PART
II. REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
We have no king,
because we feared not the Lord.
Hosea 10.3.
So then, brethren,
stand firm and hold
to the traditions
which you were taught by
us, either by word of
mouth or by letter.
II Thessalonians 2.15.
“Terrible and mysterious,” wrote Metropolitan Anastasy, 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.”[1]
The event that triggered the revolution was the abdication of Tsar
Nicholas. “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work,” says St. Paul;
“only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way” (II
Thess. 2.7). Since “he who restrains”, according to the interpretation of
On
February 21, a 14-year-old Kievan novice, Olga Zosimovna Boiko, fell into a
deep trance which lasted for exactly forty days and during which many mysteries
were revealed to her. One of these was the coming abdication of the Tsar. And
she saw the following: “In blinding light on an indescribably wonderful throne
sat the Saviour, and next to Him on His right hand – our sovereign, surrounded
by angels. His Majesty was in full royal regalia: a radiant white robe, a
crown, with a sceptre in his hand. And I heard the martyrs talking amongst
themselves, rejoicing that the last times had come and that their number would
be increased.
“They said that they would be tormented for the name of Christ and for
refusing to accept the seal [of the Antichrist], and that the churches and
monasteries would soon be destroyed, and those living in the monasteries would
be driven out, and that not only the clergy and monastics would be tortured,
but also all those who did not want to receive ‘the seal’ and would stand for
the name of Christ, for the Faith and the Church.”[2]
The abdication of Tsar Nicholas on March 2, 1917 (old style) was the
single most important event in modern history; its consequences are still
reverberating to the present day. And yet it remains in many ways shrouded in
mystery. For there is no consensus on several critical questions raised by it,
such as: Did the Tsar in fact abdicate? Did he have the right to abdicate? Was
he right to abdicate?
In the months leading up to the abdication, the Tsar was put under
increasing pressure by the political and military leaders of
They reassured him that it would. But the Tsar knew the quality of the
men who were advising him. As he sadly wrote in his diary on the day of his
abdication: "All around me I see cowardice, baseness and treason."[3] And
again, on the same day, while holding a bundle of telegrams from the Corps of
Generals and even from his own uncle, he said: "What is left for me to do
when everyone has betrayed me?"
And
indeed, there was very little he could do. He could probably continue to defy
the will of the social and political élite, as he had done more than once in
the past. But could he defy the will of his generals?[4] Perhaps
he could count on the support of some military units. But the result would
undoubtedly be a civil war, whose outcome was doubtful, but whose effect on the
war with
It was probably this last factor that was decisive in the Tsar’s
decision: he would not contemplate undermining the war effort for any reason.
For the first duty of an Orthodox Tsar after the defence of the Orthodox faith
is the defence of the country against external enemies – and in the case of the
war with
What has been called “the Abdication Manifesto” was in fact a telegram
to the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Alexeev: “During the days of the
great struggle against the external foe which, in the space of almost three
years, has been striving to enslave our Native Land, it has pleased the Lord
God to send down upon Russia a new and difficult trial. The national
disturbances that have begun within the country threaten to reflect
disastrously upon the further conduct of the stubborn war. The fate of Russia,
the honour of our heroic army, the well-being of the people, the entire future
of our precious Fatherland demand that the war be carried out to a victorious
conclusion, come what may. The cruel foe is exerting what remains of his
strength, and nor far distant is the hour when our valiant army with our
glorious allies will be able to break the foe completely. In these decisive
days in the life of Russia, We have considered it a duty of conscience to make
it easy for Our people to bring about a tight-knit union and cohesion of all
our national strength, in order that victory might be the more quickly
attained, and, in agreement with the State Duma We have concluded that it would
be a good thing to abdicate the Throne of the Russian State and to remove
Supreme Power from Ourselves. Not desiring to be separated from Our beloved
Son, We transfer Our legacy to Our Brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich,
and bless Him to ascend the Throne of the
It has
been argued that the telegram was not an abdication, but a final coded appeal
to the army to support him. But such a supposition cannot be reconciled with
the plain meaning of the text. And since all agree on the crystal-clear
sincerity of Nicholas’ character, there is no reason not to believe the plain
meaning of the text. In any case, Grand Duke Michael’s refusal to take up the
burden placed on him by his brother meant the effective end of the dynasty…
It has also been argued that the “abdication”, if that is what it was,
had no legal force because there was no provision for abdication in the
Fundamental Laws. Thus, as Michael 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
to 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 legitimating principle of
the Basic Laws’, so that these acts would have been ‘juridically non-existent’,
says Zyzykin (in this Korevo agrees with him). ‘Great Prince Michael
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…”[6]
On the other hand, Archpriest John Vostorgov considered the transfer of
power lawful, in spite of its incompatibility with the Basic Laws of the
Empire: “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.”[7]
And yet confusion and searching of consciences continued, as can be seen
in a letter of some Orthodox Christians to the Holy Synod dated
M.A. Babkin points out that Great Prince Michael’s statement contained
the sentences: “I made the firm decision to accept supreme power only if that
would be the will of our great people, to whom it belongs in the Constituent
Assembly to establish the form of government and the new basic laws of the
Russian State. Therefore I ask all citizens of the Russian Realm to submit to
the Provisional Government until the Constituent Assembly by its decision on
the form of government shall express the will of the people”. “We can see,”
writes Babkin, “that the talk was not about the Great Prince’s abdication from
the throne, but about the impossibility of his occupying the royal throne
without the clearly expressed acceptance of this by the whole people of Russia.
Michael Alexandrovich presented the choice of the form of State government (in
the first place – between people power and the monarchy) to the Constituent
Assembly. Until the convening of the Constituent Assembly he entrusted the
administration of the country to the Provisional Government ‘which arose on the
initiative of the State Duma’.”[9]
Since Great Prince Michael had presented
the choice of the form of State government to the Constituent Assembly, many
firm opponents of the revolution – for example, Hieromartyr Andronicus,
Archbishop of Perm – were prepared to accept the Provisional Government on the
grounds that it was just that – provisional. They were not to know that the
Constituent Assembly would hardly be convened before it would be dissolved by
the Bolsheviks, and therefore that the monarchical order had come to an end. So
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, the Constituent
Assembly was not convened, 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 history, followed by unprecedented sufferings and
persecutions of the faith for generations. Indeed, in retrospect we can see
that this act brought to an end the 1600-year period of the Orthodox Christian
Empire that began with the coming to power of St. Constantine the Great. “He
who restrains” the coming of the Antichrist, the Orthodox Christian Emperor,
“was removed from the midst” (II Thessalonians 2.7) – and very soon “the
collective Antichrist”, Soviet power, began its savage torture of the Body of
Holy Russia. St. John of Kronstadt had said that Russia without the Tsar would
no longer even bear the name of Russia, and would be “a stinking corpse”. And
so it proved to be…
So was the Tsar right to abdicate, if there was no provision for such an
act in law and if the results of his decision were so catastrophic for Russia?
The saints were ambiguous in their utterances. 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”.[10] But
Blessed Duniushka of Ussuruisk, who was martyred in 1918, said: “The
Tsar will leave the nation, which shouldn’t be, but this has been foretold to
him from Above. This is his destiny. There is no way that he can evade it.”[11]
And another great
eldress, Blessed Matrona of Moscow (+1952), 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.”[12]
“He shouldn’t have done it”? Or was it
“his destiny” in the sense that it was the will of God, which he neither could
nor should have avoided?
One might have expected the Church
authorities to throw light on this question by coming out for or against the
abdication. 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.[13]
Then, on February 27, it refused the request of the Over-Procurator, N.P. Raev,
that it publicly support the monarchy. Ironically, therefore, that
much-criticised creation of Peter the Great, the office of Over-Procurator,
proved more faithful to the Anointed of God at this critical moment than the
Church leadership itself…
“On March 2,” writes M.A. Babkin, “the
Synodal hierarchs gathered in the residence of the Metropolitan of Moscow. They
listened to a report given by Metropolitan Pitirim of St. Petersburg asking
that he be retired (this request was agreed to on March 6 – M.B.). The
administration of the capital’s diocese was temporarily laid upon Bishop
Benjamin of Gdov. But then the members of the Synod recognized that it was
necessary immediately to enter into relations with the Executive committee of
the State Duma. On the basis of which we can assert that the Holy Synod of the
Russian Orthodox Church recognized the Provisional Government even before the
abdication of Nicholas II from the throne. (The next meeting of the members of
the Synod took place on March 3 in the residence of the Metropolitan of Kiev.
On that same day the new government was told of the resolutions of the Synod.)
“The first triumphantly official session
of the Holy Synod after the coup d’état took place on March 4. Metropolitan
Vladimir of Kiev presided and the new Synodal over-procurator, V.N. Lvov, who
had been appointed by the Provisional government the previous day, was present.
Metropolitan Vladimir and the members of the Synod (with the exception of
Metropolitan Pitirim, who was absent – M.B.) expressed their sincere joy at the
coming of a new era in the life of the Orthodox Church. And then at the
initiative of the over-procurator the royal chair… was removed into the
archives… One of the Church hierarchs helped him. It was decided to put the
chair into a museum.
“The next day, March 5, the Synod ordered
that in all the churches of the
“The Synod reacted neutrally to the ‘Act
on the abdication of Nicholas II from the Throne of the State of Russia for
himself and his son in favour of Great Prince Michael Alexandrovich’ of March
2, 1917 and to the ‘Act on the refusal of Great Prince Michael Alexandrovich to
accept supreme power’ of March 3. On March 6 it resolved to accept these acts
‘for information and execution’, and that in all the churches of the empire
molebens should be served with a Many Years ‘to the God-preserved Russian Realm
and the Right-believing Provisional Government’.”[14]
But was the new government, whose leading
members were Masons[15],
really “right-believing”? The foreign minister of the new government, Paul
Milyukov, when asked who had elected his government, had replied: “The Russian
revolution elected us”.[16]
But the revolution cannot be lawful, being the incarnation of lawlessness. How,
then, could the Church allow her members to vote for Masonic or
social-democratic delegates to the Constituent Assembly? After all, that
Assembly would determine the future form of government of the Russian land. Why
had the Church so quickly renounced Tsarism, which had formed one of the
pillars of Russian identity for nearly 1000 years?
The
hierarch who took perhaps the most uncompromising stand on this question was
the future Hieromartyr, Archbishop Andronicus of
The new over-procurator wrote to Andronicus demanding an explanation for
his actions in support of the old regime, which “aimed at the setting up of the
clergy against the new order”. The correspondence between them culminated on
April 16 with a detailed letter from Archbishop Andronicus, in which he said:
“The act on the refusal of Michael Alexandrovich which legitimises the
Provisional Government declared that after the Constituent Assembly we could
have a monarchical government, or any other, depending on how the Constituent
Assembly will pronounce on this. I have submitted to the Provisional
Government, I will also submit to a republic if it will be established by the
Constituent Assembly. But until then not one citizen is deprived of the freedom
of expressing himself on the form of government for
A
similar position was taken by Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of
“… We must do this, first, in fulfilment of the oath given by us to His
Majesty Nicholas II, who handed over power to Prince Michael Alexandrovich, who
handed this power over to the Provisional Government until the Constituent
Assembly. Secondly, we must do this so as to avoid complete anarchy, larceny,
fighting and sacrilege against the holy things. Only in one must we listen to
nobody, neither now nor in the past, neither tsars nor rulers nor the mob: if
they demand that we renounce the faith, or defile the holy things, or in
general carry out clearly lawless and sinful acts.”[18]
However, with the exception of a very few such as these, the Church
could not be said to have been on the Tsar’s side. Thus on March 7 the
“conservative” Archbishop Seraphim (Chichagov) of Tver and Kashin appeared to
welcome the change of regime: “By the mercy of God, the popular uprising
against the old, wretched order in the State, which led Russia to the edge of
destruction in the harsh years of world war, has taken place without many
victims, and Russia has easily passed to the new State order, thanks to the firm
decision of the State Duma, which formed the Provisional Government, and the
Soviet of workers’ deputies. The Russian revolution has turned out to be almost
the shortest and most bloodless of all revolutions that history has known…”[19]
On March 9, the Holy Synod addressed all the children of the
Now it is understandable that the Synod would not want to risk a civil
war by displaying opposition to the new government. But was it true that “the
will of God has been accomplished”? Was it not rather that God had allowed the
will of Satan to be accomplished, as a punishment for the sins of the
Russian people? And if so, how could the path be called a “great work”?
Babkin writes: “This epistle was characterised by B.V. Titlinov,
professor of the Petrograd Theological Academy, as ‘an epistle blessing a new
and free Russia’, and by General A.I. Denikin as ‘sanctioning the coup d’état
that has taken place’. To the epistle were affixed the signatures of the
bishops of the ‘tsarist’ composition of the Synod, even those who had the
reputation of being monarchists and ‘black hundredists’, for example,
Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow. This
witnessed to the ‘loyal’ feelings of the Synodal hierarchs…”[20]
Other hierarchs echoed the words of the Address in still more
revolutionary tones. Thus Bishop Andrew of
“… The Autocracy of the Russian tsars degenerated first into absolutism
[samovlastie] and then into despotism [svoevlastie] exceeding all
probability… And lo! their power has collapsed – the power that turned away
from the Church. The will of God has been accomplished… The Catholic Church of
Christ has been delivered from the oppression of the State.”[21]
The Council of the
If the Church hierarchy, traditionally the main support of the
Autocracy, faltered, it is not surprising that the people as a whole faltered,
too… The Tsar was alone. And since the leadership of a
As P.S. Lopukhin
wrote: “At the moment of his abdication his Majesty felt himself to be
profoundly alone, and around him was ‘cowardice, baseness and treason’. And to
the question how he could have abdicated from his tsarist service, it is
necessary to reply: he did this because we abdicated from his tsarist service,
from his sacred and sanctified authority…”[24]
And yet in a real sense the Tsar saved the monarchy for the future by
his abdication. For in abdicating he resisted the temptation to apply force and
start a civil war in a cause that was just from a purely juridical point of
view, but which could not be justified from a deeper, eschatological point of
view. (Compare the words of the Prophet Shemaiah to King Rehoboam and the house
of
The Tsar-Martyr resisted the temptation to act like a Western absolutist
ruler, thereby refuting those in both East and West who looked on his rule as
just that – a form of absolutism. He showed that the Orthodox Autocracy was not
a form of absolutism, but something completely sui generis – the
external aspect of the self-government of the Orthodox Church and people on
earth. He refused to treat his power as if it were independent of the
Church and people, but showed that it was a form of service to the
Church and the people from within the Church and the people, in
accordance with the word: “I have raised up one chosen out of My people… with
My holy oil have I anointed him” (Psalm 88.18,19). So not “government by
the people and for the people” in a democratic sense, but “government by one
chosen out of the people of God for the people of God and responsible to God
alone”.
In
demonstrating this in the whole manner of his self-sacrificial life, the Tsar
actually preserved the ideal of the Orthodox Autocracy, handing it over “for
safe-keeping”, as it were, to God and His Most Holy Mother. For on that very
day the Mother of God appeared to the peasant woman Eudocia Adrianovna and said
to her: “Go to the
The New Synod
After the Tsar’s abdication, writes Bishop Gregory Grabbe, “everything
happened amazingly quickly. The Synod could meet only when everything was
already over, and almost immediately its membership was changed, while V.N.
Lvov, a not completely normal fantasist, was appointed over-procurator. There
were few who understood the whole significance of what had happened at that
moment. Events were evaluated in society only from a political point of view
and proceeded from a condemnation of everything that was old. The religio-moral
side of what had happened could not be presented in a single organ of the
press. Unlimited freedom was presented only for the criticism and condemnation
of everything connected with the Church. There were few who understood at that
moment that, in accepting this coup, the Russian people had committed
the sin of oath-breaking, had rejected the Tsar, the Anointed of God, and had
gone along the path of the prodigal son of the Gospel parable, subjecting
themselves to the same destructive consequences as he experienced on abandoning
his father.”[26]
The Holy Synod was soon to learn what that new government really
represented. Instead of the separation between Church and State that the
government promised and so many Church leaders longed for,
On March 7 the Holy Synod declared: “On March 7 the over-procurator
explained to us that the Provisional Government considers itself endowed with
all the prerogatives of the Tsar’s power in Church matters. It is not that he,
the over-procurator, remains de facto the master and boss, as under the
previous regime: for an indefinite time until the convening of a Council he
also turns out to be the absolute controller of Church matters. In view of such
a radical change in the relations of the State power to the Church, the
signatories do not consider it possible for them to remain in the Holy Synod,
although, of course, they retain a filial obedience to it and in due submission
to the Provisional Government.” However, within a few hours the authors of he
declaration had changed their decision about their presence in the Synod. In
the following days they continued to discuss the situation and pointed out to
the government “the uncanonical and unlawful” manner of acting of the new
over-procurator. This was the end of the conflict between the Holy Synod and
the Provisional Government. And although on March 10 at a session of the
government
The next hierarch to go was the highly-respected Metropolitan of Moscow,
Macarius, Apostle of the Altai. But it required a personal visit to
The government went still further. On April 7, it ordered the house
arrest of Metropolitan Macarius in the Holy Trinity – St. Sergius monastery. He
prepared for publication an appeal to the hierarchs requesting that they
recognize his retirement as invalid and again restore him to the see of
Metropolitan Macarius was never reconciled with his forced and
uncanonical retirement. As he later wrote: “They [the government] 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
“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 he whom 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 – a member of
the Provisional Government, now servant of the Sovnarkom – Vladimir Lvov.”[30]
Already on March 7, with the support of the liberal Archbishop Sergius
(Stragorodsky) of Finland, whom we have already met as one of the most
prominent of the “proto-renovationists”, Lvov had transferred the Synod’s
official organ, Tserkovno-Obshchestvennij Vestnik (Church and Society
Messenger), into the hands of the “All-Russian Union of Democratic Orthodox
Clergy and Laity”, a left-wing grouping founded in Petrograd on the same day of
March 7 and led by Titlinov, a professor at the Petrograd Academy of which
Sergius was the rector.[31]
Archbishop (later Patriarch) Tikhon protested against this transfer, and the
small number of signatures for the transfer made it illegal. However, in his
zeal to hand this important Church organ into the hands of the liberals, Lvov
completely ignored the illegality of the act and handed the press over to
Titlinov, who promptly began to use it to preach his Gospel of “Socialist
Christianity”, declaring that “Christianity is on the side of labour, not on
the side of violence and exploitation”.[32]
On April 14, a stormy meeting took place between
The next day
On April 29, 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. Thus Archbishops
Basil (Bogoyavlensky) of
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, after being forced to retire, was later reinstated at the
demand of the people. Again, Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) of
The turmoil in both Church and State in
In the same month of March the Russian government ceased subsidising the
American diocese. The ruling Archbishop Eudocimus (Mescheriakov) went to the
All-Russian Council in August, leaving his vicar, Bishop Alexander (Nemolovsky)
of Canada, as his deputy. But then Protopriest John Kedrovsky with a group of
renovationist priests tried to remove Bishop Alexander from administering the
diocese and take power into their own hands “with submitting to imperial power
or hierarchical decrees”.[39]
On June 20, the Provisional Government transferred 37,000 church-parish
schools into the administration of the Ministry of Enlightenment.
From June 1 to 10 an All-Russian Congress of clergy and laity took place
in
The transfer of the church schools to the state system 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…
In general, the June Congress carried forward the renovationist wave;
and although the June 14 “On Freedom of Conscience” was welcome, the government
still retained de jure control over the Church. Even when the government
allowed the Church to convene its own All-Russian Local Council of the Russian
Orthodox Church in August, it retained the right of veto over any new form of
self-administration that Council might come up with. Moreover, the Preconciliar
Council convened to prepare for the forthcoming Council was to be chaired by
the Church’s leading liberal, Archbishop Sergius. Thus it looked as if the
All-Russian Council would finally seal the break with the pre-revolutionary
past and bring the
What Kerensky was for Russia, the Cretan nationalist and
Freemason Eleutherius Venizelos was for Greece, coming to power in Athens in
1917 through a military coup d’etat, forcing King Constantine to resign
in favour of his son Alexander and turning the allegiance of the Greek
government away from the Central Powers and towards the Allied Powers of
France, Britain and Russia. The Apostle Paul said that “the Cretans are always
liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons” (Titus 1.12). This text is
particularly apt in relation to Venizelos, who lied to the Greek people, raised
their hopes of conquest and glory – his aim was a
“At the end of the century,” writes Macmillan, “as
“The East meant Ottoman Turkey. So much of the Greek past lay there:
“Venizelos wrote to the powers in
“For all that Greece, and Greek society, bore the imprint of its Ottoman
past, Venizelos spoke for many Greeks when he insisted that his people were
part of the modern, Western world. The Greeks would naturally civilize the
backward Turks, just as the British or French were civilizing Africans and
Asians. Why, he argued, one had only to look at the Greek birth rate
(especially in
“The correct figure was probably closer to one and a half million. Not
all of that number, however, despite what Venizelos claimed, thought of
themselves as part of a greater
“In the decades before 1914 thousands of Greeks migrated to
“The First World War changed the picture completely. The Ottomans chose
the losing side, Venizelos and
“The divisions were a legacy of
“In the Allied camp these actions, if they were noticed at all, did
little damage to Venizelos’ reputation. He had bravely allowed British and
French troops to land at Salonika (today Thessaloniki) when Greece was still
neutral; he had spent millions that Greece could not afford on the military;
and Greek troops had not only fought in the war but had gone off to help Allied
anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. He was a loyal ally, completely in sympathy with
the West and its values, and opposed to German militarism. Venizelos, wisely,
quoted Wilsonian principles whenever possible; he became an enthusiastic
supporter of the
“He was one of the stars of the Peace Conference [in
“On
Venizelos’ destructive work in the State was complemented in the Church
by his fellow Cretan and nephew Emmanuel Metaxakis, later Patriarch Meletius
IV. “He was born on
Metaxakis had become a Freemason at the beginning of 1909…[43]
This election is surprising in view of the fact that the Cypriots only
elect fellow Cypriots to the sees of their Church. It is explained by the fact
that the Archbishop of Cyprus at that time, Cyril, who later introduced the new
calendar into his Church, was also a Mason, and probably helped the advancement
of his fellow-Mason.
Bishop Photius continues: “In the years before the war Metropolitan
Meletius began successful talks in
On November 10/23, 1916 a Greek Minister, Andrew Mikhalakopoulos, wrote
to President Venizelos, arguing for the necessity of a radical reform of the
Greek Church that would bring her closer to the West. And he suggested that
Meletius, a fervent Venizelist, would be a suitable agent of this reform. His
letter amounted to nothing less than a proposed wholesale reformation of the
Orthodox Church in a Protestant direction:
“Mr. President, I told you a long time ago in the Council of Ministers
that after we had brought to a successful conclusion the national struggle that
you have undertaken, it would be necessary, for the good of the country, for
you to take care of another, equally important, struggle, that of modernizing
our religious affairs… To head this truly revolutionary reform, you will need a
far-seeing Hierarch, one almost like you in politics. You have one: We are
talking of the Hierarch from
“What are the elements that will require reform (once the political
revolution has removed Archbishop Procopius of Athens and those like him) in
intellectual and monastic circles, when there will have been put in place an
ecclesiastical Hierarchy and a universal Synod, or perhaps only a Greek Synod…?
“1) Abolition of the Fasts, which today are a simple formality. Nobody
keeps the Fasts, except one who has nothing to eat. The English and the
Germans, and even the northern Italians, who have been liberated from religious
fanaticism, eat well, and by eating well they are working well and building a
good race. Nourishment brings the necessary strength to work, work brings
profit, and profit brings good nourishment. I do not think that the Italians of
the north are worse than those of the south, whom the momentous propaganda of
the Dante Alighieri Society has not succeeded in snatching from the claws of
religious prejudice.
“2) Modernization of the different ceremonies and Liturgies. Less
presence of the Priest, the Psaltes, and the Deacon, and increased
presence of the expository preacher. What can people who attend religious
ceremonies really understand… from these hours that they spend and from
standing upright? Nothing. If the Priest were obligated to recite two or three
hymns… and to teach during a half-hour period, the listeners would derive much
more benefit from this in a very short time, from the social, moral, and
patriotic point of view.
“3)… The Priests, by being educated at special schools, will have
learned, not the meaning of [a certain phrase from the Liturgy, which
Michalakopoulos is not familiar with either, since he misquotes it]…, but how
to speak to the people in an intelligible way about sobriety, savings…, love of
one’s country, even about the political duties of their listeners, etc., etc.
“4) We will abolish the different Feasts of Saint Athanasios, Saint
Andrew, and so on and so forth, which are nothing but an excuse for idleness. A
holiday on Sunday and two or three holidays per year will be quite satisfactory
for the sluggards. In the villages, holidays are more numerous than workdays…
Hence, idleness and its harmful consequences: drunkenness, gambling, and crime,
during the time that remains free in the day after the Liturgy. Obviously, it is
not possible (unfortunately) to make the idea of holiness disappear… Once there
fell into my hands a French book, which my taste for reading made me read, the
title of which was Preacher’s Panorama; a large tome… We will publish a
book of this type, fruit of the collaboration of good Church and lay writers.
And the word ‘holy’ will disappear…
“5) The monasteries, the source of all corruption and of all the abuses
of fortune and morals, will be abolished. Their lands will pass into the hands
of the peasants…
“Of course, all the foregoing is just a very small part of the program.
Many other things will need to be reformed… They will tell you, Mr. President,
that putting such an undertaking into effect is an arduous thing; that the
people will rise up against the new Iconoclasts; that a revolution will rise up
against the impious. Nothing of the kind will happen, from the moment that your
own prestige increases… If we succeed on the national level, then the other
purge, the interior purge, will follow, and no one will be capable of provoking
any troubles… The ecclesiastical Hierarchy that we will train to prepare the
reform will have to respond to the need for regulating our religious affairs,
following the abolition of the Turkish state and the reduction of the area in
which the Oecumenical Patriarchate exercises its jurisdiction… The struggle
which was recently waged in
The
On August 15, the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church convened.
It held three sessions between August 15 and September 20. Then it was brought
to a close by the Bolsheviks before it could finish its business.
The Council, assembled in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in
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, and again on October 20, the Council issued
statements condemning the increasing violence, theft and sacrilege against
churches, monasteries and priests that had been increasing ever since February.[47] In
general, however, revolutionary sentiment was dominant.
On October 21, 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. 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 on October 25, a new spirit of defiance began to prevail in it, a spirit that
became still stronger after the Bolsheviks dispersed the Constituent Assembly
in January. One of the delegates, Metropolitan Eulogius of Paris and
The Council coincided with the most momentous events in Russian history:
the war with
Some of the most important decisions of the Council were the following:-
1.
The Restoration of the Patriarchate
The pre-conciliar council in June had
expressed itself strongly against the restoration of the patriarchate.
Moreover, on September 1, the Provisional government, not waiting for the
verdict of the Constituent Assembly, had declared that
On November 5, lots were drawn.
Metropolitan Eulogius writes: “Everybody shivered in expectation of whom the
Lord would call… At the end of the moleben Metropolitan Vladimir went up
to the analoy, took the casket, blessed the people with it, broke the
cord with which the casket was bound and removed the seal. The venerable elder,
Hieroschemamonk Alexis, the hermit of Zosima desert (not far from the
Trinity-St. Sergius monastery), came out of the altar; he had been taking part
in the Council for the sake of ecclesiastical obedience. He crossed himself
three times and, without looking, took the piece of paper from the casket.
Metropolitan
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.” Archbishop
Hilarion said in triumph: “The eagle of Petrine autocracy, shaped in imitation
of the West, tore asunder the Patriarchate, that sacred heart of Russian
Orthodoxy. The sacrilegious hand of the impious Peter pulled down the senior
hierarch of the
Metropolitan Tikhon was duly enthroned on
November 21 in the Kremlin cathedral of the Dormition to the sound of rifle
fire from the battle for
According to the new constitution of the
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
- on February 3/16 Prince Trubestkoj said that there had been “a closed session
of the Council” to discuss this question, and that “it was decreed that the
whole fullness of the rights of the Patriarch should pass to the locum tenens”,
and that “it is not fitting to speak about all the motivation behind the
decision taken in an open session”.[52]
The Patriarch’s will was revised by him towards the end of 1924, and was
published only after his death in 1925. It was read out in the presence of
sixty hierarchs and declared: “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 turned out to be inspired, although
Metropolitan Peter was not well known at the time of the Council. 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
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
The Council’s decree of December 2, “On the Legal Status of the Russian
Orthodox Church”, ruled, on the one hand, that the State could issue no law
relating to the Church without prior consultation with and approval by her, 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 Lenin decreed that all Church schools be transferred to
the Council of People’s Commissars. As a result, 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 (and Lenin’s mistress), sent a detachment
of sailors to occupy the Alexander Nevsky monastery 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.[55]
According to Orlando Figes[56], Lenin
was not yet ready for a confrontation with the Church; but Kollontai’s actions
had forced his hand, and on January 20 the “Decree on the Separation of the
Church from the State and of the School from the State” was passed (it was
published three days later in Izvestia).
