Persecution and Revival

The modern era subjected Orthodox monasticism to its severest trials since the age of the martyrs — the long attrition of the Ottoman centuries, the state restrictions and secularizations of imperial Russia, and the Soviet campaign to annihilate monastic life altogether — and to remarkable recoveries. This file traces the suppressions and the revivals, from Catherine II’s secularization of 1764 through the Soviet catastrophe to the reopening of the monasteries after 1988 and the twentieth-century renewal of the Holy Mountain.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Under the Ottomans

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 placed the ancient heartlands of Orthodox monasticism — the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Levant, and eventually the whole Greek world — under Ottoman rule. Monasticism survived, but under heavy constraint: monasteries were subject to taxation and periodic confiscation, forbidden to expand or build freely, drained of resources, and cut off from the cultural and educational nourishment that had sustained them in Byzantine times. The Holy Mountain endured — Athos negotiated its survival with the sultans and remained inhabited throughout, though impoverished and, in this period, increasingly idiorrhythmic in its way of life (Graham Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, on Athos under the Ottomans; Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge, 1968, on the Church under Ottoman rule). It was against this background of decline that the eighteenth-century Athonite renewal of the Philokalia — the labor of Sts. Macarius of Corinth and Nikodemos the Hagiorite, and, in the Slavic world, Paisius Velichkovsky — took on its significance, gathering and reviving the hesychast tradition precisely when the outward conditions of monasticism were at their lowest (see Possessors and Non-Possessors on the Paisian revival; The Philokalia).

The Russian State: Peter and Catherine

In Russia the pressures came from the modernizing state. Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) distrusted monasticism as a drain on manpower and a refuge from useful service; his reforms restricted new tonsures, subjected monasteries to state supervision, and turned some to secular uses, while the abolition of the patriarchate and the establishment of the Holy Synod in 1721 placed the whole Church, monasteries included, under state control (Gregory L. Freeze, “The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia,” and the standard histories; Igor Smolitsch, Russisches Mönchtum, Augustinus-Verlag, 1953). The heaviest blow was Catherine II’s secularization of 1764, which confiscated the vast monastic estates — the very landed wealth the Possessors had defended (see Possessors and Non-Possessors) — and reduced the monasteries to a fixed number of state-supported “staffed” houses, closing hundreds of others and capping the number of monks (Smolitsch, Russisches Mönchtum, 1953; Freeze and the standard histories). Yet, paradoxically, the stripping-away of wealth and the impoverishment of monasticism coincided with, and arguably helped to make room for, a profound spiritual revival: the nineteenth century, despite the reduced institutional base, saw the flowering of the startsy (elders) fed by the Paisian revival — Optina Pustyn, St. Seraphim of Sarov and Sarov, Valaam, Diveyevo — one of the great ages of Russian holiness (Smolitsch, Russisches Mönchtum, 1953; and see The Optina Elders and The Elder and the Disciple). The poverty imposed from without unexpectedly served the Non-Possessor, hesychast ideal from within.

The Soviet Catastrophe

The twentieth century brought an assault without precedent. The Bolshevik regime, militantly atheist, set out to destroy monasticism as an institution. The great monasteries were seized and closed; monastic lands and buildings were confiscated; churches were desecrated, looted, or demolished; and monks and nuns were dispersed, imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or shot (Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy, Westview, 1995; Dimitry Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984). The symbolism was pointed: the Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea, one of the oldest and greatest of Russian houses, was turned as early as 1923 into one of the first Soviet concentration camps (SLON, the Solovetsky Camp of Special Purpose) — a monastery become a prison, the white martyrdom become red (Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 1995; and see Martyrdom and Monasticism). By the late 1930s nearly every monastery in the Soviet Union had been closed; the age filled the calendar with new-martyr monks and nuns. A brief, limited reprieve came during the Second World War, when Stalin’s partial rapprochement with the Church allowed a few houses to reopen and the Trinity–Sergius Lavra was returned in 1946; but by the fall of the USSR only a small handful of functioning monasteries remained in the whole vast country (Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 1995; Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1984). The other Orthodox lands that fell under communism — the Balkans, Romania, Georgia — suffered comparable, if variously severe, suppressions.

