a history of the russian church

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ANGEL FRANCISCO SÁNCHEZ ESCOBAR

A HISTORY OF THE RUSSIANCHURCH

(IX-XX CENTURIES)



A HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH(IX-XX CENTURIES)

ÁNGEL FRANCISCO SÁNCHEZ ESCOBAR

2008



A History of the Russian Church Angel F. Sánchez Escobar

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©Ángel F. Sánchez Escobar The St. Stephen Harding College Publishing House,Winston-Salem, NC, 2009.ISBN-13-978-84-692-4725-9.




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SOME WORDS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Most Rev. Angel F. Sánchez Escobar: BA (University of Seville, English Philology), BA (U. of Seville, Spanish Philology),MA (Vanderbilt U., Spanish Literature and Linguistics), MA(Vanderbilt U., Education), Ph.D. (Vanderbilt U., EnglishEducation), Ph.D (U. of Seville, English Philology), Ph.D. (U. of Seville, Spanish Literature), Th.D (St.Stephen Harding TheologicalCollege and Seminary)

Angel F. Sánchez Escobar also received a Certificate of Orthodox Theology from the University of Joensuu (Finland) and anInterfaith Ministry Certificate from the New Seminary (New York).Moreover, he attended Universidad Pontificia de Comillas (Madrid).He is a Professor of English Language Teaching at the University of Seville (Spain) and the Director of the Seminario Ortodoxo Hispanode la Santísima Trinidad. He is Associate Dean of St. StephenHarding Theological Seminary and College.

Angel has published books and articles in the areas of theology, English language teaching, contrastive rhetoric, Spanishliterature, and poetry.




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TABLE OF CO TE TS

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….8 1. KIEVAN PERIOD (IX-XIII CENTURIES): THE BAPTISM OF RUSSIA AND THE FLOWERING OF KIEVAN CHRISTIANITY……………………………14 2. THE TARTAR-MONGOL YOKE AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE PRINCIPALITY OF MOSCOW (XIII-XV CENTURIES)………………….42

PRINCE ALEXANDER NEVSKY OF NOVGOROD ......................................49 ST. SERGIUS (SERGII) AND THE CHURCH IN MOSCOVITE RUSSIA: XIV-XV CENTURIES ....................................................................................56

St. Sergius of Radonezh ....................................................................................59 St. Stephen, the Enlightener of Perm, a missionary ......................................67 The End of the Tartar Yoke and the Emergence of Moscow ........................70 A RUSSIAN RENAISSANCE ........................................................................75

HERESIES ....................................................................................................76 3. FROM POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS TO THE GREAT SCHISM (XVI-XVII CENTURIES)……………………………………………………………..….77

POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS ...................................................77 IVAN III THE TERRIBLE AND ST PHILIPS ..............................................85 THE EMERGENCE OF MOSCOW AS A PATRIARCHATE .........................90

A TIME OF TROUBLES (1584-1613) ........................................................95 THE SCHISM OF THE OLD BELIEVERS ..................................................102

4. THE CHURCH IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA: THE SYNODAL PERIOD (1700-1917)… 113

1. THE CHURCH IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA: THE XVIII CENTURY ...........113 2. THE CHURCH IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA: THE XIX CENTURY ..............131 3. OPENING YEARS OF THE TWENTY CENTURY: MOVEMENT FOR CHURCH RENEWAL AND THE END OF THE SYNODICAL PERIOD (1917) ........................................................................................................147

4. A TIME OF PERSECUTION AND REBIRTH: THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH IN THE XX CENTURY (1917-)……………………………………………….158 THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH FROM THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION OF 1917 UNTIL THE SECOND WORLD WAR: SIX MAIN STAGES ......................................................................................................158

The Sobor ..........................................................................................................163 First Stage (1918-22): Communists’ Optimism, the Sobor and Lenin’s State............................................................................................................................167 Second Stage (1922-29): Communists’ Attempts at Splitting the Church 173 Third Stage (1929-1941): Stalin’s Bloody Persecution of the Church .......181 Fourth Stage (1941-1953): Second World War and Stalin’s Restoration of the Russian Church ..........................................................................................187




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Fifth Stage (1958-1964): Nikita Khrushchev, a New Assault on the Church............................................................................................................................193 Sixth Stage 1965-1991: The Church under the Decaying Socialism .........198

Brezhnev .......................................................................................................198 Andropov ......................................................................................................203 Chernenko ....................................................................................................204 Gorbachev ....................................................................................................206

SOME NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH 1991 TO MODERN DAYS .........................................................................................214

WORKS CITED.................................................................................................224 TABLES Table 1: The Rus’ ................................................................................ 17Table 2: St. Andrew in Kiev .................................................................. 22Table 3: Lavra Monastery, a history ...................................................... 29Table 4: In memory of Byzantium......................................................... 30Table 5: Earliest head of the Russian Church......................................... 31Table 6: Monastery of Trinity-St. Sergius Sergiev Posad ......................... 60Table 7: The Russian tsar—the “New Constantine” ................................ 88Table 8: The Swedish and the Polish in the Time of Troubles ................. 99Table 9: Historical data about Peter I the Great (1721-1725).................117Table 10: Early Romanov tsars and tsarinas .........................................127Table 11: Late Romanov tsars .............................................................132Table 12: The Philokalia ......................................................................140Table 13: Pilgrimage in Russia .............................................................141Table 14: Monastery of Optina Pustyn..................................................143Table 15: Causes of the Russian Revolution of 1917 .............................156Table 16: The February Revolution ......................................................157Table 17: The October Revolution........................................................160Table 18: Article 17 of the revised religious law issued by Stain (April 8 th ,

1929).........................................................................................182Table 19: Statistics indicating the consolidation of the Church in the post-war years ...................................................................................192

Table 20: Period early 1960’s to mid-1980’s .........................................206

ILLUSTRATIONS Illustration 1: Prince Vladimir................................................................ 21Illustration 2: Vladimir Monomakh ........................................................ 26Illustration 3: St. Theodosius ................................................................ 27Illustration 4: Lavra Monastery ............................................................. 30




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Illustration 5: Kiev in the 10 th century ................................................... 33Illustration 6: The Kievan Rus’ and the world ca 1100 A.D...................... 35Illustration 7: Yaroslav “the Wise”......................................................... 39

Illustration 8: Medieval walls of Novgorod ............................................. 44Illustration 9: Prince Alexander Nevsky receiving Pope’s legates ............. 51Illustration 10: Moscow in the fifteenth century ..................................... 57Illustration 11: Monastery of St. Sergius Sergei Posad............................ 60Illustration 12: St. Sergius of Radonezh................................................. 61Illustration 13: St. Stephen of Perm (1340-1396) in his way to Moscow .. 69Illustration 14: Archangel Michael Cathedral .......................................... 73Illustration 15: Ivan the Terrible ........................................................... 87Illustration 16: Patriarch Nikon (1652-58).............................................107

Illustration 17: Avvacum, the Holy Martyr (1620-1680) .........................110Illustration 18: Peter I the Great..........................................................117Illustration 19: St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724-83)...................................130Illustration 20: St. Paissy Velichkovsky .................................................137Illustration 21: St. Serafim of Sarov .....................................................139Illustration 22: The Monastery of Optina ..............................................141Illustration 23: Tsar Nicholas II and Family...........................................151Illustration 24: Patriarch Tikhon...........................................................170Illustration 25: Danilov Monastery........................................................203




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INTRODUCTION

After having seen the development of the Early Christiancommunity in A History of The Early Christian Church (I-III

Centuries) and the Byzantine Church in Byzantine Church History

(313-1453 AD) , we approach the last section of the Church History

of the Orthodox Church. We concentrate on the History of the

Russian Church. For clarity, in Byzantine Church History I dealt

extensively with the political and cultural aspects of the Byzantine

Empire and, separately, in greater detail with religious aspects. The

reason for this separation was both the length, as well as the

complexity of this period which covered a thousand years. In this

chapter dealing with the History of the Russian Church we will focus

mainly on the development of the Russian Church across another

period of thousand years, a period from the end of the tenth century

to the beginning of the twentieth-first. It will be noticed that there

undoubtedly existed a link between political and cultural events, as

we deal with the unique religious outlook of Russians. Alexander Schmemann, in “The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy”, says




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that in all three basic stages he distinguishes in his evaluation of

Russia’s historical development, namely the Kievan, Muscovite, and

the Petersburg period:

The history of the Russian Church cannot be separated fromthe history of Russia, as it cannot be separated from itsByzantine origins. Just as Orthodoxy is one of the major factors in Russian history, so the destiny of Russia defined thefate of Russian Orthodoxy. Even the simplest delineation of the development of the Church inevitably includes a definiteattitude toward Russia’s past.

This is especially true regarding the struggles between Church and

State. The Russian Church and the Early Christian Church have in

common this struggle between Church and State in common—astruggle in which the Church has always been triumphant.

The Church of Russia, regardless of the place where it had its

center or the time when it initially had its seat at Kiev, subsequently

at Vladimir in 1229 or eventually at Moscow in 1328, it never ceased

to be considered as its spiritual head the Patriarchate of

Constantinople from whom it had received Christianity. It is true that

in 1588, the Patriarch of Constantinople granted it, as a grown-up

daughter its own patriarchate, the fifth Patriarchate of the Eastern




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Church. However after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks the

Church of Russia proclaimed itself the Third Rome. This occurred

late in the sixteenth century, during the time of Ivan the Terrible.

However, being afraid of the power of the Church, in 1721 Peter the

Great suppressed the creation of a permanent administrative Synod,

which had its seat at Petrograde, while he accepted the Patriarchs of

the East.

Although, trying to compel the Church to be silenced, Peter

the Great worked toward the betterment of the clergy by founding

clerical schools and reforming the monasteries. In this way he set anexample for Catherine II and the tsars who succeeded her. In this

period, four theological seminaries were created and missions among

the Israelites, Tartars and Japanese flourished as in former times. But

the persecutions which had accompanied the Orthodox Church since

its formative stages resumed in Russia with an unusual strength

during the rule of the atheist Bolshevists in 1917. During the years

1918, 1919 and 1920 alone, twenty-six bishops and six thousand

seven hundred and fifty-five priests were martyred by the




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Bolshevists, as well as thousands and millions of faithful and other

victims. With short periods of relief for the Church from persecution,

the confrontation between the Church and the Communist state

continued, and during seven decades it was on the verge of complete

destruction (Kallinikos). It was in the Byzantine Church, in which

Russians searched for spirituality and the mirror in which the

Russians saw spirituality reflected, But certain factors, such as

historical calamities, the Byzantine Church’s temporal surrender to

the Papacy and its final fall to the Islam, the distinctive character and

complex history of Russia, made the Russian Church a unique center of Easter Orthodoxy.

We will begin with the Kievan period (IX-XII centuries).

This period began, as already mentioned in the context of discussing

the Byzantine Church’s mission to the Slavs at the end of the tenth

century with Prince Vladimir of Kiev’s baptism (972- 1015) in 988

and his continued and further change of the nature of religion among

his people. Secondly, we will focus on the Tartar yoke and the

emergence of the Principality of Moscow (XIII-XV centuries).




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Thirdly, we will study the period of two centuries that covers the

struggles between the Possessors and the Non-Possessors and the

eventual great schism. It was during this important period when

Russia broke its ecclesiastical dependence on Constantinople, and

when the spiritual and political views of the country were changed.

Fourthly, we will concentrate on the Church in Imperial

Russia (XVIII-XX Centuries), a period in which we witness the

abolition of the Russian patriarchate by Peter the Great and the

subordination of the Church to the Holy Synod, to the secular state

bureaucracy. This period also covers the first years of the twentiethcentury up to 1917, in which I will describe the renewal movement

of the church, the assault on the stardom, and the end of the Holy

Synod. Fifthly I will focus on the twentieth century from 1917, the

year of the restoration of the Russian Patriarchate, and a period of

almost seven decades under Communist dictatorship (1917-1991), a

time in which both persecution and some success existed side by

side. A crucial date and event the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, as

this event caused the temporary decay of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy was




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confronted with the beliefs and political policies of militant atheists

who tried to eliminate Christianity from Russian. To summarize, I

will divide the discussion into five periods:

1. The Kievan period of the Christian conversion of the Rus(IX-XII centuries)

2. The Tartar-Mongol Yoke and the Emergence of thePrincipality of Moscow (XIII-XV Centuries)

3. The period from the Possessors and Non-Possessors to theGreat Schism (XVI-XVII Centuries)

4. The Church in Imperial Russia: The Synodical Period (1700-1917)

5. A Time of Persecution and Rebirth: The Russian OrthodoxChurch in the XX Century (1917-)

For Pospielovsky, the Kievan or pre-Mongol period corresponds to

Russian Antiquity and the thirteenth-seventeenth centuries

correspond to the Medieval Age. The last century and a half of the

Medieval period can be considered a transitional period from the

Medieval to the Modern Age—a pale reflection of the European

Renaissance (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 37).




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1. KIEVAN PERIOD (IX-XIII CENTURIES): THEBAPTISM OF RUSSIA AND THE FLOWERING OFKIEVAN CHRISTIANITY

As already noted, historically although perhaps merely

indirectly, the evangelizing mission undertaken by the two Greek

brothers from the Balkans, Cyril and Methodius, had a great

significance and importance for Christianity taking root in Russia. In

the first place, the teaching of the faith in the language of the local

people elevated the vernacular to a sacred language of worship. It

also heralded the advent of a new language, Church Slavonic. It was

a language which became the ecclesiastical lingua franca of theSlavs, most especially the Serbs and Bulgarians, from whom the

Russians would import the texts of worship. In the second place,

once the evangelizing process had started, it infiltrated into Russia, in

spite Photius’ failure to convert the Slavs. Around 864, Photius had

sent a bishop to Russia with the intention to evangelize Russia, but,

some years later, Oleg, who assumed power at Kiev (the main

Russian city at this time) in 878 exterminated this first Christian

foundation (Ware 78). Oleg, like his immediate successors—Igor,




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Olga, Sviatoslav, and Vladimir—was pagan. In their pagan

background, the Slavs had a well-developed pantheon of pagan gods

akin to those of the Vikings, and Vladimir even actively cultivated

the cult of Perun, the god of fire and lightning. In 955, Olga, Prince

Igor’s widow, converted to the Byzantine form of Christianity.

However, she failed to covert her son, Saviatoslaw, who justified this

rejection by saying that his warriors would laugh at him. This meant,

Pospielovsky asserts, inThe Orthodox Church in the History of

Russia , that in the minds of the Russians Christianity was associated

with pacifism. It was also a clear sign, he says, that “the Church theRussians were familiar with came from Byzantium, where military

exploits were seen as barbarism, and not from the West with it

Frankish Teutonic tradition of knighthood and military honor” (19).

But despite this infiltration and the influence of Byzantium,

the conversion of Rus’ to Christianity was also the outcome of the

significant affinity of Russian character with Orthodox Christianity.

A relevant fact that predicates on this harmony was, as Zernov

comments inThe Russians and their Church (1978), their choice of




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Orthodoxy once they had already become familiar with the great

religions of the world—Islam, Judaism, Eastern Christianity, and

western Christianity—due to their vital link they formed between

Europe and Asia though their rivers Dnieper and Volga which

facilitated international trade. Also, the ancient Russian country,

centered around the city of Kiev, displayed a measure of religious

tolerance towards its inhabitants. Paralleled with this was the fact of

the Kievan Prince Vladimir’s consulting the wisest men before

deciding to be baptized and the end of the tenth century and join the

Eastern Orthodox Church. In contrast to the western tradition,Eastern Christianity was less institutionalized and more oriented to

the beauty of worship and divine mercy and forgiveness (5).

THE RUS1

The first mention of the Rus or Ros people occurs in seventh century Arabchronicles, describing them as a warlike nation with an eye for trade.

Archaeological finds in ancient Russian cities such as Staraya Ladoga andGorodische (later to become Novgorod) indicate that the Rus were Vikingraiders from Scandinavia (mostly likely from Birka in Sweden) who set uptrading posts along the rivers running along a north-south axis across theplains of present-day European Russia to the capital of the ByzantineEmpire, Constantinople. The Viking Rus ruled over a number of Eastern

1 It should be noted that contemporary Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all claimKievan Rus as their cultural and political ancestor.




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Slav tribes—the Drevlians, the Radomichi, the Severians and the Vyatichi—introducing Scandinavian customs and military retainers and organizingthe occasional raid on Byzantium. By the time of the earliest Russian

literature in the eleventh century it had become clear that these erstwhile Viking rulers had adopted the medieval Slav language, while Scandinaviannames now became recognizably Slav: Vladimir (the Viking Valdamar),Olga (Helga), and Igor (Ingvar). The Russians had now appeared on thescene as a nation (“A History of the Russian Church”).

Table 1: The Rus’

Zernov also points out that there were some features of the

Russian pagan background, congenial with Eastern Orthodoxy,

which helped the transition without causing much upheaval or any

great struggle. Further, Fedotov, inThe Russian Religious Mind , says

that pre-Christian Rus’ worship of the mother earth may preclude

Russian veneration of the Mother of God and the fact that

motherhood has been stressed by the Russians to a greater degree

than the fact of Mary’s virginity, which resulted in an ethical

characteristic of the Russian male as well. This is the source,according to Fedotov, of the difference between the Russians and the

West Europeans. While the former saw society as an extended

family, as a social organism, the latter developed their unique

traditions of knighthood. Also in contrast with the pride and honor of




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the West, the female values of humility, fidelity, and a degree of

fatalism existed in Russian mass culture.2

Another factor favoring the rapid advance of Christianity

among Russians was, as already suggested, that they heard the

Gospel preached and the services celebrated in their native tongue.

They were also profoundly influenced by the beauty and artistic

perfection of the Byzantine rite. If we remember the following words

cited from the twelfth-century Tale of Bygone Years: “We knew not

whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such

splendor or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it toyou: only this we know, that God dwells there among men, and that

their worship surpasses the worship of all other places. For we

cannot forget that beauty.” These words were retold to the pagan

ruler of Kievan Rus Prince Vladimir, Sviatoslav, bastard son, around

the year 9883 by envoys sent to the Greeks to query as to the

appropriateness of a faith for the emerging Russian state.

2 Quoted in Pospielvsky (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 23-24).3 Conventionally, A.D. 988 is regarded as the year that Christianity came to theRussian people as the religion of the realm.




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We see that these envoys focused on the core that the divine,

mystery and beauty occupied in worship. This aesthetics of divine

beauty and holiness laid the foundation of the Russian culture for the

next thousand-years, a culture that emerged from the adoption of

Byzantine Orthodox Christianity by Vladimir. He was later

canonized a saint by the Orthodox Church. Not too many Russian

rulers after him were granted this honor. We are told that he also sent

envoys to the German assumed to be representatives of western

Christianity, but they returned with reports of the gloominess,

boredom and lack of mystery of the Latin mass.4

Paradoxically, inVladimir’s reign, human sacrifices were made to pagan gods and

Christians were actively persecuted. Yet, when converted, he placed

a heavy emphasis on the social implications of Christianity.

Pospielovsky says that, before Vladimir’s option for Christianity,

there had existed among the Russians Christian communities and

rulers. For example, there already existed at least since the fourth

4 Mass is the term used to describe celebration of the Eucharist in Westernliturgical rites.




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century Greek colonies with numerous Christian churches in several

places along the Black Sea coast. It was also in the fourth century

that St John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople,

mentioned a Gothic Church on the Black Sea litoral who worshipped

in their own language and even made quite extraordinary missionary

progress (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 16-17).

Pospielovsky asserts that the fact that Vladimir chose Christianity

over Islam—another option he had, along with Judaism—hasn’t been

acknowledged by the west, which instead responded with hostility

and invasions. This historian says “had this occurred, there would probably not have developed the European Christian civilization as

we know it” (21).




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Illustration 1: Prince Vladimir 5

However, it is perhaps not only religious but also political

reasons that were behind Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity. By

becoming Christian, Russia would be the youngest nation to join a

powerful Byzantine commonwealth on equal terms. This political

element in the adoption of Christianity was symbolized byVladimir’s marriage to the Byzantine Princess Anna (“A History of

the Russian Church”). Pospielovsky also states that Vladimir needed

some common faith to unify the people (Slavonic, Finnic, and

5 See: <www.calpha.redeemer.ca>.




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Lithuanian tribes) of the vast territories he ruled. He had gained

controlled over he whole of Rus’ and annexed what are today Galicia

and Carpathian Ruthena from Poland and the land of the Lithuanian

tribe of Yatviags. The tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church has

it that the hilltop upon which the city of Kiev would later arise was

visited by the Lord’s disciple St. Andrew as early as the first century

and who prophesied that the Gospel would be preached in these

lands. The story of St. Andrew as the first evangelizer of Russia most

likely belongs to the realm of pious legend, a legend which, however,

had an effect in the popular choice of the name ‘Andrei’ (Andrew)among Kievan princes and notables (“A History of the Russian

Church”).

The tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church has it that the hilltop uponwhich the city of Kiev would later arise was visited by the Lord’s discipleSt. Andrew as early as the first century and who prophesied that theGospel would be preached in these lands. The story of St. Andrew as thefirst evangelizer of Russia most likely belongs to the realm of pious legend,a legend which, however, had an effect in the popular choice of the name

‘Andrei’ (Andrew) among Kievan princes and notables. (“A History of theRussian Church”)

Table 2: St. Andrew in Kiev




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The Russians had in common with other Christians, the Bible,

the Creed, the threefold ministry and parish organization, but as

Zernov adds

But having in common with others the fundamentalelements of their newly acquired religion, the Russians foundtheir own approach to it. The majority of Christians saw theChurch in the light of the Greek and Latin theologicalwritings. The Russians were the only people in Europe whoremained outside this influence; and this made it possible for them to understand Christianity in their own way. Their attitude to religion was much less philosophical than theByzantine, and much less institutional than the Latin. It might perhaps appear too direct and too spontaneous to other morelearned and sophisticated Christians, but it contained new anddeep insight into Christian truth and stressed a side of Church

life which was neglected by other traditions. (6-7)Prince Vladimir’s death in 1015 was followed by a violent period

caused by the subject of succession to the throne of Kiev. The first

Christian ruler of Russia had left no system by which his kin would

become rulers. However, Vladimir’s emphasis on the social

implications of Christianity was inherited by his immediate

successors, who also displayed the typical Russian interpretation of

Eastern Christianity. Vladimir, for example was in favor of relaxing

the laws against evil-doers, based on his conviction that torture and




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capital punishment were nor in accordance with Christianity. His two

youngest sons, Princes Boris and Gleb, chose serenely to sacrifice

their lives and follow Christ’s example instead of defending

themselves against their half brother Svyatopolk, “the Cursed”, in his

attempt to become the sole ruler of the country. The two brothers

died as “passion-bearers of Christ”. They were venerated for their

humility when confronted by an evil destiny and their example has

been upheld as an image of a peculiar “kenotic” type of Russian

Christian spirituality whereby evil is conquered not through

pragmatism or forced response but by a self-emptying to the point of death (“A History of the Russian Church”).

Vladimir’s great grandson, Vladimir Monomakh (1053–1125)

continued this thread of Christianity. He was married to a daughter of

the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos. It was under his

father, Yaroslav the Wise (c. 978-1054), that the Greek Orthodox

religion really began to take hold in Russia. Religion played a big

part in Monomakh’s early life as well as later on in his rule. He was a




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man of many gifts and the most outstanding ruler of the Kiev period

of Russian history. In “A Charge to my Children,” he wrote:

My children, praise God, and love men. For it is not fasting,nor solitude, nor monastic life that will procure you eternallife, but only doing good. Forget not the poor, but feed them.Remember that riches come from God and are given you onlyfor a short time. Do not bury your wealth in the ground; thisis against the precepts of Christianity. Be fathers to orphans, be judges in the cause of widows and do not let the powerfuloppress the weak. Put to death neither the innocent nor theguilty, for nothing is so sacred as the life and the soul of aChristian. Do not desert the sick; do not let the sight of corpses terrify you, for 6we must all die. Drive out of your heart all suggestions of pride and remember that we are allmortal, to-day full of hope, to-morrow in the coffin. Abhor lying, drunkenness and debauchery. Endeavor constantly to

obtain knowledge. Without having quitted his country, myfather learned five foreign languages, a thing which won for him the admiration of foreigners.7

As Zernov states, in “A charge to my Children” Vladimir

Monomakh, one of the best educated Princes of that time in Europe,

expressed ideals universally shared by Russian Christians. His words

were received as from a high authority because he behaved in

accordance with his teaching (9-10). His emphasis on divine mercy

6 In English this is more commonly referred to asThe Primary Chronicle .7 Qtd. in Zernov (25).




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was to be at the very heart of many of Russia’s most prominent

personalities, both political and religious.

Illustration 2: Vladimir Monomakh 8

Ware asserts that in Kievan Russia, as in Byzantium and the

medieval west, monasteries played an important role in the

Christianization of Kievan Rus’. The most influential of them was

the Monastery of the Caves—Petchersky Lavra—founded as a semi-

eremitic brotherhood by St. Anthony. St. Anthony, a Russian, had

lived on Mount Athos in northern Greece, from which he developed

8 See: <www.vladimir-russia.info>.




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his own spirituality, subsequently given to the Monastery of the

Caves. His successor, St Theodosius (died 1074) reorganized the

brotherhood and introduced a full community into the structure of the

Monastery.

Illustration 3: St. Theodosius 9

Moreover, despite the occasional anti-Latin rhetoric in the writings

of St. Theodosius, the Roman Church was rarely viewed with

antagonism, even after the schism between the Churches of Rome

and Constantinople in 1056. The dynastic marriages between the

9 See: <www.in2greece.com>.




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princes of Kiev and the royal houses of Europe, most notably

between Prince Vladimir Monomakh and Princess Ghita, daughter of

the English King Harold, would seem to indicate a continuing

Christian fellowship between the western and Russian Churches that

would be extinguished only with the Mongol invasion in the early

thirteenth century (“A History of the Russian Church”).

Furthermore, like Vladimir, St. Theodosius was conscious of

the social consequences of Christianity, and applied it radically,

identifying himself closely with the poor, not unlike the way as St.

