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Scott M. Kenworthy, "The People's Patriarch: Tikhon Bellavin and the Orthodox Church in North America and Revolutionary Russia" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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New Books Network Host
welcome to the New Books Network.
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Roland Clark
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Roland Clark and I'm here today talking to Scott Kenworthy about his latest book, the People's Patriarch, Tikon Belavin, and the Orthodox Church in North America and Revolutionary Russia. Scott is professor of History at Miami University in Ohio, where he specializes in the history and thought of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, particularly in modern Russia. His first book, the Heart of Trinity, Sergius Monasticism and Society after 1825, won the Frank S. And Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society for Church History, and he's also co authored an introductory textbook called Understanding World Russia. So welcome to the podcast, Scott.
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Scott Kenworthy
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
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Roland Clark
Really, Scott, for those listeners who have never heard of Patriarch Tikhon, who was he and why was he so important?
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Scott Kenworthy
So Patriarch Tikhon was elected to the become the head or patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in November 1917, literally within a week or two of when the Bolsheviks had seized power. And when the Bolsheviks seized power, their plan was to uproot religion and kind of overthrow the role of the, of the Russian Orthodox Church. So he was immediately thrust into this role of trying to defend the church against this radical militant atheist government that had just come to power. And at that time there was on the books there was some hundred million Orthodox believers in Russia. Of course, probably some many millions of them were nominal believers, but, but the vast majority were still serious Orthodox Christians. So they vastly outnumbered the Communists at that time. And therefore the Bolsheviks saw it as a real threat. And the Patriarch had to lead the church and navigate this hostile government. So you could say he's the first religious leader in kind of radically hostile state. It's comparable to on the scale of the French Revolution, except it lasted even longer. And yet, despite being the head of the largest body, you know, non governmental body in the country, his life has received very little attention, especially in the English speaking world. There's one tiny biography about him that was written in the 1960s. So for the person who was leading a major Christian church through one of the most traumatic moments in history, it's a really important and fascinating, I think, story.
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Roland Clark
Yeah. So as someone who knows a bit about this time period, when I picked it up, I knew that Tikon was interesting because of his conflict with the Bolsheviks. What I hadn't expected was the really interesting stuff about his earlier life and his impact in North America. And there's so much more to him than just the revolutionary patriarch. So to start at the beginning, Vasily Belovodin, he studied at the St. Petersburg Theological academy during the 1880s. What were Russian Orthodox theological academies like at this time?
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Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, so the church, in the Orthodox Church, priests marry. And it was a tradition where the sons of priests would become priests and succeed their fathers, as it were. And so the church had an entire schooling system established just for the sons of the parish clergy. So which started in essentially elementary schools. And then the seminaries were the equivalent to the high schools. And then they had four theological academies which were the equivalent of the university. And they modeled the seminaries on the kind of gymnasium, the equivalent of the high schools or what have you, the secondary schools and the secular one. So they studied a lot of the same subjects. And then the academies were pretty high level, sophisticated theological studies and history and everything else. And so the best students from the seminaries had the chance to go on to one of the theological academies. But in the 1880s, in 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by revolutionary terrorists. And so this created across society, I mean, especially in the government, a kind of conservative counter reaction or reactionary movement that also had its impact on the church and on the academy and the seminaries. There was this sense that in the 1860s and 70s they'd become too liberal. And so therefore there was a push to make the theological academies more conservative, to bring them closer under the thumb and the observation of the church administration and and so on. But, you know, the students, because they came up through the ranks, they were sort of in the church to some degree by default. They were ordinary people reflecting what was going on in society. And so some were pulled towards this kind of more conservative, reactionary direction. And then others were reading Marx. And this was the time when Tolstoy was writing his kind of radical religious writings that rejected a lot of traditional Christianity. And he embraced this kind of radical pacifism and anarchism and so on. So students at the theological academy were reading, you know, these works by Tolstoy and getting some radical ideas too. And so the. The accounts of Tikhon when he was at the academy are that he was somebody who tried to navigate this sort of polarized atmosphere and find a way through the middle. And so there were this kind of symbolic moment where formerly the students themselves could elect the student library. And so the students had their own library that was separate from the main academy library, where they kept their own books that they wanted to read for themselves. And formerly they had elected the librarian. But this was a right, a privilege that was taken away from them in this change precisely in the 1880s. And the first person to be appointed was Tikhon, while he was still Vasily Bhallavin. But the administration at the academy kind of knew the mood of the students and was being, you could say, cautious or respectful of their position. So he elected Vasily Bilavin because he was somebody who would not just stalk the student library with pious religious literature, but would also be willing to engage the thought of the time, but not allow it in a kind of take it too far in a radical direction. And he didn't want the. He was okay with the students doing symbolic things that, you know, sort of express their support for some, you know, you could say sort of dissident movement, but without embracing or using the church in a political way, if I can put it like that.
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Roland Clark
When does Tikhon become a monk? What motivates him to pursue a monastic career. Was it careerism like a lot of people in his middle ear?
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Scott Kenworthy
Yeah. So this was another thing about the academies is that there was a real push, especially precisely in the 1880s with the new leadership, to take people who were still students in the academy, tonsure them as monks, and then immediately put them in positions of church authority. And so the kind of typical career trajectory, if you did that was that you would become assume sort of administrative position in a seminary. And then once you were old enough, because you had to be 33, according to the canons, once you were old enough, you would be consecrated a bishop and usually appointed as an assistant or vicar bishop to some larger diocese for a number of years before then you received your own diocese. And so if you took monastic vows in the academy, that was kind of fast track for. For an ecclesiastical career. Of course, those who married would then become parish priests, but their opportunities for advancement, you could say, were limited, since the bishops, while the priests marry in the Orthodox Church, bishops have to be celibate. And so normally my first book was about Orthodox monasticism, and there was a revival of monasticism in 19th century Russia. And normally the monastic path was one of withdrawal and contemplation and avoidance of the temptations of the world and so on. But if you took monastic vows at the theological academy or after you'd received an academy education, this was not a career choice of withdrawal and living a quiet life in a monastery. You know, it was sort of known that this was a life of service, you could say. But when Vasily graduated from the theological academy, he still felt like he was not yet mature enough, right. He's whatever, 22 or 23, to make that kind of decision. And so he returned to his alma mater, the Pskoff Theological Seminary, as a professor there, and taught theology for three years while he kind of tested his vocation, as he said in a letter to a friend after he became a monk. So he took monastic vows December 1891, when about a month before his 28th birthday, when he sort of felt like he was mature enough to make that lifetime decision, right, Whether you remain celibate or whether you get married and also mature, ready to be able to enter into the kind of church administration that he knew would follow.
