MASTER'S THESIS M-2013

WAGNER, Noah Chester CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS IN THE SOVIET UNION 1947-1967.

The American University, M.A., 1969 Religion

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS IN THE SOVIET UNION 1947-1967

Noah Cl' Wagner

Submitted to the

Faculty of the School of International Service

of The American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree

of

Master of Arts

in

Soviet Area Studies

Signatures of Committee: r Chairman-: ^ V X L

Date:

The American University AUG 8 196S Washington, D.C. June 1969 WASHINGTON. O. C. TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER PAGE

I. ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF CONFLICTS BETWEEN

ORGANIZED CHURCHES AND THE SOVIET STATE . . . 5

Historical and Political Factors 5

Ideological Factors ...... 27

Geographic and Ethnic Factors ...... 42

II. THE POLITICAL FRAMEWORK FOR SOVIET CHURCHES . . 45

The Constitution and Legal C o d e ...... 45

Party and Government Structure...... 59

The Government and Church Affairs ...... 73

The Moscow Patriarchate ...... 76

The All-Union Council of Evangelical

Christians/Baptists (AUCECB) ...... 84

III. CHURCH-STATE INTERACTION AFTER WORLD WAR II . . 91

Internal Policies ...... 91

The last years of Stalin's Reign ...... 91

Religion under Khrushchev ...... 96

Policies under Brezhnev and Kosygin .... 108

External Relations ...... 126

The World Peace Council ...... 130

The Ecumenical Movement ...... 134

The World Council of Churches ...... 139 iii

CHAPTER PAGE

IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS ...... 148

S u m m a r y ...... 148

Conclusions ...... 157

APPENDICES ...... 164

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 184 LIST OP FIGURES

FIGURE PAGE

1. Organizational Structure of the Soviet Legal

Sy s te r n ...... 69

2. Party and Government Control Channels for Religious

Organizations in the U S S R ...... 90 LIST OF TABLES

TABLES PAGE

I . Selected CPSU Members and Their Positions in

the Soviet Government as of August 5, 1968 .

II. CPSU, Membership as a Percentage of Total USSR

Population for Selected Y e a r s ...... 72

III. Distribution, Size and Population of Orthodox

D i o c e s e s ...... 81 INTRODUCTION

From the time of Constantine the Great (306-337) the

Church has represented a secular power structure. As such, political leaders have had to take this fact into account whether or not they believed in God. Since the Church exists in the world and continues to attract people and their loyalty, it cannot avoid joining in some way the mechanism of political and social power. Even the revolution carried out by Lenin in Russia and the policies followed by his succes­ sors have failed to exclude the Church. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the degree to which Soviet political authorities have allowed the various religious groups in the

U.S.S.R. to become a part of the Establishment and what mutual advantages have accrued to each party to these arrangements.

The present study deals primarily with developments in Church-state relations in the Soviet Union after World War

II to the present. The development of the Soviet Union has been characterized, among other things, by attempts of those in power to mobilize the entire population in building a new type of social structure. Under such conditions if institutions from the old regime are to survive in the new order, particu­ larly if they happen to be the object of planned extermina­ tion, they must arrive at some modus vivendi with those in power. Internal tensions will be created within these institutions as the policies of adaptation are worked out and in some cases maÿ lead to a splitting of the old organization.

This happened in the Soviet Union both with the Russian Ortho­ dox Church and Protestant sectarian movements after the

Bolsheviks came to power.

The methodology followed in this study is to trace the evolution of Soviet laws within which religious bodies must operate, describe the political framework within which these laws are applied, and to a limited degree examine the institu­ tional structure of the religious bodies themselves. Against this background the interaction between church and state will be examined with respect to particular events, either within the churches, within the Soviet government, or in international affairs. The study deals primarily with two religious groups— the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Baptists— although some other bodies are mentioned briefly. The first was selected because of its centuries-old identification with the social patterns of Russian life while the second is the most promi­ nent Protestant organization in Soviet society. Both are sources of spiritual and intellectual forces with which the authorities must come to grips in their attempts to sustain a regimented society.

The relations between the various religious groups and the Soviet state during the last twenty years cannot be studied 3 in isolation from the society in which they exist nor can we ignore certain historical developments in Russia which have had a bearing on religion in the U.S.S.R. today. The basic sources for this study are Russian materials such as the legal code, official decrees, books, and articles appearing in

Soviet newspapers and magazines. These sources are used by other Western scholars as well and their work has been most helpful, particularly in dealing with original sources not otherwise available.

Any study of Soviet affairs which deals with very re­ cent history places rigorous demands on the researcher's need to maintain objectivity. Even more critical is the difficulty caused by the propagandistic nature of the source materials themselves. Not even official publications of the Soviet government— laws, constitutions, statutes— can always be taken at face value. One must reserve judgment about such materials until they can be evaluated in light of their appli­ cation under the actual Soviet practice of the times.

Limited amounts of concrete information reach the West from time to time without passing through the filter of the

Soviet press. In themselves, they cannot give the complete picture of religion in the U.S.S.R., but they do provide verification at specific points. Church publications printed in the Soviet Union are also subject to propagandistic distor­ tion. If a church publication does not print active propaganda for the state, it will almost certainly take pains not to contradict the state. Works by other scholars and observa­ tions of Western travellers in the U.S.S.R. must also be treated with caution, for some highly qualified observers have exhibited pronounced tendencies to believe propaganda for or against the Soviet state and for or against the Rus­ sian Church.

It is hoped that in spite of the limited resources and the pitfalls enumerated above that the present study will provide a valid and useful picture of some of the interactions between Church and state under Soviet conditions. CHAPTER I

ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF CONFLICTS BETWEEN ORGANIZED

CHURCHES AND THE SOVIET STATE

I. HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL FACTORS

Eusebius of Caesaria was the court theologian of

Constantine the Great. In his speeches and writings on

Constantine, as well as in his Ecclesiastical History Eusebius' key concept was that of the Imperium Christianum. In this he was probably taking up the ideas of Constantine himself as expressed when he consecrated the city of Constantinople on

May 11, 330 under the name of "New Rome." He thus proclaimed his own view of his position within the Empire and the Church.

At the heart of the theocracy formulated by Eusebius was a

Christian emperor, modeled upon Constantine, who was the vicar of God on earth. God himself had made him the "image of His omnipotent autocracy." Eusebius asserted that the rule of the

Orthodox emperor was based upon divine right when he wrote :

"Thus God himself, the supreme Ruler of the whole world,

appointed Constantine the lord and leader of all, so that no man can boast of having raised him up. " This picture remained

the prototype of the Christian emperor and dominated the

historical, political and ecclesiastical mentality of

Orthodoxy. 6

Once the ruler occupied such a dominant position, it was extremely difficult for an Independent Church to develop alongside him. The chief bishop of the Church of the Empire was restricted to his spiritual functions of safeguarding doctrinal purity and supervising the modes of worship. The emperor, however, enjoyed the same solemn privilege as ordained priests since he was the only layman permitted to attend the

Eucharist inside the sanctuary, behind the iconostasis. Thus the emperor was, in the theological sense, subject to the

Church's spiritual guidance since he was a son of the Church, but in reality the balance of power greatly favored the

Christian emperor. In the sixth and seventh centuries the imperial code of law fixed this special position of the emperor within the Church, It also explicitly stated that the patriarch was to "stand without fear before the emperor for the truth and for the defense of the holy teachings." The patriarch was assured spiritual freedom and autonomy but was precluded from developing independent political authority in the manner of the Roman Pope.^ In 988 Russia was Christian­ ized. Along with this religion whose particular form had originated in Byzantium came a written language worked out by

^Ernst Benz, The Eastern Orthodox Church (New York: Doubleday cind Company, 1963) , pp. 163-167. 7 two monks, Cyril and Methodius, a way of looking at life, and a Church derived from the Greek Orthodox.

In the Byzantine Empire the head of the Church could not claim any political or legal authority beyond his spiri­ tual authority in the Christian Empire. Only if the emperor violated the moral law or doctrines of the Church could the metropolitan or patriarch reprove the emperor or use the

Church's disciplinary measures against him. The danger with­ in such a system was that the emperor might abuse his position in this state-Church system to reduce the Church completely to a tool of the state. The political ideology of Russian tsarism was founded directly on the Byzantine conception of

Church and state as formulated under Constantine. These con­ cepts were taken over by the Eastern Slavs and became implicit in the Russian Empire. It was only after Byzantium fell that this ideology was fully elaborated and merged into the awakening national consciousness of Muscovy. The premise that

Moscow was the "third Rome" became the basis for the Muscovite 2 state Church.

In 1453 the new "Rome on the Bosporus" was conquered by the Turks. This eliminated the last focus of power in the

Byzantine Empire and destroyed the real heart of the Eastern

^Ibid., pp. 171-172 8

Church when its holiest cathedral, Hagia Sofiya, was converted

into a mosque. After the conquest of Constantinople the

spiritual claims of the Byzantine Church were assumed by

Muscovy and the Church of Moscow. In the political realm

this idea of succession was furthered by the marriage of

Grand Duke Ivan III (1462-1505) to the Byzantine princess

Sophia. It was he who introduced the two-headed Byzantine

eagle into the Russian state insignia and made the title

"Tsar of All Russia" a reality. In 14 92 Metropolitan Zosimus

ordained that God had chosen the "devout Ivan Vasilevich as

Tsar and Autocrat of All Russia" to be the new emperor and proclaimed him the protector of Orthodoxy, and the direct

descendant of the devout Emperor Constantine.

The new ideology was most distinctly stated by Starets

Filofey of Pskov in his letters to the ruler of Moscow. The historical theory put forth in them justified the transference

of the Empire from Byzantium to Moscow on the basis of

apostasy, just as the claim of Byzantium to being the "New

Rome" had been earlier. The destruction of Byzantium was

considered divine retribution for its union with Rome, even

though this was necessitated by the military pressure of the

Turks. Upon his coronation in Moscow Tsar Ivan IV assumed

the title of "Holy Tsar and Autocrat of All Russia, crowned by God." In 1588 when Patriarch Jeremias of Constantinople 9 visited Moscow, Boris Godunov persuaded him to establish an independent Russian patriarch. On January 26, 1589, Métro­ polite Job was solemnly consecrated "Patriarch of Moscow and 3 of all Russia."

The seventeenth century was one of profound social up­ heaval marked by rebellions and unrest of peasants or Cossacks, townspeople or strel' tsy, the infantry regiments armed with muskets which had been created by Ivan the Terrible, In 1649 the Law Code legalized serfdom. A systematic program to cor­ rect liturgical texts began, probably under Patriarch Pilaret in the 1620's, and at the latest under Patriarch Iosif in the

1640*s. Thus, when Nikon, archbishop of Novgorod, became the patriarch in 1652 he and the higher clergy in general were the executors of reforms initiated and guided by the secular government in the person of the tsar. In the first two years of his partriarchate, 1652-54, Nikon decreed changes in ritual

— the sign of the cross, the number and manner of prostrations, the hallelujah glorification— and published new service books.

Considerable opposition to these changes developed and culminated in the Raskol or Great Schism of 1667 which gave rise to the Old Believer movement encompassing a large variety of religious groups. Attempts of the Russian Orthodox

^Ibid., pp. 179-183 10

Church to deal with the schismatics failed and in 1861 a

council of Russian clergy asked for aid from the tsar in re­

solving the problem. This resulted in the use of troops

against the Old Believers, executions, tortures, and internal

weakening of the Orthodox Church. A law of 1684 made

adherence to the schism a secular, state crime with a punish- 4 ment of death for the non-repentant schismatic. By appealing

to the state for aid the Church surrendered the possibility of

resisting the encroachments of civil power.

The balance of power continued to shift in favor of

the tsar during the eighteenth century. In 1721 the patriar­

chate, which had been empty since the death of Patriarch

Adrian in 1700, was entirely abolished by Peter the Great

and replaced by the "most Holy Synod" made up of bishops and

other clergy appointed and removable by the tsar. The post

of Over-Procurator was created to handle administration of

the Synod, The Over-Procurator at this time had very little

real influence over anyone— he had no definite rights and

powers over the Synod, he could only protest to the tsar if

he disapproved of actions of the Synod, other lay officials

were subject to the clergy, and the churchmen could withhold

^Michael Cherniavsky, "The Old Believers and the New Religion,” Slavic Review, Vol. XXV, No. 1, March, 1966, p. 20. 11 his salary. This weak position was to change radically under

Alexander I.

Under Peter the Great, the government's view of the church was most clearly shown by the rule that priests had to inform against persons confessing to them who had had, and had not repented of, evil intent against the state or the sovereign:

"and the sanctity of the confessional is not infringed upon by this disclosure, for the admission of an intended lawlessness which the confessing person is not ready to renounce and does not include in his sins is not a confession, but a cunning trick to seduce the conscience." From 1718 on, the parish church was the official place for the publication of laws and decrees. The clergy supported the state by sermons on state occasions, by interpretation of the Scriptures, and by their defense of the existing order. Pastors were required to re­ port not only specific evil intent among their flocks but also general disaffection in the popular mind. In 1724 control of the church lands was given to the Holy Synod, the Monastery office was abolished, and they were given jurisdiction over religious offenses and church peasants. Tolerance was extended to several non-Orthodox religious groups, but not to

Jews and dissenters.

During the lengthy reign of Catherine II (1726-96) little true progress was observed in the social development of Russia, although a more liberal attitude toward Old 12

Believers, some of whom were encouraged to return to Russia, seemed to indicate some relaxation in church-state relations.

However, the question of lands belonging to the Russian Ortho­ dox Church was resolved in favor of the state. The Church

ceased to be a great land-holding institution with the loss

to the state of around two million serfs, male and female, amounting to 13.8 per cent of all the peasants of Great

Russia and Siberia. The lands they retained were so unpro­ ductive that the monasteries and bishops were largely dependent on the small incomes paid them from the treasury in compensa­

tion for their lost land.

In 1817 under Alexander I (1801-25) a new Ministry of

Religious Affairs and Public Education was created. The

Holy Synod and the administration of the non-Orthodox faiths were placed under it. This ministry was abolished in 182 4 but at the same time the Over-Procurator was raised to the

status of minister with the Synodal organs as the ministry

over which he exercised control. He was admitted to the coun­

cil of ministers,' the civilian clerks and officials of the

Synod were made subject to him, and he became the sole inter­

mediary between the tsar and the church hierarchy.

When Nechaev occupied this office from 1833 to 1835 he

was held personally responsible for the political trustworthi­

ness of the bishops; he even had some of them followed

secretly by gendarmes. His successor, Potrasov, took under 13 his own direct control the church's educational institutions and its accounting system. Thus the Synod became a tool in the hands of the Over-Procurator, and it became the official usage to refer to his jurisdiction (which embraced the diocesan administration as well as the Synod and the institu­ tions connected with it) as the "Administration of the Religious

Affairs of the Orthodox Faith." The Synod remained in this position throughout the reign of Nicholas I.

In 1880 Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev was appointed Over-

Procurator of the Holy Synod and held this post through October,

1905. He is known in history as the "evil genius" or the

"Grand Inquisitor" of the reigns of Alexander III and

Nicholas II during which he was considered the intellectual and political leader of reactionary forces in Russia. There are probably more data available in the West concerning his activities and opinions than those concerning any other nineteenth-century statesman because of the quantity of his published works, the care with which he collected letters and other source material, and the large number of his Russian and foreign acquaintemces who have written about him.^ Here

Robert F. Byrnes, "Pobedonostsev on the Instruments of Russian Government" in Ernest J. Simmons, ed., Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 195S), p. ll3. 14 we shall merely summarize certain of his beliefs and policies having to do with church affairs while he serves as Over-

Procurator.

The autocracy was the foundation upon which his politi­ cal philosophy was based. He bitterly opposed constitutional and democratic government for Russia, particularly because it restricted the powers of the ruler and divided political power in such a way as to make government impossible.^ In one of his books he expressed the opinion that

. . . Among the falsest of political principles is the principle of the sovereignty of the people, the principle that all power issues from the people, and is based on national will - a principle which has unhappily become more firmly established since the time of the French Revolution. . . The institution of Parliament is indeed one of the greatest illustrations of human delusion. It only serves for the satisfaction of the personal ambition, vanity, and self-interest of its members. . . Democracy is the most complicated and most burdensome system of government recorded in the history of humanity . . . The greatest evil of constitutional government lies in the formation of ministries on parliamentary or party principles.7

Pobedonostsev, like other Russian conservatives, opposed parliamentary democracy so obstinately, not because he dis­ trusted ordinary people more than their superiors in rank, but

^Ibid., p. 118. 7 K. P. Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian States­ man (Ann Arbor; University of Michigan Press, 1965), pp. 34— 35. 15 because he felt convinced that democracy— taken too seriously

— would debauch hitherto decent common people, and would lead

to a cynical intellectual tyranny over them, more inescapable

and degrading than monarchical autocracy. He regarded the

average Slav as congenitally lazy and unreliable, unless

spurred by severe leaders, but he always praised middie-class virtues, and admired self-made professional men as the best servants of a stable social order. On this vital issue he showed more insight and common sense than he has been given credit for.

He complained that while energy and money were poured out in colonizing wild regions of Siberia amd Central Asia,

the peasants in European Russia were reduced to penury by the stranglehold of primitive communal agriculture. He wrote plainly that the sole remedy was to emancipate the peasant by making him independent of the village mir (commune) , by

abolishing the absurd collective responsibility for paying

taxes, and by granting to each individual in perpetual free­ hold the amount of lemd to which he was entitled. But while he pleaded that the peasant should be released from slavery

to the village m i r , he accused of criminal neglect those educated people who ought to have acted as the peasant's g moral guardians.

Q Richard Hare, Portraits of Russian Personalities Be­ tween Reform amd Revolution (Lon5on7 Oxford Press, 1959) , pp. F99-300. 16

His general philosophy was characteristic of the upper

clergy rather than of the gentry, even though he had been per­ mitted to attend the School of Jurisprudence, which was

intended for children of the gentry. His grandfather had been

a simple priest. His father was educated at the Moscow

Ecclesiastical Academy and later became a professor of

Russian literature at the University of Moscow. From his belief that the character of a state or society was shaped by its "national faith" or by its church, Pobedonostsev drew

the logical conclusion that no healthy state or society could have more than one creed. For him, the Orthodox Church was

the state's principal servant and weapon. No state could have more than one religion, no matter how many races it con­

tained, for other beliefs and churches would be "agents of

disintegration."

The Church was also to help eliminate the religious

and national minorities since he considered all non-Orthodox

religious groups "enemies of the state because the laws of

the Orthodox Church are the laws of the state." He character­

ized the Old Believers as "dark, ignorant, stagnant in thought,

and distinguished by deceit, slyness, meemness and frivolity."

He charged the German Lutherans in the Baltic provinces with 9 seeking to destroy the Orthodox Church and the Russian state.

Q Robert F. Byrnes, o£. cit., pp. 124-125. 17

He was convinced that two religious and racial minority groups would be impossible to convert or assimilate completely.

The Jews should be erased from Russian public life; one third would be converted, one third would "wander away" across the frontier, and one third would die out. He firmly believed that "the existence of a Polish state means slavery and oppres­ sion for all the Russian people." He asserted that he did not know "a single Catholic who is not hostile to us and who does not dream of seizing our western provinces." He declared to the tsar in 1899 that the Polish-Lithuanian issue was "a matter of life or death" for Russia. Since he believed religion could not be separated from nationality, acceptance of a nuncio would only give the Poles, the Catholics, "the

Latins," a nest of intrigue inside Russia.

Pobedonostsev believed that the great dangers to

Russia derived from intellectuals and the ideas they produced and carried. He hoped to isolate the Russian intellectuals from the West by reorganizing and revitalizing the Holy

Synod's censorship. He maintained close scrutiny of Russian intellectual life to guarantee that control remained thorough and effective. He felt that repression could halt or control hostile or harmful ideas, but that indoctrination of the

^^Ibid., pp. 126-127. 18 proper views was vital to ensure victory. In his eyes, the

Orthodox Church and its schools were the logical place to assign this task of indoctrination. Under his leadership the

Holy Synod Press became one of the largest and most efficient in Russia and was used mainly to distribute materials for the

Church and its parish schools. They emphasized the "four

R's"— reading, writing, arithmetic and religion. The Church was above all to control education, particularly in the primary grades.

In his view, the primary instrument for controlling and educating man was the family, the "foundation of the state" and the "eternal element of prosperous societies." Pobedonostsev described the family as "the spiritual and cultural nursery for citizens," and he assigned it the functions of maintaining tradition, ensuring social stability, harnessing and control­ ling man's most fundamental instincts, and providing for the 12 orderly perpetuation of the human race.

The last several paragraphs have illustrated that

Pobedonostsev had firm ideas on the issues most fundamental to any political philosophy. He worked vigorously to promote his own ideas and from his advantageous position was often able to suppress those with which he did not agree. The -

^^Ibid., pp. 123-124. ^^Ibid., p. 125. 19 degree of success he achieved in having his church-state policies adopted is shown by some of the privileges given to the Orthodox Church under the Code of Laws in 1900.

Orthodoxy was declared the official religion and the emperor could profess no other faith. The emperor, as Christian sovereign, was named the supreme defender and preserver of the dogma of the ruling faith, and protector of the orthodoxy of belief and decorum in the holy Church. The Russian Ortho­ dox Church was given a monopoly over propaganda, the right of censorship, and fiscal support from the state. Representation in several of the political institutions of the realm was enhanced. The Over-Pro curator of the Synod became a member of the Committee of Ministers and the Senate, the highest court in the land. Each bishop was empowered to appoint a member of the clergy to attend the meetings of the provincial zemstvo assembly, and some right to attend county zemstvo assemblies. He could also appoint members of the clergy to attend meetings of town councils to guard the interests of the Church. Provincial governors were ordered to limit the missionary work of non-Orthodox denominations while the official Church was encouraged to carry out missionary work.

As the list of privileges grew, so did the number of duties the clergy was required to carry out for the state.

The chief duty was to use the authority and influence of the

Church to silence or weedcen opposition to the government, to 20 discredit hostile spokesmen, or to win the rebellious over to submission to the authorities. Thus they were charged with maintaining the allegiance of the masses and with carrying on counter-revolutionary activity through sermons or pamphlets.

The clergy were required to disclose to the secret police any information concerning plots or attempts against the emperor or his government, even when this knowledge had been obtained during a confessional. District priests and the diocesan authorities were required to supplement the work of the police in seeing that deserters, vagrants, and men without pass­ ports were not received or sheltered in the villages under their jurisdiction. They were expected to provide chaplains for the armed forces and to bolster the morale of the armed forces in time of war. The Church was placed in charge of public education. Less significant duties rendered to the state were the keeping of parish records, proclamation of imperial manifestos, etc., in the churches, and urging the congregations to submit to vaccination against smallpox.

In most respects the Russian Church in the years after the revolution of 1905 presented no significant changes from its previous condition except for the rising influence of

Rasputin over church and civil affairs. During Lent, in 1903,

Rasputin was brought to the capital by Abbot Khrisanf who believed him to be a holy man of the people. By 1905 he had been taken on several occasions to the imperial palace at 21

Tsarskoe Selo, had been made much of by members of the

highest society of St. Petersburg, cind as a result found it

easy to gain access to the household of the tsar. Once in­

side the palace, Rasputin was able to convince the imperial

couple that he was a man sent from God and to convince the 13 empress that the fate of her son depended on this "holy man."

One writer describes Rasputin as "belonging to the religious

underworld. . . He shared the teaching: of the Khlysty, an

orgiastic sect, according to which the soul of a man

'possessed of the Holy Ghost' could not be polluted by any carnal transgression."^^

Rasputin's dissolute conduct at court certainly does

not conflict with this description. As his power grew,

drunken orgies and debauches, even with society ladies, be­

came characteristic features of his life. By 1911, the

situation had become so serious that Stolypin, president of

the council of ministers, felt compelled to intervene.

Luk'ianov, the Over-Procurator of the Synod, gathered all

available material on the "holy man" and presented it to the

tsar, and Stolypin supported Luk'ianov in insisting that •

13 John S. Curtiss, Church and State in Russia, 1900- 1917 (New York: Octagon Books, 1965) , pp. 366-3él7. 14 Nicolas Zernov, The ,Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 166. 22

Rasputin must go. In September, 1911, Stolypin was assassin­

ated and Luk'ianov resigned to be succeeded by V. K. Sabler who soon became a supporter of Rasputin. Almost immediately

the Synod was confronted by a proposal to appoint Abbot

Varnava, a former gardener of Archangel and reported to be

almost illiterate, as bishop of Kargopol. Both Sabler and

the emperor insisted on the appointment, largely because

Rasputin had pushed Varnava into the episcopate. The appoint­ ment was the subject of debates in the Third Dumain 1912 and newspapers began to denounce both Rasputin and the authorities of the church who allowed him to work evil unchecked. Early in 1912 Rodzianko, president of the Duma denounced Rasputin

to the tsar to be followed somewhat later by Count Kakovtsov who also urged the emperor to get rid of him. As a concession to public opinion, Rasputin went to Siberia until September,

1914, but his influence with the imperial family remained 15 strong.

With Russia's entry into World War I in 1914, the energies of church and state were committed to the war effort.

The church strongly supported the government in every way possible, even to the extent of monetary contribution toward

relief for the wounded and aid for the widowed and orphaned.

^^Curtiss, o p . c it. , pp. 369-377. 23

Mcuiy dioceses raised these funds by self-taxation and did take an active part in relief work. However, the Duma clergy in

1915 in their manifesto urged that the monasteries take part in extensive charitable work to disprove the increasingly frequent' charges that these institutions did not display sufficient zeal in the work of caring for sick and wounded soldiers.After the first few months had passed, the government considered the church periodicals sufficiently important to provide them financial support. These funds were distributed for propaganda purposes to churchmen aind periodi­ cals as follows :

1914 - 28,500 rubles

1915 - 23,500 rubles

1916 - 105,000 rubles

The last sum included payment of 60,000 rubles to Russkaya

Zhizn* (Russian Life), a secular newspaper, at the request of Archbishop of Khar'kov. The attitude shown by speeches of the clergy was one of continuing support for the war which was referred to as a "holy crusade" by Archbishop Arsenii 17 before the Council of State in July, 1914. During the war the government also looked to the clergy for aid in its

^^Ibid., pp. 378-379. ^^Ibid., p. 381. 24 18 campaign against the liberal elements in the Duma.

