Christianity and Russian Culture in Soviet Society

Nicolai N. Petro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367013066
• eBook ISBN: 9780429713781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is the product of a three-day conference at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. It focuses on the tension between the expression of Christian beliefs and the legal restrictions imposed on professions of faith and the importance of Christian culture to perestroika.

Part 1
Christianity and the Soviet State

1
Religion in the Soviet Union: Survival and Revival

Philip Walters

“All political work with the clergy is carried on in the interest of the state” and is aimed “not only at keeping them within the bounds of law, but at diminishing their activity and limiting their influence with believers.” So writes V. Furov, a deputy chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs in the Soviet Union, in a secret report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the current state of the Russian Orthodox Church, dated 1974. The “law” referred to here is the Law on Religious Associations of 1929, which is still in force today. According to this law, the only permitted activity for believers is to meet in a registered building for an act of worship. Everything else is either illegal or in fact discouraged by the authorities: organizing meetings, libraries, educational activity for young people; evangelizing; unofficially printing and distributing religious literature; and raising money for welfare or charitable activity.

We are all familiar with the fact that the witness of the churches in Soviet society is disastrously truncated as a result of the consistent anti-religious attitude of the authorities. Let us take just two examples. There is a grievous shortage of religious literature. In the thirty years since 1956 the Russian Orthodox Church received permission to print about 450,000 pieces of scripture. Hence the growth of samizdat: over a ten-year period in the 1970s and early 1980s, and despite all the difficulties involved in setting up and dismantling secret printing presses and moving them from place to place, the unregistered Baptists have managed to produce a comparable number of pieces of scripture unofficially. There is also a grievous shortage of places of worship; believers are in fact prevented in many parts of the Soviet Union from exercising the one right they enjoy according to Soviet legislation. Visitors to Moscow will find over forty working churches in that city; but the diocese of Irkutsk, which is roughly the same size as Australia and has a comparable population, has about fifty working churches, while Australia has over 19,000.

The ideal church from the point of view of the Soviet authorities would consist of a docile hierarchy, some church buildings opened for worship in the major cities, especially those visited by foreigners, and a dwindling elderly flock. What the authorities particularly distrust are active clergy or younger believers who attempt in any way to relate their faith to everyday life. As Furov says in his report, “if a priest gives sermons, they must be strictly Orthodox in content, containing expositions of the Gospel or Epistles… sermons must contain no political or social issues or examples.” The type of bishop of whom the state approves is one who will speak positively of conditions for believers in the Soviet Union while doing the minimum to encourage those believers in their spiritual growth. Furov describes with approval “Bishop Palladi,” who “leaves a favorable impression, with his loyal attitude towards the organs of Soviet power… as far as religious activities are concerned, the bishop limits himself to periodic services in the Cathedral on religious festivals, and he never travels outside the town;” while Bishop Iona “delivers regular sermons, but they are very short and not very expressive… in the seven years he has been head of a diocese he has never visited any of the rural parishes of the region.”

Despite the 1929 legislation, the churches in the Soviet Union have in fact been allowed to run very few monasteries and theological educational establishments and to undertake only a small amount of publishing activity since the Second World War. This activity is obviously closely monitored, and the authorities could put a stop to it at any moment. The price church leaders pay for these concessions is that they are expected to promote the Soviet image and Soviet policies abroad, and the main activity here is to speak on the subject of peace. There may seem to be a discontinuity here between what they are expected to do abroad and what they are expected to do here - that is, keep well away from political matters. But if we look more closely at the terms in which their contribution to the international peace debate is couched, we will soon see that this does not represent an occasion for religious leaders to give a specifically religious analysis on questions of peace and war.

A Peace Conference in Budapest in December 1987 brought together peace activists from East and West, from official and unofficial groups. Archbishop Kirill of Smolensk gave one of the three introductory speeches. He argued that world peace can be achieved only on the basis of the widest possible consensus. “Humanity,” he said, “should unite… on the basis of common moral principles. In other words, the world view to unite human spirit in the struggle for survival should be described in moral terms common for all men.” What he had to say intrigued many, excited some and left others baffled. Those who were baffled included many who had been looking forward to hearing a particularly Russian Orthodox perspective on the theology of peace. In fact, the Archbishop’s words are readily understandable if one bears in mind that the Soviet authorities always appeal on peace questions to as wide a constituency as possible and expect representatives from the religious organizations in the Soviet Union to do likewise.

