Saints and Persecutors

April 14 is Russian Easter, the most important religious holiday on the Orthodox calendar. Russian Life's Robert Greenall traveled to the provinces to see how religion is faring in an average Russian town. The ancient city of Murom, with its famous saints and nameless persecutors, provides the focus.

On a bright day in early Spring, novice monk Sergy shovels wet snow off the path leading to his cell in the peaceful monastery courtyard. A lover of Orthodox chanting, he, along with the handful of other novices and monks, is also a devotee of selfless labor and discipline. They are inhabitants of Murom’s Annunciation Monastery, site of an ancient burial ground and the oldest holy place in one of Russia’s oldest cities.

Founded in 862 (over 300 years before Moscow) on the river Oka by Ugro-Finnish tribesman, Murom soon fell under the influence of the Slavs, and converted to Christianity with the rest of Kievan Rus in 988. A few years later, it became a major center for trade with Rus’ eastern neighbors, the Volga Bulgars.

In its early years, Murom became renowned as a generator of heroes and saints, and it produced several of both local and national significance. The most famous is Ilya Muromets, a real life knight and defender of Russian nationhood, whose myth-shrouded persona has made him a hero for countless generations of Russian children.

It was also home to Peter and Thebronia, Russia’s patron saints of marriage. There is a legend that this model couple, following a custom among noblemen, took monastic vows in extreme old age. Because of this, their wish as a couple to be buried together was denied them. When, however, they died on the same day and were buried, their coffins moved together under the earth.

Not all of Murom’s saints met such a happy fate. St. Basil of Ryazan, then the local bishop, was chased out of town by an angry mob and forced to sail upriver, where he founded the city whose name he then took. From these times, the citizenry of Murom acquired a reputation as ‘saint-persecutors.’

History treated Murom in much the same way that it did other Russian towns: there was peaceful development facilitated by its position on the river, sackings by enemy armies, and a 16th century plague which wiped out virtually the whole population.

It acquired stone monasteries and churches, notably thanks to Ivan the Terrible, who forded the Oka here on his way to attack the Tatar stronghold of Kazan. One of these was the Annunciation Monastery.

A Loss of Faith

By the time of the 1917 revolution, Murom was a medium-sized provincial Russian town with a flourishing religious life in four monasteries and 27 churches. But the trials of the two decades following the revolution left almost no tangible trace of the former power of the Orthodox Church there. As the Bolshevik government proclaimed the victory of atheism, saints and their persecutors abounded again.

Persecutions began following a botched revolt in 1918 by White guardsmen in the Civil War. It was an attempt to raise the Volga area against the Red strongholds of Moscow and Petrograd. Churchmen who survived this initial ordeal faced arrest during the first wave of terror in the 1920s, or failing that, labor camps or firing squads in the 1930s, as Stalin turned the screws of repression tighter.

Twenty one-year-old Dmitri Tushin, a member of today’s congregation at the Annunciation Cathedral, had a repressed great uncle on his father’s side, a priest and icon-painter, about whom he found out too late Ñ his grandparents had recently died, and there was no one left alive who remembered him.

“My mother couldn’t even tell me his name,” he said bitterly. Dmitri knew only that witnesses had seen him in a camp, where he was continuing to preach and help those more unfortunate than himself. His ultimate fate is unknown.

Decimation of the priesthood in those years was accompanied by the closure and destruction of churches. In 1917, Russia had around 45,000 functioning churches. By 1939, the Orthodox Church’s blackest year ever, barely 100 remained.

The year 1939 in Murom witnessed the detonation of the main town church, the 15th century Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin, a local echo, perhaps, of the explosion which had destroyed Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral eight years earlier. By now, the town had no functioning churches. Monasteries, meanwhile, had been dissolved, and their inhabitants dispersed or imprisoned. The Annunciation Monastery buildings were settled in by ex-convicts and other undesirables, while the Savior’s Monastery was taken over by a military unit.   

