It is perfectly true that the leaders of the Communist movement are not religious. All students, in fact the entire “intelligentsia” or educated classes of Russia, were never religious. Before the revolution all groups of revolutionaries and literary folk prided themselves on their lack of religion. So anti-religion is not confined strictly to the leaders of the Communist movement. Any other party except the Monarchist Party would be equally devoid of interest in religion. The Monarchists necessarily support the church because the Tsar was really head of the church. This has been true since the time of Peter the Great, who while not actually abolishing the office of Patriarch, never allowed another Patriarch to be elected. One of the curious and interesting sidelights of the revolution was that a few weeks after the church was separated from the state, a Patriarch was elected for the first time in two hundred years, so that while in one way the church lost its power, in another way it really came into its own. Freedom of religion, as we know it in the United States, was a surprise and a shock to the members of the Russian church, for up until 1917 no other sects but the Greek Orthodox were permitted by law in Russia. Naturally, when other religious orders began to send in missionaries the old church protested, and when the Soviets answered that freedom of religion was now an established fact they did not understand it as “freedom” and called it discrimination. And it seemed like discrimination, because, while the Orthodox Church was losing its former possessions, other religions were gaining concessions. Tikon, whose official title is Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias, and who is called, with a sharp flavor of French revolutionary days, by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, “Citizen Basil Ivanovitch Baliavin,” was born in Pskoff in 1860. He was educated in Petrograd Theological Academy and became a monk upon the completion of his studies. He later held several important posts as a professor in theological institutions. He was consecrated Bishop of the Aleutian Isles and North America in 1897 and then came to America. In 1905 he was made Archbishop and moved the cathedral residence from San Francisco to New York. He returned to Russia in February, 1907, having been appointed Archbishop of Jaroslav. In 1913 he became Archbishop of Vilna. Early in 1917 he was elected Metropolitan of Moscow and in November of that same year, just when the Bolsheviks came into power, he became Patriarch.