The church and the Russian revolution

Foreword

The epochal changes which revolutionized the very foundations of Russian life had a rousing effect upon the rest of the world. Where changes of such magni¬ tude and far-reaching consequences are concerned, it is inevitable that the movement causing them be both extolled and condemned by doctrinaires of opposite tempers, without either much critical regard for the exact course of events, or much historical discrimina¬ tion of them. Hence, before any judgment worthy of respect may be passed upon such a cataclysmic event, it is imperative for a careful investigator to make sure of the exact facts upon which to base his opinions and conclusions.

The fierce antagonism to the Soviet regime, char¬ acteristic of many works dealing with the Russian Revolution, found ample expression in the hitherto published scanty and fragmentary treatment of the Russian church during the revolutionary era. The present work is animated by the sole desire to gather the primary historical source material which would be fairly representative of both the governmental as well as the ecclesiastical sides, and to present the course of events in the light of this evidence. The aim sought is a sympathetic understanding and appreciation of the conflicting interests which inevitably produced the deplorable strife into which the parties to the conflict were hurled, for a study of the actual situation is vastly more profitable than any amount of debate regarding

vii viii Foreword

the merits or demerits of the respective philosophies involved. The book does not aim to justify or con¬ demn the opposing principles, but to present them in the light of their historical development, which pro¬ duced the situation where conflict between them was inevitable. It is sincerely hoped that this mode of presentation may contribute toward a more critical, and therefore more equitable, appraisal of the present Russian ecclesiastical realities.

Certain problems peculiar to this particular type of investigation were encountered in the process: in the matter of dating, it should be borne in mind that the dates appearing in this book were left as given in their respective sources, for the author found it impossible to determine in every instance which calendar had been used. The Soviet government adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918; the second Local Sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church, representative of the reformist groups, likewise adopted, in 1923, the calendar in use in the West; but the patriarchal party, representative of some two-thirds of the Russian church, still adheres to the old calendar, which is thirteen days behind the Gregorian.

Another problem concerned the transliteration of the Russian alphabet. The system used in this work is, in the main, the one adopted by the British Conference of University Teachers of Russian and Slavonic Lan¬ guages, for this mode is much less cumbersome than the so-called Library of Congress scheme.

The author takes this opportunity to thank Dr. Sherwood Eddy, of New York, for his friendly aid in securing the Russian vise; also the splendid staff of the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Coun¬ tries, in Moscow, for arranging interviews with impor-

Foreword

IX tant state officials. Invaluable help was likewise given, both by opening the archives to the author and by private conferences, by many high digni¬ taries of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church and the patriarchal party of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia as well as in this country.

Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the editors of The Journal of Religion and of The Religious Edu¬ cation for the permission to use some sections of the text which had previously appeared in these magazines. Sincere thanks are likewise rendered to Dr. Carl S. Patton of the Chicago Theological Seminary, who read and corrected the text in proof.

The Author.

The Chicago Theological Seminary May 9, 1927

Introduction

It is hard to discuss impartially policies with which one differs. Particularly is this true in the case of religion, and most difficult of all where a complete social philosophy is involved. This is very likely the reason why we have been given such varying pictures of the religious condition of Russia. It is hard for an observer to detach himself from his own sympa¬ thies and shape his opinions by facts alone. Inabil¬ ity to use the Russian language compels most English and American observers to rely upon second-hand information and, at best, translations of various dis¬ cussions and official documents. This places the observer very much at the mercy of other people’s prejudices and interests.

Dr. Spinka has written a work which, in my opinion, is an exception to these generalities. A master of the Russian language, he has been able to examine mate¬ rial inaccessible in translation. In a recent visit to Russia he was able to gain information from many persons at first hand, and an historical training has guided him in the use of material. Naturally he has his own convictions as an American Protestant, but he has sincerely attempted to look at the Russian situa¬ tion as an historian rather than as a critic or as a champion of either Bolshevism or Russian Christian¬ ity. As a result his work is a well-balanced introduc¬ tion to a study of a very complicated and delicate xi

Xll

Introduction situation. It cannot fail to give the American reader much needed information and a point of view from which to interpret the facts Dr. Spinka gives so generously.

Shailer Mathews.

