The book discusses the decline and resurrection of the canonical jurisdiction and administrative authority of the Russian Orthodox Church in the period 1917-1948 on the basis of unpublished and understudied archival documents. In general, this issue was only rarely touched on by scholars before 1991.5 AS a rule, their attention was concentrated on the political rather than the ecclesiastical aspects of Russian church history. On one hand, this focus of research was determined by the uniqueness of Bolshevik militant atheism, and on the other, By the lack of access to the relevant Soviet archives. In this way, studies on the post-1917 development of the Russian Orthodox Church were oriented toward its domestic problems, namely, its persecution in Soviet landS.® Meanwhile, its international activities were regarded mostlY as an extension of Soviet foreign policY.7
A greater sensitivity to questions about the jurisdiction and authority of the Moscow Patriarchate was demonstrated by Russian emigres. Their interest in this issue was especially strong during the interwar period, when the decline of the Russian Orthodox Church was as its most intense. In the first place, they concentrated their efforts on defending the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate over its dioceses in the so-called Near Abroad, which had moved under the jurisdiction of other Orthodox patriarchates. After the 1927 declaration of Metropolitan Sergii (Starogorodskii), a number of the Russian emigres also contested his rights To act as locum tenens of the Moscow Patriarchate (i. e., to exercise authority over them). As a result, they published many works dedicated to the ecclesiastical and canonical problems of Russian Orthodoxy between the two world wars.8
After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941), the emigres lost control over the debate on Moscow’s canonical jurisdiction and authority. Meanwhile, the Kremlin useD the alliance between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill to launch a series of propaganda works that claimed on behalf of the Russian Orthodox Church that there was freedom of religion in RussiA.9 These had a twofold task. On the one hand, they were to silence the voices against the religious repressions in the Soviet Union, thus facilitating its military collaboration with the United States and Great Britain.10 On the other, they had to persuade the Christian world that the Moscow church administration of Metropolitan Sergii (Starogorodskii) was the only canonical leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. In this way, they defended the right of the Moscow Patriarchate to spread its jurisdiction over all dioceses that used to belong to the Russian Orthodox Church before 1917 and to claim canonical authority over its diaspora.
The outbreak of the Cold War revived the interest of Western democracies in the freedom of religion in the Soviet Union. As a result, this issue occupied a central place in the studies of scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Generally, these works are concentrated on church-state relations in Soviet timeS.11 In comparison with the previous period, however, there were some new developments. Scholars began to analyze the issue of the Russian Orthodox Church from the perspectives of human rights and nationalisM. ® 2 In its turn,
Soviet propaganda responded with publications that fell far short of meeting academic standardS.13 From this perspective, the representatives of the Karlovci Synod, which was renamed the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia (ROCOR) after the transfer of its headquarters to the United States in the second haLf of the 1940s, also developed its an own position. During the Cold War, they mostly published works that contested the right of the Moscow Patriarchate to present itself as the canonical leader of Russian OrthodoxY.14 In this way, the horizon of Cold War studies on the Russian Orthodox Church remained limited to its development within the Soviet lands. On rare occasions, Western observers showed interest in the international aspects of the activities of the Moscow Patriarchate. This tendency reached its peak in the mid-1960s, when it joined the World Council of Churches.15
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the declassification of its secret archives, especially of the records of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, expanded the scope of research in this field. Although the emphasis on The aforementioned domestic developments still dominates studies on the Soviet past of the Russian Orthodox Church, scholarly interest in the foreign affairs of the Moscow Patriarchate is growing.16 However, the new studies have kept the old periodization, which regards the 1943 “concordat” between Stalin and Metropolitan Sergii (Starogorodskii) as the starting point of the international activities of the Moscow Patriarchate. The view of this church as a passive tool of Soviet domestic and foreign policy also continues to persist in historiography. In a similar way, the active support of the Russian Orthodox Church’s leaders for Soviet wartime policy is explained mostly by referencing their patriotism.17 There are, however, some new insights. More sensitive to specific church interests, Rev. Vladislav Tsypin uses canonical arguments to defend Moscow’s jurisdiction over the Baltic eparchies or over the Ukrainian Uniates. In general, however, the ecclesiastical motives of the Moscow Patriarchate for its collaboration with Stalin remain unexplored.