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Roland Clark
So to jump forward a little bit, at the age of 33, Tikon's appointed Bishop of all of North America, including Alaska, without ever having set foot outside of Russia. As you explain in the book, America's a particularly challenging assignment for a bishop. What does he do when he gets there.
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Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, as you said in your introduction, I have two chapters on his American, you know, what he did in North America, which is also an incredible story. So just a bit of background. So Orthodox Christianity begins in North America, primarily through Alaska, when Alaska was part of Russia and there had been a quite successful mission there among Alaska Natives and so on. And then when Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867, the church decided to move, move the bishop's residence from Sitka in Alaska to San Francisco so that it would. Was easily accessible to Alaska by boat, but still could be on the mainland for, you know, legal and political purposes to be able to communicate with the American government and officials and so on when, when that was necessary. And it took a long time for throughout the 1870s and 1880s, there were very few Orthodox Christians in the lower 48th, but precisely in the 1890s. So in the years before Tikhon arrives, the number of immigrants had really started to rise very quickly. And so this kind of shifted the balance of the Church of Orthodox, the landscape of Orthodox Christianity from Alaska to, to especially the eastern part of the United States. And so when he arrives, he's still a young bishop. He'd been bishop for less than a year where he was serving in a region that's now part of Poland. And he's made bishop of the largest diocese in the entire world, not in terms of number of people, but in terms of the geographical landscape, as you said, everything of the United States. Oh, the entirety of North America, basically. And so he spends the first five years effectively there. He's there from 1898 to 1907. He spends the first five years just traveling non stop across the country. He would hop on a train and travel across to Minneapolis and Chicago and Cleveland and all through Pennsylvania and onto New York and around New York and so on and back. And there was a parish in Galveston. So he'd go down to Galveston and then back to San Francisco and barely catch his breath and hop on a boat and travel all around Alaska and back and forth and this kind of thing. And it was incredibly exhausting, even though he was a young man, but still you can imagine what travel was like by train and carriage and boat and things like that at the turn of the century. And so he realizes that the job first of all is kind of overwhelming, but also realizes the various needs that the church in America is having, especially at this pivotal moment when it's growing so fast. So the first thing he does is sponsor, helps build actively involved in building Major important churches both in Chicago and in New York. The one in Chicago he worked with, Lewis Sullivan, considered the. The father of modern architecture, who designed this church in Chicago. And then what he realized was that the needs for Alaska were so great that the most important thing was that Alaska just have its own bishop. And then whoever was bishop in the lower 48 could concentrate on that part of the country. But the Holy Synod of the Church in Russia was very reluctant to give this. And so he traveled back to Russia in 1903, spent months there, and finally presented persuasively the case that the church in Alaska needed its own bishop. So he secured that. And then once he comes back in beginning of 1904, in the last three years he's there, he just accomplishes an extraordinary number of things. So once he has a bishop full time for Alaska, he can move the bishop's residence from San Francisco to New York, because the overwhelming majority of the new immigrants are all in the eastern part of the United States. So that makes travel for the bishop a lot easier because you can make day trips or week trips or something like that instead of being on for months at a time. And the Orthodox Christians that were coming. So he's the only Orthodox bishop, right. Today the Orthodox Church in the United States, as in other places in Europe too, is divided among kind of ethnic jurisdictions. You have the Russian Orthodox and the Greek Orthodox and the Serbian Orthodox and the Romanian Orthodox. And they all had their own bishops and everything else. At that time, he was the only bishop, which meant that all the Orthodox Christians who were emigrating, all were in principle at least supposed to look to him. And there was a lot of Orthodox Christians coming from the Ottoman province of Syria. So what is today Syria and Lebanon, Palestine. And there were a lot of. A lot of Serbian Orthodox Christians as well, Greeks too. The Greeks somehow never really. They kind of ignored him. That's a separate story. But especially with the Serbs and the. The Syrio Arabs, as they called him in those days, he was their bishop. And so he consecrated a Syrian priest, monk who had been educated in Russia, he consecrated him as a bishop for the Syrian Orthodox Christians in the United States. He had a plan to do the same thing for the Serbs. And he appointed this Sebastian Devovich to be the head of this kind of Serbian mission within. So he had this vision of a unified Orthodox Church that would include all the diversity within it, for all the ethnic diversity. They could each have their own parishes and even their own bishops, but it would all be in one larger church structure that all fell apart after 1917 for a variety of reasons. But that was his vision, which many people still see as compelling for the. A compelling model for the way the American Orthodox Church could be. He established. One of the problems was finding enough priests as the massive numbers of immigrants are coming in, they're founding new churches. But it was very hard to find priests because I had to recruit people who had a seminary education, which meant getting people from Russia. Whether they wanted to come to the United States or whether they sort of worked out because of ethnic and linguistic differences was a challenge. So he establishes the first seminary in the United States to train locally born people to become candidates to become priests. He establishes the first monastery. He promotes and supports the publication of the first English language service book. Sort of seeing that that's going to be the future in America. He's the first bishop to go to Canada and consecrate churches there. And then finally he sort of culminates his time in 1907, shortly before he leaves, by convening the first church council in North America. So generally the Orthodox Church is a very hierarchical church, but there was this kind of renewal movement in the early 20th century for to mobilize the voices from the laity and the clergy from below and have their voices held. And so church council was kind of symbolic of that. And that was very much the way he embraced his leadership in North America and something he would bring back with him to Russia.
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Roland Clark
Now, one of the other challenges out of everything you mentioned while he's in North America is the large number of Orthodox migrants who are converting to Greek Catholicism when they arrive in America, as well as Greek Catholic migrants converting to Orthodoxy. How does Tikhon approach that problem?
