Kalkandjieva Paper Fin ACADEMIA EDU PDF

The final version of this paper is published in CAS Sofia Working Papers Series, 2018,
Issue 10, pp. 1-50. See: https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=703492
Daniela Kalkandjieva
RUSSIAN ECCLESIASTICAL GEOPOLITICS
BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS
DRAFT
In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Orthodox population in the world counted 144
million and three-fourths of them (110 million) belonged to the Russian Church.1 At that time,
her flock consisted not only of the Orthodox subjects of the Russian emperor but also of
thousands of believers who lived abroad, yet whose religious life was administrated by
structures created by Russian church missionaries since the late seventeenth century:2 the
Russian Archdiocese in North America, a series of ecclesiastical missions in the Middle and
the Far East, multiple ambassadorial churches throughout Europe as well as some parishes
scattered across South America and Australia. In this way, the imperial Russian Church
appeared as a peer of the Catholic and the Anglican churches with their international networks
of adherents. On the eve of World War I, it seemed that nothing could challenge the religious
and administrative authority of this particular Orthodox Church. Moreover, none of the other
then existing Orthodox churches, including the Patriarchate of Constantinople, had such a
globally developed network of structures at their disposal.
In 1917, however, this state of affairs abruptly changed and in just a few years the centuries-
old power of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was dramatically shaken. The decline of
1
Matthew Spinka, “Post-War Eastern Orthodox Churches,” Church History 4, no. 2 (June 1935): 103.
According to the Russian Synod Abroad, in the late 1930s the Russian Orthodox Church had over 120 million
believers (in the Soviet territories and abroad), while the other Orthodox churches had altogether 40 million, see
ROCA, Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago Sobora Russkoy Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi zagranitsey [Acts of the
Second All-Abroad Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad] (Belgrade: [Karlovci Synod], 1939), 59.
2
In 1685, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) set up an ecclesiastical mission in China. Another one was
established in Alaska in 1793. Later on, it was transformed into a North American Diocese. In parallel, Russian
tradesmen began to organize Orthodox chapels at venues connected with their trips – for example, at the Russian
Trade House in Stockholm in 1640. In the eighteenth century, with the assistance of the imperial government,
the ROC began to build up a network of ambassadorial churches in London (1721), Paris (1738), Vienna (1762),
etc. In the next century, Russian missionaries expanded their activities, reaching Japan (1870) and Korea (1897).
At the same time, the ROC developed the unique custom of establishing special representative churches in
traditionally Orthodox areas, also known as her podvories. Before 1917, she had set up such podvories at the
patriarchates of Jerusalem (1847), Antioch (1848), Alexandria (1853), and Constantinople (1883).
1
this religious institution started with the abdication of Nicholas II, an act that undermined the
two main pillars of the Church’s previous domestic and international authority: the Romanov
dynasty and the monarchical order. The political upheaval was used by the Orthodox
Georgians to reject the ROC’s jurisdiction. In March 1917, they unilaterally proclaimed the
restoration of their ancient autocephalous patriarchate. Several months later, the Bolshevik
regime established in Russia struck another, much more dangerous blow to the local Orthodox
Church. Regarding religion as their major enemy, the new rulers launched a policy of
systematic extermination of all God-related beliefs and practices in the areas under their
control. As a representative of the majority religion in the country, the ROC became the main
target of the atheist policy of the Bolshevik government. In an attempt to secure the Church’s
survival in the new conditions, the Local Sobor of the Orthodox Church of All Russia
(henceforth All-Russian Church Council) reformed the mode of the ROC’s governance. On
10 November 1917, almost immediately after the Bolshevik revolution, it abolished the
Synodal system imposed by Peter the Great in 1721, restored the Moscow Patriarchate, and
elected Metropolitan Tikhon (Belavin) as patriarch.
In the next years, however, the Russian church leadership faced problems not only on the
domestic but also on the international front. The defeat of their country in World War I and
the Soviet-Polish War caused a series of transformations on the political map of this part of
Europe. By cutting off parts from the former Russian imperial territory the treaties of Brest-
Litovsk (1918) and of Riga (1921) undermined the direct control of the Moscow Patriarchate
over the ROC’s dioceses which were now integrated in the newly established states of
Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the short-lived Ukrainian state as well as in
interwar Romania. As a result, between 1919 and 1923 almost all Near Abroad dioceses,
except for the Lithuanian ones, left the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate and moved
under that of other Orthodox churches. In 1919, the Kishinev diocese joined the Romanian
Patriarchate. In 1923, the ROC’s dioceses in Finland and Estonia left the bosom of the
Russian Church and moved under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul.
In 1936, their example was also followed by the Orthodox community in Latvia. Similar
developments also took place in interwar Poland. The local Orthodox dioceses were
transformed into a Polish Orthodox Church, which first moved under the jurisdiction of
Constantinople (1923) and soon afterwards was granted autocephaly by the Ecumenical
Patriarch (1924).
2
In addition to the process of territorial disintegration, the ROC also suffered significant
material losses not only within the territories under Bolshevik control, where the new masters
of the country confiscated almost all her properties and finances, but also abroad. In many
limitrophe states, the ROC’s properties were entirely or partly transferred to the churches
representing the local religious majority – for example, to the Romanian Orthodox Church in
Romania, to the Catholic Church in Poland, etc. At the same time, some measures undertaken
by the Bolshevik government caused certain losses of the ROC’s properties linked with the
North American Archdiocese. In this regard, the most notorious example is the failure of the
administration of this archdiocese to defend its property rights over St. Nicholas Cathedral in
New York. In 1924, John Kedrovsky, a representative of the so-called Living Church,
supported by the Soviet authorities as the only legal Orthodox institution in the Soviet Union,
filed and won a lawsuit against the representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Unites
States.3 As a result, the temple was transferred to him. At the same time, the Moscow
Patriarchate also lost a significant number of high- and low-ranking clergy. In the Soviet
Union, many bishops and priests, who firmly supported Patriarch Tikhon and his Church,
were arrested, killed or sent to Siberia. In parallel, many Orthodox clerics defected by leaving
the bosom of the canonical Church and setting up schismatic churches, the most influential of
which became the state-protected Living Church. Finally, the multiple bishops and ordinary
clerics who fled from Soviet Russia turned out to be unable to maintain normal
communication with the Moscow church administration and to provide effective help to it. In
this case, the negative aspects were partly compensated by the creation of a Russian Orthodox
Church Abroad (ROCA) that had to take care of both the ROC’s historical structures abroad
and the newly established émigré communities.
The size and speed of the losses described above stood in striking contrast with the ROC’s
centuries-old self-perception as an exceptional Church which, by God’s will, had assumed the
responsibility for the protection of entire Orthodoxy since the Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople.4 Challenged by the collapse of the old political order in Russia, on the one
hand, and by the threats to the centuries-old administrative authority, canonical jurisdiction,
and institutional unity of the Russian Church on the other hand, her hierarchy undertook a
3
Lambeth Palace Archive, Douglas Papers, vol. 42, ff. 126–128. Letter from George Zabriskie, Counselor at
Law in New York, to Canon Douglas in the UK (30 April 1926). See Daniela Kalkandjieva, The Russian
Orthodox Church, 1917–1948: From decline to resurrection (London: Routledge, 2015), 40–41.
4
Evgeny Golubinsky, Istoriya Russkoy Tserkvi [History of the Russian Church], vol. II, part I (Moscow:
Universitetskaya tipografiya, 1900), 269; Nikolay F. Kapterev, Kharakter otnosheniya Rossii k pravoslavnomu
vostoku v XVI i XVII stoletiyakh [The nature of Russia’s relations with the Orthodox East in the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries], 2nd ed. (Moscow: Sergiev Posad, 1914).
3
series of measures to preserve the pre-1917 status quo and to stop the processes of
disintegration. In the pursuit of this goal, many leading Russian churchmen and lay
theologians, in the Soviet lands and abroad, engaged not only in the elaboration and
implementation of a new ecclesiastical policy aimed to overcome the ROC’s crisis, but also in
the development of its theoretical grounds. As a result, between the two world wars they
advanced new concepts aimed to defend the ROC’s rights over the flock, dioceses and other
ecclesiastical missions which had belonged to her prior to 1917 and which were cut off from
her direct control between 1918 and 1922. In this way, they developed something which can
be defined as Russian “ecclesiastical geopolitics”.
The present paper discusses the advent of modern Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics as a
response of leading Russian hierarchs and lay theologians to the above-described challenges
faced by their Church between the two world wars. Comprising specific religious practices,
concepts, and views, this response is analyzed from two perspectives. The first addresses the
general question about the appropriateness of the term “ecclesiastical geopolitics” from the
viewpoint of contemporary studies in the fields of international relations, Orthodox theology,
and geopolitical thinking from the first decades of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the
second perspective aims to shed light on the specificity of Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics
on the grounds of the concrete goals pursued by the ROC’s leadership between the two world
wars, the mechanisms used for their realization, and the theoretical considerations advanced
for their justification.
Ecclesiastical Geopolitics: Theoretical Considerations
a. The Issue of Religion in International Relations Studies
The first question which this paper raises is whether we can speak of any religion-related
geopolitics. Until recently, geopolitics was perceived as a purely secular realm. This notion
was created under the influence of the conventional study of international relations. More
specifically, it regards the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as a turning point in international
relations which excluded religion from political power not only in Europe but also in the
world. In this way, secularity was adopted as “the dominant principle in international
relations”.5 Such an approach de facto excluded the option of active involvement of non-state
5
Jeffrey Haynes, An Introduction to International Relations and Religion (London: Routledge, 2013), 16–17,
119.
4
actors in geopolitics. Within this framework, the research efforts focused mostly on the lip
service paid by the ROC to Soviet/Russian foreign policy. Correspondingly, most analyses
did not go beyond the role of this Church in the achievement of purely secular goals. Another
weakness of this approach is its neglect of the interwar period, when the Bolshevik regime
suppressed almost all activities of the Moscow Patriarchate at home and impeded its contacts
with the Russian church structures abroad. To a great degree, the shortage of research on the
interwar period is also due to the tendency to equate the Moscow Patriarchate with the
Russian Orthodox Church, thus turning a blind eye to such ROC structures abroad as the
Russian Synod in Sremski Karlovci, the Russian North American Metropolia and the Western
European parishes of Metropolitan Evlogii (Georgievskii), which used to be part of the
Russian Church as well. Therefore, the focus of research used to fall on later developments,
mostly after the 1943 election of Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii) as Patriarch of Moscow.6
In the last two decades, however, the dominance of the principle of secularity in the analysis
of international relations has been weakened by the processes of religious resurgence and a
series of terrorist acts motivated by religious extremism. These developments have sparked
special interest in the role of religion in international affairs. They have also provoked a new
critical analysis of the Westphalian paradigm, which points out that “the principle cujus
region, ejus religio (the ruler determines the religion of his realm)” has influenced not only
the domestic church-state relations but also the international ones. This understanding has
made scholars much more attentive to such guiding principles of the Westphalian
international order as religious tolerance and noninterference (on religious grounds) in the
affairs of foreign states.7 No less important is another avenue of research focused on the ways
of involvement of religion in international relations. This approach allows scholars to define
the religious factors that have the potential to influence international relations as well as the
specific spheres of their influence – for example, non-state factors, religion-related
6
W. B. Stroyen, Communist Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church 1943–1962 (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1967); William C. Fletcher, Religion and Soviet Foreign Policy 1945–1970
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1973); Dianne Kirby, Church, State and Propaganda: The Archbishop of
York and International Relations. A Political Study of Cyril Forster Garbett, 1942–1953 (Hull: University of
Hull Press, 1999); Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism and Alliance Politics, 1941–
1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Robert C. Blitt, “Russia’s ‘Orthodox’
Foreign Policy: The Growing Influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Shaping Russia’s Policies
Abroad,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 33, no. 2 (2011): 363–460; Alicjia Curanović,
The Religious Factor in Russian’s Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2012).
7
Scott M. Thomas, “Taking Religious and Cultural Pluralism Seriously: The Global Resurgence of Religion and
the Transformation of International Society,” in Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile, ed.
Fabio Petito and Pavlos Hatzopoulos (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 24.
5
transnational issues, religious identity, etc.8 At the same time, the new investigations of the
role of religion in international relations stimulate their study not only from a contemporary
but also from a historical perspective – an area that often remains out of the scope of political
analyses. In this regard, the approach of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd,9 who questions the
secularist view of religion as something separated from politics, deserves special attention. In
her view, this separation has been socially and historically constructed by political leaders for
their own ends.
Furthermore, the latest debates on the international role of religion have inspired a revision of
Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis that religion should supplant existing
paradigms and become the main prism for thinking about international politics.10 Instead, the
majority of scholars have adopted an alternative view. It abandons the idea of religion as a
“game changer” that can offer a fundamental vision about international relations, but admits
that religious actors can play an important role “in certain contexts and in relation to some
issues,” therefore neglecting them will be a mistake.11 Finally, contemporary authors pay
special attention to the specific behavior of religious actors on the international scene who,
unlike states, use soft power to achieve their aims. In this regard, scholars also emphasize the
interest of some religious actors in close collaboration with one or another government in the
pursuit of shared goals. From the perspective of the subject of this paper, special attention
deserves Robert C. Blitt’s reference to the ROC’s foreign policy mandate as one that
embraces activities which have been internationally undertaken by the Moscow Patriarchate
with the authorization of the contemporary Russian government – for example, the
participation of its representatives in certain debates or in the solution of specific issues. No
less important is his observation that the present church-state collaboration differs from the
Soviet state’s Cold War practice of using the Church as a tool for the achievement of purely
secular aims. He admits that the present administration of the Moscow Patriarchate not only
acts as a partner of the Russian state on the international scene but also plays a key role in
shaping its policies abroad.12 As that of most scholars, however, Blitt’s analysis remains
limited to the church-state relations in Russia today, yet the ROC’s specific interest in
8
Jonathan Fox and Nukhet A. Sandal, Religion in International Relations Theory: Interactions and Possibilities
(London: Routledge, 2013).
9
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton. NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007).
10
Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49;
Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
11
Haynes, Introduction to International Relations, 82–86.
12
Blitt, “Russia’s ‘Orthodox’ Foreign Policy.”
6
contemporary international affairs cannot be understood without taking into account her
interwar experience. Studying this experience will allow us not only to draw parallels between
the ROC’s policies toward its structures in the interwar and post-Soviet Near Abroad
territories, but also to take into consideration the ROC’s practices and concepts developed at a
time when her hierarchy was not able to rely on the support of the Bolshevik state. In
addition, the majority of politological analyses demonstrate a general neglect of the issue of
the Russian ecclesiological policies and theories on the Orthodox diaspora in general and on
the ROC’s communities abroad in particular.
This short overview of the studies on religion in international affairs reveals two important
lacunae: the already mentioned shortage of research on the role of religion in interwar
international affairs and a general disregard of the case of Eastern Orthodoxy. The scientific
literature does not provide answers to many questions, such as: How do the churches from
this religious tradition approach international relations, secular and religious? Do they have
their own aims in the sphere of international affairs, different from those of states? What are
these aims? What are the tools for the achievement of these aims? What are the factors that
determine the independent behavior of an Orthodox Church on the international scene? Are
the relations between Orthodox churches part of international relations? What is the impact of
these relations on world affairs? To answer them, scholars need to be familiar with the
individual histories of Orthodox churches, the spatial composition and transformations of the
Orthodox world throughout the centuries, and the canonical requirements for establishing new
autocephalous Orthodox churches, for their integration into the family of the already existing
autocephalous churches, for defining and changing the jurisdictions of the individual
churches, etc.
b. Theological Visions of the Relationship between Orthodoxy and Geopolitics
The contemporary Orthodox world consists of fourteen canonically recognized Orthodox