Francis of Assisi did in the West (79-80).Ware adds that:Vladimir, Boris and Gleb, and Theodosius were all intenselyconcerned with the practical implications of the Gospel:Vladimir in his concern for social justice and his desire totreat criminals with mercy; Boris and Gleb in their resolutionto follow Christ in His voluntary suffering and death;Theodosius in his self-identification with the humble. Thesefour saints embody some of the most attractive features inKievan Christianity. (80)

The Pechesrk 10 Lavra Monastery came into being in the eleventh century

10 Pechersk stands for pechery , that is “caves” which are to be found in its territoryand which early monks used to live in, and Lavra is an honorific title given to a




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and for nine centuries its territory was expanding with new buildings beingadded to it through the centuries. The architectural complex of theMonastery the way it looks today is truly grandiose. On a sunny day one is

almost dazzled by the reflections from the innumerable golden domesabove churches and belfries. Most of the buildings in the Monastery datefrom the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and are excellent examplesof Ukrainian Baroque style in architecture and there is only one church inthe Monastery that has been preserved from the twelfth century with veryfew architectural changes introduced since then. The church sits above themain entrance gate of the Monastery and is consequently called Nadvratna- «the one above the gate». The full name of the church is TroitskaNadvratna Tserkva - «The Holy Trinity Church above the Gate». It is

almost a miracle it has survived as the Monastery itself was throughout itshistory the object of so many enemy attacks, of devastating fires and of other crippling misfortunes. (“The Pechersk Lavra Monastery”)

Table 3: Lavra Monastery, a history

monastery of extra-size and religious importance (“The Pechersk LavraMonastery”).




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Illustration 4: Lavra Monastery 11

During the Kievan period, the Russian Church was subject to

Constantinople, and until 1237, even after the Mongol invasion, the

Metropolitans of Russia were usually Greek. From 1237 during the

Kievan period, as for the origin of the bishops, about half were native

Russians; one was even a converted Jew, and another a Syrian (Ware

80).

In memory of the days when the Metropolitan came from Byzantium, theRussian Church continues to sing in Greek the solemn greeting to abishop, eis polla eti, despota (“unto many years, O master”) (Ware 80).

Table 4: In memory of Byzantium

11 See: <www.allrussiatours.com>.




31

The earliest mentioned head of the Russian Church was the Greek Metropolitan Michael (988-992). Further Greek prelates (Leontius, John I,Theopemtus) headed the largest of the ecclesiastical provinces of theChurch of Constantinople, which nominated and elected them to theirposition. Dioceses numbered approximately half a dozen and would becentred around such princely realms as Novgorod and Turov. There areno formally organized monasteries during the reign of Vladimir, althoughchronicles do indicate the existence of small groups of monks(Mouravieff).

Table 5: Earliest head of the Russian Church

With the decision by St. Vladimir Russia was transformed from a

pagan country with Christian communities to a Christian state. But,

as Pospielovsky explains, it was quite different from that of

Byzantium, which “with its concept of symphony had known nodivision between secular and the ecclesiastical spheres, even at the

level of legal courts.” In Russia the Metropolitan was either a citizen

of the illustrious East Roman Empire, or even if he was a native of

Russia, he was nevertheless ordained by the Ecumenical Patriarch in

Constantinople and approved by the Roman Emperor himself! Thus,

apart from the Russian Church remaining a subordinate branch of the

great Church of Constantinople, her chief hierarchs’ status was

considered to be much superior compared to that of the local prince.




32

This special position of the Church was reflected in the first Russian

Statute by Vladimir. It made it clear that royal power was derivative

from and circumscribed by the superior norms of Christian moral

teaching; and it stressed that the limitation on secular rulers would be

forever binding (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 25).

Thus, Vladimir established an ecclesial court structure as

distinct from the secular one with jurisdiction over all moral

transgressions of the laity (25). Although there is not a clear picture

of how worship was organized in the Church in Russia, we know that

they held regular celebrations of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,most likely in Greek, although texts in Church Slavonic were

available from the earlier converted Bulgarians and Serbs. We also

know that Vladimir constructed adjacent to the imperial palace in

Kiev a Tithe (Desyatnnaya) Church. It was thus named because

Vladimir promised to dedicate a tenth of the income from his lands

and newly built churches to the Mother of God; it was in honor of the

Mother of God that this church was built. The church was destroyed

during the Mongol invasion. Moreover, Vladimir’s conscious choice




33

of Byzantine Christianity did not necessarily imply the exclusive

existence of the Eastern Christian religion. During his reign, there are

no indications of hostility between Latin and Eastern Christians.

Under Vladimir Russia entered the family of Christian nations (“A

History of the Russian Church”).

Illustration 5: Kiev in the 10 th century 12

All these advances of Christianity in Russia did not mean that paganism was suddenly exterminated. The dual faith of paganism—

which posed a strong resistance to Christianity—would continue to

12 Kiev. The main area of the upper city of King Vladimir with the DesyatinaChurch, bottom right, built before the year 1000 A.D. See:<http://www.infoukes.com/history/origin_of_kyiv/>.




34

plague the Church’s mission in centuries to come: later chronicles

would relate uprisings of pagan sorcerers against the Christian

Church, while Kievan Christian priests inveighed regularly in their

sermons against pagan practices (“A History of the Russian

Church”). Kallinikos says that:

It must not, however, be supposed that the vast Russianterritories were suddenly transformed as if by magic, nor yetthat Christianity was able to establish its supremacy without astruggle. In the north-eastern regions of Russia, idolatry, backed by a divination of the black arts, presented animpenetrable front to the new ideas.

Therefore, as Ernst Benz, inThe Eastern Orthodox Church: Its

Thought and Life (1963) asserts that by the end of the eleventh

century the territory of the East Slavs had been Christianized, though

not completely so, from Novgorod in the north to beyond Kiev in the

south. Let us here look at a map of Kievan Rus’:




35

Illustration 6: The Kievan Rus’ and the world ca 1100 A.D. 13

Benz adds that the direction of future Christian expansion wasdecided by political conditions; therefore it had to be toward the

northeast. The division of the land under the sons of Yaroslav (1019-

54) led to a waning of the power of Kiev as the center of power

13 See: <www.shsu.edu>.




36

shifted towards the north. “The Polovtsians, pressing against the

southern border of the steppes, were more than a match for the

Russian princes, even when the latter met them with their combined

forces.” The second half of the eleventh and almost the entire twelfth

centuries were filled with these struggles. The population of the

southern parts of Rus left their homes in despair and sought a new

and more peaceful life farther to the north, “beyond the forests.” This

displacement of the center of power toward the north was decisively

influenced by the Crusades, which changed the whole nature of trade

and economic life in the Orient. Kiev, up to that moment the center of European commerce between North and South and West and East,

became irrelevant. However, Novgorod, on the other hand,

developed into an important trans-shipment site and the link between

the West and the Russian East. The hinterland of Novgorod was

more densely populate and increasingly became more thickly settled.

In Vladimiron-the-Klyazma a new political center arose, whose

heritage was later taken over by Moscow.




37

Russian missionary work went hand in hand with Russian

colonization. The early colonization was by no means a military

conquest. It was a matter of peaceful but continuous infiltration

which resulted in a fraternal mingling of new settlers and the native

population rather than suppression of the latter by the former. The

history of the colonization of northern Russia as far as Arkhangelsk

to the north and along the Volga and Kama to the Urals in the east is

a story of slow, peaceful expansion, with hunters, traders and monks

leading the way, penetrating ever deeper into the northeastern forests,

and gradually followed by peasant settlers who cleared the land.Religious penetration of these areas accompanied the colonization.

Before the Tartar invasion, Russian monks on missions had

partly followed, partly preceded the peaceful progress of Russian

colonizers in the northeast, until the Tartar hordes swept across the

steppes. The Orthodox religion of the Russian settlers became

established not only as a system of religious ideas, but also as a way

of everyday life. The calendar and the customs of the Orthodox

Church operated as a cultural and civilizing force, and served to




38

structure the daily life and holidays (holydays) of the population.

Throughout this period, missionary activity was exclusively in the

hands of individual monks. By the twelfth century, Christianity had

penetrated into the region of Vyatka, west of Perm; from 1159 on,

the monk Avraamy spread the gospel among the Votyaks and

Cheremisses there. The Mongol invasions of eastern Europe in 1237

interrupted this development, but on the other hand, the menace of

the Mongols gave greater urgency to the need to colonize and carry

on missionary work (58).

During the reign of Yaroslav, there was the first rapidflowering of Christian culture in Russia. The best masters of church

architecture were invited from Byzantium; iconography developed

and produced the first native Russian genius in this field, the art of

letters reached its first apogee with the promotion of the copying and

translation of the Bible and other ecclesiastical writings such as the

works of the holy fathers of the Eastern Church; hymnography also

grew with the development of the so called Znamenny chant, a

refinement of the chants inherited from Byzantium. The greatest




39

example of early Russian literature is with no doubt the Sermon on

Law and Grace by the first native head of the Russian Church,

Metropolitan Hilarion (1051-1055). This verbal icon combined a

panegyric to Vladimir with a discourse on Russia’s place in sacred

history (“A History of the Russian Church”).

Illustration 7: Yaroslav “the Wise” 14

14 See: <http://fixedreference.org/>.




40

But it is commonly said that, in spite of the amazing

intellectual and cultural progress that the Rus’ had within a mere

century and a half, Russia did not have time to assimilate the full

spiritual inheritance it has received from Byzantium. It did not have

time either to be inspired by it for further creativity. Disintegration

came from internal and external forces in the thirteen century which

delayed the process for some four centuries, by which time,

Pospielovsky says, “alas, Russia was much more interested in

imitating western Europe than in a creative re-adaptation and revival

of her true and essential legacy (The Orthodox Church in the History

of Russia 35).

Nevertheless, in medieval Russia Christianity had flourished

in different ways from the way it had spread, developed, and

functioned in the West. Parish priests of the Eastern Church were

married men and not a separate, elite, caste of men. In an emerging

culture where worshipping was done in the vernacular, Latin, and

Greek were superfluous. However, just as the West transformed

Latin (until Vatican II) into the exclusive, ‘sacred tongue’ to be used




41

for ecclesiastical life, and the Greek Orthodox Church did with

Byzantine Greek, so Russian and all Slav Orthodoxy eventually

treated church Slavonic, until today, as the exclusive sacred tongue

to be used for the Liturgy. Kievan Christianity did not inherit any of

the classical learning that was an integral part of western Christian

culture. In Russia, there was nothing comparable to the great

universities of Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne founded under

the direct guidance of Latin monastic orders. Kiev did not look to

Paris or Rome, but to the Christian East of Constantinople, Athos,

Syria, and Cappadocia. From a young nation, Russia has changedinto a Christian civilization, but great misfortunes were in the way

that did not allow it to continue to grow and develop (“A History of

the Russian Church”).




42

2. THE TARTAR-MONGOL YOKE AND THEEMERGENCE OF THE PRINCIPALITY OF MOSCOW(XIII-XV CENTURIES)

Pospielovsky makes the following summary regarding the

Tartar-Mongol yoke Russia suffered from 1238 to 1480:15

This period of over two centuries was marked by mutuallyfeuding appanages and the division of the Rus’ lands intodomains under the control of Mongols, Lithuania, and Poles,with the gradual rise of Moscow as the new Russian core andits ecclesiastical and political center. A large part of that period could be considered as Russia’s Dark Age. (TheOrthodox Church in the History of Russia 15)

The Tartars were a branch of the Mongols who inhabited the Altai

region of Siberia. These eastern people appeared in 1237 at thefrontiers of the vast realm of Kievan and Russia. With 400.000

horsemen, the Tartars had an army much larger than the military

forces at the disposal of the Russians, who were split into many

independent principalities at that time, and brought devastation upon

the Russians. By establishing their headquarters at Saray, the Golden

Horde would subject Russian cities to considerable destruction.

15 For Pospielovsky, rather than 1480, a more accurately date is 1447, when the lastmajor royal succession dispute was settled not by appeals to the Mongol rulers, but by decision of a council of five Russian bishops in favor of direct succession fromfather to the eldest son.




43

Princes were obliged to pay tribute to the Khan, and complete

political obedience was expected to be paid to the new overlords of

Russia.

In 1240 Kievan Rus ceased to exist as an independent State.

Kiev was sacked and the whole Russian land overrun, excepting the

far north around Novgorod including Pskov, Vladimir, Rostol,

Iarovslavl, and Susdal, and the south-western provinces of Galicia

and Volhynia. These regions were sheltered geographically from the

fury of the Tartar forces either by the Carpathians, in the case of the

south western areas, or by marshes or immense forests in the case of the northern areas. Yet many of these cities also had to suffer as the

prey of their western neighbors.




44

Illustration 8: Medieval walls of ovgorod 16

A visitor to the Mongol Court in 1246 wrote that he saw

neither town nor village, but only ruins and countless human skulls

in Russian territory. Yet, Fedotov asserts that even if Kiev was

destroyed, the Christianity of Kiev remained a living memory:

Kievan Russia, like the golden days of childhood, was never dimmed in the memory of the Russian nation. In the purefountain of her literary works anyone who wills can quenchhis religious thirst; in her venerable authors he can find hisguide through the complexities of the modern world. KievanChristianity has the same value for the Russian religious mindas Pushkin for the Russian artistic sense: that of a standard, a

16 See: <www.weblio.jp/>.




45

golden measure, a royal way. (The Russian Religious Mind 412)

Having collapsed Kiev, which was the single undisputed center of Rus’, and having proliferated so many practically independent

appanages who were occupied with fighting each other, the concept

of a common heritage of Rus’ or of a single Russia state relatively

vanished from the memory of politicians and the general populace. It

was the Church that remained as the only institution and its chief

bishop kept the title of Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus’, which was

retained even after they moved to the northeast (Pospielovsky,The

Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 37).

As mentioned, the suzerainty of the Mongol Tartars over

Russia lasted from 1238 until 1480. However, after the great battle of

Kulikovo (1380), when the Russians finally took courage to face

them openly and actually defeated them, the Tartar overlordship was

considerably weakened. It was the Grand Dukes of Moscow Dimitry

who inspired the resistance to the Mongols and who led Russia at

Kulikovo (Ware 82). Most of what is now European and Asian




46

Russia was under direct Mongol rule, while the remaining Russian

appanage principalities retained some degree of separate existence as

vassals to the Mongols. The most significant of these principalities

included Kiev, Chernigov, Ryazan, Vladimir, Suzdal, Smolensk,

Polotsk, and Novgorod. Eventually, out of the territory of Vladimir-

Suzdal, Moscow began to gain in influence.

Yet the consequences of the so called Mongol-Tartar yoke for

the Church were not necessarily the same as those for the state. In

1279, the Mongol rulers issued their own edict of tolerance for

religious faiths, allowing the Orthodox Church in Russia to enjoyequality with the paganism (and later Islam) of their masters. The

Mongols interfered comparatively little with the canonical structure

of the Church; many of them were quite open to the message of

salvation to be found in Christianity and became converted. One can

even say that, in a sense, the Mongol invasion could even have

contributed to the preservation of the Byzantine character of

Orthodox Christianity in Russia (“A History of the Russian

Church”). As a consequence, Ware says that more than anything else,




47

“it was the Church which kept alive Russian national consciousness

in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the Church was later to

preserve a sense of unity among the Greeks under Turkish rule (82).

Also, since the Tartar felt great respect for the Church,

Pospielovsky asserts, one of the functions of the metropolitan and

other bishops was to mediate between the khan and the Russian

Prince, mainly trying to protect the latter from the Tartar revenge.

They also had a similar mediation role between the feuding Russian

princes exhorting them to national unity hoping to achieve freedom

from foreign domination. Pospielovsky adds that “in the performanceof these mediatory functions, double dealing, hypocrisy, cunning,

flattery, and deception were inevitable” (The Orthodox Church in the

History of Russia 38). Very often at the center of this dealing was the

fact that while the tartars respected the Church, the westerners sought

to destroy the Orthodox Church. As an illustration, Metropolitan

Kiril I (or II, according to some sources) had to flatter militantly the

Tartars assuring them of eternal loyalty while trying to talk the

Galician-Volinian Prince Daniel Romanovich out of a negotiation




48

with the Pope to attack the Tartars. At the same time, he tried to

convince Daniel to support the Duke Alexander Newsky in his

decision, as we will see, to acquiesce the Mongol authority and

attack the Teutonic Knight, who had been blessed by the pope to

conquer Russia for the Latin Church (The Orthodox Church in the

History of Russia 38). Kirill, who died in 1281, was the last all-

Russia Metropolitan to be buried in Kiev. His successor, the Greek

Metropolitan Maxim, aware of the devastation of Kiev, transferred

his seat to the city of Vladimir, less than 150 kilometers east of

Moscow. Volynian Metropolitan Peter also established his seat inVladimir, yet he very often visited Moscow, a city where he died in

1326 and apparently requested to be buried. His successor the Greek

Theognostos also spent much time in Moscow. Finally, the

canonization of the Russian Metropolitan Alexis (1354-78), who like

Metropolitan Peter was canonized, solidified Moscow’s status of the

ecclesiastical capital of Russia (The Orthodox Church in the History

of Russia 39).




49

PRINCE ALEXANDER NEVSKY OF NOVGOROD

In the thirteen century Russia witnessed the most violent

Crusades organized by Latin Christendom against the Greek

Orthodox in the Levant. Taking the opportunity that the Russians—

the most numerous of the Orthodox peoples—were under the rule of

the Mongol khans, the Pope of Rome decided to organize Swedish

and Teutonic knights into a crusade against the already weakened

Russian Orthodox. Yet, it was Alexander Nevsky (1220-1263), the

young prince of Novgorod, one of the great warrior saints of Russia,

who organized the defense of the Russian lands against the westerninvaders. Yaroslav II’s son was prince of Novgorod from 1236-1251

and later was named grand prince of Kiev and of Vladimir by the

Mongols. He secured the western part of the region. He secured the

west frontiers of Rus in the result of victorious battles with Sweden

(Battle on Neva 1240) and Teutonic Knights (battle of Ice of Lake

Chudskoe called “Ledovoe Poboishche,” 1242), the most spectacular

battle being fought and won by Alexander Nevsky.




50

When the attempts to convert Russia by force proved

fruitless, the pope, Innocent IV, began to employ other means.

Mouravieff tells us, inThe History of the Russian Church (1842),

that wishing to take advantage of the distressed condition of the

Eastern Church—the patriarchs of Constantinople living as exiles at

Nice and Russia having already been now ten years without a

metropolitan—and seeking the union of the churches along with a

proposition of a crusade against the Mongols, the papal legates

visited the court of Alexander and addressed him with flattering

speeches; however, he refused either to receive their letters or listento their solicitations. Fedotov records these words Nevsky had

replied to the messengers of the Pope: “Our doctrines are those

preached by the Apostles. The tradition of the Holy Fathers of the

Seven Councils we scrupulously keep. As for your words, we do not

listen to them and we do not want your doctrine (The Russian

Religious Mind 383).” The Roman pontiff sent envoys to David of

Galich too, offering him also a regal crown. Acting more cautiously,

Daniel accepted the crown, and the title of King of Galich, but put




51

off the proposition for a union of the Churches till there should be an

ecumenical council (22). Seen logically, it was the period of the

Mongol domination that finally split Russian Christians from western

Christianity, not only by the isolation imposed upon them by the

Golden Horde, but also by the way the Latin Church sought to take

advantage of the Russian Church’s weak political position.

Illustration 9: Prince Alexander evsky receiving Pope’s legates 17

17 See: <www.abcgallery.com>.




52

Alexander Nevsky is popularly credited with having saved the

Russian Church during these turbulent years and was numbered

among the saints of the Church in Russia in 1380. Pospielovsky

states that in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century almost all

canonizations were princes, with no pretense of their piety or

spiritual value. In the case of Prince Alexander Nevsky, his only

claim to sainthood was his having defeated the Swedes and the

Germans, this his contemporaries perceived as a miracle because of

his enemies’ greater numbers and better armaments. This historian

thinks that “there was a concept of just and unjust wars, the former being wars of defense, understood as sacrificial service to fellow-

men, similar to the monastic vocation. This tradition, however, was

broken by St.Sergius with whom the era of canonizing warrior-

princes ends (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 40-41).

Furthermore, due to his clever policy, Alexander reduced the

Tartar-Mongol occupation, even acting as a mediator between his

people and the invaders. Ware believes that his reasons for treating

with the Tartars rather than with the West was primarily religious,




53

the Tartars, he adds, “took tribute but refrained from interfering in

the life of the Church, whereas the Teutonic Knights had as their

avowed aim the reduction of the Russian schismatics (83)”. In this

period, as already seen when earlier on we discussed the Church of

Byzantium, a Latin Patriarch ruled in Constantinople. Zernov says

regarding him:

His line of conduct was prophetic. He was in tune with thenew Russia which was slowly and painfully rising from theruins of the Tartar invasion—a Russia with profoundexperience of suffering and humiliation, a nation whicheventually learned the lesson of unity, patience, andendurance. Alexander had the moral strength to accept the

grim truth that neither he nor his children would see their native land set free. He was not crushed by the knowledgethat unconditional surrender to the Asiatic invaders was, for the time being, the only policy open to his people. His firmfaith in God, the Ruler over all nations, gave him confidencein the remote yet certain victory of the Christians over their heathen oppressors. He stood far above his generation, andhis gaze could penetrate into that distant future when oncemore Orthodox Russia would be master of the great Eurasian plain. But few of his contemporaries were able to share hisvision. (25)

Two centuries later the Byzantine Church, after the Council of

Florence made the same choice: they would rather submit themselves




54

politically to the Turks than spiritually capitulate to the Roman

Church (Ware 83).

In his endeavors, Nevsky was supported by the above-

mentioned Cyril, the Metropolitan of Kiev (1242-81). Cyril was a

Russian because the Patriarch of Constantinople could not find a

Greek bishop willing to go to devastated Russia. For thirty years this

man traveled of over the country indefatigably consolidating and

instructing the scattered believers. The Tartars offered the clergy and

the Metropolitan privileges—they were exempted from taxation and

any act of violence inflicted upon them was punishable with death— treating them with the same respect they gave to all ministers of

religion. Using these privileges, Cyril inaugurated a new type of

service for the Metropolitans of Russia. If before the invasion

Metropolitans were only concerned with ecclesiastical matters, after

the invasion they become equally concerned with the national revival

of the country (Zernov 25)

As a ruler of Vladimir, Kiev (Kyyiv), and Novgorod,

Alexander Nevsky did much to unify the principalities of northern




55

Russia. Yet, as Zenov explains, the end of the thirteenth century and

the beginning of the fourteenth century were particularly dark in the

history of Russia. After Nevsky’s death, his brothers and sons, with

the exception of his younger son, Daniel, fought unscrupulously for

the title of Grand Prince in the North-eastern provinces (with their

main cities, Vladimir, Iarovslavl, Rostov, and Susdal). In the North-

western provinces (Novgorod and Pskov) the citizens were split into

hostile factions and constantly quarreled among themselves. The

Tartars took this opportunity for the further plunder and massacre of

the Russian people. Also, large slices of territory around the BalticSea were lost to the Germans and the Swedes. Bishops were the only

authority that could restore peace, but they very often failed. In the

South-western, the provinces of Galicia and Volhynia fell to western

rule, subjugating their Orthodox population for many centuries to the

Roman Catholics (Zernov 27-28).

During the years of the Tartar’s rule, the Church was obliged

to look inwards. The literature of the period tends to concentrate on

the tragedy of the destruction of Kievan Russia. There are few if any




56

innovations in the nascent Russian school of iconography and

hymnography. Yet the invaders revered any form of worship to a god

and thus the Russian Church remained unmolested; but her saints of

this period are known mainly to God.

ST. SERGIUS (SERGII) AND THE CHURCH IN

MOSCOVITE RUSSIA: XIV-XV CENTURIESAfter the two centuries of Mongol domination, a completely

different Russia emerged, yet it had left an indelible imprint on the

Russian psyche. Kiev never recovered from the sack of 1237 and

many of the political and legal advances of the Kievan period wereeffectively eclipsed. Even ecclesiastical life was affected, as the

metropolitan see of the Orthodox Church was moved from Kiev to

Vladimir in 1300 and then to Moscow in 1321. The rise of Moscow

was closely bound up with the moving of the Church to that city.

When the town was still small and comparatively unimportant, Peter,

Metropolitan of Russia from 1308 to 1326, decided to settle there;

and henceforward it remained the city of the chief hierarch of Russia.

This eventually led to the division of the Russian Church between




57

two metropolitans, one at Moscow and the other at Kiev, yet this

arrangement did not become permanent until de middle of the fifteen

century (Ware 82), when Moscow had become the most powerful of

the Russian principalities and began to expand its territory,

consolidating its primacy over its neighbors.

Illustration 10: Moscow in the fifteenth century 18

Zernov says regarding Moscow:

There are cities which, like people, are marked by destiny.Such a town is Moscow. Both the dark and the bright sides of

18 <www.tspace.library.utoronto.ca>.




58

Russia’s life are revealed in her history. The bizarre colors of her red, blue and green cupolas, and the unusual contours of her buildings, reflect the sensuousness of the Orient and theserenity of the North, two elements present in the mentality of her inhabitants. Cruelty and mercy, oppression and tolerance,holiness and lust made in turn a strong appeal both to therulers and to the people of Moscow. Her Kremlin and her streets are associated with the most heroic and the mostshameful deeds of her national history. All that Russia possesses, good and bad, finds its expression in the life of thatcity, which appeared on the scene of Russian history in itsgloomiest hour, and which has since governed the fortunes of her people (31).

He adds that little is known about the origin of Moscow. The

name is mentioned for the first time in the Chronicle of the year

1147. During the Tartar invasion, Moscow was destroyed, but it wassoon rebuilt, and allotted to Daniel, Alexander’s son, at the time of

his father’s death, when he was still a child (1263). During the

twenty-seven years of his rule, he transformed the insignificant little

town into an important center of national revival. Daniel, a deeply

religious man, achieved this by refusing to take part in the quarrels

which absorbed the energy of his brothers and relatives, and by

concentrating on the improvement of his small principality (31).




59

St. Sergius of Radonezh

The central figure in this period of the Russian Church’shistory and one of the most remarkable men Russia has ever

produced is St. Sergius of Radonezh, considered as one of the great

fathers of Russian monasticism. He was born in 1314 in the northern

city of Rostov but due to the civil wars his parents had to move to

Radonez, some fifty miles north of Moscow. There he lived as an

ordinary peasant. This is why he is called the peasant saint of Russia.

