The Black Hundreds and the Russian Orthodox Clergy

Abstract

The Black Hundreds unions positioned themselves as committed champions and defenders of Russian Orthodoxy. The Black Hundreds’ ideology was based on the three-part formula of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationhood,” formulated by S.S. Uvarov and M.P. Pogodin during the reign of Nicholas I. The ideologues of the extreme right emphasized that the Russian people were tied by indestructible bonds to Orthodoxy—“the sole true, apostolic, and paternalistic church.” The monarchists conducted their processions under gonfalons, every branch had icons, and meetings and rallies began with prayers. Congresses of “Russians” were accompanied by ceremonial prayer services. The extreme rightists’ close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church were so obvious that Soviet historiography equated the Orthodox clergy with the Black Hundreds. Up to the end of the 1920s, a good number of articles and pamphlets were published about the ties between the Black Hundreds and the Church that had a sharply anticlerical tone. These works treated the Orthodox Church as a reactionary force that was the main pillar of the Black Hundreds movement. Paradoxically, the concept of total identification of the extreme right with the Orthodox clergy still exists today, but it has merely replaced a negative assessment with a solely positive one. Works published by the Institute of Russian Civilization present the “holy Black Hundreds,” consisting of zealots and martyrs who gave their lives for the Orthodox faith during the revolution and the Civil War. It would be wrong to suggest, however, that the entire Orthodox clergy during the prerevolutionary period supported the extreme right. By the same token, one cannot say that the extreme right relied solely on Orthodox clergymen. The Black Hundreds did not shun cooperation with other religions. The Union of the Russian People in its “Founding Principles,” a kind of symbol of faith, stated that “non-Orthodox and