Explanations of church and home prayers. From the letters of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk. Patriarch Tikhon - letter to the Council of People's Commissars Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia

28.01.2024

Letter to the Council of People's Commissars
All who take the sword will die by the sword.
(Matt. 26:52)
We address this prophecy of the Savior to you, the current arbiters of the destinies of our Fatherland, who call themselves “people’s” commissars. You have held state power in your hands for a whole year and are already preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution. But the rivers of blood shed by our brothers, mercilessly killed at your call, cry out to heaven and force us to say a bitter word to you
truth.
When seizing power and calling on the people to trust you, what promises did you make to them and how did you fulfill these promises?
Truly, you gave him a stone instead of bread and a snake instead of a fish (Matthew 7:9-10). To the people exhausted by a bloody war, you promised to give peace “without annexations and indemnities.”
What conquests could you give up, having led Russia to a shameful peace, the humiliating conditions of which even you yourself did not dare to fully disclose? Instead of annexations and indemnities, our great Motherland was conquered, diminished, dismembered, and in payment of the tribute imposed on it, you secretly export to Germany the accumulated gold that was not yours.
You have taken away from the warriors everything for which they previously fought valiantly. You taught them, recently brave and invincible, to leave the defense of their homeland and flee from the battlefields. You have extinguished in their hearts the consciousness that inspired them that sowing love no one has greater, but whoever lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13). You have replaced the Fatherland with a soulless international, although you yourself know very well that when it comes to defending the Fatherland, the proletarians of all countries are its faithful sons, and not traitors.
Having refused to defend your homeland from external enemies, you, however, are constantly recruiting troops.
Who will you lead them against?
You divided the entire people into hostile camps and plunged them into fratricide of unprecedented cruelty. You openly replaced the love of Christ with hatred and, instead of peace, artificially incited class enmity. And there is no end in sight to the war you have created, since you are striving, with the help of Russian workers and peasants, to bring triumph to the specter of the world revolution.
It was not Russia that needed the shameful peace you concluded with the external enemy, but you, who planned to completely destroy the internal peace. No one feels safe; everyone lives under constant fear of search, robbery, eviction, arrest, and execution. They seize hundreds of defenseless people, rot for months in prison, execute them by death, often without any investigation or trial, even without the simplified trial you introduced. They execute not only those who have been guilty of something before you, but also those who, even before you, are obviously not guilty of anything, but were taken only as “hostages”. These unfortunates are killed in retaliation for crimes committed not only by people who are not like-minded, but often by your own supporters or those close to you in convictions. They execute bishops, priests, monks and nuns who are not guilty of anything, but simply on blanket accusations of some vague and indefinite counter-revolution. The inhumane execution is aggravated for the Orthodox by the deprivation of the last dying consolation - the parting words of the Holy Mysteries, and the bodies of the murdered are not given to relatives for Christian burial.
Isn’t all this the height of aimless cruelty on the part of those who present themselves as benefactors of humanity and as if they themselves once suffered a lot from cruel authorities?
But it’s not enough for you that you stained the hands of the Russian people with their fraternal blood: hiding behind various names - indemnity, requisition and nationalization - you pushed them into the most open and shameless robbery. At your instigation, lands, estates, plants, factories, houses, livestock were plundered or taken away; money, things, furniture, clothes were robbed. First, under the name of “bourgeois,” they robbed wealthy people, then, under the name of “kulaks,” they began to rob more prosperous and hardworking peasants, thus multiplying the beggars, although you cannot help but realize that with the ruin of a great many individual citizens, the people’s wealth is destroyed and the country itself is ruined.
Having seduced the dark and ignorant people with the possibility of easy and unpunished profit, you have clouded their conscience and drowned out the consciousness of sin in them; but no matter what acts are used to cover up the atrocities, murder, violence, robbery will always remain grave and crying to Heaven for vengeance as sins and crimes.
You promised freedom...
The great good is freedom, if it is correctly understood as freedom from evil, which does not constrain others, and does not turn into arbitrariness and self-will. But you did not give such freedom: the freedom you granted lies in all kinds of indulgence in the base passions of the crowd, in the impunity of murders and robberies. All manifestations of both true civil and highest spiritual freedom of humanity are suppressed by you mercilessly. Is this freedom when no one without special permission can bring in food, rent an apartment, or move from city to city? Is this freedom when families, and sometimes the population of entire houses, are evicted, and property is thrown into the street, and when citizens are artificially divided into categories, some of which are given over to starvation and plunder? Is this freedom when no one can openly express their opinion without fear of being accused of counter-revolution? Where is the freedom of speech and press, where is the freedom of church preaching? Many brave church preachers have already paid for martyrdom with their blood; the voice of public and state discussion and denunciation is muffled; The press, except for the narrow Bolshevik press, has been completely strangled.
The violation of freedom in matters of faith is especially painful and cruel. Not a day goes by without the most monstrous slander against the Church of Christ and its servants, vicious blasphemies and blasphemies being published in your press. You mock the altar servers, force bishops to dig trenches (Bishop of Tobolsk Hermogenes Dolganov) and send priests to do dirty work. You laid your hand on the church property, collected by generations of believers, and did not think about violating their posthumous will. You closed a number of monasteries and house churches without any reason or reason. You have blocked access to the Moscow Kremlin - this is the sacred property of all believing people. You are destroying the original form of the church community - the parish, destroying brotherhoods and other church-charitable and educational institutions, dispersing church-diocesan meetings, interfering in the internal governance of the Orthodox Church. By throwing out sacred images from schools and prohibiting children from being taught the faith in schools, you are depriving them of the spiritual food necessary for Orthodox education.
And what else will I say. I don’t have enough time (Heb. 11:32) to depict all the troubles that befell our Motherland. I will not talk about the collapse of the once great and mighty Russia, about the complete breakdown of communications, about the unprecedented food devastation, about the hunger and cold that threaten death in the cities, about the lack of things needed for farming in the villages. All this is in front of everyone. Yes, we are experiencing a terrible time of your rule, and for a long time it will not be erased from the soul of the people, darkening the image of God in it and imprinting on it the image of the beast. The words of the prophet come true: Their feet run to evil, and they hasten to shed innocent blood, their thoughts are wicked thoughts, devastation and destruction are in their paths (Isa. 59:7).
We know that our denunciations will only cause anger and indignation in you and that you will only look for them as a reason to accuse us of resisting the authorities. But the higher your “pillar of malice” rises, the surer it will be evidence of the justice of our accusations.
It is not our place to judge earthly power. Any power permitted by God would attract our blessing if it truly appeared to be “God’s servant” for the benefit of those under his command and was terrible not for good deeds, but for evil ones (Rom. 13:3). Now, to you, who use your power to persecute your neighbors and exterminate the innocent, we extend our word of exhortation: celebrate the anniversary of your stay in power by freeing prisoners, ending bloodshed, violence, ruin, oppression of faith; turn not to destruction, but to the establishment of order and legality, give the people the desired and well-deserved rest from internecine warfare. Otherwise, all righteous blood that you shed will be required from you (Luke 11:50), and you yourself, who took the sword, will perish by the sword (Matthew 26:52).
Patriarch Tikhon

