The Last Period: 1924–1925

Patriarch Tikhon’s final fifteen months, lived under the continuous pressure of the OGPU and its church-affairs handler Yevgeny Tuchkov: demands to commemorate the Soviet state, abortive schemes to reconcile with the state-sponsored Renovationists, the December 1924 killing of his cell-attendant Yakov Polozov in the patriarchal residence, the collapse of his heart, his admission to the Bakunin clinic, and his repose on the feast of the Annunciation, 7 April 1925, with the deathbed words his cell-attendant recorded — “The night will be long and very dark.”

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1989)

The Vise of 1924: Tuchkov and the Demand to Commemorate the State

By 1924 Patriarch Tikhon (Vasily Ivanovich Belavin) had been at liberty for roughly a year following his June 1923 release from imprisonment — a release secured only by his signed statement that he was “henceforth no enemy of the Soviet power” (the concession is treated in The Trial of Patriarch Tikhon; see also the summary in The New Martyrs and Confessors). Liberty, however, was a relative term. The Patriarch governed the Church under the constant supervision of the OGPU’s Sixth (“church”) Department, headed from 1922 to 1929 by Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Tuchkov, the documented handler of the regime’s operations against the Orthodox Church (Wikipedia, “Yevgeny Tuchkov,” locating the OGPU department dates; Vostryshev, Patriarkh Tikhon).

Tuchkov’s program was incremental. He pressed the Patriarch for a graduated series of public gestures of loyalty, each one further than the last: liturgical commemoration of the Soviet authorities, condemnation of the émigré bishops abroad, calendar reform, and ultimately a comprehensive declaration of the Church’s solidarity with the state. The Patriarch yielded on minor administrative points while resisting the substantive demands — a pattern of partial concession and quiet refusal that the strict ROCOR reading and the more sympathetic Moscow reading interpret very differently, but that the documents themselves attest as a man maneuvering for the survival of the Church without surrendering its freedom (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime; Vostryshev, Patriarkh Tikhon).

One concrete instance of the commemoration demand was the question of whether the Patriarch and his clergy would liturgically commemorate the civil authorities at the Divine Liturgy — a gesture the state wished to make a public test of loyalty. A second was the renewed press for calendar reform: Tikhon had, under pressure, briefly issued and then suspended a decree introducing the New (Gregorian) Calendar in the autumn of 1923, withdrawing it in the face of the faithful’s resistance, and the calendar remained one of Tuchkov’s recurring levers (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime; Vostryshev, Patriarkh Tikhon). The deeper aim behind every particular demand was the same: to bind the canonical Church publicly to the regime and so to neutralize it as a center of independent moral authority. The Patriarch understood this, and his resistance was correspondingly stubborn beneath his outward willingness to negotiate on points of form.

The Renovationist Reconciliation Schemes

A central instrument of Tuchkov’s pressure was the Renovationist schism — the “Living Church,” the state-sponsored body that had seized the Church’s administrative apparatus during Tikhon’s 1922–1923 imprisonment and claimed to have deposed him (see Soviet Persecution). With the Renovationists collapsing in popular esteem after Tikhon’s release, the state shifted tactics: rather than destroy the Patriarch outright, it sought to fold the canonical Church and the Renovationists into a single, state-manageable structure.

Through 1924 and into 1925 a sequence of negotiations was floated for a “reconciliation” or reunion with the Renovationists, with Tuchkov as broker. The Patriarch was willing in principle to receive repentant Renovationist clergy individually but refused the terms that would have legitimized the schism as a body or admitted its married and remarried bishops in their ranks. The schemes failed; the Renovationists never recovered, and withered through the following decade (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime; Roslof, Red Priests). What the episode demonstrates is the texture of the final year — pressure exerted not only by threat but by the offer of a poisoned peace.

The Killing of Yakov Polozov (9 December 1924)

On the evening of 9 December 1924, armed men broke into the patriarchal residence at the Donskoy Monastery. They shot and killed Yakov Anisimovich Polozov, the Patriarch’s cell-attendant, secretary, and close personal friend, who had served him for years. The Patriarch was in an adjoining room at the moment of the murder (St. Panteleimon Church, “Fourteen Facts About the Life and Struggles of Patriarch Tikhon”; Orthodox History, “The Nine Years That Almost Destroyed the Orthodox Church: 1924”).

The contemporary Orthodox accounts record that the assailants escaped and that the killing was never seriously investigated. Whether Polozov was the intended target or whether he died in the place of the Patriarch is not established by any document; the standard Orthodox lives state only that “the possibility has not been excluded that they had actually come for the Patriarch” (St. Panteleimon Church, “Fourteen Facts”). Some accounts hold that Polozov interposed himself, blocking the entrance to the Patriarch’s room; this detail belongs to the devotional reception of the event rather than to any investigative record, and is best reported as such. The killing is therefore best reported as what it is — a documented murder in the patriarchal residence whose motive and intended victim remain open.

