Notes on V. I. Lenin and the 1922 Moscow Trial of the Russian Orthodox Church
Introduction
Like a shape-shifter, global communism and its intellectual ideals have shown a remarkable resiliency and an ability to adapt to various cultures. The fall of communism in 1989 dealt a significant blow to its credentials, but discontent with aspects of modern capitalism mean that collectivist ideals are never quite vanquished. At the risk of being labelled yet another aging cold warrior, I offer these notes on two figures in the history of early Russian communism: Vladimir I. Lenin (1870-1924) and Vasily Ivanov Bellavin, better known by his religious title, Patriarch Tikhon of the Russian Orthodox Church (1865-1925). Here I argue that Lenin and Tikhon both represented religions, Lenin an anti-democratic and dictatorial religion of materialist atheist communism; and Tikhon a religion traditionally hierarchical, but starting to show some democratic tendencies by the early decades of the 20th century. The historical moment where the conflict between the religions of these two figures could be seen most publicly was the Moscow trial of Orthodox churchmen in the spring of 1922. The clash between these rival religions and their key leaders had profound repercussions across the ensuing century, and the story needs to be retold rather than forgotten.
Lenin’s Antipathy to Orthodox Belief
Born into a middle-class family in Simbirsk, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) matriculated to the Classical Gimnazia for boys in 1878, where he excelled in his studies. The “Ministry of Popular Enlightenment” had established strict guidelines for Russian education in 1871. The hours of study were divided thus: six devoted to studying the Russian language, six hours on science and math, and four hours on religion. Over the ensuing years, students were exposed to French, Latin, German, and Greek.[1] Though his Orthodox father and Lutheran mother were formally affiliated with their respective churches, his upbringing was only very nominally influenced by piety. Upon reading the works of Nikolai Chernyshevski (1828-1889), Lenin abandoned the Christian faith by age 16.[2] This author was a revolutionary socialist journalist who espoused a faith in the Russian peasant class. While in Siberian exile during the period 1862-1864, he wrote a novel entitled What is to Be Done, a title that was later used by Lenin, in 1902, for one of his own publications.
While studying at the Imperial University of Kazan, Lenin fell afoul of recently-strengthened student reforms designed to rein in student radicalism. The conflict between the school administrators and radical students came to a head through the activity of debate clubs. An outburst of chanting at a December 4, 1887 rally, voiced student demands that the school operate free of the control of the state. The dispute became so intensified that police scoured the city and made arrests of students, 39 of whom were expelled, including Lenin, who was exiled to another city.[3]
Upon the family’s acquiring a farm, his mother persuaded him to manage the workers, a task for which he was ill-suited and resentful. This is of course ironic, given how often his writings claimed to care about the plight of the worker vis a vis capitalism. He used this period to solidify his Marxist ideology, as evidenced by his translation of The Communist Manifesto into Russian. He was 19.[4] He devoted himself to the study of English and German, as well as intensively scouring core texts authored by Marx, Engels, and Georgi V. Plekhanov (1856-1918), with whom Lenin would by 1900 co-edit the communist journal Iskra (“The Spark”). As a promoter of the Mensheviks, Plekhanov would by 1903 break with Lenin’s Bolsheviks and in 1917 oppose the October Revolution. Plekhanov is widely regarded as the father of Russian Marxism, and his commentaries on Marxist theory fill some 26 volumes.
Upon the death of Vladimir’s sister Olga in May of 1891, a religious dispute arose. His nominally Lutheran mother desired for her daughter to be buried in an Orthodox cemetery, but for the funeral rites to be performed by a Lutheran pastor. This was a violation of the laws of the Orthodox church and of the state. Robert Service notes that “Vladimir had abandoned religion entirely around the age of sixteen and, as a devotee of Russian revolutionary thought, was an atheist. For him, it counted for nothing whether the cemetery was Orthodox or Lutheran. His task as he saw it was simply to make the burial arrangements as unoppressive as possible for his mother.”[5] The episode may mean little in the grand scheme of this narrative. Yet it at least added an element of personal antipathy to Lenin’s already growing ideological opposition to organized religion.
