296 - The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History

The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History

By Jane Ellis

Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986. 531 Pp. $39.95.

Jane Ellis is the Senior Fellow of Keston College, Kent, England, a research institution that specializes in the study of religious communities in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. She is also the Senior Research Editor of the Journal of Religion in Communist Lands and has contacts with many eminent specialists in the field.

Her current book is impressive, full of information in many fields and with many historic and ecclesiastical personalities who affected Russian destiny. For greater clarity, Ellis divides her material into two larger parts with subdivisions.

Part One discusses the organizational structure and chief components

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of the Orthodox Church-churches and dioceses, parish life, clergy, theological education and training, monasticism, the laity, the episcopate, and, finally, the relations between the church and the state.

Part Two deals with dissent, presenting a historical review of dissent within the Orthodox Church, from the late 1950s to 1974 and later. Ellis traces the rise of Orthodox dissent and the attendant personal hardships during its growth (1974-76), and flowering (1976-79). Then came a phase of stern repression of dissent (1976-1980) and painful crises with brutality, calumny, trials landing some in psychiatric wards, reminiscent of those portrayed by some Soviet writers and poets of the period.

For her source material, Ellis consulted the official publications of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, Samizdat, Bogoslovskie Trudy, and other official documents, reports, and articles written by visitors. Her historical material covers a vast temporal and geographical span, which she presents with precision, clarity, and scholarly documentation. At the end of the book the reader also finds an extensive bibliography, tables, index, and copious footnotes, all of which keep the reader oriented.

On this background, Ellis presents the central subject, the Russian Orthodox Church, its direction and progress. In her introduction, she writes, "The emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church into the international ecclesiastical arena ... began shortly after Stalin allowed the restoration of the Moscow Patriarchate ... in 1943, and gained momentum when the Church joined the World Council of Churches in 1961. It has continued to gather pace during the last two decades."

We learn that later the Russian Orthodox Church entered into a series of continuing discussions with the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, Lutheran Churches, the World Council of Churches, the Council of European Churches, and other international groups. Thus, a rapprochement was built-up gradually between them for the future and focused on the importance of peace and disarmament.

The Russian Church's peace-making efforts were also involved in the International Catholic Peace Movement, Pax Christi International, begun in 1974. The cause of peace assumed great importance to all and soon it was decided to convene a World Interreligions Peacemaking Conference. In September, 1975, a noteworthy assembly was held on "Peace, Disarmament and Just Relations." Other conferences soon followed, bringing international contacts, mutual understanding, and a basis for creative friendship. Ellis notes that this flowering of detente between the East and West in the 1970s was due partly to the desire on the part of the Soviet government to foster abroad the view that "freedom of religion exists in the Soviet Union." This notion, however, should be taken with a grain of salt.

The status of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet world is still of great interest to many believers, and even to atheists. They are deeply concerned. They want to know just what is the form and the real status of the Mother Church seventy years after the establishment of their

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atheistic society. Ellis addresses herself to this question, showing the limitations imposed on the Russian Orthodox by the contemporary Soviet world. For instance, while the Church and its members strove to keep alive the religion of their forebears, the state encouraged sabotage and mockery of the Church by atheists. Many churches were arbitrarily forced to close, leaving broad rural areas without services so important to the devout Orthodox. This was hard to accept because the, parishioners were deprived of the service of their priests, and the priests also missed fulfilling their pastoral duties. Besides, the vacant church building was often commandeered by the local commissar for some other use, such as a barn or a local movie. Fortunately, there are quite a few architectural treasures of Old Russia that continue to be restored professionally and are used for religious purposes.

"In 1976 the KGB launched a campaign against public dissent within the Russian Orthodox Church that reached its peak in 1979-80 with a series of trials of Orthodox believers, including some of the best-known leaders from the scene, such as Father Gleb Yakunin, Alexander Ogorodnikov, and Father Dimitri Dudko. As a result of these events, Orthodox believers were less willing to protest openly about the injustices they perceived.

However, on March 14, 1987, The New York Times had a short notice that Fr. Gleb Yakunin had just been released from Siberia by the Supreme Soviet (on March 13) and that he was returning to Moscow after ten years of exile for being a founding member of the "Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers in the USSR."

Ellis' material on the Russian Orthodox Church has been widely collected and thoroughly studied and evaluated for the reader. She is compassionate in the face of tragedies, of which there have been many. She emphasizes the intellectual and spiritual debates held by Orthodox thinkers in the Soviet Union and shows the bitter price that some dissidents paid.

For many, the period of dissent was excruciating. Yet, some found a way out by repairing and working around churches and religious structures that bad been ruined by atheists and foreign invaders during World War 11. They repaired these "casualties" and soon some domes gleamed again and their bells rang out summoning the faithful to services within. Hopefully, the direction of life has changed.

In conclusion, I wish to call the reader's attention to Ellis' pages on the survival of monasticism, which brings up the ineffable figure of the monastic Elder Tavrios in whom-as in Dostoevsky's famous Zossima in Brothers Karamazov-the wisdom, mercy, and spirituality of Old Russia survives, despite the restrictions imposed on monastic orders by the current state.

LUDMILLA TURKEVICH

Center of Theological Inquiry
Princeton, New Jersey