Lived Orthodoxy in the USSR

Although the last thirty years have seen a remarkable increase in the number of studies of Orthodoxy in the USSR, in many ways this scholarship is still in its early stages. English-language scholars have traced important developments within the institutional church,Footnote ²⁴ illuminated the experiences of monks and nuns in the USSR,Footnote ²⁵ explained the development of Soviet anti-religious policy,Footnote ²⁶ and demonstrated the persistence of belief, especially in the countryside.Footnote ²⁷ Recent work has revealed continuities and changes in Orthodox thought in the Soviet era.Footnote ²⁸ Russian-language scholars have produced a number of important works on the church hierarchy from the beginning to the collapse of the USSR, on church-state relations, and, more recently, on questions concerning Orthodox parish life and property in the early revolutionary years.Footnote ²⁹ As Gregory Freeze points out, however, scholars continue to ignore the importance of religion, and of Orthodoxy in particular, for understanding the drastic changes that occurred in the former Russian empire after 1914, not least because scholars who study the church have not always demonstrated its importance for understanding the revolution.Footnote ³⁰

Moreover, as compared to the work done on the imperial era, we still have a very limited sense of how Orthodoxy was lived by believers in the USSR, and particularly in the early, pre-Stalin Soviet Union. Although we have begun to become aware that many places in revolutionary Russia experienced a revival of Orthodox practice both in the years leading up to the revolution and during the first years of Bolshevik rule, with the exception of the few works cited above, we still know little of the myriad ways in which Orthodox religious practice persisted, and how its practitioners conceived of themselves.Footnote ³¹ If we have considered how Orthodoxy was lived by regular people after the Bolshevik revolution, we have tended to assume that those who thought of themselves as Orthodox after October of 1917 did not simultaneously consider themselves “Soviet,” however they understood that term. In contrast, scholars have shown the myriad ways Soviet Jews in the early-Revolutionary period conceived themselves as both “Soviet and kosher.”Footnote ³²

Thus, Orthodox belief, especially among lay people, is often considered through the lens of resistance to the Soviet state. This may partially explain why the persistence of Orthodox belief and/or practice among lay people in the USSR has come to be seen as an especially female phenomenon. Village grandmothers (babi bunty) protested against relic confiscations and collectivization campaigns that targeted churches, and women in general were considered to be less susceptible to retribution from authorities should they publicly expose their Orthodox beliefs.Footnote ³³ It was the Bolsheviks, first of all, who argued that religion only continued to survive among “old women,” and “hysterics.”Footnote ³⁴

These characterizations often tell us very little about Orthodox women themselves. As Page Herrlinger argues, “women's beliefs and behaviors have been analyzed with respect to the expectations of either the Bolsheviks or Church authorities, while their own perspectives and priorities have been for the most part marginalized or ignored.”Footnote ³⁵ If women, as Herrlinger argues, are rendered “one-dimensional” by scholars of Orthodoxy in the USSR, laymen are barely present. Yet, the majority of lay defendants in the confiscations trials were men, precisely because women were less likely to be prosecuted for their lived religiosity.Footnote ³⁶ Perhaps we have not tried to know these subjects because we ourselves have been shaped by the Bolshevik portrayals of lived Orthodoxy in the USSR.Footnote ³⁷

So who were these people? What became of the baptized Orthodox who maintained some attachment to their Orthodoxy and did not necessarily become party members, but who also did not necessarily oppose the Soviet state? What of those who went to church and who also joined the local soviet; those who, as Christine Worobec argues, “still needed the religious rites, prayers, and symbols that helped them make sense of their sorrows and gave them comfort”?Footnote ³⁸ What, especially of those ordinary people who grew up in the twilight years of the Russian empire in a largely Orthodox world, where Orthodox religious observance, which may have been on the decline in some areas, was much higher than Christian religious observance in the rest of Europe?Footnote ³⁹ What about those who took part in the massive religious processions (krestnyi khody) in urban centers throughout the former empire in 1918, or the parishioners who, while perhaps being more anti-clerical, also rose up to defend their clergymen after the Bolshevik Revolution, or those who flocked to confession and the sacraments in the early years of the Bolshevik regime?Footnote ⁴⁰ How did they think about themselves as Orthodox people, as believers, as Soviet citizens? Surely the answers to such questions are not of interest only to scholars of religion or Orthodoxy, but to any scholar of the USSR, especially in the wake of the turn towards the study of Soviet subjectivity and identity. Perhaps we have had difficulty in asking these questions, not only because sources are hard to come by, but also because of a limited understanding of what being Orthodox, or even religious, meant in the early Soviet period.

