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christian HISTORy
The Faith in
Russian History
by Warren H. Carroll, Ph.D.
From the beginning of their Christian history, it has been the special call and mission of the Slavic peoples to suffer for the Faith, to be nailed to the Cross with Christ. This has been the great theme of the history of both Poland and Russia.
Christianity came to Russia through Ukraine, the two not then being separated, in 988 by the conversion of the king of Kiev, St. Vladimir. Before his conversion he had killed his brother and engaged in human sacrifice; afterwards he became a ruler of notable charity and gentleness who was only with difficulty persuaded that it was ever lawful for a Christian monarch to wage war. His instruction in the Faith came from Constantinople when he married the Eastern Emperor's daughter Anna, but he was also in touch with the Pope through Holy Roman Empress Mother Theophano, Anna's sister. A papal embassy went to Russia in 990, probably in response to reports of Vladimir's conversion, and was received by him "with love and honor" in 991, the year in which local chroniclers first mention "Russian bishops" at Vladimir's court.
There are good reasons to believe that these "Russian bishops" were of the Latin rite, though using the Slavonic liturgy developed by Sts. Cyril and Methodius. The earliest Russian word for bishop, piscoup, appearing in the thirteenth-century Statutes of St. Vladimir, derives from the Latin rather than the Greek form of this title. There is no record of a Greek bishop in Kiev until 1038, no less than 23 years after Vladimir's death. In 996 Vladimir instituted a church tithe in Russia. Obligatory tithes were not then required in the Byzantine empire, but were in most of the Latin West. Vladimir sent his own ambassadors to the Pope in 994 and received another embassy from Pope Sylvester II in Kiev in the year 1000. This shows that St. Vladimir's allegiance was given to the Catholic Church and Faith, not to a separate "Russian Orthodox" or "Greek Orthodox" church which did not yet exist.
When the tragic Eastern schism occurred in 1054, with the Patriarch of Constantinople and the whole church in the Byzantine empire breaking away from Rome in a quarrel with papal ambassador Humbert, Russia at first remained loyal to Rome. Humbert went to Kiev before he returned to Rome and was honorably received there by St. Vladimir's son, King Yaroslav the Wise. For many years afterward the Russian church continued to use the Slavonic liturgy of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, approved by Rome, though accepting Greek bishops in Kiev. There is no record for the next 150 years of any formal or explicit rejection of papal authority by the Russian church. That church has always maintained essential Catholic doctrine, and all its sacraments remain valid.
But in the thirteenth century savage conquerors came to Russia and Ukraine from the Far East: the Mongols. For more than two hundred years the Mongol yoke lay heavy on these Christian peoples. The combination of their historic ties with the Greek church in Constantinople and the disruptions created by the Mongol conquests cut them off completely from Rome and even from the memory of a connection with it. The Latin West became distant and alien.
Then in 1453, just as Russia was beginning to free itself at last from the Mongol domination, Constantinople and the remnant of the Byzantine empire fell to the Muslim Turks, who have ruled it ever since. Constantinople had been the "new Rome" when founded by Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman Emperor, and until the end had proudly claimed that title. With the original Rome faded into incommunicable distance, and the second Rome seized by the infidel, the leaders of the Russian church in the rising city of Moscow proclaimed their capital to be the third Rome, heir to both the religious and the political authority of the forgotten first Rome and the captured second Rome. It was a natural error under the circumstances; and for 250 years neither the Russian people nor most of their leaders were able to correct it, because they were almost completely cut off from the rest of Christendom.
Their only contact with Catholics was on the east European plain with the Poles and Lithuanians, both traditional enemies of the Russians. By 1500 Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow, had established absolute rule in central and northern Russia, modeling his government on the tyranny of the Mongols. He married the daughter of the last Byzantine emperor and claimed to be his successor, and built the finest church then to be found in Russia, the Church of the Annunciation in the Kremlin. But he fought almost constant wars with the Poles and Lithuanians and totally rejected the Catholic Church.
He and his successors dominated the church in Russia, selecting its bishops. The tradition of the Byzantine church had included a strong element of "caesaropapism" - control of the church by the highest political authority, the Emperor. The emerging state of Muscovy adopted this system.
