The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917-1948

The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917-1948
Author: Daniela Kalkandjieva
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-10-12
Genre: Church and state
ISBN: 9781138577992

This book tells the remarkable story of the decline and revival of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. Following 1917, the Bolsheviks' anti-religious policies led to a significant decline in the church in the 20s and 30s. However, in 1939, Stalin gave the Patriarch of Moscow jurisdiction over orthodox congregations in Poland and later encouraged the church to promote patriotic activities in resistance to the Nazis. He agreed a Concordat with the church in 1943 and continued to encourage the church in the immediate postwar period. Based on extensive original research, this book puts forward a great deal of new information and overturns established thinking on many key points.

The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917-1948

The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917-1948
Author: Daniela Kalkandjieva
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2014-11-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317657764

This book tells the remarkable story of the decline and revival of the Russian Orthodox Church in the first half of the twentieth century and the astonishing U-turn in the attitude of the Soviet Union’s leaders towards the church. In the years after 1917 the Bolsheviks’ anti-religious policies, the loss of the former western territories of the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union’s isolation from the rest of the world and the consequent separation of Russian emigrés from the church were disastrous for the church, which declined very significantly in the 1920s and 1930s. However, when Poland was partitioned in 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Stalin allowed the Patriarch of Moscow, Sergei, jurisdiction over orthodox congregations in the conquered territories and went on, later, to encourage the church to promote patriotic activities as part of the resistance to the Nazi invasion. He agreed a Concordat with the church in 1943, and continued to encourage the church, especially its claims to jurisdiction over émigré Russian orthodox churches, in the immediate postwar period. Based on extensive original research, the book puts forward a great deal of new information and overturns established thinking on many key points.

Global Tensions in the Russian Orthodox Diaspora

Global Tensions in the Russian Orthodox Diaspora
Author: Robert Collins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000818845

This book explores the tensions that have arisen in the diaspora as a result of large numbers of Russian migrants entering established overseas parishes following the collapse of the Soviet Union. These tensions, made more fervent by the increasing role of the Church as part of the expression of Russian identity and by the Church’s entry into the global ‘culture wars’, carry with them alternative views of a range of key issues – cosmopolitanism versus reservation, liberalism versus conservatism and ecumenism versus dogmatism. The book focuses on particular disputes, discusses the broader debates and examines the wider context of how the Russian Orthodox Church is evolving overall.

Russian Orthodoxy, Nationalism and the Soviet State during the Gorbachev Years, 1985-1991

Russian Orthodoxy, Nationalism and the Soviet State during the Gorbachev Years, 1985-1991
Author: Sophie Kotzer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2020-01-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000026213

This book examines how the Russian Orthodox Church developed during the period of Gorbachev’s rule in the Soviet Union, a period characterised by perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness). It charts how official Soviet policy towards religion in general and the Russian Orthodox Church changed, with the Church enjoying significantly improved status. It also discusses, however, how the improved relations between the Moscow Patriarchate and the state, and the Patriarchate’s support for Soviet foreign policy goals, its close alignment with Russian nationalism and its role as a guardian of the Soviet Union’s borders were not seen in a positive light by dissidents and by many ordinary believers, who were disappointed by the church’s failure in respect of its social mission, including education and charitable activities.

The Church’s Unholy War

The Church’s Unholy War
Author: Nicholas Denysenko
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2023-05-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 166674817X

How did religion contribute to Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Heated disputes and alienation among Orthodox Christians in Ukraine and Russia contributed to Russian aggression in Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This book examines attempts from the early twentieth century to the present day to liberate the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Russian control. It explores the causes of bitter alienation, Russia's use of soft power to maintain control, the development of hate speech used to discriminate against independent-minded Ukrainians, and the transition from soft to hard power from 2014 to the present.

The Russian Orthodox Community in Hong Kong

The Russian Orthodox Community in Hong Kong
Author: Loretta E. Kim
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2021-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793616744

Hong Kong has been a unique society from its establishment as a political region separate from mainland China in the nineteenth century under British colonial rule until the present day as a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. A hub of interregional and international migration, it has been the temporary and long-term home of people belonging to many racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. This book examines the evolution of the community established by clergy and congregants of the Russian Orthodox Church. This community was first developed in the 1930s and then revived after a hiatus of over two decades from the 1970s to the 1990s with the founding of the Orthodox Parish of Apostles Saints Peter and Paul (OPASPP) at the turn of the twenty-first century. This study demonstrates how the OPASPP has become a vital provider of knowledge about Russian language and culture as well as a religious institution serving both heritage and convert believers. The community formed by and around the OPASPP is important to foster Sino-Russian relations based on individual-to-individual contact and mutual exposure to Chinese and Russian cultures in a region of China which allows spiritual and social diversity with minimal political constraints.

