Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow
Patriarch Alexy II was the 15th Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus', the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Elected Patriarch of Moscow in 1990, eighteen months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he became the first Russian Patriarch of the post-Soviet period.
Family history
Alexey Mikhailovich Ridiger was a patrilineal descendant of a Baltic German noble family. His father, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Ridiger, was a descendant of Captain Heinrich Nikolaus Rüdinger, commander of a Swedish fortification in Daugavgrīva, Swedish Livonia who was knighted by Charles XI of Sweden in 1695.Swedish Estonia and Swedish Livonia became part of the Russian Empire in the aftermath of the Great Northern War, in the beginning of the 18th century.
Friedrich Wilhelm von Rüdiger, adopted Orthodox Christianity during the reign of Catherine the Great.
From the marriage with a Polish woman, Sophie Dorothea Jerzębska, was born the future Patriarch's great-grandfather, Yegor von Rüdiger.
After the October Revolution of 1917, Alexey Ridiger's father Mikhail became a refugee and the family settled in Estonia, first in Haapsalu where a shelter was provided by priest Ralph von zur Mühlen. Later Mikhail moved to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where he met and married in 1928 to Yelena Iosifovna Pisareva, who was born and later died there.
Alexey Ridiger's father graduated from the theological seminary in Tallinn in 1940 and was ordained a deacon and later a priest and served as the rector of the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Tallinn. Later, he was a member and the chairman of the Diocesan Council in Estonia.
'''Patrilineal family tree'''
Biography
Early life
Alexey Ridiger was born and spent his childhood in the Republic of Estonia that had become a Russian Orthodox spiritual center and a home to many Russian émigrés after the Russian October Revolution in 1917. He was baptised into the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church.From his early childhood Alexey Ridiger served in the Orthodox Church under the guidance of his spiritual father, Archpriest Ioann Bogoyavlensky. He attended Tallinn's Russian Gymnasium.
After the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940, Alexey's family was listed for arrest in order to be deported from Estonia according to the Serov Instructions, but were not found by the NKVD because instead of staying in their home they were hiding in a nearby hovel.
During the occupation of Estonia by Nazi Germany Alexey with his father Mikhail, who had become an Orthodox priest on 20 December 1942, visited the Soviet prisoners of war in German prison camps in Estonia. Such activity was tolerated by the German occupational authorities because it was seen as effective anti-Soviet propaganda. After Soviet forces returned to Estonia in the autumn of 1944, unlike most of the people with Baltic German roots, the Ridiger family chose to stay in Estonia instead of evacuating to the West.
During the war Joseph Stalin had revived the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. Having been closed during the war time, after the Soviet annexation of Estonia the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Tallinn was reopened in 1945. Alexey Ridiger, who had become a Soviet citizen served as an altar boy in the cathedral from May to October 1946. He was made a psalm-reader in St. Simeon's Church later that year; in 1947, he officiated in the same office in the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in Tallinn.
Ordination and priesthood
He entered the Leningrad Theological Seminary in 1947, and graduated in 1949. He then entered the Leningrad Theological Academy, and graduated in 1953.On 15 April 1950, he was ordained a deacon by Metropolitan Gregory of Leningrad, and on 17 April 1950, he was ordained a priest and appointed rector of the Theophany church in city of Jõhvi, Estonia, in the Tallinn Diocese. On 15 July 1957, Fr. Alexy was appointed Rector of the Cathedral of the Dormition in Tallinn and Dean of the Tartu district. He was elevated to the rank of Archpriest on 17 August 1958, and on 30 March 1959 he was appointed Dean of the united Tartu-Viljandi deanery of the Tallinn diocese. On 3 March 1961 he was tonsured a monk in the Trinity Cathedral of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.
His name was not changed when he became a monk, but his patron saint changed from Alexius of Rome to Alexius, Metropolitan of Kiev whose relics repose in the Theophany Cathedral in Moscow.
Tenure as bishop
On 14 August 1961, he was chosen to be the Orthodox Church Bishop of Tallinn and Estonia, succeeding his father-in-law, John, who was promoted to Archbishop of Gorky and Arzamas.On 23 June 1964, he was elevated to the rank of archbishop. On 22 December 1964, he was appointed Chancellor of the Moscow Patriarchate and, ex officio, a permanent member of the Holy Synod. On 25 February 1968, when he just turned 39 years old, he was elevated to metropolitan.
