Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union

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The history of Christianity in the Soviet Union was not limited to repression and secularization. Communist policies toward religious belief and practice tended to vacillate over time between, on the one hand, a Utopian determination to substitute secular rationalism for what they considered to be an unmodern, "superstitious" world view and, on the other, pragmatic acceptance of the tenaciousness of religious faith and institutions.

In any case, religious beliefs and practices did persist, in the domestic and private spheres but also in the scattered public spaces allowed by a state that recognized its failure to eradicate religion and the political dangers of an unrelenting culture war.^[1]

Contents 1 Russification 2 Official Soviet stance 3 Soviet tactics 4 Anti-religious campaign 1917-1921 5 Anti-religious campaign 1921-1928 6 Anti-religious campaign 1928-1940 7 World War II rapprochement 8 Postwar era 9 Resumption of Anti-Religious Campaign 10 1964-1970s 11 Renewal of Persecution in 1970s 12 Penetration of Churches by Soviet secret services 13 Glasnost 14 See also 15 References 16 External links

Russification

Before and after the October Revolution of November 7, 1917 (October 25 Old Calendar) there was a movement within the Soviet Union to unite all of the people of the world under Communist rule (see Communist International). This included the Eastern European bloc countries as well as the Balkan States. Since some of these Slavic states tied their ethnic heritage to their ethnic churches, both the peoples and their church where targeted by the Soviet and its form of State atheism.^[2][3]

Official Soviet stance

The Soviets' official religious stance was one of "religious freedom or tolerance", though the state established atheism as the only scientific truth.^{[4][5][6][7][8][9]} Criticism of atheism or the state's anti-religious policies was forbidden and could lead to forced retirement, arrest and/or imprisonment.^[10][11][12] Holding of a religion was never outlawed and the Soviet Constitutions always guaranteed the right to believe. However, since marxist ideology as interpreted by Lenin and his successors dictated that religion was an obstacle to the construction of the communist society, putting an end to all religion (and replacing it with atheism) was a fundamentally important ideological goal of the state. The persecution of religion was carried out officially through many legal measures that were designed to hamper religious activities, a massive volume of anti-religious propaganda as well as education, and through various other means. The official persecution was also, however, accompanied by much secret instructions that remained unofficial.

The official persecution was often disguised under euphemisms in official party documents such as 'struggle against bourgeois ideology', 'dissemination of materialist ideology', etc. The government often rejected the principle that all religious believers should be treated as public enemies, partly due to pragmatic considerations of the large number of people adhering to a faith and also partly from the belief that there were many loyal Soviet citizens included among the number of believers whom ought to be convinced to become atheists rather than outright attacked.

Religious believers were always subject to anti-religious propaganda, legislation that restricted their religious practice or suffered restrictions in Soviet society, however, as a result of the paradigm stated above, they were rarely officially ever subject to arrest, imprisonment or death simply for having their beliefs, but usually they suffered those things during the persecution as a result of some perception (real or imagined) of their resistance to the state's broader campaign against religion.^[13]

The campaign was designed to disseminate atheism, and the acts of violence and terror tactics that would be used, while being almost always officially invoked on the basis of perceived resistance to the state, in the larger scheme they were meant not simply as acts against rebellion, but to further assist in the suppression of religion in order to disseminate atheism ^[13]. Often, the state even deliberately provoked resistance or invented resistance for the purpose of having an excuse to attack believers in order to help further the cause of the elimination of religion.

The Soviet government sought to put the Church under control by appointing loyal men as priests, allegedly ending up with the entire upper ranks of the Church being officers of the KGB.

Soviet tactics

The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an ideological objective the elimination of religion. The tactics varied over the years and became more moderate or more harsh at different times. Among common tactics included confiscating church property, ridiculing religion, harassing believers, and propagating atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most organized religions were never outlawed.

Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals.^{[14][15][16][17]} Many Orthodox (along with peoples of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them give up their religious convictions (see Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union).^{[15][16][18][19]}

In the Soviet Union, in addition to the methodical closing and destruction of churches, the charitable and social work formerly done by ecclesiastical authorities was taken over by the state. As with all private property, Church owned property was confiscated into public use. The few places of worship left to the Church were legally viewed as state property which the government permitted the church to use.

Protestant believers in the USSR (Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists etc.) in the period after the Second world war were compulsively sent to mental hospitals, endured trials and prisons (often for refusal to enter military service). Some were even compulsively deprived of their parent rights.^[20]

Anti-religious campaign 1917-1921

Most of the clergy reacted toward the Russian Revolution with open hostility. Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the new Russian Government in November 1917. During the Civil War, many representatives of the Russian orthodox clergy collaborated with the White Armies and foreign invading armies, hoping for a restoration of the prerevolutionary regime. ^[21]

Work began to be done to make the state Atheist by removing the influence of all religion, and the Orthodox church especially, from Soviet society from the earliest days after the revolution and continued until the fall of the USSR.

In November 1917, following the collapse of the tsarist government, a council of the Russian Orthodox church reestablished the patriarchate and elected the metropolitan Tikhon as patriarch.

