Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946

Preface

PREFACE “We are not particularly afraid of all these socialists, anarchists, atheists and revolutionaries. . . . But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists . Those are the people we are most afraid of. They are terrible people ! The socialist who is a Christian is more to be feared than the socialist who is an atheist.” —Fëdor Dostoevskii, The Brothers Karamazov The 1917 Revolution that gave birth to Soviet Russia had a profound impact on Russian religious life. Social and political attitudes toward religion in general, and toward the Russian Orthodox Church in particular, remained confused for nearly thirty years. Orthodox clergy known as “red priests” (krasnye popy) banded together in an organized movement during those decades of religious uncertainty. Their organization followed a unique and controversial path in ceaseless attempts to reconcile Christianity with the goals of the Bolshevik state. By embracing the radical socialism of Lenin and his party, red priests unwittingly proved that the great nineteenth -century Russian novelist Fëdor Dostoevskii had been right. Nearly everyone—including most Orthodox believers and Bolshevik officials— feared clergymen who proclaimed themselves Christians and socialists. Orthodox believers feared the theology and actions of red priests. Most believers were not passive observers of emerging Soviet society. They constantly sought ways to exercise their traditional faith while adapting to postrevolutionary social change. Red priests moved beyond popularly accepted limits by actively accommodating Orthodox religious beliefs and institutions to new Soviet realities. They proclaimed that accommodation was the only way to prevent the church from dying. To indicate their intention of reviving an organization that had one foot in the grave, they named their movement “renovationism” (obnovlenchestvo) and said they were “renovationists” (obnovlentsy) forming a “Living Church” (zhivaia tserkov’). Their opponents in the church used a pejorative term (“red priests”) for renovationists. The choice of color was significant. Historically , Russian Orthodoxy described differences among clergy using only two categories that referred to the color of liturgical vestments. Married x PREFACE priests who served in parishes were called white clergy (beloe dukhovenstvo ), while those who took monastic vows were known as black clergy (chernoe dukhovenstvo). Although the renovationists kept traditional vestments —white or black, depending on their clerical rank—they lost support from ordinary believers by becoming too closely identified with the country’s Bolshevik (“red”) leadership. Calling someone a red priest labeled him as a traitor to Orthodoxy, an alien to Orthodox tradition, and a person who compromised his Orthodox faith to please the atheists. Ironically, Bolsheviks feared that renovationism might compromise the party’s ideology. Lenin and his allies in the party held a strict materialistic worldview that denied the existence of any spiritual forces. A genuine alliance with red priests threatened to undermine Bolshevik claims to absolute truth by saying Christianity was as acceptable as atheism among party members. Bolshevik leaders, therefore, treated the notion of red priests as a political contradiction in Soviet Russia. Early Soviet society proved more complicated, however, than political theory imagined. Believers and nonbelievers had to live together in a society filled with contradictions. Many priests, some educated lay believers, and even a few bishops initially embraced renovationist ideas in their desire to integrate Orthodoxy into the Soviet social order. Local government officials ignored , misunderstood, or simply remained ignorant of Bolshevik theory. They knew that the Orthodox Church would not simply disappear on command and openly protected red priests out of a practical desire to have allies in charge of Orthodox parishes. These patterns of support shifted over time, as believers, state officials, and party functionaries responded to developments in Soviet society. This book tells the history of red priests as they repeatedly reshaped their organization and tactics in a hostile environment. For over four decades, they responded to changes in Russian politics and social expectations . While not ignoring evidence to the contrary, I argue that renovationists generally acted out of genuine religious conviction. I also argue that Bolshevik policy toward religion was complex. Party functionaries and secret policemen frequently manipulated church reformers even while publicly defending the legal fiction of separation between church and state. The history of renovationism is an important part of broader developments in Russia between 1905 and 1946; it sheds valuable new light on the dynamics of society, politics, and religion in those decades. Methodology This study presents an institutional history of renovationism from the perspective of the red priests and their government allies. It emphasizes the [3...