The moscow courtyards of the eastern patriarchates and their struggle for the "property of the entire greek nation" after the revolution of 1917

Abstract

The article examines the situation of the farmsteads of the four Eastern Patriarchates in post-revolutionary Moscow. Special attention is paid to the struggle of the official representatives of the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem for their Moscow apartment houses reflected in correspondence with various Soviet authorities. Responding to the attempts motivated by the decrees of the Soviet authorities to nationalize the households of the farmsteads, their abbots used a wide range of arguments, up to the declared concern for the Middle Eastern proletariat. At first they tried to justify the inviolability of their property by the charitable nature of the use of the income received from it, then they shifted the emphasis to the secularism of the institutions they represent (the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem) and, finally, they began to assert the impossibility of nationalizing what, in their opinion, has already been nationalized by the Greek nation. The fluctuations of representatives of various Soviet bodies, to which the abbots of Greek farmsteads, including the Moscow Soviet and the NKID of the RSFSR, applied with their petitions, are shown. In fact, the end of the question was put at the beginning of 1919 by the chairman of the VIII Liquidation Department of the NKYU, P.A. Krasikov, who had no doubt what policy regarding religious organizations should be carried out in Soviet Russia (a policy ensuring their complete early liquidation). The seizure of apartment buildings foreshadowed the subsequent termination of the activities of the Moscow farmsteads of the Eastern Patriarchates, although attempts were made to revive it until the second half of the 1920s, and Constantinople - even until the second half of the 1930s.