In Russia today such a political trend as Christian socialism has been completely lost. Meanwhile, after the Revolution, he was very popular among the people. For example, in Tsaritsyn in the 1920s there were powerful communities of Renovationists, Tolstoyans, Baptists, Old Believers who saw socialism as a continuation of renewed Christianity.
The February Revolution, among all the people, liberated the believers (from the dictatorship of the state and the Synod).
Already in March 1917, the "Union of Democratic Clergy and Laity" emerged, the leader of which - Archpriest A. I. Vvedensky (later - the head of the Renovationist "Living Church") - called upon believers and clergy to build a new state system on the principles of political and church democracy … The social base of the movement was mainly the lower clergy, and from the laity - the soldiers and the urban lower classes. In the political struggle, the Union supported the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties. In January 1918 A. I. Vvedensky recognized the Soviet government and expressed his readiness to cooperate with it.
In the years 1918-1920, "religious communists" appeared, claiming the unity of the goals of Christianity and communism. Among them, the most notable was Hieromonk Iliodor, who renounced his dignity, who published the book The Holy Devil. In it, he exposed Grigory Rasputin, spoke unflatteringly about the royal family, many secular and spiritual influential persons. In Tsaritsyn in 1920, Iliodor acted as a preacher of the "church revolution", recognized the correctness of the actions and teachings of the Communist Party, declared that his teachings differed little from the communist.
Iliodor's ideas were very popular among the peasants of the Tsaritsyn province. However, in this territory he was not the only one who preached the values of Christian communism. Let us consider in more detail what reforms the believers carried out here.
Tsaritsyn province was multi-confessional at the beginning of the 20th century. Among the Christian churches and groups of the region, in addition to the Russian Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian Apostolic, Evangelical Lutheran churches, up to 30% of the believers were Old Believers, Evangelical Christians, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, groups of spiritual Christianity (milk). Tolstoyans have been especially active in Tsaritsyn since 1917. The Society of True Freedom in memory of Leo Tolstoy (OIS) created a religious and philosophical library. Its members conducted lectures and talks of an educational plan, preached pacifism, published the journal "Path to Light", and provided support to people who were repressed for their religious beliefs in tsarist times.
The ideas of the Tolstoyans were popular not only in the city, but also in the countryside. The peasants of the province organized 10 interconnected societies.
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In 1917-1921, within the sectarian and Protestant confessions of Russia, there was a split into traditionalists who did not accept the idea of the need to renew the religious and social sphere, and radicals who strove for this. Among the latter, there were three trends, the boundaries between which were mutually transverse: Christian-liberal, Christian-anarchist and “sectarian-communist”. The first stood for a position of neutrality in the political struggle, had a negative attitude to the policy of "war communism", was an opponent of socialist reforms in agriculture, and opposed the ideas of Christian socialism to Marxism. The second trend opposed contacts with the Soviet state, tried to create closed labor collectives of co-religionists, and positively assessed the naturalization of the economy. The third trend was ready for broad cooperation with the Soviet government in the peaceful construction of a new life, subject to the latter taking into account the worldview of believers.
Among the aforementioned religious groups, the Tolstoyans defended their views most consistently and actively, considering themselves participants in the revolutionary process, and welcomed the October Revolution. In the worldview of the Tolstoyans, along with the preservation of the basic features of the teachings of Leo Tolstoy (religiosity, rationalism, the ideal of non-violence, vegetarianism, humanism, anarchism), under the influence of war and revolutions, there was an awareness of the role of collective methods in the matter of social reconstruction. They considered it natural to have a difference in the paths of movement towards truth, calling for the unity of all revolutionary forces in this process. The Tolstoyans were ready to cooperate with anarchists, Bolsheviks, and other religious groups in building a new world.
Since 1922, some of the Tolstoyans have joined the Renovationist movement in the Orthodox Church. Some of the members of the OIC Tsaritsyn united with the "religious revolutionaries" - the Iliodorites, whom by that time had already been left to fend for themselves by Iliodor, who had emigrated abroad. Some Tolstoyans converted to Baptism.
In the 1920s, Tolstoyans actively created communes and artels. In the first half of the 1920s, 5 such collectives operated on the territory of the Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) province (okrug); four of them survived until the early 1930s.
The Tolstoyans of the Lower Volga were staunch anarchists. Thus, members of the Gorodishche commune denied the need to register the charter with the land authorities, did not elect a chairman. The property was socialized, a third of the income was donated to the fund of the national economy. The Tolstoyans repeatedly offered the cooperatives of the province moneyless cooperation: the cooperatives take food from the commune free of charge, supplying it with shoes, clothes and necessary goods in return.
Tolstoy's communes were not religiously “closed”. Not only Tolstoyans worked in them, but also Baptists and sectarians. The historian and ethnographer Redkina considered the anarchism of the Tolstoyans of the Stalingrad district as a certain regional feature associated not only with the teachings of Tolstoy, but also with the specifics of the religious situation on the Lower Volga, where various sectarian groups emerging from the Old Believers were widespread among the peasantry (Enokh, Spasov, non-payers, etc.), opposing themselves to the state.
