Revolution and Dissolution

Abstract

This chapter assesses how the outbreak of war and then revolution subjected all Orthodox monastic communities in the Russian empire to a confluence of economic, social, and political challenges that ultimately led to their dissolution. While this outcome is not surprising given the ideology and goals animating the Soviet regime, it was not inevitable. On the contrary, like most female monastic communities in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese, the community at the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross demonstrated a resiliency during the decade and a half after the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917. This resiliency stemmed from the solidarity, flexibility, and leadership skills developed prior to the war by the combination of the community's religious character and practices and its communal organization. Confounding Bolshevik expectations, the community disappeared in the end not because it could not survive in the conditions of early Soviet socialism, but because it embodied a competing ideal for communalistic life and an alternative system of beliefs that could not be tolerated by a revolutionary regime committed to the implementation of a radical secularist vision of socialism.