Vera i zhizn’ (Faith and Life)

The Orthodox Press in Interwar Latvia 

Vera i zhizn’ (Faith and Life) was a journal issued from the beginning of 1923 to June 1940 by the Latvian Orthodox Church. To some extent, it was the successor of Rizhskie eparkhial’nye vedomsti (Riga Diocesan Gazette), which ceased to exist in 1917, after evacuation in 1915 first to Iaroslavl’ and then to Nizhnii Novgorod. Indeed, the position of the Orthodox Church on Latvian territory in 1915 was in general very difficult, as much of the diocesan administration was compelled to flee deep into Russia. The German army entered Riga on 21 August 1917: the occupation authorities were not inclined to support Orthodoxy. Then came revolutionary events: the declaration of the independent Latvian republic, the civil war throughout Latvian territory, repeated changes in government – all of these circumstances made normal church life extremely difficult. Normalisation occurred only from 1921 after the arrival in Riga of Archbishop Jānis (Pommers) and the establishment of new church administration [1]. One of the most important measures here was the creation of an Orthodox periodical in the form of Vera i zhizn’, which was published in both Latvian (Ticiba un dzive) and Russian.

The history of the Russian-language version of Vera i zhizn’ can be divided into two periods. The first stretches from 1923 to 1933, when Archpriest Kirils Zaics (ru. Kirill Zaits) [2], the journal’s first editor, played the most important role. Prior to 1933, the journal was published by the Orthodox parish cooperative Brāliba; in 1933, Father Zaics published it on his own account. The second period begins in 1934, when Zaics was replaced with Archpriest Nikolai Perekhval’skii.

A few words should be said about the founding editor. Born on 15 July 1869, he graduated from the Riga Orthodox seminary in 1891. After teaching for a few years, he was ordained in 1896, serving in several parishes in modern Latgale. In 1900, he took missionary courses in St Petersburg, and was subsequently appointed as the anti-Catholic and anti-sectarian missionary in Vitebsk. Between 1912 and 1918, he was the diocesan missionary of the Polotsk-Vitebsk diocese, while also serving in the Vitebsk cathedral. In 1917, he was made an archpriest and sent as a delegate by his diocese to the All-Russian Church Council of 1917-18. From 1918 to 1922, he served as the priest of Grodno cathedral (today in Belarus, but, at the time, part of Polish territory). In 1922, he returned to Latvia, where he was appointed as the priest of the Riga cathedral and a member of the Latvian Orthodox Holy Synod: besides his editorial work, he also taught a range of subjects in the Riga seminary. In 1933, he was removed from all his positions by the Holy Synod ‘for embezzling the funds of the cathedral’. He was forbidden from serving the liturgy and the embezzlement charge went to court. Later, at the end of 1937, he was found innocent by the Latvian high court. However, he returned to holy service only in 1941 under Metropolitan Sergii (Voskresenskii), once again working as the priest of the Riga cathedral. In 1944, he was arrested: he died in prison four years later.

Vera i zhizn’ was initially imagined as a monthly publication, but in the first year not enough material was gathered for such a schedule. The lack of authors, especially at the beginning, was a consequence of the evacuation in 1915, when a large number of educated clergy and ecclesiastical social actors was forced to flee from Latvia. True, former residents had already begun to return at the beginning of the 1920s, but repatriation was a far from simple process, and not everyone managed it. Thus, during the first years of Vera i zhizn’, the editor himself was forced to be the journal’s principal author: indeed, even later his essays filled up a substantial number of the journal’s pages.

In this period, the journal published a significant number of missionary articles. This, of course, reflects the former specialisation of the editor, who now continued to actively work in this field. Criticism was primarily directed at the teachings of so-called ‘sectarians’, the Baptists and the Adventists. In comparison with the activities of the pre-revolutionary press, much less attention was paid to the Old Believers (a series of groups that had entered into schism with the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century and had been often subjected to persecution in the imperial era). This most probably reflects the new political situation, in which it was convenient for Latvia’s Orthodox population (mostly made up of Russians) to work together with the overwhelmingly Russian Old Believers. This was especially relevant when Archbishop Jānis was elected to the Saeima, actively involving the Latvian Orthodox Church in the young republic’s political struggles.

