had discussed at length the main issues which were to dominate the history of the Orthodox Church in the coming century, including Church-State relations, the relations between the hierarchy and laypeople within the Church (i.e. sobornost or conciliarity) and the beginnings of Ecumenism. Many of the recommendations of the commission were eventually adopted without major modification by the Local Council of 1917-18.

 

            Moreover, the period had brought to the fore several of those churchmen who would play such important roles, both for good and for ill, in the coming struggle with the revolution: on the one side, men such as Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky), Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky), Archbishop Theophan (Bystrov) of Poltava and Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin), and on the other, Bishop Antoninus (Granovsky), Bishop Sergius (Stragorodsky) and Bishop Eulogius (Georgievsky). Thus the battle-lines for the coming struggle had been drawn, and a discerning observer might even have foreseen the outcome of the struggle by examining the events of 1905-07.

 

 

Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) and Carpathian Rus’

 

            Especially well-known in the pre-war years was Archbishop Anthony of Volhynia. On all the major issues of the day he adopted an uncompromisingly Orthodox position. Thus he supported the Tsar and rebuked the liberal, “unchurched” part of the Russian population, writing of them in 1899: “It is no longer a people, but a rotting corpse, which takes its rotting as a sign of life, while on it, or in it, live only moles, worms and foul insects… for in a living body they would find no satisfaction for their greed, and there would be nothing for them to live on”.[33]

 

            Another of Vladyka Anthony’s major concerns was the defence of the Orthodox population of Austria-Hungary. The Hungarian government and the uniates tried by all means to prevent the return of the Carpatho-Russians to their ancestral Orthodox faith. This led to martyrdoms, such as that of the priest Maximus Sandovich, who had been ordained by Vladyka Anthony.[34]

 

            “Vladyka Anthony struggled with the unia and both by the printed word and in his sermons he often addressed this theme. He tried by all means to destroy the incorrect attitude towards the unia which had been established in Russia, according to which it was the same Orthodoxy, only commemorating the Pope of Rome. With profound sorrow and irritation he said: ‘They can in no way accept this simple truth, that the unia is a complete entry into the Roman Catholic church with the recognition of the Orthodox Church as a schism.., with the recognition of all the Latin saints and with a condemnation of the Orthodox saints as having been schismatics outside the true Church…’

 

            “… Vladyka Anthony also laboured much to establish in Russian society an Orthodox attitude towards Catholicism. In educated Russian society and in ecclesiastical circles in the Synodal period of the Russian Church the opinion was widespread that Catholicism was one of the branches of Christianity which, as V.S. Solovyov taught, was bound at the end of time to unite into one Christianity with the other supposed branches – Orthodoxy and Protestantism, about which the holy Church supposedly prayed in her litanies: ‘For the prosperity of the Holy Churches of God and for the union of all’.

 

            “The correct attitude towards Catholicism as an apostate heresy was so shaken that the Holy Synod under the influence of the Emperor Peter I and with the blessing of his favourite, the protestantising Metropolitan Theophanes Prokopovich, allowed Swedish prisoners-of-war in Siberia to marry Russian girls with the obligatory conversion to Orthodoxy. Soon this uncanonical practice of mixed marriages became law and spread, especially in the western regions. In his diocese Vladyka Anthony strictly forbade the clergy to celebrate mixed marriages.

 

            “Vladyka Anthony well knew that Catholic influence in the midst of the Russian clergy was introduced through the theological schools: ‘We have lost (an Orthodox attitude towards Catholicism) because those guides by which we studied in school and which constitute the substance of our theological, dogmatic and moral science, is borrowed from the Catholics and Protestants; we are left only with straight heterodox errors which are known to all and have been condemned by ecclesiastical authorities…’

 

            “Seeing the abnormal situation of church life in subjugated Carpathian Rus’, Vladyka Anthony turned to the Ecumenical Patriarch Joachim III with a request to accept the Orthodox Galicians and Carpatho-Russians under his omophorion, since the Russian Synod for political reasons was unable to spread its influence there. The patriarch willingly agreed and appointed Vladyka Anthony as his exarch for Galicia and Carpathian Rus’. The Galicians, after finishing work in the fields and in spite of the great obstacles involved in crossing the border, sometimes with a direct danger to their lives, made pilgrimages in large groups to the Pochayev Lavra. Many Carpatho- Russians and Galicians entered the Volhynia theological seminary.

 

            “Under the influence of all these undertakings, the Orthodox movement in these areas began to grow in an elemental manner with each year that passed. This elicited repressions on the part of the Austro-Hungarian government, which tried to suppress the movement. The persecution grew and soon Vladyka was forced to speak out in defence of the persecuted Christians. In August, 1913 he published an encyclical letter in which he eloquently portrayed all the woes and persecutions of the Orthodox population of the western regions. In going through the various instances of Catholics humiliating Orthodox, he cited the following example of the firmness of the persecuted and the cruelty of the persecutors: ‘Virgins who had gathered together to save their souls in fasting and prayer were stripped in winter and driven out onto a frozen lake, like the 40 martyrs of Sebaste, after which some of them soon died. Thus do they torture our Russians in Hungary and Austria in broad daylight in our civilized age…’

 

            “But when massive arrests and tortures of the Orthodox began, and there was a trial of 94 Orthodox in Sihet, Vladyka Anthony composed a special prayer and petitions in the litanies, which were read in all the churches of the Volhynia diocese in the course of the whole period of the trial, which lasted for two months.

 

            “This was the only voice raised in defence of the persecuted, not only in Russia but also throughout Europe.

 

            “The Austro-Hungarian political circles, in agreement with the Vatican, undertook decisive measures to suppress the incipient mass return to Orthodoxy of the Carpatho-Russians and Galicians. It seems that they undertook diplomatic negotiations in St. Petersburg in order to remove the main cause of the movement that had arisen, Vladyka Anthony, from his Volhynia see.”[35]

 

            On May 20, 1914 Archbishop Anthony was duly transferred from the see of Volhynia to that of Kharkov… However, where human leaders fail, the King of kings intervenes. The First World War, which broke out on the feast of the recently canonized St. Seraphim of Sarov, July 19, 1914, removed – temporarily, at any rate – many of the dangers which had arisen in the pre-war period and against which Archbishop Anthony had struggled. Thus patriotic emotion and reverence for the Tsar revived, and concern for the fate of the Orthodox Christians in Serbia and the south-west regions made the struggle, in the minds of many, into a holy war in defence of Orthodoxy against militant Catholicism and Protestantism.

 

 

The Jewish Question

 

            By 1914 there were about seven million Jews in the Russian empire – the largest non-Slavic ethnic minority. Most of them lived in the Pale of Settlement. Russian law, very loosely observed, confined them to this area, but on religious, not racial grounds; Karaite Jews, who did not accept the Talmud, the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, who were strongly tainted with paganism, and Jews who became Christians of any denomination, were given equal rights with the rest of the population.           

 

            Moreover, permission to live outside the Pale was given to various categories of Jews: Siberian colonists, domestic servants, artisans, university graduates (one-fifth of the students of Kharkov university were Jews), businessmen, industrialists, bankers and others. This meant that in spite of the discriminatory laws there were considerable colonies of Jews throughout the empire and even in the capital, which enabled them to play a prominent role in the cultural and commercial life of pre-revolutionary Russia. In all, Jews made up about a third of Russia’s total trading community.

 

            In spite of the considerable opportunities thus presented to Jews in the Russian empire, the traditionalist, rabbi-dominated Talmudic Jews of the Pale continued to think of Christians and Christian society as unclean and despicable. “The eminent Jewish-Russian lawyer, Genrikh Sliozberg,” write Fitzlyon and Browning, “never forgot the ‘real grief’ of his family and relations when they discovered that his father had sent him to a Russian grammar school. His school uniform they found particularly irritating, sinful even. It was, they thought, ‘an apostate’s garb’, and his mother and grandmother cried bitterly every time they saw him in it.’ Again, ‘the Russian-Jewish revolutionary, Lev Deutsch, writing in 1923, clearly remembered the time when the Jews ‘considered it sinful to learn Russian, and its use was allowed only if absolutely essential and, of course, only for speaking to Christians (the goyim).’”[36]

 

            It was in this fanatical atmosphere that Communist and Zionist propaganda made inroads into Jewish youth; and, as Chaim Weitzmann recalled in his Autobiography, zealots of both types were to be found in his own family, being united only in their hatred of Orthodox Russia.[37]

 

            Such sentiments were bound to lead to a reaction on the part of the surrounding population. Moreover, Jewish money-lenders exploited Russian peasants who wished to buy their freedom after Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The government tried to help with generous, low-interest loans, and on several occasions cancelled the debts outright; but the remaining need was filled by less generous Jews, who stepped in with much tougher, high-interest loans.

 

            Dostoyevsky wrote: “Jewry is thriving precisely there where the people are still ignorant, or not free, or economically backward. It is there that Jewry has a champ libre! And instead of raising, by its influence, the level of education, instead of increasing knowledge, generating economic fitness in the native population, – instead of this, the Jew, wherever he has settled, has still more humiliated and debauched the people; there humaneness was still more debased and the educational level fell still lower; there inescapable, inhuman misery, and with it despair, spread still more disgustingly. Ask the native populations in our border regions: What is propelling the Jew – has been propelling him for centuries? You will receive a unanimous answer: mercilessness. ‘He has been prompted so many centuries only by pitilessness for us, only the thirst for our sweat and blood.’

 

            “And, in truth, the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws. They always managed to be on friendly terms with those upon whom the people were dependent, and, certainly, it is not for them to complain, at least in this respect, about their restricted rights compared with the native population. They have received from us enough of these rights over the native population. What, in the course of decades and centuries, has become of the Russian people where the Jews settled is attested by the history of our border regions. What, then? – Point to any other tribe from among Russian aliens which could rival the Jew by his dreadful influence in this connection! You will find no such tribe. In this respect the Jew preserves all his originality as compared with other Russian aliens, and, of course, the reason therefore is that status in statu of his, the spirit of which specifically breathes with pitilessness for everything that is not Jew, with disrespect for any people and tribe, for every human creature that is not a Jew. And what kind of justification is it that in Western Europe the nations did not permit themselves to be overwhelmed, and that thus the Russian people themselves are at fault? Because the Russian people in the border regions of Russia proved weaker than the European nations (and exclusively as a result of their cruel political circumstances), for this sole reason should they be completely crushed by exploitation, instead of being helped?[38]

 

            “And if reference is made to Europe, to France, for example, – there too, hardly has their status in statu been harmless. Of course, there, Christianity and its idea have been lowered and are sinking not because of the Jew’s fault, but through their own fault; nevertheless, it is impossible not to note also in Europe the great triumph of Jewry which has replaced many former ideas with its own.

 

            “Oh, it goes without saying that man always, at all times, has been worshipping materialism and has been inclined to perceive and understand liberty only in the sense of making his life secure through money hoarded by the exertion of every effort and accumulated by all possible means. However, at no time in the past have these tendencies been raised so cynically and so obviously to the level of a sublime principle as in our Nineteenth Century. ‘Everybody for himself and only for himself, and every intercourse with man solely for one’s self’ – such is the ethical tenet of the majority of present-day people, even not bad people, but, on the contrary, laboring people who neither murder nor steal. And mercilessness for the lower classes, the decline of brotherhood, exploitation of the poor by the rich, – oh, of course, all this existed also before and always; however, it had not been raised to the level of supreme truth and of science – it had been condemned by Christianity, whereas at present, on the contrary, it is being regarded as virtue.

 

            “Thus, it is not for nothing that over there the Jews are reigning everywhere over stock-exchanges; it is not for nothing that they control capital, that they are the masters of credit, and it is not for nothing – I repeat – that they are also the masters of international politics, and what is going to happen in the future is known to the Jews themselves: their reign, their complete reign, is approaching! We are approaching the complete triumph of ideas before which sentiments of humanity, thirst for truth, Christian and national feelings, and even those of national dignity, must bow. On the contrary, we are approaching materialism, a blind, carnivorous craving for personal material welfare, a craving for personal accumulation of money by any means – that is all that has been proclaimed as the supreme aim, as the reasonable thing, as liberty, in lieu of the Christian idea of salvation only through the closest moral and brotherly fellowship of men.

 

            “People will laugh and say that this is not all brought about by the Jews. Of course, not only by them, but if the Jews have completely triumphed and thriven in Europe precisely at the time when these new principles have triumphed there to the point of having been raised to the level of a moral principle, it is impossible not to infer that the Jews, too, have contributed their influence to this condition. Our opponents point out that, on the contrary, the Jews are poor, poor even everywhere, especially in Russia; that only the very summit of the Jews is rich – bankers and kings of stock-exchanges – while the rest, virtually nine-tenths of the Jews, are literally beggars, running about for a piece of bread, offering commissions and anxiously looking for an opportunity to snatch somewhere a penny for bread. Yes, this seems to be so, but what does this signify? Does it not specifically mean that in the very toil of the Jews (i.e., at least, their overwhelming majority), in their very exploitation there is something wrong, abnormal, something unnatural carrying itself in retribution. The Jew is offering his interposition, he is trading in another man’s labor! But temporarily, this changes nothing. As against this, the summit of the Jews is assuming stronger and firmer power over manking seeking to convey to it its image and substance. Jews keep vociferating that among them, too, there are good people. Oh, God! Is this the point? – Besides, we are speaking not about good or bad people. And aren’t there good people among those? Wasn’t the late James Rothschild of Paris a good man? – We are speaking about the whole and its idea; we are speaking about Judaism and the Jewish idea which is clasping the whole world instead of Christianity which ‘did not succeed’…”[39]

 

            “The Jewish idea”, in Dostoyevsky’s words, or “the mystery of iniquity”, in the words of the Apostle Paul, was preparing for the final assault on “that which restraineth”, the Orthodox Christian empire. And the pogroms of the oppressed Ukrainian peasantry against the oppressor Jewish money-lenders provided the excuse which international Jewry, together with its “Christian” front, the secularised intelligentsia of Russia, needed. Soon a vast campaign was being whipped up against “the sick man of Europe”, the so-called “prison of the peoples”. Jewish and Socialist propaganda distorted the significance of these events, obscuring their causes, hiding the extremely provocative behaviour of Jewish gangs, and quite unjustly accusing the Church and the State, and in particular the Tsar, of complicity in these crimes.

 

            The innocence of the government and Tsar is illustrated by their reaction to the assassination by the Jewish revolutionary Bogrov of Prime Minister A.A. Stolypin in Kiev Opera House in 1911. Robert Massie writes: “Because Bogrov was a Jew, the Orthodox population was noisily preparing a retaliatory pogrom. Frantic with fear, the city’s Jewish population spent the night packing their belongings. The first light of the following day found the square before the railway station jammed with carts and people trying to squeeze themselves on to departing trains. Even as they waited, the terrified people heard the clatter of hoofs. An endless stream of Cossacks, their long lances dark against the dawn sky, rode past. On his own, Kokovtsev had ordered three full regiments of Cossacks into the city to prevent violence. Asked on what authority he had issued the command, Kokovtsev replied: ‘As head of the government.’ Later, a local official came up to the Finance Minister to complain, ‘Well, Your Excellency, by calling in the troops you have missed a fine chance to answer Bogrov’s shot with a nice Jewish pogrom.’ Kokovtsov was indignant, but, he added, ‘his sally suggested to me that the measures which I had taken at Kiev were not sufficient… therefore I sent an open telegram to all governors of the region demanding that they use every possible means – force if necessary – to prevent possible pogroms. When I submitted this telegram to the Tsar, he expressed his approval of it and of the measure I had taken in Kiev.’”[40]

 

            A particularly prominent role in the Jewish question was taken by Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky), who spoke out courageously on the side of the Autocracy in the revolutionary turmoil of 1905, and was a prominent member of the patriotic “Union of the Russian People”, the so-called “Black Hundreds”. For this he was accused of anti-semitism, to which he replied: “… It is unpleasant to talk about oneself, but if you ask anyone who is close to me or knows me well: what is he most interested in? they would tell you: monasticism, communion with the Eastern Churches, the struggle with Latinism, the transformation of the theological schools, the creation of a new direction of Orthodox theology [in opposition to scholasticism], the yedinoveriye [relations with the Old Believers], the typicon of Divine services, Slavophilism, Orthodoxy in Galicia… etc. But no one would name Judophobia as one of my most important interests…

 

            “… Concerning the Jews I delivered and published a sermon in 1903 (against pogroms), thanks to which the pogroms that enveloped the whole of the south-western region did not take place in Volhynia in that year. In 1905 in the sixth week of the Great Fast the Jews in Zhitomir shot at portraits of his Majesty and were beaten for that by the inhabitants of the suburb. The day before Palm Sunday I arrived from Petersburg and in Holy Week again delivered a speech against the pogrom that was being prepared for the first day of Pascha. This pogrom did not take place, and only after the murder by a Jewish hireling of the popular police-officer Kuyarov on the evening of Thomas Sunday, when I was leaving Zhitomir for Petersburg, did fights begin with the Jews, who later said that ‘the government deliberately summoned our hierarch to Petersburg because while he was in the city they did not beat us’. In 1907 I published in a newspaper, and then a brochure with the article: ‘The Jewish question and the Holy Bible’, which has now been reissued in Yiddish. All this, however, did not stop the liberals from printing about me that I was going in cross processions to incite pogroms. Meanwhile, all pogroms have ceased in Volhynia since the Pochayev Union of the Russian People was formed in 1906…

 

            “… If they are talking about the limitation of rights [of the Jews], not for the highest motives of defending the poor Little Russians from Jewish exploiters, but out of hatred for the latter, then this is truly disgusting, but if the patriots do not hate the Jews, but love and pity them, but do not want to give horns to a cow that butts, then this is reasonable, just and humane…”[41]

 

 

The Beilis Trial

 

            In 1911, a Christian boy, Andrew Yuschinksy, was ritually murdered. In connection with this, in 1913, the trial took place in Kiev of a Jew named Beilis, which became an international cause célèbre. The verdict of the court was that the boy had been ritually murdered, but Beilis was acquitted (because witnesses and jurors were suborned, according to some).[42]

 

            Now stories of ritual murder of Christian children by Jews have surfaced in many countries in many ages, leading to many formal trials and convictions. These are completely dismissed by western authors, who speak about the “blood libel” against the Jews. However, the Orthodox Church has canonized at least one victim of such a murder, Child-Martyr Gabriel of Zverki, Belorussia, to whom Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) wrote a service in 1908.[43]

 

            It is the tendency of prosemite authors to dismiss all this as “antisemitic lies”. However, even if all the historical evidence of Jewish atrocities could be dismissed, it would be surprising indeed if a religion steeped in such hate against Christ and Christians as Talmudic Judaism did not produce acts of hatred. As long as incitement to such acts exists in the “sacred” book of the Judaistic religion, there must be a presumption that some of its followers may be tempted to carry them out.

 

            On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Christians also acted with hatred and committed atrocities, as in the pogroms in the Rhineland in 1096 or in Spain leading to the expulsion of all the Jews from Spain in 1492, or in Russia before the revolution. Hatred of enemies is forbidden by the Gospel of Christ; so such acts, whether or not they were provoked by hatred on the Jews’ side, cannot be condoned. But the justified horror at Christian antisemitism which has become so de rigeur in the modern world, must always be balanced by a similar horror at the antigentilism and antichristianity of the Talmud, the most hateful of all “sacred” books.

 

            Over a hundred well-documented cases of the murder of Christian children by the Jews for ritual purposes in various countries are cited by Oleg Platonov, who goes on to cite Monk Neophytus’ account as giving especially valuable evidence, not only of the real existence of this horrific practice, but also of the religious rationale behind it.

 

            Monk Neophytus was until the age of 38 a Jewish rabbi who then became a monk of the Greek Church. His book, entitled “A Refutation of the Religion of the Jews and their Rites from the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments”, originally appeared in Moldavian in 1803 and was translated into Russian in St. Petersburg in 1913, the year of the Beilis trial:-

 

            “The secret use of blood, which the Jews collect from Christians killed by them is a rite which they consider to have been commanded by God Himself and indicated in certain mysterious expressions in the Scriptures.

 

            “Many scholars have written works aimed at proving, with the help of the Bible, the appearance of the true Messiah promised by God to our fathers, Who is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the All-Pure Virgin Mary. An innumerable quantity of works have also been written to refute the superstitious beliefs of the Jews and their false teachings. Many of these authors were native Jews who converted to the Christian Faith. Meanwhile, nobody has yet published anything serious concerning this barbaric mystery of blood, which is kept and used by the synagogue. If some book hinting at this mystery happens to fall into the hands of Christians, and they make reference to it, the Jews never reply in any other way than with feigned mockery or evasions, like the following: ‘But how would we kill Christians if the law forbids us to eat blood?’

 

            “In my opinion, the reason preventing the Jews, even those converted to Christianity, from clearly exposing this is hidden either in the fact that they really were not initiated into the mystery, or in the fact that they still foolishly pity our unfortunate people, and fear to attract to it the powerful vengeance of the Christian peoples. 

 

            “But I, having by the mercy of God received Holy Baptism and monasticism, have no fear, in the interest of Christians, to declare everything that I know about these rites, which I myself zealously carried out and kept in the strictest secrecy all the time that I was a haham, or rabbi.

 

            “But first of all it is necessary to explain that the mystery of blood is not known to all Jews, but only to the hahams, or rabbis, the scribes, or Pharisees, who for that reason are called the keepers of the mystery of the blood – a mystery which, moreover, is not contained in clear words in any of their books and which they pass on exclusively by oral tradition.

 

            “The fathers of families initiated into the mystery pass it on only to that one of their sons whose secrecy they have tested. Also, they insist that he is obliged to pass on the mystery only under those condition and in that form, and that he should never disclose it to a Christian, even in the cruellest woes, and even for the saving of life. This revelation is accompanied by the most terrifying curses on anyone who gives away the secret. Here, for example, is how I was initiated into it myself.

 

            “When I reached the age of thirteen, – the age at which the Jews have the custom of laying a wreath called the wreath of glory on the heads of their sons, – my father went apart with me and had a long talk with me, instilling hatred for the Christians into me as a duty laid down by God. This hatred was to go as far as killing them. Then he told me of the custom of collecting the blood of the murdered, and he added, embracing me: ‘So, my son, in this way I have made you confidant and as it were my second I.’ Then he put the wreath on my head and in great detail explained to me the mystery of the blood as the holiest of the holies and the important rite of the Jewish religion. ‘My son,’ he continued, ‘I abjure you by all the elements of heaven and earth always to keep this secret in your heart and not to entrust it to anyone, neither your brothers, nor your sisters, not your mother, nor, later, your wife, – not to any mortal, and especially women. If God gives you even eleven grown sons, do not reveal the secret to all of them, but only to one – the one whom you recognise to be the cleverest and the most capable of keeping the secret, just as I am now acting with you. You must take great car that this son of yours should be devoted and zealous for our faith. Once more I adjure you: beware of trusting women, even your daughters, your wife and your mother, but trust only the son whom you consider worthy of trust.’ ‘O my son,’ he cried finally, ‘may the whole earth refuse to accept your corpse and thrust you out from its depths, if, even in conditions of the most extreme necessity, you reveal this secret of blood to anyone besides him of whom I have spoken. Even if you become a Christian for the sake of profit or for other reasons. See that you do not betray your father by giving away this divine secret which I have revealed to you today. Otherwise may my curse strike you at the very hour at which you sin, and may it accompany you all the days of your life until death and to the ages of ages.’

 

            “May the Father Whom I have acquired in heaven and Who is the Lord Jesus Christ turn away these curses from the head of him who writes exclusively for the sake of the benefit of the Church and the triumph of the Truth.