By 1892, Lenin began to practice law in the city of Samara. His role was assistant barrister, but his passion remained revolutionary activity. A famine was afflicting the Volga region in which he was employed. While many revolutionaries sought ways to ameliorate the plight of the starving, Lenin did not. In his determinist view of history, he believed that “mass impoverishment was inevitable.” Such conditions were the effects of hated capitalism. Using charity to help the poor was counter-productive in his mind, because the masses would only revolt if the full force of starvation pushed them toward socialism. Lenin’s ideology was thus not rooted in the sentiment of compassion for the poor, but was utterly elitist and doctrinaire in character.[6]
He moved to St. Petersburg and from 1893-1895 intensified his ideological formation in Marxist doctrine. He did not desire to affiliate with the milder “agrarian socialism” to which he had been exposed in overseeing farm labor. The author Petr Tkachev (1844-1886) influenced Lenin greatly during this period. This author found Engels insufficiently radical. “Tkachev believed in revolutionary will, conspiratorial organization, and political violence,” declaring that upon seizing power, revolutionaries must “carry out a mass terror against priests, policemen, and landlords.” [7]
On December 9, 1895, Lenin was arrested in an action by the Ministry of the Interior against members of Russian Marxist organizations. During his incarceration in the House of Preliminary Detention he began composing his own version of Marxism. In January of 1897 Lenin and several other members of the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle to three years exile to eastern Siberia. By 1899 Lenin published under the thinly-veiled pseudonym Vladimir Ilin, in order to evade censorship, his The Development of Capitalism in Russia.[8] By the 1902 publication of what might pass as his manifesto, What is to be Done, no more was the pseudonym employed.
Lenin’s Program of Religious Repression
In Lenin’s notes on anti-theologian Ludwig Feuerbach, the ideological lens of materialism was applied rigorously to religious ideas. Lenin cited Feuerbach as asserting: “Religion gives man an ideal. Man needs an ideal, but a human ideal corresponding to nature and not a supernatural ideal. ‘Let our ideal be no castrated, disembodied, abstract being, let our ideal be the whole, real, all-sided, perfect, developed man.’” Lenin’s marginal note added “excellent equating” to the statement “’Man has no idea, no conception, of any other reality, of any other existence, than sensuous, physical existence. . . .’”[9] The rigid embrace of philosophical materialism, coupled with the association of religion with capitalism and the bourgeoise class, rendered it one of Lenin’s many enemies.
With the accession of Bolshevism into power via the Revolution of 1917 came sweeping social and political change under the leadership of V. I. Lenin. As McMeekin has detailed in his fine study of the Russian Revolution, early communist policies, including a virtual obliteration of the banking industry, as well as mishandled agriculture, led to profound shortages and suffering for the Russian people.[10]
Food shortages, uncertainties about payment for work, a banking industry in free-fall, and the costs of both war and revolution led the revolutionaries to seek sources of revenue. The unpopularity in intellectual circles of the Orthodox church, coupled with her accumulated wealth, made of her an inevitable target. By October of 1917, with Lenin assuming power over the Bolshevik cause, efforts to despoil the church of her influence and her wealth were rapidly undertaken. January of 1918 saw the promulgation of Lenin’s “Decree of the Soviet Commissars Concerning Separation of Church and State, and of School and Church.” Ostensibly designed to promote freedom of conscience for Russia’s people, the goal was to create space for the official atheism of the Party’s foundational Marxist philosophy. The Orthodox church no longer received government subsidies, and teaching of religion was banned in public schools. Janz points out the component of this new policy that brought the clash between Orthodoxy and Bolshevism to a head: “Finally, all Church property was pronounced to be state property that was then loaned to the Churches free of charge.”[11] Eventually, the Bolsheviks removed the sanctioning of marriage and divorce from the authority of the Orthodox church, and reduced these to merely civil functions.[12]
By 1919 Pravda and other organs favorable to the revolution began to develop the cult of Lenin. The failed attempt on his life in August of 1918 provided the potential for the theme of martyrdom to take center stage in this cultic development. According to Lenin biographer Robert Service, “The image was of a selfless leader brought low by humanity’s enemies.” Lenin often portrayed his revolution as an international one, and he despised elements of Russian nationalism. Further, “The party’s writers described him as an authentic son of Russia and a fighter for material improvements, for enlightenment, and for peace.” Privately Lenin raged often against the ignorance and backwardness of many sub-populations of Russia. “Lenin appeared as a Soviet Christ: superhuman powers were attributed to him. His survival was ascribed to a miracle; the writers did not bother to explain how to reconcile this with their militant atheism,” Service observes ascerbically.[13]
Famed dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his English publication of a sweeping indictment of Soviet Communism in 1973, noted key elements of the ensuing conflict between church and state. Actions speak louder than words, and the freedom of conscience rationale for the separation of church and state was a transparent ruse.[14] In 1918 the Bolshevik government “began to ransack the churches and throw out the relics of saints, and to carry off church plate. Popular disorders broke out in defense of the plundered churches and monasteries.” Some parishioners even brought out clubs to try to defend their local parishes from the plunder, but to little avail.[15] Our narrative now turns to briefly offer some notes on the leader of the Orthodox church, and his efforts toward a formal church response and resistance to the new revolution’s treatment of the church and her religious properties.