churches: the ancient patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, the
junior patriarchates created in Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Georgia after the
Seventh Ecumenical Council (787),13 the autocephalous archbishoprics in Cyprus, Greece,
Albania, and the former Czechoslovakia, as well as the autocephalous Orthodox Metropolia in
Poland. Only six of these churches became autocephalous during the age of the ecumenical
13
Three of the junior patriarchates have been abolished and restored several times since their initial
establishment: the Bulgarian and the Serbian ones were incorporated into the Patriarchate of Constantinople
during the centuries in which their believers were subjects of the Ottoman sultans, while the Georgian one was
included in the Russian Orthodox Church between 1811 and 1917.
7
councils (325–787): those of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Cyprus, and
Georgia, then known as the Church of Mtskheta.14 The first five churches were created within
the Roman Empire, while the last one was closely linked with the Kingdom of Kartli (also
known as Iberia in the writings of ancient authors). As a result, the territorial jurisdictions of
the churches in the Roman Empire were not linked with specific political entities, but took
shape under the influence of two factors: the historical spread of Christianity and the
administrative organization of that polity. In her turn, the Georgian Church was closely linked
with the Kingdom of Kartli. We observe a similar development in the Bulgarian, Russian, and
Serbian cases, whose churches were established outside the borders of Byzantium between the
ninth and thirteenth centuries and functioned as religious institutions of the corresponding
medieval principalities. The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, however, caused new changes
in Orthodoxy’s geography. The Bulgarian and the Serbian churches lost their autocephalous
status and their patriarchal dignity for longer or shorter periods.15 In fact, they achieved their
canonical independence only after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This event also
stimulated the rise of the Romanian Orthodox Church as an autocephalous body. Meanwhile,
the Polish and the Czechoslovakian Orthodox churches owed their independence to political
changes which took place in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, namely
the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Soviet westward expansion after World War II.
Another no less important specificity of the currently existing canonical autocephalous

churches is the lack of a unified structure. Some churches are simply organized – for example,
the Bulgarian Orthodox Church consists of fifteen dioceses (two of them abroad). The
composition of other churches, however, can be very complicated. This is especially true for
the Patriarchate of Moscow which includes not only simple dioceses but also conglomerates
14
Mtskheta was the capital city of the Georgian Principality of Kartli and a historical center of Christianity there.
In the fifth century, the Church of Mtskheta was granted autocephaly by the Patriarchate of Antioch, see
Konstantin E. Skurat, Istoriya pomestnykh tserkvey [History of the local churches], 2 vols. (Moscow: Russkie
ogni, 1994).
15
The Bulgarian Patriarchate of Tarnovo was abolished upon the conquest of medieval Bulgaria (1393). In 1870,
the Bulgarians set up their own Exarchate which, however, was declared schismatic by the Patriarchate of
Constantinople two years later. The schism was abolished in 1945, when the Patriarchate of Constantinople
finally recognized the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as a canonical body and granted it autocephaly. In 1953,
however, the Bulgarians unilaterally proclaimed the restoration of the patriarchal dignity of their Church. This
brought about a new conflict with their mother church and they had to wait some more years before being
recognized as a Patriarchate by Constantinople (1961). In its turn, the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć was abolished
twice during the centuries of Ottoman rule. In 1463 it was subjected to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, but in
1557 the Serbs succeeded in restoring their autocephaly and patriarchal dignity. In 1766 they lost their church
independence again. In 1879, however, when Serbia was recognized as a sovereign state, the Patriarchate of
Constantinople granted autocephaly to its local Orthodox Church. At the same time, the Serbian Church obtained
patriarchal dignity again in 1920 as a result of the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenians.
8
of dioceses organized in bodies with different levels of internal autonomy (e.g., the
autonomous Japanese Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Belarusian
Exarchate). In addition, it has a network of own podvories, that is, representative
ecclesiastical centers set up on the territories of other Orthodox churches, and hosts the
podvories of other Orthodox churches established mostly in Moscow.
Furthermore, the study of the link between Orthodoxy and geopolitics needs to take into
consideration the group of the so-called schismatic Orthodox churches. In general, they
follow this Christian tradition, but have been isolated from the canonical churches because of
jurisdictional disputes. In this regard it is important to mention that most contemporary
Orthodox churches have passed through periods of isolation from the family of canonical
churches. The first series of such crises was provoked by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,
when the governments of the newly established independent nation-states took measures to
secure the emancipation of their local Orthodox structures from the Patriarchate of
Constantinople, then perceived as an Ottoman institution. In 1833, the Kingdom of Greece
unilaterally declared the autocephaly of the local Orthodox Church, breaking off relations
with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The conflict continued until 1850, when the
Patriarchate recognized the new status of the Greek Church as canonical. In 1866, the
Romanians did the same and received a canonical approval of their autocephaly in 1885. In a
similar manner, the Albanian Orthodox Church proclaimed her independence in 1922 and
remained in isolation until 1937. More complicated was the case of the Bulgarian Exarchate,
which had existed for seventy-three years as schismatic before obtaining an autocephalous
status from the Patriarchate of Constantinople (1945). Only the Serbian Orthodox Church
succeeded in becoming autocephalous without complications in 1879, a year after the
liberation of its state. At the same time, the collapse of the Russian Empire provoked another
series of disputes over church jurisdictions. This time, they were connected with the Russian
Church and her response to the attempts of the Orthodox communities in Georgia, Ukraine,
and Poland to obtain autocephaly between 1917 and 1923. All this will be discussed in further
detail in the second part of this paper.
The solutions of such jurisdictional disputes involve not only the issue of the canonical status
of Orthodox churches16 but also the question of their territorial jurisdictions. In recent years,
16
Sergii Troitskii, “Sushtina i faktori avtokefalije” [The essence of autocephaly and its factors], Arkhiv za pravne
i drushtvene nauke (Belgrade) XXVII, no. 4 (1933): 472–86; A. K. Svitich, Pravoslavnaya tserkov’ v Pol’she i
ee avotkefaliya [The Orthodox Church in Poland and its autocephaly] (Buenos Aires: Nasha strana, 1959);
9
there has been a growing interest in the spatial dimension of these religious bodies. From an
ecclesiological point of view, the relationship between Church and territory in Orthodoxy
stems from the principle of the geographical nature of the eucharist, which defines the
churches as linked with a particular place.17 For that reason, the early Christian churches were
named after the cities where their bishops were situated – for example, the Church of Rome,
the Church of Alexandria, etc. In general, this tradition was preserved until the age of
nationalism, when, in the course of the dissolution of the Ottoman and the Russian Empire, it
was replaced by the practice of associating Orthodox churches with particular nation-states.
Under its influence, a new generation of Orthodox churches emerged – the national ones.
Therefore, many modern autocephalous churches are characterized by a correlation between
the territorial and the national principles; for example, we refer to them as Bulgarian, Serbian,
or Romanian instead of naming them after the city where their supreme hierarchs preside.18
This custom can be also traced in the case of the Czechoslovakian Orthodox Church, which
has preserved her status and territorial jurisdiction after the 1993 dissolution of the former
Czechoslovakia, while changing her name to the Orthodox Church of Czech Lands and
Slovakia. Meanwhile, the four ancient patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch,
and Jerusalem, associated with the Byzantine legacy, have kept the reference to the city where
their ecclesiastical headquarters were originally established. Following this tradition, the
Patriarchate of Antioch has preserved its historical name, although its headquarters moved to
Damascus in the thirteenth century.
Having in mind the state of affairs described above, we should admit the specificity of the
Russian case. Historically, the Russian Church is associated with the city of Moscow as the
headquarters of her Patriarchate, established in 1589. On the one hand, by using the name
“Moscow Patriarchate” she is symbolically linked with the pattern that is intrinsic to the four
ancient patriarchates. On the other hand, the equally popular name “Russian Orthodox
Church” draws associations with the group of the national Orthodox churches in Southeastern
and Central Europe. In addition, there is another version of her name that is often neglected
by the non-Russian-speaking public: “Rossian [Rossiyskaya] Orthodox Church.” This term
appeared after the establishment of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great and implies
something different – namely, that this particular Church is not ethnically Russian, but a
Alexander A. Bogolepov, Toward an American Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 2001).
17
John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 247.
18
Bogolepov, Toward an American Orthodox Church, 12.
10
religious organization that used to administrate all Orthodox communities in the Russian
Empire, also known as Rossia (Rossiya), regardless of their nationality. Therefore, in 1917
Metropolitan Tikhon (Belavin) was elected as Patriarch of Moscow and All Rossia, not of
Russia, by the Holy Council of the Orthodox Church of All-Rossia (Svyashtenii Sobor
Pravoslavnoy Rossiyskoy Tserkvi). This specific reference to the “Rossian Orthodox Church”
was preserved by the Moscow Patriarchate until 1943, when it was abandoned by the ROC’s
hierarchy in the Soviet territories. A special church council, convoked in Moscow in
September, elected Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii) as Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’.
The change was purposefully made. On the one hand, it was meant to suppress the
associations with the Russian Empire, while on the other, to draw links with Kievan Rus’.19
This title of the ROC’s supreme hierarch has remained unchanged to this day. In this regard, it
is also worth mentioning that the ROC’s Statute, adopted after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, has introduced a new definition of the term “Moscow Patriarchate” (Moskovskii
patriarkhat). Now it signifies the family of the ROC’s canonical structures (e.g., autonomous
and self-governing branches, exarchates, metropolitan districts, dioceses, monasteries,
synodal authorities, ecclesiastical seminaries and academies, etc.) in Russia and abroad.20 In
parallel, it also uses the term “Moscow Patriarchy” (Moskovskaya patriarkhiya) to refer to the
ROC’s central church administration. If we return to the interwar period discussed in this
paper, we should admit that by defining their Church as “Rossian” the Russian Orthodox
hierarchs in the Soviet Union and abroad emphasized the link of their Church with Russian
imperial legacy, especially in regard to territories and religious structures abroad. Meanwhile,
by referring to the same body as “Moscow Patriarchate” they stressed the canonical status and
historical authority of their Church. In short, whereas the first term justified the ROC’s
jurisdiction over the Orthodox communities which were cut off from the direct control of the
Moscow Patriarchate by the interwar Soviet borders, the second aimed to secure the canonical
and historical position of this particular Church in the Orthodox world. At the same time, for
the sake of simplicity, this paper uses the name “Russian Orthodox Church” as an
internationally popular reference to this religious body.
During the age of ecumenical councils, the spatial borders of churches were defined either on
the grounds of the so-called ancient custom, mainly in the cases of the patriarchates of Rome,
Alexandria, and Antioch, or by special canons such as Canon 8 of the Third Ecumenical
19
Vladislav Tsypin, Istoriya Russkoy Tserkvi, 1917–1997 [History of the Russian Church, 1917–1997]
(Moscow: Spaso-Preobrazhensky Valaamsky Monastyr’, 1997), 294.
20
Statute of the Russian Orthodox Church, Chapter One “General Provisions,” available in Russian at:
http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/133115.html.
11
Council (431) and Canon 28 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (451), especially in the cases
of the patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem as well as the Church of Cyprus.21 This
pattern, however, did not fit the needs of the modern nation-states and their Orthodox
churches. Hence, they promoted a new reading of some old patterns and canons regulating the
church-building process. Whereas the ecumenical councils ruled that the organization of
ecclesiastical parishes must follow the administrative order in the Roman Empire – for
example, Canon 2 of the Second Ecumenical Council (381) and Canon 17 of the Fourth
Ecumenical Council (451) – the modern Orthodox churches22 started drawing analogies
between the term “parishes” and themselves, on the one hand, and between the administrative
borders in the Roman Empire and the contemporary state borders, on the other. On these
grounds, they assumed that the territories of autocephalous churches had to be in agreement
with the political and/or national ones. This situation presupposes several scenarios:
1) The territorial jurisdiction of an Orthodox Church grows or shrinks in parallel with changes
of the corresponding state borders, but this also means that such churches have a general
interest in supporting the expansion of their state;
2) The dissolution of imperial polities and the establishment of new states on their former
territories trigger disintegration processes within the local Orthodox churches and provoke the
birth of new ones as well as a struggle between the former “imperial” churches and their
“offsprings”;
3) The preservation of the territorial jurisdiction of a particular Orthodox Church after the
collapse of the corresponding polity by means of structural changes, for example, by granting
autonomy to parts that are no longer under her direct control due to the change of political
borders.
The discussed spatial dimension of contemporary inter-church relations in the Orthodox world
gives grounds to speak about ecclesiastical rather than religious geopolitics, because its major
concern is not the interpretation of religious dogmas but church jurisdictions. Moreover, the
21
Yurii Grabbe, “Otnosheniya Zarubezhnoy Russkoy Tserkvi s Avtokefal’nymi Tserkvami i otdelivshimisya
chastyami Russkoy Tserkvi” [Relations of the Russian Church Abroad with the autocephalous churches and the
parts that have left the Russian Church], in Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago Sobora Russkoy Pravoslavnoy
Tserkvi zagranitsey [Acts of the Second All-Abroad Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad]
(Belgrade: [Karlovci Synod], 1939), 403–23; Ioann, Bishop of Shanghai, “Polozhenie Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi
posle voyny” [The post-World War I situation of the Orthodox Church], in Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago
Sobora Russkoy Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi zagranitsey (Belgrade: [Karlovci Synod], 1939), 389–402; Bogolepov,
Toward an American Orthodox Church.
22
The ancient patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and the Church of Cyprus
are not included here.
12
term “ecclesiastical geopolitics” points to specific features of Orthodoxy which distinguish it
from Western Christianity. Having in mind the nature of major conflicts in the modern
Orthodox world, it is questionable to what degree one could apply the Westphalian principle
of noninterference on religious grounds in the domestic affairs of other states.23 From an
Orthodox perspective, the establishment of a new state does not pose the question about the
religious affiliation of its governing authorities, but about the canonical status of the local
Orthodox community. In addition, it does not matter whether this community represents a
religious majority or minority – for example, the questions of the status of the Orthodox
Church in independent Ukraine, where Orthodoxy prevails, or of the minority Orthodox
Church in Catholic Poland, have had international implications. As a result, the solution of
such problems involves not only the corresponding churches and states but also international
religious and secular actors, such as pan-Orthodox forums or Kemalist Turkey. According to
canon law, only certain canonical autocephalous churches are eligible to arrange the
ecclesiastical status of the Orthodox community in a newly established state. In general, this
is the mother church from which the new Orthodox body, usually defined as “daughter
church,” wishes to separate. If the former is different from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of
Constantinople, however, then the granting of autocephaly, including the question about the
territorial jurisdiction of the future Orthodox Church, needs to be approved by the latter. At
least, this was the custom established in the course of the last century – for example, the
autocephaly, which the Moscow Patriarchate granted to the Georgian Orthodox Church in
1943, obtained full recognition by the Orthodox world only after its approval by
Constantinople in 1990.
At present, the link between Orthodoxy and geopolitics remains understudied. The first
studies on this issue appeared after the Cold War. Most of their authors, however, lack
grounded knowledge of Orthodox history and ecclesiology. Many analysts also tend to regard
Orthodoxy as a “source of national ideology and collective legitimatization” which informs
geopolitical visions.24 Such an approach, however, fails to take into account the universal
nature of the Orthodox Church as well as the eschatological vision of this religious tradition.25
From a theological perspective, the very nature of the Orthodox Church as a body of Christ
“in whom all divisions are overcome”26 is incompatible with the very idea of geopolitics.
Therefore, it seems that the link between Orthodoxy and geopolitics works mainly at the level
23
Thomas, “Taking Religious and Cultural Pluralism Seriously,” 24.
24
François Thual, Géopolitique de l’orthodoxie (Paris: Dunod, 1993), 121.
25
Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Orthodoxy and Political Theology (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2012), 136.
26
John D. Zizioulas, “Primacy and Nationalism,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 57, no. 3–4 (2013): 453.
13
of individual church institutions or their inter-church formations rather than at that of the
universal Orthodox Church. In this regard, it is important to distinguish between the Orthodox
Church as a theological category and the way(s) in which the contemporary Orthodox Church
functions in reality, that is, as a kind of federation of the fourteen canonically recognized
autocephalous churches. Only in this second case it is possible to refer to the Orthodox
Church as “a complex geopolitical reality” which does not constitute a homogenous block.27
According to Nicolas Kazarian, the diverse historical experiences of the individual Orthodox
churches have led to differences in their geopolitical agendas.28 A no less important factor
was the “territorial reconfiguration of Orthodoxy” caused by the political changes in Eastern
Europe and the mass migration of Orthodox believers in the twentieth century.29 At the same
time, the traditional close link of Orthodox churches with their states is not an absolute one,
but allows churches to “deal with their own geopolitical agenda, in addition to being
encompassed by state diplomacies.”30 Taking into consideration the differences in the
geopolitical agendas of individual churches and in the foreign policy interests of their states,
the creation of a common geopolitical agenda of entire Orthodoxy seems an almost
impossible task. In this regard, we should also admit the fact that today half of the canonical
autocephalous Orthodox churches function in states with non-Orthodox and even with non-
Christian religious majorities, namely the patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria,
Antioch, and Jerusalem and the autocephalous churches in Albania and Poland as well as that
in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This places them in a less advantageous position than the
other seven Orthodox churches, which can rely on the support of their states not only for their
domestic but also for their foreign affairs. In this regard, Kazarian’s observation on the
contradictions between the patriarchates of Moscow and Constantinople points to one of the
main problems faced by geopolitics in general – the tensions between authority and power. In
his view, if the authority of an Orthodox Church reflects her potential to mobilize symbols
effectively, her power depends on her ability to consolidate the corresponding human,
financial, political, and territorial resources for the achievement of certain goals.31
27
Nicolas Kazarian, “Vsepravoslavnyy sobor: formirovanie novoy pravoslavnoy geopolitiki” [The Pan-
Orthodox Council: shaping new Orthodox geopolitics], Gosudarstvo, religiya, tserkov’ v Rossii i za rubezhom
[State, Religion and Church in Russia and Worldwide] (Moscow: RANEPA) 34, no. 1 (2016): 102.
28
Nicolas Kazarian, “New Orthodox Geopolitics,” Public Orthodoxy (January 6, 2016),
https://publicorthodoxy.org/2016/01/06/new-orthodox-geopolitics/.
29
Kazarian, “Vsepravoslavnyy sobor,” 117.
30
Kazarian, “New Orthodox Geopolitics.”
31
Kazarian, “Vsepravoslavnyy sobor,” 123.
14
Furthermore, under the influence of the Islamist terrorist attacks, analysts of the interplay
between religion and geopolitics have started paying special attention to the various religious
diasporas.32 Correspondingly, the study of the geopolitical role of Orthodox churches needs to
embrace not only the issue of their territorial jurisdictions but also that of their canonical and
administrative jurisdiction over parts of the Orthodox diaspora created outside the historical
lands of this religious tradition as a result of such events as the Bolshevik revolution (1917),
the Lausanne Treaty (1923), World War II, the military conflicts in the Middle East, the
disintegration of Tito’s Yugoslavia, etc.33 At the same time, the formation of Orthodox
diaspora communities has raised the question of their status regarding the corresponding
mother churches, on the one hand, and within global Orthodoxy, on the other.34 From this
perspective, the strong national identity of most Orthodox churches presupposes their
attitudes/policies towards specific parts of the Orthodox diaspora.35 The liturgical language
seems to be another important factor for the structuring of the Orthodox diaspora – for
example, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is in charge of the entire Greek-speaking diaspora
regardless of their country and Orthodox Church of origin, therefore the Cypriote diaspora is
also under its jurisdiction.36 At the same time, in the ROC’s case the ethnos and language
seem to be less important than the original citizenship of the Orthodox believers abroad – for
example, if in the past the Moscow Patriarchate claimed jurisdiction over believers abroad
who were themselves, or whose parents and grandparents were, subjects of the Russian
emperors, today we observe an analogous attitude within the context of the Russian World
concept.
c. Relationality between Early Geopolitical Concepts and the Orthodox Concepts of