 

            “The bases of this barbaric custom are the following: 1) hatred for Christians, 2) superstition, and 3) faith in the spiritual reality of Christian blood. I shall explain each of these points.

 

            “On the first reason, which is hatred for Christians.

 

            “The Jews as it were from their mother’s breast instil hatred of Christianity into their sons from the earliest childhood. On receiving these convictions from their fathers over a whole series of generations, they are really and sincerely convinced that to despise Christians and even to kill them is very pleasing to God, thereby exactly justifying the words of Divine redemption: ‘everyone who kills you will think that he is thereby serving God’ (John 16.20).

 

            “On the second reason, which is superstition.

 

            “The second reason is based on the superstitious beliefs which the Jews hold and which relate to the sphere of magic, sorcery, the kabbala and other mysterious rites. They believe that Christian blood is necessary for these diabolical operations. Out of all these superstitions I will indicate only one, which concerns the curse of God that fell on the unhappy people of Israel and which was prophesied by Moses himself in the following expressions: ‘the Lord will strike you with Egyptian leprosy… a foul leprosy on the knees and shins from which you will not be able to be healed’ (Deuteronomy 28.27, 35).

 

            “This terrible illness always was and is very common among the Jews – much more common than they think… And when the haham visits the sick who have been struck down by it, and gives them medicines, he at the same time sprinkles them with Christian blood, if he has any, as the only means of healing…

 

            “On the third and principal reason, which is the faith of the Jews in the spiritual reality of Christian blood.

 

            “The main reason which compels the Jews to kill Christians and collect their blood is the faith, secretly preserved especially by the hahams, or rabbis, that Jesus Christ, the Son of Mary from Nazareth, who was condemned by our ancestors to death on the Cross, is, in all probability, the true Messiah who was for so long expected and invoked by the patriarchs and prophets. There are enough prophecies to convince them of this; especially important is the passage from Jeremiah: ‘Be amazed, O heavens, tremble and be seized with horror, says the Lord, for two evils have My people committed: they have abandoned Me, the source of living water, and have cut out for themselves broken cisterns which cannot hold water’ (Jeremiah 2.12,13).

 

            “This prophecy is well-known and is understood in its true meaning by many rabbis, as it was very well known by Annas and Caiaphas. But, like them, from pride and hardness of heart, the rabbis do not want to recognise it, and therefore, resorting to pitiful interpretations, they have composed new rules – a real parody on the most important mysteries of the Church, so as to be saved by Christian blood, in which they see the blood of the Messiah Himself.

 

            “In consequence of their conviction… the Jews use Christian blood at circumcision, which represents baptism; at marriage, which corresponds to this mystery among the Christians; in the unleavened bread of Pascha, which represents the Eucharist; at burials, imitating holy unction; in their lament over the destruction of Jerusalem, which represents the mystery of repentance. This is the basis of the secret, which I knew and sometimes applied with extraordinary zeal. I shall stop on each of these explanations.

 

            “Marriage. When a marriage is concluded between Jews, the bride and bridegroom prepare for it with a strict fast for 24 hours, abstaining even from water until the setting of the sun. it is then that the rabbi appears. He takes a just-boiled egg, removes the shell and divides it in half. Then he sprinkles it, not with salt, but with a special ash, which I will say more about later. He gives half of this sprinkled egg to each spouse.

 

            “Let us now say what this ash is. It is used not instead of salt, but instead of fresh Christian blood, being in actual fact changed Christian blood. It is precisely with the blood left over from the sacrifices carried out for the feast of unleavened bread, the more the better, that the rabbis infuse a corresponding quantity of flax or cotton thread, then they dry it and burn it. The ash is kept in bottles that are carefully sealed and given to the synagogue’s treasurer. The latter distributes it gradually to the rabbis who ask for it, or for their own use, or for sending to those countries where it is impossible to obtain Christian blood, whether because there are no Christians there or because the police have been roused to be more watchful and the Christians more careful.

 

            “In any case, fresh blood is always preferable, but it is necessary only for the unleavened bread, and in the case of insurmountable obstacles the indicated dark ash represents an acceptable substitute.

 

            “Circumcision. A rabbi also appears for the circumcision of children on the eighth day after birth. He puts into a cup some of the best wine he can get hold of and pours one drop of Christian blood into it. It has been collected from torture, but if that is not available, some of the above-mentioned ash is used, into which a drop of the blood of the circumcised child is added. When this is well mixed with the wine, the rabbi immerses the finger of the child into the cup and says: ‘I declare to you, child: your life is in your blood.’ And he twice repeats this rite and these words.

 

            “Here is a superstitious explanation which the rabbis give for this ceremony amongst themselves. The Prophet Ezekiel twice said: ‘“Live in your blood!” Thus I say to you: “Live in your blood!”‘ (Ezekiel 16.6). By these words the prophet perhaps wanted to indicate the blood of Jesus Christ, Who freed from bonds the souls of the holy fathers who did not receive a water baptism; and in such a case the souls of the Jews, although also themselves deprived of the water of baptism, will be saved by the blood of a Christian baptised in water. But one of the reasons why this blood must be collected amidst the cruel sufferings of the victim is precisely the necessity of representing thereby the Passion of Christ. On the contrary, if the Prophet Ezekiel wanted to speak only about every man’s blood of circumcision, then the Jewish child will be saved by the power of the single drop of blood mixed by the rabbi in the wine with the Christian blood. What a pitiful nation!

 

            “The anniversary of the taking of Jerusalem. The Jews again use the ash of which I have spoken on the ninth day of July, when they weep over the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. On this anniversary they use it in two ways: first, they wipe their forehead with it, which they thought would be unseemly to do with fresh blood, and secondly, they sprinkle an egg with it, and on that day every son of Israel without exception must eat a hard-boiled egg sprinkled with this ash…

 

            “Death. A haham immediately goes to the house of him of whose death he just learned. He takes the white of an egg, mixes into it some Christian blood and a little ash and puts this mixture into the breast of the corpse, uttering the supposed words of Ezekiel: ‘I shall sprinkle you with pure blood and you will be cleansed from all your filthiness’ (Ezekiel 36.25). Ezekiel, it is true, said, not ‘pure blood’, but ‘pure water’… But by dint of this corruption of the text the Jews convince themselves that the dead man will undoubtedly be admitted to paradise.

 

            “The feasts of Pascha and Purim. These two feasts demand the same blood ritual.

 

            “On paschal days the Jews must eat unleavened bread, small breads prepared only by hahams, into which Christian blood has been poured. Everyone, nobles and simple people, young and old, even those without teeth, must taste of this bread, even if it only a crumb the size of an olive…

 

            “The feast of Purim was established in memory of the deliverance from the dominion of Haman by means of Esther and Mordecai, as this is recounted in the book of Esther. As is known, this feast comes in February. The initiated Jews are then occupied, wherever they can, with seizing as many Christians as possible, especially children. However, in this night they sacrifice only one, reproducing the torments of Haman. But for this reason, while the body is hanging, all those present cover it with thousands of insults, as if they were addressing Haman himself. The collected blood is poured out by the rabbi into flour that has already been dissolved with honey, from which he then makes small breads in the form of a triangle for the sake of ridiculing the mystery of the Holy Trinity. These breads are meant, not for the Jews, but through boundless cunning they are distributed to the most eminent families, which must give them away – and these gifts are considered the height of kindness – to their friends from among the Christians. This rite is called the Bread of Purim.

 

            “We should note that this rite does not require the application of too heavy tortures to the victim precisely because the collected blood does not have any other purpose than the one I have indicated.

 

            “The rest of kidnapped Christians, however, are kept in secret hiding-places until the day of Pascha, which comes shortly after Purim. At this time they are all offered in sacrifice in the cruellest and most barbaric manner, and they collect their blood partly for the unleavened bread and partly for other necessities which come up in the course of the year and have been indicated above. These torments at Pascha have a definite aim – to renew the sufferings of Christ, and for that reason they must be carried out mainly on children who through their innocence and virginity better symbolise the Saviour.

 

            “In these depressing pourings out of blood the words of Jeremiah written in prophecy about the Jews are justified: ‘Even on the hems of your clothes is found the blood of poor innocent people’ (Jeremiah 2.34), and still better the words of Ezekiel: ‘You eat with blood… and shed blood’ (Ezekiel 33.25). In consequence of these innumerable murders Israel was expelled from various states, in particular from Spain, thereby justifying another prophecy of Ezekiel: ‘Blood calls you to court’ (Ezekiel 30.6).”[44]

 

            Archbishop Anthony’s attitude to Jewish blood rituals in general, and the Beilis trial in particular, was expressed in an interview he gave to A. Chizhevsky. After reminding his readers of how, at the request of Rabbi Skomorovsky, he had twice, in 1903 and 1905, spoken up against the antisemite pogroms in Zhitomir, he went on: “But in both of the above-mentioned cases of my conversation with the rabbi, I decisively refused to say that I did not recognize the existence of ritual murders carried out by Jews, but on the contrary I expressed to my interlocuter my conviction that these murders exist, perhaps as belonging to one or another sect of the Jewish religion, perhaps as a secret of the highest spiritual government of the Jews, but there undoubtedly have been cases of ritual murders both in recent times and in antiquity.

 

            “When my Jewish academic acquaintances pointed to the fact that Jewish law forbids the drinking of the blood even of animals, so that the thought their mixing Christian blood with the paschal matsa was absurd, I replied that what seemed more probable to me was the link between the ritual killings and, not the Jewish feast of Pascha, but the feast that precedes it of ‘Purim’, in which the story of Esther, Haman and Mordecai is remembered, when the Persian king, having executed the enemy of the Jews, Haman, allowed them, who had not long before been condemned to general killing, to kill their enemies themselves. Purim in 1911 [the year of the ritual killing of Andrew Yuschinsky] took place on March 14 and 15, while the Jewish Pascha was from March 15-18…

 

            “Already in deep antiquity the Jews were causing various disorders against various symbols hostile to them during this feast. Thus in 408 and 412 the Byzantine emperor issued two special decrees forbidding the Jews from celebrating Purim and to mock Christian crosses instead of Haman. I think that Christian children were also killed on this feast…[45]

 

 

The Name-Worshipping Heresy

 

            At the beginning of the 20th century there arose the heresy of name-worshipping (imyaslavie or imyabozhie in Russian), which consists in the belief that the Name of God is not only holy and filled with the grace of God, but is holy in and of itself, being God Himself. It arose first in the Caucasus, and then among Russian monks on Mount Athos, with the publication, in 1907, by Schema-monk Hilarion, of a book on the Jesus prayer entitled On the Mountains of the Caucasus. This book was at first well-received and passed the spiritual censor; but later its claim that the name of God is God elicited criticism. Soon monastic opinion in Russia was polarised between those who, like the monks of the Kiev Caves Lavra, approved of the book and its name-worshipping thesis, and those, like the monks of the Pochaev Lavra and the Optina Desert, who rejected it. The heresy was condemned by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1912 (Charter No. 8522 of Patriarch Joachim III to Mount Athos, dated September 12) and 1913 (Charter No. 758 of Patriarch German V to Mount Athos, dated February 15), and by the Russian Holy Synod in 1913 (Epistle of May 18, and Decree of August 27, No. 7644)[46].

 

            However, as Vladimir Gubanov writes, “the illiterate G.E. Rasputin interceded for the heretical name-worshippers and even tried to incite the empress to attack the fighters against the heresy of name-worshipping.”[47] In 1914 the leading name-worshippers, including Hieroschemamonk Anthony (Bulatovich), author of An Apology of Faith in the Name of God and the Name of Jesus (1913), were justified by the Moscow Diocesan Court, which declared: “… The Synodal Office has found that in the confessions of faith in God and in the Name of God coming from the named monks, in the words, ‘I repeat that in naming the Name of God and the Name of Jesus as God and God Himself, I reject both the veneration of the Name of God as His Essence, and the veneration of the Name of God separately from God Himself as some kind of special Divinity, as well as any deification of the very letters and sounds and any chance thoughts about God’ – there is contained information allowing us to conclude that in them there is no basis for leaving the Orthodox Church for the sake of the teaching on the Names of God.’ (decree № 1443 of May 8, 1914)”.

 

            Of course, this decree does not constitute a “justification” of the name-worshippers’ teaching, especially in view of the fact that on the same day the Office, led by Metropolitan Macarius, affirmed that name-worshipping – “the new false-teachings on the names of God proclaimed by Schema-Monk Hilarion and Anthony Bulatovich” – was a heresy (decree № 1442 of May 8, 1914). Moreover, in rejecting “any deification of the very letters and sounds and any chance thoughts about God”, Bulatovich was obliged also to renounce his words in the Apology: “Every mental representation of a named property of God is the Name of God [and therefore, according to the name-worshippers, God Himself]”, “the contemplation of the His name is God Himself”, “the conscious naming of God is God Himself”, “Every idea about God is God Himself”, “we call the very idea of God – God”. But did he in fact repent?  

 

            Unfortunately, the repentance of the name-worshippers turned out to be fictional. Bulatovich did not repent, but concealed his heresy behind ambiguous words and phrases. Thus on May 18, 1914, in a letter to Metropolitan Macarius, Bulatovich thanked him for his “justification”, and nobly deigned to declare that he was now ready to return into communion with the Orthodox Church (!). And he added: “Concerning the Name of God and the Name of Jesus Christ, we, in accordance with the teaching of the Holy Fathers, confessed and confess the Divinity and the Divine Power of the Name of the Lord, but we do not raise this teaching to the level of a dogma, for it has not yet been formulated and dogmatised in council, but we expect that at the forthcoming Council it will be formulated and dogmatised. Therefore we, in accordance with the teaching of the Holy Fathers, in the words of the ever-memorable Father John of Kronstadt said and say that the Name of God is God Himself, and the Name of the Lord Jesus is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, understanding this not in the sense of a deification of the created name, but understanding it spiritually, in the sense of the inseparability of the God-revealed Truth, Which is the Action of the Divinity.”

 

            These words of Bulatovich show that he was not sincere in his signature below the confession of faith in God and in the Name of God, but deceived Metropolitan Macarius (who was probably under pressure from the Over-Procurator Sabler, who was in turn under pressure from the fervent name-worshippers Gregory Rasputin). Mixing truth with unrighteousness” (Rom. 1.18), Bulatovich mixed Orthodoxy with heresy. Thus Orthodoxy recognises that there is a “Divine Power” in the name of Jesus, but does not recognise that it is “Divinity”. Again, Orthodoxy recognises that in prayer the name of God is indeed inseparable from God, but it does not confuse the two, as does Bulatovich. For while a shadow is inseparable from the body that casts it, this is not to say that the shadow is the body. Finally, Bulatovich’s “dogmais still notformulated and dogmatised in council” – because it is not a dogma, but heresy!

 

            The Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church accepted that Bulatovich and his fellows had not really repented, so they set aside decree № 1442 of the Moscow Synodal Office, and confirmed the sentences against the name-worshippers (decree № 4136 of May 10-24, 1914), which confirmation was again confirmed by decree № 2670 of March 10, 1916. “In this decree of the Most Holy Synod,” wrote the future Hieromartyr Basil (Zelentsov), Bishop of Priluki, “we find a confirmation of the basic rule that the name-worshippers must be received into ecclesiastical communion and admitted to the sacraments of the Church only on the unfailing condition that they reject the false teaching of name-worshipping and witness to their faithfulness to the dogmas and teaching of the Church and to their obedience to Church authority”

 

            Although name-worshipping was on the agenda of the 1917-18 Council and a subcommission to study it under the leadership of Archbishop Theophan of Poltava and Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, the subcommission did not have time to complete its work before the Council was terminated by the Bolsheviks. However, on October 8/21, 1918, Patriarch Tikhon and the Most Holy Synod declared: “The Most Holy Synod does not change its former judgement on the error itself [of name-worshipping]… and has in no way changed its general rule, according to which the name-worshippers, as having been condemned by the Church authorities, can be received into Church communion… only after they have renounced name-worshipping and have declared their submission to the Holy Church… The petition of Hieroschemamonk Anthony to allow him to serve is to be recognised as not worthy of being satisfied so long as he continues to disobey Church authority and spread his musings which have been condemned by the Church hierarchy to the harm of the Church”.

 

            After this decision, the leading name-worshipper, Anthony Bulatovich, broke communion for the second time with the Russian Church and was shortly afterwards killed by robbers.

 

            In spite of all these condemnations, the name-worshipping movement did not die out; it survived in the Caucasus and South Russian region (where the Tsar had transported the rebellious monks); and the sophianist heretics Florensky and Bulgakov also confessed name-worshipping in the inter-war period. In modern times the heresy has enjoyed a revival in intellectualist circles in Russia, especially in the works of Hieromonk Gregory (Lourié) of St. Petersburg, who supports the heretical views of Bulatovich, considers Bulatovich himself to be a saint, and those who oppose his ideas, including several hieromartyrs of the Russian Church to be “enemies of the Name”!         

 

            One reason for the failure to stamp out the heresy was the comparatively weak defence of the truth produced by the Greek and Russian theologians[48], the aura of martyrdom which was attached to the name-worshippers as a result of their forcible expulsion from Mount Athos to Russia on a Russian cruiser, and the fact that the heresy coincided with the end of the Balkan wars and the transfer of Mount Athos from Turkish to Greek dominion after the Treaty of Bucharest, which meant that mutual suspicions between the Greeks and the Russians concerning the status of Athos hindered a united and thorough approach to the problem. Many took up the cause of the name-worshippers as part of their general attack on the “paralytical” Russian Holy Synod, and the whole debate soon acquired political overtones, with the democratic and socialist left generally taking the side of the name-worshippers and the monarchists taking the side of the Orthodox.[49] Patriarch Tikhon indicated that the controversy needs further study “in essence” at a future Pan-Russian (or Ecumenical) Council. But this does not mean, as some have claimed, that the Church has not delivered its verdict on the question. She has delivered her verdict: but the reasons for that verdict need to be more extensively elaborated, and the “positive” teaching of the Church on the relationship between the uncreated and the created in prayer needs to be expounded still more clearly and thoroughly.[50]

 

 

The February Revolution

 

            But let us now turn to that phenomenon which was to sweep away the State and bring the Russian Orthodox Church, and through her the whole of the Church of Christ on earth, to the very edge of total destruction – the Russian revolution.

 

            “Terrible and mysterious,” wrote Metropolitan Anastasius, second leader of the Russian Church Abroad, “is the dark visage of the revolution. Viewed from the vantage point of its inner essence, it is not contained within the framework of history and cannot be studied on the same level as other historical facts. In its deepest roots it transcends the boundaries of space and time, as was determined by Gustave le Bon, who considered it an irrational phenomenon in which certain mystical, supernatural powers were at work. But what before may have been considered dubious became completely obvious after the Russian Revolution. In it everyone sensed, as one contemporary writer expressed himself, the critical incarnation of absolute evil in the temper of man; in other words, the participation of the devil – that father of lies and ancient enemy of God, who tries to make man his obedient weapon against God – was clearly revealed.”[51]

 

            Great lights such as St. John of Kronstadt had warned of the coming catastrophe. In 1907 Bishop Andronicus, the future hieromartyr, wrote: “It is not a question of the struggle between two administrative regimes, but of a struggle between faith and unbelief, between Christianity and antichristianity. The ancient antichristian plot, which was begun by those who shouted furiously to Pilate about Jesus Christ: ‘Crucify Him, crucify Him: His blood be on us and on our children’  – continued in various branches and secret societies. In the 16th century it poured into the special secret antichristian order of the Templars, and in the 18th century it became more definite in the Illuminati, the Rosencrucians and, finally, in Freemasonry it merged into a universal Jewish organization. And now, having gathered strength to the point where France is completely in the hands of the Masons, it – Masonry – already openly persecutes Christianity out of existence there. In the end Masonry will be poured out into one man of iniquity, the son of destruction – the Antichrist (II Thessalonians 2). In this resides the solution of the riddle of our most recent freedoms: their aim is the destruction of Christianity in Rus’. That is why what used to be the French word ‘liberal’, which meant among the Masons a ‘generous’ contributor to the Masonic aims, and then received the meaning of ‘freedom-loving’ with regard to questions of faith, has now already passed openly over to antichristianity. In this resides the solution of the riddle of that stubborn battle for control of the school, which is being waged in the zemstvo and the State Duma: if the liberal tendency gains control of the school, the success of antichristianity is guaranteed. In this resides the solution of the riddle of the sympathy of liberals for all kinds of sects in Christianity and non-Christian religions. And the sectarians have not been slumbering – they have now set about attacking the little children… And when your children grow up and enter university – there Milyukov [the future foreign minister in the Provisional Government] and co. will juggle with the facts and deceive them, teaching them that science has proved man’s origin from the apes. And they will really make our children into beasts, with just this difference, that the ape is a humble and obedient animal whereas these men-beasts will be proud, bold, cruel and unclean….”[52]

 

            Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Prophet Abel had prophesied to Tsar Paul I: ‘Nicholas II will be a holy tsar, like Job the much-suffering. He will have the mind of Christ, patience and dove-like purity. The Scriptures speak about him: Psalms 90, 10 and 20 have revealed to me the whole of his destiny. He will exchange a royal crown for a crown of thorns, will be betrayed by his people as was once the Son of God. He will be a redeemer, he will redeem his people, like the bloodless sacrifice. There will be a war, a great war, a world war. People will fly through the air like birds, and swim under the water like fish, they will begin to exterminate each other with evil-smelling sulphur. On the eve of victory the Russian throne will collapse. But the betrayal will grow and multiply. And your great-grandson will be betrayed, many of your descendants will also whiten their garments in the blood of the Lamb, the peasant will seize power with his axe in madness, but he himself will later weep. A truly Egyptian punishment will begin… Blood and tears will soak the wet earth. Rivers of blood will flow. Brother will rise up against brother. And again: fire, the sword, invasions of aliens and the inner enemy of the godless authority. The Jew will beat the Russian land with a scorpion, he will take hold of her holy things, close the churches of God and execute the best Russian people. This will be allowed by God, it will be the wrath of the Lord against Russian for her rejection of her God-anointed [tsar]”.[53]

 

            The Tsar abdicated on March 2/15, 1917, noting in his diary for the day that he was surrounded “by treason, deceit and cowardice”. And indeed, most of the leading men of the kingdom, including grand-dukes, generals, ministers and parliamentarians, had been urging him to abdicate, so for him to hold on to power would have been almost impossible, and would almost certainly have led to a civil war. It was in order to avoid civil war at a time of world war against Germany that the Tsar abdicated in favour of his brother, Great-Prince Michael.

 

            Was he right? His advisor, the great eldress Paraskeva (Pasha) of Sarov (+1915), who had foretold his destiny at the glorification of St. Seraphim of Sarov in 1903, is reported to have said: “Your Majesty, descend from the throne yourself”.[54] However, another great eldress, Blessed Matrona of Moscow (+1952), later said: “In vain did Emperor Nicholas renounce the throne, he shouldn’t have done that. They forced him to do it. He was sorry for the people, and paid the price himself, knowing his path beforehand.”[55]

 

            Moreover, as Mikhail Nazarov points out, the Basic Laws of the Russian Empire, which had been drawn up by Tsar Paul I and which all members of the Royal Family swore to uphold, “do not foresee the abdication of a reigning Emperor (‘from a religious… point of view the abdication of the Monarch, the Anointed of God, is contrary to the act of His Sacred Coronation and Anointing; it would be possible only by means of monastic tonsure’ [N. Korevo]). Still less did his Majesty have the right to abdicate for his son in favour of his brother; while his brother Michael Alexandrovich had the right neither to ascend the Throne during the lifetime of the adolescent Tsarevich Alexis, nor be crowned, since he was married to a divorced woman, nor to transfer power to the Provisional government, or refer the resolution of the question of the fate of the monarchy to the future Constituent Assembly.

