Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

7

The Assault on Religion

In histories of the Russian Revolution, religion receives little if any attention. W. H. Chamberlin devotes to this subject fewer than five pages in a book of nearly one thousand. Other scholars (for instance, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Leonard Schapiro) ignore it altogether. Such lack of interest can only be explained by the secularism of modern historians. And yet, even if historians are secular, the people with whom they deal were in the overwhelming majority religious: in this respect, the inhabitants of what became the Soviet Union—Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike—may be said to have lived in the Middle Ages. For them, culture meant religion—religious belief, but especially religious rituals and festivals: baptism, circumcision, confirmation, confession, burial, Christmas and Easter, Passover and Yom Kippur, Ramadan. Their lives revolved around the ceremonies of the religious calendar, because these not only glorified their hard and humdrum existences but gave even the humblest of them a sense of dignity in the eyes of God, for whom all human beings are equal. The Communists attacked religious beliefs and practices with a vehemence not seen since the days of the Roman Empire. Their aggressive atheism affected the mass of citizens far more painfully than the suppression of political dissent or the imposition of censorship. Next to the economic hardships, no action of Lenin’s government brought greater suffering to the population at large, the so-called “masses,” than the profanation of its religious beliefs, the closing of the houses of worship, and the mistreatment of the clergy. Although for reasons that will be spelled out below, Orthodox Christianity bore the brunt of Communist persecution, Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam were not spared.

Bolshevik policy toward religion had two aspects, one cultural, the other political. In common with all socialists, the Communists viewed religious belief as a relic of primitive times that stood in the way of modernization. They sought to uproot it with characteristic zeal by a combination of “scientific” education and ridicule. Socialists in Russia were particularly hostile to religious sentiments because of the Orthodox Church’s intimate links to tsarism and its implacable anti-intellectualism. Already in the 1870s, Russian radicals had assigned high priority in their propaganda to combatting religious “superstition,” because they saw it as a major impediment to their efforts at arousing the masses to rebellion: militant atheism has been called the element uniting the various groups of the intelligentsia under the tsarist regime.¹

In their tactics for combatting religious belief, however, the Bolsheviks were divided. The cruder atheists among them wanted to attack it directly by every available means, especially mockery; the subtler ones, adapting the French proverb that one does not destroy except by replacing, wanted to raise socialism to the status of a surrogate religion.

To the latter, religion represented a genuine, if misplaced, yearning for spirituality that had to be satisfied in one way or another. Lunacharskii, the principal exponent of this viewpoint, acknowledged in Religion and Socialism (1908–1911) man’s need for mystery and ardor. The quintessence of religion was to be found in man’s relationship to nature. In the course of his historic evolution, man had gradually liberated himself from unthinking subjection to nature, seen as the plaything of gods or God, and with the help of science obtained mastery over it. Marxism marked the apogee of this evolution. In the early 1900s, Lunacharskii founded a movement called “God-building” (Bogostroitel’stvo), which sought to replace traditional religion with human solidarity, with mankind itself as the object of worship. Proceeding from these premises, as Commissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharskii urged a sophisticated strategy:

Religion is like a nail: if you hit it on the head, you only drive it deeper.… Here one needs pliers. Religion must be grabbed, squeezed from below: you do not beat it, but pull it out, pull it with its roots. And this can be achieved only by scientific propaganda, by the moral and artistic education of the masses.²

Much Bolshevik antireligious activity in the 1920s followed this method, promoting science as the alternative to religion, and developing a Communist surrogate cult with its own divinities, saints, and rituals. In some official pronouncements, the function of Communism as a substitute for religion was explicitly affirmed, as, for instance, in a declaration that defined the aim of antireligious upbringing to be “the replacement of faith in God with faith in science and the machine.”³

A cruder version of atheism was espoused by Emelian Iaroslavskii, who called for a frontal attack on religion on the grounds that it was nothing more than base superstition exploited by the ruling class. Trotsky, whom Lenin placed in charge of the antireligious campaign in 1922, seems to have shared Iaroslavskii’s views.^*

Lenin treated the theories of the “God-builders” with distaste, for he, too, felt that religion was a pillar of class society and an instrument of exploitation. He had little faith that scientific propaganda would be able by itself to eliminate it.⁴ On these grounds he preferred the uncompromising atheism of Iaroslavskii. At the same time, keeping political considerations in mind, as always, as long as the Civil War was in progress he did not wish needlessly to antagonize the church with its one hundred million followers. Hence, he postponed an all-out assault on religion until 1922, when he was in unchallenged control of the country. It was then that he launched what he hoped would be the decisive offensive against the church.

Like the rest of the intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks felt confident that with the advance of the economy and the spread of education, religious faith would falter and ultimately disappear. Its eradication was only a matter of time.

Matters stood differently with organized religion, that is, the church, for in the one-party state, with its aspiration to a monopoly on all organized activity, the survival of an independent clergy, outside party control, was intolerable. This held especially true of the Orthodox Church, which ministered to the spiritual needs of three-quarters of the population and was “the last fragment of the political organization of the defeated classes still surviving as an organization.”⁵ Indeed, the symbiotic relationship between church and state in Russia before the Revolution resembled that prevalent in medieval Europe,

in that the church and state were identical and the church provided the veritable ideal foundation of worldly rule. Hence if the Revolution really wanted fully to liquidate the old regime, it had to settle accounts with the church. It could not rest content with toppling the tsar, the supreme symbol of worldly authority: first and foremost, it had to seek to undermine the foundation on which the Russian world had hitherto reposed.⁶

The confrontation that got underway immediately after the October coup, attaining a climax in 1922, assumed a variety of forms. The clergy was made destitute by the abolition of state subsidies, confiscation of church properties, and prohibition on the levying of dues. Churches and monasteries were despoiled and converted to utilitarian uses; so too, although less frequently, were synagogues and mosques. Clergymen of all faiths (except for Muslims) were deprived of civil rights and subjected to violent harassment and sham trials, which ended for many in imprisonment and for some in execution. Religious instruction for children was outlawed and replaced with atheistic propaganda in schools and youth organizations. Religious holidays gave way to Communist festivals.

Communist Party members were required to take an active part in atheistic activities and enjoined, under penalty of expulsion, from participating in all religious rites, including baptisms and church weddings.⁷

As the established Church, the Orthodox hierarchy had enjoyed unique privileges under tsarism. It alone had the right to proselytize and to prevent members from converting to other faiths. It received state subsidies. At the time of the Revolution, Russia had some 40,000 parish churches and over one thousand monasteries and cloisters. The clergy, “black” (monastic) and “white” (parish), numbered 145,000.⁸

So intimately was the Orthodox Church linked to the monarchy, and so isolated from political currents agitating the country, that the abdication of Nicholas II left it bewildered and perplexed. Its initial impulse was to ignore the February Revolution: many priests, from habit, continued to offer prayers for the tsar. Toward the Provisional Government, the Church hierarchy assumed an attitude of unfriendly neutrality, which had turned into outright hostility by the time the government fell. Such support as the Provisional Government received from this quarter came from reformminded theologians and a minority of parish clergy who welcomed the loosening of the bonds joining the church to the state.⁹

While the Provisional Government paid little attention to ecclesiastical affairs, the drift of its legislation pointed to disestablishment. In June 1917, it abolished the post of Procurator of the Holy Synod, created by Peter the Great in place of the Patriarch, whose office he had done away with. This measure was welcomed by conservative as well as liberal churchmen who wanted to convene a Council to direct the reorganization of the Church. The clergy reacted less favorably to the government’s other actions. In July, it proclaimed the equality of all religions, a measure which deprived the Orthodox priesthood of its privileged status. Next came a law that placed all schools that benefited from state subsidies, including those operated by the Church, under the Ministry of Education; subsequently, the subsidy paid the church was cut in half. The clergy was particularly angered by the government’s edict eliminating the compulsory study of the Orthodox catechism from the school curriculum.¹⁰ Churchmen interpreted these measures as steps toward secularization and blamed them for the decline of religious sentiment in the country.

Indeed, there were signs of hostility to the Church among the population at large. Immediately following the February Revolution, peasants in some villages assaulted and expelled priests. Known reactionaries, among them the notorious Archbishop Antonii Khrapovitskii of Kharkov, were evicted from their dioceses.¹¹ Here and there, clerical land was seized and distributed to the communes. It was reported that when Russian prisoners of war in German camps learned of the outbreak of the February Revolution, nine-tenths ceased to attend church services.¹² In addition, the February Revolution brought into the open smoldering conflicts within the Church between the parish and monastic clergy, the latter of whom had exclusive access to administrative posts.¹³ These developments, against the background of spreading anarchy, had the effect of pushing the predominantly conservative Orthodox establishment still further to the right.