Tikhon buried Polozov himself near the residence and grieved him deeply; the loss is generally counted among the blows that broke the Patriarch’s health in his last months. The murder also belongs to a wider pattern of intimidation in 1924: the year saw repeated harassment of the Patriarch, the manipulation of the courts, and the constant threat of renewed arrest, so that even at liberty Tikhon lived under siege within his own residence at the Donskoy (Orthodox History, “The Nine Years That Almost Destroyed the Orthodox Church: 1924”). That the killing occurred inside the patriarchal house, with the Patriarch a wall away, made it a message as much as a crime.

The Collapse of His Health

Worn down by seven years of arrest, interrogation, public vilification, and the unceasing pressure of Tuchkov’s department, the Patriarch’s health failed rapidly through the winter of 1924–1925. From January 1925 he suffered a series of cardiac episodes (heart failures), and in the early spring he was admitted to the private clinic of the Bakunins on Ostozhenka Street in Moscow — one of the few medical institutions willing to receive the politically disgraced Patriarch (St. Panteleimon Church, “Fourteen Facts”; obitel-minsk.org, “The Life of the Holy Patriarch Tikhon”). Even from the clinic he continued to govern, leaving on Sundays and feast days to serve, and continuing to receive Tuchkov’s documents through intermediaries (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow”).

The Last Liturgy and the Final Day

The Patriarch served his last Divine Liturgy on Sunday, 5 April 1925 (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”; Wikipedia, “Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow,” which dates the last Liturgy to 5 April). Two days later — on 7 April 1925 (25 March Old Style), the feast of the Annunciation of the Theotokos — he reposed at the Bakunin clinic, aged sixty.

The account of the final evening rests on the memoirs of his cell-attendant, who was present, and is reported by the standard Orthodox lives as his testimony rather than as official record. As the evening came on, the Patriarch grew anxious; he looked at his hands and saw that the nails had darkened, sighed deeply, and said: “Now I’ll fall asleep … deeply and for a long time. The night will be long and very dark” (St. Panteleimon Church, “Fourteen Facts,” citing the cell-attendant’s memoirs). He asked repeatedly what time it was. At 11:45 p.m. he asked for the last time; on hearing the answer he said, “Well, glory be to God,” and began to make the sign of the cross. He completed it twice; at the third his hand fell, and he died (St. Panteleimon Church, “Fourteen Facts”; OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon,” which gives the final words as “Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee”).

The “night will be long and very dark” saying is pinned to its single source — the cell-attendant’s recorded memoir — and is read in the Russian Church’s reception not as a private complaint of pain but as a prophecy of the long Soviet night that would follow; it carries that weight by attestation and reception, not by documentary corroboration of the words themselves.

That his repose fell on the Annunciation — the feast of the angel’s announcement of the Incarnation — has been received throughout the Russian Church as providentially fitting for the confessor-patriarch (obitel-minsk.org, “The Life of the Holy Patriarch Tikhon”).

Through these final months, even from the clinic, the Patriarch continued to receive visitors, to govern the Church’s diminished administration, and to serve when his strength allowed; the sources describe a man worn to exhaustion yet retaining the calm and even the humor for which he was known, bearing the pressure without bitterness toward his persecutors (obitel-minsk.org, “The Life of the Holy Patriarch Tikhon”; OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”). This bearing — the confessor’s patience under a slow constriction rather than a single dramatic martyrdom — is precisely what the Russian Church honors in commemorating him as Confessor (see The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia). The “long and very dark night” he is recorded as foreseeing was, on the Church’s reading, both the night of his own death and the decades of persecution that his successors would have to endure, beginning within months of his funeral.

References

Vostryshev, Mikhail. Patriarkh Tikhon [Patriarch Tikhon]. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudei series). The standard Russian biography.
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
Roslof, Edward. Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905–1946. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, Enlightener of North America.” oca.org (Lives of the Saints, 7 April).
“Fourteen Facts About the Life and Struggles of Patriarch Tikhon.” St. Panteleimon Church (spro.church) — quoting the cell-attendant’s memoirs for the deathbed words, the Bakunin clinic, and the Polozov killing of 9 December 1924; used here as a locator to the published memoir tradition.
“The Nine Years That Almost Destroyed the Orthodox Church: 1924.” Orthodox History (orthodoxhistory.org), 2019.
“The Life of the Holy Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow and All Russia.” obitel-minsk.org.
“Yevgeny Tuchkov.” Wikipedia — used only to locate the OGPU Sixth Department dates (1922–1929) and Tuchkov’s role; not a terminal citation.