 

            “Even if the monarch had been installed by the will of such an Assembly, ‘this would have been the abolition of the Orthodox-legitimate principle of the Basic Laws’, so that these acts would have been ‘juridically non-existent’, says Zyzykin (in this Korevo agrees with him0. ‘Great Prince Mikhail Alexandrovich… performed only an act in which he expressed his personal opinions and abdication, which had an obligatory force for nobody. Thereby he estranged himself from the succession in accordance with the Basic Laws, which juridically in his eyes did not exist, in spite of the fact that he had earlier, in his capacity as Great Prince on the day of his coming of age, sworn allegiance to the decrees of the Basic Laws on the inheritance of the Throne and the order of the Family Institution’.

 

            “It goes without saying that his Majesty did not expect such a step from his brother, a step which placed the very monarchical order under question… However, Great Prince Mikhail Alexandrovich also acted under duress, under the pressure of the plotters who came to his house. Kerensky admitted that this had been their aim: ‘We decided to surround the act of abdication of Mikhail Alexandrovich with every guarantee, but in such a way as to give the abdication a voluntary character’”.[56]

 

            Truly, the results of the Tsar’s abdication for Russia were different from what he had hoped and believed. Instead of an orderly transfer of power from one member of the royal family to another, Great-Prince Michael also abdicated, and the whole dynasty and autocratic order collapsed. And instead of preventing civil war for the sake of victory in the world war, the abdication was followed by defeat in the world war and the bloodiest civil war in world history, with the tormented country left in the hands of a God-fighting anti-authority, “the collective Antichrist”.

 

            How did the Orthodox Church react to the fall of the Orthodox monarchy? With surprising indifference in view of the enormous, indeed apocalyptic significance of the event. Sadly, even the Holy Synod failed to measure up to its responsibilities at this time. The first question that needed to be answered concerned the legitimacy of the new Provisional Government. The constitution of the Russian Empire did not allow for any transition to a non-autocratic, still less an anti-autocratic form of government. However, the Synod showed itself to be at a loss at this critical moment. At its session of February 26 (old style), it refused the request of the Assistant Procurator, Prince N.D. Zhevakhov, that the creators of disturbances should be threatened with ecclesiastical punishments.[57] Then, after the resignation of the Tsar, it refused the request of the Procurator, N.P. Raev, that it publicly support the monarchy. Rather, it welcomed Great Prince Michael’s refusal to accept the throne from his brother, offered no resistance when the Royal Throne was removed by the new Procurator, Prince V. Lvov, from the hall in which its sessions took place, and on March 9/22 published an Address to the faithful children of the Orthodox Church in which it declared that “the will of God has been accomplished” and called on the church people to support the new government. “Trust the Provisional Government,” said the Synod. All together and everyone individually, apply all your efforts to the end that by your labours, exploits, prayer and obedience you may help it in its great work of introducing new principles of State life…”[58]

 

            “This document, which appeared during the days when the whole of Orthodox Russia was anxiously waiting for what the Church would say with regard to the events that had taken place in the country, introduced no clarity into the ecclesiastical consciousness of the people. The Synod did not utter a word about the arrest of the Emperor and even of his completely innocent children, about the bloody lynch-mob trials established by the soldiers over their officers or about the disorders that had led to the death of people; it did not give a religio-moral evaluation of the revolutionary excesses, it did not condemn the guilty ones. Finally, the Address completely ignored the question how one should relate to the deposition and arrest of the Anointed of God, how to conduct Divine services in church without the important prayer for the prosperity of the Emperor’s House…”[59]

 

            For the liberals in the Church, however, the Synod’s Address did not go far enough. They wanted the removal not only of the Tsar, but also of the very concept of Sacred Monarchy. In its sessions of March 11 and 12, the Council of the Petrograd religious-philosophical society resolved that the Synod’s acceptance of the Tsar’s abdication “does not correspond to the enormous religious importance of the act, by which the Church recognized the Tsar in the rite of the coronation of the anointed of God. It is necessary, for the liberation of the people’s conscience and to avoid the possibility of a restoration, that a corresponding act be issued in the name of the Church hierarchy abolishing the power of the Sacrament of Royal Anointing, by analogy with the church acts abolishing the power of the Sacraments of Marriage and the Priesthood.”[60]

 

            In the end very few refused to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Among the few was Count Paul Mikhailovich Grabbe, who later raised the question of the restoration of the patriarchate at the Local Council of the Russian Church and some years after that received a martyr’s crown. Only slightly less uncompromising was the leading monarchist hierarch, Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky), who on March 5/18 preached to his flock in Kharkov: “When we received the news of the abdication from the Throne of the Most Pious Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich, we prepared, in accordance with his direction, to commemorate the Most Pious Emperor Michael Alexandrovich. But now he, too, has abdicated, and has ordered obedience to the Provisional Government, and that is the reason, and the only reason, why we commemorate the Provisional Government. Otherwise no power would be able to force us to cease the commemoration of the Tsar and the Tsar’s House.”[61]

 

            Probably the best justification of the Synod’s line was expressed by Archpriest John Vostorgov, who was to receive a martyr’s crown the next year: “Our former Emperor, who has abdicated from the throne, transferred power in a lawful manner to his brother. In his turn the brother of the Emperor, having abdicated from power until the final decision of the Constituent Assembly, in the same lawful manner transferred power to the Provisional Government, and to that permanent government that which be given to Russia by the Constituent Assembly. And so we now have a completely lawful Provisional Government which is the powers that be, as the Word of God calls it. To this power, which is now the One Supreme and All-Russian power, we are obliged to submit in accordance with the duty of religious conscience; we are obliged to pray for it; we are obliged also to obey the local authorities established by it. In this obedience, after the abdication of the former Emperor and his brother, and after their indications that the Provisional Government is lawful, there can be no betrayal of the former oath, but in it consists our direct duty.”[62]

 

            And yet, when the foreign minister of the new government, Paul Milyukov, was asked who had elected his government, he replied: “The Russian revolution elected us”.[63] But the revolution cannot be lawful, being the incarnation of lawlessness… Therefore confusion and searching of consciences continued. This can be seen in a letter of some Orthodox Christians to the Holy Synod dated July 24, 1917: “We Orthodox Christians most ardently beseech you to explain to us in the newspaper Russkoye Slovo what… the oath given to us to be faithful to the Tsar, Nicholas Alexandrovich, means. People are saying in our area that if this oath is worth nothing, then the new oath to the new Tsar [the Provisional Government?] will be worth nothing. Which oath must be more pleasing to God. The first or the second? Because the Tsar is not dead, but is alive and in prison…”[64]

 

            In any case, the Holy Synod was soon to learn from its own experience what the new government really represented. Instead of the separation between Church and State which the government promised and so many Church leaders longed for, the new Procurator, Prince V.N. Lvov, immediately began to act like a new dictator worse than any of the Procurators of the Tsarist period. As we have seen, at the beginning of his first appearance at the Synod on March 4/17, he removed the Royal Throne (it was placed in a museum). Two days later he secured the forced retirement of the Metropolitan of Petrograd, Pitirim, on the grounds that he had been placed in his see by Rasputin. The removal of the highly-respected Metropolitan of Moscow, Macarius, Apostle of the Altai, required a little more time (he was removed from his see on March 20 and retired on April 1), and was accomplished only after a personal visit to Moscow by Lvov to stir up opposition to the metropolitan among his priests and laity.

 

            Metropolitan Macarius was never reconciled with his forced and uncanonical removal from his see. This is what he later wrote about the Provisional Government as a whole and Lvov in particular: “They corrupted the army with their speeches. They opened the prisons. They released onto the peaceful population convicts, thieves and robbers. They abolished the police and administration, placing the life and property of citizens at the disposal of every armed rogue… They destroyed trade and industry, imposing taxes that swallowed up the profits of enterprises… They squandered the resources of the exchequer in a crazy manner. They radically undermined all the sources of life in the country. They established elections to the Constituent Assembly on bases that are incomprehensible to Russia. They defiled the Russian language, distorting it for the amusement of half-illiterates and sluggards. They did not even guard their own honour, violating the promise they had given to the abdicated Tsar to allow him and his family free departure, by which they prepared for him inevitable death…

 

            “Who started the persecution on the Orthodox Church and handed her head over to crucifixion? Who demanded the execution of the Patriarch? Was it those whom the Duma decried as ‘servants of the dark forces’, labelled as enemies of the freedom of the Church?… No, it was not those, but those him the Duma opposed to them as a true defender of the Church, whom it intended for, and promoted to the rank of over-procurator of the Most Holy Synod – the member of the Provisional Government, now servant of the Sovnarkom – Vladimir Lvov.”[65]

 

            On March 13/26, Lvov’s actions were recognised to be “uncanonical and illegal” by the Synod. On April 14/27, a stormy meeting took place between Lvov and the Synod. The subject was the unlawful transfer by Lvov of the Holy Synod’s official organ, Tserkovno-Obshchestvennij Vestnik, into the hands of the renovationist Professor Titlinov, who was now using it to preach his Gospel of “Socialist Christianity”. The next day Lvov marched into the Synod at the head of a detachment of soldiers and read an order for the cessation of the winter session of the Synod and the retirement of all its members with the single exception of Archbishop Sergius (Stragorodsky) of Finland.

 

            Thus in little more than a month since the abdication of the Tsar, the Church had been effectively placed in the hands of a lay dictator, who had single-handedly dismissed her most senior bishops in the name of the “freedom of the Church”. But who was this Archbishop Sergius, the one member of the old Synod that the revolutionary powers did not want to remove?

 

            Archbishop Sergius (born 1867) was perhaps the most prominent of the learned, academic bishops of Russia after his teacher, Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky). Thanks to his erudition and the well-known “suppleness” of his views, he took a very active part in the work of the society for the rapprochement of the Orthodox and Anglican Churches. This sympathy for the ideas of the West manifested itself also in his active participation in the activities of the liberal religious-philosophical society of St. Petersburg, from whose bosom there came the heretics S. Bulgakov and N. Berdyaev and the future renovationist leader Antonin (Granovsky). His political sympathies were also leftist. Thus “when in 1905 the revolutionary professors began to demand reforms in the spiritual schools, then, in the words of Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), ‘his Grace Sergius… wavered in faith.’”[66] Again, when the revolutionary Peter Schmidt was shot in 1906, Archbishop Sergius, who was at that time rector of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, served a pannikhida at his grave; and he also gave refuge in his hierarchical house in Vyborg to the revolutionaries Michael Novorussky and Nicholas Morozov (a participant in the attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II). Having such sympathies, it is not surprising that he was not liked by the Royal Family: in 1915 the Empress wrote to the Emperor that Sergius “must leave the Synod”.[67]

 

            Sergius was in favour of many of the innovations that were later to be introduced by the heretical “living church” renovationists. Thus among the suggestions made to the Pre-Conciliar Commission preparing for the Council of the Russian Orthodox Church that eventually took place in 1917-1918, we read of “a suggestion of the clergy of the cathedral of Vyborg on the longed-for reforms, presented by Archbishop Sergius of Finland to the Holy Synod on January 18, 1906:

 

 

            Sergius also called for another popular aim of the liberals – the complete separation of Church and State.[69] This was in complete contrast to his behaviour after the revolution, when he was among the closest collaborators of both the Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks. Thus he was among those who welcomed the February revolution – although, as we have seen, there were many other bishops and priests who did the same. And, as Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) testified, “already in 1917 he was dreaming of combining Orthodox Church life with the subjection of the Russian land to Soviet power…”[70]

 

            Already on March 7, 1917 an organisation was founded in Petrograd with the title “All-Russian Union of the democratic clergy and laity”. This organisation was the embryo of the future renovationist schism. Their supporter in the Synod was Sergius, who, together with one other member of the Synod, approved Lvov’s transfer of the Synod’s official organ, Tserkovno-Obshchestvennij Vestnik, into the hands of Titlinov.

 

            Now Titlinov was a professor at the Petrograd Academy of which Sergius was the rector; the two worked closely together, being inspired by the same liberal views. Archbishop (later Patriarch) Tikhon had protested against this transfer, and the small number of signatures for the transfer made it illegal. Lvov, however, in his zeal to hand this important Church organ into the hands of the liberals, completely ignored the illegality of the act and handed the press over to Titlinov.[71]

 

            At the session of April 14/27, Sergius apparently changed course and agreed with the other bishops in condemning the unlawful transfer. However, Lvov understood that this was only a tactical protest. So he did not include Sergius among the bishops whom he purged from the Synod. He thought that Sergius would continue to be his tool in the revolution that he was introducing in the Church. And he was right in so thinking.

 

            For on April 29 / May 12, the new Synod headed by Archbishop Sergius accepted an Address to the Church concerning the establishment of the principle of the election of the episcopate, and the preparation for a Council and the establishment of a Preconciliar Council. This Address triggered a revolution in the Church. The revolution consisted in the fact that all over the country the elective principle with the participation of laymen replaced the system of “episcopal autocracy” which had prevailed thereto. In almost all dioceses Diocesan Congresses elected special “diocesan councils” or committees composed of clergy and laity that restricted the power of the bishops. The application of the elective principle to almost all ecclesiastical posts, from parish offices to episcopal sees, resulted in the removal of several bishops from their sees and the election of new ones in their stead.

 

            Although the spirit behind this revolutionary wave was undoubtedly anti-ecclesiastical in essence, by the Providence of God it resulted in some changes that were beneficial for the Church. Thus the staunchly monarchist Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kharkov, after being forced to retire, was later reinstated at the demand of the people. Again, Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) of Lithuania was elected metropolitan of Moscow, and Archbishop Benjamin (Kazansky) was made metropolitan of Petrograd. However, there were also harmful changes, such as the removal of the metropolitan of Vladimir and his replacement by – Archbishop Sergius.[72] And, as we shall see, the democratic revolution in the Church had a particularly deleterious effect when combined with nationalist passions, as in Georgia and the Ukraine.

 

            From June 1 to 7 an All-Russian Congress of clergy and laity took place in Moscow consisting of 800 delegates from all the dioceses. This Congress carried forward the renovationist wave; and with Archbishop Sergius in charge of the Preconciliar Council, it looked as if the All-Russian Council that was being prepared would finally seal the break with the pre-revolutionary past and bring the Russian Church into the mainstream of twentieth-century ecclesiastical life, by which the liberals meant, in effect, her protestantization. But it was not to be.

 

            On June 20, the Provisional Government transferred 37,000 church-parish schools into the administration of the Ministry of Enlightenment. This was disastrous for the Church because the state’s schools were infected with atheism. It would be one of the first decrees that the coming Council of the Russian Orthodox Church would seek (unsuccessfully) to have repealed…

 

 

The Moscow Council of 1917-18

 

            The Council, the first in the history of the Russian Church since 1666, assembled in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow on August 15/28, being composed of 564 delegates, including 350 laymen.

 

            At the beginning there was little sign that more than a minority of the delegates understood the full apocalyptic significance of the events they were living through. On August 24 / September 6, and again on October 20 / November 2, the Council issued statements condemning the increasing violence, theft and sacrilege against churches, monasteries and priests that had been increasing ever since February. In general, however, revolutionary sentiment was dominant, and many opposed one of the main items on the agenda, the restoration of the patriarchate, on the grounds that it was a reactionary, monarchist measure (the Pre-Conciliar Council in June had called it “antichristian”!).

 

            On October 21 / November 3, during Vespers in the Dormition cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, two people dressed in soldiers’ uniforms went up to the shrine and relics of St. Hermogen, Patriarch of Moscow, threw off the covers and began to remove the vestments. When taken to the commissariat, they told the police that “now there is freedom and everyone can do anything he wants”. Three days later a penitential moleben was carried out in front of the shrine with the holy relics. The next day, the October revolution took place.[73] St. Hermogen, who been canonized by the Church only a few years before, was notable for his refusal to recognize the government of the False Demetrius, and for his call to the nation to rise up in arms against it. For those with eyes to see the incident at his shrine just before the coming to power of the Bolsheviks was a sign that the time had come to act in his spirit, against another false or anti-government.

 

            The Council seemed to understand this, for after the Bolsheviks came to power a new spirit began to prevail in it. One of the delegates, Metropolitan Eulogius of Western Europe, described the change thus: “Russian life in those days was like a sea tossed by the storm of revolution. Church life had fallen into a state of disorganization. The external appearance of the Council, because of the diversity of its composition, its irreconciliability and the mutual hostility of its different tendencies and states of mind, was at first matter for anxiety and sadness and even seemed to constitute a cause for apprehension… Some members of the Council had already been carried away by the wave of revolution. The intelligentsia, peasants, workers and professors all tended irresistibly to the left. Among the clergy there were also different elements. Some of them proved to be ‘leftist’ participants of the previous revolutionary Moscow Diocesan Congress, who stood for a thorough and many-sided reform of church life. Disunion, disorder, dissatisfaction, even mutual distrust… – such was the state of the Council at first. But – O miracle of God! – everything began gradually to change… The disorderly assembly, moved by the revolution and in contact with its sombre elements, began to change into something like a harmonious whole, showing external order and internal solidarity. People became peaceable and serious in their tasks and began to feel differently and to look on things in a different way. This process of prayerful regeneration was evident to every observant eye and perceptible to every participant in the Council. A spirit of peace, renewal and unanimity inspired us all…”[74]

 

            The Council was in session for over a year, until September, 1918. It thus coincided with the most momentous events in Russian history: the war with Germany, the fall of the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik coup, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the beginning of the Civil War. On all these events the Council was able to make declarations that expressed the opinion of Believing Russia. In a real sense, in the absence of any other representative assembly, it was the voice of Russia – or, at any rate, of that large proportion of the population which had not been engulfed by the revolutionary frenzy. As for the Bolsheviks, whose decrees with regard to the Church were either ignored or outrightly defied by the Council, they made no serious attempt to impede its work…

 

            The significance of the Council for the understanding and evaluation of the present state of the Russian Church cannot be overestimated. It pronounced authoritatively on almost all the major questions that were to divide Russian Orthodox Christians during the next seventy-five years. Let us look at each of these in turn:-

 

            1. The Election of a Patriarch. As we have seen the pre-conciliar council in June had expressed itself strongly against the restoration of the patriarchate, and at the beginning of the Council proper the proposal met with considerable opposition. However, the opposition steadily declined in strength during the autumn, largely due to the energetic support of the patriarchate by Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) and the future Hieromartyr Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky). On October 30 the first ballot produced the following result: for Archbishop Anthony – 101 votes; for Archbishop Cyril of Tambov (the future hieromartyr and first-hierarch of the Catacomb Church) – 27; and for the new Metropolitan of Moscow Tikhon – 23 votes. At the second ballot on October 31 three candidates were elected: Archbishop Anthony of Kharkov, Metropolitan Arsenius of Novgorod and Metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow. On November 5, lots were drawn, and the let fell on Metropolitan Tikhon, who was duly enthroned on November 21 in the Kremlin cathedral of the Dormition to the sound of rifle fire from the battle for Moscow outside. Thus was the wish of one of the peasant delegates fulfilled: “We have a tsar no more; no father whom we love. It is impossible to love a synod; and therefore we, the peasants, want a Patriarch.”

 

            According to the new constitution of the Russian Church agreed at the Council, the Church’s supreme organ was the Sacred All-Russian Council, composed of bishops, clergy and laity, which was to be periodically convoked by the Patriarch but to which the Patriarch himself was responsible. Between Councils, the Patriarch administered the Church with the aid of two permanent bodies: the Synod of Bishops, and the Higher Church Council. Questions relating to theology, religious discipline and ecclesiastical administration were to be the prerogative of the Synod of Bishops, while secular-juridical, charity and other church-related social questions were to be the prerogative of the Higher Church Council.

 

            On January 23, 1918, the Bolsheviks issued their Decree on the Separation of Church from State and School from Church. On January 25, the Council heard that Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev had been murdered by the Bolsheviks. These events concentrated minds on the danger the Patriarch was in; and on the same day the Council immediately passed a resolution entrusting him with the drawing up of the names of three men who could serve as locum tenentes of the Patriarch in the event of his death and before the election of a new Patriarch. These names were to be kept secret, and they were in fact published only after the Patriarch’s death in 1925, when his will (revised by him towards the end of 1924) was read out in the presence of sixty hierarchs: “In the event of our death our patriarchal rights and obligations, until the canonical election of a new Patriarch, we grant temporarily to his Eminence Metropolitan Cyril (Smirnov). In the event of the impossibility, by reason of whatever circumstances, of his entering upon the exercise of the indicated rights and obligations, they will pass to his Eminence Metropolitan Agathangelus (Preobrazhensky). If this metropolitan, too, does not succeed in accomplishing this, then our patriarchal rights and obligations will pass to his Eminence Peter (Polyansky), Metropolitan of Krutitsa.” Since both Metropolitans Cyril and Agathangelus were in exile at the time of the Patriarch’s death, Metropolitan Peter became the patriarchal locum tenens.

 

            Patriarch Tikhon’s choice of Metropolitan Peter turned out to be inspired, although he was not well known at the time of the Council and his meteoric rise through the ranks of the episcopate roused some suspicion among some of the bishops. As Regelson comments: “That the first-hierarchical authority in the Russian Church after the death of Patriarch Tikhon was able to be preserved was thanks only to the fact that one of the patriarchal locum tenentes Patriarch Tikhon chose in 1918 was Metropolitan Peter, who at the moment of the choice was only a servant of the Synod! Many hierarchs were amazed and disturbed by his subsequent swift ‘career’, which changed him in the course of six years into the metropolitan of Krutitsa and Kolomna… But it was precisely thanks to the extraordinary nature of his destiny that he turned out to be the only one chosen by the Patriarch (in actual fact, chosen by the Council, as entrusted to the Patriarch) who was left in freedom at the moment of the death of Patriarch Tikhon. It is difficult even to conjecture how complicated and, besides, tragic would have been the destiny of the Russian Church if the wise thought of the Council and the Patriarch had not been realized in life.”[75]

           

             2. The Attitude towards Soviet power. The Council refused to recognize the legitimacy of Soviet power. Thus when, on the day after the coup, October 26, Lenin nationalized all land, making the Church’s and parish priests’ property illegal, the Council addressed a letter to the faithful on November 11, calling the revolution “descended from the Antichrist and possessed by atheism”: “Open combat is fought against the Christian Faith, in opposition to all that is sacred, arrogantly abasing all that bears the name of God (II Thessalonians 2.4)… But no earthly kingdom founded on ungodliness can ever survive: it will perish from internal strife and party dissension. Thus, because of its frenzy of atheism, the State of Russia will fall… For those who use the sole foundation of their power in the coercion of the whole people by one class, no motherland or holy place exists. They have become traitors to the motherland and instigated an appalling betrayal of Russia and her true allies. But, to our grief, as yet no government has arisen which is sufficiently one with the people to deserve the blessing of the Orthodox Church. And such will not appear on Russian soil until we turn with agonizing prayer and tears of repentance to Him, without Whom we labour in vain to lay foundations…”[76]

 

            The Council’s decree of December 2, “On the Legal Status of the Russian Orthodox Church”, continued to claim for the Orthodox Church the legal status of the national Church of Russia. It ruled, on the one hand, that the State could issue no law relating to the Church without prior consultation with and approval by the Church, and on the other hand, that any decree and by-laws issued by the Orthodox Church that did not directly contradict state laws were to be systematically recognized by the state as legally binding. Church holidays were to remain state holidays, blasphemy and attempts to lure members of the Church away from her were to remain illegal, and schools of all levels organized and run by the Church were to be recognised by the state on a par with the secular schools. It is clear from this decree that the Church was determined to go Her own way in complete defiance of the so-called “authorities”.