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Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, so actually the largest number of immigrants that were coming into the Orthodox Church were people who were very few actually came from Russia itself. The vast majority came from Carpathian regions, people we call Rusyns, who are coming from Austro Hungarian Empire. Places of, you know, that are today Slovakia and eastern part of Poland and Ukraine and so on. Galicia. And these were Eastern Slavs who once upon a time in the Middle Ages had been Orthodox Christians, but living under Catholic rule, whether it was the Austrian or before in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth had been brought under Rome. But they were allowed in the. In the kind of Union of Brest in the 17th century. They were allowed to keep their Eastern rite liturgies and even married priests and things like this. So they basically continued to look and practice like Orthodox Christians, but they recognized their bishop as the head of their church, as the Pope. In Rome. Right. So that's why they're called Greek Catholics. Or sometimes the term used is unique, which is not in favor today, but they were often used that term at the time. And so a lot of these immigrants who are coming over, when they landed as Greek Catholics, they came over as Greek Catholics. And when they came to the United States, they didn't have a very welcome reception, often by the Roman Catholic bishops who didn't really understand what this whole Greek Catholic thing was all about, right. Bishops coming, tracing their roots to whatever, Ireland or something like this. And it was a, you know, 1890s was a time when the, the Catholic Church was trying to integrate itself into America and not seem foreign and exotic to the Anglo Saxon Protestant Americans. And so to have these really exotic foreign looking Catholics was kind of, you know, a double problem for them. So they, or that are, these Greek Catholics would arrive and, and they would not recognize the Roman Catholic bishops, wouldn't recognize their priests. And they would tell the people, you know, yeah, just go to this Polish church, that should be fine. And the people are like, no, this is completely different. This is not what we ever knew. So on a massive scale, thousands and thousands of people from, you know, Pennsylvania to, to Minneapolis were as, as, as Greek Catholics were turned to the Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox bishops and said, aha, okay, this is where we can keep our traditions. Because that was kind of the thing that was most important to them. It's like they didn't even really understand the difference between being under the Pope or being under somebody else. A lot of them that, that really didn't make much difference. Them, it was keeping their traditions, their way of doing the liturgy and all those kind of things. So on a massive scale, these people started coming into the Orthodox Church. And so this was the biggest population group that Bishop Tikon had to navigate. And so he had to find ways of bringing them in, of finding the priests and all these sort of things. And it was often very complicated at the, at the local level. So if, if priests came over from, let's say, Austria, they, if they planned to go back because most the majority of immigrants at that time, they would come to the United States and they'd work for a number of years and try to make a lot of money and then for them, right. And then go back home. So they never fought or staying permanently. A lot of the priests were the same way. So the priests didn't necessarily want to convert to Orthodoxy because this would be a real problem for them when they went back home. So the Ideal was like, for example, in 1902, there was a church in Mayfield, Pennsylvania that converted, that Tikhon brought into the Orthodox Church. That for him was the ideal scenario because it was a huge parish, it was like a thousand people. The priest led the whole congregation into the Orthodox Church and they already had this big beautiful building. So it was the perfect scenario. But in lots of cases the priest wouldn't want to go and the congregation would be split. And sometimes there were lawsuits over church buildings and all those kind of things was a bit messy, but sort of addressing that particular population and he had to be sensitive to the fact that these people weren't Russians and they, their language was different and so on. So he had to try to find priests, usually from Ukraine and so on, who could kind of speak their language and do the traditions they were, the way they were used to doing them and so on. And it was very successful. And thousands and thousands of people of these Greek Catholics became Orthodox sort of in his time in North America, which
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Roland Clark
I'm sure creates all these sorts of problems with Catholic bishops as well.
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Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, there was, there was obviously a lot of tensions. There were tensions over that. And there was, yeah, some tensions with Catholics in Alaska too. And Catholics are setting up orphanages and regions that, where there was Orthodox Christians and you know, kind of, he kind of had really positive relations with the Episcopal Church, but there were some tensions, human origin, with the Catholic Catholic Church.
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Roland Clark
So he returns to Russia in 1907, which is just as the empire is starting to come to terms with the Revolutions of 1905 and right wing movements like the Union of Russian People were gaining momentum. What was Tikon's relationship with a religious right?
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Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, this is a really interesting question. It has always been one of kind of speculation, but with very contrary kind of assessment. So even in 1917, there was this idea that in 1913, 1914, he's moved from being the Archbishop of Yaroslavl to being Archbishop of Vinus, which could be seen as a kind of demotion almost. So there was some speculation that he had ran afoul with the Union of Russian People maybe or something like this. But on the other hand, there are sources even today, like the Russian language. Jewish Encyclopedia has an entry on him, and there was this new encyclopedia of the Black Hundreds, both of which say he was the head of the Union of Russian People chapter in Yaroslavl. Right. So you get these completely contradictory images. So it was definitely a question I tried to sift out. And it's hard because there's Not a whole lot of evidence. And he was very cautious about expressing himself in ways that we can say with sort of definiteness. But I would say the way I understand it is that when the 1905 revolution was happening, of course he's in the United States and he's reading about it in newspapers, both Russian newspapers and American newspapers. And he's kind of, you know, shocked and horrified and really worried about what's going on and things like that. So it seems like when he returns to Russia and he sees these sort of very whatever monarchist kind of ultra conservative movements as declaring that they're there to support the Church and so on, that he's initially maybe sympathetic to them, but he's very cautious. In fact, the bishop who preceded him in Yaroslavl had essentially been driven out because he had crossed the Union of Russian People. And. And the same would happen when he was made archbishop of Yiddish level that his predecessor there was also, because the Indian Russian people had a lot of influence in the court. And the court in turn could put pressure on the Holy Synod to basically remove bishops if they crossed the Union of Russian People. It was a really crazy kind of atmosphere. And there were bishops who actively supported them, as well as those who were not very keen on them and kind of opposed certain things they were trying to do. So it was a complicated thing within the Church in general. And Tikhon seemed to understand all of this and tried to just navigate the field very cautiously. So the way I would put it is that he increasingly realized, both in Yaroslavl and in later on in Vilnius in Lithuania, that these monarchist, you know, far right organizations that they. They declared their support for the Church, but in fact they were kind of using the Church for political reasons, just very much like the religious right does in the United States, and uses religion as a means of gaining support and manipulating people for political ends. And so he never actively supports them or participates then, but he cultivates personal relationships with their leaders on friendly terms. So he never openly challenges them or confronts them. He tries to find this way where. Where the Church remains independent of these kind of movements and retains its integrity, as it were, to not get mixed up in politics, but without openly confronting them. But he has some letters later on in this period where he's openly getting frustrated with the ways in which they're trying to manipulate things and so on. So he grows more and more disillusioned with these kind of movements as time goes on.
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Roland Clark
I think you mentioned in 1914 he becomes archbishop of Vilnius in Lithuania, which is a particularly bad time to become a new archbishop in a borderland city, because Vilnius was very quickly found itself on the front lines of World War I. How does Tikon respond to the challenge of being a wartime archbishop?
