p The October Socialist Revolution marked the beginning of a new historical era—the triumph of socialism and communism. Working people all over the world acclaimed the victory of Russia’s revolutionary proletariat. The Russian revolution frightened and angered the ruling classes throughout the world. Allied with counter-revolutionaries inside the country, the bourgeoisie of some European countries, of the USA and Japan started armed struggle against Soviet power. Religion and the church acted as strong-points of the anti-Soviet movements. The church’s counter-revolutionary activities at that time ensued from the prevailing socio-economic and political conditions. The clergy had accumulated enormous wealth over the centuries, and the church’s ideological influence was great. Russia was covered by a huge network of places of worship and public prayer buildings where an army of thousands of priests, monks and metropolitans worked hard to confuse the people. A great number of parish schools also served the autocracy in Russia.

p The October Revolution profoundly affected the interests of Russian Orthodoxy, which was the established Church under tsarism. The clergy rightly saw the end of their age-old rule over the minds of millions of believers in the overthrow of landowners and capitalists. The absolute majority of the clergy was against Soviet power, though the measure of their hostility was different in different echelons. The regular clergy (monks) and bishops were the most reactionary. The secular and parish clergy 88 was more sensitive to the mood of their parishioners, because they depended more on the believers.

p The church’s counter-revolutionary activity was part of a general counter-revolutionary movement. In the very first days after the victory of the Revolution, the counter-revolutionary forces made an attempt to overthrow Soviet power, Kerensky, who had fled from Petrograd, gathered Cossack detachments and moved them to the capital. They were led by General Krasnov. The so-called Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution, made up of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, stirred up a counter-revolutionary rebellion of military cadets. Simultaneously, a revolt flared up in Moscow. The counter-revolutionaries tried to strangle the young republic, while it was still weak. The clergy helped them as best they could, which was shown by the activity of the Local Council, convened on the eve of the Kornilov revolt in August 1917 and continuing after the October Revolution. The Council supported the military cadets who had revolted in Moscow. When the rebels seized the Kremlin for a time, its cathedrals and bell-towers were placed at their disposal at once. But the revolt was soon suppressed. Powerless in their rage, the Council members started rumours that the Bolsheviks had treated the cadets brutally and destroyed sacred places in the Kremlin. The idea was simple: to appeal to believers’ emotions and incite them against Soviet power.

p The Local Council headed by Tikhon, the elected Patriarch, became the hub of the Orthodox Church in its fight against Soviet power. Tikhon appealed to the clergy and believers with an epistle slanderously attacking the October Revolution and the workers’ and peasants’ state. He anathematised Soviet power and called upon the believers to fight against it and resist enforcement of its decrees. He sent out a secret directive to all local priests recommending that they rally “loyal parishioners" into brotherhoods, unions, and councils and incite the population against Soviet power through them. The Patriarch and the Council of the Russian Orthodox Church responded to the decree “On the Separation of the Church from the State and the School from the Church" with rage and hatred. The Council openly urged fighting against Soviet power in its crude appeal 89 entitled “To the Orthodox People”. “It is better to shed one’s blood and to be awarded martyr’s crown than to let the enemies desecrate Orthodox faith,” said the Appeal.

p The hopes of the enemies of the Revolution were placed in the church due to its special position in the first post- revolutionary years. While such instruments of the old government as assemblies of the nobility in gubernias and uyezds, merchants’ societies, conventions of tradesmen and industrialists, zemstvos (elective district councils) of gubernias and uyezds, and city dumas ceased to exist after the Revolution, the church preserved almost all of its old organisational forms: discipline, orderly functioning apparatus and well-trained priesthood. While the Revolution deprived the overthrown classes of their former rights to hold conventions and meetings against the interests of the people, initially, the church retained its opportunities for political demonstrations under the guise of religious processions, addressed political sermons to parishioners, appealed to them via its press and held parish meetings for the same purpose. In many rases, it used churches given over to believers by Soviet power for purposes that had nothing to do with worship. Instigated by the anti-Soviet top hierarchy, many priests continued to serve the old regime. They manipulated believers’ religious feelings, spread lies about alleged persecution of the church, and tried to arouse the masses to anti-Soviet struggle under cover of “defence of religion”. That was the purpose of the epistles addressed by the Council and Patriarch Tikhon to the parishioners.

p The Patriarch’s epistles outlined a general political course for resisting the new government and contained specific recommendations as to forms and methods of anti-Soviet activities by the clergy, as well as by laymen. There were 16 such epistles issued between 1917 and 1922 on behalf of the Council and Patriarch Tikhon.

p The central and local Soviet authorities pursued a flexible, yet firm policy toward the counter-revolutionary intrigues of the clergy and Patriarch Tikhon. The authorities did not wish to make Patriarch Tikhon look like a “martyr of faith”, because it could only enhance his prestige in the eyes of believers who were still politically immature. During the Civil War and the early years 90 of peaceful construction, when the absolute majority of the urban and rural masses unconditionally supported all the undertakings of Soviet power, the epistles of Tikhon, as well as the appeals issued by Denikin, Kolchak and Purishkevich, revealed the essence of the old feudal and landowners’ ideology and of the church policy pursued by Tikhon.

