THE GREAT PURGES AND THE RUSSIAN CHURCH

Vladimir Moss

In the summer of 1934, Stalin summoned Leningrad Party Boss Sergei

Kirov to spend the summer at his dacha in Sochi, “to join him and Zhdanov in
laying down the guidelines for the rewriting of history textbooks. Published
in 1936, Remarks Concerning the Conspectus of a Textbook on the History of the
USSR produced an abrupt reversal in Soviet historiography, establishing the
Soviet regime as the custodian of national interests and traditions. The new
history celebrated the great men of Russia’s Tsarist past – Peter the Great,
Suvorov, Kutuzov – whose state-building, military victories and territorial
conquests had created modern Russia. It was the autocratic [in this context –
“absolutist”] tradition… which was highlighted, so establishing a natural link
between the new patriotism and the cult of Stalin.”1

It was ironic that Stalin, who had spent the last five years in an
unprecedented assault on everything Russian, should now seek to celebrate
the great tsars and military leaders of Russia’s past. Of course, not all of them
were celebrated - Nicholas II would remain “bloody Nicholas” to the end. But
Stalin was proud to see himself as the successor of the more totalitarian and
bloody tsars such as Ivan the Terrible (his favourite) and Peter the Great.

In this policy, as Alan Bullock writes, “sentiment and calculation coincided.

To combine the Marxist vision with the deep-seated nationalist and patriotic
feelings of the Russian people was to give it a wider and stronger emotional
appeal than ideology by itself could generate. As early as June 1934 Pravda
had sounded the new note, ‘For the Fatherland’, ‘which alone kindles the
flame of heroism, the flame of creative initiative in all fields, in all the realms
of our rich, our many-sided life… The defence of the Fatherland is the
supreme law… For the Fatherland, for its honour, glory, might and
prosperity!’”2

Other factors influencing Stalin’s change of tactics probably included the

failure of the revolution to catch fire in other countries – and the success of
Hitler’s nationalist socialism. Probably he came to realize that, as Mussolini
had put it, “the nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that it was
annihilated. Instead, we see it rise, living, palpitating before us!” Hence his
adoption of the slogan: “Socialism in one country”, which emphasized the
national uniqueness of Russia. Hence, too, his persecution of many ethnic
minorities from the early 1930s, transporting them en masse from one end of

1
Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives , London, 1991, p. 702.
2
Bullock, op. cit., p. 701.
the Union to the other, and the artificially-induced famine of 1932-33, whose
aim appears to have been to wipe out Ukrainian nationalism. After all, in
spite of the fact that Stalin was Georgian, Lenin had called him “a real and
true ‘nationalist-socialist’, and even a vulgar Great Russian bully”.

In the middle of the 1930s, perhaps as a result of his new national policy,
Stalin began to ease up in his unprecedentedly savage war on the Russian
people. The God-haters seemed to have triumphed, violence was no longer so
necessary, and they were now building a new, godless civilization to replace
the old one of Holy Russia. But the reign of fear continued, and was about to
be ratcheted up yet again…

The West, to its shame, cooperated with the red beast. America now joined
the European nations recognizing the Soviet Union, and helped its rapid
industrial growth through trade. Moreover, comparing their own economic
slump with the Soviet performance, westerners even began to applaud the
achievements of Communism, as journalists closed their eyes to Stalin’s
appalling assault on his own people. “The chief luminaries of the British
Labour Party,” writes Norman Davies, “wrote a glowing survey of the ‘New
Civilization’. The chief reporter of the New York Times, Walter Duranty,
probably a victim of blackmail, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his
enthusiastic descriptions, which have since been found to be completely and
knowingly false.”3 Probably the cleverest of these fellow-travellers was the
famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who had spent his life
championing democracy and equality, but who in this period spoke out for
dictatorship – not only Stalin, but also Hitler and Mussolini!

