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Bolsheviks, Soviets and Old Believers1 Japanese Slavic and East European Studies Vol.35. 2014 SPECIAL ARTICLE Bolsheviks, Soviets and Old Believers1 Nobuo Shimotomai (Hosei University) Following the liberalization of religion in Russia, activities of the Orthodoxy became salient by the beginning of the twenty-first century. This process is alongside the reinvigoration of the other religions like Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism. Gods survived and are alive in Russia. The demise of the atheist state, the USSR, and its opening of religious activities during the perestroika period may be the reason why de-seculalization began to predominate recently. The dichotomy of atheist Russia versus the religious West in the twentieth century has been reversed today, and replaced by a religious Russia confronting with a secularizing West in the twenty- first century. The turning point was believed to be the perestroika period, when General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev changed religious policy in the USSR, especially at the 1000th anniversary of baptization of Kiev in 1988. In 988 Orthodoxy become the official religion, which continued until 1917. But atheist ideology was imposed from October 1917 by the Bolsheviks, as Fagan put it, “the enforced collective pursuit of a bright communist future was merely a subversion of Russia’s previous sense of messianic destiny” (Fagan: 3). However, things were a little more complex than has been generally supposed. The fact was that policy change had taken place earlier in the 1980s, when the Soviet leaders were confronted with Ronald Reagan’s declaration that the Soviet Union was an “Evil Empire”. By 1982, Patriarch I. Pimen asked the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party to change its policy, and in May 1983 Yuri Andropov allowed the renovation of the Danilovskii Monastery. It was a former diplomat and chair of the religious commission on the Soviet Council of Ministry, Konstantin Kharchev, who 23 Nobuo Shimotomai advanced this program (Nezavisimaya gazeta, 20 Aug., 2013). He recollects that this motivated to use religion politically by Soviet authority. However, it would be naïve to conclude that such changes in policy on religion could have been carried out by a mere official like Kharchev.2 It was, Yuri Andropov, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Andrei Gromyko, then Foreign Minister and a Politburo member, who had advanced these new ideas into practice, apparently to counter Reagan’s anti-Soviet campaign. Andrei Gromyko, in turn, was at the height of his power after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, and in November 1982 he even rehabilitated his mentor and Stalin’s Foreign Minister, V. Molotov at that time (Shimotomai 2002, 203). In his official biography published in the USSR, Gromyko was exceptionally open about the religious character of his family. He revealed that his family descended from the Old Believers, who were sent to Vetka, Belarus in 1686, following the religious repression by the Orthodox Church. Incidentally, another political heavy weight at that time, D. Ustinov was also from the Old Believers(Kozhurin:8). Old Believers were the name of various religious dissidents in the Russian Orthodoxy that were against church reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the middle of the 17th century (Gromyko:12). Nikon, then Patriarch, wanted to change rites, according to the Modern Greek standard, but faced with furious traditionalists who adhered to the old rites (Ware: 258). Pious and stubborn traditionalists were called as Raskolniki (splitters), and were ousted to such places like Vetka, Belarus, including the ancestors of the Gromykos. Needless to say, the Old Believer as a subject of Russian religion is nothing new. However, they were mostly dealt with, in conjunction with the minority issue of religious dissidents, in the Russian Far East or in the countries like USA or in the pre-war colonial Manchuria. Or almost as a purely religion phenomenon, devoid of economic or political implications, though recently Russian economic historians began to research on textile industrialists-merchants in Moscow in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century Russia.3 However, the depth and significance of their activities, especially in the beginning of the twentieth century, were broader and had direct political connotations. Oleg Shavnazarov, a Russian historian, referred to the relations between Bolshevism and the Old Believers, which evoked new academic 24 Bolsheviks, Soviets and Old Believers interest in the Old Believers (Voprosy Istorii, No.8, 2002, 88) in the beginning of the last century.4 In fact this topic of political character of the religious minority in Russia was also neither new, nor limited to twentieth century Russia. During the nineteenth century, there had been debates on the ‘revolutionary’ potential of the Old Believers by such revolutionaries like M. Bakunin and Narodniks (Sud’ba:149). It was the famous Aleksander I. Gertsen who had first advanced the thesis of the anti-governmental and revolutionary potential of the Old