A Long Walk To Church

A Contemporary History Of Russian Orthodoxy

Nathaniel Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429975127
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Making use of the formerly secret archives of the Soviet government, interviews, and first-hand personal experiences, Nathaniel Davis describes how the Russian Orthodox Church hung on the brink of institutional extinction twice in the past sixty-five years. In 1939, only a few score widely scattered priests were still functioning openly. Ironically, Hitler's invasion and Stalin's reaction to it rescued the church -- and parishes reopened, new clergy and bishops were consecrated, a patriarch was elected, and seminaries and convents were reinstituted. However, after Stalin's death, Khrushchev resumed the onslaught against religion. Davis reveals that the erosion of church strength between 1948 and 1988 was greater than previously known and it was none too soon when the Soviet government changed policy in anticipation of the millennium of Russia's conversion to Christianity. More recently, the collapse of communism has created a mixture of dizzying opportunity and daunting trouble for Russian Orthodoxy. The newly revised and updated edition addresses the tumultuous events of recent years, including schisms in Ukraine, Estonia, and Moldova, and confrontations between church traditionalists, conservatives and reformers. The author also covers battles against Greek-Catholics, Roman Catholics, Protestant evangelists, and pagans in the south and east, the canonization of the last Czar, the church's financial crisis, and hard data on the slowing Russian orthodox recovery and growth. Institutional rebuilding and moral leadership now beckon between promise and possibility.

1
From the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II

ΤHE YEAR 1939 WAS the worst in history for the Russian Orthodox Church. Never before had the institutional and human situation of the church been quite so desperate. Never again, after the Soviet territorial acquisitions of 1939-1940 brought new priests, bishops, and resources to the church, would it become quite so bad.

In 1939 the acting head of the church, Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski), lived in Moscow, virtually cut off from the few score churches still functioning in the vast Soviet land. According to a well-informed observer, Wassilij Alexeev, "Sergi awaited arrest each minute.... His attendant went away during the night, fearing that he would be arrested with the Metropolitan [if he stayed].... The aging hierarch remained completely alone ... and if something like a heart attack had occurred, he would have died without aid of any kind."¹

All the monasteries, nunneries, and seminaries were closed. Dioceses did not exist as administrative units. A few of the separated churches sent irregular letters to the metropolitan, but even this meager correspondence consisted mostly of greetings.² The Russian Orthodox Church was in agony.

How did the church reach this pass? Although this book focuses on post-World War II events and more particularly on the contemporary situation, a brief review of the church-state struggle between 1917 and 1939 maybe in order.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church was electing its first patriarch since the time of Peter the Great. After the fall of the czar, even the modernists in the church had become convinced that a strong, unifying leader was needed, and the provisional government had given permission for a church council with the authority to act. Eleven days after the storming of the Winter Palace, Metropolitan Tikhon (Belavin) of Moscow was chosen by lot from among three elected candidates.³

The new Soviet government already had nationalized all church lands, and it would soon decree the separation of church and state, cancel the church's status as a juridical entity, ban state subsidies to clergy and religious bodies, seize church bank accounts, deny legal standing to church marriages, divorces, and baptisms, and ban organized religious education of the young.

Still, most of the church leaders believed that the communist government was an affliction that would pass. After electing Patriarch Tikhon, the council affirmed that the Russian Orthodox Church was the national church of Russia, that the state needed church approval to legislate on matters relating to the church, that blasphemy should remain illegal, that church schools should be recognized, and that the head of the Russian state and the top appointees in education and religious affairs should be Orthodox.⁴

In January of 1918, the patriarch excommunicated the faith's "open and secret enemies."⁵ Other pronouncements from the patriarch and the church council followed, excommunicating priests or laymen who conspired against duly appointed ecclesiastics, facilitated antichurch legislation or laid hands on Orthodox church-men.⁶ The stage was set for confrontation, and it came, despite the patriarch's refusal to support the Bolsheviks' enemies in the civil war that soon engulfed the nation. In fact, the church-state struggle was but a part of the cataclysm through which Russia was passing. All of society had been riven asunder, and the misfortunes of the church seemed to be, in a sense, by-products of revolution and chaos.

On the all-European scene, Russia was losing World War I, having suffered over 9 million casualties—more than any other belligerent. Appalling conditions had characterized the situation at the front. Sometimes Russian soldiers had been obliged to wait in backup trenches, lacking even rifles, until the deaths of comrades allowed them to scavenge arms. As the British military attaché described it, the soldiers had been "churned into gruel" by German artillery.⁷ In the peace treaty with Germany signed in March 1918, the Soviet Union lost a third of its population and a third of its arable lands.