In return for the support of its policies by the church,

the government provided strong support to the church against

its enemies, particularly the sectarians. From 1905 through

the war years, the Baptists and Adventists were subjected to

repressive action on the grounds that they represented a

form of German influence. In 1914 the Senate decreed that

all sectarian denominations were to officiate only before

the congregations to which they were accredited. In March,

1915, Missionerskoe Obozrenie declared that wounded men had

reported that Baptists and Evangelical Christians had preached, or talked in hospitals, against the war. Similar statements made before the Duma in August, 1915 led the Social Democrat

Skobelev to condemn the attack on sectarians as an attempt to make them scapegoats. He stated that before the war the

Synod had regarded Baptism as largely of English origin, but

after the first volley this denomination was termed a German

faith. These charges were made in various diocesan publica­

tions and by the missionaries resulting in the exile of many noted Baptist leaders, closing of houses of prayer and even

the closing of hospitals organized by the Baptists. In June,

1916 a complaint of a Baptist congregation in Omsk was

^®Ibid., p. 382. 25

introduced into the Duma which alleged that they had been persecuted as pro-German and that their congregation had been

closed by the authorities, who had acted at the request of 19 the Diocesan Brotherhood of OrasH.

The threat of the sectarians to the influence of the

Russian Orthodox Church in the summer of 1916 was consider­ ably less than the danger represented by the power exercised by Rasputin. Over-Procurator Sabler was replaced by Samarin,

Marshal of the Moscow nobility, a sincere and honorable member of the church. This appointment had been made over the opposi­ tion of the empress and Rasputin and to the eminent satisfac­ tion of certain church circles, conservative and reactionary publications, and much of the Russian populace, Samarin was not equal to the task of curbing Rasputin and was requested by the tsar to resign at the end of September, 1915, after a quarrel with Bishop Varnava over the canonization of 2 O Archbishop of Ioann Maximovich of Tobolsk who died in 1715.

After Samarin* s fall Rasputin's hold upon the church increased by having his man Volzhin appointed Over-Procurator in

October, 1915. Following this, Rasputin had Metropolitan

Vladimir of Petrograd, primate of the Russian Church, trans­ ferred to Kiev and replaced him with Pi trim who had already

^^Ibid., pp. 384-386. ^^Ibid., p. 392. 26

shown himself, while archbishop of Samara, to be a Rasputin 21 supporter. When this had been accomplished, Rasputin became supreme in the church. The chief source of his power

at this time was apparently the empress who remained con­ vinced of his holiness.

On Jauiuary 20, 1916 a new prime minister, Sturmer, was appointed who had received strong support from Rasputin,

Pitrim and the empress. Since the appointment of Pitrim, many prelates were known to be opposed to Rasputin but there was little they could do without risking overthrow of the regime. In spite of individual complaints, the Synod as a body remained completely subservient. In November, 1916,

Miliukov, leader of the dominant Progressive bloc, before the Duma cited the Berliner Tagblatt to show that Manasevich-

Hanuilov, Prince Andronikov, and Metropolitin Pitrim had been

"participants, together with Rasputin, in the appointment of

Sturmer. As the examples of Rasputin's influence multi­ plied, attacks against him in speeches and in the press increased but had little effect on his protectors. On

August 7, 1916, N. P. Raev, son of former Metropolitan

Palladii, had been appointed Over-Procurator. After Rasputin's assassination on December 16, 1916, Raev was unable to maintain

^^Ibid., p. 393. ^^Ibid., p. 401. 27 securely his position in the "Rasputin party" and to continue its policies. The prestige of the Russian Church was too low by this time to expect any meaningful restoration in the two and a half months between the death of Rasputin and the fall of the empire.

II. IDEOLOGICAL FACTORS

For the position of religion in the society uprooted by the October revolution two aspects of Communist philosophy are iraportcint: its view of the nature and social function of religion, and its theory of social evolution. From

Hegel, Marx learned to regard philosophy as an alternative to theology and from Kant and Schelling, he mastered the current philosophic criticism of religious tradition. The clearest and most complete expression of Marx's theory of religion was stated in the introduction of his Critique of Hegel* s

Philosophy of Right written in 1843. It reads:

. . . The foundation of irreligious criticism is that "man makes religion, not religion makes man." Religion is man's consciousness and awareness of himself when he has either not come into his own or has lost himself. . . Man is man's world and includes state and society. State and society produce religion which is perverse apprehen­ sion of the world because they comprise a perverse world. Religion is this world's general view, its comprehension of fact, its logic in popular form, its spiritual enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its devotional complement, its general ground of consolation and justification. It is the realization in fantasy of human nature, because human nature possesses no reality. The struggle against religion is therefore immediately the struggle against that world whose aroma religion is. 28

Religious misery is both the expression of real misery and a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the temper of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of inanimate cir­ cumstances. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion is a requisite of their real happiness.23

The interpretation of the phrase "opium of the people" by some critics leaves the impression that the exploiting classes administered the religious drug to the unsuspecting masses but this is not supported by the context. Marx sees religion as a pipe dream to both the exploiters and the exploited. Its materials are those of common experience but the proportions, perspectives, and values of actuality are distorted. The drug is made up of those unwholesome elements of the social order which forces man to seek consolation ctnd justification in illusion. Conditions as they are cause the aroma auid the only recourse is to change the conditions and eliminate the drug. This emphasis on action was a precursor of the Marxian doctrine of revolution. Commenting on Feuer­ bach's Essence of Christianity he stated what was to become the theme of the Russian revolutionaries: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the important thing is to change it." According to Marx and Engels,

I. I. Brazhnik, F. I. Dolgikh, eds., O religii [On Religion] (Moscow: State Publishing House for Political Literature, 1963), pp. 13-14. 29 economic factors were the primary conditioning factors in history.

The Bolshevik outlook in Russia was the joint product of the Russian revolutionary spirit, the organizational logic of the party, Lenin's personality and the Marxian doctrine which served to give expression and justification to the 24 movement. The "classics" of Marx and Engels provided the philosophical assumptions, the broad historical laws, and the ultimate ends which formed the foundation stone of the

Bolshevik ideology. For Lenin, doctrinal purity was the only guarantee that the party would preserve its revolutionary vigor. Within this general framework he identified religion as an "enemy" to be destroyed, since it had its roots in the 25 social oppression of the toiling masses. Any return to religion, in Lenin's eyes, was both repugnant cind dauigerous to the revolutionary spirit. In a letter to Maxim Gorky in

1913 he wrote:

. . . Any religious idea, any idea of any god at all, any flirtation even with a god, is the most inexpressible foulness, particularly tolerantly (and often very favorably) accepted by the democratic bourgeoisie - for that very reason it is the most dangerous foulness, the most

24 Robert V. Daniels, The Nature of Communism (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. §9. 25 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, "Socialism and Religion" (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966) , Vol. 10, p. 83. 30 26 dangerous "infection." . , From the social, from the personal standpoint, every theory of God is nothing but the adoring self-concern of the stupid petite bourgeoisie, of the destructive middle class spirit.

Lenin's formal writings on religious questions are found in three essays: Socialism and Religion, The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion, and Classes and Parties in Their Attitude to Religion and the Church. The first of these opens with the affirmation that "present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class 2 8 of the landowners and that of the capitalists." He main­ tains further that the social function of religion is to disguise this picture and confuse the workers with visions of imaginary satisfactions to compensate for real privations.

He stated that "religion must be declared a private affair" but went on to accurately define what this meant:

. . . We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no con­ cern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which

2 6 I. I. Brazhnik, op. cit., p. 119.

^^Ibid., p. 291.

I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion," Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966) , Vol. 10, p. ff’3. 31

which every atheist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convic­ tions is wholly intolerable,29

He mentions the protests of Russian Orthodox clergy

against the bureaucratic practices and police spying under

the present system and encourages socialists to lend their

support to the clergy's aspirations for freedom. He reminds

Party members, however, that

. . . Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indif­ ferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat religious fog with ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we formed our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. . . Under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an cibstract, idealistic fashion, as an "intellectual" question unconnected with the class s t r u g g l e . 30

In the second essay Lenin stresses the relentless fight Marxists must wage against religion. Following the class struggle thesis he views the real roots of religion in modern capitalist countries as being mainly social. He paints a vivid picture of the situation;

The deepest root of religion today is the socially down­ trodden condition of the working classes and their apparently complete helplessness in the face of the blind

^^Ibid., p. 84. ^®lbid., pp. 85-86. 32

forces of capitalism, which every day cwid every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extraordinary events, such as earthquakes, wars, etc. Fear of the blind forces of capitalism. . . is the root of modern religion. . . No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard leüsor, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organizeâT7 planned and conscious way.^^

The third essay is essentially editorial comments on debates in the Duma on the Synod, the restoration of rights to persons with clerical vocations and on the position of

Old Believers. He expresses concern over the fact that

"militant clericalism in Russia not only exists, but is 32 clearly gaining ground and becoming more organized. " Lenin interprets this as an attempt by the "counter-revolutionary" bourgeoisie to recapture its control over the workers.

In 1919, as part of the effort needed to enlist the support of the rank emd file for the Party program, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky wrote The ABC of Communism which became a classic exposition of the basic tenets of Marxism. One '

I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers Party to Religion," Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966),Vol. 15, pp. 405-406. 32 V. I. Lenin, "Classes and Parties in Their Attitudes to Religion and the Church," Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966) ,VbTl IS, p. 414. 33 brief chapter was devoted to communism and religion. The main ideas concerned the complexity of the task of eliminating religion and the time this would require. The task of the

Party was defined to be

. . . to impress firmly upon the minds of the workers, even upon the most backward, that religion has been in the past cuid still is today one of the most powerful means at the disposal of the oppressors for the mainte­ nance of inequality, exploitation, and slavish obedience on the part of the toilers. . . One who, while calling himself a communist, continues to cling to his religious faith, one who in the name of religious commandments infringes the prescriptions of the party, ceases there­ by to be a communist.

The struggle with religion has two sides, and every communist must distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand we have the struggle with the church as a special organization, existing for religious propaganda, materially interested in the maintenance of popular ignorance and religious enslavement. On the other hand we have the struggle with the widely diffused auid deeply ingrained prejudices of the majority of the working population.33 They described the church as

, . . a society of persons who are united by definite sources of income at the cost of the faithful, at the cost of their ignorance and lack of true culture. It is a society united with the society of other exploiters such as the leuidlords and capitalists, united with their State, assisting that State in the oppression of the workers, and reciprocally receiving from the State help in the business of oppression. . .34

33 N. Bukharin, The ABC of Communism (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press, I5'66) , pp. 2"48-249,

^^Ibid., p. 249. 34

The new socialist society being created in the Soviet

Union by bringing to an end the capitalistic society, freeing

it from all class divisions and class struggle was expected

to bring about the natural death of religion and all super­

stition. Bukharin realized this would not occur over night

and that it would not be enough to merely wait for the "natural

death" to occur. In this respect he writes :

It is essential at the present time to wage with the utmost vigor the war against religious prejudices, for the church has now definitely become a counter-revolu­ tionary organization, and endeavors to use its religious influence over the masses in order to marshal them for the political struggle against the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Orthodox faith which is defended by the priests aims at an alliance with the monarchy. . . But the campaign against the backwardness of the masses in this matter of religion, must be conducted with patience and considerateness, as well as with energy and perseverance. The credulous crowd is extremely sensitive to anything which hurts its feelings. . . If the church were to be persecuted, it would win sympathy among the masses, for persecution would remind them of the almost forgotten days when there was an association between religion and the defense of national freedom; it would strengthen the antisemitic movement; and in general it would mobilize all the vestiges of an ideology which is already beginning to die out.35

With the outbreak of the revolution in 1917 the com­ munist attitude toward religion became more militant and

Lenin's views in Socialism and Religion became the official policy to be reiterated by Stalin, Lunacharsky (the minister

^^Ibid., p. 255. 35 of education) , and Yaroslavsky, president of the League of

Militant Godless. Lenin's earlier view that religion should be fought only with weapons of psychological warfare were disregarded. Although the pressure of persecution was steady from 1917 until the beginning of World War II, it varied in intensity, depending largely on the launching and success or 36 failure of the government's economic programs. The famine of 1921 coupled with the universal unpopularity of the Soviet government abroad gave the authorities an excuse to requisi­ tion from the church all objects of value except a minimum needed in the liturgy. Patriarch Tikhon resisted vigorously but to no avail. These confiscations served the dual purpose of raising badly needed cash and representing any protests made by church authorities as callous indifference on the part of Christians to the dire need of the populace for 37 food.

The first period in anti-religious tactics extended from 1917 to 1923 during which the three basic features of the policy were to: (1) deprive churches of material means

3 6 Robert Conquest, ed., Religion in the U.S.S .R. (New York : Frederick A. Praegar, 1968), pp. FÔ, 26, 28. 3 7 Julius F. Hecker, Religion and Communism (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1934), ppl 2'0'7-210; Matthew Spinka, The Church and the Russian Revolution (New York: The Macmillan Company, 192'?) , pp. 16î-rô9. 36

and legal existence; (2) reduce priests and other ministers

to a status of social inferiority; and (3) destroy the

church's influence on various phases of life, especially on education. This period ended in June, 1923 when Patriarch

Tikhon, who had been arrested in May, 1922, was released from prison. The Catholic church had also resisted the confisca­ tion of church valuables on the grounds that Papal permis­ sion was necessary before any could be surrendered. Two

Catholic clergymen. Bishop Jan Cepliak and Msgr. Budkiewicz were brought to trial and sentenced to death in 1923. That

the real issue was religion rather than the money to be realized from these church valuables is shown by a report sub­ mitted by Rev. Edmund Walsh, S.J. who was serving as Director of the Papal Relief Mission in Russia at the time. He re­ ported that in the spring of 1922 the Pope had sent two official messages through Chicherin to the Soviet government offering to pay for all the church treasures according to the evaluation set by the government, no matter what the sum might be. He received no reply to either telegram and the 38 treasures were seized.

38 Boleslaw Szczesniak, The Russian Revolution and Religion, 1917-1925 i^i/-lyzo (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press,Religion, l9S9f, p p .~ T U - T T 8 7 37

From 1923 to 1928 direct attacks on the clergy and loyal laymen were abandoned in favor of a stepped-up propaganda campaign under the direction of the League of Militant Godless 39 formed on February 7, 1925. The idea of a League of Godless did not fit in with the atmosphere of the middle twenties when the Soviet government was still trying to appease the peasants and hesitated to show open antagonism toward their religious feelings. This view changed radically in 1928-1929 with the beginning of the first five year plan and the collectivization of agriculture. The League was instrumental in closing many thousands of churches of all creeds and 40 flooded the country with anti-religious pamphlets and posters.

Its lack of effectiveness was demonstrated in the returns of the 1937 census wherein about nine-tenths of the population proclaimed themselves "believers" in some form of religion.

The census returns were never published and the census officials were arrested for causing the authorities such embarassment.^ ^

39 N. S. Timasheff, Religion in Soviet Russia (New York; Sheed and Ward, 1942), p. 35.

^®W, Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962), p . 11. 41 Alexander Uralov, The Reign of Stalin (London: The Bodley Head, 1953), p. 218. 38

In the early days of the Soviet regime the "sectarians,"

particularly such active groups as Evangelical Christians and

Baptists, were in a relatively advantageous position as com­ pared with the Orthodox church. They had been persecuted by

the tsarist regime and hence could not be declared "counter­

revolutionary" and were not seriously affected by the confisca­

tion of church property. They formed no special social group

since most were humble people pursuing a normal secular occupation thus making it most difficult to attach a class

label to them. The vast majority of sectarians still lived

in-the countryside so that the efficiency of Russian agricul­

ture and the consolidation of the Soviet regime in the village very much depended on the communist attitude toward sectarians.

In Pravda in 1924 Bonch-Bruevich, the main protagonist of the sectarians in the Communist Party,described them as "exemplary toilers" who formed an economic and cultural vanguard in the countryside and that they should be used for Russia's economic 42 recons truetion.

Mikhail Kalinin, the peasant affairs expert in the supreme Soviet leadership, who was strongly influenced by

Bonch-Bruevich, urged at the thirteenth party conference that measures be taken to direct the considerable economic and

42 W. Kolarz, o p . cit., p. 288. 39

cultural potentialities of the sectaricuis into the channels

of Soviet work. The end result was the setting up of

religious communal and collective farms by numerous sectarian

groups with active support from the regime, particularly from

the People's Commissariat of Agriculture. Prokhanov, chair­

man of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians, felt

that they were not to confine their own activities to

religion, but were to leave their mark on every branch of

national life, including scholarship, agriculture and

industry. He conceived the idea of building a town (to be

called "Evangelsk" or "City of the Sun?)where all people would live according to the principles of the Bible as the

Russian Evangelical Christians understood them. Everything was to be held in common ownership except purely personal

belongings. Such a town would have been a little theocracy 43 inside an anti-religious communist dictatorship. The

regime could no longer tolerate these communal farms once the

collectivization of agriculture began on a large scale. The

sectarians in their enthusiasm to organize communal living

and in achieving it far better than the communists challenged

the Soviet regime rather than supported it. This was not a

43 Ibid., p. 292. A more complete account of these religious communes is given in K. Petrus, ^ligious Communes in the USSR (New York: Research Progreim of the USSRÿ 1953) . 40

practical implementation of Marxist-Leninist ideology but

offered a demonstrably successful alternative to it.

In the education of the young the sectarians also

competed successfully against the state organizations. An

All-Russian Union of Christian Youth was formed in 1917 but was disbanded by the authorities for "counter-revolutionary activities" thus depriving them of a national organization to 44 compete with the Komsomol (Young Communist League). After this organization was disbanded the members formed small

Christian groups of 25 or 50 who were described by Bukharin in 1928 as "Bapsomol" and "Khristomol" organizations, probably indicating that they were dangerous replicas of the Komsomol.

At the VIII All-Union Komsomol Congress in October 1928 it was noted that in certain places (Stalingrad) roughly sixty to seventy per cent of the working youth were in the sectarian 45 youth organizations. They also outstripped the Komsomol in having a highly developed spirit of comradeship which, accord­ ing to Rudzutak, a Politburo member, had vanished from the party emd the Komsomol by 1929.^^ They were considerably

44 W. Kolarz, op^. cit., p. 296. 45 P. Fedorenko, Sekty# ikh yera i dela [Sects, Their Faith and Affairs] (Moscow: Publishing House for Political Literature, 1965), p. 160.

Kolarz, op. cit., pp. 297-298. 41 more successful in combatting alcoholism and other forms of immorality in Soviet society after World War I. The religion of the Baptists and Evangelical Christians was largely rooted in their love for and knowledge of the Bible. The anti- religious propagandists were ill-prepared to cope with believers who had a sound knowledge of the Scriptures, and were many times warned to be careful in the selection and use of the Bible texts or even that they should ignore the Bible.

By the summer of 1928 these propaganda successes achieved by the sectarians were apparently considered serious enough by the authorities that measures had to be taken to preclude more of the same in the future. The license to print Bibles was revoked for both groups and not renewed until twenty-eight years later. Within a few months all sectarian periodicals were stopped and not allowed to reappear for some sixteen years. In addition, the religious training schools for both Baptists and Evangelical Christians were 48 closed in 1929. The most serious blow was passage of the law of April 8, 1929 on religious associations which will be discussed in the next chapter.

Under these severe restrictions the sectarians did much the same thing that the communists would do where legal

^^Ibid., p. 299. ^^Ibid., p. 300. 42 existence was denied them; they penetrated into the organiza­ tions sponsored by the regime and used their membership for further proselytizing. They retained their influence on certain sections of Soviet youth. Prom 1929 through 1937

Baptist organizations were accused by the police at various times of working for Poland, Germany, and Japan against the interests of the Soviet state. The sectarians professed a

"proletarian religion" and were accused of using a proletarian mask for purposes of deceit and wrecking. During the great purge of 1937 the Baptists were made to serve as scapegoats for all sorts of technical and economic shortcomings in industry as one more means of eliminating this embarassing 49 working class sectarianism.

III. GEOGRAPHIC AND ETHNIC FACTORS

As a result of the disadvantages associated with the location of the Russian people on the Eurasian plain, the foreigner as a cunning and implacable enemy has always seemed significemt in the Russian political mind. The vastness of the plain, its numerous resources and its proximity to both

Europe and Asia offered the promise of power but lack of wealth and defensible frontiers tended to make military

49 Ibd^. , pp. 302-303. 43 strength and political centralism necessary for national independence. Suspicion of foreigners and foreign influences was inherent in the tsarist monarchy. The injection of the

Marxist idea of class struggle and the division of the world into the socialist and capitalist camps intensified these traditional feelings and had considerable effect on the internal policies of the new Soviet state, particularly in its attitude toward religion emd religious groups.

As the Soviet state expanded by incorporating other nations within its borders, additional complicating factors were introduced. Some of these are brought out by a Soviet writer in a discussion of the All-Union Council of Evangelical

Christians/Baptists. He writes :

The nationality factor, which forms a unique colloquial sectionalism, exerts a considerable influence over the formation of religious institutions. Specific problems arise in this respect in the Baptist societies of the Caucasus, which includes various ethnic groups. The same may be said with respect to the Mennonite groupings which are made up of persons of German nationality. The latter creates additional difficulties for their union with the Evangelical Christians/Baptists, in spite of the fact that there is almost complete correspondence, from the point of view of dogmatics and ritual, between Baptism and the Mennonite movement (particularly "fraternal").

A similar influence of these same factors is mani­ fested in still other religious unions. In the largest institutionalized religious organization of the USSR - the Russian Orthodox Church - differences are observed and difficulties encountered in the process of unifica­ tion in the western regions of the Ukraine where the Uniat influence is strong, in the Moldavian regions where 44

Rumanian Orthodoxy exerted influence, etc.

In addition, still other factors influence the process of forming religious institutions : the tradi­ tional historical way of life of this or that group, the social psychology of the believers. The English historian, Charles Dodd, noted in his time the influence of specific norms, ideals, customs, convictions, prejudices, etc. on the consciously expressed desire of ecumenical groups of Englishmen and non-conformists to search for agreement strictly on "biblical and dogmatic foundations". The influence of a similar kind of "unconscious" theological factors is observed in the interrelations of all the basic religious movements: between Orthodoxy and the Old Believers movement, between Orthodoxy and the Russian Protestant branches, etc.

The large variety of religions practiced by Soviet citizens, the ethnic groups which practice them, and the particular areas where they are to be found are shown in

Appendix 1.

Yu. V. Kryanev, "The Typology of Religious Associa* tions and the Differentiation of Atheistic Education," Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma [Problems of Scientific Atheism] (Moscow: "Thought" Publishers, 1967), 3, p. 62. CHAPTER II

THE POLITICAL FRAMEWORK FOR SOVIET CHURCHES

I. THE CONSTITUTION AND LEGAL CODE

Within the ranks of the new Communist rulers' of Russia in 1917 two schools of thought existed as to how best to exterminate religion, one of the cornerstones of the old order, from the minds of the people. One faction, drawing the logical conclusion from the Marxist interpretation of religion in capitalist society, felt that once liberated from the bonds of capitalism, people would understand that religion was their enemy and would cleanse their minds of religious superstition.^ They advocated a procedure of separating religion from the state and undermining its material existence, but not much else. The second faction felt that the defeated bourgeoisie would resort to religion as a means of exploiting the political inexperience of the workers. To prevent this would require forceful intervention in the struggle between religion and Communism and adoption of an active anti-religious policy. Both factions recognized the

^N. S. Timaaheff, Religion in Soviet Russia (New York; Sheed and Ward, 1942} , p. 21.

45 46 2 need for caution in their respective approaches.

This issue was debated in the constitutional committee where the more moderate strategy prevailed. The end result

in the constitution of the RSFSR of July 10, 1918 was Article

13 as revised by Lenin which guaranteed the freedom of ■ 3 religious and anti-religious propaganda. The Communist

party in its first program in 1903 had put forth a demand for

the separation of the church from the state and of the school

from the church along with guaranteeing freedom of conscience

to all citizens.^ The basic document of the Soviet state which defined the position of religion and the church in the

U.S.S.R. was the decree of the Soviet of Peoples' Commissars

of the RSFSR "On the Separation of the State and the School

from the Church" issued on January 23 (Februairy 5) , 1918 over 5 Lenin's signature. The complete text of this decree is

given below. On the surface, the wording of Article 13 of the

July, 1918 constitution appeared to equalize religious and

anti-religious propaganda but the relative strengths of the

new state and the old church made the contest far from equal.

^Ibid., p. 22. ^Ibid. 4 I. P. Tsaroeryan, ed., Stroitel'stva Kommunizma i Preodolenie Religioznykh Perez^i^ov (Building Communism and Overcoming Religious Survivals) (Moscow: "Science" Publishing House, 1966), p. 10.

^Ibid., p. 22. 47

Decree of the Soviet of People's Commissars on Separation of the Church from ^he State and of the School from the Church, January 23 (February 5), 1918.b

1. The church is separate from the state.

2. It is prohibited to enact on the territory of the republic local laws or regulations which would put any restraint upon, or limit freedom of conscience or establish any advantages or privileges on the grounds of the religion of citizens.

3. Each citizen may confess any religion or no religion at all. Loss of any rights as the result of confessing a re­ ligion or the absence of a religion shall be revoked. The mention in official papers of the religion of a citizen is not permitted.

4. The actions of the government or other organizations of public law may not be accompanied by any religious rites or ceremonies.

5. The free performance of religious rites shall be granted so long as it does not disturb public order and infringe upon the rights of citizens of the Soviet Republic. In such cases, local agencies are authorized to take the necessary measures to secure public order and safety.

6. No person may evade his duties as a citizen on the grounds of his religion. Exceptions to this provision, and only under the condition that a certain duty of a citizen shall be substituted by another, may be permitted by the decision of a people's court.

7. Religious oaths shall be abolished. Only a solemn vow may be given in cases where it is necessary.

8. The acts of civil status shall be kept solely by civil agencies.

9. The school shall be separate from the church. The teach­ ing of religion is prohibited in all state, municipal or private educational institutions where a general education is given. Citizens may give and receive religious instruction privately.

I. I. Brazhnik, F. I. Dolgikh, eds., O religii (On Religion) (Moscow: State Publishing House for Political Literature, 1963), pp. 502-503. 48

10. All ecclesiastical and religious associations are sub­ ject to regulations pertaining to private societies and unions, and shall hot enjoy any advantages or receive any subsidies either from the state or from local self-governing institutions.

11. The compulsory levying of fees or impositions to benefit ecclesiastical and religious associations as well as any kind of coercion or infliction of punishment by these associations upon their members is prohibited.

12. No ecclesiastical or religious associations shall have the right to own property. Such associations shall not enjoy the rights of a legal entity.

13. All property belonging to churches and religious associa­ tions existing in Russia shall become public property. Buildings and objects intended especially for religious worship shall be turned over by special decision of local or central authorities, free of charge, for use by the religious associations concerned.