In November 1917, within weeks of the revolution, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment was established, which a month later created the All-Russian Union of Teachers-Internationalists for the purpose of removing religious instruction from school curricula. In order to intensify the anti-religious propaganda in the school system, the Chief Administration for Political Enlightenment (Glavpolitprosvet) was established in November 1920.^[22]

Lenin's decree on the separation of church and state in early 1918 deprived the formerly official church of its status of legal person, the right to own property, or to teach religion in both state and private schools or to any group of minors.^[23] This measure was meant to cripple the church and allow for its collapse. The new government for the next few years launched a campaign to seize church property.^[24] Churches were closed, and could be converted to other uses, such as warehouses.

Patriarch Tikhon excommunicated the Soviet leadership on January 19 1918 (Julian Calender) for conducting this campaign. In retaliation the regime arrested and killed dozens of bishops, thousands of the lower clergy and monastics, and multitudes of laity.^[25] The seizing of church property over the next few years would be marked by a brutal campaign of violent terror.^[24]

Between 1917 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of Orthodox priests, monks and nuns were arrested. In 1918, the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky executed over 3,000 Orthodox clergymen of all ranks.^[26] Some were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice or poured over with cold water in winter until they turned to ice-pillars.^[26] During the summer of 1918, 47 members of the clergy from the Yekaterinburg diocese were shot, axed to death or drowned.^[27]

During the Russian Civil War, the red army massacred large numbers of clergy and believers often on grounds of alleged support for the Whites; much of these killings were not officially instigated from the top, but were done on the initiative of local units of soldiers. In later years, the church would declare that the excommunication was a misunderstanding based on the belief that these killings were officially instigated (however, they were never officially repudiated either) ^[28]. Later Soviet authors would claim central responsibility for these actions, however, including Yaroslavsky (who was a participant in these killings) who justified the campaign by claiming that the church was fighting against them.

Atheistic propaganda was considered to be of essential importance to Lenin's party from its early pre-revolutionary days and the regime was quick to create atheist journals to attack religion shortly after its coming to power. The first operated under the name Revolution and the Church (Revolustiia i tserkov). It was originally believed in the ideology that religion would disappear quickly with the coming of the revolution and that its replacement with atheism would be inevitable. The leadership of the new state did not take much time, however, to come to the conclusion that religion would not disappear on its own and greater efforts should be given to anti-religious propaganda.^[29]

For this purpose atheistic work was centrally consolidated underneath the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the CP Central Committee (Agitprop) in 1920 using the guidelines of article 13 of the Russian Communist Party (RCP) adopted by the 8th party congress.^[29]

Article 13 stated 'As far as religion is concerned, the RCP will not be satisfied by the decreed separation of Church and State... The Party aims at the complete destruction of links between the exploiting classes and... religious propaganda, while assisting the actual liberation of the working masses from religious prejudices and organizing the broadest possible education-enlightening and anti-religious propaganda. At the same time it is necessary carefully to avoid any insult to the believers' feelings, which would lead to the hardening of religious fanaticism' ^[30]

The article would be very important in anti-religious policy in the USSR in later years, and its last sentence, which would be both ignored and recalled back at different point in Soviet history, would play an important role in later rivalries in the power struggles of later years between different Soviet leaders.^[22]

Public debates were held between Christians and atheists after the revolution up until they were suspended in 1929. Among famous participants of these debates included on the atheist side, Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky. People would line up for hours in order to get seats to see them. The authorities sometimes tried to limit the speaking time of the Christians to ten minutes, and on other occasions the debates would be called off at last minute. This may have been a result of a reportedly high quality of some of the religious debaters. Professor V.S. Martsinkovsky, raised as orthodox but who had become an evangelical Protestant was one of the best on the religious side, and Lunacharsky reportedly canceled one of his debates with him after having lost in a previous debate.^[31] On one occasion in 1921 a large crowd of Komsomol hecklers arrived at one of Martsinkovsky's debates and occupied the two front rows. When the leader tried to heckle, he found himself unsupported by his boys, and after wards they told him that he was not saying what they were told he was going to say.^[31]

Anti-religious campaign 1921-1928

The tenth CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) congress met in 1921 and it passed a resolution calling for 'widescale organization, leadership, and cooperation in the task of anti-religious agitation and propaganda among the broad masses of the workers, using the mass media, films, books, lectures, and other devices.^[32][33]

In August 1921, a Plenary meeting of the CPSU Central Committee (the highest leadership of the state) adopted an 11-point instruction on the interpretation and application of article 13 (mentioned above). It differentiated between religious believers and uneducated believers, and allowed the latter to have party membership if they were devoted to Communism, but that they should be re-educated to make them atheists. It also called for moderation in the anti-religious campaign and emphasized that the state was fighting against all religion and not simply individual ones (such as the Orthodox church) ^[34]

The public debates began to be suppressed after the 10th congress, until they were formally suspended in 1929 and replaced with public lectures by atheists. Martsinkovsky was arrested and sent into exile in 1922 on account of his preaching that was attracting people to religion and told he could return in a few years once the workers had become wiser (he was in fact never allowed to return).^[35]

The church allegedly tried to set up free religio-philosophical academies, study circles and periodicals in the 1920s, which Lenin met by arresting and expelling all the organizers abroad and shutting down these efforts with force ^[36].