The defeat abroad hardly matched the upheaval at home. Soldiers streamed home to their villages to grab pieces of land. Russia's erstwhile allies invaded. Anti-Bolshevik forces advanced toward Petrograd and Moscow from the north, south, east and west. In the meantime, former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war seized the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Cruelty and brutality were appalling. Just as the anti-Bolsheviks faltered and the Western powers began losing stomach for their interventions, the Poles attacked; Kiev changed hands seventeen times between 1918 and 1921.

In the countryside, the Bolsheviks organized Committees of the Village Poor and sent out workers and soldiers from the cities 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 fled Moscow and Petrograd seeking food in the countryside; more than half the people in those cities abandoned them. The ruble stood at one two-hundred-thousandth of its prewar value.

Over 7 million people died from hunger and epidemics; cannibalism spread. The editor of Pomoshch [Relief], the organ of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, described it: "People mainly ate members of their own families as they died, feeding on the older children, but not sparing newborn infants either ... despite the fact that there wasn't much to them."⁸

In this context of desperation, the Bolshevik regime demanded the church's valuables for famine relief. On February 19, 1922, the patriarch duly asked parishes to surrender all precious articles except those used in sacraments and worship. A few days later the government launched a propaganda campaign against a "heartless" church and ordered virtually every treasure confiscated, including consecrated vessels.⁹ Loyal Orthodox believers rallied to defend their sacramental treasures, and the Russian press reported some 1,400 bloody fights as priests and parishioners tried to guard their churches.¹⁰ The bloodiest incidents occurred in Shuya, east of Moscow, where church supporters and Bolsheviks battled for days. Throughout the country churches were closed by force, and priests and hierarchs were arrested. Although there had been bloody incidents before, this was the first great crisis in the church-state struggle.¹¹

Almost a half century later it was revealed that Lenin had sent a secret memorandum to his Politburo colleagues on March 19, 1922, in which he wrote with brutal candor that the campaign to seize church treasures was intended to break the power of the clergy, not simply to obtain resources with which to buy food. Lenin called the opportunity "exceptionally beneficial," the only moment "when we are given ninety-nine out of 100 chances to gain a full and crushing victory" over the clerical enemy and

assure ourselves the necessary positions for decades ahead. It is precisely now and only now, when there is cannibalism ... and corpses are lying along the roads that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of valuables with fanatical and merciless energy.... No other opportunity but the current terrible famine will give us a mood of the wide masses such as would provide us with their sympathies or at least neutrality.... Now our victory over the reactionary clergy is guaranteed.... the trial of the Shuya rioters for resisting aid to the hungry [should] be conducted in as short a time as possible, concluding in the maximum possible number of executions.... If possible, similar executions should be carried out in Moscow and other spiritual centers of the country.¹²

The fight over church treasures had ongoing consequences. On May 6, 1922, Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest—accused of resisting the confiscations. Leaders of reformist and leftist currents that had developed within the church took advantage of Tikhon's confinement to seize control of the patriarchal chancery and church administration.¹³ Calling themselves Renovationists, these clerics had coalesced into three factions. The largest of them, the Living Church, was led by Archpriest Vladimir Krasnitski, a radical-rightist cleric before World War I, who emerged as a leader of the married priests who wanted to change the Orthodox rule that permitted only monastic clergy to aspire to episcopal office. The second Renovationist grouping was led by Father Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenski, a charismatic preacher who was alleged to be a libertine and police collaborator. Clerics in Vvedenski's Union of Communities of Ancient Apostolic Churches also wanted to open the door to married priests becoming bishops. The smallest but most respected grouping was led by Bishop, then Metropolitan, Antonin (Granovski), an opponent of autocracy even in the prerevolutionary time. The Renovationists had Bolshevik support, clearly motivated by the authorities' desire to split and thereby rule the church. The government turned over the majority of the functioning Orthodox churches in the country to the collaborating Renovationists.¹⁴

For moral, traditional, and political reasons, most of the Orthodox laity disdained the Renovationists. The church schism was a blow to the institutional integrity of the patriarchal church, however, and it influenced Tikhon in his decision to "confess" anti-Soviet acts, renounce them, and declare that he was "no longer an enemy of the Soviet Government." The authorities freed him on June 26, 1923, and he was able to reassert his authority and turn the tide against the Renovationists.¹⁵

