Figure 5.2 “Drunkenness on Holidays: A Survival of Religious Prejudices” (antireligion campaign).
Source: Hoover Institution Archives.
Who stressed the social element of Christian teachings (initially in favor of selling church property to assist famine victims) and loyalty to the Soviet regime. The obvious favoritism that the communist regime showed the renovationists and their attacks on Tikhon, who was still accepted as Patriarch by most believers, discredited the renovationists. Even the death of Tikhon in 1925 and the official recognition of the renovationists as the legal Orthodox Church failed to help their position among believers, who often locked up churches and physically ejected Renovationist priests.28
While the renovationists had thrown in their lot with the communists, they were at least in many cases sincere Christians trying to make the best of a difficult situation. For more radical antireligious elements within the party, however, any compromise was out of the question. In 1925 a long-time militant atheist and supporter of Stalin wrote under the nom de plume Emelyan Yaroslavsky, edited a weekly magazine The Atheist (Bezbozhnik), and created the “League of the Militant Godless.” The League, which counted over 100,000 members in 1928, brought together a variety of antireligious approaches. Some advocated education and dialogue to show the religious how illogical and scientifically unproven their beliefs were. Atheist “preachers” went out to the countryside to lecture against belief in God or debate with priests; these rallies were sometimes attended by thousands but were not always won by the atheists: peasants were reportedly unimpressed, indeed derisive, at one atheist’s argument that “nature created itself.” In general, the argumentation of the League must have seemed quite irrelevant to believers. For example, a “challenge” from the league argued that holy water, if left to stand, would develop the same microorganisms as water that had not been blessed. But why should the presence of microscopic creatures “with hair, horns, and tails” (sic!) shake one’s faith?
The League of the Militant Godless sponsored antireligious publications, artwork, and even theater. Most of this fell flat. Most of the antireligious propaganda was being spread by urbanites to peasants, and the country folk had long mistrusted newfangled ideas coming from city slickers. Even more to the point, the atheists had little to offer believers in place of religion. It was one thing to say that God does not exist (after all, the Russian proverb admitted “God is far up, and the Tsar is far away”), but the replacement of God with abstractions like nature or science was unacceptable. Most of the party apparatus also did not respect the league, regarding it as meddling, inefficient, and frequently downright ridiculous. At times the league’s festivals and attacks on religion (such as the blasphemous poster showing the Virgin Mary as pregnant and awaiting a Soviet abortion) simply enraged believers, party educators claimed, making it all the more difficult to garner support among the peasantry. The extreme tactics adopted by the league also alienated schoolteachers, many of whom remained religious but were seen as more open to logical argument (initially for science and perhaps later for communism) than the less educated masses.29
Antireligious propaganda and attacks were not limited to the Orthodox Church. Pope Benedict XV repeatedly expressed dismay over the arrest of bishops, the refusal of Bolshevik authorities to allow religious teaching for children, and the closing down of churches. While relatively few Catholics remained within the USSR before 1939, Catholic priests were subject to arrest and harassment as agents of a hostile foreign power. Young communists of Jewish origin attacked both religious beliefs and practices as absurd, going so far as to burst into synagogues on the sabbath or stand outside ostentatiously smoking (strictly forbidden on the sabbath) or even eating pork. Communist support among Muslims was so weak that local leaders dared not take Islam on directly, but imams and religious institutions were endlessly depicted as corrupt, ignorant, and inhumane. The attempt to woo Muslim women in Uzbekistan to cast off their veils in a public ceremony - the so-called hujum of 1927 - was generally admitted, even by communist authorities, to have been a failure. Most women who unveiled themselves were forced by public disapproval and violence to leave the region or go back to wearing the traditional garb.
