Tag: orthodox church

An Unorthodox Solution

To the average Russian, it must have seemed in the summer of 1941 that their was no salvation from the Nazi tide to the West. Within the first month of Germany’s “Operation Barbarossa”, which takes overtones

Religious Return

Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht was unstoppable. Their operational and tactical levels in war were resilient- “the finest army in the world” (Freeze, 276) at the time. The Soviet Union was going to be easy to take, right? Wrong. Joseph Stalin was able to mobilize his people in a remarkable way. The centralization under Stalin’s dictatorship unified the […]

The Lost Shepherd to a Revolutionary Flock

Ever since the October Revolution in 1917, the relationship between the Orthodox church in Russia and the newly Bolshevik-ruled state had been tense. The head of the Orthodox church, Patriarch Tikhon (pictured above), and other traditionalists in the church had openly opposed the Bolsheviks. This would cause a rift to form between the church and …

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The “Opium of the People”

And then there were two… February 1917: Bolshevik law separates church and state. Starting with the February Revolution, the contention between the Orthodox Church and the Bolsheviks escalated. The Bolsheviks who came into power after the 1917 October Revolution were atheists who considered religion to be “opium of the people,” working against the interests of […]

Christianity and the Church Before the Revolution

This photograph, taken from the Prokudin-Gorskii collection at the Library of Congress shows the Cathedral of St. Nicholas towering over residential structures in the outskirts of Mozhaisk, an ancient town 68 miles west of Moscow. I chose the photograph because of the striking contrast between the imposing, brightly-colored cathedral and the quaint scene of a … Continue reading Christianity and the Church Before the Revolution

Alter of Virgin Mary

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Miraculous Icon of Mother of God-Odigitria in the Mother of God Church, 1912. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer whose claim to fame was his work with color sensitization and three-color photography that led to him photographing Leo Tolstoy in 1908. His vision for his work was to document the Russian Empire systematically … Continue reading Alter of Virgin Mary

View of Kasli

This 1910 photograph is the “View of Kasli” by photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Kasli, now in present day Chelyabinsk Oblast. I find this picture fascinating as it’s description pointed out the predominate points of the image, and the town, to be the massive churches (two on the left in the background, and in looking at the … Continue reading View of Kasli