related to this determination that home resources should be called upon first. The later legend that the Soviet government had been required to 'pay' for aid (in fact, the Riga agreement of 20 August 1921 required only payment for transport, storage and administrative costs) probably derives from this pressure. (See Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 741 for the rumour, p. 746ff. for the agreement).
For instance, the press emphasised that one of the accused in the Petrograd case, Father Anatoly Tolstopyatov, chaplain of the Petrograd Conservatoire, was a former lieutenant in the Russian navy, i.e. a member of the 'officer class' (KG 20 June 1922, p. 6).
For the term 'campaign justice', see Peter Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Zhizhilenko is quoted in the published resume of the transcript from the trial ofVeniamin and his supposed associates, Delo mitropolita Veniamina, ed. Anon (Moscow: TRITE-Rossiiskii arkhiv, 1991), http://www.krotov. info/acts/20/1920/1922_veniamin.htm. For the mockery of him, see Vysokushkin (no initials given), 'Ne tvorite muchenikov!', KG 4 July 1922, p. 5.
This can be traced in KG's coverage over the first half of 1922. Cf. Jonathan Waterlow's account of how telling jokes that had been considered harmless at the time when they were originally narrated in the early 1930s was frequently adduced as evidence of seditious behaviour in 1937-8: 'Popular Humour in Stalin's 1930s: A Study of Popular Opinion and Adaptation', D.Phil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012.
The show trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, also orchestrated in spring 1922, was given far more prominent press coverage (front rather than inside pages), but this represented the end of the first phase of power consolidation by the Bolshevik leadership - the crackdown on alternative political parties, rather than the beginning of the second, the move against 'hostile' or 'alien' groups that did not necessarily intend to present themselves as oppositional in political terms.
These figures (157 Orthodox churches, 'two or three Catholic and Jewish' ones) were given in a letter from the Board of Management (Upravlenie) of the Petrograd Provincial Soviet responding to representations from Jewish communities against the closure of their 'house churches'. TsGA-SPb.,
f. 1001, op. 7, d. 1,1. 310.
TsGA-SPb., f. 1001, op. 7, d. 19,1. 24.
See my Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of Heritage in Petrograd-Leningrad, 1918-1988 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), chapters 2-3.
G. S. Yatmanov, 'Okhrana khudozhestvennogo dostoyaniya', PP 25 May 1922,
p. 3.
On Soviet monetisation of artistic resources generally, see N. Iu. Semenova and Nicolas V. Iline, Selling Russia's Treasures: The Soviet Trade in Nationalized Art, 1917,1938 (Paris: The M. T. Abraham Center for the Arts Foundation, 2013), including good discussions of religious art by Yuri Pyatnitsky.
Mackenzie, Russian Crucifixion, p. 27.
A. A. Valentinov, ed., Chernaya kniga: Shturm nebes. Sbornik dokumentalnykh dannykh, kharakterizuyushchikh bor'bu sovetskoi kommunisticheskoi vlasti protiv vsyakoi religii,protiv vsekh ispovedanii i tserkvei (Paris: izd. Russkogo natsional'nogo studencheskogo ob'edineniya, 1925). pp. 6-16, quotation p. 7.
'O poriadke provedenii v zhizn' dekreta 'Ob otdelenii tserkvi ot gosudarstva i shkoly ot tserkvi' (Instruktsiia)', 24 August 1918, Sbornik uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii RKRSFSR. no. 62 (1918). Article 685, clause 29, p. 764. For objections to the removal of objects, see Chernaya kniga, pp. 26-9.
A. I. Vvedensky, 'Smert' religii', Sobornyi razum nos. 3-4 (1918), p. 5.
Chernaya kniga, pp. 35-44, details numerous cases, e.g. Andronik, Archimandrite of Perm and Solikamsk, who had his eyes put out and cheeks slashed before being murdered, as well as desecration of churches in areas hit by the War (pp. 29-30).
The letter later became known as 'Anathema to Soviet Power' but its original title, 'On the Unprecedented Oppression Unleashed upon the Russian Church', was less specific.
There is an enormous literature on the exposure of relics. Two excellent accounts in English are Steve Smith, 'Bones of Contention: Bolsheviks and the Exposure of Saints' Relics, 1918-30', Past and Present vol. 204 (August 2009), pp. 155-94; Robert Greene, Bodies Like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Orthodox Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).
See Chernaya kniga, chapter 1.
Mikhail Gorev, 'Tserkovnoe zoloto - golodayushchim', KG, 25 February 1922, p. 2. On the Eighth Section, see Smith, 'Bones.
'Sovetskaya politika v religioznom voprose', Revolyutsiya i tserkov' no. 1 (1919), p. 2.
As reported in an article published in the journal of the reformist clergy, Sobornyi razum, no. 3-4 (1918), p. 1: 'Parishes have gradually won for themselves the right to act as juridical subjects, they have de facto exercised these rights, and no-one has dared challenge these.'
As James Ryan points out ('Cleansing NEP Russia: State Violence against the Russian Orthodox Church in 1922', Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 65, no. 9 (2013), pp. 1811-12), this was part of a general shift to legalism at this point.
For example, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Southern Baptist Convention, National Catholic Welfare Council, American Friends Service Committee (Fisher, p. 163). Direct aid was also accepted from the Vatican.
See e.g. PP 16 February 1922, p. 2, 17 February 1922, p. 2.
Regional variation and agency-by-agency variation in response to the confiscations campaign were important factors, too complicated to assess here. Daly, 'Storming the Last Citadel', emphasises that Cheka officials
in Tatarstan, for example, began the confiscations before the 16 February 1922 decree; Gregory L. Freeze, 'Subversive Atheism: Soviet Antireligious Campaigns and the Religious Revival in Ukraine in the 1920s', in Catherine Wanner, ed., State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 27-62, underlines pockets of lassitude and resistance in this area.
See the account in Chernaya kniga, chapter 11, section 3. The meeting on 5 March (but not its sequel) was reported also in the official newspaper materials about the trial of Veniamin. The surmise about a directive from the centre seems to be borne out by the fact that, on 8 March, the Politburo held a meeting resolving to step up the confiscations campaign: AK, no. 23-2.