With the end of NEP, antireligious policy hardened. Two of the strongest groups pressing for resolute action against religious peasants were the Komsomol (Young Communists) and League of Militant Atheists. Among those specifically targeted for arrest and exile during collectivization were village priests, in part because they often functioned as local leaders but also simply because of their symbolic value as an element of the noncommunist (if not openly anticommunist) past. A new slogan, “the Storming of Heaven,” indicated a turn from the gradualist approach of the NEP period. During collectivization, priests and kulaks were seen as allies and denounced as such in the press. Along with mass arrests of priests came the symbolic confiscation of hundreds of church bells, the closing of the few remaining monasteries, and attacks on believers of all religions. New laws in 1929 not only forbade religious propaganda but made the teaching of atheism obligatory in school and defined priests as parasites on society who received income from their parishioners without working. It became increasingly hazardous to openly profess religious beliefs or to attend religious services. Many believers were subjected to various harassments; others even arrested. One indication of the effectiveness of these antireligious measures is the statistic that by 1930 four-fifths of village churches had been destroyed or shut down. By the early 1940s over 100 bishops, tens of thousands of Orthodox clergy, and thousands of monks and lay believers had been killed or had died in Soviet prisons and the Gulag.30
As motivation for the stepped-up antireligious policy from 1928, it seems clear that politics played a more important role than ideology. When writer Maxim Gorky in November 1929 wrote a letter to Stalin complaining of antireligious excesses and criticizing the crude methods used by the “Godless,” Stalin seemed to agree. In his reply to Gorky, Stalin failed to mention any ideological justification for the antireligious attacks and even admitted that some methods of antireligious propaganda were silly and ineffective. But more important for Stalin than the crushing of belief was the destruction of an organization that could possibly oppose his own power: the church. It should also be remembered that the collectivization of agriculture involved the destruction of many rural churches, the arrest of priests, and the terrorization of the bulwark of Orthodox belief, the peasantry. After all, collectivization essentially destroyed traditional peasant life, and a vital part of that tradition was religious faith.
In the fervent atmosphere of socialist construction during the 1930s, antireligious measures and rhetoric blossomed. In 1930 two court trials of allegedly counterrevolutionary clergy took place, one in Leningrad and the other in Ukraine of the “Society for the Liberation of Ukraine.” Membership in the League of the Militant Godless shot up to over five million in 1932, though party officials groused that only a small percentage were active. At the same time the Soviet state came to a kind of accommodation with Orthodox Metropolitan Sergii, who had issued a Declaration of Loyalty in 1927 and followed this up with a controversial pamphlet, The Truth about Religion in the Soviet Union (1930), in which he claimed that no religious persecution existed in the country. Sergii appeared to have been motivated by the sincere desire to persuade the communist government away from further persecution of believers, holding that compromise and loyalty to the present rulers was the only way to assure at least a modicum of acceptance for Orthodox believers.31
At the same time the renovationists who had cooperated with the Soviet authorities against Patriarch Tikhon remained active as the so-called Living Church. Sergii came from this background but later repented and rejected reno-vationist ideas. This group drew from a broad variety of individuals unhappy with the present church, including some with both extreme right (e. g., the prerevolutionary group “Union of the Russian People” or Black Hundreds) and extreme left backgrounds. As their name implies, the renovationists hoped to renew the Orthodox Church, bring it more in line with present realities in the Soviet state, emphasize its social role, and in this way win the trust and support of the communist authorities. They also wanted to reduce the power of the “black clergy” (monks) for whom traditionally all ecclesiastic offices (bishops, metropolitans, etc.) had been reserved. In general they argued for a less hierarchical and more democratic inner church structure. While there were sincere motives among some who joined the renovationists, others were motivated by more petty aspirations for power and prestige. The fact that some renovationists denounced Orthodox priests who opposed them to the secret police tainted the entire movement. The communist authorities saw the Living Church mainly as a tool to weaken Orthodoxy and the taint of cooperation with the communists made it difficult for the renovationists to find acceptance among the peasant faithful. In 1946 the Living Church was finally disbanded.
The Survival of Religion under Soviet Rule
According to all constitutions of the USSR, Soviet citizens were allowed to follow their convictions in religious matters. In fact, as we have seen, religion was at best tolerated, and that within very narrow boundaries. Religion did not disappear entirely from public view, but increasingly retreated to private, personal, or underground venues. In particular communists were expected to shun religion, but being known as a believer could prevent one’s acceptance to university or led to dismissal from a job (in particular, educators were expected by the 1930s to abjure religious faith).