This letter was reproduced on a hectograph in tens of thousands of copies on the initiative of the Council of United Parishes of Moscow. It was also distributed in thousands of handwritten lists. Outside Russia, under the title “Message to the Council of People’s Commissars,” it was printed in Russian in five million copies and published in foreign languages in many foreign newspapers.
Cheka agent Alexei Filippov reported to the famous security officer Latsis that in this letter “the patriarch, with extraordinary courage and sharpness, enters into political exposure and accusations. This appeal-letter reproachfully throws in the face of the Bolsheviks that the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, which they concluded, is humiliating, and that is why the Bolsheviks are hiding even the content of its terms, meanwhile taking Russian gold abroad, that they dismembered, fragmented their homeland, extinguished the courage in the hearts of soldiers and undeservedly gave first place in Russia to the proletariat, which is a traitor among us.”
In Ancient Rus', patriarchs and metropolitans were given the right to grieve before the highest authority - the sovereign for those convicted or disgraced. The last case of sadness dates back to 1698, when Patriarch Adrian unsuccessfully petitioned Emperor Peter I for a pardon for the Streltsy sentenced to execution. The new highest power, the Council of People's Commissars, revived by Patriarch Tikhon, perceived the custom of grieving for one's people as a counter-revolutionary political action.
On November 11/24, after Vespers, the patriarch’s apartment was searched, and His Holiness himself was subjected to house arrest. After the search, Commissioner Khrustalev took with him two patriarchal panagias, patriarchal crosses and a miter, declaring that they had been stolen from the Chudov and Ascension monasteries. The Trinity Compound was now ruled by Red Army soldiers around the clock, constantly emphasizing their atheistic consciousness with their appearance and actions.
The Synod and the Supreme Church Council have repeatedly addressed the Council of People's Commissars with requests for “the need for the immediate release of the patriarch in order to prevent extreme difficulties in the course of church affairs and a painful insult to the feelings of the Orthodox people by depriving them of the opportunity to communicate with their spiritual leader in patriarchal services.”
But the Council of People's Commissars listened more to the opinion of the Central Indictment Board at the Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which informed the pseudo-people's representatives, “that since Patriarch Tikhon already has three cases, no statements about lifting his house arrest should not be taken into account.”
One of these three cases was considered to be a letter to the Council of People's Commissars, in which His Holiness allegedly called for the immediate overthrow of Soviet power by force of arms. To this accusation, the patriarch replied that “I do not and cannot sympathize with many of the measures of the people’s rulers, as a servant of Christ’s principles. I do not hide this and wrote about this openly in an address to the people's commissars before the celebration of the anniversary of the October Revolution, but at the same time, and just as openly, I declared that it is not our business* to judge earthly power, allowed by God, and even more so to take actions aimed to her overthrow. Our duty is only to point out people’s deviations from Christ’s great covenants of love, freedom and brotherhood, to expose actions based on violence towards Christ.”
On the evening of December 24/January 6, when the Bolsheviks realized that by arresting Patriarch Tikhon they were inciting not only Orthodox subjects, but also foreign powers, against themselves, His Holiness was released from custody, and the next day, on the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, Muscovites saw him again during the service in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
A year earlier, on January 1/14, in the same church, Patriarch Tikhon said with hope: “Now voices are heard more and more often that it is not our plans and construction efforts, which we were so rich in last summer, that will save Russia, but only a miracle - if we will be worthy of it. Let us pray to the Lord that He will bless the crown of the coming summer with His goodness, and may it be a favorable summer of the Lord for Russia” (Ex. 61:2).
But the summer of 1918 did not become the Lord's.

