p Having failed in their open struggle against Soviet power, the secular and clerical counter-revolutionaries did not abandon hope that the republic of workers and peasants would starve to death.

p An unheard-of famine occurred in 34 Russian gubernias with a population of 30 million in 1921. The extraordinary measures to help the famine-stricken from state reserves were exhausted. Starvation threatened millions of people. At the same time, the church had enormous wealth. Spending even part of the church’s riches to help the starving would have been a humane action. The riches of the Orthodox Church alone would have been enough to save 100 million people from starvation.

p The Council of the Orthodox Church and Tikhon himself were unanimous in their support of the rebellious military cadets who seized the Kremlin in early November 1917. There were voices at the Council urging to raise “great militia force" in support of the rebels “and to call upon everybody, young and old, to come out in defence of the Motherland" (i.e. counterrevolutionaries). In his speech at the Council, Priest Nezhintsev urged the Council to appeal to the entire Russian people, stating that the Council “gives its blessing to the churches and monasteries to give everything, including life" in order to have the lost privileges recovered. “The moment is coming,” said a speaker at the Council, “when one has to give up everything. Don’t spare anything, give all the property of the monasteries, give gold, precious stones, pearls, precious chasubles, expensive 94 shrines, give all" for the sake of the overthrow of Soviet power.

p The wealth of the church had been accumulated for centuries at the expense of the people, by exploiting the down- trodden masses. It therefore belonged to the people by right, and the working people had the moral right to demand at a difficult moment that the wealth should be returned.

p Factory and office workers proposed in 1921 that the church’s wealth be used for the needs of the hungry. These well- grounded proposals were supported by the overwhelming majority of believers and by some clergymen. But many priests headed by Patriarch Tikhon opposed giving even part of the church valuables to the fund set up for the aid to the starving. Tikhon even threatened repressions against those clergymen and laymen who wanted to give away church riches.

p This, then, was the situation when the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR decreed on February 26, 1922 that surplus church valuables should be expropriated in response to the people’s requests. Under the decree, only part of the gold and silver articles were to be confiscated from the property placed at the disposal of believers by the state free of charge. In anticipation of difficulties with the expropriation of church valuables, the Central Committee of the Communist Party sent out a telegram on March 1922 to gubernia Party committees recommending that extensive explanatory work should be conducted amongst the population, believers in particular. Articles made of precious metals were to be taken away with caution and the clergymen were to be informed in advance of the procedure and dates for the confiscation. It was specially stipulated that the process of expropriation should not hinder public worship or hurt the interests of believers in any way.

p On March 26, 1922 Pravda published an editorial entitled “On the Expropriation of Church Valuables”. The Party Central Committee, it said, recommended that Party and government bodies should differentiate between different ranks of the clergy and try to win over those parish priests, who meet measures of the authorities with understanding, to the side of Soviet power.

p Lenin attached great importance to correctly solving all the problems connected with the expropriation of valuables. 95 On March 12, 1922 he requested that the Party committees in the gubernias be instructed to make sure that delegates to the llth Party Congress bring detailed information on the wealth of monasteries and churches and on the progress of the expropriation.  [95•1  Reporting to the llth Party Congress on behalf of the Central Committee, Lenin informed the delegates on the subject. The Congress approved the measures taken by the Central Committee to expropriate the valuables. “The will of the working people and an unquestionable urgent necessity," stated a Congress document, “ever more insistently call tor broad assistance to be rendered to the millions of starving peasants from this rich storehouse.”

p About 48,000 tons of grain and other foodstuffs were bought in other countries with the funds raised by the expropriation of dhurch valuables. A lot of money was spent on purchases of livestock and agricultural implements, on aid to children and the crippled, and for other humane purposes. The negative reaction of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to the expropriation of valuables was not accidental. The famine was an instrument of political struggle against Soviet power in the ’hands of the secular and ecclesiastical counter-revolutionaries. The diehard reactionary Bulgakov wrote cynically: “We and hunger are both means of political struggle.”

