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Moscow Patriarchate and Sergianism – Adaptation to Soviet / Communist Atheism

The following are selections from an essay by Boris Talantov entitled, The Moscow Patriarchate and Sergianism (italics in original). “On June 12, 1969, Boris Talantov was arrested, and on September 3 he was sentenced to two years in prison for ‘anti-Soviet activities.’ He died in prison on January 4, 1971” “for having written these and similar texts.”

In his Appeal to the faithful of August 19, 1927,[1] Metropolitan Sergius set forth new bases for the activity of the Church Administration, which at that very time were called by E. Yaroslavsky [Head of the League of Militant Atheists, in charge of the anti-religious propaganda and activities conducted by the Soviet regime[2]] an “adaptation” to the atheistic reality of the USSR.

“Adaptation” consisted first and foremost of a false separation of all the spiritual needs of man into the purely religious and the socio-political. The Church was to satisfy the purely religious needs of citizens of the USSR without touching on the socio-political, which were to be resolved and satisfied by the official ideology of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]…

In essence Adaptation to atheism represented a maniacal union of Christian dogmas and rites with the socio-political views of the official ideology of the CPSU. In actual fact all religious activity was reduced to external rites. The church preaching of those clergymen who held strictly to Adaptation was totally remote from life and therefore had no influence whatever on the hearers. As a result of this the intellectual, social, and family life of believers, and the raising of the younger generation remained outside the Church’s influence…

Adaptation to atheism culminated in the heretical teaching of H. Johnson concerning a new religion, which in his opinion was to replace the Christian religion and be a synthesis of Christianity and Marxism-Leninism[3]

The bishops who had condemned the Appeal of Metropolitan Sergius were soon arrested and banished to concentration camps, where they died…

Contemporary influential atheists regard Adaptation as a modernization of religion which is politically useful for the CPSU and harmless for the materialistic ideology. “This (Adaptation—our addition. B.T.) is one of the paths to the dying out of religion” (Journal, Science and Religion, [A leading official Soviet anti-religious periodical] no. 12, 1966, p. 78)…

The Communist Party saw in this Appeal the Church’s weakness…Here is how E. Yaroslavsky evaluated this in 1927: “With religion, even though Bishop Sergius may have adorned it in whatever worldly garb you may want, with the influence of religion on the masses of workers, we shall wage war, as we wage war with every religion, with every church” (E. Yaroslavsky, On Religion, Moscow, 1957, p. 155)…

From the end of 1929 until June, 1941, there occurred the mass closing and barbarous destruction of churches, arrests and sentencing by Troikas[4] [9] and secret trials of virtually every single clergyman, most of whom were simply physically exterminated in concentration camps…

At the beginning of the Second World War in every region, out of many hundreds of churches there remained five or ten, the majority of priests and almost all the bishops (with the exception of a few who collaborated with the authorities like Metropolitan Sergius) had been martyred in concentration camps…

atheist regime, which at that moment wished to use for its own ends the religious feelings of its citizens with the fewest possible concessions from atheism. The restoration of churches within limited and narrow bounds was the State policy of J. Stalin…

The opening of churches was the bone which J. Stalin threw to a people worn out by war and hunger. The very opening of churches occurred under the control of State Security…

the opening of churches within narrow bounds…was done by the atheist regime itself under pressure from the simple people in order to pacify them

Patriarch Sergius, and later Patriarch Alexis, gathered and placed new bishops who, as distinct from the former bishops, who as a rule perished in the concentration camps (there were, of course, exceptions), were obedient to the Patriarchate and assimilated well the leaven of Herod, i.e., Adaptation to the mighty of this world. Here is how, for example, Bishop Vladimir of Kirov expressed Adaptation in his sermon of May 28, 1967. “We must adapt ourselves to new conditions and circumstances of life like a little stream which, on meeting a rock in its path, goes around it. We live together with atheists and must take them into consideration and not do anything that displeases them.”

[On February 14, 1967 B. V. Talantov was told the following by the KGB[5]] “You,”—said the KGB agent, addressing Talantov—”demand that all closed churches be opened; but you live together with atheists and must take their wishes into consideration, and they do not wish that churches be opened.”

the new bishop, having assimilated Adaptation to atheism, has become an obedient tool in the hands of the atheist regime, and this is a most ruinous result for the Church…

Adaptation…furthered the loss of genuine freedom of conscience and the conversion of the Church Administration into an obedient tool of the atheistic regime

chief measures directed toward the limitation and undermining of faith which are being carried out by the authorities of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, with the participation of the clergy:
1. Obligatory registration of passports before the celebration of certain services by request.[6] 2. Not allowing children of school age to receive confession, communion, or baptism. 3. Chasing beggars out of churches and church yards. 4. Forbidding believers to spend the night on church porches 5. Institution of the time for celebrating services by request in village churches of the Kirov region, during the summertime, at from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