At an early age he sought the life of a solitary and wished to spend

his life in prayer and meditation. He retired as a monk to the vast

forests north of Moscow living completely alone for several years.

Eventually he was discovered by some peasants and soon he

gathered around himself a community of like-minded zealots by

whom he was elected abbot (hegumen ). The community built a small

monastery dedicated to the Holy Trinity.

The grand monastic complex and church of Sergiev Posad, located 45 miles

north of Moscow, is the center of Russian Orthodoxy and one of the mostimportant places of pilgrimage in the entire country. (The center of RussianOrthodoxy was originally in Kiev, Ukraine but following the 13th century




60

Mongol invasion, the patriarch moved to the town of Moscow in 1308). Thefirst religious structures at Sergiev Posad were founded by the Russiannobleman Sergius (1319-92), also called Sergiev, who retired to the forest

of Radonezh with his brother Stephen to lead a life of prayer.In 1340 (some sources say 1337) the two brothers built a small woodenchurch and the site began to attract other monks and a growing number of pilgrims. Rapidly developing into a monastic complex, the site was giventhe name Trinity Monastery. Because of his religious and politicalachievements, Sergius was canonized in 1422. His relics were placed in asilver reliquary in Trinity Cathedral, constructed between 1422-27, uponthe site of the earlier wooden church (destroyed during a Tartar raid). TheCathedral was decorated by the most famous Russian icon painters, DaniilChernyi and Andrei Rublev. The main object of worship in the cathedral arethe relics of St. Sergius. (From “Sacred Sites of Russia)

Table 6: Monastery of Trinity-St. Sergius Sergiev Posad

Illustration 11: Monastery of St. Sergius Sergei Posad 19

19 See: <www.rustoys.com>.




61

In his biography one can read the following passage: “St.

Sergius built the Church of the Holy Trinity as a mirror for his

community, that through gazing at the divine Unity they might

overcome the hateful divisions of this world.” Zernov says that “The

sense of peace which emanated from him, his loving kindness and,

above all, his complete confidence in God, which made him

singularly free from any fear and hesitation, were the sources of his

influence and attraction” (37).

Illustration 12: St. Sergius of Radonezh 20

20 See: <www.holydormition.com>.




62

This is why St. Sergius attracted the attention of the

Metropolitan of Moscow Alexis (the primatial see by this time

having been transferred to Moscow from Kiev via Vladimir). Alexis

was deeply impressed by him and several times Sergius went at his

request to see the princes who endangered the national efforts toward

unity and freedom by their quarrels. Sergius was the broker for peace

between quarreling princes. Alexis tried to persuade him to become

his successor, but Sergius declined. Zernov adds that “he was not

called to govern but to serve and he never used any authority except

moral persuasion (37). However, his influence on the Russian politicwas idiosyncratically strong for a humble monk.

He became a recognized spiritual leader of the nation. It was

Sergius who gave his blessing to the Grand Prince of Moscow

Dmitry Donskoi who had turned to him for advice in the critical hour

of Russia’s struggle for liberation: to go into battle with the Mongol

khan Mamai at Kulikovo Field in 1380. Sergius’ words were “Go

forward and fear not. God will help thee.” This battle was fierce and

the losses on both sides were enormous, but it was won, and meant a




63

turning point in Russian history as it shattered the legend of the

invincibility of the Mongol army; however, it was only the beginning

of the Russians’ liberation from their Oriental rulers. Zernov says

that:

St. Sergius performed a miracle with the Russians: hechanged a defeated people into the builders of a great Empire.He did not, however, employ any of the methods which areusually associated with the work of great leaders andreformers. He never preached a single sermon; he did notwrite a single book; all his life he behaved like the humblest,the least distinguished of men—and yet it was he who wasselected by the unanimous voice of the nation as its teacher and liberator. The secret of St. Sergius’ influence lies in thesingular integrity of his life: his sole activity was in the

service of the Holy Trinity, and he became in himself such afaithful reflection of divine harmony and love that all whocame in contact with him grew aware of the Heavenly Vision.The Christian faith that God is the Holy Trinity implies thatthe Creator of this world is the perfect community of ThreePersons whose relation is that of mutual love. St. Sergius wasnot a theologian in the accepted sense of the word. He never wrote or spoke about the Trinitarian doctrine, but he washimself a living example of that divine Unity in Freedomwhich is the essence of the Christian revelation of the natureof God. (40)

Ware compares and contrasts Sergius and Theodosius. He

says that both displayed the same kenosis and deliberate self-

humiliation—Sergius lived as a peasant in spite of his noble birth—




64

and actively played a role in politics. Yet while Theodosius’

monastery of the Holy Trinity was situated in the wilderness, at a

distance from the civilized world—Sergius was more an explorer and

a colonist—, the Kievan monastery of the Caves lay on the outskirts

of the city. Also, while there is nothing in the religious experience of

Theodosius that one can label “mystical”, there was an evident

dimension of spirituality in Sergius. Ware adds that Sergius was a

contemporary to Gregory Palamas, one of the last great Fathers of

the Church, and it is not impossible that he was familiar with the

Hesychast movement in Byzantium (85). Pospielovsky, however, believes that after Palamas successfully defended hesychasm at the

1341, 1347, and 1351 councils of Constantinople, the movement

spread to all Orthodox countries, including Russia (42). Indeed

Sergius showed to be an exponent of an interior, ascetic style of

monastic life, similar to what Byzantine spiritual masters termed

‘hesychasm’, the silent prayer of the heart of the recluse—”hesychia”

in Greek means “silence,” “quietude”. As we noticed in Byzantine

Church History , a controversy concerning hesychasm had raged in




65

thirteenth-century Byzantium over whether God could be

contemplated and whether the human person was capable of being

united with Him. The hesychasts claimed conditionally since God

can be contemplated not in His essence but in His energies and the

human person can become united, or deified in Him, but only

through the way of the Cross and only by grace. Thus man cannot

become a god by nature. This teaching was embodied by Sergius

upon combining a reclusive life with compassion for those whom he

encountered in the northern forests. Under Sergius’ tutelage the

hesychastic monastic movement took root in the far north of Russia.It, furthermore, laid the foundations for the great monasteries of St.

Cyril of Beloozero and Solovki and the skete of St. Nilus of Sora,

who introduced this particular form of monasticism from Mt. Athos

(“A History of the Russian Church). Pospielovsky believes that: “It

was precisely this hesychast Orthodox concentration on man as a

wholesome reflection of the Divine and as a channel for inner contact

with the Divine that led to the achievement of the greatest artistic




66

spiritual heights in iconography as a physical representation of the

Spiritual” (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 42).

St. Sergius did a very important thing not only by helping

Russians to embrace the ideals of Christian society based on unity

and freedom, but also by convincing them that there was a way that

enabled its practical application. Thus, beside the political rise of the

Moscow principality, the first part of the fifteenth century was also a

period in which the New Russia of Moscow emerged spiritually. This

time was the foundation on which the Moscow tsardom was to be

based during the next two centuries. The extensive powers given tothe tsars and their preventive measure for national security and

independence took form in the serfdom of the peasants, which

obliged the Russians to give up their national freedom, so cherished

by their ancestors (Zernov 36-41, 44; Ware 84-86; “A History of the

Russian Church”).




67

St. Stephen, the Enlightener of Perm, amissionary

St. Stephen, the Enlightener of Perm, a missionary St.Stephen (1340-1396) another saint and relevant figure, leads us to

consider another aspect of Church life under the Mongol yoke:

missionary work. This is an activity the Russian Church actively

pursued from its early days. It was also undertaken by the followers

of Sergius of Radonezh as they found more and more monasteries.

Stephen was a contemporary of St. Sergius of Radonezh. The

spiritual affinity of the two saints is illustrated by the following

incident, as recorded in St. Sergius’ Life:

Once, when St. Stephen was passing near St. Sergius’monastery on his way to Moscow, he stopped and turned inthe direction of the monastery with the words: “Peace to thee,my spiritual brother!” Seeing this with his spiritual eyes, St.Sergius, who at that moment was sitting in the refectory withhis monks, arose, said a prayer and bowed in St. Stephen’sdirection, saying as he did: “Rejoice also, thou pastor of Christ’s flock, and may the blessing of the Lord be with thee!” (“St. Stephen of Perm”)

He entered the monastery of St. Gregory the Theologian in

Rostov quite young and soon he became a student of the Holy




68

Scriptures and the Greek language. He became inspired with the idea

of bringing the light of Christianity to the pagan Ziryans who

inhabited the distant land of Perm on the western edge of the Ural

Mountains. In preparation for this missionary work, the Saint studied

the Ziryan language and, after composing an alphabet based on

Ziryan monetary symbols, following the examples of Cyril and

Methodius, he translated into that language from Greek the sacred

texts. The head of the Moscow diocese at that time, Bishop Gerasim,

blessed the young missionary and gave him the necessary church

utensils, while the tsar provided him with a letter of safe conduct.Although grieved by the Ziryan’s hostile attitude towards the Faith,

this young missionary patiently went on with his missionary work

and eventually the pagans began arriving first in small groups and

later in crowds, asking for Holy Baptism.




69

Illustration 13: St. Stephen of Perm (1340-1396) in his way to Moscow 21

In 1383 Stephen was made the first bishop of Perm. He

provided a strong foundation for the fledgling Church. He erected

many temples and monasteries, established schools for future clergy,

taught them himself, and showed an example of active charity in

caring for the poor and unfortunate. When there was a famine in thearea he freely distributed bread to the people. He sought the

reduction of taxes and protected his flock from oppression by secular

authorities. St. Stephen died in 1396 while in Moscow on church

21 See: <http://www.answers.com/topic/stephen-of-perm>.




70

business. He was buried in one of the Kremlin churches, something

which greatly saddened his flock. The monk Epiphanius described

their grief in his prose epic “The Lamentation of the Land of Perm”

which forms the basis of this biographical data:

Had we lost but gold and silver, these we could regain. Butwe shall never find another like you ... What right does[Moscow] have? She has her own metropolitans andhierarchs; we had but one, and she has taken him for herself. And now we don’t even have a bishop’s grave. Wehad only one bishop; he was our lawmaker, our baptizer,our apostle, our preacher, our confessor... (“St. Stephen of Perm”)

The End of the Tartar Yoke and the Emergence of Moscow

In 1448, the Tartar yoke finally ended under Ivan III, a Grand

Prince of Moscow. The end of Tartar domination was coincident

with the absorption by Moscow of the remaining principalities. By

the end of the fifteen century, the Moscow Grand Duchy was an

empire (or stardom). Ivan III became sole ruler of a vast country, but

there remained the problem of defining his position in the life of the

nation, and an ideology to justify Russia expansion. Zernov says that




71

the answer that was found was the belief that Moscow was the

successor of Constantinople and that its tsars were the legitimate

hairs of the Byzantine Emperors (47). In 1472, Ivan III married

Sophia Paleologos, the niece of the last emperor—Constantinople

had fallen in 1453. He took as his coat-of-arms the two-headed

Byzantine Eagle and also zealously fostered the concept of Moscow

as the third Rome, which implied that it should inherit the

prerogatives of the first and second Rome. Some years later under, in

1551, Ivan IV the Terrible submitted a series of questions to the

Church Council. The answers were in one hundred numberedchapters and were given the name “Hundred Chapters” (“Stoglav ”).

One of its purposes was the strengthening of true orthodoxy, based

on the belief that the divine scriptures forbade believers to follow

foreign customs. Consequently, after the fall of the Byzantine Empire

in 1453, the church and state worked together to make Russia the

stronghold of Orthodoxy. Theologians put forth the idea of Moscow

as “the third Rome.” Their idea of the third Rome did not however

resemble the Byzantine theory of the Basilea of the symphony




72

between the State and the Church as the tsar was considered to be

supreme in both state and church. As we will see, this eventually led

to the development of two factions in the church: the first was led by

Abbot Joseph of Volokolamsk in favor of the tsar’s intervention in

church affairs with a strong emphasis on the rituals and outward

practice of religion, and the second led by Nilus Sorsky, who held

that the tsar should not have power over religious affairs.

Ivan III had advanced very rapidly to the position of leader of

the nation because he had the backing of the Russian Church.

Besides, he was a great church builder. In 1505-1508, he erected inMoscow its first cathedral, dedicated to the Archangel Michael,

which later became the burial place of all Grand Princes and tsars.

During Ivan’s reign, the political and ecclesiastical supremacy of

Moscow was firmly established (Zernov 33).




73

Illustration 14: Archangel Michael Cathedral 22

Soon the Grand Principality of Moscow consolidated its

suzerainty over most of the northern forests of what is now European

Russia. There were three elements which caused the rise of Moscow:

first, the liberation from the Mongol yoke; second, the gathering of

the lands of the old Kievan state; and third, the centralization of

political power in the hands of the princes of Moscow. The rise of

Moscow required the gradual building of a central state apparatus to

22 See: <www.answers.com/topic/stephen-of-perm>.




74

govern the growing state of Muscovy. An important step towards the

centralization of Moscow’s authority was the Sudebnik (Law Code)

produced by Ivan III (1462-1505) in 1497, by codifying existing laws

into a second legal code. The Sudenik, which came to characterize

much of Russian history, attempted to standardize legal procedures

and punishment for crimes. Yet this Law Code was merely a start

toward government centralization of justice. In 1550 Ivan IV The

Terrible (1533-1584), who proclaimed himself tsar or autocrat, put a

new law code into effect. The title of tsar, a corruption of the Latin

“Caesar”, had previously been in use among the Grand Princes of Moscow and became an official designation with the blessing of the

Church for the ruler of Muscovy with the advent of the reign of Ivan

the Terrible in the sixteenth century. In 1453, sixty-one years after

Sergius’ death, the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks. After

Kulikovo a new Russia emerged which would inherit Byzantium’s

place as protector of the Orthodox world. Ware says that “it proved

both worthy and unworthy of this vocation (86).”




75

A RUSSIAN RENAISSANCE

The disciples of St. Sergius founded fifty new monasteries

during his lifetime, and another forty during the next generation, all

under the influence of Sergius and his followers. This is an example

of the fact that from 1350 to 1550 their existed in Russia a golden

age of spirituality, an extraordinary renaissance in both the inner and

outward life of the Church. The early fifteenth century saw the

emergence of the characteristic onion domes of Russian church

buildings as well as masterpieces of iconography by Andrei Rublev,Theophanes the Greek, and Daniel Chorny, which adorned cathedrals

and churches in dioceses that grew across the length and breadth of

Muscovite Russia. Furthermore, the Church’s mission reached as far

as the Ural Mountains with the evangelization of Finno-Ugric

peoples, especially the Zyrians, as already shown, a people into

whose language St. Stephen of Perm had translated the Gospels and

Divine Liturgy. The inner life of the church was enriched by Sergius’

spirituality, in spite of him not having left any writings. We know




76

this through his biography or Vita , written by Epiphanius the Wise.

His spirituality was centered on prayer and contemplation, thus

revealing the roots the Russian Church had in Byzantium. This

renewal of the Church’s life of prayer was reflected in the revival of

iconography. Rublev’s Trinity, painted in honor of Sergius’ vision of

the Trinity, represents the most perfect example of it.

HERESIES

But at the same time when the Muscovite Russian Church

began to speak with its own voice and Russia witnessed arenaissance, there emerged a number of heresies. They began mostly

in Novgorod, a city culturally more advanced than Moscow and with

considerable western contacts, through trade and European

merchants. This was at a time when heresies and Protestantism were

rapidly spreading in the West. For example, in 1311, a Russian

Church Council condemned a Novgorod archpriest for rejecting

monasticism. Toward the end of the fourteenth century another

heresy appeared in this same city: the Strigol’niki (meaning “cutting”




77

or “shearing”). Its followers protested against the fees bishops would

charge clerical candidates for their ordination, a practice that

contradicted the canon. Based on this assumption the Strigol’niki

concluded that all of the Russian clergy were canonically invalid.

Another sect came to be known as the “Judaizers”. Among other

things, they argued that the New Testamental concept of the Trinity

contradicted the Old Testament Teaching of one God (1989, 53).

3. FROM POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORSTO THE GREAT SCHISM (XVI-XVII CENTURIES)

POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS

St Sergius brought a spiritual renaissance to the Russians in his

attempt to unite the socia life with the mystical side of monasticism.

But his followers were not always able to follow his path and they

began to split into opposite schools, each one emphasizing one aspect

of their common inheritance. The two schools became known as “the

Possessors” (or “Acquisitors”) and “the Non-Possessors” (or “Non-

Acquisitors.”) Fedotov describes the Possessors as active, practical,social; good farmers and administrators, social leaders in the




78

surrounding countryside, political advisers of the Muscovite princes

in the building of a unified, autocratic state. Their religious life was

founded upon the fear of God and the meticulous observance of

ritual, mitigated by their aesthetic appreciation of liturgical worship

(The Russian Religious Mind 6). He said of the Non-Possessors—the

mystics of the northern forests—, that they “cultivated absolute

poverty, silence, and spiritual prayer, preserving a great moral

independence of secular powers, which they even held it their

obligation to teach and reprove” (6). Fedotov adds that “This kind of

spirituality undoubtedly inspired the highest manifestations of theRussian art in icon painting, which reached its peak in the fifteenth

century: this was the golden age of Russian saints and artists” (6).

Zernov also says that while the Possessors centered on “unity, greatly

appreciating the beauty and dignity of ritual both in conduct of

worship and in daily life,” the Non-Possessors focused on “the

importance of freedom and taught that nothing was more pleasing to

God than a humble and contrite heart lovingly and freely obeying the

Creator” (51). Furthermore, the Possessors, whose religious houses




79

possessed large estates and even controlled the serfs who inhabited

them, were good administrators and autocrats and were ready to

allow the tsar to take a leading role in the Church. For them the

sovereign should be loved and obeyed as fathers were obeyed by

their children. However, the Non-Possessors were scholars and

mystics and men of learning and independent minds. They were not

reluctant to criticize either the leaders of the State or the Church.

They also insisted that the monks should depend only on their own

labor and thereby maintain their spiritual independence. Moreover,

they were against persecuting heretics and taught that one cannot be put to death for holding erroneous doctrine. Zernov says that: “In a

century when, in the West, Roman Catholics and Protestants held,

with equal vigor, that it was the duty of Christian Governors to

execute heretics, the Russian Church alone contained an influential

party which considered this practice as incompatible with the spirit

of the Gospel (52). Thus, while Nilus was prone to the spiritual re-

education of heretics, and in extreme cases isolating them under

arrest in monasteries, Joseph was harsh, severe, and merciless




80

towards heretics, even in favor of applying the death penalty—as the

Spanish Inquisition was doing; while for Nilus a repentant heretic

should be welcomed like the prodigal son in the Bible, for Joseph

they deserve a milder form of punishment but not forgiveness (The

Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 59). Undoubtedly, Nilus

was following the Christian thread of St. Vladimir or St. Vladimir

Monomakh. Joseph’s harshness was atypical for the Russian Church.

Outstanding men in the sixteenth century took one of these

two different paths. On the one hand, St. Joseph, the famous Abbot

of Volotsk (1439-1515), Genadi, Archbishop of Novgorod (d. 1505),and Daniel, Metropolitan of Moscow (d. 1539) were the spokesmen

of the Possessors; on the other hand, St. Nilus of Sorsk (1433-

1508)—a monk in the forest beyond the Volga—, Prince Vassian

Patrikeev (d. 1531) and St. Maxim the Greek (d. 1556) were the

exponents of the Non-Possessors’ perspective (51). This division

functioned well as long as both parties had their full share in the

shaping of the country’s destiny. But at a Church council in 1503 this

division turned into a crisis when St. Nilus launched an attacked on




81

the ownership of land by monasteries (about a third of the land in

Russia belonged to the monasteries at this time). This attack was

answered by St Joseph who was in favor of monastic landholding,

and being supported by the majority of the council. For Joseph and

his followers: “The riches of the Church are the riches of the poor.”

This contrasts with the words of the monk Vassian, a disciple of

Nilus:

Where in the tradition of the Gospels, Apostles, and Fathersare monks ordered to acquire populous villages and enslave peasants to the brotherhood? … We look into the hand of therich, fawn slavishly, flatter them to get out of them some little

village … We wrong and rob and sell Christians our brothers.We torture them with scourges like wild beasts. (Pares 93)

The monastic Statute of Nilus of Sorka and Joseph’s tracks against

the Judaizers (“The Enlightener”) are considered as Russia’s first

theological works. Pospielovsky asserts that Joseph’s ideas prevailed

after 1504 and remained the ideology of Russia establishment, while

those of Nilus survived among many monastics as well as many

humble priest and laymen (Pospielovsky,The Orthodox Church in

the History of Russia 57).




82

During the next twenty years there was a considerable tension

between these two groups until 1525-1526 when the Non-Possessors

through the Metropolitan Varlaam (1511-21), a Non-Possessor,

openly criticized Basil III for unjustly divorcing his wife. Basil had

no children and decided, therefore, to divorce his wife and marry

another woman. Yet, the Possessors supported the tsar’s desire

declaring that the future of the monarchy was of greater importance

than the fate of a woman, and their spokesman, Daniel, expressed his

willingness to re-marry the Sovereign. Basil gladly availed himself

of this offer, secured Daniel’s election to the Metropolitan seat in1522, and was remarried by him in the next year. Daniel pursued a

Josephite line concerning collaboration, a line that implies close

collaboration with the ruler. The fruit of this wedlock was Ivan the

Terrible (1533-84). The tsar then imprisoned the leading Non-

Possessors and closed the Transvolga hermitages (Ware, 104).

Outstanding disciples of St. Nilus were themselves condemned as

heretics. Pospielovsky believes that this accusation was not

completely groundless for at a heresy trial in 1531, monk Vassian




83

Patrikeev advocated monophysite heresy by rejecting Jesus’ full

humanity. After the victory of the Possessors, Pospielovsky

continues, many heretics found refuge in the compassionate, trans-

Volga sketes. Two centuries later, this area housed a major

concentration of the most persistent Old Believers (The Orthodox

Church in the History of Russia 60

This action condemned the movement to go underground and

the whole mystical movement disappeared from the surface of

Russian history for about two centuries, and thereby restricting their

influence. This was the period during which the Possessors reignedsupreme (Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality ). This victory

for the Possessors, undoubtedly attained because of their close

connection with the princes of Moscow, is shown by the

canonization of Joseph within a generation of his death; while Nilus

was canonized only in the twentieth century. Fedotov points out

The age of the Muscovite tsardom (the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries), so favorable to the growth of Russia’s political power, was very unfruitful with regard to the

spiritual life. Josephitism degenerated into static ritualismwith the gradual suppression of the caritative elements in




84

Russian traditional piety. But in spite of the general barbarization of morality during this period, it is impossibleto deny the strengthening of social discipline, the training of the will in public service, which shaped the “Great Russian”character as it is known through modern Russian literatureand history.

Pospielovsky thinks that Joseph was the pioneer (61) in Russia of the

theory of the theocratic character of royal prerogatives by which tsars

and princes were God’s representatives on earth. However, knowing

well that a centralized autocracy could lead to the liquidation of

monastic property, Joseph formulated a theory of disobedience to

tyrants using the following terms:

Should a tsar…fall pray to ugly passions and sins, greedinessand rage, cunningness and lies, pride and violence or, what iseven worse, want of faith and slander—such a tsar is notGod’s but devil’s servant; he is not a tsar but a tyrant … andthou shouldst not fulfill such tsar’s orders … even if torturedand threatened with murder.23

Yet, I believe that Joseph, in spite of his defense of the theocratic

character of the tsars, he could not forget the all the tradition of

martyrdom in the name of faith and his Russian roots. This Josephite

position will be seen some years later with St. Philips when

23 Qtd. in Pospielovsky (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 61).




85

confronting Ivan the Terrible. Pospielovsky adds that Joseph’s

teaching on resistance to heretical kings, also “allowed the Old

Ritualists in the seventeenth century to proclaim the ruling tsar to be

a servant of Satan, and thus to refuse his orders (The Orthodox

Church in the History of Russia 62).

The victory of the Possessors, Pospielovsky asserts, had also

direct consequences on the Great Schism of the seventeenth, on the

secularization of the Church and its complete subordination to state

bureaucracy by Peter the Great, and even on the Bolshevik victory of

militant atheism in the twentieth century (The Orthodox Church in

the History of Russia 57).

IVAN III THE TERRIBLE AND ST PHILIPS

The victory of the Possessors meant a close and friendly

collaboration between the State and the Church, which resulted in the

initial success of the Moscow Principality. Ivan was deeply

influenced by the teaching of the Possessors about the supreme

power of the tsar and firmly believed that he was divinely appointed.

Ivan was a deeply unstable man whose long rule could be called




86

despotic at best. Though intellectually brilliant, his change of moods

and increasing paranoia made for erratic policies and outright

savagery, particularly in the later years of his reign. He brought the

Moscow tsardom great successes but also its most serious reverses.

Ivan even took an active interest in Church affairs, composing hymns

and strictly executing all of the prescribed ritual. Zernov makes a

clear picture of him:

Ivan was the first Russian revolutionary. He inspired andcarried through that special type of revolution directed by thehead of the State which has since become a characteristicfeature of Russian history. He used his high authority as a

divine sanction for the brutal treatment of all those who stoodfor the traditional order. By doing so he undermined theorganic growth of Russian culture and prepared the groundfor the violence of Peter the Great’s reforms in the eighteenthcentury and for the Red Terror of the Communist experimentof the twentieth. He was, however, not solely responsible for this tragic turn in the history of Russia, for his whole outlook was shaped by the teaching of the Possessors. Their theory of the tsar’s illimitable power contributed much to Ivan’s abuseof the authority entrusted to him by the Russian people. (63)

Both Ivan, who considered himself the successor of the

Byzantine emperors, and his victims firmly believed that God was

the Ruler of the world and it was to Him that they one day would




87

have to give an account of their conduct. Thus, Russians perceived

Ivan as a punishment from above which was visited upon them

because of their sins, and they hoped that by God’s mercy their

sufferings would not last long. This aided them to face their trials

(63).

