The Revolution and the First Blood

The first phase of the persecution, 1917–1922: the Bolshevik seizure of power and the decree separating Church from state; the murder of Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev in January 1918, the first Orthodox hierarch to fall; and the 1922 campaign to confiscate church valuables under cover of the Volga famine, which produced the resistance at Shuya, Lenin’s secret directive to exploit the famine against the clergy, and the Petrograd show trial that sent Metropolitan Veniamin to death.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Revolution and the Separation Decree

The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 (November, new style) coincided almost exactly with the restoration of the Moscow Patriarchate: the All-Russian Local Council sitting in Moscow elected St. Tikhon (Bellavin) Patriarch on 5/18 November 1917, the first since Peter the Great had abolished the office in 1721 (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1, on the Council and Tikhon’s election; see St. Tikhon and the Patriarchal Church). The new government moved quickly against the Church. The Decree on the Separation of Church from State and School from Church, promulgated in January 1918 (20 January / 2 February 1918), stripped the Church of juridical personality and of the right to own property, nationalized its assets, and removed religion from the schools — turning the Church, at a stroke, from the established faith of the empire into a barely-tolerated and legally disabled association (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the separation decree; Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve, Moscow, 1999).

Patriarch Tikhon answered not the state’s politics but its violence. In his epistle of 19 January / 1 February 1918 he denounced those who were shedding innocent blood and pronounced anathema against the persecutors, calling the faithful to defend the Church even to suffering — a document that framed the coming decades as a time of confession and martyrdom (Patriarch Tikhon, Epistle of 19 January / 1 February 1918, in Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1). The blood he spoke of had already begun to flow.

Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev: The First Hierarch-Martyr

The first bishop of the Russian Church to be killed in the persecution was Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev and Galicia, a hierarch who had successively occupied the three senior sees of the Russian Church — Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev. On the night of 25 January 1918 (7 February, new style), amid the fighting for Kiev and within the walls of the Kiev Caves Lavra, armed men seized the seventy-year-old metropolitan from his quarters, led him out through the Economic Gates, and shot and bayoneted him near the Lavra wall; his body was found the next morning (OrthodoxWiki, “Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev,” summarizing the account in the Zhitiia and the OCA synaxarion; OCA, “Saint Vladimir, Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich,” oca.org). His killing has a double significance for the whole category. Chronologically, he is the protomartyr among the hierarchs of the new persecution, the first bishop to die. Liturgically, it is his date — the Sunday nearest 25 January (old style) / 7 February — on which the Russian Church later fixed the feast of the whole Synaxis of the New Martyrs, so that the commemoration of them all is anchored to the day the first bishop fell (see The Feast and the Cult). Metropolitan Vladimir was among the first New Martyrs glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate, at the Bishops’ Council of 1992 (see The Martyred Bishops).

The Civil War Years

Between 1918 and 1922 the killing was extensive but poorly documented, carried out amid the chaos of the Civil War by local Chekas, Red Army units, and revolutionary tribunals rather than by a single coordinated campaign. Bishops, priests, monks, and lay believers were shot, drowned, and tortured across the collapsing empire; the figures for these years are the least reliable of the whole persecution precisely because of the disorder in which the deaths occurred (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the Civil War killings and the difficulty of their accounting). What can be said firmly is that the pattern of the whole persecution was set in these years: the state’s violence against the Church was real and lethal from the beginning, and it was clothed from the beginning in the language of counter-revolution rather than of religion (see The Scale of the Persecution).

The Church-Valuables Campaign of 1922

The first coordinated assault came in 1922, and its occasion was the catastrophic famine along the Volga. On 23 February 1922 the state decreed the compulsory confiscation of church valuables — including consecrated vessels — ostensibly to buy grain for the starving. Patriarch Tikhon had already authorized the Church to give freely of its non-consecrated treasures for famine relief, but he protested the seizure of the consecrated vessels used in the Eucharist as a sacrilege that the canons forbade the faithful to permit (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the valuables campaign and Tikhon’s position). The campaign was, in reality, less about famine relief than about breaking the Church: this is documented from the regime’s own side.