“Totalitarianism,” writes Piers Brendon, “won adherents across frontiers,

for the failures of capitalism were palpable during the Depression and the
democracies suffered a sharp crisis of confidence. Hearing that Stalin had
achieved planned progress and social equality [!], that Hitler had abolished
unemployment and built autobahns, that Mussolini had revived Italy and
made the trains run on time, people in Britain, France and the United States
were inclined to believe that Utopia was another country…”4

“The trauma of the Great Slump,” writes Eric Hobsbawn, “was underlined
by the fact that the one country that had clamorously broken with capitalism
appeared to be immune to it: the Soviet Union. While the rest of the world, or
at least liberal Western capitalism, stagnated, the USSR was engaged in
massive ultra-rapid industrialization under its new Five Year plans. From
1929 to 1940 Soviet industrial production tripled, at the very least. It rose from
5 per cent of the world’s manufactured products in 1929 to 18 per cent in 1938,

3
Davies, Europe at War 1939-1945. No Simple Victory , London: Pan Books, 2006, p.
49. Duranty also mocked the truthful dispatches of British journalists Gareth
Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge on the famine in Ukraine.
4 Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, London: Pimlico, 2001, p. xvi.
while during the same period the joint share of the USA, Britain and France,
fell from 59 per cent to 52 per cent of the world’s total. What was more, there
was [supposedly] no unemployment. These achievements impressed foreign
observers of all ideologies, including a small but influential flow of socio-
economic tourists to Moscow in 1930-35, more than the visible primitiveness
and inefficiency of the Soviet economy, or the ruthlessness and brutality of
Stalin’s collectivisation and mass repression. For what they were trying to
come to terms with was not the actual phenomenon of the USSR but the
breakdown of their own economic system, the depth of the failure of Western
capitalism. What was the secret of the Soviet system? Could anything be
learned from it? Echoing Russia’s Five Year Plans, ‘Plan’ and ‘Planning’
became buzz-words in politics… Even the very Nazis plagiarized the idea, as
Hitler introduced a ‘Four Year Plan’ in 1933.”5

So far, Stalin had simply continued the work of Lenin on a larger, more
systematic scale. But in 1937 he began to do what Lenin had never done:
destroy his own party. According to Hobsbawm: “Between 1934 and 1939
four or five million party members and officials were arrested on political
grounds, four or five thousand of them were executed without trial, and the
next (eighteenth) Party Congress which met in the spring of 1939, contained a
bare thirty-seven survivors of the 1827 delegates who had been present at the
seventeenth in 1934.”6

Norman Davies writes that Stalin “killed every single surviving member of
Lenin’s original Bolshevik government [Ordzhonikidze killed himself].
Through endless false accusations, he created a climate of collective paranoia
which cast everyone and anyone into the role of suspected spy or traitor or
‘enemy’. Through orchestrated show trials, he forced distinguished
Communists to confess to absurd, indecent charges. Through the so-called
‘purges’, he would thin the ranks of the Communist Party, and then, having
put the comrades into a mood of zombie-like deference, he would order the
exercise to be repeated again and again. Everyone accused would be cajoled
or tortured into naming ten or twenty supposed associates in crime. By 1938
he reached he point where he was ordering the shooting of citizens by
random quota: 50,000 this month from this province, 30,000 next month from
the next province. The OGPU (the latest incarnation of the Cheka) sweated
overtime. (They too were regularly purged.) The death pits filled up. The
GULag became the biggest employer of labour in the land. State officials,
artists and writers, academics and soldiers were all put through the grinder.
Then, in March 1939, it stopped, or at least slowed down. The Census Bureau
had just enough time to put an announcement in Izvestia saying that 17
million people were missing, before the census-takers themselves were

5
Hobsbawn, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914 -1991, London:
Abacus, 1994, pp. 96, 97.
6
Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p. 391.
shot…” 7 Thus was fulfilled the prediction of Pierre Vergniaud in 1793
concerning the French revolution: “There is reason to fear that, like Saturn,
the Revolution may devour each of its children in turn”.8

One of the few Old Bolsheviks who refused to incriminate themselves was
Nicholas Bukharin, whom Lenin had called “the party’s favourite”. In his
“Letter to a Future Generation of Party Leaders”, he wrote: “I feel my
helplessness before a hellish machine, which has acquired gigantic power,
enough to fabricate organised slander… and which uses the Cheka’s bygone
authority to cater to Stalin’s morbid suspiciousness… Any member of the
Central Committee, any member of the Party can be rubbed out, turned into a
traitor or terrorist.”9