The hypothesis of a connection between the old Russian sectarianism and Tolstoyism finds confirmation in archival materials. When studying the sects of the Leninsky District in the fall of 1924, the influence of anti-religious and Protestant propaganda on the sectarian youth was noted: the poor sectarians went to the Komsomol or Protestant groups, or, disappointed in both, became extreme Tolstoyan anarchists.
The communes of Tolstoyans proved in practice the possibility of collective voluntary labor, they were viable economic collectives. During the NEP years, the provincial land authorities treated them as ordinary collective farms. They could receive loans from the state on equal terms, but they often refused this for ideological reasons. Relations with the financial authorities were worse, since the Tolstoyans did not pay taxes, for which their collectives were subjected to repeated fines. This caused serious damage to the economy.
The destruction of agricultural communes in the Lower Volga region at the turn of the 1920s-1930s led initially to the movement of Tolstoyans from rural areas to Stalingrad. Then the Stalingrad Tolstoyans moved to the Kuznetsk region of the West Siberian Territory, where their communes existed during the 1930s.
Other representatives of Christian socialism on the Lower Volga in 1922 were the renovationist Orthodox groups - the Living Church (the largest in the region), the Union of Church Renaissance (SCV), and the Union of the Ancient Apostolic Church (SODATS). In the Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) diocese, a split has been consolidated for two decades. In parallel, there were parishes of the Patriarchal Church and Renovationist groups led by the Renovationist Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) Diocesan Administration (CEU).
There is a common point in the renovationist churches: the recognition of the "social truth" of revolutionary transformations and, accordingly, the recognition of the correctness of the Soviet regime. SODATS and NCV tried to revive certain traditions inherent in Christianity in the first centuries of its existence, which had a lot in common with the idea of socialism.
The "Living Church" differed from the aforementioned trends in that it basically sought to solve the problem of establishing the power of the white clergy in the church with the support of the organs of the Soviet state. However, its peculiarity was the recognition of the need for state participation in the reform of the Church. Renovationism of the 1920s recognized the Soviet government as the guardian of the covenants of "social truth." Their views reflected the ideas of Christian socialism (criticism of social inequality, a call to put into practice the commandments of Christian love, a call for democratic reforms in the church, for the development of a Christian social doctrine). However, to a greater extent in the statements, declarations, programs of the renovationists, their “revolutionary nature” (in opposition to the “counterrevolutionary” Patriarchal Church), loyalty to the Soviet government, was emphasized in every possible way,willingness to build a socialist society together with it, which clearly attracted believers to them.
Renovation schism captured a significant part of the lower Volga dioceses. In 1925, out of 395 Orthodox parishes in Stalingrad province, only 35 (or 8.8%) were at the disposal of the Patriarchal Church. The strengthening of the activity of the renovationists in 1928 led to the creation of the Regional Mitoropolitan church administration, which managed to strengthen its church structures in the region.
The likely reason for the support for Renovationism among the believers of Stalingrad at the turn of the 1920s-1930s was their innovative approach to cult activity, noted in the reports of the Stalingrad Union of Militant Atheists. Adapting to the new socio-political conditions, the clergy developed new forms of service to society.
For example, at the Church of the Intercession of Stalingrad there was a diocesan administration of the Renovationists, and in it, next to the crucifix, hung a portrait of Stalin and the slogans: "Renovationism is a form of collectivization of the spirit on the basis of religion." Seraphim of Sarov as the son of a merchant, Joseph Belgorodsky as the son of a landowner, Anna Kashinskaya as the wife of the Grand Duke, etc. were removed from the list of revered saints. Continuous ministry was introduced in still functioning temples. The demand was put forward to attract representatives of the working class to the clergy. There was a gradual proletarianization of church councils, the majority of which began to be workers, members of the trade union. Solos, concert singing and even recitation to music were introduced into the service. The renovationists took measures to end the pilgrimage movement.
The spirit of "renewal" is also observed among the Protestants. After the X All-Union Congress of Evangelical Christians in November-December 1926, Evangelical Christians tried to implement the program of the "new life" of one of the spiritual leaders of Evangelical Christians, IS Prokhanov. An integral part of it was the organization of Christian "universal communities" following the example of the first apostolic community. On the whole, the meaning of the “new life” program was to bring the Christian world closer to the secular one.
In total, 8 agricultural labor collectives of Baptists and Evangelical Christians were created in the Lower Volga region in the 1920-1930s, but all of them were destroyed during collectivization.
On the whole, by the end of the 1920s, up to 80% of believers in Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) province were in communities adhering to the ideas of Christian socialism. In the early 1930s, almost all of them were destroyed by the Stalinist regime. With the resumption of Christian service in the USSR in the mid-1940s, an end was put on the idea of Christian socialism - only the state had a monopoly on socialism. By the beginning of the 21st century, this situation has not changed - the state governing the church also adheres to the principle that ideology is its monopoly, and there is no place for Christian socialism in it (when the sprouts of leftist religious freethinking appear from below, they are immediately trampled by the authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church) …