Contents

PAGE

Foreword . vii

Introduction . xi

Chapter I The Boots Of The Matter

The Great War, so staggeringly costly in human life and treasure, was likewise profligate of spiritual values. The ghastly beastliness which it revealed served to manifest to the startled world that the dominating ele¬ mental passions of the so-called Christian nations, which nevertheless were not nations of Christians, were utterly pagan, and that the “Christian” civilization of which they all boasted was but skin-deep, and failed to penetrate into and affect the soul of the European peo¬ ples. The frank and brutal disregard of Christian ideals and practice, and worst of all, the general hearty and even enthusiastic moral support which the national churches loyally manifested in a multitude of unmis¬ takable ways, glaringly illuminated the fact that the dominant passions which actuated the imperialistic states were shared by the Christian church as well. For ever and ever, the fact that the church was permeated with the shamelessly pagan spirit of greed for power which dominated the Western imperialistic policies must be acknowledged by the followers of the Great Teacher as one of the most serious cases of disloyalty and unfaithfulness to his gospel.

The fearful price which in consequence the church was called upon to pay for its subservience to the imperialistic and militaristic state policies was nowhere revealed with greater clarity than in Russia, where the tsarist caesaropapism was likewise at its worst. The whole Christian world was startled and shocked with the fateful consequences of that situation, for the swift and terrible vengeance which overtook the tsarist church along with the tsarist state was wreaked indis¬ criminately upon the guilty and the innocent. Ulti¬ mately, the fiery scourge which purged the Russian church and burned away so much, may prove, and indeed is quite likely to prove, to have been a blessing in disguise. But such catastrophic upheavals are costly in human suffering, and the fire of destruction rages indiscriminately, reducing to ashes the rotten as well as that which was well worth preserving. It is utterly futile to raise the question whether the urgently needed reform of that communion could not come in a less destructive way: historical forces, like natural laws, are pitiless in their unrestrainable onward rush, and where wind has been sown for so many centuries so generously, who can wonder that a whirlwind should finally arise?

To many Westerners, so little and imperfectly informed about the conditions which prevailed under the former Russian tsarist autocracy, it appeared that the Russian church was overtaken by a swift and inex¬ plicable doom, as when a hurricane suddenly swoops upon the coast of Florida, wrecking its cities and scat¬ tering the ruins all along the shore. But in reality, there was actually nothing sudden about the Russian hurricane. The storm had been brewing for many decades, and the rumble of the revolutionary thunders was heard long before the storm broke out into fury. To understand the situation in which the church found itself after the October Revolution of 1917, it is neces¬ sary to traee the causes of the revolt against the church in the history of the nineteenth century. Hence, a brief review of these movements must be presented.

First of all, it must be understood that Russia, religiously speaking, is a world by itself. It is Chris¬ tian, but its Christianity is Byzantine to begin with, and besides remained untouched by the influences both of the Renaissance and the Reformation movements. It was largely free of the legalisms of Latin Chris¬ tianity, but its petrified Byzantinism, redolent with mystical piety and superstitious ceremonialism, was essentially medieval, other-worldly, ascetic, and myth¬ ological. It may be said to be much nearer to the Christianity of the early centuries, in the sense that it retained the atmosphere of supernaturalism and magic as its native air. Thus its uneducated masses are only half Christian, the larger half of their religious attitude being of a pre-Christian quality. The same judgment is expressed by no less a historian of the Russian cul¬ tural life than Paul N. Milyukov in his classical Essays upon the History of the Russian Culture.1

The official orthodoxy prided itself upon the preser¬ vation of the Greek theological system, as worked out by John of Damascus in the eighth cen¬ tury, essentially unchanged, unprogressive and reac¬ tionary. Fundamentally, it differed but little, as far as the temper of its doctrine was concerned, from West¬ ern Catholicism; it regarded the dogmas of the church as “revealed truth,” and as such they were held to be

