1917-1942 - Under the Soviets
| Patriarch St. Tikhon | 1917-1925 |
| Patriarch Sergius I | 1943-1944 |
| Patriarch Alexius I | 1944-1970 |
| Patriarch Pimen I | 1970-1990 |
| Patriarch Alexius II | 1990-2008 |
| Patriarch Kirill I | 2009-2xxxt |
The only way out of this menacing situation was to convoke a council, which is the supreme normal organ of Church legislation, administration, and justice. The Council assembled in Moscow on the 15th day of August, 1917. The Metropolitan of Moscow, Tikhon, was elected President. Metropolitan Tikhon (TEE-khahn), in the world Basil Ivanovich Bellavin, upon being informed of his selection to the Patriarchy on 01 November 1917, looked to the future and commented that the election itself was "for me the scroll on which is inscribed 'lamentations and mourning and woe.' Many will be the tears I will have to swallow and the moans I will have to utter in the office of patriarch, especially in these grim times!" On November 21 / December 4, 1917, Metropolitan Tikhon was enthroned as Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia in the Kremlin Dormition cathedral to the sound of gunfire from the battle of Moscow raging outside.
The Patriarchate was restored, but not restored in the form it had in Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In those days the Patriarch was invested with great personal power, which did not strictly conform to the spirit of the Orthodox Church. The Council narrowly defined the position of the Patriarch as that of "the first among equals," on a par with the other organs of the higher Church administration, the Holy Synod and the supreme Church Council, of which the Patriarch is president. He was awarded a position much like that occupied by the Patriarch of Constantinople, but with some extension of rights, compared to those given to the latter by the statute of his local Patriarchate.
Karl Marx, the political philosopher whose ideas were nominally followed by the Bolsheviks, called religion "the opiate of the people." Although many of Russia's revolutionary factions did not take Marx literally, the Bolshevik faction, led by Vladimir I. Lenin, was deeply suspicious of the church as an institution and as a purveyor of spiritual values. Therefore, atheism became mandatory for members of the ruling Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). To eliminate as soon as possible what was deemed the perverse influence of religion in society, the communists launched a propaganda campaign against all forms of religion.
By 1918 the government had nationalized all church property, including buildings. Tikhon's leadership was almost impossible. On January 19, 1918, he anathematized the Bolsheviks and their co-workers, saying: "I adjure all of you who are faithful children of the Orthodox Church of Christ not to commune with such outcasts of the human race in any matter whatsoever". The forces of right and left clashed with each other to form an ecclesiastical revolution to be exploited by the state. After Lenin's decree in November the Church was denied the right to hold legal title to its property. Six thousand church and monastic buildings were first confiscated. Religious instruction was forbidden, sermons were censored. More church buildings were appropriated for secular purposes such as social clubs and dance halls. By 1922 the Russian Orthodox Church was destitute and existed only as a non-legal entity.
The Catacomb Church of Russia was "bathed in the glory of a vast multitude of new martyrs and confessors" [that is to say, the two categories of religious witnesses qualified for sanctification]; but the whole apparatus of one of the most evil and most powerful states in history was directed towards her complete annihilation. In the first five years of the Soviet Union (1922-26), twenty-eight Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were executed, and many others were persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and publication of most religious material was prohibited.
The Living Church members broke away from the Greek Catholics and called the latter, which Patriarch Tikon heads, the "Dead Church." The 'Renovationists' were church figures that colluded with the Bolsheviks. This group of pro-revolutionary "renovationist" clergy created the so-called "Living Church". In May 1922 they took advantage of the Patriarch's transfer to the Donskoy monastery to seize control of the Church's central administration. The renovationists attacked several of the basic dogmas of the Church, and introduced modernist innovations such as the new calendar and married bishops. They adopted a vigorously pro-Soviet and anti-Patriarch policy. They accepted the newcalendarist Churches of Constantinople, Alexandria, Greece and Romania as truly Orthodox.
In 1923 Patriarch Tikhon condemned both renovationism and the renovationists, declaring all their sacraments to be invalid. But the Patriarch Tikhon's life was spared at the cost of his former integrity. Tikhon was forced to sign a confession in which he stated, "I hereby declare to the Soviet authorities that I am henceforth no more an enemy of the Soviet Government, and that I have completely and resolutely severed all connections with the foreign and domestic monarchists, and the counter-revolutionary activity of the White Guards." This confession, made under duress, implied that he had been a counter-revolutionary, and an enemy of the state. Such a confession indicated the intention of the state to humiliate the church and to insist upon its subordination to its atheistic purposes.