Post-Soviet historiography is also characterized by a differentiation between Russian and non-Russian scholars exploring the Soviet period of Russian church history. As a rule, Russian scholars pass over in silence the issue of the experience of Orthodox communities in the western borderlands during the first Soviet occupation (1939-1941). They also avoid elaborating on the canonical aspects of the “reunion” acts that the Moscow Patriarchate initiated in Eastern Poland and the Baltic States in this short period. The general approach of Russian scholars to these developments is to treat them as something domestic: The Russian Orthodox Church simply restored its canonical authority over areas that had belonged to it for centuries.
Meanwhile, their foreign colleagues have developed a different approach, which is more sensitive to the religious dimensions of the discussed reunions. The fact that research on this subject is still scarce is mostly due to recent lack of access to archival sources. At the same time, foreign historiography discusses the church reunions of 1939 and 1940 fTom the perspective of the political sovereignty of the non-Russian nations; that is, they are treated as international rather than domestic affairs.18 In this way, it implicitly indicates that the collaboration between Stalin and the administration of the Moscow locum tenens, Metropolitan Sergii (Starogorodskii), was mutually beneficial: The Soviet regime expanded its political power, while the Moscow Patriarchate restored its jurisdiction over dioceses and believers in the western borderlands. All this calls for more detailed study of the activities of the Moscow Patriarchate in these areas during their first Soviet occupation.
Finally, part of the problem in post-Soviet studies on Russian church history stems from the restricted access to archival sources. Scholars use mostly archival documents of the Soviet government and Communist Party but have no access to those of the Moscow Patriarchate. As a result, research on the activities of this patriarchate has concentrated on their political dimensions, while the ecclesiastical dimensions remain understudied. To overcome this weakness, this book uses archival documents kept in foreign church archives. to them, it reveals some new facts about the Russian Orthodox Church, particularly about its attempt to maintain its unity and canonical jurisdiction despite the changes in the political map of Europe after World War I and the aggressive antireligious policy of the Soviet regime in the period 1917-1938. It also gives publicity to archival documents that reveal an early collaboration between Stalin and the Sergian church administration in the international sphere, before the concordat of 1943.
The Soviet sources used in this book include documents fTom the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (CAROC), kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), and fTom the Department of Propaganda and Agitation at the Central Committee of the All-Soviet Communist Party (Bolsheviks), kept in the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (RGASPI). The research presented has also benefited from several recently published volumes of documents from the Russian state archives.19 At the same time, part of this research was conducted in non-Russian archives, which reveal different perspectives on its subject. One of these is the Archive and Library of the Keston Institute, which keeps materials about the Karlovci Synod, a leading center of the Russian emigration.20 The most significant non-Russian sources for the study of the international activities of the Moscow Patriarchate in the first half of the twentieth century, however, were found in the Lambeth Palace Library (London). In this regard, especially valuable were the papers of several archbishops of Canterbury, namely, Cosmo Lang (1928-1942), William Temple (1942-1945), and Geoffrey Francis Fisher (1945-1961), as well as the files of Canon John Albert Douglas, the general secretary of the Church of England Council on Foreign Relations (1933-1945). These not only offer a different perspective on the international activities of the Moscow Patriarchate in the 1940s but also contain important information about the Russian churches outside the Soviet Union between the two world wars.
Another important source of information for this research was the Open Society Archive (OSA). Especially valuable in this regard were the documents from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which discuss various aspects of the history of the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. Finally, the book also uses documents from the Archive of the Institute for Church History (ATsIAI) at the Bulgarian Patriarchate and the Bulgarian State Archives (TsDA). These keep the files of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Communist Party, and the Directorate of Religious Affairs at the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These resources shed light on the mechanisms used by the Moscow Patriarchate and Stalin’s government to include the Orthodox churches in the Balkans within the Soviet sphere of influence.
World History
