An essay in universal history

27. THE PASSPORTLESS MOVEMENT

After Khruschev’s 1956 speech against Stalin, and especially by the beginning of the 1960s, the pressure on the Catacomb Church was beginning to wane. Thus “when, in 1961,” writes Archbishop Lazarus (Zhurbenko), “the priests’ rights were taken away from them and given to the church council, they quieted down and it was easier for us; at least we could get to our priests and priests began more freely to come to us, to confess and commune us. From 1961 the Moscow Patriarchate calmed down in its attitude towards us. Of course, when foreigners asked representatives of the M.P., ‘Does a catacomb church exist?’ the answer was always ‘No’. That was a lie. There were catacomb believers all over Russia, just as there are today…”³⁴²

The relaxation of pressure from the patriarchate was almost certainly a result of the fact that the patriarchate was now the object of persecution itself. Although the numbers of believers killed and imprisoned was only a fraction of the numbers in earlier persecutions, the Khrushchev persecution of 1959-64 closed some thousands of patriarchal churches and forced many patriarchal priests to serve illegally. These “pseudo-catacombs” did not merge with the True Church and continued to commemorate the Soviet patriarch.³⁴³ However, in 1961 new legislation against secret Christians was passed, of which the most important was the legislation on passports.³⁴⁴ This measure paradoxically served to swell the numbers of the True Orthodox...
Now passportisation had been introduced into the Soviet Union only in 1932, and only for the most urbanized areas. Already then it was used as a means of winkling out Catacomb Christians. Thus M.V. Shkarovsky writes: “Completing their liquidation of the Josephites, there was a meeting of regional inspectors for cultic matters on March 16, 1933, at a time when passportisation was being introduced. The meeting decided, on the orders of the OGPU, ‘not to give passports to servants of the cult of the Josephite confession of faith’, which meant automatic expulsion from Leningrad. Similar things happened in other major cities of the USSR.”³⁴⁵
Most Catacomb hierarchs did not bless their spiritual children to take passports because in filling in the forms information making them liable to persecution.³⁴⁶ Some leaders, such as Schema-Abbess Michaela of Kiev, sent her nuns out to convince people that the passport was the seal of the Antichrist. Many Catacomb Christians refused passports, not wishing to declare themselves citizens of the antichristian kingdom.³⁴⁷
In the 1930s the peasants had not been given passports but were chained to the land which they worked. They were herded into the collective farms and forced to do various things against their conscience, such as vote for the communist officials who had destroyed their way of life and their churches. Those who refused to do this – refusals were particularly common in the Lipetsk, Tambov and Voronezh areas – were rigorously persecuted, and often left to die of hunger. Thus passportisation in the cities and collectivisation in the countryside constituted two forms of the Bolsheviks’ struggle to force everyone in the country to accept the Soviet ideology.
On May 4, 1961, however, the Soviet government issued a decree on “parasitism” and introduced a campaign for general passportisation. In local papers throughout the country it was announced that, in order to receive a Soviet passport, a citizen of the USSR would have to recognize all the laws of Soviet power, past and present, beginning from Lenin’s decrees. Since this involved, in effect, a recognition of all the crimes of Soviet power, a movement arose to reject Soviet passports, a movement which was centred mainly in the country areas.
