The law passed on 16 February 1922 had represented the removal of church valuables as a measure in extremis, to relieve the suffering caused by the terrible famine in the Volga region after drought and crop failures the previous year. The Soviet press carried articles about the disaster throughout the autumn and winter of 1921-22. On 27 January 1922, for instance, a headline in Petrograd Pravda screamed: THE STARVING ARE DRAGGING CORPSES FROM GRAVEYARDS TO EAT THEM. Reporting the aid work carried out by Russian and foreign organisations, the press made clear that the efforts were totally inadequate.3
On 18 February, Father Alexander Vvedensky, star preacher and intelligentsia salon lion, exhorted the Orthodox faithful to help all they could with the drive to bring aid to the starving. 'In the crazed state caused by hunger, mothers are killing their own children and eating their little corpses,' he wrote. 'We weep over them, far off, dying, forgotten. Forgotten by whom? By the Christian world.'4 An avalanche of Soviet press coverage over the next weeks pressed home the point. The first confiscations were reported in early March, and by the end of March, the propaganda pressure had been increased, with newspapers recording mass votes by factory assemblies demanding the surrender of church valuables.5
By this point, the Bolshevik leaders were preparing to use the confiscations as an excuse for an all-out assault upon what were officially known as 'religious associations'. An important plan, where the Orthodox Church was concerned, was 'to initiate a split in the clergy, seizing the initiative in a decisive way and taking under government protection the clergy who are openly advocating cooperation with the confiscations,' as Trotsky put it on 20 March 1922.6
The basis for this policy lay in a division about exactly what 'church property' was to be confiscated. The decree passed on 16 February had stated that only objects 'the removal of which cannot impact on the interests of a given cult' were to be confiscated.7 The issue was whether communion vessels and other 'sacred objects' (svyatyni), such as reliquaries, might be removed without bringing about such 'impact'. On 19 and 28 February, Patriarch Tikhon explicitly stated that the removal of these was improper. However, a month later, this policy was openly challenged. A letter signed by twelve reformist priests, including Vve- densky, published in Petrograd Pravda on 25 March, pointed to the justification in Christian practice for surrendering 'even the most sacred vessels', provided that the government would allow the Church to help in the relief effort. This rider was quickly forgotten, and cooperation with the state became the issue. On 18 May 1922, Vvedensky and other supporters of the confiscations created the Higher Board of Church Management, a body that began to act as a government-sanctioned alternative to the official church, promoting a self-declaredly progressive agenda of church reforms. For several years, the so-called 'Renovationist' (Obnovlencheskoe) movement enjoyed official favour, with traditionalists rehabilitated only in 1927, when, two years after Tikhon's death, the Patriarchal locum tenens, Sergii, made a statement of cooperation with the Soviet government. 8
In terms of their declared rationale - to raise funds for aid to the starving - the confiscations produced disappointing results. Across Ukraine, only 2.6 metric tonnes of silver had been collected by 4 May 1922.9 But the social change they brought about was enormous. The stripping of church valuables fatally weakened the institutional authority of Patriarch Tikhon and the official church hierarchy. It caused immense distress to believers and strife among them, leaving wounds - in particular a deep suspicion of attempts to reform Orthodoxy - that lasted into the twenty-first century.
The confiscations also underlined the pariah status of what Bolshevik terminology labelled 'religious cults'. From now on, religious associations, particularly the Orthodox Church, would be regarded by Soviet officials as bastions of privilege, milked for financial contributions (such as local taxes), and denied access to state resources for the repairs to buildings that were legally required by the terms of their contracts of use. Religious associations were under a pall of suspicion, their members pilloried as benighted (at best) and at worst, socially hostile. Over the spring and summer of 1922, a series of show trials, their results predictable from the denunciatory style of the prosecutors' orations, ended with the execution of clergy and laymen who had supposedly resisted confiscation, including, among others, Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd. Veniamin and his co-defendants were charged under Article 62 of the 1922 Criminal Code, which dealt with counter-revolutionary activity. Court discourse and press reporting alike underlined the political threat posed by church leaders and their links with the ancien regime.10
The confiscations were more than just an episode in the history of church-state relations. The drive to seize church property was also a pioneering example of all-out mass mobilisation, the harnessing of media and organisational resources to achieve immediate political ends. By participating in it, minor officials and members of the population learned (more accurately, invented) the rules of 'campaign justice'.11 'Vengeance is not the purpose of justice,' Professor Alexander Zhizhilenko remarked in his summing-up for the defence at the trial of Metropolitan Veniamin. But the mockery in the press of the defence team - 'their conclusions are ridiculous' - betrayed the obsolescence of this view.12 A particularly clear indicator of change was the attribution of seditious character to actions that had been sanctioned by the authorities when they actually happened. Petrograd churchmen who had read aloud a letter from Metropolitan Veniamin about the need to cooperate with the confiscations were retrospectively accused of taking part in a political plot.13
The conduct of the confiscations also predicted later social and political campaigns more broadly. The hysterical, authoritarian insistence on high-speed achievement of arbitrarily imposed targets (in this case, insistence that ever larger and more impressive quantities of precious metals, jewels and other valuables be located and handed over); the assumption that shortfalls were caused by subterfuge and ill will on the part of opponents (in this case, believers); the vituperative stig- matisation of actual and supposed enemies (in this case, top clergy) - all this established the new paradigms. The later confrontations with 'bourgeois specialists', 'wreckers' and 'kulaks' were rehearsed and perfected at this point.14
In the context of attitudes to heritage as well as church-state relations, the effects of the 16 February 1922 law were epoch-making. By 22 August 1922, more than 160 house churches in Petrograd alone had been closed, including 157 Orthodox house churches.15 On 25 October 1922, a local official in Petrograd expressed ungrammatical bewilderment about what to do with the residuum of church property after liquidation had taken place:
We offered icons kiots and iconostases free of charge to Parish Councils of Parish churches that are still open but they refused because
of not having no spare funds for transport and proper packing. On the basis of the above we request you to issue the appropriate order of what we are to do with the icons and kiots. If we take them into storage then they might as well be firewood or should we sell them to private icon shops or destroy them on the spot.16