by Vladimir Moss
Today is the feast of the first-hierarchs of the see of Moscow, and therefore the historical leaders of the Russian Church, both metropolitans and patriarchs. For what should we be especially praying to them?
The greatest need of the Russian land at the present time is not the ending of the war, or the removal of the bloody usurper Putin, necessary and hugely desirable though these acts would be, but the removal of the anathema which hangs over the Russian land. What anathema are we talking about? We are talking about the anathema delivered by Patriarch Tikhon, and confirmed by the Local Council of the Russian Church in 1918, against the Bolsheviks and all those who cooperate with them.
There is a clear historical precedent to such an act. During the Time of Troubles in the early years of the seventeenth century, the Russian people had sworn an oath of allegiance to the “false Dimitry”, Grisha Otrepev, a crypto-Catholic who, with the help of the Poles and others, had seized control of the Kremlin after the deaths of Tsars Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov. There was an alternative: the boyar Vasily Shuisky. The problem was that Shuisky, though he had been canonically anointed by Patriarch Job of Moscow, was controlled by the other boyars, who had struck a kind of Magna Carta deal with him which did not accord with Orthodox tradition.
The choice set before the Russian people at this time was not as simple as that between an absolutist tyranny of the kind conducted by Ivan the Terrible and the proto-constitutional monarchy of the kind put forward by Vasily Shuisky. There was also the third, traditionally Orthodox choice: of an autocracy that was genuinely sovereign in its own, political sphere, but which was limited morally and dogmatically by the Orthodox Church. Ivan the Terrible had created a tyranny by trying to abolish the influence of the Church and killing her first-hierarch (just as the Bolsheviks killed Patriarch Tikhon in 1925). Vasily Shuisky had surrendered his sovereignty, formally to the people but in reality to the boyars. It was now up to the Church, in the person of its new first hierarch, St. Hermogen, to lead the country in re-establishing a truly Orthodox autocracy whose rule was sovereign but not unlimited, being limited by the Christian Gospel as preached in the Church…
“Wonderful is the Providence of God,” writes Archpriest Lev Lebedev, “in bringing [St. Hermogen] to the summit of ecclesiastical power at this terrible Time of Troubles… In 1579 he had been ordained to the priesthood in the St. Nicholas Gostinodvordsky church in Kazan. And in the same year a great miracle had taken place, the discovery of the Kazan icon of the Most Holy Theotokos. This was linked with a great fall in the faith of Christ in the new land, the mocking of the Orthodox by the Muslims for failures in harvest, fires and other woes. A certain girl, the daughter of a rifleman, through a vision in sleep discovered on the place of their burned-down house an icon of the Mother of God. Nobody knew when or by whom it had been placed in the ground. The icon began to work wonders and manifest many signs of special grace. The whole of Kazan ran to it as to a source of salvation and intercession from woes. The priest Hermogen was a witness of all this. He immediately wrote down everything that had taken place in connection with the wonderworking icon and with great fervour composed a narrative about it. The glory of the Kazan icon quickly spread through Russia, many copies were made from it, and some of these also became wonderworking. The Mother of God was called “the fervent defender of the Christian race” in this icon of Kazan. It was precisely this icon and Hermogen who had come to love it that the Lord decreed should deliver Moscow and Russia from the chaos of the Time of Troubles and the hands of her enemies. By the Providence of the Mother of God Hermogen was in 1589 appointed Metropolitan of Kazan for his righteous life, and in 1606 he became Patriarch of all Rus’.
“As his first work it was necessary for him to correct the wavering of the people in relation to the false Dmitry and free them from the oath (curse) they had sworn. A special strict fast was declared, after which, on February 20, 1607, public repentance began in the Dormition cathedral of the Kremlin. Patriarch Job repented of having hidden from the people the fact that the Tsarevich Dmitry had been killed ‘by the plotting of Boris’ and called everyone to repentance… The Muscovites wept and repented of having sworn allegiance to Boris Godunov and Grisha Otrepev. Two Patriarchs – [the retired] Job and Hermogen – absolved everyone with a special prayer-declaration, which was read aloud by the archdeacon.
