Social and living conditions of episcopal service in the first two decades of Soviet power

The revolutionary upheavals of 1917, the events of the civil war, as well as those that launched the anti-religious campaigns and persecution of the Church, had the most negative impact on the social and living conditions of episcopal ministry in comparison with the pre-Revolutionary period. However, even in popular works of the biographical genre, this topic for the most part remains outside the attention of authors. The purpose of the proposed article is to fill this gap in Russian historiography. Bishops who arrived in Moscow on various matters often did not even have the means to return to their dioceses. The abolition of the monasteries was accompanied by the eviction of the bishops who lived there. Changes in the social status and living conditions of the episcopate caused among a wide circle of believers, especially among women, a desire to financially and morally support the persecuted church and its archpastors. From 1922 until the legalization in 1927 of the highest church administration headed by Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), the Soviet authorities, not recognizing bishops as ruling in the dioceses, registered them only as priests at divine services in churches. Therefore, any manifestation of their power, administrative, and even more judicial, in the eyes of the Soviet authorities was an act of opposition to it and even counter-revolutionary. A very widely used means of combating the clergy who remained faithful to the canonical church authorities was their exile, mainly to the harsh northern regions of the country. In addition to exile, other types of repression against hierarchs were imprisonment or forced labor. The return of bishops to their former places of life was for the most part accompanied by a significant deterioration in living conditions in comparison with the time when the bishops were at large. The article shows in detail the very embarrassing conditions for the life of the organs of higher church administration in the second half of the 1920s and the 1930s.