Investigations of Bishop's Political Crimes of Non-Commemorating of the Empress Anna Ioannovna at Divine Services

Abstract

The present article is devoted to investigations of bishop's political crimes of non-commemorating of the Empress Anna Ioannovna at divine services. Preachers the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna’s time spoke with indignation about the Empress Anna Ioannovna’s reign: Germans under the Empress Anna’s government killed many innocent upper clergy representatives. Repressions against bishops did take place during the Anna Ioannovna’s reign, but it is true that the reasons for the deaths of the hierarchs are not entirely truthful. The Empress Anna Ioannovna’s accession to the Russian throne did not, as it turned out later, meet the expectations of the majority of the upper clergy. Instead of the expected by Old Moscow party patriarch, the Russian Orthodox Church got a sympathetic to Protestantism and to the reforms of Peter the Great time-server in the person of Archbishop of Novgorod Theophanes (Prokopovich), and the closeness of the clergy to the conspiracy’s members and to members of the supreme privy council has subsequently cast a shadow over all representatives of the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus, at the accession of Anna Ioannovna with the rights of an absolute monarch, all the state and Church officials who directly or indirectly supported the restriction of autocracy were naturally subjected to disgrace. The Old Russian church party, which was an opponent of Peter's reforms and had conservative views, especially on the patriarchate restoration, lost their power under Empress Anna, and archbishop of Rostov George (Dashkov), as a head of the "party", became the main target for archbishop Theophanes.