Chairman of the Soviet of People's Commissars, V, Ul'yanov (Lenin)

People's Commissars;

N. Podvoiskiy, B. Algasov, B. Trutovskiy,

A. Shlikhter, P. Prosh'yan,

V. Menkhenskiy, A. Shlyapnikov,

G. Petrovskiy.

Charge d' affaires

V I. Bonch-Bruevi ch

Secretary N. Gorbunov

Constitutional revisions were made in 1924 to incorpo­ rate the provisions of the January, 1918 decree cited above.

With the advent of collectivization in 1929-30 and the hostile 49 attitude of the clergy toward this policy, severe repressions against churches and believers were resumed. On April 8, 1929 a second basic law on religious associations was enacted con­ sisting of 68 articles. Some of the more significant provi­ sions are:

-1 * • t Article 2. Religious associations of professing citizens of all cults are registered in the fomra of religious societies or groups of believers. Every citizen may be­ come a member of only one religious-cultural association (society or group).

Article 3. A religious society is a local association of believing citizens who have reached the age of 18 years, of one and the same cult, religion, direction or sect, to the number of not less than twenty persons who have associated themselves for the joint satisfaction of their religious needs. Believing citizens, who in view of their small numbers are unable to form a religious society, have the right to form a group of believers. Religious societies and groups of believers do not enjoy the rights of a juridic person.

Article 4. A religious society and a group of believers can begin to function only after the society or group has been registered with the competent administrative depart­ ment. . . (Today this would be the Committee for Religious Affairs at the proper city Or district soviet.)

Article 5. In order to register a religious society, its founders, to the number of not less than twenty persons, present to the organs enumerated in the foregoing para­ graph (4) an application for registration on a form estcüslished by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the R.S.F.S.R.

Article 14. The organs performing the act of registra- tion havethe right to eliminate from the number of persons composing the executive organs of the religious society or group of believers, any individual person.

Article 17. Religious associations are forbidden: a) creation of mutual aid banks, cooperatives, industrial associations, and generally to use any property in their control for any other purpose except the satisfaction of 50

their religious needs; b) to assist their fellow members by giving them material support; c) the organization of special meetings for children, youths, and women for prayer purposes auid generally biblical, needlework, and other meetings for the teaching of religion, etc., further meetings, groups, circles, and departments, also the arranging of excursions and children's gatherings, to found libraries and reading rooms, to organize sanatoria and medical assistance. In buildings used for prayer purposes, only such books may be kept which are required in connection with the particular cult.

Article 19. The region of the activity of persons in the service of the cult, preachers, instructors, etc., is limited to the domicile of the members of the religious association so served, and by the location of the cor­ responding premises used for prayer purposes. The activities of persons engaged in the service of the cult, of religious preachers and instructors, who are habitually rendering services to two or more religious associations, are limited to the territory in which the believers re­ side permanently, and which belongs to the particular religious associations.'

The new regulation meant that the Church no longer had a right to circulate religious propaganda which had been explicitly recognized by the constitution of July 10, 1918 and

Q the revised constitution of May 11, 1925. A constitutional amendment adopted on May 22, 1929 declared "freedom of religious worship and anti-religious propaganda" for all citizens. This had the practical effect of making illegal any replies in speech or writing which either church

7 Full text of this decree is available in International Conciliation (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1930), No. 261, pp. 303-317. g N. S. Timasheff, o£. cit., p. 41. 51 representatives or individual believers might make to the attacks on religion in the various anti-religious publica- 9 tions. When the Stalin constitution of 1936 was promulgated, this same provision was retained as Article 124 which states:

In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the U.B.S.R. is separated from the state, and the school from the church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-religious propaganda is recognized for all citizens.^® Article 135 deals with the rights of believers to vote and be candidates for elected offices :

Elections of deputies are universal: all citizens of the U.S.is.R. who have reached the age of eighteen, irrespective of race or nationality, sex, religion, education, domicile, social origin, property status or past activities, have the right to vote in the election of deputies, with the exception of persons who have been legally certified insane.

Every citizen of the U.S.S.R. who has reached the age of twenty-three is eligible for election to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., irrespective of race or nationality, sex, religion, education, domicile, social origin, property status or past activities.11

The preceding extracts from laws and the constitution of the U.S.S.R. cover the positive aspects of the way in which religion may find expression in organized form. These

g N. S. Timasheff, Religion in Soviet Russia (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), pp. 42-4j.

^^Constitution of the U.S.S.R. As Amended by the Fifth Session of the Sixth Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, p. 97.

^^Ibid., p. 106. 52 are supplemented by certain articles in the Ciminal Code which defines actions specifically punishable in the criminal courts. For example, the Criminal Code of the RSFSR published in 1938 contained the following articles dealing with actions related to religious beliefs:

Article 59.5 Persons enrolled in barrack duties and persons freed from military service because of their religious convictions, who decline draft in war time into regiments for barrack duties and labor regiments (are punished by) deprivation of liberty for a period of not less than one year.

Article 69. Persons freed from military service because of religious convictions and persons enrolled in barrack duties who decline to fulfill generally useful work assigned to them, (are punished by) deprivation of liberty for à period of ûp to two years or correctional work for a period^ , to one year or fine up to one thousand fubles.

Article 59.7 Propaganda or agitation directed toward the arousing of national or religious hostility or disturbance and also distribution or preparation and holding literature of this character (is punishable by) deprivation of liberty for a period up to two years.

Article 84. Going abroad or entremce into the U.S.S.R. without the required passport or the permission of the proper authorities (is punishable by) incarceration in camp for a period from one year to three years. Note: The action of this article is not applicable in the case of entrance into the U.S.S.R. without the required passport or permission of the proper authorities for the purpose of taking advantage of the right of refuge provided for in Art. 12 of the Constitution of the RSFSR for foreigners who are persecuted for political activity or religious convictions.

Article 122. The teaching of religious beliefs to infants or to adolescents in state or public educational institu­ tions and schools, or breaking the rules established there­ for, is punishable with correctional work for a period, of one year. 53

Article 123. The conducting of deceiving acts with the purpose of arousing superstition in the masses of the population, in order to gain benefit therefrom (is punishcüsle by) correctional work for the period of one year with confiscation of part of the property or fine up to five hundred rubles.

Article 124. Forced collections in aid of church or religious groups (is punishable by) correctional work for the period up to six months or fine up to three hundred rubles.

Article 125. Assumption by religious or church organiza­ tions of administrative, juridical or other public- legal functions and the rights of a juridical person (is punishable by) correctional work for the period up to six months or fine up to three hundred rubles.

Article 126. The conducting in state or public institu­ tions or enterprises of religious rites, and also the placing in these institutions or enterprises of any kind of religious images (is punishcüsle by) correctional work for the period of three months or fine up to three hundred rubles.

The religious policy of the Soviet government from

1917 to 1939 was characterized by vigorous application of

the principles discussed previously. The devices used in pursuing this policy included:

(1) Direct violence - imprisonment or execution of clergymen

and active laymen, forcible closure of churches, destruction

and desecration of icons and church vessels;

(2) interference in Church life - depriving churches of legal

and economic means, hindering normal relations between higher

12 Paul B. Anderson, People, Church and State in Modern Russia (New York; Macmillan Co., 1944), pp. 18-20. 54

cuid lower levels of the church hierarchy, helping to launch

a schism, prohibition of charitable, cultural and social

activities by the churches;

(3) discrimination - official discrimination against the

clergy, unofficial discrimination against active laymen;

(4) eradication of religious education - eliminated from

schools and churches, restricted to the family;

(5) organization and carrying out of massive anti-religious

campaigns;

(6) obstructing pious customs proper to the "Orthodox way of

life.

Not all the measures were used at the same time. The

systematic use of violence peaked three times during this period: (1) in 1921-23 as a result of resistance by the

clergy to state confiscation of religious objects of value

for feunine relief; (2) in 1929-30 during the collectivization

of agriculture; and (3) in 1937-38 during the period of the great purge. The gross effect on the Russian Orthodox Church

is shown by statistics published in the Soviet War News on

August 22, 1941, as compared with corresponding figures in

^^Timasheff, op. cit., pp. 144-145, 55 14 19X7:

1917 1941

Religious associations of all kinds —— 30,000

Licensed places of worship 8,338

Ministers of cults — — 52,442

Orthodox Churches 46,457 4,225

Orthodox Priests 50,960 5,665

Orthodox Deacons 15,210 3,100

Orthodox Bishops 130 28

Orthodox Monasteries 1,026 38

The official attitude toward individual believers or religious leaders who violate the laws on religion is quite different from that shown in Western societies. According to Soviet sources, religious activities as such are not sub­ ject to punishment under ciminal law. However, the organizers and active members of religious associations are held re­ sponsible for any criminal activities committed under the pretext of religious teachings or the performance of religious

Anderson, op. cit., pp. 159. These figures are widely quoted and are generally attributed to information collected in the Soviet census of 1937 which was never published, pre­ sumably because of the high percentage of believers (about 50 million) remaining after twenty years of Soviet rule. See W. Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union, N. Y. (New York: St. Martins j^ress, 19?2) , p“ T21 b. J. Dallin, The Real Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), pp. 75-T61 Slightly different figures are given by A. Uralov, The Reign of Stalin (London: The Bodley Head, 1953), pp. 218-2x9, but tHe differences are not significant. 56

rites. Such criminal activities are classified under one of

two headings, anti-Soviet agitation or propaganda or en- 15 croachment upon the person and rights of citizens. The

first of these classifications falls into the category of

especially dangerous crimes against the state, both in older

and current official publications. A textbook put out in

1950 by the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Justice in discussing such

crimes against the administrative order places them under

article 59 of the then current criminal code of the RSFSR.

Under article 59.7 are punishable

propaganda or agitation aimed at exciting national or religious enmity or dissension, or, the same basis, the dissemination or preparation and storage of literature of the same nature. A crime falling under Article 59.7 of the criminal code of the USSR differs from counter-revolutionary agitation cind propaganda by the fact that it is committed without counter-revolu­ tionary intent. Punishment; Deprivation of liberty for a period of up to two years.

A more recent Soviet publication states that the

ideological struggle against the Soviet state was one of the

Yu. T. Mil'ko, "Scientific-Atheistic Propaganda and the Fight by Criminal Law against Crimes Committed by Church­ men and Sectarians," Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i^ Pravo (Soviet State and Law), Moscow, No. TT July 1964, p. 71.

D. Men'shagin, Z. A. Vyshinskaya, Sovetskoe Ugolovnoe Pravo (Soviet Criminal Law),(Moscow; State Publish­ ing House for Juridical Literature, 1950), p. 256. 57

forms of hostile activity for the entire duration of the

Soviet state, Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda carried out in various ways emd means, are the basic forms of this 1 7 struggle. Article 7 of the Law on Criminal Responsibility for State Crimes (Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the

RSFSR) in specifying the responsibility for anti-Soviet agita­ tion and propaganda gives clear and more complete character­ istics of the objective and subjective bases comprising the crime under discussion. Agitation is normally defined as the dissemination of ideas hostile to the Soviet state among a large circle of persons and propaganda is the dissemination of points of view and ideas hostile to the Soviet state among 18 a small or specific circle of persons. The text of Article

70 states;

Agitation or propaganda carried on for the purpose of undermining or weakening the Soviet Government or lead­ ing to the commission of individual especially dangerous crimes against the state; dissemination for the same' purpose, of slemderous fabrications discrediting the Soviet political and social order; or the dissemination, keeping or preparation, for the same purpose, of litera­ ture containing any such material— is punishable by

17 M. V. Turetskij, Osobo Opasnye Gosudarstyennye Prestupleniya (Espially Dangerous Crimes Against the State) (Moscow; Moscow University Publishing House, 1965), p. 72.

^®Ibid., pp. 74-75. 58

imprisonment: for a period of from 6 months to 7 years. Exile for a period of 2 to 5 years may or may not also be imposed.!»

Those crimes which are considered cin encroachment on

the person and rights of citizens are provided for in Article

227 of the Criminal Code. It reads:

Article 227. Encroachment on the person and rights of citizens under the pretense of performing religious rites

The organization or leadership of a group whose acti­ vities, conducted under the pretense of preaching religious dogma and performing religious rites, is accompanied by (1) causing harm to the health of citizens or by other infringements on the person or rites of citizens, (2) in­ ducing citizens to renounce social activity or fulfill­ ment of their duties as citizens, or (3) drawing minors into this group is punishable by deprivation of liberty for a period of up to five years or exile for the same period, with or without confiscation of property.

Active participation in the activity of the group mentioned in the first part of the present article or systematic propaganda directed toward performing the acts in it is punishable by deprivation of liberty for a period of up to three years, by exile for the same period or by corrective labor for a period of up to one year.

NOTE: If the acts of persons in the second part of the present article and the persons themselves who committed them represent no great public danger.

Ugolovnyj Kodeks RSFSR (Crininal Code of the RSFSR) (Moscow: "Juridical Literature" Publishing House, p. 70. This is the official text with changes as of December 1, 1963 with appendices of systematically arranged commentary on each article as approved by the juridical commission of the RSFSR council of ministers. This will be subsequently referenced as CC RSFSR.

^^Ibid., p. 91. 59

measures of public pressure (as worded In the Law of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR of 2 5 July 1962) may be applied to them.

These are the primary provisions of laws affecting religious organizations and their participants in the USSR today. Next, we shall discuss the structures of the party and government as frameworks in which these laws are enforced.

II. PARTY AND GOVERNMENT STRUCTURES

In the Soviet Union the key position of the Communist

Party has been given constitutional sanction. Article 126 of the constitution reads:

In conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to develop the initiative and political activity of the masses of the people, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed the right to unite in mass organiza­ tions - trade unions, cooperative societies, youth organizations, sport and defense organizations, cultural, technical and scientific societies; and the most active and politically conscious citizens in the remks of the working class, working peasants and working intelligent­ sia voluntarily units in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which is the vanguard of the working people in their struggle to build communist society emd is the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both government and non-government.

The party is organized on a territorial basis correspond­ ing roughly to the territorial-administrative subdivision of the country. At the All-Union level the organization com­ prises the All-Union Congress and the permanent organs of

^^Constitution of the USSR, pp. 9 8-99. 60 party organizations of the fourteen Union republics (exclud­

ing the RSFSR) , autonomous republics and autonomous oblasts

(regions). Party organizations at these levels totaled 154 22 on April 1, 1965. The last level is composed of ten okrug organizations, 738 city organizations, 396 urban and 2,434 rural district organizations. The functional organization of the party is composed of 311,907 primary party organizations

formed at industrial enterprises, state and collective farms

and government, educational, cultural, scientific and trading 23 institutions. The largest and most important Union republic,

the RSFSR, has no party organization separate from the All-

Union organization. The party organizations of the Union republics are in no sense national parties, but branches of the All-Union party, subject to central discipline and con­

trol like any other subordinate party organization.^^

The political functions to be carried out by party members are also defined in the party rules (ustav). For our purpose here we will be quoting from the version of the rules as amended at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961.

The All-Union Congress is the supreme organ of the party.

22 L. Schapiro, The Government and Politics of the Soviet Union, Revised Edition (New York; Random House, p. 62.

^^Ibid., p. 63. ^^Ibid. 61

The Congress elects a Central Committee and a Central Revi­

sion Commission. The Central Committee in turn elects a

Political Bureau (Politburo) and a Secretariat and sets up a

committee for Party control. These organizations are usually

reproduced, in modified form, at lower levels. The Central

Committee functions as the supreme party organ between All-

Union Congresses. The party rules state that the Central

Committee :

selects and assigns the leading cadres, directs the work of central state and voluntary organizations through the party groups in them, sets up various bodies, institu­ tions and enterprises of the party, appoints the editors of central newspapers and magazines, which work under its control. . .25

The lowest level, or primary, party organization is

expected, among other things, to

. , . concern itself with raising the vanguard role of communists in laüoor, and in the socio-political and economic life of the enterprise, collective farm, educa­ tional establishment, etc; . . . carry on mass-agitational and propaganda activities. . ,^6

The rules also draw together the obligations of members. Three of these are of interest to us in this study. The party member must :

1. firmly and undeviatingly carry out the decisions of the party, to explain the party's decisions to the masses, to foster the strengthening and exten­ sion of the party's links with the masses, to be

25 XXXI ~S"ezd Kommunisticheskoj Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza; Stenoqraficheslcil otcheP" r 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Moscow, Vol. Ill, pp. 337-338.

^^Ibid., p. 352. 62

sensitive and attentive to people and to respond promptly to the inquiries and needs of the working people;

2. master Marxist - Leninist theory, to raise his [the member] ideological level, to foster the formation and training of the man of communist society; to conduct a decisive struggle with all manifestations of bourgeois ideology, with the vestiges of private- • property psychology, with religious prejudices, and other carryovers from the past, to observe the princi­ ples of communist morality, and to place public be­ fore personal interests;

3. to strengthen by all means the ideological and organizational unity of the party, to guard the party against the penetration of its ranks by people un­ worthy of the lofty title of communist, to be truth­ ful and honest toward the party and the people, and to be vigilant and preserve party and state secrets * • *27

Within the party, the secretarial hierarchy, together with its full-time employees, makes up the backbone of the party— the "apparatus," in which the military— bureaucratic organizational pattern reaches near perfection. In a general sense, then, the function of party membership in the Soviet

Union is to bring all important people in the country under 2 8 the control, discipline and indoctrination of the party.

There is a, very close interlocking between the party and government in the U.S.S.R. Karl Radek, in 1921, expressed

^^Ibid., pp. 338-339. 2 8 R. V. Daniels, The Nature of Communism (New York; Random House, 1962) , pp. 124-125. A Very thorough study of the role of the party apparatus can be found in A. Avtorkhanov, The Communist Party Apparatus (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1966) . 63

it this way;

The government is the practical, organized expression of the will and decisions of the party. Lenin has said. . . the party is the brain and the government is the body, both part of the same organism. Obviously, most of the government leaders. . . are party members but they don't have to be party members, as long as they carry out the will of the party. In other words, the party and government are not identical but closely connected, and of the two, the government is secondary because it proceeds from the party.29

Chapters III and V of the constitution describe the higher organs of state power and of state administration in

the U.S.S.R. Article 30 names the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.

S. R. as the "highest organ of state power," Article 32 states that the "legislative power of the U.S.S.R. is exercised exclusively by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.Article

64 names the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. as re­ sponsible and accountable to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.

S.R., or, in the intervals between sessions of the Supreme

Soviet, to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.

The Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. issues decisions and orders on the basis and in pursuance of the laws in operation, and verifies their execution. Decisions and orders of the

29 W. Duranty, Stalin & Co.: The Politburo - The ^ n Who Run Russia (New York; WilîTam sloan Associates, l94ÿ), p. 12.

Constitution of the U.S.S.R., pp. 33-34. 64

Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. are binding throughout the territory of the U.S.S.R.

The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. consists of a president, fifteen vice-presidents (one from each union republic),a secretary, auid sixteen members of the

Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. It is account­ able to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. for all its activi­ ties. Among the powers invested in the Presidium by Article

49 of the constitution are the right to;

a. - convene sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the

U.S.S.R.;

b. - issue ordinances;

c. - interpret the laws of the U.S.S.R. in operation;

d. - annul decisions and orders of the Council of

Ministers of the U.S.S.R. and the Council of

Ministers of the union republics if they do not

conform to law;

e. - appoint or remove ministers of the U.S.S.R. on

recommendation of the chairman of the Council of

Ministers of the U.S.S.R., subject to subsequent

confirmation by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.

when it next convenes;

f. - appoint and remove the high command of the armed

forces of the U.S.S.R.

^^Ibid., pp. 55-56, ^^Ibid., pp. 40-41. 65

A similar pattern of government is followed in the lower administrative echelons for union republics, republics and autonomous republics. For administrative subdivisions encompassing smaller territory (krays, oblast's, autonomous oblast's, rayons, etc.) the organs of state power are known as Soviets of Working Peoples' Deputies. These organs operate within the constitutional framework of the union republic where they are situated. The executive and adminis­ trative organ of these Soviets is known as the Executive Com- 33 mittee (Ispolkom) . This very brief description of the structure of the Soviet government is sufficient for purposes of this study. It remains to comment briefly on some of the organs of control.

The Soviet system of government is characterized by the existence of a multiplicity of organs and institutions for checking, supervision and control over the activities of the entire machinery of administration. The party is the most important of these organs. The members of all other such organs and institutions are not only frequently party members but are subject to direct control by the party, through 34 one of the departments of the central secretariat. The

^^Ibid., pp. 79-82.

■J A L. Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 144-145. 66

first of the organs we will consider here is the Committee

for State Security commonly known by its initials KGB. This

committee is attached directly to the all-union council of ministers with similar committees at republican, regional and other local levels, The KGB is the organ responsible for

(a) external espinoge, (b) internal counter-intelligence,

(c) and the preliminary investigation of all crimes against

the state, ranging from espionage to "anti-Soviet propaganda,"

loss of documents or illegal border crossing, and certain 35 economic crimes. In the conduct of preliminary investiga­ tions, the KGB officials are subject to the same rules as other investigators. The responsibility for ensuring the observance of these rules is delegated to the procuracy, our second organ of control to be discussed.

Chapter IX of the Soviet constitution is devoted to the courts and the procurator's office. The supreme court of the U.S.S.R. is elected by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. 3 6 for a term of five years (Article 105). Supreme supervisory power to ensure the strict observance of the law by all ministries and institutions subordinated to them, as well as by people in office and citizens of the U.S.S.R. generally.

^^Ibid., p. 148.

^^Constitution of the USSR, p. 86. 67

is vested in the Procurator-General of the U.S.S.R. for a 37 term of seven years (Article 114). The procuracy is a

unified service, admission to which is confined to law

graduates (or the equivalent) and, in normal practice, to members of the party. Existing law makes the procurator

responsible from start to finish for the preliminary investi­

gation for every case, whether the investigation is conducted by his own investigating officers, the militia, or by offi­ cials of the KGB. At this stage he is placed in the dual position of prosecutor and guardian of the rights of the accused. For an individual, the procuracy is a very important channel for lodging complaints. The right of the individual to lodge a complaint with the procurator is very wide in scope and informal in the matter of procedure. If the com­ plainant has already exhausted the normal channels of redress, the procurator is required to investigate the complaint, and if necessary to take action to secure redress. It is a characteristic of Soviet constitutional and criminal law that it confers on the citizen a great number of rights but 38 provides virtually no effective means to enforce them.

3?ibid., p. 89.

38 L. Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 149-152. 68

The organizational interrelationships of the various levels

of Soviet government emd of the communist party are shown in

Figure 1.

The degree of party control over the state apparatus

on a personality basis can be seen readily from an examination

of the government posts occupied by top party members after

the twenty-third congress of the CPSU which met from March 29

to April 8, 1966. At the congress the central committee was

enlarged from 175 to 195 members and from 155 to 165 candi­

date members as compared with the twenty-second party congress 39 in October 1961. Selected members of the party central

committee and their other posts are given in Table I. At

the twenty-third congress it was reported that the membership

of the CPSU totaled 11,673,676 field members and 797,403

candidate members for a total of 12,471,0 79 or 5.4 per cent 40 of the population of the USSR. How this percentage has

39 For detailed discussions of the changes made at the twenty-third congress of the CPSU see A. Lebed, "The Party Oligarchy After the Twenty-Third Congress," Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, Vol. XIII, No. 7, July 1966, pp. T6-42'; l 1 Scna^ro, "The Twenty-Third CPSU Congress (1)," Survey, July 1966, pp. 72-85; W. Klatt, "The Twenty- Third CPSU Congress (2)," Survey, July 1966, pp. 85-91; H. Achminov, "The Party Within a Party; The Structure of the CPSU," Studies on the Soviet Union, Vol. VI, No. 3, pp. 129-148, 40 This total membership figure was cited in Izvestiya of March 30, 1966 and rounded off to 12,400,000 in Ekohomi- Ga&atâf n o . i s , p. 4, 1966. Partiinava Z M m ' # No. 19, October, 1967, pp. 8-10 gave the corresponding figures as 11,548,287 full members and 809,021 candidate members for a total of 12,357,308. 69

Council Supreme Ministers I Administrative Organs ) . Soviet of the of th e USSR USSR

SUPREME

y c e n t r a i \ /^CommUteex ^ PARTORB \ Council Union Republic \ Supreme Soviet SSR

irtk o m Ralon Exec. Comm.

PROC: PEOP LES COU

COMMUNITIES Rural & Urban Administrative Subordination I Vertical Party Controls ^ f o r m a l Appointment — •lateral Party Controls •0 formal Election Figure 1

Organ!zational Structure of the Soviet Legal System

W. M. Overgaard, The Schematic System sf. Soviet T o t a l i ­ tarianism (Intelligence Department, U.S. Army School, Europe, 1961), p. 250. •P ■P 0 0 0 •H •H *3 > > 0 O •P OP CO 0 CO P ■P 70 0 > 0 *M •P- •H 8 O 8 0 V > hJ 0 CO 0 O 0) p p 1—1 > CO H 04 04 •H > 3@ 3 U 3 3 O CO 0 CO 3 P O 6 CO p 3 0 ■M tu 04 V O -H ■P p 0 >1 3 >1 u > tH •H 04 8 -p CO •p o g to 3 0 3 3 r-l CO o CO p 04 0 04 0 s* 04 CO Q) a g 5 g p i 1 •p Xi CO 3 0 M 3 -P +j «P 0 P p 4J -p G 3 CO > «H P o 3 3 O O _. 1 o EH _ 0) g CO 3 -H 3 •H k. CO U CO CO CO H 0 0 H ■H È •H PK 0) 1 8 0 s 0 6 O P H 00 A 3 •H H •H 3 3 •H 3 O 3 CO m a 04 0 •P 0 P 0 D 04 (0 Ot*M g rH 0) (U .3 m 43 to 0 o %Q U 1—1 O f-4 6 Q 6 g g g M *• EH m M H to EH M o to u a 04 D o m o a u % oa p o u 3 H < u U O o u q o CJ 0 H K o u u o u o u p O p •H » b p o ota P O 0 0 0 0 0 0 P w o O o 3 1 :3 1 :2 5 p p P | a 0 u U u 3 ttî o 3 0 8 U »4H«p p p p p CJ p 43 3 P 43 P o o 0 o o o o o P 0 3 P 0 «k. 0 p 0 0 •rH U P •H m 8 I+» 1 1 O 0 %* •H P 43 43 •9 P P P P 0 O O P A 3 O rH O PPP P P P O P •k 04 ■k 0 i 0 O ■H •iH •H •iH •H •H ■H p P p p O O 04 >1 rH rH rH rH rH H ÜM H 0 0 P 0 0 D p p O O O o O O P O p O .g P CO fx 3 •p 0 04 04 04 04 04 04 0 04 8 O

, 04 « CO e H •# > g % g p • < > Û , < A • * g < IX P4 04 te < g » ■ & o •> >1 «k g > M . •k & >1 M 3 > 0 3 3 > 3 0 •H » 3 0 •H o P 3 04 > g I B w€. cn p O 0 0 q a N O' H rH I •H >i 3 >1 a 0 P 0 N *3 rH 0 0 § p •H 0 à O O 43 3 m g g 04 04 CO CO § I I 0) p 71 pB p CO 0 c o •H P4 CO •H D p 0 O A 0 3 U i (d m I M (U o I p 1 I i p §• §■ M CO CO Bn) 1-4I U CL ÎT El U § • . s, â CO oo S CO I g g Pu 0) crt S g u (U M 0) +> 1 iq o M r4 D p (U s i 5 P "H u 8 a s g. fl) r-t 0) S n o Ü u P4 s > nt > g 2 p ja I D I a 72 varied over time is shown in Table II.

