Anathema and Resistance

Patriarch Tikhon’s public confession in the opening years of the persecution: the anathema of January 19/February 1, 1918 — which condemned those committing the bloody atrocities, not “Soviet power” by name, and was never formally rescinded — the protest-epistles to the Council of People’s Commissars (“a stone instead of bread”), the Civil-War neutrality he refused to break, and the 1922 stand against the confiscation of consecrated vessels.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1989)

The Anathema of January 19/February 1, 1918

Within weeks of the Decree on the Separation of Church from State (January 20/February 2, 1918), as churches were seized, relics desecrated, and clergy killed, Tikhon issued his first epistle of confrontation — the document remembered as the anathema. Dated January 19/February 1, 1918, it was read in the churches and confirmed shortly afterward by the All-Russian Council.

The precision of its wording matters, and the scholarship insists on it. The anathema does not name “Soviet power” or the Bolshevik government as such. It is directed against those — whoever they may be — who were committing the bloody persecution: the perpetrators of the “open and secret blows” against the Church, those staining their hands with the blood of the innocent. Tikhon wrote:

“By the authority given Us by God, we forbid you to approach the Mysteries of Christ, we anathematize you, if only you still bear Christian names and although by your birth you belong to the Orthodox Church… I adjure all of you, faithful children of the Orthodox Church of Christ, not to enter into any communion with such outcasts of the human race: ‘Remove the evil one from among you’ (1 Corinthians 5:13)” (Tikhon, epistle of January 19/February 1, 1918; text and analysis in Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, vol. 1, ch. 2; cf. the discussion in “The Anathema of Soviet Power,” orthochristian.com/88587.html).

The grammatical object of the anathema is thus those who shed innocent blood and persecute the faith — phrased so that it falls on any baptized person who does these things, not on a named regime. The distinction is not a quibble. Tikhon, who knew the canons, framed a spiritual censure on spiritual grounds: communion with Christ is forbidden to those whose hands are red with the blood of the innocent. He did not pronounce a political verdict on a government, because the anathema of a Patriarch is not a political instrument; it is the Church’s last appeal to the conscience of the baptized. This precision had two consequences the tradition has weighed ever since. First, it left genuinely open the question of whether the anathema “fell on” the Soviet state as such, since the state was never its named target — a point pressed by later commentators on both sides, some holding that the Bolshevik leadership, being apostate from their baptism and steeped in the very atrocities described, fell squarely under it, others that an unnamed regime cannot be the canonical subject of a personal anathema. Second, because the anathema was issued by the Patriarch and confirmed by the Council, the Patriarch had no authority to annul unilaterally an act of the Council; and in fact it was never formally rescinded (repo-consistent with The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, which records that the anathema “was never formally rescinded”). Tikhon would later moderate his public stance toward the regime under duress (see Arrest and Trials), but moderation of tone is not the lifting of a conciliar censure, and the 1923 loyalty-statement neither named nor revoked it.

The Epistles to the Council of People’s Commissars (1918)

Through 1918 Tikhon continued to address the new authorities directly. Two epistles stand out.

The first, in the spring of 1918, protested the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), by which the Bolsheviks had concluded a separate peace with Germany at the cost of vast territories. Tikhon condemned the “shameful” peace concluded “with humiliating conditions,” under which “the great Motherland is conquered, diminished, dismembered” — not as a partisan of any war party, but as a pastor mourning the dismemberment of the Orthodox land and the abandonment of the faithful now cut off beyond the new frontiers (Pospielovsky, vol. 1, ch. 2; Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State, ch. 3).

The second and more famous is the epistle to the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) marking the first anniversary of the October Revolution, dated by its text to the anniversary of the seizure of power (October 26 O.S. / November 7, 1918, N.S.). It is among the boldest documents any churchman addressed to the Bolshevik state. Tikhon arraigned the regime by its own promises:

“Having seized power and called upon the people to entrust their fate to you, what promises did you give them, and how have you fulfilled those promises? In truth you have given them a stone instead of bread, and a serpent instead of a fish (cf. Matthew 7:9–10)” (Tikhon, Epistle to the Council of People’s Commissars, October/November 1918; OrthoChristian, “Epistle to the Soviet of People’s Commissars,” orthochristian.com/108201.html).

He continued with the charge of fratricide:

“You have divided the whole people into warring camps and have plunged it into a fratricide of unheard-of cruelty. You have openly replaced the love of Christ with hatred, and instead of peace you have artificially inflamed class enmity. And there is no end in sight to the war you have engendered, since you are striving to use the workers and the poor to destroy… other people” (Epistle to the Council of People’s Commissars, 1918; orthochristian.com/108201.html).