Church
To grasp the specificity of Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics between the two world wars, we
also need to analyze it from the perspective of contemporary geopolitical thought. Such an
approach could shed light on the possible avenues of interchange of religious and political
concepts in the practice and philosophy of the Russian hierarchs from that period. Moreover,
there are chronological parallels between the advent of geopolitical theory and modern
Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics. The former emerged from ideas advanced at the turn of the
nineteenth and the twentieth century by historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner (USA)
32
Ibid., 113.
33
Ibid., 103.
34
Ibid., 113.
35
Ibid., 115.
36
Ibid.
15
and Vasilii Klyuchevskii (Russia), and by geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel (Germany)
and Halford Mackinder (Great Britain). If the first two scholars stressed the role of the
geographical factor in determining the political order in their states – for example, Turner’s
thesis on the role of the western frontier in building American democracy37 and
Klyuchevskii’s view that the geographic features of every country presuppose the character of
its society, the development of its history, and even its foreign relations38 – the other two
focused their efforts on bridging theory with practice by pointing to the spatial aspects of
domestic and world politics. Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Ratzel’s Politische
Geographie (1903) approached the state as an organism which needs space (Raum) to grow
healthily. If the physical features and natural resources of that space were insufficient, then
the state was either doomed to death or had the chance to survive by an expansion.39 In his
turn, Mackinder suggested a global approach to the impact of geography on politics. He built
on Social Darwinism, analyzing international relations as ones dominated by pitiless
competition between states.40 Influenced by the experience of Great Britain as a world
colonial power, Mackinder’s article “The Geographical Pivot of History” (1904) promoted the
thesis that all major conflicts in the history of mankind had been driven by tensions between
the “Heartland,” that is, the land-locked peoples in Eurasia (inner Asia) and Eastern Europe,
and the world “sea powers.”41 In this way, Mackinder’s ideas stimulated a shift of the focus
from the impact of geographical factors on the domestic development of the state as an
organism to their role in international relations not only between individual states but also
between blocs of states.
The very term “geopolitics,” however, was coined after World War I by Rudolf J. Kjellen.
Inspired by the radical changes on the map of Europe, this Swedish political scientist
employed the ideas of Ratzel and Mackinder in his research on the relationship between state
and territory.42 He assumed that this relationship exerts influence not only on the domestic
affairs of individual states but also on their foreign policy.43 According to Kjellen’s definition,
geopolitics was “the theory of the state as a geographic organism or a phenomenon in
37
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1921), http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/turner/.
38
Vasilii Klyuchevskii, Kurs Russkoy Istorii [Course of Lectures on Russian History] (St Petersburg, 1904),
Lecture 1, http://www.runivers.ru/new_htmlreader/?book=7814.
39
Charles B. Hagan, “Geopolitics,” The Journal of Politics 4, no. 4 (November 1942): 429.
40
Gerry Kearns, “Geography, Geopolitics and Empire,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
New Series 35, no. 2 (April 2010): 196.
41
S. V. Puntambaker, “Contemporary History and the Science of Geopolitics,” The Indian Journal of Political
Sciences 4, no. 3 (January–March 1943): 270.
42
Hagan, “Geopolitics,” 482; Puntambaker, “Contemporary History,” 271.
43
Hagan, “Geopolitics,” 482.
16
space.”44 At the same time, the systematic development of geopolitics into a field of study
took place in the Munich Institute of Geopolitics set up in 1924. Its founder, Karl Haushofer,
a military historian and geographer, believed that Kjellen’s theory would reveal both the
causes for the failure of Germany and the ways for its resurrection.45 Under his guidance the
Institute treated geopolitics as an applied science aimed “to investigate the relationship of
political events to a significant part of the earth’s surface.”46 Correspondingly, its major task
was to explore the practical implications of the conjunction of geography and politics.47 In the
early 1930s, under the influence of the four-dimensional time-space conception of physics,
the German school advanced an updated geopolitical concept of Raum which combined “the
space extension of geography” with “the time extension of history.”48 On these grounds,
geopolitics started approaching states as dynamic phenomena.49 According to Haushofer’s
methodology, geopolitics had to explore and use geographical facts (and the beliefs in the
corresponding lands was one of the research directions) from the perspective of the ambition
of a specific state or nation to become a world power or to win a world war.50
Correspondingly, one of the main tasks of geopolitics was to provide policy makers with tools
and guidance for their actions.51 On the one hand, this approach turned Haushofer’s
geopolitics into “an instrument of world conquest.”52 On the other hand, however, it raised the
question about the quality of geopolitics as a universal science because of the discrepancy
between the geopolitics of individual states which stemmed from their different geographic
environment and national aims.53
During and after World War II, the German school of geopolitics became the subject of
serious criticism. Some political scientists associated with the Allied Powers even called for
the rejection of geopolitics as a scientific field.54 What happened was a revision of interwar
geopolitical thought. In general, the postwar geopolitical schools distanced themselves from
such Third Reich ideas as “the theory of space and expansion as the foundation on which the
44
K. P. Mukerji, “The Emergence of Geopolitics (in the inter-war period),” The Indian Journal of Political
Sciences 9, no. 4 (October–November 1948): 12.
45
Puntambaker, “Contemporary History,” 269.
46
Werner J. Cahnman, “Concepts of Geopolitics,” American Sociological Review 8, no. 1 (February 1943): 55–
56.
47
Or Rosenboim, “Geopolitics and Regional Order,” in The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in
Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 61–62.
48
Cahnman, “Concepts of Geopolitics,” 57.
49
Hagan, “Geopolitics,” 484.
50
51
Cahnman, “Concepts of Geopolitics,” 55–56; Hagan, “Geopolitics,” 484.
52
53
Ibid., 277.
54
Puntambaker, “Contemporary History,” 266–83; Mukerji, “The Emergence of Geopolitics,” 11–24.
17
progress and happiness of a virile people could be permanently built”55 and adopted a new
vision of the world as “a compact, small, closed-space geographic system.”56 They also
invented new tools for the interpretation of international relations.
This overview of early geopolitical thought draws two intriguing parallels with key Orthodox
concepts about the Church. It seems that Darwinism had left its imprint not only on the first
generation of geopolitical theorists but also on their Orthodox contemporaries. In the first
decades of the twentieth century, both groups of scholars referred to their objects of research
as organisms, although they approached them differently: while the state organism was treated
through the secular prism of Social Darwinism, the Church was approached as a sacral
organism. In this regard, especially important are the works of two professors at St. Serge
Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris: Nicholas Afanasyev (1893–1966) and Georges
Florovsky (1893–1979). Regarding the Church as a divine-human organism, they laid the
grounds of the so-called “eucharistic ecclesiology” or “communion theology.”57 At the same
time, it is worth mentioning that the Orthodox concept of the Church as a divine-human
organism involves also a complex of theoretical visions of the so-called “local church.” The
latter is often viewed as a city-centered eucharistic assembly of believers, who are gathered
around and presided by the local bishop, and who through him are in communion with the
other local churches, thus being an inseparable part of the universal Christian Church. In this
regard, Afanasyev defined the Church organism “as an interaction of giving and receiving
among local churches.”58 Together with Florovsky, he opposed the views of the Church as a
confederation or a corporation of local churches. Instead, on the grounds of the Paulician
conception of the Church as the Body of Christ and the commentaries of St. John Chrysostom
that the “Church is the complement of Christ in the same manner in which the head completes
the body and the body is completed by the head,” Afanasyev and Florovsky referred to her as
an organism.59 In this regard, however, Florovsky warned that the believers in the Church
55
Rosenboim, “Geopolitics and Regional Order,” 61–62.
56
Ibid., 56.
57
Andrey Shishkov, “The Problematic Issues of Eucharistic Ecclesiology in the Context of Contemporary
Political Theology,” in Political Theologies in Orthodox Christianity: Common Challenges – Divergent
Positions, ed. Kristina Stoeckl, Ingeborg Gabriel, and Aristotel Papanikolau (London and New York:
Bloomsbury and T&T Clark, 2017), 189–205; Brandon Gallaher, “The Christian Church Facing Itself and
Facing the World: An Ecumenical Overview of Modern Christian Ecclesiology,” in The Community of
Believers: Christian and Muslim Perspectives, ed. Lucinda Mosher and David Marshall (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2015), 98–99.
58
Aidan Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1893–
1966) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 84.
59
Georges Florovsky, “The Church: Her Nature and Task,” in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox
View, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing Company,
1972), 63–64; Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora, 95.
18
cannot be approached as the cells in a biological organism, because the former do not lose
their own personalities in the Church, but enter “in direct and immediate union with Christ
and His Father.”60 In this way, the Christian Church forms not only a theantropic but also a
catholic organism. Furthermore, in contrast to the secular approach of the early geopolitical
thinkers who view interstate relations as a struggle for existence, similar to that between
species, Orthodox theologians point to the catholic nature of the Church, which allows her to
stay united thanks to its charismatic life. As mentioned recently by Andrey Shishkov, the
focus of the eucharistic theology falls “on the people and the community, rather than on the
Church hierarchy and vertical power.”61 At the same time, some representatives of Russian
theological thought from the first half of the twentieth century applied the analogy with an
organism not only to the catholic Church but also to the local churches. This is especially true
for theologians associated with the Russian Synod Abroad that found asylum in Sremski
Karlovci, in interwar Yugoslavia. They regarded themselves as “dry bones that had been
scattered across the world and that were waiting for the voice of the Prophet to gather them
together, to put in flesh and to give them the breath of life again.”62 They also believed that
the ROC and the Russian nation are linked as body and soul in one and represent one
organism.63
Furthermore, the second big difference between the secular and the theological thinkers
concerns their views on the role of ministry in the state and the Church. While the authorities
of a secular state consist of “commissioned officers” or delegates of the corresponding nation,
the Church has developed a different kind of ministry – that of the bishops. They preside the
eucharistic assemblies as “representatives” of Christ Himself, not of believers. According to
Florovsky, “in them and through them, the Head of the Body, the only High Priest of the New
Covenant, is performing, continuing and accomplishing His eternal pastoral and priestly
office.”64 If the local celebration of the eucharist secures the communion of the corresponding
assembly of believers with Christ, the sacramental authority of its bishop transcends the
physical and geographical divisions between local churches and allows them to stay in unity
with the Universal Church, thus meeting the principle of catholicity.65
60
Florovsky, “The Church,” 67.
61
Shishkov, “The Problematic Issues of Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” 204.
62
ROCA, Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago Sobora, 27.
63
Ibid., 162.
64
65
Zizioulas, “Primacy and Nationalism,” 256–57; Florovsky, “The Church,” 66.
19
Another avenue of exchange of ideas between Orthodox theology and geopolitical theory
concerns the spatial aspects of the Church and the state. This time, however, the attention of
theologians is focused on the local rather than on the catholic Church. Since the end of World
War I, the interest in the ways in which the religious life of the adherents of Christianity has
been organized on the earth throughout the centuries has been growing.66 The studies on this
issue brought about different visions of the local Church. In general, theologians agree that
the early local churches represented communities of believers organized on the basis of the
territorial principle of celebration of the eucharist, but differ in their understanding of the
relationship between the local Church and the bishop’s office. While some give priority to the
ancient concept of the local Church as one in communion with the bishop of the main city in
the corresponding geographic area, others “put more emphasis on the administrative aspect
and the national understanding of the local Church,” thus linking the latter with a specific
polity or a particular nation-state.67
The first approach is presented by scholars affiliated with St. Serge Orthodox Theological
Institute in Paris. According to Florovsky, the recognition of Christianity by the Roman
Empire has changed the way in which local churches are functioning. Under the new
conditions, they “had to learn to live no longer as self-contained units (as in practice, though
not in theory, they have largely lived in the past), but as parts of a vast spiritual
government.”68 In his turn, Afanasyev pointed to the “quasi-territorial” authority of the
bishops as presidents of eucharisitic communities.69 More recently, this idea has been further
developed by Metropolitan John of Pergamon, who regards the local Church as an entity that
stems from the interplay of the catholic and the geographic nature of the eucharist.70 In his
view, it is “an entity with full ecclesiological status in the episcopal diocese.”71 He also admits
that the recognition of Christianity by the Roman Empire has stimulated a shift of the center
of the “local” unity “from the Episcopal diocese to larger geographic units comprising the
dioceses of a province under the headship of the bishop of the metropolis of that province.”72
According to him, however, this transformation in the structure of the terrestrial Church “has
not essentially altered the view of the local Church as identical with the Episcopal diocese,”
66
Zizioulas, “Primacy and Nationalism,” 249–57; Florovsky, “The Church,” 95.
67
Johannes Oeldemann, “The Concept of Canonical Territory in the Russian Orthodox Church,” in Religion and
the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faiths, ed. Thomas Bremer (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 233.
68
69
Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora, 109.
70
Zizioulas, “Primacy and Nationalism,” 247.
71
Ibid., 251.
72
Ibid., 252.
20
but has disappeared with Byzantium.73 In this regard, he also argues that the establishment of
the metropolitan system did not abolish the territorial principle introduced by the First
Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (381), whose Canon 2 forbade bishops to interfere in
the affairs of other local churches.
At the same time, Alexander Schmemann, who graduated from St. Serge Institute but
developed his theological career after World War II as a priest of the North American
Metropolia, advanced a different vision on Orthodox ecclesiology. More specifically, he
referred to the Church from the epoch of the ecumenical councils (fourth–eighth centuries) as
a “union of ‘autocephalous’ patriarchates.”74 This approach was further developed by the
post-Soviet Russian theological school, whose representatives consider the currently existing
autocephalous churches as the local churches of the contemporary era. In contrast to
Metropolitan John (Zizioulas), they state that the metropolitan system was simply one of the
stages in the development of the local Church.75 Whatever vision of the local Church in
Orthodoxy we accept, that is, as one identical with the Episcopal diocese or with an
autocephalous body, we cannot neglect her spatial aspects. This state of affairs suggests that
the issue of church territory occupies a special place if not in ecclesiastical geopolitics then
definitely in the Orthodox inter-church relations.
From the perspective of the issue of ecclesiastical geopolitics, a no less intriguing approach to
the local Church was suggested by Nicholas Afanasyev, who discussed some negative
implications of the marriage between the Christian Church and the Roman Empire. In
particular, he pointed to the fact that, in the beginning of the fourth century, the Church
included not only the Christian communities within the Empire’s territorial frontiers, but the
whole inhabited world, the so-called oikoumene. Therefore, when the Byzantine basileos
adopted the care of all Christians as his most sacred duty, he found it not only justifiable but
also compulsory to expand his authority beyond the territory of his empire. As a result, these
inspirations gave rise to an “ecclesiastical imperialism.”76 It seems that some representatives
of the post-1917 ROC were not far from such an ideology. Clerics and theologians connected
73
Ibid.
74
Alexander Schmemann, Istoricheskii put’ Pravoslaviya [The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy] (New
York, 1963), 99, https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Aleksandr_Shmeman/istoricheskij-put-pravoslavija/4.
75
Hilarion (Alfeyev), Bishop of Vienna and Austria, “Princip ‘kanonicheskoy territorii’ v pravoslavnoy traditsii”
[The principle of “canonical territory” in the Orthodox tradition], Tserkov’ i vremya 31, no. 2 (2005): 43–61;
Aleksandr Kyrlezhev, “Mirovoe pravoslavie: Tipologiya avtokefal’nykh tserkvey” [Orthodox Commonwealth:
A typology of autocephalous churches], Gosudarstvo, religiya, tserkov’ v Rossii i za rubezhom [State, Religion
and Church in Russia and Worldwide] (Moscow: RANEPA) 34, no. 1 (2016): 74–101.
76
Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora, 87.
21
with the Russian émigré Synod in Sremski Karlovci became its main pioneers. In 1938,
during the Second Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, they advanced the thesis
of the exceptional character of Russia and her Church. In this endeavor they built on the ideas
of Nikolay Kapterev, a pre-revolutionary church historian who believed that by adopting the
title “tsar,” the Moscow prince became not only the guardian of Orthodoxy in Russia but of
entire Orthodoxy, that is, he also became the tsar of all Orthodox nations.77 On these grounds,
the ROCA’s representatives advanced a new interpretation of the medieval idea of Moscow –
Third Rome. According to them, this theory had serious political and ecclesiastical
implications. On the one hand, it transformed Moscow from a main city of an appanage
principality (udel’noe knyazhestvo) into the capital of the Russian State.78 On the other hand,
it signified a move of the center of Orthodoxy from Constantinople to Moscow as well as the
change of its character from a Greek to a Slavonic one.79 In this regard, it was even claimed
that “the Patriarchate of Constantinople could receive its freedom only from the hands of the
Russian Tsar” as the only rightful pretender for the church heritage of the Byzantine Empire.80
At the same time, it should be mentioned that the advent of nationalism provoked similar
developments in many other Orthodox churches. Although they did not reach the point of
Byzantine or Russian “ecclesiastical imperialism,” their close links with the corresponding
national governments transformed them into “half-political, half-ecclesiastical” structures,
whose interests were now determined by national concerns.81
Russian Ecclesiological Geopolitics between the Two World Wars: Practices and Concepts
From the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453) to the end of World War I, the Russian
Church did not face any real competition from another Orthodox Church.82 In addition, during
