In September 1943, as the tide of the Second World War was delivering the Soviet Union’s favour, the Soviet chief Joseph Stalin known as a gathering at the Kremlin. Alongside the overseas minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the head of the secret police Vsevolod Merkulov have been three males in Stalin’s workplace for the first time: Metropolitan Sergius, Metropolitan Aleksey, and Metropolitan Nikolay, three of the few Orthodox Church hierarchs left in the Soviet Union.
The truth of such a gathering going down is of course stunning. Even those that know little about the Soviet Union are conversant in its anti-religious insurance policies, particularly thanks to Cold War rhetoric about ‘godless communists’. Indeed, this assembly was being held after a long time of persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church by the formally atheist Soviet state. The three Metropolitans got here to this assembly after a long time of watching their Church decimated throughout them. As they greeted Stalin at the Kremlin, lots of their fellow clergy have been imprisoned in labour camps – and others have been useless. By the finish of the Nineteen Thirties, the Soviet state had successfully destroyed a lot of the official existence of what had been for hundreds of years imperial Russia’s strongest and rich non secular establishment.
But in September 1943, as Stalin imagined a job for a victorious Soviet Union in a postwar world, he started to rethink his authorities’s place with regards to the Russian Orthodox Church, and finally to the complete query of the function of faith in an atheist empire. At this assembly, Stalin offered these males with a daring proposal: the identical Soviet state that had destroyed their Church was now going to commit its assets to bringing it again.
The story of this assembly and the proposal to revive Orthodoxy isn’t instructed – however, when it’s talked about, it’s dismissed as a wartime measure, as short-term as the friendship campaigns between the USSR and the United States that additionally characterised the conflict years. Yet to gloss over this assembly is to miss its significance as a shift in the Soviet method to faith, one which would depart a mark on non secular life for Soviet individuals and their descendants in the a long time that adopted.
What was the nature of this shift? It started with an acknowledgement that, regardless of the state’s efforts, non secular ties and concepts of non secular belonging resonated with its inhabitants. Instead of ignoring the continued affect of faith, the state would possibly find a way to use it to its personal benefit. Rather than permit non secular life to function outdoors of Soviet society in the depths of the underground, the state might create an official non secular life that could possibly be surveilled, regulated, taxed and, most critically, used to accomplish political objectives.
This story doesn’t change the significance of atheism to the Soviet challenge or the significance of the USSR’s founding as the world’s first atheist state. The anti-religious insurance policies of the Bolsheviks got here from each their interpretations of Marxism, in addition to the specific Church-state relationship(s) that characterised imperial Russia. On the entire, any faith was seen as a barrier to the transformation the Bolshevik revolution envisioned as a result of it supplied a competing authority to the knowledge of the Party leaders who have been main the revolution. But in each the first anti-religious campaigns undertaken by the Bolsheviks in addition to the extra systematic and large-scale measures of the Nineteen Thirties, Russian Orthodoxy was singled out due to its shut ties to the previous regime and its function as companion to the Russian autocracy. Russian Orthodoxy was harmful in the eyes of the Bolsheviks not simply due to its perception system, but additionally its institutional wealth and affect all through Russian society.
Stalin’s new method to Russian Orthodoxy was thus probably potential solely due to earlier anti-religious campaigns in opposition to the Church. State-enforced atheism and its official exceptions have been two sides of the identical coin. As Stalin noticed it, in the tumultuous a long time between the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Soviet challenge had been transformative sufficient that non secular life now not posed a risk. In the minds of the architects of the new non secular coverage, the state was highly effective sufficient to not solely control non secular life however make it work for its personal ends.
Historical religious ties could possibly be used to assist Soviet claims on jap European territories
The 1943 assembly led to a sequence of measures that created a brand new institutional framework for the Russian Orthodox Church to function in the USSR. These measures included re-establishing the Moscow Patriarchate, the official seat of the Russian Orthodox Church, and enthroning a Patriarch. Sacred properties expropriated by the state might as soon as once more be utilized by the Church. Seminaries have been based and clergy recruited to educate at them. But final control over Church affairs and possession of Church property remained with the state. A brand new bureau was based for the state administration of the Church: the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church.
What objectives was Stalin hoping to accomplish with these preliminary measures? Insight into the reply to this query could be present in the questions Stalin started posing to state specialists on non secular life prematurely of the assembly, questions that targeted on the standing of Orthodoxy in jap Europe. It isn’t any coincidence that Stalin was asking these questions at the second the tide of conflict was turning. It was turning into clear to the Soviets that victory in the conflict might permit them to safe a sphere of affect in jap Europe. With an formally sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, historic religious ties could possibly be used to assist Soviet claims on jap European territories and be used as vectors of political and cultural affect in locations with Orthodox traditions, together with jap Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. This line of considering helps underscore how Soviet views on faith had modified in only a quick period of time. The ties between non secular communities that had the potential to transcend borders was initially perceived as a risk to the Soviet regime – now it was seen as one thing the authorities might use.
There have been additionally different issues. The Soviets have been dealing with criticism by their wartime allies about the USSR’s lack of non secular freedom. The Red Army was additionally re-taking territory that had been occupied by the Nazis, and understood that the German occupying authorities had, as a part of their very own technique, re-opened shuttered church buildings and mosques on Soviet soil. The Red Army was not so sure that they need to be in the enterprise of closing these once more. But, in creating an area for an formally sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, the state was doing greater than addressing these speedy considerations – it was wanting to a postwar future.
In evaluating the potential for what a state partnership with Russian Orthodoxy might do for Soviet energy, Ukraine served as a testing floor, particularly the western area of Ukraine annexed from Poland to grow to be a part of the USSR throughout the Second World War. It is in the Soviet expertise with these lands and its peoples that one can discover the roots of the wartime shift in faith that culminated in the 1943 assembly.
In 1939, following the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Soviet Union annexed jap Poland and divided former Polish lands between Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine. The individuals dwelling in these lands have been mobilised into Soviet society beneath the banner of what the historian Jan T Gross has known as a ‘revolution from abroad’. The Soviets additionally mobilised the rhetoric of nationwide liberation: calling their annexation of jap Poland a ‘reunification’, arguing that they have been reuniting traditionally Ukrainian and Belarusian individuals to traditionally Ukrainian and Belarusian lands – and, most significantly, beneath the management of Moscow.
Yet behind this rhetoric of ‘reunification’ was a recognition by the Soviet state that these individuals have been fairly completely different from their ‘Slavic brothers’ to the East. At occasions, this recognition was acknowledged and emphasised. Soviet propaganda supplies portrayed these peoples as being completely different as a result of they’d been oppressed by the earlier Polish regime and that quickly these variations would fade away as soon as they’d been remodeled by Sovietisation. But Soviet authorities have been additionally frightened about the affect of newly Soviet peoples on their Soviet ‘brothers’, particularly in Ukraine. Moscow’s notion of Ukraine as disloyal preceded the 1939 annexation – it was a suspicion that led to harsher repressions in opposition to these accused of Ukrainian nationalism than of Russian nationalism, for instance. But with the new lands added to Ukraine, the risk was deemed starker. Thus, in western Ukraine starting in 1939, Soviet authorities confronted their worries about subversive Ukrainian political exercise with the violent ways that have been hallmarks of Stalinism: mass surveillance, arrests, deportations and executions. The nature of this suspicion has been summed up in the saying: ‘When they cut fingernails in Moscow, they cut fingers in Kyiv, and chop off the entire hand in L’viv.’
But, paradoxically, the singling out of L’viv and its west-Ukrainian environment as significantly harmful might additionally lead to concessions, not simply violent crackdowns. Observing the religiousness of its newly Soviet inhabitants in western Ukraine, Soviet authorities feared the potential for non secular establishments to mobilise anti-Soviet sentiment in the inhabitants. Recognising that the Soviet state didn’t have the capability to absolutely repress non secular life in western Ukraine, they started to discover how to use faith for their very own ends. Soviet authorities discovered that non secular establishments could possibly be helpful companions in supporting the thought of ‘reunification’ as a justification for territorial annexation.
State control of Orthodoxy straddled the blurred boundaries between overseas and home coverage
At the root of the ‘reunification’ narrative was the concept that these previously Polish lands have been traditionally Ukrainian and traditionally tied to Russia. While the Soviets didn’t initially acknowledge this, this narrative relied on the historic function of a shared non secular custom, particularly Eastern Orthodoxy, in forming and sustaining these ties. Soon, nevertheless, the Soviets realised {that a} pragmatic method to faith might permit them to buttress their claims to western Ukraine. The concept that these lands on the western borderlands ought to be dominated by Russia could possibly be justified with the presence of Orthodox church buildings.