On August 15, 1917, the Orthodox Church convened in the Moscow Kremlin’s Uspenskii Cathedral its first Council (Sobor) since 1666: it would sit, intermittently, for a year. Present at the opening session were Kerensky and two ministers. The 588 delegates, chosen by their dioceses, voiced alarm over the demoralization of the country, including the armed forces. They warned that Russia hovered on the brink of destruction, and appealed to the nation to bury its differences.¹⁴ On this matter, the Council spoke with one voice. But when the proceedings turned to internal Church matters, it split into two factions, a conservative majority and a liberal minority. The most divisive issue was the proposal to reestablish the patriarchate. The conservatives favored such a course because they saw in the patriarch a leader who would defend the interests of the Church, now deprived of state patronage. Liberal clergymen, afraid that the patriarch would become a tool in the hands of conservatives, preferred to entrust the management of Church affairs to a council.

At the end of October, as pro-Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik troops fought for control of the Kremlin, the Council voted to reinstitute the patriarchate. Three candidates were nominated, with the archconservative Khrapovitskii receiving the largest number of votes. As custom dictated, ballots with the three names were left overnight in an urn. In the morning, the oldest monk present drew from it one ballot: it bore the name of Tikhon, the Metropolitan of Moscow, who had received the fewest votes. Tikhon was a moderate whom one foreign observer described as “a pious unsophisticated monk … with more than a touch of Russian fatalism and apathy.”¹⁵ The installation ceremony took place on November 21 in the Uspenskii Cathedral. Following the ceremonies, the delegates adopted a new church constitution that represented something of a compromise between the conservatives and the reformers. Supreme authority was vested in the Church Council, which was to meet periodically: the Patriarch became the Church’s chief executive, subordinate to the Council. One of his responsibilities was to represent the Church in dealings with the secular authorities.¹⁶

45. Patriarch Tikhon.

Tikhon was determined to keep the Church out of politics: who ruled Russia was none of its business, its true vocation being to minister to the nation’s spiritual needs. His commitment to neutrality went so far that when early in 1918 Prince Grigorii Trubetskoi, about to depart for the Don to join the Volunteer Army, asked him to bestow a blessing on one of its leaders (apparently Denikin), Tikhon refused: he persisted in his refusal even after receiving assurances that the act would be kept in strictest confidence.¹⁷ Such a policy of neutrality might have been feasible if the new regime governed in a conventional manner. But since it deliberately violated accepted norms of conduct, Tikhon, against his best intentions, soon found himself embroiled in a head-on conflict with it.

At the beginning of 1918, the Communist authorities had not as yet taken any measures overtly hostile to the Church, although their attitude toward it was difficult to mistake. The Land Decree of October 26, 1917, stipulated that church and monastic lands were subject to nationalization: in European Russia these properties amounted to 750,000 acres (300,000 hectares).¹⁸ As of December 18 responsibility for the registration of births, marriages, and deaths, traditionally a prerogative of the Church, was transferred to the civil authorities. Henceforth only civil marriages had legal Standing. Children born out of wedlock received the same rights as those born of married parents.¹⁹ On December 11, all schools, including those not in receipt of government subsidies, were subjected to state control.²⁰ These blows to its prerogatives the Church could absorb. What worried it were reports that a government commission was at work drafting a law on the separation of church and state; after reading an account to this effect in the press in early January 1918, Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd warned the authorities to desist.²¹ Nor could one ignore the mounting assaults on clergymen by soldiers and sailors, which the Bolshevik regime not only tolerated but encouraged. In many localities churches and monasteries were looted and priests abused. In late January 1918, drunken soldiers murdered the Metropolitan of Kiev, Vladimir.

On January 19/February 1 Tikhon signed an encyclical that deplored the hatred and cruelty let loose in Russia by those he called “the monsters of the human race … the open and concealed enemies of the Truth of Christ who have begun to persecute the [Orthodox Church] and are striving to destroy Christ’s Cause by sowing everywhere, in place of Christian love, the seeds of malice, hatred, and fratricidal strife.” Persons who engaged in such abominations were anathematized.^*

The Bolsheviks responded the very next day with a decree that laid down the principles of their religious policy, terminating the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the state established when the Russian state first came into existence. Like most Soviet laws of the time, the decree was deliberately mistitled to conceal under the cover of liberal-sounding terminology its true totalitarian intent. The opening article of the “Decree on the Freedom of Conscience [and on] Church and Religious Associations” declared the Church separated from the state.^† The articles that followed guaranteed every citizen the right to profess any religion or none. Foreign fellow-travelers and sympathizers, who took these professions at face value, saw them as granting the people of Russia a degree of religious liberty they had never previously enjoyed.²² But these were hollow pledges, for the law’s operative clauses spelled death for organized religion in the country. Unlike in revolutionary France, where the clergy, after its landed wealth had been nationalized, was placed on government salary, the Soviet edict not only deprived it of state pensions but forbade ecclesiastical and religious bodies to own property of any kind, including houses of worship and objects used in rituals. (Since the government was not yet prepared to shut down all churches, synagogues, and mosques, it authorized local and central state authorities to lease to religious associations “buildings and objects specifically designated for purposes of worship.”) Worse still, the decree prohibited the churches from levying dues. The clergy thus was left without any means of support. In the Soviet Constitution of 1918, under Article 65, it was deprived of the right to vote and to serve in the soviets.²³ As if these disabilities were not enough, the Communist authorities subsequently chose to interpret the principle of separation of church and state to mean that the clergy could never act in an organized manner, that is, as a single national church: attempts at coordination among the religious communities or acknowledgment of a hierarchy were viewed as prima facie evidence of counterrevolutionary intent.^* Supplementary decrees outlawed the teaching of religion to persons under 18 years of age.²⁴ In the Criminal Code of the Russian Republic of 1922, the teaching of religion to minors in public or private establishments and schools was designated a crime punishable by forced labor for up to one year.²⁵ None of these measures had anything to do with the principle of separation of church and state.

In its response to the new laws, the Church Council quite correctly stated that “under the pretext of separating church and state, the Council of People’s Commissars attempts to make impossible the very existence of churches, church institutions, and the clergy”: even the heathen Tatars when they lorded it over Russia had shown greater respect for Christianity. The Council warned all who helped implement the decree that they risked excommunication, and called on the faithful to defend the churches and monasteries from seizures.²⁶

The January 20 decree stimulated throughout Bolshevik-controlled Russia more raids on churches and monasteries in the course of which soldiers, sailors, and Red Guards plundered objects of value, often after overcoming fierce resistance. According to Communist reports, between February and May 1918, 687 persons died while participating in religious processions or attempting to protect church properties.²⁷

The Orthodox Church and the Communist regime were at war. In rural Russia, peasants, convinced that Antichrist was abroad and the Last Judgment near, drank, gambled, and worked themselves into hysterical frenzy.²⁸ Confronted with this situation, the authorities refrained from closing the houses of worship: in most localities, the soviets “leased” back to the communities the expropriated churches, synagogues, and mosques. For the time being they concentrated on the monastic establishments, which they viewed as centers of religious opposition and which enjoyed less popular support. In the course of 1918–19 they sacked and shut down most of the country’s monasteries and cloisters: by 1920, 673 monasteries were closed and their assets—not only land, but also factories, dairies, and hospitals—either handed over to peasants or taken over by State agencies.²⁹ Private churches and chapels were looted and shut down almost without exception and converted into social clubs or places of amusement.

Tikhon departed from his policy of noninterference in politics in March 1918, after the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, to which he took strong exception. “The Holy Orthodox Church,” he wrote, “which has since time immemorial helped the Russian people to gather and glorify the Russian state, cannot remain indifferent at the sight of its ruin and decay.”³⁰ It was incontrovertibly a provocative statement on a purely political subject.

The Patriarch directed his boldest protest against the Bolsheviks after they had formally launched in early September 1918 their Red Terror. On October 26, the first anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, he sent a message to the Council of People’s Commissars condemning Communist rule for having brought the country nothing but a humiliating peace and a fratricidal war, for spilling rivers of innocent blood, for encouraging robbery and violating freedom. “It is not our task to judge the earthly power,” he concluded even as he appealed to the government to:

celebrate the anniversary of taking power by releasing the imprisoned, by ceasing bloodshed, violence, ruin, constraints on the faith. Turn not to destruction, but establish order and legality. Give the people the respite from the fratricidal strife that they long for and deserve. Otherwise, all the righteous blood you shed will cry out against you (Luke 11:51) and with the sword will perish you who have taken up the sword (Matthew 26:52).³¹

It was the most daring challenge to the new regime that any public figure had had the courage to issue: it recalled the admonition three hundred fifty years earlier by another Metropolitan of Moscow, Philip, to Ivan the Terrible, condemning the tsar’s barbarities, for which he paid with his life. It is not quite clear what was on the Patriarch’s mind when he spoke out: whether he wanted to arouse the population against the regime or merely to fulfill a moral obligation. Some historians, assuming the former and observing the population’s failure to react, conclude that it failed in its purpose.³² Such judgment ignores not only the atmosphere of unbridled Cheka terror prevailing at the time, but the fact that Tikhon in a subsequent epistle (July 21, 1919) urged Christians under no condition to wreak revenge for the sufferings they had endured at the hands of the regime.³³

In response, the government placed Tikhon under house arrest. Three months later, in early October, the Soviet press carried a startling message from him: an Epistle instructing the clergy to stay clear of politics, since it was not the Church’s mission to incite fratricidal war. In the published version, Christians were enjoined without qualification to obey the Soviet authorities: they were “to do nothing that could justify the suspicion of the Soviet government [and to] submit to its commands.”³⁴ These words evoked great bitterness in the White army, which at this time was approaching Moscow.³⁵ In fact, the text of Tikhon’s Epistle had been doctored. The opening of Russian archives makes it possible to ascertain that Tikhon had significantly qualified his call for obedience to the regime by adding that it was due only to the extent that its orders did not “contradict the faith and piety (vere i blagochest’iu).”³⁶ Since in the eyes of the Church virtually all of the Communists’ actions violated the tenets of Christianity, the injunction—as actually written, not as made public—had a rather hollow ring.