Despite the August 1921 instruction, the state took a very hard line against the Orthodox Church on the pretext that it was a legacy of the Tsarist past (the difference in practice and policy may have reflected internal disagreement among the party leadership). Trotsky wanted Patriarch Tikhon to be killed, but Lenin forbade it for fear it would produce another Germogen (a Patriarch who was killed by the Poles when they occupied Moscow in 1612).^[37]

In order to weaken the Orthodox church, the state supported a schism called the Renovationist sect, by giving it legal recognition in 1922 and continuing to terrorize the old Orthodox as well as deprive it of legal means of existence.^[37] The Patriarch was arrested in 1922, and his chancery was taken over by the Renovationists.^[38] He refused to give in to the government's demands and was tortured. The Renovationists restored a Holy Synod to power, and brought division among clergy and faithful.

In 1922 there was a famine in Russia and Lenin had ordered that all of the precious metals, precious stones and valuable material (including icons) that could be found in religious buildings throughout the country should be confiscated and sold in order to create funds to help relieve the famine. This provoked some resistance and a bloody incident in a town called Shuia. Lenin wrote that their enemies had foolishly afforded them a great opportunity by this action, since he believed that the peasant masses would not support the church's hold on its valuables in light of the famine and that the resistance that the church offered could be met with bloody retaliation against the clergy without inciting popular sympathy for them.^[39]

The sixth sector of the OGPU, led by Yevgeny Tuchkov, began aggressively arresting and executing bishops, priests, and devout worshipers, such as Metropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd in 1922 for refusing to accede to the demand to hand in church valuables (including sacred relics). Archbishop Andronik of Perm, who worked as a missionary in Japan, was buried alive.^[26] Bishop Germogen of Tobolsk, who voluntarily accompanied the czar into exile, was strapped to the paddlewheel of a streamboat and mangled by the rotating blades. .^[26]

In 1922, the Solovki Camp of Special Purpose, the first Russian concentration camp and a former Orthodox monastery, was established in the Solovki Islands in the White Sea [1]. Eight metropolitans, twenty archbishops, and forty-seven bishops of the Orthodox Church died there, along with tens of thousands of the laity. Of these, 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad.^{[citation needed]} Father Pavel Florensky was one of the New-martyrs of this particular period.

In the first five years after the Bolshevik revolution, An English journalist estimated that 28 bishops and 1,215 priests were executed.^[40][41] Recently released evidence indicates over 8,000 were killed in 1922 during the conflict over church valuables.^[40] This included people like the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna who was at this point a monastic. Along with her murder was Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich Romanov; the Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor Konstantinovich and Vladimir Pavlovich Paley; Grand Duke Sergei's secretary, Fyodor Remez; and Varvara Yakovleva, a sister from the Grand Duchess Elizabeth's convent.

They were herded into the forest, pushed into an abandoned mineshaft and grenades were then hurled into the mineshaft. Her remains were buried in Jerusalem, in the Church of Maria Magdalene.

Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals.^[14][17] Many Orthodox (along with peoples of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them give up their religious convictions (see Piteşti prison).^[18][19]

Specialized anti-religious publications began in 1922, including Yemelyan Yaroslavsky’s Bezbozhnik, which would later form the basis for the League of the Militant Godless.

With the conclusion of the campaign of seizing church valuables, the terror campaign against the church was called off for a while. The church closings ended for a period and abuses were investigated ^[42]. The propaganda war continue, and public institutions worked to purge religious views from intellectuals and academia ^[43][44].

The old marxist assumption that religion would disappear on its own with changing material conditions was pragmatically challenged as religion as persisted. The Soviet leadership debated with themselves of how best to combat religion. The positions ranged from the 'rightist' belief that religion would die on its own naturally with increasing education, and the 'leftist' belief that religion needed to be attacked strongly. Lenin called the struggle to disseminate atheism ‘the cause of our state’ ^[45][46].

The government had difficulties trying to implement anti-religious education in schools, due to a shortage of atheist teachers. Anti-religious education began in secondary schools in 1925.

The state changed its position on the renovationists and began to increasingly see them as an independent threat in the late 1920s due to their great success in attracting people to religion.

Tikhon died in 1925 and the Soviets forbade patriarchal elections to be held. Patriarchal locum tenens (acting Patriarch) Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky, 1887-1944), going against the opinion of a major part of the church's parishes, in 1927 issued a declaration accepting the Soviet authority over the church as legitimate, pledging the church's cooperation with the government and condemning political dissent within the church. With his notorious Declaration of 1927, he made the church in the Soviet Union a political tool of the atheist government. The majority of the clergy vehemently protested against this concordat, but they were systematically killed.

He did this in order to secure the survival of the church. Metropolitan Sergius formally expressed his "loyalty" to the Soviet government and henceforth refrained from criticizing the state in any way. This attitude of loyalty, however, provoked more divisions in the church itself: inside Russia, a number of faithful opposed Sergius, and abroad, the Russian metropolitans of America and western Europe severed their relations with Moscow.