Among the thousands of churches destroyed or converted to secular uses in the late 1920s and 1930s, perhaps the most famous was the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. This enormous church, if architecturally undistinguished, had been built over a period of two generations, and was finally completed under Tsar Alexander III in 1883. The cathedral towered over the Moscow river near the Kremlin, impressive with its enormous marble panels and paintings of saints. The cathedral’s huge size and its proximity to the Kremlin must have annoyed the communist government, but the cathedral was left mainly untouched for almost a decade and a half after the revolution. Then, on July 18, 1931, a short article appeared in Pravda announcing that the authorities had decided to build a new Palace of the Soviets. The article mentioned the address of the future palace without noting that the new building would rise on the site where the cathedral now stood. To build the new palace, it was clear that the cathedral would have to be demolished. On December 5, 1931, a series of explosions leveled the cathedral, though it took over a year to clear away the debris. In June 1933 Stalin signed an order to construct the world’s largest building on the site: taller and heavier than the Empire State building (completed in 1931), topped by a 6,000 ton statue of Lenin. While the palace was never built, the destruction of the largest Orthodox cathedral in the world sent a clear signal to all believers of a newly militant antireligious policy.32
Christians were not, of course, the only ones affected by the antireligious repressions of the 1920s and 1930s. Jews found themselves in a peculiar position: at the same time a nationality and a religion. Because of the antisemitic excesses of the Bolshevik’s opponents in the Civil War period, probably most Jews welcomed, if cautiously, Soviet rule. But rapidly their own religious practices and clergy came under attack. Yiddish publishing was allowed and even encouraged (though using a phonetic spelling system not accepted outside the USSR), but as a sacred tongue - and the language of Zionism - Hebrew was viewed with suspicion by the authorities. Just as with churches, many synagogues were shut down, often converted into communist clubs, like the Choral Synagogues in Minsk and Kharkov. Frequently the communist specifically used militant atheists of Jewish origin to attack the religion of their fathers. Rabbis, like other clergymen, were stripped of their rights as citizens and were often subject to harassment and arrest.33
While Jews were simultaneously a nationality and a religion, Muslims made up a number of national groups, mainly but not exclusively Turkic in ethnicity and language. Islam is more than a religion; it is a way of life that includes schools, courts, charities, and everyday practices. In the generation between revolution and World War II, most of these institutions were shut down and even the number of mosques declined radically: from 26,279 in 1912 to 1,312 in 1942.34 Mullahs were “persuaded” to resign or were arrested for allegedly encouraging resistance to the Soviet government. Muslim women were encouraged to leave the isolation of their homes and participate in public affairs. Polygamy was outlawed as was the zakah (the contributions to charity every Muslim was required to make) and kalym (bride-price). Campaigns were undertaken against ritual prayer and fasting during Ramadan. Finally, in 1935, the Soviet government forbade Muslims from undertaking the hadj or pilgrimage to Mecca. Soviet measures against Islamic practices had a number of motivations: antireligious, national, and international. Besides the general distaste among communists for any religion, Islam seemed particularly dangerous as a possible source of contact with believers abroad. Within the USSR, the Soviet leadership worried about Pan - Turkic sentiments: the memory of the anti-Bolshevik Basmachi during the Civil War and the heresies of Sultan-Galiev remained strong.
As in other times of catastrophe, millennial sects cropped up. In certain ways, sects were better equipped to survive Soviet persecutions than were organized churches. Baptists had long existed, though on the edge of legality, even in imperial Russia. Following a brief period of toleration they ran into trouble with the authorities after 1929, when proselytizing was forbidden. But with their tight-knit communities, emphasis on reading the Scriptures, and experience with persecution, the Baptist communities continued to exist illegally in secret.
