Canon Law in a Bolshevik Courtroom: The Russian Revolution as an Orthodox Legal Revolution

Abstract

This paper examines how the rapid shift in the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the state in 1917 both facilitated and undermined the Church’s longstanding attempt to come to terms with its canonical tradition. Legal restrictions placed upon the Church forced Orthodox leaders to consider the value of their own canonical laws and how to apply them in an inimical context. At the same time, the Church’s long history of internal disagreement over the meaning and application of canon law before 1917 left it vulnerable both to the Bolsheviks’ intellectual and moral critiques of Church law, and also to their legal restrictions on the Church.