The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

This article examines the figure of a prominent Renovationist figure, “Archbishop” Alexy (Shcherbakov). Unlike many representatives of the Renovationist movement, during World War II he supported the occupation authorities, leading the opening of parishes in the area around the towns of Valuyki and Ostrogozhsk. As the article demonstrates, this process was spontaneous, relying solely on the occupation authorities and local Russian collaborators, as well as on individuals with limited knowledge of Orthodoxy. The article recounts the process of reviving local parishes, drawing on Shcherbakov’s own interrogations by Soviet investigators. During these interrogations, he, already an old man, shared key moments from both his own life and the lives of the occupied districts of the described territory. This material also reveals an interesting evolution of the political views of the Renovationist “bishop” himself, who managed to be an opponent of the Tsarist regime during the Russian Empire, sympathize with the Reds during the Civil War while serving in the Great Don Army, and later adopt an anti-Soviet stance due to Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s. The great value of introducing this source, the interrogation protocol, into scholarly circulation also lies in the fact that the arrested man was well into his 90s and presumably told the truth. Furthermore, this material also helps shed light on such little-studied aspects of church history as the attempted expansion of “Metropolitan” Theophilus (Buldovsky)’s jurisdiction into the territory of the RSFSR, the clergy’s participation in German propaganda campaigns, and much more.