The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on February 26: all valuables were to be requisitioned from the churches—for the starving! The Patriarch wrote to Kalinin, who did not reply. Then on February 28 the Patriarch issued a new, fateful pastoral letter: from the church’s point of view such a measure is sacrilege, and we cannot approve the requisition.