The appeal is to “all people of goodwill.” In 1976 The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, describing the Helsinki process, recognized the contribution of “all peace-loving forces of our planet, including the religious community, and also including the efforts of all people of goodwill.” In 1978 the Journal reported the message from Mr. Kosygin to the Prague Peace Conference: “Problems connected with the preservation of peace on earth… are important to all people, irrespective of their religious or other convictions…” Therefore “all people of goodwill are united.” A recent atheist pamphlet quotes the late Metropolitan Nikodim to the effect that a Christian must recognize the ethical superiority of the classless Soviet society over any other social system, and the commentator observes that “in this way, renouncing the role of bystanding spectator and giving approval to the socialist system, religious ideologues come out in defense of spiritual values which belong to the majority of Soviet people regardless of their relation to religion or the Church.”

It is actually impossible, as far as the Soviet authorities are concerned, for a churchman to offer a distinctively religious contribution on any social or political matter. If it is a religious view, it is automatically invalid before it is uttered. I have before me a pamphlet from December 1987 which promises to tell us what ”Leninist” principles are in relation to religion. We may remember that Mr. Kharchev, Chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs, said in August 1987 that under conditions of perestroika Soviet church policy would be governed by these Leninist principles. How to explain, asks the author, the fact that while religious beliefs are in themselves reactionary, many believers and even clergy throughout the world are backing the peace struggle? “The point is that we as atheists do not share the theological view that religious belief defines or ought to define all the actions of believers.” Amongst other factors which define their actions are “the objective conditions of their existence - their class interest. And the process of involving the members of the working class who are religious believers in the struggle for socialism can precede the creation in them of a scientific materialist and atheist world view.” Religious believers who support the Marxist political program “inevitably try to give a religious interpretation to their new progressive political views, and the fact that such an interpretation is scientifically baseless is no reason for Marxists to refuse the cooperation of believers.” There is a well known liberal maxim, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The attitude of the Soviet authorities towards those who would enter the peace debate from a religious perspective is to some extent the opposite of this: “I may well agree with what you are going to say, but I oppose absolutely your right, as a religious believer, to say it.”

I have dwelt on this point at some length because it seems to me that it is a point which is often misunderstood, particularly by religious believers in the West who would like to take the involvement of the churches of the Soviet Union in peace discussions as evidence for the fact that they enjoy the freedom to put forward a specifically religious point of view. Nevertheless, I also believe that by and large and to an encouraging extent the leaders of the churches in the Soviet Union are aware of the fact that it remains a vital element in their activity that they should continue to try to preserve an area of spiritual freedom, however small, for their religious community and to try persistently to extend it. Hence, not only the Soviet authorities but also the religious leaders themselves, for different reasons, are anxious that the churches of the Soviet Union should continue to be represented on international religious bodies such as the World Council of Churches. Churchmen from the Soviet Union, by their regular appearances at these gatherings, prevent themselves from sinking into total isolation; and they provide their western counterparts with the opportunity to say things to them about the domestic situation in the USSR which they can then report to the authorities when they return and perhaps use as bargaining chips to gain a few more concessions. Hence, too, we should not be afraid of raising so called “difficult” questions with Soviet churchmen in these international gatherings; they are certainly not going to withdraw from those bodies of their own accord.

The awareness of Soviet church leaders that they have to defend their real spiritual integrity dates to the time of the Renovationist experiment in the 1920s. The Renovationist church split from the Patriarchal church on the platform of total identification with the aims of the new socialist state. When Lenin died in 1924, Patriarch Tikhon of the Patriarchal Orthodox Church declined to attend his funeral, saying that his presence would upset Lenin’s adherents and furthermore would not fit in with what Lenin himself would have wished. Not so the Renovationist leaders. A delegation of them accompanied Lenin’s coffin and sent a message which included the sentiment,”… eternal memory and eternal rest be with your hard-tested, kindly and Christian soul.”

In the early months of the Renovationists’ triumph, when Patriarch Tikhon was already under house arrest, two clergymen, Aleksii Simanskii and Nikolai Iarushevich, who were later to become respectively Patriarch and Head of the Church’s Department of External Relations, tried to establish a third approach for the church. A little later came the activity of Archbishop Manuil, who led the Tikhonite counter-reformation in 1923. Exiled religious writer Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov describes his aim as the formation of a “free, pure and independent Russian church in a free socialist Russia.”

According to the Furov report, only about a third of the bishops of the Orthodox Church in the mid-1970s could be totally trusted to combine a vigorous loyalty to the state with suitable neglect for the nurture of the faith. Nevertheless, many observers and involved activists both in the West and in the USSR are very frustrated with what they see as the pusillanimity of the leaders of the churches and will even blame them for the fact that the state has managed to exert such complete control over internal church matters in violation of the constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state. Unfortunately, the Soviet authorities are also interested in driving a wedge between “good” and “bad” believers, between the “loyal” hierarchy and their faithful flock and the “disloyal” lawbreakers, that is, the more articulate believers, including the “dissidents”, who are concerned to relate faith to life. It is my belief that we should take every opportunity to insist that we are dealing with one church, one body of Christ; it is my belief that we should make it clear that the two sides of religious experience in the Soviet Union will need to be complementary rather than antagonistic in the regeneration of religious life in that country.