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Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, so the Invilis and Lithuania, where the diocese was, which also included a large chunk of what is today Belarus, the majority, of course, were actually not Lithuanians, except for in the northern part of the diocese, but Poles and Jews. The Russian Orthodox were a minority in the city of Vilnius itself. Only in the part that belonged, you know, Belarus today did you have a lot of Orthodox Christians. So it was an incredibly mixed and complicated kind of position to begin with, which is presumably why the Holy Synod appointed him, because he'd had so much experience being in these diverse places like North America and so on, and was seen. I'd proven himself somebody who could. Was very diplomatic and could handle these things so that the Orthodox believers felt like he was their man. You know, he was defending and protecting them, but in a way that was not. Didn't generate hostility with the Polish and Jewish populations. And that was the case while he was there. But, yeah, once the war breaks out, Venus is very close to the front lines. It's where the railroad is going, taking troops to the front. A lot of people are fleeing away from the occupied region. So there's a huge refugee crisis. And then, of course, once the battles start happening, they're getting a lot of wounded soldiers coming back in. So his main role at that point was organizing charity, let's say, to turn, in fact, they turned the seminary into a hospital for wounded soldiers, and he housed the seminarians in his own residence, kind of sacrificed that to be able to provide these institutions. And he mobilizes all of the church institutions to. To basically be there to serve the wounded soldiers and the refugees and things like this. He actively cooperated with the heads of other religious groups, with. With the Catholics in particular, to provide these kind of services and so on. And then once the Germans take Vilnius itself, he. All of the German. All of the Russians essentially evacuate from the city. So he becomes basically a bishop in exile, where he's serving on the Holy Synod. So that's kind of his main. He's most of the time in St. Petersburg, Petrograd, serving on the Holy Synod. But he would always travel back to what remained of his diocese that was not under occupation, that is primarily those Belarusian regions. And he was even at times, you know, visiting the soldiers on the front lines. There's a picture of him which I include in the book where he's in the trenches with this group of officers and things like this. And there were. Some of the accounts are like, you know, bombs were falling, you know, shortly before or after his arrival and stuff like that. So it was quite adventurous.
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Roland Clark
And then the February Revolution breaks out in 1917, and the orthodox Church refuses to support the Tsar and they just watch him fall. How does Tikhon, you've already said, like, he's very diplomatic. How does he navigate the calls for reform inside the Church that follow the abdication of the Tsar in February 1917?
- [35:08]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, this is a sort of surprising moment for some people that the old way of looking at the old historiography of the Russian Orthodox Church in the imperial period was that it was the handmaiden of the state. It was really just there as a prop for the tsarist regime and in turn itself was an unpopular institution that was propped up by the tsarist regime. That historiography has pretty much been overthrown by scholarship in the last two decades. And in fact, in the last decade or so of the old regime, even the leadership of the church had grown pretty frustrated with the ways in which the tsarist government was interfering in internal affairs of, of the life of the church and its decision making processes and things like this. I detail some of these things in the book that were specific that Tikon was involved in. And, and so when the February Revolution breaks out and one of the ministers comes to the church, the Holy Synod, and says, please, you know, issue some kind of statement. They're like, oh, so, you know, you're constantly interfering and controlling us and telling us what to do, and now you want us to turn around and support you. Right? Kind of like, you know, no, thanks kind of response. They probably, these were protests, you know, protests that happened before in Russia. Probably they didn't have a sense that the, you know, the monarchy was literally on the verge of collapsing. Or they might have responded differently, who knows, but. But at the time they said, no, we're not going to issue a statement. And then the monarchy does fall. And some bishops, of course, are horrified. It's like hard for them to imagine Russia and even the church without the monarchy. But Tikhon seems to pivot very quickly and as you said, there's this large movement of church reform and renewal that had been gaining momentum since 1905. That was partially. I talked about this when he has the Council in the United States in 1907. This is part of the same thing where they wanted a lot of people within the church wanted to renew the church as a whole by having more voices of the people, and not just the church hierarchy, but also that the church as a whole, including the hierarchy, could be more independent of the government and not under the government's thumb. And this was supposed to be manifested or accomplished or realized by having a church council, which they had been trying to have since 1906 or 7, and Nicholas II actually prevented them from having, probably precisely because he didn't want the church to be independent of the state. And so, effectively, the moment the monarchy falls, the church leadership says, okay, now we can finally convene this church council. And they begin to organize for it immediately. And in every diocese, they're having these congresses, let's call them, of clergy and laity. And when then Archbishop Tikhon convenes one of these in what's left of the Vilnius diocese, he gives this really stunning address to the congress where he talks about how he had always encouraged believers and, you know, rank and file clergy and believers to be active in their own congregations. But now the historical moment was such that because of the forthcoming church council, they could actually participate in and express their voice, voice for the renewal of the church as a whole. And he says, even the renewal of Russia as a whole, of the state. And so this model of a kind of conciliar church, where you have the voices of everybody contributing to church, seems to be applied to politics and a support for democracy, too. Now everybody's voices can be heard in actually shaping Russia's democratic future.
- [39:35]
Roland Clark
So coming out of that conciliarism, after 200 years of being governed by a synod during 1917, the church decides that it wants to appoint a patriarch. How do they reach that decision? And once they decide that they want a patriarch, how do you elect one? Do you watch for smoke coming out of a chimney? Or how does it work in Russian Orthodoxy?
