Has There Also Been a Change in the Russian Orthodox Church Since the Political Reform? Discussion of Reform at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Author(s):  
Rudolf Prokschi
Author(s):  
Тимофей Ясеницкий

В настоящей статье содержится оценка прозелитической активности Галицкой грекокатолической митрополии на канонической территории Российской Православной Церкви в первой четверти XX в. Первоиерарх галицких униатов митрополит Андрей (Шептицкий) на протяжении многих лет участвовал в создании нелегальных грекокатолических структур в Российской империи. Разрушение монархического строя и политический кризис 1917 г. способствовали временному успеху униатов: в это время учреждается Российский экзархат католиков восточного обряда и основываются несколько униатских приходов в Новороссии и Малороссии. Впрочем, в исторической перспективе, начавшиеся советские антирелигиозные кампании полностью нивелировали все результаты униатской активности на территории Российской Социалистической Федеративной Советской Республики и Украинской Социалистической Советской Республики. This article assesses the proselytizing activity of the Greek Catholic Metropolis of Galicia on the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church in the first quarter of the 20th century. Metropolitan Andrey (Sheptytskyi), the first-hierarch of the Galician Uniates, for many years participated in the creation of illegal Greek Catholic structures in the Russian Empire. The collapse of the monarchical system and the political crisis of 1917 contributed to the Unitarians' temporary success: at that time the Russian Exarchate of Catholics of the Eastern rite was established and several Uniate parishes in Novorossia and Little Russia were founded. In the historical perspective, however, the beginning of the Soviet anti-religious campaigns completely negated all the results of the Unitarian activity on the territory of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic.


2019 ◽  
pp. 286-292
Author(s):  
Николай Сергеевич Черепенин

Изучение жизненных обстоятельств священнослужителей первой половины XX в. является важной составляющей изучения истории Русской Православной Церкви. Оно позволяет детально проследить некоторые процессы и явления, происходившие в Церкви того периода, на конкретных примерах. Данная статья посвящена священнику Петру Ильинскому, около сорока лет прослужившему на сельском приходе. Его служение раскрывается в статье в хронологическом порядке: педагогическая и хозяйственная деятельность пастыря дополняется описанием его публицистических трудов и заканчивается описанием его семьи и исповеднического подвига. Данная работа служит свидетельством незаурядного пастырского служения священника Петра в переломный момент жизни нашего государства и в достаточной мере иллюстрирует историческую эпоху конца XIX - первой половины XX веков на конкретном примере. The study of the life circumstances of clergymen in the first half of the 20th century is an important part of the study of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. It allows us to trace in detail some of the processes and phenomena that took place in the Church in that period, using concrete examples. This article is about the priest Peter Ilyinsky, who served forty years in a rural parish. His ministry is presented in chronological order: his teaching and economic activities are followed by a description of his publicist writings and ending with a description of his family and confessional deeds. This work is a testimony to the extraordinary pastoral ministry of the Priest Peter at a crucial point in the life of our nation, and illustrates the historical era of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century with concrete examples.


Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin

This chapter examines militant atheism under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, focusing on how the Bolsheviks approached religion from the revolution in 1917 until Stalin's death in 1953. Using legal and administrative regulation, extralegal repression and terror, and militant atheist propaganda, the Bolsheviks sought to build a new Communist world, remake society, and transform human nature. The chapter first provides a background on Russia's “old world” in order to understand the political, social, and cultural landscape that the Bolsheviks inherited when they seized power in October 1917. It then considers the Marxist–Leninist framework within which the Bolsheviks understood religion, the Bolsheviks' atheist propaganda and scientific enlightenment, and byt (culture of everyday life) as the final frontier in the Bolshevik Party's war against religion. It also describes the Bolshevik Party's adoption of the Stalinist religious policy, Stalin's wartime rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church, and his decision to abandon atheism.


2010 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Bogumił

Until the end of 1980s, the topic of Soviet persecutions was tabooed in the USSR. Political and social transitions that took place in that period finally eroded the wall of silence. The stories about Gulag past started to appear in the newspapers and the witnesses finally spoke. The reconstruction of the history of the Gulag, proposed at that time, became the cornerstone of the public memory of this historical experience. In my paper, I use Michel Foucault’s concept of anti-history in order to analyse the methods of interpretation and commemorating of these tragic events of the 20th century by the Memorial Society and by the Russian Orthodox Church. It was these two institutions who were the most active in the process of forming the contemporary perception of the Gulag. The interpretations proposed by them are comprehensive constructs that explain the Gulag system in all its complexity. On the basis of materials gathered during field research in Russia, I deconstruct the significance of secular and religious anti-history discourses and analyse their influence on the perceptions of the Soviet persecutions in today’s Russia.