Rethinking Religion and Identity in Revolutionary Russia

For years, the study of Orthodoxy in Russia was marked by artificial binaries that often clouded our understanding of lived Orthodoxy in medieval and imperial Russia. Whether it be the notion of dvoeverie, the idea that “popular” and “official” (clerical) Orthodoxy were two distinct categories that were often in contention, scholars often unwittingly accepted the Bolshevik narrative of religion as dichotomous class struggle between elites and masses, educated and un-educated, clergy and peasants.Footnote ⁴¹ Scholars of the imperial period have long since adapted a much more nuanced framework, viewing religion as “fully and deeply entangled with the world. Belief, spirituality, and the sacred are seen not as separate, clearly bounded spheres . . . nor as mere reflections of social and political life but, rather, as powerful and complex cultural expressions of transcendent meanings, passions, and beliefs entwined inescapably with the whole of life, in Russia and beyond.”Footnote ⁴² These scholars have sought out “sacred stories,” and have demonstrated how modern identity in the late-imperial period was deeply shaped by religious practices, convictions, and experiences.Footnote ⁴³

On the one hand, then, this nuanced mode of thinking needs to be brought to bear on our studies of religion in the early Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Soviet period, which was marked by the Bolshevik desire to break sharply with all institutions, beliefs, and practices of the past, provides its own challenges and opportunities when it comes to the study of religion. The subjects of this article gave their testimony under threat of death, imprisonment, or exile. Although religious freedom was officially protected in the USSR, there can be no doubt that, as Vera Shevzov has argued, the Bolsheviks sought to “spiritually colonize” the former empire and the minds of its subjects through a “sociocultural engineering project” that employed violence, propaganda, and incentives to eradicate institutions of religion, the “powerful communities of feeling” that religions often are, and, at various times, clergy and lay people who professed themselves to be religious.Footnote ⁴⁴

In such a context, it is all the more difficult to try to get at what religion or religiosity might have meant to a Soviet citizen who was also a believer. As David Morgan explains, religion is not just about articulating what one believes; after all “human beings do not translate everything significant or compelling into words.”Footnote ⁴⁵ For the subjects in this study, the material objects and concrete spaces of their churches elicited in them a range of emotions, thoughts, opinions, actions and reactions, some of which might have been contradictory, halting, and even not understandable to the subjects themselves. The study of material religion moves beyond that of “belief,” insofar as the latter is limited to “propositional claims about knowledge and belief.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Orthodoxy in particular, with its robust liturgical life, cannot be reduced to what its participants can express in words. It engages all the senses, calling the participant into intimate communion with God and human beings, often through materials like icons, water, relics, the eucharistic bread and wine, bells, and incense.Footnote ⁴⁷

In the case of sacred vessels, in particular, the combination of fear, respect, and awe that the objects elicited in the defendants also led them to form the conviction, whether vague or firm, that such objects should not be touched by lay people like themselves. As baptized Orthodox, they would likely have attended church at least once a year until 1917, where they would have become familiar with the iconostasis that separated the lay people from the clerics. The lay people in the Moscow trial carried these experiences with them, and clearly felt there was some barrier that ought not to be crossed, some shred of reverence that had to be maintained, when dealing with objects deemed sacred. They may very well have been anti-clerical, as a growing number of workers, soldiers, and peasants seem to have been after the February Revolution.Footnote ⁴⁸ But whether they knew, had a relationship with, liked, or respected their local clergymen or not, many of the accused expressed in more or less cogent ways the sense that certain objects should not be touched by non-clerics.

Such an experience of the sacred cannot be entirely captured by the notion of private vs. public, institutional vs. non-institutional, or pro-or anti-clerical belief, or even of parish lay vs. clerical power.Footnote ⁴⁹ This is not to claim that these concepts are not helpful, but to suggest that to speak of religiosity and the sacred, especially in this period of historical flux, is to face what Mark Steinberg, referring to proletarian worker writers, calls “the challenge . . . of trying to comprehend clearly how people handled an elusive and ambiguous form of knowledge” that was central to how they conceived of themselves.Footnote ⁵⁰

The thirty-two lay people who were put on trial along with twenty-two clerics in the Trial of the Fifty-Four in Moscow were a diverse lot. The youngest was eighteen and the eldest sixty-two. Ranging from students to professors, metalworkers to locksmiths, some had moved to Moscow from surrounding provinces, while others had been born in the city. Some of them were more educated than others; some described themselves as religious; others did not. Still others gave changing and even contradictory accounts of their religious identities and of their involvement (or lack thereof) in attempts to save the sacred vessels from confiscation. There were no graduates of seminaries or theological academies, or people who worked in professional fields related to the church. They were all, however, responding to the way that objects deemed sacred in the Orthodox tradition were being treated. These objects were not merely signifiers of articulated beliefs, but often the very source of beliefs, attitudes, and emotions.Footnote ⁵¹ They were things that Chernov could describe as being “dear to me.”

