Moscow and the Council

The road from the Yaroslavl and Vilna sees to the All-Russian Council of 1917: the wartime evacuation of the Lithuanian diocese, the June 1917 election of Tikhon as Metropolitan of Moscow — the first Moscow hierarch chosen by his flock rather than appointed — and the Council’s debate and vote to restore the Patriarchate, which narrowed to three candidates remembered as “the cleverest, the strictest, and the kindest.”

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1989)

From America to Yaroslavl (1907)

When Archbishop Tikhon returned to Russia in 1907 after nine years building up the Orthodox mission in North America — where he had reorganized the diocese, moved its see to New York, blessed the cornerstone of St. Nicholas Cathedral, and so endeared himself that he was made an honorary citizen of the United States — he was assigned to the ancient see of Yaroslavl on the upper Volga (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow”). There he governed for six years (1907–1913) in the manner that had marked his American episcopate: unassuming, accessible, willing to travel to remote parishes, content to arrive without fanfare and to be received as a guest rather than a grandee. Contemporaries and the later hagiographical record agree on the trait — he won the affection of his clergy and people by a personal warmth rather than by administrative severity, and he was made an honorary citizen of the city of Yaroslavl as well (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon”; Vostryshev, Patriarkh Tikhon, chs. on the Yaroslavl years). This reputation — the gentle, approachable bishop, the same man whether in Minneapolis, San Francisco, or a Volga village — is the thread that runs unbroken through to the patriarchal election a decade later, and it is precisely the quality the Moscow faithful would later name when they called him “the kindest” of the candidates.

Vilna and the War (1913–1917)

On December 22, 1913 (Old Style), Tikhon was transferred to Vilna (Vilnius) as Archbishop of Lithuania and Vilna, a frontier diocese of mixed confession on the western marches of the empire (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon”; stjohndc.org, “Tikhon (Belavin), Patriarch of Moscow”). The First World War overtook him there within months. As the German advance pressed into the western provinces in 1915, the diocese had to be evacuated: relics, including those of the Vilna Martyrs, and the diocesan administration were carried east to Moscow and beyond, and Archbishop Tikhon spent the war years ministering to the displaced and organizing relief for refugees and wounded soldiers (Vostryshev, Patriarkh Tikhon; OrthoChristian, “Fourteen Facts about the Life and Struggles of Patriarch Tikhon,” orthochristian.com/124525.html). He was thus a wartime bishop without a settled diocese when the monarchy fell in February 1917 — and therefore available, in the new ecclesiastical order, for Moscow.

The First Elected Metropolitan of Moscow (June 1917)

The February Revolution did not merely depose a tsar; it dismantled the machinery by which the Synodal Church had been governed for two centuries. The Provisional Government, while keeping the Synodal framework, permitted the dioceses to choose their own ruling bishops by the vote of clergy and laity — a revolutionary-era novelty without precedent in the synodal period, when bishops were assigned from above.

On June 21, 1917 (Old Style), the Diocesan Congress of Moscow clergy and laity elected Archbishop Tikhon the ruling bishop of Moscow (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon”; stjohndc.org). This is the pivotal and easily missed fact: Tikhon was the first Metropolitan of Moscow chosen by his own flock rather than appointed by Synod and crown — a man lifted to the senior Russian see by election in the brief window when such elections were possible. The novelty is exactly of its moment. For two centuries Moscow’s hierarchs had been transferred there by imperial fiat on the Synod’s recommendation; in the revolutionary spring of 1917 the principle of sobornost — the conciliar participation of the whole body of the Church, clergy and laity together — was for the first time put into practice at the level of the senior see itself. That the Moscow congress, free to choose any of the empire’s bishops, chose the gentle wartime archbishop of Vilna says something about how he was already regarded. On August 13/15, 1917, as the All-Russian Council prepared to open, he was raised to the dignity of Metropolitan of Moscow (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon”). When the Council convened, the Metropolitan of Moscow was its natural chairman, and Tikhon was elected to preside over it — so that the man who would be made Patriarch by lot in November had spent the autumn presiding over the very assembly that restored the office.

The Council and the Restoration Debate

The All-Russian Council (Pomestny Sobor) opened on August 15/28, 1917 — the Feast of the Dormition — with the Divine Liturgy in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, and gathered 564 members: bishops, clergy, monastics, and a lay majority, in one of the most broadly representative assemblies in Orthodox history (see The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918; Destivelle, The Moscow Council).