1 Prague, 1903 ; part II, Chapter V.

absolutely without error, unsusceptible of either addi¬ tion, subtraction, development, or reinterpretation. The belief in these dogmas was necessary to salvation ; the sacraments were regarded as mediating objective grace in a truly magical manner and were defined essen¬ tially in the Roman Catholic sense. This authoritarian system was imposed upon the clergy and the believers, and on the whole has been accepted, by the great majority, unquestioningly and implicitly, with even less desire for a rational apprehension of the articles of belief than has been the case in the Western com¬ munions. The mentality of the official church had been well represented by the opinions of the notorious ober-procuror of the Holy Synod at the end of the nine¬ teenth century (1880-1905), Constantine P. Pobedonostsev. He rejected all rationalism as the fatal disease of Western Europe, and proudly offered the Byzantine mysticism and mystagogism in its stead. The absolute truth cannot be clearly, logically formulated or rea¬ soned out; it must be intuitively apprehended. The Christian truth is thus mystically mediated through the Orthodox cult, and in consequence the believer is in possession of the absolute truth. Logic is the work of the devil. “The spread of popular education is posi¬ tively harmful.” 2

Another representative of this official Byzantinism was a monk, Constantine N. Leontev (1831-91). The true Christianity for Leontev was the ascetic other¬ worldliness of the monks and the nuns. The world— as well as man — is utterly corrupt. Since man is cor¬ rupt, he cannot be expected freely to believe in God; therefore, “we must force ourselves to believe in

2 T. G. Massaryk: The Spirit of Russia, Vol. II, Part II, p. 286

(In Czech.) F „ a

God.”3 Others, of course, must likewise be forced. God cannot be known through reason or the moral sense, but only by mystical intuition ; science and phil¬ osophy can give us no true knowledge of God, and are in reality enemies of all true religion. Therefore, illit¬ eracy is Russia’s great good fortune. Russians must be preserved from the sins of European civilization, for thus alone can they retain purity of faith ; Russia must therefore be permitted “to freeze.”

But along with this obscurantist dogmatism of Orthodoxy, the Russian church was expected to serve as the spiritual police of the autocratic state. This probably was the greatest spiritual wrong which it had suffered. It had always been in subjection to the tsars, with just a few exceptions which only served to accen¬ tuate the rule, but since the days of Peter the Great, who could not tolerate even a possibility of the revival of the pretensions of some Patriarch Nikon, the church was effectually subjugated by the creation of the Holy Governing Synod (1721). By this device, the tsar became, in matters civil, the autocratic governor of the church as well as of the state. It is often said that the tsar was not the head of the Russian church. The exact scope of his office may be seen from the Fundamental Laws of the state, revised on May 6, 1906. Paragraph 4 states that the tsar of all the Russias wields an auto¬ cratic power. To obey his supreme rule not only out of fear, but because of duty dictated to us by conscience, is advised by God himself. Paragraph 64 defines that the Russian tsar, being a Christian ruler, is the supreme protector and guardian of the dogmas of the Greek- Russian faith, and supervises orthodoxy and good order in the holy church. It is in the sense of a “bishop of exterior affairs” that he is called the head of the church. Katkov, the outstanding journalist of the reactionarytheocracy of the nineteenth century, described the tsar’s theocratical standing in these glowing terms:

All power has its derivation from God ; the Russian tsar, however, was endowed with a special significance, distinguishing him from the rest of the world’s rulers. He is not only the tsar of his land and the leader of his people but has been designated by God to be the guardian and custodian of the Orthodox church. The Russian tsar is more than an heir to his ancestors, he is a successor to the Caesars of the Eastern Empire, the builders of the church and its conclaves, the founders of the very creed of the Faith of Christ. With the fall of Byzantium, Moscow arose and the grandeur of Russia began. Herein lies the mystery of the deep dis¬ tinction between Russia and all the nations of the world.4

The appointment to the Holy Synod was ultimately in the hands of the tsar. The original Regulations pro¬ vided for a council of twelve, consisting of both clerical and lay members. But soon by custom the lay mem¬ bers were excluded, with the exception of the ober-procuror, who was the tsar’s direct representative. This official, in the course of time, became a practical dic¬ tator. The decrees of the Synod became valid only upon the signature of the tsar, but were presented to the tsar only by the ober-procuror, who could veto the synodical decree, or could merely refrain from present¬ ing it to his imperial master, whereupon it automat¬ ically lapsed. Down to 1905, the members of the Holy Synod could not even communicate with the emperor

