CC BY
29gion was central in the formation of Peter's reformatory convictions. All that the great reformer achieved was compared to the actions of the biblical King David, and even the tsar's contemporaries compared his military victories to the defeat of Goliath.
But it was not just military victories and administrative innovations that provided material for reform, and it is now time to return to the question of the "Petrine instauration." Collis suggests that the reformist mission of Peter I was seen by the tsar and his circle as a return to sources of ancient knowledge, which were accessible to people before the fall; Collis writes about the deeply conscious attempt within Peter's circle "to restore academic knowledge" (p. 358). This understanding seems strange to us, but in that epoch encapsulat-
ed a more natural interweaving of elements that we now call scientific, religious and esoteric.
Collis's work will certainly not be interpreted unequivocally: clearly problems of crisis and reform, conservatism and innovation, relations of church and state, science, religion and esotericism are extremely current, and arguments are still raging in our day. However, the ideas formulated by this impartial and attentive researcher will, most probably, prove of interest to many.
Yuri Rodichenkov (Translation by Keith Walmsley)
References
Florovsky, Georges. (2009). Puti russkogo bogosloviia [The ways of Russian theology]. Moscow: Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii.
Tatyana Shevchenko (2013). The Valaam Monastery and the Establishment of the Finnish Orthodox Church (1917-1957). (Valaamskii monastyr' i stanovlenie Finliandskoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi). Moscow: Pravoslavnii Sviato-Tikhonovskii gumanitarnyi universitet (in Russian). — 500 pages.
The resources of Saint Tikhon's Orthodox University of the Humanities have provided the basis for a number of studies devoted to various aspects of the twentieth-century history of the Russian
Orthodox Church (ROC).2 One of the most important fields to attract the attention of researchers
2. See Bakonina 2014; Anashkin 2014; Efimov 2014; Kostriukov 2011.
at the university is the history of those parts of Russian Orthodoxy that inadvertently found themselves outside the borders of the Russian state during that century's cataclysms. Tatyana Ivanovna Shevchenko's monograph, which focuses on the history of the the Valaam Monastery and the Finnish Orthodox Church in the first half of the twentieth century, fits neatly into this traditional area of research.
The most valuable sources used in the research are those materials from the archive of the Valaam Monastery that reveal life there during the interwar period in all its complexity and diversity. The diaries, letters and reminiscences of the directors and monks of the monastery, which Shevchenko is the first to cite in academic research, — most notably of Fathers Superior Khariton (Dunaev) and Nestor (Kiselenk-ov), and monk Iuvian (Krasnop-erov), a representative of the Old Calendarists — offer unique insight into the life of a Russian Orthodox monastery that found itself on the territory of an independent Finland during the twentieth century, and the relationships of its inhabitants. To her credit, the author complements her research with materials from the State Archives of Karelia and the Russian Federation where, in the archives of the Council for the Affairs of the ROC,
there is a mass of documents relating to the Finnish Orthodox Church (FOC), assembled during the preparations for the transfer-ral of the FOC to the jurisdiction of the ROC in the second half of the 1940s. The research has been organized chronologically and undertakes to analyze the period between the appearance of the independent Finnish state and the change in status of the Orthodox structures on its territory (1917), and the Moscow Patriarchate's abnegation of its rights to the Finnish Church (1957).
As the monograph remains at heart an academic dissertation, the first chapter is, as expected, devoted to a survey of the sources and historiographical studies pertaining to the theme of the work. The second chapter is devoted to the specifics of the situation of the Orthodox Church in Finland at the moment that the independent state was formed. The unique nature of the Finnish project within the borders of the Russian Empire, and the specific character of Orthodoxy's development in the country — conditioned, as it was, by the influence of a strong Lutheran tradition — led to an atypical situation in the country before the end of the Imperial period and were actively debated during the discussions of general state and church reforms at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even then, the influ-
ence of Lutheran norms was perceived by various representatives of Orthodoxy as a threat to a separate Orthodox identity. However, the major successes attained in resolving such problems as the participation of parishioners in the life of the Orthodox parish in Finland, and the legal definition and social significance of the parish priest, were offered by several church-state activists as a model for the whole empire. In order to understand the context of the history of Finnish Orthodoxy it is necessary to understand that Finland had a unique status within the Russian Empire: it possessed its own statehood, language and ideas of national identity, which had already been formulated by the Finnish intelligentsia around the middle of the nineteenth century.