TABLE II

CPSU MEMBERSHIP AS A PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL USSR POPULATION FOR SELECTED YEARS42

Total Total Party Membership Per Year Population (Full Member & Candidates) Cent

1917* . 134,000,000 350,000 0.26 1920 (March)° 129,391,700 611,978 0.47 1926 147,013,600 1,079,814 0.70 1932 164,500,000 3,117,250 1.90 1940 191,700,000 3,399,975 1.77 1945 166,800,000 5,760,369 3.44 1952 189,600,000 6,707,539 3.53 1960 212,500,000 8,708,667 4.09 1963 224,800,000 10,387,196 4.62 1966 230,000,000 12,357,308 5.37 1967 234:, 000, 000 12,947,926 5.53

This is the Soviet estimate given in Kommunist, No. 87.15, October 1967, p 87.15, b There were no candidate members at this time.

42, 'T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the SZSSE, 1917-1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 52-53, was used for party membership data and standard statistical year book figures provided the total population figures. 73

III. THE GOVERNMENT AND CHURCH AFFAIRS

The present lines of control from the Soviet govern­

ment to church organizations, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox,

were institutionalized during World War II. On September 14,

1943, ten days after the meeting between Stalin and the

Russieui Orthodox Church leaders, the Council for the Affairs

of the Russian Orthodox Church was set up with one Georgii 43 Karpov as chairman. For a number of years, he had belonged

to the GPU-NKVD secret police organizations whose religious

section conducted the antireligious campaigns over a consider­

able period. He had publicly stated that he was a member of 44 the Communist party and therefore, an atheist. The terms of reference for the "Council" have never been published except in very general terms. The Patriarch cannot approach directly any ministry or other official body without first going through the "Council." It also has its plenipotentiaries

in all republics and provinces, at least one for every diocesan

W. C. Fletcher, A Study in Survival (New York: Mac­ millan Co., 1965), p. 113. FormaT”appointment of Karpov was on October 8, 1943. 44 D. J. Dallin, The Real Soviet Russia, revised edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), p. 87. 74

bishop of the Orthodox Church,According to Izvestiya of

October 8, 1943 the function of this new Council was "to main­

tain liaison between the government of the USSR and the

Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia on questions of the Rus­

sian Orthodox Church requiring decision by the government of

the USSR.

On July 1, 1944 a Council for the Affairs of Religious

Cults, headed by I. V. Polyansky, was formed to perform the #ame

functions for the "Armenian-Georgian, Old Believer,

Catholic, Graeco-Catholic and Lutheran Churches, the Muslim,

Jewish and Buddhist creeds and sectarian organizations."

The Bolshava Sovetskava Entsiklopediya describes these coun­ cils as "consultative organs of the government" and no repre­ sentatives of religious bodies are members. They have rep­ resentatives attached to the Council of Ministers of Union

and Autonomous Republics and to the Executive Committees of

Kray and Oblast* Soviets. Their basic functions include

(1) preparatory consideration for subsequent submis­ sion to the Government of such questions raised by reli­ gious bodies as require governmental decision (the pro­ vision of buildings for purposes of worship, instruction, etc., the issue of materials, the provision of printing facilities, etc.);

(2) drafting for submission to the Government of laws and decrees relative to religious associations and of instructions for their application;

Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union (New York; St. Martin's Press, 1962), p . '34. dfZ R. Conquest, Religion in the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 35. 75

(3) supervision of the 'correct and timely' execution of governmental laws and decrees 'based on the principle of the separation of the Church from the State and the school from the Church' ;

(4) assistance to religious associations in resolving questions necessitating negotiations with such bodies as ministries.

These Councils also register the communities, arrange for the official transfer of prayer houses to existing, as well as 47 to newly organized religious communities.

G. G. Karpov remained the official contact between the

Russian Orthodox Church and the state from 1943 to 196 0 and was associated with the policy of limited accommodation to the needs of the church which had been instituted by Stalin during the war. On February 21, 1960 Izvestiya announced 48 that he had been replaced by one Vladimir A. Kuroedov.

Until this appointment, he was known chiefly as an expert on Marxist-Leninist ideology and problems of party agitation and propaganda. Along with Karpov, some of his closest col­ laborators in the Council for Affairs of the Orthodox Church were dismissed and replaced by new people. A few months after

Kuroedov had taken over. Metropolitan Nikolai ceased to be the Church's spokesman on foreign affairs and the deputy of

^^Ibid,, p. 36.

^®W. C. Fletcher, Nikolai (New York: Macmillan Co. , 1968), p. 193. 76 49 the Patriarch. Thus the two persons who had managed

Church-State relations at the highest level for seventeen

years passed from the scene.

In December, 1965, the two councils attached to the

U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers were combined into a single

organization designated the Council on Religious Affairs 50 with V. A. Kuroedov as chairman. Little is known to the present writer about the authority given the new council beyond Kuroedov's statement in August, 1966, that its "role

and responsibility in enforcing the observance of the legisla­ tion on cults have been considerably raised, and it has been

given corresponding powers.

The Moscow Patriarchate

In a church based on a hierarchy, the position of the

Patriarch is a very responsible one, particularly under cir­

cumstances which exist in the Soviet Union. The rights of

the Patriarch of Moscow are defined in general terms in the

first eleven paragraphs of the new constitution approved on

January 31, 1945, by the Holy Synod. The first paragraph

49 W. Kolarz, 0£. cit., p. 71. 50 Izvestiya, December 18, 1965. 51 V. A. Kuroedov, "Some Questions on Religion and the Church," Izvestiya, August 30, 1966, p. 4. 77

states that the Russian Orthodox Church is headed by the

Patriarch of Moscow, who rules it jointly with the Holy Synod.

This means that in theory the rights of the Patriarch are

restricted by the Holy Synod, but in practice they are so

broad in scope that they are limited only the Soviet Authori- 52 ties. Following Stalin's grant of legal recognition to the

Russian Orthodox Church in September, 1943, a church council was called at which Sergii was unanimously elected Patriarch.

Objections have been raised concerning his election since

neither the general rules of the church on Synods (Sobor) nor

the provisions of the All-Russian Synod of 1917-18 were 53 observed. One unverifiable report alleged that the N.K.V.D.

searched prison camps frantically to find prelates who would

submit to Sergii to increase the size of the council. At 54 any rate, only nineteen bishops attended. His reign as head of the church was curtailed abruptly by his death in

May, 1944, only a few months after his election. He was

succeeded by Patriarch Alexii (Simansky) who had participated

in the meeting with Stalin and had taken an active part in

the restoration of the patriarchate.

52 L. Haroska, "Soviet Policy Toward Religion After 1942," in B. Iwanow, ed., Religion in the USSR (Munich: Insti­ tute for the Study of the USSR, 196ÜT, p. 1?.

^^Ibid., p. 8.

C. Fletcher, A Study in Survival (New York: Macmillan Co., 1965), p. Tl3. 78

The magnitude of the restoration task facing Alexii

may be judged to some degree by the following facts. Toward

the end of 1938, after the purges, only four active bishops

remained on the territory of the U.S.S.R., while several dozen

bishops were inactive, and approximately twenty others were

in prison or in exile. This situation remained until 1942

when the number of active bishops began to increase rapidly.

At the beginning of 1945 there were 54; in 1948, 78; at the

end of 1959, 64.^^ In January, 1964 the following statisti-

cal picture, based on data as of August, 1963 was reported:

Total Numbers of Sees and Unfilled Sees in the USSR

Total Number Number of Republic of Sees Unfilled Sees

RSFSR in Europe 38 5 RSFSR in Asia 5 2 Ukrainian SSR 19 5 Belorussian SSR 3 2 Moldavion SSR 1 Latvian SSR 1 1 Lithuanian SSR 1 Estonian SSR 1 Kazakh SSR 3 2 Uzbek SSR 1 Total 73 17

55 L. Haroska, 0£. cit., p. 14.

^^N. Teodorovich, "The Structure of the Moscow Patriar­ chate, " Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 1, January 1964, p. 33. 79

Numbers of Bishops Actually Serving in the USSR and Abroad

Rcuik In the USSR Abroad Total

Patriarch 1 1

Me tropoli tans 8 - 8

Archbishops 17 6 23

Bishops______35______5______40

Total 61 11 72

The present territorial division of the U.S.S.R. for ecclesiastical purposes is similar to that which obtained during tsarist times. In most cases the dioceses are the same, and the practice of giving each see a double name has been retained wherein the second name usually refers to an ancient center of religious life located in the diocese.

The present borders correspond to those of the territorial- administrative subdivisions of the country. For example, they may coincide with the frontiers of union or autonomous republics (e.g., the dioceses in the Baltic countries, of

Moldavia, or Cheboksary); they may unite two krays (e.g., the 57 diocese of Krasnoyarsk).

In addition to the large number of unfilled sees there is a further complication resulting from a very uneven

N. Teodorovich, "The Episcopacy and Diocesan Network of the Moscow Patriarchate," Bulletin, Vol. VIII, No. 6, June, 1961, p. 44. 80

distribution of dioceses between European and Asiatic Russia,

both in terms of population and area encompassed by the

dioceses. During the Soviet regime industrialization amd

expansion of mining and agricultural centers have caused

large shifts of population from European Russia to Siberia,

Central Asia and the Far East. In many of these areas people who have migrated from regions such as the RSFSR, the Ukraine

and Belorussia now outnumber the native population. These

same migrants are also nationalities historically associated with the Orthodox Church who either require the services of

the church or are potential new members and are referred to

in the following table as "population of Orthodox descent."

From this data the average size of dioceses in the

European U.S.S.R. is approximately 82,130 square kilometers with an average population of just over two million. Cor­ responding figures for Asiatic Russia are 1,873,000 square kilometers and over 3,310,000 persons. The enormous size of the dioceses in the Asian part coupled with relatively poor communications east of the Urals and nearly half of the sees vacant make for a very unwieldy situation.

The death of the Patriarch in May, 1944, required the convening of a new church council which began on January 31,

1945, to elect his successor. This was done without incident and guidelines for the administration of the church were laid • i-f

.. Uf M ; 81

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CO a* 0 1 _ « « PÜ 01 CO « _ W 01 01 to P« to 01 01 «•H *** to N e “ *^8.3 § PiMM'âs'i oi9| giJ2 N » DM 82 down. The council was attended by representatives of major national churches throughout the Orthodox world including the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch; the Catholicos of the Georgian Church; representatives of the Ecumenical

Patriarch, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and the Serbian and

Rumanian churches. Metropolitan Veniamin, exarch of the

Moscow patriarchate in North and South America, and a number of non-Orthodox Western dignitaries also attended. The success of the 1945 council pointed out two things to the

Soviet government; (1) the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox

Church wielded considerable potential influence outside the

U.S.S.R. and, (2) speeches, statements and messages which several of the foreign representatives had had a part in could be directly applicable to the aims of Soviet propaganda.

The council had clearly indicated the general direction of future church-state collaboration with Soviet foreign policy and served as a model for the major campaign by the Russian

Orthodox Church to gain predominance over the entire Ortho- 59 dox East within the next three years. Before pursuing these aspects further, we need to ^ee how the administrative guidelines of the council were translated into functional procedures for the Moscow patriarchate.

C. Fletcher, Nikolai (New York: Macmillan Co., 1968), pp. 52-56 183 The patriarch presides over the Holy Synod which con­

sists of five permanent and three temporary members. The

permanent members include the metropolitans of the oldest

dioceses (Kruitsy, Kiev and Leningrad) and, after 1961, the

bishops heading the Department for External Church Relations,

and the Directorate for the Affairs of the Moscow Patriar­

chate. The temporary members are diocesan bishops called to

attend the sessions of the Synod on a basis of seniority.

The various activities of the Moscow Patriarchate are

administered by six departments attached to the Holy Synod

and headed by bishops or senior priests. These are: (1)

the Administration of the Moscow Patriarchate, which is

responsible for the execution of instructions from the supreme

church authorities (the Patriarch and the Holy Synod) and

liaison with the dioceses, (2) the Department for External

Church Relations, which administers the dioceses of the

Moscow Patriarchate abroad and maintains relations with

foreign ecclesiastical, political, etc., bodies; (3) the

Training Committee, which administers the Church's secondary

cind higher religious training institutions in the U.S.S.R.;

(4) the Finance Administration, which supervises incoming .

funds and assigns them according to the various needs of the

Church; (5) the Pensions Committee, which awards pensions

and benefits to aged and ailing ecclesiastical officials and workers in various institutions of the Church; (6) the 8» Publishing Department, which publishes the monthly Zhurnal

Moskovskoi Patriarkhii (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate), the annual Church calendar, missives of the Patriarch, various religious books and reference works.

From the 1950's to the present, the activities of the

Department for External Church Relations must be considered one of the most important of the Moscow Patriarchate. This will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.

The All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians/Baptists (AUCECB)

Creation of the Council for Affairs of Religious Cults in 1944 indicated a desire on the part of the government to centralize and combine where possible ecclesiastical and sectarian organizations as a means of facilitating political control and police surveillance of all organized religions in the U.S.S.R. The non-Orthodox groups under the purview of this Council included Catholics, Protestant sects such as

Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites, Baptists and other,

Russian sects, Jews, Moslems and several less numerous groups.

Within this mixture of religious beliefs there also exists a wide range of attitudes toward the Soviet government cind the policies it pursues. One of the primary jobs, therefore.

Teodorovich, "The Structure of the Moscow Patriar­ chate," Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 1, January, 1964, pp. 31-32. 85 of the "Council" is to acquire detailed knowledge on various church personalities and to assess their reliability from the regime's point of view, which church leaders should be allowed to travel abroad, etc. Once the Russian Orthodox Church had been made subservient to the state, the government turned its attention to the sectarians.

The first mass baptism in the Ukraine took place in

1871 under the leadership of Johann Gerhard Oncken. In the

Caucasus the Baptist movement began in 1867 with the baptism of N. I. Voronin. The Russiem Evangelical movement was begun in St. Petersburg during two visits of the Englishman, Lord

Rads took, to Russia in 1874-78 where he had a profound in­ fluence on Pashkov, a colonel of the Guards, who took the movement to the poorer classes of the population. The Union of Russian Baptists was founded in 1884 but remained illegal until religious toleration was proclaimed in 1905. Their first open congress was held that year and was attended by a hundred delegates. A local Evangelical Christian organiza­ tion had existed in St. Petersburg from 1908 and a national organization was founded in 1909 as a result of the First

All-Russian Congress of Evangelical Christians. After this the number of adherents grew rapidly so that by January 1,

H?. Kolarz, 0£. cit., pp. 284-285, 86

1912 official information listed 114,652 Baptists emd 30,715

Evangelicals. The most probable number of Evangelical 6 2 Christians in Russia by 1917 was between 150-200 thousand.

For the space of a decade the Evangelical Christians and

Baptists were successful in their propaganda battle with the communist regime. In the summer of 1928 and particularly after passage of the law of April 8, 1929 the attitude of the regime changed radically.

The last Evangelical Christian congress took place in

1930, and the last plenary meeting of the "All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians" was held in 1931. The central organization of the Baptists stopped all activity in 1935 and the Baptist Moscow branch folded up in 1936 after the state had confiscated the Baptist house of prayer.A

Soviet source corroborates the fact that "in the mid-thirties the Union of Baptists ceased to exist. In May, 1942 leaders of the Baptist church proposed to the Council of Evangelical

Christians that they undertake to care for the Baptist congre­ gation."^^ At the end of October 1944, the two groups were

g O L. N. Mitrokhin, Baptizm (Baptism) (Moscow: Publish­ ing House for Political Literature, 1966), p. 65.

Kolarz, o p . cit., p. 303.

^*L. N, Mitrokhin, og.» cit., p. 76. allowed to hold a conference in Moscow to work out details of a merger. Delegates from the provinces obtained permission to travel in wartime from the Council for the Affairs of

Religious Cults. M. A. Orlov, chairman of the unity con­ ference revealed the power of the Council when he said:

"This Council has its local representatives attached to the

Provincial Soviets. These representatives decide the prob­ lems of our congregations and take an extremely attentive 6 5 attitude toward our needs."

The name for the new organization became the "All-

Union Council of Evangelical Christians/Baptists" (AUCECB).

The Evangelical Christians obtained a slight predominance for two reasons: (1) they were numerically superior, and (2) they were predominantly Russian and it was expedient to have

Russian leadership in the new organization, in line with the general trend of development in the U.S.S.R. The government seemed willing to grant the AUCECB the sole right to repre­ sent all "sectarians" of the Soviet Union and lent its active cind passive support to the new Council whenever it attempted to extend its influence to other groups. The authorities especially counted on the help of the AUCECB leadership to establish a kind of order among the sectarians of the "new"

Kolarz, 0 £. cit., p. 304. 86 Soviet territories where they were particularly undisciplined and anti-communist. As a result, the Council gathered around

it a very heterogeneous crowd of religious believers who recognized its authority only in order to escape persecution.

Administratively the central council in Moscow keeps in

touch with the 5400 congregation throughout the country with the help of forty-five senior presbyters who look after as many as

200 congregations each. These senior presbyters appoint the presbyters, inspect the latter, settle all disputes between presbyters and their flocks, and draw up reports for head­ quarters. Each congregation obeys orders from the central council and collections are made five times a year.^®

Lutherans and Seventh-Day Adventists are the most important of the other Protestant churches in the Soviet

Union. An All-Union Council of Seventh-Day Adventists exists but it is not known for certain over how many members it has 6 7 jurisdiction. No information on a similar national-level organization of the Lutherans in the U.S.S.R. is known to the

^^Ibid., pp. 304-305. 6 7 R. Conquest, op. cit., p. 110. There is some ques­ tion as to the accurac5“bf“tîTis statement. The Soviet book by I. P. Ts amer y an cited earlier states that the All-Union Council of the Seventh-Day Adventists was dissolved in December 1960, "for activities incompatible with the Soviet laws on cults" and that "at present (1966) the Seventh-Day Adventist communities are not organizationally connected one to the other." (P. 82.) 89 present writer. One may assume, however, on the basis of past performance that the Council for Religious Affairs would take steps to create a better control mechanism of this sort should increasing influence exercised by the Lutherans or any other sect warrant it. Figure 2 shows in simplified form the formal and informal lines of authority exercised at the national level in the U.S.S.R. over all religion by the

Communist party and governmental organs. 90

% CO 1%

CM i

e: M o

SI l§

cQ m CHAPTER III

CHURCH STATE INTERACTION AFTER WORLD WAR II

I. INTERNAL POLICIES

The Last Years of Stalin's Reign

The concordat between the Church and the Soviet state rested entirely on verbal assurances and was a reality from

1943-47 during which the state was not opposed to the re­ juvenation of the church and to some extent helped it. The

Moscow Patriarchate assisted the regime during the war by encouraging guerilla activities behind German lines in occupied Soviet territory. Metropolitan Nikolai, who became a member of the Extraordinary Commission to Establish and

Prosecute German Crimes, signed the protocol blaming the

Germans for the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers.

The epistles of the Moscow Patriarchate helped remove Bulgaria,

Albania, and Rumania from the war against Russia and gained sympathy for the Soviets in Yugoslavia and Greece. The epistles appealed to these peoples in the name of a common religion, the common Slavonic origin of these countries, and that they had been liberated from the Turks by the tsars. ^

N. Teodorovich, "The Political Role of the Moscow Patriarchate," Bulletin (Institute for the Study of the USSR), Vol. VII, No. 9, September, 1960, p. 48,

91 92

On August 15, 1945 it was reported that a decree by

the Council of People's Commissars granted the church the

right to acquire objects needed for divine service and to 2 build, rent, or acquire church buildings. The local soviets were required to assist the congregations to repair and im­ prove church buildings. On February 22, 1946, the government passed a law ending taxes on monastery buildings and lands.

Whereas in 1940 there were no seminaries or theological academies in the U.S.S.R., in 1946 a U. S. visitor reported that four seminaries and the Theological Academies of Moscow and Leningrad were in operation. By 1948 G. G. Karpov 4 stated that there were ten seminaries. The government had paid the bill for the assembly in 1945 at which Patriarch

Alexii had been elected and had supplied airplanes to be used by the Eastern patriarchs to come to Moscow.^

2 John S. Curtiss, o^. cit., p. 305. Curtiss attri­ butes his knowledge of this decree to N. S. Timasheff in W. Gurian, ed., The Soviet Union (sic), pp. 156-157 but had been unable to find the decree himself (footnote on page 366), 3 J. S. Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, Publisher, IÏÏÏÏFT, p7~J0T,—

^Ibid., p. 308.

^N. Teodorovich, 0 £. cit., p. 47. 93

After the war the church continued to grow so that, according to Karpov, by 1948 the number of parishes had in­ creased from 16,000 to 22,000.^ The population was allowed to build chapels in some of the major cities, and the govern­ ment began restoring the Troitse-Sergiev Monastery and the

Moscow Cathedral. This gave the Moscow Patriarchate an im­ pressive facade for visitors such as foreign church delega­ tions, public, political and cultural figures, journalists, and young people. Reports in the Soviet press in 1960 indi­ cate that visitors are normally taken to see the same build­ ings. These are the ten most outstanding churches in Moscow; two to three in Leningrad and Kiev respectively; the monu­ ments in the village of Kolomenskoe; the four residences of the Moscow Patriarch; the Troitse-Sergiev Monastery; the

Kiev Pokrovsky Nunnery; some Churches of the Kiev-Pechersk 7 Monastery; and the Moscow and Leningrad theological colleges.

Other gains secured by the Church were permission to resume publication of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and relaxation of the law against religious instruction of children in groups of more than three (although the law itself was not

^Curtiss, 0£. cit., p. 305.

^Teodorovich, op. cit., p. 49. #4 g repealed).

Alongside these concessions to the Church the govern­ ment, in 1944, had started to stimulate "scientific and enlightening propaganda" to eliminate "the remants of ignorance, superstition, and prejudice," but did not exhibit an openly anti-religious bias until 1946. Outspoken anti- religious articles began to appear more often in various publications in 1947-48.^ The League of Militant Atheists, which had been abolished in 1942, was replaced by a new organization, the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of

Political and Scientific Knowledge. (Since June 1963 the name has been shortened to the "Znanie" or"Knowledge"

Society.) It was established on July 7, 1947, with A. I.

Oparin, President of the Academy of Sciences, as its chair­ man.^® In 1949 the anti-religious movement became more in­ tense with the Communist party urging the schools and the

Komsomol to take the lead. At their eleventh congress in

1949 Komsomol members were accused of relaxing in the face

g Matthew Spinka, The Church in Soviet Russia (New York: Oxford University Pressl 1956TT p. 120. 9 Curtiss, 0£. cit., p. 319-320.

^®Leu Haroska, "Soviet Policy Toward Religion After 1942," in B. Iwanow, ed., Religion in USSR (Munich: Institute for the Study of the USSR, i960), p. 25. $5 of increased activity of churchmen and were told directly

that "participation in religious rites is incompatible with

being in the ranks of the Komsomol."

In August, 1950 it was announced that the "Znanie" So­

ciety had decided to launch an intense drive against the

"medieval Christian outlook" which would be waged entirely

on a scientific basis. Propagandists would be sent to all

Soviet republics with anti-religious films, and 29,000,000 pamphlets were to be distributed.^^ The society had decided

that religion would not die out by itself under socialism

and could only be eliminated by systematic and unrelenting propaganda. The trade unions played a role in the campaign

as well, but apparently not as actively as before the war.

In January, 1953, many of them were accused of "still under­ estimating the significance of questions of ideology," and were reminded that the "whole activity" of their institutions should be "directed to the Communist education of the workers

and to overcoming survivals of capitalism in people ' s con- 12 sciousness." Shortly thereafter came the death of Stalin, bringing to an end a decade of relative tolerance for religion.

^^Curtiss, op. cit. , p. 323. 12 R. Conquest, Religion in the USSR (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968) , p.”T2. Religion Under Khrushchev

On December 18, 1953 Komsomolskaya Pravda stepped up the pace of the anti-religious campaign by denouncing 13 "religious superstition" in the strongest of terms. By summer of 1954 the themes of ridicule and condemnation of both believers and their beliefs had been picked up by the central press. All the propaganda media at the disposal of the authorities were brought into the well-organized cam­ paign including the domestic radio, specially trained atheistic lecturers and special books and pamphlets were pre­ pared. The anti-religious museums in Moscow, Leningrad and

Kiev were reopened and mobile exhibitions were organized to tour the collective farms. A typical example of the approaches used are shown by brief extracts from an article attacking the Islam faith:

. . . Islam represents an anti-scientific reaction­ ary world outlook, alien and inimical to the scientific Marxist-Leninist world view. , , Like all the Koran's teachings about life, its myths of paradise and hell have always been a class weapon ; for the exploiters, a means of converting the workers into will-less slaves. . . With the help of Islam the enemies of the workers and peasants have always sought to deceive the masses, to . replace their class and national interests with religious views inimical and alien to these interests. The Koran is a weapon for suppressing women. Polygamy, sale of brides, abduction, marrying off of children— all of these

^^I. Shatunovsky, "The Evil Eye," Komsomolskaya Pravda, December 18, 1953. barbarous institutions are sanctified by Islam.

Some trade union locals were still not militant enough

in their approach to believers and actually adapted produc­ tion schedules to accommodate the Sabbath requirements of

Seventh-Day Adventists. A union local in Tallin in September,

1954 was criticized for being "neutral" toward religious prejudices since "the religious believers pay their member­ ship dues punctually" even though obeying the "Sabbath regu- 15 lation violates labor discipline at the enterprise."

This campaign was slowed down abruptly on November 10,

1954 by the party Central Committee decree "On Errors in

Conducting Scientific-Atheist Propaganda Among the Public"

(see Appendix 2 for complete text). The decree reprimanded the party for its handling of the anti-religious campaign, charged that "gross errors had been committed in scientific- atheist propaganda among the public in many localities" and that some speakers had made "insulting attacks upon the clergy and believers who perform religious rites." No fundamental changes in the party's basic policy was envisaged for

14 L. Klimovich, "Origin and Reactionary Essence of Islam," Zarya Vostoka, October 10, 1954, pp. 2-3. Translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. VI, No. 40, pp. 9-11.

