This address passed through two translators, and was more of a conversation than outlined presentation.
Alexander Ogorodnikov
Godlessness and the Russian Experience of Tyranny
The War Against Religion
The unprecedented challenge to the Faith and the Church in the 20th century was Totalitarianism - by means of violence asserting itself as the new religion. In Germany, the Nazis sought to make Arianism the new religion, while the Bolsheviks sought the elimination of ALL religion.
In 1923 there was a Tribunal held in Moscow by the powers - a show trial - in which God was tried, found guilty, and condemned to death.
Lenin gave the order to exterminate religion:
In 1939, there remained 4 out of 400 Bishops.
1952 - 5 year plan to destroy all churches and a further strategy employed which would lead to the elimination of the word ‘God’ from the Russian language. Destruction of icons and other visible religion. Not a battle against religion alone, but a ‘storming of heaven’ to overthrow God and bury him.
The term was not ‘atheist’ but the more specific ‘godless’
What they could not extinguish was the quiet courage of faith. Quiet family faith endured. That said, while there were thousands and thousands of martyrs, there were also many more thousands of apostates.
Results
The blood of the martyrs was sprinkled across the ground of Russia as far as its widest boundaries.
The miracle of the re-birth of the Russian Church was through the seed of this prophetic martyr blood.
The Church was founded on the blood of martyrs and this has been witnessed again 2000 years into her history, this time in Russia. The modern massacre could not succeed in its objectives. Yet in 30 years in Russia there were more martyrs made than in all the previous years of the entire Church’s history combined.
What happened to turn things around was WW2. It began in Russia on the day of the celebration of the Feast of Russian Saints. While every Russian suffered unspeakably, and the persecution of the Church returned after the war, Stalin - the former Seminarian(!) - knew that people would not die for the sake of the communist ideal, but for a unified nation. The Germans had started to re-open churches in the occupied territories. In 1943, Stalin met with 3 hierarchs and asked them to re-found (form) the Moscow Patriarchate. He allowed the opening of seminaries and released some priests from prison. This was a brief respite from the persecution.
The Bishops were released from the labor camps but were under constant surveillance (kept in a golden cave)
Both Bishop and godless official were working on the same project: national unity. But the Church re-opened was a religious museum with a performance of ritual; any deviation from the form resulted in re-imprisonment.
In the 1970s an independent Christian community began to form
This development signaled the rebirth of the Church in Russia, though the official hierarchy refused to recognize it.
On a certain feast day, a Bishop was preaching to a large congregation, some 60% of whom were youth, and not a few were Jewish converts as well, he said ‘your parents brought you to church...’ - revealing he knew nothing about the Church or what the Lord was doing in calling again a new people to himself.
This chasm between perception and reality has left a schism in the contemporary church
The Bishops came to the West and told western leaders that there was no persecution of the Church in Russia and that those in the prisons had to be criminals. It is tragic that such voices as Solz and others were not heard.
The emergence of the ‘separatist’ movement - living church - looked to be missional - apologetics, evangelistic, etc., but so many were new converts and thus young in the Faith. Only later did they discover the depth of Church life beneath the surface of the visible church.
The strength of the Orthodox experience for survival was Sobornsk - the spiritual father, the elder, the staritz. People attended prayer services on the anniversary of the October revolution.
Perestroika: the Path to Freedom
The genesis of this meant that the suffering ended. While the country needed a new leader, the Church was not able to provide such. The captive church could not produce a leader. Yeltsin emerged proclaiming himself a democrat. The fall of communism created an ideological vacuum. A ‘meta-idea’ was needed however for the society. The idea that was essential was repentance.
The Russian Hierarchy refused to repent (Bulgarian and Romanian experience was different)
The new situation appears to have the seeds of a new totalitarianism through secularism.
There is a strong anti-clericalism among the members rooted in their experience of the Church’s connection with abusive power. There is massive growth in the Church, but resistance to various expressions of Church authority, and not as much growth in the numbers of priests. Still though, little opportunity for initiative on part of the laity for the Church
there was a massive influx of ‘Protestant’ missions (these were mostly evangelical sects of course) with large expenditures in the 1980s, but this mission has largely failed. Before they came there were approximately 500K protestants in Russia and the number is now the same.
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