This was the Bolsheviks’ fiercest attack yet on the Church. It forbade
religious bodies from owning property (all property of religious organizations
was declared to be the heritage of the people), from levying dues, from
organizing into hierarchical organizations, and from teaching religion to
persons under 18 years of age. Ecclesiastical and religious societies did not
have the rights of a juridical person. The registering of marriages was to be
done exclusively by the civil authorities. 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.[57]
On January 19, Patriarch Tikhon, anticipating the decree, issued his
famous anathema against the Bolsheviks: “By the power given to Us by God, we
forbid you to approach the Mysteries of Christ, we anathematise you, if
only you bear Christian names and although by birth you belong to the Orthodox
Church. We also adjure all of you, faithful children of the Orthodox Church of
Christ, not to enter into any communion with such outcasts of the human race:
‘Remove the evil one from among you’ (I Corinthians 5.13).”
The significance of this anathema lies not so much in its casting out of
the Bolsheviks themselves, as in the command to the faithful to have no
communion with them. 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).[58]
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. However, this argument fails to take into account
several facts. First, the patriarch himself, in his declarations of June 16 and
Most important of all, when the Patriarch’s anathema came to be read out
to the Council on January 28, 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 Sacred Council of the Orthodox
Russian Church welcomes with love the epistle of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon,
which punishes the evil-doers and rebukes the enemies of the Church of Christ.
From the height of the patriarchal throne there has thundered the word of
excommunication [preschenia] and a spiritual sword has been raised
against those who continually mock the faith and conscience of the people. The
Sacred Council witnesses that it remains in the fullest union with the father
and intercessor of the
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!”[62]
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 pretence 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
“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 these 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).”
These recommendations were then adopted by the Council as its official
reply to the decree (February 7). In the same spirit, on April 15 the Council
decreed: “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.”[63]
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. Neither
St. Basil nor his friend, St. Gregory the Theologian, recognised the rule of
Julian the Apostate to be legitimate.[64] This
and other examples show that, while the principle
of authority as such is from God (Romans.
13.1), individual authorities or rulers are sometimes 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.[65]
There were some who took the anathema very seriously and fulfilled it to
the letter. Thus in 1918, the clairvoyant Elder Nicholas (Parthenov), later Hieromartyr Bishop of Aktar, “following
the anathema contained in the Epistle of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon, and not
wishing to enter into relations with ‘the outcasts of the human race’, went
into reclusion…”[66]
The Council had 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
“The Sovnarkom had expected its
decree to be implemented quickly and relatively painlessly, but this was
prevented first and foremost by the opposition of millions of peasants, who
supported the expropriation of church and monastic property but were against
making births, marriages and deaths a purely civil affair, depriving parishes
of their property rights, and dropping divinity from the school curriculum.
Peasants thus resisted Bolshevik efforts to break the ‘unshakable traditions’
of ‘a life of faith’ in the Russian countryside. The implementation of the law
was also hindered by the lack of suitable officials to carry it out, and by the
inconsistence of the local authorities’ understanding of the law.”
A
Barmenkov wrote: “Some school workers began to interpret [the principle of
Church-School separation] as a transition to secular education, in which both
religious and anti-religious propaganda in school would be excluded. They
supposed that the school had to remain neutral in relation to religion and the
Church. A.V. Lunacharsky and N.K. Krupskaia spoke against this incorrect
interpretation…, emphasising that in the Soviet state the concept of the
people’s enlightenment had unfailingly to include ‘a striving to cast out of
the people’s head religious trash and replace it with the light of science.’”[67]
“On March 14/27,” writes Peter Sokolov, “still hoping that the existence
of the Church could be preserved under the communist regime and with the aim of
establishing direct relations with the higher state authorities, a Church
deputation set out in the name of the Council to the Council of People’s
Commissars in Moscow. They wanted to meet Lenin personally, and personally
present him with their ideas about the conditions acceptable to the Church for
her existence in the state of the new type.”[68]
This initiative hardly accorded with the
anathema against the Bolsheviks, which forbade the faithful from having any
relations with them. It was therefore unsuccessful. “The deputation was not
received by Lenin. The commissars (of insurance and justice) that conversed
with it did not satisfy its requests. A second address to the authorities in
the name of the Council that followed soon after the first unsuccessful
audience was also unsuccessful…”[69]
The Council made two other decisions relating to Soviet power and its
institutions. On April 15 it decreed: “Clergymen serving in anti-ecclesiastical
institutions… are subject to being banned from serving and, in the case of
impenitence, are deprived of their rank”? On the assumption that
“anti-ecclesiastical institutions” included all Soviet institutions, this would
seem to have been a clearly anti-Soviet measure.
However, on August 15, 1918, the Council appeared to take a step in the
opposite direction, declaring invalid all defrockings based on political
considerations, applying this particularly to Metropolitan Arsenius (Matsevich)
of Rostov and Priest Gregory Petrov. Metropolitan Arsenius had indeed been
unjustly defrocked in the reign of Catherine II for his righteous opposition to
her anti-Church measures. However, Fr. Gregory Petrov had been one of the
leaders of the Cadet party in the Duma in 1905 and was an enemy of the
monarchical order. How could his defrocking be said to have been unjust in view
of the fact that the Church had officially prayed for the Orthodox Autocracy,
and Petrov had worked directly against the fulfilment of the Church’s prayers?
However, too many people, including several hierarchs, had welcomed the
fall of the Tsarist regime… If the Church was not to divide along political
lines, a general amnesty was considered necessary.
And yet, as Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) writes, the Council could be
criticised for its “weakening of Church discipline, its legitimisation of
complete freedom of political orientation and activity, and, besides, its
rehabilitation of the Church revolutionaries like Gregory Petrov. By all this
it doomed the
“That this Council… did not express the voice of the complete fullness
of the
“At the Karlovtsy Council remembrance was finally made of the St.
Sergius’ blessing of the Christian Sovereign Demetrius Donskoj for his battle
with the enemies of the Church and the fatherland, and of the struggle for the
“The Church-land Council in
On April 18 / May 1, 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
“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…”[71]
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
3. The New Calendar
On
Protopriest Alexander Lebedev writes: “The Sobor [Council] addressed the
issue three days after the Decree was signed, at its 71st Session on
“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
“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.”[72]
4. Ecumenism
O
August 16, 1918 a declaration was made regarding the opening of a department
for the reunification of the Christian Churches: “The Sacred Council of the
Orthodox Russian Church, which has been gathered and is working in conditions
that are so exceptionally difficult for the whole Christian Church, when the
waves of unbelief and atheism threaten the very existence of the Christian
Church, would take upon itself a great responsibility before history if it did
not raise the question of the unification of the Christian Churches and did not
give this question a fitting direction at the moment when not only one
Christian confession, but the whole of Christianity is threatened by huge
dangers on the part of unbelief and atheism.
“The task of the department is to prepare material for a decision of the
present Council on this question and on the further development of the matter
in the inter-Council period…”[73]
On September 20, the last, 170th session of the Council, the
project for a commission on the reunification of the Churches was reviewed and
confirmed by the Council. The president of the department on the unification of
the Churches, Archbishop Eudocimus (Meschersky) of the Aleut Islands, said: “I
am very sad that the report has come at such a difficult time, when the hours
of our sacred union in this chamber are coming to an end, and when at the end
of work my thoughts are becoming confused and I cannot report to you everything
that I could tell you. From our point of view, the Council should have directed
its attention at this question long ago. If the Church is alive, then we can
remain in the narrow limits she has existed in up to now. If we have no courage
to preach beyond the bounds of our fatherland, then we must hear the voice
coming from there to us. I have in mind the voice of the Anglo-American
Episcopalian Churches, who sincerely and insistently seek union or rapprochement,
and do not find any insurmountable obstacles on the path to the indicated end.
Considering the union of the
‘1. The Sacred Council of the Orthodox Russian Church, joyfully
beholding the sincere strivings of the Old Catholics and Anglicans for union
with the Orthodox Church on the basis of the teaching and traditions of the
Ancient-Catholic Church, blesses the labours and endeavours of the people who
work to find paths towards union with the named friendly Churches.
‘2. The Council directs the Holy Synod to organize a permanent
Commission attached to the Holy Synod with branches in Russia and abroad for
the further study of the Old Catholic and Anglican questions, to explicate by
means of relations with the Old Catholics and Anglicans the difficulties that
lie on the path to union, and possible aids to the speedy attainment of the
final end.’”
The decisions of the Council of a theological or dogmatic significance
were subject to confirmation by a special assembly of bishops. At the last such
assembly, on
On
According to the teaching of the
On hearing the news, Patriarch Tikhon 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, on July 21, 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…”[76] But the
people as a whole did not condemn the evil deed…
Shortly after the murder, some members 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 August 8, 1918, 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.”[77]
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 partially met 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.
“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…”[78]
The incompatibility between Socialism and Christianity was never doubted
by the apostles of Socialism. Religion was to Marx “opium for the people”, and
to Lenin – “spiritual vodka”. 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”.[79] 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.”[80]
As for morality, in his address to the Third All-Russian congress of the
Union of Russian Youth in October, 1920, Lenin wrote: "In what sense do we
reject morality and ethics? In the sense in which it is preached by the
bourgeoisie, which has derived this morality from the commandments of God. Of
course, as regards God, we say that we do not believe in Him, and we very well
know that it was in the name of God that the clergy used to speak, that the
landowners spoke, that the bourgeoisie spoke, so as to promote their
exploitative interests. Or… they derived morality from idealistic or
semi-idealistic phrases, which always came down to something very similar to
the commandments of God. All such morality which is taken from extra-human,
extra-class conceptions, we reject. We say that it is a deception, that it is a
swindle, that it is oppression of the minds of the workers and peasants in the
interests of the landowners and capitalists. We say that our morality is
entirely subject to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Our
morality derives from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat."[81]
Thus, 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…”[82]
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. By his abdication in favour
of himself and his son, the Tsar had already renounced all claims to power, so
his murder could have 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. As Trotsky wrote: “In essence this
decision was inevitable. The execution of the tsar and his family was
necessary, not simply to scare, horrify and deprive the enemy of hope, but also
to shake up our own ranks, show them that there was no going back.”[83]
And just as the whole tragedy of the Russian
people in the years that lay ahead consisted in the fact that they had paved
the way for this satanic act, the destruction of the Russian autocracy, and
cooperated with it, so the only real hope of their regeneration now lies in their
repentance of it…
Thus the Council was not altogether consistent in its attitude to the
Bolsheviks. Moreover, it did not openly declare its loyalty to the monarchical
order, and even removed the anathema against those who denied the mystical basis
of the power of the Orthodox rulers from the service of the Triumph of
Orthodoxy. And so in 1922 Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) wrote: “If the
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?”[84]
The fall
of the Russian Autocracy, and the sufferings of the Russian Church, as well as
the general political turmoil created by the world war, gave the opportunity to
several ecclesiastical separatist movements in the Russian borderlands to break
free from the authority of the Russian Church.
As we have seen, in 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. This led to a break in communion with the Russian Church. In the
summer, however, “the Georgian Church sent a special deputation to the Most
Holy Russian Synod to inform the Most Holy Synod about the re-establishment of
the autocephaly of the Georgian Church and greet it. The Russian Synod through
the mouth of Archbishop Sergius of Finland confirmed ‘that Russian Church
consciousness has never been foreign to the thought of the necessity of returning
to the Georgian Church her former constitution… If this thought has not been
realised up to now, for this there were special reasons’ not depending on
Church actors, but ‘now, in the days of the general liberating spring, Russian
Church consciousness is ready to welcome the fulfilment … of the long-time
dream’ of the Orthodox Georgians, and the Russian hierarchs hope ‘that God will
order all for the good, and that certain roughnesses in this matter will be
smoothed over’ and that at the forthcoming Local Council of the Russian
Orthodox Church a fraternal meeting of representatives of the two Churches is
bound to take place in order to find a path to mutual understanding’.”[85]
In September, while the Local Council of the Russian Church was just
getting under way, a General Council of the Georgian Church confirmed the Acts
of the March Council, and on October 1 Bishop Kirion Sadzaguelachvili was
enthroned as Catholicos-Patriarch in Tbilisi. The Provisional Government
confirmed this election, and soon the Georgians proclaimed an independent
socialist republic.[86]
However, on December 29 / January 11, Patriarch Tikhon protested against
the re-establishment of Georgian autocephaly, pointedly addressing Kirion as
only a bishop. He wrote that Georgia had united with Russian more than a
hundred years before, and from that time the highest ecclesiastical authority
in Georgia had belonged to the Holy Synod. However, when, in 1905, an attempt
to restore the autocephaly of the Georgian Church took place, the Holy Synod in
1906 decreed that this question should be handed over for discussion at the
All-Russian Council, the decisions of which the Georgian hierarchs were obliged
to wait for. “According to canon law, the agreement and permission of the
Mother [kiriarkhal’noj] Church to the autocephaly of the other Local
Church which before was subject to her jurisdiction is required. Usually the
Church which is seeking independence addresses the Mother Church with her
request, and, on the basis of data of a political and ecclesiastical character,
seeks her agreement to the reception of autocephaly. The request is directed in
the name of both the ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the country, and
also of the people; it must be a clearly expressed declaration concerning the
general and unanimous desire to receive ecclesiastical independence. That is
how it was in Greece, in Serbia and in Romania, but it was not like that in
Bulgaria, where the well-known schism arose. And it was also not like that,
unfortunately, in the Transcaucasus in 1917… In pointing out your errors and
mistakes, we suggest to you, Most Reverend Bishops, that you submit to the
demand of the ecclesiastical canons and, following the canonical order, appear
at the All-Russian Sacred Council, and, recognising your errors, convey your
desire concerning the autocephaly of the Georgian Church to the court of the
whole All-Russian Council, so that you may not be subjected to the judgement of
the canons and not fall into the great and terrible sin of alienation from the
Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church…”[87]
When the
Russian Civil War began, the Georgians refused to help the Whites. For a few
months the British occupied the country. They were succeeded by the Mensheviks,
with whom the Church was able to live in peace. On August 5, 1919 Catholicos
Leonid again wrote to Patriarch Tikhon, pointing out that while Georgia had
voluntarily joined Russia politically in 1800, there had never been a desire
for such a union ecclesiastically, and that this had been recognised by the
Russian Holy Synod at first. “The abolition of the autocephaly of the Georgian
Church was an act of force carried out by the secular powers contrary to
ecclesiastical laws. But the Russian Church, instead of protesting against
these abuses of the secular rulers, accepted the lordship over the
Autocephalous Georgian Church that had been handed to it by the secular
authorities. After that every protest on the part either of hierarchs or of
laymen against the arbitrary abolition of the independence of the Georgian
Church and the russification of the Georgians was suppressed by the secular
authorities. Since recently the Russian Synod did not support the hierarchs of
Georgia when, in 1905, they submitted a request in relation the re-establishment
of the autocephaly of their Church, they decided on their own initiative to
proclaim the independence of their Church. But even after this act they were
filled with the desire to be in unity of faith and love, which is why they
consider the exarch of Georgia, Archbishop Plato, to be the hierarch-locum
tenens of the Russian Church in the Caucasus in those dioceses that are
beyond the boundaries of the Georgian Church… And we now hope, Most Holy
Vladyko, ‘that God
will order all for the good, and that certain roughnesses in this matter will
be smoothed over’, and it is not our fault that we did not meet fraternally at
the Local Council of the Russian Church – in spite of the promise of the
over-procurator A.V. Kartashev, nobody ‘fraternally’ invited us to the Council,
as the representatives of the Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Serbia, and
other were invited… Your Holiness’ invitation to us to appear before the
All-Russian Sacred Council and admit our supposed errors is inappropriate and
pointlessL there is no error in our actions. And if beyond all expectation
there would turn out to be such, then for their extirpation every Church has a
means that is well-known to Your Holiness: the unfailing ‘grace of the Holy
Spirit, through which rightneousness is rationally contemplated by the priests
of Christ and firmly upheld….’ As regards those ‘roughnesses’ about which his
Reverence Sergius, the first in rank in the Holy Synod spoke, and which truly
took place between you and us, they have been elicited by the interference of
worldly bosses into the affairs of the Church one hundred years ago… But, Your
Beatitude, you know that all this ‘has taken place not according to Church
rules, but according to other human motivations’, and for that reason, having
restored canonical order in the Churches of Georgia and Russia, we shall take
diligent care ‘that from now on nothing of the sort should take place’ (First
Ecumenical Council, canon 21). And this is the more possible and necessary in
that by the mercy of God the past has gone, and now everything is new (II
Corinthians 5.17).”[88]
This last remark somewhat spoiled the
otherwise strong canonical case presented by the Georgians. At that time, the
Russians were undergoing the most terrible persecution in history, so it was
rather by the wrath of God that the relatively far better times of the past
were gone. But the Georgians were soon to share in the sufferings of their
brothers in the faith: in February, 1921, however, the Bolsheviks, at the
initiative of the Georgians Stalin and Ordzhonikidze, invaded, and after a
short war of three weeks took control of the country. Soon the Church was
deprived of juridical status, and churches and monasteries began to be closed…
“On February 7, 1922,” writes Fr. Elijah Melia, “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 1922 letter to the Genoa
Conference, 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…”[89]
The Church in Bessarabia
One of
the consequences of the Russian revolution was that Russian Moldavia
(Bessarabia), 60% of whose population was Romanian, was united to the Romanian
State. Before the revolution, writes Jelavich, “Romanians as such did not face
prejudice, and there were Romanian as well as Russian large landowners. The
widespread discontent was economic and social more than national. The position
of the peasants was regulated by the Russian emancipation laws of the 1860s and
subsequent reform measures, but, as in other parts of Russia, these had not
solved the basic agrarian problems. Since conditions were roughly the same in
the Regat, independent Romania did not hold a great attraction for the peasant
majority. The main demand of all peasants was a breakup of the large estates
and a distribution of their lands…
“Because of these conditions, the Russian
revolutions in March and November 1917 were bound to have a great effect. They
influenced not only the disaffected peasants, but also the many soldiers in the
province who had deserted the rapidly disintegrating Russian army… As early as
July 1917 the peasants began to seize the land; by the end of the year they had
appropriated about two-thirds.
“In October 1917 a provisional government
for Bessarabia was organized, with its center at Kishinev… This government
remained in control of the province from November 1917 to November 1918. In
December 1917 it declared itself the Democratic Moldavian Republic and
expressed the desire to join a Soviet federative republic…”[90]
However, in view of the discussions that
had begun between the Soviet and German governments, this decision disturbed
the Allied Powers, and with the approval of France the Romanian army invaded
the province. On March 27, the Moldavian parliament, surrounded by Romanian
soldiers, voted for the union of Bessarabia with Romania. The Kishinev diocese
was handed over by the new government to the Romanian Church.
It was suggested to Archbishop Anastasy
(Gribanovsky) of Kishinev that he join the Romanian Church; but he refused. In
May he left the province, and the Kishinev archiepiscopate fell under the
jurisdiction of the Romanian Church.[91]
On June 14, the Holy Synod of the Romanian
Church appointed Bishop Nicodemus (Muntianu) of Khush as deputy locum tenens
of the see of Kishinev (he later became Patriarch of Romania). He began to
“Romanize” the Bessarabian Church, introduced the Romanian language into the
Kishinev seminary and in some monasteries replaced Russian and Ukrainian
superiors with Romanian ones.
In October, 1918 Patriarch Tikhon wrote to
Metropolitan Pimen of Moldavia and Suceava, the president of the Synod of the
Romanian Church, protesting strongly at the anticanonical seizure of the
Kishinev diocese by the Romanian Church, “which by her unilateral decision
taken without the agreement of the Russian Church did not have the right to
determine the destiny of the Kishinev diocese by submitting it to her power
after Orthodox Bessarabia had constituted an indivisible part of the Russian
ecclesiastical body for the last one hundred years. This way of acting on the
part of the Romanian Holy Synod contradicts at the same time the spirit of
Christian love, the age-old canonical decrees and the sacred customs of the
Orthodox Church. Pointing to the supposed fact that political union always
brings with it a union of the Churches cannot in the given case serve as a
justification for the Romanian ecclesiastical authority, first, because it is
not itself justified by history, and secondly, because such a point of view
rests on a confusion of the nature of ecclesiastical and political life, which
are different by their very essense… Moreover, the act of joining
The Patriarch’s Epistle ended with a
warning: “If the
The Romanians paid no attention to the
Patriarch’s admonitions, and in 1919 placed on the see of Kishinev
Archimandrite Gurias (Grossu), a Russian priest of Moldavian extraction, and a
graduate of the
Thus, as K.V. Glazkov writes, “with one
hand mercilessly destroying the communist opposition (for example, mass
punitive operation were undertaken against Bolsheviks in the army, and Romanian
units took part in the suppression of the red revolution in 1918 in Hungary),
with the other hand the Romanian authorities suppressed every kind of
dissidence. A number of deputies of the Popular Assembly who were opponents of
the union of Bessarabia and Romania were shot, after which the National
Assembly itself was dissolved, while on the same day the pro-Romanian deputies
triumphantly overthrew the monuments to Tsars Alexander I and Alexander II in
the capital. In January, 1920, the White armies of General Bredov…, in whose
carts were fugitives, women and children, were shot from Romanian machine-guns
as they approached the Dniester. In this way the new authorities in Bessarabia
spoiled for good their relations with the Russians.
“We should note that from the very
beginning the Russian hierarchy and clergy, as if foreseeing the possibility of
church-political disturbances, adopted quite a cold attitude to the inclusion
of Bessarabia into Romania. This act was even condemned by Archbishop
Anastasius (Gribanovsky) of Kishinev and Khotyn (latter first-hierarch of the
Russian Orthodox Church Abroad). Hoping for the speedy victory of the White
movement, the representatives of the Bessarabian Church together with the zemstvo
took part in the creation of a Committee for the liberation of Bessarabia.
Therefore the Romanian Synod began the canonical submission of the Bessarabian
diocese by demanding that Vladykas Anastasius, Gabriel and Dionysius separate
from the Russian Orthodox Church in spite of the protests of Patriarch Tikhon.
When the hierarchs refused to do this, the Romanian military units arrested
them and exiled them from the country. But the believers were told that the
hierarchs had left their diocese voluntarily. In the place of Metropolitan
Anastasius there arrived from Bucharest the Romanian Archbishop Nicodemus; he
was met by the clergy and laity by no means in a friendly manner. The
ecclesiastical authorites [of the
“In the Kishinev spiritual seminary and
spiritual schools the Romanian authorities removed the teaching of Russian and
Church Slavonic languages, clearly intending to create a situation in which in
Bessarabia as a whole there would remain no priests able to serve in Church
Slavonic. Also, Church Slavonic service books were removed from the churches,
and the priests were banned from delivering sermons in Russian. Direct physical
persecution began against the zealots for the language of Saints Cyril and
Methodius. In the village of Rechul the nuns of the local monastery were beaten
with birch-rods by Romanian gendarmes for taking part in services in Church
Slavonic, while an old priest of the village of Goreshte who was suspected of
sympathising with the opposition was tortured with wet lashes until he lost
consciousness, after which he went mad. It may be that the whole guilt of the
priest consisted in the fact that he, like many true patriots, did not want to
commemorate the Romanian king, his family and the Synod at the liturgy.
“The majority of the zealots for Church
Slavonic as the liturgical language were Russians, but many Moldavian priests
and laypeople fought steadfastly against forcible Romanianization. ‘The
Moldavians,’ reported the Romanian counter-intelligence of Beltsky uyezd,
‘are hostile to the Romanian administration, they avoid the Romanian clergy…,
they threaten the priests when they commemorate the name of the king in
church.’…
“In July, 1922 there was formed in
Kishinev a multi-national ‘Union of Orthodox Christians’. Soon Bessarabian
patriots came to lead the Union. They were closely linked with the Russian
communion in Kishinev. According to certain information, Russian monarchists
led by General E. Leontovich took part in the organisation of the Union. In
1924 the re-registration of another organisation took place – the Orthodox
Brotherhood of Alexander Nevsky, which was led by activists of Moldavian,
Gagauz and Russian nationalities – Protopriest Michael Chakir, Priest Nicholas
Lashku and K.K. Malanetsky, etc. All these were branded by the secret police as
‘ardent pan-Russists’, while the brotherhood was called the centre for the
preservation and propaganda of Russian monarchist ideas…”[94]
In the Ukraine, meanwhile, the Patriarchal Church was struggling not
only against the renovationists, but also against the Ukrainian separatists. 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, the first hierarchical martyrdom in the long
roll-call of the Russian new martyrs.[95]
On December 17-18, after the retreat of the Germans and the capture of
Kiev by Petlyura, Metropolitan Anthony of Kiev, Archbishop Eulogius of
Volhynia, Bishop Nicodemus of Chigirinsk, Archimandrite Vitaly (Maximenk) and
others were arrested and handed over to the Poles. In August, 1919, Kiev was
liberated by the Whites, and with the help of pressure from the Western powers,
the prisoners were released by the Poles. As the Red Army regained the upper
hand, Metropolitan Anthony set off for the Kuban, where he became honorary
president of the Higher Church Authority that had been formed there.
In 1920 an “Independent Union of Ukrainian Orthodox Parishes” was
formed, which convoked the first council of the
When the metropolitan had departed, on October 23 the participants
proceeded to a so-called “conciliar consecration”. That is, since no bishops
had joined them, they were forced to create bishops for themselves in a manner
that no other Orthodox Church recognized as canonical, earning for themselves
the title of the “Lypkovsky samosvyaty” after the first “bishop” to be
thus consecrated, Basil Lypkovsky. As
Lypkovsky himself wrote: “30 priests and all the laymen – as many as could fit
into the walls of the Sophia cathedral - took part in the consecration. At the
moment of consecration a wave of enthusiasm ran through the crowd. The members
of the council and all those present put their hands on each other’s shoulders
until a chain of hands went up to the priests who surrounded me.” Then they
took Lipkovsky to the relics of Great Martyr Metropolitan Mercurius and placed
on his head the dead head of the saint. That is how Lypkovsky became a
“bishop”. On October 24 and 30 several other bishops were consecrated. The
Council also introduced a married episcopate and second marriages for priests.[96]
Later in the 1920s a second autocephalist movement was 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
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, violators, 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 he suffered martyrdom in
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
Although the Ukrainian autocephalists were now largely controlled by
Soviet agents, in January, 1930 the authorities convoked a council which
dissolved all their whole Church organisation.[99]
The Russian
Civil War
The defiant spirit of the Moscow Council continued to manifest itself in
the Patriarch’s statements. Thus on
“In truth you gave it a stone instead of bread and a serpent instead of
a fish (Matthew 7.9, 10). You promised to give the people, worn out by
bloody war, peace ‘without annexations and requisitions’. In seizing power and
calling on the people to trust you, what promises did you give it and how did
you carry out these promises? What conquests could you renounce when you had
brought
“Having seduced the dark and ignorant people with the opportunity of
easy and unpunished profit, you darkened their consciences and drowned out in
them the consciousness of sin. But with whatever names you cover your evil
deeds – murder, violence and looting will always remain heavy sins and crimes
that cry out to heaven for revenge.
“You promised freedom. Rightly understood, as freedom from evil, that
does not restrict others, and does not pass over into licence and self-will,
freedom is a great good. But you have not given that kind of freedom: the
freedom given by you consists in indulging in every way the base passions of
the mob, and in not punishing murder and robbery. Every manifestation both of
true civil and the higher spiritual freedom of mankind is mercilessly
suppressed by you. Is it freedom when nobody can get food for himself, or rent
a flat, or move from city to city without special permission? Is it freedom
when families, and sometimes the populations of whole houses are resettled and
their property thrown out into the street, and when citizens are artificially
divided into categories, some of which are given over to hunger and pillaging?
Is it freedom when nobody can openly express his opinion for fear of being
accused of counter-revolution?
“Where is freedom of the word and the press, where is the freedom of
Church preaching? Many bold Church preachers have already paid with the blood
of their martyrdom; the voice of social and state discussion and reproach is suppressed;
the press, except for the narrowly Bolshevik press, has been completely
smothered. The violation of freedom in matters of the faith is especially
painful and cruel. There does not pass a day in which the most monstrous
slanders against the
However, this was only the beginning of sorrows… The Russian Civil War
was dominated by the regime’s struggle for survival against White armies coming
from the North, South, East and West. It was the bloodiest conflict in human
history to that date, causing the deaths of up to twenty million people according
to some estimates, eight or nine million according to others. The defeat of the
Whites has been attributed to many factors – the Reds’ occupation of the
centre, the Whites’ difficulties of communication, the fitful and self-centred
intervention of the western powers, the betrayal of the Poles… But the sad and
most fundamental fact was that, as Elder Aristocles of Moscow (+1918) said,
“the spirit [among the Whites] was not right.” For many of the Whites were
aiming, not at the restoration of Orthodoxy and the Romanov dynasty, but at the
reconvening of the Constituent Assembly or the restoration of the landowners’
lands.
Of course, if the White armies approaching Ekaterinburg from the East in
July, 1918 had managed to rescue the Tsar and his family alive, the task of the
Whites would have been easier – which is precisely why the Reds killed them.