As 1917 approached there were forty parish priests, twelve deacons, fifty-eight thousand Orthodox parishioners, and twenty-nine parishes in Finland. Of the latter, fourteen were Karelian and the rest belonged to the state, with the majority being Russian. When the empire fell there were a number of well-developed parishes in Finland in which, given the relative weakness of epar-chial power and, moreover, the incorporation of the parishes into the administrative structure of the region, the parish [aka "white," as opposed to monastic,
or "black" — the editors] clergy played a large administrative and state role. The author of the study highlights the fact that in the Grand Principality of Finland eparchial life was characterized by two tendencies — the Finnish and the Russian — the boundaries of which were decisively formed in 1917, and the Finnish tendency's national orientation prevailed.
In the third chapter Shevchen-ko analyzes the normative organizational structures of the FOC and the Valaam Monastery within the context of the changing political systems of Finland and Russia. The Valaam Monastery, in which there were 426 monks, was dragged into the political upheavals. Amongst the monks there were supporters of radical reform who wished to effect a revolution in their cloisters; later some monks, having received the nickname Nikolaevtsy after Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich, supported right-monarchist emigrant organizations, provoking the distrust of the Finnish authorities. The brotherhood of Valaam found itself in unfamiliar territory when faced with the complicated challenges of modernity, responses to which, when considered within the framework of the Orthodox tradition, were not unambiguous. Besides the imperial-monarchical problem referenced above, there arose questions surrounding the adoption of Finnish citizenship
and, subsequently, of relations with the governing higher clerical orders and of a change in church jurisdiction (i.e., its transformation into an autonomous structure of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1923). The negative attitude of a number of monks was provoked by the first Finnish bishop, Herman (Aav), whose external appearance — "in secular clothing, shaved and with closely cropped hair" — they never forgave as long as he lived. In this they were actively supported by Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky), who was attempting to exert authority over the Finnish Orthodox Church. This chapter lays out in detail the political and institutional contexts of the transferral of the Finnish Church under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and the correspondence regarding this question between the church hierarchy and canonists.
The fourth chapter describes the development of a conflict within the Orthodox monastic community of Finland around the question of calendar reform. The fact remains that, even as part of the Russian Empire, Finland lived according to the Gregorian calendar, and Lutheran holidays were endorsed by the state. The demand for calendar reform was conceived within the Orthodox parish system and was in general supported by the eparchial directorship in the
small country, where cohabiting Lutheran and Orthodox Christians necessarily lived according to different calendars. If the existence of the Julian calendar in Orthodox life was justified by the fact of the whole Russian Empire's adherence to it, then with the latter's fall and the transfer of the new states to the Gregorian calendar the rationale behind continued use of the Julian system disappeared. It was interesting that within the Russian Orthodox hierarchy there was not a defined position on the question of calendar reform, and it was the move to the new calendar among a series of local Orthodox churches that provided the basis for such a precedent. Calendar reform culminated with the problem of calculating a date for Easter, and from 1923 the Finnish Church adopted a corrected date.
If calendar reform was easily established in practice within the parishes, it provoked stormy arguments and schisms among the monks of the Valaam Monastery. As Shevchenko's research convincingly shows, this conflict was not exclusively due to disagreements surrounding the new calendar, but included a whole range of subjects — for instance, relationships with Old Russia, the Empire and the Finnish state, reforms in Orthodoxy, and so on — and was accompanied
by a conflict with the governing figure, the father superior. From 1925 the cloisters were home to a situation that was impossible according to church ecclesiology, in which the brotherhood of the monastery "came to eat together, but prayed to God separately," a situation that lasted for several decades.
The fifth chapter outlines the history of the Valaam Monastery in the period of the Second World War and the vicissitudes of its relationship with the ROC, which, straight after the war, attempted to include the FOC within its jurisdiction. By force of changing political conditions, however, it rejected this policy and in 1957 accepted the status quo, i.e., the FOC's inclusion in the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It is clear that in this period canonical questions took a back seat to political aims. Thus, the transferral of Valaam's monks to the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate was effected in Moscow through an order of penance by Father Superior Khariton, and this transfer was accompanied by a ban on communion with the FOC. The transferral of the Val-aam Monastery to the jurisdiction of the ROC revealed the long-term intentions of the leadership of the ROC to, in the event of unification, completely destroy specific features of the organization of Orthodox life in Finland (p. 281), while the adoption through penance
showed the hostility of the Moscow Patriarchate toward the Finnish Church in the interwar period.
After the legality of the FOC's entry into the Constantinople Patriarchate was confirmed in 1957, the monks of Valaam were informed that they must now subordinate themselves to the FOC not just in questions of administration, but also in matters of canon and prayer. Some monks, particularly those that loved the Russian Church, were advised to move to the USSR. The monograph finishes with the unfortunate story of the natural erosion of Russian monasticism at Val-aam, which had its roots, according to the observations of Arch-priest Aleksandr Schmemann, in the peasant (muzhitskii) tradition. Attempts by the aging monks to conserve or restore this tradition already seemed quite artificial to Schmemann when he visited the monastery in 1975.