God Save the USSR

God Save the USSR
Author: Jeff Eden
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190076275

During the Second World War, as the Soviet Red Army was locked in brutal combat against the Nazis, Joseph Stalin ended the state's violent, decades-long persecution of religion. In a stunning reversal, priests, imams, rabbis, and other religious elites--many of them newly-released from the Gulag--were tasked with rallying Soviet citizens to a "Holy War" against Hitler. To the delight of some citizens, and to the horror of others, Stalin's reversal encouraged a widespread perception that his "war on religion" was over. A revolution in Soviet religious life ensued: soldiers prayed on the battlefield, entire villages celebrated once-banned holidays, and state-backed religious leaders used their new positions not only to consolidate power over their communities, but also to petition for further religious freedoms. Offering a window on this wartime "religious revolution," God Save the USSR focuses on the Soviet Union's Muslims, using sources in several languages (including Russian, Tatar, Bashkir, Uzbek, and Persian). Drawing evidence from eyewitness accounts, interviews, soldiers' letters, frontline poetry, agents' reports, petitions, and the words of Soviet Muslim leaders, Jeff Eden argues that the religious revolution was fomented simultaneously by the state and by religious Soviet citizens: the state gave an inch, and many citizens took a mile, as atheist Soviet agents looked on in exasperation at the resurgence of unconcealed devotional life.

The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia

The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia
Author: Karin Hyldal Christensen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351850350

Following the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church has canonized a great number of Russian saints. Whereas in the first millennium of Russian Christianity (988-1988) the Church recognized merely 300 Russian saints, the number had grown to more than 2,000 by 2006. This book explores the remarkable phenomenon of new Russian martyrdom. It outlines the process of canonization, examines how saints are venerated, and relates all this to the ways in which the Russian state and its people have chosen to remember the Soviet Union and commemorate the victims of its purges. The book includes in-depth case studies of particular saints and examines the diverse ways in which they are venerated.

Orthodox Christian Identity in Western Europe

Orthodox Christian Identity in Western Europe
Author: Sebastian Rimestad
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-11-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1000227618

This book analyses the discourses of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe to demonstrate the emerging discrepancies between the mother Church in the East and its newer Western congregations. Showing the genesis and development of these discourses over the twentieth century, it examines the challenges the Orthodox Church is facing in the modern world. Organised along four different discursive fields, the book uses these fields to analyse the Orthodox Church in Western Europe during the twentieth century. It explores pastoral, ecclesiological, institutional and ecumenical discourses in order to present a holistic view of how the Church views itself and how it seeks to interact with other denominations. Taken together, these four fields reveal a discursive vitality outside of the traditionally Orthodox societies that is, however, only partly reabsorbed by the church hierarchs in core Orthodox regions, like Southeast Europe and Russia. The Orthodox Church is a complex and multi-faceted global reality.Therefore, this book will be a vital guide to scholars studying the Orthodox Church, ecumenism and religion in Europe, as well as those working in religious studies, sociology of religion, and theology more generally.

Eastern Christianity in Its Texts

Eastern Christianity in Its Texts
Author: Cyril Hovorun
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 897
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567682935

Surveying theological literature produced in the Christian East from the first through the 20th century, Eastern Christianity in its Texts explores different theological themes (analytical and mystical), genres (epistles, treatises, and poetry), and milieux (Greek, Armenian, Western and Eastern Syriac, Russian and Romanian). The book illustrates the evolution of the Orthodox thought, how it influenced and was influenced by intellectual, social, and political environments. It demonstrates a theology in context, and yet displays consistency in the traditions spread through different epochs and countries. The book is divided in five parts, each standing for an epoch with distinct features: formation of the Christian identity in the era before Constantine, golden age of theology in the period of Late Antiquity, the pinnacle of erudism and mysticism in the eastern Middle Ages, wrestling with the Modernity imported from the West in the 18th-19th centuries, and finally theological polyphony in the 20th century.