But even a living Tsar would probably have availed little in view of the fact
that in their majority neither the White soldiers nor the populations whose interests
they sought to represent were Tsarists. Thus, as Michael Nazarov points out,
“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’?”[101]
Again, the leading White General A.I. Denikin said: “It is not given us
to know what state structure
Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) comments with some bitterness on
this: “Unfortunately, the most noble and pious leader of this [the White] army
listened to those unfitting counsellors who were foreign to
Not having firmly Orthodox and monarchical convictions, the Whites were
bound to be disunited amongst themselves and weak in opposing the corrosive
effects of Red propaganda in their rear. This was especially evident on the
northern front, where Red propaganda was effective amongst both the White
Russians and the British.[104] But it
was hardly less true on the other fronts. In this failure, the Whites lost their
own major card in the propaganda war. For as Trotsky said: “If the White
Guardists had thought of unfurling the slogan of the kulaks’ Tsar, we would not
have lasted for two weeks…”
Paradoxically, the population was probably more anti-Bolshevik in the
Red-occupied areas than elsewhere – because they had had direct experience of
Bolshevik cruelty. As General A.A. von Lampe writes, “the border regions, which
naturally attracted to themselves the attention of those Russians who did not
want to submit to the dictatorship established in the centre, did not know
Bolshevism, that is, they probably did not know the results of its
practical application on the skin of the natives. They had not experienced the
delights of the Soviet paradise and were not able to exert themselves fully to
avoid the trials and torments that were coming upon them.
“The population of these provinces, of course, knew the war that was
exhausting the whole of
“On the territory of this population a real war was being waged, a civil
war with its gunfights that did not always hit only those who were fighting in
the direct line of fire; with its repressions, not only in relation to people
and their property, but also to the settlements themselves, which sometimes, in
the course of a battle, were mercilessly and inexorably razed to the ground…
The population had to be sacrifice their rights and their comforts. The White
army was not that equipped and organized army that we are accustomed to imagine
when we pronounce that word; immediately on coming into contact with the
population it was forced to take from it fodder, horses, reserves of food and,
finally, the people themselves!
“War on a given territory always brings with it many deprivations and
sufferings. War, and in particular civil war, feeds itself and supplements
itself! And, of course, the population could not welcome this; it, as I
have already said, thought not about its responsibilities, but only about its
rights, and it expected from the Whites only the immediate restoration of order
and normal conditions of life, not thinking on its side to offer it any help at
all.
“The whole sum of unpleasantnesses brought by the drawn-out war
was very sharply experienced by the population; and at the same time it was
being forcibly corrupted by the Red and socialist propaganda promising them
deliverance from all these woes, promises of complete prosperity and complete
dominion, promises which, as we know, have seduced not only Russia, but are
disturbing no small part of the population of the whole world to this day…
“All this came down to the fact that the inconveniences caused by the
Whites ranged the population against them…
“The Reds threatened and threatened very unambiguously to take everything
and in fact took a part – the population was deceived and… relieved.
The Whites promised legality, and took only a little – and the population was
embittered…
“The Reds promised everything, the Whites only that which which
was fitting according to the law…
“The Reds had terror and
machine-guns as arguments and measures of persuasion; the Whites threatened – with
the law…
“The Reds decisively rejected
everything and raised arbitrariness into a law; the Whites, in rejecting the
Reds, of course could not also reject the methods of arbitrariness and violence
employed by the Reds…
“The population demanded nothing from the
Reds since the only thing they could wish for once they had fallen into their
hands was peace, and they did not, of course, demand that! But from the Whites
the population demanded… a miracle, they demanded that the Whites, with one
wave of their white hands, should remove all the blood from
However, a miracle was not forthcoming,
because
In the East, however, the White armies
under Admiral A.V. Kolchak, the
most monarchist of the White leaders and their formal head, fought explicitly
for the sake of the Orthodox faith. In November, 1918, in view of the lack of
communication with the Patriarch, an autonomous Temporary Higher Church
Authority was formed under the leadership of Archbishop Sylvester of
In April, 1919 a Council of the THCA took place in
Kolchak believed that the Orthodox Church combined with an authoritarian
system of power based on theocratic principles would help him stabilize the
situation in
Perhaps for this reason, in January, 1919
the Patriarch appeared to reverse his apolitical stance, at any rate in
relation to the Siberian armies. For to Admiral Kolchak he sent a disguised priest with a tiny
photograph of an icon of St. Nicholas the following message: “As is well known
to all Russians and, of course, to your Excellency, before this Icon, revered
by the whole of Russia, every day on December 6, the day of the Winter Nicholas
feast, there was a prayer service, which ended with the whole people chanting:
‘Save, O Lord, Thy people…’ with all the worshippers on their knees. And then
on
“On the same day, on the orders of the powers of the antichrist this
Holy Icon was draped with a big red flag with a satanic emblem. It was firmly
attached to the lower and side edges. On the wall of the Kremlin the
inscription was made: ‘Death to the Faith – the Opium of the People’. On
December 6 in the next year, many people gathered for the prayer service, which
was coming to its end undisturbed by anyone! But when the people fell on their
knees and began to chant: ‘Save, O Lord…’ the flag fell from the Icon of the
Wonderworker. The atmosphere of prayerful ecstasy cannot be described! One had
to see it, and he who saw it remembers it and feels it to this day. There was
chanting, sobbing, cries and hands raised on high, rifle fire, many were
wounded, many were killed… and… the place was cleared. The next day, early in
the morning, with My Blessing, it was declared in front of the whole people
what the Lord had shown through His God-pleaser to the Russian people in
“I am sending you a photographic copy of the Wonderworking Icon as my
blessing to you, Your Excellency, in your struggle with the temporary atheist
power over the suffering people of
Significant here is the Patriarch’s use of the phrase, “powers of the
Antichrist” to refer to the Bolsheviks.
However, this anti-Soviet stance was not maintained. On
This shift in attitude took place when Denikin’s Volunteer Army looked
on the point of breaking through to
Nevertheless, while we can explain and to some degree justify the
Church’s neutrality in this way, it remains true that insofar as the
more-than-political and essentially anti-Christian nature of Bolshevism was not
spelled out by the leadership of the Church, a chink was left in her 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
However, even if the Church did not expose the evil of Bolshevism with
complete clarity, the Bolsheviks were providing their own proofs of their
antichristianity by their behaviour. Thus Shkarovskii writes: “The spread of
civil war was accompanied by a hardening of Bolshevik anti-religious policies.
The RKP(b) anticipated that religious faith and the Church would soon die away
completely, and that with a ‘purposeful education system’ and ‘revolutionary
action’, including the use of force, they could be overcome fairly quickly. At
a later stage Soviet atheist literature referred to this period as ‘Sturm
und Drang’. In the programme adopted at the Eighth RKP(b) Congress in March
1919, the party proposed a total assault on religion, and talked of the coming
‘complete disappearance of religious prejudice’.
“In order to attain this goal the authorities brought in ever-increasing
restrictions. On
“… Despite all the obstacles placed in its way, the Orthodox Church was
able to conserve its structure during the civil war. Thousands of small
churches which were supposed to have been closed down, even in the capitals,
continued to function, as did religious schools. Charitable works continued,
and religious processions took place, until the autumn of 1921 in
“A very small number of priests served in the Red Army. The right-wing
section of the clergy was active in its support of the White cause… Military
chaplains served with the White armies – Kolchak had around 2,000, Deniking had
more than 1,000, and Wrangel had over 500. All this provided further ammunition
for the Bolsheviks’ anti-clerical campaign. During 1920 state bodies continued
the tactic of excluding religion from all aspects of life. A circular issued by
the People’s Commissariat of Justice on 18 May resulted in almost all the
diocesan councils being liquidated in
But still more staggering than the material losses of the Church in this
period were the losses in lives. Thus in 1918-19, according to Ermhardt, 28
bishops and 1,414 priests were killed[111];
according to Edward E. Roslof, estimates of numbers of clergy killed between
1918 and 1921 range from 1434 to 9000[112]; while
by the end of 1922, according to Shumilin, 2233 clergy of all ranks and two
million laymen had been executed.[113] 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.”[114]
The persecution against the Church was led by the Cheka, whose attitude
to its work was described by Latsis on
However, as Shkarovskii writes, “the first wave of attacks on religion
had not brought the results which had been expected by such Bolshevik theorists
as N.I. Bukharin. The majority of the population of
Moreover, with the gradual suppression of all military and political
opposition to the Bolsheviks after the 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.
At the same time as the revolution in
The revolution began, as in
Meletius immediately started commemorating
Venizelos at the Liturgy instead of the King. This led to an ideological schism
within the Synod between the Venizelists and the Royalists. The latter included
St. Nectarius of Pentapolis and Metropolitan Germanus of Demetrias, the future
leaders of the True Orthodox Church.
Almost simultaneously, Patriarch Germanus
V of Constantinople was forced into retirement as a result of the stormy
protest of Orthodox Greeks against what they saw to be his compromising
politics in relation to the Turkish authorities.[118]
Now the Greek government wanted to introduce the western, Gregorian
calendar into Greece. And so Meletius promptly, in January, 1919, raised this
question in the Church. The only obstacle to the introduction of the new
calendar, he declared, was the Apostolic Canon forbidding the celebration of
Pascha at the same time as the Jewish Passover or before the spring equinox.
But since, he went on, “the government feels the necessity of changing to the
Gregorian calendar, let it do so without touching the ecclesiastical calendar.”
And he set up a Commission to investigate the question.[119]
The Commission was set up with Metropolitan Germanus of Demetrias, the
future leader of the True Orthodox Church, as the representative of the hierarchy.
In May 20, 1919, on the initiative of Meletius Metaxakis, the Synod
raised the question of changing to the new calendar. Meletius told the Synod:
“The situation in Russia has changed, and the possibility of becoming closer to
the West has become more real. We consider it necessary to introduce a rapid
calendar reform.”
However, the Commission headed by Metropolitan Germanus was more
cautious: “In the opinion of the Commission, the change of the Julian calendar
provided it does not contradict canonical and dogmatic bases, could be realised
on condition that all the other Orthodox Autocephalous Churches agree, and
first of all, the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, to which it would be
necessary to present the initiative in any action in this sphere, so long as we
do not change to the Gregorian calendar, but compose a new, more scientifically
exact Gregorian calendar, which would be free from the inadequacies of both of
the calendars – the Julian and the Gregorian – at present in use.”[120]
When
these conclusions had been read out, Meletius changed his tune somewhat: “We
must not change to the Gregorian calendar at a time when a new and
scientifically perfect calendar is being prepared. If the State feels that it
cannot remain in the present calendar status quo, it is free to accept the
Gregorian as the European calendar, while the Church keeps the Julian calendar
until the new scientific calendar is ready.”[121]
Two
things are clear from these events of 1919. First, Meletius was very anxious to
accommodate the government if he could. And yet he must have realized that
blessing the introduction of the new calendar into the life of the State would
inevitably generate pressure for its introduction into the Church as well.
Secondly, while he did not feel strong enough to introduce the new calendar
into the Church at that time, he was not in principle against it, because he
either did not understand, or did not want to understand, the reasons for the
Church’s devotion to the Julian calendar, which have nothing to do with
scientific accuracy, and all to do with faithfulness to the Tradition and
Canons of the Church and the maintenance of Her Unity.
The new calendar was not the only innovation Meletius wanted to
introduce: what he wanted, writes Bishop Ephraim, “was an Anglican Church with
an eastern tint, and the faithful people in Greece knew it and distrusted
everything he did. While in Athens, he even forbade the chanting of vigil
services (!) because he considered them out of date and a source of
embarrassment when heterodox – especially Anglicans – visited Athens. The
people simply ignored him and continued to have vigils secretly.”[122]
However, the heart of Greek Orthodoxy was
not Athens, but Constantinople. It was necessary for Venizelos to get his own
man on the throne of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. That man would eventually be
Metaxakis; but in the meantime, until Metaxakis could be transferred, he needed
someone else to stir up the kind of nationalist ferment he needed.
Fortunately for Venizelos, the patriarchal
locum tenens in 1919, Metropolitan Dorotheus of Prussa, was just the
right man for the job. He introduced two important and closely related
innovations in the conduct of the patriarchate towards the
The patriarchate had in effect carried out a political coup d’état
against the
Thus in January, 1919, a Greek-Armenian conference was held to
coordinate the activities of the two groups in the city.[124] Then,
in the summer, Metropolitan Nicholas of Caesarea in the name of the
patriarchate accepted the invitation of the Joint Commission of the World
Conference on Faith and Order, a forerunner of the World Council of Churches,
to participate in its preliminary conference in Geneva the following year. He
said that the patriarchate was “thereby stretching out a hand of help to those
working in the same field and in the same vineyard of the Lord”. This
statement, which in effect recognized that the western heretics belonged to the
“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…”[125]
This project elicited the first public debate on the question of the
nature of the unity of the Church and the ecumenical movement between leading
representatives of the Western and Orthodox Churches. Participants in the
debate were, on the one hand, Mr. Robert Gardiner, secretary of the Joint
Commission, and, on the other hand, Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of
Kharkov and Archimandrite, later Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky). In the course
of this debate, Archimandrite Hilarion wrote:
“I could ask you this question: Do you and I belong to the one Church of
Christ? In answering it you undoubtedly would mention the insignificance of our
dogmatic differences and the virtually negligible difference in rites. For me,
however, the answer is determined not by considerations of dogmatic
disagreements but by the fact on hand: there is no ecclesiastical unity in
grace between us…
“The principal truth of Christianity, its great mystery – the
Incarnation of the Son of God – is acknowledged by all Christian creeds, yet
this alone cannot fuse them into one Church. For, according to the Apostle
James (2.19), the devils also believe; as attested by the Gospel, they
confessed their faith like the Apostle Peter did (Matthew 16.16; 8.26; Mark
1.24; Luke 8.28). But do they belong to one Church of Christ? On the
other hand, the Church community undoubtedly embraces people who do not know
the dogmas of the Council of Chalcedon and who are unable to say much about
their dogmatic convictions…
“If the
question of the belonging or non-belonging to the Church be formulated in terms
of theological dogma, it will be seen that it even cannot be resolved in a
definite way. Just how far should conformity to the Church’s ideas go in
dogmatic matters? Just in what is it necessary to agree and what kind of
disagreement ensues following a separation from the Church? How are we to
answer this question? And who has so much authority as to make the decision
stand? Perhaps you will point to the faith in the incarnate Son of God as the
chief characteristic of belonging to the Church. Yet the German Protestants are
going to argue against the necessity of even this feature, since in their
religion there are to be found even such ministers who openly deny the Divinity
of the Saviour.
“Christ never wrote a course in dogmatic religion. Precise formulations
of the principal dogmas of Christianity took place centuries after the earthly
life of the Saviour. What, then, determined the belonging to the Church in
those, the very first, times of the historical existence of Christianity? This
is attested to in the book of the Acts of the Apostles: ‘Such as should
be saved were added to the Church’ (2.45; 6.13-14). Membership of the Church is
determined by the unity with the Church. It cannot be otherwise, if only
because the Church is not a school of philosophy. She is a new mankind, a new
grace-filled organism of love. She is the Body of Christ. Christ Himself
compared the unity of His disciples with the organic unity of a tree and its
branches. Two ‘bodies’ or two trees standing side by side cannot be organically
related to each other. What the soul is to the body, the Holy Spirit is to the
Church; the Church is not only one body but also One Spirit. The soul does not
bring back to life a member which has been cut off, and likewise the vital sap
of a tree does not flow into the detached branch. A separated member dies and
rots away. A branch that has been cut off dries up. These similes must guide us
in a discussion of the unity of the Church. If we apply these similes, these
figures of a tree and a body, to the Church, any separation from the Church,
any termination of the unity with the Church will turn out to be incompatible with
membership of the Church. It is not the degree of the dogmatic dissent on the
part of the separated member that is important; what is significant in the
extreme is the fact of separation as such, the cessation itself of the unity
with the Church. Be it a separation on the basis of but a rebellion against the
Church, a disciplinary insubordination without any dogmatic difference in
opinion, separation from the Church will for the one who has fallen away have
every sad consequence.
“Not only heretics but schismatics, too, separate themselves from the
Church. The essence of the separation remains the same.”[126]
The
Ecumenical Patriarchate would have done well to listen to the reasoning of
their Russian co-religionists. However, the time was past when
So in
January, 1920, Metropolitan Dorotheus and his Synod issued what was in effect a
charter for Ecumenism. This encyclical was the product of a conference of
professor-hierarchs of the Theological School at Khalki, led by Metropolitan
Germanus of Seleucia (later of Thyateira and Great Britain).
It was
addressed “to all the Churches of Christ everywhere”, and declared that “the
first essential is to revive and strengthen the love between the Churches, not
considering each other as strangers and foreigners, but as kith and kin in
Christ and united co-heirs of the promise of God in Christ.”
It went on: “This love and benevolent disposition towards each other can
be expressed and proven especially, in our opinion, through:
“(a) the reception of a single calendar for the simultaneous celebration
of the great Christian feasts by all the Churches;
“(b) the exchange of brotherly epistles on the great feasts of the single
calendar..;
“(c) close inter-relations between the representatives of the different
Churches;
“(d) intercourse between the
“(e) the sending of young people to study from the schools of one to
another Church;
“(f) the convening of Pan-Christian conferences to examine questions of
common interest to all the Churches;
“(g) the objective and historical study of dogmatic differences..;
“(h) mutual respect for the habits and customs prevailing in the
different Churches;
“(I) the mutual provision of prayer houses and cemeteries for the
funeral and burial of members of other confessions dying abroad;
“(j) the regulation of the question of mixed marriages between the
different confessions;
“(k) mutual support in the strengthening of religion and philanthropy.”[127]
The unprecedented nature of the encyclical consists in the fact: (1)
that it was addressed not, as was Patriarch Joachim’s encyclical, to the
Orthodox Churches only, but to the Orthodox and heretics together, as if there
were no important difference between them but all equally were “co-heirs of God
in Christ”; (2) that the proposed rapprochement was seen as coming, not
through the acceptance by the heretics of the Truth of Orthodoxy and their
sincere repentance and rejection of their errors, but through other means; and
(3) the proposal of a single universal calendar for concelebration of the
feasts, in contravention of the canonical law of the Orthodox Church.
There is no mention here of the only possible justification of Ecumenism
from an Orthodox point of view – the opportunity it provides of conducting
missionary work among the heretics. On the contrary, as we have seen, one of
the first aims of the ecumenical movement was and is to prevent proselytism among the member-Churches.
From this time the Ecumenical Patriarchate became an active participant
in the ecumenical movement, sending representatives to its conferences in
Geneva in 1920, in Lausanne in 1927 and in Edinburgh in 1937.[128] The World Conference on Faith and Order was
organized on the initiative of the American Episcopalian Church; and the
purpose of the Joint Commission’s approaches to the Churches was that “all
Christian Communions throughout the world which confess our Lord Jesus Christ
as God and Savior” should be asked “to unite with us in arranging for and conducting
such a conference”.[129]
The real
purpose of the 1920 encyclical was political, to gain the support of the
Western “Churches”, and especially the Anglicans, in persuading their
governments to endorse Dorotheus’ and Venizelos’ plans for a Greek
Constantinople and the transfer of Smyrna and its hinterland to the Greeks.
Thus on February 24, 1920, Dorotheus wrote to the Archbishop of
Canterbury: “We beseech you energetically to fortify the British government… in
its attempts to drive out the Turks [from Constantinople]. By this complete and
final expulsion, and by no other means, can the resurrection of Christianity in
the
The tragedy of the Greek position was that, in spite of the support of
the Anglican Church for Dorotheus, and of Lloyd George for Venizelos, the
Allies never committed themselves to supporting the creation of a Greek kingdom
in Asia Minor. The reason for this was obvious: it would have meant full-scale
war with Turkey – an unattractive prospect so soon after the terrible losses of
the First World War, when British troops were still fighting in Soviet Russia
and other theatres of war. From the Allied Powers’ point of view, their troops
stationed in Constantinople were there, not as a permanent occupation force,
but only in order to protect the Christian minority. Moreover, the Greek
attitude antagonized the Turks and led to the creation of a powerful Turkish
nationalist movement.
It was not only the Greeks who were flirting with the Anglicans at this
time. In 1920 Anglican emissaries promised large sums of money to the
impoverished Patriarchate of Antioch in return for recognising the lawfulness
of their priesthood. No promises were made, but from the U.S.A. a delegation
led by Metropolitan Gerasimus (Messara) was sent to take part in a conference
of Anglican bishops in Portland, Oregon, where this question was raised.
Archdeacon Anthony Bashir, who accompanied Metropolitan Gerasimus and later became
leader of the Antiochian Church in America, was promised a salary if he, on
being ordained, would promise to work among the Orthodox for the rapprochement
of the Churches. However, the hopes of the Anglicans were not realised at this
time…[131]
Out of the chaos of the Russian Civil War
there was formed one of the most important ecclesiastical formations of the
twentieth century – the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile, later known as the
Russian Church Abroad.
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
“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 Sylvester 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[132], 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…[133]
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 № 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:
“’1. 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…’[134]
“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
further action. 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 revive church activity abroad’, which was later renamed the
‘Russian Church Council Abroad’, also known in the literature as the Karlovtsy
Council. Soon, at the invitation of Patriarch Demetrius of Serbia, the HCA led
by Metropolitan Anthony moved to Sremskie Karlovtsy in Serbia – a fraternal
country which in the course of many years proved to be a safe haven for the
leadership of the Church Abroad.”[135]
Meanwhile, at the end of 1920 200,000 Russian refugees with the retreating
remnants of the White armies in Siberia crossed from Siberia into China. Among
them were six bishops and many priests. This large colony of Russians, together
with the Russian Spiritual Mission in Jerusalem, recognised the authority of
the HCA in Serbia.[136]
The canonical status of ROCOR was unique in the history of the Orthodox
Church. ROCOR always called herself a part of the
This clearly anomalous situation was seen as being justified on a
temporary basis, - until the fall of communism in
On October 13, 1921, in response to a request from ROCOR, the Russian
Holy Synod and Higher Church Council under the presidency of Patriarch Tikhon
issued resolution № 193, which declared: “(1) In view of the
inappropriateness of submitting to the Higher Church Administrationy of the
Russian Church Abroad all the Orthodox churches and communities of the Moscow
Patriarchate beyond the borders of Soviet Russia, to leave this Administration
with its former privileges, without spreading the sphere of his activities onto
the Orthodox Churches in Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which
preserve their presently existing form of Church administration, (2) also to
turn down the petition for the creation of a post of deputy of his Holiness the
Patriarch abroad, as being unnecessary, and (3) to accept the news of the
proposed convening of a Council of the Russian Orthodox churches abroad on
October 1 old style.”[137]
The First All-Emigration Council opened in Sremskie Karlovtsy, Serbia on
November 21, 1921. 11 Russian bishops and 2 Serbian bishops took part, and 24
Russian bishops who could not be at the Council sent telegrams indicating their
recognition of its authority to organise the life of the Russian Church Abroad.
Clergy, monastics and laity also took part in the Council – 163 people in all.
Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) was the president of the Council,
and Patriarch Demetrius of Serbia its honorary president. It was expected that
the patriarch would visit the Council, but unexpectedly something happened to
disrupt this. This was related to the schism between the Constantinopolitan and
Bulgarian Churches. The Bulgarian Metropolitan Stefan of Sophia arrived,
bringing a greeting from the Bulgarian Holy Synod. This upset the Patriarch of
Serbia, whose relations with the Bulgarians were not good. So he gave excuses
for not coming, while Metropolitan Stefan immediately returned to Bulgaria.
Bishop Seraphim (Sobolev), who was in charge of the Russian communities
in Bulgaria reported to the Council about the great difficulty of their
position in Bulgaria because of the Bulgarian schism and the impossibility of
concelebrating with the Bulgarian clergy. The hierarchs discussed this matter
from all sides and declared that they would like to restore communion with the
Bulgarian Church, but could not exceed their canonical prerogatives without the
participation of the other Local Churches, and in particular of the Church of
Constantinople. In spite of that, continuing the practice of the Russian Church
and basing themselves on the canons (71, 81, 88 and 122 of Carthage), the
delegates allowed the Russian priests and deacons to serve all kinds of Divine
services and sacraments with the bishops and clergy of the Bulgarian Church,
and they also allowed the Russian bishops to serve with the Bulgarian clergy.
Between bishops only joint serving of molebens, pannikhidas, etc. was allowed,
but “in no way the celebration of the Divine Liturgy and other holy sacraments
of the Orthodox Church”.[138]
The Council called on the Genoa conference to refuse recognition to the
Bolshevik regime and help the Russian people to overthrow it. And it called on
all to pray for the restoration of the Romanov dynasty. After a vote, the
Council issued an Epistle to the Russian emigration, which declared: “May {the
Lord God] return to the All-Russian throne his Anointed One, strong in the love
of the people, a lawful tsar from the House of the Romanovs”. In connection
with this there were disagreements among the delegates, with Archbishop
Eulogius and Anastasy expressing their disagreement. The hierarchs were split
in two, two-thirds of the clergy abstained from voting, and the Epistle was
issued only thanks to the votes of the laity.
Under pressure from the Bolsheviks, Patriarch Tikhon resolved: “To close
the Council (it was already closed), and to recognise the resolutions of the
Karlovtsy Council as having no canonical significance in view of its invasion
into the political sphere which does not belong to it. To demand the materials
of the Council abroad, so as to judge on the degree of guilt of the
participants in the Council.” The Synod added: “To enter into discussion of the
activity of those responsible for the Council, and to give them over to
ecclesiastical trial after the establishment of the normal life of the Russian
Synod.”[139]
In defence of the Karlovtsy Council’s position, Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky) 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.”[140]
In May, 1919, the Italians, having withdrawn from the Paris Peace
Conference, began to occupy parts of Turkey – Antalya in the south and Marmaris
in the west. The other Great Powers were alarmed. This gave Venizelos his
chance.
Margaret Macmillan writes: “He
had been working hard from the start of the Peace Conference to press Greek
claims, with mixed success. Although he tried to argue that the coast of Asia
Minor was indisputably Greek in character, and the Turks in a minority, his
statistics were highly dubious. For the inland territory he was claiming, where
even he had to admit that the Turks were in a majority, Venizelos called in
economic arguments. The whole area (the Turkish provinces of Aidin and Brusa
and the areas around the Dardanelles and Ismir) was a geographic unit that
belonged to the Mediterranean; it was warm, well watered, fertile, opening out
to the world, unlike the dry and Asiatic plateau of the hinterland. The Turks
were good workers, honest, in their relations, and a good people as subjects’,
he told the Supreme Council at his first appearance in February. ‘But as rulers
they were insupportable and a disgrace to civilisation, as was proved by their
having exterminated over a million Armenians and 300,000 Greeks during the last
four years.’ To show how reasonable he was being, he renounced any claims to
the ancient Greek settlements at Pontus on the eastern end of the Black Sea. He
would not listen to petitions from the Pontine Greeks, he assured House’s
assistant, Bonsal: ‘I have told them that I cannot claim the south shore of the
Black Sea, as my hands are quite full with Thrace and Anatolia.’ There was a
slight conflict with Italian claims, but he was confident the two countries
could come to a friendly agreement. They had, in fact, already tried and it had
been clear that neither was prepared to back down, especially on Smyrna.
“The
thriving port of Smyrna lay at the heart of Greek claims. It had been Greek in
the great Hellenic past and in the nineteenth century had become predominantly
Greek again as immigrants from the Greek mainland had flocked there to take
advantage of the new railways which stretched into the hinterland and
opportunities for trade and investment. The population was at least a quarter
of a million before the war and more Greeks lived there than in Athens itself.
They dominated the exports – from figs to opium to carpets – which coursed down
from the Anatolian plateau in Asia Minor. Smyrna was a Greek city, a centre of
Greek learning and nationalism – but it was also a crucial part of the Turkish
economy.
“When Venizelos reached out
for Smyrna and its hinterland, he was going well beyond what could be justified
in terms of self-determination. He was also putting Greece into a dangerous
position. Taking the fertile valleys of western Asia Minor was perhaps
necessary, as he argued, to protect the Greek colonies along the coast. From
another perspective, though, it created a Greek province with a huge number of
non-Greeks as well as a long line to defend against anyone who chose to attack
from central Anatolia. His great rival General Metaxas, later dictator of
Greece, warned of this repeatedly. ‘The Greek state is not today ready for the
government and exploitation of so extensive a territory.’ Metaxas was right.”[141]
The Italians and the Americans
were against the Greek claims on Smyrna; but the British and the French were
sympathetic. Eventually the Americans were won over, and the Italians, having
already abandoned the Peace Conference, were presented with a fait accompli.
“The whole thing,” wrote Henry Wilson, the British military expert, “is mad and
bad”.[142]
Lord Curzon, the soon-to-be
British Foreign Minister, was also worried. He was far from being a Turkophile.