Spiridonov, "Viewing Good and Evil With Indifference," Trud, September 15, 1954. 98

"rectification of mistakes committed in anti-religious

propaganda must not lead to a relaxation of scientific-

atheist propaganda which. . . has as its aim. . . the libera­

tion of believers from the influence of religious beliefs.

No official explanation has ever been given for disrupting

the "peaceful coexistence" of the regime and the church or why, after the new campaign had reached a peak, it was

abruptly called off. Although no details are given of the

topics discussed, it is quite probable that the new ground rules were explained to Patriarch Alexii and G. G. Karpov, head of the Council on Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, when they visited Malenkov on December 11.

A few months later a long article by F. N. Oleshchuk appeared in a Soviet philosophical journal which repeated much of what Khrushchev had said in the November decree but shed some additional light on the lack of success of their 18 antireligious campaigns. One cause given for the potency of religious survivals under socialism was that they had not yet mastered the forces of nature to a sufficient degree to

^^Pravda, November 11, 1954. 17 Pravda, December 12, 1954. This was merely a two- sentence announcement of the fact that the meeting did take place. 18 F. N. Oleshchuk, "Religious Survivals and Ways of Overcoming Them," Voprosy Filosofii, No. 6, 1954, pp. 76-88. be able to secure agriculture completely against terrible and destructive effects of the elements. Other reasons given in the article were:

(a) the unregulated state of certain aspects of social life.

This referred to the contrast between uncomfortable, cold and dirty clubs and reading rooms and the clean, warm churches and houses of prayer plus a good choir;

(b) the unattractive civil registry offices where births and marriages are recorded;

(c) poor cultural-educational work eimong individual strata of the population;

(d) inefficient organization of anti-religious propaganda and dull expositions of atheist themes in the central press;

(e) administrative interference in the activities of religious 19 organizations and insulting attacks on clergy and believers.

Following the publication of Khrushchev's decree, measures were taken to increase the effectiveness and volume of anti-religious propaganda by organizing more lectures and printing more books. There was a general lack of militancy following the 1954 decree, however, and only temporary in­ creases in propaganda output were achieved. The poor showing of the campaign was officially acknowledged in May, 1957 by

^®Ibid. tdo M. B. Mitin, a leading Soviet ideologist and chairman of the

All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Scientific

Knowledge who stated that:

. . . the number of lectures on atheism and their relative proportion in the subject matter of the Society has been considerably reduced. . . Some of the direc­ tors of local branches and some of the lecturers. . . have slackened the struggle against religious suvivals, pre­ sumably assuming that it is impossible to conduct a struggle against religion without conducting a struggle against the clergy. . . Religion is not dying out of its own accord. On the contrary there is a partial re­ vival of religion as a result of the relaxation of our struggle against it.20

Some statistics on the output of the Society show 21 interesting trends:

Year Lectures Books

1955 120,000 187 1956 84,000 145 1957 - 102 1958 - 264 1959 335,000* — 1962 - 336 1963 660,000 - 1964 - 285

*First nine months

The sharp increase in 1958 output was a symptom of a greatly intensified campaign which paid less attention to the

November, 1954 decree. Khrushchev, in the theses of his

20 Voprosy Filosofii, 1957, No. 5, p. 223. 21 R. Conquest, 0 £. cit., pp. 46-48. 101}

report to the Twenty-First Party Congress made no direct

reference to religion or the current official attitude toward

it. He emphasized that

the realization of the magnificent plan for Communist construction demands decisive improvement in work in the education of the Soviet people, . . the uprooting of the survivals of capitalism in the consciousness of people, . . . the development of the struggle against hostile bourgeois ideology.22

He recommended increased propaganda among the masses

as one of the best measures for the realization of these aims,

Shortly after publication of the theses a strong attack was

launched in the press against "the activities of the clergy"

and criticizing the "lack of atheistic propaganda." Religion was consistently presented as a force hostile to the working

class, as a hindrance to the building of Communism and in the work of strengthening friendship between peoples, as encourag­

ing the preservation of bourgeois-nationalist views, and in

some cases entailing violation of labor and state discipline

causing losses in the national economy. In 1959 the Orthodox

hierarchy, monasteries and theological schools came under

attack. This began with attacks by former Orthodox priests

on the radio who justified their break with religion on the

basis of the "unseemly behavior" of the church heads. Some

22 Izvestiya, November 14, 1958, monasteries came under fire as deluding the faithful with a

"cult of saints" and "false Powers." The parish and monastery clergy were depicted as anti-Soviet and having been Gestapo agents and police during the German occupation, plus other similar fabricated charges.

> ■ ■■ The Vatican was termed the inspirer of obscurantism, of world reaction:, and the struggle against the international

Communist movement. Anti—Soviet activity, the sending of anti-Soviet leaflets to the U.S.S.R. was attributed to the

Catholic organizations in the United States. The various sects came in for their share of attention also. Preaching by these sects, according to Literaturnaya Gazeta, was re­ garded as the activity of "anti-Soviet organizations misusing the freedom of belief in the USSR." The Evangelical Christian

Baptists were accused of (a) past ties with the Baptists of the United States, Canada and Great Britain; (b) complicity with Hitler during World War II; (c) spreading their teach­ ings among Soviet youth; and (d) anti-Soviet activity. Three sects, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Shakers and Jehovah's 23 Witnesses, were illegal religious organizations. The cam­ paign was intensified in 1960, reached a peak by the end of

23 N. Teodorovich, "The New Propaganda Campaign Against Religion," Bulletin (Institute for the Sutdy of the USSR), Vol. VII, NÔ1 Î7 April, 1960, pp. 51-56. 101

1961 and continued at roughly the same level for the next two years.

Even in the face of these attacks religious communi­ ties during this time became stronger and their influence was spreading among the people, both young and old. This fact prompted the convocation of a meeting on 25-26 November

1963 of the Ideological Commission of the CPSU Central Com­ mittee to discuss the atheistic upbringing of the Soviet people and to decide on practical measures to be taken against religion. The meeting was attended by secretaries of Party central, oblast, the kray committees, secretaries of the

Komsomol Central Committee and the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, ministers, CPSU theoreticians, and repre­ sentatives from the fields of science, culture and education as well as from the Soviet press, radio and television. L.

Ilichev, the Commission chairman, presented the main report and wrote a lengthy article entitled "The Formation of a

Scientific World Outlook and Atheistic Upbringing," which appeared in the first issue for 1964 of Kommunist, the Party theoretical journal. The article is a remarkable testimonial to the resourcefulness of religious groups in propagating their faith and becoming increasingly active under such adverse conditions. A few extracts from the article are illustrative: loi . . . The measures taken by the theologians to modern­ ize • the [Russian Orthodox] Church and the participation of the clergy in the fight for peace are resulting in a certain, albeit temporary, strengthening of the Church's position. . . thanks to its loyal attitude to our system, the Church has managed to strengthen its influence on believers, obtained relatively favoreible conditions for spreading the religious ideology and stepped up its activity. . ,24 The following picture is frequently ob­ served: the number of churches and religious communities decreases while the number of religious rites performed still remains relatively high. . .25 The churchmen are demanding a critical approach even toward Biblical sayings. "Nothing that contradicts present-day common sense or causes the believer of today to smile," they say, "should be mentioned in a sermon." The Church is showing great adaptability in the political sphere. Officially, the Church is loyal to the Soviet regime, and certain men of religion even come out with "reasoned explanations" of -g the community of aims of religion and the Soviet state. . . . But where is the civic conscience of those "intellectuals" who at work pretend to be atheists but at home observe re­ ligious rites, go to church, have their children christened and have themselves married by a priest?. . .27 increased activity has been shown by sects of Western origin: Baptists, Adventists, Pentecostals and Jehovah's Wit­ nesses, who are particularly resourceful and active preachers of religious views. Rejecting the ritual and tradition of the Orthodox Church, they have adapted the stories of the Bible to modern times as much as possible. Some of them, the Baptists for example, have made propaganda for the "virtues" of man, as interpreted by religion of course, into their banner; they appeal to their supporters not to avoid work, and come out against druhk- enness. . .28 Strange as it may seem, Moslem rites have recently been held in the presence of representatives of local authorities. . . .29

^^Kommunist, 1964, No. 1, p. 46.

^^Xbid., p. 30. ^®Ibid., p. 31.

^^Ibid., p. 38. ^^Ibid., p. 30.

^^Ibid., p. 40. loa

Some of the weaknesses of the anti-religious campaign were the same ones mentioned by F. Oleshchuk in 1955. Ilichev noted the dilemma facing the Soviet leaders in their campaign:

. . . on the one hand a benign attitude toward religion, conciliatoriness toward its exponents, who are violating Soviet laws, and on the other hêmd an impatient desire to "settle accounts with" religion, bureaucracy, insults ■ to the feelings of the believers. . .30 incorrect methods of fighting religion harm our cause. They do not only fail to undermine the basis for the spread of religion, but, on the contrary, lead to an intensification of religious fanaticism, to concealed forms of services and rites, give rise to distrust and dissatisfaction among believers and embitter them.^^

Ilichev expressed concern over the increasing activi­ ties of the Orthodox Church and other religious groups among young people. He did add one new entry to the list of tactical errors they had committed:

The weakest link in our work is lack of attention to the atheistic education of children in school, as a result of which the younger generation is often brought up mainly by the grandparents. The facts show that the main center of the preservation of religiosity is the family and that the religious stupefaction of some children and the adolescents is definitely connected with their being influenced by older members of their family who are believers. In many places, there is cin increased attendance at church by children of school age for confession and the Eucharist before the beginning of the school y e a r . 32

An indication of a changing attitude, or at least a less liberal attitude,was provided by an article appearing, in

^°Ibid. , p. 30. ^^Ibid., p. 40. ^^Ibid., p. 44. 106

Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo (Soviet State and Law) which provides policy guidance to courts,public prosecutors and police agencies. The author states that "freedom of con­ science declared in our country does not mean only the free­ dom of religious denominations and the performance of religious worship, nor an attitude to religion as something indifferent or tolerable, as understood by several bourgeois scholars. Freedom of conscience in the U.S.S.R. means pri- 33 marily freedom to disseminate atheistic ideology." At the same time the author provided new instructions for the appli­ cation of criminal law to churches or religious groups;

The criminal activities prohibited by law which are committed under the pretext of preaching religious teach­ ings or the performance of religious worship shall be the basis for the criminal responsibility of organizers and active members of religious associations. Various criminals use religious groups which cannot be registered by the authorities for their hostile and antisocial acti­ vities. Some of these criminals, however, also use religious associations and groups permitted by the law, and commit crimes using the religious prejudices of believers. The crimes of leaders and active members of religious associations and groups committed under the pre­ text of the performance of religious worship may be anti- Soviet incitement or propaganda, or encroachment upon the person and rights of citizens, as provided in Article 70 and 227 of the Criminal Code.

Yu. T. Mil'ko, "Scientific Atheistic Propaganda and the Criminal Code Fight Against Crimes Committed by Churchmen and Sectarians," Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo, No. 7, July, 1964, pp. 66-67.

^^Ibid., p. 71. 109

According to the author, the prohibition by the leaders of religious groups for members to marry outside their own group, to attend movies or theaters, or to read certain books and papers, is punishcUsle as ein encroachment upon the person or rights of citizens. Forbidding persons to participate in meetings, demonstrations, and elections and any persuasion to bring about refusal to participate in peace and other democratic movements, to refuse to join the Komsomol, trade unions and similar organizations, or to resign from them if persons are already members, are regarded as incitements to refrain from political activities. The dissemination of religious teaching which may incite the believers to any act or failure to act in the above activities shall be punishable 35 under Article 227. Churchmen and sectarians are accused of avoiding useful work, leading a parasitical life and liv­ ing on the labor of believers. Such individuals may be prosecuted under provisions of the decree of May 4, 1961,

"On Strengthening the Fight Against Persons Avoiding Socially 36 Useful Work and Leading Antisocial Parasitic Ways of Life."

The extent to which criminal indictments have been used against believers and religious organizations is not known to the present writer. Beyond publication of this article.

^^Ibid., pp. 71-73. ^®Ibid., pp. 74-75. m there was little discernible change in the conduct of the anti-religious campaign until Khrushchev departed from the scene in October, 1964.

Policies Under Brezhnev and Kosygin

In the first issue of Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo ^ Pravo for 1965 6. Z. Anashkin, chairman of the U.S.S.R. Supreme

Court's Collegium for Criminal Cases, commented at length on the application of the legislation on religious worship. He suggested that the "extremely diverse and uncoordinated" legislation on the separation of the church from the state and the schools from the church be pulled together and issued in the near future and recommended that the task be assigned to the Council on the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox

Church and the Council on the Affairs of Religious Cults.

This had to do specifically with Article 142 of the RSFSR

Criminal Code and corresponding articles in the other union 37 republics. Some judges and investigators (no names given) were chided for failure to distinguish between offenses fall­ ing under Articles 142 and 143. His instructions were that

37 G. Z. Anashkin, "On Freedom of Conscience and the Application of the Legislation on Religious Worship," Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo (Soviet State and Law) , No. 1, January, 1965^ pp. 39-T5. Complete translation of the article available in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. XVII, No. 11, pp. ic-ir.------109

"criminally punishable cases of obstructing the performance of religious rites should be prosecuted under Article 143 of the code and all other forms of violation of the laws on the separation of the church from the state and the schools from 3 8 the church under Article 142.

He admitted that Article 227 of the RSFSR Code and

Corresponding articles of the other union republics presented

"a certain complexity in application" and provided the follow­ ing interpretations of specific clauses in Part I :

The term "harm to health". . . should be interpreted to mean beatings and other violent actions that cause physical suffering, bodily injury or the syste­ matic debilitation of believers through special ecstatic rites of religious zeal and spiritual baptism entailing grave consequences.

"Other infringements upon the person or rights of citizens" should include, for example, confining a believer in an isolated room, compelling him to refuse to participate in public undertakings, etc.

"Drawing minors into this group" means bringing children into a group (sect) that engages in fanatical activity and causes injury to the health of citizens or in some other way infringes upon the person or rights of citizens.

Existing legislation on worship does not permit the organization of special circles, groups and assemblies for the purpose of teaching religion to young people and minors. Nevertheless, the raising of children in a religious spirit when carried out by parents and other relatives does not constitute a crime, inasmuch as the January 23, 1918, decree of the Council of People's

^®Ibid., p. 17. 110

Commissars proclaimed that "citizens can teach and be taught religion privately."39

Anashkin reported that court statistics involving the violation of legislation on the separation of church êuid state and on religious worship had been analyzed in almost all criminal cases heard in the Belorussian, Ukraine, Moldavian,

Latvian, Estonian and Kazakh republics and in a number of provinces of the RSFSR. The actual number of cases studied is not given but "attention is called to the fact that there were less than a third as many convictions for the crimes in

1964 as in 1962."^® His analysis o f court statistics also showed that "instances of the prosecution of citizens for violation of the laws on religious worship are extremely rare, literally a handful." He stresses that conviction of these individual persons is strictly "for fanaticism under the guise of religious rites. . . and has nothing in common with the fabrications of those who falsely accuse agencies of the Soviet government of persecuting citizens for their faith.

The author admits that "the courts have not always arrived at the correct decisions in such cases. In certain instances mistakes are still made as a result of an incorrect

^®Ibid. ^°Ibid. ^^Ibid. Ill understanding of the law. " Several instances of improper interpretations are discussed in order to rule out such mistakes in the future. After these cases have been dis­ cussed he cautions the investigatory and court agencies that

"each unduly harsh or unjustified sentence leads only to the inflammation of religious fanaticism, resentfulness on the part of the believers, and the strengthening or even the intensification of their religious prejudices.

He unwittingly pays tribute to the strength of the convictions of some believers when he writes:

The exiling of individual active or fanatical adherents of various sects to other provinces of the country is not always justified and is sometimes even harmful. Atheistic indoctrination is not always carried out among exiled persons, and as a result they sometimes begin preaching their "doctrines" in the new localities. There have even been odious instances when the exiles have attracted individual citizens, permanent residents of the place of exile, to their faith. That is why, when setting such a penalty as exile, the court should take the above- mentioned provisions into account.

Nauka i religiya (Science and Religion) the monthly publication of the "Znanie" society, in March, 1956 touched off a thorough review of the basic principles of Soviet militant atheism with its attack on A. Y, Trubnikova who previously had been considered one of the best writers

^^Ibid. , p. 18. ^^Ibid. 112 on atheistic themes. Three staff writers, B. Maryanov, G.

Ulyanov and A. Shamaro, summarized their criticism by saying:

. . . the serious shortcomings of your essays cannot be termed accidental. They are a consequence of your wrong interpretation of the goals and methods of anti- religious propaganda. Your essays, published in huge editions, are harmful to atheistic education. They disorient propagandists and agitators. By offending the believers they instil hostility toward the atheistic word. They provide our ideological enemies cause to defame our atheistic propaganda.44

This set off a heated exchange of letters between Trubnikova and the, editors of Nauka i Religiya over several months, including a dozen readers' letters in the September issue and a refusal to print her letter in the October issue because of its offending tone (according to the editors). In this last issue, for the first time in the history of Soviet atheism, the magazine critized E. Yaroslavsky's book. The Bible for

Believers and Non-Believers, because of its "crude tone" which is offensive to believers. For forty years his book has been considered the best example of atheistic writing in the Soviet Union.

The next sharp criticism appeared in Komsomolskaya

Pravda in an exchange between N. Umanets and G. Kelt on May

29 and August 15, 1965, respectively. Kelt maintained that there were large numbers of believers in certain parts of •

^^Nauka i religiya, 1965, No. 3, p. 26 113 the U.S.S.R. still strongly attached to religion and that previous "crash methods and dri11-sargent's tactics" resulted in a score of zero in winning them over to atheism. Her comments on the League of Militant Atheists were equally caustic: » A serious danger was created that this blustering "league" would itself turn into some kind of "atheistic sect" so thoroughly did it adopt all its adversary's worst features of intolerance autid fanaticism. But it was enough to open the temples of God during the war, and many of the atheists of yesterday found themselves in church. Thus we see how shallow are the roots planted by crash methods and lack of genuine knowledge. . . . Many years of experience in anti-religious work have convinced me that barren, purely negative, book- and-lecture atheism will not be able to overcome religion, which is deeply rooted in a centuries-long past.45

In November, 1965, an open letter to Patriarch Alexii from two Orthodox priests, N. I. Eshliman and G. P. Yakunin, criticizing him for failure to resist unconstitutional and illegal limitations on church life by actions of the govern­ ment's Council for Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church

{hereafter referred to as CAROC) began an exchange of cor­ respondence which probably has not ended completely to this

45 Komsomolskaya pravda, August 15, 1965. G. Kelt, "The Holy of Holies Is Man.“ The article to which Kelt re­ plies appeared in the same newspaper on May 29 entitled "Don't Engage in Cap-Tossing" and written by G. Umanets, This title is a colloquial way of saying "Don't Expect An Easy Victory," referring to the task of atheist lecturers in overcoming religious beliefs. 114 day. On December 15, 1965, the same two priests sent an official protest to N. V. Podgorny, Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers, and to the USSR Procurator

General, R. A. Rudenko. Eshliman and Yakunin referred to the decrees of January 23, 1918, and of April 18, 1929 (dis- cussed in an earlier chapter of this study) , as the basic legislative documents regulating the relations between the state and the church and stated that these laws were still in effect. They recognized the CAROC as the government department set up to control the observance of laws determin­ ing relations between the state and the church, and for mediation between the church and the state in civil matters.

They prefaced detailed accounts of actions taken by the CAROC with the following charges:

During the period 1957-1964, under personal pressure from Khrushchev, . . . the CAROC radically changed its function from that of an official arbi­ tration organ to that of an unofficial and illegal control organ over the Moscow Patriarchate.

Thus, the intrusion of the leaders and representa­ tives of the Council in the internal life of the church took on forms which must be regarded as a flagrant vio­ lation of the very principles of socialist law and Soviet legislation relative to religion and the church.

The very method of using unofficial oral decrees, which the leaders and representatives of the Council chose as a means of systematic interference in the internal life of the Orthodox Church, is a violation of the principles of law. iis The actions of the leaders and representatives of the CounciX, which have been implemented by the above method, are violations of Soviet legislation on religion and the church.4°

The main body of the declaration describes eight

categories of official actions then sums them up.

In summary it is necessary to say that the officials of the CAROC attached to the Council of Ministers of the USSR, rudely breaking Soviet legislation on religion and the church have:

1) Assumed for themselves the "right" to remove priests, changing the registration of clergy from a defnintive act to a sanctioning act;

2) Resumed the mass closing of Orthodox churches and monasteries by the illegal administrative anti-democratic methods initiated by Khrushchev and, further, contrary to law, have in practice transformed the closing of places of worship into liquidation of religious associations;

3) Constrained the administrative organs of religious associations by an illegal system of registration of baptisms and other church rites, by infraction of Par. 3 of the decree, "On Separation of Church and State," in practice ^bringing in the registration of the religious adherence of citizens of the USSR;

4) Illegally hindered the free exercise of religious worship, by forbidding priests to conduct church cere­ monies in homes (except Holy Communion and Unction for the Sick) or requiems at cemeteries, without written permits from the local authorities in each specific instance;

Religion in Communist Dominated Areas (RCDA), Vol. V, Nos. 9-ld, May T5/31, 1966, p^i 74, The excerpted text of the open letter to Patriarch Alexei is available in RCDA, Vol. V, Nos. 11-12, June 15/30, 1966, pp. 89-105. This publica­ tion is obtainable from the International Affairs Commission of the National Council of Churches, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, N. Y. 10027. 116

5) Broken the principle of freedom of conscience in regard to children;

6) Illegally interfered with the administrative- financial life of religious associations;

7) Illegally limited the number of members of religious associations to the "Twenty," practically de­ priving millions of believing citizens of Orthodox faith , from participating in the right of exercise of the admin­ istrative-financial life of the Russian Church which legally belongs to them;

8) Illegally assumed for themselves the "right" to restrict the size of the staff of priests of a religious association, thereby administratively interfering in the internal life of the c h u r c h . 47

Publication of these two letters in Paris led to an exchange of letters between Paul B. Anderson, editor of

Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, and Metropolitan Nikodim, head of the Department for External Church Relations of the

Moscow Patriarchate. Enclosed in Nikodim's reply of August

1, 1966 was a copy of an encyclical sent by Patriarch Alexii to all bishops of the Moscow patriarchate. It condemned the two priests for the way in which the letter was sent to the patriarchate, for "an endeavor to inflict harm on the unity of our Holy Church and to destroy Church peace," and for "am endeavor to cast slander on state organs. . . and Higher '

Church Authority" which could be "utilized by certain circles abroad who are inimically inclined to our Church and Father­ land to the detriment of the Church and our homeland."

^^Ibid., pp. 80-81. Alexii added that "the distribution of such 'open letters'

must be definitely stopped. It is the duty of the diocesan 4 8 bishops to attend to this." On order of the Patriarch on

May 16, 1966, the two priests were released from their posts

and suspended from sacramental functions pending complete

repentance. A week later the two priests submitted another 49 letter to Alexii appealing their suspension.

Suppression of the 'open letters' was apparently not

too successful for in August 1966 twelve Orthodox believers

in the Kirov oblast' sent one to Patriarach Alexii requesting

the removal of Bishop Ioann immediately and reporting the

forcible closing by civil authorities of some forty, local

churches from 1960 to 1964. According to B. V. Talantov in

an official complaint to the USSR Procurator General, one of

the signatories of this open letter was expelled from the

Odessa Theological Seminary on May 29, 1967 for refusing to

repudiate his signature. The student, N. N. Kamenskikh, in his petition to Patriarch Alexii wrote:

I regard this expulsion as unwarranted, since I acted under the demands of my Christian conscience, sticking to the truth. Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Ladoga declared as non-existent the persons signing the letter from Kirov, but they

^®RCDA, Vol. V, Nos. 15-16, August 15/31, 1966, pp. 126-128. Two newspaper articles on these matters appeared in The New York Times, July 2, 1966 and in The Times in London on August 26, 1966.

^^Ibid., pp. 128-129. 119

expelled me, one of the signers, from the seminary for my signature.50

Talantov further reports that the churches in the Kirov

Oblast' had been closed because the oblast* representatives of the CAROC (Smirnov, Medvedev and Lyapin) "cancelled the registration of the priests and refused to register anyone else. The local churches had adequate income when they were closed and the monetary balances were put into the state treasure, An 'open letter ' from A. I. Kovalchuk, a

Ukrainian Baptist, to L. I. Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, on July 31, 1966, shows that similar techniques are being applied against the 52 Baptists. The text of a circular of the CAROC delineating the procedure to be used by oblast* representatives in

' managing ' church affairs is given in Appendix 3. The authenticity of this document is attested to by the eidtors of Religion in Communist Dominated Areas.

In March, 1966, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR adopted two decrees and a resolution concerning legislation on religious cults. Similar decrees were

^^RCDA, Vol. VII, Nos. 15-16, August 15/31, 1968, p. 125

^^Ibid. , p. 133.

^^RCDA, Vol. VI, Nos, 15-16, August 15/31, 1968, pp. 127-133. Several other similar letters of protest may be found in Problems of Communism, July/August, 1968, pp. 96- 114. subsequently adopted by the other union republics. The expressed intent of these documents was to clarify prevail­ ing legislation on cults and deal primarily with violations of the law on separation of church and state. They defined specifically which violations of the above law entail criminal liability (previously undefined) and narrowed the sphere of criminal punishment. According to V. A. Kuroedov, head of the CAROC, a French newspaper. Le Parisien Libéré, reported this as the organization of "a new offensive against Christian worship." This interpretation was not sustained by other

Western publications, notably the Bulletin of the World 53 Council of Churches in May 1966.

The first of these decrees deals with administrative responsibility for violations of the laws on religious cults.

It establishes that

Violations of the law on religious cults are expressed in the following acts : — refusal of leaders of religious societies to register the societies with the organs of authority; — violation of the regulations on organizations as established by law, and conducting religious meetings, processions euid other ceremonies of the cult; — organizing and conducting by clergy and members of religious societies special children's and youth meet­ ings, and also working, literary or similar clubs and groups which have no relation to the conduct of wor­ ship;

^^V. A. Kuroedov, "Some Questions on Religion and the Church," Izvestiya, August 30, 1966. 120

and carry a fine in the amount of fifty rubles, levied by the administrative commissions attached to the executive committees or city Soviets of Worker's Deputies.

The other two decrees are concerned with Article 142 of the RSFSR criminal code which reads:

Violation of the laws on separation of church from state and of the school from the church - is punished by correctional labor for a period of up to one year or a fine of up to fifty rubles.