Bishop, then Patriarch Tikhon
Patriarch Tikhon was born Vasilii Ivanovich Bellavin in the town of Klin, January 19, 1865. By 1888 he had graduated from the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary. He was hired to teach both dogmatic and moral theology at the seminary that same year. He was ordained a priest and took the name Tikhon from the monk who tonsured him in 1891. After a period of leadership in the Orthodox Seminary at Kholm, he was consecrated Bishop of Lublin in 1897. Church authorities detected a critical need of leadership in Alaska and the Aleutians for the Orthodox faithful in those regions. Thus, Tikhon was sent to oversee the work in America, serving as Bishop and later as Archbishop. While in America he also effectively established Orthodoxy in various locales after his appointment as Archbishop of the North American Archdiocese in 1905. He returned to service of the Russian church in 1907, and conditions of World War I compelled a move to Moscow. He served the church in various capacities over the next decade and promoted the monastic life. In a unique popular election, Tikhon was elevated to the re-established Patriarchate of Moscow and of Russia in 1917. In January of 1918, responding to the despoilation of church properties by Bolshevik revolutionaries, his first encyclical strongly condemned these actions, anathematizing any Orthodox who participated therein, and urging the faithful to resist such acts of theft by the state.[16]
In a blistering sermon delivered February 1, 1918, he labeled the Bolsheviks “monsters of the human race,” calling the plundering of churches “a Satanic deed” which would earn the perpetrators a place in “Gehenna’ in the afterlife, and “the terrible curse of posterity in the present life on earth.”[17] By October of the same year he was protesting to the commissars directly, arguing that the liberty of clergy to deliver sermons was being restricted, and that “many courageous priests have already paid for their preaching with the blood of martyrdom.” He also condemned the government’s taking of church property accumulated by the faithful over many centuries of time.[18]
In the context of such actions by Lenin’s government, the Bolshevik revolution was not, once it took power, merely a debate over economic policy. It was a complete cultural upheaval, including the use of the tools of totalitarian control. Mass imprisonments were envisioned in Lenin’s first decree on Red Terror in September of 1918. “Special camps” were to be created to imprison “important representatives of the bourgeoisie, landowners, industrialists, merchants, counter-revolutionary priests’” and others were to be isolated within “’concentration camps.’”[19] Some of these camps were in fact confiscated and repurposed Orthodox monasteries.
The People’s Commissariat of Justice ignored the pleas of the Patriarch as well as untold thousands of ordinary Orthodox clergy and laity, and in August of 1920 published an edict “for the liquidation of relics of all kinds, since they were a significant obstacle to the resplendent movement toward a new, just society.”[20] Resistance to such policies resulted in summary executions, arrests, and show trials, as the following section shall detail.
