HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 314

assassinate ALEXANDER II . In his childhood he
soaked up revolutionary ideals and stories while
traveling with his parents between Britain,
France, and Switzerland. At the age of 18 he
moved to Paris, hoping to find work as a drafts-
man, but instead he joined up with local anar-
chists he had met through the Russian émigré
community. Turning to translations of Russian
literature for his livelihood, he began to publish
short pieces in the French anarchist press. As
editor of L'Anarchie in 1910, he received a five-
year prison sentence for his complicity in the ter-
rorist activities of the Bonnot Gang. Following
his release in 1917, he made his way to Barce-
lona, where he mingled with Syndicalists and
followed the news from Russia. Disenchanted
with Spanish revolutionaries and eager to see
the land of his parents, he volunteered for mili-
tary service in Russia in August 1917. Fourteen
months later, after a period of internment in a
French camp, he arrived in revolutionary Petro-
grad. After contacting GORKY and ZINOVIEV ,he
joined the Bolshevik Party and soon became a
member of the Executive Committee of the
newly founded Communist International (Com-
intern), where he put his knowledge of foreign
languages to use. From the start Serge's relation-
ship with the Soviet government and COMMU -
NIST PARTY was troubled. He was uneasy about
the Bolshevik exercise of power and the cruelty
practiced in the name of the revolution. After
1926, he became aligned with the Left Opposi-
tion and was expelled from the party in 1928.
Under the pressure of increasing persecution,
Serge's wife lost her sanity and was interned in a
Red Army asylum. In 1933 Serge and his son
were exiled to Orenburg. After an intense inter-
national campaign he was released in 1936 and
allowed to leave the country with his wife and
son. Serge settled in France, but in 1941 fled
again with his son to escape the Germans, leav-
ing his wife behind in a psychiatric asylum,
where she died a few years later. After the
Dominican Republic and Cuba turned them
away, he settled in Mexico, where he remained
until his death. His many writings about revolu-

tionary Russia and the early Soviet period—nov-
els, memoirs, and histories—are an invaluable
source for the period, faithful to his socialist and
libertarian views. Among them are Year One of the
Revolution, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and The Case
of Comrade Tulayev, a novel about the Great Purge.

Sergei, Patriarch of Moscow
(1867-1944)
church leader
Born Ivan Nikolaevich Starogodsky in the town
of Arzamas, Patriarch Sergei led the Russian
Orthodox Church during the most difficult years
of Soviet antireligious persecution. A highly
regarded church scholar, Sergei graduated from
the Petersburg Theological Academy in 1890,
later serving as its inspector (1899-1901). From
1905 to 1917, he served as bishop of Finland and
Vyborg. In 1917 he was appointed bishop, then
metropolitan of Vladimir, near Moscow. In 1925
he served as the deputy locum tenens of Patri-
arch Tikhon, but upon Tikhon's death the fol-
lowing year he was arrested for his role in
attempting a secret election of a new patriarch,
and imprisoned for six months. In 1927 he pub-
lished a controversial declaration of loyalty to
the Soviet regime, which led to internal (Cata-
comb Church) and external (Church in exile)
splits within the church. To some it was a practi-
cal compromise, necessary for survival, to others
a surrender to the atheism of the Soviet regime.
After being named metropolitan of Moscow and
Kolomna in 1934, Sergei was recognized as
patriarch locum tenens by the church in 1937.
He remained the head of the church during the
worst years of persecution in the late 1930s,
when only a handful of bishops were not sent to
prisons or camps. During World War II he
stressed the church's patriotic role, rallying to
the side of the Soviet government. In exchange
the government allowed the restoration of the
PATRIARCHATE in September 1943, after almost
two decades, with Sergei as patriarch. One year
later, he died in Moscow and was succeeded by
Aleksi as patriarch.