By this he granted himself with the power that he, being a deputy of imprisoned Metropolitan Peter and acting against his will, had no right to assume according to the XXXIV Apostolic canon, which led to a split with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia abroad and the Russian True Orthodox Church (Russian Catacomb Church) within the Soviet Union, as they remained faithful to the Canons of the Apostles, declaring the part of the church led by Metropolitan Sergius schism, sometimes coined as sergianism.

Due to this canonical disagreement it is disputed which church has been the legitimate successor to the Russian Orthodox Church that had existed before 1925. [2][3][4][5]

In 1927, the state tried to mend the schism by bringing the renovationists back into the Orthodox church, partly so that the former could be better controlled through agents they had in the latter.

The Komsomol and later LMG would try to implement the 10th congress resolution by various attacks, parades, theatrical performances, journals, brochures and films. The Komsomol would hold crude blasphemous 'Komsomol Christmases' and 'Komsomol Easters' headed by hooligans dressed as orthodox clergy.^[35] The processions would include the burning of icons, religious books, mock images of Christ, the Virgin, etc. The propaganda campaign, however, was a failure and many people remained with their religious convictions. The church held its own public events with some success, and well competed with the anti-religious propaganda during these years.^[47]

Anti-religious campaign 1928-1940

The Orthodox church suffered terribly in the 1930s, and many of its members were killed or sent to labour camps. In the period between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to less than 500. 1929 was a watershed year in which Soviet policy brought much new legislation in place that would form the basis for the harsh anti-religious persecution in the following decade.

Anti-religious education was introduced from the first-grade up in 1928 and anti-religious work was intensified throughout the education system. A massive purge was conducted at the same time of Christian intellectuals, who mostly died in the camps or in prison,^[48] in order to take away the church’s intellectuals and assist official propaganda that only backward people believed in God.^[49]

The church's successful competition with the ongoing and widespread atheistic propaganda, prompted new laws to be adopted in 1929 on 'Religious Associations' as well as amendments to the constitution, which forbade all forms of public, social, communal, educational, publishing or missionary activities for religious believers.^[47] This also prevented, of course, the church from printing any material for public consumption or responding to the criticism against it. This caused many religious tracts to be circulated as illegal literature or samizdat.^[14]. Numerous other measures were introduced that were designed to cripple the church, and effectively made it illegal to have religious activities of any sort outside of liturgical services within the walls of the few churches that would remain open, and even these would be subject to much interference and harassment. Catechism classes, religious schools, study groups, Sunday schools and religious publications were all illegal and/or banned.

The League of the Militant Godless (LMG), under Emelian Yaroslavsky, was the main instrument of the anti-reilgious campaign and it was given special powers that allowed it to dictate to public institutions throughout the country what they needed to do for the campaign.

After 1929 and through the 30s, the closing of churches, mass arrests of the clergy and religiously active laity, and persecution of people for attending church reached unprecedented proportions.^[47]. The LMG employed terror tactics against believers in order to further the campaign, while employing the guise of protecting the state or prosecuting law-breakers. The clergy were attacked as foreign spies and trials of bishops were conducted with their clergy as well as lay adherents who were reported as 'subversive terroristic gangs' that had been unmasked^[50]. This was the normal way that the anti-religious persecution operated in the USSR, in that specific acts of violence would be overtly justified by specific acts of resistance perceived (real or otherwise), but in reality were simply part of the larger campaign to disseminate atheism and end religion.

The debate between the ‘rightist’ and ‘leftist’ sides of how to best combat religion found some conclusion in 1930 and afterwards, when the state officially condemned extremes on both sides. Marxist leaders who took either position on this issue would find themselves attacked by a paranoid Stalin who did not tolerate other authorities to speak as authorities on public policy.^[51]

A lull in the active persecution was experienced in 1930-33 following Stalin's 1930 article 'Diziness From Success', however, it swept back in fervour again afterwards ^[52].

In 1934 the persecution of the Renovationist sect began to reach the proportions of the persecution of the old Orthodox church.^[53]

During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot.^[54] Many thousands of victims of persecution became recognized in a special canon of saints known as the "new martyrs and confessors of Russia".

A decline in enthusiasm in the campaign occurred in the late 30s ^[55]. The tone of the anti-religious campaign changed and became more moderate. It ended at the outbreak of World War II.

Official Soviet figures reported that up to one third of urban and two thirds of rural population still held religious beliefs by 1937. However, the anti-religious campaign of the past decade and the terror tactics of the militantly atheist regime, had effectively eliminated all public expressions of religion and communal gatherings of believers outside of the walls of the few churches that still held services^[56]. This was accomplished in a country that only a few decades earlier had had a deeply Christian public life and culture that had developed for almost a thousand years.