“However, by this time it was already the question of another Imposter – false Dmitry the second. He was an obvious adventurer. And knowing about this, Rome and certain people in Poland again supported him! The legend was as follows: ‘Tsar’ Dmitry had not been killed in Moscow, but had managed to flee (‘he was miraculously saved’ for the second time!). And again Cossack detachments from Little Russia, the Don and Ukraine attached themselves to him. Again quite a few Russian people believed the lie, for they very much wanted to have a ‘real’, ‘born’ Tsar, as they put it at that time, who in the eyes of many could only be a direct descendant of Ivan IV. Marina Mnishek [wife of the first false Dmitry] ‘recognized’ her lawful husband in the second false Dmitry. However, her spiritual father, a Jesuit, considered it necessary to marry her to the new Imposter; the Jesuit knew that he was not the same who had been killed in Moscow, but another false Dmitry… Certain secret instructions from Rome to those close to the new Imposter have been preserved. Essentially they come down to ordering them gradually but steadily to bring about the unia of the Russian Church with the Roman Church, and her submission to the Pope. In 1608 the second false Dmitry entered Russia and soon came near to Moscow, encamping at Tushino. For that reason he was then called ‘the Tushino thief’. ‘Thief’ in those days mean a state criminal… Marinka gave birth to a son from the second false Dmitry. The people immediately called the little child ‘the thieflet’. Moscow closed its gates. Only very few troops still remained for the defence of the city. A great wavering of hearts and minds arose. Some princes and boyars ran from Moscow to the ‘thief’ in Tushino and back again. Not having the strength to wage a major war, Tsar Vasily Shuisky asked the Swedish King Carl IX to help him. In this he made a great mistake… Carl of Sweden and Sigismund of Poland were at that time warring for the throne of Sweden. By calling on the Swedes for help, Shuisky was placing Russia in the position of a military opponent of Poland, which she used, seeing the Troubles in the Russian Land, to declare war on Russia. Now the Polish king’s army under a ‘lawful’ pretext entered the Muscovite Kingdom. The Imposter was not needed by the Poles and was discarded by them. Sigismund besieged Smolensk, while a powerful army under Zholevsky went up to Moscow. The boyars who were not content with Shuisky… forced him to abdicate in July, 1610.”[1] He was then tonsured.
The Zemsky Sobor of 1613 called this act, forcing the lawfully anointed tsar to abdicate, “a common sin of the land, committed out of the envy of the devil” (The same could be said of the forced abdication of Vasily’s successor, Nicholas II, in 1917.) But whom would they now make Tsar? This depended to a large extent on the boyars.
Lebedev continues: “O Great Russian princes and boyars! How much you tried from early times to seize power in the State! Now there is no lawful Tsar, now, it would seem, you have received the fullness of power. Now is the time for you to show yourselves, to show what you are capable of! And you have shown it…
“A terrible difference of opinions began amidst the government, which consisted of seven boyars and was called the ‘semiboyarschina’. Patriarch Hermogen immediately suggested calling to the kingdom the 14-year-old ‘Misha Romanov’, as he called him. But they didn’t listen to the Patriarch. They discussed Poland’s suggestion of placing the son of King Sigismund, Vladislav, on the Muscovite Throne. The majority of boyars agreed. The gates of Moscow were opened to the Poles and they occupied Chinatown and the Kremlin with their garrison. But at the same time a huge Polish army besieged the monastery of St. Sergei, ‘the Abbot of the Russian Land’, the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, but after a 16-month siege they were not able to take it! Patriarch Hermogen was ready to agree to having the crown-prince Vladislav, but under certain conditions. Vladislav would be immediately, near Smolensk, baptised into the Orthodox Faith. He would take for a wife only a virgin of the Orthodox Confession. The Poles would leave Russia, and all the Russia apostates who had become Catholic or uniates would be executed. There would never be any negotiations between Moscow and Rome about the faith. An embassy was sent from near Smolensk to Sigismund for negotiations about the succession to the Throne. The spiritual head of the embassy was Metropolitan Philaret Nikitich Romanov of Rostov, who had been taken out of exile and then consecrated to the episcopate under Tsar Vasily Shuisky. But at the same time Patriarch Hermogen did not cease to exhort the Tushintsy who were still with the thief near Moscow, calling on them to be converted, repent and cease destroying the Fatherland.