4 In Moskovskya Vedomosti, Nov. 8, 1882; quoted in Olgin: The Soul of the Russian Revolution, New York, 1917, p. 58.

save through the ober-procuror. Needless to say that the ober-procurors were carefully selected men, of trusted loyalty and proven pliability, through whom the entire Holy Synod became but a state department for ecclesiastical affairs, on a par with the other depart¬ ments of the governmental machinery. The ober-pro¬ curor virtually had the power of choosing the members of the body, for the emperor made his appointments from the list nominated by the procuror. Four members of the Synod held their office not by reason of appointment, but because they occupied the chief metropolitanates in Russia, those of Moscow, Peters¬ burg, and Kiev, together with the exarchate of Georgia. But since these exalted cathedras were filled by im¬ perial appointment, and always carried with them a seat in the Holy Synod, it was merely a more indirect way of appointing to the governing body. It was in this fashion that the ober-procuror, who was really the tsar’s minister for ecclesiastical affairs, and was re¬ sponsible to him alone, possessed the power to choose the members of the body, and wielded control over them which willy-nilly made them but mere puppets in his hands.

The primary qualification of this chief executive and judicial official of the Russian church was, of course, his devotion to the tsar and subservience to the policy of making the church the mainstay of the state. For example, Constantine P. Pobedonostsev, who held the office from 1880 to 1905, was a reactionary of the deep¬ est dye. But especially enlightening is the case of the associate ober-procuror, Prince N. D. Zhevakhov, who served during the World War to the end of the tsarist monarchy, for his type goes far to explain the violent reaction of the revolutionaries against the church. He reveals himself to us in his Reminiscences 6 as a per¬ sonality naively mystical and superstitious, as well as bigotedly monarchical. He actually believed, and per¬ suaded the empress to share his “faith,” that the Great War continued to rage because an icon of St. Joasaph had not been paraded along the army front, as this saint had ordered in a dream ! Only upon the condition that the icon be exhibited would God have mercy upon Russia and the world and stop the war ! 8

His monarchism may be seen from a few examples of his own expressions. In an audience with the tsarina he reports himself as having said to her :

One of the greatest errors of the present time is the idea of parliamentarism, hostile to the idea of the imperial rule, proclaiming the principle of the collec¬ tive mind. Collective mind does not exist at all. There is a leader, and there is the mob blindly entrusting itself to that leader and following him. Such a leader is to be found in the tsar, the Anointed of God, as he leads the people in the paths of God’s law and brings down upon his people the blessing of God. The under¬ mining of the sacred bases of Autocracy began long ago, but it never originated among the masses of the people, but always in the mind of some evil-intentioned person. . . . The manifesto of October 17, 1905,

proclaiming the founding of the governmental Duma was forced from the tsar by a small group of such evil-intentioned individuals, who intimidated the govern¬ ment by the threat of a revolution.7

Describing an occasion upon which he saw the tsar attending a church service, Prince Zhevakhov waxed

5 N. D. Zhevakhov: Reminiscences, Vol. I, Munich, 1923. (In Russian.)

melodramatic: “With what a love I looked upon the tsar, with what a pain I read in the sad expression of his wonderful eyes the torment and suffering which the tsar carries on his shoulders on account of the sins of Russia. ...” 8 It may be presumed that the world at present knows fairly well whose sins it was that the tsar had carried on his shoulders! And it was such a man as Zhevakhov that headed the Russian church during the fearful period of the Great War!

Appointment to the episcopal sees throughout Russia was in the hands of the Holy Synod, which, of course, was guided in its choice by the ober-procuror. It was this very completely centralized church government which made the tsar well-nigh all-powerful in the church, as he was in the state, and made the church so abjectly subservient to his autocratic dictates. The bishops were elevated to their high office, and could hope for further promotion only as they made them¬ selves pleasing to the government. It was for this rea¬ son that transferring of bishops from one see to another was of frequent occurrence. Thus, for instance, Bishop Yakovlev of Yaroslavl was transferred no less than five different times within thirteen years ( 1892-1904) .* No wonder the bishops did not know the problems of their immense dioceses! They did not have time even to become acquainted with them.