these five centuries, the former grew in parallel with the territorial expansion of Russia.
77
Konstantin K. Nikolaev, “Polozhenie Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi posle voyny” [The state of the Orthodox Church
after the war], in Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago Sobora Russkoy Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi zagranitsey
(Belgrade: [Karlovci Synod], 1939), 424–27; Kapterev, Kharakter otnosheniya Rossii, 33.
78
Nikolaev, “Polozhenie Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi,” 424.
79
80
81
Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora, 88–89.
82
The Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century triggered a political disintegration of Kievan Rus’ which
provoked a split of its Metropolia. While the Western Kievan Metropolia remained under the Patriarchate of
Constantinople and became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the next centuries, the Eastern
Kievan Metropolia linked its destiny with Muscovite Russia. In the mid-fourteenth century, Metropolitan Alexii
(1356–1378), who was the godfather of Prince Ivan Kalita of Moscow (1324–1340) and a regent of his juvenile
son and heir to the throne, Dmitrii Donskoy, moved the headquarters of his church to Moscow, see Anton V.
Kartashev, Ocherki po istorii Russkoy tserkvi [Essays on Russian church history], vol. 1 (Moscow: Terra, 1993),
307–8.
22
Correspondingly, the Russian ecclesiastical borders progressed together with the political
ones. Moreover, when Alaska was sold to the United States (1867), the act of purchase
preserved the ROC’s control over her local structures and did not restrict the establishment of
new ones on the pre-1867 US territories. This opportunity was used by the Holy Synod in St.
Petersburg to expand its jurisdiction in North America by setting up new parishes and
dioceses there.83 As a result, in 1870 the Episcopal See was moved from Sitka to San
Francisco and in 1905 from San Francisco to New York. Another unique spatial feature of the
imperial ROC stems from her policy of creating various branches abroad: her missions in the
non-Christian countries of China, Japan, and Korea, her podvories, that is, representative
churches situated on the territories of other Orthodox churches; as well as multiple
ambassadorial churches throughout Europe. No other Orthodox Church had such structures
abroad before World War I. This means that already before the twentieth century, the ROC’s
canonical jurisdiction had exceeded the borders of the Russian Empire – that is, this Church
was operating in areas which were not under the control of Russian rulers. On the one hand,
this situation conditioned the ROC’s involvement in Russian foreign policy long before the
collapse of the Russian Empire, turning the former into a “soft power” of the latter. On the
other hand, it allowed the ROC’s authorities to develop religious activities abroad more or
less independently from the imperial government in St. Petersburg.
The political turmoil of 1917, however, shook both the ROC’s international network and the
imperial pattern of her activities abroad. By breaking up the centuries-old “union between the
altar and the throne,” the February Revolution deprived the imperial ROC of her main
supporter and defender – the Russian monarchy, personified by the House of Romanov.84
Several months later, the Bolshevik revolution destroyed not only the last remnants of the old
empire but also the traditional mode of church-state relations in Russia. On the one hand, the
end of the ancient regime stimulated centrifugal processes within the former imperial lands
and brought about the establishment of independent republics in Georgia and Ukraine. On the
other hand, it provoked similar developments in the religious sphere. The first of them took
place already in March 1917, when the Orthodox Georgians unilaterally decided to leave the
jurisdiction of the Holy Russian Synod and proclaimed the restoration of their ancient
autocephalous patriarchate. A year later, their example was followed by the Orthodox
Ukrainians who also declared the autocephaly of their local ecclesiastical structure despite the
83
Dimitry Grigorieff, “The Orthodox Church in America: An Historical Survey,” The Russian Review 31, no. 2
(April 1972): 138–52; Yaroslav J. Chyz and Joseph Slabey Roucek, “The Russians in the United States: I,” The
Slavonic and East European Review 17, no. 51 (1939): 638–58.
84
Kyrlezhev, “Mirovoe pravoslavie,” 77.
23
resistance of the Russian church leadership. None of these autocephalies was recognized by
the highest authority of the Russian Orthodox Church – her Great Ecclesiastical Council, held
in Moscow between August 1917 and September 1918.85 Taken after the collapse of the
monarchical order and at a moment when, for a short period of time, the ROC was able to act
independently from state intervention, these decisions could be considered as formative for
post-imperial Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics.
a. The Grant of Autonomy as a Means of Preserving the ROC’s Territorial Jurisdiction
The rise of modern Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics, however, was not determined simply by
the domestic change of the political regime. A much more important factor for its
development was the disintegration of the former imperial territory, which was fixed by
international treaties. More specifically, by cutting off considerable parts from the former
imperial western borderlands, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918) and the Treaty of
Riga (March 18, 1921) gave a new impetus to the centrifugal forces in the Russian Church.
The interwar political borders transformed thousands of former subjects of the Russian
emperors into citizens of foreign sovereign states, thus raising the question about their
relationship with the former imperial Church. According to the All-Russian Church Council
of 1917–1918, the changes of the political borders did not mean the end of the ROC’s
jurisdiction over the dioceses that had remained outside the Soviet territories. On October 13,
1921, this decision was reaffirmed by a joint session of the Russian Holy Synod and the
Supreme Church Council, presided by Patriarch Tikhon.86 Still, the Church’s acts were not
enough to solve the problem, as the status of her structures in the interwar Near Abroad also
depended on the good will of the national governments established there.
When Bessarabia and Bukovina united with Romania in April 1918, the Holy Synod in
Bucharest subjected the so-called “Bessarabia Diocese” of the Russian Church without asking
for her permission. In May, Patriarch Tikhon protested against this act. In his letter to the
Romanian Holy Synod, he referred to history. He stressed that the canonical separation of
Orthodox Romanians became a fact only when their mother church, that is, the Patriarchate of
Constantinople, had agreed to grant them autocephaly. In his view, the Moscow Patriarchate
85
The Moscow Patriarchate recognized Georgian autocephaly in November 1943, when the Soviets dislodged
the Nazi forces from the Caucasus region. In the case of Ukraine, however, the Russian hierarchy has never
agreed to make such concessions. To a great degree, this discrepancy reflects the different attitudes of Russian
Church leaders to the Orthodox structures in Georgia and Ukraine. While Ukraine, its people, language, and
culture have been considered an inherited part of the Russian nation, Georgia has never been part of this
paradigm. Moreover, the Georgians had become Christians and had obtained their first autocephaly centuries
before the baptism of Kievan Rus’.
86
Kalkandjieva, The Russian Orthodox Church, 24.
24
had similar rights as the mother church of those Orthodox believers who were included in
postwar Romania. Therefore, he suggested the convocation of an ecclesiastical council to
decide under which jurisdiction the Orthodox people in Bessarabia should remain. It could be
a diocesan council, where the voice of the local clergy and laity would be heard, or an
expanded council with the participation of several Orthodox churches.87 Ultimately, however,
the Romanian Church turned a blind eye to Tikhon’s requests. In 1932, the Russian canonist
Sergii Troitskii returned to this case in his studies. In his view, the convocation of an
ecclesiastical council with the participation of several Orthodox churches would be a good
solution, as it would permit the involvement of a third party that had no direct interest in
exercising its jurisdiction over Bessarabia.88 According to Count Yurii Grabbe, a Russian
canonist affiliated with the Karlovci Synod, the Romanian Orthodox Church had no canonical
rights over Bessarabia. Moreover, he considered that by spreading its jurisdiction over the
local flock, the Holy Synod in Bucharest had violated the clauses on religious minorities of
the 1918 peace treaty as well as of the Romanian Constitution.89 In a similar manner,
Konstantin Nikolaev, another theologian connected with the same Synod, condemned the
introduction of liturgy in Romanian in Bessarabia as a tool of denationalizing the ROC’s flock
there.90 He also criticized the introduction of the so-called new church calendar in Bessarabia,
Poland, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia as measures directed against the ROC’s canonical
rights.91 These concerns of the ROC’s minorities abroad, however, were not developed into a
systematic view about the status of “ecclesiastical” minorities that had been forced to leave
the bosom of their mother church due to changes in the political borders and in their
citizenship. This remains an open question in contemporary Orthodoxy that continues to
provoke tensions between the churches and mutual accusations of attempts to denationalize
the corresponding communities, especially among Orthodox structures in the post-Soviet and
post-Yugoslav areas.
One of the most important challenges faced by the post-1917 Russian Church, however, was
the settlement of the canonical status of the Orthodox community in Ukraine. It passed
through several stages, determined by the changes in the international situation. In one of its
87
Mikhail E. Gubonin, Akty Svyateyshego patriarkha Tikhona i podzneysheie dokumenty o preemstve vysshey
tserkovnoy vlasti 1917–1943 [Decrees issued by Holy Patriarch Tikhon and later documents about the continuity
of the supreme ecclesiastical authority in the Moscow Patriarchate, 1917–1943] (Moscow: Pravoslavnyi Svyato-
Tikhonovskii bogoslovskii Institut, Bratstvo vo imya Vsemilostivogo Spasa, 1994), 134–36.
88
Sergii Troitskii, Razmezhevanie ili raskol? [Demarcation or schism?] (Paris: YMCA, 1932), 71.
89
Grabbe, “Otnosheniya Zarubezhnoy Russkoy Tserkvi,” 409.
90
91
Ibid., 453; Grabbe, “Otnosheniya Zarubezhnoy Russkoy Tserkvi,” 418.
25
last sessions in September 1918, the All-Russian Church Council voted on a special definition
of the Ukrainian question. It stipulates: “the Orthodox dioceses in Ukraine, while remaining
an inalienable part of the Orthodox Church of Russia, form its ecclesiastical region with
special privileges on the principle of autonomy” (Article A1).92 In this way, the Orthodox
community in Ukraine received autonomy in local ecclesiastical affairs that concerned the
spheres of administration, education, charity, monasteries, and marriage. The metropolitans
and the ruling bishops of Ukraine, however, were not able to take office without the approval
of the Patriarch of Moscow. In addition, they were not allowed to convoke church councils
without the blessing of the Moscow Patriarch. Meanwhile, the latter had the right to send his
representatives to the Ukrainian Church Council and to approve the Statute of the Orthodox
Church in Ukraine.93
In parallel, the All-Russian Church Council arranged the status of the Orthodox Diocese of
Warsaw. On August 25 (September 7), 1918, it adopted the Statute of this Diocese, which
stipulated its “canonical dependency on the Supreme Church Administration under the
presidency of the Most Holy Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.”94 The diocesan schools of
general and religious education were obliged to use Russian as the language of instruction,
with a mandatory study of Polish. In addition, this act of the All-Russian Church Council
included a curious requirement regarding the Polish state, which had not been negotiated with
its authorities in advance. According to this requirement, the local Orthodox Church had to
enjoy “the same rights as defined by the state legislation of the Kingdom of Poland with
respect to other Christian denominations.”95 In this way, the Russian hierarchy tried to secure
the autonomy of its Orthodox Diocese of Warsaw from the Polish state, rather than the
former’s internal ecclesiastical autonomy regarding the Moscow Patriarchate. At the same
time, there is almost no information in scientific literature about the destiny of the ROC’s
dioceses in Galitsia during the Soviet-Polish War (1919–1920). It seems that during this
difficult moment they had moved under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch. At least,
this is the impression from a remark made by Andrey Kostryukov that at that moment
Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii) was “functioning de jure as exarch of the Patriarch of
92
Hyacinthe Destivelle, O.P., The Moscow Council (1917–1918): The Creation of the Conciliar Institutions of
the Russian Orthodox Church, ed. Michael Plekon and Vitaly Permiakov, trans. Jerry Ryan (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 302; John S. Reshetar, “Ukrainian Nationalism and the Orthodox
Church,” American Slavic and East European Review 10, no. 1 (February 1951): 41.
93
Destivelle, The Moscow Council, 302–4.
94
Ibid., 308.
95
Ibid., 309.
26
Constantinople.”96 Due to the lack of research on this episode, it is possible to suggest that
this was a temporary measure. Still, it is important as a clue that points to the fact that it was
customary for the Patriarchate of Constantinople to take care of Orthodox communities that
were cut off from their canonical church authorities. Moreover, there is no registered
complaint about it by the Moscow church authorities.
In 1921, when the Treaty of Riga awarded Western Ukraine and Western Belarus to Poland, it
created a new geopolitical and ecclesiastical situation. On the one hand, the Polish
government refused to allow its Orthodox citizens to be administered by a foreign church
organization.97 On the other hand, the eastward expansion of Poland brought about a radical
growth of the local Orthodox community. Under these circumstances, the decisions of the All-
Russian Church Council of 1917–1918 on the Orthodox structures in Ukraine and Poland
were no longer applicable. Faced with this new reality, Patriarch Tikhon granted autonomy to
the Polish Orthodox Church, but categorically declined her requests for autocephaly. He
argued that such a status could be granted only “to individual peoples or nations and never to
such heterogenic ethnic conglomerates as those in Poland.”98 Today it is difficult to say
whether this statement was free from Bolshevik intervention. According to recently published
archival documents, the Soviet regime endorsed Tikhon’s efforts to appoint bishops in
interwar Poland who were loyal to him. Moreover, in March 1924 the Soviet authorities
planned to get rid of Metropolitan Dionisii of Warsaw by exerting pressure on Tikhon to
dismiss this hierarch from office.99 At the same time, publications issued by the Karlovci
Synod in the 1930s reveal a different approach to the status of the ROC’s communities which
were left in foreign states after the collapse of the Russian Empire. According to them, these
émigré communities “constituted a special body with its own specific ecclesio-national
features that had been formed in the course of the ROC’s life throughout the centuries.”100
Furthermore, the very fact that the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918 had refused to
recognize the self-proclaimed autocephaly in Georgia as well as the short-lived one in
96
Andrey A. Kostryukov, “Russkaya zarubezhnaya tserkov’ i avtokefaliya Pol’skoy Tserkvi” [The Russian
Church Abroad and the autocephaly of the Polish Orthodox Church], Vestnik PSTGU [Journal of St. Tikhon
Orthodox Humanitarian University], II: Istoriya. Istoriya Russkoy Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi [Russian Orthodox
Church History Series] 4, no. 37 (2010): 19.
97
Kostryukov, “Russkaya zarubezhnaya tserkov’,” 20.
98
99
Igumen Mitrofan (Shkurin), “Russkaya pravoslavnaya tserkov’ i sovetskaya vneshnyaya politika v 1922–1929
godakh (Po materialam Antireligioznoy komissii)” [The Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet foreign policy
between 1922 and 1929: A study based on archival documents of the Anti-Religious Committee], Vestnik
tserkovnoy istorii 3 (2006): 171.
100
27
Ukraine, that is, in countries where Orthodoxy was the majority religion, presupposed the
later refusals of the ROC leadership to grant such status to the Orthodox communities in
Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where they were religious minorities. All of them
received different degrees of autonomy. Each case was individually assessed and solved on
the grounds of the specific local conditions. The Orthodox Estonians were the first. In 1920,
they received wide autonomy. Meanwhile, their co-believers in Latvia gained more limited
internal independence a year later. Associated with the personality of Archbishop John
(Pommer) of Penza, this autonomy was called into question when he was murdered in
1934.101 Furthermore, although the Moscow Patriarchate declined the initial Finnish request
for autocephaly, the local Orthodox organization received an unusually wide autonomy in
1921. It included even the right to prepare its own holy oil (myrrh) – a privilege typical for the
autocephalous churches. Such a gesture seems to have been influenced by the special status of
Finland in the Russian Empire: it enjoyed internal civil autonomy, while the local Orthodox
community was organized as a separate diocese.102
Finally, there are some important differences between the autonomies granted during the
tenure of Patriarch Tikhon (1917–1925) and that of Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii), who
became the deputy locum tenens of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1927. On the one hand, the
decisions for the church autonomy of the ROC’s structures in Finland, Estonia, and Latvia
were taken jointly by Patriarch Tikhon, the Holy Synod and the Supreme Ecclesiastical
Council. Taken in the years of the Civil War, when the very existence of Russia was under
question, they aimed to prevent a decomposition of the Russian Church alongside the new
political borders established after the Great European and the Soviet-Polish wars. On the other
hand, the autonomy which Metropolitan Sergii granted to the Orthodox Church in Lithuania
in 1928, was an act based on his personal decision and performed at a time when the Soviets
had consolidated their power.103 From a legal point of view, there is also another important
difference between the Tikhonite autonomies and the Sergian one. The first took place at a
moment when the Moscow Patriarchate lacked the status of a judicial entity in the Soviet
Union and was de facto “forbidden to maintain foreign relations,” while the Lithuanian one
101
Kalkandjieva, The Russian Orthodox Church, 26–28.
102
Ibid., 25.
103
Sebastian Rimestad, “From Empire to Nation State: The Consolidation of the Relationship between the
Orthodox Church and Independent Lithuania and Latvia after the First World War,” Studia Podlaskie (Białystok)
XX (2012): 215–16. The legitimate locum tenens of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Peter (Polyanskii),
was exiled by the Bolshevik regime and, until his death, was not allowed to resume his duties of locum tenens.
28
was declared by Sergii (Stragorodskii) when he was recognized by the Bolsheviks as the
legitimate leader of the patriarchal Orthodox Church.104
b. The Principle of Decentralization as a Means of Preserving the ROC’s Unity
While the grant of autonomy aimed to rescue the ROC’s jurisdiction over her structures in the
interwar Near Abroad and was accomplished in tune with Orthodox canon law and custom,
the Civil War provoked the ROC’s central authorities to invent some new means aimed to
secure the unity of their Church in a time of war. On October 20, 1920, Patriarch Tikhon, the
Holy Synod, and the Supreme Church Council adopted the famous Decree No. 362, which
introduced the principle of church administrative decentralization as a temporary means of
preserving the ROC’s unity. The document instructed the Russian hierarchs to follow this
principle if the central church authority in Moscow had ceased to exist or the front line had
interrupted their normal communication with that authority. In such cases, the ROC’s bishops
were allowed to govern their dioceses autonomously until the normalization of the political
situation and/or the restoration of the ROC’s central government.105 Decree No. 362 turned
out to be of vital importance not so much for the management of the ROC’s structures in the