World War II rapprochement

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and many churches were re-opened underneath the German occupation. In order to rally the country, which otherwise may have had (and did initially) large quantities of people supporting the invasion for that reason, Stalin ended the anti-religious campaign. In September 1941, three months after the Nazi attack, the last antireligious periodicals were shut down. Churches were re-opened in the Soviet Union and the League of the Militant Godless (LMG) was disbanded. Emelian Yaroslavsky, the leader and founder of the LMG, who had led the entire national anti-religious campaign in the 1930s, found himself writing an article in praise of Orthodox Christian Dostoevsky for his alleged hatred of the Germans ^[57]

Joseph Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church to intensify patriotic support for the war effort. On September 41943, Metropolitans Sergius (Stragorodsky), Alexius (Simansky) and Nikolay (Yarushevich) were officially received by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin who proposed to create the Moscow Patriarchate. They received a permission to convene a council on September 81943, that elected Sergius Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. The church had a public presence once again and passed measures reaffirming their hierarchical structure that flatly contradicted the 1929 legislation and even Lenin's 1918 decree. The official legislation was not ever withdrawn, however, which is suggestive that the authorities did not consider that this tolerance would become permanent^[58].

This is considered by some violation of the XXX Apostolic canon, as no church hierarch could be consecrated by secular authorities. [6] A new patriarch was elected, theological schools were opened, and thousands of churches began to function. The Moscow Theological Academy Seminary, which had been closed since 1918, was re-opened.

Postwar era

Between 1945 and 1959 the official organization of the church was greatly expanded, although individual members of the clergy were occasionally arrested and exiled. The number of open churches reached 25,000. By 1957 about 22,000 Russian Orthodox churches had become active. But in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev initiated his own campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church and forced the closure of about 12,000 churches. By 1985, fewer than 7,000 churches remained active.

As the Red Army progressively began to push the German soldiers out of Russia and victory became more certain, anti-religious propaganda began to resurrect. The Central Committee issued new resolutions in 1944 and 45 that called for a renewal of anti-religious propaganda. For the rest of Stalin's life, however, the propaganda was mostly limited to words and its main target was against the Vatican. The Orthodox believers had to fight hard in order to keep the churches that were re-opened during the war, and some of them were closed by the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox Church, which also tried to prevent bishops from using disciplinary measures against church members for immorality ^[59].

Tax exemptions for Monasteries was instituted on August 29 1945.

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and its clergy became one of the victims of Soviet authorities in immediate postwar time. In 1945 Soviet authorities arrested, deported and sentenced to forced labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere the church's metropolitan Josyf Slipyj and nine bishops, as well as hundreds of clergy and leading lay activists.

All the above-mentioned bishops and significant part of clergymen died in prisons, concentration camps, internal exile, or soon after their release during the post-Stalin thaw^[60]. The exception was metropolitan Josyf Slipyj who, after 18 years of imprisonment and persecution, was released thanks to the intervention of Pope John XXIII, arrived in Rome, where he received the title of Major Archbishop of Lviv, and became cardinal in 1965^[60].

There was no physical attack on the church for the remainder of Stalin's lifetime, however, the persecution escalated in 1947 at which point it was again declared that membership in the Komsomol or holding of a teaching position was incompatible with religious belief. Anti-religious propaganda was renewed in the newspapers, but with much less strength as it was before. Often the propaganda would refrain from mentioning religion specifically and would use some euphemism for it^[61].

In 1947 the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, Znanie (Knowledge), for short, was established and it effectively inherited the role that had been left behind by the LMG as an anti-religious propaganda organ^[62]. It was a much more scholarly institution than the LMG, however, and it was very diverse such that even religious believers could join it. In 1949 it claimed to have 40,200 full and associate members^[62]. The CPSU Central Committee criticized the organization in 1949 for failing to have enough membership including particularly scholarly membership, not paying sufficient attention to atheist propaganda and for showing insufficient concern for ideological content in its lectures. The Committee called for it to be transformed into a mass voluntary organization of Soviet Intelligentsia (note: this did not mean people could actually refuse to join), it called for it to have more ideological content in its lectures and that all lectures are to be submitted for approval prior to delivery.

In 1950 it claimed to have 243,000 full and associate members with 1800 institutional members^[62]. It would eventually climb, by 1972, to have 2,470,000 members, including 1700 members of the Union and Republican Academics of Sciences and 107,000 professors and doctors of sciences; it would run 'Houses of Scientific Atheism' in Soviet cities^[63].

The USSR Academy of Sciences published its first post-war atheistic periodical in 1950, but did not follow up with a second until 1954.

On July 7 1954, the CPSU Central Committee noted that the Orthodox church and other Christian sects had successfully been attracting many young people with their sermons and public activities (which were still technically illegal under the 1929 legislation), and more people were coming to religious services. The Committee therefore called on public institutions to intensify anti-religious propaganda. It also called for all school subjects to be saturated with atheism and that anti-religious education should be enhanced. On November 10 1954, the Committee issued a contrary resolution (there was a lack of political unity after Stalin's deah) that criticized arbitrariness in the anti-religious campaign, as well as the use of slander, libel and insults against believers^[64].

Public institutions, in answer to the July 1954 resolution, would begin producing more anti-religious propaganda in the coming years. The Academy of Science in 1957 published its Yearbook of the Museum of History of Religion and Atheism, and Znanie would begin producing a monthly-journal in 1959 called Nauka i religiia (Science and Religion), which would have some resemblance to the pre-war Bezbozhnik. It grew from 100,000 copies per issue to 400,000 by the early 80s, and then declined to 340,000-350,000^[65].