With the dominance of this frankly autocratic eccle¬ siastical polity, in which no suggestion of a democratic, representative system was discernible, it is not difficult to understand that the church organization has been systematically exploited in the interests of political autocracy and absolutism. The religious training of

» F. Haase: Die Religiose Psyche des Russisches Volkes, p. 54.

Russians of all classes was consciously and persistently directed toward instilling in them ideas of the divine prerogatives of the imperial autocrat, through whom God carries out His will for Russia, as well as of the obligation of passive obedience to his commands on the part of the people. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this ideological basis of the tsarist power, and the government was keenly alive to its value. The church was the surest and stoutest prop of the theocratic absolutism; it was the spiritual police of the state.

The spiritual condition of the vast masses of the Rus¬ sian peasants and workers was deplorable. They were kept in dense ignorance (which in the opinion of Leontev was so beneficial for them), and their religious con¬ cepts were hardly above superstition and magic. The very heart of the Russian peasant’s religion was his worship of the images — the icons — and the relics from which he expected relief from his many ills; and next to this was his belief in the magical powers of the sac¬ raments, with which his concept of “salvation” was identified. There were no less than 241 officially recorded “miracle-working” sacred icons, among which the various representations of the Mother of God pre¬ dominate. But aside from these, there are innumerable shrines with various sacred paraphernalia, which are all objects of veneration. Let anyone who wishes to observe this practice but go to Moscow to the most cele¬ brated shrine of the Iverian Virgin, standing under the very walls of the Kremlin, and see the type of devotion exhibited there. Secure in his naive beliefs in the mythological and mystagogic Byzantinism, the mu¬ zhik was “safe” both for the tsarist autocracy and the Orthodox church.

Even though the Russian masses were thus secured in the thraldom of autocracy and superstition, the edu¬ cated classes could not be kept segregated within the limits of the official system, and could not be rendered immune from the cultural influences of Western Europe. The educated nineteenth-century Russia was obliged to face the problems which the philosophy and the science of the day had raised. Having no native, ripe culture of their own, Russians were ill pre¬ pared to assimilate the conclusions which elsewhere were the fruit of an indigenous, slow-maturing cultural process. Therefore the results of attempting to do so were often startlingly violent and violently startling. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, educated Russia became thoroughly imbued with the spirit and opinions of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and later with the German idealistic philosophy, especially that of Schelling, Hegel, and Feuerbach, as well as with the materialism of Vogt, the positivism of Comte, and the evolutionary agnosticism of Spencer.

The reaction of the intelligentsia to the Western world-view produced various movements sharply dif¬ ferentiated from one another. In general, they may be divided into two classes : those which saw the salva¬ tion of Russia in the acceptance of the Western culture — the Westerners; and those which regarded the Euro¬ pean culture as thoroughly decadent, and insisted that Russia must create her own culture, quite unlike that of the West, out of her own native elements. These latter were known as the Slavophils.

The Slavophil party comprised educated Russians of rather narrowly nationalistic tendencies. The nine¬ teenth century witnessed an awakening of nationalistic consciousness among many previously somnolent peopies, or such as were rendered comatose by the wily drugging carried on by others, and in most cases their awakening was accompanied with an abnormal nation¬ alistic emphasis, often amounting to chauvinism, which manifested itself among them. Similarly in Russia: Slavophilism united an ardent, emotional patriotism or nationalism with an equally zealous, somewhat uncrit¬ ical valuation of the Russian Orthodox Church, even though tempered by a certain amount of cautious crit¬ icism of the excesses of official ecclesiasticism. To them a hundred-percent Russianism was indissolubly con¬ nected with a zealous profession of the Orthodox tenets and an ecstatic admiration of the Old-Slavonic cultus. In his philosophical discussion of The Meaning of His¬ tory, Nicholas Berdyaev describes the movement in these apt words :

The whole Slavophil movement was imbued with hatred not so much of the European culture as of the European civilization. The thesis “the West is decay¬ ing” signified that the great European culture was dying, and that the soulless, godless European civiliza¬ tion had become victorious. . . . The struggle of

