1917-18 Diaries of Metropolitan Leonty Published in Russia
The newly-published diaries of Metropolitan Leonty (Archpriest Leonid Turkevich at the time) provide a first-hand account of proceedings of the historic Moscow Church Council of 1917-18 and a dramatic chronicle of his time in Russia in the throes of Revolutionary conflict and his long, treacherous and arduous travel back to America through Siberia and Japan.
Metropolitan Leonty was a luminary of North American Orthodoxy in the 20th century, whose ministry as priest and bishop in America for nearly six decades culminated with his tenure as Primate of the Russian Metropolia (precursor of the Orthodox Church in America) during the last 15 years of his long life. In him could be found the lived experience of the continuity of the North American Church from the tenure of Saint Tikhon as Archbishop of North America through the tumultuous time of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath for the Church in North America to the very eve of the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America. For Metropolitan Leonty, the Church’s Councils - where hierarchs, clergy and laity gather to deliberate and decide the most crucial issues - were a cornerstone of church life. In a sense, Metropolitan Leonty was the very embodiment of conciliar experience as a participant in nearly a dozen All-American Sobors, presiding over four of them, and as a delegate from the Diocese of North America at the landmark All-Russian Church Council in Moscow in 1917-18, where he actively contributed to the proceedings.
Among the many issues before the Moscow Council was the fundamental question of the restoration of the Patriarchate, a question that provoked intense and passionate debate. In the course of this deliberation, Fr. Leonid delivered a speech in which he argued vehemently in support of the restoration of the Patriarchal system of church governance. His arguments were based on his experience in North America that the Russian Church’s missionary efforts abroad were being hindered by the general perception that the Church’s ties to the Russian state and the state’s political goals were too strong. He advocated for a Patriarch at the head of the Church who would ensure the ecclesial character of the Church’s mission and thereby enhance the Church’s authority. The call to restore the Patriarchate prevailed and Saint Tikhon was elected as the first Patriarch of the Russian Church in two centuries.
The 587-page hardbound volume of the Turkevich diaries in the original Russian is one in a series covering the Moscow Council of 1917-1918. As indicated by the full title of the book «Дневники и записные книжки периода Поместного Собора 1917-1918 гг» (Diaries and Notebooks from the Period of the Local Council in 1917-1918), the scope is not limited to the journal entries found in Fr. Leonid Turkevich’s personal diaries and official logs that are combined in the publication into a single chronological sequence, but also includes notes by Fr. Leonid on plenary and sectional meetings of the Council in which he participated, about deliberations on various critical issues and the increasingly disturbing news developments of the day. Interspersed are poems by Fr. Leonid (he wrote poetry throughout his life) revealing what was in his heart. The published diaries cover an eight-month period from October 1917 to May 1918 during Fr. Leonid’s stay in Russia while attending the Council as well as his travels to his native places in what is today Ukraine. Also documented are the arduous travails he endured and the horrors he witnessed being inflicted upon the Church and the people of Russia by the newly-established Bolshevik regime, as he journeyed through Siberia on his return trip to his family in America. This volume is only a small part of Metropolitan Leonty’s notebooks and other papers that were donated by his family to the Library of Congress a quarter of a century ago and are preserved in the Library’s Manuscript Division.
In addition to Metropolitan Leonty’s papers at the Library of Congress, a much more extensive corpus of his personal papers (totaling some 100 archival boxes, equal to more than 50 cubic feet) which comprise the largest collection in the Manuscript Division of the OCA Archives and await study by researchers.
Special gratitude must be expressed to church historians Priest Evgeny Ageev and Alexander Mramornov who labored diligently together for several years in compiling, editing and supplementing the journals to prepare them for publication. Although every effort was made to decipher the sections of Fr. Leonid’s writings in the archived notebooks, which were handwritten in a cryptic system of shorthand, these remain indecipherable and await future experts to decipher them. Even deciphering his longhand handwriting was labor intensive as it was sometimes very small or had faded. Through the labors of Fr. Evgeny and Alexander Mramornov, important archival documents are now readily accessible to the modern Russian reader.
The volume contains a foreword by His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon, as well as a very informative introduction by the editors, footnotes and 80 additional pages of explanatory comments and notes, a selection of poems by Metropolitan Leonty that were written at other points in his life, a few historical documents related to events and topics in the diaries and notes, a bibliography, a name index and photographs.
In his foreword, Metropolitan Tikhon writes:
“The contents of these diaries show to us that the light of faith in Christ enlightens every person with whom it comes into contact. Even if a person finds himself in very difficult conditions in earthly life, this light paves the way for him. As a middle-aged married priest attending the Moscow Council on behalf of the North American Archdiocese, Archpriest Leonid Turkevich fled simmering and restless Russia, which was quickly becoming unsafe and violent. In his flight, he was greatly worried for his family, who remained impoverished in America without its breadwinner. Yet despite these difficulties, he walked his path with dignity, and this dignity, manifested in the pages of his diary, is an excellent example of Christian behavior for us today as 21st Century Christians. Indeed, it clearly indicates his faith in the promise given by the Savior during His glorious Ascension: ‘I am with you, and no one shall be against you.’ The published diary is an accessible, rather close to us in time, example of following faith in this promise for all Christians.”
This book will be of interest to those seeking to learn more about Metropolitan Leonty and how his experience of the 1917-1918 Church Council influenced him and the future course of Orthodoxy in America, as well as to those studying the details of the proceedings of the historic Council in Moscow and the issues it undertook to address. The diary entry format makes the book accessible for a popular readership, despite its massive size, while the publication is, at the same time, an important addition to the scholarly historiography of the Orthodox Church in America.