The second decree provided that a second part be added to

Article 142 as follows:

— the same acts, committed by persons previously condemned for violation of the laws on the separa­ tion of the church from the state and of the school from the church, and also organized activities lead­ ing up to the commission of these acts— will be punished by deprivation of liberty for a period of up to three years.

The resolution adopted on the basis of Article 33 of the RSFSR constitution explains that by violation of the laws on separa­ tion of the church from the state and of the school from the church which entail criminal responsibility under Article 142 is meant:

- the taking of obligatory collections and assessments in favor of the religious organizations and clergy; - preparation with the intention of mass distribution, of declarations, letters, leaflets, amd other docu­ ments appealing for nonfulfillment of legislation on religious cults; - the commission of deceitful acts for the purpose of arousing religious superstition in the masses of the population; - organization and conduct of religious gatherings, pro­ cessions and other ceremonies of the cult which dis-, turb public order; 1231

- organization and systematic conduct of courses for the teaching of religion to minors, thereby violating regulations ested)lished by law; - refusal to hire citizens for work or to accept in an educational institution, discharge from work or expul­ sion from an educational institution, deprivation of citizens of the rights and privileges established by the law and also similar essential limitation of their relation to religion.54

A close reading of the text of these laws suggests that they do not provide all the clarity one might desire. The clause on the "commission of deceitful acts for the purpose of arousing religious superstition" is open to a very broad interpretation which could be made to fit numerous situations, particularly activities of some of the sectarians. The new version of the clause on the religious education of minors may also be significant. Deprivation of parental rights for religious reasons, whereby parents guilty of teaching religion to their children are convicted of spiritually crippling their children and the children are removed to state (atheistic) boarding schools, has been applied most frequently against 55 the more radical non-Orthodox sects.

On September 22, 1966, the Presidium of the Supreme

Soviet of the RSFSR issued supplements to certain parts of the

^^RCDA, Vol. V, Nos. 13-14, July 15/30, 1966, pp. 113-116. 55 William C. Fletcher, "Protestant Influences on the Outlook of the Soviet Citizen Today," Studies on the Soviet Union, Vol. V, No. 4, 1966, p. 65. 122 criminal code which gives state organs somewhat tighter control over religious activities. The text of the articles affected reads:

Article 190^. The systematic distribution in verbal form o^ clearly false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and public order, as well as the prepara­ tion or distribution in written; printed or other form of compositions of such content — shall be punished by deprivation of liberty for a period of up to three years or correctional labor for a period of up to one year or a fine of up to one hundred rubles. 2 Article 190 ; Outrage against the state seal or flag of the USSR, RSFSR or other Soviet republics — shall be punished by deprivation of liberty for a period up to two years or correctional labor for up to one year or a fine of up to fifty rubles. 3 Article 190 . The organization as well as active participation in group activities which rudely disturb public order or which are accompanied by evident dis­ obedience to legal demands of government representa­ tives, or leading to the disturbance of transportation, state or public institutions or enterprises — shall be punished by deprivation of liberty for a period of up to three years or correctional labor for^g up to one year or a fine of up to one hundred rubles.

Article 190^ and 190^, if flexibly interpreted, seem to make it impossible for those religious groups not legally recognized by the state to mass produce and distribute re­ ligious literature. Nor would it be possible for a group of

Soviet citizens to lobby or organize demonstrations as a means of seeking redress for injustice done by the authorities,*

^^RCDA, Vol. V, No, 23, December 15, 1966, pp. 181-182. 123

Both of these activities have been part of the development of the Baptist dissenter group known at first as the

"Initsiativniki" or "Action Group" whose quarrel with the

AÜCECB came to light in 1961. One of the points of their protest was dissatisfaction with the AUCECB leadership policy of acceptance of the political actions of the regime. In

1963 a national convention of the AUCECB was called to deal with the dissenter demands and, even though a new constitu­ tion was approved, the effort at reconciliation was only partially successful.

Evidence of the continuing seriousness of the split is found in a letter from Barnaul and Kulcuida in Siberia, dated

February 16, 1964, which indicates that the convention of

1963 enjoyed the support of the state as well. The letter cites the concluding accusation in the judgment rendered by the Altai District Court in Case No. 142 wherein a group of

Baptists were charged with holding meetings illegally and under unsanitary conditions:

The guilt of the accused persons is confirmed by the following evidence. As regards reactionary activity harmful to society, such and such persons (names given) declared that the group of sectarians headed by Subbotin and his active colleagues (names given) analyzed various Biblical texts, permitted arbitrary and incorrect interpretation, criticized and did not accept the new constitution of the AUCECB,

The authors of the letter add their personal comments concerning the case: 124

Since in the Civil Code there is no article against incorrect interpretation of the Bible, the Prosecutor called it harmful to society and reactionary activity, and thereby put the "incorrect" interpretation of the Bible and criticism of the constitution of the AUCECB under Article 227 of the Civil Code. The Altai Court did the same, and so it is done by other courts all over the country. . . Such is the true image of the AUCECB. Hundreds of brothers and sisters suffer in prison and exile because of the AUCECB. The coUrts, with full force, support the AUCECB, and they accuse and condemn all who do not support the AUCECB. 57

Affairs of the Action Group were managed by an organiz­ ing committee until May 25, 1965 when the committee yielded leadership to a newly-constituted Council of Churches of the

Evangelical Christians/Baptists (CCECB) as head of the re­ formed church. On May 16, 1966, about 500 delegates of the

CCECB who "represented more than 130 towns of the Soviet

Union" arrived in Moscow with the aim of obtaining an inter­ view with L. I. Brezhnev. After waiting all day for him in vain, the Baptists decided it would be safer to sleep in the courtyard of the CPSU Central Committee building. The next day they were joined by roughly a hundred believers from the Moscow church. Around noon an official said that ten leaders could be received and ordered the remainder to go home. The believers opted to wait for their leaders to re­ turn. At this point the authorities drove up in buses and

^^RCDA, Vol. Ill, No. 16, September 30, 1964, p. 124, 1 2 5 put the believers in them by force. Many members of the 58 CCECB ended up in prison as a result of the episode. It is perhaps more than coincidence that four months later

Articles 190^, 190^ and 190^ of the RSFSR criminal code were revised to provide for the possibility of other such occurrences in the future.

V. A. Kuroedov, head of the Council on Religious

Affairs, stated the "official" view of the CCECB development in Izvestiya in August, 1966. He writes that "after falsely declaring themselves the spiritual center of all Baptists, they demanded of the government that it remove the lawfully existing center, the AUCECB, and put them in its place." He went on to say that having failed in this the "Initsiativniki" began an organized campaign against Soviet legislation on cults, using leaflets, letters and various circulars distri­ buted among the ECB congregations. These eventually began to include materials of a slanderous nature regarding the

Soviet state and its policy on the field of religions.

Leaders of the group, according to Kuroedov, urged believers not to carry out the requirements of legislation on cults, attempted to organize religious processions on the streets

M. Bordeaux and P. Reddaway, "Soviet Baptists Today," Survey, January, 1968, pp. 59-60. A description of this epi- sode is translated in full in RCDA, Vol. VI, No. 10, May 31, 1967, pp. 81-85. 126 of a number of cities, conducted prayer meetings in public

places, and began to teach religion to children, in viola- 59 tion of existing regulations. In a later article he sum­

marized the efforts of the CCECB as an attempt of a small

splinter group to "excommunicate" from the church all those

remaining there for loyalty to the state. In the same article

he refers to the open letter of the priests Eshliman and

Yakunin as essentially an internal church matter whose goal

is merely to set aside decisions of the 1961 Sober.

II. EXTERNAL RELATIONS

Over the years it has become clear that the foreign

relations of any Church in the USSR are almost inseparably

intertwined with the goals of Soviet diplomacy. In a country which can be closed at any time to outgoing travellers and

foreign visitors the Church is not free to determine the nature

and extent of her foreign relations. The ability of the

Russian Church, under these circumstances to maintain friendly

or even normal relations with the Church of another country

is dependent on the state of relations of the Soviet regime

59 V. A. Kuroedov, "Some Questions on Religion and the Church," Izvestiya, August 30, 1966.

A. Kuroedov, "The Leninist Principles of Freedom of Conscience in the USSR," Nauka i religiya. No. 6, June, 1968, p. 10. at that given point in time. With particular reference to the Russian Orthodox Church, it should also be remembered that some of its own aims in its relations within Churches abroad have coincided with certain aspects of Soviet foreign policy. Two examples of this are the consolidation of the

Orthodox faith under the leadership of the Patriarch of

Moscow and the creation of a united front against the Vatican.

In the following paragraphs we shall touch briefly on this aspect of Church-state relations.

Almost a year after the death of Patriarch Sergii, a council was convened on January 31, 1945 to elect a successor cind draw up a set of rules for the inner structure of the church. Both were achieved without incident. The course the foreign policy of the Moscow Patriarchate was to take during the next three years was indicated by the attendance of representatives of major national churches throughout the

Orthodox world. The new policy in the Soviet use of religion in foreign affairs was discussed on April 10 when Stalin and

Molotov received Alexii, Nikolai and the priest Kolchitskii in private audience. The task of the church was to exploit its ability to influence the Orthodox leadership of eastern

Europe and the Near East to (1) bring all other Orthodox churches under Russian Orthodox ecclesiastical domination

(and thus under control of the Soviet state) and (2) use its IW influence in Orthodox countries to insure favorêüsle responses to and support of the propaganda campaign that would accompany the expansion of Soviet influence. Pursuance of the same objectives had a much lower priority in areas where a Com­ munist rise to power was not so imminent or where the relatively small size of the Orthodox population would make their contribution to achievement of Soviet goals less signifi­ cant.

The Orthodox churches of eastern Europe came into the

Moscow fold within three months immediately following the audience with Stalin, undoubtedly influenced in their deci- 6 2 sien to do so by the presence of the Red Army. In late

May of 1945, Patriarch Alexii, Nikolai and a sizeable entourage departed on their historic tour through the Middle

East in a special government plan piloted by a "Hero of the

Soviet Union." The three major results of this trip were

(1) establishment of closer relations with the Orthodox patriarchs of the Orient; (2) preparing the ground for resti­ tution to the Russian Church of the property in Palestine which had belonged to it before the October revolution, and

(3) creation of a good impression in the Levantine countries

^^William C. Fletcher, Nikolai (New York: Macmillan Company, 1968), pp. 52-59.

^^Ibid., p. 64. %i§ on the local Arab Christians which produced much publicity favorable to the Soviet Union for several years.When war was declared on Japan in August 1945, Patriarch Alexii com­ posed a message to the faithful stating that it was a just war and asking them to support it. Japan surrendered before this message could be made public.In 1948 a Council of the Heads of Autocephalous Churches was held in Moscow in connection with the celebration of the five hundredth anni­ versary of the autocephaly of the Russian church. The Con­ ference of Heads of Autocephalous Churches which convened after the ceremonies and entertainment in many respects acted like an ecumenical council, even though no claim was made for this. Only the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constanti­ nople was empowered to call such a council and he, along with the Patriarch of the Greek church, refused to attend the

Council. The Berlin blockade had begun in June, a month before the Council, which added a political dimension to the absence of these two patriarchs since their respective countries were aligned with the Western bloc and strongly anti-Soviet. In general, from 1948 on,the various Orthodox

6 3 W. Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union (New York; St. Martin's Press, 1962), p. 58.

®^J. S. Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, PuETxiher, 19ÉT5) , p^ To91 13d Churches have split along political lines.

One of the four general topics dealt with in the Con­ ference was the attitude of Orthodoxy toward the Papacy. Upon the initiative of Patriarch Alexii the conclave adopted a resolution accusing the Vaticcin of distorting apostolic doctrine and of disrupting the unity of the church, and charged that it had always played politics, supporting the strong against the weak;

The Vatican is the center of international intrigues against the interests of peoples, especially of the Slavs ; a center of international fascism. . . The Vatican is. . . one of the kindlers of two imperialist wars, and at present takes active part in kindling a new war and, in general, in a political struggle against world democracy.66

Thus, for various reasons, the celebration of 1948 signified the failure of the grand design which Stalin, Alexii and

Nikolai had laid out in 1945. The only areas where successes endured were in eastern Europe where the presence of the Red

Army lent a not inconsiderable worldly authority to the ecclesiastical authority claimed by the Moscow Patriarchate.

The World Peace Council

By 1948 the wartime friendship with the West had been dissipated by the severity of Soviet policies in eastern

^^Ibid., pp. 314-315. ^^Ibid., p. 316. 131

Europe, Soviet aggressivness in the Middle East and the in­ creasing tempo of anti-Western propaganda. Reaction to the attempted Soviet blockade of Berlin had resulted in abandon­ ment of tendencies toward disarmament in the United States and forced Soviet foreign policy to shift to a defensive position to gain time. A major task under these conditions would be to thwart attempts of the West to rearm and form military alliances. Soviet exploitation of the peace issue provided the Russian Church, as represented by Metropolitan

Nikolai, an opportunity to bolster its declining fortunes in the eyes of the state. Since the desire for peace and antagonism toward war have been an important aspect of

Christianity, this was an ideal area in which the Russian church and the Soviet state could cooperate.

Although there was wide-spread sentiment for peace throughout the world the peace campaign was not a spontaneous c n development. Stalin had spoken publicly of the need to organize this broad sentiment into an anti-Western instrument as early as 1946 and the Cominform had echoed this in 1947.

The Moscow Conference of Autocephalous Churches in 1948

A good discussion of the origins of the international peace movement is in Marshall D. Shulman, Stalin*s Foreign Policy Reappraised (New York: Atheneum, 1965%, pp. 80-91; Ian Pnelps-Fetherston, Soviet International Front Organiza­ tions (New York: Frederick A. Præger, Inc.7 19é^5%, p. ITT. 1 3 1 adopted a message "To the Christians of the Whole World," saying that, while the Orthodox East was inspired by the great principles of peace on earth and good will towards men,

"the aggressiveness of the Western and imperialist world strikes the eye" and that all Christians should "stand as armor against all attempts and actions directed toward the

g Q violation of peace. . The organized 'peace campaign' was a Soviet creation from the beginning, dating from the first meetings in Wroclaw, Poland. In 1950 the campaign's aims were expanded to include militant political action de­ signed to harass Western activity in Korea,The outbreak of the Korean war brought forth from the Patriarch and his

Synod a protest to the UN Security Council charging "Ameri­ can aggression" and "intervention in the internal affairs of the Korean people.In 1952, at the Nineteenth Party

Congress in Moscow, Stalin stated that the purposes' of the

'peace campaign' were temporary, and that when the time came for the overthrow of capitalism it would be either trans­ formed into something else or discarded.

g O J. S. Curtiss, o p . cit., p. 317.

^^M. D. Shulman, 0£. cit., p. 154.

S. Curtis, op. cit., pp. 318-319 71 M. D. Shulman, og^. cit., p. 246. m Many separate organizations took part in the 'peace campaign' but the chief one was the World Peace Council. The

Russian Orthodox Church sent representative delegations to all conferences convened under the World Peace Council.

Metropolitan Nikolai became the most well-known spokesman for the World Peace Council, closely following the zigzags of the Party general line. His statements, since he represented the Patriarchate, were immediately echoed by the representa­ tives of the autocephalous churches, friendly patriarchates, etc. In February 1952 Soviet propaganda began a massive campaign accusing the United States of using bacteriological warfare in Korea. A resolution in the UN Security Council requesting an investigation of the charges by the Red Cross 72 was vetoed by the Soviet Union. The 'peace campaign' duti­ fully made this one of its primary emphases for the next year.

The death of Stalin in 1953 left Soviet foreign policy in some confusion and reduced the church's collaboration in international affairs to a minor issue until a general foreign policy could be worked out. The power of the Russian Ortho­ dox Church to influence the government was at a minimum.

The Soviet-inspired peace groups exerted less and less in-> fluence after 1954 because of their obvious political bias

^^Ibid., p. 188. and as fewer people in the West could be convinced that the 73 movement was indeed free. Soviet propaganda as a whole vras undergoing a profound change as the extremism of the

Stalin era was replaced by the more subdued Khrushchev approach.

Metropolitan Nikolai continued to participate in the propa­

ganda activities of the state after 1956 but with a very

different tone— no more extremism and with greater regard 74 for balance and truth. In 1956 with a reconsideration of

its policy toward the ecumenical movement, the Russian

Orthodox Church found a new way of extending its usefulness to the state.

The Ecumenical Movement

A brief definition of the word "ecumenical" and

some history of its usage will be helpful in appreciating the position of the Russian Orthodox Church with respect to the Ecumenical Movement in 1956. Although "ecumenical," in the sense of "that which concerns the unity and the world­ wide mission of Jesus Christ," is widely used and now generally understood, that is not the meaning traditionally

assigned to the word. The word entered into official ecclesiastical usage in the year 381 when the Council of

^^lan Phelps-Fetherston, og. c i t ., pp. 22-27.

^^William C. Fletcher, Nikolai (New York: Macmillan Company, 1968), p. 169. Constantinople spoke of the Council of Nicea as an "ecumeni­ cal synod" giving the word the connotation of that which is accepted as authoritative and valid throughout the whole

Church. In the sixth century use of the word "ecumenical" played a considerable role in the conflict between Rome and

Constantinople. Patriarch John the Faster whose see was also the capital of the Byzantine Empire began to use the word as an honorific title exclusively attached to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Pope Gregory the Great of Rome objected to this most energeticàlly, since he understood the term 75 "ecumenical" in the sense of universalis. This tradition had been the stumbling block in the path of Patriarch Alexii in 1948 when he attempted to convene an ecumenical council.

The history of the Christian Church from the first century to the 20th might be written in terms of its struggle to realize its ecumenical unity. The intense and lasting hostility between East and West dates back to 1204 when the

Fourth Crusade, which had set out to fight the enemies of the Cross, instead captured and sacked the city of Constanti­ nople. The greatest Christian city in the world fell victim to Christian swords, thus permanently and fatally weakening

75 R. Rouse and S. C. Neill, eds., A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1968), pp. 735-736. 136 the Eastern Christian Empire in its struggle against Islam.

The hatred of all things Western, for which the Crusades were responsible, is still one of the psychological factors which makes difficult any rapprochement between East and

West. Through Eastern eyes, the permanent embitterment of the relations between Christians and Moslems, and between

Eastern and Western Christians appears as the main fruit of 7 6 those Crusades.

At the beginning of the 16th century the worldwide body of Christian people was divided into three great and almost wholly unrelated blocs. The largest of these was the Western bloc centered in Rome. Next came the Eastern churches whose leadership had passed to the Slavonic world with recognition of an independent Moscow patriarchate, the

"third Rome," in 1589. The Lesser Eastern Churches ranked last for several reasons. Among these are a lack of any great centers of learning, only intermittent and partial contacts with the Churches of the West, and the loss of many 7 7 of their most promising young men to Islam. The Reforma­ tion of the 16th century shattered whatever unity Western

Christendom had enjoyed and created more serious divisions than any which had occurred since the early days of the

^^Ibid., p. 17. ^^Ibid., p. 22 139 Church. All earlier divisions had taken place within the common fraimework of tradition amd worship. The most serious factor of all was acceptance of the division which became the basis of all post-Reformation settlements of religion. By the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 the boundaries between Roman and non-Roman Churches were drawn almost exactly as they have 78 remained to the present day.

Another complicating factor is the difference between the attitude of Eastern and Western Christians toward each other. The West was active and often aggressive in trying to convert Eastern Christians to its creed. The latter re­ garded these missionary efforts as acts of unprovoked hostility since, in such countries as Palestine, Syria and Egypt, the

Western missionaries disrupted the peace and unity of local

Christiem communities by increasing the number of rival groups and sects in their midst. The Western policy created among the Eastern churches a widespread impression that both

Rome and Protestantism were determined to subjugate and destroy them, and were ready to spend limitless energy and money to do so. Such a conviction was still prevalent among Eastern

Christians just prior to World War I. At that time the initiative in making contacts, both friendly and hostile,-was

^^Ibid., pp. 23-24. 138 79 entirely on the Western side.

1920 was a decisive year in the history of the ecumeni­ cal movement and in the relations between the Eastern Churches and the West. From then until the outbreeJc of World War II in 1939 the Eastern churches took part in numerous activities of the ecumenical movement, beginning with a large delega­ tion representing seven Eastern Churches who came to Geneva in August, 1920 to the Preparatory Conference of the Faith and

Order Movement. The Orthodox were also well represented at 80 Stockholm in 1925 and at Lusanne in 1927. The Orthodox participants in ecumenical affairs made valuable contributions, particularly in preparation for the Oxford and Edinburgh

Conferences of 1937. George Fedotov (1886-1951), the leading historian of the Russian Church and one of the Orthodox spokesmen at the Oxford Conference summarized his impressions as follows :

A social nature of Christianity is fully accepted by the Orthodox Church. But the Orthodox peoples, due to their unfortunate history, have lost the habit of interpreting Christianity in this spirit. Religious individualism became even traditional among recent generations. The social problems, however, cannot be excluded altogether, and when they press upon the Orthodox they nowadays take a form of aggressive paganism. The Balkan Churches suffer from their destructive nationalism. The Russian Church is silent

7*Ibid., p. 649.

®®Ibid,, p. 654. 135

and in chains. . . It is a hard soil for the seeds of social Christianity and a difficult task awaits all its workers.81

The events which occurred during and after World War

II brought about far-reaching political and social changes which greatly affected relations between Eastern and Western

Christians. The decisive year of that period was 1948, which witnessed the seventh Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops, the Conference of the representatives of the autocephelas

Orthodox Churches held in Moscow, and the Assembly in Amster­ dam which inaugurated the World Council of Churches. The decisions taken in Moscow to refrain from participation in the ecumenical movement as then constituted marked the end of the rapprochement which began in 1920. These decisions prevented the majority of the Orthodox Churches from sending 82 delegates to Amsterdam in 1948. The isolation of the

Russian Church increased after Tito's break with Stalin. The death of Stalin and the changing style of Khrushchev's diplomacy made possible a resumption of participation in the ecumenical movement.

The World Council of Churches

The idea of forming a "League of Churches" appeared in the years immediately following World War I in several minds

^^Ibid., pp. 656-659. ®^Ibid., pp. 666-667. 140

and various places, influenced by the emergence of the League of Nations. The argument was that the League of Nations might remain an empty shell unless the Churches united in creating a new spirit of justice and peace. The main pur­ pose of these early proposals in 1919-1920 was to set up a representative body to be controlled by the Churches as such, which would serve as a permanent link between them and bear a common witness to society, especially international society.

The Churches had not yet been sufficiently drawn out of their isolation for the idea of a permanent link between them to 83 seem other than utopian. During the 1930's the emergence of new and violent nationalism which demanded a nationalized

Church entirely subservient to the state underscored the spiritual dangers inherent in the idea of purely national churches with no sense of cohesion or solidarity with each other. The only remedy for the emergence of the new totalitarianism was a new affirmation and manifestation of universality as an essential characteristic of the Church,®'^

The proposals drawn up by Dr. J. H. Oldham in the summer of 1936 for a review of the ecumenical movement since the Stockholm and Lusanne Conferences culminated in a meeting at Westfield College, London, on July 8-10, 1937. The

®^Ibid., p. 697. ^^Ibid., p. 700. 1 4 1

Committee of Thirty-five, who had executed the review pro­ posed by Dr. Oldham, represented the main streams of the

ecumenical movement. The thoughts of this group rapidly con­ verged on the idea that the time had come to form a World

Council of Churches (hereafter referred to as WCC) as a permanent organ of the Churches for the accomplishment of

their common ecumenical task. The main architects of the plan were William Temple, J. H. Oldham, William Adams Brown and Samuel McCrea Cavert, General Secretary of the Federal

Council in America, who first suggested the name "World

Council of Churches." Details of the plan were presented at the Oxford and Edinburgh Conference shortly thereafter and subsequently promulgated to the Churches for approval. This would require much time and discussion so a Provisional Com­ mittee was created to continue- the work of the WCC until a 85 General Assembly could be convened.

In January 1939 at the second full meeting of the

Provisional Committee of the WCC in St. Germain it was de­ cided to set a tentative date of August 1941 as the date for the first Assembly. From 1940 to 1945 the WCC was unable to function normally through its responsible committees. Con­ tinuing reductions in the staff forced cancellation of the-

GSlbid., p. 704. 142 plan for holding the Assembly in 1941 and for a time it was questionable whether the provisional structure of the Coun­ cil would be firm enough to stand the strain. The common defense against the ideological attack on the Church Univer­ sal, the common defense and the struggle to be the Church proved to be more effective in building ecumenical convic-

Q g tions than any number of conferences, committees or journeys.

The first post-war meeting of the Provisional Committee was held in Geneva in February 1946 at which the summer of 1948 was decided upon as the date for the first Assembly of the

WCC to be held in Amsterdam.

At the meeting in 1946 the Provisional Committee had instructed its officers to make a special approach to the

Orthodox Churches, hoping they would take their rightful place in the Council. The 1948 Conference of the Moscow

Patriarchate declared the World Council of Churches to be

"a predominantly Protestant body. . . engineered and financed by the "Mason-Methodist" John R. Mott for the purpose of establishing a Universal Protestant collective Vatican."

The plenary session of the Conference adopted a resolution which further asserted that "the WCC aims at becoming a politically-oriented, capitalistic "Ecumenical Church,', , .

®®Ibid., p. 709. 143 an institution within the State, which is in one way or 87 another tied to it and which possesses secular influence."

At the Assembly in Amsterdam the political orientation of the representatives from various countries came out as they pre­ sented their views on the international situation. J. L.

Hromadka the Czech theologian, declared that the West was already bankrupt. Russian propagandists made particular capital of the part that John Foster Dulles had played in the early days of the WCC. Archpriest Razumovsky, writing in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, said of Mr. Dulles' speech at Amsterdam;

the circles of Mr. Dulles decided to establish an universal organization, i.e., the World Council of Churches, which would disorganize the growing unity of the world's political rebirth.®®

From this time on the WCC came in for its full share of the

Soviet criticism levelled at any institution in which America played a part.

In 1958 after a visit by a delegation from the WCC

Metropolitan Nikolai announced to the press that he would recommend that his church join, in spite of differences of

87 Matthew Spinka, The Church in Soviet Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956TT P» 142.

®®Ibid., p. 145. 14-4 89 view on such problems as the nuclear test ban. During the next year further discussions took place and a Russian delegation went to Rhodes to attend the WCC Central Committee meeting in August 1959. In his speech of greeting Metropoli­ tan Nikolai stated;

Our common moral task is the struggle to stop the nuclear weapons test and to achieve their complete abolition. Therefore we Orthodox entirely share and support the efforts of the WCC toward this aim.

