Soviet Orthodox Vatican – Weekend – Kommersant

In 1947-1948, the Soviet leadership pondered perhaps the most bizarre of their utopian projects. It hoped to create a “church international” of more or less global scale, which would be coordinated from Moscow. Thus, in the beginning of the world confrontation, another front was to open – the religious one.

Text: Sergey Khodnev

Hierarchs of all the Orthodox churches of the world come to Moscow. The Assembly proclaims itself an Ecumenical Council – a great historical milestone: the last Council, which has a generally recognized status of an ecumenical one, was convened in the East in time immemorial, at the end of the 8th century. The Council recognizes the Moscow patriarchal see as the main one for the entire world Orthodoxy. And the Patriarch of Moscow, accordingly, becomes the Patriarch of the Ecumenical.

Of course, many hotheads have been dreaming of something like this since at least the 17th century, when Patriarch Nikon imagined himself to be the eastern analogue of the Pope, “shining brightly to the whole world.” Some, it seems, continue to dream to this day. But still, it’s one thing when it’s all journalistic dreams. And it is quite another thing when such plans are busily outlined in the clerical documents of a godless state – and with all sorts of class alien terms and expressions. Georgy Karpov, chairman of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, in his report to comrades from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, writes without hesitation: “Ecumenical Council”, “assigning the title of Ecumenical to the Moscow Patriarchate”, and so on. This is early 1947.

There seemed to be foreign policy conveniences for such a church-historical revolution. Orthodox Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia with their autocephalous churches – all these were now countries of people’s democracy, which promised to restore “the same order in the relationship between church and state, which exists in the Soviet Union”; local church leaders knew perfectly well that disputes with the state under this order easily turn into executions and camps, and therefore their consent was, one might say, in your pocket. The same applies to the Orthodox communities of Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and there is nothing to say about the Georgian Orthodox Church. Patriarch Maxim of Constantinople had a benevolent attitude towards the Soviet Union, in Greece the communists fought with the government – and, as it seemed, not without success. The ancient patriarchates of the Middle East remained – the Church of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, but the semi-poor there and the patriarchs accustomed to the humiliated position, as always, could be bribed without any fuss.

The prerequisites were internal all the more so: after the “unforgettable meeting” in September 1943, when three hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church were received by Stalin in the Kremlin in the middle of the night, there were plenty of miracles. They allowed the election of a patriarch, released bishops, opened churches (and did not close those that were open in the occupied territories), abolished the Union of Militant Atheists, crushed the Renovationists, allowed showing the clergy on the movie screen in a positive context. Finally, in the form of paternal care, they formed the same Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by the Chekist Karpov, a half-educated seminarian. Who did not miss the opportunity to publicly make it clear that all this well-being is a gift for loyalty, “approval by the authorities of the position that the Church took in relation to the state in the pre-war decade and during the war years.”

But it’s not just about approval. Still, it is very symptomatic that during that night meeting in 1943, Stalin dropped: “You need to create your own Vatican …” He could be ironic as much as he liked about how many divisions the Pope had, but the Vatican clearly unnerved him, especially under end of the war and after. Pope Pius XII did not like the Yalta map of Europe at all, he sounded the alarm about the communist threat, and his abilities and authority in Moscow were not so mocking. This was all the more inconvenient because Catholic Poland and Czechoslovakia were now in Moscow’s zone of influence. And so it happened that at the dawn of the Cold War, it was the Holy See for the communist leadership that turned out to be the number one ideological enemy, almost the main warmonger, “the gloomy torch of the world fire.”

Something had to be opposed to this – and therefore they attacked the Uniates of Western Ukraine, organizing their forcible “reunification” with the Orthodox Church. Further plans, judging by the documents of Karpov’s department, were phantasmagoric: to put together in the traditionally Catholic regions of the USSR their own, Soviet, independent from the Vatican Catholic churches using an asset from the Old Catholics (a group that broke away from Rome back in the 19th century and does not recognize papal primacy). China still behaves in much the same way with regard to its Catholics, but Soviet intentions went further: Karpov suggested that it was necessary to completely deprive the Pope of Rome of universal autocracy, to plant the same convenient system of independent national churches throughout the Catholic world as in Orthodoxy. But for this, very powerful propaganda levers of planetary significance were needed.

Thus, in the department of the Soviet “chief prosecutor”, the idea first arose of creating, under the auspices of Moscow, a coalition of almost all the Christian denominations of the world, except, of course, the Roman Catholics, which would come out as a united front against the reactionary policy of the Vatican, at least in the form of loud appeals.