At the same time that it was undermining the economical and juridical position of the Church, the regime also moved against religious faith. Atheist agitation, which blended blasphemy with a carnival atmosphere, was pursued by means of the printed word, caricatures, theatrical performances, and mock religious ceremonies.

On March 1, 1919, Moscow launched a campaign to expose as fraudulent the relics of saints.³⁷ According to the Orthodox faith, the bodies of saints do not decompose after death. Russian churches and monasteries displayed elaborate coffins said to contain perfectly preserved remains of saints: these were popular objects of pilgrimages. When opened on orders of the regime, they turned out to contain either bare skeletons or dummies. Exposure of the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh, the most revered of national saints, at the St. Sergius Trinity Monastery, created a particular sensation. These disclosures damaged the prestige of the Church among the better-educated. On simple people they seem to have produced the opposite effect, reinforcing their faith by giving rise to tales of wonderful mysteries.³⁸ (“Baryshnia,” an old peasant explained to an American visitor, “our holy saints disappeared to heaven and substituted rags and straw for their relics when they found that their tombs were to be desecrated by nonbelievers. It was a great miracle.”³⁹)

By the time the Soviet government adopted the New Economic Policy (spring 1921), the Orthodox Church had lost its privileges and properties. Even so, it retained unique status, being the only institution in Soviet Russia (apart from the minuscule Academy of Sciences) outside the Communist Party’s control. Strictly speaking, in the eyes of the regime, the “Church” as such did not exist: the state recognized individual religious communities but not a national church hierarchy. For clergymen to assemble for any purpose whatever was seditious. In 1922, referring to one such gathering, Izvestiia wrote: “The mere fact of this meeting proves … the existence of a special ‘church hierarchy’ constituting something in the nature of an independent state within Soviet Russia.”⁴⁰ It proved nothing of the kind, of course, except to those for whom the state alone had the right to organized activity.

As we will note in the following chapter, for Lenin the relaxation of the state’s grip on the economy under the New Economic Policy of 1921 required a corresponding tightening of controls on all other aspects of national life. It is in this context that one has to interpret the offensive he launched against the Orthodox Church in March 1922.

The Church had by then accommodated itself to the new regime and posed to it no threat.⁴¹ But Lenin was an expert at provoking strife, and once he decided to make war on the Church and dismantle what was left of its structure, he had no trouble finding a casus belli. He had long perfected the methods of waging civil strife. In this instance, too, he resorted to a coordinated attack from within and without: from within, by exploiting internal dissent in the enemy camp, and from without by producing spurious evidence of “counterrevolutionary” activity. The antichurch campaign of 1922 was meant to destroy, once and for all, what was left of the autonomy of religious bodies—in other words, to carry “October” into the ranks of organized religion, the last relic of the old order. To overcome anticipated resistance, the Fifth Section of the Commissariat of Justice, which was charged with orchestrating the assault, joined forces with the security police.⁴²

In 1921, Soviet Russia was struck by famine: according to official figures, by March of 1922, over 30 million people were suffering hunger or actually starving. Various private initiatives were organized to help the famine victims. In July, a group of civic-minded public figures, agrarian experts, physicians, and writers formed, with the government’s permission, a committee, popularly known as “Pomgol,” to seek foreign assistance that the government found awkward to solicit. Patriarch Tikhon agreed to donate for this purpose church vessels known as “nonconsecrated,” most of them made of precious and semiprecious metals. “Consecrated” vessels were not included in the offer because their use for any secular purpose was regarded as sacrilegious.⁴³ Lenin quickly disposed of such private initiatives, dissolving the committee and arresting its members.⁴⁴ He ignored Tikhon’s offer, for he had other plans for the Church’s assets. Lenin, who even as a youth of 22 had opposed giving humanitarian help to starving peasants in the Volga region during the 1892 famine,⁴⁵ had no interest in saving peasants’ lives. But he pretended to care in order to force the Church into a position of both un-Christian callousness and defiance of the state by ordering it to do something he knew it could not do, namely turn over consecrated vessels for sale to aid victims of the famine.

The idea seems to have originated with Trotsky, who on January 30, 1922, sent Lenin a proposal to this effect. Trotsky urged that the operation, which was to commence in March, be organized in utmost secrecy.^* To lay the foundations for a spurious groundswell of public opinion, the Soviet press began now to carry articles demanding the confiscations of church treasures for the benefit of the hungry.⁴⁶ Concurrently, the Party organized mass meetings, which in their resolutions called for the transformation of “gold into bread.”⁴⁷ On February 23, Trotsky cabled to the provincial authorities a request for no fewer than ten reliable workers and peasants per guberniia to be sent to Moscow “who could, in the name of the starving, raise the demand that redundant valuables be converted into help for them.”⁴⁸ Realizing what lay in store, Tikhon offered to raise money equivalent to the value of the Church’s consecrated vessels through voluntary subscriptions and the surrender of additional nonconsecrated vessels, but he was refused.⁴⁹ The regime wanted not relief for the hungry but a pretext for breaking the Church.

Throughout February the Communist leaders discussed the strategy and tactics of the coming campaign: apparently, some doubted the wisdom of taking on the Church at a time when Moscow was gaining international recognition.⁵⁰ The GPU advised the Central Committee that the confiscation of church valuables might lead to “undesirable disturbances.”⁵¹ But Lenin and Trotsky stood their ground: they overcame the opposition and on February 26 an appropriate decree was issued over the signature of Mikhail Kalinin, who occupied the ceremonial post of Chairman of the Central Executive Committee.⁵² It instructed local soviets to remove from churches all those objects made of gold, silver, and precious stones the “removal of which cannot substantially affect the interests of the cult,” the proceeds to be used to help the starving. The true purpose of the measure was not philanthropic but political; for it was certain to provoke determined resistance from the Church, which Lenin intended to turn against it.⁵³ The direction of the campaign was entrusted to a commission of the Politburo, chaired by Trotsky.

The timing of this assault was closely calibrated to international events. In October 1921 the Soviet government proposed through Chicherin the convocation of an international conference to resolve the issue of Russia’s foreign debts. The Allies accepted the offer, and in February–March 1922 preparations were underway to convene a meeting in Genoa: it was to be the first international gathering to which Soviet Russia was invited. Lenin apparently reasoned that the Allies would not risk jeopardizing repayment of the moneys owed to them for the sake of the Russian Church. If such was his calculation, he turned out to be right.

He was helped by the recklessness of Russian émigré churchmen, headed by Antonii Khrapovitskii, who on November 20, 1921, convened a Council in the Yugoslav town of Sremskie Karlovtsy.⁵⁴ The most reactionary elements in the Orthodox Church promptly seized control of the Council, politicizing it and calling for the restoration of the monarchy. A resolution addressed to the Allies asked them not to admit Soviet representatives to the Genoa conference and instead to arm Russians to liberate their homeland. Although Tikhon and the hierarchy inside Russia did not approve of these resolutions, they provided a useful tool with which to accuse the entire Orthodox hierarchy, at home and abroad, of counterrevolution.

As expected, Tikhon refused to comply with the decree of February 26. He protested that turning over consecrated vessels to the secular authorities would be sacrilege: he threatened laymen who helped carry it out with excommunication and priests with defrocking.⁵⁵ For this act of defiance, he and his followers were charged with being “enemies of the people.”⁵⁶ In May 1922, Tikhon once again was placed under house arrest.

As forceful seizures got underway, in many localities crowds, some assembled spontaneously, others called out by the priests, offered resistance. In Smolensk, for instance, a multitude filled the cathedral day and night, preventing the removal of valuables.⁵⁷ According to a Soviet source, in the first months of the campaign, the Revolutionary Tribunal “reviewed” some 250 cases of defiance.⁵⁸ There is a record of 1,414 “bloody excesses” connected with resistance to the removal of church valuables.⁵⁹ The GPU and other Soviet sources reported that these incidents were not isolated and spontaneous but directed by a “Black Hundreds counterrevolutionary organization.”⁶⁰ Disobedience was not confined to the Orthodox Church: in some localities, Catholic and Jewish crowds also fought to prevent the despoiling of their houses of worship.

