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

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Archpriest A. N. Zaozersky had surrendered all the valuables in his own church, but he defended in principle the Patriarch’s appeal regarding forced requisition as sacrilege, and he became the central personage in the trial—and would shortly be shot. (All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church.) On May 5 Patriarch Tikhon was summoned to the tribunal as a witness. Even though the public was represented only by a carefully selected audience (1922, in this respect, differing little from 1937 and 1968), nonetheless the stamp of Old Russia was still so deep, and the Soviet stamp was still so superficial, that on the Patriarch’s entrance more than half of those present rose to receive his blessing.