Illustration 15: Ivan the Terrible 24

24 See: <www.cgi.ebay.com>.




88

Precisely at this time the Church became convinced that it stood at thebeginning of a new age. According to its computations, the year 1492marked the end of the seventh and last millennium of the world’s history.The Last Days which had been promised in the Apocalypse wereapproaching. The Moscow Church counted on the end with such convictionthat it did not continue its calendar beyond 1492. The world should andmust come to an end at the end of the seventh millennium. Had there notbeen only seven councils? Were there not only seven days to the week,seven sacraments, and seven pillars of wisdom?

But the world did not end, and Metropolitan Zosimus had to have newEaster tables made. In the preface accompanying their publication he

heralded the dawn of a new Christian era. He further ordained that Godhad now chosen, after St. Vladimir, the “devout Ivan Vasilievich as tsar and

Autocrat of all Russia” to be a new Emperor Constantine for a newConstantinople, namely Moscow. At the beginning of the world’s eighthmillennium the Grand Duke of Moscow stood proclaimed by the highestdignitary of the Russian Church as the protector of Orthodoxy, and thedirect descendant of the devout Emperor Constantine (Benz 88).

Table 7: The Russian tsar—the “ ew Constantine”

However, the church, as noted, did not yield all

independence, and never allowed itself to be enslaved to this tyrant.

Ivan had created a special terror police called “oprichna” whose

alleged purpose was to “sniff out treason”. After Makarius’ death he

tried to look for obedient metropolitans of Moscow such as

Athanasius (Afanasii) and German (Herman), who turned out to be in

opposition to the terror police and died mysteriously. He then

appointed a third, St. Philip (died 1569), who dared to protest openly

against Ivan the Terrible’s bloodshed and injustice and bravely




89

rebuked him at his face during the public celebration of the Divine

Liturgy. Very eloquently, in a sermon preached in the Kremlin

cathedral, he said to the Sovereign the following words, witnessing

to Christian justice:

We are offering here the pure, bloodless sacrifice for thesalvation of men, but outside this holy temple the blood of Christians is being shed and innocent people are being killed.Hast thou, Sire, forgotten that thou, too, art dust and needestforgiveness of thy sins? Forgive, and thou shalt be forgiven,for only if we forgive our subordinates shall we escape divinecondemnation. Thou hast deeply studied the Holy Scriptures,and why hast thou not followed their counsel? He who doesnot love his neighbor is not of God.

The voice of the Church was heard in Philip’s intercessions for all of those who had suffered from Ivan’s cruelty. Ivan then imprisoned

him and later had him strangled (Ware 108). Zernov explains that

Philip was a martyr who died not in defense of the faith, as many

martyrs did, but in defense of Christian mercy so flagrantly violated

by the tsar (61).

During the reign of Feodor (Theodore)—Ivan’s successor—a

significant event happened in Russia: the elevation of the status of




90

the Russian Church to a Patriarchate.25 Yet, unfortunately, after his

death, leaving no heir, a period of serious trouble of almost thirty

years began for Russia. Ivan IV the Terrible had been the most

successful of the Muscovite Grand Princes in regard to expansion—

and also the most ruthless. His son Feodor (1584-1598) was not of

the same stock. Russia changed from being a threat to its neighbors

to becoming a target. But, as Fedotov asserts, the spiritual energies

latent during this age were unleashed in the great explosion known as

the Raskol (schism) in the Russian Church (The Russian Religious

Mind 7), which has not been healed even until today. Let us viewthese three events.

THE EMERGENCE OF MOSCOW AS A PATRIARCHATE

In 1589, under the reign of Theodor, Ivan’s son and last tsar

of the House of Rurik—a dynasty begun by Alexander Nevsky’s son

Daniel—, the metropolitan see at Moscow was elevated to

patriarchal status and its autocephaly from Constantinople, the

25 See “Primates of Russia, Metropolitans and Patriarchs of Kiev and Moscow” for a list of these relevant Church positions in Kiev and Moscow.




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Mother Church, was recognized (autocephaly meaning ecclesiastical

independence). However, the ancient metropolitanate of Kiev was to

remain under Constantinople for a century more. The Patriarch of

Moscow attained the same status as that held by the historic

patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria

within the Orthodox Church. Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah II came

to Moscow in 1588 to beg for alms for his Church, which, as already

noticed, has been devastated by the Turks. The Russian government,

occupied by Godunov, received him with great honor, settled him

and his attendance in luxurious conditions at the Kremlin, though infact, as Pospielovsky narrates, the Patriarch was kept under arrest. He

could not return to Constantinople until he recognized the

autocephaly of the Russian Church and, in 1589, Job became the first

Russian Patriarch. When Jeremiah returned to Constantinople, he

informed the other patriarchal sees, yet this fact did not make the

church stronger, as we will see in the Time of Troubles. The granting

of a patriarchate to the Russian Church supposedly allowed the latter

to adopt the Byzantine model of symphony between Emperor and




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Bishop, though it was not the case. To start with, for Pospielovsky,

Job was the creation of Godunov (The Orthodox Church in the

History of Russia 66-67).

With these patriarchal sees now in Muslim-dominated lands,

some began calling Moscow the “Third Rome,” and destined to

assume the leadership of world Christianity. Thus began the popular

conception of Holy Russia possessing a divine mission to hold forth

the light of faith to the rest of the world. The Russians took upon

themselves the cultural mission of Byzantium, becoming a link

between the East and the West and the defenders and exponents of the order built on the foundation of Orthodox Christianity. Yet, as

Zernov asserts, “the Russians could not reproduce that unique

combination of the Christian, Hellenistic and Oriental civilization,

which was the great achievement of the Byzantine Empire ... the

temptation which crippled the development of the southern Slavs”

(49). Instead, he said:

The Russians followed their own path, and they created a new

order, quite distinct from that of the Eastern Empire butinspired by the same ultimate vision of life. Moscow was




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little indebted to Constantinople in politics, economics andsocial organization, but it was conspicuously the heir of Byzantium in the realm of the spirit, in art, religion and,especially, worship. Here, the Russians followed the truetradition of the Second Rome, and were able to enrich it alongtheir own lines. It was through the wealth of the Byzantineliturgy that they entered so fully into the cultural inheritanceof the ancient world. (50)

Zernov continues saying that:

The Russian interpretation of Christianity was more artisticthan intellectual, being based on the vision of the Church as aliving organism rather than an institution. Salvation wasconceived not so much in terms of the forgiveness of the sinsof the individual, as in terms of a healing and sanctifying process which aimed at the transfiguration of men, of beastsand plants, and of the whole cosmos. St. Sergius was the first

to give harmonious expression to this typically Russianapproach to religion. He was able to fulfill the highestaspiration of the nation and he became the living example of unity in freedom (Sobornost ). (51)

Since the adoption of the title of tsar by the Grand Princes of

Moscow, the Russians had procured the establishment in Russia of

the Patriarchate. Also the fall of Constantinople—the new Rome on

the Bosporus—to the Turks in 1453 had forced the Russian Church

to pursue a new identity for herself. The end of the Byzantine Empire

did not extinguish the Byzantine tradition. Rather, its ideas and its




94

claims were taken over by the Russian rulers of Moscow. Benz

asserts that the Russian historical and ecclesiastical mentality sprang

out of the conception of Moscow as the “third Rome.” He adds that

The conquest of Constantinople affected Muscovy’sconception of her historical and ecclesiastical mission inmuch the same way as the conquest of Rome by the Germanictribes had affected Byzantium’s view of herself. Russiannational and ecclesiastical pride received an enormousimpetus from the notion that Moscow had become the “thirdRome.” After the collapse of the Byzantine Empire andChurch, the political claims of the Roman Imperium and thespiritual claims of the Byzantine Church were assumed byMuscovy and the Church of Moscow. (87)

The monk Philotheos had prophesied that “the first Rome fell

because of heresy, the second Rome fell because of infidelity to the

true Church doctrine ... Moscow will be the third Rome and a fourth

there shall not be”.26 Furthermore, after the Council of Florence in

1439, which the Russians perceived as apostasy, the Russian Church

now eventually perceived itself as the primary, if not sole guardian of

the purity of the Orthodox Christian faith. Moreover, tradition

dictated that emperors should be anointed by the Patriarchate, and his

26 Filofei, a monk from the Eleazar Monastery in Pskov, sketched this theory in aletter to tsar Vasilii III in 1510/1511. See Florovsky,Ways of Russian Theology .




95

absence was a challenge to the claims of the tsars to be the

successors of the Byzantine emperor. Yet, as events turned out, the

Moscow Patriarchate did not last more than a century.

A TIME OF TROUBLES (1584-1613)

Pospielovsky affirms that with Philips the Church leaders’

opposition to Ivan’s terror ended and “the silence of the Church once

again left the nation without visible moral leadership (66). He adds

that this fact “undoubtedly contributed to the instability of power and

absence of authority once Ivan died (1584); and the violence of thestate translated itself into violence of society” (66). This a period

called the Time of Troubles, period in which was brought to the

verge of collapse, as various princes and boyars fought to gain power

and war and famine spread throughout Russia. It was a dynastic

crisis after the death of Ivan childless heir, Theodore, in 1598. With

his death, Russia was, for its first time, left without any legitimate

heir to the throne. The country went through many rulers until the

beginning of the Romanov dynasty. The first was Boris Godunov, a




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boyar who had gained much power during Theodor’s reign. Godunov

had been elected by a Zemsky Sobor , or Assembly of the Land, at the

Patriarch Job’s suggestion. However his reign was short, lasting only

from 1598 to his death in 1605. His eight years of his rule was an

absolute disaster and not a peaceful one: a terrible famine (1601-3),

Church and boyar opposition, peasants fleeing from the estates, and

Cossack rebellions occurred.

At Boris Godunov’s death, a man claiming to be Dmitrii, a

young son of Ivan IV’s who had died mysteriously—either

accidentally or murdered, allegedly by Godunov’s agents—,organized a group of rebels and took the throne in 1605.He soon

deposed Patriarch Job for refusing to recognize him as the true son of

Ivan IV. The first bishop to recognize the Impostor was Ignatius,

whom the Pretender had elected as Patriarch. His reign lasted less

than a year because he was murdered by dissatisfied boyars. Next,

Prince Basil Shuiskii reigned from 1606-1610 as Basil IV, who

deposed Ignatius and replaced him with Hermogen. Yet, civil strife

broke as the nation refused to obey the new tsar and foreign




97

intervention continued to be a problem: Poles and Swedes invaded

Russia. His reign too was full of problems. Moscow suffered from a

Cossack rebellion which was put down. Another pretender, also

calling himself Dmitrii, appeared. The climax of calamity and

general anarchy was reached in 1610 when Basil IV was forced to

abdicate. The problem was that at his fall there was nobody

responsible for the order and unity of the land. It was a time of

complete moral collapse. Finally, another Zemsky Sobor elected

Mikhail Romanov to be tsar in 1613. Mikhail Romanov was the

grand-nephew of Ivan IV’s beloved late wife, Anastasia. His father Philaret (d.1633) became the patriarch of the church and the

country’s actual ruler in 1619.This was the beginning of the

Romanov dynasty.

Zernov considers the Time of Troubles as the last phase of the

social revolution started by Ivan the Terrible. By his indiscriminate

use of violence, he had weakened the moral solidarity of the nation

and let loose class rivalries and the dark passions always lurking in

human souls. After 1613, Russian made a sudden recovery and the




98

next forty years was a period of reconstruction and reform, in which

the Church played a main role. It was the force which helped the

Russians to overcome these temptations and to restore their unity and

vigor. Zernov mentions names such as such as St. Germogen, the

Patriarch of Moscow (1606-12); St. Dionisi, the Archimandrite, and

Avraami (Abraham) , the bursar, both of the Monastery of the Holy

Trinity of Radonezh; Kusma Minin-Sukhoruk and St. Juliania

Ossorgina of Lazorevsk (76, 79). As an illustration, during

Germonen’s (German) patriarchate, which coincided with the peak of

the time of troubles, he disseminated appeals to the Russian people todrive out the Poles and the Swedes from Russia. The Poles, who had

occupied Moscow imprisoned him in a Kremlin dungeon, trying

unsuccessfully to stop him. He died of starvation in the dungeon in

1612 as a national rebellion’s army approached Moscow. Patriarch

German was later canonized as a martyr for the faith. In these trying

years, the prestige of the Church as the defender of the faith and

nation increased as others besides German such as Dionisius,

Abraham or the monks of the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery




99

defended the nation from the invaders (Pospielovsky,The Orthodox

Church in the History of Russia 68). Saint Juliana Ossorgine

(d.1604) was canonized for her compassionate love and care of the

suffering people of her time.

This confusion [The dynasty gap] provided both Sweden and Poland withthe opportunity to gain respectively regain territory and influence. The

Poles conquered Smolensk, the Swedes Novgorod (1611). A faction of Boyars offered the crown to Vassily, son of King Sigismund III.of Poland. A Polish army entered Russia and defeated the Swedes (1610),marching triumphantly into Moscow. Yet Sigismund wanted to be crownedCzar himself, and establish a Dynastic Union of Poland-Lithuania-Russia.Russia’s Boyars, together with the Metropolit of Moscow, demanded that heconverted to Orthodox christianity and resided in Moscow. Sigismund, adevoted Catholic, was not prepared to do so. A Russian revolt forced thePoles to leave Moscow in 1612, ending the prospects of a peaceful union of Eastern Europe under one dynasty. In 1613, Mikhail Romanov wascrowned Czar, a date which is regarded the end of the time of troubles.The war with Sweden was ended in the PEACE OF STOLBOVO (1617);Russia ceded INGRIA and KEXHOLM LAND to Sweden, but regainedSwedish-occupied Novgorod. In 1619, Russia and Poland signed the TRUCEOF DEULINO. Russia ceded SMOLENSK, CHERNIGOV and SEVERIA toLithuania. In 1634, the truce was turned into a peace, and Vassilyrenounced his claim to the Russian throne, acknowledging Mikhail I. as the

legitimate Czar of Russia. (“Russia’s Time of Troubles”)

Table 8: The Swedish and the Polish in the Time of Troubles

For Pospielovsky, the Swedish invasion in the north and the

Polish one from the west meant the first large scale encounters

between Muscovite-Russia and western Europe. This left scars which




100

had two opposing effects, on the one side, Russia became very

defensive and isolationist, searching for protection from western

influences; on the other, some Russians became pro-westerners,

becoming admirers of Catholicism and/or Protestantism. Between

these two opposite trends of society lay the zealots, a movement

founded by the above-mentioned Dionisius. They sought to restore

Orthodoxy to its original purity and spiritual beauty, with the purpose

of morally uplifting and enlightening the nation. They used the

sermon as a main moral weapon by preaching not only in churches,

but in the streets (68). This reforming movement was led at the beginning by Dionisius and Patriarch of Moscow Filaret (1619-1633)

and from 1633 by a group of married parish clergy. According to

Ware, “this reforming group represented much of what was best in

the tradition of St Joseph of Volokalamsk” (110). Yet in 1652-3 there

started a quarrel between this reforming group and the new Patriarch

Nikon (1605-81) which would lead Russia into another crisis.

While in the Byzantine Empire, Church and state had

disputed with one another for many centuries, and a curious harmony




101

had emerged, the two powers adapting to one another and creating a

certain tradition of respect for each other’s limits and rights. There

was no time for anything of the sort in Muscovy as Russia was a

young nation, created by the dukes. From the beginning, the secular

rulers had taken over significant powers over ecclesiastical affairs.

As we have seen Ivan the Terrible made it clear that the Church

could not exercise even the last remnant of spiritual freedom: the

right to reprove the tsar if he openly violated ecclesiastical morals

and discipline. Yosifinism had so promoted the hegemony of the tsar

that the Church became weakened by this. Consequently, theByzantine “harmony” between the Basilea and the Hierosyne , was

shattered, and as Benz asserts, “a form of national Russian

Caesaropapism came into being, in what might be called a rightist

deviation from the original status of the Orthodox Church” (84).

From 1650 to 1667, Patriarch Nikon attempted reforms seeking the

restoration of original Byzantine relationship. Yet, as Benz states,

Nikon was departing from the Byzantine model too because in

opposing tsarism’s excessive authority over the Church, he requested




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a number of secular rights in addition to his spiritual powers. For

Benz, “Nikon’s claim to complete independence of the Church as

against the state represented, so to speak, the leftist deviation from

the Byzantine tradition” (84).

THE SCHISM OF THE OLD BELIEVERS

As we have seen, in northern Russia, at the beginning of the

seventeenth century we witness the end of the Time of Troubles with

the election of a new tsar, Mikhail Romanov (1613-1645). With him,

the three-century reign of the Romanov dynasty began. It would seeRussia grow from a minor eastern principality to a European great

power. But the Time of Troubles was followed, during the reign of

Aleksey (1645-1676), by the Old Believer (also called “Old

Ritualists”) Schism. In 1652 Aleksey (Alexis) chose metropolitan of

Novgorod, Nikon, to be patriarch of the Russian Church. Nikon was

extremely popular and gifted, but according to Ware, “he suffered

from an overbearing and authoritative character” (110). Furthermore,

Pospielovsky says that “Nikon was the very embodiment of action:




103

imperious, short tempered, impatient (The Orthodox Church in the

History of Russia 71). Nikon refused the position at first; however,

he accepted when he received the formal pledge of the leaders of

church and state that they would give unwavering obedience to the

gospels, the canons, the fathers of the Church, and to him personally

as the “chief pastor and supreme father” of the Russian Church.

During Great Lent in 1653 Nikon began his reform of church

practices which were to separate church and nation. Nikon greatly

admired the Greeks as it is seen by these words “I am a Russian and

the son of a Russia, but my faith and my religion are Greek.”27

Hisfirst Pastoral Epistle, as the Patriarch of Moscow, caused great

consternation because he solemnly declared in it that the Greeks

were right and the Russians wrong in all points on which they

differed from one another (Zernov 99). Thus in his reforms, he

demanded the adjustment of the Russian liturgical practices to

conform to those of the four ancient Patriarchates and the corrections

in the wording and spelling of liturgical texts according to Greek

27Qtd. in Ware (110) from Laura Ridding (Ed., 37).




104

usage. His impatient character impeded his scholarly analysis, he

used as models for his reforms the seventeenth-century Greek and

Kievan printed books, the former been published in Venice and

containing a few Latin insertions. This, Pospielovsky says, already

shocked the “zealots” members of the above mentioned reforming

movement. These were priests, who firmly believed in Russia’s

mission to reveal to the world the truth of Orthodoxy. They did not

only reject the latinization of the Kievan academy but also doubted,

as Russians generally did, the orthodoxy of the Greeks after the

Council of Venice (71, Zernov 93). Zealots such as the ArchpriestsAvvakum and Ivan Neronov, hairs of the Josephite tradition and

avatars of the Old Belief, tapped into a deep vein of nationalism and

reacted against the perceived slight to Russian customs. Pospielovsky

reasons that both Tihkon and the young Patriarch Alexis:

were dreaming of liberating the Balkan Christians from theTurkish Yoke, restoring the Byzantine Empire, with theRussian tsar and the Moskow Patriarch in Constantinople…Imagining himself in a church celebration with theEcumenical Patriarch, Nikon foresaw the difficulties that

would arise from the differences of ritual between the Greeksand the Russians, and he was eager to remove them by




105

aligning Russian Church ritual with Greek practice— especially since the visiting Greek clergy constantly criticizedRussian practice and assured the Russians that they werewrong. (72)

Furthermore, Nikon wanted to bring the Ukrainian Church to the

Moscow Patriarchate; however, this church followed Greek practices

and their service books differed from those of the Muscovy (73).

Nikon’s reforms, which included a modification of the sign of

the cross to conform to Greek usage—with three fingers instead of

two—sparked the schism of the Old Believers—or followers of

traditional religious rituals—lead by Avakum. Hopko, in Bible and

Church History (1972-1976) asserts that in Nikon’s time such

reforms—which appear of minor importance today—were explosive

since they meant a direct denial of the “third Rome” theory and

practice of the Russian church and state and seemed to place Russian

Orthodoxy in subjugation to the Eastern patriarchates, presently

suffering under the Turks because of their sins (according to Russian

mentality). Ware also explains that the question of the sign of the

Cross was not a trivial thing due to the great importance Orthodox




106

Russians—and Orthodox in general—have always attached to ritual

actions, that is to the symbolic gestures as an expression of the inner

belief of Christians. He thinks that in the eye of many “a change in

the symbol constituted a change in the faith” (111). Other reforms

consisted in spelling of the name “Jesus” and the singing of the

“alleluia” three times during psalmody instead of twice. In addition

to establishing Greek practices in Russia, Nikon also sought a second

aim, to make the church supreme over the State. Pospielovsky asserts

that the “confrontation between the established Church and the Old

Ritualists was exacerbated by the fact that both sides wereJosephites, and the struggle was not merely for the right to coexist

but to be the state religion” (62).




107

Illustration 16: Patriarch ikon (1652-58) 28

In 1657 on his return from the fighting on the Polish front,

tsar Alexis found his church and nation in chaos. Nikon, who acted

as the tsar’s regent in his absence, had proceeded with no tact and

continued with his reforming program, in spite of the opposition led

by parish priests such as Avvakum or Neroonov, who themselves

were considered “reformers”, as well as monks and laity people. As

mentioned above, they had been calling for a return among the

people of strict obedience to the traditional rites and customs of the

Russian Church. But the opponents to the Nikonian reforms were28 See: <www.russia.nypl.org>.




108

severely persecuted and punished, suffering exile, imprisonment, and

even death in same cases. Nikon had acted confident that Alexis

would support his actions by punishing those who were disobedient

to him as “chief pastor and supreme father” of the Russian Church;

however, the tsar was not pleased with his actions and his open

statement of displeasure caused the patriarch to resign in 1658 after

publicly rebuking him. From that time until 1666 Russia had no

acting patriarch. Nikon withdrew into semi-retirement, but without

resigning the office of Patriarch. Alexis tried to make up with Nikon,

but to no avail.In 1666, the tsar Alexis requested a great council, which was

held in Moscow (1666-67). He invited the Eastern Patriarchs to join

the Council, which was presided over by the bishops of Alexandria

and Antioch. It was engineered by the unscrupulous Metropolitan of

Gaza, Paisios Ligarides. The council decided in favor of Nikon’s

reforms, but against his person. Then, on the basis of minor

differences in rituals, the council excommunicated and

anathematized the opponents of Nikon’s reforms—several million




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believers—from the Church. Then they condemned and deposed

Nikon, his deposition following a still more rigorous repression and

reduction of the spiritual freedom of the Church, and the complete

success of Yosifinism. The Old Believers were violently persecuted,

and sent into exile and harsh labor. The Greek prelates not only

condemned the old rituals, but also officially refuted the Council of a

Hundred Chapters—the most venerated of Russian Church

councils—which was held, as mentioned, in 1551, in the reign of

Ivan the Terrible, thus formally renouncing to the “third Rome”

theory and the assumed supremacy of Russian Orthodoxy over allother churches. Although he never changed his position and never

yielded his opposition to the council of 1666-1667, Nikon was buried

in the church with full patriarchal dignity. In 1682, Archpriest

Avvacum (1620-1680), who openly opposed the Council’s decision,

went into the schism with the Russian Orthodox Church and was

burned alive with three of his supporters for the “great blasphemies

... uttered against the tsar and his household” (Ware 110-114). For

Fedotov, the Old Ritualists, or Old Believers stood entirely upon




110

traditional ecclesiastical grounds, and represented the strongest moral

force in Muscovite society. He considers the belligerent Archpriest

Avvakuum, the leading figure of the movement, a writer of genius,

as the exponent of Muscovite spirituality (The Russian Religious

Mind 7).

Illustration 17: Avvacum, the Holy Martyr (1620-1680) 29

For Ware, the Old Believers, in spite of embodying the finest

elements in the tradition of medieval Russian piety,

does not embrace all the richness of Russian thought becauseit represents but a single aspect of Russian Christianity—the

29 See: <www.cus.cam.ac.uk>.




111

tradition of the Possessors. The defects of the Old Believersare the Josephite defects writ large: too narrow a nationalism,too great an emphasis on the externals of worship. Nikon too,despite his Hellenism, is in the end a Josephite: he demandedan absolute uniformity in the externals of worship, and likethe Possessors he freely invoked the help of the civil arm inorder to suppress all religious opponents. More than anythingelse, it was his readiness to resort to persecution which madethe schism definitive. Had the development of Church life inRussia between 1550 and 1650 been less one-sided, perhaps alasting separation would have been avoided. If men hadthought more (as Nilus did) of tolerance and freedom insteadof using persecution, then a reconciliation might have beeneffected; and if they had attended more to mystical prayer,they might have argued less bitterly about ritual. Behind thedivision of the seventeenth century lie the disputes of thesixteenth. (112-113)

This group, the remote descendants of St. Joseph, who,having identified religion with ritual, and had chosen to die rather

than accept a corrected version of the service books, became the first

of a long series of sectarian movements characteristic of modern

developments in Russian religion. This group remains separate to

this day from the main body of Orthodoxy. Before 1917, their

numbers were officially assessed at two million, today there are

approximately five million Old Believers of various denominations

in Russia, some of whom, known as “coreligionists”, are in




112

Eucharistic communion with the Russian Orthodox Church. After the

schism of 1666, the Old Believers thought that the reign of Antichrist

had begun in the official Church and, seeking to die as martyrs for

Jesus, about 20.000 burned themselves to death in mass immolation.

This idea was confirmed in their beliefs with the accession to the

Russian throne of Peter the Great, who tried violently to westernize

Russia and presented fierce opposition to traditional Russian ways,

and with the transfer of the capital of the Russian empire to St.

Petersburg in the eighteenth century. The Old Believers, in their

desire to preserve the pure Orthodox faith and rituals of Russia,succeeded in preserving ancient Russian forms of iconography and

liturgical chant which otherwise would likely have been lost in

history (Pospielovsky 73).

But in the seventeenth century, another problem beset the

Church in Russia, that of the so called Unia or Uniates. The Ukraine,

or ‘Little Russia’ as it was known, witnessed the development on its

soil of a Church which while worshipping according to the Byzantine

rites, it owed allegiance to the Pope of Rome. Hierarchs in the




113

Orthodox Church in the Ukraine had decided to a union with the

Roman Church under the influence of Polish Latin-rite Jesuits, taking

with them a large number of their flock. These Greek Catholics, at

times proscribed and at times granted freedom under the emperor’s

dispensation, have undergone a precarious existence within the

boundaries of the Russian Empire (“A History of the Russian

Church”).