Under Ivan III's fiercely domineering grandson, Ivan IV "the Terrible," who began using the title Tsar (derived ultimately from "Caesar," meaning Emperor), the Russian church was even more tightly controlled by the sovereign. But Russia was above all a Christian nation, and always saw itself as such. When in the middle of the 17th century Patriarch Nikon of Moscow persuaded Tsar Alexis to make a number of highly visible changes in the liturgy and texts used by the Russian church, there was massive resistance leading to hundreds of martyrdoms and an enduring schism; those who rejected the changes introduced by Nikon and Alexis called themselves the "Old Believers." It was the only substantial challenge to the religious authority of the Tsars in all of their history, and though doctrinally baseless and rooted in an irrational hostility to foreign ideas and influences, the Old Believers' schism showed that substantial numbers of Russians cared enough about their Christian faith to die for it when they believed it threatened even by the Tsar himself.
As all the world now knows, unchecked absolute government is one of the greatest evils under which men can suffer. That of the Tsars was the heritage of the Mongols and of Russia's geographic isolation and overwhelmingly rural character. Elsewhere in Europe the existence of flourishing cities led to the development of self-government and national parliaments in which the cities, along with the church and the nobility, were represented. But Russia had no cities, not even any large towns, except Moscow, until Peter the Great built St. Petersburg. Nor could the church in Russia check the Tsar, as the Catholic Church in the West checked even Holy Roman Emperors. He controlled it fully, as the massive continuing persecution of the Old Believers attested.
At the end of the seventeenth century Tsar Peter the Great opened a window to the West through his new capital, ending the sharp separation of Russia from the rest of Europe and of Christendom. Catherine the Great, ruling in the second half of the eighteenth century, was not even Russian; she was a daughter of German royalty whom a weak Tsar had married. Her successors in the nineteenth century were all strong men and good Christians, but (except for Alexander II's freeing of the serfs) they did little to change the political system they had inherited.
Under absolute rule Russians had a foreboding of disaster. Far too much rested on one man's shoulders. If the ruler were to disappear or die and not be replaced, anarchy threatened. Russians long remembered the devastating "time of troubles" that intervened between the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 and the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. These historically authenticated fears mingled with an apprehension that reached beyond politics, a prophetic anticipation of a veritable visitation from Hell that came to some Russians imagining their future. In 1830 Mikhail Lermontov wrote his terrifying poem "Prediction," in which he prophesies events a hundred years in the future so accurately as almost to suggest second sight:
A year will come for Russia, a dark year
When royalty no more his crown will wear,
The rabble who loved him once will love forget,
For Blood and Death will richest feast be set;
The fallen law no more will shield the weak,
And maid and guiltless child in vain will seek
For justice. Plague will ride
Where stinking corpses fill the countryside,
And flapping rags from cottages demand
Help none can give, while Famine rules the land.
Dawn on thy streams will shed a crimson light;
That day will be revealed the Man of Might
Whom thou wilt know. And thou wilt understand
Wherefore a naked blade is in his hand.
Bitter will be thy lot; tears flood thine eyes,
And he will laugh at all thy tears and sighs.
The Communist revolution, the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the liquidation of the kulaks, the genocidal famine in Ukraine, Lenin and Stalin - all are there, in very nearly their historic form.
For a more explicitly religious prophecy of the suffering to come, we may turn to the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, which since the time of Ivan III had been the site of an extraordinary collection of monasteries and churches. The first monastery there was founded by Savvat, who came with just one companion to these remote islands on the fringe of habitability in an arm of the Arctic Ocean. The story was told of a monk-priest named Job whom the Blessed Virgin May visited during an all-night vigil at the foot of a hill on the island of Anzer. She told Job that the hill should be named for Golgotha, and a church and monastery built there dedicated to the Crucifixion. She said: "It will be whitened by the sufferings of countless multitudes."
In 1923 the Soviet government in its sixth year of power drove the monks of Solovetsky out to die and transformed the islands into maximum-security prisons. Tens of thousands of prisoners were sent there - a substantial number because they had refused to give up their Christian faith and remained determined to preach it. They were beaten with staves, harnessed like horses to draw sledges and carts, forced to sit balanced all day on high poles as a punishment. The Golgotha Church was turned into what the prison officials called a hospital, where almost no medicine was available except the strychnine used to poison terminal cases once the doctors decided they could not recover enough to work any more. The bodies were stacked in the vestibule of the church and periodically rolled down Golgotha Hill for removal.
The last significant attempt to bridge the growing, ominous gulf between the all-powerful Tsar and the people was made by a Russian priest, whose true moral stature has been obscured and distorted by the tragedy which resulted from his efforts: Georgi Gapon. One of his contemporaries said of him: "He had unbounded love for the Tsar and felt that it was possible to attain through him all that was needed by the people. Romantic at heart, he was much concerned with the poor and unfortunate, and always ran around with various projects concerned with helping them." He established an Assembly of Russian Factory Workers of St. Petersburg which the government of Prime Minister Witte approved in 1904, welcoming the contrast of its leadership with the revolutionary workers' organizations then beginning to form in Russia.