Shevchenko's monograph introduces sources that are unique in character into the academic field. The author was able to impartially assemble and depict the history of the Valaam Monastery in this complicated period, which was plagued by many problematic and closely linked issues, be they legal, disciplinary, canonical, political or national. Her research perfectly conforms to the generic paradigm that has been formulated over the last two decades in
Russia within church-historical research, that is, the confessional, and possesses both the advantages and disadvantages of this genre.
Shevchenko describes in adequate detail the situations of different elements of the Orthodox population, in the first case Rus-sophone, appearing outside the boundaries of the empire after its fall. Inevitably this leads us to thoughts on the theme of the specifics of Russian national self-consciousness and the Russian relationship to Orthodoxy. As many Western researchers have underlined, Russians within the Russian Empire, being the titular nation, did not pass through complete phases in the formation of their national self-conscious-ness.3 After the empire's fall, they appeared, from one perspective, deprived of their own state and, from another, "guilty" in the subjugation of the unique national identities of the empire's other peoples.4 Russians, finding themselves to be a minority in the former outskirts of the fallen empire, were faced with the necessity of forcibly modeling their own identity. The Orthodox Rus-sophone environment became
3. For Miroslav Hroch's conceptualization of the phases of the formation of national self-consciousness among the countries of Eastern Europe, see Hroch 2012: 78-97.
4. See Kappeler 2000; Weeks 1996; Martin 2001.
politicized in Finland due to the number of refugees from Soviet Russia, who were representatives of very different political convictions. Thus, a powerful monarchic circle was formed around Archbishop Serafim (Luk'ianov), linked with the relatives of the tsar's family, that served as justification for the Finnish government's discharge of the archbishop, while he was allowed to maintain his Finnish citizenship and offered a life pension. The organizers of the Russian military-monarchic movement, still called Nikolaevtsy, were closely linked with those monks at Val-aam who later formed a group of Old Calendarists.
At the same time, conflicting relationships were forming between representatives of Finnish Orthodoxy and the ideologue of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA), Antony (Khrapo-vitsky), who even had his own cell at Valaam. Eventually, Antony was even forbidden entry to Finland. In their letters home Va-laam's Old Calendarists stressed that Russian Orthodoxy represented the true essence of Orthodoxy, often put the word Russian before Orthodox and, refusing to admit their fellow believers because of their differences with regard to the calendar, were prepared to welcome Soviet power. Shevchenko's research reveals the complex and multifaceted nature
of the factors in question, the absence of "clear" dividing lines between them, and the interweaving of national, church, political, economic and personal subjects.
The problems that were tearing Russian Orthodoxy apart were reflected in microcosm in Finland. We see here the opposition of monastic and parish priesthoods, the conflict between eparchial church leaders and the monasteries, and the wish to introduce a political component into church conflicts. For example, inhabitants of Valaam accused the leadership of the Finnish Church of zhivotserk-ovnichestvo (i.e., "renovation-ism" or adherence to the "Living Church"), and the de facto head of the Finnish Church movement, Archpriest Solntsev, tried to show that the monasteries, with their Russian inhabitants, were spreading a dangerous Bolshevik ideology and that only appropriate "Finnification" would be able to turn them into a "blessing" for the Finnish Church.
The Russophone Orthodox regularly accused their Finnish coreligionists of a lack of Orthodoxy, the authentic character of which was maintained only in the Russian church: "All deviations from the Russian church traditions that we have inherited, such as, for example, the priests not wearing cassocks, cropping their hair and shaving their beards, the wear-
ing of the wedding ring on the left hand in defiance of church sacrament, the reading of silent prayers aloud — all this does not correspond to Orthodoxy" — wrote one of the Orthodox neophytes from the Finnish circle (p. 277). It is, perhaps, worth seeing the conflict in the Orthodox community of Finland within the context of the eternal arguments between "traditionalists" and "modernists," the dyed-in-the-wool ideologues of Orthodoxy, and, in contrast, the champions of church universalism.
If we examine Shevchenko's thesis that the situation of the Va-laam Monastery within the Finnish Orthodox Church should be viewed on a global plane as a conflict between two identities, then, in this case, there are certainly not enough materials to allow a full appreciation of the Finnish position. This position is, of course, articulated in the exposition of official church and state documents, however, original, conceptual texts from this sphere are not available. Strictly speaking, the question of what Finnish Orthodox identity was perceived to be in the first half of the twentieth century remains as open as it has always been.