Bukharin wrote to the Politburo from prison that he was innocent of the
crimes to which he had confessed under interrogation – and, probably,
torture. But he said that “he would submit to the Party because he had
concluded that there was some ‘great and bold political idea behind the
general purge’ which overshadowed all else. ‘It would be petty of me to put
the fortunes of my own person on the same level as those tasks of world-
historical importance, which rest upon all your shoulders’…

“During his final speech from the dock [he] said that he had given in to the
prison investigators after having completely re-evaluated his past. ‘For when
you ask yourself: “If you must die, what are you dying for?” – an absolutely
black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. And, on the
contrary, everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union acquires new
dimensions in a man’s mind. This is the end disarmed me completely and led
me to bend my knees before the Party and the country… For in reality the
whole country stands behind Stalin; he is the hope of the future…”10

But it was Trotsky whom Stalin hated most, and around whom so many of
the trials and executions revolved. “By the mid-1930s,” write Christopher
Andrews and Vasily Mitrokhin, “Stalin had lost all sense of proportion in his
pursuit of Trotskyism in all its forms, both real and imaginary. Trotsky had
become an obsession who dominated many of Stalin’s waking hours and
probably interfered with his sleep at night. As Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac
Deutscher, concludes: ‘The frenzy with which [Stalin] pursued the feud,
making it the paramount preoccupation of international communism as well
as of the Soviet Union and subordinating to it all political, tactical, intellectual
and other interests, beggars description; there is in the whole of history
hardly another case in which such immense resources of power and
propaganda were employed against a single individual.’ The British diplomat

7
Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 50.
8
Bullock, op. cit., p. 511.
9
Bukharin, in Bullock, op. cit., p. 541; Brendon, op. cit., p. 568.
10
Brendon, op. cit., p. 569.
R.A. Sykes later wisely described Stalin’s world view as ‘a curious mixture of
shrewdness and nonsense’. Stalin’s shrewdness was apparent in the way that
he outmanoeuvred his rivals after the death of Lenin, gradually acquired
absolute power as general secretary, and later outnegotiated Churchill and
Roosevelt during their wartime conferences. Historians have found it difficult
to accept that so shrewd a man also believed in so much nonsense. But it is no
more possible to understand Stalin without acknowledging his addiction to
conspiracy theories about Trotsky (and others) than it is to comprehend Hitler
without grasping the passion with which he pursued his even more terrible
and absurd conspiracy theories about the Jews.”11

In September, 1936 Stalin appointed Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov as head of

the NKVD in succession to Yagoda. As he “supervised the spread of the
Terror, arresting ever-larger circles of suspects to be tortured into confessing
imaginary crimes, the Soviet press worked the population up into a frenzy of
witch-hunting against Trotskyite spies and terrorists. Yezhov claimed that
Yagoda had tried to kill him by spraying his curtains with cyanide. He then
arrested most of Yagoda’s officers and had them shot. Then he arrested
Yagoda himself. ‘Better that ten innocent men should suffer than one spy get
away,’ Yezhov announced. ‘When you chop wood, chips fly!’”12

In November, 1938 Yezhov himself was arrested and killed. He was

succeeded by Stalin’s fellow-Georgian, Lavrenty Beria…

With the murder of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 the last possible threat to
Stalin’s absolute authority from the Old Guard was gone. For, as Bullock
writes, “his suspicion never slept: it was precisely the Bolshevik Old Guard
whom he distrusted most. Even men who had been closely associated with
him in carrying out the Second Revolution were executed, committed suicide
or died in the camps.”13

Hannah Arendt defined the true role of Stalin’s party purges: as

“an instrument of permanent instability.” “The state of permanent
instability, in turn” writes Masha Gessen, “was the ultimate
instrument of control, which sapped the energies and attention of
all. The best way to insure being able to strike when it is least
expected is to scramble all expectations.” 14

The manifest absurdity of the trials, and of the idea that so many of Lenin’s
and Stalin’s closest and most loyal collaborators were in fact spies, did not

11 Andrews and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, London: The Allen Press, 1999, pp. 93-94.
12 Montefiore, Titans of History, pp. 522-523.
13
Bullock, op. cit., p. 425.
14 Masha Gessen, “The Very Strange Writings of Putin’s New Chief of Staff”, The New Yorker,

