The same happened with the confiscation of Church property. It began with a clumsy attempt by Kollontai, the People’s Commissar of Social Welfare, to turn the Alexander Nevsky Monastery into a sanctuary for war invalids. On 19 January she sent a detachment of sailors to occupy this famous holy shrine in the centre of Petrograd. They were met by an angry crowd of worshippers and, in the scuffles that followed, a priest was shot dead. Lenin was furious: the last thing he needed now was open confrontation with the Church, which so far had been careful to keep out of politics. But since Kollontai had already enraged the priesthood, he saw no reason for holding back from the conflict which, as he saw it, would have to come sooner or later. The Decree on the Separation of Church and State was published the next day, 20 January, much earlier than planned. It declared all Church property to be the property of the state. Sanctioned by this licence, Bolshevik squads went round the country’s churches and monasteries looting their silver, drinking their wine and terrorizing the priesthood. Patriarch Tikhon, the head of the Church, called on the clergy to resist ‘these monsters of the human race’ in a pastoral letter anathematizing the Bolshevik regime. Not all the priesthood chose the path of open opposition. Some of the minor clergy, who had welcomed the revolution as a chance to build closer ties with their parish, sought to conciliate the Bolsheviks. The Preobrazhensky Monastery in Viatka, for example, turned itself into a labouring commune with a nursery for workers’ children and a workshop where the nuns made clothes and shoes for orphans. But most of the clergy and their congregations followed Tikhon’s call, which enabled the Bolsheviks to brand them as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and to step up their campaign of looting and terror. The monks of the Alexander Svirsky Monastery in Olonetsk, for example, after trying to resist the Bolshevik squads, were imprisoned — and later executed — by the local Cheka.71
One of the most traumatic humiliations suffered by the wealthy classes in these early months of the Soviet regime was the compulsory sharing of all or part of their living space. The Bolsheviks were proud — and stressed it in their propaganda — that they were forcing the wealthy to share their spacious houses with the urban poor. To many people this seemed only fair: the fact that some people had lived in palaces, while others languished in damp and dirty cellars, had become a symbol of the unjust social order of the old regime. Wealthy families often tried their best to find a clean and modest couple to move in with them whom they might be able to persuade to make do with one or two of the smallest rooms in the house. But the vigilance of the buildings committees, which were placed in charge of this process, made it very hard. These committees were usually formed by the old house porters and domestic servants, among whom the desire for revenge could often be very strong. Joining the buildings committee, and even more the party, gave them a licence to turn the tables on their former superiors. They occupied the best rooms in the house and filled them with the finest furniture, while their previous employers were moved into the servants’ quarters. Here was a whole world of hidden revolutions in domestic life where the servants and the masters literally changed places. It was a microcosm of the social transformation in the country at large.