“However, it turned out that Sigismund himself wanted to be on the Throne of Moscow… But this was a secret. The majority of the boyars agreed to accept even that, referring to the fact that the Poles were already in Moscow, while the Russians had no army with which to defend the country from Poland. A declaration was composed in which it was said that the Muscovite government ‘would be given to the will of the king’. The members of the government signed it. It was necessary that Patriarch Hermogen should also give his signature. At this point Prince Michael Saltykov came to him. The head of the Russian Church replied: ‘No! I will put my signature to a declaration that the king should give his son to the Muscovite state, and withdraw all the king’s men from Moscow, that Vladislav should abandon the Latin heresy, and accept the Greek faith… But neither I nor the other (ecclesiastical) authorities will write that we should all rely on the king’s will and that our ambassadors should be placed in the will of the king, and I order you not to do it. It is clear that with such a declaration we would have to kiss the cross to the king himself.’ Saltykov took hold of a knife and moved towards the Patriarch. He made the sign of the cross over Saltykov and said: ‘I do not fear your knife, I protect myself from it by the power of the Cross of Christ. But may you be cursed from our humility both in this age and in the age to come!’”[2]
On February 4, 1610 Saltykov and his comrades concluded an agreement with King Sigismund. Sir Geoffrey Hosking calls it a Russian Magna Carta – but one doomed to failure because of the opposition of the Church: “They presented King Sigismund with a set of conditions on which they were prepared to accept his son Vladyslav as Tsar. The first was that the Orthodox faith should remain inviolate. Then came stipulations on the rights of individual estates, for example, not to be punished or to have property confiscated without trial before a properly constituted court, not to be demoted from a high chin [rank] without clear and demonstrable fault. The document implied a state structure in which supreme authority would be shared with a combined boyar assembly and zemskii sobor (duma boiar i vseia zemli), in agreement with which questions of taxes, salaries of service people and the bestowal of patrimonial and service estates would be decided. Such a document might have laid for the basis for a constitutional Muscovite monarchy in personal union with Poland.”[3]
But constitutionalism, the perennial temptation of Russian history, was rejected – this time, because the Church did not approve of it. Thus when the document was brought to the Poles at Smolensk, where there was a Russian embassy led by Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov, then, “on not seeing the signature of the Patriarch on the document, the ambassadors replied to our boyars that the declaration was unlawful. They objected: ‘The Patriarch must not interfere in affairs of the land’. The ambassadors said: ‘From the beginning affairs were conducted as follows in our Russian State: if great affairs of State or of the land are begun, then our majesties summoned a council of patriarchs, metropolitans and archbishops and conferred with them. Without their advice nothing was decreed. And our majesties revere the patriarchs with great honour… And before them were the metropolitans. Now we are without majesties, and the patriarch is our leader (that is – the main person in the absence of the Tsar). It is now unfitting to confer upon such a great matter without the patriarch… It is now impossible for us to act without patriarchal declarations, and only with those of the boyars…’
“The agreement with Sigismund and the transfer of the Muscovite Kingdom into his power did not take place… That is what such a mere ‘detail’ as a signature sometimes means – or rather, in the given case, the absence of a signature!
