The 1943 Bishops’ Council that elected Metropolitan Sergius as Patriarch of Moscow. St Luke the Surgeon is seated on the far left. Next to him is the future Patriarch Alexei I, and next to him, with the big white beard, is Patriarch Sergius.

“When Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941,” writes historian Jordan Hupka, “Stalin again changed the Soviet position on religion. All anti-religious publications ceased and some churches in major urban centres were allowed to open.”[1] Stalin was a shrewd man; as Steven Miner writes in Stalin’s Holy War, “Very early in the war, Stalin grasped the crucial role of Russian nationalism, perhaps as only a non-Russian leader could. In September 1941, referring to the common Russian soldier, the dictator told Harriman [U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union]: ‘We are under no illusions that they are fighting for us [the Communists]. They are fighting for Mother Russia.” Miner points out that Stalin’s softened position vis-à-vis Orthodoxy was not – as some think – to induce the Russian and other Slavic people to fight, but rather because they had already demonstrated their willingness to fight. Stalin was trying to reinforce this success.[2] Russian church leaders had, from the start of the war, tried to rally the faithful to support the Soviet cause. “As the war continued,” writes Miner, “Russian Orthodox Church leaders amplified their religious rhetoric, denouncing Nazi crimes against the Russian people, believers in particular. Most jarring, they began to claim that the war in defense of the Communist state was a ‘holy war.’”[3]

Even with all this support from the hierarchy, Stalin didn’t initially go very far in loosening restrictions on the church. Few churches were allowed to open, and those mainly in the big cities. The Soviets seemed more concerned with making a show of religious liberty to satisfy their American and British allies than actually allowing the church to function freely.

A shift began in 1942-43. The war turned in the Allies’ favor, and already, the question of postwar borders began to come to the fore. The Soviets wanted control over their western borderlands, but the other Allied powers were nervous about the expansion of “Godless Communism.” It was necessary for the Soviets to assuage these concerns. So in 1942, a book was published called The Truth About Religion in Russia, with copies sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the British embassy. This was a blatant piece of propaganda. In the introduction, the patriarchal locum tenens, Metropolitan Sergius, papered over the brutal persecution of the Church. “During and after the revolution, the Church suffered great losses,” but Sergius said that this was only because “all artificial barriers that forced people to remain in the body of the Church were abolished and all nominal churchmen left us.”[4]

Back in 1941, Sergius and his circle had been evacuated from Moscow. In the summer of 1943, the Soviet government decided that it was time for him to return. The idea of a revived Moscow Patriarchate became increasingly attractive to Stalin and his lieutenants, not only to satisfy the other Allied powers but also to more effectively control regions that had been freed from Nazi control – most importantly, the Ukraine – where a religious revival had begun during the Nazi occupation.

On September 3, 1943, Stalin summoned Metropolitan Sergius – who still held the title “locum tenens” – to a meeting the following day, along with the metropolitans of Leningrad (Alexei, future patriarch) and Kiev (Nikolai). Stalin’s notorious lieutenant Molotov was also present. At this meeting, Stalin gave permission for the Russian Orthodox Church to hold a council to elect a new patriarch. He also gave permission for the creation of a Holy Synod, which had not existed for many years.[5] Here is one account of the meeting, which comes from a researcher who interviewed Sergius:

“Why haven’t you any personnel? Where have they got to?” he asked, taking his pipe out of his mouth and staring intently at the company. Aleksii and Nikolai were confused….everyone knew that the “personnel’ were scattered in the camps. But Metropolitan Sergius was not discountenanced. . . . The old man replied, “We lack personnel for several reasons, one of which is we train a man to be a priest, but he becomes a Marshal of the Soviet Union.” A satisfied grin moved the dictator’s moustache. He said, “Yes, yes, I was a seminarist. I even heard about you.” He then fell to reminiscing about his years as a seminarist….He said that his mother had regretted to her dying day that he had not become a priest. The conversation between the metropolitan and the dictator took on a relaxed air. After tea had been served, they talked business.[6]

Things moved rapidly: the meeting took place on September 4; on September 8, the Russian bishops assembled and elected Metropolitan Sergius as patriarch. Immediately after this, the bishops elected the members of the Holy Synod.[7] (Significantly, one of the original members of this Stalin-sanctioned Holy Synod was St Luke, the great surgeon-wonderworker.) Although all of this was obviously done with the permission and oversight of the Soviet state, Metropolitan Alexei of Leningrad told the Moscow News that the church was completely free – unlike in Tsarist Russia, he said, in the Soviet Union “the Church has now been completely separated from the State” and “is not subject to State control.” He added that the bishops “consider themselves greatly indebted to J.V. Stalin, the Head of State, for the sympathetic hearing he gave our plans.”[8]

In addition to now having a patriarch and a Holy Synod, a host of new church institutions were created, including theological academies and a printing press – all with the authorization of the Soviet state. And while Metropolitan Alexei insisted that the church was now freer than it had been under the Tsar, a month later, the Soviet government established a “Council for Affairs of the Orthodox Church,” which included a government liaison – basically equivalent to the old ober procurator that had existed during the Tsarist period.

Russian Orthodoxy wasn’t a favored religion again, but it was allowed to function in a limited way, as long as it seemed useful to the Soviet state. The same year, Stalin allowed the Georgian Church to be granted autocephaly by Moscow.

Patriarch Sergius had a short tenure, dying on May 20, 1944. His funeral was a grand affair, with fourteen hierarchs, over a thousand clergy, and a large crowd of the faithful in attendance.[9] Alexei of Leningrad became the locum tenens and was the preordained successor as patriarch. During the patriarchal interregnum, he wrote publicly to Stalin, calling him “Our beloved God-given supreme leader.”[10] A patriarchal election was scheduled for early 1945, and invitations were sent to the various Orthodox primates. The patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch came in person; Constantinople and Jerusalem sent representatives, along with a Serbian delegation.