One incident of such violence occurred in Shuia, a textile town 300 kilometers northeast of Moscow. On Sunday, March 12, worshippers put to flight Communist officials who tried to raid the local church. Three days later, these officials returned in the company of troops equipped with machine guns. An altercation ensued: the soldiers opened fire on a crowd barring their way, killing four or five persons.^* These events had a sobering effect on the Communist leadership. A meeting of the Politburo on March 16, in Lenin’s and Trotsky’s absence, voted to delay further confiscations, and on March 19, instructions were sent to all provincial party organizations to suspend such actions until further notice.⁶¹

Lenin was ill and resting in the country at this time. He seized on the events in Shuia as justification for an all-out attack on the church hierarchy. In a top secret memorandum dated March 19, dictated over the phone and sent to the Politburo with instructions that no copies be made, he spelled out how the famine and the resistance of the Church to confiscation of vessels could be exploited to serve the government’s economic and political ends. This memorandum, first made known from a smuggled version in an émigré publication in 1970 and two decades later reproduced in an official Soviet publication, so well reflects the mentality of the Soviet leader that it deserves to be quoted at length:

46. Soldiers removing valuables from Simonov Monastery in Moscow, 192 5.

Concerning the events at Shuia, which have already been placed on the Politburo’s agenda, it seems to me that it is necessary now to adopt a firm decision in connection with the general plan of the struggle in the given direction. Inasmuch as I doubt that I will be able to attend in person the Politburo meeting of March 20, I shall present my views in writing.

The event in Shuia should be juxtaposed with the information recently sent to the newspapers by Rosta [the Russian Telegraphic Agency] that the Black Hundreds in Petersburg are organizing resistance to the removal of church valuables. Connected with what we know of the illegal appeal of Patriarch Tikhon, it becomes crystal clear that the Black Hundred clergy, headed by its leader, quite deliberately implements a plan to give us decisive battle precisely at this moment.

Apparently at secret consultations of the most influential groups of the Black Hundreds clergy this plan had been thought through and quite firmly adopted. The events in Shuia are but one manifestation of the fulfillment of this plan.

I believe that here our enemy commits a major blunder, trying to engage us in a decisive struggle when it is for him especially hopeless and especially inconvenient. For us, on the contrary, this precise moment is not only uniquely favorable, but offers us a 99 percent chance of shattering the enemy and ensuring for ourselves for many decades the required positions. It is now and only now, when in the regions afflicted by the famine there is cannibalism and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses, that we can (and therefore must) pursue the acquisition of [church] valuables with the most ferocious and merciless energy, stopping at nothing in suppressing all resistance. It is now and only now that the overwhelming majority of the peasantry will either be for us, or, at any rate, not be capable of supporting in any decisive manner that handful of the Black Hundred clergy and reactionary urban burghers who can and wish to test the policy of militant resistance to a Soviet decree.

No matter what, we must accomplish the removal of church valuables in the most decisive and swift manner. In this way we. shall assure ourselves of capital worth several hundred million gold rubles (bear in mind the immense wealth of some monasteries). Without such capital it will be utterly unthinkable to carry out governmental work in general [and] in particular to carry out economic construction, and especially to uphold our position at [the] Genoa [conference]. No matter what, we must take into our hands this capital of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several billion). This can be accomplished successfully only at this time. All considerations indicate that later on we will not succeed, because no other moment except that of desperate hunger will offer us such a mood among the broad peasant masses, which will either assure us of their sympathy, or, at any rate, their neutrality in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of the valuables will remain unconditionally and completely on our side.…

For this reason I have come to the unequivocal conclusion that we must now give the most decisive and merciless battle to the Black Hundreds clergy and subdue its resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for decades to come. The campaign for the implementation of this plan I conceive as follows:

Officially, only Comrade Kalinin ought to execute the measures—never, under any circumstances, should Comrade Trotsky appear before the public either in print or in some other manner.…

Send to Shuia one of the most energetic, intelligent and efficient members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee … with a verbal instruction conveyed by a member of the Politburo. This instruction ought to call for the arrest in Shuia of as many as possible—no fewer than a few dozen—representatives of the local clergy, local burghers, and local bourgeois on suspicion of direct or indirect involvement in the violent resistance to the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee concerning the removal of church valuables. As soon as this is done, he ought to return to Moscow and make a report to the full Politburo or to two of its authorized members. On the basis of this report, the Politburo will give detailed instructions to the judiciary authorities, also verbal, that the trial of the Shuia rebels who oppose help to the starving should be conducted with maximum swiftness and end with the execution of a very large number of the most influential and dangerous Black Hundreds of Shuia, and, insofar as possible, not only of that city but also of Moscow and several other church centers.…

The greater the number of the representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and reactionary clergy that we will manage to execute in this affair, the better.⁶²

This extraordinary document calls for several comments. Lenin proposes to capitalize on the famine, for which his agrarian policies were largely responsible and which claimed millions of victims, to discredit and break the Church and, along with it, what was left of the “bourgeoisie.” Just as in 1918 he had launched a drive against the village under the pretext of feeding the hungry cities,⁶³ so now the Church was to be crushed under the equally spurious pretext that it refused to aid the hungry village. The wealth extorted from the Church in this manner was to be used not for famine relief, but for the political and economic needs of the regime.^* Lenin wanted the courts to be instructed (verbally, so as not to embarrass him and his regime by possible leaks) to sentence many people to death even before they were charged with any crime: it was a precedent and model for the quota system of executions that Stalin would introduce in the late 1930s. Trotsky, whom Lenin placed in charge of the antireligious campaign (he was chairman of the Society of the Godless), because of his Jewish origin was to keep a low profile, lest the government provide ammunition to anti-Semites: the police advised Lenin that workers complained that Jewish houses of worship were exempt from seizures.⁶⁴ The official identified with it was to be Kalinin, who looked like a genial rural teacher but was, in fact, a hardened old Bolshevik. Finally, the desperate efforts of the faithful to protect sacred vessels from seizure was depicted as an antistate conspiracy. These beliefs, apparently sincerely held by Lenin, and articulated in a rambling, hysterical manner, suggest that by this time his mind was no longer quite balanced.^*

The next day the Politburo, composed of Trotsky, Stalin, and Kamenev, along with Molotov, its secretary, resolved to carry out Lenin’s instructions:

Secret supervisory committees are to be set up in the center and the provinces … to seize valuables.… At the same time, a split should be effected among the clergy, extending state protection to those of the clergy who openly speak in favor of seizures.… If possible, well-known priests should not be penalized till the campaign’s termination. But they should be officially warned that they will be the first to answer should any excesses occur.⁶⁵

On March 22, the Commission for the Realization of Valuables, meeting under Trotsky’s chairmanship, voted to proceed with the requisitions and to dispose of the acquired valuables on foreign markets. The sales were to be arranged by the Soviet delegation to the Genoa Conference, scheduled for April, which enjoyed diplomatic immunity.⁶⁶ Krasin had suggested that these valuables not be sold haphazardly but in an organized manner: the confiscated diamonds, he thought, were best marketed though the De Beers Mining company, with whom he had discussed the matter.⁶⁷

The “trials” began almost immediately. On April 13, Izvestiia reported that 32 people had been charged with “obstructing” confiscation procedures. In Shuia three defendants were sentenced to death.⁶⁸ Elsewhere, the accused were brought before Revolutionary Tribunals on charges of “counterrevolution,” attempts to overthrow the Soviet government, which carried a mandatory death sentence.⁶⁹ The historian D. A. Volkogonov has seen in Lenin’s archive an order from him demanding to be informed on a daily basis of the number of priests who had been shot.⁷⁰

These were the original show trials—carefully staged proceedings in which the verdict was preordained and whose objective it was to humiliate the defendants, and, by their example, to intimidate those who sympathized with their cause. It was a curious instance of life imitating art. In 1919 and the years that followed, Communist propagandists had developed a type of theatrical performance known as agit-sud, or “agitational court.” At such shows persons and practices odious to the authorities—the “Whites,” “kulaks,” and “bourgeois,” but also Hebrew schools and the Bible—were “tried” and condemned. The proceedings against priests staged in 1922 were such “agit-sudy” in all respects but one, namely that the sentences were real. They were rehearsals for Stalin’s spectacular mock trials of the 1930s.

