Diplomats and Missionaries: The Role Played by the German Embassies in Moscow and Rome in the Relations between Russia and the Vatican from 1921 to 1929

The radical changes undergone by the Church in 1917/18, and the course subsequently taken by religious affairs in Russia, had an impact on Europe that has not up to now been given the attention it deserves.¹ The tsar was replaced as the head of the Russian Orthodox Church by a new patriarchate, created at the Church Council in 1917/18; on November 5, 1917 (st.v.) the patriarch Tichon (Vassily I. Bellavin), metropolitan of Moscow, was nominated.² The loss of the Polish and Baltic regions resulted in the number of Catholics falling in Russia from 15 to 1.6 millions, but the radical new winds of change aroused fresh hopes of a union between the Catholic and Orthodox faiths.³ From Rome's perspective, the obvious way to promote Catholic interests in Russia seemed, at first, to be to act via the Polish Church and the newly resurrected Polish state.⁴ However, the precipitate plans nurtured in some quarters in Poland to recover Russia for the Roman Catholic faith, together with the war fought between Poland the Soviet Federal Republic (1920/21), made the Vatican more amenable to the idea that it might instead be better to take the neutral position on Russia and Poland,⁵ and to use the good offices of other friendly powers to pursue its goals. On the fringes of the Conference of Genoa (1922), Germany arranged a meeting between Under-Secretary of State Giuseppe Pizzardo and the People's Commissar Georgij Vasilevich Chicherin, at which the problem of religion in Russia was discussed.⁶ Cautious efforts to sound out the chances of arranging a concordat between the Holy See and the Soviet Union continued right up to 1927, with the meetings at times taking place on German territory and invariably accompanied by the active involvement of the German embassies in Rome and Moscow. The rapprochement with the Vatican, indeed, the support lent to its interests in Russia, was driven on the German side by two principal motives. To begin with, the Catholic Center Party now enjoyed new scope to exert influence on German foreign policy, an influence embodied in 1921/22 by the Reich Chancellor and Foreign Minister, Joseph Wirth.⁷ Secondly, the famous Rapallo policy was being pursued, and Germany tried to be well connected with Russia due to the Treaty of Rapallo (April 16, 1922) in order to compensate the political tensions dominating its relations to the Western powers. Support for the Vatican, or indeed for the Christian churches in general in their dealings with the Soviet Union, offered Germany additional scope to pursue good relations with its former enemy, Russia, without arousing the suspicions of the western powers.

The Persecution of the Orthodox Church

Otto von Radowitz, who served as counselor to the German Embassy in Moscow (1922–1924), wrote a number of searching analyses on the relationships between the Soviet government and the Orthodox Church.⁸ He realized that, in view of the deep-seated authority enjoyed by the Russian Church, the new government would not be able to permit it to continue to exist as an autonomous body, but that it would, on the contrary, want to instrumentalize that authority for its own purposes. In Radowitz's eyes, the confiscation of sacred utensils and the desecration of martyrs' graves and reliquaries represented a deliberate provocation calculated to strip the clergy of its power once it reacted, as it was bound to, to split the Church and to pave the way for the imposition of a patriarch compliant to the government's wishes. The traditional Church found itself competing with a so-called new Church, led by the priest Antonin (formerly a liberal in the Revolution of...