Father Kirils Zaics (1869-1948)

Continuity and change in orthodox Latvia

Kirils Zaics was an influential priest in the Latvian Orthodox Church throughout his entire life. Given his birth well before the end of the Russian Empire and his death after World War II, Zaics, like no other Baltic Orthodox cleric, can be used to show the changing fortunes and various contexts of Orthodox Christianity in Latvia throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Given that Zaics has since his death been hailed as a new martyr, there is an abundance of Russian sources available on him, even though he has not been officially canonised. They mainly focus on the last few years of his life and generally do not reflect on his role within the Orthodox Church in Latvia. My choice to use the Latvian spelling of his name reflects the focus of this biography on the earlier periods of his life, mainly in independent Latvia.

Zaics was born in 1869 into a farmer’s family in Vērene volost in Livland (about 80 km east of Riga) as Kārlis Zaķis. Practically nothing is known of his childhood, but the remainder of his life can be divided into three stages. The first began when he appeared as a graduate of the Orthodox Riga Theological Seminary in 1891 with the russified Orthodox name of Kirill Zaic. He served as psalm singer in various Livland churches before being consecrated priest in the Polotsk-Vitebsk diocese in 1896. This diocese included the Latgale region, which became part of independent Latvia during the interwar years. Zaics’ main tasks in this region was to keep the Orthodox Church alive in a region dominated by Roman Catholicism. He completed higher missionary courses in St Petersburg in 1900 and became an ardent proponent of Orthodox missionary work among the Latgalians. He founded a brotherhood to support this and was actively involved in educational work in his long-time home parish of Eržepole (near Viļaka).

Tsar Nicholas II’s toleration manifesto of 1905 brought much confessional unrest to the Polotsk-Vitebsk diocese, as large numbers of nominal Orthodox believers returned to the Roman Catholic Church. Zaics took up the challenge and became the head diocesan missionary in 1907. In this position, he devised strategies and wrote articles for the diocesan journal. He held teaching positions during World War I and was elected delegate of the diocese to the Local Church Council in Moscow in 1917-18, where he passionately argued for liturgical renewal and comprehensible sermons.

By the end of the Council, Zaics’ home diocese had been divided among three states: Soviet Russia, Poland and Latvia, and a new stage in his life began. Initially, he was priest in the Grodno cathedral in Poland (currently Belarus) for four years, before returning to his native Latvia in 1922. He was immediately welcomed by Archbishop Jānis (Pommers), who made him head priest of the Riga cathedral. Moreover, he took up the task of editing the new Latvian Orthodox journal, Ticība und dzīve (Faith and Life), both the Latvian and the Russian editions. The two editions did have some common material, but were largely independent of each other. At the same time, Zaics taught at the re-opened Riga Theological Seminary and was actively involved in the activities of the Russian Student Christian Movement in Latvia.

All these activities did not stop Zaics from being an active missionary, especially combating sects and other religions outside the mainstream. In fact, the Russian journal of the Riga diocese in the 1920s often contained more information about obscure sects than about developments in the diocese itself. This might have contributed to the “fateful blow” that hit Zaics in the early 1930s. In 1931, the Latvian Synod denied Zaics’ request for more funding for his journals. Zaics reacted by halting publication of the Latvian-language journal and turning the Russian-language one into a private international journal for Orthodox missionary theology and “sect science”. In 1933, Archbishop Jānis accused Zaics, the head priest of his cathedral, of embezzlement, having systematically taken money from the candle sales cash box.

It is difficult to gauge what prompted the archbishop to make such a claim, especially since contemporary sources are scarce and those that exist are rather skewed. Archbishop Jānis was a contentious figure – his involvement in secular politics had brought him many enemies, both on the right and on the left. Moreover, there are signs that he became somewhat paranoid towards the end of his life, eager to sideline potential enemies. The immediate trigger for the accusation was an anonymous notice in the socialist newspaper Working Thought that claimed Zaics had accused Jānis of forging a threatening letter to himself to bolster his authority in the church.