Russia with Europe, of the East with the West, repre¬ sented a struggle of the spirit with unspirituality, or religious culture with irreligious civilization. They (the Slavophils) wished to believe that Russia would not go the way of civilization, but would follow her own path, her own destiny, that in Russia alone a culture on religious bases was possible — a genuine spiritual cul¬ ture.10

The Slavophil party was, therefore, religiously very important, for in spite of its blind devotion to the

10 Nicholas Berdyaev: The Meaning of History, Berlin, 1923, p. 250. (In Russian.)

national church, it produced or influenced the leading religious thinkers of modern Russia. Hence it would be fitting and proper, in the interests of a just evalua¬ tion of the Russian religious situation as a whole, to present a brief resume of this school of thought as well as the related mystical schools, for they were all rather closely connected in principle, if not always in method.

The founder of the Slavophil party was Ivan V. Kireyevsky (1806-1855), who taught that Russia was essentially different from Europe, in as much as the foundations of Russian culture were to be sought in the mystical faith of the Russian Christianity, while those of European culture manifested themselves in her rationalistic sciences and her positivistic philosophy. The Russian church, untouched by these corrosive influences, had alone preserved Christianity in its mys¬ tical, intuitive apprehension of the absolute truth as revealed in the Orthodox dogmas as well as in the cultus; as such, Russian Christianity had the exalted task of restoring to the original purity of the teaching and spirit of Christ the churches of Western Europe, both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant.

Another exponent of the Slavophil dogma of Russian messianism was found in A. S. Khomyakov (1804- 1860), who proved to be a remarkable theological systematizer and exponent of the movement, as well as a keen polemicist against both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. His program likewise comprised the familiar thesis: Europe is decaying; we must save it! The political economist of the party was found in Con¬ stantine Aksakov (1817-1860), who advocated a sys¬ tem of theocracy. Politically, the creed of Slavophil¬ ism, as expressed by Danilevsky in that Bible of later Slavophilism, Russia and Europe, defined the task of

Russia as consisting of the unification of all Slavic nations in a pan-Slavic federation, and at the head of the united Slavic world as rescuing Constantinople from the hands of the Turk. The ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire was then to be restored to the headship of Eastern Orthodoxy under the aegis of Rus¬ sia. Even a most elementary knowledge of the policies of the Russian government during the World War suf¬ fices to reveal the startling similarities between the official and the Slavophil policies; but it ought to be added that official Russia was a great deal more inter¬ ested in securing a free outlet from the Black Sea than in making Constantinople the ecclesiastical head of the East ! Incidentally, it helps to reveal the close connec¬ tion between the slogans and policies of the movement so deeply religious as was Slavophilism, and the official imperialistic expansionist politics of the state.

Slavophilism affected the best religious minds of Rus¬ sia from that time on, and thus was religiously much more fruitful and important than its opponent, the Westernist party. Even though held with many impor¬ tant modifications by the later thinkers, yet the influ¬ ence which these ideas exerted was great. Among those deeply affected by Slavophilism is to be counted the most genuinely Russian of the great modern writ¬ ers of that nation, Theodore M. Dostoevsky (1821- 1881), whose thought gave an impulse and direction to the best minds in the Russian church; and they, in turn, afford at least a moderate promise of intellectual and spiritual reorientation within that vast com¬ munion.

Dostoevsky has been called the “father of modern Russian religious thought,” and the “Russian Dante.” The problems with which he was eternally occupied were at bottom religious problems. In everything he wrote, he was wrestling with the questions raised by nihilism: a denial of faith in God and the godman, and the Western humanistic affirmation of man, or the superman, the mangod. He was constantly asking himself the question: What becomes of the man who had lost all sense of objective responsibility and duty, and who wishes to be a law unto himself, affirming for himself moral solipsism? One may read his Crime and Punishment, or The Possessed, or his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, and everywhere find the thinker wrestling with this central problem. His answer rings out clearly that man either finds his salvation by becoming a godman, or destroys himself in an attempt to become a mangod. Either Christ or Smerdyakov; for if there be no God, then all things are permitted. That is the lesson of his Brothers Karamazov. The theme of theanthropy, i.e. of God incarnating himself in man, runs like a dominant note through most of the modem Russian progressive thought — the theme of the deification of the human, of salvation by incarnation, in opposition to the anthropocentric emphasis of the West.