Mémoire des deux mondes: De la révolution à l’Église captive (review)

Vsevolod Krivoshein was born in the Russian Empire in 1900, the son of Alexander Krivoshein, who was the minister of agriculture of Tsar Nicholas II between 1908 and 1915. When Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government in 1917, and civil war broke out in 1918, Krivoshein joined the White forces of General Anton Denikin. In 1920, with the White Army on the verge of defeat, he went to the Sorbonne to study Russian history, particularly the history of Russian Orthodoxy. In 1924 he entered the monastery at Mount Athos, taking the religious name of Basil, and studied Orthodox theology and patristics. In 1951 he was ordained a priest and continued his study of patristics at Oxford. In 1959 the Russian Orthodox Church named him archbishop for the Russian Orthodox Diaspora in Belgium, a community that dated from the nineteenth century and increased after World War II. As leader of the Russian Orthodox community in Belgium, he wrote extensively on spirituality, the Church Fathers, and church-state relations. He participated in ecumenical dialogues and conferences and was an observer at the Second Vatican Council. He became a sharp critic of the Russian Orthodox Church’s compromises with the Soviet government and the Soviet regime’s attempts to use Orthodoxy to push its foreign policy. In contrast to Orthodox leaders in the Soviet Union, he defended Orthodox dissidents, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and priest Dmitri Dudko, but he also criticized other dissidents such as A. E. Levitin-Krasnov for their visceral attacks on church leaders. He was both a pragmatist and a pastor. On the one hand, he loved Russia, wanted the Church to survive the Bolsheviks, and worked with the Soviet-ordained ecclesiastical structure to try to improve it. On the other hand, he was an unequivocal enemy of communism’s assault on the human spirit, the Church, spirituality, and man’s yearning for truth and justice. He died in 1985, leaving a rich literary and spiritual legacy.

The present volume, his memoirs, is divided into two parts. The first part is Krivoshein’s recollections of his youthful experience during the Russian Revolution and civil war before he entered religious life. Here he provides valuable information about prisons, bureaucracy, peasantry, violence, war, and many other subjects during the revolutionary era. He noted that the peasants, who were deeply religious and solidly anticommunist, sat out the civil war, ultimately to their own peril. Solzhenitsyn found the eyewitness account so valuable that he mined it extensively for his own work on the Revolution. Part 2 consists of Krivoshein’s memories of his relations with and evaluation of a series of Russian Orthodox leaders, including Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) and Patriarch Pimen. It is a rare account from a critical but sympathetic observer of Russian Orthodoxy’s paradoxical accommodation with the Soviet government during the Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev periods and of the inner political maneuvering, often exploiting believers’ faith, between the Department for External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate and Orthodox faithful outside of Russia.

Throughout his life, Krivoshein remained committed to the Christian faith, Orthodoxy, and Russia. He was a critic, but also a loving and profoundly religious pastor who worked tirelessly for Russian society and its rich Christian culture. His book is a valuable contribution to the history of Russia and Orthodoxy in the twentieth century.