User:WWWWFWF/New Economic Policy

Soviet Religion Policy During NEP
During the famine in 1921-1922, many people in the Soviet Union needed to be fed. In 1922, the Soviet government decided to confiscate the property of the local churches, which led to the violent opponent by Orthodox clergies who began to hide and transfer their property. In response, the Soviet government decided to arrest these clergies.

In a secret letter (unknown until 1990) written to the Bolshevik Politburo on March 19, 1922,"Lenin announced that the Soviet regime was declaring a 'ruthless battle against the black-hundreds clergy' (besposhchadnoe srazhenie chernosotennomu dukhovernstvu) and opined that 'the greater number of representatives of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot on this basis the better.'"Tikhon, the leader of the Orthodox, was arrested and held at the Donskoi Monastery. The Bolsheviks openly backed the Ronovationists, and the Orthodox began to split into two parts. Many clergies became renovations, and others chose to go underground into "catacombs" rather than recognize the authority of the Renovationists.

After Tikhon died in 1925, and Bolsheviks abolished the patriarchate in 1926, going underground or declaring loyalty to the Soviet Union was urged to be solved. In 1927, Sergii, the guardian of the vacant patriarchal throne and acting head of the church, issued an open declaration of loyalty to the Soviet State:"'We want to be Orthodox and at the same time to acknowledge the Soviet Union as our civic Motherland, whose joys and successes are also ours, and whose woes are our woes.'"Sergii's declaration of loyalty toward the Soviet Union somehow granted the Orthodoxy a limited "right of citizenship" in the Soviet Union but also pushed more believers underground, making the split between the two parts of the Orthodox more profound.