Russia on the Eve of Revolution

The late-imperial Russian Church and the religious world of St. Petersburg into which Vasily Muravyov rose — a church that was at once the established faith of a vast empire and a body under strain, with a flourishing of monasticism, eldership, and lay piety alongside the bureaucratic captivity of the synodal system. This file sets the historical and ecclesial stage for the merchant who would become the elder of Vyritsa, and shows how a man of commerce could also be a man of prayer in that world.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Soviet period)

The Synodal Church

The Russian Orthodox Church of Vasily Muravyov’s youth was the church of the synodal period — the system established by Peter the Great in 1721, which abolished the patriarchate and governed the Church through a Holy Synod under the supervision of a lay official, the Over-Procurator. For most of Muravyov’s adult life before the Revolution, that office was held (1880–1905) by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the arch-conservative who made the Church an instrument of the autocratic state (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1984, vol. 1, ch. 1; Ware, The Orthodox Church, rev. ed. 1993, on the synodal period). The Church was vast — by the early twentieth century tens of thousands of parishes, hundreds of monasteries, a population overwhelmingly baptized Orthodox — and at the same time clerically demoralized, its bishops drawn from the monastic clergy and its parish priests from a hereditary caste, its administration bound to the throne.

Yet the synodal centuries had not extinguished the Church’s interior life. The nineteenth century saw a powerful revival of monasticism and of the tradition of eldership (starchestvo), centered on Optina Pustyn and on the figure, above all, of St. Seraphim of Sarov (1754–1833), whose canonization in 1903 — pressed by the Emperor himself and attended by enormous crowds at Sarov — was the great religious event of Muravyov’s middle years (on Sarov, see St. Seraphim of Sarov; Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, SVS Press, 1975). The elders of Optina were visited by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Vladimir Solovyov; lay pilgrimage to monasteries and to startsy was a living and widespread practice. This is the world in which the biographies place the young merchant: a layman drawn, even amid commerce, to the monastic and the contemplative.

St. Petersburg

The capital, St. Petersburg, was the imperial city and a great commercial center — the seat of the court, the Synod, and the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, the premier monastery of the empire’s north, founded by Peter the Great in 1710 to house the relics of St. Alexander Nevsky (on the Lavra, see The Alexander Nevsky Lavra; on the saint himself, St. Alexander Nevsky). It was also the city of St. John of Kronstadt (1829–1908), the parish priest of the naval base across the gulf whose vast charitable works, daily Liturgies, and reputation for healing made him the most famous pastor in Russia — a phenomenon of urban lay piety on an industrial scale (see St. John of Kronstadt). The biographies of Muravyov relate that the young merchant knew and venerated Fr. John, a claim that fits the milieu though it rests on the devotional Life rather than independent record (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; this and similar claims are weighed in The Biographies).

Petersburg was, then, a city where a merchant of means could move easily between the counting-house and the church: where Sunday Liturgy, parish charity, pilgrimage to the Lavra, and the spiritual guidance of a confessor were ordinary features of a pious commercial life. The later figure of the merchant-ascetic is not anomalous against this background; it is a recognizable type of late-imperial urban Orthodoxy.

A Church on the Eve

By the first decade of the twentieth century the Church was visibly straining against the synodal settlement. The pre-conciliar commissions of 1905–1906 debated the restoration of the patriarchate and the reform of church administration; the Revolution of 1905 had loosened the autocracy’s grip; the religious-philosophical renaissance — Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Florensky, Florovsky — was reexamining the whole tradition (Pospielovsky 1984, vol. 1; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, on the period). The First World War, beginning in 1914, drained the empire; the February Revolution of 1917 swept away the monarchy; and in August 1917 the long-awaited All-Russian Church Council convened in Moscow, restoring the patriarchate and electing St. Tikhon as patriarch in November — even as the Bolsheviks seized power (see St. Tikhon of Moscow; on the persecution that followed, Orthodoxy: Soviet Persecution).

Vasily Muravyov was fifty-one years old in 1917. His whole formation — his commerce, his marriage, his philanthropy, his secret asceticism (as the biographies present it) — belongs to the imperial world that ended in that year. The monastic life he would enter in 1920 was a deliberate turn into the catastrophe: he became a monk not in the secure church of his youth but in the church the Bolsheviks had set out to destroy. To grasp the renunciation, one has to grasp both worlds — the late-imperial church that formed him and the persecuted church he chose.

See Also

References

  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The synodal system, Pobedonostsev, the pre-conciliar reform, the 1917 Council.)
  • Ware, Timothy (Kallistos). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The synodal period and the monastic revival.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Trans. Robert Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979. (The religious-philosophical renaissance.)
  • Zander, Valentine. St. Seraphim of Sarov. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975. (The 1903 canonization and the monastic revival.)
  • Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s. (The claim of acquaintance with St. John of Kronstadt; see the source-critical treatment in §07.)