The defendants also expressed varying degrees of enthusiasm, attachment, loyalty, indifference, hostility, perplexity, and ignorance about and/or the Soviet authorities. They were new at being Soviet subjects, living only five years after the revolution whose victory had been secured in the civil war, and a few months after the formation of a new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Although they may not have been engaged in the kind of active reshaping of their identities that was undertaken by committed Bolsheviks, these people had still passed through years of chaos that had nonetheless offered them new opportunities and new ways to think about themselves. They were likely already aware that being able to claim a proletarian identity was of great advantage to them, especially in 1922 when the Bolsheviks were eager to both rebuild the “disintegrated” industrial working class and to claim workers’ support.Footnote ⁵²

As city-dwellers stationed in the capital, they lived in a place where the Bolshevik project was more advanced. As their interrogation records, statements at the trial, and official appeals show, many of these people already knew how to think about, or at least present themselves as Soviet subjects, precisely because this was a time when what it meant to be Soviet was still being worked out on a public and personal level. The defendants presented themselves as both Soviet and religious, sometimes negotiating their identities in real time in the courtroom. Let us turn, then, to these subjects, and examine how these different facets of their identities emerged in the interrogation room and on trial.

Educated Believers in Religion and Revolution

The defendants in the Trial of the Fifty-Four fell into one of two general groups. The first was composed of people who had attended meetings at their local parishes that had been organized by the parish soviet. Since 1918, the parish soviet, “an elected committee of core parish activists” had taken over most of the responsibility for parishes.Footnote ⁵³ At the meetings, the attendees discussed the VTsIK decree ordering the confiscations of church valuables, read the patriarch's message aloud (as they had been instructed to do by the local leaders of the Orthodox Church in Moscow) and decided whether or not to hand over the sacred vessels, especially since the patriarch had forbidden doing so.Footnote ⁵⁴ The second group was made up of people who had gathered outside of churches during the confiscations, and who were accused of some form of agitation against the soldiers carrying out the confiscations, or against the Soviet authorities in general.

People in the first group were treated much more harshly by the members of the tribunal. As educated men who had, in some cases, been beneficiaries of the old regime, or who were now serving as “bourgeois specialists,” or were intellectuals working as lawyers or professors, or even as independent tradesmen, they were considered likely to be counterrevolutionaries.Footnote ⁵⁵ Most defendants in this group, regardless of the parish meeting they had attended, reported a similar series of events: they had gathered to discuss the confiscations, and most parishioners had expressed a desire to help the starving and to give over church valuables. When the patriarch's message was read aloud, however, the parishioners resolved to try to find a way to give over all the items except for the sacred vessels. Some groups of parishioners followed the suggestions of the deans of the Moscow churches and sent a form letter to VTsIK. The letter stated that it was the “moral duty” of Orthodox believers to protest the confiscations and asked VTsIK to reconsider a decision that was “deeply offensive to the religious feelings of millions of believers and contrary to the principle of freedom of conscience and freedom of religious worship.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Parishioners sometimes proposed sending items or money in exchange for the sacred vessels.Footnote ⁵⁷

In the case of this first group, the tribunal wanted to determine how the defendants reacted to Patriarch Tikhon's message forbidding believers from voluntarily handing over the sacred vessels. The tribunal members were convinced that the church was a counterrevolutionary organization in which the believer-soldiers served at the whim of the patriarch. Yet, the defendants revealed themselves to have a much more complex relationship with authority (both political and religious) than their interrogators bargained for. In describing it, moreover, they revealed that one aspect of belief in this period concerned precisely the way a subject imagined himself in relation to authority.

One defendant, Kirill Asafov, was a twenty-six-year-old employee in the State Historical Museum manuscript department and secretary of his parish soviet at the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God “Unburnt Bush” in central Moscow. In a meeting about the confiscations, members of Asafov's church decided unanimously to petition VTsIK, asking them to respect their freedom of conscience. Under interrogation, Asafov admitted that he had personally drafted the appeal, and that he had referenced the same canons as Patriarch Tikhon when explaining why it was forbidden to give over the sacred vessels. He did not, however, see his actions as being what he called “purely religious” or as counterrevolutionary:

Bolshevik investigators could make neither heads nor tails of such a statement, as they demonstrated during the trial.

The tribunal was headed by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bek, who was assisted by the leading procurator in the trials against the church, Anatolii Lunin, and a people's accuser, Anton Loginov, a well-known anti-religious activist.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bek opened the questioning of Asafov, asking if there had been a protest at Asafov's parish, to which Asafov replied that there had been a “lecture” about what the parishioners should do with the church valuables. Already wedded to the notion that religiosity and resistance went hand in hand, Loginov jumped in and argued that holding such a meeting was akin to running in the streets and screaming about “blasphemy and what you think is sinful;” it was “agitation,” plain and simple.Footnote ⁶⁰ But Asafov chafed against this characterization of himself and his actions:

Asafov was clearly perplexed by the idea that discussing specific questions related to church valuables in a parish soviet meeting could be likened to resistance or counterrevolutionary activity. Rather, he felt that having such a conversation was incumbent upon him as a believer.