In the town of Shuya, north-east of Moscow, resistance to the confiscation turned violent in March 1922, and troops fired on a crowd, killing several people. The Shuya incident became the pretext Lenin had been waiting for. In a secret letter to the Politburo of 19 March 1922, Lenin urged that the famine be exploited to crush the Church, arguing that precisely now, when the people were starving and could be turned against the “greedy” clergy, was the moment to confiscate the valuables “with the most savage and merciless energy” and to shoot as many reactionary clergy as possible — “the greater the number… the better,” he wrote (Lenin, secret letter to the Politburo, 19 March 1922; the text, long suppressed, was published after 1990 and is quoted and analyzed in Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, and in Shkarovskii, 1999; on the letter and its authenticity see also the documentary discussion in the scholarship of the campaign). The letter is one of the clearest pieces of evidence that the persecution’s political framing masked an intent that was, at its core, directed at the Church as such.

The Show Trials and Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd

The valuables campaign was enforced through public trials designed both to intimidate and to propagandize. The Moscow trial of 1922 and, above all, the Petrograd trial of the summer of 1922 sent clergy and laity to death. The chief figure of the Petrograd trial was Metropolitan Veniamin (Kazansky) of Petrograd, a hierarch beloved in his city and elected to his see by the clergy and people. He had sought to cooperate with famine relief while resisting sacrilege, and he opposed the Renovationist schismatics whom the state was promoting against the patriarchal Church. He was arrested and tried with a group of co-defendants, and the court condemned Metropolitan Veniamin, together with Archimandrite Sergius (Shein) and the laymen Yuri Novitsky (a professor of law) and Ivan (Ioann) Kovsharov (a lawyer), to death by shooting. The sentence was carried out on the night of 12/13 August 1922, the four being shot in secret outside the city (OrthodoxWiki and holynewmartyrs.org, “Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, and Those with Him,” summarizing the trial record and the Zhitie; the arrest on 29 May 1922 and the August execution). Metropolitan Veniamin and his companions were glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Bishops’ Council of 1992 (see The Martyred Bishops).

The 1922 campaign thus established the template that the whole persecution would follow: a real material or political pretext (famine relief, counter-revolution); a coordinated central directive to use the pretext against the Church; public trials to legitimize the killing; and the death of hierarchs, clergy, and laity together. It also opened the state’s second front against the Church — the sponsorship of the Renovationist (obновленческий, obnovlencheskii) schism, which the authorities backed in 1922–23 as a compliant rival to the patriarchal Church, deepening the divisions that would complicate the later reckoning of who died faithful and who did not (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the Renovationist schism; see The Criteria and the Contested Cases). The worst was still fifteen years off; but by the end of 1922 the shape of the martyrdom was already clear.

See Also

References

  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (Tikhon’s election and 1918 epistle; the separation decree; the valuables campaign, Shuya, and Lenin’s letter; the Petrograd trial; the Renovationist schism.)
  • Shkarovskii, Mikhail V. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve. Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor’e, 1999. (The valuables campaign and the state’s anti-church strategy.)
  • Lenin, V. I. Secret letter to the Politburo, 19 March 1922 (published after 1990; analyzed in Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, and Shkarovskii, 1999). (The directive to exploit the famine and shoot reactionary clergy.)
  • OrthodoxWiki, “Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev,” orthodoxwiki.org; Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Vladimir, Metropolitan of Kiev and Gallich,” oca.org. (The martyrdom of 25 Jan / 7 Feb 1918; used to locate the account, with the OCA synaxarion followed to the narrative.)
  • “Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, and Those with Him,” holynewmartyrs.org and OrthodoxWiki, “Benjamin of Petrograd.” (The 1922 arrest and trial; the execution of the night of 12/13 August 1922; the co-martyrs Shein, Novitsky, Kovsharov.)