E.A. Petrova writes: “Protests against general passportisation arose among Christians throughout the vast country. A huge number of secret Christians who had passports began to reject, destroy and burn them and loudly, for all to hear, renounce Soviet citizenship. Many Christians from the patriarchal church also gave in their passports. There were cases in which as many as 200 people at one time went up to the local soviet and gave in their passports. In one day the whole of a Christian community near Tashkent gave in 100 passports at once. Communities in Kemerovo and Novosibirsk provinces gave in their passports, and Christians in the Altai area burned their passports… Protests against general passportisation broke out in Belorussia, in the Ukraine, and in the Voronezh, Tambov and Ryazan provinces…
“Christians who renounced their Soviet passports began to be seized, imprisoned and exiled. But in spite of these repressions the movement of the passportless Christians grew and became stronger. It was precisely in these years that the Catacomb Church received a major influx from Christians of the patriarchal church who renounced Soviet passports and returned into the bosom of the True Orthodox Church.”³⁴⁸
However, not all Catacomb Christians refused to have passports – to be consistently and completely outside Soviet society was, after all, exceedingly difficult. Some Catacomb leaders considered it permissible to be a Soviet citizen with a passport so long as one did not sympathize with Soviet power or help it, and criticized those who rejected Soviet citizenship as sinful but accepted its (admittedly very meagre) benefits. Thus in 1960 Archimandrite Hilarion (Andrievsky), leader of the Catacomb Church in Voronezh, wrote to a “hardline” nun as follows: “To call oneself ‘a citizen of the Soviet state’ by no means signifies recognizing oneself to be ‘a Soviet person’. It does not signify agreement with the communists, it does not signify going together with them, it does not signify working in concert with them and sympathizing with all their undertakings… ‘A citizen of the Soviet state’ and ‘a Soviet person’ are by no means identical concepts: the first is recognition and submission to Soviet power, and the second – is an inner content, a feeling in the soul of man. There is a huge difference between these concepts. I experienced this myself in 1928, thirty-two years ago. When, after a long convoy, I was waiting for a decision on my fate together with other prisoners in Samarkand prison, I was told that I had been left to serve my term of exile in the city of Samarkand itself. Several people in the prison envied me because this, being the former capital of Central Asia, was a large, cultured, interesting city with ancient sites. But then, when I was summoned to the GPU to fill in a questionnaire, my position suddenly changed sharply – it appeared that my replies did not please them. To the question: ‘What is your relationship to the authorities?’, I replied: ‘I recognize them and submit to them in civil matters’. Then they said that ‘this is not much’. But when I asked: ‘What more do you need?’ they replied with another question: ‘But do you sympathize with them?’ I replied directly: ‘No, I do not sympathize with them, and as a believer I cannot sympathize with them in general. Moreover, how can I sympathize with them personally, when they brought me here completely against my will, tearing me away from my relatives and friends!...’ To this they said: ‘You probably need the Tsar’s authority?’ I replied: ‘No, you are mistaken. Read history, and you will see that there were times when the Tsars also fiercely persecuted the Christians.’ All these replies of mine were written down and signed. A little later I was told that there would be a sharp change in my place of exile: from the big beautiful city that I had been assigned to before I was sent to the remote steppe, whence after a five-year stay I was despatched to another exile – in distant Siberia. Thus it became clearly evident from this questionnaire that Soviet power makes a profound distinction between ‘citizenship’ and ‘sympathy’ and does not necessarily merge and confuse these two concepts into one. Otherwise, after my reply about recognizing and submitting to Soviet power, they would not have gone on to ask me about my ‘sympathy’, if this ‘sympathy’ was truly linked with ‘citizenship’. After all, they not only asked me about ‘sympathy’, but punished me for my negative reply, and changed the place of my exile from Samarkand to the remote steppe four hundred kilometres away from it.
