ABSTRACT
Many of the current tensions in the Russian Church in the West have their origins in the jurisdictional fragmentation which followed the Revolution. The shattered remnants of the once great Russian Church in the diaspora struggled to make sense of the cataclysmic events which had overwhelmed them in just a few short years. Thus, the various strands of the Russian Idea were explored most creatively in the various jurisdictional branches of the Church outside the Soviet Union. The post-Revolutionary Russian diaspora was not created by one monolithic White emigration but rather represented all the turmoil of the pre-revolutionary period. In Britain, the church at Buckingham Palace Gate to which Father Anthony Bloom was sent in 1948 was at that time operating a rota system shared between the Synodal Church and the Moscow Patriarchate. The 1990s were characterised by a polarised war of words between ROCOR and Moscow.
