The Renovationist movement in the Orthodox Church in the light of archival documents.

Publication: Journal of Church and State

Publication Date: 01-JAN-97

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COPYRIGHT 1997 J.M. Dawson Studies in Church and State

Lenin and his government never made a secret of their ideological disapproval of faith in God. However, at the same time (especially after 1921), when it became a reality that the world revolution was not around the corner and that some form of coexistence would have to be formed with the non-communist world, Lenin's government tried to convince the outside world that Soviet Russia (and after 1922 the Soviet Union) was indeed a state of religious tolerance. In fact, both the Constitution of 1918 and Lenin's Decree of 23 January 1918 on the Separation of the Church from the State and the School from the Church proclaimed equal rights for religious and antireligious propaganda.(2)

After the chaotic years of the Civil War and the so-called War Communism decrees during which the murder of dozens of bishops, thousands of priests, and lay religious activists could be written off as a local initiative, a centralized religious policy appeared. That period, known as the New Economic Policy (NEP) era could be best described, as far as religion is concerned, as divide et impera. In the ideological sphere, the NEP was marked by ambiguity which allowed the Party to pursue simultaneously diverse and mutually contradictory policies, e.g.: a total ban on factionalism within the Communist Party (The Resolution on Party Unity at the 1921 Tenth Party Congress), whereby a totalitarian regime over the Party was combined with a relative freedom of private initiative and nonpolitical intellectual creativity outside the Party. In the socioecomonic sphere (inseparable from the ideology as well), the limited restoration of market economy was combined with the retention of the War Communism decrees on lishentsy (the deprivees), i.e., people without civic rights, to which category belonged all private entrepreneurs, the clergy, and other pre-revolutionary "exploiting classes."

In the religious sphere, the Renovationist Schism served as a means to blind the outside world to the magnitude of the Communist religious persecutions. To make an impression on the outside world (and partly on his own citizens as well) that he was pursuing a relatively tolerant religious policy, Lenin extended considerable tolerance toward some of those religions which had been subjected to forms of direct or indirect repression under the Old Regime.(3) Meanwhile, he persecuted the mainline Orthodox (Patriarchist) Church under the guise of overcoming traces of the Tsarist regime with which that church had been associated as the official state religion and hence was claimed by the Bolsheviks to be an institution of oppression. In order to demonstrate that their persecution of the Orthodox Church, particularly her clergy of all ranks, had nothing to do with any persecution of religions per se, the Soviet state needed another Orthodox Church. That purpose would be served by the Renovationists, at first a genuine reform movement within the Orthodox Church, but later a Soviet Secret Police (GPU) directed front organization under the Bolsheviks.

I

The Renovationist experiment, however, proved to be precedent-setting; thus, its interest transcends the borders of the USSR and the time frame of this essay, roughly, the 1920s. First, as a movement it anticipated most twentieth-century radical movements within the established Christian churches of the West, particularly the movement of the Pretres ouvriers in the French Roman Catholic Church of the 1940s and 1950s and the Marxist-influenced "liberation theology" of the last two decades. Second, as the recently available top-secret Soviet documents have proved, the Renovationist Schism had not been merely Marxist-influenced and sympathetic to the Revolution, but had been launched by the Soviet Secret Police (the GPU) on orders from the Soviet Communist Party Politburo. Third, it set a precedent for the post-World War II communist regimes' religious policies in all Eastern European communist states, as well as in China. In all of them, the regimes attempted to create splits between the parish clergy and the bishops by launching such movements as Democratic Clergy Associations consisting of parish priests and contraposing them to bishops (the cases of the Orthodox churches in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania). Regarding the Roman Catholic churches, attempts were made in Yugoslavia, Albania, China, and Czechoslovakia to detach them from the Vatican and/or to develop the so-called Peace (or Pax) Movements of leftist clergy within the church, contraposed to their bishops and antagonistic toward the Vatican (particularly in Poland and Czechoslovakia). This divide et impera policy might be viewed as an extension of the Marxist class war concept to the domain of religions: pitting the clergy "proletariat" (the priests) against the clergy elite (the bishops).

A brief overview follows on the origins and history of renewal movements in the pre-revolutionary Orthodox Church. A movement under the name of "Alliance for Church Renewal" appeared in St. Petersburg in 1905 when the so-called Group of thirty-two priests--all belonging to the "white," i.e., married clergy--of that city submitted a memorandum on proposed church reforms to Antonii Vadkovskii, the metropolitan of St. Petersburg, on 15 March 1905. The publication of the memorandum caused a lively discussion in the press, attracted other members and sympathizers, including a noted lay theologian, Nikolai P. Aksakov, and led to further publications on desirable church reforms.

There were two famous Antoniis among Russian bishops of the time: Metropolitan Vadkovskii of St. Petersburg and Archbishop Khrapovitskii of Volynia. Metropolitan Antonii Vadkovskii saw nothing wrong with the suggestions of the "renewalists" and encouraged their group to work on further proposals for the future local sobor's agenda. Archbishop Antonii Khrapovitskii of Volynia, a protagonist of episcopal and monastic hegemony in the church, was their main opponent in the ensuing polemics.(4)

This essay focuses on the "renovationists" of the 1920s who adopted much of the program of the 1905 group. The features of programmatic continuity, from the 1905 "Alliance of Church Renewal" (ACR) to the 1922 "Renovationists" were:

1. Separation of church and state, for, as their 1905 memoranda stated, only a church free from state control is capable of performing her mission in the world.

2. The convocation of a representative local council, which alone could restore a proper canonical church structure and administration. The first memorandum cites examples from the Apostolic and the First Ecumenical Councils, as well as from several old-Russian local councils as evidence of participation of the "white" (i.e., married) clergy and laity in church councils. In addition, commissioned by the ACR, Aksakov published a thoroughly researched study proving that the term patriarch was not used by any of the seven Ecumenical Councils, that it was an invention of Justinian's bureaucracy as a parallel to the emperor. As far as the church was concerned, the ruling archbishops of the capital cities had no special powers in relation to a diocesan bishop, except for the function of consecrating metropolitans for ecclesiastic provinces within the archbishop's jurisdiction. But even here the archbishop's powers were effectively circumscribed: the candidate had to be first elected by the clergy and laity of the future diocese, and the archbishop could not consecrate him without the participation of at least several other bishops and other representatives of the province. The elevation of the archbishops of the capital cities to the special rank of patriarch led to the development of "poly-papism" which, in Aksakov's opinion, was worse than the Roman "mono-papism." He viewed it as a corruption of Orthodoxy in which the canonical power over the bishops and the local churches rested in the councils, not in the patriarchs or metropolitans.(5)

3. The church ought to be decentralized, divided into autonomous metropolitan circuits, with archdiocesan sees in provincial (gubernskie) capitals and bishops in county (uezdnye) seats. Each diocese is an autonomous entity in its own right, and a bishop's seat should be permanent, organically linked with his pastorale. Only differences of honor are rendered to the partiarchs, metropolitans, and other bishops, not differences of authority. Councils and diocesan congresses with clergy and laity participation should function on all levels of the ecclesiastic administration. Bishops and parish priests should be elected by the relevant conciliar bodies, rather than by bureaucratic appointment.

4. Clericalism should be eliminated. The term "clericalism" meant for its critics all the historically accumulated features of the church structure and practices which contradicted the Pauline statement that all Christians were "a royal priesthood." Any form of elevation of the clergy over the laity implied that the clergy itself constituted the church rather than the totality of the clergy and the laity (sobornost). The...

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