- [39:56]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, so Peter the Great. So the traditional structure of Orthodox churches is that you have patriarchs. So the old patriarch of Constantinople and Antioch and Alexandria and so on. And Russia had a patriarch from 17th century, 17th and 18th century. But then Peter the Great abolishes the patriarchate in the early 18th century because he didn't want a head of a church who could compete potentially with authority in the country, with himself, and replaces it with a holy synod, this kind of body, a sort of standing body of bishops that administers the church. And by the early 20th century, it was this model that was seen as lending itself to the sort of subordination of the church to the state. And so those who were advocating for church renewal wanted. Wanted to reinstate the patriarchate because this would give the church a strong voice vis a vis the state. Right. An independent voice. Paradoxically, after the monarchy falls and they begin to actually have the church council, which finally convenes In August of 1917, there's a question, you know, the patriarch. Restoration of the patriarchate had been a key sort of goal or aim of the church renewal movement in the early 20th century. But after the fall of the monarchy, it's like, well, maybe we don't need it anymore if we finally got rid of monarchy in the government, that we want monarchy in the church. So it was a debated question at first. But as the church council continued into September and October and the political situation was, the Russia's experiment in democracy was not being very successful, and the political situation was growing unstable, the mood began to say, no, actually, probably having a singular strong leadership in the church is actually necessary because we don't really know where the future is going in these other ways. And then the first session they have after the Bolsheviks seized power, they vote to reinstate the patriarchate. I mean, it pretty much already been this. You know, the overwhelming majority had come to support it by that point. But. But then they say, okay, this is. This is what we need to do. And so, yeah, because they were reestablishing something, but they'd also had the church council. So they didn't want that the patriarch to have this kind of super hierarchical authority. So they kind of defined it in such a way that the patriarch, whoever he be, had to work in conjunction with the church council. And the church council, while it was in session, was the highest voice in the church. It's kind of like the church council is the legislative branch, you could say, and the patriarch is the executive. He's supposed to carry out the rules that are made by the council, including in sessions, because councils only meet periodically. And so they're kind of redesigning, you could say, what the patriarch was going to look like at that moment. And so therefore they were also going to. They had to figure out a new way to appoint a patriarch because the tsar had played a role in appointing patriarchs in the past. So that obviously wasn't an option. So they picked an unusual process which is still practiced to this day in the Coptic Church in Alexandria and was done in some of the ancient patriarchates where the council elected. They cast votes and then they took the names of the three candidates who received the most votes and then drew the final name by lot. So the idea was that it was the, you know, sort of the hand of God. You had a democratic process, but then the hand of God also was expressing his voice. And part of the reason, I think, they decided to do this, they don't say this explicitly in the documents of the Church council, but it seems like there was one figure in particular, Antoni Kratowicki, who was very powerful, who'd actually been the strongest advocate for the restoration of the patriarchy and who was also very actively. He was one of these people. It was an active supporter of the Union of Russian People and so on. Very active politically and stuff. He had a big voice, but he also had a lot of enemies. So he was likely to be the person who had gained the most support. But at the same time, there was going to be a lot of people who are going to oppose him. And so if it was a democratic vote only, but he got 52% of the votes or something, then you're going to end up with nearly half of the church people not very happy with the outcome. Whereas if it's done by lot, then you have to say, well, okay, that's God's choice. And in fact, when they did the votes, Antoni Sharpovitsky did get the most, and the second was the Archbishop of Novgorod, Arseny Stadnitsky. And Tikhon, who was less well known, he was less of a prominent figure, received the three most votes, but he was a sort of candidate that when his name was chosen, that it was. Everybody could be on board with. We kind of reconciled the different factions within the Church, as it were, which
- [45:33]
Roland Clark
is probably why when the lots were chosen, he was the one that. That got the winning ticket.
- [45:38]
Scott Kenworthy
Well, and I mean, they were, you know, they describe in detail the process by which they put the three names in. And there was this, you know, they brought in this elderly monk to pick the names and they. Before they put them in the box, they put in the. They showed to a whole bunch of witnesses what the names were, that they were really putting them in the box, and that when he picked the one at random, they pulled out the other two to show, look, these were the other two. So it really was done, you know, by chance and not some preordained plan.
- [46:13]
Roland Clark
The Covenant might disagree with you there, Scott.
- [46:17]
Scott Kenworthy
Right. Yeah, exactly.
- [46:19]
Roland Clark
So whether it was preordained or not, Tikhon becomes the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in November 1917, which, as you pointed out earlier, is a terrible time to become patriarch. How does he respond to the Bolshevik Revolution when he becomes Patriarch.
- [46:34]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, exactly. I mean, he knows even his sort of, you could call it his acceptance speech when he finds out it's his name that's been chosen, he knows this is, you know, going to be a cross and not glory to be, you know, head of the church. At that particular moment, who the Bolsheviks were was still sort of, you know, they were such a radical fringe that nobody quite knew what they had in mind. Also throughout 1917, just as the church was preparing for its church council, the. The government was preparing for a constituent assembly where there was supposed to be free elections to this body that was then going to, in a democratic fashion, form Russia's government and constitution and so on. And that hadn't happened yet. The date had been set for the elections to happen later in November. And the convening of the Constituent assembly was supposed to happen in early January. And so when the Bolsheviks seized power, they'd been criticizing the Provisional Government for not having these elections and not convening the constituent Assembly. So they couldn't exactly turn around and stop it themselves. So they actually named themselves a Provisional Government too, in the beginning. So there's this in. In November and October, November, December of 1917, there's this kind of wait and see moment because everybody sort of assumes that the Bolsheviks are only there temporarily. But then in January of 1918, when they disband the Constituent assembly after one day, it's pretty clear that the Bolsheviks are just going to stay in control in an undemocratic process, no matter what the costs. Right. Even it comes through civil war and violence. And at the Same time, in January 1918, the Bolsheviks are beginning to pass legislation that directly affects the church. And there's this sort of first clash when they try to seize the most important institution of the church in Petrograd, the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. And believers come out and defend this monastery against the. The Soviet, the red soldiers, and succeed in repelling them at that moment. So Tejark Tikhon's kind of first response only comes in January, middle of January of 1918. And it's a strongly worded statement. It's usually one of the things people know him best, by which it turns out I discovered, according to Archbishop Stadnit Arseni's diaries, that Tikhon himself didn't actually write. It was sort of written by Committee, by the Executive Committee of the Church Council. But Patriarch Tikhon decided to put his name on it, to give it that kind of voice. And also, if there was a backlash from the Bolsheviks that it came on him and not on the church council as a whole. And there's this proclamation of anathema and excommunication on those who are committing violence. And so everybody has always interpreted this to mean that he anathematized the Bolsheviks and anathematized the revolution and so on. Through a kind of careful reading of the text, I make the argument that, in fact, he's not anathematizing the Bolsheviks because that part of the text he's explicitly talking about random acts of violence. So in the revolutionary period, there was just this explosion of spontaneous acts of violence and so on against the church and against the aristocracy and so on and so forth. And so it seems to be that. I mean, my. My argument is that he's. Those are the people he's anathematizing because they're often just, you know, know, soldiers, but who had been ordinary peasants and so on, and therefore baptized Orthodox Christians. So he felt like if he strongly worded statement that those people might actually think twice about the things they were doing. Everybody knew that the Bolsheviks were not believers and that pronouncing some kind of religious anathema or what have you, excommunication wouldn't mean anything to them. But then later on in the text, he does clearly criticized some of the actions that the government is taking against the church. And he summons believers to show their support for the church at that moment. Because the idea was that if the Bolsheviks are claiming to be the people's government, then the people should be able to express their will by expressing their support for the church. And that he hoped that the Bolsheviks would acknowledge that and kind of back off from some of their policies. And so in response to these summons, there were these massive, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who came out and did these religious processions, both in Petrograd and in Moscow and then other cities as well, or religious processions, but were meant to show also that people stood with the church kind of thing. And for the next six months or so, the Bolsheviks actually did kind of back off for a little while, but then they start ramping things up. In the end of 1918, chronic migraine
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- [53:59]
Roland Clark
so the civil war puts the clergy in a really dangerous position because if they side with the whites who are trying to co opt the church, then the Bolsheviks will punish the church as a whole. And if they go against the whites, then the whites will attack the church as well or call them traitors. What advice does Patriarch Tikon give about how to respond to the Bolshevik government? Like when he's talking to his priests?