4. THE CHURCH IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA: THESYNODAL PERIOD (1700-1917)30

1. THE CHURCH IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA: THE XVIIICENTURY

By the eighteenth century the Muscovite period of Russian

history had declined and had been overshadowed by the spectacular,

cruel reign of Peter I the Great (1682-1725), a westernizer and

secularizer of Russia representing the reign of western state in Russia

Yet, he was also man who brought Russia into the twentieth century.

As we have seen from the nature of the development of tsarism in the

30 As in previous sections, to give a deeper contextual perspective, some of thehistorical data pertinent to the period will be shown in different tables, which have been adapted from general articles on the history of Russia.




114

previous pages, it must have been an easy matter for Peter I the Great

to follow with the principles of absolutism regarding the Church.

Peter was the first Russian ruler to assume the title “imperator ”,

which was passed on to his successors.

Like his predecessor, Ivan the Terrible, Peter gained a

reputation for arbitrariness and cruelty, and many of his subjects,

traditional Orthodox Christians, were opposed to his reforms and

thought him to be in reality the devil incarnate. From the beginning

of his reign, Peter persecuted independent minded clergy. In 1691,

for example, he executed Sylvester Medvedev, one of Russia’s besteducated clerics and a founder of the Moscow Academy—allegedly

for Latin heresy, though ten years later he elected Yavorskii, a

latinizer, as patriarchallocum tenens . Nevertheless, there were also

reflective churchmen who, in spite of being wholly aware of the

flaws of Peter’s reforms, submitted to them without necessarily

agreeing with them. As other tsars have done, he regarded himself as

a sovereign ruler who could re-structure the Russian Church to befit




115

him as a secularizing statesman. In this sense, as Florovsky states in

Ways of Russian Theology :

Peter scarcely resembles those who came before him. Thedissimilarity is not confined to temperament or to the fact thatPeter “turned to the West.” He was neither the first nor theonly westerner in Muscovy at the end of the seventeenthcentury. Muscovite Russia stirred and turned toward the Westmuch earlier. In Moscow Peter encountered an entiregeneration reared and educated in thoughts about the West, if not in western thinking. He also found a firmly settled colonyof Kievan and “Lithuanian” emigrants and scholars, and inthis milieu he discovered an initial sympathy toward hiscultural enterprises. What is innovative in this Petrine reformis not westernization but secularization. (78)

Peter was also quite aware of the Church’s potential political

influence, thus he abolished the Russian long-cherished Institution of

Patriarchate after the death of Adrian in 1700, the last of the

seventeenth century patriarchs. The Patriarch was an arch-

conservative man, a position that was imposed on him by his arch-

conservative mother and his brother. Peter had been particularly

irritated by Adrian’s enthronement encyclical in which he had

repeated Nikon’s formula of the priority of patriarchate’s power over

the royalty. After the patriarch’s death Peter prevented the immediate




116

convocation of a council to elect a new patriarch and reestablished

the government of the Church on a synodal basis by replacing it with

an Ecclesiastical College (later called the Holy Synod). This Synod

remained responsible for church affairs until 1918, when the

Moscow Patriarchate was restored. It meant that for the first time, the

fate of the Church was decided by the tsar with no clergy

participation. He had to wait until the death of the Patriarch,

Pospielovsky explains, because although the patriarchal system was

weakened by Peter’s centralized autocracy, with the patriarchate still

remaining, he could not attain his purpose of total secularization andcommand over the population (The Orthodox Church in the History

of Russia 107).




117

Illustration 18: Peter I the Great 31

In an effort to bring that country in line with what he saw to be a more

advanced western Europe, Peter I the Great had embarked on the mostambitious reform effort yet seen in Russia. In the Great Northern Waragainst Charles XII’s Sweden, Peter conquered the territory along the NevaRiver that would be home to his new capital city, St. Petersburg, foundedin 1803. Having spent several years traveling in western Europe, hemodeled “Sankt Pieterburg” (which he gave an explicitly Dutch name) after

Amsterdam and Venice, with their canals, and Bourbon Paris, with its grandpalatial buildings. Among other things, he forced men to shave their beardsand to don western clothing in place of the traditional caftan. He alsoestablished an order of rankings for the nobility, which he centralized underhis own control. Among the casualties of his reforms were the old BoyarDuma and the Zemsky Sobor, which were replaced by a Ruling Senateunder supervision of a procurator responsible directly to the tsar. ThusPeter moved Russia in a decisively absolutist direction (Adapted from “A Capsule History of Russia”).

Table 9: Historical data about Peter I the Great (1721-1725)

31 See: <www.nndb.com>.




118

After the death of Adrian, Peter chose Stephen (Stefan)

Yavoskii, a professor of the Kiev Academy to be consecrated as

metropolitan of the Russian church—the youngest ever elected—

with the unprecedented title of “Exarch, Keeper and Administrator of

the Patriarch Throne.” However, since the exarch was a

representative, typically of a patriarch, the absence of the patriarch

made Stephen a representative of the tsar. Pospielovsky states that he

chose Ukrainians instead of men from the Russian tradition, who

would have approved of his reforms, because he did not seek reforms

but a whole revolution within the church and no Great Russianswould have never agreed on that. This historian says that Ukrainians,

“as strangers to the Great Russian Traditions, had to rely on the

emperor’s authority and support and would therefore support any of

his actions. In addition, he felt that they, as westerners, would in

general be more sympathetic to his imitation of things western (The


For the design of this Synod he followed the Lutheran model

suggested by Samuel von Pufendorf, the German Lutheran and




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placed Moscow at the head of the Synod, which was composed of the

Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Moscow, which was the see of the

patriarchate, and Kiev, the mother city of Russian Christianity. The

administration of the Church was overseen by the procurator of the

Synod, a lay man, who was answerable to the emperor alone and had

the power to appoint and transfer bishops at will. Therefore, in its

outward administration at least, the Russian Orthodox Church, had

been transformed into an imperial “ministry of religion” and its voice

in society could be heard but faintly. It is possible, as Pospielovsky

puts is, that his prolonged trip to Europe in 1698 had influenced thisdecision. On this trip, Peter had become acquainted with the situation

in Lutheran Prussia and Anglican England, where the king was the

head of the church and Defender of the Faith. The tsar had had long

conversations with Anglican theologians and with members of the

royal family and this led him to conclude that the Church should be

subordinated to the head of the state (The Orthodox Church in the

History of Russia 105).




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Peter’s reforms were in the making since 1700 in his attempt

to weaken the church and to use it as his own tool. One of his

measures had been the granting of special powers to the Senate over

the Church. As a consequence, in 1721, Theofan Prokopovich, a

young theologian from the Kievan academy consecrated bishop at

the tsar’s request, drafted aSpiritual Regulation (also translated as

Spiritual Rule ) from which a “College for Spiritual Affairs” was set

up. As Schmemann asserts inThe Historical Road of Eastern

Orthodoxy (1977), Prokopovich, who became the chief assistant of

Peter in his ecclesiastical reforms, “brought into Russia all the basic principles of the Protestant territorial Church, its concept of the

relations between Church and state, according to which the visible or

earthly Church was conceived as also a religious projection of the

state itself (169). In the era of Prokopovich many clerics were

executed, tortured, and imprisoned, as Pospielovsky asserts, not

because they were guilty of crimes, but because they had

independent thought, therefore trying to “force them to give up their




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dreams of some Byzantine symphony or dualism of power (The


Through the institution of the synod the Church became a

governmental department. All bishops were forced to pledge their

acceptance of the new system and to all members of the dynasty.

Also, until 1901 its members in their oath had to call the emperor

“the high judge of this Sacred College,” and all its decisions were

adopted “by its authority, granted by His Imperial Majesty.” Because

the bishops protested that “college” was not an ecclesiastical term, it

was changed to “Holy Synod”. Pospielovsky reasons that theSpiritual Regulation was neither a regulation nor spiritual, but rather

“an ideological manifesto of sorts, venomous and contemptuous of

Church traditions, the Russian clergy, and the canon law (The

Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 111).” Later, eastern

patriarchs canonically recognized the Holy Synod. As we will see

these radical reforms would not be repudiated until the revolution of

1917.




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Schmemann explains that there was a basic ambiguity in the

relations between Church and state which infected the thinking of

both state and Church alike:

The Russian Church in essence and in good conscience didnot accept Peter’s reform. For it the emperor remained God’sAnointed, and it continued to accept this anointment in theterms of Byzantine or Muscovite theocracy. Therefore stateand Church interpreted the imperial authority in differentways, proceeding from almost contradictory presuppositions.The Russian Church was now anointing western absolutismwith the Byzantine anointment to the throne, meaning theconsecration of the earthly emperor to serve as Christianbasileus . From this point of view, Byzantine anointing withoil is theocratically a limitation, not the absolutizing of imperial authority. (The Historical Road of Eastern

Orthodoxy )This historian further comments that Peter’s reforms, which caused a

sharp break in a theocratic tradition, and the whole Petersburg period

can be accused of depriving the Church of its freedom and

independence. Yet he adds:

But the Church had not been free, in the modern sense of theterm, since the time of Constantine the Great—neither inByzantium nor in Moscow. Yet without being free, it was stilldistinct from the state and had not been dependent on it for itsvery existence, structure, and life. However far the departures

from “symphony,” they were always departures and sooner or later recognized as such—as, for example, when the state




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itself venerated its own victims. This occurred because thestate recognized a law higher than itself, Christian truth, of which the Church was the preserver. Western absolutism, born out of struggle against the Church, denied that it had anyright to be the conscience of the state and squeezed it withinthe narrow framework of “ministering to spiritual needs,”which the state itself defined, as it defined how they should be ministered to.

Pospielovsky says that as a secular statesman and a

pragmatic, Peter favored secular education with an applied and

professional education; however, he was not successful as the

ecclesiastical schools continued to grow and became Russia’s best

educational establishments, lasting even until the fourth decade of

the nineteenth century. Yet, although with Peter ecclesiastical

education underwent an unprecedented quantitative growth, he also

gave a deadly blow to the Moscow Academy, by preferring teachers

from the Ukraine and the Belorussia because of their western links

via the Polish schools. This also brought a completely latinization of

the Moscow academy. As mentioned, Peter himself, in his

ecclesiastical transformations, had relied on the Kievans and had

used them to replace the native Russian bishops. Consequently, the




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Russian divinity school (twenty-six seminaries were opened before

1750) was a Latin school in language and in the spirit of its teaching,

evolved in complete disengagement from the true tradition of

Orthodoxy. Kiev emerged victorious. Peter also closed Novgorod

College, which was just starting to develop a purer Greek-Russian

educational system and to revive the study of Patristics. Similarly, as

Pospielovsky comments, Peter’s closing of this school cause a delay

of the revival of Orthodox patristic theology by at least a century

(The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 113). Schmemann

believes that this latinization of Russian theology also produced adichotomy between theological ‘learning’ and ecclesiastical

experience as people prayed in Slavic but clerics theologized in Latin

(171). Similarly, Pospielovsky says that:

the west-Russian pedagogues latinized the fledging Russianseminary education to such an extent that the language wasnot even taught as a subject until the last decades of theeighteenth century. Slavonic and Greek were taughtsuperficially …The tragedy for the Russian clergy was thatthe education they received was mostly irrelevant to theRussian reality, as well as to their future pastorate (113)




125

He further explains that this clergy lacked the knowledge of Church

Slavonic in which the services were officiated and had only a vague

idea of Orthodox patristic theology on which their pastorate and

sermons were supposed to be based (114).

Ware says that those who rejected the dry scholasticism of the

theological academies, instead of turning to the teachings of

Byzantium and ancient Russia, were influenced by religious or

pseudo-religious movements in the west, namely Protestant

mysticism, German pietism, or Freemasonry (116).32 By the

beginning of the nineteenth century, all teaching was conducted inLatin. Protestant theology was learned by rote to combat Catholic

propaganda and Latin theology was learned in the same manner to

combat the Protestants (“A History of the Russian Church”). Yet,

Ware consents that in spite of the latinization, the standards of

scholarship were high (116). Schmemann also says that:

In the ecclesiastical and theological experience of the RussianChurch, this theological westernizing of course played afateful role which must not be underestimated. Yet still, after

32 On pain of excommunication, Orthodox are strictly forbidden to becomeFreemasons.




126

centuries of Muscovite darkness, after the break with allscholarly and cultural traditions, mental discipline returnedfor the first time to the Church, and education and theinspiration of creative work returned as well (171).Most of Peter’s 18th-century successors, who followed each

other in quick succession, were mainly Germans by birth. Zernov

says that:

They appeared strange, shadowy figures to the nation.Dressed in comic, pompous French costumes or Prussianuniforms, often speaking only broken Russian, having thementality and horizon of the petty princelings of the smallGerman States, they were in most cases the pathetic victimsof their abysmal ignorance, moral corruption and completeisolation from the rest of the country. They led an artificial

existence in an artificial city, created by the dynamic will of Peter the Great. They and the society which surrounded themhad no personality, no style of their own; they were crudeimitations of the West, always trying to reproduce the lastword in European fashion and manners. (123)

They were mainly empresses beginning with his widow, Catherine I.

In the following table, there is a list of early Romanov tsars and

tsarinas to help you follow the historical discourse:

Mikhail, 1613–45

Alexei, 1645–76Feodor III, 1676–82

Peter II, 1727–30

Anna, 1730–40Ivan VI, 1740–41




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Ivan V, co-tsar with Peter I, 1682–96Peter I “the Great”, 1682–1725Catherine I, 1725–27

Elizabeth, 1741–62Peter III, 1762Catherine II, “the Great”, 1762–96

Table 10: Early Romanov tsars and tsarinas

The terror initiated by Peter reached its peak under Empress

Anna (Peter’s niece: 1730-40), and did not calm down even under

Catherine II (1762-96). In the time of Catherine I (1725-27)

and Peter II (1723-30), a Supreme Privy Council reigned and the

“ruling Synod” was made subject to the Senate. This aroused

Prokospovich’s ire who plotted against it, given an opportunity e

with the reign of Anna, a niece of Peter the Great. As indicated, withAnna a decade of mismanagement and terror began. She executed

several thousand people, including the “supremists,” the members of

the Supreme Privy Council, and sent over twenty thousand people to

Siberia. In his effort to root out all traces of Catholicism, so hated byProkopovich, he had hundreds of monks and priests tortured and

imprisoned. After Anna, an infant, Ivan (1740-1741), was named

tsar. His regent was his mother brought up in Germany and

surrounded by Germans. But this was more than Russians could




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tolerate and in 1741 a coup attempt by the imperial guard placed the

very Russian Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s younger daughter, on the

throne. With Elizabeth, a pious and good-hearted woman, the church

and the clergy had a respite. She released all of Anna’s political

prisoners and restored the Synod to its original status. She also took

measures to improve clergy’s education. Under her other procurators

were placed in charge of the Holy Synod. Her successor, Peter III, a

Lutheran, born and raised in Germany, was overthrown within a year

and killed in another coup attempt by the imperial guard. In 1762,

they enthroned his brilliant widow, Catherine II the Great, the mostformidable of these empresses (Pospielovsky,The Orthodox Church

in the History of Russia 116-120).

Catherine II’s long reign coincided with a number of

significant events, including the French Revolution. Catherine was a

German princess brought to Russia to marry the young heir to the

Russian throne, Peter III, Elizabeth’s nephew, who was equally

German in origin (The Empress Elizabeth had no children of her

own.). An aficionado of the French Enlightenment, she corresponded




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with a number of philosophers, particularly Voltaire and Diderot.

However, the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 moved her in a

more conservative direction and during her reign Russia witnessed

one of the most disastrous consequences of the Holy Synod: the

confiscation of monastic land-holdings. Severe restrictions were also

placed upon those wishing to pursue a monastic vocation.

Notwithstanding, this Synodal period that existed until the

1917 Revolution did not mean a period of total decline, and

stagnation for the Church, for even if it existed under non-canonical

dispensation, it continued being recognized by the other easternOrthodox Churches. Also, the spiritual life continued interrupted in

spite of its façade of westernization, decline and complete

compliance or subservience. There was also an obvious rebirth of

monasticism in Russia and a new, unforgettable emergence of

holiness, and the true life of Orthodoxy continued without

interruption with true monks and pastors. The eighteenth century was

illumined by St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724-83), Bishop of Voronezh,

a great preacher and a fluent writer.




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Illustration 19: St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724-83) 33

He was a good example of one who borrowed from the West as

many of his contemporaries did, but who, at the same time, remained

firmly rooted in the classic tradition of Orthodox spirituality. Ware

describes him in a very enlightening way which can give us a clue

about this “eclectic” westernization of Orthodox spirituality:

He drew upon German and Anglican books of devotion; hisdetailed meditations

upon the physical sufferings of Jesus are more typical of Roman Catholicism than of Orthodoxy; in his own life of prayer he underwent an experience similar to the Dark Nightof the Soul, as described by western mystics such as Saint

33 See: <www.serfes.org>.




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John of the Cross. But Tikhon was also close in outlook toTheodosius and Sergius, to Nilus and the Non-Possessors.Like so many Russian saints, both lay and monastic, he took aspecial delight in helping the poor, and he was happiest whentalking with simple people—peasants, beggars, and evencriminals. (116-117)

Notwithstanding, in this period of “ill-advised

westernization”, as Ware calls it, not only Church theology was

transformed, but also Church art and Church music: iconography

became naturalized religious portrait painting and hymnography

betrayed the influence of European baroque music or even secular

opera (116).

2. THE CHURCH IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA: THE XIXCENTURY

By the beginning of the 19th century, Russia was by far the

largest country in the world. Not only had it reached the Pacific, but

it had established colonies in Russian America, or Alaska. The

outward appearance was not different from the previous centuries:

the Romanov continued reigning, the Holy Synod continued




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silencing the Church, and conflict with other nations kept emerging.

For Zernov:

The nineteenth century opened a new page in the history of the Empire. The dynasty was at last stabilized, a fusion of Russian and western cultures seemed to have been achieved,and Russia took a prominent place in the life of the westernnations. But the impression of power produced by the Empirewas an illusion; deep-rooted contradictions sapped its vitality,and the State founded by Peter failed to become the home of the Russian people. (74)

Let us view a list of the last tsars of the Romanov dynasty for a better

understanding of the historical context of this period:

Paul I, 1796–1801 l

Alexander I, 1801–25

Nicholas I, 1825–55

Alexander II, 1855–81

Alexander III, 1881–94

Nicholas II, 1894–1917

Table 11: Late Romanov tsars

The nineteenth century really began with Catherine’sgrandson, Alexander I. His son Paul’s reign was merely a transitional

one. Paul treated the clergy with great reverence. In his time, the

extent of the procurator’s power had not yet been fully established.

When Alexander I became emperor, Napoleon was on the march to




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conquer Russia, but his forces dealt a decisive blow to the French.

Like his grandmother, Alexander began his reign as a reforming tsar

but became increasingly conservative with time. In 1817, Alexander

amalgamated the Synod and the Department of Education into the

Ministry of Spiritual Affairs, better known as the Dual Ministry. Yet

at this time arrived the first translation into Russian of Scripture,

from Hebrew and Greek, undertaken by the Bible Society, an

affiliate of the British Bible Society. The amalgamation of Synod and

Department of education was later abolished and the Synod was

separated from the Minister of Education, but it had its consequencesas Shishkov, a Minister of Education, continued illegally to give

orders to the Synod. He, for example, led a campaign against the

Bible in Russian (Pospielovsky,The Orthodox Church in the History

of Russia 136-139).

With Alexander I’s successor, Nicholas I, there came a

succession of Ministers of Education, procurators, and other events

that were fatal to the Church. The Church had to endure the rule of

Prince Alexander Golitsyn (1773-1844), who, according to the




134

fashion of the time, exchanged his rationalism for pietism, which he

tried to impose upon the Russian hierarchy. As an illustration, the

bishops were surrounded with police informers whose duty was to

report every move they made, and every word or sermon they

preached. Under this tsar, as Pospielovsky states, “the process of

converting the Church into a state bureaucracy totally subordinated

to the government, which had begun under Peter the Great, was

completed (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 144).”

Nicholas was succeeded in 1855 by his son, Alexander II, whose

reign was comparatively liberal and tolerant. Alexander is bestknown for having freed the serfs in 1861. He introduced this and

many other reforms but, as Zernov asserts,

The changes came too late to save the Empire, for they werenot radical enough to be acceptable either to the peasants or tothe educated classes. The rift between the bureaucracy of St.Petersburg and the rest of the country was rapidly widening,and Alexander was murdered by the group of extremists who,in their passion to imitate Europe, could not be satisfied withanything less than a republic with a radical social programme.(75)




135

A more liberal atmosphere was introduced into the

administration of the Church during the reign of Alexander II, but

this freedom was suppressed by the all-powerful Procurator

Pobedonostsev (1827-1907) (Zernov 75), as we will see, the

advocate of extreme reaction, also influencing the relation between

the Church and the State during the last stages of the Empire’s decay

during the reigns of Alexander III (1881-94) and Nicholas II (1894-

1917).

Although the outward life of the Russian Orthodox Church in

the nineteenth century differed little from that of the previouscentury, under its tribulation, the Russian Church overcame these

tribulations from within as it grew in holiness and flourished in

different ways. Schmemann is right when he says that:

One cannot reduce the history of Russia to the history of her culture, political struggle, social movements, or economicdevelopment, and forget this dimension of holiness, whichdrew so many to it (and not only the common people by anymeans)—this gradual but inspiring inward liberation of Orthodoxy from its bureaucratic destiny. To ignore this process would mean to overlook something most essential in

the spiritual progress of Russia and of all Orthodoxy, in that




136

crucial nineteenth century when the curtain was already risingon the “accomplishments” of the twentieth. (171)

Ware, like many other historians, affirms that the second partof the Synodal period, the nineteenth century, was a time of great

revival in the Russian Church as Russia turned away from the

contemporary religious and pseudo-religious movements of the west,

and relied once again upon the true spiritual forces of Orthodoxy.

Along with this revival in spiritual life there emerged a new

enthusiasm for missionary work and an own theology which freed

Orthodoxy from a slavish imitation of the west. For Ware this

religious renewal sprang from Mount Athos. He illustrates his point

with Paissy Velichkovsky (1722-1794), who fled to Mount Athos

and became a monk. Paissy was horrified by the secular tone of the

teaching. Ware comments that

He was deeply influenced by Nilus and the Non-Possessors, but he did not overlook the good elements in the Josephiteform of monasticism: he allowed more place than Nilus haddone to liturgical prayer and to social work, and in this wayhe attempted, like Sergius, to combine the mystical with thecorporate and social aspect of the monastic life. (117)




137

Illustration 20: St. Paissy Velichkovsky 34

Paissy, who translated the Philokalia 35 into Slavonic,

emphasized the practice of continuous prayer—above all the JesusPrayer—and the need to obey an elder or starets . Although he never

returned to Russia, under the inspiration of his disciples, a monastic

revival disseminated across Russia. They reinvigorated existing

houses and made many new foundations. Consequently while there

were 452 monasteries in Russia in 1810, in 1914 the number grew to

1,025. This monastic movement, Ware explains, restored the

34 See: <www.mega.km.ru>.35 During the years 1815-94, St, Theophan the Recluse issued a greatly expandedtranslation of the Philokalia in five volumes in Russia.




138

tradition of the Non-Possessors, largely suppressed since the

sixteenth century (118). Schmemann asserts that with these and other

spiritual centers “the ancient but eternally youthful traditions of

Orthodoxy were very clearly restored, and the full force of the never-

silent summons to ‘do honor to the heavenly calling’ (171).”

Thus nineteenth-century Russia was particularly marked by a

high development of the practice of spiritual direction. Although the

“elder” had been a characteristic figure in many periods of Orthodox

history, this century in Russia was par excellence the age of the

starets (also spelt “staretz”) The first and greatest of these elders of the nineteenth century was Seraphim of Sarov (1759-1833), a true

believer in the Orthodox doctrine of deification. For the Russians, the

greatest saint of this age, Seraphim of Sarov’s spirituality, like that of

Sergius six centuries earlier, focused on internal prayer and

compassion for the poor, combined with spiritual insight and

guidance. St. Seraphim was at the fount of monastic spirituality of

‘eldership’, whereby a monk with charismatic gifts of insight and

compassion would become spiritual confessor to thousands of




139

people, occasionally acquiring a reputation as a healer. The elders,

although never formally institutionalized by the Church, enjoyed

great authority with Orthodox believers, both educated and simple. It

is, however, an indication of the divorce between Church and culture

that had occurred in Russia by this time that her greatest holy man,

Seraphim of Sarov, and her greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, were

unaware of each other’s existence.

Illustration 21: St. Serafim of Sarov 36

36 See: <www.fatheralexander.org>.




140

The Philokalia (Gk. The Love of Good Things) is a collection of texts bymasters of the eastern Orthodox, hesychast tradition, writing from thefourth to the fifteenth centuries on the disciplines of Christian prayer and alife dedicated to God. Most of the authors were monks (“Philokalia”).

Table 12: The Philokalia

But Seraphim left no successor in the art of spiritual direction,

and after his death, another community took up his work, the

hermitage of Optina. From 1829 until 1923, when the monastery was

closed by the Bolsheviks, a succession of startsy or elders ministered

there, their influence extending, as did that of Seraphim, over the

whole of Russia. These elders of the ancient monastery of Optina

Pustyn in south-west Moscow also gradually helped to overcome the

gap between culture and faith.