Bek, meanwhile, charged Asafov with misusing the rights of the parish soviet. Instead of discussing “religious” questions (as they were allowed to do), the members of the parish soviet had instead taken up political ones by discussing Patriarch Tikhon's message, and especially the canons that the patriarch had cited. Asafov, however, fundamentally challenged Bek's definition of religion, explaining that they were discussing “on a purely religious, canonical plane.” For him, the two were not contradictory, nor was a discussion of canons and confiscations a non-religious question.Footnote ⁶²

Indeed, the confiscations seem to have pushed Asafov to reflect upon his relationship to sacred vessels, canons, church authority, and the relationship between secular and sacred authority in ways that he may not have had to before. He explained that he was “against the taking of sacred vessels” and that the patriarch had cited sacred canons, which had confirmed Asafov's own thinking. “So you accepted his proclamation on faith?” asked Bek, “Yes.” “Which means that you are persuaded of this even now?” asked Bek. “I'm not a theologian,” answered Asafov, “but I don't think the chalices should be given away.” “Were you persuaded of this?” Bek pressed on, “Or did you take it on faith?” “On faith and canons,” replied Asafov. “So you obeyed mechanically?” Bek countered. “That is not mechanical obedience,” answered the young museum worker.Footnote ⁶³

Bek was baffled and pointed out that Asafov had testified earlier that he was not familiar with canon law. “I consulted a book,” explained Asafov, which explained that “it is forbidden to use sacred objects for non-sacred purposes.” “What does that mean?” asked Bek, “Why is it sinful to take those or other valuables?” “Because they are sacred,” Asafov responded.Footnote ⁶⁴ He went on to explain that people in his parish signed their petition to VTsIK “out of morality,” and that he sincerely believed that he could write to VTsIK to ask them to confiscate everything save for the sacred vessels out of the confiscations. Such a decision was not primarily political, he explained, but had political consequences. He had not listened to the patriarch “mechanically,” he repeated, but had concluded that he had to write to VTsIK “in order to have a peaceful conscience.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Asafov had revealed his continued belief in the sacrality of material objects and in the necessity of respect for the Orthodox liturgy. In so doing, he showed himself to be neither a slave to the hierarchy, nor a rebel; neither an educated intelligent who scoffed at the idea of the transcendent, nor a counterrevolutionary fanatic or member of the “backwards masses.” He was, rather, a young man who was trying to make sense of how to live out his religious convictions in a new environment, and was doing so with some discernment and through his own initiative, which included studying canon law, something that he may not have had reason or occasion to do before the confiscations prompted him to. In front of a courtroom of one thousand people, Asafov challenged not just the Bolshevik narrative of belief, but also a very restricted notion of what it meant to be religious.

The tribunal was faced with a number of subsequent defendants who did not fit their image of what it meant to be religious. They were perplexed that the accused, especially those who were active members of their parish soviets, had differing positions on the patriarch's message and its significance for them as both believers and Soviet citizens. Some explained that they felt sympathy with the patriarch, but that they were still “wholeheartedly for” confiscations.Footnote ⁶⁶ Others, like the sixty-year-old Stepan Petrovich Chernyshev, a professor at Moscow University, expressed their strong disagreement with the patriarch.Footnote ⁶⁷

Evgenii Nikolaevich Efimov, a lawyer and professor at the Karl Marx Institute of National Economy, was a member of the parish soviet at the Resurrection Church on Kadashi Sloboda. He had read the patriarch's message aloud at a general meeting of parishioners that was attended by hundreds of people. During the trial, Efimov, who described himself as “a very religious person,” stated that he did not consider Tikhon's message to be political agitation.Footnote ⁶⁸ He admitted, however, that the message had riled believers to action. Under interrogation, he explained that he felt that VTsIK's decision to confiscate church valuables was “incorrect” but also “quite justified.” The government had the authority to order the confiscations and, as a believer, he felt obliged to obey the order; to not do so “would be a resistance to the authorities, which does not correspond to the spirit of the Orthodox religion.”Footnote ⁶⁹ It was for this reason that he urged his fellow parishioners to petition VTsIK and ask them to reconsider their decree. For Efimov, writing the petition was not an act of religious resistance, but one of deference to earthly authorities that he believed was prescribed by his Orthodox faith.

Some defendants embodied any number of these positions. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bryzgalov, an engineer who worked for the electrification commission in Moscow and was also a faculty member at the Moscow Higher Art and Technical Institute (VKhUTEMAS), explained under interrogation that he had attended two different meetings at two different parishes at which confiscations were discussed. In order to both aid the starving and also assure the protection of the sacred vessels, he had proposed an alternative plan whereby believers abroad could supply the funds to help the starving and thus save the vessels that, in any case, he had calculated had very little value.