August 15, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-very-strange-writings-

of-putins-new-chief-of-staff.
stop the “useful idiots” of the West from justifying the charade. Thus, as Tony
Judt writes, in 1936 the French Ligue des Droits de l’Homme established a
commission to investigate the great Moscow trials of that year. The
conclusion to its report state: “It would be a denial of the French Revolution…
to refuse [the Russian] people the right to strike down the fomenters of civil
war, or conspirators in liaison with foreigners.”15 Again, the US ambassador
Joseph Davies wrote to Washington that “the indictments of the defendants in
the Moscow show trials had been proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt and
that ‘the adjudication of the punishment’ had been entirely justified’”…16

Two events portended the coming of this unprecedentedly bloody

massacre. The first was the suicide of Stalin’s wife, which made him turn
more in on himself. (There is a parallel here with his favourite Ivan the
Terrible, who also began to get worse after the death of his first wife.) The
second was the murder of Kirov on December 1, 1934. As Evgenia Ginzburg
put it in Into the Whirlwind: “That year, 1937, really began on the 1st of
December, 1934”.17 Although it is likely that Stalin himself ordered the killing,
it – together with the continued opposition of Trotsky from abroad - became
the excuse to root out supposed counter-revolutionary conspiracies and
fascist spy-rings within the party.

The great purges of 1937-38 wiped out a large proportion of the leaders of
Soviet society, and not only the Party. In fact, no section of society was
exempt from Stalin’s murderous cull of his own people. He used the term
“enemy of the people” to wipe out anyone who represented the remotest
prospect of opposition to the regime. In spite of these horrors, it was precisely
in 1937 that Stalin said: “Life has become better, life has become happier”!

His assault on the army was still more thorough than his assault on the
party. Thus, according to the Soviet press, “the military purge accounted for:

“3 of the 5 Soviet marshals

“11 of the 15 army commanders
“8 of the 9 fleet admirals and admirals Grade 1
“50 of the 57 corps commanders
“154 of the 186 divisional commanders

“16 of the 16 army political commissars

“25 of the 28 corps commissars
“58 of the 64 divisional commanders

15 Judt, “Francois Furet (1927-1997)”, in When the Facts Change, London: Vintage, 2015, p. 352.
16
Service, Comrades, p. 208.
17
Ginzburg, in Bullock, op. cit., p. 516.
 “11 of the 11 vice-commissars of defence
“98 of the 109 members of the Supreme Military Soviet

The effect was not confined to the upper echelons. Between May 1937 and
September 1938, 36,761 army officers and over 3000 navy officers were
dismissed. Allowing for 13,000 re-enrolled and adding the numbers
‘repressed’ after September 1938, this gives a total for 1937-41 of 43,000
officers at battalion and company-commander level arrested and either shot
or sent to the camps (the great majority) or permanently dismissed. Roy
Medvedev sums up an operation without parallel in the striking sentence:
‘Never has the officer staff of any army suffered such great losses in any war
as the Soviet Army suffered in this time of peace.’”18

“However,” writes Brendon, “as the liquidation of top managers took its
toll on the economy and the armed forces suffered a further assault, few
doubted that Russia’s capacity to resist alien aggression was being seriously
impaired. So on 24 January 1938 Stalin touched the brakes and changed
direction, just as he had done in 1930 when he wrote his article ‘Dizzy with
Success’, condemning the excesses of collectivisation. Now he launched a
campaign against false informers, those who had denounced others in order
to save their skins. He turned his withering gaze on the secret police, who had
reckoned that their ‘personal salvation lay in swimming’ with the tide of
terror. The purgers themselves should be purged, though no one knew who
would accomplish this or how far they would go.”19

In just one day - September 12, 1938 - Stalin killed 3173 people -
more than all the death sentences in the Russian Empire from 1905 to
1913 inclusive.

