The Russian Church acquired legal status only in 1991. Before that, the Soviet state represented it legally abroad. The Russian Church Abroad resisted the Soviet attempts to take over pre-revolutionary Russian property. On May 18, 1921, the People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade and Plenipotentiary Representative of Russia in London, Lev B. Krasin, sent the following note to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon:
“The Russian government declares that all lands, hotels, hospitals, schools, and other buildings, as well as in general all other movable or immovable property of the Palestinian Society in Jerusalem, Nazareth, Haif, Beirut, and other places in Palestine and Syria, or wherever it is located, is the property of the Russian State. The Russian government simultaneously confirms its similar rights to the property of the former Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, which was under the jurisdiction of the former Holy Synod and which, by this and by the decree of January 23, 1918, on the separation of Church and State, became the property of the Russian State. Finally, the Russian government states the same about the movable and immovable property of the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Palestine and Syria (consulate buildings, etc.).”
Despite such demands during the British Mandate over Palestine, all Russian imperial property there belonged to the Russian Church Abroad. In 1948, the Israeli authorities seized property of the Russian Church Abroad in the part of Jerusalem occupied by them; they did not turn it over to the Russian Palestine Society, founded in Soviet Russia in 1918, but rather to the government of the USSR, which, in turn, handed over a portion of the property to the Moscow Patriarchate and sold the rest to Israel. However, it is clear from the following fact that the Bolshevik regime had control of the property of the Moscow Patriarchate.
Source:
Monk Benjamin (Gomarteli), “Letopis’ tserkovnykh sobytii nachinaia s 1917 goda” [Timeline of Church Events Beginning with 1917] Part I: 1917-1927.