The school system would also begin enhancing atheistic materials in its curriculum. For example, one published textbook had the declaration, 'Religion is a fantastic and perverse reflection of the world in man's consciousness... Religion has become the medium for the spiritual enslavement of the masses^[66].

The period in the years following shortly after 1954 was characterized by much liberalism towards religious belief, but this would come to an end in the late 50s.

Resumption of Anti-Religious Campaign

A new period of persecution began in the late 1950s under Nikita Khrushchev. The church had advanced its position considerably since 1941, and the government considered it to be necessary to take measures in response.

The two state organizations for overseeing religion in the country (one for the Orthodox, the other for everyone else), changed their functions between 1957-1964. Originally Stalin had created them in 1943 as liaison bodies between religious communities and the state, however, in the Khrushchev years their function was re-interpreted as dictatorial supervisors over the religious activities in the country.^[67].

New instructions were issued in 1958 attacked the position of monasteries, by placing them under high taxation, cutting their land and working to shut them down in order to weaken the church.

From 1959-1964, the persecution operated on several key levels. I) There was a massive closure of churches (reducing the number from 22,000 to 7,000 by 1965^[68]. ) ii) Closures of monasteries and convents as well reinforcement of the 1929 legislations to ban piligrimages iii) Closure of most of the still existing seminaries and bans on pastoral courses iv) banning all services outside of church walls and recording the personal identities of all adults requesting church baptisms, weddings or funerals. Non-fulfillment of these regulations by clergy would lead to disallowance of state registration for them (which meant they could no longer do any pastoral work or liturgy at all, without special state permission). v) The deprivation of parental rights for teaching religion to their children, a ban on the presence of children at church services (beginning in 1961 with the Baptists and then extended to the Orthodox in 1963) as well as the administration of the Eucharist to children over the age of four. vi) The forced retirement, arrests and prison sentences to clergymen who criticized atheism ^[69] or the anti-religious campaign, who conducted Christian charity or who in made religion popular by personal example^[69]. vii) It also disallowed the ringing of church bells and services in daytime in some rural settings from May to the end of October under the pretext of field work requirements^[69].

The government adopted many methods of creating situations that allowed for churches or seminaries to be legally closed (eg. refusing to give permits for building repair, and then shutting down churches on grounds they were unsafe).

Anti-religious education and anti-religious propaganda were intensified as well as improved. Stalin’s legacy of tolerating the church after 1941 was criticized as a break with Lenin.

In 1960, The Central Committee brought back 'individual work' among believers, which was a concept used in the 1930s. This was a practice of atheist tutors (appointed by different public institutions including the CP, Komsomol, Znanie and trade unions) visiting known religious believers at their homes try to convince them to become atheists. In most cases the tutors were workmates of the believers. If the believer was not convinced, the tutor would bring it to the attention of their union or professional collectives, and the backwardness and obstinancy of the specific believers were presented in public meetings. If this did not work, administrative harassment would follow at work or school, and the believers would often be subject to lower-paid jobs, blocking of promotion, or expulsion from college if the believer was in college. Teachers commonly physically punished believing schoolchildren^[70].

The closure of churches and seminaries was actually reported in the Soviet media as reflecting a natural decline of people who followed religious faith.

The government in 1961 forbade clergy from applying any kind of disciplinary measures to the faithful. Priests were turned into the employees of the group of lay members who ‘owned’ the parish under the law. The state attempted to achieve more defections from clergy to atheism, although they would have little success.

Measures were introduced that interfered with the spiritual life of the church and worked to destroy its financial capacity. Clergy were watched in order to find instances where they could be arrested for breaking the law.

New public institutions were creating to assist the anti-religious struggle. Laxity in the anti-religious struggle was criticized and methodology was discussed in conferences as well as other means.

It is estimated that 50,000 clergy were executed by the end of the Khrushchev era.^[41] Members of the church hierarchy were jailed or forced out, their places taken by docile clergy, many of whom had ties with the KGB.

1964-1970s

After Khrushchev's fall, Soviet writers began to cautiously question the effectiveness of his anti-religious campaign. They came to a general conclusion that it had failed in spreading atheism, and that it had only anatagonized believers as well as pushed them underground, where they were more dangerous to the state. It had also drawn the sympathies of many unbelievers and indifferent people. The mass persecutions stopped after Khrushchev, although few of the closed churches would be re-opened, and the few that did matched those closed by local authorities^[71].

The two main anti-religious serials, 'Yearbook of the Museum of History of Religion and Atheism' and 'Problems of History of Religion and Atheism' soon ceased publication. This may have reflected negative attitudes towards such dubious scholastic publications among the genuine scholars that were part of the institutions that produced these documents ^[71].

On November 10, 1964, the Central Committee of the CPSU made a resolution in which it reaffirmed previous instructions that actions that offend believers or do administrative interference in the church as unacceptable^[72].

The principle of persecuting religion in order to spread atheism did not disapppear, however, even if the methodology was re-examined after Khrushchev. Many of the secret, unofficial, instructions aimed at suppressing the Church were made into official laws during Brezhnev's control, which thereby legally legimated many aspects of the persecutions.

One of the early signs of the change in policy were articles in the official press reported that there were millions of believers who supported communism, including particularly leftist religious movements in the west and third world (eg. Liberation theology in Latin America), and that all religion should not be attacked^[73].