lands under Soviet control, but for those abroad. In practice, this innovation allowed the
Russian church emigration to organize its religious life on the principle of decentralization. In
1921 the Russian hierarchs, who had found asylum in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenians (henceforth Yugoslavia), convoked a special ecclesiastical council in Sremski
Karlovci that proclaimed the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.
Following the instructions of Decree No. 362, this new Orthodox body was organized as an
autonomous structure. The same council also decided that the ROCA’s decrees should start
with the formula, “By the blessing of His Holiness, the Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia,”
thus preserving her unity with the canonical mother church in the Soviet lands.106
In 1924, when the Bolshevik regime made an attempt to destroy the Russian Archdiocese in
North America by forcing Patriarch Tikhon to dismiss Metropolitan Platon (Rozhdestvenskii)
from office, the latter also referred to Decree No. 362. He rejected the order of the Moscow
Patriarch as one issued under pressure, and reorganized his archdiocese as an autonomous
North American Metropolia. The real significance of the principle of decentralization,
however, became apparently clear in 1927, when Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii) publicly
104
Andrei Psarev, “Looking Toward Unity: How the Russian Church Abroad Viewed the Patriarchate of
Moscow, 1927–2007,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 54, no. 1–4 (2007): 124.
105
Ibid., 128–29; Kalkandjieva, The Russian Orthodox Church, 15–16.
106
Psarev, “Looking Toward Unity,” 123.
29
declared his loyalty to the Soviet regime (July 29) and asked the Russian émigré hierarchs to
do the same. Neither the Russian Synod Abroad (henceforth Karlovci Synod) under the
leadership of Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii) nor the North American Metropolia of
Platon (Rozhdestvenskii) obeyed the Moscow order. Instead, they ceased their relations with
the Sergian church administration as one enslaved by the godless Bolshevik regime. Both
made use of Decree No. 362 to justify their further functioning as self-governing bodies. They
also relied on the decisions of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918 and Orthodox
canons as guidance for their activities. In parallel, they refuted any idea of proclaiming
autocephaly and declared that they would preserve a spiritual unity with the historical Russian
Church. On these grounds, the Karlovci Synod defined the ROCA as “an indissoluble
spiritually-united branch of the Great Russian Church.”107 It also claimed administrative
authority over the entire Russian diaspora. In this way, the Karlovci Synod declined the
implementation of the principle of decentralization for this part of the Russian Church.
This position, however, was not supported by the leading hierarchs of the ROC’s emigration
in North America and Western Europe, the metropolitans Platon (Rozhdestvenskii) and
Evlogii (Georgievskii), respectively. More specifically, the North American Metropolia
preferred to act independently from the Karlovci Synod. It also was inclined to regard
Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii) as a hostage of the Soviet authorities, who did not have
the freedom to act according to his free will. Therefore, its episcopate was ready to restore
communication with him as soon as the political situation in Russia changed. Meanwhile, the
Karlovci Synod took a firmer stand. It accused the Moscow patriarchal deputy locum tenens
of introducing an ecclesiastical heresy and even defined it as “Sergianism.”108 In their turn,
the Western European Russian parishes, administrated by Metropolitan Evlogii
(Georgievskii), made an attempt to find a compromise. After the death of Patriarch Tikhon,
Evlogii’s relations with the Karlovci Synod deteriorated. As a result, he adopted an
autonomous stand and sought support from Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii). His
negotiations with Moscow, however, reached a dead end when his churchmen were asked to
submit declarations of loyalty to the Soviet regime. In search for a solution, in 1931 Evlogii
moved under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and the network
107
ROCA, Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago Sobora, 136; Psarev, “Looking Toward Unity,” 126.
108
In 1992, Bishop Tikhon (from the Orthodox Church in America) declined the view that the leaders of the
Karlovci Synod, namely the metropolitans Antonii and Anastasii, had ever referred to this as a heresy, see
Bishop Tikhon, “About ‘Sergianism,’” The Journal of the Diocese of the West (Autocephalous Orthodox Church
in America) 1 (Summer 1992): 1, http://www.holy-trinity.org/ecclesiology/tikhon.about-sergianism.html.
30
of his parishes was transformed into the Western European Russian Orthodox Exarchate of
the latter.109
This short overview of how the principle of decentralization was interpreted and implemented
by the ROC’s different sections in the Soviet Union and abroad points to important parallels
between the interwar Russian hierarchy and the early geopolitical thinkers. At first glance, the
very idea of the ROC’s decentralization and the autonomous mode of functioning of her
different parts are far from an analogy with the geopolitical vision of the state as a kind of
social organism. Yet, Russian church leaders in emigration were aware of the contradiction
between the actual divisions in the ROC’s body in the interwar period and the claim for the
ROC’s unity. To overcome it, they issued declarations that they would keep the spiritual unity
with their historical mother church. They also supported the Moscow church center’s policy
of refusal to grant autocephaly to the ROC’s branches abroad. In this regard, however, they
used to substitute the theological notion of the universal Christian Orthodox Church as a
sacred organism with a corporal image of the Russian Church. Between the two world wars
the Russian church émigrés perceived their Church as a martyr or a sacred body whose “dry
bones” were scattered across the world and were waiting for resurrection. In 1937, learning
about the murder of Metropolitan Peter (Polyanskii), who was regarded by the Karlovci
Synod as the ROC’s last canonical locum tenens, they also defined her as “temporarily
headless.”110
c. Territorial Jurisdiction as an Issue of Interwar Russian Ecclesiastical Geopolitics
Geography turned out to be essential not only for the early geopolitical thinkers but also for
the interwar Russian hierarchs. If the former considered the geographical space as a main
factor determining the development of the state, the latter focused their attention on the
ROC’s territorial jurisdiction. In this regard, not only the Moscow Patriarch Tikhon but also
the Russian émigré Synod in Sremski Karlovci expressed special concerns about “the new
church formations” set up in the limitrophe states situated on the former Russian imperial
territories.111 More specifically, the Russian hierarchs regarded the preservation of the
historically constructed territory of their Church as a guarantee for her institutional unity and
role in the Orthodox world. This understanding stemmed from the view of the Russian Church
as “a gatherer [sobiratel’nitsa] of the Russian lands” since her creation.112 For this reason, the
109
110
ROCA, Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago Sobora, 27, 138, 399.
111
Ibid., 420–22.
112
Ibid., 694.
31
Russian hierarchs, in the Soviet lands as well as in emigration, resisted any attempts of other
Orthodox churches to reduce the Russian church territory. In this regard, the ROC’s relations
with the Patriarchate of Constantinople obtained special importance between the two world
wars. More specifically, the Russian hierarchy did not welcome the extension of the
jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to Poland, Finland, and Estonia in 1923.113 Still, its
initial reaction was relatively mild. The reason for this lay in the uncertain destiny of Patriarch
Tikhon, who had been thrown in jail by the Bolshevik regime in May 1922 and kept there
until the end of June 1923. In fact, his imprisonment blocked the normal functioning of the
Russian Church not only in the Soviet Union but also in the Near Abroad territories. At the
same time, even after his release there was no guarantee that the red commissars would not
make an attempt on Tikhon’s life. In this regard, many recently published archival documents
reveal that the acts which he issued during and after his imprisonment were not free from
intervention by the Bolshevik authorities.
Furthermore, the assessment of the acts of the Ecumenical Patriarch is also problematic.114 On
the one hand, they seem canonically justifiable by the historical role of Constantinople as the
mother church of the Russian one, as in the case of the above-mentioned functioning of
Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii) as exarch of the Patriarch of Constantinople during the
Soviet-Polish War.115 On the other hand, many acts undertaken by the ecumenical patriarchs
between the two world wars were not free from the influence of Turkey’s domestic and
foreign affairs. Among the few exceptions is the order issued by Patriarch Meletios IV
(Metaxakis) in the spring of 1923 to his representative in Moscow not to attend the Living
Church congress, announced as the Second All-Russian Church Council (April 29 – May 9,
1923). In this way, Meletios IV demonstrated solidarity with Tikhon and his Church. The
absence of his representative undermined the attempts of the Living Church to present her
forum as a continuation of the work of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918. More
importantly, this abstention meant that the Great Church of Constantinople did not recognize
the canonical validity of the decisions of the fake “Second All-Russian Church Council” to
depose Tikhon from his patriarchal office and to excommunicate the Synod of Russian émigré
bishops established in Sremski Karlovci. Furthermore, it did not allow the Living Church to
113
114
It is important to mention that in June 1923, Patriarch Meletios IV of Constantinople was removed from
office by the Kemalist government. In the beginning of July, however, Swedish diplomats, on the request of the
Finnish and the Estonian governments, negotiated with the Turkish authorities his short-term return in Istanbul,
during which the Orthodox churches of Finland and Estonia were transferred under the jurisdiction of
Constantinople, see Kalkandjieva, The Russian Orthodox Church, 24–26.
115
32
send her delegates to the Pan-Orthodox Council in Constantinople (May 10 – June 8, 1923).
Instead, Meletios IV invited the Karlovci Synod to send its representatives at the forum,116
whose participants expressed their sorrow about the Living Church’s act and appealed to the
Christian world to support the fight for the liberation of the imprisoned Russian Patriarch.117
Under these circumstances, on June 27, 1923 the Soviet authorities released Patriarch Tikhon.
He immediately informed the Church of Constantinople that he had resumed his duties not
only in the ROC’s dioceses in the Soviet Union but also abroad. However, there was no
response from the Ecumenical Patriarch, whose position was seriously undermined by the
Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). Inspired by their victory, the Turkish authorities made an
attempt to remove the See of the Ecumenical Patriarchate from Istanbul. Only the resistance
of the Great Powers stopped them. Therefore, the Kemalist government changed its tactics. It
accused Meletios IV of plotting against the state and removed him from the See of
Constantinople. Although the Lausanne Treaty (July 24, 1923) guaranteed the historical
location of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul, the new Turkish national legislation
degraded the status of the Patriarch – for example, he was not able to leave Turkey without
the permission of the Ankara government.118 At the same time, in September 1923, following
the Bolshevik example, the Kemalist government supported the creation of a national Turkish
Orthodox Church (i.e., similar to the Living Church in the Soviet Union) which was to replace
the ancient Patriarchate of Constantinople.119 In this way, not only the Moscow Patriarch but
also the Ecumenical one turned out to be a hostage of the new regime. Now their personal
survival and the destiny of their churches often depended on concessions they made to the
new masters of their states.
In December 1923, the Kemalist government permitted the enthronement of Gregory VII as
Patriarch of Constantinople. Shortly afterwards, however, in March 1924 he was accused of
plotting against the state. In this difficult moment he received unexpected support from the
Living Church, whose leadership offered him asylum in Bolshevik Russia. He did not go
there, but recognized this Church as the legitimate representative of Russian Orthodoxy. In
the next months, until his sudden death in November 1924, Gregory VII undertook a series of
steps that could be defined as direct attacks against the canonical authority of Patriarch
116
117
Mitrofan, “Russkaya pravoslavnaya tserkov’,” 164.
118
Ioann, “Polozhenie Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi,” 392.
119
Paschalis Kitromilides, “The End of Empire, Greece’s Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ecumenical
Patriarchate,” Bulletin of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies 17 (2011): 36–38; Whit Mason, “Constantinople’s
Last Hurrah: Turkey and the Ecumenical Patriarchate,” World Policy Journal 18, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 57;
33
Tikhon and the territorial jurisdiction of his Church. In June 1924, the Ecumenical Patriarch
invited his Russian colleague to resign and to abolish the Moscow Patriarchate as an
institution that “was born in abnormal circumstances.”120 In this regard, it is also important to
mention that the Soviet diplomats had secured the support of the Orthodox patriarchs of
Alexandria and Antioch for Gregory’s initiative. Only the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the
Serbian one sided with Tikhon.121
At the end of 1924, just before his death, Gregory VII undertook a step that was perceived by
the Russian hierarchy as a direct attack against their Church: the grant of autocephaly to the
Orthodox Church in Poland. This act was justified by Canon 17 of the Fourth Ecumenical
Council (451), which required that the church parishes be set up in agreement with the
administrative territorial organization of the Byzantine Empire. This principle was also
implemented with regard to the autocephalous churches in the same polity. As a result, their
boundaries were adapted to the administrative ones. Patriarch Gregory VII, however, updated
this principle. He considered that the order of church affairs in the modern era had to
correspond to the new forms of political and social life.122 This became one of his major
arguments for granting autocephaly to the Polish Orthodox Church, which was included in his
Tomos of 1924.123 Furthermore, Gregory VII pointed to the obligations of his See, as an
ecumenical institution, to take care of churches in need. Finally, his Tomos stressed that the
Patriarchate of Constantinople was the mother church of the Western Kievan Metropolia as
well as of the Metropolia of Lithuania and Poland124 before their subjection to the Church of
Muscovite Russia (1686). It also stated that the incorporation of these metropolias within the
120
121
122
123
The Tomos is the official document which the mother church issues when granting autocephaly to a daughter
church. The text of the Tomos of 1924 is available in English at http://pangreek-
ukrainianorthodoxarchdioceses.org/1924_tomos_of_autocephaly.html.
124
As noted above (footnote 82), in the thirteenth century the Mongol invasion provoked a split in the Kievan
Metropolia. While the Western one was integrated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Eastern one
linked its destiny with the Moscow Principality. The two parts also differed in their ecclesiastical status. The
Western Kievan Metropolia remained under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, while the Eastern one unilaterally
declared autocephaly in 1448. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the local Patriarchate recognized
the independence of the Moscow-based metropolia. In 1687, upon the joining of the eastern Ukrainian lands to
Muscovite Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople agreed that they would be administrated by the Moscow
Patriarchate, but did not withdraw its jurisdiction over the Ukrainian dioceses. This specific status of the latter
was soon neglected by the Moscow Church, which established full control over them, disregarding the
jurisdiction of Constantinople. In this regard, some opponents of the contemporary concept of the ROC’s
canonical territory emphasize that the “Golden Seal Certificate,” issued in 1591 by Patriarch Jeremiah II of
Constantinople for the recognition of the Moscow Patriarchate, has clearly excluded the Metropolia of Kiev and
Lesser Rus’ from the church territory of the new Patriarchate, see Fr. Jaroslaw Buciora, “Canonical Territory of
the Moscow Patriarchate: An Analysis of Contemporary Russian Orthodox Thought,” n.d. [2005], 14,
http://uocc.ca/pdf/theology/Canonical%20Territory.pdf.
34
Church of Moscow “was accomplished contrary to canon law,” because the latter suppressed
the church autonomy of the Kievan Metropolia and abolished the status of its hierarch as
“Exarch of the Ecumenical See.”
This reasoning was rejected by the ROC’s hierarchs. They pointed out that the Patriarchate of
Constantinople had not objected to the discussed incorporation within the thirty-year term
envisioned by Canon 17 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, that is, Constantinople had lost
any rights over the Kievan Metropolia.125 On these grounds, they defended the position of the
Moscow Patriarchate as the mother church of the Orthodox structures in interwar Poland and
strongly criticized the act of Constantinople as one undertaken without Tikhon’s permission,
thereby infringing the canonical principle of noninterference in the affairs of foreign dioceses.
Therefore, the act of Polish autocephaly was unanimously condemned by the ROC’s hierarchs
in the Soviet territories and in emigration as an encroachment upon the canonical authority
and territorial jurisdiction of their Patriarch.126 The Russian churchmen insisted that the
Moscow Patriarchate was the mother church of the Orthodox communities in Poland and thus
had the exclusive right to make any changes in their status.127 On June 5, 1924, Patriarch
Tikhon sent a special letter to Metropolitan Dionisii, informing him that only a future local
council (pomestnyy sobor) of the Orthodox Church of All Rossia had the canonical right to
take decisions granting autocephaly to one or another part of the Russian Church.128 In
February 1925, Tikhon’s position was supported by Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii), the
chairman of the Karlovci Synod, who asked the Patriarch of Constantinople to give up his
claims on the “territories cut off from the Rossian Patriarchate.”129
After Tikhon’s death, the Karlovci Synod developed a more flexible attitude to the issue of
Polish autocephaly. In November 1925 its chairman, Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii),
served liturgy together with Metropolitan Dionisii (Valedinskii), the head of the Polish
Orthodox Church. This behavior caused concern among some Russian church émigrés, who
perceived it as an act of recognition of Polish autocephaly. After a series of debates, in 1927
the Karlovci Synod adopted an official decision to maintain “communion in prayer”130 with
125
126
127
In 1948, the Moscow Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the Polish Orthodox Church anew.
128
129
130
The Orthodox Church distinguishes between “communion in prayer” and “liturgical communion.”
“Communion in prayer” could take place even in the case of relations with heterodox Christian churches as it
does not involve the performance of sacraments, while “liturgical communion” is allowed only between
representatives of canonically recognized autocephalous Orthodox churches. The latter involves not only the
joint performance of liturgy but also acts of consecration of new bishops, churches, etc.
35
representatives of the Polish Orthodox Church without recognizing the canonical validity of
her autocephaly. It also stressed that the ultimate decision on this issue belongs to the Russian
mother church.131 In this way, the Karlovci Synod’s position did not differ significantly from
those of Patriarch Tikhon and his heirs, the metropolitans Peter (Polyanskii) and Sergii
(Stragorodskii), who did not fully sever relations with the Polish Orthodox Church and
admitted the possibility of her future autocephaly.132
Furthermore, the proclamation of Polish autocephaly provoked a serious reconfiguration of