In explaining why he had devised such a plan, Bryzgalov seems to have been surprised that his behavior could have been construed as anything but helpful. He had assumed “that Soviet power was always ready to accommodate all proposals of practical value.”Footnote ⁷⁰ As someone who worked alongside avant-garde artists at VKhUTEMAS, helping them to select the right materials to produce monuments and frescoes for the revolution, Bryzgalov was convinced that his very approach to saving the sacred vessels was a fundamentally Soviet one that could not possibly be construed as an act of resistance.Footnote ⁷¹ Like Asafov and Efimov, Bryzgalov's testimony reveals a man carefully weighing his obligations, risks, and religious attachments in response to government and church authorities. Like them, he seems to have conceived of himself as a religious man in a country on its way to communism, who believed that he could exist comfortably within both of these worlds. Perhaps the trial disabused him of these notions; such was certainly the case for Efimov.

In his final statement before the court, Efimov expressed his frustration and disbelief in the “difficult, morally difficult trial.” What most irritated him, he explained, was the prosecution's whole “ideology” of class.Footnote ⁷² The theories of the accusers had become a prism through which they had interpreted all the evidence. He offered a different vision of social life, based on what he called “my teaching.”Footnote ⁷³ “Besides the two classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,” he explained,

Efimov saw himself as both a believer and a Soviet citizen; in articulating his self-understanding, he not only challenged the idea that one could not be both of these things, but also the narrow ideas of class that shaped the tribunal members’ assumptions and goals during the trial. Both he and Bryzgalov demonstrate both the varieties of religious identity in this time period, and also the flexibility of Soviet identity.Footnote ⁷⁵ If highly educated people were able to articulate such complex understandings of their religious and political convictions, however, the defendants in the second group—those who showed up to confiscations and were arrested for agitating against them—reacted instinctively, and sometimes violently, to the confiscations, thus exposing them to both external and internal questioning about their religiosity and their attitudes to Soviet power.

Varieties of Religious Identity among Protestors

The defendants who were arrested for agitation were overwhelmingly of worker or peasant origin and were not highly educated. Like the members of the first group, they expressed differing opinions about the Soviet authorities, but it was only members of this group who declared themselves active supporters of the Bolsheviks, or who had fought in the Red Army during the civil war. Unlike the members of the first group, most of these expressed their support for the confiscation of church valuables. Their qualms, if they admitted to having them, were with the way that the churches and the objects were treated by the soldiers, who frequently disrespected both.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the case of such defendants, the members of the tribunal clearly saw the trial as an educational opportunity, one that would help to liberate the defendants from the last fetters of religion and usher them into a new social order and political consciousness. They were also to serve as an example to the spectators and newspaper readers of the follies of religion and belief, and the cruelty of the church hierarchy and intelligentsia, who had taken advantage of people whom a reporter for Bednota called “unconscious” and “uncultured” in order to undermine Soviet power.Footnote ⁷⁷ In attempting to do this, however, the tribunal members appear to have drawn out a religious consciousness of which the defendant may not even have been aware he possessed.

The two Bashkirov brothers, Vladimir and Aleksandr, were twenty and twenty-two years old respectively. Aleksandr had served in the Red Army from 1918 to 1921, when he was discharged in order to complete his education.Footnote ⁷⁸ In their pre-trial interrogations, the brothers both explained that they had passed by the Church of the Ascension while Red Army soldiers were carrying out confiscations. Vladimir had wondered aloud why soldiers were smoking and wearing hats (a sign of great disrespect in a church building), while Aleksandr commented that the soldiers should have come at night when no one was there. When asked how they felt about religion, both brothers answered: “I was raised religious.”Footnote ⁷⁹

During the trial, the tribunal members gave more attention to Aleksandr, presumably because with his Red Army background, the optics of him repudiating his lingering religious attachments in front of the large audience were hard to resist. Unlike his brother Vladimir, who testified that he sometimes went to church and who identified himself as a “believer,” Aleksandr stated that he had not been to church since 1914. Bek asked him his opinions about the confiscations: “Do you think the [sacred] vessels can be given over, or not?” “I didn't think about it. As a lay person I cannot decide this question, this is a question of a strictly theological nature,” Aleksandr replied, perhaps unwittingly speaking about himself according to categories that made sense only within an Orthodox worldview.Footnote ⁸⁰ “I am asking you as a lay person,” countered Bek, “even a lay person can make his own judgement.” Bek was extending to the young student the chance to free himself from the oppression of the church hierarchy, the beliefs of his parents, and the practices of his youth once and for all. “In my opinion,” Bashkirov responded, “they could have left only the necessary valuables; the rest could have been taken.”Footnote ⁸¹

Having fought a bloody civil war with the Red Army for three years, and having not attended a church service in almost ten years, Bashkirov was still stubbornly shaped by the notion that some objects were “necessary,” and was disturbed by their being treated so disrespectfully by his comrades in arms. Pressed to pronounce on the “theological” issue by Bek, however, he said more than he had under interrogation, calling himself a “layman” and confirming the notion that some objects were “necessary” to Orthodox life. In his case, the tribunal's attempt to usher him towards a stronger revolutionary consciousness seems to have instead forced him to express himself as a religious subject.