We should also not forget the foreign victims of the Terror. Trotskyites,
real and imaginary, were killed all around the world; even in Spain, the
NKVD was as occupied in destroying the Trotskyite organization POUM as in
fighting fascists. 20 Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin write:
“Comintern representatives in Moscow from around the world lived in
constant fear of denunciation and execution. Many were at even greater risk
than their Soviet colleagues. By early 1937, following investigations by the
NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), Stalin had convinced himself that
Comintern was a hotbed of subversion and foreign espionage. He told Georgi
Dmitrov, who had become its General Secretary three years earlier, ‘All of
you there in the Comintern are working in the hands of the enemy.’ Nikolai
Yezhov, the head of the NKVD whose sadism and diminutive stature
combined to give him the nickname ‘Poison Dwarf’, echoed his master’s voice.
‘The biggest spies,’ he told Dmitrov, ‘were working in the Communist

18
Bullock, op. cit., pp. 547-548.
19
Brendon, op. cit., p. 565.
20 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, p. 95.
International’. Each night, unable to sleep, the foreign Communists and
Comintern officials who had been given rooms at the Hotel Lux in the centre
of Moscow waited for the sound of a car drawing up at the hotel entrance in
the early hour, then heard the heavy footsteps of NKVD men echo along the
corridors, praying that they would stop at someone else’s door. Those who
escaped arrest listened with a mixture of relief and horror as the night’s
victims were taken from their rooms and driven away, never to return. Some,
for whom the nightly suspense became too much, shot themselves or jumped
to their deaths in the inner courtyard. Only a minority of the hotel’s foreign
guests escaped the knock on the door. Many of their death warrants were
signed personally by Stalin. Mao’s ferocious security chief, Kang Sheng, who
had been sent to Moscow to learn his trade, enthusiastically co-operated with
the NKVD in the hunt for mostly imaginary traitors among Chinese
émigrés…”21

In March, 2014 an inter-departmental Commission for the Defence

of State Secrets lengthened the period of secrecy for Cheka -KGB
documents in the period 1917-1991 to the following thirty years (that
is, until 2044). Under the scope of this decision fell the whole mass
of archival documents touching on the Great Terror of 1937-38.” 22
There is a great irony, even a great mystery here: what has already
been revealed about the Great Terror is already so appalling, so
unprecedented, that it is difficult to imagine that further revelations
from closed archives could add anything significant to the horror of
what we already know…

The category of the population that suffered most during Stalin’s great
purges – and this fact has been woefully neglected by secular historians - was
neither the party, nor the army, but the Orthodox clergy, followed by the
Orthodox laity. If Metropolitan Sergius, deputy leader of the official Russian
Church, thought that by his “Declaration” of loyalty to the Communist state
in 1927 he would “save the Church”, the next few years would prove him
terribly wrong. From 1935 the Bolsheviks, having repressed most of the True
Orthodox clergy, began to repress the sergianists – i.e. those who accepted
Sergius’ leadership and justified his Declaration. In fact, the sergianists often
received longer sentences than their True Orthodox brothers who rejected
their submission to the antichristian state, and whom they had betrayed. This
only went to show how futile their Judas-like collaboration with the
Antichrist, and betrayal of their brothers in Christ, had been. Even a recent
biography of Sergius by a sergianist author accepts this fact: “If Metropolitan
Sergius, in agreeing in his name to publish the Declaration of 1927 composed
by the authorities, hoping to buy some relief for the Church and the clergy,

21 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World, London: Penguin, 2006, pp. 3-4.
22 Pater Alexander, Facebook communication, June 8, 2018.
then his hopes not only were not fulfilled, but the persecutions after 1927
became still fiercer, reaching truly hurricane-force in 1937-38.”23

In the nineteen years before the Great Terror of 1937-38, Soviet power killed:
128 bishops; 26,777 clergy; 7,500 professors; about 9,000 doctors; 94,800
officers; 1,000,000 soldiers; 200,000 policemen; 45,000 teachers; 2,200,000
workers and peasants. Besides that, 16 million Orthodox Russians died from
hunger and three million from forced labour in the camps.24 As for the years
of the Great Terror, according to Russian government figures, in 1937 alone
136,900 clergy were arrested, of whom 106,800 were killed (there were 180,000
clergy in Russia before the revolution). Again, between 1917 and 1980, 200,000
clergy were executed and 500,000 others were imprisoned or sent to the
camps.25 The numbers of functioning Orthodox churches declined from 54,692
in 1914 to 39,000 at the beginning of 1929 to 15, 835 on April 1, 1936.26 By the
beginning of the Second World War, there were none at all in Belorussia
(Kolarz), “less than a dozen” in Ukraine (Bociurkiw), and a total of 150-200 in
the whole of Russia.27