 

            On December 11 there was published the decree transferring to the Narkompros all ecclesiastical schools, as a result of which the Church was deprived of all its academies, seminaries, schools and all the property linked with them. Then, on December 18, ecclesiastical marriage was deprived of its legal status and civil marriage introduced in its place. On January 13, Alexandra Kollontai, the People’s Commissar of Social Welfare, sent a detachment of sailors to occupy the Alexander Nevsky monastery in Petrograd and turn it into a sanctuary for war invalids. They were met by an angry crowd of worshippers and in the struggle which followed one priest, Fr. Peter Skipetrov, was shot dead.[77] According to Figes[78], Lenin was not yet ready for a confrontation with the Church; but Kollontai’s actions had forced his hand, and he decided to publish a draft decree on the Separation of Church and State.

 

            On January 19, Patriarch Tikhon, anticipating the decree, issued his famous anathema against the Bolsheviks. The significance of this anathema lies not so much in its casting out of the Bolsheviks themselves (all those who deny God are subject to anathema, that is, separation from God, for that very denial), as in the command to the faithful: “I adjure all of you who are faithful children of the Orthodox Church of Christ not to commune with such outcasts of the human race in any matter whatsoever; ‘cast out the wicked from among you’ (I Corinthians 5.13).” In other words, the government were to be regarded, not only as apostates from Christ (that was obvious), but also as having no moral authority, no claim to obedience whatsoever – an attitude taken by the Church to no other government in the whole of Her history. The decree ended with an appeal to defend the Church, if necessary, to the death. For “the gates of hell shall not prevail against Her” (Matthew 16.18).[79]

 

            January 19 / February 1 was also the day on which the Soviet State introduced the new, Gregorian calendar into Russia. Thinking “to change times and laws” (Daniel 7.25), a Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars dated Janaury 24, 1918 ordered that the day after January 31, 1918 would be February 14 – not February 1. The Church rejected the calendar change imposed by the State.[80] Thus the day on which the Soviets dragged Russia into the godless twentieth-century, thinking), they themselves were expelled from the unchanging and eternal Church of God.

 

            It has been argued that the Patriarch’s decree did not anathematise Soviet power as such, but only those who were committing acts of violence and sacrilege against the Church in various parts of the country. However, this argument fails to take into account several facts. First, the patriarch himself, in his declarations of June 16 and July 1, 1923, repented precisely of his “anathematisation of Soviet power”.[81] Secondly, even if the decree did not formally anathematise Soviet power as such, since Soviet power sanctioned and initiated the acts of violence, the faithful were in effect being exhorted to having nothing to do with it. And thirdly, in his Epistle to the Council of People’s Commissars on the first anniversary of the revolution, November 7, 1918, the Patriarch obliquely but clearly confirmed his non-recognition of Soviet power, saying: “It is not our business to make judgments about earthly authorities. Every power allowed by God would attract to itself Our blessing if it were truly ‘the servant of God’, for the good of those subject to it, and were ‘terrible not for good works, but for evil’ (Romans 13.3,4). But now to you, who have used authority for the persecution of the innocent, We extend this Our word of exhortation… “[82]

 

            Most important of all, when the Patriarch’s decree came to be read out to the Council on January 22 / February 4, it was enthusiastically endorsed by it in terms which make it clear that the Council understood the Patriarch to have anathematised precisely Soviet power: “The Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia in his epistle to the beloved in the Lord archpastors, pastors and all faithful children of the Orthodox Church of Christ has drawn the spiritual sword against the outcasts of the human race – the Bolsheviks, and anathematised them. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church adjures all her faithful children not to enter into any communion with these outcasts. For their satanic deeds they are cursed in this life and in the life to come. Orthodox! His Holiness the Patriarch has been given the right to bind and to loose according to the word of the Saviour… Do not destroy your souls, cease communion with the servants of Satan – the Bolsheviks. Parents, if your children are Bolsheviks, demand authoritatively that they renounce their errors, that they bring forth repentance for their eternal sin, and if they do not obey you, renounce them. Wives, if your husbands are Bolsheviks and stubbornly continue to serve Satan, leave your husbands, save yourselves and your children from the soul-destroying infection. An Orthodox Christian cannot have communion with the servants of the devil… Repent, and with burning prayer call for help from the Lord of Hosts and thrust away from yourselves ‘the hand of strangers’ – the age-old enemies of the Christian faith, who have declared themselves in self-appointed fashion ‘the people’s power’… If you do not obey the Church, you will not be her sons, but participants in the cruel and satanic deeds wrought by the open and secret enemies of Christian truth… Dare! Do not delay! Do not destroy your soul and hand it over to the devil and his stooges.”[83]

 

            Although, as we have said, it was unprecedented for a Local Church to anathematise a government, there have been occasions in the history of the Church when individual hierarchs have not only refused to obey or pray for a political leader, but have actually prayed against him. Thus in the fourth century St. Basil the Great prayed for the defeat of Julian the Apostate, and it was through his prayers that the apostate was killed, as was revealed by God to the holy hermit Julian of Mesopotamia. Not only St. Basil, but also his friend, St. Gregory the Theologian, did not recognise the rule of Julian the Apostate to be legitimate.[84]

 

            This and other examples show that, while the principle of authority as such is from God (Romans. 13.1), individual authorities or rulers are often not from God, but are only allowed by Him, in which case the Church must offer resistance to them out of loyalty to God Himself.[85]

 

            On January 20 / February 2, the Bolsheviks issued their decree on the Separation of Church from State and School from Church, which was couched in terms of a “Decree on Freedom of Conscience, Church and Religious Organizations”. This was the Bolsheviks’ fiercest attack yet on the integrity of the Church; for it forbade religious bodies from owning property, from levying dues, from organizing into hierarchical organizations, and from teaching religion to persons under 18 years of age. Thus, far from being a blow struck for freedom of conscience, it was, as the Council put it, a decree on freedom from conscience, and an excuse for large-scale pillaging of churches and murders, often in the most bestial manner.[86]

 

            The decree elicited strong reactions from individual members of the Council. Thus one exclaimed: “We overthrew the tsar and subjected ourselves to the Jews!” And another said: “The sole means of salvation for the Russian nation is a wise Orthodox Russian tsar!”[87] The Council exhorted the faithful to protect church property, and soon there were reports of people mobbing the officials and soldiers detailed to carry out the decree. Several hundred thousand people marched through Petrograd in protest.

 

            The section of the Council appointed to report on the decree made the following recommendations: “The individuals wielding the governmental authority audaciously attempt to destroy the very existence of the Orthodox Church. In order to realize this satanic design, the Soviet of People’s Commissars published the decree concerning the separation of the Church from the State, which legalized an open persecution not only of the Orthodox Church, but of all other religious communions, Christian or non-Christian. Not despising deceit, the enemies of Christ fraudulently put on the appearance of granting by it religious liberty.

 

            “Welcoming all real extension of liberty of conscience, the Council at the same time points out that by the provisions of the said decree, the freedom of the Orthodox Church, as well as of all other religious organizations and communions in general, is rendered void. Under the pretense of  ‘the separation of the Church from the State’, the Soviet of People’s Commissars attempts to render impossible the very existence of the churches, the ecclesiastical institutions, and the clergy.

 

            “Under the guise of taking over the ecclesiastical property, the said decree aims to destroy the very possibility of Divine worship and ministration. It declares that ‘no ecclesiastical or religious association has the right to possess property’, and ‘all property of the existing ecclesiastical and religious associations in Russia is declared to be national wealth.’ Thereby the Orthodox churches and monasteries, those resting-places of the relics of the saints revered by all Orthodox people, become the common property of all citizens irrespective of their credal differences – of Christians, Jews, Muslims and pagans, and the holy objects designated for the Divine service, i.e. the holy Cross, the holy Gospel, the sacred vessels, the holy miracle-working icons are at the disposal of the governmental authorities, which may either permit or not (as they wish) their use by the parishes.

 

            “Let the Russian people understand that they (the authorities) wish to deprive them of God’s churches with their sacred objects! As soon as all property of the Church is taken away, it is not possible to offer any aid to it, for in accordance with the intention of the decree everything donated shall be taken away. The support of monasteries, churches and the clergy alike becomes impossible.

 

            “But that is not all: in consequence of the confiscation of the printing establishments, it is impossible for the Church independently to publish the holy Gospel as well as other sacred and liturgical books in their wonted purity and authenticity.

 

            “In the same manner, the decree affects the pastors of the Church. Declaring that ‘no one may refuse to perform his civil duties on account of his religious views’, it thereby constrains them to fulfil military obligations forbidden them by the 83rd canon of the holy Apostles. At the same time, ministers of the altar are removed from educating the people. The very teaching of the law of God, not only in governmental, but even in private schools, is not permitted; likewise all theological institutions are doomed to be closed. The Church is thus excluded from the possibility of educating her own pastors.

 

            “Declaring that ‘the governmental functions or those of other public-juridical institutions shall not be accompanied by any religious rites or ceremonies,’ the decree thereby sacrilegiously sunders all connections of the government with the sanctities of the faith.

 

            “On the basis of all the above-mentioned considerations, the holy Council decrees:

 

            “1. The decree published by the Soviet of People’s Commissars regarding the separation of the Church from the State represents in itself, under the guise of a law declaring liberty of conscience, an inimical attempt upon the life of the Orthodox Church, and is an act of open persecution.

 

            “2. All participation, either in the publication of the law so injurious to the Church, or in attempts to put it into practice, is not reconcilable with membership of the Orthodox Church, and subjects all transgressors belonging to the Orthodox communion to the heaviest penalties, to the extent of excommunicating them from the Church (in accordance with the 73rd canon of the holy Apostles, and the 13th canon of the Seventh Ecumenical Council).”[88]

 

            These recommendations were then adopted by the Council and became the official reply of the Russian Church to the decree (January 25 / February 7). In the same spirit, on April 15 the Council passed the following decree: “Clergymen serving in anti-ecclesiastical institutions, as well as those who put into effect the decrees on freedom of conscience which are inimical to the Church and similar acts, are subject to being banned from serving and, in the case of impenitence, are deprived of their rank.”[89] Thus the decrees of the Soviet State followed by the counter-decrees of the Orthodox Church established a state of open warfare between the two institutions.

 

            3. The Glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors. On March 31 / April 13, a Liturgy for those killed for the Orthodox Faith and Church was performed in the Moscow Theological Academy. On April 5/18, in a decree entitled “On Measures Elicited by the Ongoing Persecution of the Orthodox Church”, the Council resolved:

 

            “1. To establish the raising in church during Divine services of special petitions for those who are now being persecuted for the Orthodox Faith and Church and those who have completed their lives as confessors and martyrs…

 

            “3. To establish throughout Russia a yearly prayerful commemoration on January 25 [the day of the martyrdom of Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev], or on the Sunday following (in the evening), of all the confessors and martyrs who have fallen asleep in the present year’s savage persecutions.

 

            “4. To organize on the Monday of the second week of Pascha, in all parishes where confessors and martyrs for the Faith and the Church finished their lives, cross processions to the places of their burial, where triumphant pannikhidas are to be celebrated with the specific verbal glorification of their sacred memory…”[90]

 

            Points 3 and 4 of this decree remained a dead letter for most of the Soviet period. However, in November, 1981 the Russian Church Abroad canonized the new martyrs, and since then devotion to the new martyrs and observance of their feasts steadily increased inside Russia, leading, as some have supposed, to the fall of communism in 1991. Thus the glorification of the new martyrs, which began in April, 1918, may be said to be the earnest of, and first step towards, the resurrection of Russia.

 

            These measures implicitly condemn the attitude of the Sovietised Moscow Patriarchate, which for decades declared that the new martyrs and confessors were “political criminals” worthy of derision rather than praise. Beginning in 1989, the patriarchate began to canonize a few, less controversial martyrs, and even, in very recent years, a few genuine catacomb martyrs.[91] Then, in August, 2000, the Royal Martyrs and many catacomb martyrs were canonised – together with some “martyrs” who clearly submitted to the antichristian power.[92]

 

 

The Murder of the Tsar

 

            In 1922 Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) wrote “If the [1917-18] Council was at fault in anything, it was perhaps in failing to express with sufficient force its condemnation of the revolution and the overthrow of his Majesty. Who will be able to deny that the February revolution was as God-hating as it was anti-monarchist? Who can condemn the Bolshevik revolution and at the same time approve of the Provisional government?”[93]

 

            The Provisional government was hardly less guilty than the Bolsheviks because it was they who overthrew the Tsar, which led to the overthrow of everything else. For, as St. John Maximovich said: “It cannot be otherwise. He was overthrown who united everything, standing in defence of the Truth.”[94] In fact, according to the profound consciousness of the Church, the murder of the Tsar and his family on July 4/17, 1918 was not the responsibility of the Bolsheviks only, but of the whole people who, directly or indirectly, connived at it. As St. John explained: “All the regicides in Russia’s history were committed by some clique, not by the people. When Paul I was murdered, the people were not even aware of it, and when they found out, they brought their condolences and prayers to his grave for many years afterward. Alexander II’s murder unleashed a storm of indignation in Russia, which helped strengthen the moral fibre of the people, as became evident during the reign of Alexander III. The people were innocent of the Tsar-Liberator’s blood. But here the people, the entire Russian nation, is guilty of the spilled blood of their Tsar. Some partook in the murder, others, just as blameworthy, approved of it, while still others did nothing to interfere. All are guilty, and truly we must say: ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (Matthew 27.25)…”[95]

 

            On hearing the news, the patriarch immediately condemned the murder. He had already angered the government by sending the Tsar his blessing in prison; and he now celebrated a pannikhida for him, blessing the archpastors and pastors to do the same. Then he announced in the Kazan cathedral: “We, in obedience to the teaching of the Word of God, must condemn this deed, otherwise the blood of the shot man will fall also on us, and not only on those who committed the crime…”[96]

           

            At one point shortly after the murder of the Tsar, some member of the Council suggested to the Patriarch that he take refuge abroad, so that he not share in the fate of the Tsar. “The flight of the Patriarch,” replied his Holiness, “would play into the hands of the enemies of the Church. Let them do with me what they want.”

 

            On July 26 / August 8, in an address “to all the faithful children of the Russian Orthodox Church”, the Patriarch said: “Sin has fanned everywhere the flame of the passions, enmity and wrath; brother has risen up against brother; the prisons are filled with captives; the earth is soaked in innocent blood, shed by a brother’s hand; it is defiled by violence, pillaging, fornication and every uncleanness. From this same poisonous source of sin has issued the great deception of material earthly goods, by which our people is enticed, forgetting the one thing necessary. We have not rejected this temptation, as the Saviour Christ rejected it in the wilderness. We have wanted to create a paradise on earth, but without God and His holy commandments. God is not mocked. And so we hunger and thirst and are naked upon the earth, blessed with an abundance of nature’s gifts, and the seal of the curse has fallen on the very work of the people and on all the undertakings of our hands. Sin, heavy and unrepented of, has summoned Satan from the abyss, and he is now bellowing his slander against the Lord and against His Christ, and is raising an open persecution against the Church.”[97]

 

            This address characterized Socialism in similar terms to those used by Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, as the temptation to create bread out of stones which Christ rejected in the wilderness. Rather than seeking paradise in heaven and with God through the fulfilment of His commandments, the Socialists “have wanted to create a paradise on earth, but without God and His holy commandments”. The result has been hell in this life and (to quote from the anathema) “the fire of Gehenna in the life to come”.

 

            This went some of the way to meeting the criticisms levelled against the Patriarch and the Council by Count Olsuphyev and Protopriest Vladimir Vostokov, that the essence of Socialism as an antichristian heresy had been hardly touched upon. As Fr. Vladimir said: “From this platform, before the enlightener of Russia, the holy Prince Vladimir, I witness to my priestly conscience that the Russian people is being deceived, and that up to this time no one has told them the whole truth. So much has been said here about the terrors brought upon the country by Bolshevism. But what is Bolshevism? – the natural and logical development of Socialism. And Socialism is – that antichristian movement which in the final analysis produces Bolshevism as its highest development and which engenders those phenomena completely contrary to the principles of Christian asceticism that we are living through now.

 

            “Unfortunately, many of our professors and writers have arrayed Socialism in beautiful clothes, calling it similar to Christianity, and thereby they together with the agitators of revolution have led the uneducated people into error. Fathers and brothers! What fruits did we expect of Socialism, when we not only did not fight against it, but also defended it at times, or almost always were shyly silent before its contagion? We must serve the Church by faith, and save the country from destructive tendencies, and for that it is necessary to speak the truth to the people without delay, telling them what Socialism consists of and what it leads to.

 

            “We all, beginning with Your Holiness and ending with myself, the last member of the Council, must bow the knee before God, and beseech Him to forgive us for allowing the growth in the country of evil teachings and violence. Only after sincere repentance by the whole people will the country be pacified and regenerated. And God will bestow upon us His mercy and grace. But if we continue only to anathematize without repenting, without declaring the truth to the people, then they will with just cause say to us: You, too, are guilty that the country has been reduced to this crime, for which the anathema now sounds out; you by your pusillanimity have allowed the development of evil and have been slow to call the facts and phenomena of state life by their real names!

 

            “We all must unite into one Christian family under the banner of the Holy and Life-Creating Cross and under the leadership of his Holiness the Patriarch, to say that Socialism, which calls people as if to brotherhood, is an openly antichristian and evil phenomenon…”[98]

 

            The essential incompatibility between Socialism and Christianity was never doubted by the apostles of Socialism. Religion was called “opium for the people” by Marx, and by Lenin – “spiritual vodka”. Again, Lenin wrote that “every religious idea, every idea of a god, even flirting with the idea of God is unutterable vileness of the most dangerous kind”.[99] And in 1918 he said to Krasin: “Electricity will take the place of God. Let the peasant pray to electricity; he’s going to feel the power of the central authorities more than that of heaven.”[100] For, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn says: “Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy. It is not a side-effect, but the central pivot…”[101]

 

            That militant atheism was the central pivot of Marxism-Leninism was to become abundantly evident in the next seventy years. However, it was already clearly manifest in the murder of the Tsar and his family. For by his abdication in favour of himself and his son, the Tsar had already renounced all claims to power, so his murder had no political advantage in view, but was an act of pure malice. It was a trampling on the symbol of the old theocracy by the representatives of the new satanocracy, and an important signal from the new authorities to the people – a signal that there was no turning back. And just as the whole tragedy of the Russian people in the years that lay ahead lay in the fact that they had paved the way for this satanic act, the destruction of the Russian theocracy, and cooperated with it, so the only real hope of their regeneration now lies in their repentance of it… 

 

 

The Patriarch and the Commissars

 

            The defiant spirit of the Moscow Council and the first year of the Church’s existence under Soviet power continued to manifest itself in the Patriarch’s statements as the Church entered the second year of Soviet power. Now in view of this hostile attitude towards Soviet power it might have seemed logical for the Patriarch to bless the efforts of the White armies to liberate Russia from the Bolshevik tyranny. There is some evidence that the did bless Admiral Kolchak in the East[102], but in October, 1919 he instructed the clergy to stay clear of politics and to obey the Soviet authorities to the extent that their orders did not “contradict the faith and piety”. Indeed, after his and the Council’s condemnation of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918 the Patriarch never again made what might have been construed as a political statement or intervention in the political life of the country.

 

            The reason for this is to be found in one of the last decisions of the Council, that of August 2/15, 1918, which constituted a refusal by the Church to engage in politics. Past defrockings of clergy for political crimes (Metropolitan Arsenius Matseyevich, Fr. Gregory Petrov) were recognised to be invalid. Each member of the Church was free to engage in political activity in whatever direction his Orthodox conscience intimated to him, but no one had the right to speak in the name of the Church or place upon the Church the responsibility for his own political acitivity.[103]

 

            This decree in no way contradicted the anti-Bolshevik anathema of January, 1918. It was dictated by the simple fact that dioceses of the Russian Church were now to be found in several different States, some in Soviet Russia, others in White-occupied Russia and others still within the German sphere of influence. Orthodox teaching counsels obedience to all legitimate authorities, and the Church by this decree in effect legitimised Her members’ taking different political positions in different countries, without directly antagonizing the Soviet authorities.[104]

 

            Another reason why the Patriarch did not bless the White armies may have been a prophetic intuition that they would fail. For, as Elder Aristocles of Moscow said, “the spirit was not right,”[105] – many of them were aiming, not at the restoration of the Romanov dynasty, but at the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly or the restoration of the landowners’ lands. Moreover, many of them were Freemasons. “And could he have given [his blessing],” asks Michael Nazarov, “if there sat in the White governments at that time activists like, for example, the head of the Archangel government Tchaikovsky, who gave to the West as an explanation of the Bolshevik savageries the idea that ‘we put up with the destructive autocratic regime for too long,… our people  were less educated politically than the other allied peoples’?”[106]

 

            In 1922, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) confirmed this verdict: “Unfortunately, the most noble and pious leader of this [the White] army listened to those unfitting counsellors who were foreign to Russia and sat in his Special council and destroyed the undertaking. The Russian people, the real people, the believing and struggling people, did not need the bare formula: ‘a united and undivided Russia’. They needed neither ‘Christian Russia’, nor ‘Faithless Russia’, nor ‘Tsarist Russia’, nor ‘the Landowners’ Russia’ (by which they will always understand a republic). They needed the combination of the three dear words – ‘for the Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland’. Most of all, they needed the first word, since faith rules the whole of the state’s life; the second word was necessary since the tsar guards and protects the first; and the third was needed since the people is the bearer of the first words.”[107]

 

            Thus one of the major consequences of the overthrow of the Tsar was that the Church, not finding any real support for her aims in any post-tsarist political party or movement, felt unable to bless the anti-Bolshevik forces. This is not to say that the Church was not committed to a rejection of the Bolshevik system, insofar as the latter, basing itself on the philosophical theory of dialectical materialism, attacked Christ and the Orthodox Faith. But anti-Bolshevism alone is not a positive ideal – and only that which is truly positive and spiritual can merit the blessing of God and His Church. So there was no formal contradiction between the politically neutral tone of the Council’s August decree and the anti-Soviet content of the Patriarch’s October Epistle. Nevertheless, insofar as the more-than-political and essentially anti-Christian nature of Bolshevism was not spelled out, a chink was left in the Church’s defences which Her enemies, both political and ecclesiastical, were quick to exploit.

 

            And so the Patriarch’s anti-Soviet statements were construed as dabbling in politics; while his refusal to bless the White armies was construed as the equivalent of a blessing on the Soviet State. In fact, neither the Council nor the Patriarch (in his genuine statements, as opposed to the forged will published after his death in 1925) ever blessed or legitimised Soviet power – which is essentially why Soviet power did not legitimise the Church as long as it remained truly “Tikhonite”.

 

            And even if one of the later statements of the Patriarch, his “confession” of 1923, which was issued under extreme pressure, can be construed as indirectly conferring legitimacy on the State, this cannot, according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, be considered binding on the faithful; for no man, however eminent, can be considered infallible according to Orthodox teaching.

 

            For those who were not persuaded by the Council and the Patriarch there was an even clearer witness to the Bolsheviks’ antichristianity: their behaviour in the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. The material damage alone was enormous. Thus by 1921, according to Bolshakov, 637 out of 1,026 monasteries had been liquidated. And on August 25, 1920 the Commissariat of justice ordered the local authorities “to conduct a complete liquidation of relics”….

