Abstract
In 1917 the Cheliabinsk vicariate, similar to the larger Russian Orthodox Church, supported and was financially bound to a regime inclined to act in its own interest, ignoring those of the Church. Hence, the Church and the clergy welcomed the February Revolution as an opportunity to dissociate from the regime, to form a bond with the Provisional Government, and to enact a plethora of long deferred reforms, the most important of which was involving the laity in Church governance. The Cheliabinsk assembly adopted a radical social and administrative program, supporting peasant and worker demands, calling for the reorganization and decentralization of Church administration, and affording the laity greater authority in the parish. Despite the assembly’s popular program, its position on the increasingly unpopular war, strategically placed caveats deferring social reform until the war’s conclusion, and its inability to address parish finances proved detrimental to the Church. The social, economic, and military crises of 1917 underscored these points of the Church program and accentuated the chasm between the Church and its parishioners. Over the spring and summer of 1917 the Church and clergy became conservative and reactionary, using all available means to support the war effort, to protect their assets and future interests, and to promote the reinstitution of authority and order. These positions were unpopular and alienated impatient, war-weary parishioners, who wanted radical reform now, not a return to order. Revolution also seeped into the Church, especially at the parish level, as parishioners, working within the confines of parish administrative reforms, refused to fund Church initiatives, expelled unpopular priests, elected priests subservient to lay authority, and established their own independent parishes free from diocesan authority. The episcopate, weakened by the events of 1917, provided little resistance to lay assertiveness. Thus by early fall, the disestablishment of diocesan authority was largely complete. The revolution had led to democratization, laicization, and decentralization of Church administrative power, as well as a proliferation of lay agendas as popular religion dominated the post-revolutionary countryside much to the dismay of Bolsheviks, who thought religion would wither away.