Epistles of the Patriarchate

Between his enthronement in late 1917 and his death in 1925, St. Tikhon issued a sequence of pastoral epistles that constitute the documentary spine of his patriarchate: the 1918 anathema, the protest against the Brest-Litovsk peace, the letter to the Council of People’s Commissars on the first revolutionary anniversary, the 1919 stand against pogroms, the famine appeals of 1921–22, and the contested declarations of 1923–1925. Read together, they trace a Church learning, under fire, how far it could speak and where it would be made to fall silent.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1989)

The Corpus and Its Editions

The patriarchal epistles survive in several overlapping collections. The fullest scholarly assembly is the multi-volume Akty Svyateyshego Tikhona, Patriarkha Moskovskogo i vseya Rossii (Acts of His Holiness Tikhon), compiled by M. E. Gubonin and published by St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Institute in Moscow (PSTGU, 1994), which prints the epistles alongside the related conciliar and synodal acts (Gubonin, Akty, Moscow: PSTGU, 1994). For the biographical setting of each document, the standard popular life is Mikhail Vostryshev, Patriarkh Tikhon (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, ZhZL series, 1995/2004), and the principal English-language biography is Jane Swan, The Biography of Patriarch Tikhon (rev. ed., Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 2015). Because several of the most-cited texts circulated first in the Soviet press — Izvestia printed those the regime wished publicized and suppressed those it did not — the editorial history of any given epistle is itself part of its meaning, and this file flags where a document’s authenticity or wording is contested.

The Anathema Epistle (January 19 / February 1, 1918)

The first and most famous of the patriarchal epistles was issued on January 19 / February 1, 1918, days before the Local Council reconvened. Without naming the Bolsheviks, it pronounced an anathema upon the perpetrators of “bloody reprisals” against the Church and the faithful. Its rhetorical center is a direct apostrophe to the persecutors — “Come to your senses, you madmen, cease your bloody reprisals” (Opomnites’, bezumtsy, prekratite vashi krovavye raspravy) — and a binding prohibition on the faithful: those who shed innocent blood are placed outside the Mysteries, and the faithful are adjured “not to commune with such outcasts of the human race in any matter whatsoever” (text in Gubonin, Akty; trans. in Swan, Biography of Patriarch Tikhon). The Council of the Russian Church, then sitting in Moscow, endorsed the epistle within days.

Two points of interpretation matter for the repo record. First, the anathema is directed at those committing the violence, not formally and by name at the Soviet government as such; the common shorthand “Tikhon anathematized the Bolsheviks” is a fair gloss of its target but not a quotation of its text. Second, the anathema was never formally rescinded. This is the same datum recorded in the repo’s New Martyrs file: the 1918 anathema stood unrevoked even after the Patriarch’s 1923 concession of loyalty.

The Brest-Litovsk Letter (March 1918)

In March 1918, following the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (signed March 3) by which the Soviet government ceded vast western territories to the Central Powers, St. Tikhon addressed an epistle on the peace. His objection was framed not in the language of Russian nationalism but pastorally: “entire regions inhabited by Orthodox people are being torn away from us,” and a peace bought at the price of dismembering the Orthodox flock and surrendering it to foreign and heterodox rule could not be blessed by the Church (the epistle is printed in Gubonin, Akty; the territorial argument is summarized in Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, vol. 1). The letter is significant because it shows the early Tikhon willing to speak directly to a political act of the regime — and because, with the Sovnarkom letter that followed, it established the pattern the Bolsheviks would later use to brand him a counter-revolutionary.

The Sovnarkom Anniversary Letter (October 26 / November 7, 1918)

On the first anniversary of the October Revolution, St. Tikhon addressed the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) directly. Dated to the anniversary itself — November 7, 1918 (October 26 Old Style) — the letter is the most prophetic in tone of all his epistles. He charged the new rulers, who “call yourselves the people’s commissars,” with celebrating their year in power while “the rivers of the blood of our brothers, mercilessly slain at your summons, cry out to heaven.” He turned their slogans against them — “Truly you have given the people a stone instead of bread, and a serpent instead of a fish” — and closed with a warning drawn from the Gospel: “you who have taken the sword will perish by the sword,” for “all the righteous blood you have shed will be required of you” (Patriarch Tikhon, Epistle to the Soviet of People’s Commissars, Nov. 7, 1918; text at OrthoChristian.com, “Epistle to the Soviet of People’s Commissars,” and in Gubonin, Akty). The regime did not publish the letter; it was circulated by the Church and read in some parishes, and it figured among the charges later marshaled against him.

The 1919 Epistle Against Pogroms (July 8 / 21, 1919)

In the summer of 1919, as the civil war fronts moved across Ukraine and Belorussia and waves of anti-Jewish pogroms followed the armies of every side, St. Tikhon issued a pastoral letter condemning the violence. The documented anti-pogrom stand is unambiguous: he denounced the killings and the rape of Jewish women and men as “a disgrace to their perpetrators, a disgrace to the Holy Church” (pastoral letter of July 8/21, 1919; cited in Pogroms during the Russian Civil War and in the standard surveys of the period). In the same period he forbade the clergy any partisan political activity and called on the faithful to renounce revenge for the wrongs they had suffered.

