St. Tikhon and the Patriarchal Church

St. Tikhon (Bellavin), the first Patriarch of Moscow since Peter the Great and the confessor who led the Russian Church through the first and most disorienting years of the persecution — the separation decree, the valuables campaign, imprisonment, and the state-sponsored Renovationist schism — before dying, worn down but not executed, in 1925. This file treats his specifically confessing role and the fate of the patriarchal Church he defended; his full life is deferred to his own collection.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Confessor-Patriarch

St. Tikhon holds a singular place in the category of New Martyrs and Confessors: he is the confessor at the head of the confessing Church, the patriarch under whom the persecution began and whose endurance set the pattern for it. His full biography — his American years as bishop in North America, his election, his governance, his repose, and his glorification — belongs to his own collection and is treated there in detail (see St. Tikhon of Moscow). This file concerns only the aspect that places him in the present compendium: that he confessed the faith under the new persecution, bore imprisonment and relentless pressure for it, and died in consequence of it without being formally executed — the paradigm of the ispovednik, the confessor, rather than the muchenik, the martyr (on the distinction, see What a New Martyr Is).

The Restored Patriarchate and the First Confrontation

Tikhon (Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin) was elected Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia by the All-Russian Local Council on 5/18 November 1917 — the choice made by the drawing of lots from among three candidates, in the very days of the Bolshevik seizure of power — becoming the first to hold the office since its abolition by Peter the Great in 1721 (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1, on the Council and Tikhon’s election). He assumed the patriarchate into the teeth of the storm. When the state promulgated the Decree on Separation in January 1918 and blood began to be shed, Tikhon answered with his epistle of 19 January / 1 February 1918, denouncing the shedding of innocent blood and pronouncing anathema on the persecutors — an act of confession that publicly aligned the Church against the regime’s violence and that framed the coming years as a time of martyrdom (Patriarch Tikhon, Epistle of 19 January / 1 February 1918, in Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1; see The Revolution and the First Blood).

Imprisonment, Pressure, and the “Confession” of 1923

Tikhon’s confession cost him his liberty. During the church-valuables campaign of 1922, in which he resisted the seizure of the consecrated vessels as sacrilege while authorizing the Church’s free gift of its other treasures for famine relief, he was placed under arrest and confined, and the state prepared to bring him to trial for his life on the model of the Petrograd trial that had just sent Metropolitan Veniamin to death (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on Tikhon’s 1922 arrest and the threatened trial). Simultaneously the state sponsored the Renovationist schism, a compliant “Living Church” faction that seized much of the church administration in 1922–23 while the patriarch was imprisoned and that sought to depose him.

Under this combined pressure — imprisonment, the threat of execution, and the schism eating the Church from within — Tikhon in June 1923 issued a declaration in which he professed that he was “no longer an enemy of the Soviet government” and expressed repentance for his earlier anti-Soviet acts, after which he was released. This declaration is one of the most delicate points in the whole history, and it must be reported honestly and from both sides. [Disputed: the meaning of Patriarch Tikhon’s declaration of June 1923. One reading, sympathetic to Tikhon, holds that it was a limited and forced concession, extracted under imprisonment and the threat of death, in which he distanced the Church from active political opposition to the state while never renouncing the faith, in order to preserve the patriarchal Church against the Renovationist schism and to secure his own release for the Church’s sake; on this reading his confession is intact and his 1923 statement a canonically permissible act of a shepherd sparing his flock (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1984, vol. 1, presenting the declaration as coerced and limited). A harsher reading, later voiced especially in émigré and Catacomb-Church circles, saw in the 1923 declaration the first step on the road of compromise with the atheist state that Metropolitan Sergius would carry much further in 1927 — the beginning of what critics call “Sergianism.” The Moscow Patriarchate, by glorifying Tikhon as a confessor in 1989, affirmed the first reading; the collection reports the dispute and does not adjudicate it (on the Sergianism question and its bearing on the New Martyrs, see The Glorifications: Methodology).]

Whatever the reading of 1923, Tikhon’s release did not end the pressure, and his health, broken by the strain and by his confinement, gave way. He died on 25 March / 7 April 1925 (the feast of the Annunciation), his last years a continuous confession under surveillance and threat (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on Tikhon’s final years and death). The Church has judged that he died a confessor — that the persecution killed him as surely as it killed the executed, only more slowly.

The Fate of the Patriarchal Church

Tikhon’s death opened the succession crisis that would dominate the next years and set the terms of the later reckoning. He had named candidates to act as locum tenens (guardian of the patriarchal throne) in the event of his death, because the state would not permit a new patriarch to be elected. The senior candidate able to act, Metropolitan Peter (Polyansky), took up the office and was almost immediately arrested; he would remain the nominal locum tenens through years of imprisonment until his execution in 1937 (see The Martyred Bishops). His deputy, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), assumed the practical administration, and it was Sergius who in 1927 issued the Declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state that split the Church between those who accepted his leadership and those who broke from it — the fault line of “Sergianism” that runs through the whole history of the New Martyrs and their glorification (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the succession and the 1927 Declaration; see The Solovki Camp and The Glorifications: Methodology).

Tikhon thus stands at the head of the confessing Church in two senses. He is its first great confessor, the patriarch who suffered and died for his fidelity. And he is the last patriarch of the free Church before the succession fell into the hands of men who had to govern it from prison or under the state’s thumb — so that the story of the confessors and martyrs after 1925 is in large part the story of what became of the flock he left. His glorification by the Moscow Patriarchate at the Council of 1989, and his veneration across the whole Russian Church, are treated in his own collection (see St. Tikhon of Moscow).

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; the 1918 epistle; the 1922 arrest and valuables campaign; the Renovationist schism; the June 1923 declaration and its interpretation; Tikhon’s death in 1925; the succession and the 1927 Declaration.)
  • Patriarch Tikhon, Epistle of 19 January / 1 February 1918 (anathema against the persecutors), in Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1.
  • Orthodox Church in America and OrthodoxWiki, “Tikhon of Moscow,” for the biographical dates, cross-checked; the full sourcing is carried in the dedicated collection St. Tikhon of Moscow.