The Soviet regime demanded that Patriarch St. Tikhon (+1925) change the liturgical calendar from Julian to Gregorian on this day in 1923.
Evgenii Ivanovich Tuchkov is in the first row, the second from the right of the viewer "engineered" a number of church divsions in the Russian Church in the 1920’s in the homeland and worked on dividing the Russian church diaspora as well
At the end of 1917, the future Renovationist priest Mikhail Galkin addressed the Soviet government with a proposal to implement civil marriages (at that time, marriages for Orthodox fell under the jurisdiction of the Church) and a new ecclesiastical calendar, and to confiscate church property. According to Arseny V. Sokolov, Galkin’s letter became the foundation for the Soviet Decree on the Separation of Church and State, published on February 2, 1918. Even though the decree proclaimed freedom of conscience, it was impossible to defend believers from abuses of power in this new “atheist” country without any checks and balances in its system of government.
From 1922 to 1928, the Commission for the Separation of Church and State (the so-called Anti-Religious Commission) pressured church leaders and attempted to recruit them as state informants and agents. At a meeting of the Commission on September 18, 1923, it was decided that Patriarch Tikhon should reform the church calendar to make it compatible with the civil one, shut down parish councils (which had been introduced by a decision of the All-Russian Council in 1918), and permit the second marriages for clergy.
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