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Revolutionary Leadership and the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John D. Basil
John D. Basil
Affiliation:
associate professor of history in theUniversity of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.
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Extract

Witnessing the widespread internal discord plaguing the new Russian regime after the abdication of Nicholas II in March of 1917, one contemporary activist expressed fear that centrifugal forces.from within constituted the greatest challenge to the democratic revolution. Signs of disharmony quickly appeared among the revolutionary leaders themselves. The liberals in the Provisional Committee of the State Duma and the moderate socialists in the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet found themselves at swords' points even before the first Provisional Government was officially established, and as months passed the animosity grew. Not long after the establishment of the new government the bickering spread beyond the ruling circles, disrupting orderly working relations between the new regime and the institutions surviving from the old. It appeared as though the collapse of the monarchy encouraged divisiveness precisely when survival depended on cooperative action.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 189 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1979

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References

1. Potresov, Alexander N., “Organizatsiia vlasti,” Den' 104 (07 8, 1917).Google Scholar Both Potresov and Plekhanov consistently warned that centrifugal forces could destroy the revolution.

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19. Many liberals in the Provisional Government shared these hostile attitudes toward the church and Orthodoxy, although certainly not all of them. Miliukov, the chief figure in the Kadet party and Foreign Minister in the cabinet of the first Provisional Government, was an enthusiastic agnostic who remained convinced that the church would not exercise a strong positive influence on mankind in the future. Miliukov, Paul, Outlines of Russian Culture; part I Religion and the Church, trans., Ughet, Valentine and Davis, Eleanor (Philadelphia, 1948).Google Scholar Miliukov's work was not polemical, but his attitude toward Orthodoxy as a strong force in society was not sympathetic.

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34. Velikaia oktiabr'skaia sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia: dokumenty i materialy: Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v avguste 1917 g. razgrom Kornilovskogo miatezha (Moscow, 1959).Google Scholar

35. An alternative conclusion was reached by Curtiss, John Shelton, The Russian Church and the Soviet State 1917–1950 (Boston, 1953), pp. 30–31.Google Scholar Because he relied on the interpretations of Titlinov throughout his work, Curtiss naturally assumed that the Sobor placed great hope in the success of Kornilov's action. He then cited as supporting evidence an account of the incident written by Fr. Shavelsky, a military chaplain and elected delegate to the Sobor. (Shavel'sky, , “Tserkov',” 112–113.Google Scholar) The passage written by Shavelsky was designed, however, to free the Sobor from culpability in the Kornilov affair, and Curtiss was obliged to delete those sections that conveyed Shavelsky's motives to the reader.

36. Chrysostomus, Johannes, Kirchengeschichte Russlands der neuesten Zeit (Munich, 1965) 1: 70.Google Scholar In the western hemisphere, only St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary makes the printed records of the 1917–1918 Sobor meetings available to scholars.

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