141

Illustration 22: The Monastery of Optina 37

From its very beginning, Russian Orthodoxy was characterized by a thrivingpilgrimage tradition. Strongly influenced by similar notions in ByzantineChristianity, Russian Orthodoxy believed that icons functioned as suitableimitations of Christ and the saints, and that relics had miraculous powers.While Protestantism would later abolish the practice of pilgrimage in manyparts of Europe, Russian Orthodoxy encouraged the worship of icons andthe tradition of pilgrimage as a way of life. In the 17th through 19thcenturies tens of thousands of Russians, both peasants and educated citydwellers, went upon long walking pilgrimages to the great monastic centersin order to worship and behold the sacred icons and relics. The famous19th century spiritual diary The Way of a Pilgrim provides a fascinatingview into the lifestyle of a wandering pilgrim. The anonymous author

writes: “I made up my mind to go to Siberia to the tomb of St. Innocent of Irkutsk. My idea was that in the forests and steppes of Siberia I shouldtravel in greater silence and therefore in a way that was better for prayerand healing. And this journey I undertook, all the while saying my oralprayer without stopping.” (“Sacred Sites of Russia”)

Table 13: Pilgrimage in Russia

37 See: <http://answers.com>.




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In the 19th century many elders came from different parts of

Russia to live and teach at Optina Pustyn. These elders shared their

spiritual experience with both lay practitioners and the community of

monks, they wrote and translated books, and ministered to the poor

and sick. Optina Pustyn became a place of pilgrimage and the center

for those seeking to renew the spiritual life of Russia, not only for the

vast multitude of Russia’s peasant wanderers but also for the leading

cultural figures of the time. Then best known of Optino elders or

startsy are Leonid (1768-841), Macarius (1788-1860), and Ambrose

(?). Furthermore, Optina influenced writers such as Lev Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol and Feodor Dostoevsky, and the philosopher Vladimir

Solovyov. Dostoevsky, for example, was consoled by St. Ambrose

after his three-year old son died. In hisThe Brothers Karamazov the

reader can find an accurate rendering of the monastery and its holy

men. The anonymousThe Way of a Pilgrim vividly reflects the

religious atmosphere of the time (Ware 120-121).

The monastery of Optina Pustyn is located on the right bank of the ZhizdraRiver two kilometers from the city of Kozelsk and about 70 kilometers




143

south of Kaluga. According to legend, the monastery was founded in the15th century by a former outlaw whose name was Opta. Repenting of hissins, he took monastic vows with the name of Makarii. The first historical

evidence of the monastery comes from the 17th century, during the reignof Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich. At this time the monastery was only a smallestablishment, with one wooden church, several monastic cells and lessthan twenty monks.

During the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, theMonastery’s income significantly increased and several new buildings wereerected. This growth of the monastery was both stimulated by andcontributed to the development of a tradition called Starchestvo, whichmeans ‘a lineage of wisdom of prayer’ maintained by Staretz, these beingRussian Orthodox monks or ‘Elders’ of deep wisdom. The roots of thismovement are found in the Byzantine hesychia, ‘the art of silent prayer’ (14th –15th c.), which was introduced to Russia by St. Sergius of Radonezhand his successors. In the 16th-18th centuries the ecclesiastical life inRussia had increasingly become secular and political, and as a reactionagainst this worldliness the starchestvo tradition became widely popularamong the Russian people. (From “Sacred Sites of Russia”)

Table 14: Monastery of Optina Pustyn

In this century, there also was a marked revival of missionary

work not seen since the days of Stephen Perm. It was initiated by the

Academy of Kazan, opened in 1842, whose main concern was the

training of missionaries. As a consequence, Russian Orthodoxy

experienced a vast expansion with the foundation of dioceses in

Siberia and the Far East and flourishing missions as far a field as

China, Japan, Alaska, and the American continent. During the

seventeenth century missionary efforts have dimmed, and




144

particularly in the eighteenth century after the closing of monasteries

by Catherine II. The greatest of the nineteenth-century missionaries

was Metropolitan Innocent of Moscow (John Veniaminov, 1797-

1879), bishop in Alaska, who, like St. Stephen of Perm before him,

emphasized the necessity for the Church of acknowledging native

languages and cultures if it was to carry out her mission successfully.

Part of Metropolitan Innocent’s achievement in bringing Orthodoxy

to America was the translation of the liturgical texts and Bible into

the Eskimo languages. St. Innocent is honored by millions of

American Orthodox today as the chief “apostle” (“A History of theRussian Church”; Ware 122-23).

Moreover, in the nineteenth century, in the field of theology,

Russia broke away from its excessive dependence on the West. This

was mainly achieved by the lay theologian Alexis Khomiakov (1804-

60), leader of the Slavophil circle. For Ware, he is perhaps the first

original theologian in the history of the Russian Church. He said

regarding him that:




145

Khomiakov argued that all western Christianity, whether Roman or Protestant, shares the same assumptions and betrays the same fundamental point of view, while Orthodoxyis something entirely distinct. Since this is so, it is not enoughfor Orthodox to borrow their theology from the west, as theyhad been doing since the seventeenth century; instead of using Protestant arguments against Rome, and Romanarguments against the Protestants, they must return to their own authentic sources, and rediscover the true Orthodoxtradition, which in its basic presuppositions is neither Romannor Reformed, but unique. (123)

Khomiakov was the first who looked at Latinism and Protestantism

from the point of the Orthodoxy. This theologian’s contribution to

Orthodoxy was in the ambit of the unity and authority of the

Orthodox Church. Khomiakov exercised little or no influence duringhis lifetime on the theology taught in academies and seminaries,

which nevertheless started to grow independently from the West. By

1900 Russian academic theology was at its height with a number of

theologians, historians, and liturgists. They were trained in western

academies but did not allow western influences to distort Orthodoxy.

Educational standards in the Church rose as the seminaries produced

some of Russia’s greatest historians such as Vasilii Klyuchevsky and

Sergei Solovyov. A monumental History of the Russian Church was




146

written by Metropolitan Makary (Bulgakov) of Moscow. Moreover,

earlier hierarchs such as Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), Bishop

Ignatius (Bryanchaninov) and Bishop Theophanes the Recluse (all

later canonized) epitomized the return to the patristic tradition of the

Church in his sermons. It was due to the Church’s cooperation that

the commented liberation of the serfs was proclaimed under Tsar

Alexander II in 1862.

Outside of the Church’s official institutions, too, theology

enjoyed a renewal with the works of Alexei Khomyakov and Ivan

Kireyevsky, who oversaw the publication of the works of the holyfathers in modern Russian translations at Optina Pustyn. Church

censorship did, however, take a dim view of this innovative return to

tradition and hindered the publication of Khomyakov in Russia.

Also, former Communists such as Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) or

Nicolas Berdyaev (1874-1948) found their way back to Church and

played an important role in the life of the Russian emigration in Paris

(Ware 124-125; “A History of the Russian Church”). Schmemann

rightly says that




147

Even though it came through the West, from Latin or German books, the great forgotten tradition of thought, that of disinterested search for truth and ascetic service to it, wererevived again in Orthodoxy…At the beginning of thetwentieth century Russian theology was on the threshold of agenuine cultural flowering, a renaissance in all strength of theuniversal tradition of Orthodoxy. But the Revolution came.(171)

3. OPENING YEARS OF THE TWENTY CENTURY:MOVEMENT FOR CHURCH RENEWAL AND THE END OFTHE SYNODICAL PERIOD (1917)

In spite of this revival of the nineteenth century, N James W.

Cunningham in aVanquished Hope: The Movement for Church

Renewal in Russia, 1905-1906 (1981) points out the precarious

situation of the Russian Church, the largest single national church in

the world, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Orthodox

religious doctrine was taught in various state school systems and the

church operated its own, rapidly expanding, elementary system.

Parish schools were the means through which students made their

way to higher education as well as the way by which the loyalty of

the church was strengthened. Yet, the Church continued to besubordinated to the State through the Holy Synod, imposed by Peter




148

the Great. As commented, Peter the Great saw in it a hindrance to his

efforts to centralize control. The Church was the traditional channel

for the expression of the moral opinion of the people and he could

not tolerate any interference with his supreme power. As a

consequence, the church’s moral authority declined in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries. Pospielovsky, inThe Russian Church under

the Soviet Regime 1917-1982 (vol. 1), says that:

Externally, the pre-revolutionary Church appeared to be very powerful. She was the official state Church, and until 1905other religious were legally tolerated only as faiths of nationalminorities. Orthodox religion was an obligatory discipline in

all general schools for all pupils born of members of theOrthodox faith and children born of mixed marriages inwhich one of the parents was Orthodox had to be baptizedOrthodox. Yet the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev said thatthe Orthodox priests were the least free subject of the Empire, because no one was legally allowed to enter into religiousdisputes with them—in other words, priests were deprived of the right of dialogue. (20)

Zernov asserts that during those two hundred years of

repression by the empire, no council was ever held and dioceses and

parishes had been wholly deprived of their previous self-government.

But the policy of rigid control and suppression, imposed by the




149

government through the above-mentioned heavy-handed

administrator Procurator, Pobedonostev, suffered a temporary

change, due to the government’s realization of the existence of the

increased alienation of the people and their newfound interest in

Christianity (142). Cunningham says that

the Church was feeling the strain of social ferment, with priests, bishops, and articulate groups of laymen strugglingagainst the straitjacket of the Procurator and the state bureaucracy. Arguments that questioned the very validity of the governing apparatus set up by Peter the Great hadmushroom into demands for the renewal of the Procurator personally and the dismantling of the procuracy. (52)

Zernov thinks that this was a part a movement of awakening on the part of the laity—intellectual and artistic elite—who pressured for

reforms to recover the Church freedom. Therefore, forced by the

demand of religious freedom, the State was obliged to make

concessions to it, and, on April 30, 1905, a Manifesto on Toleration,

followed by theukaz of October 30, 1906, granting the status of legal

persons to non-Orthodox minorities, was issued. According to

Pospielovsky, this Manifesto “instilled hopes among the Orthodox

that their Church would at last be allowed to regain a canonical




150

conciliar structure” (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime

22). Cunningham believes that the disappointing result of the

Japanese War, which had began in January 1904, was a heavy load to

be born and weighed on the Committee’s deliberation on the issue of

the religious minorities, since a continuing repression of them would

exacerbate a non convenient civil violence (81).

Following the October Manifesto, Constantine Pobedonostev

(1828-1907), after twenty years of unchallenged power were forced

to resign. During his long tenure in office (1880-1905), he had

produced his own counter-pressure within the church. Pobedonostevwas opposed to these liberating measures. He even thought that the

Petrine synodal structure of the administration embodied the very

principle of sobornost ’—the sense of spiritual communality; one of

the distinctive features of Russian Orthodoxy—(Zernov 142;

Cunningham 80-81, 100-101). Pospielovsky explains that as early as

February 1905, the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg along with Sergei

Witte, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and his

Extraordinary Commission instructed the scholars of the St.




151

Petersburg Theological Academy to draft a proposal on church

reforms and for granting the Orthodox Church more freedom in

administer its internal affairs. At the end of March, the Synod

presented a report to Nicholas II (1868 –1918), among other things,

proposing the election of a patriarch and the summoning of a national

council (a sobor ) made up of all bishops of the Russian Orthodox

Church.

Illustration 23: Tsar icholas II and Familyat Lavadia 38

38 See: <www.byzantines.net>.




152

On March 31, the tsar responded favorably but suggested the

postponement of the sobor due to the current revolutionary turmoil

(The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 22). In the meantime,

the tsar also allowed pre- sobor commissions, whose deliberations

established the foundations of the sobor . Finally, the sobor had to

await until the tsar was deposed.

Cunningham complains of the western perspective of Russia

as hopelessly anachronistic in matters ecclesiastical, cultural, and

political in the beginning years of the twentieth century. In fact, he

says, the opposite was true: Numerous signs of renewal and reform were visible as thechurch sought to burst out the cocoon spun around it since theeighteenth century reforms. The Russian clergy was not agrey mass of indistinguishable nonentities, as was socommonly imagined by a significant proportion of the pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia and the majority of western students of Russia. (327)

The Russian clergy, he states, was generally a group of men of God,

profoundly concerned with revitalizing their church and made it

attune with the spiritual, social, and political demands of the century.




153

Furthermore, connecting the Russian Church with the Byzantine

Church and with Tradition, Cunningham says:

They [The Russian clergy] were conscious that the RussianChurch was rooted in the Byzantine heritage and that theywould have find the wellspring for renewal in that heritage.As demonstrated in their writings in their often turbulentdebates in the Pre-Sobor Commission, Russian religiousintellectuals were aware that the canons and regulations of theByzantine era had been hammered out in times equally asturbulent as they were facing and that distance in time and place was not as insurmountable as might it at first appear.(328)

For Cunningham canons don’t provide ready solutions for the

pressing problems, but they could not be ignored nor regarded

lightly. The canons are the touchstone upon which every serious-

minded priest, prelate or professor base their thinking. He adds:

The authenticity of the Orthodox Church depended upon itsadhering to an established tradition that had been handeddown from the time of the apostles and the church fathers.The problem was to maintain authenticity and yet bringtradition into focus with the times ... all remained consciousof the canons and the need not to emasculate or violate them.Violent arguments ensued as to how canons were to beinterpreted or how they had gained authority, but fewsuggested simply scraping them. (328)




154

Cunningham concludes that Nicholas II’s failure to summon the

sobor in 1907 caused the devastating swath of reaction and political

opportunism cutting so deeply into the church. For him the reason

was that the state was afraid of antagonism from the Church as well

as from other spheres of political and social activities (329).

Furthermore, the negative influence of Rasputin weakened

the tsar’s autocracy and led to the downfall of Nicholas II. Regarding

the figure of Rasputin (1873-1916), who overshadowed the last years

of the empire, Zernov complains that

Owing to the lack of knowledge about the Russian Church,he is usually described, by western writers, as a monk. Someeven quote him as an example of the supposedly corruptclericalism of the Orthodox Church. Whatever were the moralfaults of Rasputin’s character, his case has no bearing uponthe alleged deficiency of the Russian clergy, for Rasputin wasneither priest, nor monk, but an ordinary married peasant.Besides, his spiritual background had more in common withthe mystical sect of Khlysty than with the tradition of theChurch. The source of his influence and power lay in facts precisely opposite to those which are usually put forward in popular literature on Russia. (150)

He adds that,

In no sense did Rasputin represent Russian clericalism; hewas listened to by the Empress because she believed him to




155

be the genuine spokesman of the millions of Russian peasants—it was with them that the rulers of the Empire wereanxious to restore the contact which had been lost since thetime of Peter the Great. It was too late, however. The peasantwho came to St. Petersburg and took a place of honor near thethrone was not the sound, Orthodox Christian that some of hisadmirers believed him to be. He was a man endowed with astriking personality and with gifts of healing, but he was possessed by lust and dark passions, and his fall draggeddown those who had received him as an inspired prophet.(150)

Besides Rasputin’s influence there were other series of events

leading to the deposition of Nicholas II, namely the Russo-Japanese

war in which Japan defeated Russia at Manchuria, strikes caused by

bloody Sunday where 1,000 people petitioning for reform werekilled, and finally the entering of World War I. The February

Revolution, the first phase of the 1917 Revolution, occurred largely

as a result of dissatisfaction with the way the tsar was running the

country, in particular Russia’s ongoing involvement in the First

World War This Revolution resulted in Nicholas’ abdication in

March 2nd, 1917—he had reigned since 1894—, and the formation of

a Provisional Government, initially led by a liberal aristocrat, Prince

Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov, and then, after this government’s




156

failure, by a socialist, Alexander Kerensky. He also met failure for

maintaining the involvement of the country in the First World War

and being unable to deal with the problems Russia faced. Pressure

from the right and from the left (mainly the Bolsheviks) put the

government under increasing strain. Ultimately the regime instigated

by the February Revolution was forcibly replaced in the October

Revolution.

The underlying causes of the Russian Revolution are rooted deep inRussia’s history. For centuries, autocratic and repressive czarist regimesruled the country and most of the population lived under severe economic

and social conditions. During the 19th century and early 20th centuryvarious movements aimed at overthrowing the oppressive governmentwere staged at different times by students, workers, peasants, andmembers of the nobility. Two of these unsuccessful movements were the1825 revolt against Nicholas I and the revolution of 1905, both of whichwere attempts to establish a constitutional monarchy. Russia’s badlyorganized and unsuccessful involvement in World War I (1914-1918)added to popular discontent with the government’s corruption andinefficiency. In 1917 these events resulted in the fall of the czaristgovernment and the establishment of the Bolshevik Party, a radicaloffshoot of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, as the rulingpower. (“Russian Revolution of 1917”)

Table 15: Causes of the Russian Revolution of 1917

(March 8–12 [Feb. 24–28, old style], 1917), the first stage of the RussianRevolution of 1917, in which the monarchy was overthrown and replacedby the Provisional Government. This government, intended as an interim




157

stage in the creation of a permanent democratic-parliamentary polity forRussia, was in turn overthrown by the Bolsheviks in October (November,new style) of the same year. (“February Revolution”).

Table 16: The February Revolution

On 15 August 1917, six months after the abdication of

Nicholas II, an All-Russian Church Council was summoned at

Moscow which was to elect St. Tikhon the Patriarch. In these earlier

sessions one could hear of the Bolshevik artillery. But although

tsarism vanished, the Church not only survived the disaster, but also

revealed an amazing vitality during the years of storm and

persecution which were to follow. To grasp the quality of suchstrength we need just to contemplate the invincible inner spiritual life

of Orthodoxy during those two hundred years when immobility and

silence were imposed upon it by the State.




158

4. A TIME OF PERSECUTION AND REBIRTH: THERUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH IN THE XX CENTURY (1917-)

THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH FROM THEOCTOBER REVOLUTION OF 1917 UNTIL THE SECONDWORLD WAR: SIX MAIN STAGES

After two hundred years of immobility, silence, and

persecution imposed by the St. Petersburg Empire, the Orthodox

Church suffered a new wave of oppression and persecution starting

with the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized

power to around 1988, the year when Russian Christianity celebrated

its millennium. Yet, paradoxically the Church could finally summona Council, which was stopped by Lenin’s nationalization of the

Church’s properties, and attained canonical structure. The first phase

of the Russian Revolution, the February Revolution had ended, with

the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the tsarist regime and the

installation of a Provisional Government. The October Revolution,

the second phase of the Russian. Lenin revolution, culminated in the

creation of the first Communist state swiftly followed by systematic

efforts to curtail and eventually eliminate the influence of the




159

Church. Stalin says: “The Party cannot be neutral towards religion. It

conducts an anti-religious struggle against all and any religious

prejudices (1953, 132). Ware points out that from 1917 onwards

Orthodox and other Christians faced a situation for which there was

no exact precedent in early Christian history. It is true that the

Roman Empire persecuted Christian from time to time. Even the

Muslim Ottoman Turks, while non-Christians, were still

monotheistic, and allowed a large measure of toleration. However,

the atheist government tried systematically and militantly to suppress

religion. A neutral separation between Church and State was notsatisfactory for them. They sought directly and indirectly to destroy

all organized life and eliminate all religious belief (146)




160

The October RevolutionThe October Revolution was led by Lenin and was based upon the ideasof Karl Marx. It marked the beginning of the spread of communism in thetwentieth century. It was far less sporadic than the revolution of Februaryand came about as the result of deliberate planning and coordinatedactivity to that end. The financial and logistical assistance of Germanintelligence via their key agent, Alexander Parvus was a key component aswell.

On November 7, 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin led his leftistrevolutionaries in a nearly bloodless revolt against the ineffectiveProvisional Government (Russia was still using the Julian Calendar at the

time, so period references show an October 25 date). The OctoberRevolution ended the phase of the revolution instigated in February,replacing Russia’s short-lived provisional government with a Soviet one.

Although many Bolsheviks (such as Leon Trotsky) supported a sovietdemocracy, the ‘reform from above’ model gained definitive power whenLenin died and Stalin gained control of the USSR. Trotsky and hissupporters, as well as a number of other democratically-mindedcommunists, were persecuted and eventually imprisoned or killed.(“Russian Revolution of 1917”)

Table 17: The October Revolution

Zernov connects the October revolution with this previous

period of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, beginning with Peter

the Great’s unfortunate abolition of the Patriarchate, a period in

which the Church could never recover its freedom from the State. He

says:

Of the two partners, the one who lost more was not the

Church, but the Empire, for, by refusing to Christian freedomof speech and action, the rulers of Russia deprived themselves




161

of the benefit of friendly but independent criticism. They became morally isolated from the best elements of the nation,and they created around themselves that vacuum whichcaused the inglorious collapse of the whole State edifice in1917.The Empire of St. Petersburg vanished, but the Churchsurvived the disaster and displayed an astonishing vitalityduring the years of storm and persecution. In order tounderstand the source of its strength, one needs to study theinner spiritual life of Orthodoxy during those two hundred

years when immobility and silence were imposed upon it bythe State. (130-131)

Zernov also comments that these two centuries of submission

of the Church to the state as well as the Great Schism of the

seventeenth century caused the weakening of the grip of the

Possessors on the Russian Church and the consequent revival of the

Non-possessors’ tradition. This brought a renewed missionary zeal,

healing, and prophetic gifts, and remarkable examples of holiness

and moral perfection (132). He explains how some outstanding menof the nineteenth century—Khomiakov (1804-60), Dostoevsky

(1821-81), Soloviev (1853-1900), and Feodorov (1828-1903)—

foresaw the future development of their nation. These “prophets”—

as Zernov calls them—were sure that Europe was heading to one of




162

its greatest crisis: a confrontation between those who believed in the

self-sufficiency of man and those who professed the sovereignty of

God as revealed by Jesus Christ (139). They, this church historian

asserts,

were prepared to see victorious those leaders who would promise bread and a life of ease at the price of apostasy fromChrist; they were sure that they were living on the eve of oneof the fiercest religious conflicts ever known in humanhistory. They expected the clash to take place at the beginningof the twentieth century, and it actually occurred in 1917,when the Empire of St. Petersburg collapsed and the controlof Russia fell into the hands of Lenin and his followers. (140)

They were not wrong. After the collapse of the Empire, inMarch 1917, Russia was involved in a period of disintegration, first

by the successive governments of westernized liberals and then by

the seizure of power by Lenin and Trotsky, which started a ruthless

period of dictatorship. Zernov further explains that, “The end of the

St. Petersburg Empire therefore meant for the nation not the return to

their traditional order, but a further compulsory westernization on an

unprecedented scale and with unprecedented speed” (151).




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The Sobor

Ironically, the Church met the Marxist revolution as a free,

self-governing body. After theSobor was postponed by Nicholas II,

in August 1917, while the country was in the grip of revolutionary

turmoil, the Provisional Government, which followed Nicholas’

abdication, had granted permission to convoke an all Russian sobor

of bishops, lower clergy, and laity, in Moscow. It consisted of 563

members, including 278 lay representatives. Pospielovsky states that

the sobor started with internal divisions well represented. On the one

hand, there were those, consisting of theology professors, both layand clerical, as well as many urban married priests who were

opposed to the idea of a patriarchate and in favor of popularly elected

synod of bishops, the lower clergy and laymen with equal voting

right. On the other hand, there were those, whose number supposedly

exceeding that of its opponents, who were in favor of the restoration

of a patriarchate (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 27-

28). In spite of the differences that existed regarding the ways of

restoring the full autonomy to the church—some in favor a Patriarch




164

some of a collegiate body objecting to the rule of a single man—,

Zernov says that: “It was a proof of the maturity and ability of the

Christians that they were able, after an interval of 200 years, during

which no Councils had been held, to proceed in good order to elect

new organs of Church administration and to restore the self-

government that the Germanized Empire had taken away” (152).

Yet, these differences were silenced by the Communist

uprising in October 1917. A month later, in November, Tikhon was

elected Patriarch—he was elected Metropolitan of Moscow on 15

August of the same year. Many of the reforms proposed by theCouncil could not be put into practice. Now the Church, once

liberated from the constraints of imperial patronage, had to survive

the greatest onslaught on Christianity since the persecution by the

pagan Roman emperors (“A History of the Russian Church”). Zernov

asserts that the Russian Church had to face an enemy who was

resolute in its determination to suppress Christianity as well as any

other form of religion, something inconceivable before the outbreak

of the Russian revolution (154). This historian also complains about




165

western Christian prejudice against the eastern Church and Russia

toward this revolution:

The origin of the struggle between Christians and atheists inRussia, with its world-wide significance, lies not so much in peculiarly Russian social conditions, but mainly in the factthat the belief of modern man in his self-sufficiency andsupremacy is irreconcilable with the Christian doctrine of man as a servant of the Living God. (154)

Instead, he believes that:

The Communist experiment in Russia was the last and mostradical stage in the process of imitation of the Westinaugurated by Peter the Great. For more than 200 years, theupper section of Russian society had blindly followed the leadof Europe, convinced that all available wisdom and truth were

contained in the theories and methods of civilized westernnations. Lenin was one of the most ardent exponents of this point of view. He treated Karl Marx’s doctrines as the finalrevelation of truth—they were not only a political theory tohim, but a new, scientific religion, capable of solving all the problems of life and, therefore, intolerant of any rivalteachings. (154-5)

The Russian Christians, in 1917, had to confront a vigorous

force, not created in their own country or in their own tradition, but

in the secularized West. Its leader was Karl Marx, a German Jew,

who had become an atheist. Zernov talks about his proposed new

world order in terms of his Judaism: the coming of the promised




166

Messiah meant the victory of the proletariat. He asserts that Russian

communism was not only an economic and social experiment, but

“one of the greatest religious revolutions in the history of mankind

carried out by a group of men knowing no other truth than dialectic

materialism and recognizing no other prophet than Karl Marx (156).

Zernov delineates five main stages of soviet anti-religious

policy spanning from Lenin’s coup attempt in 1917 to Krushchev’s

new assault on the Church in late fifties. Pospielovsky delineates

only four phases (1918—though he does not specify—to

Khrushchev) (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 260-266), roughly coinciding with some of the stages defined by Zernov.

These were stages in which Russian Christians experienced a well-

planned and scientifically conducted campaign against them. In the

following pages I will mainly follow Zernov’s principal stages, but

will add a sixth, from 1965 to 1991 to describe the Russian Church

under the Decaying Socialism.




167

First Stage (1918-22): Communists’ Optimism,the Sobor and Lenin’s State

In the first stage, the communists—Zernov calls them “thegodless”—were optimistic. Blinded by their materialism, they

mistakenly thought that by destroying the economic foundations of

the Church and the exile of individual Christians they could bring

about its collapse. Thus in 1918, Lenin allowed both religious and

anti-religious propaganda. Yet, at the same time he confiscated all

the Church property and then denied the Church the right of

acquiring it again. Pospielovsky states that in so doing, Lenin made

an attempt to follow Marx’s ideological precepts in the most

orthodox way. He says that “Lenin hoped to kill the Church by

depriving her of a material and legal base, according to Marx’s

doctrine that religion as a superstructure would simply wither away if

deprived of its material basis” (The Orthodox Church in the History

of Russia 260). The Department in charge of nationalizing all former

church properties (houses of prayer, schools, seminaries,

monasteries, candle factories, charity institutions, etc) was referred to




168

as the “Liquidation Department (260). Many charitable members of

the Church deserted, but the Church, as Zernov defends, gained a

new vitality and power, mainly due to the activity of the laity. The

popular character of Russian Christianity caused it never to be

dependent on the clergy, but rather on the laity. In spite of the

destruction of the ecclesiastical administration and the cessation of

all organized instruction, at this time the church was relatively free

and still suffered little systematic persecution (157).