At the same time, despite the continued existence of the League of the Militant Godless, from the mid-1930s mainstream propaganda shifted away from direct attacks on religion (which might have the unwanted effect of making religion seem important) to more subtle approaches. Rather than deny the existence of God, Soviet culture glorified new gods: explorers, aviators, workers. To quote the very popular “March of the Jolly Guys” (1934): “We conquer space and time, We are the young masters of the world!” Soviet pilots competed to set new records. The most famous of them, Valerii Chkalov, flew over the North Pole not once but twice, becoming an international hero. Soviet athletes displayed their prowess in competitions and mass celebrations. The massive construction projects of the 1930s and the Stakhanovite competitions showed that human beings could change their world or, to put it another way, showed the triumph of science over belief.35
In the long run, violence and repression probably did less to weaken traditional religion than did economic and sociological changes among the Soviet populace. As peasants moved to the growing cities, the opportunity for religious worship was small, while the new city dwellers were attracted to many other forms of entertainment and community. Many towns were entirely without functioning churches by the late 1930s and larger cities often had only a handful. Of course, the Soviet authorities seldom allowed the building of new churches - the essentially Soviet city of Magnitogorsk had no churches at all. Even where churches could be found, in the towns churches did not play the same important role as crucial centers for community life that they had on the countryside. Perhaps Trotsky was right when he argued in 1923 (“Vodka, the Church, and the Cinema”) that the cinema would help blot out religious belief among Soviet workers.36
By the end of the 1930s overt attacks on churches, synagogues, or mosques were becoming less common. After all, the majority of holy places had been destroyed or converted to other uses by that time and the number of clergy reduced significantly, with only four of the over 100 Orthodox bishops (as of 1930) still at their posts in 1939.3 7 Religious believers could count on various forms of discrimination such as the rejection of their children-s application for higher education and their barring from certain jobs. But clearly religious belief and spirituality had not been eliminated entirely. Even among the young there often remained a fascination for this now neglected part of the past. As we have noted, in the later 1930s there was a shift away from militancy and back to many forms of traditional behavior. But while many forms of traditional Russian identity - in the family (sacred motherhood), army (tsarist ranks and epaulets), popular culture (folk dances) were rehabilitated in the latter 1930s, religious belief never was. Within strict limits, religion could be tolerated, but it could never be accepted as a legitimate part of Soviet identity.38
The leaders of religious groups in the USSR reacted differently to these state repressions. Unlike private persons, they could not simply worship in private: their public position made it imperative to come to some kind of agreement with the existing political order. As we have seen, Metropolitan Sergii cooperated with the Soviet authorities from the late 1920s and remained at this post well into the 1940s. Sergii s position has been criticized both at the time (especially by the Orthodox Churches in exile) and later. Most likely Sergii hoped that by upholding the public role of the church he could help it weather the present terrible times. He also surely wished to preserve the traditions of the Orthodox Church against the renovationists of the Living Church. Other priests pretended to abandon their clerical calling but continued to administer to their parishioners spiritual needs in secret, risking their lives in the process. In other cases religious people without a priest simply organized their own ceremonies in secret, again risking arrest if the authorities were to find out.
It is impossible to estimate accurately the numbers of “underground faithful” worshiping in secret by the late 1930s. The church historian Dmitry Pospielovsky has suggested that one reason the Soviet regime tolerated the official church was to use it to keep tabs on unofficial religious associations.89 The few remaining priests were forced to adopt such novel practices as mass baptisms, long-distance confessions, and performing funerals in absentia. Others pretended to give up their priestly calling while continuing to celebrate weddings and funeral rites in secret. In the late 1930s a second mass wave of arrests among clergy and lay believers took place in the context of the Great Terror. Thus on the eve of World War II the position of religious believers in the USSR appeared very grave, if not desperate.
Compromising with Religion: World War II
When World War II began, the USSR was allied with Nazi Germany. Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army occupied what had been eastern Poland; this area became part of the Belarusian and Ukrainian SSRs, with the city Wilno (now Vilnius) and its surroundings given to Lithuania. With the incorporation of this territory, the USSR acquired for the first time a large Catholic population, along with many Jews and Orthodox believers. With the occupation of the Baltic countries in the following year, millions of other Catholics became Soviet citizens. Catholics were problematic for the communists for at least two reasons: they were often devoutly religious and they belonged to an international church headed by an explicitly anti-Soviet Pope. The fact that Catholic clergy and church hierarchy was heavily Polish did not help matters; the Poles were well known as both anti-Russian and anticommunist. In the short period before the Nazi invasion, mass arrests and deportations removed tens of thousands of former Polish and Baltic citizens from their homes. Among these were numerous clergymen and believers. Antireligious spectacles were staged in schools whereby children were prompted to ask God for treats (and predictably nothing happened) and then to repeat the request to Stalin or the party, whereupon candies would shower down from above.
