A Contradictory and Multifaceted Relationship: Russian Orthodoxy and 1917

Recognition of the religious dimension as an integral part of the history of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union is unquestionably one of the factors that have done most to endow our understanding of 1917 and the following 74 years of Bolshevik experimentation with greater complexity. 1917, the year of revolutions, marked the beginning of a new era for the Russian Orthodox Church. The interpretations and representations of 1917 developed by the Orthodox world are manifold because they reflect a complex set of interwoven processes triggered by the revolutions of February and October. The common frame of reference for the different readings of 1917 was established, however, by the antireligious policies implemented by the Bolshevik regime from the very outset, which led in the 1920s and ’30s to a wave of bloody persecution. 1917 was also an imperial phenomenon. The Orthodox 1917 also saw a clash in the ecclesial sphere between designs and demands of an “imperial” and a “national” character. The events in Petrograd gave rise to movements of ecclesiastical separatism on a national basis in the Orthodox worlds of Ukraine and Georgia. The legacy of 1917 constitutes a prism through which we can look with no simplification at the complex history of Orthodoxy and its relations with Soviet Russian society in the 20th century and at the sometimes-contradictory tribulations of the Orthodox Church in Russia today. The question of the relations between power, religion and the sacred—whose crucial importance for the political dynamics of Russia is still evident today—constitutes one of the key elements of 1917.