There were those, however, like Dmitrii Chernov, whom we met at the outset of this article, who could not express any coherent thoughts on sacred vessels or confiscations in general, but whose obvious emotion about the items made them particularly problematic for the tribunal members. Another such was Mikhail Frolovich Talagaev, a forty-four-year old illiterate man, born into the peasant estate, who had migrated to Moscow, where he had worked in construction before becoming an independent locksmith. On March 31, he had passed by the Church of Basil of Caesarea where he was dismayed to see the soldiers confiscating property. Witnesses, including his fellow defendant and co-worker, Maksim Petrov, reported that Talagaev had wept profusely as the soldiers carried out their work.Footnote ⁸² In his pre-trial interrogations, the locksmith admitted that he had stated that confiscations were not necessary. When he was told by the crowd that they were, he explained, “I offered to give my tools and flour; I said that bread from abroad would not come for a long time.” He also admitted that he personally owned an icon of Christ the Savior, which was rimmed with metal and jewels.Footnote ⁸³ Talagaev was one of the few defendants whom the investigator recommended should be released prior to the trial, “taking into account his social position.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Perhaps the investigator hoped to ease Talagaev into repenting his actions, or perhaps the tribunal did not want to be seen as too harsh to a member of the working class. Whatever the reason, when Talagaev actually testified at the trial, his emotional distress only served to undermine the educational efforts of the tribunal members.

One of the first things the tribunal established was that Talagaev was illiterate. Bek had to read him the indictment, explaining what Talagaev had been charged with. “Why were you crying?” asked Bek. “It was because of the starving [people],” Talagaev responded. “I myself know it well. There was a crop failure in ’93, and I remember it . . .” he continued. What followed was a confused back-and-forth between Talagaev and his accusers, where the distressed man offered garbled answers. The tribunal was most concerned with establishing why he had wept.Footnote ⁸⁵ “Did you cry?” he was asked, more than once. “I was crying for those starving people,” he explained. “It would have been very good if you had laughed,” Bek replied, referring to the idea that the starving were finally going to be helped by the confiscations, “but I state that you cried, and I ask, how could that happen?” “I have a nervous temperament,” the defendant stammered. “Well then who did you feel sorry for?” Bek pushed on. Talagaev's defense advocate intervened, trying to establish that his client, traumatized by the memory of an 1893 crop failure, had cried for the starving, and not because of his attachment to the sacred items.Footnote ⁸⁶ The tribunal, however, wanted desperately to disprove this, so much so that they called on another defendant, Maksim Petrov, a friend of Talgaev's, who had been with him on the day of the confiscations, to confirm that Talagaev had, indeed, been crying over the confiscations.Footnote ⁸⁷ Although the Bolsheviks hoped to break the hold that sacred items had on believers by demystifying such items, they also clearly felt the need to prosecute such an emotion, considering it a danger to citizens and the populace at large. Emotion, after all, could quickly spur people to violent reaction.

Indeed, in the case of some defendants, their emotional reaction to confiscations was expressed through strong anti-government language. Eighteen-year-old Moscow University student Petr Iurgenson was arrested for agitating against the confiscations at the church of Basil of Caesarea. His parents had owned a music publishing house prior to the revolution, and he was a hereditary honored citizen, a member of that tsarist social estate that most resembled a middle class or bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁸⁸ In two separate interrogations, Iurgenson admitted that, swept up by passion about the confiscations, he had shouted out that the confiscators were “Red gendarmes”—violent oppressors of the civilian population. He described himself as a regular churchgoer and “Orthodox believer” who “sympathiz[ed] with the Russian Communist Party except for religious questions.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Perhaps it was the very act of thinking through this identity that convinced Iurgenson that he could no longer present himself as being both of these things.

Prior to the trial, Iurgenson expressed his regret over his words, claiming that he had “behaved recklessly towards the guards.” In his second interrogation, however, he repented not just his actions, but his mindset and thought process: “I consider my actions to be criminal. I acted incorrectly [and] feverishly.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Iurgenson's regrets have the ring of the self-reflection and repentance that were crucial to the Orthodox believer making a good confession, a practice with which any even nominally Orthodox Christian would have been familiar at the time.Footnote ⁹¹ In fact, when under interrogation, some of the defendants used the skills and language that they had most probably used when preparing for confession in order to demonstrate to the Tribunal their repentance and desire and willingness to change.Footnote ⁹²

Becoming Soviet Subjects: Repentance, Conversion, and Refashioning

As much as the trial was a forum for educating observers, condemning defendants with suspicious class backgrounds, and demonstrating the counterrevolutionary nature of Orthodox belief, it also meant to educate those defendants who could potentially become New Soviet People, and to try to bring about their transformation. Some of the defendants seem to have undergone a process of internal transformation over the course of their arrest, interrogation, trial, and sentencing.