To the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee M. I. Kalinin

If it were possible to respond to insinuations addressed to the Orthodox Church and its leaders in the current press, we would not consider it possible to humiliate ourselves by doing this.

When we asked the Central Committee of Pomgol, with which we entered into relations through our representative, to report in the press about the plans of the Church and what was given to it by the existing government to implement its plan in helping the hungry, we were refused or put on hold (for example ., our “appeal” in No. 36 of “Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee”) with comments that distort the meaning 1.

You know that since July last year the Orthodox Church has been strenuously striving to work to help the hungry, asking for permission from the Government for this work, and if it had been given the opportunity to develop its activities, perhaps we would not have witnessed the horrors of famine that we are experiencing today , since most of all in Russia there is an Orthodox population and most of all this population believes and trusts its spiritual leaders, since most of all they are organized into parish communities, which could, through their animated activities, bring undoubted benefit to the starving population. But we did not receive an answer to our knocking on the door until December 9 of last year, when finally, within extremely narrow limits, we were allowed to touch this work.

We responded with all zeal to this permission, which came to us so late, to take part in helping the starving. Through our representative we entered into contact with the Central Committee of Pomgol.

Preparatory work continued from the end of December to the present time. A Regulation on the participation of the Orthodox Church in helping the hungry was developed, approved by the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Pomgol All-Russian Central Committee Ka, instructions were drawn up and approved on the form of collections for the hungry, their direction and reporting.

