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3) Metropolitan Sergei of Moscow. One-of Russia's greatest theological scholars, no man ever looked less like a historical force. He was old (76), pudgy and short (5 ft. 5 in., the same height as Stalin), almost completely deaf, afflicted with a violent twitch of the left cheek. His benign brown eyes peered with ferret sharpness through thick spectacles above the folds of a beard like a Mother Hubbard.
Man from the Catacombs. But this venerable figure was no jack-in-the-box suddenly sprung on Russia by the Government's efficient finger. The son of a priest, Sergei was born (Ivan Nikolaevich Stragorodsky) at Arzamas (near Nizhni Novgorod) in 1867. He had been a missionary in Japan, which he reached via the U.S. (the Patriarch still likes to practice his fragments of half-remembered American: Hello, how are you, nice day). He had been rector of one of Russia's four great theological academies, Bishop of Finland, a great churchman at the court of the last Tsar Nicholas II. There he won the dislike of the Tsarina because he opposed Rasputin. But Sergei was unknown to most people outside Russia, in part because few Orthodox priests are known to the western world, in part because for 25 years he was buried alive by the Bolshevik Revolution. For Sergei is a man from the catacombs (of the GPU in whose political prisons he has served three terms) and of the church which suffered the same fate under Bolshevism that Bolshevism suffered under the Tsar: it was forced underground.
The long climb from the catacombs to legal restoration of the church is almost wholly the work of Sergei—of his simple Christian faith, his understanding of the church's basic strength (the religious masses) and the Soviet Government's basic weakness (the religious masses), and his insistence that peace with the Bolsheviks was the prerequisite for survival of the church.
At first it was easy to direct revolutionary hatred against the Church because it had been so long a part of the Tsarist Government, and the ecclesiastical apologist for its political and social sins. Not that the Bolsheviks used only crude terror. Another Bolshevik tactic was a policy of divide and terrorize.
Rasstrel and Anathema.The Bolsheviks closed churches, destroyed chapels, liquidated 637 of Russia's 1,026 monasteries and convents, confiscated sacred vessels, vestments, ikons, church real estate and a church treasure of some $1,500,000,000, arrested (for resistance to the State) thousands of bishops, priests, monks, and pious laymen, many of whom suffered "the highest measure of social protection" (Rasstrel—shooting). Patriarch Tikhon, Sergei's predecessor,' gave the Soviet authorities a blunt piecer of his patriarchal mind in an anathema which read like a Pravda editorial: "That which you do is verily a satanic deed. For it you are condemned to hell fire in the future life and to awful curses by the coming generations in the present life. We adjure all faithful children of the Orthodox Church not to enter into any kind of association with these monsters of the human race."