the Orthodox world. On the one hand, this act gave birth to a new autocephalous Church on
the map of Orthodoxy. On the other hand, it demonstrated that the Ecumenical Patriarch had
no intention to withdraw his jurisdiction from the Orthodox churches in Finland and Estonia.
This behavior was unanimously condemned by the entire Russian hierarchy, in the Soviet
territories and abroad, as “unlawful intrusion into the ROC’s affairs, aimed at tearing off parts
that belonged to her.”133 The Serbian and the Bulgarian Orthodox churches took a similar
stand. Their support was not motivated only by the common Slavonic roots but also by
specific conflicts of interests: the Church of Constantinople was refusing to abolish the schism
declared over the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1872 and was in conflict with the Serbian Synod
which had spread its jurisdiction over the Orthodox communities in interwar Czechoslovakia.
In its turn, the policy of Constantinople had the support of the Orthodox churches in Greece
and Romania (e.g., the Synod in Bucharest had an interest in defending its jurisdiction over
the ROC’s dioceses in Bessarabia and Bukovina after World War I). This intra-Orthodox
division was additionally aggravated in 1936, when the Ecumenical Patriarch cut off another
portion from the Russian Church by accepting the Orthodox community in Latvia under his
protection. In response, the Moscow Patriarchate, under the chairmanship of Metropolitan
Sergii (Stragorodskii), and the Karlovci Synod placed the emphasis on the historical rights of
the Russian Church over the Orthodox communities and structures in the interwar Near
Abroad. This historical approach reveals some affinity with the claims of the Sofia Holy
Synod over dioceses which used to be part of the Bulgarian Exarchate before World War I,
but were not included in the postwar Bulgarian state territory. A similar approach can be also
detected in the behavior of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Yet, it did not refer to developments
in modern times but to the Byzantine era and canons adopted by the first seven ecumenical
councils. At the same time, most interwar autocephalous and autonomous Orthodox churches
131
132
Kostryukov, “Russkaya zarubezhnaya tserkov’,” 24–26.
133
36
in Europe, especially the Romanian, the Polish, the Finnish, the Estonian, and the Latvian,
gave support to the Erastian principle adopted by their national governments, namely that the
state borders should determine the church ones. They insisted that the ROC had lost her
jurisdiction over all Orthodox communities who had remained outside the Soviet borders after
the peace treaties of 1918 and 1921.
d. The ROC’s Diaspora as an Issue of Interwar Russian Ecclesiastical Geopolitics
The establishment of the Bolshevik regime in Russia caused a mass exodus of Orthodox
people, including a significant number of clerics and bishops. This process also coincided
with a wave of economic emigration from other European countries and the Middle East,
provoked by World War I. For the first time in history, many of these migrants came from
Orthodox countries. Under these circumstances, not only the Russian Church but also other
Orthodox churches developed special measures to organize the religious life of their adherents
abroad. Yet, the ROC already had well-developed structures in North America and Western
Europe as well as in the Far and the Middle East, while the other Orthodox churches had to
build them from scratch – for example, until 1920 no other Orthodox Church except the
Russian one had an own diocese in North America. On the one hand, this international
network served as a basis for building the post-revolutionary Russian Church Abroad and
facilitated the transformation of the Russian church structures in North America and Europe
into autonomous bodies. On the other hand, the Moscow church administration was not able
to benefit from this network because the antireligious policy of the Bolshevik regime
interrupted its communication with the church branches abroad. Moreover, in 1924 the Soviet
government incited the Living Church to implant its groups abroad, with the task of taking
over the properties then under the control of Russian émigré churches. The same groups were
also provided with certificates attesting that they represented the only legally recognized
Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union.134 Thanks to such a document, John Kedrovsky, acting
as a representative of the Living Church, took away several churches from the North
American Russian Metropolia, including the Russian cathedral in New York. Similar attempts
took place in France and Germany, where they were directed against the parishes of
Metropolitan Evlogii (Georgievskii). In Western Europe, however, these attacks failed.135 At
the same time, the Bolshevik regime did not allow the Moscow Patriarchate to take effective
measures in defense of its properties abroad. Moreover, it exerted pressure over Patriarch
134
135
Ibid., 169–70; Kalkandjieva, The Russian Orthodox Church, 40–41.
37
Tikhon to issue decrees that pursued the abolishment of the Karlovci Synod and changes in
the leadership of the North American Russian Archbishopric. These steps seriously
undermined the canonical status of the Russian émigré church structures, provoking a lot of
confusion among their churchmen and adherents as well as tensions in their relations.
At the same time, the migration processes in the beginning of the twentieth century brought
about a new phenomenon – Orthodox diaspora. Although the majority of this diaspora
consisted of ROC adherents, the number of believers from other Orthodox churches was also
growing rapidly after World War I. This development raised the question of the management
of religious communities established outside the territorial jurisdiction of their mother
churches. In the interwar period, many Orthodox churches adopted the practice of taking care
of their own believers abroad. Some of them, however, such as the Romanian Orthodox
Church, gave preference to the principle of citizenship and claimed exclusive authority over
the émigrés from their nation-states. Others, however, chose the principle of ethnicity. In
1924, the Patriarchate of Antioch set up its own jurisdiction for the Orthodox Arabs in North
America.136 In the mid-1930s, the Bulgarian Exarchate also set up its own diocese in North
America, which included not only émigrés from Bulgaria but also from Macedonia. In this
way, multiple parallel Orthodox jurisdictions were established in non-Orthodox areas, thus
infringing the canonical principle of “one bishop in one city.”137
In its turn, the Patriarchate of Constantinople also started building its own network of dioceses
abroad. In March 1922, when the course of the Greco-Turkish War changed in favor of the
Kemalist forces, Patriarch Meletios IV issued a special encyclical, declaring the spread of his
jurisdiction over the entire Greek diaspora – that is, the émigrés who used to belong to the
Orthodox churches in Greece and Cyprus were also placed under his authority.138 Already in
April, the Patriarchate of Constantinople set up its first diocese abroad – that of Thyateira,
whose London-based archbishop was entitled to take care of the Greek émigrés in Central and
Western Europe.139 In parallel, in his private correspondence Meletios IV advanced the idea
of an exclusive authority of the ecumenical See over the entire Orthodox diaspora, regardless
136
Mark Stokoe and Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America, 1794–1994 (Syosset, NY:
Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995), 31, https://oca.org/cdn/PDFs/dept-archives/orthodox-christians-
na.pdf.
137
John Meyendorff, “One Bishop in One City,” in Orthodoxy and Catholicity (New York: Sheed & Ward,
1966), 115–16.
138
Vladislav Puzović, “Konstantinopol’skiy patriarkhat i pravoslavnaya diaspora v XX v.: Polemika vokrug
sozdaniya ekzarkhata pravoslavnykh russkikh tserkvey v Zapadnoy Evrope” [The Patriarchate of Constantinople
and the Orthodox diaspora in the 20th century: The polemics around the creation of an exarchate of the Russian
Orthodox churches in Western Europe], Vestnik PSTGU 55, no. 5 (2014): 28.
139
38
of the church of origin of Orthodox émigrés. In this regard, he suggested a new reading of
Canon 28 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (451), which had delineated the territorial
jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople and granted him special authority over the so-
called “barbarian lands.” According to Meletios IV, the twentieth-century Orthodox diaspora
in Western Europe and America could be regarded as identical with the early Christian
communities in the barbarian lands. Later on, this view was adopted by Patriarch Photius II
(1929–1935), who was able to implement it in practice thanks to the rapprochement between
Turkey and Greece. Some of his initiatives, however, were in conflict with the ROC’s
interests in the diaspora.
In 1931, Photius welcomed the request of Metropolitan Evlogii (Georgievskii) to move