As he said: “The presence of the Turks in Europe has been a source of
unmitigated evil to everybody concerned. I am not aware of a single interest,
Turkish or otherwise, that during nearly 500 years has benefited from that
presence.”[143]
“That the Turks should be deprived of Constantinople is, in my opinion,
inevitable and desirable as the crowning evidence of their defeat in war, and I
believe that it will be accepted with whatever wrathful reluctance by the
Eastern world.” “But,” he went on, “when it is realized that the fugitives are
to be kicked from pillar to post and that there is to be practically no Turkish
Empire and probably no Caliphate at all, I believe that we shall be giving a
most dangerous and most unnecessary stimulus to Moslem passions throughout the
Eastern world and that sullen resentment may easily burst into savage frenzy”.
And he called the landing in Smyrna “the greatest mistake that had been made in
Paris”.[144]
The
landing took place on May 15, 1919. Unfortunately, it was handled badly, and
some hundreds of Turkish civilians were killed. Although the Greeks arrested
those responsible and did all they could to make amends, international opinion,
stirred up by Turkish propaganda and the thoroughly pro-Turkish American
representative in Constantinople, Admiral Bristol, began to turn against them,
ignoring the mass slaughter of Greeks in Pontus and the Caucasus.
On May 16, Ataturk, disgusted
with the feebleness of the sultan’s response, slipped out of Constantinople on
an Italian pass, and arrived in Samsun to organize the nationalist movement
that eventually defeated the Greeks and created the modern state of Turkey. By
the end of the year he had created a new Turkish capital in Ankara. Although,
on May 20, the Allies had recognized the Sultan, and not Ataturk, as Turkey’s
legitimate ruler, the Italians were already secretly negotiating with Ataturk,
and the French were not slow to follow suit.
On June 14, Venizelos asked
the Supreme Council to allow the Greeks to extend their occupation zone.
However, the western powers said no. They were exhausted from more than four
years of war, had already been demobilizing their armies around the globe, and
with the defeat of the Whites in Russia, this process accelerated. The last
thing they wanted was another full-scale war with the Turks. Besides, the
Americans were concerned that their Standard Oil Company should have large
concessions in Mesopotamia, which they believed Ataturk could give them, and
the French wanted an intact Turkey in order to pay back her pre-war loans. The
British toyed with the idea of supporting an independent Kurdistan in Ataturk’s
rear, but by the spring of 1920, when no single Kurd appeared to represent the
whole of the nation, this plan was dropped. Soon they also abandoned their
protectorates in Georgia and Baku.
In April, 1920, the Sultan’s
government appealed to the allies to help him fight Ataturk, but the allies
refused. In fact, the French were already arming Ataturk by this time. In spite
of this, in May, the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, which were harsh on Turkey,
were announced. They ceded Smyrna to the Greeks, founded a free Armenia,
created a free Kurdistan, divided up the eastern part of Asia Minor into
French, Italian and British occupation zones, ceded Mesopotamia and the Straits
to Britain, Syria to France, maintained Constantinople as an international
city, and reduced the Turkish army to a token force. But none of this was going
to become reality… The Treaty also ignored the territorial concessions to
Russia that had been agreed during the Great War. This incensed the Soviets,
who now began to support Kemal…
In June, Lloyd George and the
Supreme Council, agreed to Venizelos’ plans to move inland from Smyrna to
relieve the pressure exerted by Kemal on the British at Chanak in the
Dardanelles. “The British high commissioner in Constantinople wrote angrily to
Curzon: ‘The Supreme Council, thus, are prepared for a resumption of general
warfare; they are prepared to do violence to their own declared principles;
they are prepared to perpetuate bloodshed indefinitely in the Near East, and
for what? To maintain M. Venizelos in power in
In July, the Greeks defeated Ataturk at Chanak (present-day
Canakkale) and seized Eastern Thrace. By August, 1920, 100,000 soldiers had
penetrated 250 miles inland.
But the alarmed Allies then sent token forces of their own to separate
the Greeks from the Turks. Harold Nicolson wrote: “By turning their guns
against the Greeks – their own allies – the Great Powers saved Kemal
[Ataturk]’s panic-stricken newly-conscripted army at the eleventh hour from
final destruction.”[146]
The Greeks now found themselves in difficulties with supplies, while Ataturk was receiving supplies from the Italians, the French and the
Soviets. On September 5, they were halted at the River Sakarya. Then, after
suffering casualties of 4000 dead and 20,000 wounded, they began to retreat.
However, no attempt was made to evacuate the troops. Meanwhile, Ataturk was regrouping in the centre of the country, and preparing for
a counter-attack…
In October, King Alexander of Greece died, and was succeeded by his
father, the exiled King Constantine, while in November Venizelos and his
liberal party suffered a stunning and quite unexpected defeat in the Greek
elections. This made no difference to the war because the king felt
honour-bound to try and finish what Venizelos had begun. Or rather, it made
things worse, because the king then conducted a purge of pro-Venizelos officers
which weakened the army at a critical time. Moreover, the Allies were enraged,
because Constantine was the son-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm and had shown
sympathies for the Germans during the war.
On March 25, 1921, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Greek
revolution, meetings took place in 500 Cypriot churches, and petitions were
addressed to the English authorities that Cyprus should be reunited with
Greece.
In the same month, the Italians signed a Peace Agreement with Kemal, and
in August the Supreme Council for Peace declared: “Greece is in a situation of
war with Turkey exclusively on her own; the states of Britain, France, Italy
and Japan will remain as non-participants and strictly neutral”. But they were
not neutral: the French and Italians continued to supply Kemal, while Greece
was not allowed to blockade the Turkish ports. In the same month of August, the
Greeks won a hard-fought battle at Afion-Karachisar, and would have been well
advised to withdraw from the war at that point. But they did not, and things
went steadily downhill for them thereafter…
In October, the French signed a treaty with Ataturk’s government, which
enabled them to withdraw their troops from Cilicia, which freed more Turkish
troops for the Greek front. Soon the Greek invasion of Turkey, which had begun
well in 1921, collapsed through internal dissension and lack of financial and
military backing from the western powers. “For approximately nine months,”
wrote Sir Winston Churchill, “the Turks waited comfortably in the warmth while
the Greeks suffered throughout the icy-cold of the severe winter”.[147]
Finally, on August 26, 1922, the Turks began a general offensive. The
Greek army was routed, and the Greek and Armenian population of Smyrna
(including Metropolitan Chrysostom[148]) was
slaughtered.[149]
At this moment Lord Beaverbrook arrived in Constantinople on a special
mission for the British. On learning the facts, he told the American Admiral
Bristol: “Our behaviour to the Greeks was rotten! We have behaved to them with
dirty duplicity! They were prompted and supported by us in beginning their campaign.
But we abandoned them without support at their most critical moment so that the
Turks could exterminate them and destroy them forever! Lloyd George, the
British Prime Minister, supported them and prompted them himself to make the
landing at Smyrna. He supported them with every means except for giving them
money which his Treasury did not have to give. And now we are leaving them
exposed to disaster!” Then he turned to Admiral Bristol: “And what are you
doing in this matter?”[150]
The truth is that the Allies were doing nothing: allied ships in Smyrna
were ordered to observe strict “neutrality”, and the Greek government failed to
send any of its own. Then the Greek government fell, the king resigned, and
Colonels Nicholas Plastiras and Stylianus Gonatas took control. Prime Minister
Gounaris was executed together with six leaders of the army.[151]
With the fall of Venizelos, his fellow Masonic Cretan Metaxakis also
fell.
In February, 1921, he returned to America, campaigning on behalf of
Venizelos, and immediately returned into communion with the Anglicans. Thus the
Greek ambassador in Washington reported to the prefect in Thessalonica that on
December 17, 1921, “vested, he took part in a service in an Anglican church,
knelt in prayer with the Anglicans before the holy table, which he venerated,
gave a sermon, and blessed those present in the church” of the heretics.[152]
Meletius won over the epitropos of the Greek Archdiocese,
Rodostolos Alexandros, and the two of them first broke relations with the
Church of Greece and then, at a clergy-laity conference in the church of the
Holy Trinity, New York, declared the autonomy of the Greek Archdiocese from the
Church of Greece, changing its name to the grandiloquent: “Greek Archbishopric
of North and South America”. This was more than ironical, since it had been
Metaxakis himself who had created the archdiocese as a diocese of the Church of
Greece when he had been Archbishop of Athens in 1918!
Metaxakis’ new diocese broke Church unity in another way, in that it was
done without the blessing of the Russian Church, which until then had included
all the Orthodox of all nationalities in America under its own jurisdiction.
And once the Greeks had formed their own diocese, other nationalities followed
suit. Thus on August 14, 1921 Patriarch Gregory of Antioch asked Patriarch
Tikhon’s blessing to found a Syrian diocese in North America. Tikhon replied on
Meanwhile, the Patriarchate in Constantinople was still beating the
nationalist drum. In December, 1920, it called for the resignation of the king
for the sake of the Hellenic nation, and even considered excommunicating him!
Then, in March, a patriarchal delegation headed by Metropolitan Dorotheus
travelled to London, where they met Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary,
King George V and the archbishop of Canterbury – the first such trip to the West
by the senior prelate of Orthodoxy since Patriarch Joseph’s fateful
participation in the council of Florence in 1438. And there, like Joseph,
Dorotheus had a heart attack and died, just as he was to receive the honorary
vice-presidency of the World Congress for the friendship of the World through
the Churches.[154]
The terrible tragedy suffered by the Greek nation at this time must be
attributed in no small part to the nationalist-ecumenist politics of Dorotheus
and his Synod – a classic example of the destructive consequences of the
intrusion of political passions and ambitions into the life of the Church.
There followed a prolonged struggle for control of the patriarchate
between the Royalist and Venizelist factions, which was ended by the election
of Meletius Metaxakis as patriarch of Constantinople. He sailed into
Constantinople under a Byzantine yellow flag and black eagle. How had this
happened?
Bishop
Photius writes: “Political circles around Venizelos and the Anglican Church had
been involved in Meletius’ election as Patriarch. Metropolitan Germanus
(Karavangelis) of the Holy Synod of Constantinople wrote of these events, ‘My
election in 1921 to the Ecumenical Throne was unquestioned. Of the seventeen
votes cast, sixteen were in my favour. Then one of my lay friends offered me
10,000 lira if I would forfeit my election in favour of Meletius Metaxakis.
Naturally I refused his offer, displeased and disgusted. At the same time, one
night a delegation of three men unexpectedly visited me from the “National
Defence League” and began to earnestly entreat me to forfeit my candidacy in
favour of Meletius Metaxakis. The delegates said that Meletius could bring in
$100,000 for the Patriarchate and, since he had very friendly relations with
Protestant bishops in England and America, could be useful in international
causes. Therefore, international interests demanded that Meletius Metaxakis be
elected Patriarch. Such was also the will of Eleutherius Venizelos. I thought
over this proposal all night. Economic chaos reigned at the Patriarchate. The
government in Athens had stopped sending subsidies, and there were no other
sources of income. Regular salaries had not been paid for nine months. The
charitable organizations of the Patriarchate were in a critical economic state.
For these reasons and for the good of the people [or so thought the deceived
hierarch] I accepted the offer…’ Thus, to everyone’s amazement, the next day,
November 25 [December 8], 1921, Meletius Metaxakis became the Patriarch of Constantinople.
“The uncanonical nature of his election became evident when, two days
before the election, November 23 [December 6, 1921], there was a proposal made
by the Synod of Constantinople to postpone the election on canonical grounds.
The majority of the members voted to accept this proposal. At the same time, on
the very day of the election, the bishops who had voted to postpone the
election were replaced by other bishops. This move allowed the election of
Meletius as Patriarch. Consequently, the majority of bishops of the
Patriarchate of Constantinople who had been circumvented met in Thessalonica.
[This Council included seven out of the twelve members of the
Constantinopolitan Holy Synod and about 60 patriarchal bishops from the New
Regions of Greece under the presidency of Metropolitan Constantine of Cyzicus.]
They announced that, ‘the election of Meletius Metaxakis was done in open
violation of the holy canons,’ and proposed to undertake ‘a valid and canonical
election for Patriarch of Constantinople.’ In spite of this, Meletius was
confirmed on the Patriarchal Throne.”[155]
Two members of the Synod then went to Athens to report to the council of
ministers. On December 12, 1921 they declared the election null and void. One
of the prominent hierarchs who refused to accept this election was Metropolitan
Chrysostom (Kavourides) of Florina, the future leader of the True Orthodox
Church, who also tried to warn the then Prime Minister Gounaris about the
dangers posed by the election of Meletius. The Sublime Porte also refused to
recognize the election, first because Meletius was not an Ottoman citizen and
therefore not eligible for the patriarchate according to the Ottoman charter of
1856, and secondly because Meletius declared that he did not consider any such
charters as binding insofar as they had been imposed by the Muslim conquerors.[156]
On December 29, 1921, the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece under the
presidency of Metropolitan Germanus of Demetrias deposed Metaxakis for a series
of canonical transgressions and for creating a schism, declared both Metaxakis
and Rodostolos Alexandros to be schismatics and threatened to declare all those
who followed them to be similarly schismatic. However, in spite of this second
condemnation, Meletius was enthroned as patriarch on
Thus there arrived at the peak of power one of the men whom Metropolitan
Chrysostom (Kavourides) called “these two Luthers of the Orthodox Church”. The
other one, Archbishop Chrysostom (Papadopoulos) of Athens, would come to power
very shortly… In this way the Masons through the power of money gained control
of the senior patriarchate in Orthodoxy, guaranteeing its loyalty to the
ecumenical movement.
The insecurity of Meletius’ position did not prevent him from trying to
execute his nationalist-ecumenist plans. His intentions were clear from his
enthronement speech: “I give myself to the service of the Church, so as from
her first throne to assist in the development, as far as this is possible, of
closer friendly relations with the heterodox Christian Churches of the East and
West, to push forward the work of unification between them and others.” Then,
on August 3, his Synod recognised the validity of Anglican orders. In 1923 the
Churches of Cyprus and
Within the next few years, Meletius and his successor, Gregory VII,
undertook the wholesale annexation of vast territories belonging to the
jurisdiction of the Serbian and Russian Patriarchates. Basing his actions on a
false interpretation of the 28th canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council,
which supposedly gives all the “barbarian lands” into the jurisdiction of
Constantinople, he and his successor created the following uncanonical
autonomous and autocephalous Churches:-
1. Western Europe. On April 5, 1922, Meletius named
an exarch for the whole of Western and Central Europe, Metropolitan Germanus of
Thyateira and Great Britain. In 1923 he suggested to Metropolitan Eulogius of
Paris and his flock that he submit to Metropolitan Germanus. In a letter dated
March 28, 1923, Metropolitan Eulogius decline.[159] By the
time of Gregory VII’s death in November, 1924, there was an exarchate of
Central Europe under Metropolitan Germanus of Berlin, an exarchate of Great
Britain and Western Europe under Metropolitan Germanus of Thyateira, and a diocese
of Bishop Gregory of Paris. In the late 1920s the Ecumenical Patriarch received
into his jurisdiction the Russian Metropolitan Eulogius of Paris, who had
created a schism in the Russian Church Abroad, and who sheltered a number of
influential heretics, such as Nicholas Berdiaev and Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, in
the theological institute of St. Sergius in Paris.[160]
2. Finland. In February, 1921 Patriarch
Tikhon granted the Finnish Church, led by Archbishop Seraphim (Lukyanov),
autonomy within the Russian Church. In 1922, Meletius offered to Seraphim to
ordain the renovationist priest Herman (Aava) as his vicar-bishop, and receive
autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The excuse given here was that
Patriarch Tikhon was no longer free, “therefore he could do as he pleased”
(Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky)). Seraphim refused, declaring his loyalty
to Patriarch Tikhon and the Russian Church Abroad. In spite of this, and under
the strong pressure of the Finnish authorities, Herman was consecrated Bishop
of Sortavala in Constantinople. This undermined the efforts of the Orthodox to
maintain their position vis-à-vis the Lutherans. Then, for refusing to learn
the Finnish language in three months, Archbishop Seraphim was imprisoned on the
island of Konevets by the Finnish government, while Patriarch Gregory VII
raised Bishop Herman to the rank of metropolitan. Despite the protests of
Patriarch Tikhon, the new metropolitan, under pressure from the government,
annulled the right of the monasteries to celebrate Pascha according to the
Julian calendar. Then began the persecution of the confessors of the Old
Calendar in the monastery of Valaam (see below).
“Even more iniquitous and cruel,” writes Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky), “was the relationship of the late Patriarch Gregory and his
synod towards the diocese and the person of the Archbishop of Finland. The
Ecumenical Patriarch consecrated a vicar bishop for
On November 14/27, 1923, Patriarch Tikhon and the Russian Holy Synod,
after listening to a report by Archbishop Seraphim decreed that “since his
Holiness Patriarch Tikhon has entered upon the administration of the Russian
Orthodox Church, the reason for which the Patriarch of Constantinople
considered it necessary temporarily to submit the Finnish Church to his
jurisdiction has now fallen away, and the Finnish eparchy must return under the
rule of the All-Russian Patriarch.”[162]
However, the Finns did not return to the Russians, and the
3. Estonia. In February, 1919, after the
martyrdom of Bishop Plato of Revel, Bishop Alexander (Paulus) of Porkhov was
transferred to his see and raised to the rank of archbishop. Patriarch Tikhon
then granted a broad measure of autonomy to the parts of the former Pskov and
Revel dioceses that entered into the boundaries of the newly formed Estonian
state. On September 23, 1922, the Estonian Church under Archbishop Alexander
petitioned to be received under the Ecumenical Patriarchate and to be granted
autocephaly. On March 10, 1940, in a letter to Metropolitan Sergius
(Stragorodsky), Metropolitan Alexander wrote that this decision was taken under
strong political pressure from the State authorities at a time when news was
constantly coming from Soviet Russia about the very difficult position of
Patriarch Tikhon and the Russian Church, and in reply to an appeal from
Patriarch Meletius IV.[163]
4. Latvia. In June, 1921 Patriarch Tikhon granted the
Latvian Church autonomy under its Latvian archpastor, Archbishop John of Riga,
who was burned to death by the communists in 1934. In March, 1936, the
Ecumenical Patriarch accepted the Church of Latvia within his own jurisdiction.
On March 29 Metropolitan Germanus of Thyateira and Great Britain headed the
consecration of the garrison priest Augustine (Peterson) as Metropolitan of
Riga and All Latvia.[164]
5. Poland. In 1921 Patriarch Tikhon appointed Archbishop Seraphim
(Chichagov) to the see of Warsaw, but the Poles, whose armies had defeated the
Red Army in 1920, did not grant him entry into the country. So on September 27
the Patriarch was forced to accept the Poles’ candidate, Archbishop George
(Yaroshevsky) of Minsk. However, he appointed him his exarch in Poland, not
metropolitan of Warsaw, which title remained with Archbishop Seraphim.
Moreover, he refused Archbishop George’s request for autocephaly on the grounds
that very few members of the Polish Church were Poles and the Polish dioceses
were historically indivisible parts of the Russian Church.[165]
Instead, he granted the Polish Church autonomy within the Russian Church.[166]
On January 24, 1922 Archbishop George convened a hierarchical Council in
Warsaw, in which there also participated Archbishops Dionysius (Valedinsky) and
Panteleimon (Rozhnovsky). Under pressure from the Polish authorities, Bishop
Vladimir also joined them. The ministry of religious confessions was represented
at the Council by Pekarsky. His efforts in negotiations with the Russian
hierarchs were directed mainly to forcing them to sign the so-called “Temporary
Rules”, which had been drawn up in the ministry and which envisaged
far-reaching government control over the life of the Orthodox Church in Poland.
On January 30 the “Temporary Rules” were signed by Archbishops George and
Dionysius, but not by Archbishop Panteleimon and Bishop Vladimir.
On the same day Patriarch Tikhon issued a decree transferring Archbishop
George to the see of Warsaw and raising him to the rank of metropolitan,
insofar as it had become evident that it would be impossible to obtain the
Polish authorities’ permission for the entrance into Warsaw of Metropolitan
Seraphim (Chichagov), who had the reputation of being an extreme rightist.
However, the titular promotion of Archbishop George by no means signified that
the patriarch supported his intentions, for in the decrees there is no mention
of ecclesiastical autonomy, nor of exarchal rights. Consequently, as was
confirmed by the patriarch in 1925, he was simply one of the diocesan bishops
in Poland, and not metropolitan “of all Poland”.[167]
Liudmilla Koeller writes: “The Polish authorities restricted the
Orthodox Church, which numbered more than 3 million believers (mainly
Ukrainians and Byelorussians).[168] In
1922 a council was convoked in Pochaev which was to have declared autocephaly,
but as the result of a protest by Bishop Eleutherius [Bogoyavlensky, of
Vilnius] and Bishop Vladimir (Tikhonitsky), this decision was not made. But at
the next council of bishops, which gathered in Warsaw in June, 1922, the
majority voted for autocephaly, with only Bishops Eleutherius and Vladimir
voting against. A council convoked in September of the same year ‘deprived
Bishops Eleutherius and Vladimir of their sees. In December, 1922, Bishop
Eleutherius was arrested and imprisoned’.”[169] He was
later exiled to Lithuania.
Two other Russian bishops, Panteleimon (Rozhnovsky) and Sergius
(Korolev), were also deprived of their sees. The three dissident bishops were
then expelled from Poland. In November, 1923, Metropolitan George was killed by
an opponent of his church politics, Archimandrite Smaragd (Laytshenko), and was
succeeded by Metropolitan Dionysius “with the agreement of the Polish
government and the confirmation and blessing of his Holiness Meletius IV
[Metaxakis]”. Patriarch Tikhon rejected this act as uncanonical[170], but
was unable to do anything about it.
On November 13, 1924, three days before his death, Patriarch Gregory VII
signed and confirmed a so-called “Patriarchal and Synodal-Canonical Tomos” of
the Ecumenical Constantinopolitan Patriarchate… on the recognition of the
Orthodox Church in Poland as autocephalous”. The Tomos significantly declared:
“The first separation from our see of the Kievan Metropolia and from the
Orthodox Metropolias of Latvia and Poland, which depended on it, and also their
union to the holy Moscow Church, took place by no means in accordance with the
prescription of the holy canons, nor was everything observed that had been
established with regard to the complete ecclesiastical autonomy of the Kievan
metropolitan who bears the title of exarch of the Ecumenical Throne”. Hereby
the patriarch indirectly laid claim to Ukraine as his canonical territory, in
spite of the fact that it had been under Russian rule for two-and-a-half
centuries. And yet, in contradiction with that, he affirmed as the basis of his
grant of autocephaly to the Polish Church the fact that “the order of
ecclesiastical affairs must follow political and social forms”, basing this
affirmation on the 17th Canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council and
the 38th canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council.[171]
5. Hungary and Czechoslovakia. According to the old Hungarian
law of 1868, and confirmed by the government of the new Czechoslovak republic
in 1918 and 1920, all Orthodox Christians living in the territory of the former
Hungarian kingdom came within the jurisdiction of the Serbian Patriarchate.
That meant that they were served by Bishops Gorazd of Moravia and Dositheus of
Carpatho-Russia (Gorazd was consecrated on September 25, 1921 in Belgrade by
Patriarch Demetrius of Serbia, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev and
two Serbian bishops).[172]
However,
on
“The scandal caused by this confusion,”
writes Z.G. Ashkenazy, “is easy to imagine. Bishop Sabbatius insisted on his
rights in Carpatho-Russia, enthusiastically recruiting sympathizers from the
Carpatho-Russian clergy and ordaining candidates indiscriminately. His
followers requested that the authorities take administrative measures against
priests not agreeing to submit to him. Bishop Dositheus placed a rebellious
monk under ban – Bishop Sabbatius elevated him to igumen; Bishop Dositheus
gathered the clergy in Husta and organized an Ecclesiastical Consistory –
Bishop Sabbatius enticed priests to Bushtin and formed an Episcopal Council.
Chaos reigned in church affairs. Malice and hatred spread among the clergy, who
organized into ‘Sabbatiites’ and ‘Dositheiites’.
“A wonderful spiritual flowering which
gave birth to so many martyrs for Orthodoxy degenerated into a shameful
struggle for power, for a more lucrative parish and extra income. The Uniate
press was gleeful, while bitterness settled in among the Orthodox people
against their clergy, who were not able to maintain that high standard of
Orthodoxy which had been initiated by inspired simple folk.”[173]
6. Turkey. While creating
uncanonical new Churches on the terroritory of other Local Orthodox Churches
(he also invited the Russians in America to come under his omophorion,
but they refused), Meletius contrived to support a schism on his own canonical
territory. Thus in the autumn of 1922, Metropolitan Procopius of Konium, to
whom all the churches of Anatolia were subject, with two titular bishops and
two priests (one of whom, Papa Euthymius, became the driving force in the
separatist movement) separated from the patriarchate and created his own Synod
of the “Turkish Orthodox Church”.
The new Church was strongly supported by
the government of Ataturk. In view of this, Meletius considered it
inappropriate to ban it. Instead, he suggested the creation of an autonomous
Turkish Church subject to the patriarchate, in which he promised to introduce
the Turkish language into the Divine services.
[174]
In 1938 Bishop John (Maximovich) of Shanghai reported to the
All-Diaspora Council of the Russian Church Abroad: “Increasing without limit
their desires to submit to themselves parts of Russia, the Patriarchs of
Constantinople have even begun to declare the uncanonicity of the annexation of
Kiev to the Moscow Patriarchate, and to declare that the previously existing
southern Russian Metropolia of Kiev should be subject to the Throne of
Constantinople. Such a point of view is not only clearly expressed in the Tomos
of November 13, 1924, in connection with the separation of the Polish Church,
but is also quite thoroughly promoted by the Patriarchs. Thus, the Vicar of
Metropolitan Eulogius in Paris, who was consecrated with the permission of the
Ecumenical Patriarch, has assumed the title of Chersonese; that is to say,
Chersonese, which is now in the territory of Russia, is subject to the
Ecumenical Patriarch. The next logical step for the Ecumenical Patriarchate
would be to declare the whole of Russia as being under the jurisdiction of
Constantinople…
“In sum, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, in theory embracing almost the whole
universe, and in fact extending its authority only over several dioceses, and
in other places having only a superficial supervision and receiving certain
revenues for this; persecuted by the government at home and not supported by
any governmental authority abroad; having lost its significance as a pillar of
truth and having itself become a source of division, and at the same time being
possessed by an exorbitant love of power – represents a pitiful spectacle which
recalls the worst periods in the history of the See of Constantinople.”[175]
The Bolsheviks believed that the roots of
religion lay in poverty and ignorance, so that the elimination of these evils
would naturally lead to the withering away of religion. This being the case,
they could not believe that religious belief had any deeper roots in the nature
of things. Therefore, writes Roslof, “the party explicitly rejected
‘God-building’, an attempt by its own members to develop a ‘socialist religion
of humanity’. Led by A.V. Lunacharskii, Leonid Krasin, and Bogdanov (A.A.
Malinovskii), Bolshevik God-builders maintained that the proletariat would
create a non-transcendent, earth-centered religion to complement its formation
of the ultimate human society. Only this group within the party ‘recognized
that religion’s power lay in its response to people’s psychic needs and argued
that a revolutionary movement could not afford to ignore these’.”[176]
In May, 1921 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.” At the same time he said that the
Bolsheviks must “definitely avoid offending religious sensibilities”. The
result was the suspension of the “dilettantist” anti-religious commissions
(Lenin’s phrase) that had existed thereto, and their replacement by a
Commission on the Separation of Church and State attached to the Politburo
which lasted until 1929 under 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.[177]
An important aspect of the Commission’s strategy was “divide and rule”.
For while physical methods continued to be applied, the Bolsheviks recognized
that 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 focussed 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.”[178]
“According to archival data,” writes Fr. Victor Potapov, “the politics
of enrolling the clergy began de facto already in the first years of
Soviet power. This is what one of these Cheka documents, dated 1921, says about
this:
“’The question of having agents and
informers among the clergy is the most difficult one in the Cheka both because
of the difficulty of carrying out the work and because for the most part the
Cheka has paid little attention to it up to now…
“There is no doubt that we have to stir them up and shift them from
their places. And to realise this aim more quickly and efficiently it is
necessary at the beginning to take the following measures:
“’1. Use the clergy themselves for our own ends, especially those who
have an important position in Church life – hierarchs, metropolitans, etc.,
forcing them under threat of severe punishment to distribute among their clergy
this or that instruction that could be useful to us, for example: the cessation
of forbidden agitation with regard to [Soviet anti-ecclesiastical] decrees, the
closure of monasteries, etc.
“’2. Clarify the character of individual bishops and vicars, encouraging
their desires and plans.
“’3. It is proposed that informers be recruited among the clergy after
some acquaintance has been gained with the clerical world and the character
traits of each individual servant of the cult has been clarified. This material
can be gained in various ways, but mainly through removing correspondence at
searches and through personal acquaintance with the clerical environment.
“’It is
necessary to interest this or that informer among the clergy with material
rewards, since only on this soil is it possible to come to an agreement with
the popes. It is impossible to hope for their benevolent attitude to Soviet
power, while subsidies in money and in kind will undoubtedly also bind them to
us more in another respect – namely, in that he will an eternal slave of the Cheka,
fearing that his activity will be unmasked.
