Russia's Catacomb Saints Part IV Sergianism as seen from within the Moscow Patriarchate
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Woe unto the sheperds that destroy and scatter the sheep of My pasture, saith
the Lord God. Jeremiah 23:1
The Awakening Conscience in The Moscow Patriarchate
All the dire consequences that the early hierarchs of the Catacomb Church
predicted would result from the Sergianist "Declaration" of 1927 did indeed come
to pass. The Soviet government used the "Declaration" first of all as a means of
persecuting the Catacomb Church in a "legal" way; but the "legalization" brought
no benefit to the Sergianist hierarchs either: almost all of them were
persecuted also, and by the end of the 1930's the Russian Orthodox Church had
been virtually liquidated as visible body, only a very few churches remaining
open. The reopening of churches during the Second World War was inspired not by
Metropolitan Sergius, but by the invasion of Hitler, to combat which required an
appeal to the religious and patriotic feelings of the Russian people.
After the Second World War the Moscow Paatriarchate appeared on the
international religious scene as just the kind of organization the Catacomb
hierarchs had forseen: as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Soviet government, not
hesitating at the baldest lies to justify Soviet tyranny. According to
representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate, repeating shamelessly right up to
the present day, there is not now and never has been any persecution of religion
under the Soviet government; any clergy who have suffered from the authorities
are only "political criminals"; churches are clsoed only because the people
desire this.
The Christian conscience, however, cannot for long accept such lies in the
name of Christianity. And so it is that in the two decades, men of conscience
within the Moscow Patriarchate itself (there being no other visible Orthodox
church organization in Russia) have begun to speak out, at first in the form of
protests against the new persecutions of the Khrushchev period (1959-64)-in
which the Moscow hierarchs were at at best passive spectators and at worst
willing collaborators-and then in the form of profound criticsms of the whole
Sergianist policy which the Patriarchate has followed since the time of the
"Declaration" of 1927.
Here we present three of the critics of Segianism from within the
Patriarchate. These are not representatives of the Catacomb Church, and one may
criticize their views as not offering the pure Catacomb position, and they give
us reason for hope that in the end-at least with the fall of the Soviet
regime-the best part of the Moscow Patriarchate will be restored to unity with
the Catacomb Church precisely on the basis of uncompromising Christian
principle.
Boris Talantov
1903-1971
Orthodox Confessor in an Atheist Society
On January Fourth, 1971, in a prison hospital in the city of Kirov (formly
Vyatka), Boris Vladimirovich Talantov died, in his 68th year, of heart disease.
In the Soviet system he died in disgrace, as a political criminal, having been
in prison since September, 1969, for writing a series of extremely outspoken and
detailed accounts of the persecution of the Orthodox faithful by the atheist
regime and by the leading hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate-a "crime" known
in the Soviet Union as "anti-Soviet activities."
The life of Boris Talantov is a "typical" Christian biography of Soviet
times, culminating, in his last years, in an untypical boldness in speaking the
truth concerning the religious situation in the USSR. He is an example of the
shocking truth of the statement made by the writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, who
escaped from the Soviet Union and came to the West in 1968: "It is impossible to
be a Soviet citizen and at the same time a 100 per cent decent human being."
Boris Talantov was an honest man who kept the Orthodox faith to the end and his
Christian conscience clean; and therefore there was simply no place for him in
the Soviet system-except prison.
The chief events of his own biography were described by Talantov himself in
his "Complaint to the Attorney General of the Soviet Union" of April 26, 1968
(English text in Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, August 15/31, 1968). The
quotes that follow are from this document, in the words of Talantov himself.