47. Metropolitan Benjamin on trial.

In Moscow there were 54 defendants, both priests and laymen. They were tried between April 26 and May 6, in the theater of the Polytechnic Museum, close to the Lubianka, which accommodated two thousand spectators. Spurious evidence was produced by renegade priests from the so-called “Living Church” (on which more below), that according to canon law under certain conditions the surrender of the consecrated church vessels was not only permitted but mandated. Implementing Lenin’s directions, the proceedings were used to demonstrate that the Orthodox Church hierarchy, in conjunction with émigré monarchist circles, had organized a “counterrevolutionary” plot. Since no such plot existed, the defendants had to be punished for efforts to prevent the desecration of religious objects. Eleven of the accused were condemned to death for resisting the government’s orders to surrender religious vessels.⁷¹ Six had their death sentences commuted to prison terms: this is said to have been done at the request of Trotskii. The remaining five were executed.⁷²

The Moscow trial was followed (June 11-July 5) by similar proceedings in Petrograd: here the defendants numbered 86.^* The principal accused was the liberal Metropolitan Benjamin.⁷³ He was defended by the well-known Jewish attorney Ia. S. Gurovich. The Metropolitan and his codefendants were accused of resisting the decree concerning valuables, permitting “inflammatory” sermons to be preached in the churches of their diocese, and maintaining secret communication with the émigré Church Council at Sremskie Karlovtsy. As star witnesses, the prosecution used two turncoat priests, Vladimir Krasnitskii and Alexander Vvedenskii (later Metropolitan of Moscow), both with close links to the security police. Three witnesses who testified on behalf of the defendants were arrested, following which no more offered to come forward. The trial was staged in what was once the Club of the Nobility in a highly emotional atmosphere. The formal sentences, given the seriousness of the charges, were surprisingly mild: Benjamin was ordered defrocked, as were many of the codefendants. In fact, however, Benjamin and three others were secretly executed.^* Reports of the secret executions, which spread quickly, were censored from the press, and foreign correspondents were forbidden to mention them in dispatches.⁷⁴

The charges were devoid of substance and the sentences preordained: as is known from Lenin’s memorandum of March 19, party organs instructed the courts what verdicts to render. Soviet judges, operating under the 1922 Criminal Code, could disregard any and all evidence, since the interests of the state were the only criterion of guilt and innocence.⁷⁵ The spuriousness of the entire campaign is demonstrated by the fact that Lenin ignored an offer made by the Vatican on May 14, 1922, to redeem for any sum required both Catholic and Orthodox church vessels slated for confiscation.⁷⁶ As was also noted at the time, the Communists had in their possession Russian crown jewels, the value of which greatly exceeded that of the church vessels (it was estimated at one billion gold rubles), which could have been sold abroad if aid to the starving had been genuinely intended.^†

Most of the violence against the clergy took the form of lynchings and arrests by the security organs, details of which are only sketchily known. There exist harrowing tales of torture and maiming of prominent clerics. Archbishop Andronik of Perm is said to have had his cheeks hollowed, his ears and nose cut off, and his eyes gouged: thus disfigured he was driven through the city and then thrown into the river to drown. Bishop Hermogen of Tobolsk is reported to have been drowned with a rock tied to his neck.⁷⁷ Tikhon said in 1920 that to the best of his knowledge, 322 bishops and priests had been executed since 1917.⁷⁸ In 1925, shortly before his death, he told an English visitor that about 100 bishops and 10,000 priests were in prison or exile.^* There exist published lists with the names of 18 murdered or executed bishops. An English journalist learned that the antiChurch campaign cost the lives of 28 bishops and 1,215 priests.⁷⁹ Recently released evidence indicates that over 8,000 persons were executed or killed in the course of 1922 in the conflict over church valuables.⁸⁰ Among the victims were Jews whom the populace blamed for these outrages and against whom it staged pogroms in Smolensk, Viatka, and several other localities.^†

The authorities announced in September 1922 that the drive to collect church valuables had brought in 8 trillion rubles in “money tokens” (denznaki) and that the money was used to buy food for the hungry.⁸¹ But the figure was meaningless and the claim a lie. At the end of the year, Izvestiia reported and described the loot as “ridiculously small”, saying it amounted to 23,997 puds (393 tons) of silver, plus small quantities of gold and pearls: its monetary value was estimated at between 4 and 10 million dollars, the lower figure apparently closer to reality.^‡ Very little if any of that money went for famine relief.

The surprising and shocking thing was that these outrages were committed by Russians, who were widely thought to have a deep attachment to their Church, and that the population at large did not rise in protest:

History must record the fact that, in 1922, Russian Orthodox soldiers plundered churches at the bidding of a Government consisting wholly of atheists and anticlericals. They threw into sacks the chalices to which, ten years ago, they attributed supernatural powers. They tied up priests whom they looked upon, ten years ago, as wonder-workers, able to blast them with a curse. They shot down fellow Christians for attempting to defend their churches; and, lastly, they executed ordained priests of God. It is no use saying that it was Jews, Letts, and Chinamen who did this; the men who did the work were, unfortunately, Russians, and, furthermore, the country as a whole did not express its displeasure by the general insurrection that one would have expected.⁸²

48. Inventory of valuables confiscated from churches, 1922.

The campaign against religious organizations was accompanied by a renewed drive against religious belief. In December 1922, using the Komsomol, the government launched an effort to discredit Christmas and the holidays of the other faiths. Mock religious celebrations were hastily staged in the major cities, of which the so-called “Komsomol Christmas” acquired the greatest notoriety. On the eve of Christmas, Komsomol cells received instructions from their central headquarters to “stage mass carnivals” of divinities.⁸³ During the night of January 6, 1923, and the following day, when the Orthodox celebrated Christmas (according to the old calendar), bands of youths were dispatched into the streets with effigies, to lampoon the religious ceremonies in progress in the churches. The correspondent of Izvestiia described the proceedings in Moscow as follows:

God-fearing Moscow philistines saw an unprecedented spectacle. From the Sadovaia to the Square of the Revolution there stretched an unending procession of gods and heathen priests.… Here was a yellow Buddha with contorted legs, giving the blessing, exhaustingly cunning and slanted. And the Babylonian Marduk, the Orthodox Virgin, Chinese bonzes, and Catholic priests, the Roman Pope in his yellow tiara blessing the new adepts from his colorful automobile, a Protestant pastor on a high pole.… A Russian priest in a typical stole, offering for a small price to remarry anybody. And here is a monk sitting on a black coffin containing a saint’s relics: he, too, praises his wares to the undemanding buyer. A Jewish rabbi-cantor with uplifted hands, in an exhausted, mournful voice tells how “the priest had a dog and it ate a piece of meat.” The rabbi shows with his hand how large that piece of meat was. “Ah, he killed it.…” An orderly column of young girls with flushed faces passes by, fleetingly seen. Frozen steam rises with the sound of the song:

We need no rabbis, we need no priests,

Beat the bourgeois, strangle the kulaks?⁸⁴

In the correspondent’s judgment, this travesty of one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar was a historic event not only for Moscow, and not only for Soviet Russia, but for mankind.

Similar carnivals were staged in other cities, usually in front of churches during midnight masses. In Gomel, which had a mixed population, a “trial” of Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish “gods” represented by effigies took place in the theater. The judges, assisted by the audience, condemned them to an auto-da-fé, following which, on Christmas Day, they were ceremoniously burned in the city square.⁸⁵

Measures were taken to discredit in the eyes of Russian children St. Nicholas, the Russian equivalent of Santa Claus, and the angels, the latter accused as symbols used “to enslave the child’s mind.” To counteract such decadent beliefs, the authorities organized on Christmas Eve theatrical performances that regaled children with “satires on the Lausanne Conference, the Kerensky regime, and bourgeois life abroad.”⁸⁶

In the following spring, Easter was subjected to similar treatment. So, later in the year, was Yom Kippur, the most sacred Jewish holiday.⁸⁷ Such spectacles, as well as the posters and cartoons that accompanied them, by violating ingrained taboos in a deliberately shocking and vulgar manner, produced an effect not unlike that of pornography.

While the Communist press reported that such productions drew large and enthusiastic crowds, the reality was different. G. P. Fedotoff (Fedotov), a Social-Democrat who later turned to theology, having witnessed the mock Christmas procession in Moscow, wrote that the

population, and not only the faithful, looked upon this hideous carnival with dumb horror. There were no protests from the silent streets—the years of terror had done their work—but nearly everyone tried to turn off the road when it met this shocking procession. I, personally, as a witness of the Moscow carnival, may certify that there was not a drop of popular pleasure in it. The parade moved along empty streets and its attempts at creating laughter or provocation were met with dull silence on the part of the occasional witnesses.⁸⁸

That this was, indeed, the case is confirmed by the decision of the Party in 1923 to curtail such activities. A resolution adopted by the Twelfth Party Congress held in March of that year demanded that atheists refrain from offending the sensitivities of believers since ridicule only intensified “religious fanaticism.”⁸⁹ It was a fleeting victory of the Lunacharskii approach over that advocated by Iaroslavskii.