“So a ‘citizen’ is not always and necessarily a ‘sympathizer’ with all the communist undertakings, for the concept of ‘citizen’ in itself does not contain this ‘sympathy’; and for that reason there was absolutely no sin in taking part in the census and giving a positive reply to the question about ‘citizenship’ in the Soviet state, in which, as you well know, there are citizen-communists who are completely devoted and sympathetic to it, and there are simply citizens in the sense only of subjects – and the latter are the absolute majority, in whose number are you and I, which is clearly witnessed by your passport, which you yourself took, and you live through it with the rights of ‘citizenship’ in necessary cases (reception of pension, etc.). It is more than strange to say that to take advantage of the rights of a citizen here is not a sin, but to call oneself a ‘citizen’ is, in your opinion, such a terrible sin that you have even excluded all those who took part in the census from Orthodoxy! What amazing light-mindedness! It is this that has engendered such a profound error, which even contradicts simple common logic, not to speak of the greater error that I wrote to you about earlier and which I will not repeat. I will only add that such a spiritual double-mindedness is not pleasing to God. If, in your opinion, it is sinful merely to call yourself a ‘citizen’ of the Soviet state in a census, then to take advantage, as you do, of this citizenship is a still more bitter and responsible act, although you don’t recognize it. (Your passport, your pension, etc. They reproach you!) What use is this?! And how much is said in the Divine services of the December Menaion concerning the participation of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself in the census of Herod, which proves the sinlessness of our participation in the census that has taken place. And in the Menaion for January 5 it is said of Christ: ‘He was registered, but did not work, obeying the commands of Caesar.’ As you can see, here ‘registration’ was in no way bound up with ‘work’ for Caesar. Thus our participation in the census does not necessarily oblige us to work for Soviet power, the more so in that we do not sympathize with communism, as you mistakenly think. In conclusion I want to cite one more argument in favour of our positive reply to the question on ‘citizenship’. We Russians received our holy Orthodox faith from the Greeks, from Constantinople, while the Greeks were in a condition of civil subjection to the Turks – Muslims. However, this Turkish citizenship did not hinder the Greeks from preserving the Orthodox Faith in the course of many centuries. Constantinople is considered to this day to be a cradle of Holy Orthodoxy, a Centre of the Universal Church of Christ. And this historical example clearly shows that Turkish citizenship did not necessarily contain within itself sympathy with the Muslims, just as Soviet citizenship does not necessarily contain within itself sympathy with Communism – which is sinful….”³⁴⁹
Fr. Hilarion’s point is well taken. Nevertheless, he erred in seeing no essential difference between the regimes of Pagan Imperial Rome and the Turkish sultanate, on the one hand, and Soviet power, on the other. Perhaps one could indeed be a Soviet citizen without sympathizing with, or helping, Soviet power in any way. But it was extremely difficult; and if “recognition” involved accepting the legitimacy of the Soviet regime, then this in itself helped Soviet power to a certain degree. Moreover, any kind of recognition or submission was in direct contradiction with Patriarch Tikhon’s anathema of 1918, which called on the Orthodox to obey the Soviet in no way whatsoever…
In the 1970s the detailed questionnaires required in order to receive passports were abandoned, but in 1974 it was made obligatory for all Soviet citizens to have a passport, and a new, red passport differing significantly from the old, green one was issued for everyone except prisoners and the hospitalized. Its cover had the words: “Passport of a citizen of the Soviet Socialist Republics”, together with a hammer and sickle, which was still unacceptable to the passportless, who therefore continued to be subject to prison, exile and hunger. Those who joined the Catacomb Church at this time often erased the word “citizen”, replacing it with the word “Christian”, so that they had a “Passport of a Christian of the Soviet Socialist Republics”.³⁵⁰
The issue of passports came down to the question whether the Soviet State should be considered to be “Caesar”, to which “the things of Caesar” are due (payment of taxes, army service), or “the collective Antichrist”, obedience to whom involves compromises unacceptable for the Christian conscience. Although the majority of members of the True Russian Church in this century have not made an issue of this, it remains debatable whether obedience to the 1918 anathema against the Bolsheviks does not in fact require rejection of the Soviet State, Soviet passports, Soviet army service, etc., in a way that only the passportless demonstrated. Certainly, experience demonstrated without a doubt that all attempts of Christians to cooperate in any way with the Soviet regime were worse than useless and only led to compromises in the faith… Since the fall of communism in 1991, as we shall see, the possession of passports has ceased to be such a burning issue. However, the question whether the Soviet Union was a state “established by God” (Romans 13.1), or, on the contrary, an anti-state established by Satan (Revelation 13.2), remains a critical one. The True Orthodox position is that since the Soviet State has been anathematised by the Church, neither it, nor any modern state claiming continuity from it, can command the allegiance of Orthodox Christians. To this day the Russian True Orthodox Church does not commemorate the authorities of the post-Soviet Russian Federation…