Thus, starting in 1939, the Soviet state started the technique of formally transferring church buildings on this area to Moscow’s religious jurisdiction and re-opening them with Russian Orthodox clergymen. The perceived successes that got here out of this 1939 experiment in the western borderlands laid the groundwork for the Soviet-wide revival of the Russian Orthodox Church that started in 1943. In the newly Soviet western borderlands, state control of Orthodoxy straddled the blurred boundaries between overseas and home coverage, utilizing faith to deliver borderland peoples in, in addition to extending Soviet affect outdoors, its personal borders. In a letter from the newly appointed head of the Committee for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, Georgii Karpov defined as a lot to Nikita Khrushchev, then head of the Ukrainian Communist Party:
We have decided that the Russian Orthodox Church can and will play a job … in Ukraine, in Belarus, in Lithuania, in Latvia, and overseas.
Creating an official, recognised Russian Orthodox Church supplied a blueprint for different non secular teams in the USSR throughout the Second World War, typically with the identical objectives in thoughts. Shortly after creating the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, Stalin created the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults to oversee newly revived non secular establishments for different non secular traditions, together with Islam and Judaism.
Not all religions have been granted the likelihood for a regulatory mannequin. Certain faiths have been deemed too harmful to the Soviet order to be permitted an official construction inside the Soviet Union, leaving few choices for believers and clergy related to these communities. Still, these teams weren’t worn out – as a substitute they managed to navigate a precarious existence on the margins of Soviet society.
The choice to refuse sure non secular teams the likelihood for state recognition, whereas granting the alternative to others, will get at certainly one of the central questions raised by the wartime shift in non secular coverage: might one thing as complicated as non secular life be institutionalised, regulated and surveilled to the diploma that it might exist to serve the Soviet order? Or, put merely, was Stalin’s Soviet state as highly effective because it thought it was?
Over time, the reply appeared to be no. Reports from the officers overseeing non secular life are crammed with proof that the experiments with faith have been going awry: believers rejecting the authority of ‘official’ clergy in favour of these deemed enemies of the state working in the underground, non secular practices deemed ‘anti-Soviet’ however occurring in official sacred areas, historic church buildings restored by the state to maintain providers being prevented in favour of basements, woods and rivers the place believers felt their environment to be extra sacred, and stories of Soviet-approved clergy utilizing their platforms to denigrate their authorities.
The stories present us that, whereas the Soviet state was not asserting the full control over faith it wished to, they have been altering it. In these stories, bureaucrats are parsing out the particulars of sanctioned non secular life and making determinations about what was acceptable in the atheist Soviet Union. Whether believers or clergy selected to interact with Soviet-sanctioned non secular establishments or not, they too have been making determinations about how their very own concepts of the sacred did or didn’t match up with what official non secular life allowed. Underground non secular life and official non secular life started to develop in dialog with the different. The traces between the two weren’t all the time as mounted as believers or the state needed them to be.
Those who refused switch from the Greek Catholic Church confronted arrest, deportation and demise in the gulag
One significantly bold experiment with faith undertaken by the Soviet state in western Ukraine helps illustrate these factors. When the Soviet state started sending Orthodox clergy to annexed Polish territories in 1939 to implement their narrative of ‘reunification’, they’d to confront the proven fact that not all of this area’s Slavic inhabitants have been Orthodox. In a lot of western Ukraine, they have been Catholic. In the metropolis of L’viv and its surrounding area (traditionally often known as Galicia), the majority of Ukrainians have been affiliated with the Greek Catholic Church, a Church that practised Eastern-rite Christianity comparable to Orthodoxy however that recognised the authority of the Pope and remained beneath the jurisdiction of the Vatican. The Greek Catholic Church’s presence on this area, relationship again to the sixteenth century, known as into query the thought that every one being annexed to the Soviet empire had as soon as been unified beneath one Orthodox civilisation. Historically, members of the Greek Catholic Church typically used the existence of their Church to present that Ukraine had a historical past separate from Russia. Indeed, Greek Catholic clergy and Greek Catholic believers have been a few of the most necessary figures in the development of Ukrainian nationalism.
And so, in western Ukraine, the Soviets didn’t simply set up an official Russian Orthodox Church but additionally organized a compelled non secular switch from the Greek Catholic Church to the Russian Orthodox Church for the Church’s 3 million believers and a whole bunch of clergy. Those who refused confronted arrest, deportation and demise in the gulag. Many who agreed to the switch did so beneath unbelievable duress, together with bodily torture and threats in opposition to their households. Some who refused went into hiding and tried to protect the Greek Catholic Church in the underground.
The choice to oversee this mass non secular switch from one Church to one other was a very excessive manifestation of what the Soviet state hoped to accomplish with official faith. In this case, it was not a couple of state-managed infrastructure for faith, however a direct intervention into the confessional belonging of particular person believers to assign them to a spiritual establishment that was extra according to Soviet state objectives. To be certain, there was an necessary historic precedent to this switch. The Greek Catholic Church itself was established as a method to deliver Orthodox believers into the Catholic world in the sixteenth century. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Orthodox activists – with backing from what was then imperial Russia – organized compelled transfers of Greek Catholics to the Russian Orthodox Church in the title of ‘restoring’ Orthodoxy to these peoples and lands.
In this fashion, the Soviet method to the Greek Catholic Church was knowledgeable by the objectives and techniques of its predecessor, imperial Russia. Indeed, as a lot as the Soviet Union put itself ahead as a radical break from the previous regime, in making an attempt to make sense of its various non secular panorama, Soviet officers drew on what the students Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper outline as an ‘an imperial repertoire’, what leaders imagined was potential based mostly on the previous practices and constraints of their imperial ancestor. For imperial Russian officers, in addition to Soviet ones, forcing a spiritual switch from one Church to one other allowed non secular life to justify conquest with a story of nationwide reunification and territorial restoration.
As the head of the native Communist Party in L’viv in Ukraine defined in his report to his superiors about the standing of the compelled non secular switch:
Reunification shouldn’t be carried out in solely a proper vogue, however in a method so reunified clergymen present their devotion to Orthodoxy and inculcate the believer a part of the inhabitants with love for his or her fellow Orthodox – Russians, Ukrainians, and different peoples of the Soviet Union.
Outside of western Ukraine in the a long time following the Second World War, the realisation that the instrumentalisation of faith was not working led to a reversal of the tolerant wartime insurance policies. In Stalin’s later years and beneath the management of his successor, Khrushchev, lots of the reopened sacred areas have been shuttered once more. The Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults discovered that their requests for funding and personnel have been routinely denied. Official clergy got here beneath suspicion, their loyalty to the Soviet state known as into doubt. Khrushchev launched renewed campaigns to promote atheism.
But in some locations the experiment continued on. In western Ukraine, the Russian Orthodox Church justified its presence as a bulwark in opposition to the underground Greek Catholic Church and the associations with anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalism that got here with it. While church buildings closed throughout the USSR, Russian Orthodox clergymen in western Ukraine efficiently petitioned for theirs to keep open. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, 20 per cent of its surviving Russian Orthodox Churches have been situated in the Galician area of western Ukraine – the epicentre of the non secular switch and a spot that had been principally Catholic earlier than the arrival of Soviet energy. The instance of western Ukraine demonstrates that, in locations the place official faith was seen as taking part in the function the Soviet state needed it to play, official faith survived – lengthy into the postwar period.
Reflecting on the legacy of this intervention into non secular life, it’s straightforward to dismiss the state-formulated Russian Orthodox Church in western Ukraine and different types of official non secular life as purely an imposition. But this ignores the expertise of those that discovered which means in the official Russian Orthodox Church, who prayed in its chapels, who took Communion from its clergymen, and who attended the Divine Liturgy – whether or not reluctantly or not. In making an attempt to instrumentalise faith, in western Ukraine the Soviet state modified how non secular establishments have been seen by believers and non-believers alike. The mere presence of an official Russian Orthodox Church related to the Soviet state created associations between Soviet belonging, Russian imperialism and Ukrainian nationalism that formed the experiences of believers then, and proceed to form perceptions of non secular establishments in as we speak’s Ukraine.
Bohdan felt that he was ready to protect non secular life, even beneath less-than-ideal circumstances
Evidence of this affect could be present in the recollections of those that skilled it. A sequence of oral histories carried out in the early Nineteen Nineties by what’s now Ukraine’s Institute of Church History replicate the nuances of the imposition of Orthodoxy. In an interview in 1993, Bohdan, a Greek Catholic priest who was compelled by the authorities to be a part of the Orthodox Church, displays on his choice to be a part of the official church, noting:
I knew what the Bolshevik authorities [were capable of] … all the church buildings could possibly be closed … History will say, will choose whether or not what we did was proper or not proper. But there was one objective: to shield the religion and shield the Church.
Reflecting on his time as an ‘official’ priest, Bohdan felt that he was ready to protect non secular life, even beneath less-than-ideal circumstances. Another particular person interviewed in the sequence, Anna, makes the same justification for her choice to attend a church that was nominally Russian Orthodox, but defined that, when she prayed, she famous in her prayers that she was nonetheless a Greek Catholic:
I went to the [Russian Orthodox church] … I stated ‘God … I didn’t convert. I’m praying precisely the method my mom taught me.
The area of official non secular life allowed individuals like Anna to carve out a religious existence beneath official atheism – a chance not obtainable in different occasions and locations in Soviet historical past, however in methods the Soviets probably didn’t anticipate.
Both Anna and Bohdan started brazenly attending Greek Catholic church buildings when the Soviet Union collapsed and it was secure and authorized to achieve this. For them and others interviewed, the state’s affiliation with Orthodoxy meant that Orthodoxy would grow to be related to Moscow’s imperialist objectives for Ukraine. Another girl interviewed, Nina, talked about that, earlier than the Soviet occupation, she had no destructive emotions towards Orthodoxy however now it will likely be ceaselessly related to ‘Bolshevism’.
But different former Greek Catholics continued to attend Orthodox church buildings in the Nineteen Nineties, feeling a connection to the sacred area and the priest related to the parish throughout Soviet occasions, at the same time as an period of non secular freedom was ushered in. It isn’t any coincidence that it was these Orthodox communities that grew to become instrumental in the motion for an autocephalous (unbiased) Ukrainian Orthodox Church. While they discovered resonance in the Orthodox church buildings established by the Soviet state, their expertise with official faith meant that they didn’t need the Orthodox Church to proceed to serve the objectives of Moscow.
Tright here is one other vital legacy of the Soviet experiment with official faith that lives on. Many of the males who function hierarchs in a few of the most necessary non secular establishments in the former Soviet Union obtained their theological training and clerical coaching in the unusual world of Soviet official faith. They attended Soviet-sanctioned seminaries and led liturgies in state-owned sacred properties. For instance, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church as we speak, attended a Soviet-approved seminary in Leningrad and was chosen by Soviet authorities to symbolize the USSR to the World Council of Churches as the consultant from the Moscow Patriarchate, a place he held from the early Seventies into the ’90s.
Often when observers deliver up this data, it elicits a substantial amount of hand-wringing and condemnation over the ties between official faith and the KGB. As these males preside over ceremonies to commemorate the sacrifices of Soviet martyrs, might it’s the case that they have been the ones chargeable for informing on them? It is obvious that the story of official faith is extra complicated than that. Memoirs and oral histories of these concerned in official faith have described their relationship with Soviet officialdom, together with the secret police, as a negotiation between what wanted to be sacrificed to keep a legalised existence, and what traces they’d not cross so as to keep their religion and dignity. In this fashion, the official clergy resembled many different Soviet individuals confronted with a sequence of inconceivable selections.
Religious life didn’t simply exist on the margins of the Soviet Union or in the houses of dissidents
Having this shared expertise clearly informs the function that non secular establishments play in previously Soviet nations. It is that this context that helps clarify the outsized function non secular establishments have performed in Russia’s justification for its conflict in opposition to Ukraine, particularly in the wake of the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Over his time as Russia’s chief, Vladimir Putin has cultivated a detailed relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church and the chief of the Moscow Patriarchate, Patriarch Kirill, who has held that publish since 2009. The relationship between the two establishments started as mutually useful. The Church was a key legitimiser of Putin’s ‘traditional values’ agenda that helped buttress Putin’s assist, at the same time as Russia’s economic system started an inauspicious downturn. In change, Putin ensured that the Church might control profitable properties and state property in the title of post-Soviet property restitution.
In 2014, when Russia sought a justification for annexing Crimea, Putin supplied a well-known narrative: the concept that his territorial seize ought to be seen as a restoration of the Russian Orthodox world, utilizing the Church to legitimise his worldview. In February 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin returned to this framing. Not solely has Patriarch Kirill supported this narrative however he has even gone a step additional, endorsing the conflict as being fought for a simply trigger, the unity of the Russian Orthodox world, and referring to Russian troopers killed as martyrs on this holy conflict.
Whether Patriarch Kirill actually believes this or not, it’s clear that his personal background in the official Russian Orthodox Church overseen by the Soviet state informs his choice to assist the conflict in Ukraine. The concept that non secular establishments exist to serve the political objectives of the state could be traced again to the complexities of Soviet life.
It is unsuitable to ignore the Soviet makes an attempt to reconcile with faith, or dismiss them as short-term measures. The Soviet Union’s legacy in the religious lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals is far more than a narrative of repression. Religious life didn’t simply exist on the margins of the Soviet Union or in the houses of dissidents and martyrs. It was a sphere that the state tried to control and use for its personal ends. And whereas the Soviet experiment with faith could not have achieved what it set out to do, the values and assumptions behind it persist. They persist in how post-Soviet leaders mobilise non secular ties to declare individuals and lands, how believers recognise the political implications of their non secular affiliations, and in the sermons delivered by clergymen despatched to annexed territories. Contrary to stereotypes, the non secular lifetime of the Soviet Union stays alive and energetic in the world.
