The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

The document published here is an open letter from Ivan Nikolaevich Koloskov, one of the leaders of the sobriety movement in Russia, to Cheka Investigator Ivan Anatolevich Shpitsberg. We don’t have the date that the letter was written, but its contents make it possible to date it to 1921. The letter is characteristic of the relationship between Soviet authorities and religious movements which aren’t part of the Russian Orthodox Church. The “Sober Life” Community was founded in 1907 as a consequence of Ivan Koloskov’s influential discussions against drunkenness. Before the revolution, the “Sober Life” community and its leaders were seriously persecuted by both church and secular authorities, as a result of which the community left the Russian Orthodox Church, the members of the community declared themselves to be “free Christians”, and the leaders of the community were criminally prosecuted. In the first years after the revolution, the new state authorities supported marginal church movements, including the sobriety movement. The reason that the letter was written, however, was the community’s persecution by the Soviet authorities. The author of the letter discloses the circumstances in which the sobriety community lived from the moment of its inception until the moment the letter was written; the letter compares the experience of the community’s persecution by authorities before the revolution with the newly beginning Soviet persecution. The document is preceded by an introductory article in which there is a short biographical account of both the author and the person to whom the letter is addressed, the circumstances around the founding and development of the sobriety movement in Russia at the beginning of the 20th cent., and is accompanied with all the necessary commentaries. The letter is being published here for the first time.