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Faith on the Margins: Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union

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Faith on the Margins: Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union FAITH ON THE MARGINS: JEHOVAH‘S WITNESSES IN THE SOVIET UNION AND POST-SOVIET RUSSIA, UKRAINE, AND MOLDOVA, 1945-2010 Emily B. Baran A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved By: Donald J. Raleigh Louise McReynolds Chad Bryant Christopher R. Browning Michael Newcity ©2011 Emily B. Baran ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT EMILY B. BARAN: Faith on the Margins: Jehovah‘s Witnesses in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova, 1945-2010 (Under the direction of Donald J. Raleigh) This dissertation examines the shifting boundaries of religious freedom and the nature of religious dissent in the postwar Soviet Union and three of its successor states through a case study of the Jehovah‘s Witnesses. The religion entered the USSR as a result of the state‘s annexation of western Ukraine, Moldavia, Transcarpathia, and the Baltic states during World War II, territories containing Witness communities. In 1949 and 1951, the state deported entire Witness communities to Siberia and arrested and harassed individual Witnesses until it legalized the religion in 1991. For the Soviet period, this dissertation charts the Soviet state‘s multifaceted approach to stamping out religion. The Witnesses‘ specific beliefs and practices offered a harsh critique of Soviet ideology and society that put them in direct conflict with the state. The non-Russian nationality of believers, as well as the organization‘s American roots, apocalyptic beliefs, ban on military service, door-to-door preaching, and denunciation of secular society challenged the state‘s goals of postwar reconstruction, creation of a cohesive Soviet society, and achievement of communism. In this sense, the state‘s view of the Witnesses as a hostile political organization was not without basis. Soviet Witnesses demonstrate that, despite repression, believers could and did construct identities and complex community networks that challenged the state‘s control over its citizenry. In fact, religion was a powerful organizing tool for citizens to create meaning in their lives outside of, and in iii opposition to, the official ideology. In the post-Soviet context, this project takes a comparative approach by focusing on the three successor states with the largest long-standing Witness communities: Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova. The Witnesses emerged as one of the fastest growing religions in the region and faced growing criticism and hostility from the Orthodox Church and its supporters, expressed through an ―anticult discourse‖ that framed Witnesses as a threat to democracy, state security, and traditional values. Through legal challenges to their right to practice, the Witnesses became a key player in debates over the limits of religious freedom. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates the centrality of religious pluralism to the region‘s shaky and incomplete transition from authoritarianism to democracy. iv DEDICATION To my father, who gave me a love of all things Russian v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe my parents, Elizabeth and James, for giving me a happy childhood filled with Russian folk music and folk tales, intellectual curiosity, and twelve years of religious education. This upbringing sparked a lifelong interest in Russian culture and a fascination with religion. I first began my study of the Jehovah‘s Witnesses as an undergraduate student at Macalester College. My advisor, James von Geldern, encouraged my research and helped me to start thinking like a historian. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my advisor, Donald J. Raleigh, helped me transform an undergraduate interest in the Witnesses into a rigorous piece of academic scholarship. I cannot imagine having crafted or completed this project without his tireless guidance and support. Research for this dissertation was made possible thanks to generous funding from the Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies (SSRC-ACLS), American Councils for International Education, the United States Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), and the History Department and Center for Global Initiatives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Center for Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University, in particular Edna Andrews, for facilitating three yearlong Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to study Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian, as well as two summer FLAS Fellowships to attend the Duke in Russia program in St. Petersburg. Additional summer FLAS support from the University of Kansas in 2007 allowed me to begin my archival research in L‘viv while studying Ukrainian. vi A Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and a Helen Darcovich Memorial Doctoral Fellowship from the University of Alberta made it possible for me to complete writing this dissertation in a timely manner. I have published portions of chapters 7 and 8 as articles: ―Negotiating the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Post-Soviet Russia: The Anticult Movement in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1990-2004,‖ Russian Review 65, no. 4 (2006): 637-56; ―Contested Victims: Jehovah‘s Witnesses and the Russian Orthodox Church, 1990 to 2004,‖ Religion, State and Society 35, no. 3 (2007): 261-78; and ―Jehovah‘s Witnesses and Post-Soviet Religious Policy in Moldova and the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic,‖ Journal of Church and State (forthcoming in Summer 2011). It would be impossible to name all the wonderful archivists and librarians who helped me in locating materials and navigating the complex Russian, Moldovan, and Ukrainian archival and library systems. The archivists at the L‘viv and Uzhhorod Security Service offices deserve praise simply for letting an unknown American graduate student sift through their files. I owe special thanks to the staff of the Jehovah‘s Witnesses at each of the national branch offices and at the international headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. In particular, April Taylor and her colleagues at the Office of Public Information answered dozens of email requests for information. Ruslan Mel‘nyk at the Ukraine branch office set up interviews with local Witnesses and offered valuable advice and contacts. Miriam and David Grozescu and Anatolie Cravciuc at the Moldovan branch office went above and beyond the call of duty by setting up dozens of interviews and providing me with information and documents. Their friendship and warmth make me feel at home every time I visit Chişinău. Dozens of Witnesses kindly shared their life stories with me. While I know their perspective on events vii as devout believers may differ from mine as a historian, I hope that they can find value in an historical account of their remarkable history. My colleagues in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Eric Steinhart, Gleb Tsipursky, Adrianne Jacobs, Marko Dumancic, Gary Guadagnolo, Daniel Giblin, and Edward Geist kept me entertained and were always willing to take time to read components of the dissertation. I also benefited from feedback on my work from participants of the 2007 and 2010 conferences of the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies and of the 2010 conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The members of my dissertation committee, Louise McReynolds, Christopher R. Browning, Chad Bryant, and Michael Newcity, generously committed their time to reading this lengthy work. Friends and family encouraged me at every step of my academic career, and helped me to have a life outside of graduate school. My boyfriend, Michael Paulauskas, expertly managed both of these tasks and read countless drafts of the dissertation. He knows more about the Witnesses than anyone should and could probably defend the dissertation himself. My sister, Madeleine, painstakingly and skillfully edited the entire dissertation and helpfully distracted me from work along the way. My family gave me a perfect retreat from Chapel Hill where I could rest my brain and just be at home. And my mother, Elizabeth, provided unconditional love and clocked ridiculous miles in cars and airplanes making sure I never felt homesick through my research and years in Chapel Hill. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .............................................................................................. xiii Chapter INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................1 Historiography on Postwar Religious Life and Policy .................................... 7 Religion as Dissent .........................................................................................11 Note on Sources ............................................................................................. 18 Note on Transliteration .................................................................................. 23 Overview of Chapters .................................................................................... 24 I. JEHOVAH‘S SERVANTS IN SOVIET LANDS: A PREHISTORY ........................................................................................... 27 From Pennsylvania to the Russian Empire .................................................... 28 Transforming Bible Students into Jehovah‘s Witnesses ................................ 33 Communism and the Bible
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