“’The recruitment of informers is carried out, and must be carried out,
by frightening them with the threat of prison and the camps for insignificant
reasons, for speculation, the violation of the rules and orders of the
authorities, etc.
“’True, a fairly unreliable method can be useful only if the object of
recruitment is weak and spineless in character. Above all attention must be
paid to the quality, and not to the quantity, of the informers. For only when
those recruited are good informers and the recruitment has been carried out
with care can we hope to draw from this or that environment the material that
we need’ (TsA KGB f.1, op. 5, por. № 360, 1921, secret section, l. 6;
signature: Assistant to the person authorized, So VChK).’”[179]
“One revealing incident,” writes Roslof, “involved Lenin, Lunacharskii,
Dzerzhinskii, and [the schismatic] Bishop [Vladimir] Putiata. On April 6, 1921,
Lunacharskii wrote to Dzerzhinskii about Metropolitan Sergii Stragorodskii, who
had been arrested and sat in Butyrkii Prison. Lunacharskii suggested that
Sergii might be useful in Putiata’s ‘mission’ in Kazan, the details of which
were not given. Dzerzhinskii forwarded this letter for comments from one of his
subordinates, M.Ia. Latsis, who rejected Sergii’s suitability for the task.
Dzerzhinskii then sent a note to Latsis asking him to write a report on
Lunacharskii’s letter to Lenin, adding, ’In my opinion, the church is falling
apart. We must help this process but by no means allow the church to regenerate
itself and take some renewed form. Therefore, the Cheka and no one else should
direct the government’s policy toward church disintegration. Official or
unofficial relations between the party and priests are not permitted. Only the
Cheka can manoeuver toward the unique goal of disintegration among the priests.
Any connection whatever by other agencies with priests casts a shadow on the
party. This is a most dangerous matter that only our specialists will be capable
of handling.’[180]
“This reply did not please Lunacharskii. In a telegram on May 9, 1921,
he asked Lenin to meet briefly with Putiata. Lenin refused to receive the
archbishop and asked Lunacharskii to give him a written report on the case.
Lunacharskii responded quickly. He explained that Krasikov had started working
with Putiata with the intention of exploring possible uses of the internal
church feud begun by the archbishop. Lunacharskii became involved and
communicated directly with Putiata at a time when Metropolitan Sergii was in
prison.
“Archbishop Vladimir explained that (Sergii) was ready to transfer to
the side of the so-called ‘Soviet church’, i.e. of the clergy determinedly and
emphatically supporting the present regime and leading the battle with the
patriarch. Archbishop Vladimir insisted that if Sergii were freed, Vladimir
would acquire an extremely strong assistant in the task of destroying the
official church.
“Lunacharskii at first did not want to interfere but was convinced by a
colleague of Krasikov that Sergii would indeed join the ‘leftist’ clergy. After
being released, Sergii took up the case for restoring Putiata to his former
church position, from which he had been expelled for ‘ecclesiastical
Bolshevism’. Tikhon derailed this move by Sergii by insisting on a vote by all
Orthodox bishops on the question. Putiata then suggested a new strategy by
which he would be installed as the head of a new Soviet Orthodox Church
centered in Kazan. He claimed support for his views from many other bishops.”[181]
The movement for a “Soviet Orthodox Church” was gathering pace… It was
supported by Trotsky, who in a protocol of the secret section of the Cheka
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.[182]
The
Requisitioning of Church Valuables
But it was the Volga famine of 1921-22, in which about 25 million people
were starving, and 15 million more were under threat, that provided the
Bolsheviks with their first opportunity to create a major schism in 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!”[183]
This decree annihilated the voluntary character of the offerings, and
put the clergy in the position of accessories to sacrilege. And so on February
28, in order to resolve the perplexities of the faithful, the Patriarch
decreed: “… In view of the exceptionally difficult circumstances, we have
admitted the possibility of offering church objects that 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).”[184]
This compromise decree represents the first major concession made by the
Church to Soviet power. 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!”[185]
At the beginning of March, with the approval of the whole Politburo
(Lenin, Molotov, Kamenev and Stalin), 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
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-Zemliachka. It literally rushed like a
hurricane through
Soon clashes with believers who resisted the confiscation of church valuables
took place. 1414 such clashes were reported in the official press. The first
took place in the town of
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
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 slaveowners.”
Lenin wanted Trotsky to be in charge of the campaign; “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,”[192]
because Trotsky was a Jew, and the high proportion of Jews in the Bolshevik
party had aroused the people’s wrath against them.
In addition to being the head of the commission for the requisitioning
of the valuables, Trotsky also headed the commission for their monetary
realization. And in a submission to 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
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, or between $4 and $10 million according
to another estimate,[194] while
Bukharin admitted to having spent nearly $14 million on propaganda during the
famine.[195]
In any case, the Bolsheviks already had in their possession Russian crown
jewels worth one billion gold roubles and jewels from the Kremlin museum worth
300 million gold roubles – far more than the market price of the church
valuables.[196]
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 returned to the Church.
The
Renovationist Coup
However, the crisis gave a golden opportunity to the internal enemies of the Church – the renovationist heretics. The
roots of renovationism are to be found in the liberal-democratic ideas that
came to prominence in Church circles at the beginning of the century. Philip
Walters writes: “During the early 20th Century, in pre-revolutionary
“B.V. Titlinov’s book, Novaia tserkov (The
“There are three basic ideological strands in Renovationism: a political
strand, concerned with promoting loyalty to the Soviet regime; an
organizational strand, concerned with the rights of the lower clergy and with
the administration of the Church; and an ethical strand, concerned with making
Church services more accessible to the masses and with moral and social reform.
The first strand was characteristic of the Living Church movement as a
whole…When the Living Church movement split into various factions, the second
ideological strand was taken up chiefly by the followers of V.D. Krasnitsky,
and the third by the groups which followed Bishop Antonin Granovsky and A.I.
Vvedensky.”[197]
The idea of splitting the official Church hierarchy by promoting the
renovationists 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.[198]
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:
“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.[199]
The Bolsheviks were counting on a modernist or “renovationist” faction
in the
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 “
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”.[202] Thus
Titlinov wrote that the major task of the “
And so 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.”[204]
The first shots in the battle were fired in
The leader of the
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 was reprinted five days
later in Izvestia). The letter 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…
On March 22-23 Trotsky wrote: “The arrest of the Synod and the Patriarch
is necessary, but not now, but in about 10-15 days… In the course of this week
we must arrange a trial of priests for stealing church valuables (there are
quite a few facts)… The press must adopted a frenzied tone, giving [evidence
of] a heap of priestly attempts in
On April 1 the Patriarch was placed under house arrest. Then he was
called as a witness for the defence in the trial of 54 Moscow Christians, which
began on April 26. 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: “Do you consider the state’s laws obligatory or not?”
The
Patriarch: “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.”[208]
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
The first instinct of the
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
But in practice, even more than in theory, this line proved very hard to
draw. For to 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 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
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 Pharaoh, no further concessions were made
with regard to the communist ideology.
On May 3, 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.”[210]
“This proposal,” writes Rayfield, “went to Trotsky and Stalin, who had
the Politburo resolve [on May 4] ‘1) to bring Tikhon to trial; 2) to apply the
death penalty to the priests’.”[211]
On
May 5, the following dialogue took place when he appeared for the last time as
a witness in the case of the 54
President:
“You ordered that your appeal calling on the people to disobey the authorities
[this was the statement on church valuables] should be read out to the whole
people.
Patriarch:
“The authorities well know that in my appeal there was no call [to the people]
to resist the authorities, but only to preserve their holy things, and in the
name of their preservation to ask the authorities to allow their value to be
paid in money, and, by helping their starving brothers in this way, to preserve
their holy things.”
President:
“Well, this call will cost the lives of your faithful servants.”
At this point the patriarch pointed to those on trial and said: ‘I
always said and continue to say… that I alone am guilty of everything, and this
is only my Christian army, obediently following the commands of the head sent
to her by God. But if a redemptive sacrifice is necessary, if the death of
innocent sheep of the flock of Christ is necessary’ – at this point the voice
of the Patriarch was raised and it became audible in all the corners of the
huge hall, and he himself as it were grew tall as, addressing the accused, he
raised his hands and blessed them, loudly and distinctly pronouncing the words
– ‘I bless the faithful servants of the Lord Jesus Christ to go to torment and
death for Him’. The accused fell on their knees. Both the judges and the
prosecutors fell silent… The session did not continue that evening. In the
morning the verdict was pronounced: 18 priests were to be shot. When they were
being led out of the hall, they began to chant: “Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs bestowing life”.[212]
The prosecutor also declared that the tribunal “establishes the
illegality of the existence of the organization called the Orthodox hierarchy”.
And so a juridical definition was issued placing the whole of the Russian
Orthodox Church beyond the law.[213]
That evening, the Patriarch was subjected to an interrogation at the GPU
headquarters by T.P. Samsonov and V.R. Menzhinsky. They asked him to say
clearly what punitive measures he was taking in relation to the clergy abroad,
and in particular Metropolitans Anthony and Eulogius. Menzhinsky even suggested
that the Patriarch invite the metropolitans to
It was therefore under extreme pressure that on the same day of May 5,
Patriarch Tikhon convened a meeting of the Holy Synod and the Higher Church
Council, at which he declared (decree № 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
Decree № 347 has been used by the Sovietized Moscow Patriarchate and
its satellites to cast doubts on the canonicity of the Russian Church Abroad.
However, the ukaz which the Church in Exile received did not have the
Patriarch’s signature and was signed only by Archbishop Thaddeus of
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
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 anger them. The leaders of the
The day after his interrogation, May 6, the Patriarch was placed under
house arrest. According to the will of the Patriarch, the temporary
administration of the Church should now have passed to Metropolitan Cyril of
Kazan. But since he was in prison, the next hierarch according to the will,
Metropolitan Agathangelus of Yaroslavl, should have taken over.
On May 9 the Patriarch was again called to interrogation. He was told
the verdict of the court on the Muscovite clergy (11 condemned to be shot) and
then told that he himself was to be brought to trial. The interrogation again
revolved around the Church Abroad. The Patriarch gave in and wrote: “I did not
consider Anthony Khrapovitsky, Metropolitan of Kiev, to be an enemy of the
workers-and-peasants’ power. But now, judging from his speeches in the foreign
press – Novoe Vremia and others – I find that he, Anthony Khrapovitsky
is an accursed enemy of the worker-peasant toiling masses of
On May 12, accompanied by two chekists, 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 told him that they had obtained
permission for the convening of a Council, but on condition that he resigned
from the patriarchal throne. The Patriarch replied that the patriarchy weighed
on him like a cross. “I would joyfully accept it if the coming Council removed
the patriarchy from me, but now I am handing power to one of the oldest hierarchs
and will renounced the administration of the Church.” The Patriarch rejected
the candidacies of some modernist bishops and appointed Metropolitan
Agathangelus as his deputy.[220]
“However,” writes Krivova, “the authorities did not allow Metropolitan
Agathangelus to leave for
“After Agathangelus there remained in
On May 17 the Pope proposed that he buy back all the requisitioned
Church valuables, and that they then be handed over to the leader of the
Catholics in
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 Agathangelus’ arrival in
The next day, the Patriarch was transferred to the Donskoj monastery,
the renovationists took over his residence in the Troitsky podvorye. On
May 29 the “
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!”[224]
However, the renovationists and communists still had to neutralize the
threat posed by Metropolitan Agathangelus. So Krasnitsky was sent to
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
“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…”[225]
Metropolitan Agathangelus wrote that the renovationists “declared their
intention to revise 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.[226] He was
immediately arrested…
The focus now shifts back to
The next day chekists arrived at the residence of the metropolitan and
arrested him. Meanwhile, Vvedensky took over the chancellery. Without turning a
hair, he went up to the hierarch for a blessing. “Fr. Alexander,” said the
metropolitan peacefully, “you and I are not in the
On May 29, the administration of the diocese passed to his vicar, Bishop
Alexis (Simansky) of Yamburg, the future false-patriarch. On the same day,
Metropolitan Benjamin was brought to trial together with 86 other people. They
were accused of entering into negotations with Soviet power with the aim of
annulling or softening the decree on the requisitioning of church valuables,
and that they were “in a plot with the worldwide bourgeoisie and the Russian
emigration”. He was given many chances to save himself in a dishonourable
manner. Thus even before the trial Vvedensky and the
The renovationists Krasnitsky and Vvedensky testified against
Metropolitan Benjamin during the trial, which was staged in what had been the
Club of the Nobility. Three witnesses came forward to defend the metropolitan.
They were immediately arrested, so no-one else came forward.
Once the prosecutor Krasikov prophetically remarked: "The whole of
the Orthodox Church is a counter-revolutionary organization. It follows that
the whole Church should be put in prison!" In the thirties this is
precisely what happened, when the whole of the
During the trial, Metropolitan Benjamin said: “I of course reject all
the accusations made against me and once again triumphantly declare (you know,
perhaps I am speaking for the last time in my life) that politics is completely
alien to me. I have tried as far as I have been able to only a pastor of human
souls. And now, standing before the court, I calmly await its sentence,
whatever it may be, well remembering the words of the apostle: ‘Take care that
you do not suffer as evil-doers, but if any of you suffer as a Christian, thank
God for it’ (I Peter 4.15-16).
The defence lawyer Y.S. Gurovich delivered
an eloquent speech, in which he 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."[229]
Gurovich’s speech was greeted by tumultuous applause. Then the final
word was given to the defendants (there were sixteen in all). When the
metropolitan rose to speak, he first expressed sorrow at being called an
"enemy of the people". "I am a true son of my people," he
said. "I love, and always have loved, the people. I have dedicated my
whole life to them and I felt happy to see that they - I mean the common people
- repaid me with the same love. It was the Russian people who raised me to the
high position I have been occupying in our
This was all that he had to say about himself. The rest of his speech
dealt with the defence of the others. Referring to some written documents and
other facts, he exhibited extraordinary memory, logic and calmness.
A
reverent silence followed the metropolitan's speech, which was broken by the
presiding judge. He addressed the metropolitan in a gentler tone of voice than
before, as if he also was affected by the spiritual strength of the defendant.
"All this time," he said, "you have spoken about others;
the tribunal would like to hear about yourself."
The metropolitan, who had sat down, rose, looked at the presiding judge
in a puzzled way, and asked in a low, clear voice:
"About myself? But what else can I tell you about myself? One more
thing perhaps: regardless of what my sentence will be, no matter what you
decide, life or death, I will lift up my eyes reverently to God, cross myself
and affirm: 'Glory to Thee, my Lord; glory to Thee for everything.'"
On July 5, Metropolitan Benjamin was convicted of “organizing a
counter-revolutionary group having set himself the aim of struggling with
Soviet power”. Ten people were condemned to be shot; the others were given
prison sentences of varying lengths.
In a letter written from prison, the metropolitan expressed the essence
of what was to become the position of the
The metropolitan was shot on the night of
In
Sergius’ vicar, Bishop Barnabas (Belyaev) turned for advice to the
Diveyevo eldress Maria Dmitrievna. “Hold on to the
Metropolitan John (Snychev) wrote: “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.’”[232]
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
Meanwhile, the pressures on the Patriarch were mounting inexorably. In
April, the government announced that he was about to go on trial on charges
arising from the trials of the 54 in
At about this time, international opinion began to make itself felt in
support of Patriarch Tikhon. On
One of the reasons why the Soviets postponed the trial of the Patriarch
was their desire that the renovationists condemn him first. They were not
disappointed… At their second All-Russian council, which met in the cathedral
of Christ the Saviour 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, 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.”[237]
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.”[238]
The council also consecrated the married Protopriest John (Kedrovsky) as
Metropolitan of the
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
After the new revolutionary government took power in
“’While in
However, the mood in
Indeed, the situation was so serious, and the position of the patriarchate
so vulnerable, that during the
The first concrete step towards that union was to be the adoption of the
new, papist calendar… Already at the beginning of 1923, a Commission had been
set up on the initiative of the government to see whether the Greek Church
could accept the new calendar. The Commission reported: “Although the Church of
Greece, like the other Autocephalous Orthodox Churches, is inherently independent,
they are firmly united and bound to each other through the principle of the
spiritual unity of the Church, composing one and one only Church, the Orthodox
Church. Consequently none of them can separate itself from the others and
accept the new calendar without becoming schismatic in relation to them.” On
the basis of this report a royal mandate was issued decreeing, among other
things, that “the Julian Calendar is to remain in force as regards the Church
and religious feasts in general”, and that “the national festival of the 25th
of March and all the holidays laid down by the laws are to be regulated
according to the Julian Calendar.”[246]
On February 3, Meletius Metaxakis wrote to the Church of Greece, arguing
for the change of calendar at his forthcoming Pan-Orthodox Council “so as to
further the cause, in this part of the Pan-Christian unity, of the celebration
of the Nativity and Resurrection of Christ on the same day by all those who are
called by the name of the Lord.”[247] The
revolutionary government of
As one
of the members of the commission which had rejected the new calendar,
Chrysostom might have been expected to resist Meletius’ call. But it seems that
the two men had more in common than the fact that they had both been expelled
from the
5
out of the 32 hierarchs – the metropolitans of
It was
therefore with the knowledge that the Greek Church would support his proposed
reforms that Meletius convened a “Pan-Orthodox Council” in Constantinople from
May 10 to June 8, 1923, whose renovationist resolutions concerned the
“correction” of the Julian calendar, a fixed date for Pascha, the second
marriage of clergy, and various relaxations with regard to the clothing of
clergy, the keeping of monastic vows, impediments to marriage, the transfer of
Saints’ feasts from the middle of the week, and fasting.
However, hardly more than ten people, and no official representatives of
the Patriarchates, turned up for the council, so discredited was its convener.[250] And
even Archbishop Chrysostom (Papadopoulos) had to admit: “Unfortunately, the
Eastern Patriarchs who refused to take part in the Congress rejected all of
its resolutions in toto from the very outset. If the Congress
had restricted itself only to the issue of the calendar, perhaps it would not
have encountered the kind of reaction that it did.”[251]
In his “Memorandum to the Holy Synod of the Hierarchy of Greece” (June
14, 1929), Metropolitan Irenaeus of Kassandreia wrote that the council was not
“Pan-Orthodox” but “anti-Orthodox”: “It openly and impiously trampled on the 34th
Apostolic Canon, which ordains: ‘It behoves the Bishops of every nation to know
among them who is the first or chief, and to recognize him as their head, and to
refrain from doing anything superfluous without his advice and approval… But
let not even such a one do anything without the advice and consent and approval
of all. For thus will there be concord, and God will be glorified through the
Lord in the Holy Spirit: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. He replaced
the Julian calendar with the Gregorian in spite of all the prohibitions
relating to it; he decided to supersede the Paschalion which had been eternally
ordained for the Orthodox Church by the decision of the First Ecumenical
Council, turning to the creation of an astronomically more perfect one in the
observatories of Bucharest, Belgrade and Athens; he allowed clerics’ hair to be
cut and their venerable dress to be replaced by that of the Anglican Pastors;
he introduced the anticanonical marriage and second marriage of priests; he
entrusted the shortening of the days of the fast and the manner of their
observance to the judgement of the local Churches, thereby destroying the order
and unity that prevailed in the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches of the East.
Acting in this way, he opened wide the gates to every innovation, abolishing
the distinctive characteristic of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is its
preservation, perfectly and without innovation, of everything that was handed
down by the Lord, the Apostles, the Fathers, and the Local and Ecumenical
Councils.”[252]
What made the council’s decisions still less acceptable was the reason
it gave for its innovations, viz., that changing the Paschalion “would make a
great moral impression on the whole civilized world by bringing the two
Christian worlds of the East and West closer through the unforced initiative of
this Orthodox Church…”[253]
Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) called the calendar innovation “this
senseless and pointless concession to Masonry and Papism”.[254] And
Archbishop Nicon wrote: “The most important decrees of the Congress were the
decisions to change to the new style [calendar] and to allow the clergy to
marry a second time. The Alexandrian, Antiochian and
On July 10, harassed by both Venizelos and the Turkish government, and
challenged for his patriarchal seat by the newly formed “Turkish Orthodox
Church” of Papa Euthymius, Meletius withdrew to
After Meletius’ expulsion from the Ecumenical throne, it was Chrysostom
Papadopoulos who took the lead in introducing the new calendar. He did so with
great haste and an extraordinary display of power politics that suggested (in
view of his recent opposition to the calendar change) that certain very powerful
extra-ecclesiastical interests – the Greek government is the obvious candidate,
but some have also discerned International Masonry and the Roman Papacy behind
it – were exerting pressure on him. But the way in which he was able to sweep
aside the resistance not only of his own hierarchy, but also of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate, suggests that the pressure was not only on him but on almost all
the Greek hierarchs at this time.
The Council began with the decision by the revolutionary Greek
government to suspend the old Constitutional Law in accordance with which the
Greek Church had been administered for the previous 70 years. According to the
new Law, passed on
Invested now with almost dictatorial
powers, Chrysostom convened a meeting of the Hierarchy, which, on December 24,
voted to thank the government for emancipating it from the previous
administrative system (!), and, on December 27, decided to introduce the new
calendar with the agreement of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. There was no
mention, this time, of the need to seek the other Orthodox Churches’ agreement.
It is clear that the decision to change the calendar was imposed by the
government. Thus at the meeting of December 24, Nicholas Plastiras, the
President of the Council of the “Revolutionary Government”, said to the
hierarchs: “The Revolution requests you, then, my respected Hierarchs, to leave
all personal preference to one side and proceed to purge the Church… The
Revolution hopes that a useful work for the new generation will result from
your labours, and that it will reckon itself happy to see the rebirth of the
Church being set in motion… Consequently, it wishes you not to limit yourselves
to the ancestral Canons, but to proceed to radical measures.”[257]
It is striking how similar were the programs of the renovationists in
On
The Patriarch replied on February 14 in a much more sycophantic tone,
suggesting that the change should take place on March 10 (henceforth March 23),
but asking that he be informed of the agreement of the other Orthodox Churches.
Chrysostom immediately telegraphed his agreement to this date, and asked the
Patriarch to inform his metropolitans in the
His
haste was probably elicited by the Alexandrian Patriarch Photius’ message to
the Ecumenical Patriarch on January 15: “Your announcement that, without any
real cause or dogmatic or canonical reasons, the brotherly advice and
entreaties of the four Apostolic Thrones has been rejected, and the ‘reform of
the calendar’ has taken place, caused us great grief and surprise. You are in
danger of alienating all the Orthodox peoples of the Church. Therefore I
suggest the convening of a council to examine the question. Taking into
consideration the letters from the Churches of Romania and
On February 16 Chrysostom telegraphed Photius, saying that an Ecumenical
Council could not be convened immediately, and that the calendar change was an
urgent necessity “for the sake of millions of Orthodox people”. After asking
him to change the calendar on March 10, he added, rather craftily, that there
would be no change in the Paschalion, for such a change would have to be
referred to an Ecumenical Council (as if the addition of 13 days to the
calendar was a much less important change that did not require a conciliar
decision). But Photius was not persuaded…
The other patriarchs spoke out strongly
against the calendar reforms. Thus Patriarch Damian of Jerusalem and his Synod
wrote: “The most holy Mother of the Churches is unable to accept the change at
present because of the disadvantageous position in which, as is well known, she
finds herself in relation to the Latins in the holy places, and because of the
dangers of proselytism.” And Patriarch Gregory of Antioch and his Synod wrote:
“Political factors produced the change of the calendar even though the whole of
the Eastern Church keeps to the Julian calendar. The tendency to change the
canons represents a great danger in our eyes.” And Patriarch Demetrius of
Serbia wrote: “We have indicated the necessity of postponing for the time being
the council that has been convened in order that the question be examined
before an Ecumenical Council so as to decide on a single calendar for all the
Orthodox Churches.”[258]
Finally, on March 4, he completed his coup, asking the Foreign Ministry
to “send urgent telegrams to the Blessed Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Antioch,
Alexandria and Serbia, and the Archbishops of Romania and Cyprus, informing
them that the Church of Greece has accepted the decision of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate concerning the convergence of the ecclesiastical and political
calendar, calling March 10 March 23, and to inform the Ecumenical Patriarch of
Constantinople that the Church of Greece had put his decision into effect.”[259]
As we have seen, the Ecumenical Patriarch accepted the change, albeit
with the proviso that it should be with the agreement of all the Orthodox
Churches. This acquiescence is largely explained by the very weak position of
the patriarchate in the wake of the
In fact, Patriarch Gregory VII was personally opposed to the change. But
he accepted it because, as he told the Holy Synod: “Unfortunately, the change
in the calendar was imposed by the Greek government.”[260] For as
the tomos of
On
On
This is another indication of the close spiritual link between events in
Moreover, Meletius had been helped by the fact that in
On
“In spite of all the measures that had been taken, multitudes of the
faithful inundated the metropolitan cathedral from the afternoon to late at
night, and at their persistent entreaty one priest was found who chanted a
paraklesis, being ‘obedient,’ as he said, ‘to the threats of the people’. The
wardens wanted to close the church, but in view of the fanaticism of the
worshippers the cathedral remained open into the night. Three miracles took
place at the metropolitan cathedral… Seven-year-old Stasinopoulos, a deaf-mute
and paralytic since birth, was brought by his mother to the icon of the Mother
of God, convulsed by spasms. A little while later he arose amidst general
compunction, pronounced the words “mama-granny-papa” and began to walk.
“A little later a seventeen-year-old paralytic was healed, and… a
hard-working deaf-mute. The latter spoke yesterday for the first time in thirty
years, declaring that he would not go to work today. Although the cathedral
wardens know the names of these two, they refuse to publish them, affirming
that no miracle has taken place, although the contrary is confessed by the
whole congregation.”[265]
Another newspaper, Skrip, reported on the same day: “Movement
inside the cathedral was impossible. The faithful listened to the vespers, and
after the dismissal anxiously discussed the change in the worshipping calendar
and the transfer of the feast of the Annunciation.
“Two thousand pious Christians, together with women and children,
unanimously proclaimed their adherence to the holy dogmas of religion, which
the democrats have come to change, and one voice was heard: ‘We will not become
Franks! We are Orthodox Christians, and we will remain Orthodox Christians!’”[266]
Similar scenes, and similar miracles, took place in other regional
centres, such as Nauplion, Tripolis, Thessalonica and
From the beginning the Lord showed by many signs and wonders that He was
with the adherents of the Orthodox Calendar. Thus a miracle took place on
The adoption of the new calendar by the
It followed that if, as was (temporarily)
the case, none of the hierarchs of the Greek Church would reject the calendar
change and break communion with the Archbishop of Athens, there was only one
force remaining that could take up the banner of truth – the people.
The position of the laity in the Orthodox Church has often been
misunderstood. In Orthodoxy, the laypeople are neither the inert, impotent,
blindly obedient mass of the Roman Catholics, nor the all-powerful,
revolutionary horde of the Protestants. There are two vital functions which can
only be performed by canonically consecrated clergy: the administration of the
sacraments, including the ordination of bishops and priests, and the definition
of the faith, including the position of the Church in relation to heretics and
schismatics. But while the laity cannot take the leading role in these two
functions, they do have an important confirmatory role in them. Thus strictly
speaking a bishop or priest cannot celebrate the Divine Liturgy without the
presence of at least one layman. Likewise a bishop cannot ordain a priest
without the consent of the people (expressed by shouting “axios!” or “he is
worthy!”). And a definition of the faith that is rejected by the people will
remain a dead letter.
Thus we read: “I shall judge the bishop and the layperson. The sheep are
rational and not irrational, so that no layman may ever say: ‘I am a sheep, and
not a shepherd, and I give no account of myself, but the shepherd shall see to
it, and he alone shall pay the penalty for me.’ For even as the sheep that
follows not the good shepherd shall fall to the wolves unto its own
destruction, so too it is evident that the sheep that follows the evil shepherd
shall acquire death; for he shall utterly devour it. Therefore it is required
that we flee from destructive shepherds.”[268]
In the long, over 1000-year struggle with the western heresies, the
Orthodox people had never found themselves so bereft of clerical leadership as
in 1924. The signing of the uniate council of Lyons in 1274 and the deposition
of the true patriarch Arsenius the next year had been largely the work of the
emperor and his stooge, John Beccus; and there were many clergy who resisted
the Unia, which in any case lasted only eight years (to 1282). The position
after the council of
There followed a long period in which, although there were some
latinizing (and protestantizing) patriarchs, the Church as a whole remained
united against the western peril. Thus when the new calendar was introduced by
the Pope in 1582 in order to create divisions among the Orthodox, it was
synodically condemned no less than eight times: in 1583, 1587, 1593, 1722,
1827, 1848, 1895 and 1904. Towards the end of this period ecumenist tendencies,
as we have seen, began to increase in the Orthodox Churches, but opposition to
the new calendar remained strong. However, already in their encyclical of 1848,
the Eastern Patriarchs had hinted at the role the people would have to play
independently of the clergy: “With us neither Patriarchs nor Councils could
ever introduce anything new, because the defender of religion is the very body
of the Church, or the people itself, who wanted their religion to remain
forever unchanged and in accord with the religion of their Fathers.”