The threat of Nazi invasion in 1941 brought a respite for Russia’s Christians, as the need for national unity overrode the ideological considerations of the Communist leadership. Many churches were allowed to reopen, and congregations flooded back to them with enthusiasm. Around this time, a young priest called Pimen was working at Murom’s Annunciation Cathedral. About 30 years later, his spotless career (in the eyes of the authorities at least) ensured him the Patriarchate (leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church) for the greater part of the Brezhnev years.

Despite the release from the camps and amnestying of the remains of the Orthodox priesthood, the Khrushchev thaw, paradoxically, brought renewed vigor to atheistic tendencies. A vitriolic propaganda campaign led to the re-closing of many churches in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Firing squads and forced labor may have gone out of fashion, but the authorities had discovered more subtle ways to remove recalcitrant priests, usually by means of trumped-up charges involving ‘non-payment of taxes.’

One of those who fell victim to this new method of persecution was Murom priest Father Nikolai. In those days the administration of  each parish was controlled by a starosta (elder), always a KGB plant, who had the power to withhold priests’ salaries, and if necessary, sack them. Nikolai discovered irregularities in his parish’s finances, and tried to intervene.

“He was unable to make a deal with his conscience,” explained Murom deacon Father Mikhail, Nikolai’s pupil. “He could not compromise his duties as a priest for politics.” Thrown out of his parish, Nikolai was effectively deprived of a means of existence for several years.

Church destruction also continued at this time, for reasons almost as cynical as those which impelled Stalin and his henchmen. Outside Murom, two 17th century churches, part of the former residence of the Russian martyr Prince Gleb, were dismantled by restorers from nearby Vladimir and Suzdal Ñ they desperately needed brick for those two cities’ more famous and oft-visited ancient monuments. Revenue from tourism was more important to the government than preservation of the national heritage in its entirety.

With the removal of Khrushchev in 1964, church leaders breathed a sigh of relief. The persecution was over. Yet, the ‘Years of Stagnation’ that followed were hardly kind. With accelerated urbanization, rural communities began to die, and with them religious traditions. Many churches were abandoned and fell into disrepair. Both congregations and the priesthood were aging, as enforced atheism kept the influx of fresh converts and personnel to a bare trickle.

Security forces kept a tight rein on the priesthood by means of the  notorious ‘Statement of Cooperation,’ which each priest had to sign before he was able to hold services. But while open political dissidence was not tolerated, as in other areas of society, most saw the ‘statement’ as just a piece of paper, and few became genuine informers.

“It’s one thing to sign a statement, and quite another to do something. Some priests did no more than sign,” explains Father Kronid, abbot of Murom’s Annunciation Monastery. “There’s no point in labeling or exposing, it’s the easiest thing in the world to expose.”

In these years, Christianity struggled on in Murom, as the Annunciation Cathedral, reopened during the War (though like many monastery churches it was used only as a parish church), became a focus for worship. As the only functioning church for miles around, it attracted crowds well beyond its capacity on major holidays. People in the courtyard would battle to hear the Easter service above the sounds from a nearby outdoor disco  set up specially on the next hill to drown it out.

Returning to God

Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost brought freedom of worship, and handily coincided with the millennium of Russia's baptism in 1988. Political controls were removed and, by 1991, Russia's new leadership had warmly embraced the Orthodox Church. Today, in photo opportunities and press statements, Patriarch Alexy II openly demonstrates his loyalty to President Yeltsin and other reformist leaders.

Meanwhile, ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's recent church wedding and Gennady Zyuganov's production of priests at Communist rallies shows that the entire political spectrum is courting the Christian vote. For the church's part, recent threats of a split with the Byzantine Patriarchate (which recently announced that it was taking over jurisdiction of the mainly ethnic Russian Orthodox Church in Estonia) have shown it is ready to take up nationalist causes in areas like the Baltics.

But in view of general disillusionment with politics by the man in the street, these issues are not likely to concern many Russians in the heartland. They are turning to religion, though, and showing a  more than superficial interest in those rituals and traditions which have, despite decades of communist indoctrination, survived in rural and some urban communities.

Today’s new converts to Orthodoxy usually have some grounding in these traditions. Women in particular will have followed their mothers and grandmothers to church, and will have begun to read the bible or gone on a pilgrimage to one of Russia’s many holy places. Mysticism often plays a major role

in the conversions of these people, who need desperately to believe in something.