 

            But the loss in lives was still more staggering. Thus in 1918-19, according to Ermhardt, 28 bishops and 1,414 priests were killed[108]; while by the end of 1922, according to Shumilin, 2233 clergy of all ranks and two million laymen had been executed,[109] and in Petrograd alone 550 clergy and monks of all ranks were shot in the period 1917-1922.[110] These figures prove the truth of Vladimir Rusak’s assertion: “The Bolsheviks’ relationship to the Church was realized independently of legislation. Violence, bayonets and bullets – these were the instruments of the Bolsheviks’ ‘ideological’ struggle against the Church.”[111] At the same time Lenin viewed Islam as an ally in the spreading of world revolution to the countries of the East, and he did not persecute the Catholics or Protestants.[112]

 

            However, the direct, physical assault on the Church had failed. And with the disappearance of all military and political opposition to the Communist party after the Civil War, the Church remained the only significant anti-communist force in the country. So the Bolsheviks were compelled to resort to warfare with a far higher ideological content – a content, moreover, of a much more sophisticated kind than had been produced before.

 

 

The Requisitioning of Church Valuables

 

            In the party’s May, 1921 plenum Lenin supported a resolution calling for the replacement of the religious world-view by “a harmonious communist scientific system embracing and answering the questions to which the peasants’ and workers’ masses have hitherto sought answers in religion.” The result was the suspension of the “dilettantist” anti-religious commissions (Lenin’s phrase) which had existed up to that time, and their replacement by a Commission on the Separation of Church and State attached to the Politburo which lasted until 1929 under the leadership of the Jew Emelian Yaroslavsky and whose aim was clearly the extirpation of all religion. The importance of this Commission in the Bolsheviks’ eyes was clearly indicated by the extreme secrecy in which its protocols were shrouded and by the active participation in it, at one time or another, of all the top party leaders. The strategy of the Commission was directly defined, at the beginning by Lenin, and later – by Stalin.[113]

 

            An important aspect of the Commission’s strategy was the tactics of “divide and rule”. For, although physical methods continued to be applied, the Bolsheviks recognized that such a formidable enemy as the Church could not be defeated by direct physical assault alone, and that they needed subtler methods including the recruitment of agents among the clergy and the creation of schisms among them. Thus already in December, 1920, T. Samsonov, head of a secret department of the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, wrote to Dzerzhinsky that “communism and religion are mutually exclusive… No machinery can destroy religion except that of the [Cheka]. In its plans to demoralize the church the Cheka has recently focusd its attention on the rank and file of the priesthood. Only through them, by long, intensive, and painstaking work, shall we succeed in destroying and dismantling the church completely.”[114] In the same month, Dzerzhinsky wrote to Latsis: “My opinion is that the Church is disintegrating, and we must help this process, but we must by no means regenerate it in a renovationist form. That is why the church politics of disintegration must be carried out by the Cheka, and by no one else. Official or semi-official relations of the party with the popes are inadmissible. We are counting on communism, and not on religion. This manoeuvre can be carried out only by the Cheka, with the single aim of demoralizing the popes.”[115]

 

            Again, in 1921, in a protocol of the secret section of the Cheka, Trotsky had discussed recruiting clergy with money to report on themselves and others in the Church and to prevent anti-Bolshevik agitation concerning, for example, the closing of monasteries.[116]

 

            But it was the Volga famine of 1921-22, in which about 25 millions were starving, that provided the Bolsheviks with their first opportunity to inflict large-scale damage on the Church.

 

            Solzhenitsyn writes: “At the end of the civil war, and as its natural consequence, an unprecedented famine developed in the Volga area… V.G. Korolenko, in his Letters to Lunacharsky explains to us Russia’s total, epidemic descent into famine and destitution. It was the result of productivity having become reduced to zero (the working hands were all carrying guns) and the result, also, of the peasants’ utter lack of trust and hope that even the smallest part of the harvest might be left to them. Yes, and someday someone will also count up those many carloads of food supplies rolling on and on for many, many months to Imperial Germany, under the terms of the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk – from a Russia which had been deprived of a protesting voice, from the very provinces where famine would strike – so that Germany could fight to the end in the West.

 

            “There was a direct, immediate chain of cause and effect. The Volga peasants had to eat their children because we were so impatient about putting up with the Constituent Assembly.

 

            “But political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin. A brilliant idea was born: after all, three billiard balls can be pocketed with one shot. So now let the priests feed the Volga region! They are Christians. They are generous!

 

            “1. If they refuse, we will blame the whole famine on them and destroy the Church.

 

            “2. If they agree, we will clean out the churches.

 

            “In either case, we will replenish our stocks of foreign exchange and precious metals.

 

            “Yes, and the action was probably inspired by the actions of the Church itself. As Patriarch Tikhon himself had testified, back in August, 1921, at the beginning of the famine, the Church had created diocesan and all-Russian committees for aid to the starving and had begun to collect funds. But to have permitted any direct help to go straight from the Church into the mouths of those who were starving would have undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat. The committees were banned, and the funds they had collected were confiscated and turned over to the state and to the treasury. The Patriarch had also appealed to the Pope in Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury for assistance – but he was rebuked for this, too, on the grounds that only the Soviet authorities had the right to enter into discussions with foreigners. Yes, indeed. And what was there to be alarmed about? The newspapers wrote that the government itself had all the necessary means to cope with the famine.

 

            “Meanwhile, in the Volga region they were eating grass, the soles of shoes and gnawing at door jambs. And, finally, in December [27], 1921, Pomgol – the State Commission for Famine Relief – proposed that the churches help the starving by donating church valuables – not all, but those not required for liturgical rites. The Patriarch agreed. Pomgol issued a directive: all gifts must be strictly voluntary! On February 19, 1922, the Patriarch issued a pastoral letter permitting the parish councils to make gifts of objects that did not have liturgical and ritual significance.

 

            “And in this way matter could again have simply degenerated into a compromise that would have frustrated the will of the proletariat, just as it once had been by the Constituent Assembly, and still was in all the chatterbox European parliaments.

 

            “The thought came in a stroke of lightning! The thought came – and a decree followed! A decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on February 26: all valuables were to be requisitioned from the churches – for the starving!”[117]

 

            This decree annihilated the voluntary character of the offerings, and put the clergy in the position of accessories to sacrilege.

 

            In order to resolve the perplexities of the faith, on February 28 the patriarch issued the following decree: “… In view of the exceptionally difficult circumstances, we have admitted the possibility of offering church objects which have not been consecrated and are not used in Divine services. Now again we call on the faithful children of the Church to make such offerings, desiring only that these offerings should be the response of a loving heart to the needs of his neighbour, if only they can provide some real help to our suffering brothers. But we cannot approve of the requisitioning from the churches, even as a voluntary offering, of consecrated objects, whose use for purposes other than Divine services is forbidden by the canons of the Ecumenical Church and is punished by Her as sacrilege – laymen by excommunication from Her, and clergy by defrocking (Apostolic Canon 73; Canon 10 of the First-Second Council).”[118]

 

            Although the patriarch did not go all the way in giving in to the Bolsheviks’ demands, this decree nevertheless represents the first major concession made by the Church to Soviet power.[119] Thus no less an authority than the holy Elder Nectarius of Optina said: “You see now, the patriarch gave the order to give up all valuables from the churches, but they belonged to the Church!”[120] And, as we shall see, it led not only to the plundering of the churches and the deaths of many clergy and laity, but also, indirectly, to the appearance of the renovationist schism.

 

            Under the leadership of Trotsky, but with the approval of the whole Politburo (Lenin, Molotov, Kamenev and Stalin), the Bolsheviks now set to work. At the beginning of March Trotsky formed a “completely secret” commission to mastermind the requisitioning. On March 11 he wrote to the Politburo: “This commission must secretly prepare the political, organizational and technical aspects of the matter at the same time. The actual removal of the valuables must begin already in March and then be completed in the shortest possible time… I repeat: this commission is a complete secret. Formally, the requisitioning in Moscow will take place under the direct orders of the Central Committee of Pomgol… Our whole strategy at this time must be aimed at a schism in the clergy over the concrete question of the requisitioning of valuables from the churches. Since the question is a burning one, the schism on this basis can and must acquire a very burning character, and that part of the clergy which will support the requisitioning and aid it will no longer be able to return to Patriarch Tikhon’s clique. Therefore I suggest that a block consisting of this section of the priesthood should be temporarily admitted into Pomgol, especially since it is necessary to avert any suspicion and doubts with regard to whether the requisitioning of valuables from the churches will be spent on the needs of the starving.”[121]

 

                                       On March 13, the Politburo accepted Trotsky’s suggestion. “Moreover,” writes Gregory Ravich, “the commission was ordered ‘to act with maximal cruelty, not stopping at anything, including executions on the spot (that is, without trial and investigation), in cases of necessity summoning special (for which read: punitive) units of the Red Army, dispersing and firing on demonstrations, interrogations with the use of torture’ and so on. The commission’s members were, besides Trotsky, Sapronov, Unschlicht, Medved and Samoilov-Zemlyachka. It literally rushed like a hurricane through Russia, sweeping away.. everything in its path.”[122]

 

            Soon clashes with believers who resisted the confiscation of church valuables took place. 1414 such clashes were reported in the official press. The first clash took place in the town of Shuye on March 15. Five Christians were killed and fifteen wounded, as a result of which a trial was held in which two priests and a layman were condemned and executed. In 1921-23, 2,691 married priests, 1,962 monks, 3,447 nuns and an unknown number of laymen were killed on the pretext of resistance to the seizure of church valuables in the country as a whole.[123]

 

            On March 19, Lenin sent a long letter to the Politburo marked “Top Secret. No Copies to be Made”: “It is precisely now and only now, when there is cannibalism in the famine-stricken areas and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are lying along the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of valuables with fanatical and merciless energy and not hesitate to suppress any form of resistance… It is precisely now and only now that the vast majority of the peasant masses will either support us or at least will be unable to give any decisive support to those.. who might and would want to try to resist the Soviet decree. We must confiscate in the shortest possible time as much as possible to create for ourselves a fund of several hundred million roubles… Without this fund, government work.. and the defence of our positions in Genoa are absolutely unthinkable… Now our victory over the reactionary clergy is guaranteed… It is precisely now that we must wage a decisive and merciless war with the black-hundreds clergy and crush their opposition with such cruelty that they will not forget it for many decades… The more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot the better.”[124]

 

            Concerning the Patriarch, however, Lenin said: “I think it is expedient for us not to touch Patriarch Tikhon himself, although he is undoubtedly heading this entire rebellion of slaveholders. Regarding him, a secret directive should be issued to the GPU, so that all of this figure’s connections are carefully and scrupulously observed and exposed, precisely at this moment…”

 

            Lenin wanted Trotsky to be in charge of the campaign against the Church; “but he should at no time and under no circumstances speak out [on this matter] in the press or before the public in any other manner”. This was probably, as Richard Pipes suggests, “in order not to feed rumors that the campaign was a Jewish plot against Christianity,”[125] because Trotsky was a Jew.

 

            In addition to being the head of the secret commission for the requisitioning of the valuables, Trotsky also headed the commission for their monetary realization. And in a submission to a session of this commission he wrote on March 23: “For us it is more important to obtain 50 million in 1922-23 for a certain mass of valuables than to hope for 75 million in 1923-24. The advance of the proletarian revolution in just one of the large countries of Europe will put a stop to the market in valuables… Conclusion: we must proceed as fast as possible…”[126]

 

            If money for purely political purposes was the Bolsheviks’ primary motive in this matter, then they failed miserably – the sale of church valuables fetched only about $1.5 million[127], while Bukharin admitted to having spent nearly $14 million on propaganda during the famine.[128] In any case, the Bolsheviks already had in their possession Russian crown jewels worth one billion gold rubles and jewels from the Kremlin museum worth 300 million gold rubles – far more than the market price of the church valuables.[129]

 

            But if their primary motive was in fact to destroy the Church, then they also failed – the Church emerged even stronger spiritually from her fiery ordeal. The blood of the martyrs was already starting to bring forth fruit as thousands of previously lukewarm Christians began to return to the Church. However, the crisis gave a golden opportunity to the internal enemies of the Church – the renovationist heretics.

 

 

The Renovationist Coup (1)

 

            The idea of splitting the Church hierarchy appears to have originated in 1921 with Lunacharsky, who since the early 1900s had been instrumental in developing a more subtle, less physically confrontational approach to the problem of eradicating religion.[130] It was taken up again by Trotsky early in 1922.[131]

 

            That the Bolsheviks planned on using the internal enemies of the Church at the same time that they exerted external pressure through the confiscation of her valuables is clear from a project outlined by Trotsky to a session of the Politburo attended by Kamenev, Stalin and Molotov on April 2. It declared: “The agitation must not be linked with the struggle against religion and the Church, but must be wholly directed towards helping the starving” (point 5); “we must take a decisive initiative in creating a schism among the clergy”, taking the priests who speak in support of the measures undertaken by Soviet power “under the protection of state power” (point 6); “our agitation and the agitation of priests loyal to us must in no case be mixed up”, but the communists must refer to “the significant part of the clergy” which is speaking against the inhumanity and greed “of the princes of the Church” (point 7); spying is necessary “to guarantee complete knowledge of everything that is happening in various groups of clergy, believers, etc.” (point 8); the question must be formulated correctly: “it is best to begin with some church led by a loyal priest, and if such a church does not exist, then with the most significant church after careful preparation” (point 9); “representatives of the loyal clergy must be allowed to be registered in the provinces and in the centre, after the population is well informed that they will have every opportunity to check that not one article of the church heritage goes anywhere else than to help the starving” (point 13). In actual fact, according to a secret instruction all church valuables taken from “the enemies of Soviet power” were to be handed over, not to Pomgol or the starving, but to the Economic administration of the OGPU.[132]

 

            The Bolsheviks were counting on a modernist or “renovationist” faction in the Russian Church to provide them with their “loyal” clergy. Already in the revolutionary years of 1905 and 1917, the renovationists-to-be had reared their heads with a long list of demands for modernist reform of the Church. And in March, 1918, Professor Titlinov, who was later to become one of the main ideologists of renovationism, founded a newspaper in Petrograd which criticized the Patriarch’s anathematization of Soviet power.[133]

 

            But the plotters had to wait until the spring of 1922, when both Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd were in prison in connection with the confiscation of church valuables, before they could seize power in the Church.

 

            The spiritual calibre of the renovationists, or the “Living Church”, as their main faction was called, can be gauged from the career of perhaps their most moderate leader, Bishop Antonin Granovsky. In the 1905 revolution he had been such a thorn in the side of the Church that the Holy Synod retired him. Thereafter he refused to mention the Tsar’s name in Divine services, and in 1907 he even declared that the Tsarist regime was satanic. In 1921 he was again retired by Patriarch Tikhon for introducing innovations on his own authority into the Divine services. In 1922 he accepted a Soviet invitation to be a member of Pomgol, and in the same year he appeared as a witness for the government in the trial of 54 Shuye Christians who had resisted the confiscation of church valuables.

 

            And yet Granovsky himself characterized his fellow-plotters as “the sewer of the Orthodox Church”, the rebellion of power-hungry priests pursuing their class interests against the bishops and monks.[134] And indeed, this anti-monasticism was, with their socialism, one of the main characteristics of the renovationists – Fr. George Florovsky called it “Protestantism of the Eastern Rite”.[135] Thus Titlinov wrote that the major task of the “Living Church” was “to free church life from the influence of the monastic episcopate and transfer the administration of church affairs into the hands of the white [married] clergy.”[136]

 

            Thus Soviet power may have been justified – in this respect, if in no other – in counting, in E. Lopeshanskaya’s words, “on the classically Marxist ‘inner contradictions’ and ‘class struggle’, which by its ideology was necessarily bound to arise everywhere – including the Church – between the black [monastic] and white [married] clergy, between the hierarchs and the priests, for the income of the Church.”[137]

 

            The first shots in the battle were fired in Petrograd, which was a stronghold of renovationism as it had been of the Bolshevik revolution. According to Levitin and Shavrov, the initiative here came from the Petrograd party chief, Zinoviev, who suggested to Archpriest Alexander Vvedensky that his group would be the appropriate one for an eventual concordat between the State and the Church.[138] Vvedensky then joined Archpriest Vladimir Krasnitsky and Bishop Antonin Granovsky in plotting to overthrow the Patriarch.

 

            The leader of the Patriarchal Church in Petrograd was Metropolitan Benjamin, who had actually come to an agreement with the local authorities concerning the voluntary handing over of church valuables. These authorities evidently did not yet understand that the real purpose of the Soviet decree was not to help the starving but to destroy the Church. Having conferred with the central authorities in Moscow, however, the Petrograd authorities reneged on their agreement with the metropolitan.[139]

 

            Then, on March 24, a letter signed by twelve people, including the future renovationist leaders Krasnitsky, Vvedensky, Belkov, Boyarsky and others, appeared in Petrogradskaia Pravda. It defended the measures undertaken by the Soviet government and distanced the authors from the rest of the clergy. The latter reacted strongly against this letter at a clergy meeting, during which Vvedensky gave a brazen and threatening speech.

 

            However, the metropolitan succeeded in calming passions sufficiently so that it was decided to enter into fresh negotiations with the authorities, the conduct of these negotiations being entrusted to Vvedensky and Boyarsky. They proceeded to win an agreement according to which other articles or money were allowed to be substituted for the church valuables.

 

            Having acquired some credit through this success, and having cemented relations with the Soviet authorities, the group of renovationists set about seizing power in the whole Church, taking advantage of the severe difficulties the Patriarch was in in Moscow.

 

            For as well as having been under house arrest since March 19, the Patriarch had been called as a witness for the defence in the trial of 54 Moscow Christians. In an effort to save the accused, he took the whole responsibility upon himself. And in one of the exchanges the essence of the relationship between the Church and the State was expressed.

 

            The Presiding Judge said:

 

            “Do you consider the state’s laws obligatory or not?”

 

            The Patriarch replied:

 

            “Yes, I recognize them, to the extent that they do not contradict the rules of piety.

 

            Solzhenitsyn comments: “Oh, if only everyone had answered just that way! Our whole history would have been different.”[140]

 

            And yet the Patriarch’s words constituted a distinct weakening of his position vis-à-vis Soviet power when compared with the absolutely irreconcilable position he and the Council had adopted in 1917-18; for they implied that Soviet power was legitimate, the power of Caesar rather than that of the Antichrist… This critical question has remained of fundamental importance in the Russian Church to this day, under the neo-Soviet regime of Putin.

 

            The first instinct of the Russian Church in the face of Soviet power, as manifested in the 1917-18 Council, has never been extinguished among Russian Christians. It continued to manifest itself both at home and abroad (for example, in the First All-Emigration Council of the Russian Church Abroad in 1921), both in the early and the later decades of Soviet power (for example, among the “passportless” Christians of the Catacomb Church). However, it was very soon tempered by the realisation that such outright rejection of Soviet power on a large scale could be sustained only by war – and after the defeat of the White Armies in the Civil War there were no armies left to carry on the fight against the Bolsheviks.

 

            Therefore from the early 1920s a new attitude towards Soviet power began to evolve among the Tikhonite Christians: loyalty towards it as a political institution (“for all power is from God”), and acceptance of such of its laws as could be interpreted in favour of the Church (for example, the law on the separation of Church and State), combined with rejection of its atheistic world-view (large parts of which the renovationists, by contrast, accepted). In essence, this new attitude involved accepting that the Soviet State was not Antichrist, as the Local Council of 1917-18 and the Russian Church Abroad had in effect declared, but Caesar, no worse in principle than the Caesars of Ancient Rome, to whom the things belonging to Caesar were due. This attitude involved the assertion that it was possible, in the Soviet Union as in Ancient Rome, to draw a clear line between politics and religion.

 

            But in practice, even more than in theory, this line proved very hard to draw. For for the early Bolsheviks, at any rate, there was no such dividing line; for them, everything was ideological, everything had to be in accordance with their ideology, there could be no room for disagreement, no private spheres into which the state and its ideology did not pry.

 

            Thus unlike most of the Roman emperors, who allowed the Christians to order their own lives in their own way so long as they showed loyalty to the state (which the Christians were very eager to do), the Bolsheviks insisted in imposing their own ways upon the Christians in every sphere: in family life (civil marriage only, divorce on demand, children spying on parents), in education (compulsory Marxism), in economics (dekulakization, collectivization), in military service (the oath of allegiance to Lenin), in science (Lysenkoism), in art (socialist realism), and in religion (the requisitioning of valuables, registration, commemoration of the authorities at the Liturgy, reporting of confessions by the priests). Resistance to any one of these demands was counted as “anti-Soviet behaviour”, i.e. political disloyalty. Therefore it was no use protesting one’s political loyalty to the regime if one refused to accept just one of these demands. According to the Soviet interpretation of the word: “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one has become guilty of all of it” (James 2.10), such a person was an enemy of the people.

 

            In view of this, it is not surprising that many Christians came to the conclusion that there was no gain, and from a moral point of view much to be lost, in accepting a regime that made such impossible demands, since the penalty would be the same whether one asserted one’s loyalty to it or not. And if this meant living as an outlaw, so be it…

 

            Nevertheless, the path of total rejection of the Soviet state required enormous courage, strength and self-sacrifice, not only for oneself but also (which was more difficult) for one’s family or flock. It is therefore not surprising that, already during the Civil War, the Church began to soften her anti-Soviet rhetoric and try once more to draw the line between politics and religion. This is what Patriarch Tikhon tried to do in the later years of his patriarchate – with, it must be said, only mixed results. Thus his decision to allow some, but not all of the Church’s valuables to be requisitioned by the Bolsheviks in 1922 not only did not bring help to the starving of the Volga, as was the intention, but led to many clashes between believers and the authorities and many deaths of believers.

 

            The decision to negotiate and compromise with the Bolsheviks only brought confusion and division to the Church. Thus on the right wing of the Church there were those, like Archbishop Theodore of Volokolamsk, who thought that the patriarch had already gone too far; while on the left wing there were those, like Archbishop Hilarion of Verey, who wanted to go further.

 

            The basic problem was that the compromises were always one-sided; the Bolsheviks always took and never gave; their aim was not peaceful co-existence, but the complete conquest of the Church. And so, as a “Letter from Russia” put it many years later: “It’s no use our manoeuvring: there’s nothing for us to preserve except the things that are God’s. For the things that are Caesar’s (if one should really consider it to be Caesar and not Pharaoh) are always associated with the quenching of the Spirit…”[141]

 

            However, the Patriarchal Church remained Orthodox under Patriarch Tikhon and his successor, Metropolitan Peter, for two major reasons: first, because the leaders of the Church did not sacrifice the lives of their fellow Christians for the sake of their own security or the security of the Church organisation; and secondly, because, while the Soviet regime was recognised to be, in effect, Caesar rather than Pharoah, no further concessions were made with regard to the communist ideology.

 

 

The Russian Church in Exile

 

            In order to understand the further development of the coup against the Patriarch, we must turn to the history of that part of the Church which found itself in diaspora.

 

            A.F. Traskovsky writes: “The part of the Russian Orthodox Church which was abroad already had quite a long history before the formation of the ROCA [Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, abbreviated to RCA in this book]. In Western Europe Russian Orthodox churches had been built beginning from the eighteenth century at Russian embassies and holy places which were often visited by Russians on trips abroad. In the East, thanks to the missionary activities of the Russian Orthodox Church missions were founded in China and Japan which later became dioceses, as well as a mission in Jerusalem. The spread of Orthodoxy in Alaska and North America also led to the creation of a diocese. In the “Statute concerning the convening of an Emigration Assembly of the Russian Churches”, mention was made that in 1921 there were 15 emigration regions which had Russian bishops and 14 districts where there were Russian Orthodox parishes but no bishops. The regions included: North America, Japan, China, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and the Far East. The districts included: Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, England, Switzerland, Czechia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Palestine, Greece and the city of Bizert in Tunisia. All the emigration missions, parishes and dioceses were in canonical submission to the higher ecclesiastical authorities in Russia – the Holy Ruling Synod until the restoration of the patriarchate in 1917, and his Holiness the Patriarch after 1917. But then after the revolution there began the Civil War and anarchy. The Bolsheviks began to persecute the Church. The majority of emigration missions and dioceses found themselves either deprived of the possibility of normal relations with the higher ecclesiastical authorities of Russia, or such relations were exceptionally difficult. Moreover, in Russia itself many dioceses were cut off by the front from his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon (Bellavin)’s leadership. After the defeat of the White army, a huge flood of emigres flooded abroad, amongst whom were not a few representatives of the clergy, including bishops and metropolitans. On the shoulders of the clerics who were abroad and the clergy who had emigrated lay the burden of care for the spiritual nourishment of the huge Russian diaspora. That was the situation in which the part of the Russian Church that was abroad found itself on the eve of the formation of the Church Abroad.