The question that arose in 1924 was: did the people (and a handful of
clergy) have the right to separate themselves from all the bishops and, in the
absence of any hierarchs to support them in their struggle against innovation,
declare themselves to be the truly Orthodox Church? The answer supplied by the
Holy Tradition of the Church was a clear: yes. While certain functions that can
only be performed by bishops, such as the ordination of priests, are temporarily
suspended in such a situation, the Church does not cease to exist, and remains
there, and only there, where the True Faith is confessed. For “where two or
three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them”, said
the Bishop of bishops, the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 18.20). And the 15th
canon of the First-and-Second Council of
Since the Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Romania, Finland, the
Baltic States and Poland adopted the new calendar in 1924[269], there was no way the laity in
these Churches could remain in communion with the other Churches keeping the
old calendar unless they broke communion with their innovating hierarchs.
“But why such a fuss,” say the new calendarists, “over a mere ‘thirteen
days’ difference?” Because, reply the Orthodox, the Apostle Paul said:
"Hold the traditions" (II Thessalonians 2.15), and the
tradition of the "old" Orthodox calendar was sealed by the fathers of
the First Ecumenical Council and sanctified by many centuries of usage. To
change the calendar, therefore, would be to break communion, not only with our
brethren who keep the old calendar on earth, but also with all the saints who
worship together with us in heaven. And this would be a great crime; for, as
St. John Chrysostom says, "exactness in the keeping of times is not as
important as the crime of division and schism".[270] For
unity in heaven and on earth, in time and in eternity, is the supreme aim of
our life in Christ - as the Lord said, "that they all may be one; as Thou,
Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us" (John
17.21); and anything which disrupts that unity is anathema to us. According to
the Holy Fathers, schism is no less abhorrent and deadly a sin than heresy.
Even martyrdom, writes St. Cyprian of Carthage, followed by St. John Chrysostom[271],
cannot wipe out the sin of him who divides the Body of Christ. For as Christ is
one, so is His Church one; indeed, the one Christ cannot be separated from the
one Church in that “the full and perfect Christ”, in St. Augustine’s phrase,
“is Head and Body” together.[272]
“Since the Church,” writes Fr. Justin Popovich, “is catholically one and
a unique theanthropic organism for all worlds, she cannot be divided. Any
division would signify her death… According to the united position of the
Fathers and the Councils, the Church is not only one but unique, because the
one unique God-man, her Head, cannot have many bodies. The Church is one and
unique because she is the body of the one unique Christ. A division in the
Church is ontologically impossible, for which reason there has never been a
division in the Church, only a division from the Church. According to the word
of the Lord, the Vine is not divided; but only those branches which voluntarily
refuse to bring forth fruit fall away from the ever-living Vine and are dried
up (John 15.1-6). At various times heretics and schismatics have been
separated and cut off from the one undivided
The Athonite Elder Augustine writes: “It is a dogma of the Faith that
the Church is not only Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, but also One, so that even
though the Churches are seen to be many, one and one only is the Church
composed of the many that are seen in different places. This is the teaching of
the Holy Creed, this is the message of the Divine Scriptures, the Apostolic
Tradition, the Sacred councils and the God-bearing Fathers. From this we
conclude that the union of the Church is a most important dogma of the Faith.
“We have seen… that St. Constantine and the Fathers of the First
Ecumenical Council re-established both the inner and the outer unity of the
Church, which is why the joyful autocrat cried out: ‘I have reaped a double
victory, I have both re-established inner peace through the common confession
of the Faith and brought the separation which existed before into the unity of
the Church through the common celebration of Pascha.’
“This, then, is unity, as we are assured by the Acts of the First
Council, an inner unity and an outer unity, and neither can the first be a true
unity without the second, nor can the second exist without the first. The
relationship between them is like that of faith to works and works to faith.
The one without the other is dead. Thus inner unity without outer unity is
dead, and outer unity without inner unity is dead. And the first is defined by
the common confession of the Faith, and the second by the visible harmony in
accordance with the laws and institutions of the Church, both constituting the
one and only true unity, the essential unity of the Church.”[274]
In 1968 Abbot Philotheus Zervakos of
“Last Sunday I had to go to the
“At that
moment I felt such emotion, such joy, such hope, such courage and greatness of
soul as I have hardly ever felt in the hour of prayer in the whole of my life…
“Do not suppose that following the papist calendar is a small thing. It
[The Orthodox Julian calendar] is a tradition and as such we must guard it or
we shall be subject to anathema. ‘If anyone violates any tradition, written or
unwritten, let him be anathema’, declares the Seventh Ecumenical Council… This
is not the time to continue to be silent… don’t delay, hurry.”[275]
And Fr. Philotheus described another sign in his letter. He wrote that
Chrysostom Papadopoulos told him during a meeting they had: “If only I hadn’t
gone through with it, if only I hadn’t gone through with it. This perverse
Metaxakis has got me by the throat”![276]
On
But Metaxakis did not escape retribution. In 1935, on the death of
Patriarch Damian of Jerusalem, he tried to acquire that see, too, but failed.[279] It is
said that he then went out of his mind, and six days later, grinding his teeth
and wringing his hands, he died, groaning: “Alas, I have divided the Church, I
have destroyed Orthodoxy.”[280] He
lied to the end; for he destroyed only himself, while the
In 1998 the True Orthodox Church of Greece under Archbishop Chrysostom
II of
On June 11, 1923 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: “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.”[281]
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”.[282]
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.”[283]
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.”[284]
Moreover, the Patriarch managed to write to Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky), as it were replying to the perplexities elicited by his words
on “walling himself off” from the “counter-revolution” of the Church Abroad: “I
wrote this for the authorities, but you sit and work”.[285] In
other words, the Church was not to take his words seriously…
Tikhon was released on
On the next day the Patriarch wrote: “I am, of course, not such a
venerator of Soviet power as the Church renovationists, headed by the Higher
Church Council, declare themselves to be, but on the other hand I am not such
an enemy of it as people present me to be. If in the first year of the
existence of Soviet power I sometimes permitted sharp attacks against it, I did
this in consequence of my education and the orientation that prevailed in the
Council at that time. But with time much began to change and become clear, and
now, for example, it is necessary to ask Soviet power to intercede in the defence
of the offended Russian Orthodox in
In spite of the Patriarch’s “repentance”, the Bolsheviks continued to
back the renovationists, and on December 8, 1923 forbade the commemoration of
the “former” Patriarch in that such an act would be seen “as having the
character of a clearly political demonstration against the Worker-Peasants’
authorities.”[288]
Moreover, the Patriarch was still seen, as Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes, “as a
criminal whose accusation had not been removed…For violating this
ban, according to the circular of Narkomiust № 254 of December 8, 1923, those
guilty (that is, those who would continue to consider the Patriarch the head of
the Church and commemorate him during the Divine services) were subjected to the
punishment appointed for criminals – three years in the camps! But in spite
of everything the people, the priests and deacons continued to commemorate
him!”[289]
On July 15, the Patriarch anathematised the Living Church, declaring:
“They have separated themselves from the body of the
This was the signal for a decline in the strength of the
renovationists. Large numbers of
parishes, especially in such important urban centres as Petrograd[291] and
Voronezh[292],
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[293]) to
make public confessions to the Patriarch.
The Patriarch received Sergius in the
following way. He explained that it was his Christian duty to forgive him, but
that since his guilt was great before the people also, he had to repent before
them, too. Then he would receive him with joy and love. And so he stood
throughout the liturgy in simple monastic garments without his Episcopal
mantia, klobuk, panagia, and cross. At the end of the liturgy he was led by the
Patriarch out onto the amvon where he bowed to the people three times, after
which the Patriarch restored to him them his panagia with cross, white klobuk, mantia,
and staff.[294]
Some sergianists have tried to show that Sergius did not really share
the renovationist position.[295]
However, Sergius’ published statements, especially his epistle of
“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’.”[297]
The
decline of the renovationists after the Patriarch’s coming out of prison have
led some to suppose that the price of that release, his “repentance” for his
anti-Sovietism, was a price worth paying. However, the Patriarch bitterly
repented of his “repentance”; he said that if he had known how weak the
While we can make excuses for the Patriarch, whose position was
extraordinarily difficult, there is no doubt that his “repentance” was a blow
to the Church and a victory for the communists. Thus in a report dated December
12, 1923 to his superior, T.D. Deribas, Tuchkov wrote: “The second significant
moment in the work of the Section was the accomplishment of the ‘repentance of
Tikhon’, which as you are probably aware, made an extremely unfavourable
impression on the Russian monarchists and the right-leaning elements in
general, who had seen in Tikhon, up to this time, an adamant anti-Soviet
figure.”[300]
We see a
striking parallel between the destinies and decisions of Patriarch Tikhon and
Tsar Nicholas here. Both were peacemakers, ready to lay down their own lives
for the sake of their flock. Both, in the interests of saving lives, made
fateful decisions which they came bitterly to regret – the Tsar his decision to
abdicate the throne, and the Patriarch his decision to “repent” of his
anti-Soviet behaviour. But in spite of these mistakes, both were granted the
crown of life from the Lord, Who looks on the heart and intentions of men,
forgiving them their unintended consequences…
Some
have seen a less flattering parallel between Patriarch Tikhon and his
successor, Metropolitan Sergius. We shall discuss Sergius in detail later.
Suffice it to say at this point that, whatever compromises Patriarch Tikhon
made, he never did it to spare himself, but only others, and he never betrayed
his colleagues to death by calling them “counter-revolutionaries”…
On
Why was the new calendar and the other reforms important to the
Bolsheviks? Because, as Yaroslavsky explained: “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.”[302]
On September 24 Patriarch Tikhon convened a Council of bishops which
took the decision to introduce the new calendar on October 2/15. The Patriarch
explained his decision to adopt the new calendar as follows: “This demand was
repeated many times, and was reinforced by the promise of a more benevolent
attitude on the part of the Government towards the Orthodox Church and Her
institutions in the case of our agreement and the threat of a deterioration in
these relations in the case of our refusal”.[303] He
also pointed to considerations of unity with the other Orthodox Churches; for
he had been falsely informed by Tuchkov that all the other Churches had adopted
the new style, whereas in fact all the Churches except
The Patriarch’s epistle explaining the change was read out in the Moscow
Pokrov monastery on October 14. However, the decree on the introduction of the
new style was sent out only to the deans of Moscow, while the diocesan bishops
did not receive it, since Archbishop Hilarion had obtained permission from
Tuchkov not to send it to the provinces as long as the patriarchal epistle
explaining the change had not been printed. So the new style was only
introduced in
However, on November 8, when the Patriarch learned from Archbishop
Anastasy in Constantinople that the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch,
Jerusalem and Serbia, as well as ROCOR, were against the change, and when he
saw that the Russian people were also strongly opposed to his decree, he
reversed his decision “temporarily”, making use of the fact that his epistle on
the calendar change had not been published.[306] In
spite of this, agents of the government posted up notices of the now annulled
decree on the introduction of the new calendar. But the people saw in this the
clear interference of the State, and so no attention was paid to the decree.[307]
After the Patriarch recovered from his mistake, he and the
ROCOR
condemned the new calendar, and, as we have seen, ROCOR’s Archbishop Anastasy
of
In 1926, writing to the Russian Athonite Hieroschemamonk Theodosius of
Karoulia[309],
Metropolitan Anthony explained his refusal to break communion with the new
calendarists as follows: “You know the 13th, 14th and 15th
canons of the First-and-Second Council, which speaks about separating oneself
from a Bishop or Patriarch after his conciliar condemnation. And then there is
the canon (the 15th), which says that that clergyman is worthy, not
of condemnation, but of praise, who breaks with links with him [the heretic]
for the sake of a heresy condemned by the holy councils or fathers…, and
besides ‘when he (that is, the first-hierarch) preaches heresy publicly and
teaches it openly in the Church’. But this, glory to God, neither P[atriarch]
Basil [III of Constantinople] nor [Archbishop] Chrysostom [of
In another letter he admitted that akriveia was on Fr.
Theodosius’ side, but argued in favour of oikonomia: “It is in vain that
you torment your conscience with doubts about continuing to be in communion
with the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate. Present this matter to the judgement
of the hierarchs, and until it has taken place remain in communion…”[311]
However, the wording of the 16th
century Councils that anathematised the new calendar does not support the
metropolitan’s interpretation: “Whoever does not follow the customs of the
Church,… but wishes to follow the Gregorian Paschalion and Menaion,…
let him be anathema.” Moreover, there is no word about the anathema applying
only to the generation of the anathematisers. In general, anathemas, as
expressing the unchanging decision of God with regard to something that is eternally
false, are necessarily applicable, if valid and canonical, in all places
and at all times.
One ROCOR bishop who did not agree with
Metropolitan Anthony’s relatively liberal attitude towards the new calendarists
was Archbishop Theophanes of
“Question. Have the pastors of the
Orthodox Church not made special judgements concerning the calendar?
“Answer. They have, many times –
with regard to the introduction of the new Roman calendar – both in private
assemblies and in councils.
“A proof of this is the following. First
of all, the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah II, who lived at the same time as the
Roman calendar reform, immediately, in 1582, together with his Synod condemned
the new Roman system of chronology as being not in agreement with the Tradition
of the Church. In the next year (1583), with the participation of Patriarchs
Sylvester of Alexandria and Sophronius VI of
“Through the labours of this Council there
appeared: a Conciliar tome, which denounced the wrongness and unacceptability
for the Orthodox Church of the Roman calendar, and a canonical conciliar Decree
– the Sigillion of
“In the course of the following three
centuries: the 17th, 18th and 19th, a whole
series of Ecumenical Patriarchs decisively expressed themselves against the
Gregorian calendar and, evaluating it in the spirit of the conciliar decree of
Patriarch Jeremiah II, counselled the Orthodox to avoid it…
“Question. Is the introduction of
the new calendar important or of little importance?
“Answer. Very important, especially
in connection with the Paschalion, and it is an extreme disorder and
ecclesiastical schism, which draws people away from communion and unity with
the whole Church of Christ, deprives them of the grace of the Holy Spirit,
shakes the dogma of the unity of the Church, and, like Arius, tears the
seamless robe of Christ, that is, everywhere divides the Orthodox, depriving
them of oneness of mind; breaks the bond with Ecclesiastical Holy Tradition and
makes them fall under conciliar condemnation for despising Tradition…
“Question. How must the Orthodox
relate to the new calendarist schismatics, according to the canons?
“Answer. They must have no
communion in prayer with them, even before their conciliar condemnation…
“Question. What punishment is
fitting, according to the Church canons, for those who pray with the new
calendarist schismatics?
“Answer. The same condemnation with
them…” [312]
On
Resistance to the reform was particularly strong in
In
“… Fr.
Galaction, who later became our first metropolitan, fought against the reform,
but was unable to do anything, since he was only an archimandrite. He was very
capable, and had studied in
“This is what happened, for example, in Neamţ monastery, where St.
Paisius Velichkovsky was once the abbot. When the reform took place there were
about 200 monks in the monastery, 80 of whom were clergy. This was the biggest
monastery in
“Here
are the names of the (clerical) inhabitants of the monastery who resisted all
their lives: Hieromonk Fr. Glycerius (later metropolitan), Hierodeacon David
(the first abbot of the monastery at Slatioara), Hieromonk Pambo, Fr. Baruch,
Fr. Gimnasius, Fr. Zosima, Fr. Gamaliel, Fr. Damascene, who died in the woods
near the monastery. We also know the names of other monks of Neamţ who resisted the
new style. There were also nuns: Mother Macaria, who was the helper of the
abbess of the biggest women’s monastery in the country, Agapia, which became
new calendarist (it now has 450 nuns), and who with her nuns founded the first
women’s monastery in our Church.
“The small groups of clergy and monastics of these men’s and women’s
monasteries – the purest, who had God in their hearts and not their property,
rejected the reforms and were driven out of the monasteries – had to live in
the world. The pious laity who supported them became like bees constructing
hives, the churches, while these clerics were like queen-bees. That was how our
Church came into being.”[315]
“Two months before the calendar change,” writes Metropolitan Blaise,
“something very momentous happened in the great Church of the Neamţ
Monastery. It was on the Eve of the Dormition of the Mother of God. The
Ecclesiarch went to the Church to prepare all that was needed and to light the
candles and kandelia for the Midnight Service. The weather was calm,
with clear skies and numerous stars; no cloud was in sight. Suddenly, a great
bolt of lightning came down from the heavens and, passing through a window in
the dome of the Church, struck in front of the Miracle-working Icon of the
Mother of God. It hit the stone floor, and a section of stone collapsed; from
the impact, the candlestand that was affixed to this slab in front of the Icon
was knocked over. [Cf. the words of the Lord in Revelation (2.5):
“Repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove
your lampstand from its place”]. When the Fathers and Brothers came to Church,
the Priest who was serving told them what had happened; seeing the damage done
by the lightning strike, they all concluded that it was a Divine sign.
“Here is another incident. When Father Glycherie reached the Coroi
Ravine, a spiritual uneasiness overcame him. One night, after lengthy prayer,
he was beset by heavy thoughts. ‘How is it possible,’ he said, ‘that in our country
many Priests with advanced theological training, together with a large number
of intellectuals, are leaving the Old Calendar, as it was bequeathed to the
people by the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, who have honoured it from
times of old? Should I not abandon the Old Calendar and be one of these? Am I
making a mistake before God by not changing?’ Late in the night, he had a
beautiful vision: from the West, a dark cloud appeared; it tried to cover the
whole world and was moving furiously towards the East, howling like a monster.
In front of the cloud, a powerful storm formed, adorned with a chain as black
as tar, on which black Crosses appeared. Everyone was frightened. But looking
towards the East, he saw a snow-white cloud, glittering like gold; before it
was a chain of gold, from which there were hanging Crosses of gold.
“A choir of Hierarchs also appeared – all with golden vestments, -
walking towards the black cloud. In a designated place, the two clouds collided
and the dark cloud fell; and in its place, a sea of water appeared, engulfing
the earth…”[316]
Metropolitan Cyprian writes: “The Romanian Patriarchate, both in 1926
and 1929, celebrated Pascha with the Latins, constituting an infringement of
the Orthodox tradition of centuries. Indeed, on the second occasion that this
was done, Patriarch Miron, having the undivided support of the Uniate
(Greek-Catholic) prime minister, Julius Maniu, and several others among the
clergy, compelled all of the Romanian Metropolises to proceed with the common
celebration of Pascha with the Papists, a fact which evoked great commotion in
the ranks of the
“The uncanonical and un-Orthodox celebration of Pascha with the Latins
deeply grieved the reverent Romanians, many of whom returned to the Old
Calendar. Among them were three Hieromonks, as well as two Romanian
Priest-monks who had returned to
The Romanian monks on
During this period, the Patriarch, as well as being under the most
extreme pressure from the GPU, was in essence not in control of the Church. On
And yet
the Church, while lacking a central rudder on earth, remained governed by her
Head in heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ. Moreover, even if the Patriarch could
not effectively administer the Church, the very fact of his existence at the
head of her administrative structure was of great importance in holding the
Church together. For the commemoration of the Patriarch in the Divine Liturgy
was the outward and visible sign of faithfulness to Orthodoxy and freedom from
the dark forces of the revolution.
In addition to the introduction of the new calendar, the GPU agent
Tuchkov placed several demands before the Patriarch after his release from
prison. The first was that he should commemorate the Soviet authorities during
the Divine services. The following form of commemoration was established in
January, 1924: “For the Russian land and its authorities”.[320] Fr.
Basil Vinogradov, who was entrusted with the distribution of the order round
the parishes, said that Tikhon issued it under pressure from Bishop Hilarion
(Troitsky).[321]
However, in the parishes, instead of the word “authorities” (vlastyekh)
the similar-sounding word “regions” (oblastyekh) was substituted. Soon
the whole phrase was dropped.[322]
Although the Patriarch had yielded on the question of commemoration, he
adamantly refused, according to Rusak, “to recognize the principle which was
imposed on him of registering clergy and church communities and of agreeing
with the authorities about appointing bishops, and in general he rejected any
measures which meant the interference of the State in the inner affairs of the
Church,” in which refusal he was strongly supported by Bishop Hilarion.[323]
Tuchkov also demanded that the Patriarch enter into communion with the
renovationists - a difficult demand to resist because, apart from external
pressures, some of the Patriarch’s closest assistants, such as Bishop Hilarion
(Troitsky), were in favour of concessions for the sake of church unity. But at
this point the former rector of the
The future Archbishop Leontius of
“He did not receive those bishops who had discredited themselves in
relation to the ‘
On being released from prison, in the
summer of 1923, the Patriarch convened a Council of Bishops in the St.
Michael’s church of the Donskoy monastery. Gubonin writes: “’The Little
Council’ took place in connection with some bishops’ raising the question of
the expediency of the patriarch’s administering the Church after his release
from prison, since he was due to appear as a defendant in the civil courts.
Reasons were produced in favour of his being kept away from the administration
until the trial.”[325]
Moreover, one of the bishops claimed that his Holiness had compromised himself
as head of the Church by showing himself incapable of averting in a timely
manner the appearance of the renovationist rebellion and by allowing the
catastrophic disintegration of the
However, several of the “Danilovite”
hierarchs at the Council expressed themselves clearly and forcefully in defence
of the patriarch, declaring that his activity had been blameless and without
spot. As a result, the rebellion against the patriarch was suppressed, and the
Council officially declared its filial obedience and gratitude to his Holiness
for the burdens he had undertaken for the Church. Moreover, he was asked not to
abandon his post, but to continue bearing the cross of leadership. Later the
patriarch sent a letter to Archbishop Theodore thanking him for the line the
“Danilovite” bishops had taken at the Council.
Another confrontation between the “left wing” of the
“In spite of the insulting tone of the [renovationists’] epistle,”
writes Protopriest Vladislav Tsypkin, “the patriarch was ready to enter into
negotiations with the renovationists for the sake of the salvation of those who
had gone astray and church peace. In this he was supported by the Temporary
Patriarchal Synod. Archbishops Seraphim (Alexandrov), Tikhon (Obolensky) and
Hilarion (Troitsky) opened negotiations with the pseudo-metropolitan Eudocimus
concerning conditions for the restoration of church unity. [But] the former
rector of the
“At the end of September, 1923, 27 Orthodox bishops met in the Donskoy
monastery to discuss the results of the negotiations with the
pseudo-metropolitan Eudocimus concerning the dissolution of the schism.
Archbishop Theodore did not appear at the meeting, but many of his supporters
who believed as he did participated in it…”[326]
Bishop Gervasius of
“Archbishop Theodore lived at that time, as was well known, in the
Danilov monastery, which was the residence of several extremely conservative
and staunch bishops of the
Although
the Patriarch jokingly called the “Danilovites” “the clandestine Synod”, he
continued to express his warm appreciation for their stand. Thus in October,
1923, he offered Vladyka Theodore the see of
“In November, 1923,” writes Vladimir Rusak, “[Tuchkov] summoned Patriarch
Tikhon (until then all negotiations had been conducted through Bishop Hilarion)
and in a peremptory manner suggested that he accept the head of the
renovationist-‘synodalists’, Metropolitan Eudocimus (Meschersky) and work out
with him a joint declaration on reconciliation (of the Orthodox and the
renovationists). The Patriarch’s refusal, declared Tuchkov, would be seen as a
counter-revolutionary assault, and he would again be arrested…’
“Patriarch Tikhon, of course, categorically rejected this demand and
declared that nobody in the world would force him to acts which his conscience
rejected…”[328]
But in February, 1924 the antireligious commission resumed the offensive
by declaring that the Patriarchal Synod could be legalized on condition that it
allowed into its ranks a series of persons “well known to the OGPU”. In March,
the commission entrusted Tuchkov with the task of persuading Tikhon to allow
the president of the “Central Committee” of the “
On April 9, the Patriarch succeeded in obtaining an audience with
Kalinin and Rykov, who had taken Lenin’s place as President of the Sovnarkom.
Rykov promised to lessen the pressure on religious organizations, reduce the
taxes on churches and the clergy and even free some hierarchs from prison. It
looked for a short time as if the new head of the Soviet government might be
introducing a “thaw” in Church-State relations.[330]
However, on May 19, the Patriarch, “for the sake of peace and the good
of the Church, as an expression of patriarchal mercy”, agreed to admit
Krasnitsky into communion, and on May 21, he was officially included, together
with several other renovationists, in the Higher Church Council.[331] Also
appointed to the Synod on this day, immediately after the Patriarch himself,
was Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky)…
But Krasnitsky soon showed his true face by moving into the Patriarch’s
residence in the Donskoy monastery without asking him, and by demanding that he
retain the title “Protopresbyter of All Russia” accorded him by the
renovationist council of 1923.[332] Then
Metropolitan Cyril of Kazan, on returning from exile, persuaded the Patriarch
to exclude Krasnitsky from the Higher Church Council, after which Tuchkov
dropped his demand.[333]
Meanwhile, on April 18 the renovationists tried a new tack: they voted
to ease the difficult situation of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Ataturk’s
He also demanded “that the Russian Metropolitan Anthony and Archbishop
Anastasius, who were residing
“The initiative of Constantinople with regard to this question,” writes
Gubonin, “had been elicited by the provocative and lying ‘information’ from the
renovationist Synod concerning a supposed ‘Tikhonite schism’ in the Russian
Orthodox Church (that is, among them – the renovationists) and the supposedly
universal desire among the clerical leaders (that is, of the
renovationist-synodalists) to bring peace into the difficult situation that had
been created with the cooperation of the lofty authority of the Ecumenical
Vladyka (since, they said, all means had already been exhausted and they had no
other hope!).
“Taking into account the complete isolation of the
The Patriarch wrote to Gregory: “Attached to the letter of your
Holiness’ representative in Russia, Archimandrite Basil Dimopoulo, of June 6,
1924, № 226, I received the protocols of four sessions of the Holy
Constantinopolitan Synod of January 1, April 17, April 30 and May 6 of this
year, from which it is evident that your Holiness, wishing to provide help from
the Mother Great Church of Christ of Constantinople, and ‘having exactly
studied the course of Russian Church life and the differences and divisions
that have taken place – in order to bring peace and end the present anomalies’,
… ‘having taken into consideration the exceptional circumstances and examples
from the past’, have decided ‘to send us a special Commission, which is
authorized to study and act on the spot on the basis and within the bounds of
definite orders which are in agreement with the spirit and tradition of the Church’.
“In your Holiness’ instructions to the members of the Mission one of the
main points is your desire that I, as the All-Russian Patriarch, ‘for the sake
of the unification of those who have cut themselves off and for the sake of the
flock, should sacrifice myself and immediately resign from the administration
of the Church, as befits a true and love-filled pastor who cares for the
salvation of many, and that at the same time the Patriarchate should be
abolished, albeit temporarily, because it came into being in completely
abnormal circumstances at the beginning of the civil war and because it is
considered a major obstacle to the reestablishment of peace and unity’.
Definite instructions are also given to the Commission regarding which tendencies
[factions] they should rely on in their work.
“On reading the indicated protocols, we were in no small measure
disturbed and surprised that the Representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate,
the head of the
“I, together with the whole mass of Russian Orthodox believers, and with
all my flock, very much doubt that your Holiness has, as you declare, ‘studied
exactly the course of Russian church life’. I doubt it because You have not
once turned to me for documentary explanations of who is the true and real
cause of disturbance and schism.
“The whole Russian Orthodox people long ago pronounced its righteous
word concerning both the impious meeting which dared to call itself a Council
in 1923, and the unhappy leaders of the renovationist schism… The people is not
with the schismatics, but with their lawful Orthodox Patriarch. Allow me also
to be sceptical about the measure your Holiness suggests for pacifying the
Church – that is, my resignation from the administration of the Church and the
abolition, albeit temporary, of the Patriarchate in Rus’. This would not pacify
the Church, but cause a new disturbance and bring new sorrows to our faithful
Archpastors and pastors who have suffered much even without this. It is not
love of honour or power which has forced me to take up the cross of the
patriarchy again, but the consciousness of my duty, submission to the will of
God and the voice of the episcopate which is faithful to Orthodoxy and the
Church. The latter, on receiving permission to assemble, in July last year,
synodically condemned the renovationists as schismatics and asked me again to
become head and rudder of the Russian Church until it pleases the Lord God to
give peace to the Church by the voice of an All-Russian Local Council…. The
brother in Christ of your beloved Holiness, Patriarch Tikhon”[337]
Gregory abandoned his plans to send a mission to
It should be pointed out that not all the Greek-speaking Churches acted
with such treachery towards the
If the Moscow Council of 1917-18 established the basic 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
2. The Façade of Canonical Orthodoxy. At first the renovationists put
on a mask of canonical Orthodoxy, claiming to have received power by legal
transfer from the Patriarch. But soon they – mistakenly - threw off this mask;
and, as we have seen, the crudity of their attacks on the Faith and monasticism
repelled the people. In future, the GPU would take care that their candidate
for the leadership of the
3. The Lure of State Legalization. In spite of the Patriarch’s
“confession”, the
Ironically, therefore, as Fr. Aidan Nichols writes, the renovationists
came “to resemble the pre-Revolutionary establishment in their spirit of
subordination to the State.”[342] The
Fr. Basil Redechkin writes that the renovationists “united the leaders
of various rationalist tendencies. Therefore various voices were heard: some
denied the Holy Icons, others – the sign of the Cross, others – the Holy
Relics, others denied all the sacraments except baptism, while yet others tried
to overthrow the veneration of our Most Holy Lady the Mother of God and even
the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said about the All-holy Virgin
Mary: ‘She is a simple woman, just like all women, and her son was, of course,
only a man, and not God!’ And the ‘livers’ created a completely atheist ‘symbol
of faith’ to please the God-fighting, antichristian authorities. It was
published in the journal Zhivaia Tserkov’ in 1925, and was composed of
thirty articles. This ‘symbol’ began with the words: ‘1. I believe in one power
that created the world, the heavens and the earth, the visible and invisible
worlds. 2. In one catholic humanity and in it (in the man) Jesus Christ.’