6. Forbidding the administering of communion and unction to the sick at home without special permission[7]

In conformity with Adaptation to atheism, sermons in church as a rule have become scholastic discourses, remote from life, on religious themes. Because of their remoteness from time and space, they cannot act in any way on the hearers. In such sermons there is lacking even any mention of such basic vices, errors, and faults in contemporary life as lying, flattery, the breaking up of families, moral corruption, the atheistic upbringing of children, servile fear before the mighty of this world, and injustice.

The Moscow Patriarchate has made the rejection of Christian apologetics, of the ideological battle with atheism, the chief principle of its activity, both within the country and outside

religious-moral instruction on the part of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church cannot interest the younger generation or act positively upon it. Thus, the religious-moral instruction of the Russian Orthodox Church is such that it cannot lead to the propagation of faith among the younger generation

Education and instruction in the theological schools are set up in such a way that out of them there come bureaucrats in cassocks who are ready to adapt themselves to external circumstances by any means whatever for the sake of acquiring a secure, easy, and undisturbed life in an atheistic State…

the atheist regime (CPSU) which are directed toward the closing of churches, the limitation of the propagation of faith and its undermining in our country

renounce Christian apologetics and the ideological battle against contemporary atheism[8]

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Further reading:

Some statements by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Atheist and Darwinist Communists (from the parsed essay From Zeitgeist to Poltergeist).

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Moreover, consider likewise references by Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd, And The Beginning of the Catacomb Church – Commemorated Dec. 15 (†1938)

formidable enemy of the Church appeared in the form of the pseudo-religious totalitarianism of atheistic Communism…

the forces of unbelief…were unleashed with full fury upon the Russian land and especially against the Orthodox Church, the very existence of which was a threat to the program of Bolshevism and a reproach to what conscience still remained in the frenzied atheists…

Metropolitan Peter [of Krutitsk] was arrested within five months for refusing to sign a “declaration” which would give away the Church’s inner freedom to the atheist regime…

the atheist regime succeed in introducing “Renovationism” into the Patriarchal Church itself, and the result was the decisive protest of the leading hierarchs of the Russian Church, who, when they saw that Metropolitan Sergius was clearly determined to force his will upon the whole Church, soon began to break off communion with him…

the “Declaration”…[was] indeed the work of Sergius alone at the dictation of the atheist regime…

[Russia is the] center of the capital of world atheism…

voluntary apostasy, renovationism and heresy have achieved much the same result as the coercion of the atheist regime in the USSR…

[1] “The Appeal (Declaration) of Metropolitan Sergius was actually issued on July 16/29, 1927, but it was first published in the official Soviet newspaper Izvestia on August 19”
[2] “League of Militant Atheists” aka “Society of the Godless” aka “The Union of Belligerent Atheists” aka “The League of the Militant Godless” aka “The Union of the Godless”
[3] “Hewlett Johnson, the notorious “Red Dean of Canterbury,” a “Christian” apologist for Communism, wrote his book in English under the title Christians and Communism (London, 1956). That Soviet authorities should immediately have this book translated and printed in Moscow reveals that they are not entirely opposed to “religion”—not to a Communist form of religion!”
[4] “Troika: a committee of three secret police officials who sentenced their victims without hearing or appeal.”
[5] “State Security-Secret Police; known earlier under the initials NKVD, Cheka, and (originally) GPU.”
[6] “This important rule is a part of the general system of terror that still prevails in the USSR for behevers [believers]. These records are transmitted by local authorihes [authorities] to places of employment, etc., and the believer who dares ask for a baptism, funeral, or some other open service finds himself soon out of a job end in general ostracized from society.”
[7] “A few months after this was written, this very rule was applied against Talantov’s dying wife, as Talantov himself describes in his “Complaint to the Attorney General of the Soviet Union” of April 26, 1968 (English text in Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, Aug. 15/31, 1968):

‘On the day of her death, I wished to have the rite of unction performed for her, as she desired. But the Dean of the sole remaining open Orthodox church in the city of Kirov, that of St. Seraphim, told me that the local authorities forbade the rite of unction to be performed in homes. This deplorable case demonstrates that believing Christians in the city of Kirov are deprived nowadays even of those rights that they were given by J. V. Stalin.’”

[8] “This occurred in 1961. The question of atheism and the means of battling against it were on the agenda of this Conference but at the objection of Metropolitan (then Archbishop) Nikodim the question was dropped.”


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