According to Janz, the dire social context for these moves must be factored in. A great famine blighted the land in the years 1921-1922. “As thousands of peasants were starving in the countryside, the government asked the Orthodox Church to donate its treasures of artwork, gold, precious stones, and so forth, to buy food.” The church resisted this, and the state used force to confiscate such materials. The value of the items taken is somewhat disputed, but this was not the end of the story. Many clergy were arrested for resisting these acts of plunder.[21]
The account of Solzhenitsyn gives more context and nuance than this, however. It is not as if the Orthodox church simply refused to give to the cause of helping the poor. In August of 1921, Patriarch Tikhon and other clerics “created diocesan and all-Russian committees for aid to the starving and had begun to collect funds.” Yet because this would have created bad public-relations for the Bolshevik effort to foment attacks on religion, “the committees were banned, and the funds they had collected were confiscated and turned over to the state treasury.”[22]
In Petrograd, the Metropolitan of the Orthodox church, Fr. Veniamin, addressed the authorities in March of 1922. He argued that the church would gladly give voluntarily of its treasures to the poor, but that confiscation by the state was a sacrilege. The local paper, Petrogradskaya Pravda, objected. During the period March 8-10, 1922, this organ of communist propaganda lambasted “evil pastors.” “We don’t need your donations!” these articles screamed. “Everything belongs to the government—and the government will take whatever it considers necessary.”[23] This attitude of resistance even to church compromise led to a series of trials of church officials who resisted the confiscation policies of the Bolshevik state.
Despite Lenin’s occasional public pronouncements in favor of the freedom of religion, his private correspondence reveals an attitude quite harsh in its violence. A secret letter to the Politburo dated March 19, 1922 is a case in point, and must be juxtaposed with the trial proceedings nearly contemporaneous with it. Lenin’s policy again evidences his earlier willingness to use starvation to promote communism, a policy that had not abated over the previous two decades. He saw starvation as a way of wresting power from the Orthodox Church.[24] He wrote: “’Precisely now and only now, when they are eating human flesh in the famine regions and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are lying on the road, we can (and therefore must) carry out the seizure of church valuables with the most desperate and the most ruthless energy. . . .’” The objective reader can easily draw lines of connection between communist policies and the starvation events, and thus blaming the church for these conditions partook of the rankest hypocrisy. In any case, if such confiscatory activity provoked local demonstrations, according to Lenin, no mercy could be shown in more conservative areas of Russia. “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoise we manage to shoot on this occasion, the better,” his letter urged. He perceived such repression as an effectual deterrent, when he added: “Now is the time to teach those types such a lesson that for a few dozen years they won’t even be able even [sic] to think of resistance.’”[25]
Just a week earlier, on March 12, 1922, Lenin had published his “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” in the context of the preparation for public trials persecuting the Orthodox church. Lenin expressed exasperation with the allegedly slow pace and apathy of bureaucrats tasked with promoting militant atheism. Among the goals of a militant materialist journal, he espoused the following:
“. . . [S]uch a journal must be a militant atheist organ. We have departments, or at least state institutions, which are in charge of this work. But the work is being carried on with extreme apathy and very unsatisfactorily, and is apparently suffering from the general conditions of our truly Russian (even though Soviet) bureaucratic ways. It is therefore highly essential that in addition to the work of these state institutions, and in order to improve and infuse life into that work, a journal which sets out to propagandise militant materialism must carry on untiring atheist propaganda and an untiring atheist fight.”[26]
Solzhenitsyn offers an account of the Moscow Church Trial, which transpired April 26 to May 7, 1922. Seventeen defendants arraigned were church authorities who had promulgated Patriarch Tikhon’s protest against state stripping of church properties. Even when a priest surrendered the valuables of his local parish, yet merely still verbally upheld the Patriarch’s objection, he himself was subject to harsh reprisal. This Archpriest, whose name was A. N. Zaozersky was shot by authorities after the trial.