In 1986 he was released from the post of the Chancellor, which he had held since 1961 and which allowed him to be based in the Moscow Patriarchy's headquarters, and transferred to Leningrad; the decision was effectively made by the Council for Religious Affairs and was later presented by Alexy as punishment for his letter in December 1985 to Mikhail Gorbachev with proposals of reforms to church-state relations. Shortly after Alexy's death, the then Chairman of the Council Kharchev strongly denied that and said the decision was aimed at "defusing the tense emotional atmosphere within Patriarch Pimen's inner circle". In an earlier interview Kharchev suggested the removal had been requested by Patriarch Pimen "for a year".
Alexy was one of the presidents of the Conference of European Churches from 1964. In March 1987 he was elected President of the CEC Presidium and Advisory Committee, in which post he remained until November 1990.
Criticized for Ecumenism by some within the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexy responded by saying that such were opinions expressed not by representatives of the church but expressed as private views of free citizens.
KGB
There have been reports, beginning in the 1990s, that Patriarch Alexy II had been a KGB agent.These reports originate with Gleb Yakunin, a member of the committee created for the investigation of the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 and chaired by Lev Ponomaryov, who thereby gained the access to secret KGB archives. In March 1992 he published materials alleging cooperation between the Moscow Patriarchate and the KGB. He published code names of several KGB agents who held high-rank positions in the Russian Orthodox Church including Patriarch Alexius II. The Russian church defrocked Yakunin in 1993. The allegation was repeated by Yevgenia Albats in 1994.
Western media reported on these allegations in 1999 and again in 2007/8.
The Patriarch was also named as a "KGB collaborator" in a 2015 interview with defected former KGB general and suspected double agent Oleg Kalugin.
It is alleged that the Estonian branch of the KGB recruited Alexy as an agent on 28 February 1958, just days after his 29th birthday, assigning him the codename "Drozdov". The report detailing his recruitment makes clear that the KGB contacted Alexy, then still a simple priest, because they expected him to succeed John as Bishop of the Russian Orthodox diocese of Tallinn and Estonia. Among his KGB assignments was one in 1983, when he was sent to the Pskov-Caves Monastery to "pacify" rebellious monks.
The reports further allege that Alexander Grigoryev, a KGB officer in Leningrad under cover as Orthodox priest Fr Alexander was his case officer for a while. According to Oleg Gordievsky, Alexy II worked for the KGB for forty years, and his case officer was Nikolai Patrushev.
In February 1988, exactly 30 years after his recruitment, the KGB chairman awarded him the Certificate of Honour.
Patriarch Alexy II acknowledged that compromises were made with the Soviet government by bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, himself included, and publicly repented of these compromises:
At the same time, the Patriarch has called the reports making him out to be "KGB agent" mere exaggerations of such necessary compromises he had to make with the Soviet authorities.
Similarly, the official spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchy, Father Vsevolod Chaplin, in 2000 claimed that reports of Patriarch Alexy II being an "associate of the special services" are "absolutely unsubstantiated".
Albats cites Konstantin Kharchev, former chairman of the Soviet Council for Religious Affairs, as saying: "Not a single candidate for the office of bishop or any other high-ranking office, much less a member of Holy Synod, went through without confirmation by the Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB".
In summary, a degree of "collaboration" with the Soviet authorities was necessary for all bishops. Whether such collaboration represents a necessary "compromise" or suffices to qualify the bishops as "KGB agents" appears to be a matter of interpretation. According to Davis, "If the bishops wished to defend their people and survive in office, they had to collaborate to some degree with the KGB, with the commissioners of the Council for Religious Affairs, and with other party and governmental authorities."
When asked by the Russian press about claims that he was a "compliant" bishop, "Aleksi defended his record, noting that while he was bishop of Tallinn in 1961, he resisted the communist authorities' efforts to make the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in the city a planetarium and to convert the Pühtitsa Dormition nunnery to a rest home for miners."
Official records do show that during Patriarch Alexy's tenure as bishop, the Tallinn diocese had a lower number of forced Church closings than was typical in the rest of the USSR.
In the judgement of Ware, "Opinions differ over the past collaboration or otherwise between the Communist authorities, but on the whole he is thought to have shown firmness and independence in his dealings as a diocesan bishop with the Soviet State."