Its significance lies in the asymmetry of the moment. The pogroms of 1919 were carried out largely under the banner of the White and nationalist forces with which Tikhon was widely assumed to sympathize, and to which the regime perpetually tried to tie him; for the Patriarch of a Church accused by the Bolsheviks of being the chaplaincy of the counter-revolution to condemn pogrom violence as a defilement of the Church itself was to refuse the politics of side-taking at the very point where it would have cost him least to indulge it. The epistle is the clearest single demonstration of the principle treated in Pastoral Teaching: that the Church stands above the warring camps.

The Famine Letters (1921–1922)

The Volga famine of 1921–22 produced the epistles on which the regime’s prosecution of the Patriarch ultimately turned. In August 1921, St. Tikhon issued an appeal “to the peoples of the world” and to the Orthodox faithful, soliciting relief for the starving; he organized a church relief committee and appealed to foreign churches and to the American Relief Administration (OCA, “Repose of Saint Tikhon”; Wagner, The People’s Patriarch, Oxford, on the famine chapter). The regime dissolved his committee in August 1921 and reserved relief to its own organs.

The crux came in early 1922. On February 6/19, 1922, Tikhon blessed the voluntary donation of church valuables not consecrated to liturgical use — gold and silver objects that could be given without sacrilege. When the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decreed on February 23, 1922, the compulsory confiscation of all church valuables, including the consecrated vessels of the altar, the Patriarch’s encyclical declared that the forced surrender of consecrated objects was, by the canons, an act of sacrilege (the February 1922 epistles are printed in Gubonin, Akty; the sequence is reconstructed in the Oxford study and in the 1922 seizure of church valuables in Russia literature). The regime read the distinction between voluntary gift and forced confiscation as sabotage and weaponized it: the resistance at Shuya and elsewhere became the pretext for show trials in which clergy and laity were condemned to death, and the Patriarch himself was arrested in April 1922 and held until June 1923. The voluntary-donation position — which conceded everything that could be conceded without desecration — was thus turned by the state into the evidence of obstruction.

The Declarations of 1923–1925 (the Duress Documents)

The final group of texts is the most contested in the entire corpus, and the repo treats the central case at length in The Testament Question. Two strata must be distinguished.

The 1923 declarations were extracted under arrest. To secure his release, and after months of pressure that included the threat to execute eleven men already under death sentence, Tikhon signed a statement of June 16 / July 1923 in which he declared himself “henceforth no enemy of the Soviet power” and “resolutely condemned” all agitation against it (the June 1923 epistle is discussed in OrthoChristian.com, “The Trial of Patriarch Tikhon,” and in Gubonin, Akty). The repo’s New Martyrs file records this as “a concession extracted under intense pressure.” Crucially, the loyalty declaration did not rescind the 1918 anathema, and Tikhon insisted he was “innocent of political counter-revolution.”

The 1925 “Testament” (the so-called Deathbed Appeal, dated by the regime to the day of his death, April 7, 1925, and published in Izvestia days later) stands on still weaker ground. It calls on the faithful to a far fuller loyalty than anything Tikhon had freely signed, and its authenticity has been disputed since the moment of publication: critics point to titles and turns of phrase the Patriarch never used of himself and to signatures inconsistent with his practice, and many have judged it a fabrication or at best a document altered after his death by the GPU (the forgery case is set out in OrthoChristian.com, “The Trial of Patriarch Tikhon,” and weighed in Swan and Vostryshev). The Testament Question examines the evidence on both sides; for the purposes of the corpus, it is enough to record that the 1925 document cannot be cited as a free expression of the Patriarch’s mind in the way the 1918 anathema or the 1919 anti-pogrom epistle can.

References

Gubonin, M. E., comp. Akty Svyateyshego Tikhona, Patriarkha Moskovskogo i vseya Rossii [Acts of His Holiness Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia]. Moscow: PSTBI (St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Institute), 1994.
Vostryshev, Mikhail. Patriarkh Tikhon. 2nd ed. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya (Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudei), 2004.
Swan, Jane. The Biography of Patriarch Tikhon. Rev. ed. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 2015.
Wagner, William G. (and contributors). The People’s Patriarch: Tikhon Bellavin and the Orthodox Church in North America and Revolutionary Russia. Oxford University Press (cited from the famine and confiscation chapters via Oxford Academic).
Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
Patriarch Tikhon. “Epistle to the Soviet of People’s Commissars” (Nov. 7, 1918). English text at OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/108201.html).
“The Trial of Patriarch Tikhon.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/64798.html) — on the 1923 loyalty declaration and the forged 1925 appeal.
Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, Enlightener of North America.” oca.org.
“Pogroms during the Russian Civil War” and “1922 seizure of church valuables in Russia” — used to locate the July 1919 anti-pogrom wording and the February 1922 confiscation chronology; cross-checked against Gubonin and Pospielovsky.