Shevchenko's introduction of texts pertaining to Russian mo-nasticism of the twentieth century to academic study demands, it would appear, further conceptualization of the problems presented by these texts and their further
analysis, giving due consideration to the intended meanings of their authors. In the behavior of the inhabitants of Valaam we see traditionally Russian forms of religious resistance, including the characteristic genre of written denunciations with an active application of eschatological motives, anonymous attacks, a refusal of communal prayer and of full communion. Taking everything into account, the Valaam Old Cal-endarists had been planning opposition over a long period: the schemamonk Fr. Mikhail (Pitk-evich) secretly prepared ten thousand units of consecrated bread and wine before the strife over the calendar (p. 333). Here, of course, we are not talking about a conflict with Finnish Orthodoxy, but with their monastic brothers.
Throughout the book the acrimony of the conflict within the Russian Orthodox sphere is palpable. The impression is given that Russian Orthodoxy in the 1920s and 1930s, having freed itself from the cruel system of state regulation through the Department of Orthodox Religion, was transformed into a sphere of permanent strife. The opposition between "patriarchal" and "renovationist" currents in the USSR is sufficiently well described, however the confrontation with the "right" opposition was no less sharp, to say nothing of the conflict between the Ortho-
dox Church in the USSR (ROC) and those elements that inevitably found themselves outside its borders (in the first case, the ROCA). All unarticulated questions of church and social life, deprived of legal ground for discussion and complicated by political cataclysms, rose to the surface, and, as in a microcosm, we see the reflection of these processes in the texts that appeared in the territories of the FOC.
The image in Russian culture of the monks as martyrs for the true faith, persecuted by their previous coreligionists who had reached a compromise with anti-Christian state powers, which the Old Cal-endarists of the Valaam Monastery had endeavored to manipulate, was unintentionally softened by the fact that neither the administration of the Finnish Church, nor the Finnish state itself, pursued the cruel victimization of heretics, as is accepted within the Russian consciousness. The monograph reveals confessional-state relationships that are surprising from the point of view of Russian history and, it seems, offer a paradigm for executive behavior that still awaits rationalization: in response to cruel opposition, the administrative bodies of the church showed maximal flexibility and patience in allowing the monastery to live according to the Old Style using the traditional date for Easter. Furthermore, among oth-
er things, they offered advice on the living arrangements of monks outside the state, and paid them a pension. At the same time, the specific self-consciousness of the representatives of Finnish Orthodoxy, who, being solidly rooted in Orthodoxy, no less solidly stood up for the Finnish character of the
Orthodox structure in the country, is clearly felt. It is understood that strategic calculation in relation to the monasteries allowed the representatives of Old Russian mo-nasticism to die peacefully, and to maintain monastic property on behalf of the Finnish Church. From the analyzed monograph we clearly see that it is impossible to speak of "pure" national constructs and any "pure' religious contents that might inhere in them; religious, confessional and jurisdictional factors were constantly present in different sociopolitical and national projects.
Nadezhda Belyakova5 (Translation by Keith Walmsley)
References
Anashkin, D. P. (Ed.). (2014).
Zakonodatel'stvo Russkoi pravo-slavnoi tserkvi Zagranitsei: 1921 — 2007 [Legislation of the Russian
5. This work has been supported by the Russian Scientific Fund, project no. 1518-00135, "Person, Ethnos, Religion in Intercultural Cooperation: Russian and International Experience of the Shaping of Civil Identity."
Orthodox Church Abroad: 19212007]. Moscow: PSTGU.
Bakonina, S. N. (2014). Tserkovnaia zhizn' russkoi emigratsii na Dal'nem Vostoke v 1920-1931 gg.: Na mate-rialakh Kharbinskoi eparkhii [Church life of Russian emigration in the Far East, 1920-1931: On materials of Kharbin Eparchy]. Moscow: PSTGU.
Efimov, A. B. (2012). Aleutskaia i Severo-Amerikhanskaia eparkhiia pri svi-atitele Tikhone [The Aleutian and North American Eparchy under Prelate Tikhon]. Moscow: PSTGU.
Hroch, Miroslav. (2012). "From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The Nation-Building Process in Europe." In G. Balakrishnan (Ed.), Mapping the Nation (78-97). London: Verso.
Kappeler, A. (2000). Rossi-ia — mnogonatsional'naia imperi-ia: Vozniknovenie, Istoriia, Raspad [Russia — a multinational empire: Rise, history, fall]. S. Chervonnaia (Trans.). Moscow: Traditsiia.
Kostriukov, A. A. (2011). Russkaia Zarubezhnaia Tserkov' v 1925-1938 gg.: Iurisdiktsionnye konflikty i ot-nosheniia s moskovskoi tserkovnoi vlast'iu [The Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia, 19251938: Jurisdictional conflicts and relations with the Moscow Church authority]. Moscow: PSTGU.
Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Weeks, T. R. (1996). Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
