Ioann of Kronstadt’s social gospel

I owe my introduction to Ioann of Kronstadt to an Orthodox friend’s joke about converts’ inevitable favorite saints. Interested to learn more about this recent Russian saint—canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1964 and the Russian Orthodox Church in 1990—I found few that knew of Ioann besides devout Orthodox faithful and a few historians of late imperial Russia. As for scholarly sources on him, I found only Nadieszda Kizenko’s seminal biography (2000), a handful of articles with varying viewpoints, and brief mentions in overviews of late imperial Russian history, which noted little beyond his celebrity, philanthropic projects, and unsavory associations with Russian reactionary conservatism. Indeed, Ioann of Kronstadt seems to have been the subject of more hagiography than scholarly investigation.

 

Intrigued by his relative obscurity, I chose to research Ioann of Kronstadt for my undergraduate history thesis, which I had long intended to write on late imperial Russian history. I was most interested in exploring Ioann’s relationship with the so-called chernosotentsy—“the Black Hundreds”—the reactionary nationalist movement in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperial Russia. While gathering sources, I incorporated my findings on Ioann into a presentation pitch that was accepted by the 2024 Nanovic Institute Undergraduate Research Conference in European Studies. However, I ultimately chose to write both my presentation and thesis on another late imperial Russian Orthodox cleric, Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii); the examination of Ioann’s life and political views in early drafts of my Nanovic Conference paper ended up unused. However, I still wanted to write on Ioann of Kronstadt, but not to pin down his relationship with late imperial Russian conservatism, as originally intended; instead, I wanted to examine the unique aspects of his social doctrine.

As a historical figure, I see Ioann as primarily a popular religious leader, notable for his charisma and charitable works. Born Ivan Ilyich Sergiyev in 1828 to a poor family in the village of Sura near the White Sea, the future “Righteous Ioann of Kronstadt” studied at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy before becoming a secular priest in 1855. Upon his ordination, he was assigned to the Cathedral of St. Andrew—demolished by the Soviet regime in 1932—in Kronstadt, the site of a large Baltic port and naval base. Early on, both his parishioners and his superiors censured him for his unorthodox approach to his priestly duties: for example, he improvised with the rubrics of the Divine Liturgy, and dispensed with rules of the Orthodox Church for the reception of the Mysteries in hopes of encouraging frequent communion. However, by the 1880s, he had become famous throughout the Russian Empire as a preacher, healer, advisor, and miracle worker. Despite criticism from fellow clergy and the incredulity of some laypeople, Ioann’s charismatic preaching, his personalized and emotional serving of the Liturgy, and his holding of mass public confessions won him both a reputation for unusual sanctity and the interest of curious skeptics. People of both sexes from all over Russia—agnostics, Muslims, and Protestants as well as Orthodox—wrote and visited him, requesting spiritual guidance, bodily healing, and financial help. Above all, Ioann’s commitment to assisting the poor won him huge numbers of supplicants. He was a tireless philanthropist, giving away money gifted to him by wealthy patrons, donating to charitable organizations and causes like the Red Cross, local orphanages, and foundations for poor seminarians, and running the “House of Industry” that he founded to aid the homeless and jobless of Kronstadt.

 

However, my research has uncovered that Ioann of Kronstadt, while renowned for sanctity and charity, espoused extreme political conservatism and had connections with the contemporary Russian far right. Ioann obdurately supported the Tsarist monarchy out of a desire that the Russian Empire embody “Holy Rus’”—an idealized, quasi-medieval society where a fatherly Tsar ruled over contented peasants and benevolent gentry, united by Orthodox faith and traditional social norms. He preached in defense of this vision against what he saw as the attacks of materialism, immorality, and the burgeoning Russian revolutionary movement, along with its natural ally, the Russian intelligentsia. His conservative political platform and reputation as a wonderworker earned him connections with not only arch-conservative Tsar Alexander III—at whose deathbed he assisted—and Nicholas II, but also with the Russian radical far right, notorious then and now for its inflexible monarchism, ethnonationalism, and antisemitism. His speeches and endorsements of such organizations meant that far-right chernosotentsy parties like the Soyuz Russkogo Naroda—“Union of the Russian People”—touted him as an honorary member, earning him the dislike of Russian liberals and the hatred of socialist revolutionaries.

Yet, in my study of Ioann, his activities, and his politics, I was struck by the revolutionary character of an aspect of his worldview: his condemnation of socioeconomic inequality. I first encountered this theme in Kizenko’s biography, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People, which drew heavily upon sermons of Ioann’s that I was not able to find translated from Russian. It seems that Ioann saw poverty not as a necessary evil but as an injustice that should not exist in a Christian society—an injustice, furthermore, that would be rectified by the rich sharing their wealth: “If we had Christian love,” Ioann preached, “[we] would not allow…inequality in clothing and housing to persist: the rich would share with the poor.” He declared that the wealthy would not reach Heaven if they did not practice such charity, warning “[r]ich people” to “[r]edeem righteously your falsehoods and injustices: give your unrighteous profits to the lowly as alms: and then you may hope for salvation. You will not be saved in any other way.”

 

This conviction, as Kizenko argues, seems to have originated in his own childhood experience of poverty and his conviction that the Gospel called him to share everything—from money to the shoes on his feet—with those less fortunate.

 

Ioann’s view of Russian society as an organic body also led him to prioritize economic justice for the community above individuals’ desire to amass money and property. Indeed, his call for wealth distribution on the basis of the Gospel differed from earlier Russian religious figures’ acceptance of natural social inequality. Instead, he maintained that Russians should recognize themselves as a mutually interconnected social body, emulating those “societies abroad,…[and] Jewish, Muslim, and schismatic communities [in Russia],” who he thought put Orthodox Russia to shame by their practices of “mutual aid and support.” Furthermore, he argued that the problem of economic inequality, as a disease affecting the whole social body, warranted government intervention, not private charity alone, leading Kizenko to characterize his program as a “socialist” one, albeit rooted in “the conservative basis of scripture.” Such an assessment is indeed striking for a figure who viewed attacks on the Tsarist establishment as an assault on a divinely-ordered Holy Rus’.

In conclusion, I do not know Ioann of Kronstadt well enough to contribute an original, synthetic account of his brand of reactionary conservatism, or its status vis-à-vis his contemporaries. However, my research has convinced me that his unusual view of socioeconomic inequality, an apparent anomaly in relation to his conservatism, ought to be studied further. These beliefs inevitably invite questions about how to characterize this much-venerated and much-criticized figure. One might ask:

• How did Ioann reconcile his condemnation of economic inequality with his attachment to the imperial Russian social pyramid?
• How did he maintain faith in a hierarchical Holy Rus’, anathematize its perceived enemies, and collaborate with reactionary conservative parties, while simultaneously calling for the Tsarist government to erase the divisions between rich and poor?

Whatever conclusions future historians come to about Ioann of Kronstadt, I believe they should try to resolve these thorny questions.

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Stella Webster 24’ is a recent graduate of Hillsdale College, where she majored in history. This fall, she will continue her studies as a master's student at Stanford University's Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. In the spring of 2024, she wrote a history honors thesis exploring the political and philosophical views of Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Antonii Khrapovitskii (1863-1936). Her related paper “Between Populism and Philosophy: Antonii Khrapovitskii in Relation to 20th-Century Russian Conservatism,” was accepted by the Nanovic Institute’s Undergraduate Research Conference in European Studies earlier this year. The essay published here, on late imperial Russian celebrity and Russian Orthodox Saint Ioann of Kronstadt, is based on research she did in conjunction with that project.