Although the decree on the “Separation of Church and State” granted every citizen the freedom to practice his religion, the holding of religious observances in public places was gradually restricted. It was forbidden even to perform religious rites at funerals. Traditional religious holidays became ordinary working days. They were replaced by secular celebrations, of which there were six: New Year, the anniversaries of Bloody Sunday (January 22) and of the February Revolution (March 12), the day of the Paris Commune (March 10), International Labor Day (May 1), and the anniversary of the October coup (November 7).⁹⁰

1922 saw the appearance of the daily Bezbozhnik (“The Godless”), edited by Iaroslavskii, followed in 1923 by a weekly of the same name: the two eventually merged. They published short articles and crude cartoons ridiculing religious beliefs and observances: in the case of Jewish subjects, they resorted to anti-Semitic stereotypes that anticipated the Nazi Stürmer. Sympathizers were invited to join the Society of the Godless, formed at the time.

The trials of priests and the antireligious campaigns were only two facets of the atheist drive: they contributed outside pressure. Another aspect of organized atheism was boring from within by pitting the reform-minded Orthodox minority against the conservative establishment and the parish priesthood against the monastic clergy. Such a divide et impera strategy, a standard Bolshevik tactic, was mandated by the Politburo’s resolution of March 20 calling for “a split [to be] effected among the clergy.” In implementing this decision, the authorities relied on elements within the Orthodox Church that for one reason or another opposed its leadership. The Central Committee ordered local party organizations to support the segment of the lower clergy that backed the confiscation of church valuables. “The political task,” the message read, “consists in isolating the upper clergy, compromising it on the most concrete issue of help to the starving, and then showing it the stern hand of worker’s justice, to the extent that they dare to rise against it.”⁹¹

In line with this directive, the regime created and sponsored a splinter body known as the “Living Church” (Zhivaia tserkov’). The idea of splitting the hierarchy seems to have originated with Lunacharskii, who in May 1921 wrote Lenin about Archbishop Vladimir, a renegade priest who had been defrocked for what he called “church Bolshevism.” According to Lunacharskii, Vladimir proposed to exploit divisions among the clergy to promote the cause of revolution and reconciliation with the Soviet government.⁹² The suggestion was apparently not followed up. Nearly a year later, on March 12, 1922, Trotsky raised the issue once again, proposing to split the Church over the issue of vessels by enrolling pro-Soviet priests to assist in their confiscation. This time the suggestion was accepted by the Politburo the following day.⁹³ The Living Church was brought into being in late March, first to incriminate the church hierarchy and then to dislodge it from authority.⁹⁴ Its composition was diverse. It included bona fide reformers committed to aligning the church with the social changes that had occurred in Russia since 1917. There were also parish clergymen resentful of the monks’ exclusive access to higher offices: a central plank in the Living Church’s program was allowing married priests to become bishops. And there were ordinary opportunists who accepted bribes from the police for their apostasy.⁹⁵ In the latter category were not a few monarchists and adherents of the Black Hundreds: one leader of the Living Church had supported the charge that Jews used Christian blood at the time of the Beilis trial in 1913.⁹⁶

This organization, the clerical equivalent of the Left SRs in 1917–18, was used to carry out a coup in the Church. In mid-May 1922, several priest-collaborators visited Tikhon at the Troitse-Sergeeva Lavra, where he was confined. They demanded that he convoke a Church Council and in the meantime withdraw from all participation in church affairs. This he had to do both because his inflammatory encyclicals were responsible for the death sentences passed on the eleven churchmen tried in Moscow, and because, living under house arrest, he could not fulfill his responsibilities. Tikhon replied that he had never sought the post of Patriarch and would gladly give it up if such was the wish of the Church Council. The same day he wrote Metropolitan Agafangel of Iaroslavl that in view of the prospect of having to stand trial he, Tikhon, could not carry out his obligations and desired him to take charge of the church administration until the Church Council met.⁹⁷ The Soviet press falsely reported this action to mean that Tikhon had resigned.⁹⁸ When Agafangel made it clear that he would not cooperate with the usurpers, he was prevented from traveling to Moscow to assume his duties; later on, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. The Patriarch’s authority was arrogated by a body calling itself the Higher Church Administration (Vysshee Tserkovnoe Upravlenie), made up of members of the Living Church. On May 20, this organization took over the Patriarch’s residence and chancery. It was nothing less than a coup d’église. A replica of the defunct Holy Synod of tsarist days, the Higher Church Administration was managed by the Living Church under the nominal authority of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, but in fact, under that of the GPU, which established a special department to deal with ecclesiastical matters: church administration thus became a branch of the security police. Objections from abroad against these actions were either ignored or dismissed as impermissible interference in Soviet Russia’s internal affairs. Trotsky characterized the protest of the British clergy, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, as “having been dictated by narrow caste solidarity, wholly directed against the real interests of the people and the elementary requirements of humanity.”⁹⁹

A shrill public campaign was now launched, calling for the abolition of the patriarchate: it sufficiently frightened some bishops that they joined the Living Church. Those who defied the illegitimate hierarchy were arrested and replaced by more compliant clergymen. By August 1922, the Orthodox Church was split: of the 143 bishops, 37 supported the Living Church, 36 opposed it, and the remaining 70 sat on the fence.¹⁰⁰ That month, the Living Church held a congress, one participant in which was V. N. Lvov, the Procurator of the Holy Synod under the Provisional Government and a principal in the Kornilov affair.¹⁰¹

Courting martyrdom, Tikhon stood his ground. In December 1922 he anathematized the Higher Church Administration and everyone connected with it as doing the “work of Antichrist” and exhorted Christians to brave death in defense of the true Church.¹⁰² The Patriarchal Church, virtually outlawed, went underground.

The utter subservience of the Living Church to the regime manifested itself in the resolutions of the Second Church Council, which it convened in April 1923 and packed with adherents (of the 430 delegates, 385 represented various branches of the “reforming” movement).¹⁰³ The assembly hailed the October 1917 coup as a “Christian creation” for its struggle against capitalism, denied that the Communists persecuted the Church, and voted gratitude to Lenin for his role as “world leader” and “tribune of social truth.” The Soviet government, it declared, was the only government in the world that strove to realize “the ideal of the Kingdom of God.” Accusing Tikhon of heading a counterrevolutionary plot, it formally deposed him, without granting him a hearing, and abolished the patriarchate. It authorized bishops to marry and widowed priests to remarry.¹⁰⁴

It was widely expected that in view of the serious charges leveled against him, Tikhon would face trial, and indeed such was the government’s intention. But after one month in the GPU prison, he was set free. An internal report by the head of the GPU section charged with overseeing the clergy hints that Tikhon decided to cooperate in order to maintain control over the Church and prevent a disastrous split.¹⁰⁵ Henceforth he was utterly compliant and signed any document placed before him. On June 16, 1923, he addressed a letter to the authorities, almost certainly written by someone else, in which he admitted to charges that had led to his detention and recanted his “anti-Soviet” past. He also withdrew the anathema on the Living Church, pronounced the previous December, claiming it to have been a forgery.¹⁰⁶ As a reward, all charges against him were dropped and the patriarchal churches were allowed to reopen.

Tikhon died in April 1925 of heart failure, leaving a testament in which he praised the Soviet state for ensuring full freedom of religion and urged Christians to support it because it was a “stable and unshakable,” “genuinely popular worker-peasant government.”¹⁰⁷

A Russian theologian has suggested that for all its revolutionary posturing, the Living Church really represented “the old, traditional ecclesiastical order,”¹⁰⁸ reviving the tradition of church subservience to the state. Seen in this light, it was the Patriarchal church that stood for innovation in that it wanted a church that was free and self-governing.

The Living Church was brought into being for one purpose only: to divide and subvert the established Church. Once it had accomplished this objective, and this happened following Tikhon’s capitulation, it lost its utility. Aware that it enjoyed virtually no favor with the population, the authorities withdrew their support. Soon the Living Church faded from the picture. It disappeared in the early 1930s, when its leaders were arrested.

Of the other members of the Christian community, the Sectarians (members of sects not linked to the Orthodox Church, like the Baptists) enjoyed relatively the most tolerant treatment. This happened because the Bolsheviks believed that having been oppressed by tsarism and the Orthodox establishment, they would be more sympathetic to their regime.¹⁰⁹

Although many Christians were convinced that their persecution was the work of Jews, and calls for resistance by clergymen were in some localities accompanied by anti-Semitic diatribes, Jewish religious institutions also suffered from Bolshevik antireligious policies. It is impossible, of course, to measure the anguish of adherents of diverse faiths when forbidden to practice their religion. But a case can be made that in some ways Jews suffered more from the Bolshevik policies than Christians, because their religious institutions not only performed rituals and educated youth but served as the center of Jewish life:

The assault on Jewish religious life was particularly harsh and pervasive because a Jew’s religious beliefs and observances infused every aspect of his daily life and were invested with national values and feelings.… Family relations, work, prayer, study, recreation, and culture were all part of a seamless web, no element of which could be disturbed without disturbing the whole.¹¹⁰

State-sponsored atheism tore the very fabric of social and cultural life of that vast majority of Jews who resided in small towns and led traditional lives. An Orthodox Russian, unable to attend church services, still had his Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov; an observant Jew cut off from the Torah, the prophets, and the Talmud was left in a cultural no-man’s land.