“And it is completely understandable that after this they should declare
that the Canonical rules by which the Holy Church has been guided for two
thousand years: the rules of the Holy Apostles, of the Ecumenical and Local
Councils and of the Holy Fathers – ‘have become infinitely outdated’ and have
’repealed’ themselves… So the ‘liver-renovationists’, wanting to walk ‘in step
with the times’,… introduced a married episcopate, allowed widowed priests to
marry a second and even a third time, and took other liberties.”[344]
However, as one Catacomb bishop wrote: “In the 1920s the renovationists,
while promoting their reformist teaching, were only carrying out an experiment…
These open demands and programmes proclaimed by renovationism were in the
simple form too sharp for the majority of simple believers to accept. And so
the mass of the Orthodox people moved away from them… Through these
‘experimenters’ [the atheists] were able to convince themselves that this
method was bad. What the renovationists were not able to do immediately, the
Moscow Patriarchate was able to do at the beginning of the 1930s – gradually,
beginning with the actions of Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky. That which the
renovationists and livingchurchmen tried to do openly, the Moscow Patriarchate
was able to accomplish secretly, quietly and at first glance without being
noticed. In this way they introduced a complete renovation into the life of the
Church…”[345]
[1] Metropolitan Anastasius, Besedy
so svoim sobstvennym serdtsem (Conversations with my own Heart),
Jordanville, 1948, p. 123 ®; translated in Living Orthodoxy, №
101, vol. XVII, September-October, 1996, p. 9.
[2] Letter of Sergius Nilus to
Hierodeacon Zosimas, 6 August, 1917; in Vladimir Gubanov, Tsar’ Nikolai
II-ij i Novie Mucheniki (Tsar Nicholas II and the New Martyrs), St.
Petersburg, 2000, p. 121 ®.
[3] “My abdication is necessary.
Ruzsky transmitted this conversation [with Rodzianko] to the Staff HQ, and
Alexeev to all the commanders-in-chief of the fronts. The replies from all
arrived at
[4] E.E. Alferev writes: “Factually
speaking, in view of the position taken by [Generals] Ruzsky and Alexeev, the
possibility of resistance was excluded. Being cut off from the external world,
the Sovereign was as it were in captivity. His orders were not carried out, the
telegrams of those who remained faithful to their oath of allegiance were not
communicated to him. The Empress, who had never trusted Ruzsky, on learning that
the Tsar’s train had been help up at
[5] All dates are given according to
the Old, Julian calendar then in use in
[6] Nazarov, Kto naslednik
rossijskogo prestola? (Who is the Heir of the Russian Throne?),
[7] Quoted in Tamara Groyan,
Metropolitan Macarius of
[8] In Groyan, op. cit., pp.
122, 123.
[9] Babkin, “Sviatejshij Sinod
Pravoslavnoj Rossijskoj Tserkvi i Revoliutsionnie Sobytia Fevralia-Marta 1917
g.” (“The Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Revolutionary
Events of February-March, 1917”), http://www.monarhist-spb.narod.ru/D-ST/Babkin-1,
p. 3 ®.
[10] Gubanov, op. cit., p. 70.
[12] In Gubanov, op. cit., p.
62.
[13] A.D. Stepanov, “Mezhdu mirom i
monastyrem” (“Between the World and the Monastery”), in Tajna Bezzakonia
(The Mystery of Iniquity),
[14] Babkin, op. cit., pp. 2,
3.
[15] Tsuyoshi Hasegawa writes: “Five
members, Kerensky, N.V. Nekrasov, A.I. Konovalov, M.I. Tereshchenko and I.N.
Efremov are known to have belonged to the secret political Masonic
organization” (“The February Revolution”, in Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev,
William Rosenberg (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution
1914-1921, Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1997,
p.59).
[16] Quoted in G.M. Katkov, Fevral’skaia
Revoliutsia (The February Revolution),
[17] Babkin, op. cit., p. 8.
[18] Archbishop Anthony, Pastyr’ i
Pastva (Pastor and Flock), 1917, № 10, pp. 280-281; Pis’ma
Blazhenneishago Mitropolita Antonia (Khrapovitskago) (The Letters of his
Beatitude Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), Jordanville, 1988, p. 57; Monk
Benjamin (Gomareteli), Letopis’ tserkovnykh sobytij Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi
nachinaia s 1917 goda (Chronicle of Church Events, beginning from 1917), www.zlatoust.ws/letopis.htm, pp.
2-3 ®. Cf. Victor Antonov, “1917 god: Arkhiepiskop Antonij i Fevralisty” (1917:
Archbishop Anthony and the Februarists), Vozvrashchenie (Return),
№ 2 (6), 1994, p. 25 ®.
[19] Archbishop Seraphim, Tverskie
Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti (Tver Diocesan Gazette), 1917, № 9-10, pp. 75-76;
in Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 4.
[20] Babkin, op. cit., pp.
3-4. The epistle also said: (quoted by Oleg Lebedev, “Mezhdu Fevraliem i
Oktiabrem” (“Between February and October), Nezavisimaia Gazeta (The
Independent Newspaper),
[21] Archbishop Andrew, Ufimskie
Vedomosti (
[22] Groyan, op. cit., p. 142.
Italics
mine (V.M.).
[23] As Lev Tikhomirov writes:
"Without establishing a kingdom, Moses foresaw it and pointed it out in
advance to
[24] Lopukhin, “Tsar’ i Patriarkh” (Tsar
and Patriarch), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The
[25] It is said that during the siege
of the Moscow Kremlin in October, 1917, the Mother of God ordered the
“Reigning” icon to be taken in procession seven times round the Kremlin, and
then it would be saved. However, it was taken round only once… (Monk Epiphany
(Chernov), Tserkov’ Katakombnaia na Zemle Rossijskoj (The Catacomb
Church in the
[26] Grabbe, Russkaia Tserkov’
pered litsom gospodstvuiushchego zla (The Russian Church in the Face of
Dominant Evil), Jordanville, 1991, p. 4 ®.
[27] Babkin, op. cit.; Monk
Benjamin, op. cit., p. 3.
[28] Tserkovnie Vedomosti
(Church Gazette), 1917, № 9-15, pp. 69-70; Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 6.
[29] Groyan, op. cit., pp.
CXCV-CXCVI; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 7.
[30] Quoted in Groyan, op. cit.,
pp. 183-184.
[31] As Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky) testified, “already in 1917 he [Sergius] was dreaming of
combining Orthodox Church life with the subjection of the Russian land to
Soviet power…” (“Preemstvennost’ Grekha” (The Heritage of Sin), Tsaritsyn, p. 7
®).
[32] See Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, “The
Russian Orthodox Church”, in Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev, William
Rosenberg (eds.), op. cit., p. 417; “K 80-letiu Izbrania Sv. Patriarkha
Tikhona na Sviashchennom sobore Rossijskoj Tserkvi 1917-18gg.” (Towards the
Election of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon at the Sacred Council of the Russian
Church, 1917-18), Suzdal’skie Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti (Suzdal Diocesan
News), № 2, November, 1997, p. 19 ®.
[33] Bishop Gregory (Grabbe) wrote:
“I can remember the opinions of those who knew him and who considered him to be
a careerist and the complaints of hierarchs that he promised to retire with
other members of the Synod in protest against Lvov, then he changed his mind
and became head of the Synod” (Letter of April 23 / May 6, 1992 to Nicholas
Churilov, Church News, April, 2003, p. 9).
[34] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
pp. 7-8.
[35] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 8.
[36] The electors in
[37] V. Egorov, K istorii
provozglashenia gruzinami avtokefalii svoej Tserkvi v 1917 godu (Towards a
History of the Proclamation by the Georgians of the Autocephaly of their Church
in 1917), Moscow, 1917, p. 9; in Monk Benjamin, op cit., p. 6.
[38] Monk Benjamin, op cit.,
pp. 8-9.
[39] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 7. In May, Archbishop Eudocimus, Bishop Alexander and Bishop Alexander
(Dzyubai) consecrated Archimandrite Aftimius (Ofiesha) as Bishop of Brooklyn in
the place of the reposed head of the Syro-Arabian mission, Bishop Raphael (p.
8).
[40] Shkarovskii, op. cit., p.
418.
[41] Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers,
[42] Bishop Photius of Triaditsa,
"The 70th Anniversary of the Pan-Orthodox Congress in
[43] In 1967 a eulogy of the Mason
Meletius was published in the official bulletin of the Great Masonic Lodge of
Greece by Alexander Zervudakis. It read: "The first time that he passed
through
[44] Also after the war, on
[45] Bishop Photius, op. cit.,
p. 40.
[46] D. Gatopoulos, Andreas
Michalakopoulos, 1875-1938,
[47] Metropolitan Tikhon said: “Look!
Her unfortunate, maddened children are tormenting our dear mother, your native
Rus’, they are trying to tear her to pieces, they wish to take away her
hallowed treasure – the Orthodox Faith. They defame your Father-Tsar, they
destroy His portraits, they disparage his Imperial decrees, and mock him. Can
your heart be calm before this, O Russian man? Again ask of your conscience. It
will remind you of your truly loyal oath. It will say to you – be a loving son
of your native land” (in Archimandrite Luke, “Nationalism,
[48] Translated in Nicholas Zernov,
"The 1917 Council of the Russian Orthodox Church", Religion in
Communist Lands, vol. 6, № 1, 1978, p. 21.
[49] L. Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj
Tserkvi, 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of the Russian Church, 1917-1945),
[50] Hilarion, quoted in John
Shelton, Church and State in
[51] Firsov, Russkaia Tserkov’
nakanune Peremen (konets 1890-x – 1918 gg.) (The
[52] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 15.
[53] Regelson, op. cit., p.
67.
[54] On the same day, however, the Council decreed that those killed on both sides in the conflict should be given Christian burials.
[55] Pipes, Russia under the
Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, London: Fontana, 1995, p. 343. According to
Regelson (op. cit., p. 226), this took place on January 19.
[56] Figes, A People’s Tragedy,
London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 528; Archpriest Michael Polsky, The New Martyrs of
Russia, new edition with additions, Wildwood, Alberta: Monastery Press,
2000, pp. 91-92.
[57] Professor Ivan Andreyev,
"The
[58] Russian text in M.E. Gubonin, Akty
Svyateishego Patriarkha Tikhona (The Acts of His Holiness Patriarch
Tikhon), Moscow: St. Tikhon's Theological Institute, 1994, pp. 82-85 ®.
[59] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
280, 296.
[60] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
151.
[61] Deiania Sobora (The Acts
of the Council). Another source quotes the following response of the Council to
the patriarch’s anathema: “The Patriarch of Moscow and all
[62] Deiania Sobora (The Acts of
the Council), p. 159 ®. In
reply to this remark, Protopriest Elijah 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”.
[63] Bogoslovskij Vestnik (The
Theological Herald), № 1, 1993, p. 217 ®.
[64] V.A. Konovalov, Otnoshenie
khristianstva k sovyetskoj vlasti (The Relationship of Christianity to
Soviet Power),
[65] Konovalov, op. cit., p.
35.
[66] Alexis Rufimsky, “Biografia
sviaschennomuchenika Nikolaia (Parfenova), episkopa Atkarskago, radi Khrista
yurodivago ‘malenkago batiushki’” (A Biography of Hieromartyr Nicholas
(Parthenov), Bishop of Aktar, fool for Christ, ‘the little batyushka’), Pravoslavnaia
Rus’, № 17 (1782), September 1/14, 2005, p. 5 ®.
[67] Barmenkov, in Alexander
Mikhalchenkov, “Tserkov’ v ogne” (The Church in the Fire), Pravoslavnij
Vestnik (The Orthodox Herald) (
[68] Sokolov, “Put’ Russkoj
Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi v Rossii-SSSR (1916-1961)” (The Path of the Russian
Orthodox Church in Russia and the USSR (1916-1961), in Russkaia
Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ v SSSR: Sbornik (The Russian Orthodox Church in the
USSR: a Collection), Munich, 1962, p. 15 ®.
[69] Sokolov, op. cit., p. 15.
[70] Alferov, op. cit., pp.
16-17. For more on the Vladivostok Congress of the Land, see Demetrius
Anakshin, “Poslednij zemskij sobor”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, № 21 (1594), November 1/14, 1997,
pp. 10-11,15 ®, and M.B. Danilushkin, Istoria Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi
(A History of the Russian Orthodox Church), vol. I,
[71] Regelson, op. cit., pp.
236-237.
[72] Lebedev, “St. Patriarch Tikhon
and the Calendar Question Part 1”, orthodox@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU,
[73] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 21.
[74] Sviataia Rus’ (Holy
Rus’), 2003; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 23-24.
[75] Cited in Orthodoxy
[76] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
143.
[77] Regelson, op. cit., p.
52; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 146.
[78] Cited in Anonymous, V
Obiatiakh Semiglavago Zmia (In the Embraces of the Seven-Headed Serpent),
Montreal, 1984, pp. 22-23 ®.
[79] Lenin, Letter to
[80] Liberman, S.I. “Narodnij komisar
Krasin” (The People’s Commissar Krasin), Novij zhurnal (The New
Journal), № 7,
1944, p. 309 ®; quoted in Volkogonov, D. Lenin,
[81] Lenin, op. cit., vol. 41,
p. 309.
[82] Solzhenitsyn, Acceptance Speech,
Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, 1983; Russkaia Mysl' (Russian
Thought), № 3465,
19 May, 1983, p. 6 ®.
[83] Trotsky, in Edvard Radzinsky, The
Last Tsar,
[84] Metropolitan Anthony,
"Tserkovnost' ili politika?" (Churchness or Politics?), Pravoslavnaia
Rus' (Orthodox Russia), № 9 (1558), May 1/14, 1996, p. 4 ®.
[85] Epistle of Catholicos Leonid to
Patriarch Tikhon, August 5, 1919; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 9.
[86] K.D. Kafafov, “Vospominania o
vnutrennykh delakh Rossijskoj imperii” (Reminiscences of the Internal Affairs
of the Russian Empire), Voprosy Istorii (Historical Questions), №
7, 2005, p. 93 ®.
[87] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
71-75; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 14.
[88] K.E. Skurat, Istoria
Pomestnykh Pravoslavnykh Tserkvej (A History of the Local Orthodox
Churches), chapter 1; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 37-38.
[89] Melia, "The Orthodox Church
of Georgia", A Sign of God: Orthodoxy 1964, Athens: Zoe, 1964, pp.
112-113. According to Slava Katamidze, the number of victims was “enormous”,
but “the real figure has never been published” (Loyal Comrades, Ruthless
Killers, Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2003, p. 39).
[90] Barbara Jelavich, History of
the Balkans, Cambridge University Press, 1983, volume 2, pp. 158-159.
[91] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
pp. 17, 18.
[92] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
155; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 24-25.
[93] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 41.
[94] Glazkov, “Istoricheskie prichiny
niekotorykh sobitij v istorii Rumynskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi do II Mirovoj
vojny” (The Historical Reasons for some Events in the History of the Romanian
Orthodox Church before the Second World War), Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church
Life), №№ 3-4, May-August, 2000, pp. 46-48 ®.
[95] A Wreath on the Grave of the
New Hieromartyr Vladimir of Kiev, Liberty, TN: St. John of Kronstadt Press,
1987, chapter 2.
[96] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 58. According to another version, Lipkovsky was “consecrated” by placing his
hand on the head of St. Clement, Pope of Rome. See Archbishop Leontius
(Filippovich), “Tserkovnie shovinizm in samosviatstvo na Ukraine. K Istorii
vozniknovenia UAPTs v 20-e gody XX st.” (Church Chauvinism and
self-consecration in Uktraine. Towards a history of the appearance of the UAOC
in the 20s of the 20th century”, http://catacomb.org.ua/php?name=Pages&go=print_page&pid=821
®.
[97] Protopresbyter
Michael Polsky, Novie Mucheniki Rossijskie (The New Martyrs of Russia),
Jordanville, 1957, part 2, chapter IV ®; “Hieromartyr Basil, Bishop of Priluky”,
Orthodox Life, vol. 48, №
6, November-December, 1998, pp. 39-50.
[98] "Spravka
o Priniatii v Obschenie Episkopa Seraphima (Lyade)" (Document on the
Reception of Bishop Seraphim (Lyade) into Communion), Tserkovnaia Zhizn'
(Church Life), № 12, 1937 ®.
[99] See Archbishop
Leontius (Philippovich), "Ukrainskie shovinsity i samosvyaty"
(Ukrainian Chauvinists and Self-Consecrators), Russkij Pastyr (Russian
Pastor), II-III, 1995, pp. 154-187 ®; J.-F. Meyer, Religions et securite
internationale (Religions and International Security), Berne: Office
Centrale de la Defense, 1995, p. 29 (F).
[100] Vestnik Russkogo
Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian Movement), 1968, №№
89-90, pp. 19-23 ®; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 25-26.
[101] Nazarov, Tajna Rossii
(The Mystery of Russia), Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1999, pp. 85-86 ®.
[102] Denikin, Kto spas Sovetskuiu
vlast’ ot gibeli? (Who Saved Soviet Power from Destruction?), Paris, 1937,
in A.I. Denikin and A.A. von Lampe, Tragedia Beloj Armii (The Tragedy of
the White Army), Moscow, 1991, p. 8 ®. Denikin said during the war: “You think
that I’m going to Moscow to restore the throne of the Romanovs? Never!”
[103] Khrapovitsky, op. cit.,
p. 4.
[104] Anthony Lockley, “Propaganda and
the First Cold War in North Russia, 1918-1919”, History Today, vol.
53 (9), September, 2003, pp. 46-53.
[105] Von Lampe, “Prichiny neudachi
vooruzhennogo vystuplenia belykh” (The Reasons for the Failure of the Whites’
Armed Intervention),
[106] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 35-36.
[107] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
pp. 30-31.
[108] Kniazev, V.V. Zhizn’ za vsekh
i smert’ za vsekh (Life for all and death for all), Jordanville: Holy
Trinity Monastery, 1971, pp. 20-23; S. Volkov, Admiral Aleksandr Vasilievich
Kolchak, Moscow, 1991, pp. 70-81; Fr. Stefan Krasovitsky, "Otvet
apologetu kommunisticheskoj ideologii" (Reply to an Apologist of the
Communist Ideology), Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), № 1553, February 15/28, 1996, p. 15
®. According to another source, the Patriarch sent Bishop Nestor with the 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” (Gubanov, op. cit., p.
131).
[109] Regelson, op. cit., p.
237; Sokolov, op. cit., p. 16; Shkarovskii, op. cit., p. 423;
Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 38-39.
[110] Shkarovskii, op. cit., pp.
422, 423.
[111] Russkaia pravoslavnaia
tserkov’ i kommunisticheskoe gosudarstvo, 1917-1941 (The Russian Orthodox
Church and the Communist State, 1917-1941),
[112] Roslof, Red Priests,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 27.
[113] Gustavson, op. cit., p.
34. In Petrograd alone 550 clergy and monks of all ranks were shot in the
period 1917-1922 (Anatoly Latyshev, "Provesti besposhadnij Massovij Terror
Protiv Popov" (Undertake a Ruthless Mass Terror against the Priests), Argumenty
i Fakty (Arguments and Facts), № 26, 1996 ®).
[114] Rusak, op. cit. However,
it should be remembered that this was exclusively an anti-Orthodox rather than
an anti-religious struggle; for at the same time as he persecuted Orthodoxy,
Lenin viewed Islam as an ally in spreading world revolution to the countries of
the East, and he did not persecute the Catholics or Protestants (Latyshev, op.
cit.).
[115] Latsis, Ezhenedel’nik ChK
(Cheka Weekly), № 1; in Priest Vladimir Dmitriev, Simbirskaia
Golgofa (Simbirsk’s
[116] Shkarovskii, op. cit.,
pp. 423-424.
[117] "To imerologiakon skhisma
apo istorikes kai kanonikes apopseos exetazomenon" (The Calendar Schism
from an Historical and Canonical Point of View), Agios Agathangelos
Esphigmenites (St. Agathangelos of Esphigmenou), 130, March-April,
1992, p. 16 (G).
[118] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 29.
[119] Goutzidis, Ekklesiologika
Themata (Ecclesiological Themes),
[120] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 37.
[121] Goutzidis, op.
cit., p. 68.
[122] Monk (now Bishop) Ephraim, Letter
on the Calendar Issue, Brookline, Mass.: Holy Transfiguration Monastery,
1968, second edition 1979, St. Nectarios Educational Series, № 2.
[123] Alexis Alexandris, The Greek
Minority of
[124] Alexandris, op.
cit., p. 58.
[125] Averky, "O polozhenii
pravoslavnago khristianina v sovremennom mire" (On the Position of the
Orthodox Christian in the Contemporary World), in Istinnoe Pravoslavie i
Sovremennij Mir (True Orthodoxy and the Contemporary World), Jordanville,
1972 ®.
[126] Troitsky, The Unity of the
Church and the World Conference of Christian Communities,
[127] Vasilios
Stavrides, Istoria tou Oikoumenikou Patriarkheiou (1453 – simeron) (A
History of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (1453 to the present day), Thessalonica,
1987, pp. 248-249 (G).
[128] Stavrides, op. cit., pp.
260, 247.
[129] Fr. George Macris, The
Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Movement, Seattle:
[130] Alexandris, op.
cit., p. 62.
[131] Paul Gerrard, in Monk Benjamin, op.
cit., p. 51.
[132] Before being evacuated, while
still in Ekaterinodar, Metropolitan Anthony came out of the cathedral,
accompanied by all the clergy, and addressed the thousands of faithful, asking
them – for one knows, he said, that “the voice of the people is the voice of
God” - whether they should leave with the White Army or stay in Russia and
suffer for the faith. The crowd replied that they should leave (Monk Anthony
(Chernov), Archvêque Theopane de Poltava (Archbishop Theophanes of
Poltava), Lavardac: Monastère de St. Michael, 1988, p. 73 (F)) (V.M.).
[133] On that day more than 125
Russian and foreign vessels full of Russian refugees, about 150,000 people,
arrived in the Bosphorus. The session of the HCA took place on board the
steamer Great Prince Alexander Mikhailovich. In it took part
Metropolitan Anthony of Kiev, Metropolitan Plato of Odessa, Archbishop Theophan
of Poltava and Bishop Benjamin of Sebastopol. It was decided to continue the
prerogatives of the members of the HCA, discussing all aspects of the Church
life of the refugees and soldiers in all states having relations with the
Ecumenical Patriarch (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 47-48). (V.M.)
[134] Other points in this extremely
important ukaz:
“1) In the event that the Sacred Synod and the Higher Ecclesiastical
Council for any reason whatever terminate their ecclesiastical administrative
activity, the diocesan bishop, for instructions in directing his ministry and for
the resolution of cases in accordance with rules which go back to the Higher
Church Administration, turns directly to His Holiness the Patriarch or to that
person or institution indicated by His Holiness the Patriarch.
“4) In the case of the impossibility of establishing relations with
bishops of neighbouring dioceses, and until the organization of a higher
instance of ecclesiastical authority, the diocesan bishop takes upon himself
all the fullness of authority granted him by the canons of the Church, taking
all measures for the ordering of Church life and, if it seems necessary, for
the organization of the diocesan administration, in conformity with the
conditions which have arisen, deciding all cases granted by the canons to
episcopal authority, with the cooperation of existing organs of diocesan
administration (the diocesan assembly, the diocesan council, et al., or those
that are newly organized); in case of the impossibility of constituting the
above indicated institutions, he is under his own recognizance.
“5) In case the state of things indicated in paragraphs 2 and 4 takes on
a protracted or even a permanent character, in particular with the
impossibility for the bishop to benefit from the cooperation of the organs of
the diocesan administration, by the most expedient means (in the sense of the
establishment of ecclesiastical order) it is left to him to divide the diocese
into several local dioceses, for which the diocesan bishop:
“a) grants his right reverend vicar bishops, who now, in accordance with
the Instruction, enjoy the rights of semi-independent bishops, all the rights
of diocesan bishops, with the organization by them of administration in
conformity to local conditions and resources;
“b) institutes, by conciliar decision with the rest of the bishops of
the diocese, as far as possible in all major cities of his own diocese, new
episcopal Sees with the rights of semi-independent or independent bishops.
“6) A diocese divided in the manner specified in paragraph 5 forms an
ecclesiastical district headed by the bishop of the principle diocesan city,
which commences the administration of local ecclesiastical affairs in
accordance with the canons.
“7). If, in the situation indicated in paragraphs 2 and 4, there is found
a diocese lacking a bishop, then the Diocesan Council or, in its absence, the
clergy and laity, turns to the diocesan bishop of the diocese nearest or most
accessible to regards convenience or relations, and the aforesaid bishop either
dispatches his vicar bishop to administer the widowed (i.e. vacant) diocese or
undertakes its administration himself, acting in the cases indicated in
paragraph 5 and in relation to that diocese in accordance with paragraphs 2 and
6, under which, given the corresponding facts, the widowed diocese can be
organized into a special ecclesiastical district.
“8) If for whatever reason an invitation from a widowed diocese is not
forthcoming, the diocesan bishop indicated in paragraph 7 undertakes the care
of its affairs on his own initiative.
“9) In case of the extreme disorganization of ecclesiastical life, when
certain persons and parishes cease to recognize the authority of the diocesan
bishop, the latter, finding himself in the position indicated in paragraphs 2
and 6, does not relinquish his episcopal powers, but forms deaneries and a
diocese; he permits, where necessary, that the divine services be celebrated
even in private homes and other places suited to that purpose, and severs
ecclesiastical communion with the disobedient.
“10) All measures taken in places in accordance with the present
instruction, afterwards, in the event of the restoration of the central
ecclesiastical authority, must be subject to the confirmation of the latter.”
[135] Traskovsky, "Istoria
Russkoj Zarubezhnoj Tserkvi, 1921-1939 gg." (A History of the Russian
Church Abroad, 1921-1939), Pravoslavnij Put' (The Orthodox Way),
Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1995, pp. 20-24 ®. Sremskie
Karlovtsy was a significant centre for the Russian Church in Exile because in
1691 37,000 Serbian families had fled there from Turkish-ruled Serbia with the
blessing of Patriarch Arsenius III, forming an autonomous metropolitanate in
1712. Just as the Serbs fled west from the Turks, so the Russians now fled west
from the Bolsheviks.
[136] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 51.
[137] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
695; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 57.
[138] Academic Ivan Snegarov, Otnosheniata
mezhdu B’lgarskata ts’rkva i drugite pravoslavni ts’rkvi sled
prov’zglasiavaneto na skhizmata (Relations between the
[139] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
pp. 60-61.
[140] Holy Transfiguration Monastery,
Boston, A History of the Russian Church Abroad, Seattle: St. Nectarios
Press, 1961, p. 24; Archbishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie
Blazhennejshago Antonia, Mitropolita Kievskago i Galitskago (A Life of his
Beatitude Anthony, Metropolitan of Kiev and Galich), New York, 1960, vol. VI,
p. 36 ®.
[141] Macmillan, Peacemakers,
London: John Murray, 2003, pp. 440-441.
[142] Macmillan, op. cit., p.
443.
[143] Curzon, in Matthew Stewart,
“Catastrophe at Smyrna”, History Today, vol. 54 (7), July, 2004, pp.
28-29.
[144] Macmillan, op. cit., p.
451.
[145] Macmillan, op. cit., p.
459.
[146] Nicolson, History, 1919-1925,
1934, p. 250; quoted in Jean de Murat, The Great Extirpation of Hellenism
& Christianity in Asia Minor, Miami, 1999, p. 95.
[147] Churchill, Memoirs; in
Murat, op. cit., p. 108.
[148] Murat writes, basing himself on
the account by Edward Hale Bierstadt in The Great Betrayal: “Just after
midday on Monday, 11 September 1922, the Turkish High Commander Noureddin sent
men to arrest the Greek Archbishop Chrysostom and to bring him to his Residency
Konak. The reverend priest arrived there separately from the Turkish escort,
accompanied by a French naval attachment of 12 men. The old Archbishop ascended
the stairs of the Residency with difficulty and, entering the General’s office,
held out his hand to greet him. Noureddin, instead of taking it, spat at him in
uncontrolled anger and, showing the venerable and eminent priest a file which
was open on the table, said to him savagely: ‘Based on these sworn statements,
the court in Ankara has already sentenced you to death. It is only remains for
the people to carry out this judicial decision’. And shouting out with
unsuppressed violence ‘Take yourself out of my sight!’, he made a sign at the
same time to the guards, who pushed the Archbishop out.