On Epiphany of 1905 Father Gapon decided to lead a procession of workers and their families to the Tsar's Winter Palace to request an eight-hour day, an increase in the minimum daily wage, free medical aid for workers, legal recognition of their right to organize unions, a national legislature for Russia, and an end to its war with Japan. The march was to be completely peaceful, without any weapons, with women and children and the aged participating. It was to be Christian and respectful of constituted authority, the marchers carrying icons and pictures of the Tsar.
The Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries were taken completely by surprise by the magnitude of the response to Father Gapon's Assembly among the workers of St. Petersburg. An evident and genuine alternative to the apocalyptic confrontation the revolutionaries desired had suddenly been offered by men who, though challenging the established order in strong terms, had kept both faith and hope. Father Gapon was their spokesman. He should not be judged by his tragic disintegration after disaster struck his demonstration, nor by his limitations in education and knowledge. On that frosty Sunday morning in St. Petersburg in January 1905, when he marched into history under the banner of the King of Kings, Georgi Apollonovich Gapon was a man of God doing God's work, a peacemaker who hungered and thirsted after righteousness for Christ's sake. The whips and bullets that met him and his people destroyed Tsarist Russia, the terror of the government matching the terror of the revolutionaries, love and loyalty met with death.
At least a thousand probably died on "Bloody Sunday," and five thousand more were injured. Father Gapon lost his faith and quite possibly his reason, and became a revolutionary after all. Bishop Sergei of St. Petersburg, who kept the Faith, looked back in horror, quoted Job, and said sadly: "Oh, if only that day was not in our history!" Boris Pasternak said: "This is the tearing apart of the joints of oaths, to the dynasty sworn."
Then came the tragic, unnecessary, incredibly bloody First World War, which damaged Russia more than any other combatant nation, and so weakened its government that Lenin, revolutionary and committed enemy of Christianity, was able to overthrow it in 1917 with relative ease, and make his Communist Revolution. In that same year the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three children at Fatima, and through them warned the faithful everywhere that a mighty evil was coming out of Russia which would bring great wars and persecutions of the Church, but that in the end Russia would be converted and there would be peace.
As soon as Lenin had established himself and his comrades in power and dissolved the Constituent Assembly which had been elected to draft a constitution for Russia, he moved against the church. In February 1918 a decree of his government ended all financial support for the Russian church and denied it the legal right to own any property. It prohibited all religious instruction in any school where any subject other than religion was taught. The world-view of Russian Christians had never encompassed even the possibility of a militant atheist government. But Patriarch Tikhon spoke out at once against it:
Come to your senses, you madmen, and stop your bloody actions. For what you are doing is not only a cruel deed; it is in truth a Satanic act, for which you shall suffer the fire of Hell in the life to come, beyond the grave, and the terrible curses of posterity in this present earthly life.
Four years later a Soviet decree ordered the confiscation of all sacred vessels made of precious metals. When church leaders protested, the Orthodox archbishop of Moscow and many of the leading Orthodox priests in that city were arrested, along with a number of Catholic priests in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was now called). In May four priests and a deacon were executed, and Patriarch Tikhon was put under house arrest. Telling him that his confinement could last a very long time, the government urged him to appoint Archbishop Agafangel of Yaroslavl his successor. After a night of bullying Tikhon agreed.
Archbishop Agafangel was a very old, mild-mannered man whom the Soviets had evidently assumed would accept their control. Two pro-Soviet priests and a political commissar went to see him. They gave him his letter of appointment from Patriarch Tikhon, but told him that before acting on it he must sign a statement pledging to be guided as acting head of the Orthodox church in Russia by the government.
Yaroslavl is on the Volga River northeast of Moscow, in the very heart of Russia. Bent with age, totally without political experience, Archbishop Agafangel was helpless before the might of Lenin's regime, without help or hope in this world. But he wore the armor of God. He refused to sign.
Three days later Patriarch Tokhon's letter was taken away from Archbishop Agafangel and he was forbidden to leave Yaroslavl. That very day Lenin suffered the first of a series of crippling strokes that was to kill him in less than two years.
No one, it seems, then or later, ever saw any connection between the two events. Our age has forgotten how terrible it can be to fall into the hands of the living God. The world's greatest revolutionary had felt the touch of the one Power he and his followers could never overthrow.