Alexei was chosen unanimously on February 2, 1945. You’re familiar with Soviet show trials – this was a show council. Ahead of this, at a pre-conciliar meeting, St Luke vehemently objected to the process – he found it outrageous that a council would only have a single candidate to consider, and he vowed to vote against Alexei if they didn’t adopt a more canonically sound procedure. But Luke was alone in his opposition, and because of it, he was the only active Russian bishop excluded from the council itself. Alexei was duly elected patriarch in an unsurprisingly unanimous vote in early 1945. Despite his opposition to (and ultimate exclusion from) the process, St Luke accepted the result and would say of Patriarch Alexei, “We should not criticize the Patriarch but share in his suffering.”[11]

In a lengthy report on the election to the U.S. Secretary of State, the Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan), explained, “The revival of the Patriarchate is the result not of any spontaneous movement on the part of the church but [of] a deliberate policy on the part of the Soviet Regime. This policy, in the Embassy’s views, has little or nothing to do with [the] state of religion in the Soviet Union. It is founded in the determination of the regime to make available for its own use every possible channel of influence in foreign affairs.” Kennan went on, “Through the apparatus of the church the Soviet Government wishes to have (1) a direct channel of influence to all believers of the Eastern Church wherever they may reside, (2) an iron in the fire of Near Eastern politics through Russian Church property and traditional privileges, and (3) a means of disarming criticism and gaining sympathy in western religious circles.” Further on, Kennan offered this brutal conclusion:

The immediate effect which this ceremonious patriarchal election may have on the Russian Church itself should not be exaggerated. It is true that it has made possible the most imposing gathering of churchmen since the revolution, and that one of them, at least, has now acquired a prominence and international connections which will give him a certain independent dignity even in the eyes of the regime. It is also true that knowledge of the event will spread throughout the entire Russian religious community and will give encouragement and hope to many believers at a moment when the calamities of war have done much to stir religious feeling. But the realities surrounding the teaching and practice of religion in Russia can be scarcely affected by these events. The situation cannot be compared with that prevailing before the revolution, when the Russian rulers officially shared the ideology of the church. Today the church, in its relations with the state, is dealing with what purports to be in effect a rival religion, no less Byzantine in conception and no less Russian in method. There has been, and can be, no accepted dogmatic relationship between the Holy Sepulcher and Lenin’s tomb. In the Communist Party, dignitaries of the Russian Church will encounter other churchmen no less astute, no less experienced, and considerably more disciplined than themselves, armed in addition with all the attributes of physical power. In this case, there can be no question whose interests will be served first. As long as no young person in Russia can hope for normal advantages of recreation and association unless he belongs to the Pioneers, as long as the Young Communist League and the party remain the stepping stones to almost every respectable career, and as long as no Pioneer, Young Communist or party member can admit to the holding of religious beliefs, so long the Russian church must remain at the bottom largely a withering church of old priests and old women [and] at the top one of a number of fronts for the policies of the Kremlin in the outside world.[12]

A CIA report from the November 1946 expresses a similar view. “The sermons in all Soviet controlled churches must include literature prepared by the propagandists of the Ministry of Religious Affairs […] The Communists remind all clergymen that the Soviet Government has reestablished the church. Therefore, it is the duty of the ecclesiastics to uphold the Communist principles. […] Minister Karpov gives direct orders to Patriarch Alexei. The liaison officers act as overseers.”[13]

Alexy became patriarch of Moscow at the beginning of February 1945. On May 29, he set off with an entourage to visit the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Long before, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsarist state had been patrons of Orthodoxy in the Near East; now, Alexy sought to revive that influence. This coincided with a broader Soviet effort to bring the region into its sphere of influence. In a report on Soviet policy in the Near and Middle East, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union wrote to the Secretary of State, “With communities in Turkey, Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, the Orthodox Church is an important extra-national force in the Near East. At present, it offers an opportunity for apparently innocent cultural penetration and propaganda, which opportunity the U.S.S.R. is assiduously cultivating. Having traditionally entertained a keen appreciation of temporal as well as spiritual powers, the Orthodox Church in the Levant does not view the courtship of the Soviet State with excessive distaste. Eventually the Church in the Near East may, despite factional jealousies, serve as a ponderable political force operating in response to Soviet direction.”[14]

World War II had just ended, and the United States and the USSR were jockeying for leadership in the postwar world. With the Moscow Patriarchate seen as a tool of Soviet expansion, the Americans began to look toward the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a possible counterweight.

Endnotes

[1] Jordan Hupka, “The Russian Orthodox Church as a Soviet Political Tool,” Constellations 2:2 (Winter 2011), 33.

[2] Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 67-68.

[3] Miner, 77.

[4] Miner, 100.

[5] September 7, 1943 telegram from the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to the Secretary of State.

[6] Miner, 125-126.

[7] September 9, 1943 telegram from the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to the Secretary of State.

[8] September 11, 1943 telegram from the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to the Secretary of State.

[9] May 20, 1944 telegram from the U.S. Chargé in the Soviet Union to the Secretary of State.

[10] October 24, 1944 telegram from the U.S. Chargé in the Soviet Union to the Secretary of State.

[11] Archdeacon Vasily Marushchak, The Blessed Surgeon: The Life of Saint Luke Archbishop of Simferopol (Divine Ascent Press, 2001), 129-130.

[12] February 3, 1945 telegram from the U.S. Chargé in the Soviet Union to the Secretary of State.

[13] Nov. 11, 1946 CIA report, CIA-RDP82-00457R000100580004-7.

[14] October 23, 1945 report from the U.S. Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Harriman) to the Secretary of State.