Stepan Ionov, a sixty-six-year-old metal worker, was born a peasant in Saratov and moved to Moscow at twelve in order to help support his family.Footnote ⁹³ Present during the confiscations at the church of Basil of Caesarea, Ionov was accused of agitation for having shouted that the Red Army guards outside the church should have been removed during confiscations because their presence was unnecessary. During his pre-trial interrogation he described himself as a “worker and citizen” who would never insult the Red Army. He claimed that he had only been suggesting that all citizens should have been helping with the confiscations in particular, and with famine relief in general. His peasant parents in Saratov were suffering the famine, and he knew that the people needed help. He had never attended a meeting at a church, he stated, but he did go to a church every year to get his kulich (Easter bread) blessed.Footnote ⁹⁴

After being convicted for counterrevolutionary activity and sentenced to a year's imprisonment, however, he spoke about himself differently. In a letter to the tribunal asking for pardon, he not only highlighted his proletariat status, but also tried to show how his worker consciousness had evolved since his arrest:

Eschewing his peasant identity and his attachment to Easter bread, he now presented himself as a worker transformed—converted—into a fuller class consciousness through the throwing off of the last vestiges of belief.

People like Ionov and Iurgenson may have genuinely transformed their thinking, or just as easily learned how to write petitions in convincing language, or perhaps both. One defendant, however, found himself pushed to refashion himself during the trial itself. Nikolai Motylev endured a questioning that saw him emerge from the courtroom, if not a different man, at least a man with a different way of describing himself and his beliefs. Motylev, a thirty-six-year-old former member of the executive committee of the Zamoskvorechye Soviet, head of the financial department of the district, accountant at the Pavlovsk hospital, and secretary of the parish soviet at the hospital's chapel, came from a peasant family.Footnote ⁹⁶

When the members of the parish soviet gathered to discuss confiscations Motylev suggested that they separate the sacred objects into three categories: objects necessary for the liturgy, objects that were archeological treasures, and objects to be given over to the commission for confiscations. He helped the members of the parish soviet write a petition to VTsIK explaining why they wanted to deal with the objects as Motylev had advised them.

Motylev's lengthy pre-trial interrogation and tribunal testimony reveal a man in the process of renegotiating his own beliefs and identity in a rapidly changing world. In his pre-trial interrogation, he described his devotion to his work in the Zamoskvorechye Soviet, and then turned to his religious convictions, on which he elaborated at length with an often-confusing rhetorical flourish. “I belong to Christianity with a direction of thought in the spirit of Lev Tolstoi,” he began. He deplored the clergy, whom he saw as “exclusive materialists at heart, thinking only of their own benefits, and therefore steadily leading to the perversion of Christ's ideas.” In 1919, he had been elected secretary of the parish soviet in the hospital, where he claimed “religious questions were not discussed. . . . I am of the opinion that for sick believers, the fulfillment of their religious needs is necessary as a means of helping them to physically endure their illnesses.” Meanwhile, relatives of the sick could find comfort in Orthodox rituals if they were believers. He, of course, thought this was all rubbish and explained: “I thought that this was all rubbish and explained that he supported antireligious propaganda ‘but not at the bedside of the sick when people’s loved ones are dying.’”Footnote ⁹⁷ Motylev was absolutely confident that his reasoning would make sense to his interrogators.

Of all the defendants, Motylev was most challenged to articulate his beliefs during the trial, a process that both he and the tribunal members found to be confusing and often contradictory. When Lunin asked him if he was a believer, he responded: “I have a Tolstoian bent,” although he qualified it by saying that “I don't exactly know Tolstoi's point of view.” Again, he qualified his statement: “I am not a Tolstoian; more precisely, I am a shallow Orthodox believer.” Bek asked if Motylev considered Tolstoi to be a Christian. Was he, Motylev, an unconvinced Tolstoian? “I am not much of a believer in the sense of conviction,” explained Motylev. But was he not the secretary of the parish soviet? Did the priest of his church know that he was not much of a believer? “Yes,” replied Motylev.

