Jānis (Pommers) (1876-1934)

ARCHBISHOP AND POLITICIAN

On 6 September 2022, the Latvian authorities passed a law that declares the Latvian Orthodox Church independent from foreign centres, ostensibly forcing it into autocephaly. President Egils Levits argued that the Russian war on Ukraine no longer made such links suitable for a religious community in Latvia. Moreover, in the “independent, democratic, and constitutional Latvian state, our Orthodox need their own, independent Church. That was, is, and will always be the position of the Latvian Government. Under the leadership of Archbishop Jānis Pommers, this was proclaimed shortly after the establishment of the Latvian Republic” (in Russian here). Regardless of the question if such a secular coercion into autocephaly has any consequences in church law, the reference to Archbishop Jānis has been widely criticised among Orthodox believers in Latvia. They consider this to be an instrumentalisation of a martyr saint for immediate secular image goals, not to mention that Archbishop Jānis himself certainly would not have welcomed this move, even though he certainly was a controversial figure in the 1920s and 1930s. In the remainder of this contribution, I will highlight the archbishop’s role as a politician, based primarily on his portrayal in the secular press of the period and his public statements.

Jānis (Pommers) was born into a Latvian peasant family on 6 January 1876. His great-grandfather had been a convert to the Orthodox Church during the great Livland mass conversion movement of the 1840s, so Jānis attended the local Orthodox parish school before continuing his education in the Riga Orthodox Seminary and ending up as a monk with a degree from the Kyiv Theological Academy in 1904. He became a bishop in 1912 and acted as archbishop of Penza from 1918, where he had a hard time opposing the Bolshevik revolutionaries. In 1921, he received a call from the Latvian Orthodox Church, who had repeatedly tried to convince him to “return home” as their head shepherd. This time, they were successful, and the archbishop travelled via Moscow to Riga in June 1921. His reception in Riga was rather ambiguous, for a few days earlier the Latvian government had confiscated the designated diocese headquarters and episcopal lodgings, the Alekseevskii monastery. The buildings were handed over to the Roman Catholic Church, which did not have a representative home in the Latvian capital.

Jānis therefore moved into the basement of the Orthodox cathedral, reportedly a dark and damp hole, which he officially inhabited until his death in 1934. From the beginning, he used the state of his lodgings as an argument for the mistreatment of the Orthodox Church in Latvia. The government considered the Orthodox Church a remnant of the former tsarist rule over Latvia, and therefore a foreign element to be eliminated. However, Archbishop Jānis would have none of this discourse, so he tirelessly argued that his church was not to be confused with the Russian Orthodox Church, to which it had only a formal link, otherwise being completely independent. He repeatedly stated that Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow had provided him with a document confirming this independence as he passed through Moscow on his way to Riga. It is unfortunate – or telling – that no such document has been found in any archives.

When his petitioning for a legal status for the Orthodox Church in Latvia did not yield visible results, the archbishop decided to enter politics and was promptly elected to the Saeima, the Latvian parliament, on the list of the “United Russian Minority” in 1925. Already in his belated inauguration speech at a general assembly of the Latvian Orthodox Church two years earlier, he had shown his political rhetoric, arguing that the enemy was not “the Russian”, but the socialists, both in Russia and even in Latvia, where they called themselves Social Democrats. This way, he largely deflected attention away from the brewing ethnic split within the Orthodox community that pervaded the Estonian Orthodox Church to the north. [1]

Archbishop Jānis was a very active member of the Saeima. He did not give many speeches in his three terms, but when he spoke, this was a celebrated event in the Orthodox Church. His speeches were edited and republished by the Latvian Orthodox journals. The actual speeches must have been events as well, for the Social Democrats did not refrain from showing their disapproval of the archbishop by interrupting his speeches with numerous objections and comments. In his Saeima speeches, the archbishop continued the line of his 1923 speech, focusing on three main topics: the as-yet unrecognised legal status of the Latvian Orthodox Church, the incompetence of the Social Democrats (in Latvia and in the Soviet Union), and the value, in spite of the past, of the Russian nation.

By mixing political and theological language, the archbishop discredited his political opponents while preaching tolerance to his flock. It is difficult to ascertain the influence of the archbishop’s rhetorical strategy and powers of persuasion, but during the Saeima recess of October 1926, the Latvian government issued a decree on the status of the Latvian Orthodox Church, finally making it a regularly legalised body in the Latvian state. Since this put an end to the “new era of persecution”, the archbishop could now turn to his other two main subjects, arguing against the Social Democrats and improving the image of the Russians, especially those living in Latvia. These two topics were closely intertwined, as is shown by his ‘crusade’ against the Social Democrats in the Saeima and in the local Russian-language press.