During the ensuing year Archbishop Benjamin of Petrograd, 27 other bishops, and over 1,200 priests were martyred in Russia. Patriarch Tikhon was broken by captivity and abuse. For most of their ensuing 69 years of rule the Communists were able to bend to their will those they permitted to lead the Russian Orthodox Church. But the majority of the people kept the Faith. Throughout all those years, more than half of all children born in Russia were still baptized.
In hundreds of "gulag" death camps established all across the wilderness regions of the Soviet Union, where some twenty million people died during the thirty ghastly years of Stalin's rule, the Christian prisoners in particular drew courage from their faith which enabled them to endure unto death, and if they perished (as most of them did), to die still in hope of salvation. They used the ancient symbol of the fish, going back to the Roman catacombs, to identify one another. They made rosaries and prayed them constantly. Priests among them ministered to them secretly. In his epochal The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn reports Christian prisoners joining in marriages witnessed by a priest though they had never seen each other, but only communicated by coded notes. Frail old women defied their torturers with Christ's name on their lips.
"He that endures to the end shall be saved," Christ said, and so it was in Russia. The Faith survived and communism went down to defeat. The year 1988 was the thousandth anniversary of the conversion of Ukraine and Russia to Christianity. Easter services were broadcast for the first time over Soviet television. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, met publicly with Patriarch Pimen and other leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. Hundreds of churches were reopened; famous monasteries, such as the Danilov in Moscow and the Pechersky in Kiev, were restored to the Church; Orthodox relics which had been taken from churches and put in museums were given back. Father Gleb Yakunin, the long-imprisoned Orthodox priest who in 1975 had called on the Catholic faithful of Portugal to stand by Our Lady of Fatima and never surrender their land to communism, hailed Gorbachev's meeting with the patriarch and bishops as "a symbol of a change in policy." In June the millennium of Russian Christianity was celebrated by the first Mass in the Kremlin since the Communist Revolution, at what had once been, and now was once again, the cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Gorbachev never became a believer. But in 1990, the next to last year of his power and of the existence of the Soviet Union, the traditional Communist May Day parade through Red Square in Moscow was followed by a people's parade calling for an end of Communist rule, with men carrying placards reading "Down with the Party!" "Down with the cult of Lenin!" "Marxism-Leninism is on the rubbish heap of history!" But the demonstrator best remembered from that day was the long-bearded monk from the Russian Orthodox monastery at Zagorsk, carrying a life-sized crucifix seven feet tall, who stood before Lenin's tomb facing the relic of the dead ultimate revolutionary and his living heirs, and cried out to Gorbachev in a voice of thunder: "Mikhail Sergeyevich, Christ is risen!"
With Communist rule over Russia collapsing, in the midst of the last attempt to preserve it - the abortive coup of August 1991 - came an incident which should be memorable to every Christian. The stronghold and headquarters of opposition to the coup, led by Boris Yeltsin, was the parliament building of the Russian republic in Moscow. For two days thousands of unarmed men and women had prevented troops, unwilling to fire on them, from seizing it. But now in the middle of the night the coup leaders sent three helicopters loaded with secret police to land on the roof of the parliament building. The defenders had no way to resist attack from the air. They had no anti-aircraft guns; they could not block the landing of helicopters with their barricades or with their bodies. But some rain had already fallen that night, and too much water on the roof would prevent the helicopters from landing. Father Gleb Yakunin, survivor of the prison camps, devotee of Our Lady of Fatima, stepped forward, praying fervently for a downpour of rain - and a downpour of rain came. The helicopters did not land. The coup failed. Five months later the red flag of the Communist Revolution came down for the last time over the Kremlin, and Russia was free.
But the consequences of 74 years of Communist rule - a full lifetime - could not be soon eliminated. No one in Russia under 85, except the few who had lived abroad, knew how to function in a free society. The immense task of social, economic and political rebuilding has been begun, but with many difficulties and setbacks. Though the Faith endured in Russia all through the years of Communist rule, three full generations have grown up mostly without religious instruction. Millions do not believe, because Christian belief has never really been explained to them. Millions more who do believe, understand little of their faith. Whatever the Blessed Virgin Mary may have precisely meant when she spoke of "the conversion of Russia," clearly the evangelization of these millions must be an essential part of it. It is an undertaking in which every serious Christian on earth has a stake. Even without its empire, Russia remains the largest nation in the world, and one of the most populous. The Faith survived there for three-quarters of a century under the deadliest earthly foe it has ever faced, but needs help and renewal in the new century now so close upon us. The foundations remain, but the structure built upon them has largely crumbled. The triumph of the Faith which outlasted communism can only be assured by rebuilding the house of God in Russia.
Dr. Warren H. Carroll is Professor of History at Christendom College.