“This gave a spiritual and lawful basis (in prevision of fresh boyar betrayals) for the Russian cities to begin corresponding with each other with the aim of deciding how to save Moscow and the Fatherland. In this correspondence the name of Patriarch Hermogen was often mentioned, for he was ‘straight as a real pastor, who lays down his life for the Christian Faith’. The inhabitants of Yaroslavl wrote to the citizens of Kazan: ‘Hermogen has stood up for the Faith and Orthodoxy, and has ordered all of us to stand to the end. If he had not done this wondrous deed, everything would have perished.’ And truly Russia, which so recently had been on the point of taking Poland at the desire of the Poles, was now a hair’s-breadth away from becoming the dominion of Poland (and who knows for how long a time!). Meanwhile Patriarch Hermogen began himself to write to all the cities, calling on Russia to rise up to free herself. The letter-declarations stirred up the people, they had great power. The Poles demanded that he write to the cities and call on them not to go to Moscow to liberate it from those who had seized it. At this point Michael Saltykov again came to Hermogen. ‘I will write,’ replied the Patriarch, ‘… but only on condition that you and the traitors with you and the people of the king leave Moscow… I see the mocking of the true faith by heretics and by you traitors, and the destruction of the holy Churches of God and I cannot bear to hear the Latin chanting in Moscow’. Hermogen was imprisoned in the Chudov monastery and they began to starve him to death. But the voice of the Church did not fall silent. The brothers of the Trinity-St. Sergius monastery headed by Archimandrite Dionysius also began to send their appeals to the cities to unite in defence of the Fatherland. The people’s levies moved towards Moscow. The first meeting turned out to be unstable. Quite a few predatory Cossacks took part in it, for example the cossacks of Ataman Zarutsky. Quarrels and disputes, sometimes bloody ones, took place between the levies. Lyapunov, the leader of the Ryazan forces, was killed. This levy looted the population more than it warred with the Poles. Everything changed when the second levy, created through the efforts of Nizhni-Novgorod merchant Cosmas Minin Sukhorukov and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, moved towards the capital. As we know, Minin, when stirring up the people to make sacrifices for the levy, called on them, if necessary, to sell their wives and children and mortgage their properties, but to liberate the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Dormition of the All-Holy Theotokos, where there was the Vladimir icon and the relics of the great Russian Holy Hierarchs (that is, he was talking about the Dormition cathedral of the Kremlin!) That, it seems, was the precious thing that was dear to the inhabitants of Nizhni, Ryazan, Yaroslavl, Kazan and the other cities of Russia and for the sake of which they were ready to sell their wives and lay down their lives! That means that the Dormition cathedral was at that time that which we could call as it were the geographical centre of the patriotism of Russia!
“On the advice of Patriarch Hermogen, the holy Kazan icon of the Mother of God was taken into the levy of Minin and Pozharsky.
“In the autumn of 1612 the second levy was already near Moscow. But it did not succeed in striking through to the capital. Their strength was ebbing away. Then the levies laid upon themselves a strict three-day fast and began earnestly to pray to the Heavenly Queen before her Kazan icon. At this time Bishop Arsenius, a Greek by birth, who was living in a monastery in the Kremlin, and who had come to us in 1588 with Patriarch Jeremiah, after fervent prayer saw in a subtle sleep St. Sergius. The abbot of the Russian Land told Arsenius that ‘by the prayers of the Mother of God judgement on our Fatherland has been turned to mercy, and tomorrow Moscow will be in the hands of the levy and Russia will be saved!’ News of this vision of Arsenius was immediately passed to the army of Pozharsky, which enormously encouraged them. They advanced to a decisive attack and on October 22, 1612 took control of a part of Moscow and Chinatown. Street fighting in which the inhabitants took part began. In the fire and smoke it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe. On October 27 the smoke began to disperse. The Poles surrendered….
“Patriarch Hermogen did not live to see this radiant day. On February 17, 1612 he had died from hunger in the Chudov monastery. In 1912 he was numbered among the saints, and his relics reside to this day in the Dormition cathedral of the Kremlin.
“Thus at the end of 1612 the Time of Troubles came to an end. Although detachments of Poles, Swedes, robbers and Cossacks continued to wander around Russia. After the death of the second false Dmitry Marina Mnishek got together with Zarutsky, who still tried to fight, but was defeated. Marinka died in prison… But the decisive victory had been won then, in 1612!”[4]
At the beginning of February, 1613, a Zemsky Sobor was assembled in Moscow in order to elect a Tsar. “Some five hundred delegates came from everywhere between the White Sea and the Don, representing boyars, service nobles, clergy, merchants, Cossacks, posadpeople (townsfolk), and ‘black’ (non-enserfed) peasants. The bitter divisions which had plunged Russia into anarchy for so long were not fully stilled by the common victory; service nobles and Cossacks were at loggerheads, boyar clans continued to feud and insist on their pedigree, while some supported foreign candidates.”[5]