p There were other, equally important, reasons that made the church leadership sabotage the Soviet government’s decision to expropriate church valuables. The church’s wealth was regarded as reserves for the counter-revolutionaries. The expropriation of gold and silver articles deprived the counter-revolutionary clergy and other representatives of the overthrown classes of an opportunity to use famine to return to the old monarchical order with its lost privileges. That was why Patriarch Tikhon called upon the clergy and laymen openly to resist the measures taken by the Soviet government. In many cities the clergy succeeded in provoking religious fanatics to bloody riots against the expropriation of church valuables. Criminal proceedings were instituted against the initiators of the riots.

p The trials of the participants and organisers of the resistance 96 to the expropriation of church valuables revealed that Patriarch Tikhon had led and inspired the bloody riots and counter- revolutionary actions by the clergy. A considerable part of the clergy then began to openly oppose his anti-national actions. A group of church figures from Moscow, Petrograd and from the countryside visited the Patriarch’s residence on May 12, 1922 in order to protest against his actions. The delegation demanded that a church council should be convened and Tikhon removed from his post. On May 14, 1922, Izvestia published an appeal to adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Appeal, signed by prominent representatives of the clergy of Moscow, Petrograd and Saratov, called upon believers to unconditionally support all the measures of the Soviet government. Charged with anti-popular actions, Tikhon was arrested.

p Tikhon’s trial was a model of the humanity and fairness of Soviet justice. As the head of the church, he was to blame for the anti-Soviet actions of the clergy in the first place. His appeals to resist the “power of Antichrist" caused great loss of life. He was the first to be punished as he deserved. Although Tikhon had actively opposed Soviet power from the very beginning, he was not brought to trial until May 1922. The bourgeois press in those days bristled with malicious fabrications about the Patriarch’s forthcoming trial and strove to convince readers that Soviet power was going to try him for his religious views rather than for political crimes. However, as the trial papers show, Patriarch Tikhon was tried for his counter- revolutionary activities, nothing else. “The state is trying Patriarch Tikhon as a counter-revolutionary,” Metropolitan Vvedensky wrote at the time. “This is the concern of the state. It has the right to try any citizen, whatever his title, whatever his rank.... They are not trying him here for faith, they are trying him for deception by means of faith, for religious charlatanism.”

p Caught in counter-revolutionary actions, Tikhon was brought to trial as a political criminal. Some other figures of the church had been tried in the past for similar anti-popular actions, not for their belief in God, as anti-Soviet writers suggest. These facts are common knowledge and they are now recognised by prominent church authorities. The Truth about Religion in Russia, a book published by the Moscow Patriarchate, points out that court 97 trials of the clergy did take place in the early years of Soviet power, but the defendants were not tried for their faith, but “solely because they conducted anti-Soviet work, concealing their intentions with cassock and the church banner. Those were political trials that had nothing to do with the life of religious organisations or the church work of individual priests".

p Finding himself completely isolated and confronted with irrefutable evidence, Tikhon was compelled to make a public statement admitting his criminal actions. On June 16, 1923 in his appeal to the Supreme Court of the RSFSR and on June 28, 1923, in his address to the believers, he publicly repented of his crimes against the people, recognised that he had been brought to trial on fair grounds, openly dissociated himself from the counter-revolutionary church and secular organisations and condemned the decisions taken by a council of the exiled clergy in Sremski Karlovci. “At the same time,” Tikhon wrote, “I declare to the Supreme Court that from now on I will not be an enemy of Soviet power. I dissociate myself definitely and resolutely from both foreign and interior monarchic and Whiteguard counter-revolutionaries.”

p Considering Patriarch Tikhon’s public repentance, the Soviet court was humane enough to stop his hearings. Tikhon was released in late June 1923.

After Tikhon had repented in public, the openly counter- revolutionary activities of the Orthodox clergy started to decline. Tikhon’s will and testament made public after his death on April 7, 1925 contributed to this process. The will contained an appeal to the believers and clergy to recognise Soviet power.