2020 ◽  
pp. 149-180
Author(s):  
Радомир (Роман) Владимирович Булдаков

В настоящей публикации представлен ранее нигде не публиковавшийся Протокол Пензенского епархиального съезда духовенства и мирян, который проходил с 25 апреля по 1 мая 1917 г. Он отражает общее настроение рядового духовенства и мирян Русской Православной Церкви начала XX в. на примере конкретной епархии. Пензенский Съезд проходил одновременно с аналогичными Съездами многих других епархиальных центров, чьи постановления получили своё развитие на Всероссийском Съезде духовенства и мирян в Москве и далее на Поместном Соборе Православной Российской Церкви 1917- 1918 гг. Вопросы, рассматриваемые участниками Пензенского Съезда, касались как общецерковных проблем, так и внутренних дел самой епархии; часть постановлений вошла в состав решений Поместного Собора. Количество вопросов, поднятых на Съезде, превышает два десятка и относится к самым разным сферам церковно-государственных и церковно-общественных отношений, а также к внутренним преобразованиям самой Церкви, одновременно олицетворяя общую тенденцию к Её обновлению и являясь следствием этих перемен. Но среди них важнейшими, по мнению делегатов Съезда, считались вопросы об отношении к происходящим в стране политическим событиям и о поэтапной реформе церковной организации, начиная с прихода и заканчивая уровнем Поместной Российской Церкви. This publication presents the previously unpublished Protocol of the Penza Diocesan Congress of the Clergy and Laity, which took place from April 25 to May 1, 1917. It reflects the general mood of ordinary clergy and laity of the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 20th century by the example of a specific diocese. The Penza Congress was held simultaneously with similar Congresses of many other diocesan centers, whose resolutions were developed at the AllRussian Congress of Clergy and Laity in Moscow and further at the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917-1918. The issues considered by the participants of the Penza Congress concerned both general church problems and the internal affairs of the diocese itself; some of the decisions were included in the decisions of the Local Council. The number of issues raised at the Congress exceeds two dozen and relates to the most diverse spheres of church-state and church-social relations, as well as to the internal transformations of the Church itself, at the same time embodying the general tendency towards Her renewal and being a consequence of these changes. But among them the most important, in the opinion of the Congress delegates, were the questions about the attitude to the political events taking place in the country and about the gradual reform of church organization, from the parish level to the level of the Local Russian Church.


Author(s):  
N.A. Beliakova

This study aims at providing an overview of the everyday life of Russian nuns in Palestine after World War II. This research encompassed the following tasks: to analyze the range of ego-documents available today, characterizing the everyday life and internal motivation of women in choosing the church jurisdiction; to identify, on the basis of written sources, the most active supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate to examine the nuns’ activity as information agents of the Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet government; to characterize the actors influencing the everyday life of the Russian nuns in the context of the creation of the state of Israel and new borders dividing the Holy Land; to present the motives and instruments of influence employed by the representatives of both secu-lar and church diplomacies in respect to the women leading a monastic life; to describe consequences of including the nuns into the sphere of interest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR; to show the specific role of “Russian women” in the context of the struggle for securing positions of the USSR and the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in the region. The sources for the study were prodused by the state (correspondence between the state authorities, meeting notes) and from the religious actors (letters of nuns to the church authorities, reports of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, memoirs of the clergy). By combining the methods of micro-history and history of the everyday life with the political history of the Cold War, the study examines the agency of the nuns — a category of women traditionally unnoticeable in the political history. Due to the specificity of the sources, the study focuses exclusively on a group of the nuns of the Holy Land who came under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patri-archate. The majority of the Russian-speaking population of Palestine in the mid-1940s were women in the status of monastic residents (nuns and novices) and pilgrims, and in the 1940s–1950s, they were drawn into the geopolitical combinations of the Soviet Union. The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, staffed with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, becomes a key institution of influence in the region. This article shows how elderly nuns became an object of close attention and even funding by the Soviet state. The everyday life of the nuns became directly dependent on the activities of the Soviet agencies and Soviet-Israeli relations after the arri-val of the Soviet state representatives. At the same time, the nuns became key participants in the inter-jurisdictional conflicts and began to act as agents of influence in the region. The study analyzes numerous ego-documents created by the nuns themselves from the collection of the Council on the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the USSR Council of Ministers. The study shows how nuns positioned themselves as leading a monastic life in the written correspondence with the ROC authorities and staff of the Soviet MFA. The instances of influence of different secular authorities on the development of the female monasticism presented here point to promising research avenues for future reconstruction of the history of women in the Holy Land based on archival materials from state departments, alternative sources should also be found. The study focused on the life of elderly Russian nuns in the Holy Land and showed their activity in the context of the geopolitical transformations in the Near East in the 1940s–1950s.


Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin

This conclusion examines the demise of the Communist project, along with its vision to create an atheist society. Over the course of its history, Soviet atheism developed through direct engagement with religion. These engagements exposed atheism's contradictions, pointing to the deeper crisis within Soviet Communism. The conclusion first considers Mikhail Gorbachev's reintroduction of religion into Soviet public life, highlighted by his meeting with Patriarch Pimen (Izvekov) and the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, before explaining why Soviet Communism never managed to overcome religion or produce an atheist society. It also discusses the political transformations of perestroika and cites the history of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow as an allegory for the fate of religion and atheism under Soviet Communism. Finally, it asks why the Soviet Communist Party orchestrated the divorce between Communism and atheism, and between the party's Communist ideology and political power.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document