The Path from the Idea Of Social Truth to Compromise with the Bolsheviks in the Publications of the Ideologist of the Renovationist Split, Prof. B.V. Titlinov

Abstract

The article discusses the development of the idea of the “social truth of the Gospel” in the works of Professor of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy B.V. Titlinov, who, after the February Revolution of 1917, became one of the active supporters of the new liberal government, and in 1922 veered into the Renovationist schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, became a key figure in Renovationism, one of the ideologists of the Renovationist schism. The author of the study, based on the texts of Titlinov from different years, proposes to identify the point that made it possible to establish a certain compromise between the renovation movement and the Bolshevik authorities of socialist Russia. A feature of this historical moment was the situation in which what for B.V. Titlinov and other Renovationists was an attempt to reconcile Christianity and revolutionary socialism, for the Bolsheviks themselves it was exclusively a tool for the defeat of Christianity in Russia. The antagonism of these two views — Christianity and Bolshevism — was manifested even at the time of the First Russian Revolution of 1905-1907, although the desire for social truth was also expressed by church liberal democrats of these years, to which Titlinov can be attributed, and the leader of the Bolshevik socialists V.I. Lenin.