Having thus surveyed the background to the current religious situation in the Soviet Union, let us look more closely at developments under Gorbachev.

There are a number of problematic issues which are currently inspiring debate in the Soviet Union. Let us take just two examples: the question of the search for moral values and the question of nationalism. There are of course many more; the question of “peace,” for example, is one such. On controversial topics such as these, the authorities would of course like to set the agenda for the debate, to control it from above. The topics we have mentioned are controversial, however, in that those involved in discussing them will be drawn to using “spiritual” terms when debating the origins and nature of morality, national feeling or peace. The authorities would like the spiritual element in each debate to be tamed, muted, made unspecific, deprived of any transcendent element, or redefined in less potentially subversive terms: in terms of aspirations common to all humanity (as we have seen in the peace debate), or of mythology (as far as the search for moral standards is concerned), or of culture (as far as the nationalist question is concerned), for example. But the tendency is that the deeper one allows the debate to go in any of these fields, the more the terms of the debate are likely to depart from those the authorities would prefer.

Let us look first, then, at the search for moral values. Under Gorbachev there has been open recognition of the moral collapse and corruption in Soviet society, and there has been widespread discussion of the potential role of religion in keeping a society morally sound. As one psychotherapist said in a recent round table discussion reported in the Soviet press on the rising divorce rate: “traditions have changed, parental authority has collapsed… there is no fear of God… in other words, the external mechanism for keeping families together has weakened.” What we have here is a recognition of the passive role of religion as a sort of social cement. But of course once the debate has begun, it moves on. Since the 1970s more and more writers in the Soviet Union are concerned with religious and moral themes. These preoccupations have been criticized in the Soviet press but also discussed in some detail; there is official recognition that moral problems in society are real and must be solved. Here the dilemma for the authorities presents itself. These themes will be discussed; the question is, in what terms. How far, then, can writers go in their religious quest? Pronouncements from on high continue to indicate that a line will be drawn at some point. In October 1986 Egor Ugachev said, “sometimes when certain people encounter violations of socialist morality they begin to talk about the advisability of showing tolerance for religious ideas and of returning to religious morality. In doing so they forget the Marxist truism that religion is by no means a source of man’s moral principles. It was not religion that gave mankind the moral norms that are now shared by mankind.”

One response by the authorities to the discussion of morality in religious terms has been to try to redefine religious concepts and give them a Marxist content - to change as it were the meaning of the very terms in which the debate is being conducted. One Vladimir Shinkaruk argued in 1986 in the publication Argumenty ifakty that the notions of “faith” and “the sacred” are not exclusively religious, but psychological phenomena independent of religious impulses. Today, he urges, “the sacred” is a term which should be applied to the cultural phenomena of ordinary life and to the new Soviet values. He calls for a form of “unreligious” faith in the inevitability of a communist future, reinforced by a system of symbolic rites which are an integral part of socialist culture.

There was of course a previous attempt earlier this century to reinterpret religious concepts in the context of socialist construction -the “godbuilding” of Gorky and Lunacharsky. As outlined in Gorky’s novel Ispoveď [Confession], godbuilding is about inspiring man’s faith in his own creative potential as an individual, expressed through the collective. It is about promoting creative social energy, which becomes the incarnation of a living deity. In the context of godbuilding, we may look at the novels of the contemporary Soviet writer Chingiz Aitmatov. One commentator on these novels has recently seen a development in Aitmatov’s thinking, from a preoccupation with individualism, through a growing concern about collective integration, towards an affirmation of moral and social collectivism as the highest value. In Aitmatov’s novel Plakha, Christ speaks of “the god of tomorrow,” and says of him that “in him is all the essence, the sum total of the activities and aspirations of men, and hence the nature of god tomorrow - whether he is to be good or evil, merciful or vengeful - depends on men themselves.” It is arguable, then, that in the novels of Aitmatov we can read a progression from the question of the moral motivation of the individual to the question of the morality of the social collective. Thus defined, the religious terms in which the moral search is carried on may well be more acceptable to the Soviet authorities. It certainly seems that Aitmatov is not at the moment as popular among the reading public in the Soviet Union as he used to be. The novel Plakha seems to have been received with a certain amount of skepticism. Readers may well be feeling that the religious search in Aitmatov is running into familiar channels.

At one point in Plakha, the hero talks to a priest who tells him that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• Part One: Christianity and the Soviet State
• Part Two: Christianity and Soviet Russian Culture
• Contributors
• Index