together with his Russian Western European parishes under his jurisdiction. As a result, these
parishes were transformed into a Western European Russian Exarchate of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate.140 This act provoked fierce criticism from both the Moscow Patriarchate and the
Karlovci Synod. In the case of the former, the establishment of the Russian Western European
Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarchate stimulated a shift in the foreign policy of the
Moscow church leadership. In contrast to the 1920s, when its international activities were
marked by stagnation and withdrawal from international affairs, now the Moscow Patriarchate
adopted a pro-active approach by setting up its own puppet exarchates in Western Europe in
1931 and in North America in 1933.141 In both cases, only an insignificant number of
believers joined the new structures. Still, having in mind the efforts of the early Bolshevik
regime to suspend the ROC’s international activities in the 1920s, it is possible to interpret
these steps of the Moscow Patriarchate also as a shift in the religious policy of the Soviet
regime.
At the same time, the Karlovci Synod, whose members were not controlled by the Soviet
regime, reacted much more strongly to the act of Constantinople. They denied the new
reading of Canon 28 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (451) and condemned the attempts of
the Ecumenical Patriarchate to treat contemporary Russian émigrés as “barbarians.” The
Karlovci hierarchs also stressed that, being part of the great Russian nation, these émigrés had
belonged to the ROC’s jurisdiction and had no intention to leave her bosom.142 In this regard,
they openly declared the Church of Constantinople as their major enemy on the Orthodox
arena. They accused her patriarch of trying to benefit from the ROC’s tragedy and of
140
Puzović, “Konstantinopol’skiy patriarkhat”; Kalkandjieva, The Russian Orthodox Church, 44–48.
141
Kalkandjieva, The Russian Orthodox Church, 44–48; Grigorieff, “The Orthodox Church in America,” 146.
142
39
behaving as “heir to Russian church power and prestige [avtoritet].”143 Furthermore, they
were irritated by the decision of Photius II to award Metropolitan Evlogii with the title
“Bishop of Chersonesos,” as if this city was still under the jurisdiction of Constantinople.144
On this occasion, they emphasized that Canon 8 of the Second Ecumenical Council (381) had
imposed a ban on bishops to spread their jurisdiction over foreign dioceses. Curiously enough,
they claimed that when an Orthodox nation was separated from its bishop and its Church and
subjected to a foreign power, it lost its freedom.145 In 1937, another act of the Ecumenical
Patriarch added additional fuel to this conflict: his decision to accept Bishop Bogdan
Shpilko’s Ukrainian Church in North America under Constantinople’s jurisdiction.146 In
response, the Karlovci Synod advanced a new vision of the modern Orthodox world as one
divided into two ecclesio-cultural alliances: Greek and Slavonic. For a set of historical
reasons, some of which were mentioned above, this view became popular among the Serbian
and Bulgarian church hierarchs.
In the case of the Orthodox diaspora, we also need to outline two specificities. The first stems
from the global infrastructure of the imperial ROC, which assisted the creation of the Russian
émigré churches and allowed them to act as important non-state factors in international
relations between the two world wars, for example, by initiating prayers for the victims of the
Bolshevik regime. This feature was also demonstrated during World War II, when the three
Russian émigré church centers adopted different attitudes to the Soviet Union and Nazi
Germany. The second specificity concerns the attitude of Soviet authorities to the Living
Church and the Moscow-based patriarchal church as tools for dealing with the Russian
emigration. While the Living Church’s groups abroad were used mostly during the tenure of
Patriarch Tikhon and mostly for taking away the properties of Russian émigré communities,
the Moscow Church, under the leadership of Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii) acting as her
deputy locum tenens, was allowed to appear on the international scene in the 1930s, that is,
after the refusal of the leaders of the Russian émigré churches to sign declarations of loyalty
to the Soviet regime.147 From such a perspective, the Moscow exarchates, set up in Western
Europe and North America in the 1930s, emerged as bodies designed to compete with the
Russian North American Metropolia and the Western European Russian Exarchate of the
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople on the religious field.
143
Ibid., 430–32.
144
145
146
ROCA, Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago Sobora, 416, 434–35.
147
40
e. Conceptualizing Interwar Russian Ecclesiastical Geopolitics
The issue of autocephaly became another point of concern among the post-revolutionary
Russian churchmen. Yet, their roles differed. Those of them who were in charge of the
Moscow Patriarchate were able to develop and implement a specific religious policy as
representatives of the mother church of all Orthodox communities and structures situated on
former Russian imperial territories. No other autocephalous Orthodox Church, including the
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, was considered canonically eligible to intervene
in structures and areas that used to be parts of the imperial Russian Church, also known as the
Orthodox Church of All-Russia. According to the ROC’s Statute adopted by the All-Russian
Church Council of 1917–1918, only the Moscow Patriarch, in agreement with the Holy Synod
and the Supreme Church Council, had the canonical authority to change the ecclesiastical
status of the aforesaid communities. This right, however, was limited to the grant of
autonomy. Meanwhile, the grant of autocephaly was considered to be an act of special
significance that had to be accomplished on the grounds of a decision of the ROC’s local
council – for example, such a solution was suggested for the Polish case. Furthermore, the
change of the status of one or another part of the Russian Church was also bound to certain
political criteria. Only church structures that had been cut off from the Russian/Soviet
territory and integrated into a foreign sovereign state received internal autonomy, for example
in Finland and Estonia. In this regard, it is also important to point out that the All-Russian
Church Council of 1917–1918 agreed to grant autonomy to the Orthodox communities in
Georgia and Ukraine when their lands were proclaimed independent states. At the same time,
in the interwar period the ROC’s hierarchy systematically refused to recognize the self-
declared autocephalies in these countries.
In their turn, the ROC’s churchmen and theologians, who had emigrated after the Bolshevik
revolution, lost the opportunity to be active participants in the policy discussed above.
Instead, they concentrated their efforts on providing moral support for it, as in the case of the
statements made by the ROCA’s representatives against the Constantinople act of granting
autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Poland. In this regard, especially important is their
contribution to the development of the conceptual framework of the Moscow church policy
towards the issue of autocephaly. Not all of them, however, were equally involved in this
endeavor. The leadership of the North American Metropolia was much more concerned with
preserving the ROC’s legacy on that continent. On the one hand, the Metropolia had to
compete with the other Russian and non-Russian Orthodox churches set up there after World
41
War I. On the other hand, its hierarchy had to find a solution for the linguistic diversity of
their flock. In contrast to the Russian émigré churches in Europe, the North American
Metropolia included many native people who had converted to Orthodoxy and did not speak
Russian. In parallel, the majority of its adherents consisted of second- and third-generation
American citizens. To consolidate them, the Metropolia started using the English language
not only in its administrative but also in its religious affairs. In a similar way, Metropolitan
Evlogii (Georgievskii) and his Paris-based administration faced specific challenges that
turned the issue of autocephaly into one of secondary importance. Initially, he protested
against the Polish autocephaly as an act directed against the ROC’s unity, but he abandoned
this position when his parishes were accepted under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate (1931). In addition, his parishes as well as the famous center of Russian religious
thought in Paris, St. Serge Orthodox Theological Institute, owed their normal functioning to
the material and moral assistance of the Anglican and the Catholic churches. As a result, the
attention of the Western European Russian Exarch, his clergy and flock, was attracted by the
problems of inter-Christian dialogue and theological exchange rather than jurisdictional
issues.
Furthermore, unlike the Russian church centers in North America and Western Europe, the
Karlovci Synod functioned in an Orthodox milieu. It did not need the assistance of heterodox
Christian bodies to develop its activities. Instead, the Karlovci Synod built up alliances with
Orthodox churches, mainly with the Serbian Patriarchate and the Bulgarian Exarchate. Having
its headquarters in Southeast Europe, it was also influenced by the experience of the local
Orthodox churches born out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and usually in a struggle
with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. In this regard, it wholeheartedly supported the
resistance of the non-Greek Balkan Orthodox churches against the primacy claims of the
ecumenical patriarchs. At the same time, being in charge of a global network of parishes and
dioceses, most of which were situated in non-Orthodox and even non-Christian lands (e.g.,
Germany, China, Palestine), the Karlovci Synod had to organize their activities not only in
line with canon law but also in line with different national laws and religious regulations.
These circumstances stimulated a deep interest in the jurisdictional aspects of church
functioning which the representatives of the North American Metropolia and Western
European Exarchate had never experienced. Furthermore, in contrast to the Patriarchate of
Constantinople whose leaders justified their rights over Orthodox diaspora communities and
certain Eastern European territories by references to the Byzantine era and canons adopted by
42
the first seven ecumenical councils, the Karlovci Synod gave preference to the Russian
imperial times when the ROC had become not the most numerous body in the Orthodox
world, but the one with the most extended territorial jurisdiction. As a result, between the two
world wars the theologians affiliated with this center of Russian Orthodoxy abroad developed
concepts and views that can be defined as Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics.
The first systematic attempts in this direction were made by Sergii Troitskii, a Russian jurist
and theologian whose works in the field of Orthodox canon law had a great impact on the
Russian school of canon law. After the Bolshevik revolution, he found asylum in Yugoslavia
where he joined the academic staff of the Faculty of Law in Belgrade. While teaching there,
he also contributed to the elaboration of a series of legal acts concerning the Orthodox Church
in interwar Yugoslavia. In 1929, he started reading lectures at St. Serge Orthodox Theological
Institute in Paris, but soon left it as an act of disagreement with the decision of Metropolitan
Evlogii (Georgievskii) to move under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch.148 Upon
his return to Belgrade, Troitskii published a series of articles against this act, which he
considered non-canonical. He rejected the view that the Patriarch of Constantinople had the
right to act as the most supreme authority (verkhovnii avtoritet) for the entire Orthodox
Church. In his view, Evlogii’s appointment as the exarch of the Ecumenical Patriarch was at
odds with the church tradition and, more importantly, it violated the canonical authority of the
Moscow Patriarchate as the mother church of the Russian parishes in Western Europe.149
Troitskii argued that the subjection of the Western European parishes to a “non-Russian
authority” was a mistake.150 Furthermore, he fiercely criticized the arguments used by
Patriarch Photius II to justify this expansion of his jurisdiction over the Russian parishes in
Western Europe. According to the Russian canonist, these arguments were laying down a
“theory of Eastern papism” whose aim was to justify the seizure of those parts from the
Russian Church which had remained outside the interwar Soviet borders. Moreover, he
thought that this new papism endangered the external missions of other Orthodox churches as
well.151
At the same time, there are interesting parallels between the described position of the Russian
émigré theologians and the views expressed by Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii) on the
148
Archimandrite Iriney (Serednii), “Professor S. V. Troitskii: Ego zhizn’ i trudy v oblasti kanonicheskogo
prava” [Professor Sergii Troitskii: His life and his works in the field of canon law], Bogoslovskie Trudy
(Moscow Patriarchate) 12 (1974): 218.
149
Troitskii, Razmezhevanie ili raskol?, 114–20.
150
Ibid., 101–2.
151
Ibid., 125–26; Troitskii, “Papisticheskie stremleniya grekov” [The papism-like drive of the Greeks], Na
strazhe Pravoslaviya (Paris), (May 1936): 29–35.
43
establishment of a Russian exarchate by the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Moscow church
leader also rejected the argument of the Ecumenical Patriarch that it was his duty to take care
of churches in danger, regardless of whether they were under his jurisdiction or not. In a
special letter sent by Sergii to the Patriarch of Constantinople in September 1931, the former
repeated Tikhon’s arguments of 1924 that the ecumenical title was one of honor and did not
include superiority of authority. On these grounds, Sergii concluded that in the case of
churches in need the Patriarch of Constantinople had only moral obligations, but no right to
intervene in their administrative affairs. In this regard, the Moscow deputy locum tenens also
stressed that the Patriarch of Constantinople had no right to intervene outside his territorial
jurisdiction as defined by Canon 28 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council. According to this
canon, his jurisdiction included the Black Sea areas and the surrounding barbarian lands, but
not the barbarian lands in Western Europe which had been under the jurisdiction of the
Roman Pope. In Metropolitan Sergii’s view, the Great Schism did not change this state of
affairs, but created an opportunity for the Orthodox churches to freely organize their own
