Priests, archbishops and a metropolitan imprisoned in the Solovetsky labor camp (1926). Solovetsky, a thriving monastery before the Bolshevik revolution, was returned to the Russian Church in 1990. Photo source: Tomasz Kizny<\/p><\/div>
\nEstimates of the numbers of Orthodox clergy who perished, as with the precise numbers of those millions who died in the vast Soviet Gulag system, are notoriously unreliable. But one estimate puts the total number of Church people killed during the Soviet period at 600 bishops, 40,000 priests, and 120,000 monks and nuns. Many died in the inhumane conditions of the Gulag work camps, in prisons, or were executed and buried in unmarked mass graves. This went on for long, bloody decades. Some point to Fr. Alexander Men, a charismatic Russian Orthodox priest who was murdered in 1990, as one of the last martyrs of the faith under Soviet rule.<\/p>\n

The persecution of the Russian Church crested during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, at which point the Soviets had virtually destroyed the Church\u2019s institutional capabilities. In his 1967 book \u201cThe Rule of Terror,\u201d Austrian journalist Hellmut Andics estimated that the number of religious institutions in Russia fell from 30,000 to 20,000 from 1937 to 1938. \u201cIn 1937 alone, at the peak of the anti-religious campaign, 1,100 Orthodox, 240 Catholic, 61 Protestant, and 110 Muslim places of worship were closed during the year,\u201d Andics wrote.<\/p>\n

The campaign of annihilation lifted during WWII when Stalin needed the Orthodox Church to prop up patriotic spirits in the face of an invasion by Hitler\u2019s Wehrmacht. The repression of believers continued in the post-war period. Slowly, some Russians began to speak out about the futility of imposing atheism on a land that had been Christian for 1,000 years — and the failures of their Church.<\/p>\n

Craven Clerics<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1974, a book of essays published by prominent Russian dissidents, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, looked at the state of modern day Russia and its religious life. In the essay \u201cThe Schism Between the Church and the World,\u201d Evgeny Barbanov explored the crisis in the Russian Church and its tendency — always strong in Orthodoxy — toward renunciation of the world at the expense of its mission to transform the culture.<\/p>\n

Barbanov praised the priests Nikolai Eshilman and Gleb Yakunin for a 1965 public letter of protest to Patriarch Alexius. The priests, Barbanov said, rightly criticized church officials for the \u201ccraven, hypocritical position adopted by the higher administration. They showed convincingly how a significant part of the governing episcopate, with voluntary silence or cunning connivance, had assisted atheists to close churches, monasteries and religious schools, to liquidate religious communities, to establish the illegal practice of registering christenings, and had yielded to them control over the appointment and transfer of priests.\u201d But accountability was not to be found.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems at times that we Christians deliberately do not wish to understand our historical failure or to admit our historical sins,\u201d Barbanov said. \u201cWe shift the blame onto anyone else we can find — the state, atheism, secularization — but ourselves only remain innocent victims.\u201d<\/p>\n

More recently, human rights activist Sergei Kovalev blamed the Russian \u201cmentality\u201d for refusing to accept responsibility for crimes committed during the nation\u2019s \u201cbloody, cruel, shameful\u201d history. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to know about the Gulag, we didn\u2019t want to see it,\u201d Kovalev wrote. \u201cWe believed the propaganda that anyone who was arrested was an \u2018enemy of the people.\u2019 We hated them. We went out into the streets with huge placards reading: \u2018Death to the Trotskyite dogs!\u2019 We shouted out at rallies and demanded their death — huge crowds of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Historian James Billington has suggested ways that Russians can move past the \u201cmassive past complicity in unprecedented evil\u201d connected to their Soviet history. Evil, of course, is a theological concept and on this matter he charged the Russian Church with failing to accept accountability and self-scrutiny. \u201cAs an institution, it ended up in the late Soviet period accepting a defensible, but ultimately Faustian, bargain with an atheistic state,\u201d Billington said. \u201cIt secured a limited survival to perform liturgical rituals as long as it sought no educational role in society, supported state policies when requested, and cleared all major appointments with the state. As a result, the Russian Church played a role in perpetuating and even at times legitimizing a system bent on its destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebirth<\/strong><\/p>\n

That system ultimately exhausted itself with the heavy burden of violence and repression, the long assault on human dignity, and the unsustainable socialist economy. But for decades there were many in the West who were convinced that it was here to stay. Some saw through it as a false Gospel. In his 1953 book \u201cCommunism and Christ,\u201d Charles W. Lowry observed that it was not the \u201cna\u00efve simplicity\u201d of Marxism that gave it such power, but its appeal to people as a revolutionary faith. \u201cThe miracle of Marxism is its social and institutional embodiment and its transformation into an aggressive, universal religion of salvation,\u201d Lowry wrote.<\/p>\n

A phony religion, having no reality of its own, must borrow its expressions from true faith. In 1936, the newspaper Pravda published a Communist anthem written for Stalin that evoked the tones of Byzantine hymnody.<\/p>\n

O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,
\nThou who broughtest man to birth,
\nThou who purifiest the earth,
\nThou who restoreth the centuries,
\nThou who maketh bloom the Spring,
\nThou who makest vibrate the musical chords.
\n*****
\nThou splendor of my Spring, O Thou
\nSun reflected of millions of hearts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Russian Church today is growing, nourished by the blood of millions of martyrs who perished under the Soviet regime. Their deaths, as St. John Chrysostom put it in another age, is a \u201cproof of the Resurrection, mocking at demons.\u201d Orthodox parishes, at 6,000 in late 1980s, now number almost 30,000, the Church says. Where there were three institutions of theological training, there are now more than 100. Monasteries, reduced to a mere 18, have grown to more than 750. The Church claims a strong interest in vocations.<\/p>\n

In a slender book on the subject of nihilism, the priest-monk Fr. Seraphim Rose showed how radically materialist ideologies such as communism and fascism will always fail as long as a single believer remains. In the person of the believer, all the arguments against God will be refuted.<\/p>\n

\u201cMan\u2019s mind is supple, and it can be made to believe anything to which his will inclines,\u201d Rose wrote. \u201cIn an atmosphere permeated with nihilistic fervor, such as [existed] in the Soviet Union, the soundest argument can do nothing to induce belief in God, in immortality, in faith; but a man of faith, even in this atmosphere, can speak to the heart of man and show, by his example, that what is impossible to the world and to the best of human intentions, is still possible to God and to faith.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now we wait to see if Russia, with the best of intentions and the help of God, can show the world what is possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Moscow Times reports on the funeral of Russian Patriarch Alexy II: Candles flickered and white-robed elders chanted prayers as the country bade farewell Tuesday to Patriarch Alexy II, who guided the country’s dominant Russian Orthodox Church through its remarkable recovery after decades of Communist-era repression. Nuns, believers and government officials looked on as prayers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[402,124,194,218,13,204,404,160,296,211,41,403,401],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":664,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions\/664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}