The back and forth that followed ended in Kirils Zaics being dismissed from the cathedral, defrocked, and ordered to pay back the 8,443 Lats missing. He tried to portray himself as a victim and was not able to pay back the money: he disappeared from the Latvian Orthodox scene for some years. The lawsuit that followed his refusal to acknowledge guilt went through all three instances of the Latvian legal system. However, it only started in 1936, which was after the murder of Archbishop Jānis and the reorganisation of the Latvian Orthodox Church as an autonomous church under Constantinople. In the first instance, Zaics was convicted and sentenced to pay back the money and spend eight months of prison. His appeal was successful, and he was acquitted, but the prosecutors appealed again. The highest court in Latvia also acquitted Zaics, since there was no proof that the missing money had actually been taken by Zaics.

Nevertheless, Zaics did not return to church life, and so starts the third and last period of his biography. Zaics reappears with a reader’s letter in the new Orthodox journal in the summer of 1940, in which he criticised the church leadership for its rupture with the Moscow patriarchate in 1936. Following the murder of Archbishop Jānis and the coup d’état of the quasi-authoritarian leader Kārlis Ulmanis, both in 1934, the Orthodox Church in Latvia had bowed to political pressure and switched allegiance from the Moscow patriarchate to the patriarchate of Constantinople. Augustīns (Pētersons), the new Metropolitan of Riga and All Latvia, has been variously described as an authoritarian figure in his own right or a puppet of the Ulmanis regime. The dissatisfied voices within the Church only came to the fore after World War II forced Latvia to accept more Soviet influence in the summer of 1940. One of these voices came from Kirils Zaics, who closed his letter with the hope that he would soon be able to celebrate the liturgy again freely in Latvia.

And his hope came to pass. Metropolitan Augustīns was summoned to Moscow in early 1941 to read a forced public repentance for his “schismatic actions”: he was officially replaced by Metropolitan Sergii (Voskresenskii), who became the exarch of the Russian Church‘s Baltic dioceses. One of his first moves was to reinstate Kirils Zaics as the head priest of the Riga Cathedral. Less than two weeks later, the Nazis occupied Riga and changed the situation again. Exarch Sergii refused to evacuate and remained in Latvia during the German occupation. The Germans accepted both Sergii’s exarchate and Augustīn’s Latvian Orthodox Church as legitimate organisations, thereby avoiding strong Orthodox resistance to the occupation. Zaics remained staunchly behind his exarch and the Moscow patriarchate. His missionary zeal came in useful, as Sergii named him head of the Orthodox pastoral ministry in the camps of Russian prisoners of war.

The German occupation soon expanded to western regions of the Soviet Union, where the atheistic regime had severely restricted Orthodox church life over the last two decades. For Exarch Sergii, this was an opportune moment to make himself useful to the occupation authorities, and he suggested a missionary foray into these regions to bolster acceptance of the Germans. Since local individuals were no longer allowed to visit prisoner-of-war camps from October 1941, Zaics was instead named the head of the Pskov Mission, as the endeavour was to be called.

The Pskov Mission was a huge success in the two years it was active. Everywhere the missionaries went, the local inhabitants flocked around them, eager to take part in the religious life that had been banned for the last twenty years. A documented attempt by Soviet partisans to draw Zaics over to their side failed, as he remained loyal to Metropolitan Sergii. On 19 February, 1944, Pskov was regained by the Red Army, and the Pskov Mission stopped functioning. Zaics, who in the meantime had risen to the rank of protopresbyter, returned as head of the Department of the Inner Mission of the Baltic Orthodox exarchate.

Shortly thereafter, Metropolitan Sergii was mysteriously murdered as the Red Army approached Riga and arrested Zaics. The NKVD sentenced him to 20 years in a disciplinary camp in January 1945 and interned him in KarLag (Kazakhstan), where he died on 28 October 1948. Seven years later, the cases related to the Pskov Mission were reviewed and numerous irregularities found, but Kirils Zaics did not live to see his rehabilitation.

Author

Sebastian Rimestad

SourceS

Konstantin Oboznyj, “V pamiat’ vechnuiu budet pravednik…” in Posev, 2/2014, p. 18-26