A highly active missionary participant in Vera i zhizn’ was the priest Grigorii Dribintsev. His first article was published at the end of 1923 and he soon became a regular contributor. Father Dribintsev was born in Vetka, one of the largest Old Believer centres. Throughout his early career in the last decades of the Russian Empire, he had been an important activist within edinoverie, a movement designed to entice the Old Believers to return to Orthodoxy [3]. In the 1920s and 30s, he was the priest of the Pokrovskaia edinoverie church in the Daugavpils region: from 1922, he was dean of the edinoverie churches in Latgale.

Now we turn to the contents of the materials published in this first period. Besides missionary articles, Vera i zhizn’ offered an array of didactic materials and sermons (mostly those by Archbishop Jānis). Official documents were also published, such as accounts of clergy congresses and reports on the councils of the Latvian Orthodox Church. Periodically, obituaries appeared is of the journal, along with pieces marking the anniversaries of the clergy. Equally, materials dedicated to the history of the Russian community appeared, such as descriptions of parishes and relevant ethnographic information. In this vein, Anton Pommers, the archbishop’s brother, published Orthodoxy in Latvia under the pseudonym ‘Istorik’ (Historian): this was later released as a book in 1931.

Current events were also covered in the journal. For example, more than half of issue 3-4 in 1923 was occupied by materials about Latvian government’s transfer of the Alekseevskii Orthodox monastery and the Orthodox episcopal palace in Riga to the Catholic Church. Almost an entire extended issue was dedicated to the demolition of the Orthodox chapel on the train station square.

The journal’s politicisation can be especially noted from the end of 1925, a consequence of the election of Archbishop Jānis as a deputy of the Saeima. Vera i zhizn’ reprinted the archbishop’s exclusively political articles (originally featured in the Segodnia (Today) and Slova (Words) newspapers) and published the prelate’s Saeima speeches [4]. Issue no. 2 of 1927, for instance, was almost fully occupied with Ioann’s speeches against the conclusion of a trade agreement with the USSR. In the run up to elections, Vera i zhizn’ essentially became a campaign publication.

Nonetheless, the journal also played host to literary offerings, periodically publishing verse and prose on religious themes. These were usually quite weak, penned by very young authors – in some cases, the authors were in senior school (and there were more poetesses than poets). Elizaveta Mangusgofskaia (Knauf), one of the more famous authors in the local periodical press, published two of her poems in Vera i zhizn’ in 1923 and 1926. Literary contributions were to become much less frequent in the 1930s, however.  

In the last two years of Zaics’ editorship, the journal gathered new steam – it grew in size and new names appeared among the featured authors. However, as noted, Zaics was forced to abandon the journal in 1933, with Archpriest Nikolai Perekhval’skii becoming editor in 1934. Perekhval’skii was born on 12 March 1873 into a priest’s family in Riazan diocese. Graduating from the Riazan seminary in 1894 and the Kazan ecclesiastical academy in 1898, he was ordained in 1899: from 1904, he served as priest of the Riga Aleksandro-Nevskaia church. Prior to the First World War, he also worked as a teacher in the Riga gymnasium and a member of the Riga consistory. He stayed in the city throughout the war, evacuating to Iaroslavl’ only in 1918. Returning in 1920, he continued to serve his old parish, being promoted in 1932 to dean of the Riga Orthodox churches. In 1944, he fled first to Germany and then the United States, where he taught in a church school in Lawrence, MA. He died in New York on 15 May 1966.

Although Perekhval’skii himself wrote little in the journal during his years as editor, with the exception of editorial interventions, the contents of Vera i zhizn’ became more diverse, with Perekhval’skii introducing the innovation of dividing the journal into thematic sections. New authors continued to appear, including young individuals who were later to play a sizeable role in the religious and cultural life of Latvia (and elsewhere). Father Aleksei Ionov, for instance, made his debut on the journal’s pages in 1934: educated at the University of Latvia and the St Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, he had become a priest in 1933 before returning to his native Latvia. Ionov was the editor of Vera i zhizn’s biography section and authored several theological pieces: in 1937, he translated from French an extract of Sergei Bul’gakov’s work Orthodoxy. Another active contributor was deacon Vasilii Rushanov. He, too, was an alumnus of the St Sergius Institute, coming home to Lativa in 1932. Although his first article appeared in 1927, while he was a seminary student, from 1934 he continuously published pieces on church history: he was also the editor of the journal section dedicated to the contemporary situation of Orthodox churches beyond Latvia’s borders. In 1935, Father Ioann Legkii, a young priest fresh out of Riga seminary, was put in charge of the journal pages dedicated to religious education: one of his longer pieces was a description of his pilgrimage to the Valaam monastery in Finland. Emigrating to the USA from Germany in 1949, he ultimately became the Orthodox bishop of New York, dying in 1994.