In the meantime, I think it necessary to express the hope that the social concern of the WCC will not overshadow the main task of the ecumenical movement, which aims at the unity of faith that is divided by differing interpretations. We Christians must stand above the political contradictions of our time and give to the divided peoples an example of unity and peace, brotherhood and love, removing ourselves from all self-sufficient isolationism and unfriendly relations to each other.80

A WCC delegation went to the Soviet Union in December

1959 and on March 30, 1960 Geneva received a formal applica­ tion from the Russian Orthodox Church for membership. They were admitted at the Third General Assembly held in New Delhi in November-December 1961. Nikolai had been replaced by

Metropolitan Nikodim well before the New Delhi meeting. The latter was asked at a press conference about the state's <

______89 William C. Fletcher, Nikolai (New York: Macmillan Company, 1968, p. 171. 90 Michael Bordeaux, O p i ^ of the People (New York : Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. , 1^66TT pp. 224-2^5. 1.45

attitude toward his Church's joining the WCC and replied:

The Church is completely free from state interference, and it is necessary to say that we are quite indepen­ dent in our inner life. Therefore it is not possible to speak of state approval or disapproval of our Church's action in joining the Council. In spite of this assertion by Nikodim, it would have been

impossible for the Russian Orthodox Church to join the WCC without approval from the government.

Michael Bordeaux has postulated three things the

Communist Party may hope to gain from this participation:

1) An insight into the world-wide ecumenical movement to

find out where it will lead and why it may be important;

2) an influence over the WCC which would be beneficial to

the cause of Communism;

3) the approval of the Christian world for Russian church

leaders as a means of diverting attention from the persecu­ tion of believers inside the Soviet Union.

The first objective is accomplished by the permanent representative of the Russian Church who is resident at WCC headquarters in Geneva to ensure that any important Christian 92 developments anywhere in the world is reported to Moscow.

The question of influence over the WCC is much more complex.

Discussion of political issues is part of the agenda for'the

*llbid., p. 225. ^^Ibid., p. 226. 146

WCC and the crucial question seems to me to be the ideological and political acumen of the non-Communist representatives.

It is a well-known fact that anyone who represents the Soviet

Union abroad in any official capacity has already proven his reliability to the regime before he gets the assignment. To expect a Soviet representative to the World Council of Churches to restrict his efforts to things ecclesiastical would be extremely naive in view of the recent history of the Russian

Church.

The third point is the most serious but seems to have been proved by events which transpired after the Russian

Church joined the WCC. The appearance of the Russian delega­ tion received world-wide press coverage. This well-publicized

"freedom" given the church by the state created a consider­ able amount of good will among those assembled and in the countries they represented. At the same time in the USSR an intense antireligious campaign had been in progress since

1958-1959 and continued at roughly the same level until

1965, aimed both at Orthodox and sectarian believers. Many other documents besides those cited in this study as well as the Soviet anti-religious press itself attest to this.

In August, 1962 the Lutheran Churches of Latvia and

Estonia, the Russian Baptist Church, the Georgian Orthodox

Church, and the Armenian Apostolic Churches also joined the 1 4 9 WCC which may make possible a genuine ecumenical movement within the Soviet Union. The WCC itself has gained through having a large Orthodox Church as a full member. The World

Council is now as well balanced as it can be until the Roman

Catholic Church applies for membership. Relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the WCC are delicately balanced but they do offer a slim hope for millions of persecuted 93 believers.

^^Ibid., pp. 229-230. CHAPTER IV

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

I . SUMMARY

We have looked in some detail at the interaction be­ tween church and state in Russia on the eve of and after the revolution in October, 1917. The Bolshevik attitude toward religion, especially the Russian Orthodox Church, was strongly biased by the latter's intimate identification with and de­ fense of the pre-1917 social and political order. They felt that the church in Soviet society was a social ill which attempted to serve the needs of the backward masses and diverted them from socially useful work. Lenin felt that one of the immediate problems in 1917 was to destroy the power of the Orthodox Church as an enemy capable of generating sup­ port among the population against Bolshevism. The decrees of February 5, 1918, "On Separation of the Church from the

State and the School from the Church," and the Law on Re­ ligious Associations dated April 8, 1929, removed the Church's means of subsistence, disrupted its lines of communication and its central organization, and established administrative mechanisms to keep Church activities under surveillance.

By 1929 Stalin had eliminated in one way or another most of his rivals and was ready to start his program of

149 14S rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agri­ culture. The Church was one of the social institutions which could not be completely assimilated into the evolving totalitarian system and therefore was subjected to a con­ centrated attack which continued until the beginning of World

War II. Two schools of thought developed during this period

— those who urged a continuous, intense emti-religious strug­ gle and opposed all forms of cooperation with any church as a matter of principle, and the pragmatists who favored sub­ ordinating the antireligious campaign to the interests of the class struggle. The latter were less optimistic about any early success of the Ccunpaign and tried to find ways of using the Church's influence at home and abroad. World War

II halted the anti-religious campaign and actually helped the Russian Church regain some of the ground it had lost.

As a result of the concordat reached between Patriarch

Sergii and Stalin in 1943, supervision over Church affairs by the state was raised to the national level with the creation of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian

Orthodox Church headed by G. G. Karpov, formerly associated with the secret police as a specialist in ecclesiastical affairs. As part of a policy of centralization of control over church affairs, the Baptist and Evangelical Christian

Churches were allowed to unite under all-union leadership . ISO and a Council for Affairs of Religious Cults under I. Polyansky in 1944. These two organizations were merged to form a single Council for Religious Affairs under V. A. Kuroedov in

January 1966. Dissent movements have appeared in the Russian

Orthodox Church and among the Baptists in opposition to the trend toward greater and greater state control over church affairs.

The Russian Orthodox Church had achieved, with con­ siderable assistance from the Soviet government, a dominant position in the Orthodox world by 1948. The political polari­ zation resulting from Cold War tensions precluded participa­ tion of the Russian Church in the ecumenical movement. The loyalty of the Church to the regime during this period was shown by the extensive propaganda activities engaged in by

Metropolitan Nikolai (Yarushevich), By 1958 the political atmosphere was such that Metropolitan Nikolai could recommend openly that the Russian Church join the World Council of

Churches. The Orthodox Church joined in 1961 and in August,

1962, the Lutheran Churches of Latvia and Estonia, the Russian

Baptist Church, the Georgian Orthodox Church, and the Armenian

Apostolic Church also joined.

This activity on the part of the churches has been paralleled by an intense anti-religious campaign since 1958-

1959. The campaign has made wide use of propaganda directed 1 5 1 against both Orthodox and sectarian believers. In addition, several articles of the Criminal Code have been revised to give the authorities tighter control over religious groups.

Methods used in this campaign have included arbitrary mis­ interpretation and manipulation of existing laws, issuing confidential verbal orders to religious leaders, discourag­ ing the participation of minors in religious rites, and reduc­ tion of the number of monasteries, clergy and parishes.

Changes in the Criminal Code broadened the definition of

"crimes committed under the guise of performing religious rites" and outlawed the production and distribution of religious literature by unregistered religious groups.

The question arises as to the numbers of believers who remain in the Soviet Union. This is a difficult question to answer for many reasons. The fact is, there exists no reliable means of gathering this kind of information within the USSR and it is certainly much more difficult to put to­ gether this sort of data from the outside. Official Soviet statistics from the press probably reflect only the member­ ship of legal (i.e., registered) religious groups. There is also a possible tendency on the part of the government and the

"illegal" religious groups to inflate the figures which seem most favorable to their point of view. The statistical data presented below should be read with these cautions in mind. 152

In 1961 when the Russian Orthodox Church joined the

World Council of Churches it was claimed that it had 20,000 places of worship and 30,000,000 "regular adult worshippers."

In 1962 the Armenian Georgian Church cited a total membership of 4,500,000 (1,400,000 were living outside the USSR) while the Georgian Orthodox Church gave no membership but had 100 churches.^ A figure of 11,500 Russian Orthodox places of 2 worship was reported for 1962 and about 10,000 by the begin­ ning of 1964^ as opposed to 54,174 in 1914 with some 87,123,604 baptized Orthodox believers. Some 25 to 30 million people can historically be regarded as Moslems. Officially there are said to be 400 mosques and "about 1,000 unregistered groups practicing religious observances in their homes.Soviet broadcasts to foreign audiences in recent years have given the number of functioning Catholic churches as 1,235, the number of priests as 1,270 and the number of Catholics in the Soviet

^Robert Conquest, Religion in the USSR (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968) , p. 6*4. 2 Michael Bordeaux, Opium of the People (New York : Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 2341

^D. Konstantinov, "The Results of Soviet Persecution of the Orthodox Church," Bulletin (Institute for the Study of the USSR), Vol. XII, No. 5, May 1965, p. 40. 4 Spravochnik Propagandists i Agitators (Moscow, 1966), p. 149. Cited by Geoffrey Wneeler ih "SurveyTNo. 66, January, 1968, p. 67. 153 Union as about 4,000,000.^ The AUCECB gave a figure of

545,000 full members when it applied for membership in the

World Council of Churches in 1962. Outside sources have estimated the number of Soviet Baptists at 1,500,000 full members with a total community of 3,000,000.^ This latter figure agrees with a total estimate given in Bratskii Vestnik in 1954 which included members of believers' families and 7 other people near to their brotherhood. Whatever the true numerical strength is in this case, the hostility of the regime is out of all proportion to a movement whose adherents are less than one quarter of one per cent of the total popula­ tion.

The relative strengths of the churches and the state

(assisted by the Party) in their continuing struggle offer little encouragement to the churches. It appears that the only real basis for hope lies in the ability of the churches themselves to attract today's youth and thereby bring new blood into the religious movements. The Moscow Patriarchate has seen a steady increase in recent years in the number of

^Robert Conquest, 0£. cit., p. 98.

^Ibid., p. 108. 7 M. Bordeaux and P. Reddaway, "Soviet Baptists Today," Survey, No. 66, January 1968, p. 49. 1 5 4 young bishops. The composition by age group as it has varied

over time is as follows: Percentage Age Group 1949 I960 1965

30-49 9 15 28 50— 69 60 — 70-89 30 33 23 90—99 1 —— ——

The higher educational level of the members of the

Patriarchate in 1965 is indicated by the fact that 2 4.0 per cent had both a secular and theological higher education com­ pared with only 11.5 per cent in the 1941-52 period and 17.1 per cent in 1953. There is a relatively large number of persons ordained as priests or monks at a young age who de­ voted their entire lives to the Church long before they became bishops. These bishops have comprised am estimated 53.3 per cent since 1953, as opposed to 2 8.4 per cent in the period

19 41-52. Another group of young bishops are those fulfilling political functions in the Moscow Patriarchate such as Metro­ politan Nikodim, head of the Department for External Church

Relations. These are said by some to be purely careerist bureaucrats and are termed "red cassocks." In the process of replenishing the ranks of these "red cassocks" with young bishops, the state tends to increase its influence over the

Church in the upper hierarchy. Anti-religious articles in the Soviet press indicate that young, educated ordinary 1155’. priests are also causing the authorities concern due to

O their success with both older and young believers.

For comparable statistics on the Evangelical Christian/

Baptists we must turn to the results of Soviet sociological studies on modern sectarianism. These results provide the following picture of the largest of the ECB communities, 9 located in the city of Voronezh:

Age Groups 1955 1964 ______in %

Up to 30 14.6 6

30 to 50 33.6 21

over 50 51.8 73

In the Voronezh community, persons who joined the movement before the war comprise 39 per cent of the total, which is rather typical. Persons who have been in the sect for 20-

30 years comprise approximately 15 per cent of the number, 30-

40 years— 7 per cent and 40 years and over— 17 per cent. ,

Û N. Teodorovich, "The Rejuvenation of the Russian Orthodox Clergy," Studies on the Soviet Union, Vol. V, No. 4, 1966, pp. 35-42. 9 A. I. Klibanov, L. N. Mitrokhin, "Schism in Contempo­ rary Baptism," Voprosy Nauchnogo Ateizma (Moscow: "Thought" Publishers, 1967), p. 92. lü« The greater part of the believers entered the church during the initial period of NEP.^®

In 1957 the dissident Baptists pulled away from the

AUCECB and, in the Voronezh community at least, formed their own "Free Church" out of roughly one-third of the parent group.

In 1958 the composition of the "Free Church" by age group was as follows:

up to 40 19.6%

40 to 50 15.0%

50 to 60 28.0%

over 60 37.4%

Almost half of this religious organization is made up of people able to work. Thirty-four per cent of the followers of the "Free Church" (Initsiativniki) were baptized in the prewar period and joined the sect in the 1920's and 1930's.

Another source of worry for the regime is the attempts of the dissident Baptists to "rejuvenate" the communities by concentrating their chief attention on recruiting the youth.

They try to impart their outlook to the youth, set up Sunday schools for young children, and arrange seminars for youth groups

Youths are more widely represented in the dissident Baptist groups than in the Evangelical Christian/Baptist communities.

^°Ibid., p. 97. ^^Ibid., pp. 99-100. 157

Youth comprise more than half of several groups of the 12 Initsiativniki. There is some doubt, however, that in a modern technological society any large percentage of the population would be drawn to a religious group such as these dissident Baptists. This need not necessarily decrease the influence they can have on society. Even under conditions of almost complete freedom, the Communist Party has never had more than a small percentage of the population in its ranks.

This possibility of the Baptist movement becoming a strong competitor to communism in Soviet society may explain the virulence of the anti-religious campaign against the Baptists in the last few years.

II. CONCLUSIONS

Daniels has written that "communism in power displays all the traits of a state religion. The old rebels become the new oppressors, doctrine becomes orthodoxy, and heresy is hunted down with all the inquisitorial resources at the 13 disposal of the state machinery." Before 1917 Orthodoxy was the state religion and under law was the only church permitted to proselytize among people of other faiths. After the revolution, atheism became in effect the official faith

^^Ibid., p. 105.

^^Robert V. Daniels, The Nature of Communism (New York : Vintage Books, 1962), p. 52TÜ 15B: and all religions became heresies. Only the official faith in the USSR has the right to proselytize and provide instruc­ tion for the young. The position occupied by V. A. Kuroedov is functionally the same as that of the Over-Procurator of tsarist times but without the prestige and broad powers enjoyed by Pobedonostsev for many years.

It is very difficult, if indeed it is possible at all, to discuss strictly church-state relations in the Soviet

Union apart from the influence of the Communist Party which controls the government directly by the simple mechanism of having the members of the top decision-making body of the

Party also fill the key governmental posts. The Party also exercises complete control over central newspapers and magazines and all other means of communication. Thus, in actual practice, the Party formulates the laws governing religious activities in the USSR, interprets them in specific applications and controls what appears in the press concern­ ing actions taken against believers under these laws.

Freedom of conscience in the religious sphere is interpreted to mean freedom to disseminate anti-religious propaganda.

Churches in the Soviet Union, if they are to exist legally, must first satisfy the state that their ministry to the congregation they serve will not adversely affect the policies the government is pursuing at that point in time,- 153L either internally or externally. There is a tendency because of this for the state to intrude more and more into the internal life of the churches, contrary to existing legislation on these matters. Within the churches there are apparently sizeable numbers of believers who object to the interference from the state in religious affairs and consider acquiescence of their church leaders to these infringements a perversion of the mission of the church. These dissidents in Orthodox and non-Orthodox churches have in many cases split off from the parent church and thus lost their legal status but gained a greater degree of freedom in managing their own affairs.

It is primarily these groups which are the targets of the continuing anti-religious campaigns and the recent revision of articles of the Criminal Code dealing with religious activities.

The road ahead of religious groups in the Soviet

Union, legal and illegal, is a difficult one with little hope of major relaxation of tensions between the churches and the state. There may be a change of attitude toward particular groups from time to time, but no change of heart can realistically be expected from the regime. After fifty years of attempting to eradicate religion from Soviet society, the authorities appear to be accepting the fact that they are faced with a long struggle requiring serious attention to detail. A. P. Okulov, writing in Voprosy nauchnogo

ateizma in 1967 stated that "although religion and the church

have no great influence in the life of our society, the pro­

cess of breaking with religion has not been completed and

religious ideas continue to offer serious interference in

the building of communism. . . . Overcoming religion is a

long and complex process requiring a profound scientific

explanation of religion, of the reasons why it arises, and

of the ways in which workers depart from it. " Some socio­

logical studies have already been undertaken by Soviet

scholars to provide at least partial answers to these ques­

tions. The interpretation of the results of these studies

could lead to even more difficult times for churches in the

Soviet Union.

The process of rejuvenation going on in the ranks of

Soviet clergy is also going on among Party and government

officials. Brezhnev's report on the composition of the CPSU

as of January 1966 indicated that it is undoubtedly a "young party." According to his statistics, more than fifty per cent

of its members are not yet forty years old, and almost one half of the total membership joined the party after Stalin's 14 death. Since their political outlook was formed in the

14 Borys Lewytzkyj, "Generations in Conflict," Problems of Communism, January-February 1967, p. 38. 161 period of destalinization, these younger men have been

trained to regard the problems of modern society differently

from those older party members who now constitute the party

elite. The 23rd Party Congress demonstrated the determina­

tion of the party leaders— the war generation— to keep the 15 younger men out of power.

Within the CPSU Central Committee, those over 46 years of age dominate the membership almost completely. This

same "overaging" is characteristic of the state machinery

as well. Of the 76 high-level government functionaries, 48

are between 55 and 65 years old, and 27 of them have been party members for over 35 years. All of these men held high positions during the Stalin era, and there undoubtedly exists between them and the party bureaucracy a feeling of mutual 17 trust and understanding. The fundamental long-term trend

in the evolution of Soviet society is the increasing special­

ization of the decision-making process. It seems clear that

the resolution of conflicts between the major interests in 18 Soviet society continues to be carried out by the party.

^^Ibid., p. 39. ^^Ibid., p. 36. ^^Ibid., p. 40. 18 Jerry Hough, "The Soviet Elite: I. Groups and Individuals," Problems of Communism, January-February 1967, p. 35. 162 It may be hypothesized that the "younger generation" who joined the party during or after World War II and who have matured in a modern technological society may well be 19 less committed to communism and be functionally indifferent toward it and toward religious faith. At the time thesë people entered the party, Marxist-Leninist ideology had been de-emphasized and the party had even restored fairly close relations with the Orthodox Church. The "younger generation" may have concluded from this state of affairs that Marxist-

Leninist ideology is of secondary importance to the resolution of industrial and military problems. The ideological struggle between Marxism-Leninism and religion would, therefore, rank even lower on their priority scale with correspondingly less active support from them for party campaigns in this area.

One could engage in almost endless speculation on the

"ifs" of future Soviet internal developments but eventually you must return to the fact that the CPSU, through the state machinery, exercises an ideological monopoly and shows no sign of wishing to take in a partner. Under these conditions the probability that an equal contest between religion and

Jerry Hough, "The Soviet Elite: II, In Whose Hands Is the Future?," Problems of Communism, March-April 1967, p. 19. communist principles will be permitted in Soviet society is rather remote. Genuine freedom of conscience in religious matters in the USSR will be possible only after the present totalitarian system has been altered to the degree that Party primacy becomes secondary to regard for the individual rights of Soviet citizens. That time has not yet come. APPENDICES APPENDIX I

RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC COMPOSITION OF THE USSR AND THE RELATED GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF PEOPLE

NUMERICAL STRENGTH* M ajoiuty R elirion MINORITY REUHIONS N ationality (unless stated G eoohaphicai. OR C h u r c h otherwise D irtridution according to the I9S9 census)

Russian Orthodox Old Believers, Baptists, Great Russians 114,588,000 In all 15 Soviet Republics Church Dukhobors, Molokans and especially in other sects. R S F S R (97,845,000) Ukraine (7,400,000} Kazakhstan (4,000,000) Uzbekistan (t, 100,000)

Russian Orthodox Catholics of Slavo* Ukiainians 36,981,000 Ukraine (31,852,000) Church Byzantine Kite R S F S R (3.377.000} (dominant among Kazakhstan (762,000) Western Ukrainians), Moldavia (421,000) Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostalistt ; and other sects.

Russian Orthodox Strong Catholic minority, Byelorussians 7,829,000 Byelorussia (6,444,000) Church Baptists, Pentecostalists ! R S F S R (845,000) and other sects. Ukraine (291,000)

Russian Orthodox Baptists, Innoccntists, Moldavians 2,214,000 Moldavia (1,887,000) Church Jehovah’s Witnesses ond Ukraine (239,000) other sects.

Russian Orthodox Chuvash 1,470,000 Chuvash AS S R Church

Russian Ortliodox Mordvinians 1,285,000 In the eastern parts of Church European Russia, especially in the ■ Mordvinian AS S R

Russian Orthodox Small Moslem minorities, Udmurts 623,000 Udmurt ASSR Church remnants of pagan beliefs, especially Kngu Sorta Russian Orthodox sect among the Mari. Mari 504,000 Mari AS S R Church

Russian Orthodox Komi and Komi 4 3t.«» Komi AS S R Church Pcmiyaks Komi-Pcnnyak National Okrug

Russian Orthodox Uulgnrs 324.000 Ukraine and Moldavia Church

Russian Orthodox Melhodists Koreans ,314,000 U/hekistiin (139.000) Church Kuziikhsliiii (74,000) R S F S R (91,000)

Russian Orthodox Greeks 310,000 Ukraine (104,000) Church Georgia (73,000) R S F S R (43,000) Kazakhstan

■ Russian Orthodox Shamanist survivals. Yakuts 236,000 Yakut AS S R Church

♦Figures represent the ethnic population, not the number of believers. 166

Russian Orthodox Karelians 167,000 Karelian AS S R Church Kalinin Province (RSFSR) Nominally Central Asian Oypsios Gypsies 132,000 About half in RSFSR, Orthodox (5000) arc rtlci^lcnis. halfscattcrcd over other Soviet Republics S

Russian Oitlnnlox Ilaptist groups Gagau/ 1 3 4 ,0 0 0 Moldavian AS S R nnJ Ctuirdi Odessa Province of Ukraine

Russian tîrilunlox Rumanians 106,000 'I'ranscarpiilhinn and Church Chernovtsy Provinces of Ukraine

Russian Orthodox Shamanist sur\ ivals Khnkftssians 47,000 Khakassian Autonomous Church Province

Russian Orthodox Remnants of‘Durlthanii:;;*. Altaitsy (Oirots) 45,000 Autonomous Province of Church a nationalist-messianic the High Altai faith and Shamanist survivals

Russian Orthodox Vcpsinns 16,000 Karelian AS S R Church I-eningrad Province

Russian Orliiodox Shiiuumisi survis als Shoriuns 15,000 Kemerovo Province Church (Southern Siberia)

Georgian Orthodox Shiite Moslems (Inghiio), Georgians 2,650,000 Georgia Church Sunnite Moslems (Atlzharians), Pagans (Khevsurs), small groups of Catholics and Baptists

Sunnite Moslems Uzbeks 6,004,000 Uzbekistan (5,026,000) Tadzhikistan (454,000)

Sunnite Moslems About 100,000 Tartars, Tartars (including 4,969,000 In many parts of the the so-called ‘Kryashens*, Crimean Tartars USSR, especially in the arc Orthodox Christians. expelled from the Tartar and Bashkir Crimea in 1944) Autonomous Republics and in Uzbekistan (Crimean 'I'arturs)

Sunnite Moslems Kazakhs 3,581,000 Kazakhstan (2,755,000) R S F S R (383,000)

Shiite Mostema Sunnite Moslems (30%) Azerbaidzhani Turks 2,929,000 Azerbaidzhan (2,481,000) Armenia (108,000) Georgia (157,000)

Sunnite Moslems Ismailitcs Tadzhiks (including i.3 9 7.«»o Tadzhikistan ( 1,051,000) Pamir nationalities) Uzbekistan (312,000)

Turkmenians 1,004,000 Sunnite Moslems - Turkmenistan

Sunnite Moslems Bashkirs • 983,000 Bashkir AS S R

Sunnite Moslems Kirghiz 974,000 Kirghizia

Peoples of Daghestan 945.000 All in the Daghestan Sunnite Moslems ASSR. There arc about including 48,000 Lezghins in Avars 268.000 Azerbaidzhan I-ezchins 223.000 Darghinians 158.000 Kumyks I3 5,W I.aki 64.000 Nogay Tartars 41.000 Tabasarans 3 5 .0 0 0 Aguly 8,000 Riituls 7.000 Tsakhura 6.000 169

Sunnite Mnslcnu Chechens 418,000 Chcchen-Ingush AS S R

Sunnite Moslems Circassians (Soviet 314,000 Northern Caucasus région statistics divide them (Kabardinian-Balkar up into ‘Chorkcss*, ASSR, Karachai-Cherkess ‘Adygc’ and and Adyge Autonomous 'Knhardimatis') Provinces)

Sunnite Moslems Karakalpaks 173,000 In Uzbekistan, especially Karakalpak AS S R

Sunnite MnT

Sunnite Moslems Uigurs 95,000 Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Uzbekistan

Sunnite Moslems Knrachai 81,000 Karachai-Cherkess Autonomous Province

Shiite Moslems Talyahi 77,000 Southern parts of (19*6) Azerbaidzhan Soviet Republic

Sunnite Moslems Balkars 4a,000 Kabardino-Balkar AS S R

Sunnite Moslems Turks 35,000 Scattered mainly over Transcaucasia

Shiite Moslems Taty 38,000 Azerbaidzhan (19*6)

Sunnite Moslems Dungans 21,000 Kirghizia Kazakhstan

Shiite Moslems Bahai Persians 21,000 Scattered over towns of Transcaucasia and Central Asia

Sunnite Moslems Abazu 20,000 Karachay-Cherkess Autonomous Province

Sunnite Moslems Arabs 8,000 Uzbekistan

Sunnite Moslems Bnluchi 7,800 .Soullicrn TiirkniciiiHtiiii

Ucligiout alleginnce divided between Orthodox' Ossetins 410,000 About one-third in and Sunnite hloslems. Remnants of pagan beliefs. Georgia, two-thirds in Small Uaptistgrnups. R S F S R (North Caucasus) .

Religious allegiance divided between Sunnite Abkhazians 74,000 Abkhazian AS S R Islam and Georgian Orthodox Church.

