Book Description

In 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church became independent from the state for the first time in two centuries. The first All-Russian Church Council voted to restore the institution of the patriarchate, and in the midst of the Bolshevik Revolution, Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) was chosen to become the Patriarch of Moscow and All-Rus. Tikhon's eight-year tenure as patriarch spanned the crucial period during which two powerful currents-long-awaited ecclesiastical reform and unexpected political upheaval-converged and clashed. This dissertation reconstructs the language and worldview of Patriarch Tikhon, tracing the historical roots of the ideas and beliefs he espoused. The patriarch's mode of speaking about Russia, the human person, and the meaning of life and history represented an alternative to Bolshevik definitions of those same terms. Patriarch Tikhon has been largely ignored by Western scholars of Russia. In recent years, historians of Soviet Russia have argued that we ought to take more seriously the discourse of Bolshevik actors and consider that Bolshevik language revealed a great deal about the worldview and practices of the Bolsheviks themselves. This dissertation proceeds on the assumption that the same can be said of the patriarch's language. It analyzes how this language developed in the pre-revolutionary period, how it fit within larger trends in Orthodox thought and practice, and what it meant for Tikhon, his contemporaries, and the Bolsheviks. This centerpiece of this study is the published version of the sledstvennoe delo or "investigatory file" of Patriarch Tikhon. The file contains information gathered by the secret police about the patriarch from 1918 to 1925. Each chapter relies on different types of sources in order to parse the language of the investigatory file. These include archival documents from the Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), and the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), and from the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Published sources include records of correspondence between Tikhon and government representatives, friends, and other clergymen; theological journals from the nineteenth century; diocesan newspapers from all of the dioceses in which Tikhon served; post-revolutionary Russian newspapers; foreign newspapers; and memoirs.