ORTHODOXY AND REVOLUTION: THE RESTORATION OF THE RUSSIAN PATRIARCHATE IN 1917

Abstract

ABSTRACTAt the height of the October Revolution in Moscow – a much bloodier affair than the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd – the Orthodox Church installed Tikhon (Bellavin) as Russia's first patriarch since 1700. At the most obvious level, this was a counter-revolutionary gesture aimed at securing firm leadership in a time of troubles. It was nevertheless a controversial move. Ecclesiastical liberals regarded a restored patriarchate as a neo-papal threat to the conciliarist regime they hoped to foster; and since Nicholas II had explicitly modelled himself on the Muscovite tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, the potential for renewed conflict between church and state had become clear long before 1917. Whilst previous historians have concentrated on discussions about canonical and historical precedent, this paper emphasises the extent to which a single individual haunted the whole debate. For, until the last moment, it was widely assumed that the new patriarch would be not the little-known Tikhon, but Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii), whose attempts to model himself on Patriarch Nikon – the most divisive of seventeenth-century Muscovite patriarchs – helped to make him the most controversial prelate of the age.