With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 the position of religious believers changed suddenly. As we have seen, Stalin underwent a total breakdown and it was Metropolitan Sergii who immediately called on the faithful to defend their homeland in a widely (strictly speaking, illegally) disseminated pastoral letter that urged Russians to use all means to resist the foreign invader. Combining religious with national appeals, Sergii called on patriotic Russians to support the Soviet war effort because only the USSR could defend the Russian nation. The crisis of foreign attack immediately made Russian Orthodox believers and the church hierarchy allies with the Soviet government against the Nazi invaders. Collections in churches went to arm a tank column that was christened “Dmitrii Donskoi” after the medieval prince who defeated the Tatars. Metropolitan Aleksii of Leningrad remained in the city throughout the siege and pronounced many sermons on patriotic themes, comparing the present military struggle with the battles of Alexander Nevsky against the Teutonic Knights centuries earlier. Metropolitan Nikolai of Moscow spoke of the church’s “holy hatred for the enemy,” telling the faithful that the commandment “love their neighbor” did not apply to “the German murderers” and even spoke of Stalin as “our common father” in the struggle against the fascists.
The regime repaid this support with a lessening of restrictions. The League of the Militant Godless was abolished in 1942 and religious leaders were allowed freer expression of religious (cum patriotic) sentiments. The fact that churches in the territory under Nazi occupation were allowed to open encouraged Stalin to adopt a similarly benevolent position. In September 1943 the Soviet leader met with church leaders in the Kremlin, and the following month the Council for Affairs of Orthodox Church was set up. Other religions also received similar concessions, essentially trading loyalty to the regime for official recognition. A sobor (council) of church officials was allowed and Sergii was elected Patriarch of Moscow. Some 20,000 churches were allowed to reopen (showing the strength of underground faith) and several seminaries were allowed to train future clergy.40
The Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church reached agreements that in many ways would last until the end of the Soviet regime. This is not to say that religious persecution ended but merely that the position of the church and its relations with the Soviet state were at least significantly stabilized. The Soviet state would support the Orthodox Church, for example, in incorporating the Baltic bishoprics and Uniates after the war; in turn the head of the Orthodox Church (by war s end Patriarch Aleksii, Sergii having died in 1944) had to support, for example, Soviet claims that the Katyn massacre had been the work of the Nazis.
At war’s end, many of the freedoms allowed the clergy were again withdrawn, in particular in publicizing their sermons and pastoral letters. But the basic agreement between Soviet state and Orthodox Church remained, restoring the right of the church to train - within strict limits - new priests, fill existing positions, and even open up new churches if sufficient interest and finances could be shown (obviously a rare event). The fundamental hostility of the Soviet state toward religiosity had not changed. Perhaps the very weakness of the Orthodox Church in 1945 compared to two or three decades earlier made the Soviet authorities more willing to agree to concessions.
The belief system of Soviet citizens in 1945, it seems safe to say, differed radically from that of subjects of the tsar in 1861. Even those who retained the belief in a transcendent God perceived the relation between God and human life in a quite different way. In 1861 the tsar’s political legitimacy was derived from God: Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike said a prayer for the Russian ruler in churches, synagogues, and mosques weekly. At the end of World War II, religion had largely retreated from the public stage (despite a return during the war), retaining its place mainly in the private sphere. For many Soviet citizens, a secular worldview had made God seem old fashioned or simply irrelevant.
The process of secularization in the USSR was not, of course, unique to that country, though the violence of antireligious sentiments and practices was. During the same period in western and central Europe, church attendance declined and Orthodoxy among Jews was increasingly replaced by less stringent forms of religious practice. But the fact that the communist leaders regarded their atheism as a central part of a progressive, modern political ideology, combined with the deep religious believers of the majority of the population, made a clash of incompatible worldviews likely if not entirely inevitable. The destruction of the Russian peasantry went hand in hand with destruction of the traditional church. Once the victory over the peasantry had been assured, especially after the patriotic fervor of the remaining Orthodox hierarchy had been shown during World War II, compromise could be allowed. But religious belief never ceased to be perceived as a flaw, a personal weakness, or eccentricity by the Soviet regime.
World History
