During my residence in Moscow I visited the Patriarch, Tikhon, at his palace. I was first met by one of his clergy, who warned me that the Patriarch was under “house arrest,” and not supposed to see anyone without authorization. I was also given to understand that I should run some risk myself, as I should have to sign my name in a book which had to be submitted afterwards to the Extraordinary Commission.

I signed my name, however, and was soon afterwards ushered into the presence of the Patriarch, who certainly lives in comfortable surroundings, having the whole palace to himself and his small entourage of clergy and servants. None of the furniture, pictures, ikons, etc., in the spacious halls have been disturbed, and the whole place is kept in good condition. Tikhon wore the gorgeous dress of a Russian patriarch, and he received me with simple dignity. He is a tall man of about sixty, with shrewd grey eyes and a florid, healthy face—the face of a peasant. In the subsequent conversation he struck me as simple in the ways of the world, but fearless and sincere. He is as different from, say, Cardinal Mercier, as the Orthodox Church is different from the Roman. The latter, I should say, has a powerful organization, and possesses among its higher ecclesiastics cultured men with trained minds and great diplomatic ability. The former is in a more primitive stage, and its long connection with the State has atrophied it. Cardinal Mercier is a highly educated man with Latin energy and initiative. Patriarch Tikhon is a pious, unsophisticated man with a considerable knowledge of Russian theological literature, and with more than a touch of Russian fatalism and apathy. Although he lived for several years in America and Alaska, visiting Russian congregations there, he must have lived in monasteries all the time, for he knows nothing of American conditions, and has only picked up one word of English—“Good-bye.” He is capable of being a martyr, but incapable of inaugurating and carrying on an active anti-Bolshevik movement. He told me of the encyclical in which he had cursed the Bolsheviks, and remarked, with a chuckle, that the latter were very annoyed about it, and had complained to him that Denikin’s troops were using it very extensively as propaganda and had pasted it up on all the walls in Tombov and other towns. I told him that Kolchak had used it in the same way, and this intelligence seemed to gratify him. But I do not think that he will write any more encyclicals, being apparently satisfied that he has done all he can, and that the rest is in the hands of God. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks are not likely to trouble him so long as he keeps quiet.

He approved of the separation of Church and State, but complained that, though the Church had lost Government help, the Government continued to interfere in its internal affairs. About sixty Bishops and several hundred priests had been put to death, but the Communists made it impossible for him to get accurate statistics. It was difficult for any ecclesiastic to get a permit to travel, with the result that diocesan visitations had been pretermitted, many churches left without a pastor, and the whole ecclesiastical machinery stopped. Thus Lenin has made use of the peculiar importance of the railways in a vast and thinly settled country like Russia, and of the fact that Bolshevism has a firm hold on the railwaymen, in order to strangle not only all the political parties which are opposed to him, but also Christianity. He prevents rival politicians from travelling on the railway or sending their correspondence by it, and he also prevents priests from doing so. No doubt some of these difficulties are due to a disorganized transport service, and not specially created for the persecution of the Church.

There was little altar wine left and little oil. The Patriarch wanted to know if I could get these for him from England. He was anxious to know my religion, being apparently afraid of Jews visiting him. All the Church’s printing-presses and paper had been confiscated, and this made the publication of religious works or periodicals impossible. All meetings of ecclesiastical Councils are also impossible, and it is doubtful if they will be allowed in the future, so that common action among the leaders of the Russian Church is precluded.

The position of the Patriarch is pathetic, and also the position of the clergy, who are now entirely dependent for support on their parishioners. If the latter do not want a particular priest or any priest at all in their villages, they need only refuse their offerings. The result will be an entire change in the status of the clergyman who, in any case, was never very much venerated by the villagers. That status will be lower, I think, henceforward, for the clergyman will be an expensive luxury, and the higher ecclesiastical authorities will cease to have any hold on him. He will tend to become a mere tool in the hands of the dominant faction in his parish. The peasants, at least, will not dispense with him, for he will be useful at the blessing of the crops and other functions to which the muzhiks attach a superstitious importance; but, even under the Tsars, the parish priest was generally regarded as a man who had his own trade, like a cobbler or a carpenter, and was not expected to take an interest in the social and moral life of the people like the English or French clergyman. Nor did he take any such interest. When he had finished reading his Mass or performing some other religious service, he went home to his family, without thinking that he had any other obligations towards society at large than a mechanic who had done a piece of work and been paid for it.

Bishop Anthony of Ufa tried to interest Kolchak in a scheme for making the clergy take an interest in social and educational work, such as the clergy of the Western Churches take, but this scheme was never carried into execution. What would tell against its success would be the fact that the priest is, as a rule, only a peasant himself, uneducated and sometimes addicted to drink. In one village in Vologda Province, where I lived before the war, the muzhiks complained to me of a parish priest who beat his wife, and got so drunk on Saturday night that they sometimes had to pull him out of bed on Sunday morning in order that he might say Mass for them.

The Patriarch told me that there are now no candidates for the priesthood, and that all the ecclesiastical seminaries are closed. The net result will probably be the downfall of the Russian Church and the formation of a great number of small sects, some of them probably of a very strange character. The Old Believers among the Cossacks will probably become stronger, and so will the Baptists, the largest Protestant sect in Russia, but there is more likely to be a throw-back towards old and fantastic heresies than an advance, or what is generally called an “advance,” on modern religious lines in the West. The Communists will probably have trouble with sporadic religious outbreaks, but these outbreaks will be accompanied by such massacres of Jews and by the preaching of such impossible doctrines that Europe will find it difficult to sympathize with them. Bolsheviks have confessed to me that they are nervous on the subject of religion, and that they must go slow. A Russian gentleman, who distinguished himself before the war by his strongly anti-alcohol views, recently started some sort of religious revival in Petrograd, but the Bolsheviks promptly put him in jail, whereupon the movement collapsed.