Annunciation Cathedral regular Galina Chumak found faith through a series of minor ‘miracles’ during her travels: “When we left [Sergiyev Posad], we waited at the station,” she said, “and there were a lot of doves, which flew around us. We gave them bread, and they sat on our hands and shoulders. We had just come from the Laura, cleansed, and for us this was another miracle.”

In today’s polarized society, though, many people reject God with a savagery as powerful as the faith of those who accept Him. Two women, both meat traders in Murom market, told of how their alcoholic husbands refused to drink holy spring water which their wives tried to add to their vodka.

Father Kronid’s experience of Murom suggests that good and evil are particularly accentuated here. The rise of religion has been matched by the despair and anger caused by increased unemployment and poverty, in a town where the major employers are crisis-hit defense industry plants.

“When I walk down the street, people either seem to snarl at me or go down on their knees,” he said, slightly bewildered. It seems the old struggle between saints and persecutors still rages here.

Foreign Influences

It rages within faith itself, too. Foreign religious organizations with more reach, mobility and money have an advantage over the Orthodox Church, and their influences can vary drastically.

For some, like Dmitri Tushin, this meant finding Orthodoxy in a roundabout way: “My first contact with the Bible,” he explained, “was through American preachers, who came to our Youth Center. I got a certificate of study from them. As far as I know they were working with the blessing of the Vladimir Bishop. They were a great help to me.”

Other groups, though, have alarmed the church with their aggressive methods of obtaining converts and their obvious hostility to Orthodox Christianity. Notorious sects like the Kiev-based White Brotherhood, and the international Unification Church (commonly known as “moonies”) were able to spread to even the most remote of Russia’s urban communities in the early post-Soviet years.

However, church leaders see this as a temporary phenomenon, and one which ultimately shows some of its victims what they consider to be the true path.

“We don’t know what influence they have, they just come and go,” explains Father Mikhail. “When preachers force on people an alien way of life, people lose their way. They go into a trance, move away from religious questions, or the opposite, become interested.”

A Surge of Monasticism

Another result of the rise of Orthodoxy in Russia in recent years has been the revival of monastic life. This striving for strict and self-denying lifestyles, though, is not as healthy a phenomenon as it may at first seem, and is often motivated by despair.

“We’re getting people who are half-possessed, or mentally ill,” said Father Kronid. “Some come to live in towers or cellars, enforce strict fasts on themselves, and then just run away. There’s one you’d always see on his knees in the church, but if you asked him to do anything he would get angry, there was no elementary obedience in him.”

At the other extreme, there are alcoholics and drug addicts. Kronid even hinted that some of the novice nuns in the nearby Trinity Convent had joined simply because “they thought the black uniform suited their pale complexions and went well with their figures.”

Kronid tries to be selective in choosing novices, and makes strict demands on them. No one is allowed outside the monastery after 9 pm, in case they should fall prey to the temptations of the town’s nightlife. Each novice is required to study through correspondence courses for a degree in religious studies. The aim is to make Russia’s monasteries the progressive centers of learning that they were in pre-Revolutionary times.

However, there is strong pressure from above to push up monastic numbers. Many monasteries and convents, recently returned to the Church, are in a terrible state of repair. Unlike in Moscow, where projects like the rebuilding of the Savior's Cathedral are generously funded, provincial church bodies are desperately short of money, their only sources being modest icon stall sales and voluntary contributions (usually small change from churchgoers Ñ local businessmen rarely seem interested in helping with larger sums). In this situation, the only means of restoring buildings is to engage a large, cheap workforce.

Kronid knows these problems well enough. He needs help to repair his belltower, replace the peeling plaster in his church, and improve the cramped conditions of his monks, still living side by side with the shady characters moved to the monastery in Soviet times.

For the moment, there is no answer. “We need to work out a new approach,” he concluded, “something that you won’t find in the old books.”

Until that happens, the Russian Orthodox Church will still be searching for a role in modern society. With a shortage of the likes of Sergy the novice, and of the means to nurture them, Russia's and Murom's saints will continue to be at the mercy of their persecutors.