 

            “What was the prehistory of the Russian Church Abroad? Her beginnings went back to 1919, in Russia. In Stavropol in May, 1919 there took place the South Russian Church Council headed by the oldest hierarch in the South of Russia, Archbishop Agathodorus of Stavropol. There took part in the Council all the bishops who were on the territory of the Voluntary army, the members of the All-Russian Ecclesiastical Council and four people from each diocesan council. At the Council there was formed the Higher Church Administration of the South of Russia (HCA of the South of Russia), which consisted of: President – Archbishop Metrophanes of Novocherkassk, Assistant to the President – Archbishop Demetrius of Tauris, Protopresbyter G. Shavelsky, Protopriest A.P. Rozhdestvensky, Count V.V. Musin-Pushkin and Professor of theology P.V. Verkhovsky. In November, 1919 the Higher Church Administration was headed by Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev and Galich, who had arrived from Kiev.

 

            “The aim of the creation of the HCA was the organization of the leadership of church life on the territory of the Volunteer army in view of the difficulties Patriarch Tikhon was experiencing in administering the dioceses on the other side of the front line. A little earlier, in November, 1918, an analogous Temporary Higher Church Administration had been created in Siberia headed by Archbishop Silvester of Omsk. Later, a part of the clergy that submitted to this HCA emigrated after the defeat of Kolchak’s army and entered the composition of the Chinese dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church. The HCA of the South of Russia, like the Siberian HCA, was, in spite of its self-government, nevertheless in canonical submission to his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon, and in this way Church unity was maintained.

 

            “After the defeat of the armies of Denikin, in the spring of 1920 the head of the HCA of the South of Russia, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), was evacuated from Novorossiysk to Constantinople[142], and was then for a time in a monastery on Mount Athos. However, in September, 1920, at the invitation of General Wrangel, he returned to Russia, to the Crimea, where he continued his work. The final evacuation of the HCA of the South of Russia took place in November, 1920, together with the remains of Wrangel’s army. On the steamer “Alexander Mikhailovich” there set out from the Crimea to Constantinople the leaders of the HCA and a large number of simple priests.

 

            “On arriving in Constantinople, as Archbishop Nicon (Rklitsky) indicates in his Biography of Metropolitan Anthony, Metropolitan Anthony ‘first considered that from now on all the activities of the Russian Higher Church Administration should be brought to an end and all the care for the spiritual welfare of the Russian Orthodox people should be taken upon herself by the Church of Constantinople and the Local Orthodox Churches in whose bounds the Russian Orthodox people found themselves.’ However, as soon became clear, the realization of this variant became extremely problematic in view of the fact that huge masses of Russian refugees did not know the language and customs of those countries to which they had come, and the nourishment of such a large flock by priests speaking other languages (for example Greeks) presented very many problems. Moreover, the numerous émigré Russian clergy, who were fully able to deal with these problems, would not be involved. Therefore it was decided to continue the activities of the Higher Church Administration.

 

            “In order to work out a plan of further action, the first session of the HCA outside the borders of Russia took place on November 19, 1920… Metropolitan Dorotheus [the locum tenens of the patriarchal throne of Constantinople] gave his agreement [to the HCA’s decisions] and the HCA of the South of Russia was transformed into the Higher Church Administration Abroad.

 

            “Literally the day after the above-mentioned session, on November 20, 1920, an event took place in Moscow that had an exceptional significance for the Russian Church Abroad – his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon passed decree N 362 concerning the self-governance of church dioceses in the case of a break of communications between this or that diocese and his Holiness the Patriarch for external reasons over which they had no control (what they had in mind was war or repression by the authorities). This is the main content of this decree:

 

            “‘With the blessing of his Holiness the Patriarch, the Holy Synod and the Higher Church Council, in a joint session, judged concerning the necessity of… giving the diocesan Hierarch… instructions in case of a disconnection with the higher church administration or the cessation of the activity of the latter…

 

            “‘2. If dioceses, as a result of the movement of the front, changes of state boundaries, etc., find themselves unable to communicate with the higher church administration or the higher church administration itself together with his Holiness the Patriarch for some reason ceases its activity, the diocesan hierarch will immediately enter into relations with the hierarchs of neighbouring dioceses in order to organize a higher instance of church authority for several dioceses in the same conditions (in the form of a temporary higher church government or metropolitan region, or something similar).

 

            “‘3. The care for the organization of the higher church authority for the whole group who are in the situation indicated in point 2 is the obligatory duty of the eldest ranked hierarch in the indicated group…’[143]

 

            “This wise decree of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon, which was passed in conditions of anti-church terror, was given to the foreign bishops a year after its passing with the help of Bishop Meletius of Nerchenk. It served as the canonical basis for the formation of the Russian Church Abroad, since the émigré clergy were in the situation indicated in points 2 and 3.

 

            “Meanwhile the HCA in Constantinople continued to work out a plan for its further activities. At the sessions of April 19-21, 1921, it was decided to convene a ‘Congress of the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad to unite, regulate and reanimate church activity abroad’, which was later renamed the ‘Russian Church Council Abroad’, which has also become known in the literature as the Carlovtsy Council. Soon, at the invitation of Patriarch Demetrius of Serbia, the HCA led by Metropolitan Anthony moved to Sremskiye Karlovtsy in Serbia – a fraternal country which in the course of many years proved to be a reliable harbour for the leadership of the Church Abroad.”[144]

 

            The Emigration Council, which opened its first session on November 8/21, 1921, called on the Genoa conference to refuse recognition to the Bolshevik regime, to arm its opponents, and restore the Romanov dynasty.[145] In defence of this call, which provoked the frenzy of the Bolsheviks and which many regarded as dangerous dabbling in politics, the First-Hierarch of the Church in Exile, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev, said: “If by politics one understands all that touches upon the life of the people, beginning with the rightful position of the Church within the realm, then the ecclesiastical authorities and Church councils must participate in political life, and from this point of view definite demands are made upon it. Thus, the holy hierarch Hermogenes laid his life on the line by first demanding that the people be loyal to Tsar Basil Shuisky, and when the Poles imprisoned him he demanded the election of Tsar Michael Romanov. At the present time, the paths of the political life of the people are diverging in various directions in a far more definite way: some, in a positive sense, for the Faith and the Church, others in an inimical sense; some in support of the army and against socialism and communism, others exactly the opposite. Thus the Karlovtsy Council not only had the right, but was obliged to bless the army for the struggle against the Bolsheviks, and also, following the Great Council of Moscow of 1917-1918, to condemn socialism and communism.”[146]

 

            On May 3 (new calendar), a secret midnight meeting of the presidium of the GPU – Comrades Ushinsky, Menzhinsky, Yagoda, Samsonov and Krasikov – took place, at which it was decided “to summon Tikhon and demand of him that he publish within 24 hours the expulsion from the Church, defrocking and removal from their posts of the above-mentioned clergy [the leaders of the Russian Church in Exile]. If Tikhon refuses to carry out the above-mentioned demands, he is to be immediately arrested and accused of all the crimes he has committed against Soviet power.”[147] The signed protocol of this meeting was sent to Politburo, where it was reviewed in the presence of Lenin on May 4. It was decided to bring the Patriarch to trial.

 

            On the same day, the Patriarch appeared for the last time as a witness in the case of the 54 Moscow clergymen. After his speech the prosecutor declared that the Patriarch was to be put on trial in connection with the evidence he had given during the trial. It was therefore under conditions of extreme pressure that on May 5, Patriarch Tikhon convened a meeting of the Holy Synod and the Higher Church Council, at which he declared (decree no. 347) that “neither the epistle, nor the address of the Karlovtsy Synod [to the Genoa conference] express the voice of the Russian Church”. And he ordered the dissolution of the Church in Exile’s Higher Church Administration and the transfer of all power over the Russian refugees in Europe to Metropolitan Eulogius of Paris.[148] On the evening of that day, the Patriarch was interrogated by the GPU, and on the next day he was arrested.

 

            Decree no. 347 has been used by the Sovietized Moscow Patriarchate and its satellites to cast doubts on the canonicity of the Russian Church Abroad. However, (i) according to the renovationist Archbishop Eudocimus, Patriarch Tikhon later wrote to Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky): “I wrote that for the authorities, but you sit down and work”; (ii) the ukaz which the Church in Exile received did not have the Patriarch’s signature and was signed only by Archbishop Thaddeus of Astrakhan![149]; (iii) as Igumen Luke points out: “If one reads the decree one will see that it contains nothing concerning violation of canons by the Higher Church Administration and nowhere declares it to be uncanonical. No one, not even Metropolitan Eulogius accepted the authority of the document. The Patriarch in assigning Metropolitan Eulogius to head the parishes in Western Europe ‘overlooked’ the fact that there were eight other dioceses in the Church Abroad and said nothing about their leadership. This and other confused aspects of the decree only support the universal opinion that it was issued under pressure from the Bolsheviks who desired by all means to weaken the anti-Communist from abroad. Upon receiving notification of his appointment as ruling bishop in Europe Metropolitan Eulogius wrote to Metropolitan Anthony: ‘This decree amazed me by it suddenness and simply shocks one by the possible confusion it could bring into church life’ (exactly what the communists wanted and continue to desire in order to eliminate any opposition to their control of the Church). ‘There is no doubt that the decree was issued under pressure by the Bolsheviks.’ Metropolitan Eulogius continues, ‘I do not recognize this document as having any authority even though it might have been written and signed by the Patriarch. This document is political and not ecclesiological…’”[150]

 

            In any case, the Patriarch did not actually anathematise the émigré bishops, and so the action which was designed to placate the Bolsheviks only served to exacerbate their annoyance.[151]

 

            The leaders of the Russian Church in Exile took the view – and in this they were at first supported, as we have seen, by Metropolitan Eulogius – that the patriarch had been acting under duress at the time. So they acted in order formally to obey the Patriarch’s decree, while in effect ignoring it. They dissolved the Higher Church Administration and created a Synod of Bishops presided over by Metropolitan Eulogius in its place.

 

            The patriarch, as if in tacit acknowledgement of this, issued no further condemnation of the Synod Abroad and acted in future as if he fully recognised its authority.[152]

 

 

The Renovationist Coup (2)

 

            On May 12, the renovationist priests Vvedensky, Belkov and Kalinovsky (who, as the Patriarch pointed out, had but a short time before renounced holy orders), visited the Patriarch at the Troitsky podvorye, where he was confined, and demanded that he renounce the patriarchal throne. “After tormented hesitations,” writes Krivova, “well knowing who lay behind this act, Tikhon was forced to concede. But he did not renounce the throne and did not give the reins of the Church into the hands of the renovationists. The meaning of the Patriarch’s actions came down to a temporary departure from work, but he was prepared to renounce the throne only ‘if the coming Council removes’ the patriarchy from him. For the time being Tikhon was transferring power to one of the oldest hierarchs of the Church, Metropolitan Agathangel (Preobrazhensky) of Yaroslavl, about which he officially informed the President of the VtsIK, M.I. Kalinin.

 

            “However, the authorities did not allow Metropolitan Agathangel to leave for Moscow. Already on on May 5, 1922 V.D. Krasnitsky had arrived at the Tolga monastery where the metropolitan was living, and demanded that he sign the appeal of the so-called ‘Initiative Group of Clergy’. The metropolitan refused to sign the appeal. Then, two days later, his signature declaring that he would not leave was taken from him, and a guard was placed outside his cell and a search was carried out.

 

            “After Agathangel there remained in Moscow only three of the members of the Holy Synod and HCC, but they were not empowered to take any kind of decision that would be obligatory for the whole Church. Thus the path to the seizure of Church power by the renovationists was open. Using Tikhon’s temporary concession and the impossibility of Metropolitan Agathangel’s taking the place of the Patriarch, the renovationists declared that Tikhon had been removed and in an arbitrary manner seized power. Arriving on May 15, 1922 at a reception with M.I. Kalinin, they understood that Metropolitan Agathangel’s departure to Moscow was hardly possible. The next day the renovationists sent a letter to M.I. Kalinin, in which they declared that ‘in view of Patriarch Tikhon’s removal of himself from power, a Higher Church Administration is formed, which from May 2 (15) has taken upon itself the conducting of Church affairs in Russia.”[153]

 

            On May 18 the renovationists again presented the Patriarch with a written statement complaining that in consequence of the existing circumstances, Church business remained unattended to. They demanded that he entrust his chancery to them until Metropolitan Agathangel’s arrival in Moscow, in order that they might properly classify the correspondence received. Considering it a useful measure, the Patriarch yielded to their request and inscribed their petition with the following resolution: “The undersigned persons are ordered to take over and transmit to the Right Reverend Metropolitan Agathangelus, upon his arrival in Moscow, all the Synodical business with the assistance of secretary Numerov.”[154]

 

            The next day, having obtained the Patriarch’s transfer to the Donskoj monastery, the renovationists took over the Patriarch’s residence in the Troitsky podvorye. On May 29 the “Living Church”, the largest renovationist grouping, was officially created. Two days earlier, on May 27, Trotsky had written to Lenin: “The separation of the Church from the State, which we have established once and for all, by no means signifies that the state is indifferent to what is happening in the Church”. He spoke about “loyal and progressive elements in the clergy” and set the task of “raising the spirit of the loyal clergy” in indirect ways – through the press. He complained that “the editors of Pravda and Izvestia are not taking sufficient account of the huge historical importance of what is happening in the Church and around her”. Trotsky fully understood the importance of this, “the most profound spiritual revolution in the Russian people”. Lenin commented: “True! A thousand times true!”[155]

 

            However, the renovationists and communists still had to neutralize the threat to their plans posed by Patriarch Tikhon’s handing over of power to Metropolitan Agathangelus. So Protopriest Krasnitsky was sent to Yaroslavl to negotiate with the metropolitan. He placed a number of conditions before the Patriarch’s lawful deputy which amounted to his placing himself in complete dependence on the renovationists. Naturally, the metropolitan rejected these conditions. So Krasnitsky returned to Moscow and the renovationists spread abroad the rumour that the metropolitan was occupied “with his own affairs” and “was not hurrying” to fulfil the Patriarch’s command.

 

            Levitin and Shavrov write: “… Metropolitan Agathangelus’ behaviour would indeed have appeared quite incomprehensible if it had not been for one detail: for a month now E.A. Tuchkov and Metropolitan Agathangelus had been conducting secret negotiations. E.A. Tuchkov, whom the Higher Church Administration considered their main support in negotiations with the metropolitan expressed the desire to separate as quickly as possible from this unsolid institution [the HCA] and support Agathangelus [?!]. However, a series of concessions was expected from Agathangelus; he had to declare that he was renouncing Patriarch Tikhon’s political line. After a month’s negotiations, seeing that no progress was being made, Metropolitan Agathangelus unexpectedly [??] addressed the Russian Church with an appeal [dated June 5/18, 1922, N 214] which was printed by some underground printing-press and very quickly distributed in Moscow and the other cities…

 

            “E.A. Tuchkov was taken completely by surprise. The HCA was also shocked. Metropolitan Agathangelus was immediately arrested and sent into exile, to the Narymsk region. However, the appearance of this appeal showed that the unprincipled line of V.D. Krasnitsky was meeting with a sharp rejection in ecclesiastical circles…”[156]

 

            Metropolitan Agathangelus’ epistle accused the renovationists of “revising the dogmas and moral teaching of our Orthodox Faith, the sacred canons of the Holy Ecumenical Councils and the Orthodox Typicon of Divine services given by the great ascetics of Christian piety”, and gave the bishops the right to administer their dioceses independently until the restoration of a canonical Higher Church Authority.[157]

 

            And so, in the year of the creation of the Soviet Union, Russia was deprived, for the first time in her history since the Time of Troubles, of a legitimate centralized administration in both Church and State.

 

            In Petrograd, meanwhile, Metropolitan Benjamin was brought to trial, accused of resisting the confiscation of church valuables and called an “enemy of the people”. He was given many chances to save himself in a dishonourable manner. Thus even before the trial Vvedensky and the Petrograd commandant Bakayev had come to him and given him the choice: either revoke the anathema against Vvedensky or face trial. But the metropolitan refused to revoke the anathema. Again, during the trial, the judges hinted that he save himself by naming “the authors” of the proposition he had sent to Pomgol. The metropolitan again refused, saying: “I alone did it – I thought everything over; I formulated, wrote and sent the proposition myself. I did not allow anybody else to participate in deciding matters entrusted to me as archpastor.”

 

            It was during this trial that the prosecuting counsel Krasikov made the following remark: “The whole Orthodox Church is a subversive organization. Properly speaking, the entire Church ought to be put in prison!” On the other hand, the counsel for the defence, Gurovich, said: “If the metropolitan perishes for his faith, for his limitless devotion to the believing masses he will become more dangerous for Soviet power than now… The unfailing historical law warns us that faith grows, strengthens and increases on the blood of martyrs.”[158]

 

            Both remarks could be said to have been prophecies – the first of the coming total persecution that was to take place in the thirties, and the second of the final triumph of the Church which has already begun.

 

            In a letter written from prison, Metropolitan Benjamin expressed the essence of what was to become the position of the Catacomb Church a few years later: “The reasonings of some, perhaps outstanding pastors are strange.. – ‘we must preserve the living forces’, that is, for their sake, we must abandon everything! Then what is Christ for? It is not the Platonovs, the Chuprins, the Benjamins and their like who save the Church, but Christ. That point on which they are trying to stand is destruction for the Church; it is not right to sacrifice the Church for oneself.”[159] The metropolitan was shot on the night of August 12 to 13, 1922.

 

            He was replaced by a man with the opposite philosophy – Bishop Alexis (Simansky), the first hierarch to recognize the renovationist Higher Church Administration and the future second Soviet “Patriarch of Moscow”. He it was, moreover, who removed the ban placed by Metropolitan Benjamin on the renovationists and on June 5, 1922 announced their communion “with the re-established Church”.[160] This continuity between the leading hierarchs of the renovationists in the early 1920s and the leading hierarchs of the sergianists from 1927 onwards shows the inner links between the two movements. It shows that sergianism is in fact “neo-renovationism”, the continuation of the same heretical movement in a more subtle form.

 

 

The Church in Georgia and the Ukraine

 

            At this point some words should be said about the Church of Georgia, which was going through a very similar persecution at the hands of the authorities.

 

            Just after the abdication of the Tsar, on March 12, 1917, an Assembly of the bishops, clergy and laity of Georgia proclaimed the re-establishment of the autocephaly of the Georgian Church, which, as the Georgians claimed, had never been lawfully abolished.

 

            In September, a General Council confirmed the Acts of the March Council, and on October 1 Bishop Karion Sadzaguelachvili was enthroned as Catholicos-Patriarch in Tbilisi. The Provisional Government confirmed this election. However, on December 29 / January 11, the Russian Church, in the person of the newly elected Patriarch Tikhon, protested against the re-establishment of the autocephaly, pointedly addressing Karion as only a bishop.[161]

 

            When the Russian Civil War began, the Georgians refused to help the Whites. For a few months the British occupied the country, and when they left the Mensheviks came to power. For the next few years the Georgian Church was able to live at peace with the ruling Menshevik party.

 

            In February, 1921, however, the Bolsheviks invaded, and after a short war of three weeks took control of the country. “On February 7, 1922,” writes Fr. Elijah Melia, “the Catholicos Ambrose sent to the Interallied Conference at Genoa (the highest degree of international jurisdiction at that time) a letter of protest in which, recalling the moral obligations towards the nation of his charge, he protested in the name of the people of Georgia, deprived of their rights, against the foreign occupation and demanded the intervention of civilized humanity to oppose the iniquity committed against Georgia. He was arrested in February 1923 with Archbishop Nasaire and all the members of his Council. Their trial, which took place under conditions of semi-liberty, greatly stirred up the country.

 

            “There were three accusations: 1) the letter to the conference at Genoa of 1922, 2) the concealment of the historic treasures of the Church in order to preserve them from passing into the hands of the State and 3) the prohibition imposed [by the] Governmental Commission for Religion against the redemption of precious objects in favour of the starving. Archbishop Nasaire was assassinated during the trial, most probably in order to impress the others accused. All the members of his Council showed their solidarity with the Catholicos Ambrose, who conducted himself heroically, assuming the entire responsibility for his acts, which he declared to have been in conformity with his obligations and with the tradition of the Church of Georgia in similar cases. He was condemned to eight years imprisonment. Two members of his Council were given five and two years respectively. The Catholicos was liberated before the term of his imprisonment was over. He died on March 29, 1927.

 

            “In August 1924, a general insurrection broke out, organized by all the active forces of the nation – the higher ranks of the army, the political parties, the university, the ecclesiastics, the population as a whole. But the uprising was doomed to fail, for the plot had been betrayed. The repression created thousands of victims. Groups of partisans still operated for some time…”[162]

 

            In the Ukraine, meanwhile, the Patriarchal Church was struggling not only against the renovationists, but also against the Ukrainian separatists. Three times in this century the Ukraine has attained independence from Russia, and each time political independence has provided the spur for ecclesiastical schism: in 1917, in 1941 and in 1990. In mid-November, 1917, a committee in charge of convoking a council of the Ukrainian clergy and laity was organized in Kiev under the leadership of the retired Archbishop Alexis Dorodnitsyn. Although canonical in its origins, this committee soon turned its attention to the quite uncanonical goal of creating an autocephalous Church  of the Ukraine and the removal of the canonical leader of the Church, Metropolitan Vladimir. These revolutionary demands were vigorously opposed by the metropolitan until his martyrdom at the hands of the Bolsheviks in January, 1918.[163]

 

            In 1920 an “Independent Union of Ukrainian Orthodox Parishes” was formed, which convoked the first council of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church in October, 1921. However, since no bishops had joined the autocephalists, they were forced to create bishops for themselves in an uncanonical manner which no other Orthodox Church recognized, earning for themselves the title of the “Lypkovsky samosvyaty” after their leader Lypkovsky. Later in the 1920s a second autocephalist movement came into being initiated by Bishop Theophilus (Buldovsky) of Lubensk, who received consecration in the Patriarchal Church at a time when the Lypkovsky schism was declining, but who later separated from the Church on the same basis of Ukrainian nationalism and united the remnants of the Lypkovsky schism to his own.

 

            One of the most popular patriarchal priests in the Ukraine at this time was Fr. Basil (Zelentsov). It was largely through his influence that Buldovsky’s schism was rejected by the mass of the people. In 1922 he was put on trial on a political charge, and in his speech at the end of the trial he made one of the clearest statements of how far a Christian could go in recognizing Soviet power: “I have already told you, and will tell you again, that I am loyal to Soviet power as such, for it, like everything else, is sent to us from above… But where the matter touches the Faith of Christ, the churches of God and human souls, there I have fought, do now fight, and will continue to fight to my last breath with the representatives of this power. It would be shamefully sinful for me, as a warrior of Christ, who bear this cross on my breast, to defend myself personally at a time when the enemies have taken up arms and declared war against Christ Himself.”