parishes in Western Europe without asking the Pope or the Patriarch of Constantinople for
permission. Therefore, the Moscow church leader defined the Ecumenical Patriarch’s support
for the disobedient Evlogii as a violation of canon law.152
Troitskii’s analysis, however, went beyond the specific problem of the Western European
Russian Exarchate. Attracted by the broader issue of autocephaly, he published a series of
studies on this subject throughout the 1930s. He approached the autocephalous Church as a
body “whose authority is not granted by another Church, but stems from the very founder of
the Church, Jesus Christ, through the act of ordination [χειροτονία] of her leading hierarch
and her other bishops.”153 This is a unique feature of the Orthodox churches, which
determines their rights over certain territories and their Orthodox inhabitants as well as over
concrete diaspora communities. Moreover, this feature limits the rights of an Orthodox
Church to intervene in another’s affairs.154 At the same time, Troitskii’s interest in
autocephaly was also nurtured by the theological consultations which the Preparatory
Commission of the Holy Orthodox Church held at the Vatopedi Monastery in Mount Athos
(1930). In the course of these meetings, the Commission defined seventeen themes that were
to be discussed at a special pan-Orthodox conference, the so-called Pro-Synod. Originally
152
153
Troitskii, Razmezhevanie ili raskol?, 8. See also Troitskii, “Sushtina i faktori avtokefalije.”
154
Troitskii, Razmezhevanie ili raskol?; Troitskii, “Sushtina i faktori avtokefalije”; Troitskii, “Tsarigradska
Tsrkva kao faktor avtokefalije” [The Church of Constantinople as an agency of autocephaly], Arkhiv za pravne i
drushtvene nauke (Belgrade) XXXIV, no. 1 (1937): 20–47.
44
scheduled for 1932, this forum had to define the conditions for the proclamation and
recognition of the autocephalous and the autonomous status of an Orthodox Church.
However, due to the inability of several autocephalous Orthodox churches, including the
Russian one, to take part in its work, the Pro-Synod was postponed for better times.155
According to Troitskii, an Orthodox Church needs the consent of her mother church in order
to become canonically independent. Such a case, however, involves a conflict of interest
between the daughter church and her mother church. If it happens, such a change will be
especially disadvantageous for the mother church, as she will lose territories and material
resources.156 In this regard, the criticism of the Russian hierarchy was targeted against the
seizure of monasteries and other properties that had belonged to their Church before 1917 but
were later on confiscated by the national authorities in Poland and other Near Abroad
states.157 To solve this dilemma, Troitskii referred to the principle of natural justice: Nemo
judex in sua causa (no one should be a judge in his own cause). In his view, the issue of
administrative divisions within a particular autocephalous Orthodox Church falls within the
scope of her canonical jurisdiction, while that of autocephaly needs to be solved by the voice
of the majority on the grounds of canon law. In order to avoid a schism that would tear off
parts from her body, the universal Orthodox Church has developed special mechanisms to
deal with the cases of internal divisions.158 According to Troitskii, if the mother church has
agreed to grant autocephaly, then the recognition of this act is a formality. If the mother
church resists, however, then the conflict could be resolved with the assistance of third
parties. This could be a metropolitan or a patriarch who acts as a higher judge (treteyskii
sudiya), or a mediating agency – for example, the Athonite brotherhood assisted the grant of
autocephaly to the medieval Serbian Church by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the
thirteenth century. It is also possible to seek autocephaly via an appellation to an extended or
ecumenical church council.159
At the same time, during her Second Council the ROCA paid little attention to the
mechanisms by which autocephaly could be achieved. Instead, the participants in the forum
focused their attention on the rights that stemmed from autocephaly. They stressed that this
155
Natalia Vasilevich, “Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate postponed the Council: History of Vatopedi
1932,” website of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, June 7, 2016,
http://sobor2016.churchby.info/en/comments/holy-synod-of-the-ecumenical-patriarchate-postponed-the-council-
history-of-vatopedi-1932/; Troitskii, Razmezhevanie ili raskol?, 133.
156
Troitskii, Razmezhevanie ili raskol?, 61.
157
158
159
Ibid., 72.
45
status allowed the so-called local churches (pomestnye tserkvi) to organize their domestic
affairs independently of Constantinople.160 This also meant that only the central authorities of
an autocephalous Church had the right to transfer the jurisdiction over some of her parts to
another autocephalous Orthodox Church.161 In the ROC’s case, they also linked her
autocephaly with the exclusive rights of the Moscow Patriarchate to exercise its canonical
jurisdiction not only over the Soviet territories but also outside them: in the interwar Near
Abroad states, from Finland in the north to Romania in the south, as well as over the ROC’s
diaspora and the various structures abroad created before 1917. In this regard, it is also
important to take into account some specific aspects of Russian Orthodoxy that distinguish it
from the other Orthodox churches. For example, the imperial Russian Church used to refer to
her structures abroad as missions (e.g., the Chinese mission).162 When established on the
territory of another Orthodox Church, however, they were called “podvories” and served as
ecclesiastical embassies.163 A no less important peculiarity concerns the ROC’s tradition to
name her bishops not only after the cities where their Sees were located but also after the
name of the lands – for example, Bessarabian, Lithuanian, Finnish, etc.164
Finally, in regard to the ROC’s believers dispersed around the world after the Bolshevik
revolution, Troitskii pointed out that the question of their organization and order had ceased to
be an intra-church issue, having become an inter-church one. He considered that in the
modern era this issue concerns all autocephalous Orthodox churches as parts of one and the
same organism of the Church of Christ, where if one member suffers, all suffer.165 In contrast
to Evlogii (Georgievskii), however, Troitskii was not inclined to seek the assistance of the
Patriarch of Constantinople. Instead, he promoted an alternative idea. In his view, the Serbian
Orthodox Church, more than any other Church, had the duty to defend the canonical order.
Moreover, in the cases related to the ROC and her diaspora, this duty also stemmed from the
blood and spiritual ties between the two Orthodox churches and their flocks. In this regard,
Troitskii considered that a no less important factor was the ROC’s historical role for the
Serbian Church. The latter was the first and de facto the only canonical autocephalous
Orthodox Church which recognized the legitimacy of the Karlovci Synod as the government
of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. In 1922, the council of Serbian Orthodox hierarchs
160
Ioann, “Polozhenie Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi”; Grabbe, “Otnosheniya Zarubezhnoy Russkoy Tserkvi.”
161
162
163
Ibid., 124.
164
Ibid., 108–10.
165
Ibid., 129.
46
issued a special decision on this matter. It allowed the Karlovci Synod to freely exercise its
jurisdiction over the Russian priests in interwar Yugoslavia, who were not appointed at the
Serbian Patriarchate, as well as on the marriage and divorce affairs of the Russian refugees
there. Finally, the expansion of the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople over the
Orthodox diaspora in the 1930s stimulated further close collaboration between the Serbian
Orthodox Church and the administration of the Karlovci Synod.166
On the eve of World War II, Troitskii’s ideas received a new reading during the Second
Church Council of the ROCA (1938), which made an attempt to reunite the North American
Metropolia and the Western European parishes of Metropolitan Evlogii (Georgievskii) with
the Karlovci Synod. On the one hand, this forum adopted the jurisdiction-based approach of
Troitskii’s ecclesiology by placing the emphasis on the role of the hierarchy as the Church’s
vertical power.167 On the other hand, the Karlovci Synod combined this ecclesiology with a
historical approach that emphasized the unique experience of the Russian Church and its link
with the Russian monarchy, and especially with the Romanov dynasty since the establishment
of the latter in the beginning of the seventeenth century.168 In addition, the Karlovci
participants in the ROCA’s Second Council developed further some of Troitskii’s ideas. They
modified his idea of “Eastern papism” and adopted the term “Greek papism,” thus stressing its
aloofness regarding the Orthodox Slavs.169 Following this line, they pointed to the Romanian
Orthodox Church as a major ally of the anti-Russian policy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In
their view, the joint efforts of the interwar patriarchs of Constantinople and the Romanian
ones had destroyed the Slavic spirit of Orthodoxy.170 Meanwhile, it is important to mention
that during World War II, the Moscow church leadership also adopted Troitskii’s concept of
papism but preserved its original description as “Eastern.”171
Conclusions
The two Russian revolutions of 1917 and the changes on the political map of Eastern Europe
between the two world wars challenged the centuries-long status quo of the Russian Church
not only within the borders of the former Russian Empire but also within the framework of
entire Orthodoxy. In an attempt to save her past legacy and authority over millions of
166
Ibid., 130–32.
167
Shishkov, “The Problematic Issues of Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” 204.
168
ROCA, Deyaniya Vtorogo Vsezarubezhnago Sobora, 24–25.
169
Nikolaev, “Polozhenie Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi,” 457–58.
170
Ibid., 456.
171
Daniela Kalkandjieva, “Orthodoxy and Nationalism in Russian Orthodoxy,” St Vladimir’s Theological
Quarterly 57, no. 3–4 (2013): 302.
47
believers and multiple structures, some of which had never been subjects of the Russian rulers
or part of their polity (e.g., the Orthodox communities in Japan), the ROC’s hierarchy
developed a complex of policies aimed to defend the institutional unity of their Church and to
preserve her canonical authority and past administrative and material power. For this purpose,
the All-Russian Church Council of 1917–1918 and the Moscow Patriarchate initiated and
implemented a series of measures that had to justify the ROC’s canonical jurisdiction over (1)
the Orthodox communities in the former imperial territories, (2) all Orthodox structures
created by Russian missionaries before the collapse of their empire, and (3) the ecclesiastical
bodies created by Russian churchmen in emigration between the two world wars.
Furthermore, the discussed measures were addressed mainly at Orthodox bodies, whose list
included autocephalous ones such as the Patriarchate of Constantinople or the Romanian
Orthodox Church, and at former parts of the imperial Russian Church such as the Orthodox
churches in Finland and Estonia. As a rule, they were performed in accordance with Orthodox
canon law and custom, as in the case of the acts of granting autonomy, although the then
unique experience of the Russian Church brought some innovations as well – for example, the
introduction of the principle of temporary ecclesiastical decentralization as a means of
survival. In addition, the ROC’s hierarchs in the Soviet territories as well as those in
emigration developed and advanced specific views and concepts in defense of their policies –
for example, Tikhon’s view of the primacy of the Patriarch of Constantinople as one of honor
but not of power, or Troitskii’s thesis regarding the Patriarch of Constantinople’s Eastern
papism. In short, the scope and scale of these activities of the Russian Church and the level of
their conceptualization allow us to define them as ecclesiastical geopolitics.
At the same time, this overview of interwar Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics reveals that it
was not developed in isolation from the other Orthodox churches, but in the course of their
interaction. In this way, it sheds light on the ways in which the geopolitical agenda of
individual Orthodox churches was shaped in the first half of the twentieth century. It also
contributes to a better understanding of the factors that have informed the geopolitics of
individual Orthodox churches as well as the causes for some contemporary tensions between
them, for example, when the issue of autocephaly is at stake. Furthermore, the presented case
allows us to understand the ways in which the geopolitical agenda of Orthodox churches can
be encompassed by the diplomacy of their states – a feature that has been recently highlighted
by Nicolas Kazarian. Finally, when approached from the perspective of early geopolitical
thought, interwar Russian ecclesiastical geopolitics reveals some intriguing parallels with the
48
development of the secular geopolitics of that period – for example, the attitude to the states
and the Orthodox churches as organisms or dynamic phenomena. It seems that the specific
link between church and state in Orthodoxy, and not only in the Russian case, has stimulated
the advent of ecclesiastical geopolitics as a phenomenon similar to that of secular geopolitics.
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Issue 10, pp. 1-50. See: https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=703492

RUSSIAN ECCLESIASTICAL GEOPOLITICS

BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS

Ecclesiastical Geopolitics: Theoretical Considerations

a. The Issue of Religion in International Relations Studies

b. Theological Visions of the Relationship between Orthodoxy and Geopolitics

The contemporary Orthodox world consists of fourteen canonically recognized Orthodox

Another no less important specificity of the currently existing canonical autocephalous

c. Relationality between Early Geopolitical Concepts and the Orthodox Concepts of

a. The Grant of Autonomy as a Means of Preserving the ROC’s Territorial Jurisdiction

b. The Principle of Decentralization as a Means of Preserving the ROC’s Unity

c. Territorial Jurisdiction as an Issue of Interwar Russian Ecclesiastical Geopolitics

Furthermore, the proclamation of Polish autocephaly provoked a serious reconfiguration of

d. The ROC’s Diaspora as an Issue of Interwar Russian Ecclesiastical Geopolitics

In 1931, Photius welcomed the request of Metropolitan Evlogii (Georgievskii) to move

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