Patriarch Tikhon took the stand on May 5, and accepted responsibility for writing and disseminating his decree. The judge pressed for the names of others who had actually written the decree, seeking to turn the Patriarch against others under a presumed conspiratorial action. The judge then asked the Patriarch: “’Do you consider the state’s laws obligatory or not?’” To this the Patriarch replied, in alignment with ancient church teaching, “’Yes, I recognize them, to the extent that they do not contradict the rules of piety.’” A long debate in the trial then followed in which the Patriarch acknowledged that freely giving the items to the state is acceptable to the church, but state seizure of the items was a violation of church law, and a sacrilege. As just one instance of this, the trial included the description of a sacrilegious act, wherein an ikon cover had been reported as trampled under the feet of those who confiscated the church property. This act the Patriarch labeled as blasphemy. The judge insisted, while noting that Tikhon was not personally present for this event, that he was only reporting a “repulsive slander” and “an unsubstantiated assertion.”[27]
An important recent doctoral thesis from the University of Toronto adds needed texture to the spiritual rationale for Tikhon’s resistance to the Soviet takeover of church property. Francesca Silano points out the value of sacred space in the preaching and teaching of Bishop Tikhon in “countless articles and homilies instructing his flock.” In the context of The Great War, these messages had sought to point out the distinct national identities of Germany and Russia. He had “in 1914, defined the Russian national character as being different from the German one precisely because the Russian landscape was defined by its churches.” This bespoke his conviction “that Church property was a literal manifestation of the sacred in the modern world.” This was an ethos deeply embedded in Orthodox theology and iconography, wherein the spiritual is manifested in the beauty of the physical. Patriarch Tikhon was also able effectively to cite both Soviet and Canon law within his homilies, delivered within a liturgical context, to challenge the confiscation policies of the government.[28] During the trial, Tikhon was able to draw upon his expertise in canon law and in state law in his arguments. He also relied upon his theological convictions. He insisted that the state confiscation of religious property was a violation of canon law, state law, and the more fundamental law of God. He urged that he had no right to abrogate any of these merely to appease state functionaries.[29] In the ensuing days, the judge as well as the local press relentlessly portrayed Tikhon’s motives as a combination of political malice, greed, and calloused disregard for the starving poor.[30]
The sentence on the seventeen defendants in the Moscow trial was pronounced on May 7, 1922. Eleven were sentenced to be shot, though five actually were. Patriarch Tikhon was himself removed from office and subsequently placed under arrest.[31]
Earlier, Lenin, at least in public, had spoken of holding back the open suppression of religion. Toleration of religion could be justified along the same lines as Marx, namely, the belief that the success of the revolution would cause religion to wither and die. Research into Lenin’s private correspondence shows this was not his true view, and even his public declarations frankly did not hide his antipathy for traditional religion. Yet after Lenin’s death, by 1925 the Party undertook ever-more aggressive anti-religious propaganda tactics, more in keeping with the true hostility Lenin had desired. This included the formation of “cells of atheist activists on the local level.” Further, “public burnings of icons and religious books, carnival parades with mock priests and rabbis,” and even contests to compare the health of “baptized and unbaptized infants,” in order, ostensibly, to render religious faith unscientific in the public eye.[32] This reminds the reader of eugenic “fitter families contests” occurring at local fairs in the United States during the same decade, yet this time not merely for a purportedly scientific purpose, but for an openly anti-religious one.[33] Propagandistic discrediting of religious persons, as well as policies of repression, imprisonment, exile, torture, and execution, became the coin of the realm in the Soviet treatment of religious believers over the ensuing decades.
Conclusion
A comparative study Vladimir Lenin and Patriarch Tikhon is a valuable, yet often overlooked, window upon the contrast in leadership between atheistic materialist Bolshevism and Christian Orthodoxy. By 1918, Lenin openly espoused dictatorship and mocked democracy. He wrote: “’Dictatorship is the power relying directly upon force unbound by any laws.’”[34] Tikhon appealed primarily to religious or canon law, which he held as his duty to uphold given his position as Patriarch. He also appealed to state law, but to a lesser degree. Under continuous interrogation from August of 1922 until March of 1923, possibly including torture and various threats to others in his orbit, Tikhon admitted to misinterpreting the canons and acknowledged that the use of church property to feed the starving had a long and venerable history. As Silano notes, however, the recantations authored by Tikhon never undermined the authority of the canons themselves. Tikhon often stated that he had not sought, nor had he even desired, to be Patriarch, but that he served at the will of his fellow-churchmen. Thus, as a matter of principle, he upheld law over dictatorship, even if others, over the ensuing decades, have criticized his eventual compelled compromises with the Soviet regime.[35] The contrast between the democratically-oriented reforms in the Orthodox church by the early decades of the 20th century, and the totalitarian dictatorial attitude of Lenin, may now start to emerge with ever more clarity.