 

            After his consecration to the episcopate in 1925, Bishop Basil continued to wage a spiritual war against the Bolsheviks, publicly calling them “apostates from God, violaters, blasphemers of the Faith of Christ, murderers, a satanic power, blood-suckers, destroyers of freedom and justice, fiends from hell”. He constantly called on the people “to make them no allowances, to make no compromises with them, to fight and fight with the enemies of Christ, and not to fear tortures and death, for sufferings from Him are the highest happiness and joy”. In 1930 Bishop Basil suffered martyrdom in Moscow for his rejection of sergianist neo-renovationism.[164]

 

            Although the Ukrainian autocephalists were a clearly schismatic movement, they did not share the modernist ideology of the Muscovite renovationists, and entered into union with them only in the autumn of 1924, evidently with the aim of securing the recognition of their own autocephaly from Constantinople, with whom the renovationists were in communion. That is why it was not until January 5, 1924 that the patriarch extended his anti-renovationist anathema of 1923 to the autocephalists. Even then, the autocephalists showed little animosity towards the patriarch, and in their Second All-Ukrainian Council of 1925 the Synod issued an epistle calling for the review of Patriarch Tikhon’s defrocking by the renovationists.[165]

 

            In 1929 Stalin reversed the Bolshevik regime’s tolerant policy towards the Ukrainian autocephalists (who were in any case now largely controlled by Soviet agents), and in January, 1930 the authorities convoked a council which dissolved all the Church’s central and regional organs, although some parishes continued to exist for a few more years under the strict supervision of the authorities.[166]

 

 

The Renovationist Council of 1923

 

            In Russia the renovationists continued to gain ground throughout 1922. On June 16, three important hierarchs declared their full adhesion to the “Living Church” as follows: “We, Metropolitan Sergius of Vladimir and Shuya [the future first Soviet “Patriarch”], Archbishop Eudocimus of Nizhegorod and Arzamas and Archbishop Seraphim of Kostroma and Galich, having studied the platform of the Temporary Church Administration and the canonical lawfulness of its administration, consider it the only lawful, canonical, higher church authority, and all the instructions issuing from it we consider to be completely lawful and obligatory. We call on all true pastors and believing sons of the Church, both those entrusted to us and those belonging to other dioceses, to follow our example.”[167]

 

            The Sergianist Metropolitan John (Snychev) wrote about this act: “We do not have the right to hide from history those sad and staggering apostasies from the unity of the Russian Church which took place on a mass scale after the publication in the journal ‘Living Church’ of the epistle-appeals of the three well-known hierarchs. Many of the hierarchs and clergy reasoned naively. Thus: ‘If the wise Sergius has recognized the possibility of submitting to the Higher Church Administration, then it is clear that we, too, must follow his example.’”[168]

 

            Meanwhile, the GPU gave valuable aid to the renovationists, arresting and sending into exile all the clergy who remained faithful to the Patriarch. Also, they handed over to them nearly two-thirds of the functioning churches in the Russian republic and Central Asia, as well as many thousands in the Ukraine, Belorussia and Siberia. However, these figures exaggerate the true strength of the renovationists, in that their churches were almost empty while the patriarchal churches were filled to overflowing.

 

            At their second All-Russian council, which met in Moscow on April 29, 1923, the renovationists first heaped praises on the revolution, which they called a “Christian creation”, on the Soviet government, which they said was the first government in the world that strove to realize “the ideal of the Kingdom of God”. And they were no less generous to Lenin: “First of all, we must turn with words of deep gratitude to the government of our state, which, in spite of the slanders of foreign informers, does not persecute the Church… The word of gratitude and welcome must be expressed by us to the only state in the world which performs, without believing, that work of love which we, believers, do not fulfil, and also to the leader of Soviet Russia, V.I. Lenin, who must be dear also to church people…”

 

            Patriarch Tikhon was tried in absentia (he was still imprisoned in the monastery), and deprived not only of his clerical orders but also of his monasticism, being called thenceforth “layman Basil Bellavin”. Then the patriarchate itself was abolished, its restoration being called a counter-revolutionary act. Finally, some further resolutions were adopted allowing white clergy to become bishops and priests to remarry, and introducing the Gregorian calendar.

 

            When the decisions of the council were taken to the Patriarch for his signature, he calmly wrote: “Read. The council did not summon me, I do not know its competence and for that reason cannot consider its decision lawful.”[169]

 

            46 “bishops” (out of 73 who attended the council) signed the decree condemning the Patriarch. One of them, Joasaph (Shishkovsky), told Fr. Basil Vinogradov how this happened. “The leaders of the council Krasnitsky and Vvedensky gathered all those present at the ‘council’ of bishops for this meeting. When several direct and indirect objections to these leaders’ proposal to defrock the Patriarch began to be expressed, Krasnitsky quite openly declared to all present: ‘He who does not immediately sign this resolution will only leave this room straight for the prison.’ The terrorized bishops (including Joasaph himself) did not find the courage to resist in the face of the threat of a new prison sentence and forced labour in a concentration camp and… signed, although almost all were against the resolution. None of the church people had any doubt that the ‘council’s’ sentence was the direct work of Soviet power and that now a criminal trial and bloody reprisal against the Patriarch was to be expected at any time.”[170]

 

            However, already at this 1923 council the renovationist movement was beginning to fall apart. The 560 deputies were divided into four groups: the supporters of Krasnitsky (the Living Church), of Vvedensky (the Ancient-Apostolic Church), of Antoninus (Church Regeneration) and of Patriarch Tikhon. When Krasnitsky tried to take control of the council and reject any coalition between his group and the other renovationists, a schism amidst the schismatics was avoided only by strong behind-the-scenes pressure on his supporters from the communists, who succeeded in regrouping them under a “Holy Synod” led by Metropolitan Eudocimus.[171]

 

            Meanwhile, the pressures on the Patriarch were mounting inexorably, with daily visits from the GPU agent Tuchkov (Tikhon called him “an angel of Satan”), who made blackmail threats to force him to make concessions to the State. In April, the government announced that the Patriarch was about to go on trial on charges arising from the trials of the 54 in Moscow and of Metropolitan Benjamin in Petrograd the previous year. However, partly because the authorities wanted to give the renovationist council the opportunity to condemn him first, and partly, later, as the result of an ultimatum issued by the British foreign minister Lord Curzon, which was supported by an outcry in the British and American press, the trial was postponed to June 17.

 

            Volkogonov writes: “Tikhon, imprisoned in Donskoi monastery, was being subjected to the standard treatment: interrogation, threats, pressure and bribes. The interrogations went on even after Lenin had lost his faculties, as his instructions on Church affairs continued to be carried out to the letter.”[172]

 

            On June 11 Yaroslavsky, president of the Antireligious Commission, wrote to the Politburo and Stalin: “It is necessary immediately to pass the following resolution on the case of Tikhon: 1) the investigation of Tikhon’s case must be continued without a time limit; 2) Tikhon must be informed that the penalty meted out to him may be commuted if: (a) he makes a special declaration that he repents of the crimes he has committed against Soviet power and the working and peasant masses and that he now has a loyal attitude to Soviet power; (b) he admits the justice of his being made to answer in court for these crimes; (c) he walls himself openly and firmly from all counter-revolutionary organisations, especially White Guard and Monarchist organisations, both civil and religious; (d) he expresses his sharply negative attitude to the new Karlovtsy Synod and its participants; (e) he expresses his negative attitude to the attacks by Catholic clergy (in the person of the Pope, also the Bishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Constantinople Meletius); (f) he expresses his agreement with some reforms in the ecclesiastical sphere (for example, the new style). If he agrees, we should release him and transfer him to the Valaam podvorye, without forbidding him ecclesiastical activity.”

 

            On the same day, Yaroslavsky wrote the following note: “A short motivation for the proposal regarding Tikhon. 1) It is necessary that there should be some sort of step that would justify our putting of Tikhon’s case, otherwise the impression will be created that we were have been frightened by the threats of Whiteguardism. 2) From conversations with Tikhon it has become clear that with some pressure and some promises he will go along with these proposals. 3) If he agrees, these statements of his will have enormous political significance: they will completely confuse the plans of all the émigré gangs; they will strike a blow against all those organisations that were oriented on Tikhon; Tikhon will become a guarantee against an increase in the influence of the HCA [the renovationists]; his personal influence will be compromised by his ties with the GPU and his admissions; his statements against the Bishop of Canterbury, Meletius, Anthony and the Pope will be a slap in the face first of all to the English government and will deprive England’s declarations in defence of Tikhon of all significance in European circles; and finally, his agreement with even one of these reforms (he has agreed to recognise the new, Gregorian calendar) will make him a ‘heretic’ – an innovator in the eyes of the True Orthodox. The HCA will thereby preserve its former position together with a significant diminution in its influence.”[173]

 

            At the beginning of June, the Patriarch fell ill, and was transferred from the Donskoy monastery to the Taganka prison. There he was able to receive only official Soviet newspaper accounts of the Church struggle, which greatly exaggerated the successes of the renovationists. Feeling that his presence at the helm of the Church was absolutely necessary, and that of his two enemies, the renovationists and the communists, the renovationists were the more dangerous, the Patriarch decided to make concessions to the government in order to be released. Thus on June 16 and again on July 1 he issued his famous “confession”, in which he repented of all his anti-Soviet acts (including the anathema against the Bolsheviks), and “finally and decisively” set himself apart “from both the foreign and the internal monarchist White-guard counter-revolutionaries”.[174]

 

            As a result, according to Fr. Gleb Yakunin, “all the hitherto righteous and courageous words of the patriarch censuring the moral and spiritual fall of the people, the terrible bloody excesses and murders of innocent people, the wild outbursts of satanic spite and hatred, the profanation of religious and national holy things – all these words of the patriarch calling men to heed their consciences and full of righteous indignation against the evils committed were declared ‘antisoviet politics’ by the patriarch himself. In spite of the greatness of the personality and exploit of Patriarch Tikhon, we must with great sorrow admit that the principle of the use of lies and false witness for the sake of ‘the salvation of the Church’ was applied in the Moscow Patriarchate for the first time by him.

 

            “In its time Patriarch Tikhon’s ‘repentance’ did not elicit wide protests: believers understood the extraordinary difficulty of the situation and hope that the grievous compromise would nevertheless work for the benefit of the Church. Besides, joy at the liberation of Patriarch Tikhon drowned all feelings of alarm. The absence of protests was also elicited by the huge authority that the patriarch enjoyed, and the unquestioning trust people had in all his actions.

 

            “Only a few more sensitive Christians understood the terrible danger of the path chosen by the patriarch.”[175]

 

            However, Archbishop Nicon (Rklitsky) takes a less severe attitude towards Tikhon’s declaration, pointing out that: “1) it did not annul the anathema in the name of the Russian Orthodox Church on Soviet power, 2) he did not declare himself a friend of Soviet power and its co-worker, 3) it did not invoke God’s blessing on it, 4) it did not call on the Russian people to obey this power as God-established, 5) it did not condemn the movement for the re-establishment of the monarchy in Russia, and 6) it did not condemn the Whites’ struggle to overthrow Soviet power. By his declaration Patriarch Tikhon only pointed to the way of acting which he had chosen for the further defence and preservation of the Russian Orthodox Church. How expedient this way of acting was is another question,… but in any case Patriarch Tikhon did not cross that boundary which had to separate him, as head of the Russian Orthodox Church, from the godless power.”[176]

 

            Tikhon was released on June 27, 1923, and his appearance in public – he had aged terribly in prison – was enough to send the Living Church into a sharp and irreversible decline.[177] They remained dangerous as long as they retained the favour of the authorities; but by 1926 the authorities were already turning to others (the Gregorians, then Metropolitan Sergius) as better suited for the task of destroying the Church. And by the end of the Second World War the last remaining renovationists had been absorbed into the neo-renovationist Soviet Moscow Patriarchate.

 

            However, the Patriarch bitterly repented of his “repentance”; he said that if he had known how weak the Living Church really was, he would not have signed the “confession” and would have stayed in prison.[178] And when he was sadly asked why he had said that he was no longer an enemy of the Soviet government, he replied: “But I did not say that I was its (i.e. the Soviet government’s) friend…”[179]

 

            On July 15, the Patriarch anathematized the Living Church, declaring: “They have separated themselves from the body of the Ecumenical Church and deprived themselves of God’s favor, which resides only in the Church of Christ. Consequently, all arrangements made during our absence by those ruling the Church, since they had neither legal right nor canonical authority, are non-valid and void, and all actions and sacraments performed by bishops and clergymen who have forsaken the Church are devoid of God’s grace and power; the faithful taking part in such prayers and sacraments shall receive no sanctification thereby, and are subject to condemnation for participating in their sin…”[180]

 

            Large numbers of parishes, especially in such important urban centres as Petrograd (through Bishop Manuel (Lemeshevsky)[181]) and Voronezh (through Archbishop Peter (Zverev)[182]), now renounced renovationism, and influential renovationist hierarchs such as Metropolitan Sergius hastened (and yet not very quickly, as Hieromartyr Bishop Damascene of Glukhov pointed out[183]) to make public confessions to the Patriarch.

 

            “We cite here an important witness of these historical events, the fellow-struggler of Patriarch Tikhon, the confessor-archimandrite Pitirim, [who said] concerning the ‘repentance’ of Metropolitan Sergius: ‘Sergius saw the patriarch’s firmness and hastened to offer his repentance to the Patriarch… Patriarch Tikhon, taking into account the great extent of the harm done… to the Church’s cause, did not consider it possible to accept the repentance of Sergius in a private form, but ordered him to offer repentance in the rank of a deeply penitent person… And this deep repentance of Sergius was carried out on the appointed day in the Donskoy monastery in the city of Moscow. A multitude of Orthodox had gathered…. After the Divine service the holy Patriarch Tikhon came out to the ambon in his patriarchal vestments accompanied by the clergy, while the excommunicated Sergius, standing outside the church at the threshold, crawled through the whole church on his knees between the ranks of the people, without a ryasa and with his head uncovered. Standing in front of the Church’s first-hierarch on his knees, Sergius confessed his sin and asked forgiveness of his Holiness. But the people with loud shouts drowned the words of the traitor to Orthodoxy, Metropolitan Sergius: “Holy Vladyko, do not believe him, do not believe him!” shouted the people. The patriarch stood without speaking, without uttering a word. And the former Metropolitan Sergius, crawling on his knees left the church. Then again, from the outer doors of the church, he crawled through the whole church towards the ambon, and again asked for forgiveness. But the people kept on rejecting him, repeating one and the same word: “Don’t believe him, he’ll still deceive you!” And again he was forced to crawl out of the church, so as for the third time to approach the first-hierarch of the Church who was standing on the ambon and ask forgiveness for the apostasy he had committed. And although the people continued to cry out to the holy hierarch: “Do not believe him, do not believe him!”, Patriarch Tikhon turned to the people… and pronounced the words of the Saviour: “He who comes to Me I will not cast out” (John 6.37). And finally he turned to speak to the former Metropolitan Sergius. Did he understand his great guilt before the Orthodox Faith and Church? Did he promise before God and the many witnesses of the Church heavenly and earthly to carry out the commands of the Patriarch? To all this Sergius gave an affirmative answer and confirmed that he clearly recognised his great guilt, that he renounced renovationism and delivered it to anathema, that he would remain until death in Holy Orthodoxy, and that he promised to carry out any penance that his Holiness the Patriarch would lay upon him. And the Patriarch pronounced upon him the judgement of the All-Russian Orthodox Church: “The former Metropolitan Sergius, as having fallen away into the anti-God heresy of living-church renovationism, and as having drawn many Orthodox priests, monks and laity into destruction, is to remain for the rest of his life weeping for what he has done, and from now on cannot touch church serving, but will remain in the rank of a simple monk”. And he instructed him to remain in a certain monastery without departing from it, in complete obedience to the father abbot. And before Christ God and His Angels and the Holy Church the former Metropolitan Sergius gave a promise to fulfil everything he had promised exactly. But alas, he immediately deceived the Patriarch, broke his promise to him, boldly trampled on the canons of the Catholic and Apostolic Church. He deceived everyone he could deceive; he declared that “he had received complete forgiveness from his Holiness” and began to serve. In view of the canons of the Holy Apostles, Holy Councils and Holy Fathers, after this he is not only considered banned, but also completely deposed, even excommunicated.

 

            “‘And this deception was successful, for in those days that were so difficult for the Church, the voice of his Holiness the Patriarch could scarcely be heard beyond the Donskoy monastery, where he lived after his imprisonment… Although the reposed Patriarch Tikhon often warned that none of the leaders of the renovationist false-church could be allowed to lead the true Orthodox Church.’”[184]  

 

            Some sergianists have tried to show that Sergius did not really share the renovationist position.[185] However, Sergius’ published statements in favour of the renovationists, especially his epistle of June 16, 1922 contradict this view. Moreover, the people did not trust him, shouting to the Patriarch not to receive him; while the renowned Elder Nectarius of Optina said that the poison of renovationism was in him still.[186]

 

            The Bolsheviks continued to back the renovationists, and on December 8, 1923 issued an instruction forbidding the commemoration of the “former” Patriarch at Divine services in that such an act would be seen “as having the character of a clearly political demonstration aginst the Workers-Peasants’ authorities.”[187] Such was the popularity of the Patriarch, however, that neither the renovationists nor the pressure of the GPU could shake the loyalty of the great mass of the people. The Russian Church Abroad also remained loyal to him, as did all the Autocephalous Churches except Alexandria and Constantinople. The Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VII recognized the renovationists and decided to send a commission “to bring peace and end the present anomaly” – only to be firmly rebuked by Patriarch Tikhon.[188]

 

            “Honour and glory to the late patriarch,” wrote Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) in 1925, “that, with all his good-natured condescension towards people, with all his yearning for peace, he never gave an inch of ground to this barren ‘living church’, but received penitents from her according to the rite for the reception of heretics and schismatics, and re-consecrated churches which were returned from them to their lawful pastors as churches ‘defiled by heretics’.”[189]

 

            The Patriarchal Church had triumphed.

 

 

The Lessons of Renovationism

 

            If the Moscow Council of 1917-18 established the fundamental position of the Church vis-à-vis the State, the renovationist council of 1923 revealed the basic modes of attack employed by the State against the Church, and thus provided the Church with valuable experience for the still fiercer struggles ahead. These basic modes of attack were:-

 

            1. Control of the Central Church Administration. Like the State, the Church in Her post-revolutionary structure was a highly centralized organism. The astonishing success of the Living Church in its early stages was partly the result of its usurpation of the central administration and the confusion this engendered in both the higher and the lower ranks of the faithful. The Patriarch was in prison, and some reports said that he had resigned, others – that he had been killed. Although the patriarchal locum tenens, Metropolitan Agathangelus, circulated a secret order directing the bishops to rule their dioceses independently in accordance with the Patriarch’s ukaz no. 362 of November 7/20, 1920, the habit of looking to the centre for all major directives was difficult to break. This habit was broken, for some, only after the still greater shock of the events of 1927, when another unscrupulous hierarch, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), took control of the central administration of the Church.

 

            2. The Façade of Canonical Orthodoxy. The renovationists originally put on a mask of canonical Orthodoxy, claiming to have received power by legal transfer from the Patriarch. Very soon, however, they threw off this mask – wherein lay their fundamental mistake. Thus, as we have seen, the crudity of their attacks on the basic dogmas of the Faith and on monasticism repelled the people. In future, the GPU would take care that their candidate for the leadership of the Russian Church would have at least the appearance of canonical and dogmatic Orthodoxy.

 

            3. The Lure of State Legalization. In spite of the Patriarch’s “confession”, the Patriarchal Church never received legalization by the State during his lifetime. This meant that the Church was always as it were in the wilderness, without the favour and security enjoyed by the renovationists. The depths to which the renovationists were prepared to go in order to win this security is illustrated by the pannikhida they celebrated for Lenin after his death, in which they described his soul as “essentially Christian”! In the same vein was Vvedensky’s speech to the 1923 council, in which he said: “We must turn to the government with words of deeply felt gratitude. The Church is not persecuted, whatever the calumnies of the foreign propagandists may say. Everyone in Russia can voice his conviction. We must direct this message of thanks to the only Government in the world, which, though it does not believe in God, yet acts in accordance with love, which is more than we, who believe, can claim for ourselves.”[190]

 

            Ironically, therefore, as Fr. Aidan Nichols has pointed out, the renovationists came “to resemble the pre-Revolutionary establishment in their spirit of subordination to the State.”[191] The Patriarchal Church, however, gained in spiritual authority. For, already in the early 1920s, the view was current that the faithful were living, in the Patriarch’s words, “in the years of the triumph of Satan and of the power of the Antichrist”. So the “Living Church”, in coming to terms with Soviet power, was, as the Patriarch said, “an institution of the Antichrist”.[192]

 

            The Patriarchal Church, on the other hand, was like the woman fleeing into the wilderness from the red dragon (Revelation 12); and it was still to her that the faithful children of the Church clung.



[1] “The First Chinese Orthodox Martyrs”, Chinese Herald, June, 1935 ®; Orthodox Life, vol. 29, no. 1, January-February, 1979, pp. 14-18; The True Vine, N 8, Winter, 1991, pp. 42-51.

[2] V. Moss, “Ecucommunism”, Living Orthodoxy, September-October, 1989, vol. XI, no. 5, pp. 13-18. (Sources in Greek marked (G); Latin (L); French (F), Bulgarian (B), Serbian (S) and Russian (R)).

[3] Averky, “On the situation of the Orthodox Christian in the Contemporary World”, in Istinnoe Pravoslavie i Sovremennij Mir, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971 ®.

[4] Vladimir Gubanov (ed.), Nikolai II-ij i Novie Mucheniki, St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 701 ®.

[5] Marek Kohn, “Joyfully back to Church?”, New Statesman and Society, May 1, 1992, p. 32.

[6] See I. Shafarevich, Sotsializm kak yavlenie mirovoj istorii, Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, and his contributions to A. Solzhenitsyn (ed.) Iz-Pod Glyb, Paris: YMCA Press, 1974 ®.

[7] Orthodox Life, vol. 41, no. 6, November-December, 1991, p. 10.

[8] See Nicholas Kozlov, Krestnij Put’, Moscow, 1993; Enel, “Zhertva”, Kolokol, Moscow, 1990, N 5, pp. 17-37, and Michael Orlov, “Ekaterinburgskaya Golgofa”, Kolokol’, 1990, N 5, pp. 37-55 ®.

[9] Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920; quoted in Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion, Durban, S.A.: Dolphin Press, 1978, pp. 272-273.

[10] However, Lenin was partly Jewish. His grandfather was called Israel before his baptism by an Orthodox priest, and his father’s name was Moishe Blank. See Lina Averina, “Yevrejskij koren’”, Nasha Strana (Israel), January 22, 1997 ®.

[11] Reed, op. cit., p. 274.

[12] Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, London: Fontana Press, 1995, pp. 112-13. Jews – even religious Jews – continued to play a major role in the Communist parties of Eastern Europe until well after the Second World War. For example, Moses Rozen became a member of the Romanian Communist Party after the war, and continued to serve the Romanian Communists even after becoming Chief Rabbi of Romania in 1948, and continued to have a strong influence after the fall of Ceausescu in 1989. See Pyatnitsa (Israel), N 69, January 22, 1997, p. 8 ®.

[13] Pipes, op.cit., p. 113.

[14] Weitzmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weitzmann, New York: Harper, 1949.

[15] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1947, p. 383

[16] Shafarevich, “Sotsializm”, in Solzhenitsyn, A. (ed.) Iz-pod Glyb, Paris:YMCA Press, 1974; Sotsializm kak yavlenie mirovoj istorii, Paris: YMCA Press, 1977 ®.