The “rivers of blood of our brethren, mercilessly slain at your summons, cry out to heaven and compel Us to tell you the bitter truth,” he wrote — and yet, even here, he called for repentance and an end to the bloodshed, not for the regime’s overthrow by force (Pospielovsky, vol. 1, ch. 2).

Civil-War Neutrality and the Denikin Episode

This is the hinge of Tikhon’s public conduct, and it is easy to misread. The same Patriarch who anathematized the perpetrators of atrocities and called the regime’s gifts a stone and a serpent refused to bless the White armies or to convert the Church into a belligerent in the Civil War (1918–1921). The refusal was deliberate and documented.

When emissaries came to him — including, in the documented episode, in connection with General Anton Denikin’s White forces in the south — asking the Patriarch to bless the White movement and summon the faithful to rise against the godless regime, he declined. Although he was personally sympathetic to the anti-Bolshevik cause (he acknowledged as much under interrogation at the Lubyanka, saying he had felt for Denikin and Kolchak), he held that he had no right to commit the whole Church to one side of a fratricidal war, and that “the blood shed always cries out for new blood, and revenge for new retribution” (message of July 8/21, 1919; ROCOR Australian and New Zealand Diocese, Karipoff lecture, rocor.org.au; OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/124525.html). In his message of September 25/October 8, 1919, he went further, forbidding the clergy to greet the advancing White forces with the ringing of bells and molebens — that is, he forbade the parishes within reach of the front from turning the liturgy into a partisan celebration (orthochristian.com/124525.html). His settled line, declared from the outset, was that the Church stood above politics — neither white nor red — a stance that satisfied neither side and that he held at growing personal cost (Pospielovsky, vol. 1, ch. 2; Curtiss, ch. 4).

The Confiscation Crisis of 1922

The line Tikhon would not cross was sacrilege. During the catastrophic famine of 1921–1922 the Soviet government, led by Lenin, demanded the confiscation of all church valuables — including consecrated liturgical vessels — ostensibly for famine relief. Lenin’s secret letter of March 19, 1922 reveals the true aim: to use the famine as the pretext to “crush” the Church’s resistance “with the most savage and merciless energy” (see Soviet Persecution, quoting the Lenin letter).

Tikhon’s response distinguished, on canonical grounds, between the giving and the profaning of holy things. In February 1922 he issued an appeal blessing the Church to surrender freely its non-consecrated valuables for the starving — indeed he had already established a church famine-relief committee and called the faithful to sacrifice — but he refused to permit the handing over of consecrated vessels (chalices, patens, and the like), the surrender of which the canons (the Apostolic Canons and the canons of the councils) treat as sacrilege punishable by excommunication for clergy and laity alike. His February 28 appeal declared the forced surrender of consecrated objects an act the Church could not sanction. “I will not come to an agreement or make concessions which could lead to the loss of the purity and strength of Orthodoxy,” he declared (OCA, “Glorification of Saint Tikhon”; see Soviet Persecution). This refusal was exactly the pretext the regime sought — and, as Lenin’s secret letter shows, exactly the resistance it had hoped to provoke so as to “crush” the Church under cover of charity. It triggered the wave of arrests and show-trials of 1922 — among them the trial and execution of Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd in August 1922 (see The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia) — and it set in motion the proceedings against the Patriarch himself, which are the subject of the next file (Daly, “Storming the Last Citadel”; Pospielovsky, vol. 1, ch. 3; see Arrest and Trials).

References

Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
Curtiss, John Shelton. The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917–1950. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953.
Daly, Jonathan W. “‘Storming the Last Citadel’: The Bolshevik Assault on the Church, 1922.” In The Bolsheviks in Russian Society, edited by Vladimir N. Brovkin, 235–268. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Vostryshev, Mikhail. Patriarkh Tikhon. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (ZhZL), 1995. (In Russian.)
Tikhon, Patriarch. Epistle of January 19/February 1, 1918 (the anathema); Epistle to the Council of People’s Commissars, October/November 1918. Texts at OrthoChristian, “Epistle to the Soviet of People’s Commissars,” orthochristian.com/108201.html; analysis in “The Anathema of Soviet Power,” orthochristian.com/88587.html.
Orthodox Church in America. “Glorification of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.” oca.org.
“Fourteen Facts about the Life and Struggles of Patriarch Tikhon.” OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/124525.html.
Karipoff, Nicholas, Archpriest. “Patriarch Tikhon, Revolution and a Century Later.” Lecture, Sydney 2017; Australian and New Zealand Diocese (ROCOR), rocor.org.au.
Scripture: Matthew 7:9–10; 1 Corinthians 5:13.