Along with discussing the issue of collections in the Church and donations, our representative had a judgment with Comrade. A. N. Vinokurov about the donation of church jewelry for the needs of the hungry, and these donations, by agreement of the said parties, were supposed to be in the amount of things that did not have liturgical use.

In this sense, our appeal to the believers in the appeal to them was assumed, and this appeal was approved by the Central Committee of Pomgol and, with permission to print it and distribute it among the broad masses, it was handed to us. This appeal has now already been sent along with the Regulations on the participation of the clergy to many dioceses for execution. At the same time, the instructions approved by the Central Committee of Pomgol, in §11, stated the following: “The Church’s donations for the benefit of the hungry also consist of church jewelry. The latter are donated, taken into account and transferred to the Pomgol Commission in accordance with specially developed instructions.”

After we performed a solemn prayer service before the announcement of our provision of assistance to the hungry (it continues to this day as collections for the hungry since August 15, tacitly permitted to us), after our proclamation was read out in the churches and from the church pulpit It was announced about the nature of the transfer of church treasures, as it was agreed upon and strengthened in a written document issued to us by the Central Committee of Pomgol, suddenly especially angry attacks intensified against us in the press and news appeared about the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of February 16 this year. g., establishing a completely different nature of the use of church treasures (Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, No. 44). The above-mentioned §11 of the instructions on February 24 was crossed out by order of Comrade Vinokurov.

Our position at present is ambiguous. We believed not only the given word, we believed the document - and were deceived. We appear before the Orthodox population in the role of some kind of deceivers, provocateurs, and we will be forced to inform the Orthodox population, in explaining the appeal we sent out, about the true state of affairs. At the same time, from now on it is difficult to continue negotiations with the Central Committee of Pomgol with constant appeals to us from representatives of the spiritual authorities and believers for clarification and guidance on this matter. Such negotiations were successful when the principle of voluntary donation on the part of the Church and believers to help the hungry was systematically maintained.

We are accused of "greed for gold." But what does greed have to do with it, when we keep in complete integrity from the depths of centuries the church treasures that have reached us that have sacred or historical significance, and want to preserve them for future centuries, and, on the contrary, we now allow everything that does not have such significance believers to give to help the hungry, as having value only in terms of material value.

We are persecuted in the press, and certain sections of the population are openly incited against us.

We ask you to take measures to stop such protests against the Church and its representatives, which are disturbing the Orthodox population, and to influence the restoration of the instructions in their original form.

Patriarch Tikhon

____________________________

1 The newspaper “Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee” dated February 15, 1922 fragmentarily outlined the contents of Patriarch Tikhon’s message of February 6 with an appeal to help the starving. The author expressed doubt that religious objects, icon decorations (chains, bracelets, etc.) voluntarily donated by believers, scrap gold and silver are enough to save the starving, and raised the question of the forced confiscation of all jewelry stored in churches.

From His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon to the Council of People's Commissars.

“All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52).