The decree of January 20, 1918, on relations between church and state initially affected Jews less harshly than Orthodox Christians because they never received state subsidies and had no compulsory religious education in schools. Nor did synagogues have many articles of value which the regime could appropriate. Nevertheless, under the terms of this decree, synagogues with their contents were as much subject to confiscation as churches. Under instructions of 1918–19 it was enough for the local soviets to determine that housing for residential, medical, and educational purposes was in short supply or else that the “masses of the people” so desired, for houses of prayer to be converted to secular uses.¹¹¹ In practice, as was the case with churches, most synagogues were left intact until 1922.

When in early 1922 the time was judged opportune for a frontal attack on organized religion, the Bolsheviks employed toward the Jewish community the proven divide et impera tactics. Whereas in the campaign against the Orthodox Church they exploited the animosity between reform-minded and conservative clerics, as well as between parish priests and monks, in the case of Jews they capitalized on the hostility of Jewish socialists toward rabbis and synagogues. In this they relied mainly on the Bund, the Jewish section of Social-Democracy. After the February Revolution the Bundists found themselves rejected alike by the masses of their people, who followed traditional observances, and by the secularized elements who embraced Zionism. Although they initially opposed the October coup, in their isolation they gravitated toward the Bolsheviks. During the 1920s they were the main agent the regime used to break up the Jewish community. They persecuted their own religion with exceptional zeal in order to prove the anti-Semites wrong. A Bundist convert to Communism argued as follows:

If the Russian people should once get it into their minds that we are partial to the Jews, it would go hard with Jews. It is for the sake of Jews that we are absolutely objective in our dealings with the clergy—Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The danger is that the masses may think that Judaism is exempt from antireligious propaganda and, therefore, it rests with the Jewish Communists to be even more ruthless with rabbis than non-Jewish Communists are with priests.^*

Observing the frenzy with which Jewish Communists profaned their religion, one Jew remarked: “It would be nice to see the Russian Communists tear into the monasteries and the holy days as the Jewish Communists do to Yom Kippur.”¹¹²

As an analogue of the Living Church, the regime created “Jewish Sections” (Evsektsii) of the Russian Communist Party. Overcoming his aversion to Jewish nationalism (for he did not regard Jews as a true nation), Lenin in the fall of 1918 consented, as a matter of propagandistic expedience, to the establishment of special branches of the Russian Communist Party to carry his revolution to the Jewish masses. Their mission has been described as “the destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture.”¹¹³ They were mostly staffed with ex-members of the Bund, which in 1920 adopted the Communist program and in March 1921 merged with the Communist Party.¹¹⁴

The Evsektsii opened their offensive in the summer of 1919 following an order of the Central Jewish Commissariat abolishing kehillas, the traditional organs of Jewish self-government. The resistance to this decree was fierce and in some cases successful, since here and there kehillas survived to the end of the 1920s. In time, every Jewish cultural and social organization came under assault. In 1922, while mounting its offensive against the Orthodox Church, the Party struck at Jewish religious practices. The attack was inspired and carried out by Jews: “the Evsektsiia jealously guarded its monopoly over the persecution of Jewish religion.”¹¹⁵ There were the usual meetings and spectacles, supposedly spontaneous, in fact highly organized, demanding the closing of religious schools; disruptions of services during High Holidays; publications deriding Jewish observances, closely modeled on standard anti-Semitic smut; and mock “trials” of religious schools and practices.

On Rosh Hashanah, 1921, the Jewish religion was “tried” in Kiev, ironically, in the same auditorium where the Beilis trial had been held. The “judges” saw a strange array of “witnesses”: a “rabbi” testified solemnly that he taught religion in order to keep the masses ignorant and subservient; an obese “bourgeois,” bedecked in glittering jewelry, testified to the alliance between the exploiters and Judaism. The “prosecutor” … demanded a “sentence of death for the Jewish religion.” A Hebrew teacher who rose from the audience to defend Judaism was arrested on the spot. The “judges” returned from their chambers and, to no one’s surprise, announced a death verdict.¹¹⁶

“Red Haggadahs” were published to celebrate the “deliverance” of Jews from capitalism. In Gomel in July 1922, rabbis who resisted the closing of heders (religious schools) were hailed before a court.¹¹⁷

The earliest case of a synagogue seizure seems to have occurred in 1921 in Vitebsk, when local authorities, having decided that the city had more than enough synagogues, ordered some closed and turned over to them. Observant Jews surrounded the condemned synagogues, but they were driven off by cavalry, following which the structures were transformed into a Party “university” and club, a kitchen, and a dormitory.¹¹⁸ Subsequently, large, so-called “choral” synagogues were confiscated in Minsk, Gomel, and Kharkov and converted into Communist centers, clubs, and restaurants.¹¹⁹

The pattern was almost the same everywhere. The Evsektsiia would initiate meetings of “workers,” mostly non-Party members of trade unions, at their places of work. Resolutions would be adopted “unanimously,” in the name of “all the toilers,” they would request the conversion of the synagogue, which was claimed to be empty and of no further use, “serving as a nest of counter-revolution” or “as a speculators’ club,” into a workers’ club or some other institution. The local authorities would, of course, listen to these “wishes of the toilers” and hasten to satisfy them.¹²⁰

Synagogues were robbed of such valuables as they possessed: Torahs, removed from the Holy Arks, were piled up for disposal; in some localities, houses of prayer were vandalized.

The Communists had less success splitting the Jewish religious establishment than the Orthodox. Nothing corresponding to the Living Church emerged in the rabbinate. Of the one thousand rabbis in Soviet Russia, only six expressed sympathy for Communism.¹²¹ Instances of Jewish clergymen incriminating each other, such as occurred in the Orthodox Church, were unknown.

After the resolution of the Twelfth Party Congress demanding greater respect for the sensitivities of believers, the seizures of synagogues, as of churches, stopped. But not for long. The antireligious drive resumed in 1927, and by the end of the 1930s no functioning synagogues remained. Severe punishments awaited Jews who practiced religion in private.

49. Antireligious play Heder: the letters on the actors’ backsides spell “kosher.”

A singular disability imposed on Jews was the prohibition on the use and teaching of Hebrew, the language of religious services but also of the Zionist movement. The Soviet authorities initially saw no harm in the language, but they were persuaded by Evsektsiia Communists that it was the speech of the Jewish “bourgeoisie.” In 1919, Hebrew publishing houses were nationalized. Soon all traces of Hebrew publications disappeared. By the mid-1920s, Hebrew was outlawed and taught only in clandestine private schools. Yiddish, which the Bundists of the Evsektsiia regarded as the true speech of the masses, was declared the national language of Jews, a language indeed widely used in everyday conversation but hardly a key to high culture.

The Evsektsii used their newly won power to settle scores with their Zionist rivals. To obtain support of the authorities, who had no views in this matter, they pronounced Jews who wished to emigrate to Palestine to cultivate the soil “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionary.” The zeal with which the Communist authorities persecuted Zionists from 1919 onward was inspired by this internecine Jewish quarrel: for although Lenin rejected the idea of Jewish nationhood and the Zionist ideology based on it, in the first year of his regime he did not bother the Zionists. The persecution began under the influence of Bundists who saw a chance to destroy a competing movement with an incomparably larger following. In September 1919, the Evsektsii shut down the Zionist Central Office and the following year got the Cheka to arrest and exile numerous Zionists. In 1922, the campaign resumed with arrests and trials in Russian and Ukrainian cities. In September 1924, police raids resulted in the detention of several thousand Zionist activists. The movement managed, nevertheless, to survive underground for several years longer, so deep were its roots.

50. Torah scrolls from desecrated synagogues.

Ultimately, the Evsektsii went the way of the Living Church, being liquidated in December 1929 on the grounds that there was no need to maintain separate organizations for the Jewish “proletariat.”¹²² Their functionaries were “purged” in 1937 and disappeared from view.¹²³ The Chairman, Semen Dimanshtein, was shot.

The Catholic Church also did not escape persecution. On March 21, 1923, the authorities opened in Petrograd a trial of Catholic priests, headed by the Polish Archbishop Jan Cieplak, and 15 priests, most of them Poles as well. They were charged with “counterrevolution” and resisting the removal of vessels.¹²⁴ This particular show was managed by Nicholas Krylenko, the Deputy Prosecutor of the Russian Republic who had the previous year indicted the Socialists-Revolutionaries. (See below, this page.) Krylenko accused the defendants of seeking to elevate canon law above the law of the state and providing religious instruction to youth. Archbishop Cieplak and Msgr. Constantin Budkiewicz, the canon of the Church of St. Catherine in Petrograd, were sentenced to death. Bowing to foreign protests, especially strong in Poland, which declared the trial a violation of the Treaty of Riga guaranteeing the religious rights of Poles in Soviet Russia, Moscow relented and commuted the archbishop’s sentence to a prison term. It eventually set him free and allowed him to go to Poland. Msgr. Budkiewicz, however, was executed.

