Designation of the Civil War in the Epistles, Addresses, and Speeches of Patriarch Tikhon and in the Materials and Diaries of the Members of the Local Council

The article is devoted to the use of the denomination “civil war” in the church milieu in 1917–20. In the summer of 1917 the Holy Synod published an epistle about the “domestic fratricidal war,” which began in Russia according to the highest church authority. The opening of the Local Council and the election of the patriarch there coincided with a bloody military confrontation, i.e. combat clashes in Moscow. In the church press and in one of the speeches in the Council, the term “civil war” was used to denote local rather than all-Russian events. In the church circles, the phenomena of the first post-revolutionary months were compared to the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century. The term “civil war” was used in one of the three currently known diaries of participants in the Local Council. The epistles and letters of the Patriarch and the participants in the council mentioned “internecine struggle,” “popular tumult,” “fratricidal struggle,” “Moscow internecine strife,” “internecine turmoil,” and even “domestic war,” and the term “civil war” was hardly ever used. Perhaps, at that time the clergy hoped that the bloody civil strife in some parts of the country would not turn into a real civil war that would engulf almost the entire territory of the former Russian Empire. The author assumes that the patriarch deliberately used a great number of archaic terms and Slavic words both at the Council and in his epistles. It is pointed out that the events of the Revolution and the Civil War left a certain imprint on the language of the church epistles, the latter acknowledging “the class struggle,” which apparently had not happened earlier.

Kashevarov, A.N. Pravoslavnaya Rossiiskaya Tserkov' i sovetskoe gosudarstvo (1917–1922) [The Orthodox Russian Church and the Soviet state (1917–1922). Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee podvor'e; Obshchestvo lyubitelei tserkovnoi istorii, 2005. (In Russian)
Plaksin, R.Yu. Krakh tserkovnoi kontrrevolyutsii 1917–1923 gg. [The collapse of the church counter-revolution of 1917–1923]. Moscow: Nauka, 1968. (In Russian)
Rogoznyi, P.G. Pravoslavnaya Tserkov' i russkaya revolyutsiya. Ocherki istorii 1917–1920 [The Orthodox Church and the Russian Revolution. Essays on the history of 1917–1920]. Moscow: Ves' Mir, 2018. (In Russian)
Rogoznyi, P.G. “‘Tserkovnyi bol'shevizm’ (istoria razvitia termina)” [‘Church bolshevism’ (history of the development of the term)]. In Slova i konflikty: yazyk protivostoyaniya i eskalatsii grazhdanskoi voiny v Rossii: sbornik statei [Words and conflicts: The language of opposition and escalation of the civil war in Russia: A collection of articles], edited by B.I. Kolonitskii et al., iss. 16, 296–325. St Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2022. (In Russian)
Zybkovets, V.F. Natsionalizatsiya monastyrskih imushchestv v Sovetskoi Rossii (1917–1921) [Nationalization of monastery properties in Soviet Russia (1917–1921). Moscow: Nauka, 1975. (In Russian)