Divisions in Estonian orthodoxy during the Great Patriotic War: characteristics and reasons for joining parties

The problem of church unity is dramatically revealed in the history of Orthodoxy in Estonia, now represented by two autonomous church structures, the Moscow Patriarchate and the Constantinople Patriarchate. This article focuses on the motives behind the church schisms during the Great Patriotic War. The example of the personal choice in relation to the Mother Church of the antagonists: Metropolitan Alexander (Paulus) of Tallinn and All Estonia and Bishop Pavel (Dmitrovsky) of Narva and Izborsk, on the one hand, and Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) of Vilnius and Lithuania, the exarch of the Baltics, on the other, provide us with some very powerful but scarce material for reflection on the basis of church-canonical self-identification in a crisis situation.