This was, without a doubt, the greatest persecution of Christianity in

history. But it did not wipe out the faith: the census of 1937 established that
one-third of city-dwellers and two-thirds of country-dwellers still believed in
God. Stalin’s plan that the Name of God should not be named in Russia by
the year 1937 had failed…

Nevertheless, the immediate outlook for believers was bleak indeed. Thus
E.L. writes about Hieromartyr Bishop Damascene: “He warmed the hearts of
many, but the masses remained… passive and inert, moving in any direction

23 Sergius Fomin, Strazh Doma Gospodnia (Guardian of the House of the Lord), Moscow, 2003,
p. 262.
24
Kharbinskoe Vremia, February, 1937, N 28, in Protopriest John Stukach,
“Vyskomerie kak prepona k uiedineniu” (Haughtiness as an obstacle to union),
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=page&pid=1357
25
A document of the Commission attached to the President of the Russian
Federation on the Rehabilitation of the Vi ctims of Political Repressions, January
5, 1996; Service Orthodoxe de Presse (Orthodox Press Service), N 204, January,
1996, p. 15. The rate of killing slowed down considerably in the following years.
In 1939 900 clergy were killed, in 1940 – 1100, in 1941 – 1900, in 1943 – 500. In the
period 1917 to 1940 205 Russian hierarchs “disappeared without trace”; 59
disappeared in 1937 alone. According to another source, from October, 1917 to
June, 1941 inclusive, 134,000 clergy were killed, of whom the majority (8 0,000)
were killed between 1928 and 1940 ( Cyril Mikhailovich Alexandrov, in V.
Lyulechnik, “Tserkov’ i KGB” (The Church and the KGB), in
http://elmager.livejournal.com/217784.html ).
26
Nicholas Werth, “A State against its People”, in Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas
Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Packowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean -Louis
Margolin, The Black Book of Communism , London: Harvard University Press, 1999,
pp. 172, 173.
27
Nathanael Davis, A Long Wal k to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian
Orthodoxy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003, p. 13.
in accordance with an external push, and not their inner convictions… The
long isolation of Bishop Damascene from Soviet life, his remoteness from the
gradual process of sovietization led him to an unrealistic assessment of the
real relations of forces in the reality that surrounded him. Although he
remained unshaken himself, he did not see… the desolation of the human
soul in the masses. This soul had been diverted onto another path – a slippery,
opportunistic path which led people where the leaders of Soviet power – bold
men who stopped at nothing in their attacks on all moral and material values
– wanted them to go… Between the hierarchs and priests who had languished
in the concentration camps and prisons, and the mass of the believers,
however firmly they tried to stand in the faith, there grew an abyss of mutual
incomprehension. The confessors strove to raise the believers onto a higher
plane and bring their spiritual level closer to their own. The mass of believers,
weighed down by the cares of life and family, blinded by propaganda,
involuntarily went in the opposite direction, downwards. Visions of a future
golden age of satiety, of complete liberty from all external and internal
restrictions, of the submission of the forces of nature to man, deceitful
perspectives in which fantasy passed for science… were used by the
Bolsheviks to draw the overwhelming majority of the people into their nets.
Only a few individuals were able to preserve a loftiness of spirit. This
situation was exploited very well by Metropolitan Sergius…” 28

Sergius has had many apologists. Some have claimed that he “saved the
Church” for the future. This claim cannot be justified. He saved only a false
church that had been morally crushed. It was rather the Catacomb Church,
which “in a sense saved the official Church from complete destruction
because the Soviet authorities were afraid to force the entire Russian Church
underground through ruthless suppression and so to lose control over it.”29

As St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco wrote: “The Declaration of

Metropolitan Sergius brought no benefit to the Church. The persecutions not
only did not cease, but also sharply increased. To the number of other
accusations brought by the Soviet regime against clergy and laymen, one
more was added – non-recognition of the Declaration. At the same time, a
wave of church closures rolled over all Russia… Concentration camps and
places of forced labor held thousands of clergymen, a significant part of
whom never saw freedom again, being executed there or dying from
excessive labors and deprivations.”30

Others have tried to justify Sergius by claiming that there are two paths to
salvation, one through open confession or the descent into the catacombs, and