His most paradigmatic speech in this vein came during a debate on the violent police reaction to a labour demonstration in Riga in January 1929. Here, in obvious reference to the Social Democrat reaction to all his actions in the Saeima, Jānis told the story of how a coachman in southern Russia reassured him not to be afraid of the barking and howling dogs: “Do not worry, Father, the dogs simply greet you with dogs’ manners, it is their instinct.” The newspapers noted that “during the entire speech, there was a virulent storm of interjections from the left and laughter from the right.” The chairman of the Saeima had to intervene five times in order to calm the agitation. Another newspaper commented on the Saeima session that “the debate about the ministry’s reply to the interpellation, which has already lasted for two days, took on a purely personal hue yesterday. Particularly spicy criticism of the Social Democrats came from J. Pommers. Many delegates from outside Riga unhappily began wandering around the chairman’s seat. Then some delegates, both from the coalition and from the opposition disappeared one by one. […] This was the first occasion on which a government response had caused such a heated debate in the Saeima.”

While these appearances in the Saeima might have positively impacted the image of the archbishop among the Orthodox faithful of Latvia and elsewhere, it is doubtful whether it really affected the image of the Orthodox Church in Latvia. It is beyond doubt, however, that Jānis’ political activities and his stubbornly uncompromising attitude provoked many negative reactions from his enemies. A particularly fiery debate in 1931 ended with open violence in the Saeima plenary, which the archbishop called “a wake-up call”. For the Baltic German conservative politician Paul Schiemann, it was rather a black day for Latvian democracy, especially since Jānis seemed to be “no friend of parliamentarism and democracy”. 

When Archbishop Jānis was first elected in 1925, he took the candidacy in order to strengthen the voice of the Orthodox Church in the Latvian political scene and gain its recognition. He achieved this goal within one year as a parliamentarian, so one might argue that the two Saeima re-elections in 1928 and 1931 were no longer necessary and did not really befit a Christian bishop. But Jānis seemed to enjoy the attention he received in parliament and did not show any indications of stepping down. Only the parliamentary coup of Kārlis Ulmanis in May 1934, which disbanded the Saeima and eliminated all political parties, relieved the archbishop from his political role.

He retreated to his summer residence on the outskirts of Riga, where he was brutally murdered in the night between the 11 and 12 October that same year. The murder has never been comprehensively solved, and there are many speculations about the possible perpetrators. One theory is that his political opponents among the Communists, maybe even Soviet agents, were behind the assassination, but there are several other possibilities too. The active, controversial, and confrontational political role of the archbishop certainly created an atmosphere of hostility towards him from several corners, an atmosphere he was eager to exploit himself. There are signs of paranoia and an obsessive wish to control every detail in the archival records of his last year. However, the archival acts are very obviously not complete, and it is likely that Soviet authorities tampered with them in order to paint a less benevolent picture of the archbishop.

Nevertheless, Archbishop Jānis (Pommers) was canonised as a martyr saint, first by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in 1981 and by the Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia 20 years later. This means, on the one hand, that his biographies carry hagiographical traits and therefore focus on the positive aspects of his life story. On the other, it is difficult to criticise him as a politician, as the focus lies on his religious achievements and suffering. To use him as a pretext for forcing the Latvian Orthodox Church away from the Moscow patriarchate is, however, not right on several accounts. Not only did the archbishop live in an entirely different time period where the role of politicians was different, but he also remained adamant till the end that ethnicity does not directly influence one’s character. His political rhetoric was not directed against “the Russians”, but concretely against the communists of the Soviet Union and Latvia, regardless of their faith or nationality.

The attempt by President Levits to instrumentalise Jānis as a champion of independence from Moscow might seem like a good idea, but not among the Russian majority within the Orthodox Church of Latvia. They may even perceive the president’s actions, benevolent as they may seem, as similar to the Soviet persecution against which Archbishop Jānis so vehemently argued. In this way, the status of Jānis as a martyr saint is being reinvigorated through this posthumous misrepresentation. The last word has definitely not been said in this affair and the struggle of the Latvian Orthodox Church has just entered a new stage, the outcome of which is far from certain.

Notes

[1] An English version of this speech can be found here: https://www.balticorthodoxy.com/speech-from-the-latvian-archbishop-1923

AUTHOR

Sebastian Rimestad

Sources

This text is based roughly on Sebastian Rimestad, The Challenges of Modernity to the Orthodox Church of Estonia and Latvia (1917-1940) (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang 2012), esp. p. 122-141; 155-164. The concrete references to the speeches and newspaper articles can also be found here.