Believers, though this myth of their revolutionary character was far from the reality, as the following history has demonstrated (Tarantsev 1: 320). This discourse was repeated in the beginning of the twentieth century when Marxism emerged as a new ideology. This coincided with the golden age of the Old Believers, between 1905 and 1917, following the rift of discrimination from the October 1905 revolution. Revolutionaries such as the Russian Social Democrats also were interested in attracting new attention to these trends. What were the actual relationships between the Tsarist state, dissidents’ religious groups and the social upheavals of the 1910s, culminating in the revolution of 1917? As an anti-establishment religious group which in principle were anti-imperial who regarded them as anti- Christian, the Old Believers were also realistic enough to request the separation of the Tsarist state from the State religion, thus obtaining autonomy of their confession in 1905. In the beginning of the twentieth century some dissident–oligarchs from the Old Believers like N. A. Bugrov and Sabba Morozov were among them. A new wave of social upheavals have brought to what Nikolai Berdyaev called the‘Old Believers who wore European cloths of Marxism.5 It looks paradoxical, but Archie Brown is right when he argues the origin of communist ideas come from the Old religious Christianity.6 The present author also wants to revisit these old and new problems. 1 Bolsheviks and Old Believers The first part concerns the relations between the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, (RSDLP) and the Old Believers. Conventional 25 Nobuo Shimotomai wisdom of the secular and atheist character of the Russian revolutionary movement in the beginning of the twentieth century is simply wrong. At the time, revolutionist thinking and rise of religiosity went side by side. This was even true of the Russian Marxists. The second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (1903) is famous for the schism of, and the birth of, Bolshevism, or the radical faction led by Vladimir I. Lenin, a departure from the Mensheviks, or moderate faction. Bolsheviks eventually became core of the future Communist party organization. However, the lesser-known fact of this congress is the fact that the Social Democrats, including Lenin, adopted a strategic alliance with the religious minority at this congress, among others, with the Old Believers. The organ of this party ‘Iskra (the Spark)’also had been deeply related to the Old Believers influence at that time, a fact not researched by historians. The decision to publish‘Iskra’was first made in April 1900 at the Pskov meeting where the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and the legal Marxist Peter Strube were in attendance. Georgii Plekhanov in Munich also endorsed this publication. From December 1900 the organ was published by Lenin, Plekhanov, Yuri Martov and A. N. Potresov. The name of the last person, Potresov, is less known, but was the key figure regarding the relationship with the Old Believers. Pskov itself had few industrial workers or Social Democrats, but it had a community of Old Believers, especially Pomortsy, bespopovtsy or Priestless, at that time, and they were instrumental in bringing organizational help to Marxist publication including this paper “Iskra”. It was Potresov, among others, who had contact with this religious organization and Potresov even nicknamed himself as‘Old Belief (Starover)’. He continued to work for this newspaper, even after Lenin had left this organ in 1905. It was natural that the Old Believers and the Social Democrats became natural partners. Among them was Lenin’s secretary and famous researcher, the future first Cabinet Secretary of the Soviet government, Vladimir Bonch- Bruevich, whose documents are located now in the Lenin Library at the ‘rukopis’ or manuscript department. His memoirs, letters and other documents contain also some interesting documents. By the advent of the twentieth century, the Old Believers were diverse and far from consolidated entity. Amongst two important trends, Popovtsy was a moderate wing that had retained the priesthood. The leader of the Popovtsy, 26 Bolsheviks, Soviets and Old Believers textile industrialist Savva Morozov was known as a magnate. On the other hand, bespopovtsy had no priests, and was considered more radical (Ware: 112). Bonch-Bruevich himself was busy in Geneva and was absent from the activities of the second congress of the RSDLP, which took place in Brussel and London. Still he had submitted a thesis on the “Russian Old Believers and Sects”, read by G. Plekhanov himself at the congress. Sects were the result of the schism in the Old Believers, but assumed a diversified character due to these schisms. The core of this thesis was that the Old Believers and sects became ‘the central channel for the democratic trends against the establishment’and was declared to cooperate with them and invite to the Social Democratic channel.7 For the infant Social Democratic movement, the Old Believers and the sects became pertinent partners for the support of the information network, finances and the organization.
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