“The reverend priest descended the stairs of the mansion slowly and at
the same time Noureddin went out onto the balcony, shouting to the crowd of
fanatical Turks who were gathered there (from a French translation): ‘Give him
what he deserves’. The savage brutality which followed is absolutely horrific.
They fell upon him like hungry wolves. They put out his eyes, they cut out his
tongue, his ears and his nose, they pulled out his hair and his beard in their
frantic mania, they cut off his hands and did other unspeakable horrors. Then they
put a chain around his butchered body, hung him on the back of a car and
dragged him around the square and towards the Turkish quarters. The French
marines who had escorted Chrysostom to the Residency and who were waiting for
his return, went crazy when they saw this brutal savagery. Some of them hurled
themselves instinctively forward to give human protection to the victim, but
the leader of the detachment forbade them to proceed. They were an
insignificant minority under the circumstances and they would doubtless have
met the same fate as the unfortunate Archbishop from the maniacal crowd had
they thoughtlessly proceeded to take action. The French leader of the
detachment himself had his pistol ready in his hand, but he was trembling from
head to foot from the outrageous spectacle. One of the French naval detachment
testified later, saying bitterly: ‘That’s why we didn’t dare to use our own
arms’. ‘They finished off Chrysostom in front of our very eyes’.” (op. cit.,
pp. 137-138)
[149] Fr. Raphael Moore (ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU,
January 17, 1999) calculates that the following numbers of Greeks were killed
in
[150] Murat, op. cit., p. 128.
[151] Jelavich, op. cit., pp.
131-132, 173-174; "1922-1982", Orthodox Christian Witness,
October 4/17, 1982.
[152] Archimandrite Theokletos A.
Strangas, Ekklesias Ellados Istoria (A History of the Church of Greece),
Athens, 1970, vol. II, p. 1118 (G); quoted in “Oecumenical Patriarch Meletios
(Metaxakis)”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVII, №№. 2 & 3,
2000, p. 11.
[153] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 56.
[154] Monk Paul, Neoimerologitismos-Oikoumenismos
(Newcalendarism-Ecumenism),
[155] Bishop Photius, op. cit.,
p. 41-42.
[156] Alexandris, op.
cit., pp. 75-76.
[157] “To
imerologiakon skhism apo istorikis kai kanonikis apopseos exetazomenon"
(The Calendar Schism from an historical and canonical point of view), Agios
Agathangelos Esphigmenites (St. Agathangelos of Esphigmenou), № 131,
May-June, 1992, p. 17 (G); Bishop Photius, op. cit., p. 41.
[158] Stavrides, op. cit., p.
45.
[159] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 93.
[160] A History of the Russian
Church Abroad, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1972, p. 51.
[161] Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky), in Monk Gorazd, "Quo Vadis, Konstantinopol'skaia
Patriarkhia?" (Where are you going, Constantinopolitan Patriarchate?), Pravoslavnaia
Rus' (Orthodox Russia), № 2 (1455), January 15/28, 1992, p. 9 ®.
[162] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
304.
[163] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 87. The recent renewal of this unlawful decision by the present Ecumenical
Patriarch, Bartholomew, has led to a schism between the Ecumenical and Moscow
patriarchates.
[164] Monk Benjamin, http://www.zlatoust.ws/letopis2.htm,
p. 56 ®.
[165] Danilushkin, op. cit., p.
197.
[166] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 57.
[167] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
pp. 63-64.
[168] For example, on October 22, 1919
the Poles ordered 497 Orthodox churches and chapels, which had supposedly been
seized from the Catholics in the past, to be returned to the Catholic Church.
See Danilushkin, op. cit., p. 586. (V.M.)
[169] Koeller, "Kommentarii k
pis'mu Arkhiepiskopa Rizhskago i Latvijskago Ioanna Arkhiepiskopu Vilyenskomu i
Litovskomu Elevferiu ot 2 noiabria 1927 g." (Commentary on the Letter of
Archbishop John of
[170] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
320-321.
[171] K. Svitich, Pravoslavnaia
Tserkov’ v Pol’she i ee autokefalia (The Orthodox Church in
[172] Meanwhile, on August 9,
Archimandrite Alexis (Kabaliuk) convened a Council of the Carpatho-Russian
Church to which 400 delegates came. Because of the persecution of the faith in
Russia, the Council decided to remain within the jurisdiction of the Serbian
Church (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 57).
[173] Monk Gorazd, op. cit. At
the beginning of the Second World War, Metropolitan Dositheus was imprisoned
and tortured in Zagreb, and died on January 13, 1945 without returning to
consciousness. See “Novij sviashchenno-ispovyednik Dosifej mitropolit
Zagrebskij” (New Hiero-Confessor Dositheus, Metropolitan of Zagreb), Pravoslavnaia
Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), № 7 (1628), April 1/14, 1999, p. 3 ®.
[174] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 84. At that time there lived about 50,000 Turkish-speaking Orthodox in Anatolia. This movement lost all support after the great exodus of the Orthodox from Turkey in 1922-9-1923.
[175] Archbishop John, "The
Decline of the Patriarchate of Constantinople", translated in The
Orthodox Word, vol. 8, № 4 (45), July-August, 1972, p. 175.
[176] Roslof, op. cit., p. 28.
[177] S. Savelev, "Bog i
komissary" (God and the Commissars), in Bessmertny A.R. and Filatov, S.B.,
Religia i Demokratia (Religion and Democracy), Moscow: Progress, 1993,
pp. 164-216 ®.
[178] Quoted in Edward Radzinsky,
[179] Potapov, “’…Molchaniem predaetsa
Bog’” (God is Betrayed by Silence), Posev (Sowing), № 166, 1992,
pp. 209-210 ®.
[180] Rayfield translates this
sentence differently: “that is very, very dangerous. We’ve had enough trouble
with just the ‘specialists’” (op. cit., p. 121). (V.M.)
[181] Roslof, op. cit., pp.
33-34.
[182] N.A., "Ne bo vragom Tvoim
tajnu poviem..." (I will not give Thy Mystery to Thine enemies), Vestnik
Germanskoj Eparkhii Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi za Granitsej (Herald of
the German Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad), 1992, № 1, p.
17 ®; Grabbe, op. cit., p. 42.
[183] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag
Archipelago,
[184] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
190; quoted in "Mucheniki Shuiskie" (The Martyrs of Shue), Vestnik
Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian
Movement), № 170, III-1994, p. 182 ®.
[185] Matushka Evgenia Grigorievna
Rymarenko, "Remembrances of Optina Staretz Hieroschemamonk Nektary", Orthodox
Life, vol. 36, № 3, May-June, 1986, p. 39. One concession to the
Antichrist invariably leads to others. Thus on
“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. (The Authorities and the
Church in 1922-1925), Moscow, 1997 ®; S. Golubtsov, op. cit., pp.
151-152).
[186] Krivova, op cit., pp.
184-85. See also Roslof, op. cit., pp. 43-44; Gregory Ravich,
"Ograblennij Khristos, ili brillianty dlya diktatury proletariata"
(Christ Robbed, or Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat), Chas-Pik
(Rush Hour), № 18, p. 24 ®.
[187] Ravich, op. cit., pp.24-25.
[188] Ravich, op. cit., p. 26.
[189] Pipes, Russia under the
Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, op. cit., p. 355.
[190] V. Petrenko, “Sv. Patriarkh
Vserossijskij Tikhon” (His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon of All Russia), Vestnik
I.P.Ts. (Herald of the True Orthodox Church), Odessa, № 1 (11), 1998,
p. 27 ®. Donald Rayfield writes that in the parishes some 2,700 priests and
5,000 monks and nuns perished (Stalin and his Hangmen, London: Viking,
2004, p. 122).
[191] Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie
Sochinenij (Complete Works), vol. 45, p. 666, cited in Vestnik Russkogo
Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (The Herald of the Russian Christian Movement),
№ 94, pp. 54-60, Regelson, op. cit., p. 314 ®, and 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
[192] Pipes, The Unknown Lenin,
op. cit., p. 155. Volkogonov (op. cit., p. 380) agrees with this
opinion. As does Rayfield (op. cit., pp. 121-122).
[193] "Mucheniki Shuiskiye",
op. cit., p. 190.
[194] Pipes, op. cit., p. 355.
According to Rayfield, “barely four million gold roubles was realized of which
one million was spent on famine relief” (op. cit., pp. 120-121). For
another estimate, see Volkogonov, op. cit., p. 381. Rukh (№ 34, November 4, 1996) reports
that the Bolsheviks received a “profit” of 2.5 million gold rubles.
[195] Richard Joseph Cooke, Religion
in Russia and the Soviets, p. 149.
[196] Pipes, op.
cit., p. 355.
[197] Walters, “The Living Church
1922-1946”, Religion in Communion Lands, vol. 6, № 4, Winter, 1978, pp. 235-236.
[198] Pipes, op.
cit., p. 338.
[199] N.A., op.
cit., p. 17.
[200] Grabbe, op. cit., p. 32.
[201] Jane Swan, A Biography of
Patriarch Tikhon, Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, N.Y., 1964, p. 62;
Levitin-Shavrov, in Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet
Regime, 1917-1982, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1982,
vol. I, pp. 55, 54.
[202] Cited in Pospielovsky, The
[203] Cited in Grabbe, op. cit.,
p. 5.
[204] E.L., Episkopy-Ispovedniki
(Bishop-Confessors), San Francisco, 1971, p. 68 ®. On
[205] According to Danilushkin (op.
cit., p. 180), Vvedensky admitted that both Zinoviev and Tuchkov were
directly involved in the schism.
[206] Grabbe, op. cit., pp. 31,
32.
[207] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 67.
[208] Gubonin, op.cit., p. 198;
Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 348.
[209] Russkaia Mysl' (Russian
Thought), № 3143,
March 17, 1977 ®.
[210] Istochnik (The Source), № 3, 1995, p. 116 ®.
[211] Rayfield, op. cit., p.
123.
[212] Protopriest Lev Lebedev, Velikorossia
(Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 573 ®.
[213] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 69.
[214] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 71.
[215] Acts of the
[216] Protopriest Alexander Lebedev,
“’Ia napisal eto dlia vlastej, a ty sidi i rabotaj’” (I wrote this for the
authorities, you sit and work), Vozvrashchenie (Return), № 2 (6),
1994, p. 29 ®.
[217] Igumen Luke, "An Answer to
the Orthodox Church in America's Document, 'Why Deepen the Schism?'", Orthodox
Life, vol. 40, № 6, November-December, 1990, pp. 13-14.
During his interrogation by the GPU on May 9, the Patriarch, according
to Sergius Golubtsov (op. cit., p. 115), “was forced to recognise
Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky as ‘an accursed enemy of the workers’ and
peasants’ toiling masses of Russia’. But the patriarch made the substantial
qualification that he had not up to that moment considered Metropolitan Anthony
an enemy of Soviet power, while his ‘antisoviet and interventionist speeches’
became known to him only from February-March, 1922, having in mind, evidently,
his address in the name of the Karlovtsy Council to the Genoa conference. By
this recognition, in our view, the Patriarch underlined his walling off from
the Church Abroad only with regard to the latter’s political declarations,
which he did not support. At the same time he strove by all means to avoid
evaluations of Metropolitan Anthony both as a whole and during his time in the
camp of Denikin, Wrangel and Skoropadsky.”
[218] Grabbe, op. cit., p. 32.
For example, he accepted the authority of the Synod Abroad to appoint
Metropolitan Platon to head the American dioceses in 1922. See Igumen Luke, op.
cit., p. 14; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 69-70.
[219] Monk
Benjamin, op. cit., p. 73. Metropolitan Michael (Ermakov) of
[220] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 74.
[221] N.A. Krivova, op. cit.;
in Golubtsov, op. cit., p. 116.
[222] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 74.
[223] J.S. Curtiss, The Russian
Church and the Soviet State, Boston: Little, Brown, 1953, pp. 159-160;
Gubonon, p. 290; Grabbe, op. cit., pp. 33-34.
[224] N.A. "Nye bo vragom Tvoim
ajnu povyem...", op. cit., p. 17.
[225] Levitin, A., Shavrov, V. Ocherki
po istorii russkoj tserkovnoj smuty (Sketches on the History of the Russian
Ecclesiastical Troubles), Kusnacht, 1977; quoted in Gubonin, op. cit.,
p. 813.
[226] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
219-221.
[227] Protopriest Vladislav Tsypin, Istoria
Russkoj Tserkvi, 1917-1918, chapter 2; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p.
76.
[228] Levitin and Shavrov, op. cit.;
Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 77.
[229] Regelson, op. cit., p.
302.
[230] Polsky, op. cit., part 2,
p. 294.
[231] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
218-219.
[232] Snychev, “Mitropolit Sergij i
Obnovlencheskij Raskol” (Metropolitan Sergius and the Renovationist Schism), in
Danilushkin, op. cit., p. 182 ®.
[233] Quoted in Volkogonov, op.
cit., p. 383.
[234] “G. Chicherin and L. Trotsky
told the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets: ‘Do nothing and say nothing that could
close the path to a peaceful resolution of the conflict with England’” (S.
Bychkov, Moskovskij Komsomolets (Muscovite Komsomolian), May 16, 1990
®).
[235] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 94.
[236] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 96.
[237] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
224.
[238] Cited in Archbishop Nikon
(Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie, op. cit., vol. VI, p. 114.
[239] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 96.
[240] Savelev, op. cit., p.
195.
[241] Karamitsos, O
Synkhronos Omologitis tis Orthodoxias (The Contemporary Confessor of
Orthodoxy), Athens, 1990, p. 25 (G).
[242] Peter Botsis, Gerontas
Ieronymos o Isykhastes tis Aiginas (Elder Jerome the Hesychast of
[243] The British, whose troops were
still occupying Constantinople and probably prevented a massacre there similar
to that which had taken place in Smyrna, suspected the hand of the Vatican in
this proposal to remove the patriarchate. For, as the advisor to the Archbishop
of Canterbury on Near Eastern questions, J.A. Douglas, said: “No one with the
slightest knowledge of the Near East can doubt that Rome is bitterly hostile to
the Phanar, and reckons a disaster to it as an institution to be a great
thing.” (Alexandris, op. cit., pp. 90, 91)
[244] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 90.
[245] Oriente Moderno (The
Contemporary East), January 15, 1924, p. 30; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p.
118.
[246] Goutzidis, op.
cit., pp. 68-70.
[247] Goutzidis, op.
cit., p. 76.
[248] Cited in Bishop Photius,
"The 70th Anniversary of the Pan-Orthodox Congress in
[249] Goutzidis, op.
cit., pp. 74-78.
[250] However, an Anglican hierarch,
Charles Gore of Oxford, was allowed to attend one of the sessions and was
treated with great honour.
[251] “Oecumenical Patriarch Meletios
(Metaxakis)”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVII, №№
2
& 3, 2000, p. 9.
[252] Monk Paul, op. cit., pp.
72-73.
[253] Dionysius
Battistatos, Praktika-Apophaseis tou en Kon/polei Panorthodoxou Synedriou
1923 (The Acts and Decisions of the Pan-Orthodox Conference in
Constantinople in 1923), 1982, p. 57 (G).
[254] See Monk Gorazd, op. cit.
[255] Nicon (Rklitsky), op. cit.,
vol. 10, p. 38. See also A History, op. cit., pp. 53-55.
[256]
Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow:
Rodnik, 1998, p. 478 ®. Moreover, he again tried to push many of the Greek
Orthodox in America into schism. See Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, A
Reply to Archbishop Athenagoras, Montreal, 1979, p. 19; Monk Benjamin, op.
cit., p. 150.
[257] Archimandrite Theocletus A.
Strangas, Ekklesias Hellados Historia, ek pegon apseudon, 1817-1967 (A
History of the Church of Greece from Unlying Sources, 1817-1967), vol. 2,
Athens, 1970, p. 1181 (G); translated by Kitskikis, op. cit., p. 18.
[258]
Abraham Tsimirikas, Eis Ipakoin Pisteos (To the Obedience of the Faith),
1977, pp. 28-30 (G).
[259] Tsimirakis, op.
cit., pp. 85-98.
[260] Demetrius Mavropoulos, Patriarkhikai
selides: To Oikoumenikon Patriarkheion apo 1878-1949 (Patriarchal Pages:
The Ecumenical Patriarchate from 1878 to 1949), Athens, 1960 (G); translated by
Kitsikis, op. cit., p. 19.
[261] Metropolitan Calliopius of
Pentapolis, Deinopathimata G.O.X. (The Sufferings of the True Orthodox
Christians), vol. 1,
[262] Metropolitan Calliopius, op.
cit., p. 15.
[263] From The New York Times,
June 7, 1917, p. 22: “A miniature civil war between Venizelists and the
supporters of King Constantine of Greece was fought in the basement of the St.
Constantine’s Greek Orthodox Church at 64 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, last
night when the Constantine faction sought to expel the pastor of the church for
omitting the usual custom of saying ‘long live the King’ in every Sunday
prayer.
“Police were called in to untangle the
difficulties, and while the king’s men were at the Adams Street police station
making complaints about the religious, political and military zeal of the
Venizelists, the supporters of the pro-Allies ex-Premier elected a Board of
Trustees and informed the pastor of the church, the Rev. Stephano Papmacaronis,
that he could omit to pray for the King.”
[264] Cited in Bishop Photius, op.
cit., p. 42.
[265] Metropolitan
Calliopius, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
[266] Metropolitan
Calliopius, op. cit., p. 22.
[267] Metropolitan
Calliopius, op. cit., pp. 45-48.
[268] Apostolic Constitutions,
10:19, P.G. 1, 633.
[269] In Poland, The Russian,
Ukrainian and Belorussian press was full of protests against the innovation.
However, the government strongly supported it, and there were some bloody
confrontations with the police (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 121). The
Church of Alexandria did not immediately accept the new calendar, but only in
1928 when Meletius Metaxakis became patriarch.
[270] Quoted by Liudmila Perepelkina,
"Iulianskij kalendar' - 1000-letnaia ikona vremeni na Rusi" (The
Julian Calendar – a thousand-year icon of time in
[271] St. Chrysostom, Homilies on
Ephesians, 4.4.
[272] St. Augustine, Discourse on
Psalm 37, 4.
[273] Popovich, Orthodoxos Ekklesia
kai Oikoumenismos (The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism),
[274] Phoni ex Agiou
Orous (A Voice from the Holy Mountain), op. cit., pp. 57-58. St. Nicodemus of the Holy
Mountain writes, in his commentary on the 31st Apostolic Canon: "Even as
the ecclesiastical traditions have need of the Faith, so also is the Faith in
need of the ecclesiastical traditions; and these two cannot be separated one
from another"
[275] Hieromonk Theodoritus (Mavros), Palaion
kai Neon: i Orthodoxia kai Airesis? (Old and New: Orthodoxy and Heresy?),
[276] Hieromonk Theodoritus, op.
cit., p. 25.
[277] The Christian East, Autumn,
1930.
[278] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 2, p. 45.
[279] As Metropolitan Methodius
(Konostanos) writes: “This exile from the Holy Land, from Kition, from Athens,
from Constantinople, Meletius Metaxakis – an unstable, restless, power-hungry
spirit, an evil demon – had no qualms about grasping for the throne of
Jerusalem, even from Alexandria.”
[280] Monk Paul, op. cit. p.
82.
[281] N.N. Pokrovsky, S.G. Petrov, Arkhivy
Kremlia: Politburo i Tserkov’ 1922-1925gg. (The Kremlin Archives: the
Politburo and the Church, 1922-1925), Moscow: Rosspen, 1997, vol. 1, pp.
282-284 ®.
[282] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
280, 286. There is some evidence that Patriarch Tikhon's release from prison
was linked with the fact that in June, 1923 the Bolsheviks finally accepted
that Lenin was too ill to return to politics. A. Rykov took over from Lenin as
president of the Sovnarkom, and on entering office immediately received the
Patriarch and promised to reduce the pressure on religious organizations,
reduce the taxes on the clergy and churches and release some hierarchs from
prison - a promise that he kept. See Latyshev, op. cit.
[283] Yakunin, "V sluzhenii
kul'tu (Moskovskaia Patriarkhia i kul't lichnosti Stalina)" (In the
Service of the Cult (the Moscow Patriarchate and the Stalinist Cult of
Personality), Na puti k svobode sovesti (On the Path to Freedom of
Conscience), Moscow: Progress, 1989, p. 178 ®.
[284] Nikon, op. cit., pp.
151-152.
[285] Izvestia, June 12, 1924;
Lebedev, Velikorossia, op. cit., p. 577.
[286] Pospielovsky writes: "If by
the end of 1922 the patriarchal Church in Moscow had only 4 churches against
the 400 or so of the renovationists, in Petrograd after the exile of Bishop
Nicholas almost all the churches had been seized by the renovationists, and
throughout the country about 66% of the functioning churches were in the hands
of the renovationists, then by November, 1924 the renovationists had about
14,000 churches, not more than 30%" ("Obnovlenchestvo: Pereosmyslenie
techenia v svete arkhivnykh dokumentov" (Renovationism: A Rethinking of
the Tendency in the Light of Archival Documents), Vestnik Russkogo
Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian Movement), № 168, II-III, 1993, p. 217) ®.
[287] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 103-104.
[288] Danilushkin, op. cit., p.
192.
[289] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op.
cit., p. 577.
[290] Regelson, op, cit., p.
347; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 291.
[291] 83 out of 115 renovationist
parishes had returned to the patriarch by December, 1923 (Regelson, op. cit.,
p. 343). Bishop Manuel (Lemeshevsky) was mainly instrumental in this. See
Metropolitan John (Snychev) of
[292] Through Archbishop Peter
(Zverev). See "Petr, arkhiepiskop Voronezhskij" (Peter, Archbishop of
Voronezh), Vestnik Germanskoj Eparkhii Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi za
Granitsei (Herald of the German Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church
Abroad), № 6, 1991, pp. 18-21 ®; "Episkop Varnava (Belyaev)"
(Bishop Barnabas (Belyaev), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn' (Orthodox Life),
№ 3 (518), March, 1993, p. 19 ®; Andreyev, Russia's Catacomb Saints,
Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, p. 177; "Vospominania
monakhini Seraphimy ob Arkhiepiskope Petre (Zvereve)" (Reminiscences of
Nun Seraphima on Archbishop Peter (Zverev), Troitskoe Slovo (Trinity
Sermon), № 6, pp. 12-27) ®.
[293] E.L. Episkopy-Ispovedniki,
op. cit., p. 68, note.
[294] Parayev, “Istinnoe Pravoslavie i Sergianstvo”, Eparkhialnie Vedomosti, September, 1997 http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=page&pid=544 ®.)
[295] Pospielovsky, "Mitropolit
Sergij i raskoly sprava" (Metropolitan Sergius and the Schisms on the
Right), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian
Christian Movement), № 158, I-1990 ®.
[296] I.M. Kontsevich, Optina
pustyn' i ee vremia (
[297] Metropolitan Anthony, in Orthodox
Life, vol. 25, March-April, 1975.
[298] Swan, op. cit., p. 83.
[299] Quoted in Protopriest Lev
Lebedev, “Dialogue between the
[300] Archpriest
Alexander Lebedev, “[paradosis] Who is Really Behind the Schisms?”, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com,
“At
the present time there are four such groups that are fully formed and which
have their own ecclesiastical apparatus, namely the Tikhonites, the
Renovationists, the Renascenists, and the
“The splitting up of the Orthodox Church into the above-indicated groups
is the fulfilment of only one part of the work which was completed regarding
the Orthodox churchniks [tserkovniki] in 1923.”
[301] N.N. Pokrovsky, S.G. Petrov, Arkhivy Kremlia: Politburo i Tserkov’ 1922-1925gg. (The Kremlin Archives: the Politburo and the Church, 1922-1925), Moscow: Rosspen, 1997, vol. 1, p. 531 ®; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 113.
[302] Pokrovsky and Petrov, op.
cit., pp. 282-284.
[303] Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 299-300,
335. On January 21, 1919 the patriarch had written to the patriarch of
Constantinople suggesting various options with regard to the calendar (Gubonin,
op. cit., pp. 332-338).
[304] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 114.
[305] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 113.
[306] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
300, 335; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 118.
[307] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
332-338; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 115-117, 130-131.
[308] Archbishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie
Blazhenneishago Mitropolita Antonia, 1960, vol. VI, p. 164; Monk Benjamin, op.
cit., pp. 134-135.
[309] See “Starets Feodosij Karul’skij
Sviatogorets”, Russkij Palomnik, № 23, 2001, pp. 15-43 ®.
[310] Pis’ma Blazhennejshago
Mitropolita Antonia (Khrapovitskago) (The Letters of his Beatitude
Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), Jordanville, 1988, p. 195 ®.
[311] Pis’ma Blazhennejshago
Mitropolita Antonia, op. cit., p. 197. But Fr. Theodosius remained
in communion with the Athonite zealots and not with the new calendarist
innovators…
[312] Archbishop Theophanes, “Kratkie
kanonicheskie suzhdenia o letoschislenii” (Short canonical judgements on the
calendar), in V.K., Russkaia Zarubezhnaia Tserkov’ na Steziakh
Otstupnichestva (The Russian Church Abroad on the way to Apostasy),
[313] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 118.
[314] K.V. Glazkov, “Istoricheskie
prichiny nekotorykh sobytij v istorii Rumynskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi do II
mirovoj vojny” (Historical Reasons for Certain Events in the History of the
Romanian Orthodox Church up to the Second World War), Tserkovnaia Zhizn’
(Church Life), №№ 3-4, May-August, 2000, pp. 48-49 ®.
[315] Metropolitan Blaise, in Pravoslavnaia
Rus’ (Orthodox
[316] Metropolitan Blaise, The Life
of the Holy Hierarch and Confessor Glicherie of
[317] Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos,
"The True Orthodox Christians of
[318] Letter to Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky), in Glazkov, op. cit., p. 54.
[319] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 131; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 348.
[320] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 118.
[321] Pospielovsky, D.
"Mitropolit Sergij i raskoly sprava" (Metropolitan Sergius and the
Schisms on the Right), op. cit., p. 63.
[322] Archbishop Nikon (Rklitsky), op.
cit., pp. 181-183.
[323] Rusak, op. cit., p. 173.
[324] Archbishop Leontius, Vospominania
(Reminiscences) (MS), quoted in Matushka Joanna (Pomazanskaia)
"Ispovednicheskij Put' Vladyki Fiodora" (The Confessing Path of
Vladyka Theodore), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn' (Orthodox Life), vol. 47, № 549 (9), September,
1995, p. 24 ®.
[325] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
737.
[326] Tsypkin, Istoria Russkoj
Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (A History of the Russian Orthodox Church), Moscow, 1994,
quoted by Pomazanskaya, op. cit., p. 18.
[327] Quoted by Pomazanskaia, op.
cit., pp. 19-20.
[328] Rusak, Svidetel’stvo
Obvinenia (Witness for the Prosecution), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity
Monastery, 1988, Part III, pp. 9-10 ®. As well as showing firmness, the
Patriarch showed that he had not lost his ability to evaluate events
accurately. Fr. Michael Ardov writes: “While the holy hierarch was still alive,
the first mausoleum, at that time still wooden, was built on Red square.
Evidently they built it hastily, and soon after the work was finished an
annoying event took place in the new building – the water-closet broke down and
a pipe began to gush water. Rumours about this event began to spread through
Moscow. They told Patriarch Tikhon also, and he responded to the information
shortly and expressively: ‘From relics myrrh flows.’” (Posev (Sowing),
167, 1992, p. 251 ®).
[329] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
pp. 118-119.
[330] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 121.
[331] Gubonin, op. cit., pp.
317, 319, 745-746; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 125.
[332] Even the Bolsheviks had felt
obliged to check Krasnitsky's overweening ambitions. See Savelev, op. cit.,
pp. 190, 195.
[333] See the patriarch's resolution,
addressed to the Elisavetgrad clergy of 26 June / 9 July; Gubonin, op. cit.,
p. 325.op. cit., p. 124).
[334] Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 127.
[335] Monk Gorazd, op. cit.;
Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 122.
[336] Gubonin, op. cit., p.
747.
[337] Quoted in Nikon (Rklitsky), op.
cit., vol. VI, pp. 161-163.
[338] Sokurova, O.B. Nekolebimij
Kamen’ Tserkvi (An Unshakeable Rock of the Church), St. Petersburg:
“Nauka”, 1998, p. 32 ®.
[339] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 120.
[340] Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 155.
[341] Cited in Gustavson, op. cit.
[342] Nichols, Theology in the
Russian Diaspora,
[343] Regelson, op. cit., p.
313.
[344] Redechkin, Pojmi vremia:
Iskazhenie Pravoslavnogo Uchenia Moskovskoj Patriarkhii (Understand the Time:
The Distortion of Orthodox Teaching by the Moscow Patriarchate), Moscow, 1992,
samizdat, p. 5 ®.
[345] Redechkin, op. cit., p.
42.