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the Russian

Orthodox Church was electing its first patriarch since the time of Peter the Great. Eleven days after the assault on the Winter Palace,

Metropolitan Tikhon (Belavin) of Moscow was chosen by lot from

among three elected candidates. As Nathaniel Davis narrates, in A

Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian

Orthodoxy , in spite of the above mentioned nationalization of all the

church lands, most of the church leaders believed that the communist

government was a temporary affliction. After electing Patriarch

Tikhon, the sobor unrealistically passed a number of resolutions




169

decreeing that the Russian Orthodox Church was the national church

of Russia, noting the state’s need of church approval to legislate on

matters relating to the church, the illegality of blasphemy, the

recognition of the church schools, and the required Orthodoxy of the

head of the Russian state and the top appointees in education and

religious affairs. Soon however, as already suggested, Davis

continues, the Soviet regime would issue a decree separating church

and state, canceling the church’s status as a juridical entity, banning

state subsidies to clergy and religious bodies, seizing church bank

accounts, denying legal standing to church marriages, divorces, and baptisms, and prohibiting organized religious education of the young

(9).




170

Illustration 24: Patriarch Tikhon

In January of 1918, the sobor backed Patriarch Tikhon’s

encyclical criticizing the Soviet regime for its anti-Church actions

and for the persecutions and terror. Trying to protect the Church, in

the encyclical the patriarch also excommunicated those “open and

secret enemies of [Christ’s] Truth” who bring about persecutions and

sow “the seeds of hatred and ... fratricide.” The believers reacted

with an enthusiastic support for their patriarch. It was of no use. The

stage was set for confrontation (9). Zernov says that the threat of

divine punishment only excited anti-religious fervor (158).




171

As Pospielovsky asserts, the sobor continued its sessions

periodically up to September 1918 when it had to end for lack of

funds caused by the nationalization of church property. It could not

complete all legislative plans, yet it passed the necessary legislation

to give the Church the canonical conciliar structure, all the way from

the local parish to the office of the patriarch (The Russian Church

under the Soviet Regime 33). He adds that:

Although the conciliar system proved to be an impossibilityunder the new regime at the top, at the parish level the newresponsibility granted to the parish councils and the securityof priest’s tenure, in the opinion of many church historians,

saved the Church from disintegration in the years of the practically total collapse of the central church administrationcaused by the city state legislation, by periodical arrests of bishops and by the proliferation of schismatic groups. (37-38)

Thus, as noted above, the stage was set for confrontation between the

Church and the State. It came during the period between 1918 and

1920 when the civil war engulfed the nation. The civil war erupted

when the White Army supported by anti-Lenin Russians and many

western countries fought Lenin’s Red Army. In the three years the

war lasted, 15 million people were killed before Trotsky led the Reds




172

to victory. Lenin created a New Economic Policy in order to restore

the economy, moved the capital to Moscow, renamed the country the

Soviet Union, and named his party the Communist Party.

Pospielovsky tells us that during this period 1918-1920, despite the

patriarch’s refusal to support the Bolsheviks’ enemies, the state

retaliated against the church; consequently, at least twenty-eight

bishops were murdered and thousands of clerics were imprisoned or

killed only because of their religious activity (The Russian Church

under the Soviet Regime 38).

On the International scene, Russia was losing World War I,having suffered over 9 million casualties—more than any other

belligerent. At the front conditions were appalling. Sometimes

Russian soldiers were forced to wait in backup trenches, lacking even

rifles, until the deaths of comrades allowed them to scavenge arms.

In the peace treaty with Germany signed in March 1918, the

Communist Government—The Soviet Union was established four

years later—lost a third of its population and a third of its arable




173

lands. Davis described the distressful situation of Russia in this

period of 1918-1922 the following way:

In the countryside, the Bolsheviks organized Committees of the Village Poor and sent out workers and soldiers from thecities to seize grain. Peasant revolts swept the countryside,and the civil war became a peasant war. Industrial output plummeted to one-seventh of its prewar level. Citizens fledMoscow and Petrograd seeking food and safety in thecountryside; more than half the people in those citiesabandoned them. The ruble stood at one two-hundred-thousandth of its prewar value. Over 7 million people diedfrom hunger and epidemics; cannibalism spread. ( A Long Walk to Church 10)

Between 1920 and 1922, several millions of Orthodox Russians were

forced to leave their country and try to find a refuge in Europe andAmerica. This emigration meant the appearance of the Russian

Church in exile. Zernov asserts that it was of a “particular

significance for the mutual re-discovery of Russian Orthodoxy and

the Christian West” (168).

Second Stage (1922-29): Communists’ Attemptsat Splitting the Church

For Zernov, this campaign of divide and conquer had started

in February, 1922 with the Government demanding the church’s




174

valuables for famine relief. The Civil War had resulted in an

unprecedented famine. To help the famine-stricken, on February 19,

the Patriarch had urged believers to be generous in their help and

asked parishes to give “all precious articles except those used in

sacraments and worship. However, as Davis relates, a few days later

the government began a propaganda and terror campaign against a

“heartless” church and ordered the confiscation of all church

valuables, including even the consecrated vessels. This blatant

disregard for anything considered “holy” caused priests and

parishioners alike to rally in an attempt to guard their churches anddefend their sacramental treasures. This defiance resulted in some

1,400 bloody fights as reported by the Russian Press (Davis, A Long

Walk to Church 10). Yet, it was later discovered, as Pospielovsky

explains, that the government deliberately misrepresented the church

as a heartless institution indifferent to human suffering. This was a

part of an “exceptionally beneficial” campaign to break the power of

the clergy and not simply to obtain resources with which to buy food:

It is precisely now and only now, when there is cannibalism




175

... and corpses are lying along the roads that we can (andtherefore must) carry out the confiscation of valuables withfanatical and merciless energy. ... No other opportunity butthe current terrible famine will give us a mood of the widemasses such as would provide us with their sympathies or atleast neutrality.... Now our victory over the reactionaryclergy is guaranteed. ... The trial of the Shuya rioters for resisting aid to the hungry [should] be conducted in as short atime as possible, concluding in the maximum possiblenumber of executions. ... If possible, similar executionsshould be carried out in Moscow and other spiritual centers of the country.39 (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 94)

The fight over church treasure had the expected

consequences. The Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest

accused of resisting the confiscation of his Church’s properties.

Pospielovsky states that:

The general state of the Church as an institution was not promising. The patriarch had been put under arrest since May10. 1922. Purges and imprisonments were rampant across thecountry, mostly under the pretext of the Church’s resistanceto the confiscation of valuables, in connection with which2,691 married priests, 1.962 monks, 3,447 nuns and anunknown number of laymen loyal to the patriarch were physically liquidated in the course of 1921-1923. (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 99)

39Lenin’s secret memorandum to his Politburo colleagues, March 19, 1922. See thecomplete internal order in Pospielovsky,The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime , 95.




176

Taking advantage of Tikhon’s confinement to seize control of

the patriarchal chancery and church administration, a few days later,

a group of priests, members of the so called “Renovationists”—one

of their factions was the “Living Church—, visited him in prison and

obtained from the Patriarch permission to take over temporarily

ecclesiastical administration until his deputy, the Metropolitan

Agathangel arrived in Moscow. However, this “temporary” transfer

of power was part of a carefully arranged plan since theses clerics

had no intention of handing over the government of the Church to the

Patriarch’s nominee. The Renovationists had Bolshevik support,clearly motivated by the authority’s desire to split and thereby rule

the church. They, instead, convoked a Council (August 1922),

announcing various reforms such as the introduction of a married

Episcopate. The new leaders, who called themselves members of the

Living Church, declared that they were ready to support

Communism, because it put into practice the social message of the

Gospel . Thus the government turned over the majority of the

functioning Orthodox churches in the country to the collaborating




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Renovationists, a group disdained by most of the Orthodox laity for

moral, traditional, and political reasons. However, ironically for the

new Communist Government, the Living Church was no better than

the Church of the Patriarch. The members of the Party abhorred the

idea of a compromise between belief in God and dialectical

materialism (Zernov 158; Davis, A Long Walk to Church 10).

Davis comments that the church schism was a blow to the

institutional integrity of the patriarchal church. Nevertheless, it

influenced Tikhon in his decision to “confess” anti-Soviet acts,

renounce them, and declare that he was “no longer an enemy of theSoviet Government ( A Long Walk to Church 11).” The authorities

unexpectedly freed him on June 26, 1923, and he was able to reassert

his authority and counteract the Renovationists. Zernov says that he

also declared his loyalty to the Soviet government and publicly

expressed his regret for his opposition to the confiscation of the

sacred vessels in 1922. This act of repentance shocked some

Christians, but the majority believed that the Patriarch had degraded

himself for the sake of his flock and approved his action. Till his




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death, Tikhon was surrounded by the warm affection of all the

faithful (159). Pospielovsky says that “When the patriarch died in

April 1925 the church was just recovering from the terror. But the

physical persecutions could not stop the internal spiritual recovery of

the Church, freed from all secular-governmental obligations for the

first time in several hundred years (The Russian Church under the

Soviet Regime 99).

With only a small segment remaining with the Living Church

and other dissenting voices, the unity of the Church was

spontaneously restored. By late 1924 the Renovationists had losttheir control over a third to a half of the churches the authorities had

given them. In the same year, Lenin died and Stalin slowly

consolidated his power. There was an economic recovery due to the

New Economic Policy. During this time, the strength of the

patriarchal church grew (Davis, A Long Walk to Church 11). The

attempt to undermine the solidarity of the church had failed. The

members of the Living Church were allowed to have a last Council

in 1926. Zernov asserts that:




179

The lesson of this second stage of the conflict was learned by both parties. The godless realized that neither materialhardships nor artificially created divisions were strongenough to destroy Christianity. The leaders of the Churchunderstood at last that the Soviet Government was firmlyestablished and that the Christians would have to find a newway of life under the rule of the resolute enemies of their religion. (159)

Zernov also quotes a clarifying statement written in 1926 by a

group of Russian Churchmen, exiled in the concentration camp on

the Solovetski Island, in the face of suffering and death:

The Church recognizes the existence of the spiritual principle;communism denies it. The Church believes in the LivingGod, Creator of the world, Guide of its life; communism does

not admit His existence… The Church believes in thesteadfast principles of morality, justice and law; communismlooks upon them as the conditional results of class struggle,and values moral questions only from the standpoint of their usefulness. The Church instills the feeling that humilityelevates man’s soul; communism abases man through pride.(160)

They were proposing the total separation between Church and State.

However, there was another thread of thought, one of whose

spokesman was Metropolitan Sergii as well as two young bishops

Aleksii—the future Patriarch—and Nicolai. For them, instead of

separation between Church and State, they were in favor of




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compromise and accommodation with even a hostile government. As

a consequence, in 1927, Metropolitan Sergii issued aConcordat , a

declaration pledging loyalty to the Soviet State and even proclaiming

that the aspiration of the Church and the Government were identical

and that the Church had been neither oppressed nor persecuted. As a

consequence the Orthodox Church was registered and restored its

proper organization, something denied it since 1922. Sergii’s action

created several conflicting groups under different Russian hierarchs,

the majority accepting Sergii’s leadership while other rejecting it

(Zernov 158-60). Pospielovsky says that Sergii was accused of “exerting pressure on the believers and the clergy to identify the

interests of the Church with those of the atheist state, which was

impossible (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 155).”

This was a very controversial issue because this 1927 Declaration

obliged Orthodox clergy to proclaim loyalty to the Soviet regime,

creating a schism involving large numbers of clergy and believers.

Because many refused to comply, especially bishops and priests who

were forced into emigration, a synod of Russian bishops was




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convoked in Karlovtsi (Yugoslavia) to set up a Russian Orthodox

Church in Exile disavowing all links with the Mother Church in

Soviet Russia.

Third Stage (1929-1941): Stalin’s BloodyPersecution of the Church

As we have seen, in Lenin’s period, the Communist Party

tried unsuccessfully to tear the masses away from their church and

clergy. Pospielovsky says that instead of dying deprived of property

and legal rights, the Church grew not only in the 1920’s when it had

experienced a revival but even in the 1930’s, prior to its physical

destruction, in its third stage of its struggle with the Soviet State (The

Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 161). This was the period

of Stalin—the most tragic period in the history of the Russian

Church. It began on April 8th, 1929, when a revised law on religionwas published by the dictator. Pospielovsky asserts that Metropolitan

Sergei, in return for his 1927 Declaration of Loyalty had hoped to

gain the right to expand the socio-cultural and private educational

activities of the Church, but the new legislation dealt a heavy blow to




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these hopes (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 164).40

Every form of religious propaganda was made a legal offense. This

meant a radical departure from the religious freedom of the first stage

in 1918. Besides, Article 17 also prohibited any form of

philanthropic and educational activity, consequently strictly

constraining the life of the Church to the officiating of divine

worship.

Article 17 “Religious unions (parishes) are forbidden, ( a ) to establish mutual aidfunds, co-operative and productive unions, and in general, to use the

property at their disposal for any other purpose than the satisfying of religious needs; ( b ) to give material aid to their members; to organizeeither special meetings for children, youth, women, for prayer and otherpurposes, or general meetings, groups, circles, departments, Biblical orliterary, handwork for labor, religious study, etc., and also to organizeexcursions and children’s playgrounds; to open libraries, reading rooms,to organize sanatoria and medical aid. Only such books as are necessaryfor the performance of services are permitted in the Church buildings andhouses of prayer.”

Table 18: Article 17 of the revised religious law issued by Stain (April 8 th ,1929)

40 For Pospielovsky, the third stage begins in 1928 with the liquidation of the NEPand continued, with some minor respite, in 1939 (The Orthodox Church in the

History of Russia 261). In that year, the Soviet Union annexed western Ukraineand western Belorussia, with populations predominantly Orthodox but with largeminorities of Byzantyne-Rite Ukrainian Catholics, Jews, and pockets of PolishRoman Catholics. This, Pospielovsky says, forced the Soviets to moderate their physical attack on religion, at least in the western areas (261-262).




183

In this new attempt to suffocate the Church slowly by

forbidding its members to spread their teaching, the State also

conducted anti-religious propaganda with vigor and determination.

The schools especially, were all made strongholds of godless

teaching. Police measures were not neglected. Davis states that the

wave of violence in 1929 and 1930 and the famine that came

afterwards produced a reversion. By 1932, the League of the Militant

Godless (LMG) grew from half a million to its largest membership,

up to 5.5 million by 1932. Mocking plays, songs, and carnivals

reappeared. The school curriculum, previously essentially secular, became sharply anti-religious ( A Long Walk to Church 14).

By the 1930s the Russian Orthodox Church had been brought

to its knees. A handful of bishops survived in the administrative

structure of the Church, but a vast number of priests and ordinary

believers met their death in Stalin’s extermination camps. Church

buildings as well as monasteries and schools were targets for

wholesale closure and destruction. The monumental Christ the

Saviour Cathedral in Moscow (built to commemorate the defeat of




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conducted a census adding a question about religious allegiance

hoping it would reveal the overwhelming atheism of the population.

He was apparently disappointed and thus, suppressed the result of the

census. The Church once again had survived in Russia (162).

Moreover, as Pospielovsky asserts, the LMG, instead of

growing to an expected 22 million members, had dropped to two

million by 1938 (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 178).

Yet, as the 1930s progressed, godless propaganda evolved into the

form it retained until the late 1980s (Davis, A Long Walk to Church

14). A 1937 census revealed that 50 percent of the population wasstill believers (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 263).

Pospielovsky also observes that, according to official Soviet

estimates, by the late 1930’s, Orthodox were split into different

groups: 75 to 80 percent of Orthodox were Sergiiite, 15 to 20 percent

Renovationists, and a 5 percent of Buitess and the less radical Non-

commemorators–those who did not commemorate Sergii’s name at

the liturgy. The latter, known as “catacomb” Christians, possessed no

registration and, since they were less controlled than the official part




186

of the Church, they led a more intensive spiritual live even engaging

in the spiritual upbringing and education of children (The Russian

Church under the Soviet Regime 179).

In 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a pact known

as the Treaty of Nonaggression between Germany and the Union of

Soviet Socialist Republics. In spite of the harm this pact might have

brought for Europe and the world, Davis sees benefits for the church.

He says that:

... it rescued the institution of the Russian Orthodox Church.Hitler’s deal with Stalin allowed the Soviets to occupy eastern

Poland, and 1,200 Orthodox parishes were incorporated intothe Soviet Union as a result. Then, in mid-June of 1940, theSoviets occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, amongwhose 6 million people were almost a half milliontraditionally Orthodox persons who worshiped in about 300Orthodox churches. Later in the same month the Sovietscompelled the Romanians to cede Bessarabia and northernBukovina with their 4 million people, 3 million of themtraditionally Orthodox. There were between 2,000 and 2,500 parishes in these formerly Romanian lands. Theseannexations brought the Russian Orthodox Church more than6 million traditionally Orthodox people and 3,500-4,000churches with active priests, as well as many monasteries andnunneries, some bishops and seminaries, and other resources.The institutional strength of the church must have increased

fifteen fold. The communists soon started closing churchesand arresting priests and lay Christians in the newly acquired




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lands, but they also understood that the Russian OrthodoxChurch could be an instrument of assimilation and of Sovietcontrol. ( A Long Walk to Church 19)

This treaty of mutual non-aggression lasted until June 22, 1941,

when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Fourth Stage (1941-1953): Second World Warand Stalin’s Restoration of the Russian Church

A fourth and new stage of this conflict between the Russian

Government and the Church (delineated by Zernov) started during

the Second World War, on June, 21, 1941, the same day the German

armies invaded Russia. The entry of the Soviet Union into theSecond World War changed the Church’s fortunes dramatically.

Stalin, a former seminarian who had trained to be a priest, made a

drastic reversal to his religious policy, restoring the Russian Church

as an organized body (163). For Pospielovsky, phase four began with

the German attack and continued until Stalin’s death in 1953, and,

more accurately, until Khrushchev‘s new assault on religion

beginning in 1957 (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia

265). Pospielovsky believes that Stalin, in order not to antagonize the




188

masses of Orthodox Christians living in the newly occupied territory

along with those living in the USSR, felt constrained to tone down

his persecutions (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 194).

Zernov says that for Russian believers, this new religious policy

taking place on the Sunday commemorating all Russian saints

“meant that Russian saints were with them in this war which cost

Russia over twenty million lives. In their gigantic struggle, people

needed religion (163)”. Eventually, the victory of the anti-Hitler

alliance gave Stalin an ominous power over central and eastern

Europe (163).In September 1941, anti-religious propaganda came to an end.

In 1942, the government publishedThe Truth about Religion in

Russia to demonstrate Stalin’s benevolent attitude towards believers

(163). Yet in the face of the German invasion in 1941, Stalin made

the decision to evacuate most of the leaders of the religious

communities, including Metropolitan Sergii, who was not allowed to

return until late August 1943, long after the Germans had retreated.

Davis explains that Stalin was afraid that they might defect, or that




189

the Hitler’s troops could use the Soviet churchmen for their own

political purposes if they were captured. David says that “the

decision to evacuate these men rather than kill them may have been

sheer luck, as the Soviets in retreat had frequently executed people in

such circumstances. Reportedly Sergii drew up a will on October 12,

two days before he was sent east from Moscow ( A Long Walk to

Church 18).

But from the very first sign of German hostilities, the aging

Metropolitan Sergii had wholeheartedly supported the war effort

appealing to the patriotism of believers, and a very modest materialrevival of the Church (the opening of some monasteries and

seminaries, the recruitment of priests and the publishing of a church

journal) was permitted in exchange for the Church’s putting to use

her gifts for rallying the Russian people in a time of national crisis

(Zernov 163). Pospielovsky says that Stalin was very slow and

cautious in changing his policy toward the Church and there is no

available evidence of church openings on the Soviet side until 1943

(The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 196). Also, after 1943,




190

the Church was permitted to have some institutions for training

priests and to undertake a limited publishing program; however, it

was not allow to do anything beyond this. For example, the bishops

and clerics were not allowed to engage in charitable or social work

nor could they hold catechism classes or Sunday schools for children.

The worst thing was that every member of the clergy had to require

permission from the State to exercise their ministry (Ware 146).

There also were many forms of anti-religious propaganda. An

atheistic instruction was given in schools. Teachers received

instruction such as:A Soviet teacher must be guided by the principle of the Partyof science; he is obliged not only to be an unbeliever himself, but also to be an active propagandist of godlessness amongothers, to be the bearer of the ideas of militant proletarianatheism. Skillfully and calmly, tactfully and persistently, theSoviet teacher must expose and overcome religion prejudicesin the course of his activity in school and out of school, day inand day out. (Oleschuk 41, 1949)

On September 4th, 1943, the Kremlin received a delegation of

the Russian Church, consisting of Metropolitan Sergii, Aleksii, and

Nicolai, the three authors of the Concordat of 1927 and sanctioned41 Formerly Secretary of the League of Militant Atheists.




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the restoration of the Patriarchate of Moscow. Three days later,

Sergii was elected as Patriarch by nineteen bishops who had returned

from concentration camps. Upon Sergii’s election, the Church

reappeared in public life. Aided by several outstanding leaders,

Patriarch Sergii started to rebuild the ecclesiastical organization. He

made appointments to vacant Sees, ordained new priests, and

reopened churches. After his death in May 1944, his successor,

Patriarch Aleksii, elected in 1945, continued this movement, and

began the training of the clergy in the Theological Institute in

Moscow and in provincial Seminaries. He was also allowed to printthe books necessary for church services (Zernov 161-64).

During the German invasion, the nation experienced a new

sense of unity through their suffering. Also, in these years of trial, the

clergy and laity of the Orthodox Church often showed outstanding

personal courage and devotion to duty which impressed the

Government, thereby securing for the Church a greater freedom of

action in the sphere of religious activities as assigned to it by the

Soviet constitution. Zernov provides enlightening statistics that prove




192

the consolidation of the Church in 1953, the year of Stalin’s dead

(165):

1914 1939 1953Dioceses 73 ? 73

Bishops 163 ? 74

Parish clergy 51,000 some 100s about 20,000

Monasteries 1,025 0 67

Theological schools 61 0 10

Table 19: Statistics indicating the consolidation of the Church in the post-waryears

Davis asserts that, during Stalin’s last five years of life,

between 1948 and 1953, the aging dictator’s policies changed back to

those of repression. By January, 1954, the Russian Orthodox Church

had lost about 1,000 of the slightly more than 14,400 registered

parishes it had had in January of 1949. He reasons that the shift to

repression might have been a consequence of Hitler’s defeat and the

end of the war. Thus, the Orthodox Church’s support was no longer

needed ( A Long Walk to Church 2 7-28).




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Fifth Stage (1958-1964): Nikita Khrushchev, aNew Assault on the Church

During the period which followed Stalin’s death in 1953 theChurch survived relatively unmolested. Pospielovsky says that

between 1954 and 1958 there is evidence of the construction and

reopening of churches. Yet, between 1959-1964, under Nikita

Khrushchev, the Russian Church did, however, face renewed

persecution in the form of mass closures of monasteries (most

notably the famous eleventh-century Monastery of the Caves in

Kiev), churches and theological schools, although there was no

return to the mass executions and imprisonment of priests and

believers as there had been under Lenin and Stalin (The Russian

Church under the Soviet Regime , vol. II, 327; Zernov 165).

In 1958, Nikita Khrushchev, who had become leader that

same year replacing Georgy Malenkov as prime minister, had

pursued a policy of de-Stalinisation by releasing millions of prisoners

in concentration camps and posthumously rehabilitating thousands of

Stalin’s victims. However, unexpectedly, in 1959 he launched an




194

attack on the Church, thus beginning, a fifth stage. Pospielovsky

thinks that this sudden attack did not come out of the blue. In 1950,

articles had begun to appear in the Soviet press admitting that

religion would not die away on its own, and consequently anti-

religious propaganda itself would be insufficient. In 1954, a Central

Committee resolution acknowledged that the Orthodox Church and

the sectarians were attracting young people. Yet for lack of unity in

the Soviet leadership after Stalin’s death, the attacked slowed

down. Pospielovsky thinks that this period from 1955 to 1957 was

the most “liberal” since 1947 (The Russian Church under the Soviet

Regime 329-330). Zernov blames Catherine Furzeva, the great

favorite of the dictator, for this attach. Khrushchev had entrusted her

the culture of the Soviet Union and led an anti-religious campaign

which slowed down the process of religious recovery begun during

the war. Furzeva managed to destroy more than ten thousand

churches. Yet this persecution was not accompanied by arrest and

deportation as under Stalin; the clergy was simply forced to retire.

The most prominent victim of the campaign was Metropolitan




195

Nicolai who was “released” from his duties, later dying in mysterious

circumstances (165). Pospielovsky asserts that

The Church did not reign herself without resistance. Her strategy was to remind the Soviet public and the Sovietauthorities of the Church’s important historical contributionto Russian culture as well as to the forging of Russianstatehood and Russian national consciousness, and to the patriotic cause of resisting foreign invasions, from the earliest pages of Russian History to World War. (The Russian Churchunder the Soviet Regime 333)

Pospielovsky adds that the most outstanding of this self-defense

actions was Patriarch Aleksii’s speech, on February 16, 1960, at a

Kremlin peace and disarmament conference (333). In early January

1960, the Central Committee of the Communist Party had called for

still more intensive anti-religious propaganda ( Russian Church under

the Soviet Regime 333; Davis, A Long Walk to Church 35). Davis

explains that in the text, apparently drafted by Metropolitan Nikolai

(Yarushevich), “Aleksii claimed credit on behalf of the Russian

Orthodox Church for Russia’s heroic past, its glorious culture, and its

leadership for peace. He decried the insults and attacks to which the




196

church was being subjected and quoted Jesus’ statement that the

gates of hell shall not prevail against the church” (35).

Aleksii’s speech further enraged senior Soviet leaders and

was followed by violent attacks on the patriarch from the floor.

