The Russian Church under the Bolsheviks

On 4 (17) November 1917 the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, meeting in Moscow, resolved that the highest authority in the church belongs to a council of bishops, clergy and laity, and that the patriarchate is restored, with the patriarch first among bishops who are his equals and accountable to the council (Local Council of 1917–1918, Determinations, no. 1 (4 November 1917)) (Tikhon, Letter on his accession (18 December 1917)). The Russian church had been without a patriarch for more than two centuries; the Council named candidates, and the lot fell on Tikhon of Moscow (Tikhon, Letter on his accession (18 December 1917)). He took the patriarchal seat in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin on 21 November (4 December), and said in his address that the patriarchate was being restored amid fire and gunfire, and that churches and the shrines of the Kremlin had been shot at (Tikhon, Address in the Dormition Cathedral (21 November 1917)).

On 19 January (1 February) 1918 Tikhon sent a message to the whole church, in which he wrote of daily reports of innocent people killed without trial, of churches shelled and plundered, of monasteries seized and of church property taken as the people’s (Tikhon, Message of 19 January 1918). He forbade those who did the killing to come to the sacraments and pronounced anathema on them, if they still bore the Christian name (Tikhon, Message of 19 January 1918). He called on the faithful to defend the church by the strength of their faith and, if need be, to suffer for it (Tikhon, Message of 19 January 1918).

The next day the Council of People’s Commissars, with Vladimir Lenin as chairman, issued its decree on freedom of conscience and on church and religious societies (Decree on the Separation of Church and State (1918) articles 1–13). It separated the church from the state and the school from the church, allowed every citizen to profess any religion or none, abolished religious oaths, gave the registration of births and marriages to the civil authorities, and forbade the teaching of religion in schools of general education while leaving citizens free to teach and learn it privately (Decree on the Separation of Church and State (1918) articles 1–13). Its last articles laid down that no church or religious society may own property or be a legal person, and that all their property is the people’s; buildings and objects meant for worship might be given to congregations to use without charge (Decree on the Separation of Church and State (1918) articles 12–13).

In April 1918 the Council adopted measures in answer to what it called the persecution of the church: prayers for those persecuted for the faith, a yearly commemoration, on 25 January or the Sunday after, of the confessors and martyrs who had died, and steps to recover what had been taken from churches and monasteries (Local Council of 1917–1918, Determinations, no. 25 (5/18 April 1918)).

In the famine of 1922 Tikhon allowed parishes to give church valuables not used in worship, and when the government ordered all valuables removed, sacred vessels included, he called the act sacrilege (Tikhon, Message of 15 (28) February 1922). In a secret letter to the Politburo of 19 March 1922 Lenin wrote that the famine was the moment to seize church property and to crush the clergy he called the “Black Hundreds”, proposed that those who had resisted at Shuya be tried and shot in large numbers, and advised that Tikhon himself be left untouched for the present (Lenin, Letter of 19 March 1922 whole letter).