Abstract
The Church was the object of persecution from the earliest days of the revolution. The first phase, roughly between 1918 and March 1921, was part of the Red Terror of the War Communism era. Thousands of clergy and faithful laymen were murdered or persecuted in those years. The pretexts for this were several. The principal ones were suspicion of collaboration with the enemy during the Civil War, the Patriarchal anathema pronounced on the Bolsheviks (which was seen to undermine the prestige of the new regime in the eyes of the largely religious population), sermons which blamed fraternal carnage on the Bolsheviks for causing it and on Marxist materialism for justifying it, and lastly, resistance to the implementation of the 23 January (5 February) 1918 Decree on the Separation of Church and State, particularly attempts to confiscate churches and church property.
‘We must combat religion — that is the ABC of … Marxism. The combatting of religion … must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement … eliminating the social roots of religion …’ (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15)
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Chapter 1: The Early Persecutions, 1917–21
Regelson, Tragediia, p. 239; Protopresviter M. Polsky, Novye mucheniki, vol. 1, pp. 66–8. Polsky erroneously states that during the procession the faces of the imprisoned Tsar and his family were seen at the window of the house watching the procession. The bishop allegedly stopped and gave his benediction in the direction of that window. The point is that most of the family and the Tsar had been moved to Ekaterinburg the previous day. Soviet confirmation of the murder in: V. Arkhipenko. ‘Zagovor Iliodora’, N.i rel., no. 9 (1968), p. 26; the excuse being his alleged ‘counter-revolutionary activity’; for this reason the author justifies the murder.
A. A. Valentinov (ed.), Chernaia kniga (Shturm nebes) (no publication data, probably Paris, 1925) p. 43.
Ibid, p.271. Also, N. F. Zybkovets, Natsionalizatsiia monastyrskikh imushchestv y Sovetskoi Rossii (1917–1921) (M.: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1975) pp. 110–11. He points out that the nationalization of monasteries continued on a rapid scale beyond 1921, and by 1922 722 monasteries were confiscated from the Church, leaving her theoretically with 531, but a large part of the latter was in the western territories annexed by Rumania, Poland, the Baltic states and Finland after 1918.
The most famous pre-revolutionary agrarian Christian communes were founded by a pious and philanthropic aristocrat, Nepluev, with the blessing of the Church. See: N. N. Nepluev, Trudovye bratstva … i khristianskoe gosudarstvo (Leipzig, Germany: Beer & Hermann, 1893)
Kratkiia svedeniia o Pravoslavnom Kresto-vozdvizhenskom trudovom bratstve (Chernigov: tip. Gubernskogo pravleniia, 1905)
N. N. Nepluev, Podvizhnik zemli Russkoi (Sergiev Posad: tip. Sv.-Tr. Sergievoi Lavey, 1908). Under the Soviets the Orthodox Church was denied the right to found such communes, even as the Evangelicals and Baptists were permitted to do so until the beginning of the mass collectivization by the state in 1929. Between then and 1933 all religious communes were disbanded by force.
See: Putintsev, Politicheskaia rol’ i taktika sekt (M., 1935) pp. 248–80
Ivan Prokhanov, In the Cauldron of Russia, 1869–1933 (N.Y.: 1933) passim.
Archb. Ioann (Shakhovskoi), Vera i dostovernost’ (Paris, 1982) p. 27. The anonymous author of a samizdat manuscript on the life of a Volga priest, Fr. Sergii, also writes that the First World War caused a deterioration of relations between the people and the priests, blaming the latter’s patriotism for the hardships of the war. A rumour was even circulating that priests held their savings in Germany, although ‘why should they then have wanted the war’, for which they were now being blamed? Ostraia luka (Ms., Keston College Samizdat Archives) p. 163. As to the promised moderation towards the Church, one of the reasons for the premature closure of the 1917–18 Sobor was not only lack of funds but also the fact that the Soviet Government suddenly took away from the Sobor the building where most of its sessions were occurring. Regelson, Tragediia, p. 241. The era of War Communism concluded with the trials of the diocesan administration of Archangel (in Moscow) and of the Novgorod bishops (in Novgorod). The ‘crime’ of the former group was that they had sent a report on Bolshevik religious persecutions to the Archbishop of Canterbury; that of the latter, conducting ‘counterrevolutionary propaganda’ in the diocesan press. Archbishop Pavel of Arkhangelsk, and a priest and a lay secretary, were condemned to death. The absurdity of the punishment and of the ‘crime’ must have been evident even to the Soviets, for the death sentence was commuted to a mere five-year imprisonment. In Novgorod the trial concluded with a conditional five-year sentence meted out to Archbishop Arsenii of Novgorod and to his vicar-bishop Alexii (the future Patriarch). Regelson, pp. 271–2.
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© 1988 Dimitry V. Pospielovsky
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Pospielovsky, D.V. (1988). The Early Persecutions, 1917–21. In: Soviet Antireligious Campaigns and Persecutions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19002-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19002-7_1
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