Serge Jeloutkov

This article publishes the French translation of a paschal letter written in 1972 by Russian Orthodox priest Serge Jeloutkov and originally circulated through samizdat. The text constitutes a response to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Lenten Letter to the Patriarch." Adopting the epistolary genre, Jeloutkov acknowledges the reality of the compromises made by the Soviet Orthodox hierarchy, but contests the one-sidedness of Solzhenitsyn's indictment: publicly accusing a Patriarch who is in no position to respond amounts, in his view, to telling only a half-truth. The document's principal contribution lies in its ecclesiological and historical contextualization of the situation of the Russian Church under the Soviet regime, demonstrating that forced integration into the system was not a choice but a necessity, and that the destiny of the Church remains inseparable from that of the Russian people.