Liturgical Commemorations, Political Dissent and Religious Schism in the Russian Orthodox Church during the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

Abstract In the early Soviet period, the long Christian tradition of praying for secular and ecclesiastical rulers played an important role in Orthodox debates over legitimate authority, especially after the death of Patriarch Tikhon (Bellavin, 1865–1925) in March 1925. When Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii, 1867–1944), the acting leader of the patriarchal church, ordered the liturgical commemoration of the atheistic Soviet government as the secular authority and himself as the ecclesiastical authority in October 1927, he immediately provoked strong resistance from a group of hierarchs, clergy and laypersons in Leningrad. Because this opposition was expressed publicly at worship services, the Bolsheviks considered it a form of anti-Soviet agitation. For Orthodox believers, however, commemoration represented an ecclesiastical rather than a secular question. Sergii himself resisted Soviet pressure to stop commemorating his own superior, the imprisoned Metropolitan Petr (Polianskii, 1862–1937). Despite the bitter divisions among the followers of Patriarch Tikhon in the decade that followed his death, both Sergii and his opponents both prayed for Petr – a fragile thread that united the church’s contending factions.