[17] However, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia writes (personal communication, 21 January, 1997): “It seems more probable that it was directed against the theories of Marcellus of Ancyra (who was not a millenarian); Marcellus and his followers are mentioned in Canon One of the 381 Council. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, takes the view that the clause in question is aimed against Marcellus. Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology, says nothing about any condemnation of millenarianism in 381.”

[18] Florovsky, “Metaphyzicheskie predposylki utopizma”, Put’, June-July, 1926, p. 30 ®).

[19] Quoted in Borisov, “Natsional’noye vozrozhdeniye i natsiya-lichnost’”, in Solzhenitsyn, A. (ed.) Iz-pod Glyb, Paris: YMCA Press, p. 202 ®.

[20] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, 1877; translated by Boris Brasol, Haslemere: Ianmead, 1984, p. 738.

[21] I. Shafarevich, “Obosobleniye ili sblizheniye”, in Solzhenitsyn, A. (ed.), Iz-pod Glyb, Paris: YMCA Press, 1974 ®.

[22] Tuskarev (Bishop Dionysius (Alferov)), Tserkov’ o Gosudarstve, Staritsa, 1992, pp. 9-10 ®.

[23] Quoted in Elizabeth Dilling, The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today, The Noontide Press, 1983.

[24] Protocol 10, in Begunov, Yu.K., Stepanov, A.D., Dushenov, K.Yu., Tajna Bezzakonij, St. Petersburg, 2000, pp. 174, 176 ®.

[25] Quoted in Sergius Fomin, Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem, Sergiev Posad: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1993, p. 100 ®.

[26] See I.N. Andrushkevich, “Doktrina sv. Imperatora Yustiniana Velikago”, Pravoslavnaa Rus’, No. 4 (1529), February 15/28, 1995, pp. 4-12 ®.

[27] For the situation in Russia at the time, see Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov’s letters quoted in M. Novoselov, Pis’ma k Druzyam, Moscow, 1994, pp. 94-95, V. Verkhovtseva, “Nyeskol’ko slov o nashem dukhovenstve (Khram Khrista Spasitelya)”, in Bessmertny, A.R. & Filatov, S.B. (eds.) Religia i demokratia, Moscow: Progress, 1993, pp. 141-148, and S. Golubtsov, Moskovskoe dukhovenstvo v predverii i nachale gonenij, Moscow, 1999, pp. 7-12 ®. For the situation in Constantinople early in the twentieth century, see Peter Botsi, Gerontas Ieronymos o isykhastis tis Aiginas, Athens, 1991, pp. 58-77 (G).

[28] See K. Dinkov, Istoriya na B’lgarskata Ts’rkva, Vratsa, 1953, chapter 2 (B).

[29] Quoted in L. Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tserkvi, 1917-1945, Moscow: Krutitskoye Patriarsheye Podvorye, 1996, p. 313 ®.

[30] See Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968; Charles Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece 1821-1853, Cambridge University Press, 1969.

[31] See M.V. Danilushkin (ed.), Istoria Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi, 1917-1970, Saint Petersburg: Voskreseni, 1997, pp. 67-69 ®.

[32] See James Cunningham, A Vanquished Hope: the movement for Church renewal in Russia, 1905-1906, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981; Alexander Bogolepov, Church Reforms in Russia, 1905-1918, Bridgeport, Conn.: Publications Committee of the Metropolitan Council of the Russian Orthodox Church of America, 1966.

[33] Quoted in N. Talberg, Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi, Jordanville, 1959, p. 831 ®.

[34] See Holy New Hieromartyr Maximus Sandovich, Liberty, Tenn.: St. John of Kronstadt Press, 1998.

[35] Holy New Hieromartyr Maximus Sandovich, op. cit., pp. 48-50.

[36] Kyril Fitzlyon and Tatiana Browning, Russia Before the Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1977, p. 46.

[37] Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weitzmann, New York: Harper, 1949.

[38] Dostoyevsky is here speaking about the situation of the Russians in the Ukraine in the seventeenth century especially, when they were under Polish political domination.and Jewish economic domination.

[39] Dostoyevksy, The Diary of a Writer, March, 1877, II, 3; translated by Boris Brasol, Haslemere: Ianmead, 1984, pp. 648-651.

[40] Massie, Nicolas and Alexandra, London: Book Club Associates, 1967, p. 229.

[41] Pis’ma Blazhenneishago Mitropolita Antonia (Khrapovitskago), Jordanville, 1988, pp. 37, 39 ®.

[42] On this trial see Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste (1795-1995), part 1, Moscow: “Russkij Put’”, 2001, pp. 444-451 ®.

[43] S.V. Bulgakov, Nastol’naya Kniga dlya Svyashchenno-Tserkovno-Sluzhitelya, Kharkov, 1900, p. 143 (in Russian). For ritual murders demonstrated in court, see Dal’, V. Rozyskanie o ubiyenii yevreev khristianskikh mladentsev i upotreblenii krovi ikh, St. Petersburg, 1844; Rozanov, V. Obonyatel’noe i osyazatel’noe otnoshenie yevreev k krovi, St. Petersburg, 1913; O. Platonov, Ternovij venets Rossii, Moscow, 1998 (in Russian).

[44] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 748-754.

[45] Archbishop Anthony, in Zhizn’ Volynii, № 221, 2 September, 1913 ®.

[46] See Ekklesiastiki Alitheeia, N 16, April 20, 1913, pp. 123-125, N 19, May 11, 1913, pp. 145-146, N 11, N 24, June 15, 1913, pp. 187-191, March 15, 1914, p. 119 (G); О lzhe-uchenii imyabozhnikov”, Tserkovnie Vedomosti, № 20, 1913 ®.

[47] Vladimir Gubanov (ed.), Nikolai II-ij i Novie Mucheniki, St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 770 ®.

[48] The best effort was by S. Troitsky in one of the three reports attached by the Russian Holy Synod to their decision of 1913: “Afonskaia Smuta”, Tserkovnie Vedomosti, N 20, 1913, pp. 882-909 ®.

[49] See Constantine Papoulides, Oi Rossoi onomolatroi tou Agiou Orous, Thessaloniki, 1977 (G).

[50] See V. Moss, “The Name of God and the Name-Worshipping Heresy”,

[51] Metropolitan Anastasius, Conversations with My Own Heart, Jordanville, 1948, p. 123 ®; translated in Living Orthodoxy, N 101, vol. XVII, no. 5, September-October, 1996, p. 9.

[52] Bishop Andronicus, “Russkij grazhdanskij stroj zhizni pered sudom khristianina”, Fryazino, 1995, pp. 24-25 (R).

[53] In Gubanov, op. cit., p. 30.

[54] In Gubanov, op. cit., p. 70.

[55] In Gubanov, op. cit., p. 62.

[56] Nazarov, Kto naslednik rossijskogo prestola&, Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1996, pp. 68-69 ®.

[57] A.D. Stepanov, “Mezhdu mirom i monastyrem”, in Tajna Bezzakonia, St. Petersburg, 2002, p. 491 ®.

[58] Quoted by Oleg Lebedev, “Mezhdu Febralyem i Oktyabrem”, Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 13 November, 1996, p. 5 ®.

[59] Danilushkin, op. cit., p. 88.

[60] Quoted in Tamara Groyan’s work on Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow, Tsariu Nebesnomu i Zemnomu Vernij, Moscow: Palomnik, 1996, p. 142 ®. Italics mine (V.M.).

[61] Pis’ma Blazhenneishago Mitropolita Antonia (Khrapovitskago), op. cit., p. 57 ®. Cf. Victor Antonov, “1917 god: Arkhiepiskop Antonij i Fevralisty”, Vozvrashchenie, N 2 (6), 1994, p. 25 ®.

[62] Quoted in Groyan, op. cit., p. 128.

[63] Quoted in G.M. Katkov, Fevral’skaia Revoliutsia, Paris: YMCA Press, 1984, p. 370 ®.

[64] In Groyan, op. cit., pp. 122, 123.

[65] Quoted in Groyan, op. cit., pp. 183-184. Bishop Gregory Grabbe called Lvov “a not altogether normal fantasiser” (Russkaya Tserkov’ pered litsom gospodstvuyushchego zla, Jordanville, 1991, p. 4 ®).

[66] “Preemstvennost’ Grekha”, publication of the parish of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, Tsaritsyn, p. 7 ®.

[67] A. Paryaev, “Mitropolit Sergij Stragorodskij: Nyeizvestnaya Biographiya”, Suzdal’skie Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti, N 1, September, 1997, pp. 12-15 ®.

[68] Suggestions of the Diocesan Hierarchs on the Reform of the Church, St. Petersburg, 1906, vol. 3, p. 443 (in Russian).

[69] See V ob’iatiakh semiglavago zmiia, Montreal, 1984, p. 14 ®.

[70] Preemstvennost’ Grekha”, op. cit., p. 7.

[71] See “K 80-lyetiyu Izbraniya Sv. Patriarkha Tikhona na Svyashchennom sobore Rossijskoj Tserkvi 1817-18gg.”, Suzdal’skie Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti, N 2, November, 1997, p. 19 ®.

[72] The electors in Vladimir rejected beforehand all candidates who had displayed monarchist or “reactionary” tendencies before the revolution. The liberal Sergius was therefore a natural choice. See Paryaev, op. cit.

[73] Lebedev, op. cit.

[74] Translated in Nicholas Zernov, “The 1917 Council of the Russian Orthodox Church”, Religion in Communist Lands, vol. 6, no. 1, 1978, p. 21.

[75] Regelson, op. cit., p. 67.

[76] Translated in Zernov, op. cit.

[77] Pipes, op. cit., p. 343. According to Regelson (op. cit., p. 226), this took place on January 19.

[78] Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 528; Archpriest Michael Polsky, The New Martyrs of Russia, Wildwood, Alberta: Monastery Press, 2000, pp. 91-92.

[79] Russian text in M.E. Gubonin, Akty Svyateishego Patriarkha Tikhona, Moscow: St. Tikhon’s Theological Institute, 1994, pp. 82-85 ®.

[80] Fr. Alexander Lebedev writes: “The Sobor addressed the issue three days after the Decree was signed, at its 71st Session on January 27, 1918. The need for a prompt decision by the Church on how to relate to the civil calendar change was clear – the change was to take place four days later.

                “It was decided to send the issue to a Joint Session of two separate Sections of the Sobor – the Section on Divine Services and the Section on the Relationship of the Church to the State.

                “This Joint Session of the two Sections met two days later, on January 29, 1918 and heard two major reports, one by Professor S.S. Glagolev, entitled ‘A Comparative Evaluation of the Julian and Gregorian Styles’, and one by Prof. I.I. Sokolov, entitled, ‘The Attitude of the Orthodox East to the Question of the Reform of the Calendar’.

                “Neither of these presentations in any way supported the introduction into Church life of the Gregorian Calendar – quite the contrary. Prof. Glagolev concluded, ‘The Gregorian Calendar, in addition to being historically harmful, is astronomically useless’… Professor Sokolov concluded: ‘Therefore, the controlling voice of the Orthodox East, both Greek and Slavic, is expressed as being not only against the Gregorian calendar, as a creature of the inimical to it [the Orthodox East] Catholic West, but also against a neutral or corrected calendar, because such a reform would deleteriously affect the ecclesiastical life of the Orthodox peoples.’

                “Finally, the Joint Session of the two Sections prepared a Resolution on the issue of calendar reform.

                “It decreed that the Church must stay with the Julian calendar, basing its decision on the following:

                “1) There is no reason for the Church not to have a separate ecclesiastical calendar different from the civil calendar.

                “2) The Church not only is able to preserve the Old Calendar, – at the present time it would be impossible for it to move to the new calendar.

                “3) The introduction of the new calendar by the Russian Church would cause it to break unity with all of the other Orthodox Churches. Any change in the calendar can only be done by mutual agreement of all the Orthodox Churches.

                “4) It is impossible to correlate the Orthodox Paschalion with the Gregorian Calendar without causing grave disruption to the Typicon.

                “5) It is recognised that the Julian Calendar is astronomically inaccurate. This was noted already at the Council of Constantinople in 1583. However, it is incorrect to believe that the Gregorian Calendar is better suited for ecclesiastical use.

                “In conclusion, the Joint Session resolved to maintain the Julian Calendar.

                “The Council, in full session, approved this Resolution of the Joint Session.” (“St. Patriarch Tikhon and the Calendar Question Part 1”, orthodox@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU, 10 July, 2002).

[81] Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 280, 296.

[82] Gubonin, op. cit., p. 151.

[83] “Iz sobraniya Tsentral’nogo gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Oktyabr’skoj revolyutsii: listovka byez vykhodnykh dannykh, pod N 1011”, Nauka i Religia, 1989, no. 4 (R); partly translated in Arfed Gustavson, The Catacomb Church, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1960, p. 9. One member of the Council said: “If the father, mother, brothers and sisters did not receive the returning evil-doer, but expelled him, saying: ‘You are a scoundrel, your hands are covered in blood, you are not our son, nor our brother,’ the disorders would cease” (Deyania Sobora, vol. 6, p. 40).

[84] V.A. Konovalov, Otnoshenie khristianstva k sovyetskoj vlasti, Montreal, 1936, p. 35 (R). As Bishop Gregory (Grabbe), the foremost canonist of the Russian Church Abroad, wrote: “With regard to the question of the commemoration of authorities, we must bear in mind that now we are having dealings not simply with a pagan government like Nero’s, but with the apostasy of the last times. Not with a so far unenlightened authority, but with apostasy. The Holy Fathers did not relate to Julian the Apostate in the same way as they did to the other pagan Emperors. And we cannot relate to the antichristian authorities in the same way as to any other, for its nature is purely satanic.” (Pis’ma, Moscow, 1998, p. 85 (R))

[85] V.A. Konovalov, op. cit., p. 35.

[86] Professor Ivan Andreyev, “The Catacomb Church in the Soviet Union”, Orthodox Life, March-April, 1951. For details of the destruction wrought against the Church in these years, see Vladimir Rusak, Pir Satany, London, Canada: Zarya, 1991 (R).

[87] Deyania Sobora, p. 159 (R). In reply to this remark, Protopriest Ilya Gromoglasov said: “Our only hope is not that we may have an earthly tsar or president… but that there should be a heavenly Tsar, Christ”.

[88] Deyania Sobora, p. 159, pp. 177-179.

[89] Bogoslovskij Vestnik, N 1, 1993, p. 217 ®.

[90] Regelson, op. cit., pp. 236-237.

[91] For example, Hieromartyr Victor, Bishop of Glazov and Vyatka, perhaps the very first bishop to separate from Metropolitan Sergius in 1927. See Anna Ilyinskaya, “Obretenie chestniykh moshchej svyashchenno-ispovednika Viktora Vyatskago”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 17 (1638), September 1/14, 1999, pp. 5-7; K.V. Glazkov, “Tserkovnoye pochitaniye novago syashchenno-ispovednika Viktora i novomuchenikov v Rossii”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 17 (1638), September 1/14, 1999, pp. 5-8) ®.

[92] See the prophetic remarks of Fr. Oleg Oreshkin on this subject in “Ierei Oleg otvechayet na voprosy redaktsii”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 23 (1452), December 1/14, 1991, p. 7 ®.

[93] “Tserkovnost’ ili politika?”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 9 (1558), May 1/14, 1996, p. 4 (R).

[94] “Sermon before a pannikhida for the Tsar-Martyr”, Arkhiepiskop Ioann, Arkhipastyr, Molitvennik i Podvizhnik, San Francisco, 1991, p. 125 (R). Cf. Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev): “There is no need to say how terrible a ‘touching’ of the Anointed of God is the overthrow of the tsar by his subjects. Here the transgression of the given command of God reaches the highest degree of criminality, which is why it drags after it the destruction of the state itself” (Russkaia Ideologia, St. Petersburg, 1992, pp. 50-51) (R). And so, insofar as it was the disobedience of the people that compelled the Tsar to abdicate, leading inexorably to his death, “we all,” in the words of Archbishop Averky, “Orthodox Russian people, in one way or another, to a greater or lesser degree, are guilty of allowing this terrible evil to be committed on our Russian land” (Istinnoe Pravoslavie i Sovremennij Mir, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, p. 166 (R)).

[95] Cited in Orthodoxy America, June, 1987, pp. 10-11.

[96] Gubonin, op. cit., p. 143.

[97] Regelson, op. cit., p. 52; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 146.

[98] Cited in Anonymous, V Obyatiyakh Semiglavago Zmiya, op. cit., pp. 22-23.

[99] Lenin, Letter to Gorky (1913), Collected Works (second edition, 1926-1932), vol. 17, pp. 81-86 (R). Cf. S.G. Pushkarev, Lenin i Rossia, Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1986, introduction (R): R. Wurmbrand, Was Karl Marx a Satanist?, Diane books, 1978.

[100] Liberman, S.I. “Narodnij komisar Krasin”, Novij zhurnal, N 7, 1944, p. 309 ®; quoted in Volkogonsky, D. Lenin, London: Harper Collins, 1994, p. 372. According to another version of this anecdote, Lenin said: “The peasants should pray to it; in any case they will feel its effects long before they feel any effect from on high” (S. Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, Cambridge, Mass., London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 124).

[101] Solzhenitsyn, Acceptance Speech, Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, 1983; Russkaia Mysl’, no. 3465, 19 May, 1983, p. 6 (R).

[102] Fr. Stefan Krasovitsky writes that while the patriarch did not bless the Volunteer Army of Denikin in the South of Russia, he did send his blessing to Admiral Kolchak in Siberia (“Otvyet apologetu kommunisticheskoj ideologii”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, 1553, February 15/28, 1996, p. 15 (R)). According to another source, he sent Bishop Nestor with an icon of St. Nicholas to Kolchak in Omsk with the following instruction: “Tell the people that if they do not unite and take Moscow again by armed force, then we will perish and Holy Rus’ will perish with us” (Vladimir Gubanov, Nikolai II i novie mucheniki, Moscow, 2000, p. 131 ®).

[103] Regelson, op. cit., p. 250.

[104] A similar situation had arisen in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, when the Orthodox archbishop of Japan, Nicholas Kasatkin, counselled the Japanese Orthodox priests within his jurisdiction to pray for the success of the Japanese army, although he, being a Russian, felt unable to do that personally.

[105] Quoted in Sergius Fomin, op. cit., p. 229.

[106] Nazarov, Tajna Rossii, Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1999, pp. 85-86 (R). A.D. Stepanov writes: “The officials of ‘the old regime’ were not honoured by the leaders of the White army. Civil posts under Denikin were occupied mainly by cadets” (op. cit., p. 493).

[107] “Tserkovnost’ ili politika?”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 1558, May 1/14, 1996, p. 4 (R).

[108] Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i kommunisticheskoe gosudarstvo, 1917-1941, Moscow: Terra, 1996, p. 69 ®.

[109] Gustavson, op. cit., p. 34.

[110] Anatoly Latyshev, “Provyesti besposhadnij Massovij Terror Protiv Popov”, Argumenty i Fakty, 26, 1996 (R).

[111] Rusak, Pir Satany, op. cit.

[112] Latyshev, op. cit.

[113] S. Savelyev, “Bog i komissary”, in Bessmertny A.R. and Filatov, S.B., Religia I Demokratia, Moscow: Progress, 1993, pp. 164-216 ®.

[114] Quoted in Edward Radzinsky, Stalin, New York: Doubleday, 1996. p. 244.

[115] Protopriest Vladislav Tsipin, “Obnovlenchestvo. Raskol i ego Predistoria”, Pravoslavnaia Beseda, 1994, N 3, p. 31 ®.

[116] N.A., “Nye bo vragom Tvoim tajnu povyem…”, Vestnik Germanskoj Eparkhii Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi za Granitsej, 1992, no. 1, p. 17 (R). Cf. Grabbe, op. cit., p. 42.

[117] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, London: Fontana, vol. 1, pp. 342-344.

[118] Gubonin, op. cit., p. 190; quoted in “Mucheniki Shuiskie”, Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia, 170, III-1994, p. 182 (R).

[119] One concession to the Antichrist invariably leads to others. Thus on February 24, 1923 the GPU agent Jacob Savlovich Agranov forced the Patriarch to make further concessions on this issue. “From the point of view of the Bolsheviks,” writes N. Krivova, “Tikhon’s epistle of February 28, 1922 was incorrect juridically speaking, for according to the decree of 1918 on the separation of the Church from the State Church property passed to the State and was declared the heritage of the State. Tikhon testified that in the Church canons there are no indications to the effect that State power in the event of the confiscation of Church valuables during popular disturbances should turn to the Church authorities for agreement. Although of course the Patriarch very well understood that the valuables taken from the Church would not be used for aid to the starving. And nevertheless he declared that the Soviet government need not turn to the Patriarch for agreement to the requisitioning. They managed to get an analogous testimony from the Patriarch’s closest colleague, Archbishop Nicander (Fenomenov).

                “Thus the GPU obtained a most important testimony from the Patriarch to the effect that he was guilty in issuing an appeal with regard to the requisitioning of Church valuables, that the use of the Church valuables for the needs of the starving was not sacrilege and did not contradict the Church canons” (Vlast’ i Tserkov’ v 1922-1925gg., Moscow, 1997; quoted in S. Golubtsov, op. cit., pp. pp. 151-152).

[120] Matushka Evgenia Grigorievna Rymarenko, “Remembrances of Optina Staretz Hieroschemamonk Nektary”, Orthodox Life, vol. 36, no. 3, May-June, 1986, p. 39.

[121] Op cit., pp. 184-85. See also Gregory Ravich, “Ograblennij Khristos, ili brillianty dlya diktatury proletariata”, Chas-Pik, no. 18, p. 24 (R).

[122] Ravich, op. cit.,  pp.24-25.

[123] Ibid., p. 26. According to another estimate, the antiChurch campaign cost the lives of 28 bishops and 1,215 priests – over 8000 people altogether (Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, op. cit., p. 355). According to a third estimate, up to 10,000 believers were killed (V. Petrenko, “Sv. Patriarkh Vserossijskij Tikhon”, Vestnik I.P.Ts., N 1 (11), 1998, p. 27 ®.

[124] Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij, vol. 45, p. 666, cited in Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia, no. 94, pp. 54-60, Regelson, op. cit., p. 314 (R), an Richard Pipes The Unknown Lenin, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 134. Volkogonov said that he had seen a document in which Lenin requested that he be informed on a daily basis how many priests had been executed (Literator, August 31, 1990, p. 4, in Pipes, The Unknown Lenin, p. 11, note).

                This was not the first time Lenin had demonstrated his bloodthirstiness in relation to the Church. In an order dated May 1, 1919, marked “strictly secret” and addressed to Dzerzhinsky, he said that “it is necessary to finish with the priests and religion as quickly as possible. Priests should be arrested as counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs, they should be shot mercilesslyand everywhere. And as many of them as possible. The churches are subject to closure. The buildings of the churches should be sealed and turned into warehouses” (in “Dokumenty svidetel’stvuyut”, Vestnik I.P.Ts., N 3 (17), 1999, p. 76 ®.

[125] Pipes, The Unknown Lenin, op. cit., p. 155. Volkogonov (op. cit., p. 380) agrees with this opinion.

[126] “Mucheniki Shuiskiye”, op. cit., p. 190.

[127] According to another estimate, between four and ten million dollars. See Pipes, op. cit., p. 355. For another estimate, see Volkogonov, op. cit., p. 381. Rukh (N 34, November 4, 1996) reports that the Bolsheviks received a “profit” of 2.5 million gold rubles, while killing 40,000 priests, deacons and monks (in Vestnik I.P.Ts. (Odessa), N 1, 1997, p. 45 (R)).

[128] Richard Joseph Cooke, Religion in Russia and the Soviets, p. 149.

[129] Pipes, op. cit., p. 355.