- [54:26]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, exactly. You put it exactly right, that it was a really touchy situation. And there were these instances where the whites would capture a territory and the priests would come out and greet them and say a prayer service, basically thanking God that the whites had come back and then the Bolsheviks would retake that territory and they would just round up the priests and shoot them. Right? So patriarchy kind of like this is not good. So he issues this statement in 1919 at a very critical moment actually in the civil war, where he instructs the clergy to remain politically neutral, that the church should not take sides in the civil war and the conflict. And part of the reason is tactical, obviously, precisely as I was talking about. He doesn't want priests to go out and do church services that are in favor of the whites and then turn around and get repressed. But part of it was principle. I mean, even back before with the Union, Russian people and so on, he didn't want the church to be used for political purposes. And I think that principle remained the same even during the civil war, and that he didn't view it the way the whites portrayed it, as it was a clash of good and evil, that the whites were on the side of the church and. And the side of what was good. And the Bolsheviks were all evil. And everybody who was fighting for the Reds were all evil. And see, under Patriarch Tikhon, I think, understood that a lot of the soldiers who were fighting in the Red army were conscripted, and they were peasants and they were ordinary, you know, had been baptized Orthodox Christians, too. They weren't necessarily convinced atheists and whatnot. And so he saw the battle as not as one of good versus evil or something like that in those terms, but rather as a. He always used the term internecine conflict, right? This is Russians killing Russians, and that's bad. And so he condemned the civil war as such, but in the process, and by the way, explicitly condemned pogroms that were being carried out, especially by the whites, against the Jews during. In the midst of this civil war. So therefore tells that the church should remain neutral and that the clergy should not use church services to bless the white armies or anything like this.
- [57:00]
Roland Clark
You wrote in the book that at the height of the civil war, the Soviets embarked on a campaign against the Orthodox veneration of saints, which is deeply rooted in popular piety, by targeting their relics. So how do Russian Christians respond when they see their relics and icons being desecrated?
- [57:16]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, they respond by, in many cases, by gathering outside of their churches and trying to stop, you know, these desecrations going on. Preacher Tikhon issues a whole series of statements. And this is happening at the same time, Right. At the same time, he's saying the church should remain neutral in the civil war. He's also criticizing the Bolsheviks both publicly and privately in internal letters, trying to say, like, hey, you'd pass this decree on the separation of church and state, and the constitution says you guarantee the freedom of conscience. And yet when you are going into churches and monasteries and desecrating the relics of saints. You are directly intervening or interfering in the internal religious practices of the church. So you're actually violating your own laws and stated principles. Right. He comes up with these quite strong arguments at that time. And just as before in 1918, when he sort of summoned the people to defend their churches, people also come out now and try to stop this from happening. It doesn't usually work. Right. The Bolsheviks go ahead with it anyways, but. But it doesn't. It doesn't have the effect. So the. The Soviets had this notion that all relics had to be incorrupt, that is the bodies of saints do not decay. And that if they opened up these reliquaries and showed that the vast majority of them were just bones, that this would suddenly people would not only lose their faith, but also realize that the church had been deceiving and tricking them all of this time. Right. And so it turned against the church, but in fact, it. It sort of backfired. And the majority of people were just thought that this was. Even if they maybe supported the Bolsheviks, especially peasants supported the Bolsheviks because the Bolsheviks promised to give them the land. Right? They didn't necessarily understand or buy into Bolshevik ideology, but they, you know, were. They wanted the land, and that was what the Bolsheviks promised them. But this was something that really turned people away from the Bolsheviks because it was like a direct offense to their faith. It was not something that was. Should have been political or anything like that. So eventually the campaign kind of peters out because a lot of the people who are trying to push it, the local Soviet authorities, are like, yeah, we don't really want to do this because this is just pissing the people off.
- [59:55]
Roland Clark
A massive famine then breaks out. Ration history in this period is just one thing worse than another, and millions of people die. Does the church do anything to try to help ameliorate the famine?
- [60:06]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah. So the famine, of course, is an effective direct consequence of the civil war. And part of the issue in the first part of the 1921, when it was pretty obvious the famine was or should have been obvious that the famine was going to happen because of failed harvest, you know, drought and all this sort of thing. But the Bolsheviks downplayed its significance while it was still a critical moment to do anything about it, because that would have been seen as a failure of their regime. So everything that was covered in the press, so, you know, made it out to be not a big deal. Also, in this decree that the Bolsheviks said had passed in 1918 of the separation of church and state effectively prohibited the church from gathering, from collecting money for anything other than just the upkeep of that local church. So in effect, the church didn't, you know, the church hierarchy as a whole couldn't have a campaign of collecting money and things like that without the government just coming in and taking it away. So they had to get approval. It, it happens that there was a group of non Bolshevik civic activists who, who were, who had. Many of them were older and had been involved in the famine, earlier famine in the 1890s, and realized this was going to be a disaster and the Bolsheviks weren't necessarily going to do anything about it. So they wanted to issue an international appeal. And they turned to the writer Maxim Gorky, who sympathized with them, but also had good relationships with the Bolsheviks. And so Gorky got approval for this. And apparently it's not entirely clear who, but Lenin apparently even approved of turning to Patriarch Tikhon to issue an appeal international, an international appeal. And so in the end, Gorky and Patriarch Tikhon get together. It's kind of funny moment, right, because Gorky was a very envowed atheist and so on. They get together and sit down and they write out these appeals. Each one, Gorky has his appeal. Patriarch Tikon had his appeal to, you know, world audiences and obviously Patriarch Tikkons specifically to church leaders and so on in the West, Europe and the United States. And they were actually sent around the world to be read out in radio stations and printed in newspapers with Gorky's appeal on one side and Patriarch Tikhan's appeal on the other side. And the main reader of these appeals was, of course, Herbert Hoover, who responded by mobilizing the American Relief Administration, which had developed in the aftermath of World War I, to go in to Russia and to feed. They'd probably saved 5 million lives. There was another 5 million still died as a result. And the church also, Patriarch Tikhon also tried to mobilize not only international assistance, but also all believers within Russia. And so he wrote to the government to say, hey, can you approve this? I want to establish this church committee, which would essentially mobilize people in parts of Russia that were not affected by the famine to be able to raise both money, but also foods and then transmit them through church channels and deliver them to the, you know, on the ground, to the people who needed it. And the government never approved this. Right. They probably were terrified at the idea that the church could show itself to be more effective than they themselves were. So they never approved this, and the crucial time of, you know, the second half of 1921 was effectively lost. He wrote to the government on repeated occasions offering this, and they never approved it. And then, paradoxically, in the beginning of 1922, they accused the Church and the Patriarch specifically, of not doing enough for famine relief. And this is justification for them to confiscate the Church valuables, when, in fact, the confiscation of the church valuables was done really because the government was broke and they desperately needed money. But that's a whole nother story.