Armenian Kurds are Vezidis and Sunnite Kurds 5 9 ,0 0 0 Armenia (26,000) Moslems; Georgian Kurds arc Yezidis; Georgia (16,000) Azerbaidzhani Kurds are Shiite Moslems. Azerbaidzhan

Lutherans Strong minority of Roman Germans 1,619,000 About half in Siberia and Catholics, also hlennonites, other half in the Central Baptists and smaller Asian Republics, groups of Seventh Day especially Kazakhstan Adventists. lAithcrans Finns 93,000 . I-cningrad Province Karelian AS S R

Evangelical Strong minority of Latvians 1,400,000 Latvia Lutheran Church Roman Catholics, small groups of Orthodox and Baptists

Evangelical Fairly strong Orthodox Estonians 969,000 Estonia Lutheran Church minority, smaller groups of Baptists and Methodists

Calvinists Roman Catholics, small 1 lungarians 155,000 Tmnscarpathian Baptist groups. Province of Ukraine 168

R o m a n Catholic Lutherans, Calvinists Lithuanians 2,326,000 Lithuania Church

R o m a n Catholics Orthodox Poles 1,380,000 Byelorussia (539,000) Ukraine (363,000) Lithuania (230,000) Kazakhstan (53,600)

Armenian Church Small groups of Catholics Armenians 2,787,000 Armenia (55 7%) and Baptists Georgia (15-9%) Azerbaidzhan (15 8%) R S F S R (chiefly North Caucasus) (9 *%)

Nestorian Orthodox Assyrians 22,000 Armenia Christians

Judaism Insignificant groups of Jews 2,268,000 R S F S R (875,000) Evangelical Christian (About Ukraine (840,000) converts in the Ukraine, 3,000,000 Byelorussia (150,000) and converts to Islam, the according Uzbekistan (94,000) so-called 'Chsla’ in to unofti- Moldavia (95,000) Central Asia. cial Jewish Georgia (52,000) estimates) Baltic States (62,000)

Buddhists In the Irkutsk Province, Buryats 253,000 Buryat ASSR, Chita and Orthodox Christians and Irkutsk Provinces of Shamanists. RSFSR

Buddhists Kalmucks 106,000 Kalmuck ASSR

Biiddliistt Shamanisis Tuvinian:! 100,000 Tuvinian .Autiitintunus I’roviiicv

Their religious haefcgr nund is Cath die and Prott i:. Cycehs and Slovaks . 40,000 Ukraine ant hut niiiny may hn\ e lid iptfil tlie Oitli-tJ îaitii.

Their religious backgr ound is Confucianism and Chinese 25,000 Presumably scattered all Buddhism, but nothin g is known about an over USSli organised Chinese reli tious life in the L'SSK. Half of the Soviet Chii lese do not speak the Chinese language and they arc bound to be estranged from their n .itional and religious traditions as well.

Karaiti' Rvhgiun Karaites 5,9<» I.ithuunia, Ukraine iiiiil scuttervd liver ntliei pans u f U S S R ’Peoples of the 128,000 North’ including: These nationalities practise or practised until Nentsy 25.000 European Arctic, recerttly every kind of worship characteristic of Evenki 24.000 Northern Siberia, Far primitive peoples anywhere in the world — Khanty 19.000 East, especially Am u r adoration of the sun, ancestor worship, cult of Chukchi 12.000 Valley, Kamchatka, inanimate objects (fetishism), cult of animals Evcny 9,000 Sokhalin Island and (totemism). Usually the peoples of the Nurth arc Nanai 8,000 Aleutian Islands referred to as Shainnnists in view of the Koryaks 6,300 important role played by the Shaman, the Mansi 6,000 Siberian witch-doctor. At the time of the Setkupy 4.000 establishment of Soviet power, the peoples of the Nivkhi 4.000 North fbund themselves in various stacta I'f Ulchi 2.000 Evangelization. The Lapps (Kola Benin uilal and Saanii (I-apps) 1,800 the Itclmeny (Kamchatka) may he coii.-idevcd as Udfge 1,400 Orthodox Christians. Certain groups of 1> eiiki Eskimos I,too have been under Buddhist, others uiiiler Itclmeny 1,100 Orthodox influence. Kety 1.000 Orochi 800 Nganasany 7 00 Yukagiry 400 Aleuts 4 0 0

SOURCE: W. Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin's Press,” l9‘62) , pp. &90-497. APPENDIX 2

COMMUNIST PARTY CENTRAL COMMITTEE DECREE.- ON ERRORS IN CON­

DUCTING SCIENTIFIC -ATHEIST PROPAGANDA AMONG THE PUBLIC.

In conformity with its program, the Communist Party is con­ ducting scientific-educational propaganda of the materialist world outlook, directed toward constant raising of the con­ sciousness of the toiling masses and toward their gradual liberation from religious convictions. In this the Party has always considered it necessary to avoid offending the feelings of believers in any way.

The Party Central Committee is in possession of facts which testify that of late gross errors have been committed in scientific-atheist propaganda among the public in many localities.

Instead of the development of systematic and pains­ taking work to spread knowledge of natural sciences and an ideological struggle against religion, some central and local newspapers and also the statements of some lecturers and speakers have contained insulting attacks upon the clergy and believers who perform religious rites. Cases occur when, in the press or in statements by propagandists, some ministers of religious cults and believers are depicted without justi­ fication as people unworthy of political trust. In a number of areas there have been cases of administrative interference

168 170 by local organizations and individuals in the activity of religious associations and groups, and also of a rude atti­ tude toward the clergy.

Such errors in antireligious propaganda are fundamental­ ly at variance with the program and policy of the Communist

Party toward religion and believers, and they are a viola­ tion of the Party's repeated instructions on the impermis­ sibility of offending the feelings of believers.

The Party Central Committee considers it wrong that mauiy Party organizations have held aloof from daily guidance of scientific-atheist propaganda and do not show concern for the careful selection of propaganda cadres. Articles in the press, lectures and reports are frequently allowed to be made by people who are ignorant in science and in questions of atheist propaganda, and sometimes even by hack workers who mainly know only anecdotes and tales about clergymen.

Such an irresponsible approach to the selection of authors of articles, lecturers and speakers and the absence of proper control by Party organizations over the correct direction of scientif ic-atheist propaganda do serious harm to the educational, cultural enlightening work being con­ ducted among the public.

The Party Central Committee decrees:

That province and territory Party committees. Party

Central Committees of the Union republics and all Party 171 organizations be required resolutely to eliminate errors in

atheist propaganda and in no event to permit future offending of the feelings of believers or clergymen or administrative

interference in the activity of the church. It must be born in mind that actions insulting the church, clergy and citizens who are believers are incompatible with the policy of the

Party and state in the conducting of scientific-atheist propaganda and are contrary to the U.S.S.R. Constitution, which grants freedom of conscience to Soviet citizens.

As a result of profound changes in the social-economic conditions of life, the liquidation of exploiter classes and the victory of socialism in the U.S.S.R., as a result of the successful development of science and the general rise in the

level of culture in the country, the majority of the popula­ tion of the Soviet Union has long been freed of religious survivals; the consciousness of the working people has grown immeasurably. At the same time, one cannot but take into account the fact that there are also many citizens who, while actively participating in the life of the country and honorably fulfilling their civic duty to the motherland, are still under the influence of various kinds of religious beliefs. The

Party has always demanded and will continue to demand a con­ siderate, mindful attitude toward these believers. All the more is it stupid and harmful to cast political doubt on 172

Soviet citizens because of their religious convictions. Pro­

found, patient, skillfully, aü'rranged scientif ic-atheist propa­

ganda among believers will help them in the long run to free

themselves from religious delusions. On the other hand,

administrative (i.e., penalizing. — Trans.) measures of any

kind and insulting attacks on believers and clergy can only

do harm, can only lead to strengthening and even intensifying

their religious convictions.

In conducting scientific-atheist propaganda, account

should be taken of the fact that it is impossible to identify

the position of the church in the land of socialism with the position of the church in an exploiter society. In bourgeois

society the church is a support and instrument of the ruling classes, who use it for the purpose of enslaving the working people. This does not preclude the possibility that individual

clergymen even in a capitalist society may and do go over to

the point of view of the working people on a number of im­ portant questions of politics. However, for behavior con­ trary to the interests of the exploiter classes these clergy­ men are generally subjected to persecutions of all kinds

from the church and government circles of capitalist countries.

In Tsarist Russia the church faithfully served the autocracy, the landlords and capitalists, justified the cruel exploitation of the masses and supported the exploiters in the struggle against the working people. It is also known that immediately after the victory of the October socialist revolu­ tion, during the years of the Civil War and later, many religious organizations and groups of the clergy remained hostile to the Soviet regime. Because of this, individual ministers of cults were prosecuted by the state not for their religious but for their antigovernment activity, directed against the interests of the Soviet people and for the benefit of internal counterrevolution and international imperialism.

It is natural, therefore, that the Soviet people's struggle against the enemies of the socialist state should have included a struggle against those reactionary representatives of the church who were engaged in activity hostile to the

Soviet people. At the present time, as a result of the triumph of socialism and liquidation of the exploiter classes in the U.S.S.R., the social roots of religion have been undermined and the base on which the church relied has been destroyed. The majority of clergymen, as the facts testify, now take a loyal stand with respect to the Soviet regime.

Therefore, the struggle against religious beliefs should be regarded now as an ideological struggle of the scientific, materialist world outlook against an antiscientific, religious world outlook.

Rectification of mistakes committed in antireligious propaganda must not lead to a relaxation of scientific- atheist propaganda, which is an integral part of the communist education of the working people and has as its aim the 174 the dissemination of scientific, materialia^t knowledge among the masses and the liberation of believers from the influence of religious beliefs.

Whereas, in relation to the state, religion is a private matter and therefore the church is separated from the state, the Communist Party, which bases itself on the only correct, scientific world outlook— Marxism-Leninism— and its theoretical foundation, dialetical materialism, can­ not adopt an apathetic, neutral attitude toward religion, an ideology which has nothing in common with science.

Our party has always considered and considers it its indispensable duty to promote the development of natural, technical and social sciences by all opportunities and means.

Only on the basis of modern progressive science is it pos­ sible to make thorough and full use of the riches of nature in the interests of all mankind. Only on the basis of science is it possible to achieve a fresh and considerable advance in development of industry and agriculture, to ensure higher labor productivity and thereby substantially promote the prosperity and cultural level of the people.

Proceeding from this, the Communist Party educates Soviet people in a scientific world outlook and wages a struggle of ideas against religious ideology as an antiscientific ideology.

The fundeunental opposition of science and religion is obvipus.

Whereas science relies on facts, scientific experiment and conclusions strictly checked and confirmed by life, any religion bases itself only on Biblical and other traditions. 175 on fantastic fabrications. Modern scientific discoveries in the natural and social sciences convincingly refute religious dogmas. Science cainnot be reconciled with fabricated religious concepts eüaout the life of nature and man, hence it is in­ compatible with religion. Science helps mankind to delve more and more deeply into the objective laws of the development of nature and society, helps to place the forces of nature at the service of man; science helps to increase man's ^w^eness and raise his culture; but religion clouds man's consciousness, condemning him to passivity in the face of the forces of nature and fettering his creative activeness and initiative.

Taking all this into account, the Party considers pro­ found, systematic scientific-atheist propaganda essential, without, however, permitting the religious feelings of believers and also of clergymen to be offended.

The Central Committee reminds us that the basis of scientific atheist propaganda should be elucidation in popular form of the more important phenomena in the life of nature and society, of such questions as the formation of the uni­ verse emd the origin of life and man on earth, of discoveries in astronomy, biology, physiology, physics, chemistry and other sciences which confirm the correctness of materialist views on the development of nature euid society.

The Party Central Committee en^hasizes that scientific- atheist propaganda requires the greatest care and thought in the selection of lecturers, speakers and authors of articles 176 and pamphlets on antireligious subjects. In this work cadres

should be enlisted which are particularly qualified in a

scientific regard: school teachers, teachers of technical

schools and higher educational establishments, doctors,

agricultural specialist, workers in various scientific re­

search institutions, literature and arts workers and others

capable of explaining convincingly the antiscientific nature of religion from the standpoint of a materialist world outlook,

The Party Central Committee considers that positive

results in educational work directed toward overcoming re­ ligious survivals can be achieved only on condition of further development of all our cultural-enlightening work among the working people, of considerable improvement in the activity of culture centers, libraries, reading rooms, lecture halls, parks of culture and rest and other cultural-enlightenment institutions. There, the task of Party, state and public organizations consists in fundamentally improving cultural- enlightening work among the public and thereby achieving a

further rise in the cultural level of the working people.—

N. KHRUSHCHEV, Secretary of the Central Committee of the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Nov. 10, 1954.

Copyright, 1954, The Current Digest of the Soviet Press, New York and Columbus1 Ohio. By permission, APPENDIX 3

CIRCULAR OF THE COUNCIL FOR THE AFFAIRS OF THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

1. Public cooperating commissions for controlling the- observance of the legislation on cults are to be estab­ lished by the regional city executive committees.

2. The commissions are to be guided in their work by the laws, decrees, and orders of the highest legislative and executive organs of the Soviet state concerning religious cults, and also by the interpretations of the Council for the

Affairs of the Russiaui Orthodox Church attached to the Council of Ministers of the USSR on points concerning the applica­ tion of legislation on cults.

3. The commission is to be made up of persons politi­ cally prepared who because of their knowledge of this field are capable of controlling and supervising the religious societies in the observance of Soviet legislation on cults.

Deputies of local soviets, workers of cultural-educa­ tional institutions and the organs of public education, of finance institutions, propagandists, pensioners, workers in village soviets and local activists are to be dre rn into the membership of the commission.

The size of the commission is to be determined by calculating the need for studying and controlling the activities

t^i 17B of the religious societies (parishes) in the territory of the region, and also by the need of exposing and suppressing the illegal activities of unregistered religious groups.

The cooperating commissions are to be confirmed by the city executive committees and the regional executive committees.

The vice-chairman or secretary of the city executive committee is to be made available to the commission.

4. The duties of the commissions include: a- systematic study of religious conditions in populated areas

(regardless of the presence or absence of officially active

religious societies), to gather and analyze data on the

frequency with which believers attend religious gatherings,

to study the body of persons who attend church and fulfill

religious rites (baptism, burial, marriage, confession),

the degree to which religious societies and ministers of

the cult influence and attract youth and children to religion

and the rites, to verify the accuracy of the registering

of religious rites, and through verification to stop

instances of child baptisms without the consent of both

parents ; b- to continuously study the ideological activity of the

church (propagation and accommodation, the methods and

means used by the ministers of the cult for expanding or

limiting their influence on a certain part of the popula­

tion, especially children and adolescents) and to ascertain 179 which youth the ministers of the cult are attempting to

prepare for and draw into religious work; c- to consider and study the so-called "patronal" and other

religious holidays held in populated areas, to analyze

their adverse influence on production and world discipline,

and to develop and introduce proposals aimed at liquidating

these adverse occurrences ; d- to study the membership of religious societies {parish

executive organs) and to expose their most active members; e- to closely check the ministers of the cult and religious

societies in their observance of Soviet legislation, to

expose attempts of the ministers of the cult to transgress

Soviet laws, and to inform the executive committee of these

violations at the proper time; f- to help financial organs in exposing ministers of the cult

who illegally perform religious rites in believers homes

and apartments and receive compensation without a receipt

and do not declare this income on their income tax; g- to expose persons not registered as ministers of a cult who

illegally appear in populated areas and perform religious

rites and to inform the executive committee of such persons.

One of the most important concerns of the cooperating commissions must be the seeking out of means and introducing concrete proposals aimed at weakening the activities of religious societies and ministers of the cult (within the framework of the law). The members of the commission are to systematically inform the chairman of the commission of their work and to carefully fulfill his instructions.

EXPLANATORY INSTRUCTIONS OF THE OBLAST REPRESENTATIVE (OF THE COUNCIL ON RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS)

Concluding a contract with the "Twenty" (dvadtsatka)

The text of the contract of your executive committee with the community of believers on the subject of transfer­ ring to them the f; ee use of a church that is state property is now being sent.

The present contract is to be concluded with the entire community, i.e., the "Twenty," and not with the community's executive organ, and is to be signed by the chairman of the soviet (in this instance, by the person who supervises religious cults) and by all members of the "Twenty."

It should be kept in mind that at present the "Twenty" in all the believing communities do not inspire special con­ fidence. They are almost completely composed of elderly people, the uneducated, fanatics. We cannot entrust them with government property.

You should recommend that they create a new "Twenty" composed of educated persons, persons capable of managing the community (no fanatics) , who would honorably fulfill Soviet laws and your suggestions and recommendations. 181

When a satisfactory "Twenty" is created, then sign the

contract with them.

There should be no more than twenty persons in the

"Twenty." The "Twenty" is composed of citizens who give the

community of believers a declaration stating that they want

to be members of the "Twenty" and to shoulder the material

responsibility for the property transferred to the community;

they also report their age, education, place of work and their

addresses.

In some churches there are contracts made on the

opening of the church.

Contracts are signed in triplicate and a catalogue of

the cult's property is attached to them, also in triplicate.

Everything in the church, except those articles that are for

sale, is to be included in the inventory.

Structures located on the church's property, dwellings,

garages, barns and others, except for the guardian's house and offices, and also houses with attached structures located beyond the limits of the church's property, are transferred

to the community on a lease basis. A kolkhoz concludes the contract for transferring the buildings to the community by lease and collects the lease money according to the proper article in the decree of the Soviet of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, March 26, 1926, point D (in Russian G) (see' housing laws of the 1957 edition, p. 542 for prayer buildings). 182

This also applies to prayer houses.

The transfer of the prayer building and dwellings by lease does not free the community from paying taxes (insurance, land rent, building tax). The leasing contract is concluded and signed by the Icolkhoz ' s soviet.

After the contract has been signed and concluded, let the community of believers, i.e., the "Twenty," choose its executive organ (chairman, vice-chairman, treasurer, and three members of the auditing commission).

It is essential that you take part in the selection of members for the executive organ and select those persons who adhere to our line. (Emphasis mine- N.C.W.)

When everything is completed, the following items are to be sent to the representative (of the Council on Religious

Affairs) in the oblast executive committee (Oblispolkom) for registration: a copy of the contract with the catalogue of the cult's property, inventory, a copy of the lease contract, a list of the members of the "Twenty" and a list of the members of the executive organ of the community and the audit­ ing commission.

I suggest that you do not include employees of the church in the membership of the "Twenty"; priests, choir directors, guardians, janitors, stablemen, furnacemen, chauffeurs, prosphora (communion bread) makers, bellringers. 183

Employees of the church can be selected by the com­ munity for the following posts in the "Twenty": chairman, treasurer, vice-chairman, and for no others.

Oblast Representative of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church

(The translation of this document is found in RCDA, Vol. VI, No. 7, April 15, 1967, pp. 57-60. Editorial comment states that "while this document was not published in the USSR, we have assurance of its authenticity." By permission). BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. BOOKS

Anderson, Paul B. People, Church and State in Modern Russia. New York; Macmillan Company, 1944.

Benz, Ernst. The Eastern Orthodox Church. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1963,

Bordeaux, Michael. Opium of the People. New York; Bobbs- Merrill Company, 1966.

Brazhnik, I. I. and Dolgikh, F. E., eds. O religii (On Religion). Moscow: Publishing House for Political Literature, 1963.

Bukharin, Nikolai. The ABC of Communism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.

Conquest, Robert, ed. Religion in the U.S.S.R. New York; Frederick A. Praeger, 1968.

Curtiss, John Shelton. The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917-1950. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1953

______. Church and State in Russia, 1900*1917. New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1965.

Dallin, David J. The Real Soviet Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947.

Daniels, Robert V. The Nature of Communism. New York: Vintage Books, 1962.

Duranty, Walter. Stalin and Company. New York: Random House, 1949.

Fedorenko, Fedor I. Sekty, ikh vera i dela (Sects, Their Faith and AffairsTZ Moscow: PubTisHxng House for Political Literature, 1965.

Fletcher, William C. A Study in Survival. New York: Macmillan Company, 1965.

______. Nikolai. New York: Macmillan Company, 1968.

185 166 Hare, Richard. Portraits of Russian Personalities Between Reform and Revolution. London : Oxford Press, 1^59.

Heeker, Julius P. Religion and Communism. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 19:54.

Iwanow, Boris (ed.). Religion in the USSR. Munich: Insti­ tute for the Study of theUSSR, 1960.

Kolarz, Walter. Religion in the Soviet Union. New York: St. Martin's Press, T b 'SJ.

Lenin, V. I. Collected Works, Vols. 10 and 15. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966.

Men'shagin, V. D. and Vyshinskaya Z. A. Sovetskoe ugolovnoe pravo (Soviet Criminal Law). Moscow: State Publishing House for Juridical Literature, 1950.

Mitrokhin, L. N. Baptizm (Baptism). MoscoW: Publishing House for Political Literature, 1966.

ûkulov, A. F. (ed.). Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma (Problems of Scientific Atheism). Moscow : "Thought^ Publishers, 1966. This is a semiannual publication of the Institute of Scientific Atheism of the Academy of Social Sciences attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Issues 1, 3 and 4 were used in this research.

Petrus, K, Religious Communes in the USSR. New York: Research Program of the USSR, 1953.

Phelps-Fetherston, Ian. Soviet International Front Organiza­ tions . New York : Frederick A. Praeger, 1965.

Pobedonostsev, Konstantin P. Reflections of a Russian States­ man. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965.

Rigby, T. H. Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917- 1967. Princeton:. Princeton University Press, 1968.

Rouse, Ruth and Neill, Stephen C. (eds.). A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517-1948, second edition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968.

Schapiro, Leonard. The Government emd Politics of the Soviet Union, revised edition. New York: Random House, 1967. 1É7

Shulman, Marshall D. Stalin's Foreign Policy Reappraised. New York : Atheneuiih 1965.

Simmons, Ernest J. (ed,). Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Pressl 1965.

Spinka, Matthew. The Church in Soviet Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, T5'56.

Szczesniak, Boleslaw. The Russian Revolution and Religion, 1917-1925. Notre Dame, Indiana; Notre Dame Press, 1959.

Timasheff, Nicolas S. Religion in Soviet Russia, 1917-1942. New York : Sneed and Ward, l 5 T 2 .

Tsameryan, I. P. (ed. ). Stroitel' stvo kommunizma ^ preodolenie religioznykh perezhitkov (Building Communism and Overcoming Religious Survivals) . Moscow: "Science" Publishers, 1966.

Turetskij, M. V. Osobo opasnye gosudarstvennye prestupleniya (Especially Dangerous Crimes Against the State ) . Moscow: Moscow University Publishing House, 1965.

Zernov, Nicolas. The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century. New York : Harper and Row, 19^3.

Constitution of the USSR. Moscow; Progress Publishers, 1965.

Ugolovnyj kodeks ^ F S R (Criminal Code of the RSFSR) . Moscow: State Publishing House for Juridical Literature, 1964.

B. ARTICLES

Anashkin, G. Z, "On Freedom of Conscience and the Application of the Legislation on Religious Cults," Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, No. 1, 1965, pp. 39-45. A complete translation of this article is available in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. XVII, No. 11, pp. 16-19.

Bordeaux, Michael and Reddaway, Peter. "Soviet Baptists Today," Survey, No. 66, January 1968, pp. 48-66.

Byrnes, Robert F. "Pobedonostsev on the Instruments of Russian Government," Simmons, Ernest J. (ed.). Continuity and Chyige in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 113-128. leâ Cherniavsky, Michael. "The Old Believers and the New Religion," Slavic Review, Vol. XXV, No. 1, March 1966, pp. 1-39.

Fletcher, William C. "Protestant Influences on the Outlook of the Soviet Citizen Today," Studies on the Soviet Union, Vol. V, No. 4, 1966, pp. 62-82.

Haroska, Leu. "Soviet Policy Toward Religion After 1942," , Iwanow, Boris (ed.). Religion in the USSR (Munich: Institute for the Study of the USSR, 1960^) , pp. 7-28.

Hough, Jerry. "The Soviet Elite: I. Groups and Individuals," Problems of Communism, January-February 1967, pp. 28-35.

"The Soviet Elite: II. In Whose Hands Is the Future?," Problems of Communism, March-April 1967, pp. 28-35.

Klibanov, A. I. and Mitrokhin, L. N. "Schism in Contemporary Baptism," Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma (Moscow: "Thought" Publishers, 1967), 3, pp. 84-102.

Klimovich, L. "Origin and Reactionary Essence of Islam," Zarya vostoka (Dawn of the East), October 10, 1954, pp. 2^-3. Translation available in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. VI, No. 40, pp. 9-11.

Konstantinov, D. "The Results of Soviet Persecution of the Orthodox Church," Bulletin (Institute for the Study of the USSR), Vol. XII, No. 5, May 1965, pp. 38-47.

Kryanev, Yu. V. "The Typology of Religious Associations and therDifferentiation of Atheistic Education," Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma (Moscow: "Thought" Publishers, Î967), 3l pp^ 4F-63.

Kuroedov, V. A. "Some Questions on Religion and the Church," Izvestiya, August 30, 1966.

. "The Leninist Principles of Freedom of Conscience i'n~the USSR," Nauka i religiya (Science and Religion) , No. 6, June 1968T"pp. ^-10.

Lewytzkyj, Borys. "Generations in Conflict," Problems of Communism, January-February 1967, pp. 36-40. 189 Mil'ko, Yu. T. "Scientific Atheistic Propaganda and the Criminal Code Fight Against Crimes Committed by Churchmen and Sectariems," Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo. No. 7, July 1964, pp. 66-67.

Oleshchuk, F. N. "Religious Survivals and Ways of Overcoming Them," Voprosy filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), No. 6, June 19577"“p p T 76-78.

Teodorovich, N, "The Structure of the Moscow Patriarchate," Bulletin (Institute for the Study of the USSR), Vol. XI, No. t, January 1964, pp. 31-42.

"The Episcopacy and Diocesan Network of the Moscow Patriarchate," Bulletin (Institute for the Study of the USSR). Vol. VIII, No. 6, June 1961, pp. 44-52.

"The Political Role of the Moscow Patriarchate," Bulletin (Institute for the Study of the USSR), Vol. VII, Nol 51 September 1960, pp. 44-50.

"The New Propaganda Campaign Against Religion," Bulletin (Institute for the Study of the USSR), Vol. VII, No. 4, April 1960, pp. 51-56.

"The Rejuvenation of the Russian Orthodox Clergy," Studies on the Soviet Union, Vol. V, No. 4, 1966, pp. 35 TT, ------

C. PERIODICALS

Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 1954-1967,

Kommunist (The Communist), formerly Bolshevik, organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet ‘ Union. Selected issues.

Nauka ^ Religiya (Science and Religion), popular scientific and atheistic journal published by the All-Union "Znanie" (Knowledge) Society, Moscow. 1965-1968.

Problems of Communism

Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, semi-monthly publica- tion of the National Council of Churches, U.S.A. which has translations from original sources dealing with the attitude and practices of Communist parties toward religion and religious institutions in Communist dominated countries. 1964-1968. 1 9 D Slavic Review 1964-1968

Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo ^ yravo (Soviet State and Law), provides guidance to courts, public prosecutors and police agencies in interpreting the law. Selected issues.

Voprosy Filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), organ of the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

D. NEWSPAPERS

Izvestiya (News) , organ of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Komsomolskaya Pravda (Young Communist Truth) , organ of the Central and Moscow Komsomol Committee. 1965-1968,

Pravda (Truth) , organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1965-1968.