The Eldership under Persecution

The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 brought the destruction of Optina as a monastery: its lands were nationalized, its life was reorganized as an “agricultural artel” and then a museum, and by 1923 the monastery was closed and the monks dispersed. Yet the eldership did not simply end; it survived in scattered, secret, and exiled form, carried by the last elders and their disciples into the years of terror.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Optina synaxis glorified 1996 local / 2000 general)

The Nationalization and Closure, 1918–1923

The Bolshevik decree separating church and state (January 1918) and the sweeping nationalization of church and monastic property that followed doomed Optina as an institution. In 1918 the monastery’s lands and property were nationalized, and the community, to survive at all, was reconstituted for a time as an “agricultural artel” — a labor collective, the monks living as workers on what had been their own land — while the buildings were increasingly requisitioned (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970, on the nationalization and the artel; the standard histories of the Soviet suppression of the monasteries, as summarized in the Optina literature). At the same time a part of Optina was turned into a museum — “Optina Pustyn” as a monument of history and art — a common Soviet expedient that preserved the buildings while extinguishing their monastic use (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; see The Closure and the Rebirth).

The precise chronology of the closure is given somewhat differently in different accounts, since suppression came in stages rather than by a single act. [Disputed: the standard accounts date the effective closure of Optina as a monastery to the early 1920s, with the nationalization and the artel beginning in 1918–1919 and the final liquidation of the community and the full conversion to a museum usually placed around 1923 (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970); some summaries give 1918 for the closure and others carry the museum’s operation and the last monastic remnants into the later 1920s. The staged character of the suppression accounts for the variation.] What is not in doubt is that within a few years of the Revolution the great skete was silenced: the elders were arrested or driven out, the church services ended, and the monastic community as such ceased to exist.

The women’s convent at Shamordino, St. Ambrose’s foundation, was suppressed in the same wave; its sisters were expelled and its buildings taken (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; see The Shamordino Convent and the Crowds). Among the Shamordino nuns caught in the suppression was Grand Duchess Elizabeth’s circle only indirectly, but the fall of the two houses together — Optina and its convent — completed the destruction of the world the elders had built.

The Elders Scattered

The suppression fell directly on the last elders. St. Anatoly the Younger died on the eve of his arrest in 1922; St. Nektary was arrested, imprisoned, released, and exiled to the village of Kholmishchi, where he continued a hidden eldership until his death in 1928 (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; see St. Anatoly the Younger and St. Nektary). The rest of the brotherhood was scattered: some monks were arrested at once, others found refuge in nearby towns — above all in Kozelsk, across the river, where a number of the Optina fathers gathered around the parish churches and continued, as far as they could, the liturgical and confessional life of the monastery in exile from it (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the Optina monks at Kozelsk; the accounts of St. Nikon’s ministry there — see St. Nikon the Confessor).

This is the crucial fact about the eldership under persecution: it did not survive as an institution but as a network of persons. The tradition — the Jesus Prayer, the disclosure of thoughts, the direction of souls — passed from the closed skete into the cells, apartments, and back-room churches of scattered monks and their spiritual children, who kept it alive at the risk of their freedom and their lives (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; and, on the broader phenomenon of the “catacomb” survival of Russian spiritual life under Soviet persecution, the histories of the New Martyrs — see The New Martyrs of Russia). The disciples of the Optina elders — laypeople and clergy formed by Nektary, by Nikon, and by the others — carried the Optina inheritance through the whole Soviet period, so that when the monastery was at last returned in 1987 there were still living witnesses who had known the elders (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; see The Closure and the Rebirth).

From Eldership to Martyrdom

The persecution transformed the character of Optina holiness. The elders of the golden age had been confessors of souls; the last Optina saints became confessors and martyrs in the older, bloodier sense — men who bore witness by imprisonment, exile, and death. St. Nikon (Belyaev), disciple of Barsanuphius, kept the Optina eldership going at Kozelsk after the closure until his own arrest and death in exile in 1931; St. Isaac II (Bobrikov), the last superior, was shot in 1938 (see The Hieromartyrs of Optina). Their glorification would come not among the elders of the nineteenth century but among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, and it is fitting that the general glorification of the whole Optina synaxis in 2000 took place together with the great glorification of the New Martyrs (see Glorification and Veneration).

Thus the line that began with St. Leonid’s open eldership in the 1820s ended, a century later, in the labor camps and execution grounds of the Soviet state — the same tradition of prayer and self-emptying, now carried to the ultimate witness of blood. The persecution did not defeat the eldership; it changed the form of its victory (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the continuity of the Optina witness through the persecution into martyrdom).

See Also

References

  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (The nationalization, the artel, the museum, the closure; the scattering of the monks; the Optina fathers at Kozelsk; the continuity of the tradition through the persecution.)
  • On the staged Soviet suppression of the monasteries and the “catacomb” survival of Russian spiritual life: the standard histories of the Church under the Soviets, as summarized in the Optina literature and in the New Martyrs’ hagiography — see The New Martyrs of Russia.