Pospielovsky records one of these verbal attacks from representatives

of “the Soviet public”: “You want to assure us that the whole

Russian culture has been created by the Church... this is not true!”

Pospielovsky adds that this was probably the main reason why

Metropolitan Nikolai—who had stated that he had authored that

speech—was enforced to retire from the chairmanship of theChurch’s Department of External Ecclesiastical Relations. The other

reason, Pospielovsky adds, was his sermons counterattacking the

atheists. The consequent pogrom against the church and the

retirement of Nicolai seemed to have caused Patriarch Aleksii’s

complete submission to the Soviet pressure and restructure the

Church according to Soviet law. Pospielovsky asserts that the most

tragic manifestation of this submission was the amending of the

Church statute issue in July 18, 1961, which deprived the parish




197

priests of all the powers, subordinating the parish to a “parish

community”, in fact depending of the local city o county soviets (The

Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 335-6).

Pospielovsky also gives some details of the persecutions

during Khrushchev’s administration aimed at the restoration of

Leninist “socialist legality” after Stalin’s abuses. Among other

measures, he says, in the beginning years of the sixties, churches and

monasteries were closed, parishes were banned to organize any form

of charity, religious instruction to minors was also banned, even

keeping children and young people from frequenting churches, andmonastic institutions were most cruelly hit when tax exemptions

were lifted (The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 343). At

Khrushchev’s fall in 1964, the wave of persecution came to an end.

Once again, the Church had survived. The beginning of the religious

revival can be traced back to 1964 at the failure of Khrushchev

campaign. Khrushchev died in 1971, the same year a new council

took place.




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Sixth Stage 1965-1991: The Church under the

Decaying SocialismBrezhnev

Khrushchev was replaced by the more conservative Leonid

Brezhnev, who was effective ruler of the Soviet Union from 1964 to

1982, though at first in partnership with others. With Brezhnev, theSoviet Union became corrupted from within and without and the

church stagnated. Pospielovsky says that Brezhnev’s regime had no

intention of discontinuing Khrushchev’s harsh oppression of the

Church; it only took more civilized forms (The Russian Church

under the Soviet Regime 397). Pospielovsky explains that:

The status of the Church did not, however, advance in astraight line during the two post-Khrushchev decades. Therewere changes of direction even in the Brezhnev era: from an

oblique critique of Khrushchev’s persecutions in 1964-66 andan attempt to revive the “god-building” imitations of theChurch, to the toughening of anti-religious policies in theearly to mid-seventies, and the somewhat more relaxed,although unpredictable, situation of the last two to threeBrezhnev years. (The Orthodox Church in the History of

Russia 340)




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For Davis, after Khrushchev’s headlong assault on the

Orthodox Church in the early 1960’s, Brezhnev’s “period of

stagnation,” although less dramatic, slowly eroded Orthodox

institutional strength bringing the possibility of the church facing its

ultimate extinction. On August 14, 1967, The Central Committee of

the Communist Party passed a resolution calling for intensified

atheistic propaganda. Efforts to enhance the effectiveness of

education in scientific materialism continued through the remaining

years of the Brezhnev era and into the Andropov and Chernenko

periods ( A Long Walk to Church 43). However, the situation of theRussian Orthodox Church in the late 1960s was better than it had

been under Khrushchev. Early in 1968, a Posev reporter noted that

forcible church closings had stopped, that the authorities no longer

persecuted priests indiscriminately, and had ceased canceling their

registrations. If needed in a diocese and he wished to go, a priest

could be registered –yet this situation changed for the worst in the

following years. Besides, the practice of keeping children from

attending church had eased off, yet priests were still banned to




200

baptize children outside church premises and still had to record both

parents’ internal passport data, thus exposing them to harassment and

reprisal. The commentator further says that, though afraid, priests

kept going to people’s homes to perform baptisms. Between 1971

and 1975 churches continued to be closed and there were just a small

number of newly opened churches (43-44).

The Patriarch Aleksii died in 1970, at the age of 93, and in

1971, and an all-Russian NationalSobor chose Pimen (Isvekov, b.

1910) as his successor (Zernov 166). Although the Soviet authorities

chose the candidate for political convenience, Pospielovsky assertsthat “It was the first time since the revolution that the deceased

patriarch had not named a preferred heir in his will. In this sense,

Pimen’s election was the first formally canonical one since the

election of Tikhonin 1917 (The Russian Church under the Soviet

Regime 387)”. In spite of having subsided direct persecutions after

Khrushchev was ousted from power, there is no evidence, during the

last years of Patriarch Alexii of having won back the positions,

parishes, seminaries and monasteries lost in the preceding five years




201

(387). Yet he did a last act of granting autocephaly to the Orthodox

Church in America (OCA), formed in the last decades of the

nineteenth century after the sale of Alaska to the United States.

Tikhon, then Archbishop, had ruled the American diocese from 1898

to 1907 (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia 331).

Canonical links were reestablished with Orthodox Christians in

America with the granting in 1970 of the Tome of Autocephaly to

the former metropolia of the Russian Orthodox Church in America.

In July of 1973 the USSR Supreme Soviet passed an educational law

that placed an obligation on parents “to bring up their children in aspirit of high Communist morality.” In theory, this law would have

forced believing parents to raise their children as atheists, although

this interpretation seems never to have been enforced (44).

In the five years between 1976 and 1981, the number of

registered Orthodox societies stabilized. This did not mean that

church closings in the western lands stopped, but closings there were

partially counterbalanced by the registration of new communities in

the rest of the country. Overall, about sixty church societies were




202

deregistered in those years and thirty new societies were inscribed.

The 1978-1980 period was the best time during the 1970s and early

to mid 1980s for the authorization of new Orthodox communities.

They were also more responsive to believers’ desires in remote areas

of Asia, probably, Davis asserts, “to accommodate Russian settlers

and to promote Russification in politically and strategically sensitive

non-Russian areas ( A Long Walk to Church 46).” In 1982, Brezhnev

on his death bed authorized the Council for Religious Affairs

(CRA)—which has arbitrarily been ruling during the Communist

era—to return Danilov Monastery in Moscow to the Church to mark the Millenium of Russia’s Christianity (1988), so that the historic

monastery complex could be rehabilitated to become the central

headquarters of the patriarchate during the celebration of the

Millennium. This did not mean, however, that the repression of

dissidents stopped. If anything it intensified in the early 1980s ( A

Long Walk to Church 47). In Soviet society as a whole, the Brezhnev

period was characterized by corruption, cronyism, slowing economic

growth, ideological rigidity, a creeping return to Stalinist attitudes,




203

an atmosphere of cynicism, and recurring cycles of dissident activity

and repression (43).

Illustration 25: Danilov Monastery 42

Andropov

During the year and three months he was in power

(November 1982-February 1883) Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev’s

successor, there were some stirring of changes. A former head of the

KGB, Andropov was much better informed of the real situation in

the country than his predecessor, and he knew the only way of

solving the country’s problems namely repression. So he tried by

42 See: <www.moscow.info>.




204

force to put and end to corruption and loafing. However, as

Pospielovsky asserts, he acknowledged that believers were more

honest, responsible and conscientious, drank less and worked more

than the atheists, had a more respectful attitude towards the

established religion and their clergy, yet he fomented the use of

terror against religious initiatives such as study circles, seminars, and

religious activities. Furthermore, he imprisoned religious activists,

both in concentration camps and in “psycho-prisons” in a number

reaching its post-Khrushchev peak. Nevertheless, during Andropov’s

reign some churches were reopened (The Orthodox Church in the

History of Russia 340).

Chernenko

Chernenko’s government was characterized by a less tolerant

religious. Chernenko, Andropov’s successor, returned to most of the

policies of Brezhnev, and stagnation again settled across the land,

lasting until his death in March 1985. There was even an attempt to

take St Daniel’s Monastery back from the Church. To reverse this

decision, the church had to pay millions of rubles in bribes to high




205

party officials and ha to decide to call it a religious administrative

center with the Department of External Church Relations as its focal

point instead of a monastery. Pospielovsky reminds that the

ideological head of the Party under Chernenko was Gorbachev. Also,

being Chernenko ill for almost a half of his short tenure in power,

Gorbachev was the real leader and the maker of the aggressively

anti-religious turn (The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia

340-1). Chernenko presided the Supreme Soviet from April 11, 1984

until his death in 1985. His successor, Gorbachev, was the leader of

the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991. His attempts at reform led tothe end of the Cold War, but also caused the end of the political

supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and

the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The period from the early 1960s to the beginning of Soviet reforms in themid-1980s saw the Church enter the ecumenical movement and the WorldCouncil of Churches. Enormous restrictions were placed upon thefunctioning of the Church in Russia, reducing her to little more than acultic institution. Religious education in Russia had been wiped out to bereplaced with compulsory study of ‘scientific atheism’. The Church foundherself alienated from society with no voice in the communist-controlled

media; priests were not even permitted to make pastoral visits toparishioners’ homes. Yet to characterize this particular period of theChurch’s history as one of ‘stagnation’ would be mistaken. The spiritual




206

life did continue in hidden forms. There were pastors and preachers suchas Fr. Vsevolod Schpiller and Fr. Alexander Men who disseminated theWord of God to the intelligentsia, often with the risk of imminent arrest by

the KGB. The tradition of spiritual eldership was continued in theremarkable figure of Fr. Tavrion (Batozsky, d.1979), who had spentseventeen years of his life in the labour camps. In the 1980s there was arediscovery of traditional iconography and a renewal of the theology of the icon through the labors of Archimandrite Zenon (Teodor), whosenumerous iconostases and icons have now become known beyond theconfines of Russia. Sermons preached by Metropolitan Antony (Bloom) of Sourozh, the head of the Russian Orthodox diocese in London, were read(in samizdat form) and listened to by crowds of believers on his occasional

visits (“A History of the Russian Church”).

Table 20: Period early 1960’s to mid-1980’s

Gorbachev

Being the deviser of Chernenko’s anti-religious hard line,

Gorbachev’s ascent to power promised not relaxation in soviet

religious policy, yet as Davis states, during the Gorbachev era a

turnabout occurred in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church:

By the close of 1988, the millennial year, over 800 newly

opened parishes had been registered; new monasteries andnunneries had been established; seminaries, theologicaltraining institutes, and schools for psalmists, choir directors,and church administrators had opened. After six decades of suppression, Sunday schools, church-run charitable activities,and overt Christian study groups had reappeared. Bishops, priests, and faithful could once again march down to therivers on Epiphany Day to bless the waters and hail the baptism of Christ ( A Long Walk to Church 52).




207

Gorbachev himself was a pragmatist, never the ideological

fighter Khrushchev had been. Personally, Gorbachev confirmed

publicly in 1989 that both he and his wife had been baptized as

infants. It was also public that his mother was a believer. For

whatever reasons, Gorbachev was never confined to atheistic

militancy and had a relatively benevolent attitude toward the church

(53).

Davis tells that early in his mandate, Gorbachev was already

searching for allies to make perestroika work. He understood that his

country needed a moral reawakening from the corruption andcronyism that had prevailed during the Brezhnev era. A population

sodden with alcohol and devoid of a work ethic could not implement

perestroika ( A Long Walk to Church 73). According to Riasanovsky,

in A History of Russia (1999), he began a campaign against the

consumption of alcohol. Alcoholism has always been widespread in

Russian society, but the people resented the new changes.

Restrictions could not stem the tide of the demanding market. As a

result, illegal manufacture and trafficking of vodka and other spirits




208

prospered, encouraging the development and rapid growth of the

infamous Russian Mafia (701). For Gorbachev, glasnost in its

original conception was less freedom of speech than it was the

license to speak up and to denounce the wrongdoer and the evil done.

For him, Davis adds, all these goals would require higher ethical

standards, and the church could help ( A Long Walk to Church 53).

As Davis continues, yet, Gorbachev, who took office in

March of 1985, did not implement changes in religious policy right

away nor did he have a clear line of action. New Orthodox parish

registrations that year totaled exactly three, as compared to two newregistrations the previous year. Deregistration outnumbered new

parishes in both years, and the total number of Orthodox

communities in the country continued to sink. But in the late 1980s,

the Millennium of the baptism of Rus’ in 988, glasnost and

democratization, Gorbachev’s felt need for new sources of support,

his desire for international acceptance, and his pragmatism led to a

new Soviet religious policy. In April of 1985, the party directed

members not to permit the “violation of believers’ feelings.” But the




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government policy on religion did not begin to change significantly

until the end of the year. In the 1985-1986 period some pro-Christian

literary works were successfully published; in June 1986, several

pro-church speeches were given at the Eighth Writers’ Union

Congress. Also, the church was praised publicly for its generous

response to the Chernobyl tragedy. In 1987 reformist publications

began writing sympathetically about believers’ rights and publicizing

their struggles to have churches returned to them. Permission to

publish scriptures and liturgical books in the USSR was becoming

easier to obtain. Publicly expressed Soviet governmental attitudeswere sounding more tolerant (54).

Davis also says that on April 29, 1988, Gorbachev received

Patriarch Pimen and five metropolitans who were members of the

Holy Synod in the Kremlin. He thanked the church leaders for the

Russian Orthodox Church’s patriotism and material contributions

during World War II and for the leaders’ participation in the fight for

peace and against nuclear destruction. He also acknowledged that

both Stalin and Khrushchev had mistreated the church and believers,




210

and that they, like other Soviet citizens, deserved the benefits of

democratization and glasnost . He also took credit on behalf of the

Soviet government for the return of the Danilov, Tolga, and Optina

convents and for government assistance in planning the millennial

celebration. In his reply, Pimen somewhat pointedly added to the list

of benefits that he hoped might be extended by the Soviet

government, mentioning, among others, restoration of the church

societies closed in the 1960s, the registration of new church societies,

the opening of church edifices closed down, and the building of new

churches. Pimen blessed Gorbachev and his labors for the welfare of the motherland. Moreover, Gorbachev promised to refer the

patriarch’s specific requests and concerns to his colleagues for

resolution. In truth, Gorbachev’s government responded to the

church’s appeals in all of these areas. After the Millennium

celebrations, the pace of beneficent change quickened. The

authorities relaxed their ban on ringing church bells, which had been

in effect since 1961. Some years later, on Easter of 1994 even the

bells of the Kremlin’s churches and towers pealed out over Moscow




211

(56, 59). After the collapse of the communist institution, aggressive

Marxist ideological materialism in Russia is a whispered memory.

Once again the church is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of

misfortune (3).

Riasanovsky states that on the foreign relations front, the

situation was not good. Financial shortfalls resulted in the Soviet

army being removed from eastern Europe and the Soviet Republics.

Once the armies were gone, republics began falling away and

demanding political autonomy. Gorbachev could only stand and

watch, as there was no money to fight another war. Even Russiaitself demanded freedom from the Soviet Union. By 1991 Gorbachev

found himself president of a non-existent nation, and the Soviet

Union collapsed (722), yet he had brought the Church back from its

communist darkness.

Peter Scorer, in “The Russian Orthodox Church 1991-1994,”

asserts that the end of the Soviet Union took place on December 31,

1991, following shortly after the failed coup in August 1991. It

closely coincided with the death of Patriarch Pimen, who survived




212

just long enough to see the first fruits of Gorbachev’s glasnost ’ affect

the Church by permitting the millennium celebrations to take place.

This was a celebration, fruit of the fresh air brought by Gorbachev to

the Soviet Union, who permitted a full local council of the Russian

Church to be held for the first time since the October Revolution.

The council took important decisions returning to the principles

proclaimed at the famous council of the Russian Church in 1917-18.

Scorer adds that it stipulated: “the regular convening of both

Bishops’ Councils and of Local Councils, as well as the

establishment of local diocesan councils, to which members would be elected. In parishes, the priest was restored to his rightful position

as head of the parish council, which would also be elected.

The following year, 1989, was another jubilee year when the

Church celebrated 400 years since the establishment of the

Patriarchate in Russia (1589). A Bishop’s council was held that year

deciding on the canonization of two patriarchs, the first Patriarch of

Russia, Job, and Patriarch Tikhon. These two canonizations were

regarded as a real advance in the freedom and independence of the




213

Church. On May 3, 1990, the old and sick Patriarch Pimen died—he

had been elected Patriarch at theSobor of 1971. At the June 1990

Sobor , following the death of the Patriarch Pimen, Patriarch Aleksii

II, a relatively young and energetic leader, was elected. Pospielovsky

asserts that “This was the first council since 1917 at which a genuine

secret ballot, with multiple candidates, occurred” (The Orthodox

Church in the History of Russia 336). He also asserts that the new

Patriarch’s assignment from theSobor was his complaint to

Gorbachev of the Soviet bureaucrats’ revision of the first version of

the draft on religion freedom, a revision in which the Church was notconsulted. Consequently, Church representatives were invited to

collaborate in the preparation of a final text and law Russian

Republic law on religion was finally issued in October 1990.

Fourteen months later, the URSS ceased to exist and, once

Pospielovsky adds:

The Russian Law abolished the CRA, recognized the Churchas a social organization and as a person-in-law, with thenright to own property, including churches and other buildings.

La law recognized not only actual religious society, i.e., parishes, but also the whole hierarchical structure of the




214

Church, by stating that it recognized such form of religiousorganization as required by that religion’s canons. The lawconfirmed that Russia was a secular state, in which neither atheistic nor religious organizations are subsided by the state;they must finance themselves through private donations or other private sources. The registration of religious community became an act of certification instead of authorization (TheOrthodox Church in the History of Russia , 367-366).

Scorer continues by saying that the last two years before the collapse

of the Soviet Union in 1991, had already seen a quick increase in the

number of parishes. If in 1986 there were 6794, a year later, by 1988,

the figure had increase by only 100. Yet in the following two years

there were nearly 10,000: some 29 new monasteries had been opened

along with seven theological schools. Furthermore, the whole

population was extremely supportive of the church and the clergy

had to baptize a great number of people.

SOME NOTES ON THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH1991 TO MODERN DAYS

After the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Yeltsin came to

power eager to speed up reforms. He opposed the policies of Soviet

leader Mikhail Gorbachev, yet was instrumental in defeating a coup




215

against Gorbachev in 1991. Yeltsin remained in power, and despite

political setbacks, rumors of heavy drinking, and at least two heart

attacks, was reelected to office in 1996 and retired abruptly on 31

December 1999. Scorer asserts that the period 1991-1994 were years

of changes which totally transformed Russian society; changes which

neither the state, nor the people, and certainly not the Church, were

ready to confront. In these years forces of inertia and of change

become so polarized that the country was nearly thrown into civil

war in October 1993. In addition, the tragic inheritance of the years

of socialist totalitarian control has become apparent in the last four years: the absence of any real moral foundations, endemic

corruption, a total lack of civic responsibility and bankruptcy in the

economic sphere. The initial euphoria during the extraordinary

summer of 1991 following the putsch, was soon to be followed by

discontent, hunger, poverty, mass unemployment, an escalation of

crime and corruption, coming to a climax in the confrontation

between the president and his parliament in October 1993. Apathy

has tended to dominate the mood of the people, together with a




216

general feeling of resentment. Yet during Yeltsin’s years in power

there was a positive alliance with the church. His appearance at a

Moscow Easter service in 1991 was considered a major factor in his

success in the presidential election held two months later. Having

supported Yeltsin during the presidential campaign, Patriarch

Aleksiiy officiated at his inauguration that year (The Russian

Orthodox Church) and he spoke out spoke out in a crucial moment

during the August putsch.

Scorer wonders how the Church was to behave in this new

situation. In a sense, he says, the Holy Synod did little. He asserts:The ensuing process was taken out of its hands, by those whohad already begun to open new parishes, those demanding thereturn of churches, and restoring buildings which for so manyyears had been used for other purposes. The Church began to blossom even more; the rush to be baptized gathered pace,while Bibles, books and religious pamphlets began to appear in every kiosk and book shop, together with icons, calendars.The church became involved in charitable works, Sundayschools began to flourish, more new theological schools wereopened to cope with the sudden demand for new priests. Bythe beginning of 1993, the number of parishes in Russia hadgrown to 14,000. There were 213 monasteries and 35theological schools of various sorts. There were 127 bishops

(including suffragan bishops), and just over 12,000 priests.




217

Furthermore, according to the head of the Russian Orthodox

Church, Patriarch Aleksii II,

between 1990 and 1995 more than 8,000 Russian Orthodoxchurches were opened, doubling the number of active parishes and adding thirty-two eparchies (dioceses). In thefirst half of the 1990s, the Russian government returnednumerous religious facilities that had been confiscated by itscommunist predecessors, providing some assistance in therepair and reconstruction of damaged structures. The mostvisible such project was the building of the completely newChrist the Savior Cathedral, erected in Moscow at an expenseof about US$ 300 million to replace the showplace cathedraldemolished in 1931 as part of the Stalinist campaign againstreligion. Financed mainly by private donations, the newchurch is considered a visible acknowledgment of themistakes of the Soviet past. (The Russian Orthodox Church )

Yet, not everything went as smoothly as could be hoped.

Some representatives of the church, including senior bishops,

metropolitans and even Aleksii II were accused of having been

collaborators of the KGB. Yet, polls said that in the first half of the

1990s the church inspired greater trust among the Russian population

than most other social and political institutions. Also, Aleksii II was

found to elicit greater grassroots confidence than most other public

figures in Russia. In Russian, as in most eastern countries, political




218

leaders regularly seek the approval of the church as moral authority

for virtually all types of government policy.

During the last fifteen or more years, Russia has experienced

nearly fifteen years of “wild west” capitalism. The arrival of

President Vladimir Putin in 2000 and his economic and political

reforms have brought some stability to the Russian society and

economy. There remains, however, a great deal of adjustment and

continued dedication to the building of a democratic system. Today,

the Russian Orthodox Church is the largest of the eastern Orthodox

churches in the world. There are over 90% of ethnic Russians whoidentify themselves as Russian Orthodox. Nowadays, the Church has

over 23,000 parishes, 154 bishops, 635 monasteries, and 102 clerical

schools in the territory of former Soviet Union. It also has a well-

established presence in many other countries all over the World.

Recently, some of the church buildings were officially returned to the

Church, most of these being in a deteriorated condition (“Russian

Orthodox Church after the Revolution of 1917”).




219

Furthermore, since 2002, there has been a difficult

relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church43 and the

Vatican. Not a new situation if we review the History of Byzantium

and that of the Russian Church itself. Patriarch Aleksii had

condemned the Vatican’s creation of a Catholic diocesan structure

for Russian territory, and saw it as a throwback to prior attempts by

the Vatican to proselytize the Russian Orthodox faithful to become

Roman Catholic. This perspective is based upon the fact that for the

Russian Orthodox Church (and the eastern Orthodox Church) the

Church of Rome is but one of many equal Christian organizations,and that as such it is straying into the territory, which was already

christianized by the Christian Orthodox Church.

A particularly sensitive issue for members of the Russian

Orthodox Church is the encroachment by other Christian

denominations into Russia. Having just come out of 70 years of

Communist oppression, proselytizing by mostly foreign-based

43We should not confuse the Russian Orthodox Church with the Russian OrthodoxChurch Outside Russia. The latter was formed by some Russian communitiesoutside of Russia, which refused to recognize the authority of the RussianOrthodox Church in Communist Russia.




220

Catholics, Protestant denominations, and by many destructive sects

can be seen as taking unfair advantage of the still-recovering

condition of the Russian Church. Furthermore, smaller religious

movements (particularly, Baptists and members of other Protestant

denominations, brought into Russia by western missionaries in the

past decade) claim that the state provides unfair support to one

religion and suppresses others. They refer to the 1997 Russian law,

under which, those religious organizations that could not provide

official proof of their existence for the preceding 15 years were

significantly restricted in their rights and abilities to proselytize. Thelaw was formally intended to combat the destructive cults.

Nevertheless, it was worded in such a manner that any organization,

no matter how ancient, that could not document its presence in the

Soviet Union before the fall of Communism was automatically

affected by this law. Consequently, this law gave full rights only to a

small number of “first-rank” religions, such as Orthodox

Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism. The situation is




221

expected to normalize as the 15-year window starts to slide over the

post-Communist period (“Russian Orthodox Church”).

CONCLUSION

Religion, an area of the individual’s private life, was the

target of communism. For seventy years communism pledged tostructurally and systematically eliminate religion, not merely control

and rechannel, but to eliminate it. The leaders of the godless

movement did what was humanly possible to secure victory. But they

were unable to achieve their end. They could not foresee that theywere challenging a Power superior to man’s intelligence. Zernov44

states that Church could not be destroyed in Russia, for it is the

Church of the Living God, of God who does exist, who acts, who

loves and protects His people. For the Communists, however, truth

was on Karl Marx’s side, and Christ was a pitiful deceiver. For them,

mankind was the master of its destiny, and science and human

planning could solve all the problems of human life (93). Zernov is

44 See excerpts edited by Bishop Alexander Mileant.




222

right when saying that: “The Church in Russia was purged as by fire,

and the sufferings of its members were great. Many of them perished,

but the truth of the Christian Revelation triumphed, and those who

assaulted it were unable to find a substitute for the unique power and

beauty which belong to the Church of Christ” (94).

No one can deny that the history of the Russian Church has

been a tragedy in itself and in its encounter within itself and with the

West, but a tragedy that makes it creatively unique in its Christian

experience, but not different from the roots from which its sprang,

namely Orthodoxy. Undoubtedly, the inevitable, painful encounter with the West was essential for its full growth and its true calling.

Geographically, the Church of Russia seemed to develop apart from

the Christian world since the Middle Ages, but it did not lack unity

with Christianity, whose spiritual history goes back to the miracle of

Pentecost. It preserved a longing for the eternal truth that sprang

from Byzantium and, through it, from the primitive Christians, with

whom it shares an agonizing awareness of cruel persecution, and, at

the same time, of spiritual revival.




223

Separation from other Christians and internal problems of

Orthodoxy in Russia and the world, and the sad differences and

divisions between Christians, could be solved if we were able to

contemplate with the aid and the sound vision of the Spirit, Russia’s

primitive Christian Orthodox inspiration and grasp its untamable,

unconquerable soul, with its deep spiritual understanding and

illumination, which also were the inspirational source of so many

Russian writers, monks and saints. Russia’s primitive Christianity

irradiates a spiritual light which incited its own spiritual resurgence

because it addressed in its own consciousness the vital and eternalsources of Jesus’ faith and his message of the Fatherhood and the

brotherhood of all believers.




224

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