The most formidable enemy of Bolshevism among the religious bodies in Russia is the other great International—the Roman Catholic Church. This Church possesses in every Russian and Siberian town large and very earnest congregations composed chiefly of Poles and Lithuanians, and in no case that came under my observation has the priest deserted his flock or discontinued holding daily services, which are always well attended by men as well as by women. There has been no interference on the part of the Bolsheviks with these R.C. communities, save that their schools have been closed, their school-books and libraries confiscated, and their children forced to attend Communist schools. One of their prelates, Bishop Ropp of Petrograd, has been imprisoned, but he was probably too outspoken and aggressive, for the Government of the late Tsar once exiled him from his see and from Russia owing to the high tone he took with them. There were also arrests of Catholics in Petrograd, some few months ago, owing to religious processions of protest against several Bolshevik measures having been organized by the congregation of St. Catherine’s Church on the Nevsky Prospect. In Little Russia the Uniat Church, which is recognized by Rome, will probably gain in membership; and a large number of Lithuanians, who had been forced by the old Imperial Government to register themselves as Orthodox, will now profess Roman Catholicism openly.

The Catholic Church in Russia is powerful, well organized, and solid against Bolshevism, for no Catholic can be a Bolshevik, but owing to the fact that it is mainly Polish, there is a national prejudice against it in Russia, and it will consequently have no effect on the general situation. Rome, too, is behaving with her usual prudence in this matter. She is taking no steps against Bolshevism, being probably afraid of exposing her followers in Russia to persecution.

The standard of education and general culture among the Roman Catholic clergy in Russia is much higher than that which prevails among the Orthodox clergy, hence the machinery of the Catholic Church is able to function much as usual, despite the fact that it is exposed to the same lack of communication as has paralyzed the Russian Church. Among the Polish clergy are some very remarkable men, speaking four or five European languages besides their own, and accustomed to move in the highest circles of the Vatican. They are inclined to take little or no interest, however, in the conversion of the Russians, whom they regard with contempt as an inferior race. One of them, a very learned man, who had travelled everywhere and spoke every language in Europe with the most scholarly precision, complained to me bitterly of the Byzantine style being chosen for Westminster Cathedral. He detested everything Byzantine, and regarded the Eastern Church as a blind alley in artistic as well as in religious matters. It was not, he maintained, a living organism like the Catholic Church, and had not developed in any respect since it had cut itself off from Western Christendom. It had made no attempt to accommodate itself to modern life as the Catholic Church has done. Its architecture, its pictures, and everything about it is stereotyped. Joseph de Maistre said that the Orthodox Church is a mummy, and that, when the wrappings are taken off it and the light of modern science let into its coffin, it will crumble away. Most of the Poles believe that, and they are as little interested in the conversion of Russia as a Sinn Feiner is in the conversion of England. Consequently Rome, though it takes a great interest in the Uniat Church, is unable to do anything for it, as it has to act through the Polish clergy, who would almost decline to go to heaven if Russians were admitted there also. A well-known Galician prelate, who is also a Prince, a littérateur, a theologian, and a publicist of somewhat similar stamp to Cardinal Newman in this country, has made it his life-work, however, to persuade all Russians to enter the Uniat Church; and the lifting of the Tzarist ban on the residence of Catholic regular clergy in Russia may result in his obtaining able assistants from the heads of the religious congregations in Rome. In the present turmoil he can, however, do nothing.

I should have pointed out above that the schools, school-books, libraries, etc., of the Orthodox clergy have been all taken over by the State, and that all the children in the country of both sexes and of every race and religion are taught together in Communist schools. Education is conducted with enthusiasm, and will, if continued, reduce very much the percentage of illiteracy in Russia, but it is very anti-religious, and inculcates that anti-nationalism and class hatred which are the first principles of the Bolsheviks. A generation of this teaching will overthrow every religion in Russia, and convert the country into a factory of high explosives which will make it a danger to the whole world.

The number of Jews occupying high positions in the Soviet Government is probably larger than the Jewish community is entitled to either on account of its numbers or of its higher educational standard. But, even in Russia, there are many Jewish anti-Bolsheviks; and several of the leading Commissars are very anti-Jewish. Chicherin is Russian, though several of his assistants are Jews. Derzhinsky, the head of the Extraordinary Commission, is Russian or Polish, and none of the people whom I met in that institution were Jews. Derzhinsky’s right-hand man, Mogilevsky, with whom I was brought into close and unpleasant relations, is very anti-Jewish, and is at present trying to get hold of a Jew in Moscow who supplied Mr. North, it is alleged, with large sums of money for anti-Bolshevik agitation.

There must be many such anti-Bolshevik Jews who are probably opposed to Lenin on account of his ingenious scheme of inflating the currency until money becomes valueless. One can quite understand that a race with the financial ability of the Hebrews should dislike such a project.

Continental Freemasonry, which is not the same thing as English Freemasonry, played some part in the Young Turk movement, and in the Portuguese Revolution, but it plays no part whatever in Bolshevism. None of the leading Bolsheviks are masons, and they all regard the institution with suspicion as being calculated to encourage mysticism and help in other ways the domination of the bourgeoisie. There are also no secret societies in Bolshevism, but the movement itself is practically a secret society, and it is almost impossible for a non-Bolshevik to get admittance to Communist election meetings and conventions. Even the reporters must not only show their permits, but also their cards of membership and their identity cards, and must, in addition to this, write their names in a book.