Library › St Tikhon of Moscow › Epistles and Statements, 1918–1923
Epistles and Statements, 1918–1923
St Tikhon of Moscow, The Christian East, 1920–23; Emhardt, 1929
Chapter 2
“They that take up the sword shall perish by the sword.”—Matt. xxvi. 52.
This prophecy of Christ we address unto you, the present rulers of the destinies of our country, styling yourselves “the people’s commissaries.” For a year you are holding the State power in your hands, and are preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the October revolution, but the torrents of blood of your brothers, mercilessly killed at your bidding, compels us to speak unto you the bitter word of truth.
In seizing power and inviting the people to place their confidence in you, what did you promise them, and how did you fulfil your promise?
Verily, you have given them a stone instead of bread, and a serpent in place of fish (Matt. vii. 9-10).
You promised to a people worn out by sanguinary war to give them peace “without annexations and indemnities.”
What conquests could you renounce: you, who have brought Russia to a shameful peace, the humiliating conditions of which even you dare not fully publish? In place of annexations and contributions, our great Motherland herself is conquered, humiliated, and dismembered, and in payment of war tribute you are secretly conveying to Germany the gold which you have not assembled.
You have robbed the fighting men of all they lately gallantly fought for. You have taught those who a short while ago were brave and invincible to give up the defence of their country and flee from the battlefield. You have quenched in their hearts the inspiring consciousness that “greater love hath no man than this, to lay down his life for his friend.” You have substituted for the Motherland a soulless Internationale, although you yourselves know full well that where the defence of their native country was concerned the proletarians of all lands were its loyal sons and not traitors. Having refused to defend your country against external foes, you are nevertheless continually organizing troops.
Against whom are you leading them? You have divided the whole people into enemy camps, and have hurled them into fratricide unheard of for its cruelty. You have openly exchanged the love of Christ for hatred, and instead of giving peace have artificially kindled class war. And there seems no end to the war originated by you, for you aspire by the hands of Russian workers and peasants to bring about the triumph of the phantom of the world revolution.
It was not Russia who needed the shameful peace with the external enemy, but you in your desire to break completely our internal peace. Nobody feels safe; all live in constant fear of requisition, robbery, arrest, execution; hundreds of defenceless people are seized daily, and lie for months rotting in foul prisons, are executed without investigation or trial, even with the simplified method of trial established by you. Not only are those executed who are found guilty towards you, but also those whom you well know to be innocent, and who were merely taken as “hostages”; these unfortunate people are killed out of vengeance for crimes committed, not by their relatives or friends, but frequently by your own adherents or by persons sympathizing with your own views. Innocent bishops, priests, monks, and nuns, are shot on a wholesale, vague, and indefinite accusation of “counter-revolution.” This inhuman existence is made still harder for the Orthodox believers by their being bereft of the last consolation before death, the taking of the Holy Communion, and by the bodies of those slain being refused to their relatives for Christian burial.
Does not all this represent the culmination of aimless cruelty on the part of those who pose as the benefactors of humanity, and have themselves, as they say, suffered much from cruel authorities?
But you are not content with having smeared the hands of the Russian people with the blood of their brethren: by concealing it under different terms, such as contributions, requisitions, nationalizations, you have pushed them towards the most open and shameless robbery. You have incited them to destroy and seize the land, farms, works, factories, houses, cattle; to loot money, furniture, clothes. At first wealthy people were robbed on the pretence of their being “bourgeois”; then hard-working and well-to-do peasants, because they were supposed to be “kulaki”; thus increasing the number of paupers, although you cannot but know that by ruining multitudes of private citizens you are destroying national wealth and ruining the country. By tempting the obscure and ignorant people with the possibility of easily acquired loot, you have befogged their conscience and dulled the consciousness of sin; but whatever names you give to iniquities, murder, aggression, and rapine will always remain a heavy sin and crime, crying out to Heaven for vengeance.
You have promised liberty.
Great is the gift of liberty, if it is rightly understood as freedom from evil, which does not oppress others, does not merge into aggression or self-will. But that is the liberty which you did not give: your liberty consists in encouraging the evil passions of the mob, in leaving murders and pillage unpunished. All manifestations either of true civic or of the higher spiritual freedom have been ruthlessly suppressed.
Is that liberty when no one dares to obtain food for himself, to change one’s dwelling, to move from town to town? Is that liberty when families and sometimes all the inhabitants of a house are evicted and their property thrown out into the street, and when all citizens are artificially divided into categories, of which some are destined to famine and plunder? Is that liberty when no one dares to state openly one’s opinion out of fear of being accused of counter-revolution? Where are freedom of speech and of the Press? Where the freedom of church-preaching? Have not many brave church-preachers already paid the price of their blood, the blood of martyrs? The voice of social and State discussion is suppressed; the Press, with the exception of the narrow pro-Bolshevist section, is completely strangled.
Particularly hard and cruel is the suppression of liberty and faith. Not a day passes but the most monstrous calumnies against the Church of God, angry blasphemy and sacrilege, appear in your Press. You mock the servants of the Church, you force bishops to dig trenches (Hermogen, Bishop of Tobolsk), and set priests to perform the meanest tasks. You have laid your hand upon the inheritance of the Church, gathered together by generations of the faithful, and have not hesitated to violate their last will and testament. You have closed monasteries and chapels for no cause or reason whatsoever. You have closed the entrance to the Moscow Kremlin, that sanctuary of the people. You have destroyed the old order of Church community; you are suppressing the brotherhoods and other philanthropic and educational institutions; you disperse Church and diocesan meetings, interfere with the internal affairs of the Orthodox Church; you evict sacred images from the schools; and, by forbidding religious teaching, you deprive the children of the spiritual nourishment so indispensable to a Christian upbringing.
“And what shall I more say? For the time would fail me” (Heb. xi. 32) to describe all the calamities which have befallen our Mother-country. I will not speak of the disruption of the once mighty Russia, of the complete disorganization of transport, of the unheard-of disruption of the food-supply, of the cold and famine which threaten to bring death to the towns, of the absence of all necessities in the villages. That is patent to all eyes. Yea, we are passing through terrible times, and the memory of your power will remain for a long time uneffaced out of the people’s soul, for in it you have darkened the image of God and imprinted that of the beast. The words of the prophet are being realized: “Their feet run into evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, wasting and destruction are in their path” (Isa. lix. 7).
We know that our denunciations will only kindle your wrath and indignation, that you will only seek in them a pretext for accusing us of defiance of your authority, but as the “pillar of your wrath” rises ever higher, the greater will be the evidence of the justice of our denunciations.
It is not our business to judge of earthly powers: any power tolerated by God would receive our blessing, if it appeared as “the judgment of God” for the good of the people, and was “not a terror to good works, but to the evil” (Rom. xiii. 3).
But now unto you, who use your power for persecution of your brethren and the extermination of the innocent, we tender our word of persuasion: Celebrate the anniversary of your coming into power by liberating the prisoners, by ceasing bloodshed, aggression, ruin, persecution of the Faith; turn from destruction towards the restoration of law and order; give the people the longed-for and merited rest from civil war. But now the blood of the righteous which you have shed shall be required of you (Luke xi. 51), “and you that have taken the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matt. xxvi. 52).
(Signed) TYKHON,
Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia.