Stalin's Holy War

Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945

Steven Merritt Miner

• Éditeur: The University of North Carolina Press
• Année: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807862124
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Russian History

Histories of the USSR during World War II generally portray the Kremlin's restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church as an attempt by an ideologically bankrupt regime to appeal to Russian nationalism in order to counter the mortal threat of Nazism. Here, Steven Merritt Miner argues that this version of events, while not wholly untrue, is incomplete. Using newly opened Soviet-era archives as well as neglected British and American sources, he examines the complex and profound role of religion, especially Russian Orthodoxy, in the policies of Stalin's government during World War II. Miner demonstrates that Stalin decided to restore the Church to prominence not primarily as a means to stoke the fires of Russian nationalism but as a tool for restoring Soviet power to areas that the Red Army recovered from German occupation. The Kremlin also harnessed the Church for propaganda campaigns aimed at convincing the Western Allies that the USSR, far from being a source of religious repression, was a bastion of religious freedom. In his conclusion, Miner explores how Stalin's religious policy helped shape the postwar history of the USSR.

Part 1
The Church Redux

1. Religion and Nationality

The Soviet Dilemma, 1939–1941

There is no such thing as an apolitical church.
—Captured German document, October 31, 1941

The Russian Church is one of the most efficient organizations of subordination.
—Archbishop Jarema, 1997

The War and Myths of Solidarity

In the years following the collapse of the USSR, visitors to Moscow could regularly encounter small knots of drably clad people lingering about on the verges of Red Square peddling Russian nationalist and Communist newspapers. Most were older people embittered by the disappearance of the system to which they had dedicated their careers and lives; others were young and angry about the loss of Soviet power and what they saw as the international humiliation of their country. Many of the newspapers being hawked featured on their covers the grim image of Stalin, invariably clad in his generalissimo’s uniform at the apogee of his power. These publications contained admiring articles about the Great Leader and his supposed social, economic, diplomatic, and military achievements. For these old-line Communists and nationalists, Stalin remained a great man, the iconic vozhd’, or leader, who had brought Russia from the wooden plow to the atom bomb in one generation. This disturbing loyalty to one of the twentieth century’s great villains was inexplicable to many Westerners who believed that the implosion of Communism had at long last freed the Russian people from an era of virtual slavery. How could there still be so many admirers of the “Kremlin mountaineer” among a people who had suffered so much at his hands? The shock was almost as great as it would have been upon discovering large numbers of modern Germans openly proud of Hitler’s legacy.

The question of the Soviet people’s attitude toward Stalin and his regime has long been a battleground for Western scholars, the unavailability of reliable archival evidence until quite recently making it possible to advance vastly divergent interpretations without fear of decisive refutation. According to the premier historian of the Stalinist Great Terror, the dictator maintained his regime through force and fear alone.¹ A recent generation of revisionist historians argues, however, that the Stalinist system—even with its mass arrests and campaigns against “spies” and “wreckers”—enjoyed a wide degree of social support. One prominent historian claims that at the outset of the war Stalin was “a vastly popular leader.”² An even more extreme proponent of this view, while allowing that millions of innocent people were arrested and hundreds of thousands shot, argues that “Many citizens . . . did not experience or even notice the Terror except in newspapers or speeches” (emphasis added). The ostensible proof of the Soviet people’s mass support for the Communist regime is said to be the loyal service of millions of common soldiers in the war against Hitler, the so-called acid test of the Stalinist regime.³

Certainly this was the view of the war propagated by the Soviets, beginning with Stalin himself: the defeat of Nazi Germany, he claimed, demonstrated the superiority of the Communist system and the unshakable bonds linking the Soviet peoples. On Red Army Day in 1946, the Father of the Peoples declared that the Soviet victory “is explained, above all, in that the Army is genuinely a people’s army and defends the interests of its people. . . . All our people, unremittingly, day and night labored for the front, for victory.”⁴ The new Soviet national anthem, which replaced the revolutionary “Internationale” at the beginning of 1944, stressed both the unity of the various Soviet nationalities as well as the “leading role” of the Russian people:

Unshakeable union of free republics

Has been united by Great Rus’

Long live the country founded by the people’s will,

United, mighty Soviet Union!