Motylev's questioners were utterly perplexed. “Do you have a weak faith?” asked Lunin, “a weak faith in spirits?” “I cannot say,” responded Motylev. Bek intervened, explaining that Lunin was simply trying to get things straight because the ideas were too contradictory: “a shallow believer who still divided the church valuables into categories.” Loginov jumped into the fray, asking “Do you recognize spirits? Do you have doubts?” “Yes. I doubt I consider myself religious,” replied the Motlyev. Bek tried to get Motylev to pin down precisely “what state you were in at the time, because your psychology is decisive. . . . . Your beliefs are similar to those of the counterrevolutionary clergy; can we assume that you've made a lapse in judgment?” “Yes,” said Motylev, “a political and tactical lapse.” To the persistent questioning about how he could have helped write a petition objecting to VTsIK’s approach to the confiscations, Motylev explained that the matter of the objects was one, but the matter of association with the “organization” of the Moscow clergy was another. “I consider such an alliance shameful. Since I became a member of the (Zamoskvorechye) soviet, there was too great a change in me for me to be an opponent of Soviet power.” He now “repented” his association with the organization of the clergy because he had come to recognize that it was an “unacceptable association that I did not recognize before.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Motylev's interrogation concluded with input from his defense lawyer and Bek. Did Motylev understand that there was a great difference between Tolstoianism and Orthodoxy? His defense lawyer accused him of throwing around words like “atheist” and asked him. “Do you know what a pantheist is? A Deist? Have you ever studied theological questions?” “No,” replied Motylev. At that point, the defense advocate asked him about his social background. Motylev admitted that he was a peasant.Footnote ⁹⁹ It was in the interest of both the tribunal and the defense advocate to paint Motylev as a confused peasant who was incapable of truly grasping the nature of religious belief. They portrayed him as person who was on the way to becoming a New Soviet Man when the counterrevolutionary organization of the Moscow clergy had gotten its talons into him.

Motylev's actual testimony, however, reveals a much more complex story of religiosity and belief. In 1922, a thirty-six-year-old former peasant who was quickly climbing the social ladder could conceive of himself as any number of things: a religious believer, a Tolstoian, a Christian, a shallow Orthodox believer, a believer in spirits (but perhaps not), a member of the local soviet, a supporter of Soviet rule and a defender of sacred objects. In their quest to educate the spectators, Bolshevik procurators had taken great pains to separate one religion from another, one worldview from another, and declare them contradictory. It is precisely this notion of belief and religion as things that can be articulated and categorized that has so dominated even historians’ understanding of Soviet believers. It seems more likely, however, that hundreds if not thousands of Motylevs must have existed in these early years of Soviet Communism: people who carried within themselves, however passively, the frameworks of belief in the transcendent but who were not used to articulating it, nor explaining if and exactly how they had changed with the revolution.

On the other hand, Motylev's testimony also portrays the agonized reflections of a person in the state of becoming a “revolutionary subject.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The very act of having to articulate beliefs upon which he had perhaps not ever reflected very deeply may have forced Motylev to see the tensions between religious belief and Bolshevism that he had not before recognized or consciously acknowledged. Motylev was undoubtedly afraid on the stand, and many (if not all) of his statements may have been made for the sole purpose of self-preservation. Nonetheless, their confessional tone reveals how powerful the Bolshevik system of belief had already become by 1922. Long before the Stalin years, Motylev seems to have been one of those individuals, who, as Halfin explains,

Motylev's philosophical stances were muddied and contradictory, so unused was he to needing to have them. Yet, his statements have the ring of truth to them insofar as they are remarkably different from those of the other defendants, and reflect a subject in conflict with himself who emerged from cross-examination with an entirely different definition of himself as a believer and a person than he had when he stepped into the courtroom.

The stories of the defendants in the “Trial of the 54” reveal the complexity of early-Soviet subjectivity. Their experiences certainly add to the growing body of evidence that undermines secularization theory's claims that “secularization was an inevitable outcome of modernization . . . a byproduct of increased urbanization, education, and bureaucratization.”Footnote ¹⁰² More intriguingly, however, they demonstrate that both Soviet and religious identities were being constantly fashioned and refashioned within people who were living in a society that was undergoing rapid change. By broadening our categories of what we consider to be “religiosity” or “belief,” and considering that a significant portion of the population of the former Russian empire had some familiarity with Orthodox notions of the sacred, it becomes increasingly plausible to consider that large swathes of the early Soviet population might have existed on the same spectrum as our defendants. They were likely people who were attached to Easter bread and who also supported the Soviet government; people who maintained a lingering respect for sacred spaces, even as they hated clerics; people who slowly realized that they had to learn to talk about themselves in different ways; and people who truly began to think of themselves in different ways. These people resist the strict categorizations of the Bolshevik tribunal members, Orthodox hierarchs, and historians. As Page Herrlinger argues, turning our eye towards them “will inevitably force us to engage in some much needed ostranenie (or de-familiarization) with respect to the way we think about, and ultimately understand, the revolutionary era as a whole.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, these people invite us to consider more deeply the role of the sacred and of religiosity in the process of revolution, and invite us to a more profound and nuanced investigation of religion, religiosity, belief, and identity in the early years of the Soviet Union.