The Academy of Social Sciences of the CPSU Central Committee was handed the function of publishing major studies on religion and atheism, which was work previously done by the Academy of Sciences. A new publication, 'Problems of Scientific Atheism', came to replace 'Problems of History and Atheism' in 1966. The new publication was less scholarly than the previous one and contained intellectually cruder criticism of religion.

In 1965 the two councils over religious affairs in the country were amalgamated into the Council for Religious Affairs (CRA). This new body was given official legislation that gave it dictatorial powers over the administration of religious bodies in the country (previously the two organizations that preceded it used such powers under unofficial instructions). Several years later, V. Furov, the CRA deputy head wrote in a report to the CPSU Central Committee, 'The Synod is under CRA's supervision. The question of selection and distribution of its permanent members is fully in CRA's hands, the candidacies of the rotating members are likewise co-ordinated beforehand with the CRA's responsible officials. Patriarch Pimen and the permanent members fo the Synod work out all Synod sessions' agendas at the CRA offices ... and co-ordinate [with us] the final 'Decisions of the Holy Synod'^[74].

The state did not permit the re-opening of seminaries right through to the end of the 1980s, however, it agreed to allow expansions of the three seminaries and two graduate academies in the country that were not closed.

The volume of anti-religious propaganda, in lectures, books, the press, articles, etc., generally decreased after 1964^[75]. The circulation, however, of the works that were printed would come to surpass what it had been under Khrushchev^[76]. There was not a lull in antireligious propaganda, therefore, although the party documents of the time used less direct language in criticizing religion^[76].

The tone of the anti-religious propaganda was lowered and became less vicious as it had been in previous years. This incurred some criticism by Pravda, which editorialized about a growing indifference to anti-religious struggle. Znanie was criticized for reducing its volume of antireligious lectures.

The Komsomol was criticized in internal Komsomol and in party documents in the 1970s and 1980s for laxity in anti-religious work among youth. The resolution of the 15th Komsomol congress in 1966 resolved to created special republican and district Komsomol schools, modelled after party schools, as part of the renewal of ideology and atheism among Soviet youth^[77].

In December 1971, the 'Philosophic Society of the USSR' was founded with the aim (rather than pursuing truth) of, 'an untiring atheistic propaganda of scientific materialism and... struggle against the revisionist tolerant tendencies towards religion, against all concessions to the religious Weltanschauung^[78]. This had followed from a 1967 CPSU Central Committee resolution.

While clergy who violated the law could be punished, there was never any legal penalty given to secular authorities who violated the Laws on Religious Cults.

Despite the decline in direct persecution, the Soviet media reported in the post-Khrushchev years that religious rites (eg. weddings, baptisms and funerals) were on the decline as well as the actual number of people practicing religion. This was presented as a natural process, rather than a result of terror, harassment, threats or physical closures, as had characterized previous anti-religious work. The quality of the studies that found these figures was questioned by scholars, including even Soviet scholars implicitly^[73].

The Soviet media attempted to popularize KVAT clubs (clubs of Militant Atheism) but they found little success anywhere except Latvia. Similar clubs found some success in the western Ukraine.

Renewal of Persecution in 1970s

A more aggressive period of anti-religious persecution began in the mid 1970s, following upon the 1975 amendments to the 1929 antireligious legislation and the 25th party congress. This resulted from growing alarm over indifference, especially among youth, towards atheism and the anti-religious struggle, as well as growing influences of the Church.

Anti-religious propaganda was intensified. At the same time, the antireligious propaganda came to increasingly distinguish between the suppposed loyal majority of believers and the enemies of the state who occupied the fringes of religion. Priests and bishops who did not completely subordinate themselves to the state and/or who engaged in religious activities outside of the routine performance of religious rites, were considered to be enemies of the state. Bishops criticized for 'high religious activity' were moved around the country. The Council for Religious Affairs claimed to have gained control of the Patriarch's Synod, which was forced to co-ordinate its sessions and decisions with the CRA ^[79].

The church hierarchy could have no disciplinary powers. While the state allowed for freedom of sermons and homilies, this freedom was limited in that they could only be of an 'exclusively religious character' (in practice this meant that clergymen who preached against atheism and the state ideology were not protected) ^[80]. Lukewarm clergy were tolerated while clergy with a missionary zeal could be deregistered.

Persecution was stepped up in the 1970s against the Initiative Baptists who had separated themselves from the official Baptist Church in 1962 in protest against the official church's subservience to the regime. The official Baptists were pampered by comparison in order to deliver a message to the Initiatives that there was no point in resistance.

People who were more highly educated or who occupied more important positions were subject to harsher harassment and punishment than those who were uneducated. Religious youth at colleges could sometimes be sent to psychiatric hospitals on grounds that only a person with a psychological disorder would still be religious after going through the whole anti-religious education.^[81].

In 1975 the CRA was given an official legal supervision role over the state (prior to this it had unofficial control). Every parish was placed at the disposal of the CRA, which alone had the power to grant registration. The CRA could arbitrarily decide on the registration of religious communities, and allow them to worship or not. This policy was accompanied by intimidation, blackmail and threat to the clergy, and as a whole it was meant to demoralize the Church ^[82].