Despite such lavish official propaganda, the war remained a subversive memory for the regime, especially so long as Stalin ruled. Too many people were still alive who remembered the panic and disasters of 1941, the repressions and deportations, as well as the wanton waste of lives by some Soviet commanders and political commissars. The war had witnessed an abundance of genuine self-sacrifice, patriotism, and heroism, of course, but this too was a subversive memory. Too close a focus on the war threatened to elevate genuine heroes of the military, such as Marshal Georgii Zhukov, above the level of Stalin himself. This was intolerable; Stalinism was monotheistic.

At the Twentieth Party Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev would denounce some of the crimes committed by his dictatorial predecessor and mentor. During the brief cultural “thaw” that followed the speech, praise of Stalin would disappear from Soviet accounts of the war, replaced by measured criticisms of the now dead god’s “cult of personality.” The six-volume official history of the war that began publication in 1960 attacked Stalin for failing to foresee the German attack, refusing to accept the advice of trained subordinates, unjustly repressing military officers, and other sins great and small. Despite the more critical approach, however, this newly reworked official version of the war still maintained that a semimystical bond had united the front line with the civilian rear and perpetuated the fiction that the nationalities of the union had fought shoulder to shoulder under the unquestioned leadership of the Communist Party, with only minimal dissension by a handful of traitors or class enemies.⁵ The Khrushchevite official history, and the more than 150 military memoirs published during this period, did not discuss the mass deportation of entire minor nationalities; armed resistance against Soviet power in the borderlands at the outset of the war and again at its close; the question of collaboration with the invader, both by members of minority nationalities and by Russians themselves; or the persecution, and in the case of the Greek Catholic Church the dissolution, of religions practiced by non-Russian peoples.⁶

Instead of a genuinely critical examination of such tragic wartime events, during the Khrushchev era, and even more so during the Brezhnev years, Soviet historians constructed a master historical narrative that elevated the cult of the “Great Patriotic War” to nearly religious levels. The Soviet victory over Nazism began to rival, and even to surpass, the Bolshevik Revolution as the most important legitimating event for the Communist system.⁷ Whereas the creation of a Bolshevik state had triggered a fratricidal war pitting Russian against Russian, in which some ten million people had perished, the Second World War could, by contrast, be portrayed as an unambiguously positive morality tale in which the country was united against a truly evil invader. Soviet authorities sought to use the war to inculcate a Soviet patriotism that, they hoped, would supplant older national identities; they also drew on the example of the war to instill in the younger generation obedience to political and even parental authority.

Even Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking on the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet victory, echoed the themes of the Brezhnevite master narrative: in the war against Nazism, “everyone came to the defense of the native land, old and young, men and women, all national and ethnic groups.” The Soviet peoples had fought as one to defend “the homeland, the socialist system, the ideas and cause of October.” Nor did the new general secretary neglect his predecessor: “The great political will, purposefulness and persistence, and the ability to organize and discipline people which Stalin displayed during the war years played their role in attaining victory.”⁸ Gorbachev’s audience of apparatchiks interrupted him with seventeen seconds of enthusiastic applause at the mention of Stalin’s wartime leadership.⁹ Although this outburst seemed at the time to testify to the depth of support for the dictator’s memory, in retrospect it can be seen literally as the last hurrah of the Stalinist generation.

Not until the late 1980s did Soviet historians begin seriously to address the more troubling questions raised by the war, at first gingerly, then increasingly openly. Two years after Gorbachev’s speech, one of the more prominent Soviet historians of World War II, A. M. Samsonov, himself a veteran, made several television and radio broadcasts calling for a franker discussion of the war’s less-known aspects. Echoing Gorbachev’s new call to explore the “blank spots” of Soviet history, Samsonov specifically suggested a discussion of Stalin’s failure to anticipate the Nazi invasion, maltreatment by the Soviets of their own soldiers who had surrendered to the Germans, and the calamitous Soviet 1942 spring offensive in Ukraine.