Of the three principal religions represented in the Soviet state, the Muslims fared relatively the best. Their comparatively lenient treatment was due entirely to political considerations, namely the fear of alienating the colonial nations whose support was critical to the strategy of the Comintern, since the Middle East Muslims were counted upon to undermine “imperialism.” Sultan-Galiev, the leading Communist expert on the subject, cautioned Moscow that antireligious propaganda among Muslims had to be conducted in a very circumspect manner, not only because of their strong attachment to the faith but also because they regarded the Muslim community as an “undivided whole” and perceived an attack on one as an attack on all.¹²⁵ There also existed the danger that Russian Muslims might view anti-Islamic propaganda as a revival of Christian missionary activity of prerevolutionary days.¹²⁶

Guided by such considerations, the Communist authorities refrained from directly assaulting Islamic institutions. In the constitutions given the Soviet Muslim republics, Islam was treated much more indulgently than were either Christianity or Judaism in the three Slavic republics. The freedom to propagate atheism was not stipulated and mullahs received full civil rights, including the right to vote. Religious instruction of youth was permitted and religious schools were allowed to keep their properties. Islamic courts retained the authority to judge both civil and criminal suits. These privileges the Muslim clergy retained until the late 1920s.¹²⁷

The effect that persecution had on religious sentiments and practices during the first decade of Communist rule is difficult to assess. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence, however, that people continued to observe religious rituals and customs, treating the Communists as they would heathen conquerors. Although the observance of religious holidays had been outlawed, the prohibition could not be enforced. As early as 1918 workers received permission to celebrate Easter provided they did not absent themselves from work for more than five days.¹²⁸ Later on, the authorities acquiesced in the suspension of work on Christmas under both the old and new calendars.¹²⁹ There are reports of religious processions (krestnye khody) in the capital as well as in provincial towns. In the rural districts, religious rituals were universally observed. Ignoring Soviet legislation, the peasants insisted on regarding as legitimate only marriages performed by a priest.¹³⁰

Religious fervor, which, along with monarchic sentiments, had perceptibly ebbed in 1917, revived in the spring of 1918, when many Christians courted martyrdom by demonstrating, holding protest meetings, and fasting. The fervor increased with each year: in 1920,

The churches filled with worshippers: among them there was not that predominance of women that could be noted before the revolution. Confession acquired particular importance.… Church holidays attracted immense crowds. Church life in 1920 was fully restored and perhaps even exceeded the old, prerevolutionary one. Without a doubt, the inner growth of church self-consciousness among Russian believers attained a height unknown during the preceding two centuries.¹³¹

Tikhon confirmed this judgment in an interview with an American journalist the same year, saying that “the influence of the church on the lives of the people was stronger than ever in all its history.”¹³² Confirming these impressions, one well-informed observer concluded in 1926 that the church had emerged victorious from its conflict with the Communists: “The only thing the Bolsheviks had achieved was to loosen the hierarchy and split the church.”¹³³

But ahead of it lay trials such as no church had ever endured.

^*Both Trotsky and Iaroslavskii were Jews. The prominent role played by some Jews in the antireligious campaign of the Soviet regime has led to claims that it was part and parcel of a purported Jewish “war” on Christianity. The argument ignores the fact that Jewish religious institutions and observances were not exempt from abuse: indeed, Jewish Communists displayed particular zeal in persecuting fellow Jews.

^*A. I. Vvedenskii, Tserkov’ i gosudarstvo (Moscow, 1923), 114–16. The immediate occasion for this encyclical was the seizure on January 13 of the Aleksandro-Nevskaia Lavra in Petrograd by a detachment of sailors led by Bolsheviks. This was done at the instigation of Alexandra Kollontai. Ibid., 120–23.

^†Dekrety, I, 371–74. In subsequent publications it was renamed “On the Separation of Church and State,” by which title it is has been known ever since.

^*“According to the meaning of the decree separating church and state, the existence of a ‘church hierarchy’ as such is impossible. The decree envisaged only the existence of separate religious communities, unconnected by any administrative authority.” Izvestiia, No. 99/1,538 (May 6, 1922), 1.

^*TP, II, 670–73. The Communists emulated the French revolutionaries, who in 1791–94 had confiscated the plate of suppressed churches and monasteries and sent it for melting to the mint: J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution (Oxford, 1947), 444–45. Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, in The Prophet Unarmed (Oxford, 1959), has not a word to say about Trotsky’s role in this campaign. Trotsky himself says that among his part-time jobs (“privately and unofficially”) was “antireligious propaganda, in which Lenin was very interested.” On Stalin’s instigation, he was later replaced in this capacity by Iaroslavskii. Lev Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, II (Berlin, 1930), 213.

^*Izvestiia, No. 70/1,509 (March 28, 1922), 1; RTsKhIDNI, F. 5, op. 2, delo 48, list 29. A later internal report stated that no one was killed but that four soldiers and 11 civilians suffered injuries: ibid., list 32.

^*The American Relief Administration (ARA), which six months later took charge of aid to the starving Russians, contended that there was no need for additional funds to purchase food “since the ARA already had more food and supplies at all ports and on all the lines leading into Russia than the Soviet transportation could handle.” Boleslaw Szczesniak, The Russian Revolution and Religion (Notre Dame, Ind., 1959), 70.

^*Two months later Lenin suffered a stroke, which did not prevent him from carrying out his duties as head of state for another six months, but which seems to have adversely affected his judgment. A doctor who attended him in the later stages of his illness noted that Lenin “frequently displayed signs of strong irritation, which followed a stormy course, accompanied by a sharp influx of blood into the head, dangerous to the patient, the diminution of restraining influences—the natural and unavoidable result of a profound sclerotic lesion of his circulatory system”: V. P. Osipov in KL, No. 2/23 (1927), 247.

^*This trial ran concurrently with that of the Socialist-Revolutionary leaders held in Moscow: see below, pp. 403–9.

^*Regelson, Tragediia, 308; Francis McCullagh, The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity (London, 1924), 52; M. Polskii, Novye mucheniki rossiiskie, I (Jordanville, N.Y., 1949), 56. The other executed defendants were Archimandrite Sergei (V. P. Shein), a former Duma deputy, and the professors lu. L. Novitskii and I. M. Kovsharov: Lev Regelson, Tragediia russkoi tserkvi, 1917–1945 (Paris, 1977), 298–303.

^†McCullagh, Persecution, 8. In March 1922, Lenin was informed that the authorities had found in the Kremlin Museum (Oruzheinaia palata) jewels estimated by experts to be worth at least 300 million gold rubles: RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 2, delo 1165. The Soviet government was prepared in 1923 to sell some of this hoard to pay for German armaments: Rolf-Dieter Müller, Das Tor zur Weltmacht (Boppard am Rhein, 1984), 118–19.

^*F. A. Mackenzie, The Russian Crucifixion (London, n.d.), 84. According to this author, an official list indicated that as of April 1, 1927,117 metropolitans, archbishops, and bishops were imprisoned or exiled.

^†Szczesniak, Russian Revolution, 70. The perception of Jewish involvement was exacerbated by the deliberate Bolshevik policy in some instances of sending Jews to despoil churches. “I know of cases,” Maxim Gorky wrote to a Jewish publication in New York on May 9, 1922, “of young Jewish Communists being purposely involved in [the persecution of the Church] in order that the philistine and the peasant should see: it is Jews that are ruining monasteries [and] mocking ‘holy places.’ It seems to me that this was done partly from fear and partly from a clear intent to compromise the Jewish people. It was done by anti-Semites, of whom there are not a few among the Communists”: Novoe russkoe slovo, No. 15,559 (December 2, 1954), 3.

^‡Izvestiia, No. 287/1,726 (December 19, 1922), 3, and No. 197/1,636 (September 3, 1922), 4. With silver at the time fetching between 52 and 74 cents an ounce, the loot would have been worth around 8 million dollars. McCullagh (Persecution, 8) estimated it at 1,650,000 pounds sterling, which was roughly equivalent. Louis Fischer (Current History, July 1923, 594) cited official statistics giving the value at 5 million dollars. According to Walter Duranty (New York Times, October 16, 1922, 4) it was “almost impossible” to obtain an accurate figure, but it seemed that “no more than 4 million dollars was realized, probably a good deal less.”

^*Boris D. Bogen, Born a Jew (New York, 1930), 329. The speaker, Esther Frumkin, was arrested in 1938 and five years later perished in a Soviet concentration camp: Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence (New York, 1988), 110.