Since 1923, admittedly, almost all the hierarchs, of all orientations (with rare exceptions, such as the Hieromartyr Bishops Basil of Priluky and Amphilochius of Krasnoyarsk), followed the patriarch in abandoning the attitude of outright condemnation of Soviet power characteristic of the Council of 1917-18. They all professed a certain "civic loyalty" to the régime. According to the official version of the Patriarch's death, he died at 11.45 p.m. on March 25 / April 7, 1925. There is no hint in the official version that the Patriarch may have been poisoned.
The Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius in 1927 was a compromise by the Church administration with the Soviet atheist State, showing an erastianism and servility of extraordinary proportions. It implied that the triumphs of militant atheism were the triumphs of the Church. Metropolitan Sergei of Moscow was attempting to preserve the form of the church, or at least what little of it that was left. In this Declaration the Metropolitan stated that it was his task to convince the Soviet government that there was no contradiction involved in being both a member of the Russian Orthodox Church and a citizen of the Soviet Union. "Her happiness," he remarked, "and her successes are our happiness and successes, and her misfortunes our misfortunes." By way of an explanation he pointed out that, "for a Christian there can be no accident (in history). The regime exists by the will of God and it would be madness to struggle against it or try to hide in a corner and live as if it did not exist."
What was at stake was the mere existence of the Orthodox hierarchy. Subsequent events demontrated that its existence depended upon its subservience to the state, and its support of the domestic and international policies of the Soviet. The degree of the Metropolitan's subservience may be measured by his indication that the Soviets were guiltless of any sins against the church, Such subservience may have been acceptable to the left wing of the church, but not to those of the more traditional or historically minded groups. Those were the ones who opposed such a position. The bishops and clergy who did so were arrested by the G.P.U. as counter-revolutionaries. Most of them were executed and the remainder sentenced to life imprisonment. Their sees were given to Metropolitan Sergei's supporters. Despite such cruelties the Metropolitan referred to Stalin as, "the great, God-given leader of the Russian people."
The next quarter-century saw surges and declines in arrests, enforcement of laws against religious assembly and activities, and harassment of clergy. Antireligious campaigns were directed at all faiths; beginning in the 1920s, Buddhist and Shamanist places of worship in Buryatia, in the Baikal region, were destroyed, and their lamas and priests were arrested (a practice that continued until the 1970s).
The League of the Militant Godless, established in 1925, directed a nationwide campaign against the Orthodox Church and all other organized religions. This propaganda defined the communist states' commitment to atheism, and to the principles of negating past culture. This policy necessitated the destruction of private property, the family, and the church. Church buildings were used as atheistic museums, special courses, with appropriate awards, were provided for students and teachers, in order to indoctrinate those who were to become teachers and lecturers. Expensively published books, tracts, and posters were provided in great quantities not only for domestic, but worldwide distribution. A favorite theme of the posters was that of the exploited masses carrying an enormous gold cross on which sat bishops, priests, and pastors. The extreme position of this organization eventually led even the Soviet government to disavow direct connection with its practices.
On April the 8th, 1929, Stalin formulated a new law dealing with the nature of religious associations and specifying the restrictions placed upon them. In the original Constitution citizens were assured of their right to profess their faith similar to the right of atheists to profess theirs. This, however, was altered to limit religious expression to worship without witness.
Thus, Article 52 of the present Constitution reads as follows: "Citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess or not to profess any religion, and to conduct religious worship or atheistic propaganda." This history of church-state relations in the Soviet Union indicates clearly that its emphasis is upon atheistic propaganda. The Law of Religious Associations reinforces this emphasis.
A religious association was defined as a group of twenty or more whose members had reached the minimum age of eighteen. Such fellowships were ordered to register with the state, at first through the local soviet, and then through the Council of Religious Affairs. They were forbidden to collect funds, provide charity, teach children, organize religious conferences, hold picnics, arrange excursions, maintain playgrounds for children, maintain libraries, provide reading rooms, keep homes for the elderly or infirm, provide medical services, engage in evangelical campaigns, hold meetings outside the assigned prayer halls, visit homes. They had, in effect, no real rights.
Between 1929 and 1941 the Russian Orthodox Church was almost destroyed as an ecclesiastical entity. Thus, the Metropolitan's compromise with the atheistic state may have been pointless. The following statistical comparison provides a reasonable portrayal of the attempted negation of the church, and the subsequent suffering imposed upon its people. In 1914 the lay membership was numbered at 117.4 million. There were 67 sees with 130 bishops; church buildings were 54,174, plus 550 monasteries with 21,300 monks, and 473 convents with 73,299 nuns. Fifty-eight seminaries assured an adequate supply of priests. By 1940 there were less than 4,000 churches, and 28 bishops. The official lay membership was no more than 40,000. In 1940 an estimated 30,000 religious communities of all denominations survived in all the Soviet Union, but only about 500 Russian Orthodox parishes were open at that time, compared with the estimated 54,000 that had existed before World War I.
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