By late 1924 the Renovationists had lost their control over a third to a half of the churches the authorities had given them. In the meantime, Lenin had died and Stalin was slowly consolidating his power. The New Economic Policy was bringing economic recovery and a modicum of normality. During this time, the strength of the patriarchal church grew.¹⁶

On April 7, 1925, Patriarch Tikhon died, and his death plunged the church into a rolling crisis of leadership. By 1927, ten out of eleven prelates successively named to act as head of the church were in prison or exile, and most of the bishops were in similar straits.¹⁷ The man who emerged as acting head of the church was Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski) of Nizhni-Novgorod. Arrested more than once, Sergi was released from prison in March of 1927 and issued a loyalty declaration to the Soviet government on July 24 of that year. Its key passage, which outraged many Orthodox in the Soviet Union and in the Russian emigration, recognized "the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose [the motherland's] joys and successes are our joys and successes, and whose misfortunes are our misfortunes."¹⁸

Under the leadership of Metropolitan Antoni (Khrapovitski), formerly of Kiev, émigré Russian churchmen had met in the Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci in 1921 and established the Karlovci Synod, which ultimately became the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Promonarchist and prointerventionist resolutions of the synod had complicated Tikhon's position at the time of the first great antichurch campaign in 1922. Although Sergi did not collaborate with the Karlov cians, he had confidential correspondence with them, and the synod published a letter from Sergi in 1926 that the Bolsheviks used as a pretext for Sergi's arrest. After Sergi's loyalty declaration of 1927, the Karlovcians fiercely opposed Sergi and his perceived capitulation and came to regard the underground True Orthodox Church and True Orthodox Christians as the legitimate voices of Orthodoxy in the USSR. Metropolitan Iosif (Petrovykh), Metropolitan Agafangel (Preo-brazhenski), Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov), Bishop Aleksi (Bui), and the majority of the bishops imprisoned in the camps on the Solovetski Islands distanced themselves from Sergi and his loyalty declaration, although not all of them repudiated his authority.¹⁹

The quieter times of the New Economic Policy were shattered by the forced industrialization and collectivization drives that started in 1928. At the end of 1929 and at the beginning of 1930, as had been the case in 1921 and 1922, troops and party workers fanned out into the countryside, this time to force the peasants to join collective farms. Peasant resistance produced violence once again, and farmers slaughtered their livestock and ate or destroyed stores of food and seed. Hunger returned. Although Stalin temporarily reined in the collectivization drive in March of 1930, pressures on the peasants soon resumed and a man-made famine spread. It reached appalling proportions in Ukraine and the northern Caucasus in 1932. At least 5 million people died from hunger and attendant diseases. A Soviet demographer noted a population loss of 7.5 million. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev described how trains pulled into Kiev loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death; railroad workers had picked them up all along the route from Poltava. The rivers of the northern Caucasus carried thousands of bodies to the sea.²⁰

As in the famine of 1922, the church was among the victims. Farmers posted guards and defended their churches and priests with scythes and pitchforks, but many priests and peasants were swept away in the general violence. The campaign changed the face of the countryside, which was thereafter dotted with the shells of churches serving as granaries, overcrowded dwellings, storehouses, and workshops, their rusting and disintegrating cupolas standing hollow against the sky. In 1932 city churches also became targets, and the 1929-1933 period became the second great wave of church closings.²¹

In a dissertation completed some years ago, I made an effort to analyze the communist authorities' strategies and the churches' counterstrategies in their struggle in both the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe.²² I shall not repeat the argument here. It was notable, however, that the evolution of communist strategy in the USSR came rather close to repeating itself in the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe three decades after the battles between the Bolsheviks and Russian Orthodox believers. In both areas there was an initial political struggle characterized by violence, arrests, and church closings. The pattern continued with communist efforts to divide the various religious communities and split the ranks of clerical adversaries. Church leaders in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were subsequently forced to make declarations of political submission, with varying degrees of exception in Poland, East Germany, and one or two other places.

Both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, the frontal assault on religious communities became a long process of attrition. This was partly because in most cases church lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Prologue
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction: Communism and Religion
• 1 From the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II
• 2 The Turnaround
• 3 Stalin's Last Years and the Early Khrushchev Period
• 4 Khrushchev's Attack
• 5 The Period of Stagnation
• 6 The Millennium
• 7 Squalls and Tempests
• 8 Accusations, Schisms, Disputes, and Complications
• 9 Russian Orthodox Clergy
• 10 Illegal and Underground Orthodox Religion
• 11 Monks, Nuns, and Convents
• 12 Theological Education
• 13 Publications and Finances
• 14 The Laity
• 15 Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index