- [64:34]
Roland Clark
So if that wasn't enough, one of the biggest challenges that Tikon's facing during the 20s was something called renovationism. Who were the renovationists and what were they after?
- [64:45]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, so there was a group of sort of younger, more liberal, more radical priests who were, excuse me, not satisfied with the outcome, you could say, of the Church council that convened in 1917, 1918, in part because the council itself couldn't do a lot of the things that they had originally planned to do precisely because the revolution had happened. And so a lot of the reforms were never implemented or even the discussions never reached their final conclusions. But these people also, they were married parish priests who sort of resented the authority of the celibate bishops and so on as well. And so. And they were kind of more leftist leaning politically. And so they, you know, sort of established friendlier relations with local Soviet authorities than, you know, the main body of the Church did. And the church's leadership. But at any rate, there were still, you know, sort of small group of scattered priests, mostly in Petrograd, kind of marginal. But all along, ever since the revolution, the Bolshevik leadership had been looking for a way to undermine Patriarch Tikhon's authority in Russia, because they knew that as the head of the church, he had enormous kind of spiritual authority, you know, probably much, much more than they did legitimacy and so on among, you know, among ordinary Russians. So they were looking for a way to be able to both undermine his authority and ideally find something that they could accuse him of and prosecute him for legally. But nothing ever stuck. But one of the kind of schemes was to try to find some component of the Church that could be used as a, you know, to split the church from within. And what I had just mentioned about this confiscation of church valuables. So in the spring of 1922, the Bolsheviks go on this campaign to basically go into every church and to ransack them for anything made of gold and silver or any precious gems that were used to decorate icons and things like this. And once this law, this decree of confiscating the church valuables is announced, Patriarch Tikhon, who'd been trying to cooperate all along, up until that very moment, in fact, had encouraged believers to voluntarily give up valuables and things like this for the famine relief. And then when they turn around and issue this decree that they're just going to go in and confiscate by force whatever they decided, rather than undercutting the, you know, believers ability to do it voluntarily. Patriarch Tikhon issues this statement saying, essentially declaring that the confiscation of certain types of valuables is a desecration and blasphemy and so on. And so there were, whether in response to this encyclical of his or not, there were instances where again, believers came out to defend their churches to prevent the Soviet authorities from going in and taking these valuables. There were clashes, people were killed. And this was used as the pretext to finally arrest the Bolsheviks, or like, finally we've got something we can arrest him on and accuse him of opposing the government. And so while he's under arrest, then they scheme, and this was Trotsky's idea primarily, they schemed to work together with these liberal, you know, renovationists. They were called renovationists because of this renovation or renewal of the church. They were kind of modernists, you could say. They wanted to modernize the church by getting rid of some of the, what they regard as more archaic practices like veneration of saints. They wanted to allow married men to become bishops. They wanted to use modern language in the church services rather than the old church Slavonic. All of these kind of things embrace the Gregorian calendar because the church was still under the Julian calendar, all these kind of things. And so with the sort of help of people working under Trotsky, they bring together these priests and then basically manufacture it so that these priests can take over the church administration. While. While the. While Patriarch Tikon is under arrest, and all the other bishops who were supposed to step in were also prevented from being able to do that. And so for the next year and some months that Patriarch Tikon is under arrest, these renovationists are effectively in control of the church administration. And the secret police helps them secure control over most of the dioceses throughout the country. They'll arrest the, you know, the Tikonite bishop and the secret police will, so that then the renovationists can put in their guy. And they do this even at the parish level and things like this. So by 1923, while patriarch Tikum is under arrest. The apparatus of the church was really in control of these. You can call them sort of fellow travelers or something like that with. With the Soviets, although they were not super popular at the grassroots level. So when the patriarch is finally released, you know, the majority of people will kind of abandon the renovationist churches and return back to the patriarchs folk.
- [70:31]
Roland Clark
So this is a really complex story which you go into in great detail in the book. But Tikkun's arrested and interrogated several times between 1919 and 1923, only to be released each time before going to trial. Why did the Bolsheviks let him go?