This list of topics did not go far beyond the bounds of the Khrushchev-era debate. The public response, however, was swift and surprised even Samsonov, who was soon inundated with thousands of letters from veterans, Communist Party members, survivors of the gulag, as well as ordinary people curious about their country’s history. The sharply divided nature of the letters testified strongly to the polarization of opinion about Stalin and the war among ordinary Soviet citizens. Although Stalin’s defenders were in a minority, they angrily defended their hero. One veteran wrote: “My generation was born under Lenin and raised under Stalin. We stood and stand for the just cause of Stalin. We must not spit on Stalin, but study him.”¹⁰ Despite such vocal defenders of the old Soviet established truths, most of Samsonov’s correspondents were highly critical of Stalin, one typical veteran of the war writing: “Many say that under the leadership of Stalin we won the war. I consider that under the leadership of Stalin we almost lost it.”¹¹

The correspondence showed how even a limited discussion of the war’s hitherto taboo subjects threatened quickly to explode, unleashing the long-suppressed demons of the past. Many of the letters called for an expansion of the historical discussion well beyond the bounds envisioned by the cautious Samsonov, demanding the exploration of such forbidden areas as the gulag and police repression, as well as collaboration with the Nazis and the treatment by the Soviet government of minority nationalities.

These issues ran right to the heart of Soviet political legitimacy, questioning the Communist Party’s fitness to rule and undermining the myths of the Soviet people’s “socialist choice” and the supposed “friendship of the peoples.” The instincts of Samsonov’s Stalinist correspondents were right: if Soviet historians could manufacture a master narrative of the war designed to legitimate Soviet power, then the erosion of this mythical past could with equal force discredit the USSR.

In 1989 the former Soviet major general and historian Dmitrii Volkogonov did more than any other Gorbachev-era writer to demolish wartime mythology when he published his landmark biography of Stalin. In his sections on the Second World War he published for the first time selections of hitherto secret documents revealing widespread popular resistance to Soviet power.¹² Since the publication of Volkogonov’s book, and especially following the collapse of the USSR, a flood of memoirs, histories, and published documents, as well as the opening of Soviet archives, have all provided the resources to reevaluate the Stalin question.

This mass of newly available information has largely undermined the revisionist interpretation of the Stalin era. Nonetheless, it does not entirely vindicate traditionalist views that underestimated the power of propaganda, myth-making, modernization, and even terror to generate a degree of loyalty in a relatively unsophisticated population, most of which was only newly literate.¹³ In the light of far more detailed evidence, it has become exceedingly difficult to generalize about the Soviet people’s opinions regarding the Stalin regime, or indeed about their attitude toward the Second World War. Far from providing an “acid test” from which the Soviet regime emerged vindicated, the war instead showed just how deeply crevasses ran through Soviet society, dividing people by class, educational level, nationality, religion, political persuasion, and even personal history.

Shattered Identities

The war in the East acted like a vast centrifuge separating people into categories, often independently of their will. In his magisterial novel Life and Fate set during the Stalingrad campaign, Vasilii Grossman, a former front-line correspondent for the military newspaper Krasnaia zvezda, writes that the experience of war made individual Soviet citizens more aware—sometimes even for the first time—of the groups to which they belonged. “The most fundamental change in people at this time,” he writes, “was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly greater.”¹⁴

The cataclysm in the East overwhelmed individuals, shattering old identities, shaping new ones, and—perhaps most important—reviving ancient but latent collective loyalties that had lain dormant under the seemingly smooth surface of enforced Soviet unity. When a sledgehammer strikes a windshield, the glass shatters into hundreds of fragments, the cracks between them snaking along microscopic lines between molecules, invisible to the human eye before the blow. So too, when the Nazi invasion collided with Soviet power, at the point of impact the population fragmented along social lines that had been there all along but had been rendered invisible by the mystique of Soviet power.

For millions of Soviet citizens before the war, the Kremlin’s seeming omnipotence apparently ruled out any thought of reform, much less rebellion. The Stalin-era peasantry (in the 1940s still by far the majority of the Soviet population) sullenly hated the Stalinist regime.¹⁵ Peasants may have hated the regime, which had carried out the murderous “second enserfment” of collectivization, but they could do little to change their situation. Instead, the collective farm system bred a spirit of resentful lethargy.¹⁶

The war suddenly offered ...