28
E.L., Episkopy-Ispovedniki (Bishop Confessors), San Francisco, 1971, pp. 65 -66.
29
W. Alexeyev, "The Russian Orthodox Church 1927 -1945: Repression and
Revival", Religion in Communist Lands, vol. 7, N 1, Spring, 1979, p. 30.
30
St. John Maximovich, The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. A Short History ,
Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1997, pp. 28 -29.
the other through compromise. Sergius, according to this view, was no less a
martyr than the Catacomb martyrs, only he suffered the martyrdom of losing
his good name.31 However, this view comes close to the “Rasputinite” heresy
that there can be salvation through sin – in this case, lying, the sacrifice of the
freedom and dignity of the Church, and the betrayal to torments and death of
one’s fellow Christians! Thus Hieromartyr Sergius Mechev was betrayed by
"Bishop" Manuel Lemeshevsky.32 And more generally, Metropolitan Sergius'
charge that all the catacomb bishops were "counter-revolutionaries" was
sufficient to send them to their deaths.33

This fact demonstrates that “sergianism” can best be defined as, quite
simply, the sin of Judas…

Meanwhile, deep in the underground, the Catacomb, True Orthodox

Church delivered its verdict. In July, 1937, four bishops, two priests and six
laymen met in Ust-Kut, Siberia, convened a council, and declared:

“1. The Sacred Council forbids the faithful to receive communion from the
clergy legalized by the anti-Christian State.

“2. It has been revealed to the Sacred Council by the Spirit that the
anathema-curse hurled by his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon is valid, and all
priests and Church-servers who have dared to consider it as an ecclesiastical
mistake or political tactic are placed under its power and bound by it.

“3. To all those who discredit and separate themselves from the Sacred
Council of 1917-18 – Anathema!

“4. All branches of the Church which are on the common trunk – the trunk
is our pre-revolutionary Church – are living branches of the Church of Christ.
We give our blessing to common prayer and the serving of the Divine Liturgy
to all priests of these branches. The Sacred Council forbids all those who do
not consider themselves to be branches, but independent from the tree of the
Church, to serve the Divine Liturgy. The Sacred Council does not consider it
necessary to have administrative unity of the branches of the Church, but
unity of mind concerning the Church is binding on all.”34

31
E.S. Polishchuk, "Patriarkh Sergei i ego deklarats ia: kapitulatsia ili
kompromiss?" (Patriarch Sergius and his Declaration: Capitulation or
Compromise?), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian
Christian Movement), N 161, 1991 -I, pp. 233-250.
32
Alla D. "Svidetel'stvo" (Witnes s), in Nadezhda (Hope), vol. 16, Basel-Moscow,
1993, 228-230. See also N.V. Urusova, Materinskij Plach Sviatoj Rusi (The Maternal
Lament of Holy Russia), Moscow, 2006, pp. 285 -287.
33
I.M. Andreyev, Is the Grace of God Present in the Soviet Church? ,Wildwood,
Alberta: Monastery Press, 2000, p. 30.
34
Schema-Monk Epiphanius (Chernov), personal communication; B. Zakharov,
Russkaia Mysl’ (Russian Thought), September 7, 1949; "Vazhnoe postanovlenie
 This completed the de-centralization of the Church, which Patriarch
Tikhon had already begun through his famous ukaz no. 362 of 1920. It was
elicited by the fact that the organization of the Church was now destroyed,
and all its leaders dead or in prison or so deep underground that they could
not rule the Church. This process was sealed in the autumn of 1937, when the
patriarchal locum tenens Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa, and his only possible
successors, Metropolitans Cyril of Kazan and Joseph of Petrograd, were shot.
And so by the end of 1937, the Church’s descent into the catacombs, which
had begun in the early 20s, was completed. From now on, with the external
administrative machinery of the Church destroyed, it was up to each bishop –
sometimes each believer – individually to preserve the fire of faith, being
linked with his fellow Christians only through the inner, mystical bonds of
the life in Christ.

