Streamed on June 13
Tsar Peter was declared the emperor of Russia in 1721 and his reforms lasting about two hundred years until 1917 shifted Russian culture and religion toward a hostile stance toward the Orthodox faith. The Russian patriarchate returned, but now it had to deal with nearly insurmountable problems from outside and within the Church. There were prophetic alarms in different parts of Russian culture from both the ranks of clergy and poets. Lermontov, Dostoevsky through the characters in his novels warns about the “Russian demons” and St. John of Kronstadt too through his sermons to the people, his writings and miracles. The main spiritual reason for the revolution was that the people forgot God and right worship over a long period of time. That spiritual oblivion led to the bourgeois February Revolution and the later proletarian October Revolution that ushered in the rule of the Bolsheviks.
The “godless spirit of this world” warred against Orthodoxy. The rulers of Russia and the church broke and forgot the traditions that formed the basis of a harmonious relationship. The Church was essentially wiped out of public view. Now it was kept private, however, it was estimated that about half of the Russian people still professed religious convictions. This raging hatred fomented by revolutionaries cost churches and Christians much. Arrests, trials, shootings, bishops and priests in prison camps, famine, closed churches, “canonical chaos” and schisms the Church endured from the new government. Patriarch Tikhon was a major leader throughout the persecutions by the atheist government and counterfeit councils and conferences coming from the “renovationist” schisms, which also tried to overthrow Orthodox traditions. Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and later stated that:
I, of course, did not declare myself an admirer of the Soviet authorities, as the renovationists do … But I am also by no means an enemy of the government, as some maintain … I firmly condemn all threats against the Soviet government, wherever they may come from (266).
The delicate balance that Patriarch Tikhon and others took may be criticized from outside as compromising themselves with the government, as some Russians believers did from abroad, but in reality, it was what kept the Orthodox Church together in the fatherland. Unlike in the Roman persecutions of early centuries, the atheist regime in Russia seems to have been much more widespread and deliberate in its aim to decimate Christianity from the country. Groups such as the “Union of the Militant Godless” promised to make “the name of God forgotten throughout the entire territory of the USSR” (271). Metropolitan Sergius, for example, struggled to “legalize” Christianity to safeguard it. He met and discussed with Joseph Stalin in 1942 about how the Church needed to convene councils and to elect patriarchs, to educate clergy, and he negotiated a way for bishops to be set free from prisons. His talks with Stalin worked for a time until the Krushchev persecutions. What was common to both the Roman empire and the USSR is that the government often blamed Christians for societal problems.
Because of the various persecutions, there is a Russian diaspora in America and Europe. As a result, different schools of thought and theology developed outside of Russia in Paris, for example, called the Paris School. Writers such as Archpriest Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, Protoopresbyter John Meyendorff, Protopresbyter Nicholas Afanasiev, Archpriest Sergei Chetverikov, Nicholas Berdyaev and Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov returned to studying the fathers of the eastern Church (280). The benefit of these different schools and theologians is that their works on St Symeon the New Theologian, St Gregory Palamas and other patristic writings helped revive patristic theology.
In the twentieth century, the Russian Orthodox Church became a persecuted church like those of the early Christian martyrs that we have read already in earlier chapters of this volume. If we take that historical perspective into account, we can see that this period of persecution and troubles for the Church is not an embarrassment or completely abnormal conditions. In fact, it was the vast experience of Christians in history and it was also an opportunity for Christians to immerse themselves in Christ and that experience glorified Christ through his Church.