But then it immediately became obvious that the initiative was lost. Protestant denominations have been conducting ecumenical activity all over the world for more than thirty years, inviting all other Christians to it, and were about to proclaim the creation of the World Council of Churches at the next congress. It was difficult for the Soviet security officers to create an alternative ecumenical movement from scratch in a couple of years, and even authoritative enough to dictate their will to the world.

And then a “plan B” was formed: if not a pan-Christian, but a pan-Orthodox congress in Moscow. The status of the Ecumenical Council, willy-nilly, would have given it a certain showiness, and this council itself would have condemned the papacy. And at the same time I would decide what position the united front of the Orthodox churches should take in relation to the ecumenical movement. By the end of 1946, the Soviet leadership itself had a vague idea of ​​this position: it seems that the Anglicans are in charge in ecumenical circles, and from the war years, by inertia, they were perceived as almost allies; if only the Orthodox get an influential representation in the nomenclature of world ecumenism, then it would seem that the Anglicans can also be manipulated. And this is still Britain, and a fair amount of Christians in the United States – the prospects are dizzying.

But even from these castles in the air, little came of it. Firstly, the eastern hierarchs turned out to be not at all as malleable as expected, and secondly, Western intelligence services, and the Vatican too, took the Soviet plans very seriously and pressed all available buttons. The idea of ​​the Ecumenical Council had to be shelved: there was no general agreement on the possibility of holding it in Moscow, the Russian Church was politely offered to arrange it, if it ever came to that, somewhere on Mount Athos or in the Holy Land.

Here, the pan-Orthodox conference really met in Moscow with visible pomp, it really met in the Church of the Resurrection in Sokolniki from July 8 to 18, 1948. But he no longer had a pre-Council status: he had to be satisfied with the fact that it was timed to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the de facto autocephaly of the Russian Church and that the latter received countless rhetorical and diplomatic honors as a result. The level of representation of other churches, however, was not very brilliant, there was no church “summit”, in addition, delegations of Greek churches took part in ceremonial services, but defiantly refused to participate in the meetings.

The delegates in the final resolutions branded the Vatican for “reactionary, anti-national and anti-democratic policies”, evasively spoke about contacts with the Anglicans (if such and such doctrinal postulates are revised from the other side, then the Orthodox Church is ready to recognize the reality of the Anglican priesthood), conciliatory spoke out on the theme of the old and the new style (let the single date of Easter be preserved, and as for fixed holidays, let each church decide the issue independently) and nevertheless called on the Orthodox to refuse to participate in the ecumenical movement. And at the same time they adopted the “Appeal to Christians of the whole world”, sustained in the most desperate colors, but carefully choosing the words: “Let us not close our eyes, like an ostrich, before the impending manifestations of a new human hatred, let us not plug our ears before the furious roar of a new war. No one will dispute that the imperialists, big and small, terrorists, dictators and misanthropes of all kinds, have assumed the satanic role of instigators and preparers of a new crazy human self-destruction, the end of which will be the end of culture and the meaning of life. But we, united in the name of the King of the world – the Lord Christ, will become armor against all attempts and actions aimed at breaking the peace, etc. However, Orthodox churches outside the Soviet bloc did not see anything universally binding in all this.

It is often believed that the results of this Pan-Orthodox Conference so disappointed Stalin that it was then, in the summer of 1948, that he lost interest in his own ecclesiastical renaissance. In reality, most likely, the matter is in the limited capacity of the Council for Religious Affairs – some 17 people in Moscow, plus a hundred or something authorized locally, and everything is full of routine affairs in addition to the worldwide anti-Vatican association of Christians. Georgy Karpov, of course, sensitively caught signals from above, but he was hardly quick enough. Back in September 1947, the Party Department of Agitation and Propaganda was headed by Suslov, who could not bear the spirit of “priestry”. At the beginning of 1948, the government “turntable” was turned off in Karpov’s office – and he unsuccessfully sent petition after petition, apparently not realizing that in bureaucratic language this is the most eloquent “black mark”. Whether the successes of the Soviet nuclear project, or the changing situation in the Middle East, is to blame, but the top leadership of the country actually cooled off rather quickly to the idea of ​​the church “Warsaw Pact”. And in the same 1948, another attack on the church began.

It’s not that since then the party elite and bodies have not tried to use it in foreign policy interests at all – they have used it, and how. The unfortunate patriarchs, in their messages for the main holidays of the Christian year, obediently scourged another military clique, and ecumenism eventually came in handy as an opportunity to testify from foreign tribunes about the peacefulness and broad democracy of the Soviet system. But, firstly, by the mature Khrushchev times, this Stalinist horror of the Vatican dried up. And secondly, the courage of ideas has dried up: where is the on-duty murmur about world peace and where is the restoration of medieval Byzantine forms in the Soviet context. It dried up for a long time, but not forever.

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