The Council’s most momentous question was whether to restore the Patriarchate suppressed by Peter the Great in 1700/1721. The debate was real and hard-fought. Opponents warned that a single patriarch might become an autocrat and that the Synodal collegium, for all its faults, was more conciliar; supporters answered that the Patriarchate was the canonical norm for an autocephalous church, that the Synodal system was a Petrine borrowing from Protestant Europe, and that the Church needed a visible head to face the gathering storm (Evtuhov, “The Church in the Russian Revolution,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 [1991]: 497–511).

The decisive argument came from outside the hall. On October 25/November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd; as street fighting between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces reached Moscow and gunfire could be heard near the Council’s sessions, the urgency overrode the theological reservations. On October 28/November 10, 1917, the Council voted to restore the Patriarchate (see The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918; Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, vol. 1, ch. 1).

The Three Candidates: “the cleverest, the strictest, and the kindest”

Having decided to restore the office, the Council had to fill it. It chose by a two-stage method that joined human deliberation to divine disposal. First the members balloted to narrow the field; the three highest names would be submitted to a lot. The ballots, cast over several rounds, produced three candidates:

Archbishop Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kharkov — the leading vote-getter and the most learned of the three;
Archbishop Arseny (Stadnitsky) of Novgorod — the seasoned administrator;
Metropolitan Tikhon (Belavin) of Moscow — who had received the fewest votes of the three (Pospielovsky, vol. 1, ch. 1; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/124525.html, which gives Antony 101 votes, Arseny 27, and Tikhon 23 in the decisive ballot).

The contrast among them crystallized into a characterization that the Russian tradition has remembered ever since, voiced by Council participants and the Moscow faithful: that the Church was choosing among the cleverest (umneishy, Antony), the strictest (strozhaishy, Arseny), and the kindest (dobreishy, Tikhon) of her hierarchs (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow”; “Persecution and Resilience,” Christian History 146). Antony Khrapovitsky was the towering theological intellect of the Russian episcopate, a monastic ideologue and the leading mind behind the very movement to restore the Patriarchate; Arseny Stadnitsky was the rigorous administrator and disciplinarian, long experienced in church governance; Tikhon was neither the most brilliant nor the most commanding, but the most beloved. The saying is best understood as a contemporary characterization preserved in the hagiographical and memoir tradition rather than as a verbatim minute of the Council — its force is that it captures, accurately, why Tikhon’s selection struck so many as providential: the office that lay ahead would demand not the cleverest nor the strictest but the kindest, a confessor’s patience under a persecution none yet imagined.

That the runner-up, Antony (Khrapovitsky), would within four years become the first head of the Russian Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), presiding over the Karlovtsy Synod from 1921, gives the ballot a long afterlife in the history of the Russian diaspora (see The All-Russian Council of 1917–1918).

The final choice the Council deliberately withheld from itself. Having narrowed the field by ballot, it resolved to leave the decision among the three not to a further vote but to a lot drawn before the Mother of God — following ancient precedent associated with the practice of the Alexandrian patriarchate, and ultimately with the apostolic choice of Matthias by lot in Acts 1:23–26 — “in effect leaving it in the hands of God” (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”). The decision to cast lots was itself a theological statement: in a moment when the Church could trust neither the calculations of its members nor the favor of the new powers, it submitted the choice of its head to providence, asking God to name the man it could not safely name for itself. That drawing, on November 5/18, 1917 — eleven days after the Bolshevik seizure of power — is the subject of the next file.

References

Destivelle, Hyacinthe, O.P. The Moscow Council (1917–1918): The Creation of the Conciliar Institutions of the Russian Orthodox Church. Translated by Jerry Ryan. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.
Evtuhov, Catherine. “The Church in the Russian Revolution: Arguments for and against Restoring the Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917–1918.” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 497–511.
Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
Vostryshev, Mikhail. Patriarkh Tikhon [Patriarch Tikhon]. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (ZhZL), 1995. (In Russian.)
Orthodox Church in America. “Glorification of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Enlightener of North America” and “Repose of Saint Tikhon.” oca.org.
“Tikhon (Belavin), Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.” Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, stjohndc.org.
“Fourteen Facts about the Life and Struggles of Patriarch Tikhon.” OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/124525.html.
“Persecution and Resilience.” Christian History 146 (Christian History Institute).