Monasticism survived these years in three ways: in the tiny number of tolerated houses; in hidden, “catacomb” monastic life, monks and nuns living their vows secretly in the world; and in the diaspora, where émigrés carried the tradition abroad and founded monasteries in Western Europe and North America (see Monasticism Today). The Russian Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), in particular, preserved and transmitted the monastic and liturgical tradition in exile, at Jordanville and elsewhere (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1984; and Orthodoxy: Monasticism on the ROCOR monasteries).

The Athonite Renewal

Even the Holy Mountain seemed, by the mid-twentieth century, to be dying. The Athonite population had fallen steeply and aged severely — from tens of thousands in the early 1900s to only a little over a thousand aging monks by the early 1970s, many houses idiorrhythmic and half-empty, and serious observers spoke of Athos as a museum in its last decades (Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, Yale, 2002, giving the demographic figures and the mood of decline). Then, from around the 1970s, came an unexpected and dramatic reversal. A new generation, often well-educated, drawn by charismatic elders — figures such as Joseph the Hesychast and his spiritual descendants, and the elders around whom communities re-gathered — repopulated the monasteries, and one by one the idiorrhythmic houses returned to the strict coenobitic life (Speake, Mount Athos, 2002, on the renewal and its elders; and see The Vows and the Monastic Day on the coenobitic restoration). By the turn of the twenty-first century the Athonite population had risen again to around two thousand, younger and more fervent, and the Mountain had become once more a fountainhead sending monks and foundations across the Orthodox world (Speake, Mount Athos, 2002).

The Post-Soviet Reopening

The collapse of communism after 1988–1991 opened the way to a monastic restoration on an enormous scale. The millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ in 1988 marked the turning point; over the following decades hundreds of monasteries were reopened or newly founded across Russia, Ukraine, and the other post-Soviet Orthodox lands. Optina Pustyn was returned to the Church in 1987 and fully restored; Valaam, Solovki, the Kiev Caves, Diveyevo, and the other great houses were revived (Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 1995; and Orthodoxy: Monasticism, which records the reopenings and the disputes, including the contested status of the Kiev Caves Lavra as of the mid-2020s). The scale of the recovery is not in doubt; its depth is debated, and that debate — whether the revival represents a genuine renewal of the ascetic and hesychast tradition or a more superficial institutional rebuilding — belongs to the assessment of monasticism today (see Monasticism Today).

The Pattern of Death and Resurrection

Seen whole, the modern history of Orthodox monasticism follows a pattern the tradition itself would recognize: repeated deaths followed by resurrections, in which the stripping-away of wealth and the very persecution meant to destroy monasticism served instead to purify and renew it. Catherine’s confiscations preceded the age of the elders; the catacombs and the diaspora preserved what the Soviets tried to kill; the apparent dying of Athos gave way to its most vigorous renewal in centuries. The monastic vocation, born as the successor to martyrdom, has proved in the modern age most alive where it has been most tried — a fact the tradition reads not as historical accident but as the working of the paschal mystery at the heart of the ascetic life (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 2015; Speake, Mount Athos, 2002; and see Martyrdom and Monasticism).

References

Smolitsch, Igor. Russisches Mönchtum: Entstehung, Entwicklung und Wesen, 988–1917. Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1953. (The standard history of Russian monasticism through the imperial period; Peter, Catherine, and the nineteenth-century revival.)
Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. (The Soviet suppression and the post-Soviet reopening; Solovki; the reopenings after 1988.)
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The Soviet campaign against monasticism; survival in the diaspora.)
Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (Athos under the Ottomans; the twentieth-century decline and renewal; the demographic figures.)
Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (The Orthodox Church under Ottoman rule.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 2015. (The pattern of persecution and revival; the new martyrs.)