The Russian Revolution and the Church

For two hundred years the Russian Church had been governed not by a Patriarch but by a state department. Peter the Great had abolished the patriarchate in 1721 and placed the Church under a Holy Synod supervised by an imperial official. When the Tsar abdicated in the revolution of February 1917, this long tutelage fell away, and the Church acted at once. In August 1917 the All-Russian Council gathered in Moscow — bishops, clergy, and laity together — the freest and fullest council the Russian Church had ever held.

Its most dramatic act was to restore the patriarchate. In November 1917, after prayer and the drawing of lots, Metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow was chosen Patriarch — the first in over two centuries. The timing was heavy with meaning: as the council debated the Church's renewal, the Bolsheviks were seizing power in the streets outside. The Church recovered its own voice at the very hour a new and hostile power was taking hold of Russia.

The new regime moved quickly. In January 1918 the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree separating church from state and school from church. On paper it proclaimed freedom of conscience; in practice it stripped the Church of legal personhood and of the right to own property, forbade religious teaching to children, and placed marriage, birth, and death records in state hands. It was not neutrality but the first instrument of a militant atheism that regarded religion as an enemy to be destroyed.

Repression followed at once. Churches and monasteries were seized, clergy arrested and killed, and during the famine of 1921–22 the state confiscated church valuables — ostensibly for relief, in fact to break the Church and fund the regime — provoking resistance and mass arrests. Patriarch Tikhon protested the violence and was himself placed under arrest. The state also fostered a compliant rival body, the so-called "Living Church," to split Orthodox unity from within. The first years of Soviet power thus set the pattern: legal strangulation, physical terror, and manipulation, all at once.

The Revolution's consequences did not stay inside Russia's borders. As the civil war ended, waves of bishops, priests, and faithful fled into exile, and a Russian Orthodox diaspora took root across Europe, the Americas, and the Far East — carrying Russian Orthodoxy, its theology, and its liturgical treasures into the wider world. The divisions of these years also gave rise to enduring jurisdictional separations, including the Russian Church Outside Russia.

For the Church that remained, the coming decades would bring the fiercest persecution Christians had ever faced, and the agonized choices of survival under an atheist state — including the contested Declaration of 1927 and the hidden life of the Catacomb Church. But the Orthodox remember 1917 not only as a catastrophe. The council that restored the patriarchate had prepared the Church, without knowing it, for the trial ahead: it entered its Golgotha with its own shepherd restored, and with a generation about to become martyrs and confessors.