- [70:47]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, so as I said, they were trying literally from 1918 onward to find something that they could accuse him of that would carry some kind of legal legitimacy both within Russia and internationally. Because as the head of the largest Orthodox church in the world, they couldn't just shoot him the way they might do other enemies or throw him in prison without any reason, because that would reflect on the. Well, it would create a popular backlash within Russia itself, among other things. And so they'd arrested him and interrogated him, but they could just never find anything. That stuck until the spring of 1922, when his encyclical about the confiscation of church valuables that they said, aha, so this is. Here you are directly opposing a government decree. And finally they can put him on trial. And they. Lenin, you know, writes this stunning letter, March 1922, where he believed that it was actually an orchestrated plot that the church abroad, all the Russians who had been the whites and had fled abroad when they lost the civil war, that these guys were working abroad to form an army to go back in and overthrow the Bolsheviks. And meanwhile, Tikhon was coordinating all these parishes across the Russia to use the confiscation of valuables as a pretext for having everybody rise up and overthrow the Bolsheviks. You know, it's kind of totally conspiratorial, kind of crazy letter. And so Lenin even says, you know, the more we can shoot, put on trial and shoot, the better. During this month, this is our moment to finally crush the church. It's really bloodthirsty, bloodthirsty letter. And so this was the time they spent over a year essentially preparing this trial that was supposed to take place where they were going to, you know, a show trial. Obviously the outcome was predetermined. Trying to gather evidence that they thought would be convincing both to domestic and international audiences. And at the same time, they had also arrested a number of Catholic. The leading Catholic clergy in Russia. And as a kind of test case, they put them on trial in the spring of 1923 and sentenced them to death, the Catholic, these Catholic clergy, and actually executed one of them. And this creates such a huge international outcry that when they announced they were then going to also put Patriarch Tikon on trial, there was an equal international outcry. And in particular, like when the date was set and everything, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, got together with leading all the leaders of the sort of chief rabbi in England and the leaders of Methodist and Baptist churches and so on. And I issued a joint statement basically in defense of religious freedom in Russia, specifically in defense of, of Patriarch Tikhon. And the Bolsheviks decide they're going to. There's like, okay, hold on, this is, this is going, this is not going in a good direction. So they, they put the trial on hold. And then in the interim, the Foreign Minister, Lord Curzon in Britain, issues what's known as the Curzon ultimatum. It was all a series of points that the Brits were unhappy with with the Bolsheviks. And I said, if you don't, one of which included putting Patriarch Tikhon on trial and executing him. And effectively the message was, if you don't, you know, if you cross any of these things, we're going to break trade relations. And still Soviet Russia was financially on the verge of collapse. And if Britain broke trade relations, it was a serious, that was a really serious consequence. So it's not explicitly stated in the documents, but it's clear that the first time the Politburo meets after the Curzon ultimatum, they just postpone the trial of Patriarch Tikhon indefinitely. And then eventually Yemilian Yaroslavsky, one of the leading Bolsheviks, comes up with this plan that if we can get Patriarch Tikhon to admit that he had opposed the Soviet government and to declare his loyalty to the Soviet government, that then they could release him. So it would be a way in which they could avoid putting him on trial, but then also hopefully make people lose respect or break the Patriarch and make people lose respect for him. And so it was, you know, a way for the Bolsheviks to save face and not just release him because of the international pressure and the. They negotiate this and Patriarch Tikhon sort of doesn't go as far as they went to, but it's enough where he does admit, you know, some anti Soviet statements and he doesn't declare his loyalty to the Soviet government. But his statement is, I am not an enemy of the Soviet government, which of course he Actually didn't say all along, but that was sufficient. So then they release him at the end of June in 1923, so he's
- [76:22]
Roland Clark
finally free, and then he dies in April 1925. Was Tikhon murdered or does he die of natural causes?
- [76:31]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, so this is just, by the way, he thinks almost two years that he lives afterwards. And those last two years are really complicated. As he's trying to negotiate, he's basically spend the last two years of his life, first of all, trying to rebuild the Church after the renovationist schism, and secondly, trying to achieve some sort of, you know, legal recognition mission from the Soviet government to find a place of coexistence for the church and the Soviet regime. And after Lenin's death, that actually seems to be possible. It seems like Lenin is the one who is. Lenin and Trotsky were the ones who really took the hard line. And once Lenin dies and Trotsky is kind of marginalized, it seems like in 1924, 1925, there's this kind of window of opportunity where relations could have been normalized. And so he's working towards that. Anyways, as you said, he dies in April 1925. And there's always been speculation that he was poisoned or something like this, but no evidence. Of course, what I conclude in the book is that he died of natural causes. And the reason I argue that is that on the one hand, he clearly had a series of kind of these seizures and leading up to this, and in particular one at the very end of 1924, in December 1924, that was where he almost died then. And in fact, he spent the last four months of his life in a. In a clinic, in a health clinic. So he was clearly not well, and his health was declining. And he's. Even when he was in the clinic, at first, he spent the, you know, first weeks or month or so recuperating, and he started to do better. But then once he started to do better, he started going out and serving church services and leading meetings of the bishops and, you know, this kind of stuff. And every time he'd like, basically leave the clinic, it would take such a toll on him that. But he wouldn't stop, you know, but also from the Bolshevik point of view, as I said, after Lenin's death, internally, there's this kind of struggle, the succession struggle begins among the top Bolshevik leadership. And so when they initially released him from prison, they still kept the case open as a means of trying to manipulate him and threaten him that if he didn't cooperate they'd still put him on trial and so on. But then in the spring, a couple months after Lenin's death, the Politburo just decides to end the case completely. And then from the last year of his life in, the Politburo just never talks about Tikhon at all. They were talking about him all the time in 1922 and 1923, but in the last year of his life, they don't seem preoccupied with him. And the main body, the sort of anti religious commission, also is not preoccupied with Tikhon in the last year of his life. So it's. It seems like they didn't really, at that moment. Right. It was kind of a unique moment. But in that moment of 1924, 1925, the Bolshevik leadership was not preoccupied with Tikhon and not seeing him as the most important threat. Right. They were seeing each other as the bigger problem, the bigger threat. Stalin and Trotsky were more worried about each other than either of them were worried about the patriarchy. And so, you know, I just. They didn't have the motivation at that particular moment to, to, you know, kill him. And then finally the, the last piece of evidence is that the doctor, so he was in a private clinic, it was the Bakunin Clinic, that the doctor was a. Was a nephew or something of the famous revolutionary. And, and the doctor, both a husband and a wife, were people that the patriarch trusted implicitly. And both of them, because they cared for him, they actually had to leave Soviet Russia and flee abroad. And the wife, female doctor, wrote this lengthy account of the Patriarch's last days while she was abroad. And basically there was no opportunity. He was under their constant care. And so there was no way that they could have, you know, poisoned him or something like that.
- [81:02]
Roland Clark
Yes. As soon as they stopped trying to kill him, he dies.
- [81:04]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. And there was, you know, there had been. There was this secret police agent, Yevgeny Tuchkov, who was for the last couple years, sort of the Patriarch's handler. You know, all these decisions are being made by the politiero and the anti religious commission. But all that's behind the scenes. The Patriarch has no idea about any of that's going on because the only person he interacts with is this Tuchkov guy. And Tuchkov, you know, already in like January 1925, he's like, oh, the patriarch is really sick. And once he dies, there is no one to succeed him. And the church is gonna, you know, it was held together. You know, they thought they were gonna break it with a renovationist schism, but in fact it sort of rebounded under the patriarch after his release in those last two years, and it was still strong and still independent. But they were sort of biding their time because they knew that there was nobody that had the kind of stature and authority that Tikhon did within the church. And the other possible successors were all either in prison or in exile and wouldn't be allowed to assume leadership. And so the church would kind of disintegrate and split in the aftermath of his death, which is effectively what happens.
- [82:25]
Roland Clark
And that's about all that we have time for today. But thank you very much for sharing this fascinating story with us.
- [82:31]
Scott Kenworthy
Yeah, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about this book.
- [82:48]
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