It was also in 1922 that the Bolsheviks began to turn their resentful glare on the Orthodox Church.
In August 1921, the church had created diocesan and all-Russian committees for aid to the starving in the Volga region. The committees were banned, and the funds collected were confiscated and turned over to the state treasury. Patriarch Tikhon had also appealed to both the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury for assistance, but was rebuked by the Bolshevik authorities on the grounds that only the Soviet government had the right to enter into negotiation with foreigners. Discussing this in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn pointed his accusing finger at the cynical way the Soviets sought to turn the suffering in the Volga region to their own advantage:
But political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin. A brilliant idea was born: after all, three billiard balls can be pocketed with one shot. So now let the priests feed the Volga region! They are Christians. They are generous!
1. If they refuse, we will blame the whole famine on them and destroy the church.
2. If they agree, we will clean out the churches.
3. In either case, we will replenish our stocks of foreign exchange and precious metals.12
In December 1921, Pomgol—the State Commission for Famine Relief—proposed that the churches should help the starving by donating church valuables. The Patriarch agreed, and on February 19, 1922, he issued a pastoral letter permitting parish councils to make gifts of objects that had no liturgical and ritual significance. A week later, on February 26, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decreed that all valuables were to be forcefully requisitioned from the churches—for the starving. Two days later, the Patriarch issued a new pastoral letter stating that such a measure was sacrilege and that he could not approve the forced requisition of objects needed for the sacred liturgy.
Immediately, a campaign of persecution began in the press, directed against the Patriarch and the church authorities who, it was claimed, “were strangling the Volga region with the bony hand of famine”. The concerns of the church were expressed by Bishop Antonin Granovsky, who explained to Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, that “believers fear that the church valuables may be used for other purposes, more limited and alien to their hearts”.13 Such concerns fell on deaf ears, and on April 26, 1922, a trial of seventeen members of the church, ranging from archpriests to laymen, began in Moscow. The defendants were accused of disseminating the Patriarch’s proclamation, with the Patriarch himself being summoned to give evidence. The principal defendant, archpriest A. N. Zaozersky, had actually surrendered all the valuables in his own church voluntarily, but he was charged nevertheless because he defended in principle the Patriarch’s assertion that forced requisition was sacrilege. His principles were to cost him his life. Along with four of the other defendants, he was condemned to be shot. “All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church”, wrote Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.14
In the course of his own evidence at the trial, the Patriarch had stated that he only considered the laws of the state obligatory “to the extent that they do not contradict the rules of piety”. This led to a debate about church law. The Patriarch explained that if the church itself surrendered its valuables, it was not sacrilege. But if they were taken against the church’s will, it was. He stressed that his appeal had not prohibited giving the valuables at all, but had only declared that seizing them against the will of the church was to be condemned. In a vain attempt to instill a little logic into the proceedings, the Patriarch spoke of the philological significance of the word svyatotatstvo, meaning “sacrilege”. The word, he explained, derived from svyato, meaning “holy”, and tat, meaning “thief”.
“So that means”, exclaimed the Accuser, “that we, the representatives of the Soviet government, are thieves of holy things? So you call the representatives of the Soviet government, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, thieves?” To this the Patriarch replied that he was merely citing church law.
A week later the Patriarch was removed from office and arrested.
Two weeks after that, the Metropolitan Veniamin was arrested in St. Petersburg. He was charged, along with several dozen others, with resisting the requisition of church valuables. As the trial, which lasted from June 9 to July 5, 1922, reached a climax, Accuser Smirnov demanded “sixteen heads”. Not to be outdone, Accuser Krasikov cried out: “The whole Orthodox Church is a subversive organization. Properly speaking, the entire church ought to be put in prison.”15 In the event, the tribunal condemned ten of the defendants to death but later pardoned six of them. The other four, including Metropolitan Veniamin, were executed on the night of August 12.
The Soviet persecution of the Orthodox Church had now begun in earnest. Over the following weeks and months, there were a further twenty-two church trials in the provinces. “Here and there in the provincial centres,” Solzhenitsyn wrote,
and even further down in the administrative districts, metropolitans and bishops were arrested, and, as always, in the wake of the big fish, followed shoals of smaller fry: archpriests, monks, and deacons. These arrests were not even reported in the press… Men of religion were an inevitable part of every annual “catch”, and their silver locks gleamed in every cell and in every prisoner transport en route to the Solovetsky Islands.16
Other victims of the newly declared war on religion included the “Eastern Catholics”—followers of Vladimir Solovyev—and ordinary Roman Catholics such as Polish priests, as well as believers in a multitude of different religious sects ranging from theosophists to spiritualists. Later, as the manic effort to eradicate Christianity gathered pace throughout the twenties and thirties, the Soviet regime began the mass arrest of ordinary Orthodox believers. Again, Solzhenitsyn described this intensification of state-organized persecution in The Gulag Archipelago:
Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called “nuns” in transit prisons and in camps.17
The grim irony of the situation was that religious faith, technically speaking, was still not a crime. The crime was in mentioning it. In the twenties, for instance, the religious education of children was classified as a political offence under Article 58-10 of the Code—in other words, counter-revolutionary propaganda. All persons convicted received ten-year sentences, the longest term then given. The absurdity beggars belief: a person was allowed by law to be convinced that he possessed spiritual truth but was required, on pain of imprisonment, to conceal the fact from everyone else, even his own children.