The true orthodox church of Russia

Abstract

For the last 60 years or more, the existence of the True Orthodox Church has been one of the best-kept secrets of Soviet 'reality'. The 'True Orthodox', or 'Catacomb', or 'Tikhonite' Church claims to be the direct descendant of the Russian Orthodox Church as it existed before the revolution and in the first decade after the revolution under Patriarch Tikhon and his successor, the locum tenens of the patriarchal throne, Metropolitan Petr of Krutitsy. In 1927, however, the True Orthodox argue, power in the Russian Church was usurped by one of the senior hierarchs, Metropolitan Sergi of Nizhni Novgorod, who issued a declaration in which he thanked the Soviet state for its great services to Orthodoxy, declared that the Soviet state's joys were the church's joys and its sorrows the church's sorrows, and placed himself in more or less unconditional submission to the atheist state. This declaration was rejected not only by Metropolitan Petr, the lawful head of the Russian Orthodox Church (in prison at that time), but also by most of the senior bishops of the church and a large proportion of the faithful (90 per cent of the parishes in the Urals, for example). The schism thus created was vigQlously exploited and deepened by the KGB, who sent to the camps or shot any bishop or priest who did not accept the declaration of Metropolitan Sergi, and with the active support of Sergi, who denounced his opponents as 'counter-revolutionaries' the equivalent of a death sentence in those terrible times. So those who rejected the declaration were forced to go underground, forming what came to be called the True Orthodox Church. I The True Orthodox justify thdr separation from the Moscow Patriarchate on the following grounds: