Memory and Controversy

The still-contested memory of the New Martyrs, held honestly and from both sides. The veneration of the martyrs is real and deep, but it is not settled: the Sergianism question remains theologically unresolved; the archives that made the canonizations possible have largely re-closed; the martyrs have been drawn into political and nationalist uses, including the “tsar-redeemer” current the Church has resisted; and the reckoning itself is incomplete. This file names these live disputes without pretending to resolve them, closing the collection on the honesty its subject demands.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

A Memory Not Yet Settled

The New Martyrs are venerated across the whole Russian Church and beyond it; their feast is kept, their icons painted, their pilgrimage sites thronged (see The Feast and the Cult). It would be easy to end there, as though the story had reached a resolved and edifying conclusion. It has not. The memory of the New Martyrs remains genuinely contested at several points, and the honest close to this collection is to name the controversies and to hold them open, as the repository methodology requires of live disputes (METHODOLOGY §4). Four are decisive.

The Unresolved Sergianism Question

The deepest unresolved question is Sergianism — whether, and how far, the Moscow Patriarchate’s submission to the atheist state after 1927 compromised it, and what that means for its relation to the martyrs, many of whom died resisting exactly that submission (see The Two Glorifications and The Solovki Camp). The reconciliation of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Church Abroad in 2007 was a practical and canonical healing, sealed in the name of the shared New Martyrs, and it resolved the jurisdictional rupture. But it did not deliver a theological verdict on 1927. [Disputed: the standing of the 1927 Declaration and “Sergianism” after the 2007 reconciliation. (a) One view holds that the reconciliation vindicated the Moscow Patriarchate — that reunion on agreed terms implied the Church Abroad’s acceptance that the Patriarchate had remained the true Church through the Soviet period, and that Sergius’s Declaration, whatever its cost, was a survivable act of a Church under duress rather than an apostasy (the Moscow Patriarchate’s position, reflected in the 2000 Council’s own documents on church-state relations and in the terms of the 2007 Act of Canonical Communion). (b) Another view, held by parts of the former ROCOR constituency and by those who broke from the reconciliation, maintains that Sergianism was never repudiated by the Patriarchate and that the reunion papered over an unrepented compromise; some traditionalist groups rejected the 2007 Act precisely on these grounds (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, on the persistence of the Sergianism question through and beyond the reconciliation). The collection reports the dispute and does not adjudicate it; the martyrs who died resisting the Declaration and the Church that later glorified them from within the Sergian succession remain a knot the reconciliation tied off without untying.]

The Re-Closing of the Archives

The second controversy is evidentiary and ongoing: the archives have largely re-closed. The individual canonizations depended on access to the NKVD/KGB investigation files, relatively open in the 1990s; since the 2000s that access has been progressively restricted under data-protection rules, archival reclassification, and a changed political climate, and the pace of new canonizations has fallen almost to nothing since the total reached 1,774 in 2011 (see The Criteria and the Contested Cases; Christensen, 2018, ch. 4–5). This means the reckoning of the New Martyrs is unfinished by external constraint: there are certainly martyrs whose cases cannot now be examined because the files cannot be seen. The closure also has a political edge, part of a broader contest over how the Soviet past is to be remembered in Russia — a contest sharpened by the liquidation, by Russian court order in December 2021, of the Memorial society, the principal independent documenter of Soviet repression, whose data underlay much of the historical accounting (on Memorial’s liquidation and the contest over the memory of Soviet repression; see The Scale of the Persecution). The record of the martyrs and the record of the terror are being closed together.

The Political Uses of the Martyrs

The third controversy concerns what the martyrs are made to mean. The New Martyrs have been enlisted, since the Soviet collapse, in a narrative of national suffering and resurrection — Russia as a martyred and reborn holy nation — that can shade from theology into ideology (Christensen, 2018, ch. 5–6, on the nationalization of the New Martyr cult; see The Theology of the New Martyrdom). At the extreme stands the “tsar-redeemer” current: a fervent movement that venerates Nicholas II not merely as a passion-bearer but as a redeemer whose death atoned for the sins of the Russian people, and that has pressed for the glorification of figures the Church has firmly rejected — including Rasputin and even Ivan the Terrible. The Church hierarchy and the Canonization Commission have repeatedly and publicly repudiated this current: the tsar was glorified as a passion-bearer and no more, and the “tsar-redeemer” theology is regarded as a distortion bordering on heresy (Christensen, 2018, ch. 5, on the “tsar-redeemer” movement and the Church’s rejection of it; see The Imperial Passion-Bearers and The Criteria and the Contested Cases). That the Church has resisted the extreme current is to its credit; that the current exists, and that the martyrs are widely put to political use, is part of the honest picture. The martyr’s witness was to Christ, not to a nation or a throne, and the cult is falsified whenever it is turned to serve the kind of earthly power that made the martyrs (see The Theology of the New Martyrdom).

The Incompleteness of the Reckoning

The fourth and quietest controversy is the sheer incompleteness of the whole enterprise, and the honesty it demands. The glorified New Martyrs number under two thousand; the repressed numbered in the tens or hundreds of thousands; the great majority will never be individually known (see The Scale of the Persecution). Among the repressed were the merely broken as well as the heroic — men who apostatized, who informed under torture, who did not endure — and a memory that honestly holds the martyrs must also hold this frailty, and must resist turning a persecution that crushed far more faith than it crowned into a simple story of triumphant witness (see The Theology of the New Martyrdom). The critical scholarship has pressed exactly this point: that the making of the New Martyrs is also a making — a selective construction of memory, shaped by the criteria, the accessible archives, and the needs of the present Church — and that the cult, for all its truth, is a work of memory with the choices and silences that any work of memory has (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, 2018, the guiding thesis of the book: the New Martyrs as a constructed memory, honestly examined). This is not a debunking. The martyrs are real, their deaths documented, their fidelity attested; the persecution was as vast as the honest ranges say. But the memory of them is a human and contested thing, still being formed, entangled with politics, bounded by closed archives, and unfinished — and the truthful close to the subject is to say so.

Holding the Memory Honestly

This collection ends, then, not on a resolution but on a discipline. The New Martyrs are venerated and are worthy of veneration; and their memory is contested, incomplete, and liable to abuse. Both are true, and the honest course — the course the whole collection has tried to hold — is to keep them together: to venerate the martyrs without inflating their numbers, to honour the cult without adopting its political distortions, to affirm the glorifications without pretending the Sergianism question is settled or the archives open, and to name the unknown multitude without claiming to know them. The martyrs themselves, who died refusing to let the persecutor have the last word on the meaning of their deaths, are the warrant for this honesty: the truest veneration of witnesses to the truth is to tell the truth about them, including the truth that much about them remains unknown and unresolved (METHODOLOGY §4; see The Documentary Record).

References

Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The New Martyrs as a constructed memory; the persistence of the Sergianism question; the re-restriction of the archives; the nationalization of the cult; the “tsar-redeemer” movement and the Church’s rejection of it; the selectivity and silences of the memory.)
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The 1927 Declaration and the ROCOR–Moscow division underlying the unresolved Sergianism question.)
On the 2007 Act of Canonical Communion reconciling the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR, sealed in the name of the New Martyrs, and the traditionalist rejections of it: the documentary record of the reconciliation (see The Two Glorifications).
On the liquidation of the Memorial society by Russian court order, December 2021, and the contest over the memory of Soviet repression: the reporting on Memorial’s dissolution (used to locate the fact; see The Scale of the Persecution).