Thus was the premonition of Hieromartyr Bishop Damascene fulfilled:

“Perhaps the time has come when the Lord does not wish that the Church
should stand as an intermediary between Himself and the believers, but that
everyone is called to stand directly before the Lord and himself answer for
himself as it was with the forefathers!”35

Even sergianist sources have spoken about the falsity of Sergius’

declaration, the true confession of those who opposed him, and the invalidity
of the measures he took to punish them. Thus: “Amidst the opponents of
Metropolitan Sergius were a multitude of remarkable martyrs and confessors,
bishops, monks, priests… The ‘canonical’ bans of Metropolitan Sergius
(Stragorodsky) and his Synod were taken seriously by no one, neither at that
time [the 1930s] nor later by dint of the uncanonicity of the situation of
Metropolitan Sergius himself…”36

And again: “The particular tragedy of the Declaration of Metropolitan

Sergius consists in its principled rejection of the podvig of martyrdom and
confession, without which witnessing to the truth is inconceivable. In this
way Metropolitan Sergius took as his foundation, not hope on the Providence
of God, but a purely human approach to the resolution of church problems…
The courage of the ‘catacombniks’ and their firmness of faith cannot be

katakombnoj tserkvi" (An Important Decree of the Catacomb Church),

Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), N 18, 1949. According to one version, there
is a fifth canon: “To all those who support the renovationist and sergianist
heresy – Anathema”. See Bishop Ambrose (von Sievers), “Katakombnaia
Tserkov’: Ust’-Kutskij Sobor 1937g.” (The Catacomb Church: the Ust -Kut Council
of 1937), Russkoe Pravoslavie (Russian Orthodoxy), N 4 (8), 1997, pp. 20 -24.
35
E.L., op. cit., p. 92.
36
M.E. Gubonin, Akty Sviatejshago Patriarkha Tikhona , Moscow, 1994, pp. 809, 810.
doubted, and it is our duty to preserve the memory of those whose names we
shall probably learn only in eternity…”37

Sergius made the basic mistake of forgetting that it is God, not man, Who
saves the Church. This mistake amounts to a loss of faith in the Providence
and Omnipotence of God Himself. The faith that saves is the faith that “with
God all things are possible” (Matthew 19.26). It is the faith that cries: “Some
trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we will call upon the name of the
Lord our God” (Psalm 19.7). This was and is the faith of the Catacomb Church,
which, being founded on “the Rock, which is Christ” (I Corinthians 10.7), has
prevailed against the gates of hell.

But Sergius’ “faith” was of a different, more “supple” kind, the kind of
which the Prophet spoke: “Because you have said, ‘We have made a covenant
with death, and with hell we have an agreement; when the overwhelming
scourge passes through it will not come to us; for we have made lies our
refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter’; therefore thus says the Lord
God,… hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm
the shelter. Then your covenant with death will be annulled, and your
agreement with hell will not stand; when the overwhelming scourge passes
through you will be beaten down by it…” (Isaiah 28.15, 17-19)

A Catacomb Appeal of the period wrote: “May this article drop a word
that will be as a burning spark in the heart of every person who has Divinity
in himself and faith in our One Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Beloved
brethren! Orthodox Christians, peace-makers! Do not forget your brothers
who are suffering in cells and prisons for the word of God and for the faith,
the righteousness of our Lord Jesus Christ, for they are in terrible dark bonds
which have been built as tombs for all innocent people. Thousands and
thousands of peace-loving brothers are languishing, buried alive in these
tombs, these cemeteries; their bodies are wasting away and their souls are in
pain every day and every hour, nor is there one minute of consolation, they
are doomed to death and a hopeless life. These are the little brothers of Christ,
they bear that cross which the Lord bore. Jesus Christ received suffering and
death and was buried in the tomb, sealed by a stone and guarded by a watch.
The hour came when death could not hold in its bonds the body of Christ that
had suffered, for an Angel of the Lord coming down from the heavens rolled
away the stone from the tomb and the soldiers who had been on guard fled in
great fear. The Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead. But the thunder will also

37 M.V. Danilushkin, Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi ot Vosstanovlenia Patriarshestva do nashikh dnej (A

History of the Russian Church from the Reestablishment of the Patriarchate to our Days), vol.
I, St. Petersburg, 1997, pp. 297, 520.
strike these castles where the brothers languish for the word of God, and will
smash the bolts where death threatens men..."38

June 2/15, 2018.

St. Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople.

38
M.V. Shkvarovsky, Iosiflianstvo: techenie v Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi
(Josephitism: a tendency in the Russian Orthodox Church), St. Petersburg:
Memorial, 1999, p. 236.