But then the miracle of unanimity was achieved… In accordance with pious tradition, the Sobor began with a three-day fast and prayer to invoke God’s blessing on the assembly. “At the first conciliar session,” writes Hieromartyr Nikon, Archbishop of Vologda, “it was unanimously decided: ‘not to elect anyone of other foreign faiths, but to elect our own native Russian’. They began to elect their own; some pointed to one boyar, others to another… A certain nobleman from Galich presented a written opinion that the closest of all to the previous tsars by blood was Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov: he should be elected Tsar. They remembered that the reposed Patriarch had mentioned this name. An ataman from the Don gave the same opinion. And Mikhail Fyodorovich was proclaimed Tsar. But not all the elected delegates had yet arrived in Moscow, nor any of the most eminent boyars, and the matter was put off for another two weeks. Finally, they all assembled on February 21, on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, and by a common vote confirmed this choice. Then Archbishop Theodorit of Ryazan, the cellarer Avraamy Palitsyn of the Holy Trinity Monastery and the boyar Morozov came out onto the place of the skull and asked the people who were filling Red Square: ‘Who do you want for Tsar?’ And the people unanimously exclaimed: ‘Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov!’ And the Council appointed Archbishop Theodorit, Avraamy Palitsyn, three archimandrites and several notable boyars to go to the newly elected Tsar to ask him to please come to the capital city of Moscow to his Tsarist throne.”[6]
The adolescent boy and his mother, Schema-Nun Martha were living in the Ipatiev monastery in Kostroma, on the Volga. Arriving there from Moscow, the delegation had great difficulty in persuading the mother to agree to her son’s enthronement. She at first refused, pointing to the fickleness of the Muscovites, the devastation of the kingdom, the youth of her son, the fact that his father was in captivity, her own fears of revenge… Finally, she relented, and, falling before the Fyodorovskaia icon, she said: “May thy will be done, O Heavenly Queen! Into thy hands I deliver my son. Guide him on the path of righteousness for his sake and the sake of the Fatherland!”
In recognition of the fact that it was largely the nation’s betrayal of legitimate autocratic authority that had led to the Time of Troubles, the Sobor swore eternal loyalty to Mikhail Romanov and his descendants, promising to sacrifice themselves body and soul in his service against external enemies, “Poles, Germans and the Crimeans”. Moreover, they called a curse upon themselves if they should ever break this oath. In February, 1917 the people of Russia broke their oath to the House of Romanov by their betrayal of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II. The curse duly fell upon them in the form of the horrors of Soviet power…
*
From this account it is evident that the anathemas of the Time of Troubles were not only precedents of the 1918 anathema, but the three anathemas are the same curse. In each case disloyalty to the lawful authority of Russia (killed in 1591 and 1918, forced to resign in 1610) brings spiritual and physical disaster on the land. However, whereas the Russian people paid due attention to the anathemas in the Time of Troubles and repented, in 1918 they paid little attention, have not repented, and so are continuing to pay the price even now. Moreover, whereas the True Church authorities continued to exist in the Time of Troubles, and thus were able to receive the people’ repentance and remove the anathema, at the present time the True Church is not to be seen or heard.
So we can be more precise in our prayers to the first-hierarchs of the Russian land. We must pray, not only for the removal of the anathema on us for disobeying and killing the true tsarist authority (that is beginning in some places), but for the removal of the false church authorities. And for their replacement by true hierarchs who will receive our repentance and grant us absolution from the curse.
But why cannot the saints of today, especially his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon, receive our repentane and grant us absolution – NOW? After all, God is the God of the living, not of the dead, and Saints Hermogen and Tikhon are alive and fully endowed with that grace which they received on earth. Only one thing is missing, the most vital element: our own repentance, which will be manfest only when we openly renounce the false church and the false first-hierarch.
October 5/18, 2024.
Holy First Hierarchs of the See of Moscow.
[1] Lebedev, Veliorossia, St. Petersburg, 1999.
[2] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 118-121.
[3] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 118-121.
[4] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 121-123.
[5] Hosking, op. cit., pp. 62-63.
[6] Archbishop Nikon, “Dostoslavnoe Trekhsotletie” (“A worthy 300-hundred-year anniversary”), in Mech Oboiudoostrij, 1913 (The Double-Edged Sword, 1913), St. Petersburg, 1995, pp. 25-26. “According to Avraamy, ‘many of the gentry and lesser boyars, merchants from many towns, atamans, and Cossacks all came openly and declared to him their opinions, bringing their written depositions concerning the election of the tsar, asking him to convey them to the ruling boyars and commanders.’Avraamy did this. According to the official account, ‘they listened, and thanked God for such a glorious beginning.’ The next day Mikhail was duly elected.” (Hosking, Russia and the Russians, p. 141).
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