Russian Orthodox Church Essay

Since the days of Peter the Great, the Russian Orthodox Church was directed by a religious governing body known as the Holy Synod. Representatives of the Holy Synod were appointed by the tsar; however, Tsar Nicholas II ruled terribly that the Orthodox leaders encouraged the revolution. For years, the Russian Orthodox Church had a continuous relationship with the tsars and opposition to the liberals. The Bolsheviks were persistent in their antagonism toward religion, with their atheist ideals, they considered religion to be an opium. The revolution of 1917 proposed religious freedom, hence the church saw this as an opportunity to liberate itself from state control. A significant moment in the history of Russian, and the Russian Orthodox Church,
In June 1917, the Bolsheviks pressed for “reinstatement of the primacy of Orthodoxy in the Russian state, ignoring the fact that Russia was a multinational secular state.” Soon after, the church underwent two critical setbacks. “The first was the forced transfer of parochial schools to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education. The second was the Law on Freedom of Conscience. Together the legislation ended the official monopoly of the Orthodox Church, and undermined its ability to force its faith upon the population.” Repudiating and robbing the Orthodox Church, the Bolsheviks achieved outlawing religious education, separating church and state, and nationalizing church lands. The relationship between the Bolsheviks and the church quickly grew vehement. Shortly before the October Revolution, the Orthodox Church reestablished its earlier patriarchal Synod and held an election for a Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Patriarch Tikhon was inaugurated and instantaneously gathered opposition to the Bolsheviks. In January 1918, Tikhon remonstrated an anathema threatening that the Bolsheviks would “burn in hell in the life hereafter and be cursed for generations.” In addition, he declared that the Bolsheviks “trample on the people’s