Notes
[1] Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 37.
[2] Ibid., 64.
[3] Ibid., 67-9.
[4] Ibid., 77.
[5] Ibid., 85.
[6] Ibid., 87-8.
[7] Ibid., 98.
[8] Service, 107-109; 121-22.
[9] V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks 38, trans. Clement Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 75. Digital Reprints (2008) online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-38.pdf, accessed June 10, 2021.
[10] Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 213-54. For an account of the attack on the church under the guise of starvation, see 321-34.
[11] Denis R. Janz, World Christianity and Marxism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34.
[12] Rex A. Wade, The Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 78.
[13] Service, 393-4. See also Lenin’s “Letter to the American Workers,” published in Pravda on August 22, 1918, online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/20.htm, accessed June 11, 2021. The essay concludes: “The workers are breaking away from their social traitors—the Gomperses, Hendersons, Renaudels, Scheidemanns and Renners. Slowly but surely the workers are adopting communist, Bolshevik tactics and are marching towards the proletarian revolution, which alone is capable of saving dying culture and dying mankind. In short, we are invincible, because the world proletarian revolution is invincible.” Note the ultimacy, which can only be described as a religious fervor, in such claims.
[14] Some Protestant scholars have held that the freedom of conscience under Lenin was a boon. For example, Janz, 37, holds that: “There is, in other words, some reason to suggest that despite occasional persecution, Christianity as a whole fared better under the communist Lenin than under the Christian czar.” This seems to me a rather truncated judgment.
[15] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Vols 1 & 2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 29.
[16] Francesca Silano, “’In the Language of the Patriarch’: Patriarch Tikhon, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Soviet State (1865-1925),” Ph.D. Thesis (University of Toronto, 2017), ix-xi, online at: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/98812/3/Silano_Francesca_201711_PhD_thesis.pdf, accessed June 10, 2021.
[17] Janz, 34.
[18] Solzhenitsyn, 326.
[19] Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor, 2004), 9.
[20] Ibid., 327.
[21] Janz, 35.
[22] Solzhenitsyn, 343-4.
[23] Solzhenitsyn, 346, emphasis in the original.
[24] For descriptions of the horrors of the starvation in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as abuses of the church by the state using such as pretext, see Evgeny Krinko, Alexander Skorik, and Alla Shadrina, “The Don and Kuban Regions During Famine: The Authorities, the Cossacks, and the Church in 1921-1922 and 1932-1933,” Nationalities Papers 48 (2020), 569-84.
[25] Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 97-8.
[26] V. I. Lenin, “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” in Lenin’s Collected Works, Translated: David Skvirsky and George Hanna (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 33:227-236, V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002, online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm, accessed June 10, 2021.
[27] Solzhenitsyn, 347-9. Emphasis in original.
[28] Silano, 229-30.
[29] Ibid., 288.
[30] See the excellent and detailed analysis of these events by Silano, 290-301.
[31] Solzhenitsyn, 347-9.
[32] Janz, 35-6.
[33] See “Topic: Fitter Family Contests,” Eugenic Archive, online at: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/topics_fs.pl?theme=8, accessed June 4, 2021.
[34] Service, 376.
[35] Silano, 309-15. An account of repercussions meted out to the Patriarch by some of his fellow-Orthodox for these official recantations, while beyond the scope of this essay, is detailed in Silano, 316-28. Only fairly recently have new interpretations of church-state relations during this period in Russian history begun to receive attention in English-language scholarship. See Scott M. Kenworthy, “Rethinking the Orthodox church and the Bolshevik Revolution,” Russian Revolution 31 (2018): 1-23; and Gregory L. Freeze, “Religion and Revolution: The Russian Orthodox Church Transformed,” in Daniel Orlovsky, ed., A Companion to the Russian Revolution, 277-86 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020).
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