Besides these clerical contributors, we also find some cultural actors of note writing for Vera i zhizn’ in these years. In 1934, the name Sergei Petrovich Sakharov began to appear on its pages. From a clergy family and with a church education, he had dedicated his career and energies to teaching before coming to Latvia after the First World War. He then created a niche for himself as a leader of the country’s Belarusian minority, heading both the Belarusian Cultural Association and, from 1921, the Latvian Ministry of Education’s Belarusian department. He was also a rather eminent church historian, writing a history of the Orthodox archbishops of Riga from 1836 to 1936 and statistical description of Orthodox churches in Latgale. His pieces for Vera i zhizn’ reflect this interest, detailing the histories of individual Latvian parishes and the biographies of their priests. Although arrested at the conclusion of the Second World War, he ultimately returned to Riga, where he died in 1954.

Of the journal’s earlier contributors, many continued to work. Archpriest Dribintsev, for instance, continued his missionary publications, often describing religious talks conducted by priests in localities close to Old Believer communities. Although such pieces still tended to be polemical, they no longer sought to convince Old Believers to convert to Orthodoxy: rather, they can be considered a kind of ‘counter-propaganda’ aimed at securing Orthodox parishioners within their creed.

The beginning of Perekhval’skii’s editorship in 1934 took place in a time of change for both the Latvian state and the Latvian Orthodox Church. On 15 May that year, Kārlis Ulmanis led a successful coup, establishing an authoritarian regime. Then, on 12 October, Archbishop Jānis (Pommers) was assassinated, bringing significant changes to the Church. After two years without a primate, the Latvian Church finally ended its canonical obedience to the Moscow Patriarchate and was taken under the aegis of the patriarch of Constantinople. Augustīns (Petersons), the Latvian Church’s new metropolitan, was amenable to Ulmanis’ government. Little appeared on the pages of Vera i zhizn’ that pointed to these huge changes other than sparsely written instructions from Metropolitan Augustins, evincing the very character traits that had irritated his subordinates while still the dean of Daugavpils. In 1936 and 1938, two further bishops were consecrated in the Latvian Orthodox Church: Jēkabs (Karps) of Jelgava and Alexander (Vitol) of Jersika. Neither published much, at least in the Russian-language version of Vera i zhizn’: Alexander only twice published his sermons, while Jēkabs wrote a celebratory piece in 1937 on the anniversary of Ulmanis’ coup.

Although Vera i zhizn’ also published the obligatory pieces celebrating both patriotism and Ulmanis’ leadership, it seems to have done so less than other Russian-language periodicals in Latvia. Until 1937, the journal released little to mark the two state holidays, 15 May (the date of Ulmanis’ takeover) and 18 November (Latvian independence day). However, with the intensification of Ulmanis’ cult of personality, a whole range of materials appeared in the journal to mark these days in 1938 and 1939. Only on 15 May 1940 was nothing published to glorify the leader: a month later, the journal published its last issue.

Notes

[1] Some primary-source documents in English about the establishment of the Latvian Orthodox Church can be found here: https://www.balticorthodoxy.com/founding-latvian-orthodox-church

[2] For a biography of Father Zaics, please see: https://www.balticorthodoxy.com/kirils-zaics

[3] For edinoverie in the Baltic region, please see: https://www.balticorthodoxy.com/dorofei-emelianov

[4] For an example of one of these speeches in English translation, please see: https://www.balticorthodoxy.com/speech-from-the-latvian-archbishop-1923

Author

Iu. L. Sidiakov (translated and edited by J. M. White)

Source

Original article in Iu. L. Sidiakov, Rospis’ zhurnala “Vera i zhizn’” - Riga, 1923-1940 (Riga-St Petersburg, 2021), pp. 5-12.

The journal Vera i zhizn’ is available online via the Latvian National Library: http://www.periodika.lv/#periodicalMeta:1734;-1