We address this prophecy of the Savior to you, the current arbiters of the destinies of our Fatherland, who call themselves "people's commissars". For a whole year you have been holding state power in your hands and are already preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution, but the rivers of blood shed by our brothers, mercilessly killed at your call, cry out to Heaven and force Us to tell you a bitter word of truth.
When seizing power and calling on the people to trust you, what promises did you make to them and how did you fulfill these promises?
Truly you They gave him a stone instead of bread and a snake instead of a fish (Matthew 7:9,10). To the people exhausted by a bloody war, you promised to give peace “without annexations and indemnities.”
What conquests could you, Russia, abandon for a shameful world, the humiliating conditions of which even you yourself did not dare to fully disclose? Instead of annexations and indemnities, the great one and in payment of the tribute imposed on it you.
You have taken away from the warriors everything for which they previously fought valiantly. You taught them, who were recently brave and invincible, to leave the defense of the Motherland and flee from the battlefields. You have extinguished in their hearts the consciousness that inspired them that “No one has greater love than this, but whoever lays down his life for his friends” (John 13:15). You have replaced the Fatherland with a soulless international, although you yourself know very well that when it comes to defending the Fatherland, the proletarians of all countries are its faithful sons, and not traitors.
Having refused to defend your homeland from external enemies, you, however, are constantly serving as troops. Who are you leading them against?
You divided the entire people into hostile camps and plunged them into fratricide of unprecedented cruelty. You openly replaced the love of Christ with hatred and, instead of peace, artificially incited class enmity. And there is no end in sight to the war you have created, since you are striving, with the help of Russian workers and peasants, to bring triumph to the specter of the world revolution.
It was not Russia that needed the shameful peace you concluded with the external enemy, but you, who planned to completely destroy the internal peace. No one feels safe; everyone lives under constant fear of search, robbery, eviction, arrest, and execution. They seize hundreds of defenseless people and rot for months in prison, even without the simplified trial you introduced. They execute not only those who have been guilty of something before you, but also those who, even before you, are obviously not guilty of anything, but were taken only as "hostages", these unfortunates are killed in retaliation for crimes committed by persons who are not only not like them, but often your own supporters or those close to you in conviction. They execute bishops, priests, monks and nuns who are not guilty of anything, but simply on sweeping accusations of some vague and indefinite “counter-revolutionism”. The inhumane execution is aggravated for the Orthodox by the deprivation of the last dying consolation, the parting words of the Holy Mysteries, and the bodies of the murdered are not given to relatives for Christian burial.
Isn’t all this the height of aimless cruelty on the part of those who pretend to be that they themselves once suffered a lot from cruel authorities?
But it’s not enough for you that you stained the hands of the Russian people with their brotherly blood, hiding behind various names of indemnities, requisitions and nationalization, you pushed them into the most open and shameless robbery. At your instigation, lands, estates, plants, factories, houses, livestock were plundered or taken away; money, things, furniture, clothes were robbed. First, under the name of “bourgeois,” they robbed wealthy people, then, under the name of “kulaks,” they began to rob the more prosperous and hardworking, thus multiplying the poor, although you cannot help but realize that with the ruin of a great many individual citizens, the people’s wealth is destroyed and The country itself is going bankrupt.
Having seduced the dark and ignorant people with the possibility of easy and unpunished profit, you have clouded their conscience and, but no matter what names are used to cover up the atrocities - murder, violence, will always remain grave and crying to Heaven for vengeance with sins and crimes.
You promised freedom.
A great good is freedom, if it is correctly understood as freedom from evil, which does not constrain others, and does not turn into arbitrariness and self-will. But you did not give such freedom: the freedom you granted lies in all kinds of indulgence in the base passions of the crowd, in the impunity of murders and robberies. All manifestations of both true civil and highest spiritual freedom of humanity are suppressed by you mercilessly. Is this freedom when no one without special permission can bring in food, rent an apartment, or move from city to city? Is this freedom when, and sometimes the population of entire houses are evicted and property is thrown into the street, and when citizens are artificially divided into categories, some of which are given over to starvation and plunder? Is this freedom when no one can openly express their opinion without fear of being accused of counter-revolution? Where is the freedom of speech and press, where is the freedom of church preaching? Many brave church preachers have already paid with their blood for martyrdom, the voice of public and state discussion and denunciation has been muffled, the press, except for the narrow Bolshevik one, has been completely suppressed.
The violation of freedom in matters of faith is especially painful and cruel. Not a day goes by without the most monstrous slander against the Church of Christ and its servants, evil blasphemies and blasphemies being published in your press. You mock the altar servers, force bishops to dig trenches (Bishop Hermogenes of Tobolsk) and send priests to do dirty work. You laid your hand on the church property, collected by generations of believers, and did not think about violating their last will. You closed a number of monasteries and house churches, without any reason or reason. You have blocked access to the Moscow Kremlin - this is the sacred property of all believing people.
“And what else will I say. I won’t have enough time” (Heb. 11:32) to depict all the troubles that befell our Motherland. I will not talk about the collapse of the once great and mighty Russia, about the complete breakdown of communications, about the unprecedented food devastation, about the hunger and cold that threaten death in the cities, about the lack of things needed for farming in the villages. All this is in front of everyone. Yes, we are experiencing a terrible thing and it will not be erased from the people’s soul for a long time, darkening the image of God in it and imprinting on it the image beast...
It is not our business to judge earthly power; any power permitted by God would attract Our blessing if it truly appeared to be God’s servant, for the benefit of its subordinates and was “It is terrible not for good deeds, but for evil ones” (Rom. 13:34). Now, to you, who use power to persecute your neighbors and innocents, We extend Our word of exhortation: celebrate the anniversary of your stay in power by freeing prisoners, ending bloodshed, violence, ruin, oppression of faith, turn not to destruction, but to the establishment of order and legality, give the people the desired and well-deserved rest from internecine warfare. Otherwise “All righteous blood that you shed will be required of you” (Luke 11:51) “and you yourself, who have taken the sword, will perish by the sword” (Matthew 25:52).

Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

Letters of Elder Tikhon the Russian (Part 2)

Extensive material can be gleaned from the book by Jerome. Agafangel, his student. We translated this book on the information portal

We mainly present letters to the very famous and generally recognized ascetic Father Afanasy Ivirit. They can be attributed to the period 1955-1968. Letters from Fr. We present Tikhon for the first time.

(Translation from Greek Hier. Seraphim)

I'm a little upset that I don't have white vestments for Easter.

In other words, if you help me with this, I will be immensely glad. Then my heart will be especially warm, and I will remember you and pray for you with special fervor.

Requires vestments made of simple, cheap fabric, but white...

Then I will be all joy!

I ask you to.

Bless me too!

Sinful Tikhon.

Afanasy, bless!

May Christ and the Most Holy Theotokos bless us!

I thank you immensely, my father. The vestment is wonderful! I took a new one. And now I already remember you. You have warmed my heart with your kindness. I am not worthy of such splendid attire. But I believe that the Most Holy Theotokos and Christ Himself sent it to me. And the heart itself screams: “Remember Fr. Athanasius and the brothers of the Iviron monastery." All the clothes fit me, they just forgot to put the belt on!

I ask you to send the belt with Fr. Agathangel!

Bless!

Sinful Tikhon.

My beloved father, bless!

I wrote to you about your big Crucifixion, where and how did it disappear?

The fact is that I was very upset and thought: “With God’s help, I’ll make a big Cross.”

Therefore, I would like you to place my Cross in the place where the large Crucifixion was.

Make room. Remove 3-4 stasidia to clean the desired area. Take out the stasidia and place Golgotha there.

If you obey, I will be filled with joy.

If you don’t like this proposal, then I will take the Cross for myself and send it to Esphigmen. Their abbot, Fr. Afanasy will take my Cross for himself with great joy.

Bless!

Sinful Tikhon.

Afanasy, bless!

I'll die quickly. Remember me for the love of God while you live. And then, if God takes you to Heaven, I ask you not to forget me. Then I will be in Hell in torment. Get me out of there. Look at what is written in the Russian Psalter, Psalm 141:20: “The will of the Lord is on all who fear him,” that is, on those who love him.

And then I will thank you endlessly.

Sinful Tikhon.

Dear Fr. Afanasy, bless!

We are not the only ones who are afraid of torment...

All the Holy Fathers had fear. That is why they labored. Some made 1000 bows, others ate only grass, others were stylites, some did not eat anything for 40 days. All, all, all of them did it out of fear of God.

And in our time we do what we can. Day and night we pray to Christ and Panagia. But unceasing prayer also requires tears. May the merciful Christ give them.

You and I are now like brothers, let us always remember each other.

I am quite weak at the moment. But glory to You for this too, God!

Bless.

Sinful Tikhon.

Father Tikhon!

Bless!

With your prayer, save me from torment!

Afanasy

Dear Papa Afanasy!

Don't be afraid of torment. Christ is Grace itself.

Of course I remember you.

Dear Father Afanasy!