p The epistles of the Council and the Patriarch, filled with criticism of the Soviet government for its drastic revolutionary measures, which had deprived the landowners and capitalists of their age-old privileges, were proof enough to show whose interests the church and clergy were trying to safeguard. That was why the clergy’s open stand on the side of the counter- revolutionaries failed to make the masses of believers among workers and peasants follow suit. The agitation against Soviet government under pretext of alleged persecution for faith found no support, as prayers continued unimpeded in places of worship and believers freely celebrated religious rituals everywhere.

p The clergy and ecclesiastical hierarchy were particularly enraged that they had been deprived of their former privileges, of the right to acquire and accumulate capital and to dispose of the church property as they saw fit. But the absolute majority of believers welcomed these humane measures and actively supported Soviet policy. These measures met with complete understanding, first of all, among the proletarian and peasant believers. The Soviet government relied on revolutionary enthusiasm of the proletariat and peasantry in its church policy, just as in any other major undertaking.

p The peasants who received the land of monasteries and landowners from the state did not support those who had taken up arms to have the old order restored, despite the appeals from the Patriarch and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, now deprived of their former privileges. The proletarian members of Orthodoxy and the absolute majority of ordinary believers of other religions and sects cruelly oppressed under tsarism also welcomed all the Soviet measures on religion and spoke up as passionate adherents of its policy.

p In the first post-revolutionary years, not only priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, but also ministers of all other religions joined forces with the enemies of Soviet power. They 91 forgot about their former conflicts and joined efforts to regain their privileges and ideological influence on the poverty-stricken working people. The Moslem mullahs, for instance, resisted implementation of the decree “On the Separation of the Church from the State and the School from the Church" and tried to prevent believers from registering births or marriages in registry offices. Moslem priests collaborated with Whiteguard armies during the Civil War, actively helped the basmachi (anti-Soviet elements in Central Asia) and in some places raised special “holy” detachments under the “green banner of the Prophet".

p Anti-Soviet Old Believers fought in the “Holy Cross" detachments of the Kolchak army. Leaders of Jewish communities also actively resisted implementation of the Soviet government policy on religion and the church. In 1918, the All-Russia Congress of Judaic Religious Communities was convened in Moscow. Its delegates disagreed with the principal provisions of the decree “On the Separation of the Church from the State and the School from the Church”, and the All-Ukraine Congress of Rabbis, held in Odessa the same year, placed Soviet power under herein (anathematised). Together with bourgeois nationalists, the Jewish clericals laid claims to special privileges for the Judaic communities and put up resistance to local authorities setting up secular schools instead of kheders and ieshibots (parish schools) that were attached to synagogues.

p The leaders of the Roman Catholic clergy organised a “ Central Committee of the Roman Catholic Parish Councils" in Petrograd in 1918. The Committee instigated religious Catholics to boycott Soviet government measures. The Pope instructed Catholic priests in Soviet Russia to oppose implementation of the above-mentioned decree.

p But the counter-revolutionary plans of the churchmen failed. The working people everywhere welcomed the decree and demanded that any attempts to take actions against its implementation should be thwarted. A group of Catholic priests headed by Archbishop Tseplyak and Prelate Butkevich were brought to trial for resisting enforcement of the decree and instigating believers to take action against Soviet power.

p The reactionary forces of capitalist states launched an antiSoviet campaign in connection with the trial of Tseplyak and 92 Butkevich. The sentence passed by the Soviet court was discussed by the governments of some countries and provoked a stream of lies and threats to Soviet people in the bourgeois press. There were even attempts to use the sentence as grounds for diplomatic pressure to bear on the Soviet government. Thus, on March 30, 1923 the British Trade Mission in Moscow, on behalf of the Foreign Office, demanded that the Soviet government should rescind the death sentence for Butkevich. The solicitation was rejected. It was said in the Soviet reply that Soviet Russia was a sovereign state and the British should show mercy to the peoples of Ireland, Egypt or India. Significantly, the British Trade Mission which was given the Soviet reply refused to forward it to its government. Then the reply was published by the Soviet press.

p The Soviet government took a firm stand protecting its sovereignty and its people’s interests. The article “The Sentence on the Catholic Priests and International Capital" published in Pravda stated: “Don’t hope, gentlemen, that your cries will affect the decision of the Soviet government even in the slightest.” The court sentence was executed.

p The wish to regain their lost privileges motivated the church’s top ranks to use deception in order to mobilise believers for the struggle against Soviet power. Patriarch Tikhon’s epistles, his appeals with anathemas and imprecations of the new rule, the dissemination of falsehoods about religious persecution and participation of priests in anti-Soviet revolts and on the side of the Whiteguard armies were the best agitation for Soviet power per se. These actions made workers and peasants wonder why all religions and churches were supporting the enemies of Soviet power and why religious preachers were helping Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel and foreign interventionists bring back the rule of capitalists and landowners.

The churchmen used various methods in their struggle against Soviet power. Money, various conjectures, falsehoods and slander were all used. The clergy attached especially great importance to spreading falsehoods. Slander and lies about organised suppression of religion poured forth from church pulpits, and in oral and written statements by counter-revolutionary churchmen and top church dignitaries in the early 1920s. They had 93 one goal—to incite the people against Soviet power while concealing their hostility to it under the guise of “defence of religion”. The cries about “persecution” of religion and the church, in fact, were to mask the clergy’s anti-Soviet activity. The clerical authorities later admitted that assertions about religious “persecution” by the Soviet government were false. Thus, Metropolitan Sergii, later the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, said in an interview with foreign correspondents in the early 1930s: “There is no persecution of religion in the USSR and never has been.”