The Soviet Constitution of 1977 was sometimes interpreted by authorities as containing a requirement for parents to raise their children as atheists^[83]. It was legally possible to deprive parents of their children if they failed to raise them as atheists, but these legal restrictions were only enforced selectively when the authorities chose to do so.

The methodology of antireligious propaganda was refined and old methods were criticized, and participants were criticized for laxity. The CPSU Central Committee issued an important resolution in 1979 that called for stronger antireligious propaganda.

There were rumours in the late 70s that a comprehensive scientific study was done by Pisarov that blatantly contradicted the official figures of people abandoning religion, but was never published for that reason ^[73].

The CC issued another resolution in 1983 that promised for ideological work against religion to be the top priority of party committees on all level ^[84].

The Church and state fought a propaganda battle over the role of the Church in Russia’s history in the years leading up to the 1000th anniversary of Russia’s conversion to Christianity.

By 1987 the number of functioning churches in the Soviet Union had fallen to 6893 and the number of functioning monasteries to just 18.

Penetration of Churches by Soviet secret services

According to Mitrokhin Archive and other sources, the Moscow Patriarchate has been established on the order from Stalin in 1943 as a front organization of NKVD and later the KGB ^[85] All key positions in the Church including bishops have been approved by the Ideological Department of CPSU and by the KGB. The priests were used as agents of influence in the World Council of Churches and front organizations, such as World Peace Council, Cristian Peace Conference, and the Rodina ("Motherland") Society founded by the KGB in 1975.

The future Russian Patriarch Alexius II said that Rodina has been created to "maintain spiritual ties with our compatriots" as one of its leading organizers. According to the archive and other sources, Alexius has been working for the KGB as agent DROZDOV and received an honorary citation from the agency for a variety of services ^[86]. Priests have also recruited intelligence agents abroad and spied on Russian emigrant communities. This information by Mitrokhin has been corroborated by other sources.^[87][88]

Glasnost

Beginning in the late 1980s, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the new political and social freedoms resulted in many church buildings being returned to the church, to be restored by local parishioners. A pivotal point in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church came in 1988 - the millennial anniversary of the Baptism of Kievan Rus'.

Throughout the summer of that year, major government-supported celebrations took place in Moscow and other cities; many older churches and some monasteries were reopened. An implicit ban on religious expression on state TV was finally lifted. For the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, people could see live transmissions of church services on television.^{[citation needed]}

The Moscow Patriarchate successfully applied pressure in order to get revision of some of the anti-religious legislation. In January 1981, the clergy were requalified in their tax status from being taxed as a private commercial enterprise (as they were before) to being taxed as equal to that of medical private practice or private educators. This new legislation also gave the clergy equal property and inheritance rights as well as the privileges that were granted to citizens if they were war veterans. The parish lay organization of 20 persons who owned the parish was granted the status of a legal person with its appropriate rights and the ability to make contracts (the church had been deprived of this status by Lenin in 1918). For the first time in many years, religious societies could legally own their houses of worship. There was still some ambiguity left in this legislation, however, which allowed room for re-interpretation if the state wished to halt 'uncontrolled' dissemination of building new churches ^[89].

The religious bodies could still be heavily infiltrated by state agents, due to the power of local governments to reject elected parish officials and install their own people in the lay organization that owned the parish, which meant that even if they had ownership over their churches, it was still effectively in the state's hands. The largest gain of this new legislation, however, was that children of ten years of age and over could actively participate in religious ritual (eg. service as acolytes, psalmists, in choirs) an dthat children of any age could be present inside a church during services as well as receive communion.

Professors at theological schools, and all clergy as well as laity working for the Department of External Ecclesiastical Relations of the Church were taxed similarly to all Soviet employees in recognition of their contribution to a positive Soviet image abroad.

The state's allowance of expansions to existing seminaries bore fruit, and by the early 1980s, the student population at these institutions had grown to 2300 day and extramural students (it had been 800 in 1964)^[75].

Religious societies were given control over their own bank accounts in 1985.

This legislation in the 1980s marked a new attitude of acceptance towards religion by a state that decided that best it could do was simply to minimize the harmful impact of religion ^[90]. While the state tried to intensify persecution during the 80s, the church came to see this increasingly as merely rearguard attacks by an ideologically bankrupt, but still physically powerful, enemy,. The top party leaders refrained from direct involvement in the new offensive, perhaps due to an uncertainty over their potential success and a desire to have some manoeuvrabality according to a desire to avoid antagonzing believers too much on the eve of Russia's conversion to Christianity ^[84].

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the government of Russia openly embraced the Russian Orthodox Church, and there was a renaissance in the number of the faithful in Russia.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• God-Building
• History of the Russian Orthodox Church
• Vladimir N. Beneshevich
• Gleb Yakunin
• Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
• Josyf Slipyj
• Museum of Soviet occupation
• Persecution of Christians in Warsaw Pact countries
• Persecutions of the Catholic Church and Pius XII
• Persecution of Muslims
• Sergei Kourdakov
• New Martyr

References

External links

• Lenin's letter to Molotov on Shuia crisis

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